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Language usage, The Writing Industry

Writing Lesson 3.9-Genre: What is it?

By Lynn Dean, on October 21st, 2011

Please allow me to introduce today’s guest blogger, Shannon McNear! Shannon has been writing one thing or another since third grade and has completed five novels in genres from Southern fiction to Revolutionary War historical to fantasy. She has eight children–two in college and six still homeschooling–but does her best to steal slivers of writing and reading time when she can. She has lots of great ideas about writing, so without further ado let’s hear Shannon’s thoughts on…

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gen·re (zhän r )

1. A type or class: “Emaciated famine victims … on television focused a new genre of attention on the continent” (Helen Kitchen).

2(a). A category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, marked by a distinctive style, form, or content: “his six String Quartets … the most important works in the genre since Beethoven’s” (Time).

(The American Heritage Dictionary, via thefreedictionary.com)

When I first started writing, the one thing I knew was that I wanted to write what I love to read. Adventure, romance (well-done, please), some action, but lots of deep thought as well, all woven together with smooth and beautiful writing. I didn’t really pay attention to length or form or anything else. After a while, though, the question was posed, just what kind of story am I writing? Is it romance? Adventure? Suspense or mystery? Contemporary or historical? Science-fiction or fantasy? And why on earth did it matter? I just wanted to WRITE, for crying out loud!

It mattered, I found, because like music and painting, writing is an art form, and the techniques you use to create depend upon what you want your piece to look like.

In painting, are you creating a miniature? Is it a portrait or a landscape? A framed piece or a mural? Are you just trying to cover a wall with color?

For music—a jingle for a 15-second commercial? A praise chorus? The next radio hit, and will that be country, rock, or hip-hop? Maybe a symphony?

So it is in writing. Are you going for less than a thousand words (flash fiction), several pages (short story), a small book (novella), a medium book (novel), or a really long story in one thick volume or maybe several (epic saga, LOL)? The writing, storybuilding, and character-developing techniques you use vary with all of these. If you have a very detailed plot with several characters, don’t be surprised if they don’t fit into a short story. Likewise, if you have a simple story idea with a single point of view, but you want to write a novel, well … don’t be surprised if you find yourself writing about a lot of nothing just to get the page count in. In general, “bigger” stories call for longer page counts, and “smaller” stories for shorter, but … not necessarily.

First, let’s go back and look at what the genres are. Remember, this is a basic overview, and often the lines are blurred.

ROMANCE: Your classic “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back” story. Sure, it’s sometimes “formula” (no surprise that the couple ends up together), but the fun is in how they get there. There’s a reason why something becomes “formula” … because it works with the readers! Usually has a “HEA” (happily ever after) ending. Can range from sweet (kissing is absent or minimal, maybe handholding) to spicy (or more). Example: anything from Pride and Prejudice and Love Comes Softly to Harlequin “category romance.”

SUSPENSE/THRILLER: Key words are action, tension, danger. Your character is in peril or must protect someone in peril. With a thriller, the peril is global. Example: John Grisham, Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy … The Bourne Identity.

MYSTERY: Involves a crime of some kind, usually a murder, where one or more characters must figure out “whodunit.” Example: the Agatha Christie series.

SCIENCE-FICTION: Can employ any of the above elements, but the setting is either futuristic or on another planet, but with “hard science” details. In other words, “it could happen.” Think Star Trek rather than Star Wars, which is more properly “space opera”—sci-fi which employs elements of the next genre …

FANTASY: Commonly thought of as anything that contains magic, wizards, witches, elves, dwarves, or hobbits, but the lines have blurred to the point that anything with supernatural elements sometimes gets lumped into this genre. Examples: Lord of the Rings or Watership Down.

PARANORMAL: The supernatural, usually but not always in our world and time: angels, demons, vampires, werewolves … and usually not from a Christian perspective. Example: Twilight.

HISTORICAL: Takes place in the past, usually World War II or before. Example: Anne of Green Gables. Subgenre is the western, made famous by Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour, set in the American West, usually pre-1900 and post-Civil War.

This list is by no means exhaustive. For more lists, and longer explanations, Google the phrase “genre categories.” There’s a good one on the “Dummies” website, and some at Wikipedia.

Next time, I’ll talk about the conventions of genre—what regular readers of the various types of story expect, and how we can give them the experience they’re looking for by how we write the story.

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A Bit More Bio–

A transplant from the Midwest, Shannon McNear has lived for the last 20 years in the Lowcountry of South Carolina with her husband and eight children. With two graduated and in college and the younger six still homeschooling, she does her best to steal slivers of writing and reading time in between being ballet and drama mom. She’s served in worship and women’s ministry, in writer’s groups, and as an occasional book reviewer. Mostly she just loves to share the Lord or some tidbit of cool research she’s just found. Glimpses of her life can be found at www.shannonmcnear.com, and you can email her at sdmcnear@gmail.com.

Announcements, Personal Motivation

Writing Lesson 3.8-Get Ready for NaNoWriMo!

By Lynn Dean, on October 14th, 2011

It’s hard to imagine that any lover of literary lore hasn’t heard of NaNoWriMo, but hey…the truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.

NaNoWriMo, short National Novel Writing Month, is billed by it’s non-profit sponsors, the Office of Letters and Light, as “30 days and nights of literary abandon!” You may abandon a lot of things during the National Novel Writing Month of November–healthy meals, sufficient sleep, non-writing-related school work, maybe even take leave of your senses–in your drive to scribe 50,000 words in 30 days, but for lovers of the written word, this is a challenge that’s hard to pass up. And if 50K words sounds unattainable and you happen to be 17 or under, fret not! The NaNoWriMo Young Writers Program allows you to tailor your own ambitious word goal.

The rules state that you can’t begin writing until November 1 and must reach your target word count by 11:59 p.m. November 30th, BUT if the challenge tempts you like a double-dog-dare there are plenty of things you can do NOW to increase your odds of success.

Choose your Challenge–Go to the adult site or young writers’ site and get signed up. You even get a cool web badge that you can add to your social media. Nothing like having all your friends ask how it’s going to encourage you as you write.
Browse through the resources included on each site. The Young Writers Program site has a special Resources tab and a great Dare Machine right on the home page that’ll get you thinking “outside the box.”
If you need more story ideas, visit OLL’s related Script Frenzy site and try the Plot Machine. Once you quit laughing and groaning, try making your own plot machine by inventing an assortment of settings, characters, and story goals. Happy shuffling!
When you’ve got an idea…or at least a direction…you ARE allowed to sketch out a rough outline, diagram, or storyboard–anything that will help you pre-shape your story without actually beginning to write it. (I’ve been known to use Post-It Notes on the back of a door so that I can rearrange them as I experiment with sub-plots.)
Use the NOVELWritingSite archives (listed in the left sidebar) to review past articles on plotting, setting, characterization, goal/motivation/conflict, themes and motifs. Plenty of ideas in there!

If November isn’t a good month for you to undertake the challenge, don’t despair! Camp NaNoWriMo is open year-round, offering an idyllic writer’s retreat smack-dab in the middle of your crazy life (so there’s no excuse for copping out!)

But if there’s even a remote possibility that the NaNoWriMo challenge might, perhaps, just maybe help you get a serious manuscript underway–or even just follow a crazy idea wherever it takes you–why not give is a go? Have fun with this! And once you’ve signed up, leave a comment here so we can all cheer you on!

Editing, Self-publishing, The Writing Industry

Writing Lesson 3.7-Who is Pilcrow?

By Melinda Evaul, on October 7th, 2011

I want to introduce my new best friend.

We met when I formatted my novel, Grow Old With Me, for publication in various eBook formats.

Meet ¶ also known as Pilcrow.

This mark should become your best friend too. Pilcrow shows the end of each paragraph and opens access to other non-printing characters in a document. It is turned on and off in the tool bar when using Microsoft Word. Pilcrow is rather shy, so it won’t print or show its face unless you ask it to appear.

Copy and paste this post to a Microsoft Word document and locate the symbol in your toolbar. Click on it and watch the spaces between words become a dot. Pilcrow will appear at the end of each paragraph. Use this valuable non-printing friend to show errors in your masterpiece.

When formatting an eBook or your manuscript you want to avoid all extra spaces. Pilcrow showed that I have a habit of hitting the space bar at the end of a paragraph. This creates an unwanted space. This tool allowed me to see those and remove them.

I left an unwanted space after the above sentence so you can see it with the Pilcrow tool on. When Pilcrow is off, the space won’t print a dot, but I’d have an error code flagged if I had written this to format into an eBook. You might have a squiggly green line to indicate an error in your typing. Pilcrow will tell you exactly why it’s incorrect.

Pilcrow will bring his friends to show line spaces between paragraphs, extra spaces in the middle of a sentence, spaces between sentences, and tab keys used to indent lines. (Instead, use Format to set indentations and spacing for paragraphs.) It’s proper to use only one space between sentences. If you have Pilcrow turned on, you’ll see that I have two spaces before this sentence as shown by the two dots. I also have an unwanted space between the words extra and spaces in my first sentence here. I used the tab key to indent this paragraph so I have an arrow pointing toward my first word. (Webmaster’s comment: I hope the arrow is still there. Some details may get lost in cyberspace during conversion.) If you have problems seeing these, increase the font size of the document so they stand out.

I can’t imagine writing without using this tool since I learned its value. I’ll edit scenes as I go to avoid a reformat at the end of the book.

Styles, Find, and Replace are more friends I met during my eBook adventure. I’ll be back to introduce these tools that assist in making your documents ready for a publisher, eBook reader or your teacher.

http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/NonPrintChars.htm is a document with data about Pilcrow and the invisible things it reveals in your work. Check it out. You’ll be surprised what you may type and never see.

Editing, Plotting

Writing Lesson 3.6-The Plot Thickens

By Lynn Dean, on September 30th, 2011

Sandra Orchard has been our guest contributor this month. She “forgot” to mention in her bio that her unpublished manuscript won the Daphne DuMaurier Award in 2009. I don’t need to tell you that’s a pretty big deal! She sold her first story to Love Inspired Suspense the next year. If you’d like to read how she takes a story from the first glimmer of an idea to become a prize-winning manuscript that’s ready to submit to an agent or editor, click over to Go Teen Writers and read her September 6 article there.

And while I’m on the topic, may I just say that Go Teen Writers is an amazingly appealing and enlightening blog? I spent quite a while browsing over there and loved everything I saw.

Be sure to read the comment section, too. You’ll be encouraged to see how many others enjoy writing!

Language usage, Point of View, Showing vs. Telling

Writing Lesson 3.5-A Quick Way to Draw in Your Readers

By Lynn Dean, on September 23rd, 2011

A guest post by Sandra Orchard

Details. Not a hundred of them listed ad nauseum, but key details unique to the POV character that are both fresh and rich in sensory information. Dig deep into the scene. Don’t just say your hero is wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Maybe his mom hung them on the line to dry, and they’re stiff as a board and uncomfortable, not nicely worn in like they are after he’s worn them for a week.

See how this works? You can tell your reader that he’s wearing uncomfortable jeans, or you can give them a picture and a sense of how they feel.

The five senses are your most important friends.

Exploit them! Sticking with clothes for a moment–instead of saying Joe wore sneakers, draw your reader in by describing the squeaking sound they make as he chases a girl down the hall. And don’t forget those wires dangling from his ears. What sound is the observer hearing?

Okay, we’ve covered touch and sound. Sight isn’t a problem for most writers, but what about taste and smell? We don’t often read descriptions involving taste and smell (unless you’re reading romance).

Get up from your chair and walk outside. Take a big whiff and then come back. ….Waiting….Did you do it?….Waiting…

Okay, what did the air smell like? That fresh after-a-storm smell? The heavy, cloying, swallow-your-breath smell of humidity? Like a particular flower or tree? Like horse manure or car exhaust? These kinds of sensory details draw a reader into your story. They help them feel like they’re there.

The same with taste. And don’t restrict yourself to things you put in your mouth. That car exhaust has a definite taste. So do emotions.

Here’s an advanced technique for deepening the emotion of a scene.

The scenery, clothes, etc. that you’ve been describing are from your POV character’s point of view. If you applied last week’s lesson, you’re choosing words that convey that character’s mood in your description. Let’s take that one step further and describe the situation with a metaphor to convey that emotion.

Here’s an example from my new release, Deep Cover, written in the hero’s pov:

Ginny blinked once and then again more deliberately.

He’d forgotten how strikingly green her eyes were, like a forest he could get lost in for hours. Only now they seemed to be measuring him and finding him wanting.

The metaphor is green eyes like a forest he could get lost in four hours. It conveys a wistful sense that he’d like to get lost in looking at her. Since it’s preceded by “he’d forgotten”, it implies he’d once lost himself in those eyes. And then comes the hammer. Not going to happen. Notice the juxtaposition of the wistful feeling to “found wanting”. It makes the effect all the harsher.

A Challenge

When I teach a writing technique, especially encouraging the use of metaphors or the senses, I worry that a student will overuse it. Any technique will become destructive if overused. Choose only an occasional metaphor, and and and make sure it is relevant to the POV character. A high school student will not compare the English teacher’s backside to a German WWII tank, unless he’s a history buff. That said, neglecting the five senses will rob your story of realism.

Exercise:

Look over a scene or story you’ve written. Do you have at least one of each of the five senses there? Do they evoke memories, include emotions, or set a mood? And just in case—check to see if you’ve overdone it. Remember: too many sensory images can be worse than too few.
Step two: Do you have a metaphor in the scene? Can you include one? Try it. But it needs to be fresh (not “stiff as a board” like I used in my post…which is a simile, but those are good, too.) Be sure the metaphor is something your POV character would think.

Please share your favorite metaphors in the comment section. And feel free to ask questions.

Author Sandra Orchard has been writing for nearly three decades but took time out to homeschool three children. She “graduated” to a new career when she contracted her first book with Love Inspired Suspense (formerly Steeplehill) the same day her youngest daughter entered college. That daughter, her student, is also a writer of award-winning short stories and articles for The Canadian Horse Journal and CinchMagazine.com, an Ezine which she also co-edits.

Deep Cover, the debut novel in Sandra’s Undercover Cops series released in early September. Shades of Truth will follow in March 2012. You can read topnotch book reviews as well as inspiring true stories at her website www.SandraOrchard.com.