Write with a Cadence and Rhythm

Don’t start every sentence with the subject then go to the verb. Vary your sentence structure.

Use a mix of short and long sentences.

Avoid run-on sentences. Any sentence over 20 words long needs a period in the middle.

Use a string of shorter sentences to build tension.

Never have more than one or two descriptive paragraphs at a time. Lengthy narratives are like lumps in the gravy. Smooth them out over the entire manuscript or you risk losing your readers. Modern fiction is character driven and an omnipotent narrator describing things slows your story down.

What’s in a Name?

One of the fun parts of world creating is giving characters names that fit their roles. A perfect example is “Perry Mason”. He will “parry” the thrusts of the prosecutor while building the solid wall of his case one brick at a time. The most famous is the computer “HAL 2000” from the movie “2001, a Space Odyssey.” Go up one letter each in the alphabet from “HAL” and you get “IBM”

The Fourth Awakening is sprinkled with interesting names; some obvious, some not. For example, what else would you call an editor other than “Mark Hatchet”? An editor’s sole purpose in life is to “mark” up perfectly good copy and take a “hatchet” to a writer’s prose. Here are some of the others.

Penelope Drayton Spence. For her first name I wanted something traditional which conveyed a sense of class. Brittany, Desiree or Candi with an “I” were immediately discarded. I quickly decided on “Penelope” the long suffering but amazingly loyal wife of Odysseus. Next was her maiden name. I wanted to use two famous Charleston family names in my book. Middleton Place and Drayton Hall are pre-Revolutionary War plantations sitting side by side on the Ashley River a few miles north of Charleston. In the early draft Penelope’s maiden name was Middleton instead of Drayton. Next was her last name. I went with “Spence” because it was close to “suspense”. That’s where the problem popped up.

Penelope Middleton Spence is a great name, but it would clearly never work. I really couldn’t see how the female protagonist could have the initials of “PMS”. Penelope Drayton Spence it is.

Michael Walker. The male lead got his first name from the Archangel “Michael”. Michael is traditionally viewed by Christians, Jews and Muslims as the field commander of the Army of God. “Walker” came from my wanting to convey that he “walks among us.”

Hermes Project. This one was a no brainer. In Greek mythology Hermes was the messenger of the Gods and the guide to the afterlife. He was the patron of boundaries and of those who cross them. Hermes was only one of a small handful who could enter and leave the “underworld” at will.

Josephine Antoinette Middleton Rickman. Like Penelope, I wanted her wingman to have a traditional name. I also needed a first name which could have a cutesy nickname for this book while she weathered her midlife crisis before reverting back to her more formal preference in later books. “Joey”/“Josephine” was perfect. She inherited “Middleton” by default which gave me an opportunity to have some fun. By making her middle name “Antoinette” she would have the same initials –JAM – as my co-author, Jeffery A. Martin. Alan Rickman (Professor Snape in the Harry Potter movies and the hilarious villain in the first “Die Hard” movie) is one of my favorite actors so her married name was a tribute to him

Noah Shepherd. Like the biblical “Noah” this character helps build the “ark” that carries the ship of state. His job is to “shepherd” the people on board without too much of a fuss.

Marcus Wolfe. This character is a warrior in the ancient Roman Centurion mode – hence the name of Marcus. Plus Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, suckled on a wolf. Like a wolf, he is most effective when he runs in a pack. He and his team are highly efficient.

Robert A. Smith. I wanted the grayest name possible for this character. He is one of a multitude of faceless bureaucrats who populate Washington.

Senator Clayton Horn. Remember the old “Looney Tunes” character of the loud rooster with the Southern accent, “Foghorn Leghorn”? Senator Clay Horn.

Amy Kindle. This character carries around in her memory banks information from thousands of books which she can instantly recall. Almost like an Amazon “Kindle”.

Dr. Carl Altman. He is the brains behind the “Hermes Project” who has come up with a device which can alter man’s concept of spiritual development.

James Steerforth. The few who got this joke rolled on the floor laughing. Steerforth plays the role of the Vegas magician much like mega-star illusionist David Copperfield. In the Dickens version, James Steerforth was David Copperfield’s best friend.

Stu Levy. While, like Penelope, I have daughters named “Carrie” and “Kelly”, Stu is the only “real” person in the book. He is an old friend from high school and college. Among his many talents, he is a gifted and talented photographer and has a studio in Portland, OR.

There are a few more fun names sprinkled in the book that an astute reader might catch. I don’t want to give them all away; what fun would that be?

The 10 Most Common Mistakes Writer's Make 

1.  Not starting. You spend hours doing research. You have a notepad next to the bed for that flash of inspiration in the middle of the night. You breeze past a person in a restaurant who will be a perfect character for your novel or screenplay. You have shoebox full of notes and index cards so when you're "ready" to start on your writing project you will be completely ready.

For too many aspiring writers, the time just never seems right. There's that business thingy next week; the kids have a soccer match on Saturday; you promised your folks. Add your own excuses for never quite getting around to the starting. Everyone does it. It's hard to take the plunge.

2.  Not finishing.

3.  Thinking you’re finished when you’re not

4.  Using the wrong format, paper or font

5.  Not proofreading and copy editing.

6.  Not checking your facts.

7.  Sending your stuff to the wrong people

8.  Writing a lousy proposal letter

9.  Violating the rules of etiquette

10.  Not being patient

Plot Drives Character and Character Drives Plot

•  A forty-year-old divorcee who hasn’t seen a child support payment in five years is not going to have the same impression of men as a love struck teenager on Prom Night.

• A milquetoast middle-aged accountant is not going the react to a drink being spilled on him in a bar the same way a 25 year old hothead who has just watched the sports team he loves lose a game because of a bad call by an official.

Fiction is Friction

For fiction to work, the sparks need to fly.  In The Fourth Awakening I pitted a jaded skeptic (Penelope Spence) against a true believer (Michael Walker). By letting them duke it out with dialogue the narrator didn’t have to “tell” the reader anything, they were able to figure it all out for themselves.  

Not Every Character Needs to be Original

Fiction is filled with easily recognizable characters. There’s the geeky kid who spent more time in high school in his gym locker than in class. The woman with breathtakingly bad taste in men. The absentminded genius with no commonsense. The bureaucracy hating veteran cop. Slimy lawyers. The list is endless.

The nice thing about these universal characters, you can drop them into your story as bit players and your reader will instantly recognize them. You don’t have to slow down the narrative and spend pages describing them. We know them on sight.

 Don’t Preach or Lecture

If you want to be a successful novelist write dialogue and not monologues. No one wants to read a long-winded dissertation delivered by either the protagonist or an omnipotent narrator.

The way I dealt with some very weighty issues in The Fourth Awakening was to let two characters with very different viewpoints go at each other. The give and take between Penelope and Walker allowed me to make all the points I wanted to make and convey a great deal of information to the reader. By forcing Walker to defend his beliefs instead of letting him preach from the pulpit made the dialogue interesting. It also allowed the readers to learn a few things about the lead characters.    

Often the first thing an aspiring novelist wants to do is seize the microphone and jump up on a soapbox.  You must resist this urge with all of your might.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Eight Rules for Writing Fiction

1.      Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2.      Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3.      Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4.      Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

5.      Start as close to the end as possible.

6.      Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7.      Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8.      Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1999), 9-10.

Dialogue  

Nothing kills a book faster than lousy dialogue. There are so many ways to go wrong it is scary. One of the things I always recommend is reading your dialogue out loud to “hear” how it sounds. If it is tinny, forced, flat, boring, preachy, etc. then you know you still have some work to do.

Here are a few of the most common dialogue mistakes people make.

Trying to Write in a Dialect You Don’t Understand       

If you’re a middle-aged white guy living in a rural area who listens to Lawrence Welk’s “Greatest Hits” on your eight track tape player, don’t try to write dialogue for a hip Black teenager in New York City. You’ll just embarrass yourself.

Stick with what you know.

Writing “Our Son” Dialogue

You must resist putting words in your character’s mouth just because your plot needs the information passed on to the reader.  Can you ever imagine a conversation like this between a real husband and wife?

                “Where’s our son, Bobby?” Veronica asked.

                “Oh, you mean that 12-year-old scamp who likes video games and enjoys playing soccer?”

To be natural it should be like this:

                “Where’s Bobby?” Veronica asked.

                Archie shook his head. “He’s probably playing video games. Again.”

                “I checked; he wasn’t upstairs.”

                “Then he has to be playing soccer.”

Here the exact same information is conveyed to the reader without being forced or contrived.

               

The worst culprits for forcing information are the “CSI” shows. When you have two coroners standing over a corpse they are not going to give each other detailed explanations of something they were both taught in their first year of med school. It is highly unlikely a pathologist will need another pathologist to explain the function of a tracheotomy to them. This is lazy and sloppy on the part of the writer. All he needed to do was have a cop come in and ask dumb questions. That would allow the information to be shared with the viewers in a much more natural manner.  

Sidekicks were created for the protagonist to have someone to talk to so the author can share information with the reader. 

"Elementary, Dr. Watson."

The Character Arc

Most every book on writing has a section about the character arc. It is one of those annoying buzzwords that seminar instructors who teach screenwriting repeat so often it starts to make the fillings in your teeth hurt. In a nutshell it is how your character changes over the course of the story. Don’t get me wrong, the character arc is important but it is only one element of a good story. But if the changes that occur in your protagonist are not supported by the plot to the point where you get the reader’s buy-in, your novel will fail. 

Also, different rules apply to a character in a series than to one in a single novel. Say you’ve created a hard-boiled detective with plans for multiple titles. If his character arc in the first book takes him from a tough guy to joining the seminary, it’s going to be tough to put him back on the street shooting and punching people in the next one.

In Dan Brown’s books (The Da Vinci Code, etc.) “Robert Langdon” has a near non-existent character arc which made him available for other starring roles. Brown has sold over 20 million books. 

Original Characters

In modern fiction almost every book is now character driven. The problem for most writers, especially the novice, is to create anything even approaching an original character. Too often they are derivatives of earlier work. Every modern detective is part Sherlock Holmes and part Phillip Marlow. Every action hero is part James Bond and part John Rambo.

Truly original characters are as welcome as spring rain on parched soil but are always in very short supply.  Rambo, Yoda, Dr. Hannibal Lector, Stephanie Plum, Harry Potter, Lisbeth Salander are just a few of the handful of truly original characters to burst on the scene in the past half century.  All of the authors who came up with these original characters got stinking rich.

The first problem is once an original character emerges and becomes popular everyone starts to repackage the same character. Janet Evanovich’s “Stephanie Plum” – the world’s worst bounty hunter – started an entire new genre of female amateur sleuths stuck in lousy jobs. I was in the book room at a major writers’ conference and overheard two women talking about a book in front of them. “Isn’t that the bagel shop lady?” “No,” answered her friend solemnly. “She’s the chocolate shop lady.”  Like there’s a difference.

The second problem is most of the characters have already been claimed. At the very least, if you have a derivative protagonist, give them a few quirks and an interesting history to separate them from the pack. In my new dark comedy series, A Charon Family Adventure I have a dysfunctional family of four of the world’s best assassins. The mom, when she’s not killing people, writes trashy romance novels and reads Jane Austen. The son is a Le Cordon Bleu master chef as well as a holy terror with a knife. The wise old mentor was formerly the most feared assassin on the planet. Since his retirement he has developed an unquenchable taste for micro-brewed beers and spends half his time drunk.    

Be creative. 

Five Tips to Make You a Better Writer

TIP 5

Open with Your Strongest Point

I've always had a weakness for pulp fiction and one of my favorite writers is the late John D. MacDonald.  He wrote over 2 dozen "Travis McGee" books -- each with a color in the title.  He broke ground for most of the current mystery writers who use a continuing character as their protagonist and/or a gimmick in the naming of their books (Sue Grafton's alphabet titles, "A is for Alibi", "B is for Burglar"; James Patterson's nursery rhymes, "Along Came a Spider", "Kiss the Girls", etc.)

The theory with pulp fiction and novels in general is often a potential buyer will pick up a book and read the first page before deciding whether to reach for their wallet.  MacDonald was a master of the opening "grabber."  Here is the first sentence of his novel "Darker than Amber."

"We were just about to call it a night when somebody dropped the girl off the bridge."

If that doesn't make you want to read the next sentence, then you may want to check your pulse and see if you are still among us. 

Pulp fiction not your cup of tea?  Try these great opening sentences:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

            Charles Dickens "A Tale of Two Cities"

"Call me Ismael."

            Herman Melville "Moby Dick"

"This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast."

            Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.  "Breakfast of Champions"

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

            Jane Austen, “Pride and Prejudice”  

"Lot ninety-seven," the auctioneer announced.  "A boy."

            Robert Heinlein, “Citizen of the Galaxy”

What's the first line of your novel or screenplay? 

Five Tips to Make You a Better Writer

TIP 4

Focus Your Thoughts 

Whenever I teach an advanced screenwriting or novel writing class (for those with works already in progress) the first exercise I give my students is to summarize their idea in 25 words or less.  The groans and complaints are silenced when I tell them I'll do ALL 6 Star Wars movies in 21 words.  Here goes....

"Long, ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the forces of good overcame terrible obstacles to conquer the forces of evil."

No Luke Skywalker.  No Darth Vader.  No Empire and no Alliance.  Hans Solo didn't make the cut and neither did Yoda or R2D2.  They are elements of the story but they are not important when defining the focus and direction of the plot.  

In Hollywood they take this idea a step further; it's called a high concept.  Give me your idea in 5 words or less.  An example would be the recent Vin Diesel movie, "The Pacifer".

The concept: A rough-hewn Navy Seal is assigned to protect a group of pampered suburban kids and both sides learn to appreciate the other's world. 

The high concept:  Rambo becomes Mr. Mom  

The concept for The Charon Family Adventures: A dark comedy about a dysfunctional family of four of the  world's best assassins. 

The High Concept for The Fourth Awakening: Science-based spiritual fiction. or, Dan Brown meets Rod Serling.

If you can't distill your idea into 25 words then it is unlikely anyone will pay you for your creation. 

Five Tips to Make You a Better Writer

TIP 3

Read "The Elements of Style"

Written in 1918 by William Strunk, and later championed by E. B. White, The Elements of Style is the gold standard of writing manuals.  This thin volume will keep you from making stupid, amateur mistakes and bring a smile to the face of your Freshman English composition teacher.  My original copy is so old it doesn't have a bar scan code or ISBN number.  I bought it for less than a dollar including tax.  Last count I have more than a half dozen copies of "The Elements of Style" spread around my office.  It is hard to go a single day without stumbling across one.  That's the whole point.  Just by seeing the cover I'm reminded that writing is a craft and not an art.  There are timeless rules that can intentionally be broken for effect.  But if you don't know the rules, you may be breaking a few of them unknowingly which will brand you as an amateur. 

If you are too cheap to buy it, it is available online at Bartleby's online bookstore.    They are a great resource for FREE information, quotes, etc.  You can find them at www.bartleby.com.

Read every word of this book -- it will only take a few hours at the most.  Put it in a drawer and reread it 2 days later.  Thumb through it at least once a month.  And, whenever you happen to stumble across a copy of it in your office, pick it up and read a few pages.  It doesn't matter which ones.  They are all golden.   

Five Tips to Make You a Better Writer

TIP 2

Use as Few Words as Possible

Most everyone has heard the old Urban Legend of the rock hard English professor who gave a final essay exam with only one question. Most of the class filled their "blue book" while one student was done in a matter of moments. The student who finished early got the only A in the class.  To the question, "What is the essence of great writing?" he wrote one word: "Brevity." 

With that thought in mind, you may want to print out the next section and paste it on your computer monitor:

Pythagorean Theorem: 24 words
The Lord's Prayer: 66 words
Archimedes' Principle: 67 words
The Ten Commandments: 179 words
The Gettysburg Address: 286 words
The US Government’s Regulations on the Sale of Cabbage: 26,911 words

Are you writing memorable words or cabbage reports?  

5 Tips to Make You a Better Writer

TIP 1

Master the Simple Declarative Sentence

Think of some of the great quotes of our time:

"The buck stops here."

            Harry S. Truman

"I have a dream."

            Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Make my day."

            "Dirty Harry" Callahan

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

            President Ronald Regan

"Give peace a chance."

            John Lennon

“Yes we can”

            Barack Obama

What do they have in common? They are all simple, direct, declarative sentences.  All of these quotes are only a few words long and, if you take out the proper name, none of the words are longer than 6 letters.  A bright elementary student would have all of these words in their vocabulary.  A dull elementary student can understand them.  A genius created them. 

Unless you are writing academic gobbledygook or legal briefs, the goal of good writing is to communicate and not to impress everyone with your mastery of obscure linguistics.  This bears repeating: Write to communicate and not to impress.  Too often the "rookie" will wear out their thesaurus and dictionary looking for impressive words when a simple word would have been better. Much better.

 If you want a larger -- and paying -- audience for your work, use the language that most people will understand presented in a straightforward manner.    

Real Men Love Jane Austen!

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

                Jane Austen, Opening sentence from “Pride and Prejudice”

Several times I’ve seen articles – I’ve even written a few – on the difficulty of men trying to write female characters.  What about women trying to write from a male prospective?  Is a two dimensional “Booty Call” boyfriend created by a female author any worse than a guy thinking every woman has a shoe fetish? Does every ex-husband/boyfriend have to be a complete jerk who is 100% responsible for the breakup with zero percent of the blame going to the character without a “Y” chromosome? 

Does every male character need to be a masculine nymphomaniac with a one track mind and WD-40 on his zipper?  Most guys I know got past that by the end of their sophomore year of college. Okay, at least by the time they’re 30. Those that don’t end up as politicians or the pathetic creep you can find lurking around at the end of the bar at last call.   

If you want to add three dimensional men in your writing, turn to the Yoda of Women’s fiction, Jane Austen.  In possibly the best book ever written, “Pride and Prejudice”, she flawless captured the full spectrum of men and their complicated relationships with women.

 William Collins: The spineless toady who spent his days praising the vile Lady Catherine.  He was a soft sycophant who, due to stupid laws written by misogynistic men, would someday own the Bennet’s home. Elizabeth rebuffed his offer of marriage while her weaker friend did not.

 Charles Bingley:  A genuinely nice fellow but weak. He allows his vicious sister and Mr. Darcy to manipulate him. This pliable good nature nearly costs him the love of his life.   

George Wickham: There are not many who would be ranked lower than John Edwards, but Wickham qualifies. He is the charmer. Handsome, smart and connected with the right crowd, on the surface he would be a catch. Under the glossy veneer is pure evil. How many women have muttered “but for the grace of God” that they didn’t end up married to a smooth talker like this?  In the low light of a bar or at 3 a.m. at the Motel 8, this kind of guys looks great; in the sunlight not so much. You get the feeling that his forced marriage to the witless flirt Lydia Bennet was a match made in heaven. 

Mr. Darcy: The man every woman pines for (or should if they had a lick of sense) and every man hopes to emulate.  Gruff and strong willed, he is honest to a fault and doesn’t suffer fools lightly. He does what is right without insisting on claiming credit. With Wickham, he quietly saves the Bennet family from disgrace while refusing to divulge his part even if it means losing the woman he loves.  Does anyone doubt for a moment that if the free spirited Elizabeth were to pass away first, he wouldn’t join her a week later after dying of a broken heart?  Colin Firth was amazing in the A&E adaption.     

Even the supporting male cast – Elizabeth’s father and uncle among others  – come across as real flesh and blood people, not a derivative stereotype.      

If you go the Wikipedia page they have the most amazing graphic of the relationships of the characters in the novel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pride_and_Prejudice_Character_Map.png

Real men love Jane Austen! 

Think Like a Writer

I was incredibly lucky to sell my first manuscript. The format was slightly off, there were numerous typing and grammatical errors but it still sold. Sometime later, when my 3rd novel was in production, I asked my editor why he took my book?  Short, fat and bald, with an ever-present unlit cigar in his mouth, he was old school. If you asked him a direct question, you could expect a direct answer about 20 decibels louder then necessary. He told me, "Kid." He always called me "kid" even though at the time I was approaching 40. "I can hire English Lit majors fresh out of Columbia University for a dime a dozen to fix spelling and punctuation but none of them could write worth a sh*t . You think like a writer and not a reader."  

To this day, no one in family will watch a mystery on television with me because part way through I tell them exactly how it is going to end. It has digressed to the point were my daughters will watch a movie first and challenge me to figure it out as they sit on the end of the couch with their arms folded, confident they've finally got me.  The worst for the girls was "Usual Suspects," which I figured out almost instantly.  "Somebody told you," my exasperated eldest shouted.  In a sense, she was right. The writer had told me. The movie opens with Gabriel Byrne about to be shot by an unknown killer. We never see the killer's face but when he offers a cigarette to his soon to be victim he changes hands with his lighter. Byrne smiles and shakes his head. The moment Spacey appeared on the screen, with a deformed left hand, he was obviously the killer.  

Obvious to anyone who thinks like a writer and not a reader. 

To a writer, words are precious. Since novels can run from a few hundred pages to over 1,000, you can sprinkle nuggets like these around freely and the average reader will miss them as they read. In a movie or on television, it is necessary to bring these to the front because of time restrictions. In the case of "Usual Suspects" the writer made a point of having the killer change hands with the lighter. Then Gabriel Byrne smiled.  Why change hands? Why smile? These are the questions a writer will ask when reading a novel or watching a movie. Why was that added?  Why is that there? 

If you want to become a novelist, you must condition yourself to think like a novelist.  In a good book, the author will only put in things that drive the plot or help develop the characters.  There may be "red herrings" or other devices to try and muddy the water, but after awhile you learn to separate the blue smoke and mirrors from the important stuff.

If you want to be a writer, you must learn to think like one.