Keep it Tense: Action Scenes

Have you ever been frustrated writing a tense action sequence? What should be tense and immediate wanders slowly to an ending like an explosion in slow-motion. The truth is it’s not difficult to make your action scenes stand out, if you keep a few things in mind.

Length

Long action scenes are boring. Action scenes are often packed with information, move and counter-moves that will leave the reader breathless. The longer you drag out the sequence, the more likely your reader is going to lose that sense of immediacy and just move on.

Description

This is not the time for flowery prose. Wax philosophical about the moon some other time, right now all your character knows is he’s in trouble and he needs to act now.

MRUs

For me, the discovery of the concept of the MRU improved my action scenes significantly. The idea of the MRU is that you break up the action of your story into two-beat units of motivation followed by reaction. This is a deep point of view trick that is even more important for action scenes. The basics are simple: Something happens, and the character responds.

Motivation

Keep the danger immediate and real. Don’t bother with the motivations of the scene’s antagonists, just describe their actions so that the reader knows the threat presented to the protagonist.

Reaction

In fight scenes, the reaction will be active. Movements and immediate decisions make for realistic responses. Thoughts should be short, feelings should be displayed through their action, and dialogue needs to be even more crisp than normal.

Tie all of these together and you’ve got a fight scene that should be well liked by your reader. Just don’t go overboard, too much of a good thing can spoil.

At Least I Have Good Storage

An author I follow, Alicorn, has two things on her site which confuse me: two projects she notes on her list of other writing as being embarrassing to her.

It took me a few minutes to work out why, because I couldn't fathom putting forth anything by my best.

It occurred to me then that having the full scope of an author's work is always interesting: Jane Austen's Lady Susan came out after her death, as did Robert Heinlein's For Us, The Living. The only difference, then, is that Alicorn is not entrusting her early creations to crumbling paper, but keeping them on the internet with her other works. She's not keeping drafts and things she feels she's grown out of just for family and friends. It makes sense, as nothing else she's had up was restricted in that way: her distribution is entirely online, from what I know.

And it gives us a chance as readers to note how much she's grown as a writer without having to wait for her to die and dig through her things, which is always a plus.

I have a similar, if more private, archive in my Google Documents. I think it's probably a sign of the generation I come from that I consider it more indestructible on a collection of servers than in hard copy.

Writing To An Audience

I'm participating in this contest. It's a fun contest, an endurance competition as much as quality. And the thing about having an endurance competition is that you get to know your audience, the judge, pretty well.

I've found that freeing in a lot of ways. Most of the other writing I do, I have in mind for a wider audience. I want to communicate my ideas clearly to a wide range of people. With this, I only need to appeal to one.

That came to the forefront with this round, which included a prompt for a poem. I wrote my poem and had four people read it. Four people who were not the judge, one of whom was also a participant in the contest. Of those four people, only one of them understood the subject matter of the poem, which was particularly dense and opaque.

If it were for any situation other than this contest, that would have sent me into paroxysms of editing anguish.

But this poem was for this contest, to be read and parsed and understood by one judge. I knew he'd get it, so I took their comments about flow and meter to heart for my revisions and tweaked it before submitting it, ignoring their suggestions to make it less opaque.

My faith turned out to not be misplaced: the judge understood the subject matter. I'd gotten through to my audience.

Most of the time, most of us aren't lucky enough to be writing for an audience of one. But what would our writing be like if we were?

There is Nothing quite as wonderful as Money, Money, Money

One of my friends is completely and utterly baffled at the fact that I don't want to write for a living.

Now, a lot of my friends don't believe most of the things I say, for their own reasons--usually because they can't wrap their head around what I'm saying. I don't begrudge them that, by the way; I can't fathom some of the things they're talking about either. But why do we have to turn everything we love into a moneymaker?

I don't want to write to get published. I never did. I don't write to inform people, or to persuade them. I don't write to churn out the next Great American Novel, or New York Times bestseller, or international sensation. I don't write to be controversial or edgy, or to make people think deep philosophical things.
If I do those things, that's a great side effect. If you do, good for you. But that's not why I write.

I write to entertain. That's all I've ever done. All I want to do is tell a good story--or even a bad one. If people like it, it doesn't really matter, does it?

Now, I'm just going to come out and say it. I've had a really hard time writing lately. Haven't written a thing in months, in fact. Why? Long story. I'll try to sum it up.

It's incredibly pathetic, but I got broken. In the past, I've forgotten why I write; just every now and then I'd stop and go, "wait, this isn't fun anymore. Why am I doing this, again?" And I'd think, and I'd remember why. And I've been trying to cling to that. Then I made the mistake of taking some people more seriously than I should have, and I convinced myself that their goals were what I should have been after, and made them my goals. Did this negatively affect my writing? You bet your ass it did. For a while there I just threw up my hands and gave up writing altogether, because the stories I wanted to tell just didn't work for the new goals.

I lost my love for writing, and in forgetting why I write I lost a part of my soul. And it hurts. It hurts something terrible, because I haven't gotten that love back yet. I'm remembering my goal and trying to keep it close, but the passion's been broken and it's going to be difficult to get back. It's not something that just magically returns when someone admits "just write the story the way you want to," or when they say "but that story's great, you should finish it!"

This is why I decided, years and years ago, that I didn't want to turn writing into my career. I love it too much to turn it into a career. If I turn that into a money making endeavor, then I'm going to have to be constantly writing, constantly researching, constantly marketing myself and trawling the freelance markets for pittance just to stay afloat so I can finish writing my novels. Writing doesn't pay well unless you hit it big, or constantly whore yourself out, and I knew I wasn't going to strike gold the first time and I didn't want to do the latter.

And what I feared came to pass. I stressed out about my writing and became so obsessed with twisting and warping this story I had loved into something that the mainstream market would accept and pay me for that I stopped loving to write.

Some people can write for a living. If you can, good for you. But I can't.

I just love it too much.

Herding Cats

I've seen it done, in cartoons. It's that symbolically difficult bringing together that has become an easy throwaway line.

It's also often compared to organizing writers.

We like to think of ourselves as all strong-minded individualistic souls who refuse to compromise, who go our own way, who go where no man has gone before and do it better, faster, harder, stronger. We like to think of ourselves as isolated, the starving writer in his dark office churning out small bright gems to change the world.

We're all fantasists.

Every novel in production is a team effort: author, editor, publisher, agent, designer, printer and everyone in between. Anthologies and magazines and writers' societies and guilds and federations and forums and support networks even more so. Group blogs, too. They all require cooperation and communication and consideration. And they happen, every day, which rather negates the statement that organizing writers is like herding cats: with purpose, pettiness can be set aside, because glittering results are all that matter.

Burnout

Everyone experiences burnout eventually. As a blogger, I experience burnout whenever I constrain myself to a tight little circle of subjects. For example, my gaming blog only kept up as long as it did because I wasn't focused on just games, but on game design, running and playing games, and general game theory. That's a lot of ground to cover even if it all falls under 'games.'

In writing, I've always experienced burnout eventually, since blogging about writing is a very solitary thing. Every person who writes about writing puts out information only from their point of view, a highly draining exercise for an introvert (I'm generally introverted, don't let my blog or twitter presence fool you!).

So how do you overcome that problem?

First, don't get tied down to a single concept of what you're talking about! Seriously, if you start with writing, get more specific. Are you talking about copywriting? Blogging? Grammar? Make sure it has enough depth to talk about for a long while!

Then, spread out. Pick some related topics, things that tie into the core of your content, but are interesting and give you room to explore. A number of people I know who blog about writing also blog about movies (As an audience member). This is a great relationship of topics since a stronger understanding of the one helps the other!

The last tip only works if you're blogging for branding purposes (Meaning your blog is about you, not about a topic), don't worry if you change up to other things that interest you once in a while!

The risks and benefits of free

About a month ago, I compiled some of my best flash fiction pieces that were sitting around not doing anything, and released them as the free collection Sunset on Mars and Other Stories, a Smashwords exclusive. So far it's had 115 downloads, but here's the kicker ... that didn't correlate to any increase in sales for my related novel, Flyday.

Sure, it's sold copies since then, but every time someone buys it, they've told me (or my marketing expert) why they did: they heard one of us talk about it and thought it sounded interesting. They didn't read Sunset first. Some possible reasons? a) The free collection is really short (at 1500 words, the size of a small short story even); b) Smashwords just isn't as popular as something like Amazon, where it would have more visibility; and c) I didn't promote it as much as I promoted Flyday.

It's definitely being read. But if it isn't drawing readers toward my book as well, I need to change my strategy. Maybe I'll post the stories directly onto my blog, to draw in readers who prefer to read something short on a screen. Or work on more short stories, add to it and put it on both Smashwords and Amazon for $.99. But I think it was good practice to format another ebook, and was a good refresher for when I'll release my next novel later this year.

So I said last week that I was going to make a miniature figure of one of my characters.

Guess what?

Bam. He doesn't look like much right now, I'll admit, but that's because he's all white sculpey still, at this point. I haven't even cured it yet. (By the way, I'm thinking of boiling instead of baking--any opinions?)
All in all, I think he looks pretty awesome for being the first mini I've ever made.

Can't wait to see him all painted up.

Everything I Know About Foreshadowing I Learned From Homestuck

Have you read Homestuck?

Well, 'read' is an inadequate verb, as Homestuck has a soundtrack, and animation sometimes. And an intense and involved fan community, whose wild mass guessing is more or less key to some parts of Homestuck.

First among the things I learned is that foreshadowing can be more opaque the more people you can get to try to shed light on it. There is an extensive wiki for Homestuck and an exhaustive TVTropes page, which all add background dimension to the story. If it weren't for the foreshadowing being obviously there but not obviously leading to something, I wouldn't have gone to the wikis and - and this is key - I wouldn't be as invested in the story and the series.

Second is that you can baldly tell someone what is going to happen, in detail if you want to, and then proceed to tell the story that leads to the events you told them about, and, if you've done well, and gotten the reader involved in the story and made them care, they will still be shocked.

Other things I learned about writing from reading Homestuck I'll have to tell you later in another post.

Betas - care and proper feeding

If you're an indie writer, you're going to need betas. A beta (literally, "the second in a series," after the Greek letter) is a person who reads a writer's story and offers comments. Betas are usually a writer's friend, and they read and critique a story for free (or a low price). New writers often can't afford professional editors or proofreaders, so the beta's job is an important one--catch errors, and offer an opinion for revisions.

I rely on some betas I've met through writing forums, and we use Google Docs to share our work and read comments. Docs is easy to get started with and the files read like Word documents, but with the additional capability of letting other people edit or add thoughts in real time.

However, in the early days when I was writing, I had to print out files for some of my readers (friends and family) and physically deliver or mail them.

I thanked four of my betas in the dedication of my first novel, and everyone who helped with the novel got a coupon code to download the completed book from Smashwords, or a printed novel if they were really instrumental in getting Flyday polished. And I offer critiques to my betas' work as my schedule allows (although I have less and less time for this lately).

The writer/beta relationship is a great one, because every writer needs a second set of eyes before a story is ready for readers.

Getting it out

I have a confession.

I'm a perfectionist.

No, seriously, I'm that horrid type of perfectionist that if I can't get it RIGHT I won't do it at all! It's horrible.

Over the years, this has affected how I write. I now outline. Very detailed, scene by scene breakdowns of everything that should happen to make the story work. I also play with the characters in my head for a long while before starting that outline.

Then I start writing, often editing as I go. This always produces the same issue: I produce a damn fine scene. . . and then I burn out. It's hard to be 'done' all the time.

On my current WIP, I changed my pattern. I wrote down the cool ideas and made a scene, and I'll get back later to firm it up, add where it has holes, and will make it like the first scene (Oh, yeah, I still 'perfected' the first scene. Old habits and all that!) and present it to betas then.

So I'm here with a plea: Get it on paper. You have all the time in the world to fix what's already written, but ideas are often fleeting.

Switch Media.

Page 99 of The Observation Deck by Naomi Epel.

I won't sum up what those two pages say. I don't have to, it's all in the title. (I will briefly plug the kit, in that I believe it's worth a look-at. I got it for Christmas one year and have loved it ever since.)

I've given up writing and I'm going to make a miniature of Forever Moore using a wire armature and Sculpey and acrylic paint. Maybe I'll be able to finish the story when I have a thumb-tall figure of the narrator giving me sad looks from whatever surface I perch him.

Metaphor

So, I was going to write this long post comparing writing a novel to a love affair, but I was having some trouble elucidating some of my points, so I turned to KB to bounce ideas off. After discussing it, I had to discard it as an untenable metaphor. It wasn't something I could make make sense to someone else. Not coherently, not elegantly, despite it being a very simple idea to me.

Metaphor is one of my favorite tools, so it saddened me to not be able to make this one work for me. But one of the most important aspects of metaphor is to know when to stop, know when pushing it farther will make it all fall apart.

Some metaphors are easy cultural shortcuts, like the apple not falling far from the tree as reference to heredity. But the stronger ones, that will stick with people after they finish reading, are always going to be the ones that don't take the shortcuts.

We remember freshly blazed trails. Well-worn footpaths require something fresh to stick out. Which, in terms of metaphor, does not mean Newton jokes.

Just finish it!

Allan Edwards wrote a great post called "Oh, Just Publish the F---ing Thing Already" on his blog, and it really struck a chord with me. I am one of those writers who has to write and rewrite over and over again before I'm pleased with the final product. Then I have to show it to 3 betas. Then one will have a concern and I'll rewrite a scene. Then I'll show it to three more people...

The fact is, you can't please everybody. You can show a story to 10 different people and all of them could make a different suggestion. It's when many people point out the same issue that you need to start rewriting. If one person has a concern and two other people don't, you can probably let it go.

And writers do need to write a lot. So with that in mind, I'm going to write my second novel without worrying if it's perfect--I'm just going to write a great story.

The Profit Motive Is Good For You

I’m kind of a late comer to the party of the ‘e-book pricing debate’ but it’s really getting out of hand. One side literally is racing for the bottom. Make it as cheap as possible; more people buy it that way. The other thinks that the price each individual buys a book for somehow denotes its worth. Both groups are dead wrong!

The race for the bottom group thinks pure numbers are the key to worth. They think every person who buys into their book boosts them up some imaginary totem pole of writing. Good for them. Unfortunately, numbers don’t denote value in the world of art, and generally the wider the appeal, the lower the literary merit.

The ‘price for its value’ crowd isn’t likely to live off their writing either, though. If you think your book is worth 20 dollars, ask for that, and the numbers fall where they may. But don’t tell me that you priced it based on its value. You, as the author, don’t get to make that claim.

So, if it’s not the ‘ask for its worth’ and not ‘how low can you go?’ where is the real price we, as artists and craftsmen, should be asking for?

The obvious answer is ‘that depends.’ I don’t like that answer, but it’s the truth. But it doesn’t depend as much as you think!

There’s a concept called elasticity of demand. It’s a basic measure of how many fewer customers you’ll reach by increasing the price a certain percentage. It’s a useful tool for clipping in to an equation to find your ‘one true price.’

The problem? That value is always an estimate. You can’t guarantee the elasticity of demand on any product, but you can do your research and ball park it. So in the e-book market, which factors should you be considering before settling on your price?

Competition

Look at your genre. What are other authors putting out, and at what prices? Don’t look at the bottom: look at the range, look at how well they’re selling (Especially if you have competitors like J.A. Konrath who so kindly shares his sales numbers), look at the standard deviation of the group.

These numbers are all important. They tell you what the market is allowing people to price at.

Uniqueness

All right, serious discussion here: Anything they can get from you, they can get from another author. Except for you. So how much of a brand are you? Do you know you have 10,000 people willing to buy what you wrote? 100,000? Only 1000? These are all things to consider when you start thinking price.

Not sure what I mean by becoming a brand? Check out Kristen Lamb’s blog on social media for writers.

Royalties

Money, folks, it makes the world go round. And royalty rates can run a very interesting scale. Especially if you’re an indie publishing using Amazon’s kindle Direct Publishing. The basic idea here is you need to compare your potential reader base with how much profit you can make from them.

That’s right, folks, profit motive. It’s the greatest thing we have in this new digital age. Our books are as valuable to us as we can make monetarily in putting them into the world. So be smart, do your research, and run a few calculations. You’d be surprised some times.

Just because I know someone out there is going to ask me to put my price out there, based on some baseline assumptions (Straight line loss of readers as price increases, floors at approximately 10% of readership somewhere around the 10+ dollar range.) the optimal price in a vacuum is approximately $3.99. Of course, that’s my baseline, there’s room for movement both ways in the scale.

Terry Pratchett

So Sir Terry Pratchett is going to kill himself. Maybe. No, really.

And you know what? I understand. I can't blame him. He's got early onset Alzheimer's, for all of you who live under rocks. And for those of you who don't know what that means, it means his mind is going and he'd eventually end up drooling and unable to feed himself, nevermind be able to think and compile the masterful fantasy-comedies he's been writing for years.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste, or to see waste away. So when it's all said and done, I can't blame the poor guy for wanting to end it when he wants to, before that brilliant mind is swiss cheese. Yes, I understand that there are more variables than just wanting to die, that assisted suicide has a lot of political, social, and moral implications to consider. I'm not saying I advocate it, or that I'm dead-set against it. I'm not here to preach about my own views or whether or not I believe he should do this.

I'm just saying I understand why, and should he choose to do so--and is allowed to do so--I will still respect him. Good luck, Sir.

The Importance of Being Referential

True Names takes a notable line and makes it their topic sentence. To anyone familiar with the referenced text, it's a synopsis of parts of the story to come and also the theme and the genre. It's an easter egg. It made me giggle softly in a public place, startling the man sitting across from me. I read the sentence twice, just to revel in it.

What, you might ask, is this paragon of sentences?

"All across Beebeself, it was a truth universally acknowledged that a singleton daemon in possession of sufficiently massive computation rights must be in want of a spawning filter."

To be perfectly honest, I also read it twice to be sure I was parsing it correctly.

The source material that this sentence references is the first line of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice; "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

This is a case where building on a widely culturally recognizable landmark, such as one of the most famous opening lines in the English language, adds to a text rather than subtracting or distracting. It provides context: the rest of the world of True Names is fascinatingly alien, but drawing this connection to a staple of English romantic literature makes it relatable, gives us a frame of reference for the reading.

Covers

I’m a writer, but I’m an artist too. Not much of one, I’m still in school, but an artist to some degree. I’ve done a couple of covers this year for friends and fellow bloggers Eileen and Laura. Both have been freebies, since they’re friends and I owed ‘em anyway. Eileen “commissioned” me to do the cover for the online litmag she’s part of (this was the more exciting of the two freebies) and Laura I did the cover for her trio of flash fiction stories.

I’m going to take the side of the artist right here and say that if you have a particular vision for what you want the cover to look like, why not mention it to the artist? (If they shoot it down, ask why, and be nice.) I can’t speak for other artists, but I personally like having some parameters to work in, because then I know that what you’re getting is something that a) you will like and b) will fit the story.

When I did the cover for the litmag, I had pretty much total control. I was told to do something “apocalyptic” so I went with a photomontage style, with a tank and planes and all in black and white and gray. I liked it. It wasn’t perfect, but it was serviceable. But when I sent it off, I got the response that it wasn’t what they’d been looking for. Ah. The words “steampunk” and “train” got dropped, and I latched onto those—my parameters. Would have been nice to have those beforehand, but ah well. I cranked open Photoshop and got to work. (And then when I was about done with the second version, PS crashed and I hadn’t saved. Yippee. Always save the file, people.) The second version was what they wanted and what was used, and all was well with the world.

The second cover was a favor, and as such I had a fair bit more freedom over it, since I was doing it of my own free will. I wouldn’t even be offended if Laura decided not to use it. I whipped something up and sent a couple versions of it to her so she could pick which one she liked, if she liked either. Well, one was a big hit (I liked it, she liked it, win-win!) and is in use.

Writers, talk to your artists. We can’t read minds, and if you give us free rein then we’ll take it, and you have to deal with what comes out of that. If you want something, mention it (or insist on it, if you must) but please keep an open mind. What you want might be too difficult, unclear, or just plain bad.

Artists, talk to the writers. Listen to what they ask for and don’t get frustrated if they nix your first design. Make sure to ask if they have something in mind, and see if you can work with it if they do. Don’t be afraid to explain why their ideas might not work.

(Again, I am NOT a professional either of those things! These are just my thoughts on the subject.)

Word Choice Drools

"Waves broke against its supports. It had a skyline as intricate and twisted as a city's. Above the three leg-pillars was a cluster of seemingly random spires, and cranes moving like clawed hands; and over them all a huge minaret of girders soared and drooled fire." -China Mieville, The Scar

I read this book years ago, but some of the descriptors have stuck with me--first and foremost China's use of the word "drooled." In the above paragraph it's fire, but that's not all; water drools, blood drools, venom drools. It's a slow, sluggish, grimy word. I imagine the water to be almost more solid than liquid, slowly spreading out like gobs of glue.


Now, we've all heard it before; how you write and what words you pick are important. And they are, they really, really are.

Take the above example. How would the imagery change if the skyline was solid and blocky, the cranes moved like dead trees in the wind, the minaret was a tower, or the fire was spat? Maybe it's not that big a difference. Or maybe it's the difference between "died" and "was murdered."

Live and Share

Readers just want a powerful emotional experience.

Give it to them.

You’re human, too. Push the buttons you know work so well. If you have siblings, you know precisely which buttons to push; you’ve been doing it for years.

You’ve got dreams. Hell, if you write, your dreams are probably grander than most people. Invite them on a journey they’ll only take in their dreams. Let your characters do the thing your reader wants them to do.

You understand set-backs. Again, you’re a writer; you know what it’s like to get frustrated in your goals. Share it.

My point is: Go out and live life, then show that life to your readers. They’ll thank you.