Coffee & Conversation: How to keep your plots/stories from being repetitive?

20 Monday Dec 2021

Posted by Emmi Lawrence in Coffee & Conversation

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advice, answer, author, characters, essay, non-fiction, nonfiction, Novel, plots, prose, question, reading, writer, Writing, writing advice

How to keep your plots/stories from being repetitive?

So I’ve already discussed expanding your vocabulary in order to keep your sentence structures from stagnating and also how to keep your characters from feeling interchangeable and both of those will help make a story fresh. However, even if you use new vocabulary and make sure to differentiate the voices of your characters, there’s still a level in your story-writing that can make them seem similar to the point of rehashing the same-old same-old things. This is a mix of your setting and plot.

1) Integrate your conflict with your setting

If you took space out of Star Wars you’d get a very different story. So make sure that the placement of your story is integral to your plot. That you can’t tug it out and throw it away and stick a new one in. Even in contemporary stories, this is paramount. If your story is in New York, it better not be able to be thrown into Chicago. If your story is about a secondary world, then that world better not be able to be replaced by any other made-up world. Make the setting as much a character as your characters are.

If you are setting a series all in the same place, then you might only be able to alter the setting in minute ways, but I urge you to do your best here. To make the characters interact with the setting in a different manner than the last story. Maybe the last character was a tourist in a resort town and was seeing everything for the first time. Maybe the new character has lived there all their life and knows the secret places or the drama behind the sparkles of the place.

When crafting in secondary worlds, always keep your options open. Don’t slap down rules and guidelines that cover an entire world on your first go, leave some space for the world to grow and morph, for new types of people with new cultures and ideas and magical abilities to appear or to have their own pockets of space within this world. Don’t say the desert is devoid of people. Mention a people out there to give the impression that the world is bigger, to give yourself a new way to interact with the setting in the future. Don’t tell me that every island has the exact same creatures on it; give me the impression that each is dangerous in its own way.

2) Layer conflicts

If I crochet a chain, then all the chains I create will look pretty much the same, regardless whether they’re fatter, skinnier or made of different colored yarn. If I add layers to my project, then suddenly I have more options on where I can do tighter stitches, loopy holes or shapes. Same with stories. If you only have one single conflict, then it’s easy to see similarities between your story and others. On the other hand, if you layer multiple conflicts–an internal character-driven-one on top of multiple inter-personal ones, on top of a survivalist one on top of a magical, fantastical one–well, you’ve got something far more complicated that won’t feel much like anything else. At least not taken as a whole. Continue reading →

Coffee & Conversation: How to critique someone else’s work?

13 Monday Dec 2021

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advice, answer, author, critiqing advice, critiques, essay, national novel writing month, non-fiction, nonfiction, Novel, question, reading, writer, Writing, writing advice

How to critique someone else’s work?

Critiquing is a specialized skill, one that takes empathy and understanding. There are many writers groups out there and so many of them are filled with beginning writers who think that their way of writing or their preferred way of reading is the only one. They will often have only a rudimentary understanding of story guidelines and yet speak as if they are far more knowledgeable then they are. So I urge you to be cautious when listening to other people’s critiques before you get to known them and their writing and their critiquing style.

1) Read the story fully before commenting at all. Nothing is more annoying than to have comments that read something: “What is this??” “Oh, I understand now.” So useless. So read the entire piece first. Or, in the case of chapters, read each chapter and leave comments at the end.

2) Interpret the writer’s intentions in terms of what they seem to be trying to say and what their goals are in the piece itself. Or, at least attempt to interpret this. You might end up being wrong, but at least you tried to figure out what the writer was trying to say so you could help them succeed in their goal.

3) Start with what you enjoyed when writing up your response. There are always good parts of someone’s writing, no matter how new they are or how young they are.

4) Do not suggest prescriptive ideas. In other words, comment on how you felt (you felt cheated/you were bored/you had negative feelings about a character), but never tell them how to FIX the problem unless you’re specifically phrasing it in a “If you were attempting to do X, then maybe consider doing Y.” That way, the writer can decide whether or not they agree that they were attempting to do X.

5) Never attempt to take over the story. You’re only there to help. Don’t critique by saying things such as “Hey, I don’t like romances, maybe you should write this as a thriller?” or “This story was incredibly introspective and I think it really needs to be more action-packed.” Those types of comments are not useful because now you’re attempting to guide the other writer’s story into a way YOU would have written it. Essentially, never attempt to force another writer’s story into your own style or writing.

6) Focus on different aspects. There are a lot of different moving parts to a story. Character, voice, writing style, POV, theme, plot, stakes, hook, descriptions, timeline, clarity, emotional resonance, etc., Most people tend to focus on the things they can do, or feel they can do, best. But it can be really helpful, to yourself as well, to focus on elements of story that maybe aren’t your specialty. It can also be helpful to approach your critique thinking about each of the different elements individually and organizing your thoughts for the person in this way.

7) Show gratitude. Thank the writers for sharing their words. Sharing words is a huge deal. It’s showing a great amount of trust. Acknowledging that trust, regardless of your overall opinion of the piece, is paramount.

~Emmi

Coffee & Conversation: What to do with your Nanowrimo novel?

06 Monday Dec 2021

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advice, answer, author, editing, essay, nanowrimo, non-fiction, nonfiction, Novel, prose, question, reading, writer, Writing, writing advice

What to do with your Nanowrimo novel?

Or any other novel that you may have written in a short span of time.

No matter how well we write or how many hours we’ve spent on something, when we work on a project in a condensed period of time, we’re very liable to miss things. We’re simply too close. We know what words should be there. We know what the descriptions are trying to say. We understand what the dialogue is referring to. We know. Because it’s all in our heads and not just on the paper.

The best thing to do is set the story aside for a time. Put it in a drawer, label it draft one and give yourself a specific date when you can take it back out. I recommend something between 4 to 12 weeks. During that time, work on other projects, get your brain away, far away, from the project you just finished. That way, when you come back, you’ll be fresh.

Another really good piece of information to know is that agents and editors are often a little wary about the influx of stories they receive in December and January, thinking that these new novels/queries are messy Nanowrimo novels. So it’s best to give yourself a little time and space away from that bias.

Once you’ve come back to the story, do a thorough edit. You should have forgotten the words by this point and be reading things fresh, allowing you to catch descriptions that aren’t clear enough, words that could be read in two different ways, plot threads that end up not going anywhere, characters that switch personalities, etc.

After your edits, you can send out to your beta reader if you want, get a critique, do more edits, craft a pitch and a query, etc. Do all the things to liven up your novel and get it ready for submission (or publication).

One thing you don’t want to do is forget about your novel. Don’t let it sit forever. Make sure you have that date to go back to it. Make sure you open it back up knowing that it will need work, but that it isn’t awful and anything wrong can be fixed. That you do have something worthwhile in your hands. Don’t abandon it.

~Emmi

Coffee & Conversation: How to become a writer of habit?

22 Monday Nov 2021

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advice, answer, author, essay, non-fiction, nonfiction, Novel, prose, question, reading, writer, Writing, writing advice, writing habits

How to become a writer of habit?

A lot of authors will give the advice, Write Every Day. No exceptions.

A lot of other authors will give the advice, OMG, you don’t have to write every day. I don’t. You don’t either. Don’t listen to that advice.

Neither of these are correct and neither of these are wrong.

What you must do as a writer is create a habit. A habit that will last you through shitty days. A habit that will last you through null motivation. A habit that will last you through depression and writer’s block and burnout.

For some people, this habit needs to be every single day. And this is great. Whatever time comes around each day and you sit yourself down at your computer or in front of a notebook because your brain says, “Hey, this is supposed to be writing time, remember?”

But many people have inflexible schedules where this isn’t possible. So to those people, I say this: find a special time that WILL work. Maybe it’s once a week, Saturday morning at 6 am for one hour. Maybe it’s Tues/Thurs nights from 8pm-10pm. Maybe it’s every other Friday from 6am-3pm because that’s your CWS Friday.

I don’t know when you have time. But YOU know.

Find that special time, whether it’s an hour or ten or twenty each week. Find it and make it sacrosanct. NO ONE, and I mean NO ONE, can interrupt this time. If it’s 30 minutes during baby nap time, then it’s 30 minutes during baby nap time. If it’s sitting down at the kitchen table with your morning coffee before work or on your commute with an audio recorder.

Once you find that time, craft whatever setup you need to make it easiest to keep doing it so it becomes a habit. Put the notebook exactly where you know you’re going to need it. Add extra batteries to your pocket when you go for that walk with your audio recorder. Make sure to make your computer and your working files as easy and as organized to get to as possible. Any obstacles you can remove, remove them. Any way to make things easier, do them.

Set up meeting schedules in your calendar if need be. Set up notifications. Reminders.

And then! (And this is the super hard part)

HIDE YOUR PHONE. DO NOT OPEN THE INTERNET. IGNORE ALL ELSE DURING YOUR WRITING TIME.

Seriously.

I, personally, have a small netbook that is for writing only. Can’t even get onto the internet or it’ll probably die some horrible, virus-ridden death. It’s great, because even if i wanted to get on the interest…I can’t.

But really. Hide your phone or get yourself an app like Forest in order to turn off access to it for your special writing time that you’ve carved out to form a habit that you want to keep you going through the years <3

~Emmi

Coffee & Conversation: How fast do you write?

08 Monday Nov 2021

Posted by Emmi Lawrence in Coffee & Conversation

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answer, author, essay, nanowrimo, non-fiction, nonfiction, Novel, prose, question, reading, writer, Writing, writing advice, writing speed

How fast do you write?

This is one of those trick questions :)

I talked about how nebulous it is to talk about writing a novel based on months and years and that generally hours is a better method for counting your progress. Hours will also help you get an idea of how many words you can write in a given period of time if you keep track of your time spent and progress made.

The average word count per hour across writers is something like 500 words.

Some writers I know can dump 1000 to 3000 words each hour onto the page. Generally these are writers who are big into editing or they are over-writers who then go back and cull many of those words back out. Not always, of course. Some of these writers have simply been heavily thinking about their scene for a long time so when they sit down, the scene flows out incredibly quickly.

Other writers are like me, and we write anywhere between 250-600 words per hour. For me, specifically, this is because I have a tendency to cycle. Cycling means one doesn’t start at the last sentence from the previous session, but rather goes back a chapter or scene and begins there. I’ll read and tweak and edit as I go and then when I get to where I left off last time, I’ll continue on, but now I’m immersed in the world and can get more words out. If I’m working through a full other hour or two, then my word count will go up during those hours because I’m no longer having the time-sink of the cycle. However! This means I’ll have more words to go through during my next writing session, so it’s a give and take.

I don’t mind being a writer with an average writing speed/slower writer because I get a ton of editing done during the writing phase, which gives me great pleasure because I’m not the biggest fan of editing once the story has all the words in place. At that point, I’m eager to be done and moved on to something else and must force myself to focus on clean up. As a metaphor, it’s like waking up the next morning after a party–if you clean up during the evening as things progress, clean up doesn’t seem too bad, but when you wake up and there’s a ton to do, you’re just…tired before you even start in on it all.

So I am not a fast writer by any means. If I want to draft something quickly, I must spend a great many hours on the project in a condensed time frame.

~Emmi

Coffee & Conversation: What is a Nanowrimo novel?

01 Monday Nov 2021

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answer, author, essay, goals, nanowrimo, national novel writing month, Novel, prose, question, writer, Writing, writing advice

What is a Nanowrimo novel?

A novel written during the National Novel Writing Month (November), where people are urged to set themselves goals, the lead one being to write 50k words in 30 days.

A lot of people look down on events such as Nanowrimo. They call the books or partial books written during that focused time “brain dumps” or far worse. There are even submission guidelines by editors and agents that specifically demand not to be sent your “Nanowrimo mess” as if November is the only time that one might be able to write a mess of a novel or that if a novel is written in a month it must therefore be, a mess.

Thing is…a month is an incredibly arbitrary span of time.

What is a month? It’s four weeks. It’s 28 to 31 days. It’s 672 to 744 hours. It’s 40, 320 to 44,640 minutes.

So, when you say you wrote a novel in a month, are you saying that you spent 40,000 minutes on that novel? Did you spend 700 hours on that novel? No, of course not! (i mean, unless you never sleep or do absolutely anything else during the month.)

So what does saying “I wrote this novel in a month” actually mean?? What does saying that you spent two years working on a novel mean??

Well, in fact, they could actually mean the exact same thing. Or, they could mean nothing at all.

If, say, a person decided to spend one month working a novel, by which they decided to spend a grand total of 4 hours each evening instead of watching TV or going out or reading or any other leisure activity, by the end of the month they will have written during a total of 120 hours during that month.

If, say, a person decided to write a novel and only spent 1 hour a week over the course of two years, they would have spent 104 hours during those two years. Continue reading →

Coffee & Conversation: Are you a grammar nazi?

25 Monday Oct 2021

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advice, answer, author, commas, essay, grammar, non-fiction, nonfiction, question, reading, writer, Writing, writing advice

Are you a grammar nazi?

Not even remotely. In fact, particularly online, I really don’t care where your commas are, whether you use the Oxford comma, or whether you use the correct form of its/it’s or your/you’re.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, if you’re entire post is riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes, I might judge you. A little.

But we’ve all been there, writing too fast, skimming the words, completely missing something we’ve written. It’s why we edit. It’s why we read through our work over and over again. It’s why we have copy editors as a profession. It’s not like you’re going to hire a copy editor for your blog or your social media status. I’m not one to mock.

Just recently I was editing something and found that I’d written “view” instead of “few.” I’m constantly finding mistakes like that in my own work so I can’t really be cruel to someone else.

That being said…

The one rule that reeaallly grates when I hear it/see it, is the who/that one. People are WHOS (like the WHOS in WHOVILLE), not THATS. We are People, not objects. People WHO do things. Very important :P

~Emmi

Coffee & Conversation: How do you set promises in your writing?

18 Monday Oct 2021

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advice, answer, author, essay, non-fiction, nonfiction, Novel, prose, question, writer, Writing, writing advice

How do you set promises in your writing?

When you open up a story, you’re grounding your reader.

You’re giving them a character, introduced in a way that promises who this type of character is, and maybe even what sort of arc they are going to undergo through the story. You’re giving a setting, promising that this setting will be indicative of the story as a whole. You’re giving a writing style, promising that this style is going to represent the story in some way.

In many stories, you’re also giving a set of stakes, the tensions or conflicts or problems that need to be solved or else some awful thing might happen, might continue happening or something good might not ever happen.

These moments in the beginning of your story can be called reader promises. You’re promising your reader specific things and if those things aren’t achieved, the reader can be left feeling cheated.

As one example of this cheated feeling, I once read the first couple of pages of a novel in a bookstore. Thought it was super interesting and so bought it and brought it home. It was the first of the four books I’d bought that I began reading, that was how excited I was about it. Chapter one was great. Then chapter two went into a flashback. Okay, I thought, let’s just push through this one flashback and get back to the cool story! Only, chapter three was still flashback. By chapter four, I realized that the entire story was the flashback and the cool introductory chapter was merely a bait for the switch that would be occurring.

Another example is a story Brandon Sanderson talks about. How, in a draft of one of his novels, he sent it to his beta readers, who all came back and said some variation of: “I was waiting for the story to go back to that journey to that island they talked about.” He then realized that he’d set up the wrong promise, because that island was never and would never be a place the characters in his story would be heading. So he had to rewrite the beginning of his story to cull this expectation from readers.

I’m sure you’ve experienced something like this before in your own reading. These moments, when you feel like you didn’t get the story you thought you were getting, are examples of the author dropping the reader promise in some way. (Some times they do it on purpose because the original chapter one is boring, so they craft a more exciting chapter one to entice readers in, despite it being quite clearly a bait and switch.)

When crafting your reader promises, you have to make sure that you’re introducing your character in a way that it’s clear what type of person they are. If you start your story with a non-point-of-view character, be very careful, because your reader is going to presume this character is important. And if that character ends up not being the main character/one of the main characters, then the reader will, again, feel cheated.

One example of this was a trilogy I began reading many years ago where the book opens with a specific character and his wife. For half the book this man gets almost ALL of the point-of-view of the scenes he’s in, which was actually the bulk of the novel. Then his wife dies. Then he dies. And the two side characters, who had barely any scene time before this, suddenly became the leads. Needless to say, I was disappointed and unsatisfied. (This trilogy did not do well, I might add, despite the first trilogy by this author selling very well.)

When crafting a setting promise, writing a science-fiction story that’s going to entirely take place on a space ship, maybe don’t start the story in an enchanted forest <–That’s a metaphor. What I mean is, don’t start your story in a place that completely misrepresents the rest of the story, unless you have an epically good reason for doing so.

Another word of warning about promises: Readers pay a lot of attention to the beginning of your story. A LOT of attention. Even if they aren’t aware that they’re doing it. They are going to pick up on little things from the beginning that they wouldn’t pick up on from random middle pieces of information. So setting things up right to give the correct impressions about what kind of story the reader is going to be getting is important.

The great thing about reader promises though, is that you can always alter your beginnings and your promises as you write your book! You can always change those beginning lines to fit what the story ends up being about if your entire outline is wrecked midway through writing. That’s very useful :)

~Emmi

Coffee & Conversation: How to keep your characters from being interchangeable? (2/2)

11 Monday Oct 2021

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How to keep your characters from feeling interchangeable? (2/2)

Last week I talked about making sure each character from a specific book feels unique. Today I’m going to talk about the second way characters can feel interchangeable.

That is, from book to book each point of view character reads just like the last point of view character. This is an issue that will lead to burn-out from your readers, because well, if you’ve read one, you’ve read them all! That’s…not a response you want your readers to have. You want them to feel like your stories are all experiences, each one wonderful, but so very different.

There’s a few ways to help make sure you don’t fall into the trap of the same-old, same-old point of view character just with serial numbers filed off and a new name and face slapped on.

VOICE

In my previous post, I mostly talked about character, but this time around, I’m talking voice. When writing from a perspective, you’re writing with a specific voice in mind. That voice will dictate EVERYTHING in a story.

Description: What does this point of view character notice? What would they take time to examine? What makes them perk up? What makes them passionate? What could they study for hours?

A good example you can check out is Agatha Christie’s Cards on the Table. In this novel, Poirot interviews four different characters, all of whom describe the exact same room where a murder took place. Each of those four characters gives a vastly different description based on their personalities. Reading those differences and how it affects the story is a great example for understanding how to focus a particular character’s voice when crafting the description of a setting. (Please note: I’m more talking about points of view that are character-driven in some way, since in objective view would preclude a description via a person’s view.)

Inner Dialogue/Musing: What does this character care about? What are they constantly thinking about? What is important to them? What sneaks in when it shouldn’t? What isn’t there that another character would have noticed? Continue reading →

Coffee & Conversation: How to keep your characters from being interchangeable? (1/2)

04 Monday Oct 2021

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advice, answer, author, character, characterization, essay, non-fiction, nonfiction, question, reading, writer, Writing, writing advice, writing characters

How to keep your characters from feeling interchangeable? (1/2)

I’ve talked a little bit about how to expand your writing on a sentence level by expanding your vocabulary, etc. But now, I want to discuss characters and how to practice making them unique rather than interchangeable.

There are two ways of looking at this. First, all the characters in a particular story read and feel the same and it’s difficult to tell them apart, and second, all the characters across the author’s many stories feel the same, particularly their point-of-view characters.

This second one is interesting in the romance industry because it often means that a character who was once a side character in someone else’s story becomes the lead character in their own, only, they end up feeling like a completely different person because they read like the previous main character instead of who they’d been in that previous story. (As an example, because this reads a little confusing: Paul’s story is great. Paul is friends with side character, Lyle. Lyle is beloved by fans. Author writes book about Lyle next. Only Lyle suddenly acts like Paul rather than the Lyle everyone loved.)

So I’m going to address ways in which to help out with both these situations in two different posts since they are actually different things entirely.

First, how to keep characters in the same book from all reading the same.

1) Give each character a unique physical/visible trait.

This has to do with imagery. You want a different image in each reader’s mind when you bring up a specific character in your story. A lot of people need something physical to latch on to, something that helps paint a picture in their imagination. So giving each person a particular physical trait can make all the difference.

When I say unique, I mean unique. If all the characters have brown hair, then brown hair isn’t unique. If all the characters have scars across their faces, then the scars aren’t unique. You see this often in stories where you’ll have the blond-haired one, the brown-haired one and the red-haired one as a set of three. That’s one way to do it… Continue reading →