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Dissecting Books: Reading as a Writer Part 3

July 14, 2016 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , • 1 Comment

Read Like a Writer Part 3By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

Welcome back to my series on how to dissect books to understand how and why they work. In other words, how to “read as a writer.” (Here’s where to find Part 1 and Part 2.)

Last time we looked at plot. This week we’re going to think about characters and theme.

I’d suggest sticking with the same three books we selected last time. Just as a reminder, they were three of your favorites in your chosen genre, and they were recently written, highly rated, first in series or standalone books.

(1) How does the writer make you care about what happens to the main character?

Notice I didn’t say like the main character. Likeable main characters are easier to sell, but successful fiction has been written with unlikeable main characters.

So look at the techniques the writer uses to make you sympathize with or like the main character. Look at what makes the main character interesting or compelling. Think carefully about why you’re willing to keep reading about this character.

Does the writer use the character’s actions to gain your sympathy? Do they use hints of backstory? Do they use dialogue by other characters or other character’s internal perceptions of the character?

Create a practical list of techniques that you can use in your stories. This should be a list of techniques, not a list of things to copy.

So if the main character in the story you’re analyzing gains your sympathy by helping an old lady cross the street, that doesn’t mean you need to have your character help someone across the street. It means you write down “show the main character doing something nice for someone else.” You want to deduce general principles from specific examples.

(2) How did the writer show the importance of the story goal to the main character?

If the main character cares about the goal and has a strong motivation for pursuing it, the reader will also care. Study how the writer brought out the main character’s goals and motivations in each scene as well as in terms of the overall plot.

How did they show the importance of the goal? Did they use physical symbols? Did they use conversations with other characters? Did they use internal dialogue? How much of each did they use?

In other words, how did they make you care about the story goal?

(3) Does the character grow over the course of the book?

Not every story will have a character that grows and changes over the course of the book, and this can be genre-specific at times. For example, James Bond is basically the same in every book.

Take note of how the writer shows the character’s internal state at the beginning. If the main character is afraid of a committed relationship, for example, how has the writer shown that?

How has the writer woven that internal growth in with the external conflict? Look at the ways that each major external challenge also forced internal change. 

(4) If the book had a theme (and most books do), what helped you see that theme?

Themes in fiction can be broad—for example, justice will prevail. They can also be narrower—for example, being a parent is worth the cost.

Could you identify the theme in the book? If so, how did the author make it clear to you? Themes aren’t usually stated explicitly. They’re generally woven in through action and through the growth of the character.

If you want a copy of this series that you can download, sign up for my newsletter. I’ll be making it available to my newsletter subscribers as a PDF in the near future.

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Check out my Busy Writer’s Guides such as Showing and Telling in Fiction, Deep Point of View, or Internal Dialogue.

Image Credit: Lynn Lopez/freeimages.com

Is KDP Select Right for You?

July 5, 2016 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , • 1 Comment

Janice Hardy Fiction University

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

Because I was away teaching at a writer’s conference last week, I didn’t manage to share my regular monthly guest post with all of you. I didn’t want you to miss it, so I’m sharing it a little late. This month, I’m going over the pros and cons of KDP Select.

One of the choices we need to make when we publish our book is whether we’re going to distribute wide or go exclusive. Up until this point, I’ve always gone wide, but with a new series scheduled for release in November, the idea of going exclusive has been on my mind a lot lately.

Distributing wide means that we’ll offer our book for sale at all the major retailers—Amazon, Barnes & Noble, AppleiBooks, and Kobo at least.

Going exclusive, at this point, means we’re putting our ebook into Amazon’s KDP Select program. Amazon’s terms of service for the KDP Select program state that we can’t sell or give away the enrolled ebooks anywhere else. You agree to this exclusivity for 90 days at a time, and then you can either continue in the program for another 90 days or opt out. In exchange, they offer you some perks they don’t offer to books that aren’t enrolled.

I hope you’ll join me at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University for the rest of this post!

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Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Check out my Busy Writer’s Guides such as Showing and Telling in Fiction, Deep Point of View, or Internal Dialogue.

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Is It Important for Writers to Also Be Readers?

June 30, 2016 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , • 7 Comments

Writers Should ReadBy Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

As an editor and writing instructor, I have the privilege of talking to a lot of writers, at a lot of different career stages. So it’s not unusual for patterns to crop up—ideas, trends, challenges, and myths.

Today I want to debunk one of the myths I’ve heard frequently of late.

Here it is:

You don’t need to read novels if you want to write novels. You can learn how to write from movies and TV shows.

That thunk you just heard? That was my head smacking into my table in frustration.

I’ll explain why this myth is dangerous for writers, especially writers who want to create novels.

Yes, we can learn some things from movies and from TV shows.

We can learn how to create interesting characters that the audience will love, hate, and talk about.

We can learn about hooks. TV shows are especially good at the art of the hook because the writers know how easy it is for the audience to wander off during a commercial. They want to make sure the audience sticks around. (Movies, on the other hand, can’t teach you about hooks.)

We can learn about dialogue (though, even there, you’ll find some differences). Almost anything Joss Whedon worked on would be a great self-study for authors struggling with dialogue.  

No, we can’t learn everything from movies and from TV shows.

In fact, some of the most important elements of fiction writing can’t be learned from a visual medium. The written format brings with it special challenges that we can’t learn how to conquer by watching, only by reading.

We can’t learn internal dialogue. In fact, we can’t learn anything about how to convey the internal life of the character—their thoughts, visceral reactions, or unspoken motivations.

We can’t learn description. In movies and TV shows, the audience sees what’s happening around the characters and they see what each character looks like. As writers, we have to build everything we want the reader to imagine with our words.

We can’t learn proper written story structure. Some elements of structure are the same between movies and novels…and some aren’t. For example, movies have the freedom to start more slowly than books do because, once you’ve bought your ticket and you’re settled in with your popcorn, the movie would have to be pretty bad before you’d walk out. If the start of a book is slow, you’ll never buy it in the first place.

We can’t learn how to balance description, action, dialogue, and internalizations. As I mentioned just a second ago, there isn’t any internalization in movies and TV shows (voice overs don’t count). The description is automatically taken care of. The actors fill in the action. So we can’t see how to weave them together on the page to avoid spots that either drag or leave the reader feeling disconnected from the character or the world.

We can’t learn how to maintain a consistent point of view. Point-of-view errors are non-existent in a movie or TV show. In a book, maintaining a consistent point of view is integral to keeping a strong connection between the reader and the viewpoint character.

We can’t learn how to actually put words into tight, interesting, clear sentences. Just because someone wants to write a book doesn’t mean they were born with this skill. Most of us have to learn it.

I could keep going on the differences, but here’s the bottom line.

For novel writers, movies and TV shows can be good supplements, just like vitamins supplement our regular diet. They’re not a fitting replacement for the regular meals of reading novels.

Writers write. Writers also need to read.

What do you think? Is it essential that someone who wants to write a book also read books?

I’d love to hear your opinion even if you disagree with me. (I welcome discussion here as long as opinions are expressed in a respectful, logical manner. Trolls will be deleted.)

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Check out my Busy Writer’s Guides such as Description, Deep Point of View, or Internal Dialogue.

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The Power of Contrast in Description

June 16, 2016 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , • 3 Comments

Description: A Busy Writer's GuideBy Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

Readers need description to help them imagine the story world and to keep them grounded in the story, but often it’s considered the slow, boring part.

It doesn’t have to be.

Done right, description keeps the pace moving and brings out our point-of-view character’s emotions, backstory, and conflicts. It can also add subtext, foreshadow, and build on the theme.

One of my favorite ways to bring description to life and make sure it serves a bigger purpose in the story is to use contrast. I’m excited Jami Gold has welcomed me back to her blog today to share how to make this work.

I hope you’ll join me there to find out about the power of contrast in description.

Want to know more about writing description? Description: A Busy Writer’s Guide is available from Amazon, Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. You can grab a copy in print or as an ebook.

Tools to Help Bring Your Setting to Life

June 14, 2016 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , , , • 8 Comments

A tool that I regularly recommend is The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Rebecca Puglisi. The Emotion Thesaurus helps writers with building character emotions and showing rather than telling. So I’m very excited that these two ladies have come out with a pair of books that will now help writers with describing their setting. (And you know how important I think description is to fiction.)

Today, as part of their launch, I’ve allowed Angela to “hijack” my blog as part of the festivities they have planned. 

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As we storytellers sit before the keyboard to craft our magic, we’re usually laser-focused on the two titans of fiction: plot and character. Yet, there’s a third element that impacts almost every aspect of the tale, one we really need to home in on as well: the setting.

The setting is so much more than a painted backdrop, more than a stage for our characters to tromp across during the scene. Used to its full advantage, the setting can characterize the story’s cast, supply mood, steer the plot, provide challenges and conflict, trigger emotions, help us deliver those necessary snippets of backstory…and that’s just scratching the surface. So the question is this: how do we unleash the full power of the setting within our stories?

Well, there’s some good news on that front. Two new books have released this week that may change the description game for writers. The Urban Setting Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to City Spaces and The Rural Setting Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Personal and Natural Spaces look at the sights, smells, tastes, textures, and sounds a character might experience within 225 different contemporary settings. And this is only the start of what these books offer writers.

In fact, swing by and check out this hidden entry from the Rural Setting Thesaurus: Ancient Ruins.

And there’s one more thing you might want to know more about….

Rock_The_Vault_WHW1

Becca and Angela, authors of The Emotion Thesaurus, are celebrating their double release with a fun event going on from June 13-20th called ROCK THE VAULT. At the heart of the Writers Helping Writers site is a tremendous vault, and these two ladies have been hoarding prizes of epic writerly proportions.

A safe full of prizes, ripe for the taking…if the writing community can work together to unlock it, of course.

Ready to do your part? Stop by Writers Helping Writers to find out more!

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Description in Fiction Shouldn’t Be Boring

June 2, 2016 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , , • 3 Comments

Description: A Busy Writer's GuideBy Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

Description is often the unloved step-child of the writing craft. It’s undervalued and almost feared because writers tend to believe that things like dialogue and action are inherently better. We start to believe this because we associate dialogue and action with being active and interesting and we associate description with being static and boring.

Those are false dichotomies.

As a freelance fiction editor, I’ve more often seen people whose books lacked depth and emotion because they were dialogue heavy than I’ve seen people whose books were too slow due to excess description.

Dialogue doesn’t necessarily make our stories better. Good dialogue does. Bad dialogue makes our writing slow and boring.

Now here’s the fact we need to understand—the exact same thing is true about description. (And about every other element of the fiction writing craft.)

Good description is vibrant, interesting, and active. Bad description is slow and boring. Bad description is what readers skip over.

So what makes for boring description?

(1) A Flat Laundry List

Description should never be a simple list of objective facts. As long as we’re writing in first-person point of view or in a limited third-person point of view, description should be subjective, colored by our viewpoint character’s history, personality, and emotions.

(2) Description Whose Sole Reason to Exist Is to Show the Setting

Every passage of description should do two or more of the following things:

  • ground the reader in the setting (time, place, and/or culture) so that they know when and where they are
  • symbolize or foreshadow something important to the story
  • enhance the theme
  • add subtext
  • show something about the viewpoint character’s personality
  • show the viewpoint character’s emotions
  • add conflict or complications
  • hint at backstory

When we make our description serve multiple purposes, it becomes valuable to the story as a whole. If readers skip it, they’ll be missing something important.

(3) Purple Prose

Purple prose is writing that’s too self-aware. It uses fancy words when a simple one would do, it’s filled with flowery phrases, it’s laden with cliches and clumsy figures of speech, and it relies on adverbs and adjectives when a strong verb or noun would be better.

Purple prose can also be writing that’s there because the writer likes the sound of their own voice rather than because it serves one of the purposes I mentioned above.

(4) Description That’s in the Wrong Place

Description should happen only when the viewpoint character would naturally notice those things.

So, for example, if our character is running through the woods to escape a gunman, he’s not going to notice the nest of baby birds or the squirrels hopping from tree to tree. He’s only going to notice things that could either help him hide or help him take down his pursuer.

Much of the time, the feeling that prose is overwritten or boring comes from the writer describing things in detail that don’t need to be described at this particular point in time or which should have been described differently based on the situation.

Context matters.

(5) Description That’s Generic or Tells Rather than Shows

Showing is essential to strong description because it helps us be specific and bring the experience to life on the page.

I’ll give you a quick example.

Telling: He was ugly and deformed.

Showing: The skin on the right side of his face seemed to melt down like candle wax, and as he limped toward her, one leg dragged behind.

Just remember that telling isn’t always a bad thing. It’s a tool like showing and we need to know how to use it strategically. Description, though, usually isn’t the place for it.

Description: A Busy Writer’s Guide is now available!

Are you looking for a way to add new depth and re-readability to your writing?

Are you tired of description being “the boring part that people skip”?

Are you a writer who’s struggled with making their story world feel believable and three-dimensional?

Description in fiction shouldn’t be boring for the reader or for the writer.

Description: A Busy Writer’s Guide will help you take your writing to the next level by exchanging ho-hum description for description that’s compelling and will bring your story to life, regardless of the genre you write.

In Description: A Busy Writer’s Guide, you will

  • find the answer to the age-old question of how much description is too much;
  • learn how to use point of view to keep description fresh;
  • recognize the red flags for boring description in fiction;
  • explore how to use all five senses to bring your descriptions to life for the reader;
  • discover the ways metaphors and similes can add power to your descriptive writing;
  • gain the tools needed to describe setting, characters, and action in engaging ways;
  • learn how descriptions can add conflict, enhance the theme, and amp up emotion; and
  • much more!

Grab a copy of Description: A Busy Writer’s Guide at Amazon, Apple iBooks, Kobo, or Barnes & Noble. It’s available in print and ebook versions.

Holographic Technology and Virtual Reality on the Horizon

May 31, 2016 by • Life at Warp 10, Marcy's Blog • Tags: , , • 1 Comment

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

It’s no secret that I’m a huge Star Trek fan, and one of the technologies my husband and I desperately want to see become a reality is the holodeck. While it might not be exactly a holodeck, Microsoft’s hololens technology moves us one step closer. These are virtual reality glasses that seem to create a 3-D environment for the viewer.

I’m going to include two videos below. If you’re short on time, just watch the first one. The second one is a TED Talk, and it’s long. Or you can just skip the videos and come back to my thoughts on this and storytelling in the future below the videos 🙂

The growth in this area of technology has implications for how we’ll consume our entertainment in the coming years.

For writers, it means we may eventually have another avenue where we can sell rights to our existing properties. Susan Kaye Quinn, for example, has had her work optioned for Virtual Reality by Immersive Entertainment. I suspect, though, that producing a book for virtual reality will be expensive for the foreseeable future, and so selling your virtual reality rights will be about as common as selling movie rights.

As a reader, I’d never want to replace the reading experience with virtual reality, but it would be a fun way to experience stories I already enjoy. My concern is that this could eventually replace 2-D movies, which will be a sad day for me if it turns out that I react to virtual reality as well as I react to 3-D movies (which is to say, not well at all).

What do you think? Are you excited about the possibilities for virtual reality?

Interested in knowing when my novels are available to buy? Sign up for my newsletter. I give my newsletter subscribers exclusive discounts and freebies.

Creating Promotional Material That Works: Swag

May 26, 2016 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: , , , , , • 0 Comment

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

Janice Hardy Fiction UniversityOver the last two months during my guest posts at Fiction University, we’ve looked at writing a tag line for our books and writing our book description that goes up on retailers and on the back of our book.

This month we’re going to talk swag. Swag is physical items related to our book/series. It could be bookmarks and postcards, mugs or magnets with our book cover on it, or even jewelry based on something worn by our characters.

I decided to poll a group of authors for this post (thank you to the WANA group on Facebook!) because I suspected that experiences with swag might vary.

Please join me for “Creating Promotional Material that Works: Swag” where I’ll share what I learned about how to use swag to your best advantage and where to buy some of the fun items authors are using.

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Deep Point of View is now available! (You might also want to check out Internal Dialogue or Showing and Telling in Fiction.)

I’d love to have you sign up to receive my posts by email. All you need to do is enter your email address below and hit the “Follow” botton.

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5 Times Katniss Nailed Deep Point of View

May 24, 2016 by • Marcy's Blog, Writing • 2 Comments

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

I’m guest posting today for Christine Frazier of the Better Novel Project. I hope you’ll join me because I’m talking about one of my favorite subjects–deep POV–and how we can learn about it from Katniss and The Hunger Games.

Join me to find out 5 Times Katniss Nailed Deep Point of View.

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Deep Point of View is now available! (You might also want to check out Internal Dialogue or Showing and Telling in Fiction.)

I’d love to have you sign up to receive my posts by email. All you need to do is enter your email address below and hit the “Follow” botton.

Enter your email address to follow this blog:

Sadness Is Valuable Too

May 17, 2016 by • Life at Warp 10, Marcy's Blog • Tags: , , • 7 Comments

Sadness Is Valuable TooBy Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

A few months back, my husband asked me “Do you always have to be so cheerful?”

“Would you rather I were grumpy?” I replied.

He paused for a second, then nodded. “Sometimes.”

That started me thinking. Because sometimes I feel grumpy inside. I feel sad and angry, scared and worthless. I feel all those things, but I almost never express them.

I’m sure I wasn’t born this way, which means that somewhere along the line I learned that I shouldn’t have negative emotions. And if—heaven forbid—I had them, I’d better not let them show. Negative emotions were like dirty laundry. Everyone has dirty laundry, but you’d better wash it quick, and if someone is coming over and you couldn’t get it washed in time, at least have the decency to hide it. No one wants to have to see that.

The more I actually took the time to think about this, the more I started to see the subtle ways we’re trained to be ashamed of our negative emotions. I saw it happening to me and I watched it happen to others.

It happens when someone asks how you’ve been and what you’ve been up to, then halfway through trying to share with them the truth about your week, they’ll say something like “Okay, no more negative talk. Let’s focus on the positive.”

And you’re left thinking why did you ask me if you didn’t want to know? So the next time someone asks, you lie. You bundle all the fear and pain inside and you feel very alone.

It happens when you’re having a bad day. Maybe you’re tired. Maybe your body aches. Maybe you’re living in fear of what the doctor’s phone call will tell you. Whatever the reason, you’re not able to put on the happy veneer demanded by social situations in our society or you’re a little more quiet than usual.

And someone, who probably meant well, says something like, “Just relax and have fun” or “I like that so-and-so is always happy.”

Bull crap they are. Bull. Crap.

How do I know? I’ve been told I’m “always happy” and I can tell you there were days when I was smiling on the outside and inside I hurt so badly it’s a miracle I wasn’t crying tears of blood.

I have to wonder if the rise of mental illness, specifically anxiety and depression, isn’t at least partially connected to the fact that we’re shamed for expressing negative emotions. It’s like an infection that’s not allowed to drain. We’re holding it all inside and our body is screaming for a way to release it because it knows it can’t heal until it finds a means to purge what’s slowly killing it.

Let me be clear. I am a naturally cheerful person. I believe it’s important to find joy in life as much as we can, but trying to find ways to enjoy our life regardless of our external circumstances doesn’t mean that we should deny or ignore our equally valid negative emotions.

I loved the movie Inside Out because wrapped inside of a cute movie was this very truth—joy is essential to a good life, but it isn’t enough. The character of Joy in the movie constantly shoves the Sadness character to the side, not letting her touch anything or be involved in anything. But it’s Sadness who’s able to comfort and help another character who has experienced a tragedy because Sadness validates the importance of what he’s lost. It’s Sadness who’s able to strengthen the relationship between Riley and her parents.

Sadness is important too.

It’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to be frustrated or scared or hurt. Having those emotions is natural. And it’s in facing them, not in denying them, that we learn and grow as human beings. It’s in facing them that we develop empathy, compassion, and courage.

Ignoring those emotions doesn’t make us stronger or happier or better people. It makes us insincere. It makes us liars. And it isolates us from real connections with other people.

And that’s not who I want to be.

How about you?

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