What If You Could Not Fail

Creating Tension ... and Microtension

Another day in Laguna, so here is another post from a while back. 

 

"Conflict. Conflict. Conflict."--Arman Khodaei, a member of the Inland Empire Writers's Critique Group.

Sometimes I surprise myself.

At the recent Southern California Writers’ conference I attended a seminar about microtension—keeping every scene as suspenseful as possible. It’s an awesome task, and taught very well by writer Justine Musk. 

In a scene in Rules for Giving the protagonist, Gavin Oliver, is coming to his office on a Saturday morning. He unlocks the back door, only to realize that he can’t remember the alarm code. He fails to get it correct twice, and realizes if he screws it up a third time the system will lock him out. He finally gets it correct, but not before the police come and he has to go through fifteen minutes of showing three forms of identification and answering questions from a police officer who looks as if he was able to legally purchase liquor only a week earlier.

When I wrote this scene, the purpose was to show that Gavin was under a great deal of tension. The scene worked.

The instructor in the seminar asked for an example of a scene where we had inserted some underlying tension. I didn’t use this scene, but rather another one in which Gavin and his wife are having a tense conversation in the patio of a restaurant. They are sitting at a table that wobbles and it’s bothering Gavin, so much that when another table opens up, Gavin moves his wife over to it. At this point in the book I was still developing Gavin’s character and I wanted to show that he was impatient, and like all men, either wanted to fix something or move on.

After describing the scene to the instructor, she turned to the rest of the group and said, “What does this tell you?” Another man said, “The table is symbolic of their relationship—wobbly.”

Shit? I’d never looked at it that way, and he was right. That is exactly what was happening in that scene. Their relationship was starting to fray, and I had unwittingly used a wobbly table to show it.  

I’m really proud of myself when I create a scene like the first one, inserting microtension on purpose and by design. I’m delighted, however, when I do it without even thinking, such as the wobbly table.  At the same time, I’m also a little embarrassed that I didn’t see it.  

 

Skin in the Game

My first seminar at the Southern California Writers’s Conference in an Diego was entitled “Rewriting Novels and Narrative Non-Fiction by Jean Jenkins, a freelance editor. One of the things Jean talked about was the need for the protagonist to have a motivation as soon as possible into the book. There needs to be a physical peril in the first two pages.

But what if the book is more psychological in the nature of the conflict? Loss of a relationship, loss of a job. Do these count?

Perhaps we can extrapolate that out to some like this: Within the first two pages the protagonist has to be confronted with a situation which poses the possibility that things will never be the same.  

 

What Do You Want to Know About?

I'm headed for the Southern California Writers' Conference later this week in San Diego. Three days on the mechanics of writing and publishing. Most of the seminars I'm attending are on writing, but there will also be a few on various aspects of publishing. I will take copious and thorough notes, for my own benefit, and perhaps some future blogposts. If you have any questions, ask me and I'll try to get them answered. 

Writing for a Readership with Attention Deficit Disorder

Day #5 of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. I've been hearing a great deal about not doing anything as a writer that will lose the reader, because in today's world of distractions, you may not get that reader back. So here is a post from last year that addressed that. 

 My last blog was about editing, and also touched a little on length. Got a lot of comments, so I wanted to elaborate.

I’ve received all sorts of advice and heard all sorts of opinions—verbal, in blogs and in hard print—about length. Novels, especially for first-time published authors, need to come in at about 90,000 words. That seems to be the sweet spot. This is mostly a function of print costs. Much beyond 90,000 and the print costs go up appreciably. That’s a dollars-and-cents thing. I don’t like it, but I can understand it.

But the other thing I also completely understand: novels, and all books, need to be written so that they can be digested in easy, bite-sized pieces. Short paragraphs and lots of breaks. People in today’s world can only read, at best, in about twenty-minute increments, and preferably even smaller chunks if you can pull it off. And by the way, that three-quarter page paragraph is just too damn long. You’re asking the reader to make a real commitment. It’s kind of foreboding.

You see this in magazines all the time:  News is more frequently coming in small, pithy blurbs that can be digested in a few minutes. Articles can’t be too long or you will lose the reader. The same is true for television, although TV is more a part of the problem.

I credit all of this to the reality that we have become a nation of people with ADD—Attention Deficit Disorder—and it’s here to stay. This is largely attributable to the web-enabled cell phone, or smartphone.  We now have his little gizmo in our pocket that allows us to hook into the wired world at any time. We can access the internet, Facebook, Twitter. We can text our friends (often for no other reason than to say “What’s Up?”). I sit in restaurants and often see an entire family at another table, each preoccupied with their cell phones.

And, geez, now we can also take pictures and video! A couple of years ago I ended up, quite by accident, in the middle of a stand-off between police and a mentally deranged person.  Shots had been fired and police were advancing on this car in the middle of a crowded boulevard. Parents were on the ground covering children. And in the middle of it all, two guys were out there with their cell phones, recording video.  I have no doubt that within fifteen minutes they had uploaded it to their YouTube account and posted on Facebook.

By the way, I’ve been guilty of all of these things, in one form or another.

All of this is by way of saying that we, as writers of fiction, are in a constant battle for the attention of the reader—much more than previous generations of writers.  It’s our reality. We have to create stories that can be told in short paragraphs with lots of breaks. Our competition is not other writers. Our competition is a vibrating cell phone, the latest post on Facebook, and the new release of Modern Warfare.

We need to create stories that fit our readers’ lifestyle. 

See ya’ later.

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

 

 

"Never had an editor say to me, ‘Do you think you could make this piece longer?’”

Last week I read a short story in my critique group. It was met with approval and encouragement to get it published. One of the group members, however, someone whose opinion I respect, suggested that I try to cut it by 10 percent.

“Making a written piece shorter always makes it better,” he said. “I’ve never had an editor say to me, ‘Do you think you could make this piece longer?’” This fellow is in a position to know. He’s published hundreds of poems and more than a dozen short stories.

So over the last few days I’ve gone over this story several times. As with most editing tasks, I can eliminate about 50 percent of what I need to get rid of in larger chunks—a paragraph here, a sentence there. The rest of it, however, takes some work. It comes down to questioning the right of every word to be in that story. What purpose does it serve? Is there a better, and shorter, way to say the same thing?

In fact, I just wrote a sentence that can be edited:

As with most editing tasks, I can eliminate about 50 percent of what I need to get rid of in larger chunks—a paragraph here, a sentence there.

This leaves me with:

As with most editing tasks, I can eliminate about 50 percent in larger chunks—a paragraph here, a sentence there.

But as I look at it, there is more:

As with most editing tasks, I can eliminate about 50 percent in larger chunks—a paragraph here, a sentence there.

Now I’m down to:

I can eliminate about 50 percent in larger chunks—a paragraph here, a sentence there.

What is interesting about this is that in the first four renditions of this sentence, as I was writing it, Microsoft Word flagged is as an issue. The program didn’t indicate a specific problem with the sentence, or offer a rewrite of it. It just gave it a squiggly green underline, indicating it didn’t like the sentence. In the final version, though, Microsoft Word had no problem with it.  

I was in awe of The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy. The book was 704 pages and there wasn’t a wasted word.

This is why I respect the writers who came before me—before the baby boomers. Rewriting this sentence on my laptop is effortless. I move my cursor and either delete or insert. As I read through the final version of a manuscript, I can delete or elaborate as I see fit. A generation ago, such a change meant retyping a page, or perhaps a chapter.

Writing is rewriting, and technology erases all excuses for not writing something perfect.  

 

Preparing for the southern California Writers' Conference

I am attending the Southern California Writers’ Conference in San Diego the week after next. This is the first time I have been to one of these events. I had some business cards made up.  Take a look and give me your take. I think all the pertinent information is there. They look a little rough here because I have not figured out how to convert from the new PDF to a JPG file and have it look clean. They are going to be printed on a nice, crisp uncoated stock.

One of the big questions, looking at the schedule of events, is which seminars to attend. They fall into three general categories: writing, the business of writing, and self-publishing. Of course, in any module during the three-day weekend, there is the question of which seminar to attend. There are many times I’d like to be two or three places at once.

I’ve developed an overall strategy. I’m going to giving the seminars on writing my top priority. I see self-publishing in the same light as social media.  If you don’t know anything about social media, don’t worry about it. It’s all going to change tomorrow anyway. The same goes for self-publishing.  So I don’t feel bad about missing those seminars. As for the seminars on getting published, that’s what I have an agent for. That’s why I’m going to pay him 10 percent or 12 percent or whatever they charge.

Besides, these are subjects that are treated in articles all over the internet, so I reason that I can find out about them online.

I want more hands-on tips for writing however—plot development, characterization and those types of things. It took me a long time to figure out what people meant when they said “show it, don’t tell it.” Those are the kinds of things I’m looking for.