Tag Archives: writing

Working Title

Posted on May 15, 2012 | 14 Comments

I happen to think I’m a very good writer.  I’ve been spinning stories since I was 10 years old, probably even younger.  But as proficient as I am at creating characters and telling stories, I can’t come up with a decent title to save my life.

Yes, I suck at titles.  And as far as I’m concerned this is a real problem.

The title of a book is your first introduction to everything that comes afterwards.  People judge books by their covers, and the title is the centerpiece of the cover.  A good title can inform the reader of what the story is about, i.e. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone or The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.  It can hold volumes of meaning with just a few words, i.e. The Help or Little Women.  It can elicit an instant laugh, like this Romance novel I have on my shelf called Talk Nerdy To Me.  It can conjure memories of high school English class, like To Kill A Mockingbird or Catcher in the Rye.

Titles hold a lot of weight.  A bad title can send someone screaming in the opposite direction.  I’m sorry, but I’m just not going to read Fatal Kidnapping.  Although there are other reasons behind that.

The thing is, I’m terrible at coming up with titles.  I cringe whenever I come to the point where I have to give my hard work a name.  How do you come up with just a few words that befit what you’ve spent so much time and energy writing about?

In theory, a title should capture the intent of the novel with just a handful of words.  It should be the hook that draws your readers into the heart of your story before they even read the back cover blurb.  Along those lines, it should come out of the central theme and action of the work.  It should be catchy enough to make people want to read more but not a literal description of what the reader is about to feast on.

I fail at titles.

But you wouldn’t know it to look at the works that I’ve published so far.  The only titles I’ve ever come up with that I have been really happy with are the titles in my Medieval Romance trilogy, The Noble Hearts.  Each of the three books in this series, The Loyal Heart, The Faithful Heart, and The Courageous Heart, describe the single most important trait that the hero of the story has.  But it’s not as simple as it sounds.  The loyalty portrayed in The Loyal Heart runs deeper than just homage to a person.  The fidelity of The Faithful Heart covers so much more than remaining true to love.  And the courage displayed in The Courageous Heart cuts so much deeper than just bravery.  Yes, those are the titles that I’m really proud of.

Not so much for some of my other works.  One of the reasons I haven’t pushed myself to polish my sci-fi series enough to publish it, in spite of having the first two books completely finished, is that I can’t stand the title of the first book in the series, Grace’s Moon.  Ugh!  At one point I had named that book New Moon.  Damn you Stephanie Meyers!  Not that I liked that title much more.  I’ve run through half a dozen titles for that book at least and I can’t stand a single one of them.  However, I am satisfied with the title of the second book in the series, Fallen From Grace.  Why?  Because Fallen From Grace describes the heart of the book so well, especially when you understand whose point of view the story is told from and what has transpired to bring the action to the point that it’s at in that book.

This, of course, tells me something vital about naming books:  You can’t name a book until you are sure you know what it’s about.

Okay, that sounds a little obvious, but I’m sure many other writers out there besides me have drafted tens of thousands of words, letting the characters take us on their journey, and then when we get to the end, to the moment of truth, we look back and aren’t exactly sure what we’ve got.  Grace’s Moon is like that.  I can tell you what it’s about (a ship carrying colonists from Earth to its first planetary colony, Terra, explodes and when the survivors crash on a habitable moon they must find the saboteur and figure out how to build a civilization while preventing warring factions from killing each other and diminishing their already small gene pool) but I have a hard time encapsulating its essence in just a few words.  Even that one-sentence synopsis feels inadequate to everything going on in the story.

For me the lesson to be learned in this is that Grace’s Moon needs a lot more editing before it’s ready to go.  This is also true of about a dozen other stories I’ve started but don’t have titles for.  I’m sure you recognize the feeling.  It’s that squishy center, half-baked feeling.

The easy answer would be to slap any old title on it and let it go.  That’s why I have so many titles I can’t stand.  But as with Hollywood, I’m okay with giving my novels working titles until I come up with the real thing.  I still believe, based on my past experience, that the right title will come along when the prose is ready for it.

So what about you?  How do you come up with titles for your books?  Do they just come to you or do you have to work at them?  Any tips on how to find better titles for things?  I’d love some advice here.

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Writing Templates

Posted on May 8, 2012 | 2 Comments

For as long as I can remember I’ve always modeled the characters in my stories after particular actors or actresses that struck my fancy.  Sometimes an entire story would suggest itself to me when I watched a given performance of my favorite actors.  Not exactly a retelling of the thing I saw them in, but a variation.

Quilting: The Ultimate Template

For some reason a little voice at the back of my head has always considered this cheating.  Are you really creating an original character if you’re modeling them off of somebody else?

Imagine my surprise the other week when I finished reading Eloisa James’ novella Winning the Wallflower and there in her notes after the story she mentioned that some of her characters in this latest series were based off of House and Forest Gump!  Wait a minute, maybe I’m not the only person who does this.

In fact, I already knew that I wasn’t.  Last year while attending a writing workshop taught by Jenni Holbrook she mentioned that she uses what she called “templates” to create her characters.

I love this idea of templates.  Templates exist everywhere, from Word documents to architecture to fashion design.  All sorts of industries start with one thing and make it into something else.  I’ve always worried that there is a sort of plagiarism in the way I have become enamored of a character and then taken them out of their original setting and made them into something else.

Take, for example, the character Danny in my Grace’s Moon sci-fi series.  I’m not gonna lie.  That character started out as Ben Linus from Lost.  Yes, creepy Ben Linus.  But I love Ben.  I loved Ben from the moment he first appeared on the screen.  Probably because Michael Emerson is an amazing actor and as someone with a master’s degree in theater I know acting and I appreciate it when I see someone who does it well.

But those of you who watched Lost know that Ben was a nasty little man, manipulating things behind the scenes, ruthless in his pursuit of what he wanted, dedicated to The Island, and at the same time tragic in everything that life had thrown his way.  There is no way that character is ever going to be considered a hero.  But as I said, I love him and I wanted him to get his moment in the sun.

I wanted it so badly that I created Danny.

Now Danny is not Ben.  There are some fundamental differences in everything they stand for and the way they act on it.  But the essence of what spawned Danny began in Ben Linus.  That’s what a template means to me.  I saw something I liked in a package I found attractive and morphed it into a whole new character.

I did the same thing with Crispin from my novel The Loyal Heart.  Crispin started off as Richard Armitage.  I saw a couple of episodes of the BBC Robin Hood TV series he was in and spun it out in my imagination in an entirely different way.  Throw in about four other versions of the Robin Hood legend and the actual history of the time period and voila!  An entire Medieval trilogy.  But it all started because I think Richard Armitage is the sexiest man on the planet.

I think people do this with more than just characters.  We’ve all heard that old saying that there are no original stories.  So in essence every story out there is based off of a template.  In Romance these days there seems to be a trend of basing stories off of fairy tales.  And why not?  There is very little difference between a fairy tale and a romance novel.  Girl meets boy, obstacle gets in the way, girl marries boy.  It’s a template.

I do like to use celebrities and other well-known people (and a few people I know in real life) as my character templates though.  It’s fun to throw together really odd pairings.  I think I mentioned before in a post about Character Pics that the aforementioned Michael Emerson has been the template for more heroes in my novels than any other man (with Richard Armitage a close second – now how’s that for two entirely different men!).  Well, in my very soon to be published novel Our Little Secrets Michael Emerson is indeed the template for the character Michael.  And as you can see, I am not at all subtle about it.  And guess who the template for my heroine is?  Zooey Deschanel.  Now seriously.  Who in their right mind would ever think of putting those two together in a romantic situation?  That would be me.

So who else here uses templates for their characters?  And who do you use?  I’m dying to know which celebs out there are getting the most action in the imaginations of the writers of the world.

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Rusty Writer

Posted on May 7, 2012 | 3 Comments

I’ve been away from the internet for more than a week dealing with a family emergency.  That emergency has been rife with sorrow, exhaustion, and frustration.  But I’m home for a week before I’ll be going back to Ohio again for round two.

In all that time away I didn’t have a chance to write a single word.  For a writer, not being able to write is torture.  It wasn’t just not being able to write, it was having that part of my brain completely pushed back to the periphery while I dealt with more pressing things.

And this is what happened to my brain

On the 9 hour drive back home though, my writer brain kicked back in again.  I came up with a pretty cool idea for the third book in my Sci-Fi series (the first two books have been drafted but I’ve been focusing on my Historical Romances and haven’t revised them at all yet) along with a few other tweaks for some of my Romances.  It was so incredibly relaxing to have that part of me kick back into gear.

So here I am home again … and I’m not entirely sure how to get the engines going again.

Writing is proving itself to be like an athletic skill.  My best friend is a dancer and she’s told me that when she gets out of practice she gets stiff and inflexible again and needs to work very hard for a long time to get back into the right kind of shape.  Writing is being like that for me right now.

It’s not that I’ve lost my skill, mind you.  I still think it’s there, as evidenced by my imaginings on the PA Turnpike yesterday.  But as I sat in the mechanics shop having my car tuned up this morning I reread a novel I started writing in January, Love in a Man’s World (which started out as my stab at comedic gay erotica but turned into an emotionally compelling dystopian future story set in a world where men outnumber women 10-1) with that old feeling of “wow, how am I going to write this well ever again?”

Do you ever feel that way?  Have you ever taken a significant amount of time off from writing, voluntarily or involuntarily, then tried to come back to it and found yourself overwhelmed?

That’s where I am right now.  Compounding the problem is that as much as I would like to continue with the very last bit of editing my latest Romance, Our Little Secrets, I know that I will be heading out to Ohio again at the end of the week and once again I won’t have time to even think about writing.

So here are my questions to you, oh writer-y friends….  How do you get back into the swing of writing when you’ve had to take some time off?  And what should I spend this week working on, Our Little Secrets, Love in a Man’s World, something else (like The Courageous Heart, the third book in my Medieval trilogy that I started in February but put down again), or should I give myself a break entirely?

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How to Be Critiqued

Posted on April 24, 2012 | 7 Comments

Discussion and controversy abounded on the Novel Publicity Facebook page last week over a blog post written by Anne R. Allen, “Amazon Reader Reviews: 12 Things Everybody and His Grandmother Needs to Know”.  Without going into too much detail about the original blog post, the NP folks seemed to agree that authors should not demand readers leave only 4 and 5 star reviews and never anything lower.  They also seemed to agree that readers and reviewers had a right to leave negative reviews if the book in question truly warrants it.

Glowing reviews are a wonderful thing, don’t get me wrong.  Nothing makes me smile wider than when I am praised by someone who has read my book.  But at the end of the day I am in the school of thought that says that the occasional negative review is one of the most powerful learning tools an author has.

Negative reviews, provided they are honest and not just someone with a bone to pick, are a fantastic way to diagnose the problems with your stories that you as an author might not be able to see.  They have the potential to set you on the right track and give you an honest look at areas where you need improvement.  They usually don’t come from people with a vested interest in keeping you happy, so you can trust them even more than you can the reviews your mom gives you.

Most of the time, someone who puts in the work to write a review is going to be a serious reader with a vested interest in seeing stories of the highest quality on the market.  People who are easily pleased or who aren’t as passionate about books probably won’t take the time to write a critique.  So chances are that if you’ve been reviewed it is by someone who knows what they’re talking about.

The things these people say should be taken very seriously!  It’s not going to do you any good as an author intent on improving your craft to get angry or dismiss the reviewer’s opinion or to lash out at them in any way.  In fact, please don’t lash out at a reviewer!  The best response to a negative review that you can give is no response at all.

And now for an example of what we can learn from a negative review….

I was extremely lucky a couple of weeks ago to get a 3-star review for my novel The Loyal Heart on Amazon.  This review exemplifies several different points about how to read, accept, and learn from a negative review.  Here it is:

“ *** Engaging

I enjoyed reading this book.  It was fun and engaging.

If I was going to offer the author some pointers I’d say:

a) Add a little more description to set the scene.  I kind of know what medieval England might look like but not everyone would.  It would also add to the atmosphere.  

b) All the characters need a little more depth, back history, motivation and detail.  Why and how is Aubrey so good with a sword?  What did Crispin do that was so awful in the past?  Why don’t the people of Ethan’s estates want him back?

c) Find another word for smirk!

OK, so that last one was a bit pedantic but it was used enough that I started to notice it.

In spite of these points and a few other minor quibbles it was a pleasure to read and I should say that the sex scenes are really well written.  It moves along at a good pace.  I liked it enough that I’ll be reading the sequel.”

So that is my 3-star review.  It’s actually pretty flattering.  But the meat of the lesson is in the pointers.  Each of the reviewer’s three points brings up a different issue in how to accept a critique.

The first point is about setting and description.  This is a Style Critique.  The reviewer would have liked more description.  My personal style is not to spent too much time on description.  I would rather create the setting through dialog and action.  But what this point tells me is that there are readers out there who would like to have more of a picture painted in their mind.  I can be mindful of this in my future books and look for ways to set the scene better going forward.

The second point is about character.  This is more of a Content Critique.  Of all of the points this reviewer raises this one goes the farthest to put my nose out of joint.  Why?  Because the answers to all of the questions the reviewer poses are, in fact, answered in the book.  The reviewer just missed them.  The critique makes it look as though the story is missing something that is not missing at all.  But that also tells me something.  Maybe I was too subtle in delivering my characters’ back stories.  Maybe the way in which I presented my characters drew emphasis to the wrong things.  The important aspect of this comment is to remember that while I know everything there is to know about these characters, the reader must figure it out as they go along.  Next time I need to make sure that I communicate everything the reader needs to know.

The third pint cracks me up.  It is a Technical Critique.  Yes, I absolutely had WAY too many “smirks” in the first edition of this book.  It was ridiculous.  I mean, completely silly.  And this reviewer wasn’t the first person to notice.  I have since gone back and removed 85% of the smirks and republished the book.

So there you go.  I’m sure I’ll get worse critiques at some point.  I like this one though because it covers a lot of bases and makes a great example.  I disagree with some of it, I agree whole-heartedly with some of it, and some of it makes me wish I could sit down and explain a few things to the reviewer.  I’m glad I received this review though.

Embrace those negative reviews.  They can teach you more than effusions of love can.

 

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Developmental Editing and Copy Editing: What’s the Difference?

Posted on April 17, 2012 | 5 Comments

There are so many writers out there these days.  Now that the world of publishing has been blown wide open and anyone can publish a book a heck of a lot more people than ever before are calling themselves writers.  And that’s great!  But I’ve been lurking around the Kindle boards and other reader hang-outs lately and let me tell you, it’s not so great to them.  Because there is a lot of half-baked material being served up as if it’s a feast.

What’s the problem?  Editing.

Oh my gosh, I can’t tell you how important editing is.  If writing a book is like throwing all the ingredients together and mixing then editing is like checking the recipe to make sure you’ve put the right ingredients in at the right amount.

I’ve heard a very large number of self-published writers out there say that they can make due without an editor.

Well you can’t.

*ducks*

At least I’m in the school of thought that says you absolutely must have your work edited by a professional before you can let it see the light of day.  There are more things that need looking at in a novel than most writers setting out on the journey realize.  And based on the comments I’ve seen here and there, there is also a misunderstanding about just what it is that an editor does.  So let’s take a look at that, shall we?

First, there are two kinds of editors.  You can’t do without either of them.

When a lot of people think “editor” they think of the person who reads through your manuscript looking for bad grammar, misspelled words, and typos.  This is a Copy Editor.  Copy editing is like making sure you don’t have broccoli in your teeth.  I, for example, am terrible at punctuating dialog.  I can’t keep it straight in my head which bits of dialog should end with a comma and which should end with a period, which bit after the dialog should be capitalized as a new sentence and which is a dialog tag.  It’s obvious when you point it out to me, but when I’m just reading through I write it all wrong.

A good copy editor knows the rules of grammar and uses them mercilessly against your manuscript.  I should have had someone copy edit The Loyal Heart a little more intensely before I published it because I had a serious ‘smirk’ problem.  Copy editors are also there to catch overuse of words.  Thankfully, self-publishing allows you to discreetly swap out a more thoroughly edited version of a novel without anyone being the wiser.  *shifty look*

Yes, copy editing is obvious and oh-so necessary.

But even more essential, in my humble opinion, is developmental editing.

A Developmental Editor is a writer’s best friend, but I bet most writers are terrified of the prospect.  I know I was before I had my first manuscript developmentally edited.  A Developmental Editor reads your manuscript and asks questions.  They peel away the layers to figure out what makes your story tick.  Or more importantly, what stops your story from ticking.  A Developmental Editor not only points out the broccoli in your teeth but asks you why you needed to have broccoli in the first place.  Maybe kale would work better?

Like I said, I was terrified when I sent my first manuscript to a Developmental Editor.  I loved that story.  I was passionate about it.  The very last thing in the world that I wanted was for someone to pick it apart and tell me everything that was wrong about it.  I chewed my nails for weeks, wondering what my editor, Alison, would say about the story.  I was terrified that she would tell me I was a horrible writer and should stick to my day job.

Well, she didn’t.  Why?  Because Alison is an excellent editor!

A good Developmental Editor, like Alison, is there to work with you.  Because there are all sorts of things that you, as a writer, can’t see when you’re so close to your work.  Think of a Developmental Editor as the sharpest reader your story is ever going to have.  If something doesn’t make sense, they will tell you.  If they think you didn’t lift a character or situation to its fullest potential, they will tell you.  If they have an idea for a different direction your story or backstory could go in, they will tell you.

LISTEN TO THEM!

Case in point:  I’m working on a western Romance, Our Little Secrets, right now.  I wrote it, and rewrote it, and revised that.  But something still wasn’t right.  I knew something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was … or wasn’t.  The time came and I sent it off to Alison.  And I waited in dread because I knew something wasn’t right.  I knew a serious critique was in the mail.

And then came my edit letter.  And yep, the story has some problems.  But guess what?  I may have known that there were issues, but Alison had a much clearer idea of what the issues were.  Her long, long, long letter of critiques read like the pieces of a complex puzzle fitting into place.  Oh!  Of course my heroine seems a little too perfect and a little too capable of handling things.  I didn’t really define what she was afraid of well enough.  And of course that potentially awesome scene fell flat.  I only depicted my hero’s shock over the turn of events, not all of the other emotions he would be feeling.  Oh!  That’s what was missing!

I don’t care how good of a writer you are, if you don’t have someone else, someone professional working with you to process your story it’s not going to be as good as it could be.  Do you know which of the Harry Potter books is J.K. Rowling’s least favorite?  The Goblet of Fire.  Why?  Because she felt as though her publishers rushed her and she didn’t have a chance to edit it as much as she wanted to.  Yes folks, even the master herself doesn’t get it right on the first draft and needs the help of editors to bring a story to its full potential.

So please, please, please do yourself and your readers a favor.  Bite the bullet, hold a bake sale, wash cars, break the piggy-bank, max out your credit cards and hire an editor.  A Developmental Editor and a Copy Editor.  You need them.  Everybody needs them.  If J.K. Rowling can do it, you can too.

Next week:  How to listen to your editor, critiques, and reviews without whining or losing your temper and becoming a better writer for it.

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