Skyring's Blog

OK, I'll admit it. I'm a fan of a jillion different webthings. XKCD. TED. Questionable Content. BookCrossing. Wikipedia.

But here's a place that's pure gold for writers. With videos.



Wordplay. Over the past few weeks I've been doing more reading than writing, and this is why. K M Weiland has been running a series on novel plot structure, and I've been reviewing my own Work In Progress. And coming up short.

Basically, i didn't really have a climax in the thing. Oh, I sort of kind of had one, but it was more cerebral than anything else. The final twist, the thing revealed, the ah-hah! moment before all the loose ends are tied up and everyone goes home and lives happily ever after.

But a climax, K M tells us, is where your best and brightest and punchiest writing comes out and slams the reader around until they are stunned and panting and searching for their socks.

Yeah, well, I didn't have that, so I did a bit of thinking and realised that um, I did have a few elements in my plot that could lead to a bit of gunfire and violence and thrills and desperate conclusions and exciting escapes. It was right there in the story that I'd been setting up. I just hadn't noticed.

Funny that. All the work is done in the subconscious. The really good stuff doesn't need actual thinking effort, you just sort of hold the hose while it comes pouring out of somewhere below. Save the thinking for cleaning up and editing.

You're sleeping or doing the dishes and your conscious mind is either punching out zeds or swishing the suds around and somewhere underneath the real thought guts are paddling away hard, sorting out the characters and what they are doing and why and how and tickling all the pieces into place.

And next time you sit down at the keyboard, suddenly you think about your cardboard characters and they've developed minds of their own. Well, OF COURSE, they'd do that - why didn't I think of that before? And how come I never realised that Bill and Ben are cousins?

Odd, isn't it? It's all inside you somewhere, and when it crystallises, you don't need any thought to see that it's exactly right. It was always so and you just didn't notice.

Anyway, go off and read Wordplay. Watch the videos. Read the posts. And the guest posts. Get the free e-book. Just pour it all into your subconscious and go off and hit the gym or something.

I think I've got a good story now. Just a few more pieces need to be jostled into position, and I'm sleeping on that.

The local library is a good source of writing tips. Whole books are devoted to advice, and I could easily spend a year assimilating and understanding all the good guff.

But sometimes the best things come in small packages and I was charmed by this slender volume: Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing

Eighty nine pages, and most of them are blank or chapter headings or artwork. Amazingly witty and enjoyable artwork, to be sure, but the meat of the book is twenty-six paragraphs. That's it. One paragraph, often just one sentence, alone on a page.

Here's how he begins his ten rules,

These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

Here's the one I like most of all:

Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to go to the dictionary.

He concludes:

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Now, I've long been conscious of my own quirky "voice", and I kind of like it. Sometimes I write something that I just love. I read and re-read it and tell myself that I've nailed it.

But here's a hugely successful and respected author telling me to get rid of all that guff, and if I can't, post a warning.

Funny thing is that in the twenty-six paragraphs of sparse advice, some of which quotes other writers, Leonard sounds just like himself, with his own unmistakable voice.

He nails it.

I just finished John Grisham's Calico Joe and was struck by how well his writing has improved over the years. Many authors put out a string of great books and then feel that they can do no wrong, their books are automatic best-sellers, they just need to crank them out. Tom Clancy, Patricia Cornwell, RAH - they all reached a point where they needed a good firm editor to sort them down.

Some people have a gift of telling a story, of putting you in the scene, of creating a great character. They can do it without thinking, it seems.

Others struggle. And it shows.

I think that writing good fiction - or good anything - is less inspiration and more perspiration. I checked out the newsagent and the library yesterday, and there are magazines and books devoted to writing. Not many - maybe a tenth of one percent in both places - but enough to have a market.

Not to mention websites and blogs. I could list a hundred excellent ones without straining myself.

How to write good is out there. For free or for a modest price. Just read the instructions, follow them, and you can write a novel. In 30 days, if you follow the NaNoWriMo advice given in No Plot, No Problem!

Well, actually a lot of NaNoWriMo novels - including mine - are best hidden away. But the advice is good if followed. I've set myself a goal of reading a few thousand words each day of advice on writing, as well as my target output of a thousand word chapter.

But, well, sometimes I don't get it done. I'm sidetracked by a great read - like the John Grisham book I mentioned!

Some writers have an absolute genius for names. Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, J K Rowling. Martin Chuzzlewit, Bottom, Dumbledore. Half the fun of reading the Harry Potter saga was the huge array of superbly-named characters. What could have been a jumbled mess turned into a community of people we readers could pick out from a crowd.

Except for the Weasley twins - I never could keep them straight.

I've always struggled with character names. I try to follow the tips, such as give each character a name starting with a different letter of the alphabet and to avoid "flat" names like Horace or Roseanne. Make them "spikey" like Marshall or Kyle.

I'm still feeling my way with this novel. I've tended to use the first name that pops into my head and see how it feels. Mister Payne, the sports master, works well for me - as a student I always associated sports lessons with pain, both physical and mental.

There's a reason why I named one character Kenny, but it's not going to last, as anyone who is a South Park fan is going to suspect that Kenny won't last the distance. I surnamed him Truscott, which is kind of everyday, and then I remembered last month in Vienna, where I heard people greeting each other with "Gruss Gott". So I've changed that. Kenny Grusgott he is. For the moment.

I like odd names. Tom Wolfe is a great one for this Peter Fallow for the once-prolific writer. Gene Lopwitz for the one-eyed investment mogul.

There will be changes. The names will grow into the characters.

Call me hesitant, but I've been easing myself back into telling the world, or at least the Goodreads part of it, that I'm writing a fresh book.

I'm far enough along with a good enough idea of where it's going that I'm confident of having at least a first draft finished by midwinter.

Not the frantic pace of NaNoWriMo, nor the more achievable but still demanding chapter a day of a serial novel.

I inevitably fall behind and give up, and/or sacrifice quality, and/or lose my way plotwise.

This time my aim is for a short chapter a day of around a thousand words, but if I don't make it, I'm not going to bother too much. I'll get there.

Nor am I aiming for a finished polished product - well, not that I ever really get there, but sometimes I come up with something that makes me happy - this is strictly first draft only and when I get to the end of the story I'm going to go back to the start and get rid of the bits that make me wince rather than smile.

I'm about a tenth of the way in, I've got most of my output on a website, I'm also running a blog there which nobody reads but myself, and I'll be looking for feedback. Rough feedback, because it's only a rough draft so far, but any comments are welcome.

So why blog here as well as there? Because Goodreads is all about reading and writing, and the sort of people who hang around here are more likely to be interested in my literary fantasies than those anywhere else.

All two of you! (Counting myself.)

How to answer every Goodreads Trivia question correctly.

In my previous post, I described my glee at writing difficult questions. I've added a few more, and had the pleasure of seeing one rated as "impossible" in difficulty. At least until I gloated about this to my friends, who promptly answered the question and downgraded the rating. You'd think that true friends would take a hit for me, but no, they just wanted to demonstrate how smart they are.

Here, as promised, the answer to success at Goodreads trivia. And no, Discoverylover, this does not involve asking a friend for the answer!

Now, if you take the neverending trivia quiz, you will be presented with a series of literary trivia questions. I suspect that questions are being added faster than any normal person can answer them, so it really is neverending. Or, if one attempted to get to the end, there would be no time for actually reading the books.

Each question gives you three options. You may answer the question - usually because you already have a good idea of the answer. You may guess - an "educated guess" maybe, but a guess nonetheless. Or you may skip the question.

(Or cheat by looking up Wikipedia or something, but cheating is something that only cheats do, and I have no time for that.)

Only the first choice is a good one. Guessing answers is guaranteed failure, and skipping questions destroys your "streak".

But if you take the trivia test, you are bound to get a question on a book you know nothing about, and you must then either guess or skip.

Right?

Wrong!

The key to success at Goodreads trivia is to answer only the questions where you already know the answer. You therefore never have to guess, or skip. Just rack up an impressive score of correct answers and be the envy of your friends, top smirker in the mirror, strutter in library halls etc. etc.

Two ways of doing this. The easiest is to read a book and then find the list of trivia questions for that book. Presumably the answers to all the questions are fresh in your mind. In any case, you may skip those you are unsure about.

For example, trivia about Tom Sawyer. It's years since I read this, but I'm bound to know the answers to most of the questions. Easy way to rack up a good winning streak!

Especially if the questions are as easy as this one!

Two ways to get there. Each trivia question (if correctly marked up) will have a link on the screen, like this:

take other questions about

Book:
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Second way to find a list of questions about a particular title is to go to the book's page, and scroll down until you see a link in the right-hand column marked "trivia about....

Alternatively, (my preferred method) of finding questions to which I already know the answer is to look at someone else's list of answered questions: Somebody such as "Book Pig", who has answered 83 667 questions. (The top rankings are shown on the Trivia Leaderboard and there are some impressive statistics there.)

Just page through the questions, answering only those where you are sure of the answer.

And in no time at all, you'll be up there on the leaderboard and your friends will be wondering why they never see you in real life.

I don't know exactly happened, but somehow Goodreads.com has sucked me in that similar literary networking sites have not. Visual Bookshelf, for example.

Goodreads is fun. Besides, they list me as an author, based on one self-published travel story - about New Zealand, which, unsurprisingly, I am wholly positive about - and a couple of pamphlets masquerading as NaNoWriMo novels without the really awful bits. Just the awful bits.

But perhaps the most fun is the trivia quiz. In a neat Web 2.0 setup, users are invited to submit trivia questions for "The Neverending Quiz".

Q. Which Shakespearean character is Juliet's paramour?

A. Macbeth
B. Hamlet
C. King Lear
D. Romeo

You write the question, submit multiple answers, indicate which is correct, and the thing goes live. Other users answer (or skip) the question in their bid to get as many questions correct.

It's like a wonderful great trivia night. Best of all, you get to see how your friends fared on the same questions. Jane answered correctly, Frank fluffed it, and Ophelia skipped it.

There's also a heap of statistics for each question, for your individual progress, and for your standing within the Goodreads community. On that last point, I'll just say that a lot of people have a lot of time to read books and answer trivial questions about their contents.

Great fun!

I decided that I'd write a question or six, and I turned to that delightful saga, Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin for material.

The whole point of trivia is that questions should exercise the mind. Not too much - the answer should be something that an attentive reader will know, or that an inattentive reader will suddenly recall on being informed. Or something that a nerd might puzzle out, without having read the book itself.

Something like the Romeo and Juliet question above would be beneath my dignity:

Q. Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series deals with straight, gay, and transgender relationships in which city?

A. Salt Lake City
B. Horton, MO
C. Springfield
D. San Francisco

But with a bit of thought, one can be fiendish. For example, one of the early scenes in the first book is set in the best supermarket in the world, the Marina Safeway. The motto of the store echoes the reputation of the place as a pickup joint:

A dozen cardboard disks dangled from the ceiling of the Marina Safeway, coaxing the customers with a double-edged message: ‘xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx.’
And friends were being made.
As Mary Ann watched, a blond man in a Stanford sweatshirt sauntered up to a brunette in a denim halter. ‘Uh… excuse me, but could you tell me whether it’s better to use Saffola oil or Wesson oil?’
The girl giggled. ‘For what?’

So I wrote a question based on this well-known motto:

The motto of the Marina Safeway, famous as a place to find a date, is quoted in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City as:

A. "Ingredients for Life"

B. "Everything You Want from a Store and a Little Bit More"

C. "Safeway: Where You Get a Little Bit More"

D. "Since we're Neighbors, let's be Friends"

The correct answer is, of course, D, which was Safeway's slogan back in the Seventies, when the series began. However, since then, Safeway has used a number of slogans, each of which would be likely to be more familiar to contemporary American quiz-takers, as well as being faintly suggestive of getting spice with your soda.

I've written a few similar questions, each with four plausible answers. You've got to know the book, otherwise you are just guessing, or succumbing to my gentle misdirection. Notice how two of my (wrong) answers above are very similar. The temptation is to assume that the correct answer is one of the two.

The questions may be dressed up, with links to books and authors, book cover illustrations and author pictures. There's even the chance to add some explanation, revealed after an answer is chosen, as to why you got it wrong. It's all good fun.

Here are my questions. So far!

Next week: How to get 100% correct answers. Without cheating!