This morning I stumbled across Eudaemonia’s post on Bell’s plot & structure book (it’s a great book, and I highly recommend it!). Anyway, Lisa shared two exercises from the book and her results:

“Set aside ten minutes of undisturbed writing time. For those ten minutes, write a free-form response to the following: When readers read my novels, I want them to feel _________________________________ at the end.”

and,

The idea is to pull some of your favorite novels off the shelf and then analyze them by asking a series of questions. …
The questions about each book are: “What is it about the lead character that captures you? What is it the lead is trying to get away from? When did the story kick into “high gear”? What was the main opposition to the lead’s objective? How did the ending make you feel? Why did it work?” pg. 21.

Read through her entire post, and then do the exercises for yourself.

Yesterday I reviewed Rebecca York’s Ghost Moon, and it got me to thinking about how writers convey emotion to their readers. One truism I’ve seen repeated by a handful of romance & erotica writers is that if the writer isn’t ‘feeling it’ when he or she writes it, the reader won’t feel it when he or she reads it.

There are many elements of style that affect emotion. Pacing is used to ratchet up the tension in a thriller, for example. One of the things that makes Stephen Wilbers’s The Keys to Great Writing such a good book is that it explains the effect that various elements of style have on your work—such as the ways in which different sentence lengths affect emotion and pacing. Some writers can brilliantly convey emotion in their work by feel (without having to consciously plan the elements of style), but it never hurts, and often helps, to be able to more consciously shape the effect you have on your readers.

Take a look at that first review and some of my comments on the elements of style that seemed to rob the book of emotion for me. Then pick up a book you’ve read recently that struck you as being either particularly poor at conveying emotion or particularly good. Re-read the scene that was most unfortunately flat—or that made you tear up or whoop for joy—and then free-write for at least one side of a sheet of paper (or ten minutes, or whatever you like) about how you believe the writer’s style choices resulted in such a powerful or weak emotional impact.

Today, spend 10 minutes free-writing every stereotypically bad line of dialogue you can think of. These could be genre-inspired (think of the worst examples of the romance, horror, fantasy, or adventure genres, for example), from TV, from novels, from movies… Use anything you’d like. Then spend a few minutes thinking about why you consider these to be ‘bad dialogue’ and how you’d go about fixing them up, replacing them, or changing the scene to make it better.

If you can’t think of specific lines, try to remember a scene from a book or movie and read or watch that scene before doing the latter half of this exercise.

This exercise inspired by The Secret Scroll.

I recently stumbled across 50 timeless blogging tips. One of my favorites was:

You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. Albert Einstein

Today, pick something you consider yourself an expert at and choose one small sub-topic or item that you want to explain (make sure it’s something your grandmother isn’t already familiar with, or you’ll defeat the purpose!). Using no more than one side of a sheet of paper, write an explanation you think your grandmother would understand. If you really want to test yourself, show it to her afterward!

Today’s Booking through Thursday meme encourages book bloggers to think about what book(s) they would want to change and how if they wielded the editor’s pen. I can certainly understand the various people who felt that they couldn’t answer that, that by suggesting changes to a book they’d be turning it into a different book. However, I have a different take on that.

First, a good editor knows how to suggest changes that work with the author’s style and voice. Even the best writer needs a good editor, because a writer is generally too close to his or her work to see the holes and problems. Having someone make suggestions for changes doesn’t somehow rip it out of the author’s control; a good author will weigh others’ suggestions and opinions and decide what will work best for his project.

Second, the kind of strong imagination it takes to come up with alternate versions of an existing story is the same kind of strong imagination it takes to create your own stories. If you’re too busy telling yourself that your opinion of what could be changed in a piece of writing isn’t worth anything, then you’ll never learn how to write good material of your own.

So today, do the BTT meme. Pick a book in your chosen field of writing that you weren’t entirely happy with, and detail as precisely as possible how you would change it. Try to make those ideas suit the style, voice, and structure of the existing piece of writing as much as possible.

This morning I reviewed J.D. Robb/Nora Roberts’s mystery Memory in Death. One of the things that immediately struck me when I read the opening was how over-the-top it was:

Death was not taking a holiday. New York may have been decked out in its glitter and glamour, madly festooned in December of 2059, but Santa Claus was dead. And a couple of his elves weren’t looking so good.

A page or two in, however, it was also clear that the over-the-top style was utterly deliberate—and equally fun. It was enjoyable to just let go of preconceived notions of what’s now considered trite or overly florid, and simply enjoy something larger-than-life.

Today, pick a genre that has—or at some point has had—a style or set of conventions that would now be considered over-the-top, and write a scene, page, or some other short piece in that style. Instead of trying to write it without those conventions, dive head-first into them. Indulge gleefully. Have fun with it, and try to let that sense of fun show in the result!

Write with curiosity

In the spirit of Bill James’s Wolves of Memory, here’s a particularly tricky exercise for you today. In my review of that book I said:

Bill James fascinates me as an author. He does several things I’m not accustomed to seeing and makes them work so beautifully it’s amazing to behold. Very few things actually seem to happen in his books, and yet it doesn’t matter. Most of the story takes place in people’s heads. Even action-filled events are told as recollections, something that in most authors’ hands would rob them of their power and energy. And yet what really drives James’s books are the internal workings of the characters, who are so fascinating that you don’t mind and even vastly prefer spending whole chapters inside their oh-so-bizarre heads.

Today, write a full page of internal monologue from the point of view of a fictional character (preferably one of your own, but you could use another author’s character if you don’t have one of your own to work with). Try to make it quirky, memorable and fascinating. Try to make it say a lot about the character without simply droning on about the character directly.

Earlier today I wrote a blog post dealing with the definition of horror fiction. Read it, and then write, outline, or brainstorm a horror story in which not a single drop of blood is shed, and that in no way fits into the “gross-out” portion of the horror genre. Write a purely psychological, chilling, creepy, or horror-by-implication piece.

Humour - like romance, like drama, like excitement - needs boundaries. It needs rules, lines, differences, be they social (as in Fawlty Towers), cultural (Borat), gender-based (Tootsie) or moral. As in sex.

This, arguably, is a primary purpose of organised religion. In giving us rules to break it lets us sustain into adulthood a child’s delight in naughtiness. Childish, sure, and deeply, almost definitively human, the urge to transgress is also a constant, renewable source of creative energy.

And the more forbidden the sex - the more illicit, immoral or commercial - the greater the potential excitement, creativity and fun.

The above entertaining quote comes from this opinion piece on legalization of the sex industry in The Sydney Morning Herald by Elizabeth Farrelly. In this case, however, I’m more interested in it for its statements regarding creativity, energy, and humor. Today, write about the subject of boundaries, mores, morals, and their relationship to creativity. How do you think a culture’s mores relate to the creative output of that culture’s people?

Not long ago I found a post on George RR Martin Defends Genre on the Reading is My Superpower blog. My review of Robert Masello’s Bestiary this morning made me think of it.

First, here are a few brief thoughts of my own regarding genre so you’ll have some context:

• Genre can be a handy convention for matching books to readers. If you know you prefer fantasy or romance, genre is what lets you go to a particular part of the store and know you’re likely to find books you’ll enjoy there.
• Genre, to me, has only minor implications regarding quality, and those are not causative. By that I mean there’s no inherent reason for, say, a romance or a fantasy novel to be in any way inferior to something described as ‘literary.’ Any qualitative limitations are a result of two things in my mind: the market, and the evolution of the genre. If a genre is young and undeveloped, then the taste for it won’t have evolved yet, and the knowledge of how to write it well won’t have evolved yet. Also, if there’s a huge demand for novels of a particular genre then they tend to get rushed out to press, often with less thought to quality overall.
• Genre is a slippery thing. It has no exact definitions; everyone will set the boundaries of what constitutes a romance or a thriller a little differently. I like this—after all, the only way to work with exact definitions is to work with very formulaic material. The fact that genre is so slippery just means to me that genre writers are branching past the early formulas that got put in place to define their genres.
• There are certain expectations, however, regarding genre once you start a work. I’m not speaking of formulas such as the ones I referred to in the last point. I’m speaking of the expectation that, for example, you won’t suddenly and unexpectedly change genres in the middle of a book with no warning. Your perfectly normal mystery won’t become a paranormal thriller three hundred pages in, and so on.

That last point is the one I want to talk about this morning. In Bestiary, Masello didn’t seem to have a good handle on his genre. The book was kind of paranormal, and kind of not, and kind of thriller, and kind of not, and it bounced back and forth between these things in confusing and inelegant ways. There are authors who can make the sudden genre-shifting revelation work, but they’re few and far between, and it isn’t a wise thing to try if you can avoid it. In this case there was very little reason for confusing the genre—it didn’t add to the book at all and certainly subtracted from it—so the author would have been better off, in my opinion, keeping a more consistent genre-feel.

Today, pick up a genre novel you’ve read recently (or go read one) and pay attention to how the author conveys the genre throughout the book. How does he give you a sense for the genre right off the bat? How does he bolster that feel throughout the book? How does he make the various plots and characters feel appropriate to it?

Never let anyone tell you that this has to boil down to some sort of formula. However, you do need to work to consistently convey your world and its feel throughout your story. That’s a much larger thing than simply genre, but genre is an integral and important part of it.

‘True ease in writing
comes from art not chance.’
—Alexander Pope