Old Dog Learns New Trick

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by Debbie Burke

@burke_writer

 

Public domain photo

 

When it comes to learning new technology tricks, I’m definitely an old dog. But if there’s a way to learn a new trick in a program I already use, rather than having to master a whole new program, I’m thrilled.

In this case, the new trick is in Word.

Recently I stumbled on a post by Wendy Lyons Sunshine entitled How to Teach Word a Scrivener Trick on Jane Friedman’s always informative blog.

Scrivener is a popular and powerful writing program that number of TKZers use and swear by. One Scrivener feature that’s always appealed to me is the corkboard. You write each scene on a virtual index card. Then if you discover problems with timeline or continuity, you can easily rearrange scene order.

Unfortunately, despite taking several classes in Scrivener, I never mastered the learning curve.

So I continue to use Word since it’s the preferred program for most publications I write for.

For my novel first drafts, I write in scenes, separated by white space and asterisks. In later drafts, I divide scenes into chapters. Some chapters are only one scene long, others are three to five scenes.

A problem arises when I write scenes out of order. That leads to a jumble of scenes that need to be rearranged before completing the final draft.

This is where we pantsers get in trouble. You outliners in the audience, feel free to smirk here.

Eventually I have to find those out-of-order scenes buried in the 75-80K manuscript and, using cut and paste, reposition them where they should be. But locating those scenes, as well as their new position, can be a pain in the posterior.

Being old school, I write a summary of each scene on a 3X5 card. I lay the deck of cards on the living room floor and rearrange them as needed until the scene order is correct.

But…the Word doc still needs to be changed. That requires a lot of scrolling back and forth to find the right scene, highlight and cut it, then more scrolling to paste it into its new location.

Yes, outliners, I hear you snickering. If you had an outline, this problem wouldn’t come up.

But it turns out Word has a trick to mark scenes so they’re easy to find.

Now I’ll give the floor to Wendy since she explains it very well. She graciously granted permission to quote the following excerpt:

“Insert descriptive headings throughout the manuscript. You might insert a heading above each:

  • Chapter
  • Section
  • Scene
  • Any unit of content that needs to be easily identified or moved.

The goal is to clearly identify where a chunk of content begins. By default, that chunk ends where the next chunk (denoted by a heading of the same level) begins.

Assign styles:

Open Word “Styles” and assign each of the descriptive headings a standardized heading style. Assign “heading 1” style to chapter titles, then assign “heading 2” to other types of content.

Open the Navigation Pane

Now that headings are set up, open the navigation pane via View > Show > Navigation Pane. The Navigation Pane will display vertically along the left of the screen. 

Use the Navigation Pane two ways. First, you can navigate to specific content by clicking on that specific heading. Second, and most wonderfully, you can reorganize content by dragging and dropping the headings. Navigation Pane headings behave much like Scrivener’s index cards and are easily shuffled around.

Dragging a heading moves all associated content together in one bundle. This works beautifully across a large document and is far easier than trying to cut/paste/or drag blocks many pages apart.

Fiction writers can adjust this approach for their needs by crafting headings to describe POV, scene, location, interiority, backstory, etc.”

Thanks for making my life easier, Wendy!

After reading her instructions, I went through my WIP (working title Fruit of the Poisonous Tree) and chose Heading 2 for the beginning of each scene. Still using Heading 2,  I wrote a brief summary of that scene, so it stands out easily in the manuscript.

Now, within the Word doc, I can easily jump to the summary of each scene. No more wasted time, scrolling through pages, searching for the parts that need to be cut and pasted to different locations.

When the scenes are in correct order, then I’ll place the chapter breaks, using Heading 1.  That makes formatting easy for Kindle Direct Publishing and Draft2Digital.

Best of all, this new trick is within Word so I don’t need to learn a whole new program to accomplish what I need.

Photo credit: Lars Curfs CC-BY-SA-3.0

Now I’m still an old dog, but a happy one.

~~~

Many thanks to Wendy Lyons Sunshine and Jane Friedman for their kind permission to quote.

~~~

 

TKZers, were you aware of this capability in Word?

How do you keep track of scenes and rearrange them in your manuscript?

Do you know any other Word tricks to share?

Running and Writing
  and the Marathon

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Come what may, all bad fortune is to be conquered by endurance.  –Virgil

* * *

Writing a novel is often compared to running a marathon, and my experience dealing with the unexpected in the London Marathon in April 2010 was a good rehearsal for my later efforts in writing.

I’ve never been a good marathon runner. I’m better suited for the half-marathon. But in 2009, having completed three marathons (San Antonio, Vancouver, and Toronto), I decided I’d go for just one more. And I wanted to run one of the big marathons for that once-in-a-lifetime experience.

I told my husband I’d like to celebrate our anniversary in 2010 with a trip to the UK where I would run the London Marathon in honor of our marriage. Then we could spend a week or so vacationing. Frank was supportive, and for some unknown reason, I was convinced everything would go my way.

Hmm.

The major marathons are so popular that they can’t admit everyone who wants to enter. If you’re a very good runner and can meet the qualifying time for your age group, you’ll be entered. But if you’re like most runners (me, for instance) and can’t meet the qualifying time, they’ll put your name into a lottery and it’s just a matter of chance.

So when they opened the online registration in April 2009, I jumped in and registered along with 150,000 other runners. Although only about a quarter of those would get places, I was ridiculously confident. Around October, I received an email from the London Marathon notifying me that I wasn’t chosen. Rats.

But they held out another possibility. I could run for a charity. “That’s even better,” I thought. I could do a good deed as well as run the marathon. So I applied to several of the charities that I thought I’d like to support, and a few weeks later, one of them called. With about four months to go, I had cleared the first hurdle. I was in the race.

I was sure that from then on everything would be smooth sailing. (You can smile now.)

My running buddies at work were all excited that I was going to run the London, and that made me even more determined to do well. When they asked what kind of time I was planning on, I spouted off a near-impossible-for-me number. But if everything went perfectly, maybe I could make it.

Everything did not go perfectly.

  • Our treadmill, on which I was doing almost half of my training, broke. We needed a new one anyway, so we bought a bigger, better model. A few days of training lost.
  • I injured my knee in a tempo run. A couple of weeks of training lost.

I had stumbled over those first hurdles, but my excitement continued to ramp up as the days ticked closer to the race. Since I suffer from jetlag on international trips, we planned to fly to London six days prior to the marathon to allow my body to adjust to the time change before the race. But then…disaster.

  • A few days before our scheduled departure, I woke up to the news that a volcano in Iceland had erupted, volcanic ash was drifting over western Europe, and airports were closing. Heathrow was one of them. Our flight was cancelled.

You can overcome a lot of obstacles. But a volcano? Time to throw in the towel.

But then the winds shifted, and airports reopened. We managed to get on a flight that put us in London in the early morning hours of Friday before Sunday’s race day. Okay, so my jetlag would be a problem, but the excitement of the race would probably overcome that. (Are you laughing yet?)

I dragged myself out of bed on race day after just a few hours of sleep to discover there were more obstacles: the weather was warm (not good) and it was drizzling rain (super not good). Frank and I agreed on where we’d meet after the race, and he walked me to the starting area to join the other thirty-seven thousand people who had paid perfectly good money to punish their bodies for 26.2 miles.

But at least I had made it to the starting line. Now all I had to do was finish.

The London Marathon is unique. It’s a big party, and many of the marathoners wear costumes. One guy was dressed in a full suit of armor and someone else was carrying a huge replica of the Angel of the North sculpture on his back.

As time ticked down to the start, you could feel the buzz in the air. After an entire year of waiting, hoping, training, and planning, the starter’s pistol fired, and we were off.

I wish I could say everything went well.

  • For the first time ever, my GPS watch malfunctioned. Bad omen.
  • Another first: I got a side stitch. At least now I can describe in a book what it feels like to be stabbed just below the ribs.
  • As the miles went on, fatigue set in, and I realized I was getting a blister on one of my heels.
  • By the time I got to the eighteen-mile mark, I was starving. I guess the time change had messed up my body clock. Honestly, if I had seen a child holding a sandwich by the side of the course, I probably would have snatched it out of the kid’s hand and run away before anyone could catch me. But there were no sandwiches, my back and foot hurt, and I was run-walking so slow that I knew I was going to turn in a terrible time.

* * *

That’s when I had THE THOUGHT. I could quit. I could just step off the course, find a volunteer to give me a cart-ride to the finish, and it would be over. I wouldn’t suffer the embarrassment of a poor showing. I’d just tell everybody I was injured and couldn’t finish. I could bandage my foot and take an Advil and eat a steak dinner and forget this stupid marathon. The whole thing was wrong from the start. Why hadn’t I seen that? Why did I have to be so stubborn when there were just too many problems to overcome?

That little exercise in self-pity and frustration got me through the next mile or two. Then I had the SECOND THOUGHT. I would cross the finish line even if I had to crawl. Even if I was the last person across. Even if they had taken down the banners and all the volunteers had gone home and I didn’t get a medal or a T-shirt. Even if my feet were bleeding so profusely that I was leaving a trail of blood behind me on the course. (Self-martyrdom can be useful in certain situations.)

And I knew no matter how long it took, Frank would be waiting for me, and I knew exactly what he’d say when he saw me. After all, this was the race to honor our marriage, not to show off my great (ha!) running talent.

Those reflections got me through another mile or two, and then I was within just a few miles of the finish, so it didn’t make sense to quit.

I crossed the finish line. I didn’t crawl, and I wasn’t the last person in the race. There were still a couple of thousand people behind me, including angel sculpture man and the guy in the suit of armor. A volunteer hung a medal around my neck and someone else handed me a T-shirt that said “LonDONE 25.04.10.” Then I walked into the meeting area and saw Frank waving. As I limped toward him with my hair frizzy from the rain and my clothes damp with sweat, he jogged over and put his arm around me. “Great race, honey.”

* * *

So yeah. Writing a novel, especially a first one, is a lot like running a marathon. You start out with all this enthusiasm and confidence, but then things get hard, much harder than you thought. There are unexpected challenges, and it’s discouraging when agents and publishers don’t immediately see your genius and rush to sign you to a life-long contract.

That’s when many people give up. They hit the wall and decide it’s not worth all the pain and disappointment. According to selfpublishingus.com, only about 3% of people who start writing a book actually finish it. And of those, even fewer have their book published. But for those of us who stay in the race, there’s a satisfaction of accomplishment few have known.

I learned some lessons from the London Marathon that I believe apply to my writing.

  • Life (and running and writing) is more about what you put into it than what you get out.
  • It’s more about fighting the good fight than winning.
  • It’s more about the journey than the destination.
  • You value what you earn more than what someone gives you.

And in the long run (pun intended), whether it’s running or writing or living, endurance is more important than talent.

* * *

 

This has been a very long TKZ blog post, and if you made it to the end, you deserve a medal. Maybe you should consider running a marathon.

 

 

* * *

So TKZers: Have you ever run a marathon?
Have you faced obstacles when writing your books?
How do you deal with the setbacks?

* * *

 

Kathryn Frasier is training for her first marathon, but murderers keep getting in her way.

Run with Kathryn in The Watch Mysteries. The ebook boxset is on sale at  Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, or Apple Books.

Oh, What a Feeling: How to Show Character Emotions

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Don’t talk of stars burning above. If you’re in love, show me!
Tell me no dreams filled with desire. If you’re on fire, show me!
– Eliza Dolittle in My Fair Lady

How to describe a character’s emotions is, of course, one of the most important tools in the fiction toolbox, right next to the plot caulk, the dialogue drill, and the scene saw.

And there are, as we all know, two choices: showing and telling. A good many critique group sheriffs will insist that you must never tell (name) an emotion. Never a simple Nancy was worried or Bob was frightened.

Well, I shot the sheriff (figuratively speaking!). It all depends on what I call The Intensity Scale. Think about the emotional intensity of a scene on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being nearly catatonic and 10 a loss of control like the “Leave Britney alone!” guy. And think of 5 as the demarcation line.

A scene can travel, and usually does, from below the line to above the line.

My rule guideline is that any emotion below 5 can, and usually should, be named. If Nancy is worried about how the meatloaf will turn out, you don’t have to go into sweaty palms and racing heart. That’s too much (unless the meatloaf is being prepared for Hannibal Lecter and the cops are nearby). Just write, Nancy was worried about the meatloaf.

But when you go over 5, you should show the emotion. The goal is to help the reader feel, not just know, what the emotion is.

So how do we show when we’re in the intense portion of a scene?

Nancy Kress, my former colleague at Writer’s Digest, had a great article on that in the January, 1993 issue. She gives five ways. Here they are, with my comments.

Physical Reaction

This is the one we usually go to first. Because it’s effective. Rendering how the character feels physically helps the reader vicariously feel it, too.

The trick is to find original ways to do it. Readers are used to sweaty palms, racing hearts, and twisting guts.

Does that mean never using them? Not at all. Just give them a little boost:

Her hands were slick and slippery now.

Her heart thrummed like a souped-up engine.

His stomach rocked in a greasy hammock. (This is like something I read once in a Stephen King story, but can’t remember which one. Anyway, you get the idea).

So: Don’t just grab the first description that comes to you. Play around a little. Add your touch of originality.

Action

Actions speak louder than words, right? You can always show the character doing something as a result of the emotion.

Again, watch out for the instant answer. An angry boss pounding his fist on the table, for example. That’s expected. Add something to it.

How about pounding a coffee mug down, spilling the brew?

How about yanking out a drawer, scrambling the contents?

A good exercise is to visualize the moment and let your character improvise, try different things. Go a little wild. You’ll hit on something surprising that seems right. When that happens, you know it will surprise the reader, too.

And a surprised reader is a delighted reader.

Dialogue

What a character says in the context of a scene should reveal emotion. And the way you can tell if you’ve succeeded is that you don’t need an adverb to make it clear.

Not:

“Get out of here, John!” Nancy said angrily.

“That’s the last time I pet a lion,” said Tom offhandedly.

No finer example of how it’s done is this clip from Hemingway’s story “Hills Like White Elephants.” A man and woman are sitting at a train station, sipping drinks, as the man jauntily tries to tell the woman that an abortion is no problem. (The mastery of the story is that the word abortion is never used).

“Then what will we do afterward?” [Says the woman]

“We’ll be fine afterward. Just like we were before.”

“What makes you think so?”

“That’s the only thing that bothers us. It’s the only thing that’s made us unhappy.”

The girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold of two of the string of beads.

“And you think then we’ll be all right and be happy.”

“I know we will. You don’t have to be afraid. I’ve known lots of people that have done it.”

“So have I,” said the girl. “And afterward they were all so happy.”

That last line hits hard. We know how she feels from the context and word choice. We don’t need said the girl sarcastically.

Setting

We waste a description of setting if we don’t use it for “double duty.” It should add to the tone of the story and reflect the character’s emotion.

In “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away,” a short story about a man’s darkest moment, Stephen King begins this way:

It was a Motel 6 on I-80 just west of Lincoln, Nebraska. The snow that began at midafternoon had faded the sign’s virulent yellow to a kinder pastel shade as the light ran out of the January dusk. The wind was closing in on that quality of empty amplification one encounters only in the country’s flat midsection.

Fading light, dusk, wind, emptiness. We are being set up to feel the inner life of the character even before we meet him.

Thoughts

This is, I think, the most powerful way to convey emotion, because it’s coming directly from inside the character. It’s also the best opportunity for originality, as there are an infinite variety of choices under two main headings: explicit and implicit. Here’s an example of explicit emotion.

I can’t open this door. I just can’t. John will kill me. But I have to. I have to.

Implicit emotion can be proffered by way of metaphor (A thousand devils poked his brain with pitchforks), dreams, and memories.

And example of using a dream is the beginning of Chapter 15 of The City by Dean Koontz:

Eventually I returned to the sofa, too exhausted to stand an entire night watch. I dropped into a deep well of sleep and floated there until, after a while, the dream began in a pitch-black place with the sound of rushing water all around, as if I must be aboard a boat on a river in the rain …

Here’s an example of memory from my novel, Your Son is Alive:

He was surrounded by cops, touched by strong hands, hearing voices, but they were growing distant, and he went into another world, long ago, seeing the Mickey Mouse balloon from Disneyland when he was four, and his dad tied the string around his wrist. But he wanted to hold it himself so he slipped the string off his wrist and held the balloon and waved it around. Then had to scratch his back and somehow the string got away, and the balloon went up, up, up and he said Oh no oh no oh no, and he could only watch, helpless, his grief expanding because Mickey was all alone in the sky, no one to help him. Unmoored.

So try this:

Go to any scene in your WIP and ask:

  • Where do the moments fall on the Intensity Scale?
  • Do I show or tell intense emotions?
  • How might I use or more of the 5 ways?
  • How can I “originalize” the showing?

Jim Butcher says the emotional component of his books is the secret of their popularity. In writing about scene and sequel, where sequel = emotion, he writes:

People don’t love Harry [Dresden] for kicking down the monster’s front door. They love him because he’s terrified out of his mind, he knows he’s putting himself in danger by doing it, he’s probably letting himself in for a world of hurt even if he is successful, but he chooses to do it anyway. Special effects and swashbuckling are just the light show. The heart of your character—and your reader—is in the sequel.

Comments welcome.

Tracking Your Writing: Words of Wisdom

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The first time I participated in National Novel Writing month, I actually wrote a novel the month before writing my NaNo novel. The pre-NaNo novel was right on the word count edge of novella at 40,000 words. It had been three years since I’d drafted my first novel and I wanted to get back in the game by doing NaNoWriMo 2006, and thought, why not write a shorter book in October as a warmup?

So, I created a simple Excel spreadsheet that tracked my daily word count, as well as the running total of my WIP, and also listed daily word count and overall running count goals. It worked like a charm. I did the same thing for November, aiming for 1667 words a day to reach 50,000 words total by November 30. What I learned was that my word count fluctuated, but averaged out to close to the daily goal. It worked. However, I did not track the time I spent grinding out those words. Instead, I loosely scheduled writing time.

I drifted away from tracking my word count, but now want to return to it. I like JSB’s practice of setting a weekly word count, but even simply tracking how many words I draft each day can be helpful. It’s something I’d like to start doing when I begin drafting Meg Booker Librarian Mystery #3. Also, while rewriting the previous book, I began tracking pages revised as well as setting goals for daily pages revised which helped get me through multiple editing passes, especially the last one.

One thing I’ve never been successful at is tracking my time spent writing. Instead, I schedule writing time.

Today’s Words of Wisdom presents a grab bag of excerpts on time and words. Joe Moore gives tips for how to track your time spent writing. James Scott Bell shares two tactics to unstick your story and begin increasing your word count again. Laura Benedict discusses why word counts are important in her own creative process.

Most writers live and publish by a quota, a magical number of words or pages of work they produce each day. Supposedly, Stephen King writes ten pages a day, every day, no matter what. Hemingway was a little more reasonable, at 500 words per day.

The truth is, I don’t actually have a quota, not if one insists on the notion of measuring effort in terms of something solid and concrete, like numbers of words. My quota is more elastic, more ephemeral if you will: it’s time spent writing. I write for two hours each day in the late morning, no matter what. (Okay, sometimes I’ll write for 45 minutes a day, or 20, but those days are rare.)

The problem with my type of quota is that I’m a word worrier. I can spend the entire two hours nibbling around the edges of a single paragraph. The next day, I might strike that paragraph and start over. With this method, productivity, as you might imagine, is quite the wild card.

I do have occasional spells when the writing flows–I bound through the pages effortlessly, like Emily Dickinson’s frigate on a following sea. But those happy periods of clear sailing are inevitably followed by a dead calm, and I get bogged down on a single page for days. Or a single sentence,

“Just keep going!” When we’re stalled, this is the sage advice we get from most writing teachers, critique groups, and professional writers, But so far I’ve been incapable of doing that.  Sometimes I do leave a placeholder, something like, “Brilliant description of character goes here, but don’t do a generic description dump. Must be something fresh that will make the reader’s eyes widen in recognition.” One can take that kind of thing too far, however. You can wind up with an entire novel of placeholders, and then where would you be? Exactly where you started.

Joe Moore: October 19, 2010

Today, I want to offer a couple of tips for that fearful moment when you’re 10 – 20k in and you have absolutely no idea what to write next.

One tip was in my recent post about asking what the bad guy’s doing. If you’re stuck in the middle, take half an hour to think about what your antagonist is up to off stage. Have him planning his next few moves. Then go back to your protagonist who will feel the permutations of those moves.

The other tip I have for you when you get stuck is to do a variation of Raymond Chandler’s advice about bringing in a guy with a gun.

Yep, introduce a new character.

But what character? How do you choose?

Here are a couple of suggestions:

Open up a dictionary at random. Find a noun. What kind of person pops into your head who you would associate with that noun?

Spin the Writer Igniter. You can also use this cool app to choose a scene, a prop, or a situation.

Now you’ve got a new character ready to enter the fray. Before he or she does, ask yourself how this character will complicate the lead character’s life. Hopefully, you know enough about writing a novel that your Lead is facing a matter that feels like life and death–– physically or professionally or psychologically.

This new character will be the carrier of a subplot. A subplot needs to intersect with the main plot in some significant way––and a way that complicates matters for the Lead.

A new character like this is good for another 5k words at least

Bada-bing! You’ve added to your NaNo word count.

But what if you’re in the final act of your book? The hard part, where you have to figure out how to tie up the loose ends?

Add another character! A loose-ends tier-upper!

But won’t that seem out of the blue? A Deus ex machina?

Not if you go back to Act 1, or the first part of Act 2, and introduce the character there. You’re the writer, remember? You can go back in time in your own book!

This exercise works for NaNo, but also for any novel where you feel that long middle is starting to sag.

Introducing one complicating character gives you lots of plot possibilities. And I love plot possibilities.

James Scott Bell: October 16, 2016

One of my best friends, an enormously successful writer, has kept track of her words on spreadsheets for well over a decade. But I also know a writer who has been writing for a half-century and couldn’t tell you precisely how many stories she’s published, let alone the number of words.

The subject of word counts comes up frequently when you’re an emerging writer. Agents only want to see a certain number of pages, and competitions, magazines, and writing workshops all set limits. When you sell that novel, there will be a word count mentioned in the contract, and when it comes time for delivery, it better be close: if there aren’t enough, it won’t meet the contract; if there are too many, it could negatively impact the production schedule and projected costs. Word counts are relevant.

But should word counts have a place in your creative life? What do word counts mean to you?

This might sound a little crazy, but keeping track of my words satisfies the voice in my head that says, “use your time well.” Word counts are by nature quantifications. Proof that I’ve written. It doesn’t matter if I’ve written badly. It doesn’t matter if I throw them out later. It doesn’t matter if I don’t even like them. I’ve written. I’ve worked. It sounds a little cold, but sometimes you have to feed the voice. (Now, these are only my thoughts. If you don’t have that scary neurosis voice in your head telling you she’s watching how you use your time, good for you.)

The softer, more right-brained view is that the more words you write, the more practiced you become. A friend of mine is fond of saying, “Writing begets writing.” This is so true. When I write, I work things out on the page. The more words I get down on paper, the more room there is in my brain for birthing new ideas. My brain feels larger, happier when it’s planning new words.

At the end of December, I started tracking my word counts in my daily blog. The person who asked me why I tracked words wondered if I was in some kind of competition. The answer is yes. I am in competition with myself. I like to know how much I’ve written, and it keeps me motivated—not just to improve the numbers as I go along, but to have some markers along the way.

Laura Benedict: January 25, 2017

***

  1. Do you track the time you spend writing? If so, how do you do it, and does it help you stay on track as a writer?
  2. Are there specific word count points, like at the 10K, 20K or 30K word marks where you tend to run out of steam. Any tips or tactics you use to get the words flowing again?
  3. Do you track the words you write? If so do you keep daily or weekly word counts? Do you set word count goals? Do you track scenes or chapters written instead?
  4. Do you track the revising you do? If so, what metric do you choose-words, pages, scenes, chapters or something else?

Reader Friday-What’s In Your Pet Pantry?

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It almost escaped me, but May is National Pet Month!

 

This is Hoka, keeping company with me in my office. The head tilt says it all . . .

We’ve had cats and dogs over the years, but dogs are our favorites. Oreo, the black lab. Dok-dogi, the malamute. His name means “Smart Dog” in Korean. Bear, the Chow & Samoyed mix. And Hoka, the Smartest Dog in the Universe. So smart, she should go get a job and support us . . .

My blog post publishing June 11 on my website features all of these canine pals who’ve graciously shared our cave over the years. Go there on the 11th to see more pictures and read about their antics.

So, the questions for TKZ pet parents today are:

 

1) Do you presently have a pet; 2) Do you give your characters pets; and 3) Reaching back into your pet memory banks–what is or was your favorite pet of all time?

 

Mental Models — A Latticework of Critical Thinking

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“A mental model is a compression of how something works. Any idea, belief, or concept can be distilled down. Like a map, mental models reveal key information while ignoring irrelevant details. Models concentrate the world into understandable and useable chunks.”

This quote is from Shane Parrish who hosts a fascinating blog and podcast called Farnam Street. I’ve subscribed to Shane’s site for years and look forward to his weekly newsletter that arrives every Sunday morning. It’s free, but you can purchase a more in-depth dive for only a few bucks a month. It’s worth every nickel.

An extensive piece that Shane put together is titled Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (~ 100 Models Explained) that deals with thought experiments. He covers a vast array of subjects like Circle of Competence, Reciprocity, First Principle Thinking, Second Order Reasoning, Inversion, Probabilistics, Inertia, Leverage, Compounding, and Entropy. Here’s the link: https://fs.blog/mental-models/

This is a short submission to the Kill Zone today. I’m on vacation and traveling for most of this Thursday. I can’t respond to comments till about noon PST, but I wanted to generate discussion around critical thinking and how it applies to our work as writers.

Who has heard of mental models and the latticework of integration into thought processing? Has anyone else tapped into Shane Parrish and his Farnam Street world? And who develops characters (like Sherlock Holmes) who use woven or latticed mental models in their thinking? Comments, please.  🙂

The Most Potent Little Gadget In Your Writer’s Toolbox

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Dear Readers: I am still in Italy and out of touch. Our Wifi here is almost non-existent! So I hope you don’t mind a re-post. This is one of my favorites. See you soon. — PJ

Paragraphing is a way of dramatization, as the look of a poem on a page is dramatic; where to break lines, where to end sentences. — Joyce Carol Oates.

By PJ Parrish

Yesterday, Sue posted her critique of a First Page submission. On first read, I thought it was pretty good but something about it was bugging me. Then I just looked at it instead of reading it. It hit me that the paragraphing wasn’t quite right.

Paragraphing? Who cares about paragraphing? You just hit enter when it feels right, right? Nope. Proper paragraphing is one of the most underrated tools in your writer’s box. So allow me to wander into the weeds today and talk a little inside baseball. (I worked hard on that mixed metaphor, by the way)

Two main problems with the submission yesterday: The writer had made the common mistake of burying thoughts and dialogue within narrative.

Second problem: All the paragraphs are about the same length. Why is that a problem? Because it goes to pacing and rhythm. No variation in paragraphs is boring to the eye and that translates to boring for the reader’s imagination. But if you learn to master the fine but subtle art of judicious paragraphing, you can inject interest and even tension into your story.

Let’s address problem one first. This opening paragraph is essentially narrative. But inserted within that is both dialogue and thoughts. Here’s the paragraph:

Arizona Powers slammed her palm into the office wall, ignoring the stinging sensation. Unbelievable. “Are you kidding me? I’m not doing that. I’m a federal agent, not a babysitter.” Her boss had clearly lost his mind. She spun on her hiking shoe, locking eyes with Senior Special Agent Matt Updike. Her fingers fidgeted with a button on her shirt. I deserve a second chance.

Dialogue and thoughts are ACTION. They deserve to be lifted out of narrative and given lines of their own so the reader can emotionally latch onto them, and by extension, your character. This opening paragraph would be more effective (and more interesting to the eye) if it were deconstructed with better paragraphing:

Arizona Powers slammed her palm into the office wall, ignoring the stinging sensation, and stared hard at her boss.

“Are you kidding me? I’m not doing that. I’m a federal agent, not a babysitter.”

Matt Updike shoved his chair backward, rose and closed the distance between them in two strides.

“I’m not kidding. You are doing this,” he said. “You don’t have a choice.”

She could smell his stale coffee breath and see a vein bulging in his neck, but she resisted the urge to step back. Her boss had clearly lost his mind. But she wasn’t going to take this. She deserved a second chance.

See the difference? The drama of the scene is enhanced by allowing the thoughts and dialogue to stand out — all by simple paragraphing. Here’s something interesting: The rewrite is LONGER but it reads FASTER. Why? Because the reader doesn’t need to ferret out the important thoughts and dialogue. It’s your job, as the writer, to mine out the nuggets for them.

Now let’s consider the basic question of length of paragraphs and how that affects your reader. How long should your paragraphs be? Sounds like a dumb question, but it’s not. You need to consider it deeply.

Let me re-quote this from Ronald Tobias’s The Elements of Fiction Writing: Theme & Strategy,

The rhythm of action and character is controlled by the rhythm of your sentences. You can alter mood, increase or decrease tension, and pace the action by the number of words you put in a sentence. And because sentences create patterns, the cumulative effect of your sentences has a larger overall effect on the work itself. Short sentences are more dramatic; long sentences are calmer by nature and tend to be more explanatory or descriptive. If your writing a tense scene and use long sentences [me here: or long paragraphs], you may be working against yourself.

I often liken writing to music. Composers use punctuation to speed up or slow down pace and musicians use types of “articulation” to enhance whatever mood they are going for — intense? dangerous? romantic? thoughtful?

Good writers use similar tools — punctuation, length of sentences and paragraphs (short and choppy or longer and measured?) to create an emotional response in their readers. The best writers understand this not only creates emotion, it provides variety on each page and over the whole book.

Pacing is not just aural, it’s visual. How your writing LOOKS on the page is important. Which brings us back to the paragraph. How many you use per page, and how long or short your paragraphs are should be conscious choices you make. Here is the same thought, expressed two different ways:

Fragments, the length of sentences, punctuation, and how often you paragraph can all work to give a particular pace. If you really think about, you’ll realize that you can use sentence and paragraph structure to create a feeling of speed or slowness, depending on what kind of emotional response you want to induce in your reader.

Okay, that gets my point across, right? But what if I structured the same thought this way:

Think of it! You can move a reader through a story fast. Their hearts will race!

Or you can slow them down and make them use their heads.

It’s all in how your sentences look on the page.

The first is measured, more academic in pace, meant to make you slow down and digest the thought. The second is lively and urgent, making you anticipate an important climax-point. Neither is correct. They are just two different styles of pacing, word choice, sentence length and paragraphing to different affect.

I think most of us here, being in the crime business, know we shouldn’t write a lot of long paragraphs. You can get away with some, especially in description. But these days, too many long paragraphs per page looks “old-fashioned” or worse, “textbook.” It worked for Dickens and even for a stylist like Delillo. Not so much for the rest of us today.

Are any of you out there art folks or designers? Then you understand the value of “white space” or “negative space.” Simply put, negative space is the area around and between a subject. It appears in all drawings, paintings and photographs. The “subject” below is enhanced by the negative space surroudning him. (Notice, too, the crop lines that make for an even more compelling negative/positive composition!)

Paragraphing provides white space. Don’t believe me? Go read Elmore Leonard.

Ray Bradbury said that each paragraph is a mini-scene and when you hit ENTER you are helping your reader enter a new scene, thought or action. I’ll leave you with one more example. It’s from one of my favorite opening pages from a novel.

It was a pleasure to burn.

It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.

Montag grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame.

That’s the opening to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. I love the way the first line sits there all alone, like a roadside sign that you’re entering hell. Then he gives us this amazing loooong graph with gorgeous imagery and the nonchalance of the unnamed man. And then, a third paragraph — BAM! — he gives us our arsonist-star by name.

Bradbury could have made this all one graph. But no, he chose three. Your turn. Choose wisely when to hit enter.

How Did I Get Here?

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With Memorial Day upon us, many folks will be on the road, listening to music or daydreaming while stuck in traffic. Nothing at all interesting about it. Though we want our stories to mimic real life, showing every moment or mile gets boring and repetitive fast.

My characters are constantly on the move. If I showed the entire drive, boat ride, or flight, I’d destroy the pacing. Instead, move characters from point A to B by skipping the boring parts.

via GIPHY
When we jump ahead, tell the reader how much time has passed.

Nothing is more jarring than a character at home one minute and in the next paragraph they’re in a new location with no explanation of how they got there. Ground the reader in the first sentence. Or at least, in the first paragraph. Some writers include a scene break between paragraphs — either white space or *** — but that still does not absolve us from orienting the reader.

Show the characters getting into the car. Add a few lines of plot-related dialogue or trees zip past the window to show movement. And boom, they arrive at their new destination. Or, if nothing interesting happens, write something like…

Forty grueling minutes later without air conditioner, I arrived at the hotel with a wet scalp and my t-shirt molded to my chest.

A new chapter signals a time or POV change and/or a new setting.

It’s fine to speed past uneventful stretches in a story. In fact, it’s encouraged. Just be sure to give the reader a sense of how much time has lapsed, especially at the start of a new chapter. Even if we include a timestamp, we should still mention it as many readers will only recall whether the previous chapter took place during daylight or darkness.

Don’t make them have to backtrack to guess where or when the chapter begins.

If the action continues from the previous chapter, it’s still a good idea to set the scene with a brief mention of any time gaps or sensory cue to ground the reader. It doesn’t have to be complicated. “A few hours later” does the trick.

Establish who is present in every scene.

Nothing irks me more than a character appearing out of nowhere to offer a clue when they weren’t in the scene earlier. Too convenient. And frankly, obvious and lazy.

Again, adding a character to a scene needn’t be complicated…

The screen door slapped open, and Jack strolled out to the porch.

Now the reader knows he’s there, so when he offers that all-important clue, it makes sense within the scene.

Change in POV

As a reader and a writer, I don’t understand the fad of including the POV character’s name at the top of each chapter. In my opinion, it’s unnecessary. If we ground the reader in the character’s POV right away, they should know whose head they’re in without a label. If they don’t, then we’ve failed to set the scene. I prefer rotating POVs. They’re easy to follow and add to the overall rhythm of the story.

If you want to include the POV character’s name as a chapter heading, then by all means do so. It’s your story.

The main takeaway for this post is to orient the reader, whether the characters are on the move or we switch to a new POV.

For writers: How do you handle travel or signal a change in POV?

For readers: Have you ever been jarred out of a story due to a change in space or time?

Happy Memorial Day to TKZers in the U.S.!

Some Scene Should be Hard to Write

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

I was happily writing along in my WIP, the next Romeo thriller, and things were going pretty much as planned. That’s a great phrase for an outliner…as planned preceded by pretty much. That gives me the right amount of room to enhance or deviate from the plot outline while knowing I’ll still be on track with the overall story.

But then I came to a scene and it started fighting me. I had it outlined. I knew the general structure of the scene. But it wouldn’t flow. I’d start, write a few lines, then stop because it felt…not right.

Why was this happening? Was I overthinking? Trying too hard? That’s certainly a danger in our craft. The vile scourge of perfectionism is always lurking in the shadows. The old advice First get it written, then get it right applies. We should write like we’re in love, and only later edit like we’re in charge.

But I wasn’t loving this scene.

Finally, it hit me. The reason I was having a tussle with it is that it’s one of the most crucial in the entire series (this book will be #9). In fact, what happens here will affect all the books in the future.

Then I had a further thought: That’s why it’s hard, Bucko. It should be!

Because the difficulty was telling me that I’d hit on a vein of story that was deeper than I first thought. It was my signal that the richest material was still there in the rocks, and it was time to chip away and find it.

Raymond Chandler once said of Dashiell Hammett, “He did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that never seemed to have been written before.”

Wouldn’t you like readers to say that about you? By going deep into the difficult, you can get there.

Now, some say that’s too much work. Why not let the characters decide? This brings up the oft-cited experience, “My characters took over.”

Let’s think about that.

In one sense, it’s good to have a character surprise you from time to time, because that means the character will surprise the reader, too.

But then again, who’s the boss? Are the characters running the show, or the writer?

I know there are some who advocate always following the characters, wherever they lead.

But what if it’s off a cliff?

Bradbury famously said you should jump off that cliff and grow wings on the way down. Far be it from me to disagree with the great Ray, but it seems to me it worked best for his primary métier, short fiction. It is less successful in his full-length novels, especially the crime ones that came later in his career.

So I kept digging into the difficult. I re-wrote the scene maybe a dozen times, tweaking, discarding, adding and subtracting sentences.

There was a moment when one of the two principal characters was supposed to say, “Yes.” But I found myself typing, “No.”

The next morning, I woke up with the conviction that it shouldn’t be either Yes or No (see Sue’s post on answering Yes/No questions). I came up with something else and, finally, it clicked. I felt like Goldilocks tasting the porridge and pronouncing it “just right.” (Or “Just Write” as the case may be.)

So now it’s all settled and I can move on.

Until it’s time to edit, when I read the scene again.

Ack!

Do you think a scene should ever be hard to write? Or are you more with the “merrily we roll along no matter what” school of writing?

Coincidence Be Thy Name

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One complaint I often hear about plots is that coincidences come too frequently, or they’re unbelievable. Coincidences in fiction makes readers mad, even though they might have actually happened.

My example: Way back in 1982, my former wife and I were dining with another couple at The Shed, a steakhouse in Dallas. It was the new In eatery that everyone had to experience. Of course since it was new, the place was packed that particular night and we had to wait nearly an hour to be seated in one of the smaller dining areas off the main room. It didn’t matter, I liked the smaller area that wasn’t as noisy.

Even though my friend was a cop, I was sitting with my back against the wall with a view of the door and a dozen tables. A foursome composed of two distinct generations came in, an older couple and a pair of young folks who looked to be around eighteen or nineteen.

The young lady in a cream-colored sweater and her escort sat facing us, and I couldn’t take my eyes off the dark-haired woman. It became so awkward on my part, that I had to purposefully engage those around me so I wouldn’t stare, something that had never happened to me before.

Halfway through the meal, the young woman and her beau had a disagreement that caught my attention. The older man with them patted the air to quiet the young couple down, and the girl rose and walked out. She returned a few minutes later and all was well. The foursome finished the meal in quiet conversation.

I confess, I kept sneaking glances at the dark-eyed young lady until we paid out and left. As we walked by their table, I took one last glance at her when she smiled at the older couple, and we were gone.

Thirty years later, the Bride and I were sitting by the pool one late evening, drinking wine and talking about our past before we met. Since she grew up in a small town about forty miles from where I did in Old East Dallas, the conversation drifted to the Dallas clubs that used to line Greenville Avenue, a hotspot for the Baby Boomers such as us. In fact, I was born on this date way back in 1954, one of the earlier Boomers, and she came long ten years later almost to the day, as the last of our generation, and will celebrate her birthday on the 29th.

WIth this almost exact ten-year difference in our ages, (and by the way, our 26th anniversary is on her birthday, only three days from now) but we’ve found we share similar memories of that time in the ‘80s before we met.

The music playing through our outside speakers helped recall those days and one song reminded me of a place I enjoyed. “Hey, do you remember Spaghetti Warehouse out on I-35?”

Her white teeth flashed in the fading light. “My high school boyfriend took me there before we went dancing at Bell Star.”

“You had to be twenty-one to get into Bell Star.”

She gave me a look over the top of her glass. “I’ve heard.”

“Man, there were some great clubs and restaurants down there back then. The Longhorn Ballroom, Whiskey River, The Western Place. I loved The Old San Fransciso Streakhouse –––.”

“With the girl on the swing over the bar!” Her eyes lit up at the recollection.

“Yep, but my favorite was Baby Doe’s Matchless Mine.” The Dallas restaurant on the only hill in Dallas (and that’s a stretch to say) had a great view of the Trinity River down below, and about a million cars stuck in traffic jams off of I-35.

“I liked it, too. Especially the cheese soup.”

“That reminds me, did you ever eat at The Shed? It was a steak house in North Dallas.”

“I loved that place. My parents used to take me there–––.”

My head spun and my breath caught. I was back in That Place, staring across the restaurant at my future wife. “You were there with them and someone else once. You were wearing a cream sailor’s sweater.”

Her expression was one of shock. “I did wear that sweater when they took me and my boyfriend out to eat one time. We broke up a year later, but how did you know? ”She tilted her head and took another sip. “I’ve never told you that story.”

“Didn’t have to.” I described the scene as she nodded and listened with a frown across her forehead. “I was there and couldn’t take my eyes off of you from across the room. Y’all had a disagreement and you got up and left.”

“We sure did. He was back from college and I’d just graduated. It was the beginning of the end for us.”

For the next hour we talked about that night, how I was taken with her almost to the point of embarrassment, though I have to admit, she hadn’t noticed me at all. We talked of our lives with other people for the next eight years until a mutual friend introduced us in Austin and we married another eight years later.

It was an unbelievable coincidence, and when I used it in a manuscript, my agent urged me to take it out. “I love the story It’s too unbelievable in a book.”

“But it really happened.”

“You readers won’t like it, or believe it’s possible.”

I found out she was right once again as I went down a rabbit hole of research concerning reality and fiction. In real life, coincides are seriously cool, but in the worlds we create, the same rules simply don’t apply. Constant or poor coincidences are startling to readers, and their ability to suspend disbelief (though we always do that in fiction) can draw them out of the plot and drive ’em to complain in two-star reviews. Readers hate sudden, lazy coincides.

However, on the flip side, that interesting confluence of people and events works at the beginning of a novel because technically, all stories start with a coincidence as….

…two men just happen to be fishing under a bridge one night when the body of a woman drops into the water and the story takes off.  (John D. MacDonald in Darker Than Amber). It worked so well that particular Travis McGee novel eventually wound up on the big screen, and I know, because I saw some of it at a drive-in theater one night in 1970…never mind.

But if such a thing happens at the end of your novel, when the antagonist is about to shoot the protagonist under that same bridge and another body falls on his gun hand and saving our hero’s life, then you’ll hear about it. I guarantee.

These Rules That Aren’t tend to apply more to thrillers and mysteries. If you’re writing fantasy, horror, or romance, then you can get away with it, because it seems that readers of these genres are more open to fate and such similar interactions.

Come to think of it, maybe I can go back and dust off that old manuscript and dabble in romance for a while. Anyway, careful what you create in the way of falling bodies or chance meetings, and let reality and past memories rest for quiet discussion some night over wine.