This topic is related to Wednesday's topic. It's an important point that I thought I would hit upon again.
Backstory, whether character or plot, is needed.
Now, now, calm down, don't get your panties in a wad.
Backstory is needed if the author is to write the story well. The reader doesn't need to know the how and why a character does such and such. It isn't needed for the reader, but it is needed for the writer so the writer can craft a character well, making the reader believes the action as reasonable for said character. It is the responsibility of the author to write the scene well enough to make it believable.
The reader doesn't want to read everything about the character up front, he wants to discover it along the road during the story. A good author will dribble little bits of info throughout the story that backs up the character's actions and dialogue.
So, backstory is need, but it should NEVER be in the story except in tiny droplets.
Some writers are what we call pantsers. I'm one of them. I don't write a detailed plot or outline. I know I have to get from point A to point Z in 300 pages. Sometimes I only know of three other points along the way. In other words, I learn about my character as I write.
And this can get me into trouble by virtue of backstory. I discovered after it was pointed out to me that I started the story 'at the beginning' (my words), but I needed to start my 'story within the story'.
This time it really felt RIGHT! I'm happy with how it is going.
And you know what the saddest part of this whole topic is? I can spot backstory from 100 pace--just not in my own story. Not many of us can. We are simply too close to the subject. So thank those crit partners, the mentors, the contest judges, and even Mom for pointing out the honest truth that your stuff stinks because it isn't telling the story that is really happening because it's bogged down in backstory.
What is the highest number of pages have you deleted because of backstory? Mine's 50.
Write on!
1/28/09
Starting Over . . . Again
Scrapping a book is tough, but sometimes a writer has to do it. I'm dumping only about 50 pages, but many authors dump 100-250 pages and start over. I'm lucky in the sense that a small publisher took interest in me. She liked my writing voice in LC though it didn't fit their imprint, and she wanted to see my next endeavor.
I wrote, tweaked and edited a submission and sent it to her. I sensed there was something wrong with it, but I didn't know what. I got a response a few days later, and it wasn't good.
It was all backstory. There's a reason it's called BS, people!
Yeah, when she so kindly pointed out my problem in a two page run down, I knew I had to start over. I find it disturbing that I can spot BS in other people's work, but not my own. I guess I'm just too close to the subject.
Anyhoo, I thought about it and started writing yesterday morning. Now, just because I'm scrapping my beginning doesn't mean I can't use some of my scenes or plotline, I can, though totally rewritten. And I intend to. But what I found interesting is that by simply rewriting the first page I discovered something very important--I discovered the reason for this story.
Oh, I thought I knew what was going on, but one of those simple sentences that I wrote triggered the whole thing to come together in my mind. So I'm off to write--I just had to get the stupid out first.
Don'tcha love it when it all comes together?
Write on!
I wrote, tweaked and edited a submission and sent it to her. I sensed there was something wrong with it, but I didn't know what. I got a response a few days later, and it wasn't good.
It was all backstory. There's a reason it's called BS, people!
Yeah, when she so kindly pointed out my problem in a two page run down, I knew I had to start over. I find it disturbing that I can spot BS in other people's work, but not my own. I guess I'm just too close to the subject.
Anyhoo, I thought about it and started writing yesterday morning. Now, just because I'm scrapping my beginning doesn't mean I can't use some of my scenes or plotline, I can, though totally rewritten. And I intend to. But what I found interesting is that by simply rewriting the first page I discovered something very important--I discovered the reason for this story.
Oh, I thought I knew what was going on, but one of those simple sentences that I wrote triggered the whole thing to come together in my mind. So I'm off to write--I just had to get the stupid out first.
Don'tcha love it when it all comes together?
Write on!
1/26/09
Equery Quandary
Here is a question that I've been asking myself lately, should I equery agents or snail mail them?
Technology is a good thing, but I wonder if the idea that you can sit down and dash off numerous equeries in one sitting can be a bad thing for the serious writer.
Let me explain:
Everybody and his brother thinks he can write. Just like every wannabe on American Idol thinks he can sing, but when he is told by pros that he doesn't have a hope in hell of making it in the biz, he still listens to mom, dad, bro, sis and Great-Aunt Gertie who think he's the next big thang.
Well, you ain't, brother. Listen to the pros and don't give up your day job. Sound familiar?
Think about this if you will. If every yahoo wannabe writer out there in cyberspace equeries every agent who accepts equeries that would increase the amount of queries in an agents inbox by at least a ten-fold, probably more.
Agents already have a job. It's to work for the writers signed in their stable. So if an agent has a busy week those queries pile up in the inbox, AND if said agent doesn't have an auto-reply letting wannabe author know the equery was rec'd, he gets hit again and again. Methinks there is a lot of deleting going on just to clean out the mailbox. And the serious writer gets dumped just as quickly as the yahoo who doesn't have a finished manuscript, or doesn't know how to write, or asks if the 'idea' is good enough to write about, or doesn't have a clue about the genre he's writing in.
As much as I hate the idea of going old school and giving USPS my money, I DO want to give my Leprechaun story a chance. I've exhausted all the agents who accept equeries (I finally got tired of looking at my rejections folder and deleted it all--without documenting who I happened to query--OOPS!), but there are a slew of agents representing fantasy that don't accept equeries I haven't queried via USPS yet.
True, it might be time for me to shove this story under the bed, but I'm not ready to do that yet. I'm giving it another try and will query the last few agents on the list. What will it hurt? Yeah, I could get rejected, but I'm used to that. Who knows? I might actually find my 'dream agent'.
What do you all think? Shove the book under the bed or give it another shot by going old school?
Write on!
Technology is a good thing, but I wonder if the idea that you can sit down and dash off numerous equeries in one sitting can be a bad thing for the serious writer.
Let me explain:
Everybody and his brother thinks he can write. Just like every wannabe on American Idol thinks he can sing, but when he is told by pros that he doesn't have a hope in hell of making it in the biz, he still listens to mom, dad, bro, sis and Great-Aunt Gertie who think he's the next big thang.
Well, you ain't, brother. Listen to the pros and don't give up your day job. Sound familiar?
Think about this if you will. If every yahoo wannabe writer out there in cyberspace equeries every agent who accepts equeries that would increase the amount of queries in an agents inbox by at least a ten-fold, probably more.
Agents already have a job. It's to work for the writers signed in their stable. So if an agent has a busy week those queries pile up in the inbox, AND if said agent doesn't have an auto-reply letting wannabe author know the equery was rec'd, he gets hit again and again. Methinks there is a lot of deleting going on just to clean out the mailbox. And the serious writer gets dumped just as quickly as the yahoo who doesn't have a finished manuscript, or doesn't know how to write, or asks if the 'idea' is good enough to write about, or doesn't have a clue about the genre he's writing in.
As much as I hate the idea of going old school and giving USPS my money, I DO want to give my Leprechaun story a chance. I've exhausted all the agents who accept equeries (I finally got tired of looking at my rejections folder and deleted it all--without documenting who I happened to query--OOPS!), but there are a slew of agents representing fantasy that don't accept equeries I haven't queried via USPS yet.
True, it might be time for me to shove this story under the bed, but I'm not ready to do that yet. I'm giving it another try and will query the last few agents on the list. What will it hurt? Yeah, I could get rejected, but I'm used to that. Who knows? I might actually find my 'dream agent'.
What do you all think? Shove the book under the bed or give it another shot by going old school?
Write on!
1/23/09
WoWWiki
Okay, I'll be the first to admit that I'm severely lacking in the imagination department. Not in the story idea area, but in the supernatural critters that I invent. Guess I'm more of a visual person in this respect. And since I can't draw worth a darn, I had to go looking for inspiration somewhere.
I discovered WoWWiki
Talk about an awesome website! I scrolled through the drawings of the monsters and make up my own monster by using them as an inspiration. Using them would cause all sorts of copyright problems, but I do use their images to stimulate my own imagination or put a face to one of my secondary characters.
When I was writing Leprechaun Connection, I met a bunch of gamers at my niece's wedding. They are some of the nicest people around. The one thing they did was forced me to realize that when you are writing fantasy, it's MAGIC, NOT MECHANICAL.
Yes, I use this as a personal mantra when I start a new urban fantasy. I really love letting my imagination go, but I also love all the sites that help stimulate it.
Monstrous which takes you to Monstropedia is another one of my favorite sites.
When I wrote my Viking romance, I used The Viking Answer Lady a lot--loved her site!
What are some of your favorite research sites and why?
Write on!
I discovered WoWWiki
Talk about an awesome website! I scrolled through the drawings of the monsters and make up my own monster by using them as an inspiration. Using them would cause all sorts of copyright problems, but I do use their images to stimulate my own imagination or put a face to one of my secondary characters.
When I was writing Leprechaun Connection, I met a bunch of gamers at my niece's wedding. They are some of the nicest people around. The one thing they did was forced me to realize that when you are writing fantasy, it's MAGIC, NOT MECHANICAL.
Yes, I use this as a personal mantra when I start a new urban fantasy. I really love letting my imagination go, but I also love all the sites that help stimulate it.
Monstrous which takes you to Monstropedia is another one of my favorite sites.
When I wrote my Viking romance, I used The Viking Answer Lady a lot--loved her site!
What are some of your favorite research sites and why?
Write on!
1/21/09
Google Yourself Lately?
I did a couple of days ago.
And it can be very eye opening. Luckily, I'm a 9o-year-old woman from Colorado who does something with her state fair every year. Or maybe I could be a mid-40's woman who comments on writer's blogs and discovered this blog as the last entry on the first page. Or I'm an endocrinologist. *WooHoo*
So far I'm pretty clean. But you might want to check yourself out. For all you know, you might share a name with a stripper, or KKK head honcho, or porn star, or a leftist radical that the government is closely watching. Now, if you write erotica and you share your name with a porn star--more power to you! Bet you will get some good hits for your new book!
But if you write children's novels and you share the name with a porn star, you might seriously consider changing to a pseudonym. See To Pseudonym or Not (1/3/09) {I'd link it, but I don't know how to link to my own blog, sorry}, and start working on name recognition.
It's simple. Put your name in the search engine (google, webcrawler, yahoo) and hit enter. Now, there are various tips out there. Use quotes around the name tends to cut down on the site from randomly grabbing your first name and matching it with someone else's last name. Or you could use + in between each part of the name. This also tightens the hits some.
"Margaret A. Golla"
Margaret+A.+Golla
Just because you have a bazillion google hits, it doesn't mean they represent anything current. One of my first hits was from a blog comment two years ago. And yeah, I do comment on blogs a little more often than that.
The reason I googled myself was to see who else might have my name. I write in two very different genres and though I've bought two domain names I haven't set either one up yet. I googled myself and found out Margaret A. Golla comments on many, many topics, but M. A. Golla does not.
Guess which one I'm using for my kid's books?
Write on!
And it can be very eye opening. Luckily, I'm a 9o-year-old woman from Colorado who does something with her state fair every year. Or maybe I could be a mid-40's woman who comments on writer's blogs and discovered this blog as the last entry on the first page. Or I'm an endocrinologist. *WooHoo*
So far I'm pretty clean. But you might want to check yourself out. For all you know, you might share a name with a stripper, or KKK head honcho, or porn star, or a leftist radical that the government is closely watching. Now, if you write erotica and you share your name with a porn star--more power to you! Bet you will get some good hits for your new book!
But if you write children's novels and you share the name with a porn star, you might seriously consider changing to a pseudonym. See To Pseudonym or Not (1/3/09) {I'd link it, but I don't know how to link to my own blog, sorry}, and start working on name recognition.
It's simple. Put your name in the search engine (google, webcrawler, yahoo) and hit enter. Now, there are various tips out there. Use quotes around the name tends to cut down on the site from randomly grabbing your first name and matching it with someone else's last name. Or you could use + in between each part of the name. This also tightens the hits some.
"Margaret A. Golla"
Margaret+A.+Golla
Just because you have a bazillion google hits, it doesn't mean they represent anything current. One of my first hits was from a blog comment two years ago. And yeah, I do comment on blogs a little more often than that.
The reason I googled myself was to see who else might have my name. I write in two very different genres and though I've bought two domain names I haven't set either one up yet. I googled myself and found out Margaret A. Golla comments on many, many topics, but M. A. Golla does not.
Guess which one I'm using for my kid's books?
Write on!
1/19/09
Secondary Characters
When I start a new story, I tend to write and rewrite the first few chapters a lot. This is my way of figuring out my characters, especially my main character. But even though you are in the protag's mind, you have to keep your secondary characters in theirs while you write out of another POV.
My CP pointed this out in my current edit of Demon Spawn. And it had been pointed out in Leprechaun by a different CP. I had infused my protag's verbiage into the secondary character's vocabulary.
Here is a little mantra to chant:
**When in one character's POV, the writer must make certain the secondary characters stay in their POV through their dialogue and actions.**
Most people would snort, mumble 'amateur' under their breath and move on. But to really make a good book outstanding, the writer must remember this advice, otherwise your characters will sound alike and everyone will be flat.
I just finished judging RWA's Golden Heart contest and I found two that I really liked, BUT less than a week later, I couldn't even begin to tell you what either one of them was about! Though the plot and story were good enough for me to score it very well, the characters were forgettable.
A few years ago, I judged a contest entry, historical romance with a little paranormal, that I vividly remember. And do you want to know the interesting thing about this? It wasn't the hero or heroine that I remember, it is the heroine's aunt. To this day, I can still envision the woman, so much so that I wanted her to have her own HEA (happily ever after) as a secondary romantic sub-plot! Yes, I did suggest it to the author. :-)
How the author deals with the secondary characters will kick the book up a notch on the editorial radar. Do I know this for certain? No, but it does make for a better book, doesn't it?
What do you think?
Write on!
My CP pointed this out in my current edit of Demon Spawn. And it had been pointed out in Leprechaun by a different CP. I had infused my protag's verbiage into the secondary character's vocabulary.
Here is a little mantra to chant:
**When in one character's POV, the writer must make certain the secondary characters stay in their POV through their dialogue and actions.**
Most people would snort, mumble 'amateur' under their breath and move on. But to really make a good book outstanding, the writer must remember this advice, otherwise your characters will sound alike and everyone will be flat.
I just finished judging RWA's Golden Heart contest and I found two that I really liked, BUT less than a week later, I couldn't even begin to tell you what either one of them was about! Though the plot and story were good enough for me to score it very well, the characters were forgettable.
A few years ago, I judged a contest entry, historical romance with a little paranormal, that I vividly remember. And do you want to know the interesting thing about this? It wasn't the hero or heroine that I remember, it is the heroine's aunt. To this day, I can still envision the woman, so much so that I wanted her to have her own HEA (happily ever after) as a secondary romantic sub-plot! Yes, I did suggest it to the author. :-)
How the author deals with the secondary characters will kick the book up a notch on the editorial radar. Do I know this for certain? No, but it does make for a better book, doesn't it?
What do you think?
Write on!
1/16/09
Kick Ass Heroines
Why is it that all the bad-ass heroines wear black? Long trench coats cut open to allow mounting a motorcycle or horse with a short cape . Sleeves are baggy to allow for weapons. They can hide the sawed-off shotguns in their flowing coat, I guess.
The women bad asses ALWAYS wear tight leather pants, or spandex equivalents and tall boots. And the graphic heroines always wear stilettos. Now, I'll grant you that it looks way cool on the movie screen or in the video game, but in real life--I don't think so! Have you EVER run in heels? I have and I guarantee I couldn't outrun anything! Of course, the women are always Angelina Jolie or Mila Jovovich (of LeeLoo and Ultraviolet fame), or Jennifer Garner. They are hot, freakishly model hot with long arms and legs up to their boobs.
Granted being tall, leggy and . . . army (I suppose?), (how about reachy?) gives them the advantage of a longer stride and arm reach. And I know all about having a short arm reach. Taking a college fencing course as an elective taught me all about that. I have to admit that I lasted long in the matches, mainly because I was bouncing around like an ant on a frying pan trying to stay out of the Amazon's reach! Yeah . . . lost every bout.
So, I wanted a heroine who is a little more like me. I want her to be ignored, to blend into the background, and have nothing remarkable about her. Oh, and I want her to have a weird fetish--it's clean, and it ain't shoes!--i want her to be a fan of 'the mouse'. yes, Mickey. Don't mess with Mickey or you'll see the bottom of her shoe when she kicks your teeth out!
Okay, I did make her over twenty years younger than I am and about fifty pounds lighter. All in all she is pretty close to my ancient past as possible. I was in pretty good shape then. I had no social life so I had time to ride my horse, workout, and eat healthy. Now, I'm just lazy. That and having a family takes time that had been used for other things.
I like my character, Danica Hunter. She's got the kick-ass thing going for her, except she tends to get overlooked and has a greater maturity than many twenty-somethings. She's a sneaker and Levi's kind of gal who is into Mickey Mouse.
That's who my kick-ass heroine is, now I just have to finish the story and convince someone to buy it!
Write on!
The women bad asses ALWAYS wear tight leather pants, or spandex equivalents and tall boots. And the graphic heroines always wear stilettos. Now, I'll grant you that it looks way cool on the movie screen or in the video game, but in real life--I don't think so! Have you EVER run in heels? I have and I guarantee I couldn't outrun anything! Of course, the women are always Angelina Jolie or Mila Jovovich (of LeeLoo and Ultraviolet fame), or Jennifer Garner. They are hot, freakishly model hot with long arms and legs up to their boobs.
Granted being tall, leggy and . . . army (I suppose?), (how about reachy?) gives them the advantage of a longer stride and arm reach. And I know all about having a short arm reach. Taking a college fencing course as an elective taught me all about that. I have to admit that I lasted long in the matches, mainly because I was bouncing around like an ant on a frying pan trying to stay out of the Amazon's reach! Yeah . . . lost every bout.
So, I wanted a heroine who is a little more like me. I want her to be ignored, to blend into the background, and have nothing remarkable about her. Oh, and I want her to have a weird fetish--it's clean, and it ain't shoes!--i want her to be a fan of 'the mouse'. yes, Mickey. Don't mess with Mickey or you'll see the bottom of her shoe when she kicks your teeth out!
Okay, I did make her over twenty years younger than I am and about fifty pounds lighter. All in all she is pretty close to my ancient past as possible. I was in pretty good shape then. I had no social life so I had time to ride my horse, workout, and eat healthy. Now, I'm just lazy. That and having a family takes time that had been used for other things.
I like my character, Danica Hunter. She's got the kick-ass thing going for her, except she tends to get overlooked and has a greater maturity than many twenty-somethings. She's a sneaker and Levi's kind of gal who is into Mickey Mouse.
That's who my kick-ass heroine is, now I just have to finish the story and convince someone to buy it!
Write on!
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