Guest Post: Celtic Traveler on 'The X Factor'



designsponge.com

 
When I say that I'm a fan of books and movies, what I really mean to say is that I'm a fan of stories.
I love stories. The whole world seems to be made up of them, they seem to be in the very air we breathe.
But why do only some stories achieve fame and others not?
I thinks it's because of The X Factor.

The X Factor is where the author/screenwriter actually cares about their story. Too many writers today are just in it for the money, which I find terrible. You should love what you write. You should enjoy it, and be interested in your own story. If you don't care, nor will your audience. Writers nowadays just seem to focus on what's "cool" at the moment. Like supernatural romances and dystopian society novels.

J.R.R. Tolkien, in his essay On Fairy-Stories, spoke on how writing should involve what you desire. We all desire to be heroes, and that's why we write about them. We desire to witness magic, ride dragons, be brave in battles, and find friendship. The X Factor means taking a piece of your soul and putting it in your story. Like Red Smith once said: "There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."

Learning how stories work and how to write them are extremely important as well. But the key element is your soul; it's the spice of the story.

If you love what your doing, chances are your audience will, too.

About Celtic Traveler

An avid blogger and story connoisseur, Celtic Traveler has a passion for all things movie, music, and chocolate related. When she's not writing her own stories, she can be found at her blog, The Grey Traveler's Inn.

Read more...

Guest Post: Maria Rainier on Reading Poetry to Improve Your Fiction

In my first year of college, my idea of a poem was a Mother Goose rhyme.

In my second year of college, I studied abroad in Italy under the tutelage of modern (dead) poet Ezra Pound’s daughter. I grew so frustrated with Pound’s style that I could often be found talking into his huge volume of poems, The Cantos, in the library. No, Ez, I don’t care about or even know that random guy you met on a train to Venice, and why are you talking to me like I should? and Sorry, Ez, could you write in English? Or, maybe Italian or Spanish? I don’t know seventeen dead languages like you do.

In my third year of college, I took only fiction and creative nonfiction classes.

In my fourth year of college, I resignedly signed up for all 5 poetry classes my Creative Writing major called for that I’d skirted for three years. I learned more in that year about writing than I had in all of my previous education.

Poets Don't Waste Words

Well, the great ones don’t. Even back in the days of Alfred, Lord Tennyson and others known for their lengthy works, poets still made their words count. This is doubly true today; modern poetry like modern writing in general must appease the stunted attention spans of recent generations. Certainly, writers like Gregory Maguire with enormous vocabularies and wandering imaginations write successfully at length—even if some might call it “purple prose”—but you can be sure that poetry helped them, too.

Poets don’t have whole books to express a point (unless his name is Ezra Pound). They must choose just the right word. You will find few mundane terms like “got,” “good,” and “sleepy” in accomplished poetry. Take, for example, an excerpt from one of my favorite poems, “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owens.

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Can you think of a word more vile, horrifying, and bone-chilling than cancer? The word stands out from this stanza, chocked full of Owens’ memories from WWI.

Poets are Painters

They paint with words. Not only are the words themselves the most evocative they can muster from their vocabularies, they paint pictures of them through uncommon turns of phrase, similes, and metaphors. Take Langston Hughes’ “Suicide’s Note”:

The calm,

Cool face of the river

Asked me for a kiss

You don’t even need to read the title to know what Hughes is talking about. This is the essence of showing, not telling, since poets don’t have time to tell us every minute detail. To this end, a fiction writer who has studied poetry exercises restraint. He or she allows the reader to assume certain things or use his or her own imagination. A good writer cannot be a control freak.

Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education and performs research surrounding online degrees. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop. Read more of Maria's work at the Online Degrees site.

Read more...

Guest Post: Janice Hardy on "Trail Blazing"

We’ve all read stories where clues were so seamlessly dropped in along the way that until the big secret was revealed, we never even realized they were there. But when we finally did, all the pieces of the story fell into place and we were awed by the skill in which that bread trail had been left. Those writers made it look easy, as if they knew from page one what clue went where and how it would all come together in the end.
I’m sure there are bound to be a few writers out that who really can write that way, but for most of us, those clues are either planned ahead of time, inserted after the fact, or happy accidents. Sometimes, (heck, probably most times) a combination of all three.

Planning the Trail
Some clues we know about in the planning stage of the novel. Those details that came to us as we were brainstorming and writing our outlines or making our notes. Important clues we work hard to build a scene around. Often these are the things our protag’s will discover down the line in some fashion and a critical plot twist may even hinge on them. They’re important, which is why we know about them from the start.

Stumbling Upon the Trail
Then there are those details that just kinda happen, and it isn’t until after that we realize that throwaway detail could be so much more. A bit of backstory or internalization that suddenly has greater meaning, an off-hand setting element that becomes the perfect hiding place for a long lost secret. The types of details that lurk in our brains and leak onto the page, and somehow, always seems to be better than the stuff we actively think up.

Marking the Trail
Last, there are those details that we go back and add in once we’ve figure out how the story unfolds. The purposeful red herrings, the hidden clues, the telling off-hand remark. Each detail is inserted at just the right spot so the reader can follow that trail, even if they don’t realize they’re following it.

Keeping the Trail Clean
No matter what type of writer you are (outliner or pantser), odds are you’re going to go back at some point and edit. Doing an edit pass for clues, hints, and foreshadowing isn’t a bad idea, especially if you’re not one of those mystery writers who think of these things naturally. (I think mystery writers are born with this skill) If you’re not sure where to leave those bread crumbs, try asking…

When do I want the reader to start suspecting things?
Sometimes you’ll want a surprise, other times you’ll want the tension of trying to figure it out to help pull your story along.

When does my protagonist start to figure it out?
Readers often spot things long before characters, but if it’s too obvious, then your character might look dumb if they haven’t figured it out yet. Make sure you have a good balance between reader hints and character hints. If your protag needs to know something by page 45, leave enough clues before then so the realization feels plausible.

Are there any slow/weak spots that could use some freshening up?
Weak spots in need of help could be opportunities to create a scene that links back or foreshadows another. Would adding in a layer of mystery help?

Do the characters encounter anything thematically or metaphorically linked to the thing?
You know how someone can say something and make you think of something different? Your brain picks up on it because there’s some link between the two things. You can do the same thing with your characters. Something they’ve heard or experienced might be the perfect trigger for a memory or realization in a later scene. Or, you can go back and add something that can make this happen.

Trails are made by folks wandering back and forth over them, so it makes sense that a good plot trail might take looking at from both ends of your novel. Knowing where a plot or subplot ends up makes it a lot easier to figure out where it starts. The more you wander that trail, the more you learn about it and the more you can share with those starting down it for the first time.


About Blue Fire

Part fugitive, part hero, fifteen-year-old Nya is barely staying ahead of the Duke of Baseer’s trackers. Wanted for a crime she didn’t mean to commit, she risks capture to protect every Taker she can find, determined to prevent the Duke from using them in his fiendish experiments. But resolve isn’t enough to protect any of them, and Nya soon realizes that the only way to keep them all out of the Duke’s clutches is to flee Geveg. Unfortunately, the Duke’s best tracker has other ideas.
Nya finds herself trapped in the last place she ever wanted to be, forced to trust the last people she ever thought she could. More is at stake than just the people of Geveg, and the closer she gets to uncovering the Duke’s plan, the more she discovers how critical she is to his victory. To save Geveg, she just might have to save Baseer—if she doesn’t destroy it first.

Buy it here.

About Janice Hardy
A long-time fantasy reader, Janice Hardy always wondered about the darker side of healing. For her fantasy trilogy THE HEALING WARS, she tapped into her own dark side to create a world where healing was dangerous, and those with the best intentions often made the worst choices.
Her books include THE SHIFTER, and BLUE FIRE from Balzer+Bray/Harper Collins. She lives in Georgia with her husband, three cats and one very nervous freshwater eel.

Read more...

Guest Post: Writing Professionally

Hello, friends. It's Olive Tree, from HorseFeathers.
Let's see... I'm a pretty whimsical person, and I guess I write to share my crazy thoughts with others. A lot of the time I'll have a very vivid dream and turn it into a story or incorporate it into whatever story I am working on at the moment...I prefer to write fantasy, because all the rules are up to me — plus, describing new worlds and species gives me special joy. My current novel,...is nearly finished...I'm very excited about getting it published... I jotted down the first few sentences over three years ago! However, I actually published my first book this February.

One of the biggest problems I run into personally and that I see in other peoples' work is that it doesn't look professional. At all. This bugs the bejeezes out of me because I know that they have hopes to be published, but there's no chance when their work looks like that. So here's a few tips to make your writing sound like it was done by a professional author.

1: Make it proper

Improper spelling, grammar, and punctuation set off red flags everywhere! Spelling is something you can't skimp on when you want your writing to sound the best. Turn on spell check. Please. Punctuation is in the same boat... don't use more than one ! or ?, no more than three ..., use the proper "", and never use ?! or any other such combination. Learn how to use : , ; , and —. Indent and form a new paragraph when someone speaks. Instead of ALL CAPS, make it in italics. As for grammar, I suggest everybody read the Elements of Style. It's a short but very helpful book that will teach you how to make your writing look good. Of course, proper grammar all. the. time. is a big no-no as well... sentence fragments, run-ons, or dialect that may use improper grammar are all hugely important to give your book a personality and a style. But if you constantly make mistakes (especially in 3rd person) your writing will sound young and unprofessional.
Basically, read your favorite books (preferably not YA/children's books) and notice how the author uses the tactics above.

2: Make it plausible

If your villain is bad to the bone, or your hero has no flaws, your book will be really, really boring. Instead, give your villain an awful past, or your main character a violent streak they cannot control or some sort of internal struggle.
Also, if you use magic in your book, don't make everything ever-so-easy. You can't have your character sitting on the couch getting fat while his/her magic saves the world, with zero effort from the character.

3: Review

Whoops... suddenly your character has blond hair... wasn't it red in the beginning of the story? Or perhaps a minor character has switched names or genders without your noticing. And whatever happened to your main character's faithful dog? He seems to have disappeared.
If your work is inconsistent, even in the minor details, your book will die a very slow and painful death. Solution? Review! Either go back and read from the top every time before you begin working on it, or (if that takes several hours since your book is long, like me) every so often read the whole thing with a critical eye. Which brings me to number four...

4: Be your own critic

Okay everyone... ditch your ego and pretend you are a critic with a razor-sharp pen. Find any imperfections? Of course you did. Now go back to your usual self and fix what the "critic" found wrong or weak. I can't stress how important this is. Similarly,

5: Get a pre-editor

If you're not quite ready for a professional editor, get your most brutally honest friend, teacher, or family friend to read your story and give you honest-to-goodness feedback. Tell them to be merciless. Obviously a background in writing or publishing is preferred.
They might come back and tell you that your book is the worst they've ever read. Be ready for this. Authors must have a thick skin.
(I am always willing to read your work and give you feedback. Be warned... I'm one of those brutally-honest types.)

6: Variety and the over-use of it

If you're using "said" over and over, that's a problem. If you're repeating a name, that is a huuuge problem. Try using more descriptive words: "mumbled" or "cried"; "the girl" or "his friend".
But be careful! Too much variety will leave the reader confused and your work too wordy. Don't fall into the sandpit of variety. Teeter on the edge instead. It's a careful balance, one you have to find for yourself.

7: Have fun!

Add some humor. Make something silly. Go ahead, model a character after yourself, flaws and all. It's your book, and chances are that if you try to contain your style too much it won't sell, because it will sound like every other teen author trying to realize a foggy dream of authorship.

Good luck, and happy writing!
-Olive Tree

[If you would like to submit a guest post, e-mail me, Story Weaver, at writersnse@gmail.com]

Read more...