Revising your story

Revision is perhaps one of the most exciting elements in fiction writing, yet it is one of the most challenging. I love this part of the writing process because I feel this is where you really start writing. In your first draft you should only worry about putting words on the page; your sentences don’t have to be beautiful. Forget about adjectives, adverbs, similes, and anything that has to do with style. Anne Lamott calls this part of the process, the first drafts; “Shitty drafts.”

I like to write my first drafts handwritten on a small notebook. This may sound stupid, but I feel like a writer when I write on my little notebook. After I finish my first draft I always let that first draft alone for at least a month. I want a detachment from my story, so when I can come back and look at my story with objective eyes. In the meantime I try to work on something else; a new story, write a poem, read a book, or finish one. After a month has passed I pick that first draft and start the second one in the computer; the revision of my story

On the second draft is when the real writing begins. On the second draft you start paying attention to all those elements of style that you neglect on the first draft. Writer Josip Novakovich gives us some excellent advice on his book Fiction Writer’s Workshop:

“In the revision stage, you strive to make your writing coherent, clear, and effective. Out   of chaos, a fully developed story gradually emerges. Clumsy sentences become graceful; clichés become wit; muddled action becomes drama. If you wonder how to sound original, the answer is: revise and revise. Even if you think your stories don’t work, you can make them work – if you revise well.”

Consider Raymond Carver’s advice: “it doesn’t take that long to do the first draft of the story, that usually happens in one sitting, but it does take a while to do the various versions of the story. I’ve done as many as twenty or thirty drafts of a story. Never less than ten or twelve drafts.”

Being a writer is a lot of hard work. If you want to be a good writer, you must write until your fingers start cramping. After reading Carver’s advice I’m revising every single story I’ve written and rewrite them one more time.

Don’t forget these two pieces of advice:

1)    1^st draft; it is all about getting the story on the page.

2)    2^nd draft and more; it’s all about making the story better.

Check these two book out. They will help you with your writing and your fiction; Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird. 

Jorge Luis Borges, On Writing

I haven't seen this movie but it looks like a good one: 

HED: E-Book; A New Way to Read a Book

DEK: Welcome to the electronic book age

BYLINE: Felipe Cárcamo

WORDCOUNT:486

COPY: In my hands I hold an electronic book device; it’s my first Kindle. I behave like a little boy with a new toy,completely blown away by the object in front of me. I turn it on, and in less than a

second I am welcomed into the age of the electronic book.

A couple of months ago I walked into my favorite bookstore in town looking for another book to add to my large collection. At the counter the two guys who run the place were having a conversation about the outbreak of the electronic book. Their tone was rather depressed as they prophesized that their store will turn into a sort of antique store for books. A year ago I thought the electronic book was a truly aberration to the book-lover. Whoever thought about getting an e-book device, and called himself a book lover, was committing adultery in his mind. The experience of holding a book in your hands, leafing through its pages, smelling its indistinguishable scent, and giving it space on your bookshelf are all incomparable sensations.   

Vacations are the perfect time for reading. On vacation I read a 300-page book in 3 days. Besides work, I have the whole night to read. I remember one summer I read 20 novels. Last summer a good friend of mine invited me to spend a few weeks in Florida. As I do for every trip, I packed my small shoulder bag with books. I even tried to sneak a few books in my wife’s luggage, but she gave a stay off my bag look. That was the day she suggested a kindle for my birthday. “A Kindle,” I said. “My bookshelf is going to hate me.”    

I received my Kindle a few days ago and I just can’t get my hands off its compact, lightweight design. I have 23 titles already divided into eight collections.  This past Tuesday I started reading Madame Bovary by Flaubert. As I was reading the first chapter I bumped into a word for which I didn’t know the meaning. My Kindle comes with a built-in dictionary that provides the meaning of any word with just a click. After I learned the meaning of the word, I highlighted the word and made a comment. “I love this thing,” I said out loud and started kissing and hugging my Kindle. Not only that, I can create a collection with my own stories and documents. Last night before I went to bed, I had a talk with my bookshelf. I said “things have changed. My love for you will not be exclusive anymore.”

“Is there some book else?” She asked.

“I said yes.” 

Plot is Conflict

When we sit down in front of the computer screen to write a story we think of plot. Consciously or not, we think of plot. Plot can be defined as the series of events, chronologically arranged, that make up a story. This last week as I took a break from school I read an excellent chapter on a little book titled “The Art of Fiction,” by Ayn Rand. The chapter in question “The Plot-Theme,” deals with plot and how the apprentice writer should go about structuring (plotting) his stories. She argues that plot is conflict. A series of chronologically arranged events don’t constitute a story worth anything. Plot is conflict. When we sit down to write a story we should ask ourselves something like: “how am I going to plot the conflict of this story,” as opposed to “how am I going to plot this story.”

This realization (plot = conflict) is crucial in my understanding of how to construct a story. It’s amazing how a simple word can provide a totally better perception of things. It is like that scene in Shrek where he tries to explain to donkey the nature of an ogre by using an onion as an analogy. (I hope you can understand what I’m trying to say).

For me plot was a series of events chronologically arranged. So, when I sat down to write a story I just had to think of the events that will make up that story. Not anymore. Now I think about plot as conflict. The next time I sit down to write a story I will think about events that make up the conflict of my story. Ayn Rand says: “To appreciate what makes a good plot situation, you must identify not only a character’s specific purpose, but also all the conflicts that this purpose necessarily engenders.” In other words you must come up with all the necessary scenes that will lead to the central conflict of your story. She suggests: “Before you construct a story, you must decide on the central conflict, which will then serve as the standard telling you have to include in order to fully develop this conflict, and what is superfluous.”

Another word that can help you understand the nature of plot and conflict is action. Action equals conflict. A literary equation would be. Plot = conflict = action. In other words write meaningful scenes for your story. Scenes that will lead to the main conflict in your story. Get rid of any scene/s that will not contribute to the main message of your story, and will not lead the reader to the main conflict.

 Check this book out by Ayn Rand:

This one is a classic by John Gardner: 

How many kinds of plots you think are there? 

The Importance of Conflict

Conflict is perhaps the most important ingredient in a story. Without it, the story is flat and lacks intensity. The difference between fiction and real life is that real life is boring. We do the same thing every day; we eat at the same time, we go to work, we talk to the same people, we watch the same TV shows, and we probably go to bed at the same time every night. I know what you are thinking, what about all the memoirs that are coming out lately? You are right. If you’ve had an interesting life so far I would encourage writing about it. Even in memoir, the reason they were written is because they have a good deal of conflict. In his excellent book Story in Literary Fiction, author William Coles says that “conflict can be physical, mental, or emotional. The action is presented by placing the reader in the scene or by narrative telling, and resolution involves a change in the character, either a reversal of some thought or trait in the character or the character’s recognition of something not understood before.”


Conflict is anything that will prevent the character from achieving his goal. In order to write a good story, we must have conflict in mind. Donald Mass says, “where there is conflict, there is rich soil to plant a story.” So how can you add conflict to your story? First, determine your protagonist’s goal, and then just start thinking about thing that will make things hard for him to achieve that goal. That simple.

Two books to check

David Benioff, City of Thieves, and Joe Hill 20th Century Ghost

                  

Style

This week I'll write about style as in grammar style. As you write your stories and novels you will acquire a personal style. In your early days you probably try to emulate your favorite authors hoping to discover your own. This is a good thing and I would encourage you to imitate your favorite writers as much as you can.

Discovering your own style is a long journey. It will take hours of writing before you can actually start noticing a particular form in your writing. I feel, after more than 5 years writing every single day that I’m now developing my own voice. I can think of many things that can help you find your own style; reading all kinds of genres and authors, writing in all kinds of styles and forms, and grammar. Yes, grammar. You are probably thinking: “What are you talking about?” That’s a given. Not necessarily. I write my stories in my first language Spanish. English still feels awkward to me even though I am writing this blog in English. I noticed that paying attention to a few grammar principles, my writing improved tremendously. I will share two principles that have improved my writing. These two principles are taken from the excellent book by Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer.

1.              Order words for emphasis. Place words at the beginning of the sentences and at the end of a sentence or paragraph. Consider for example this sentence by Shakespeare: “The Queen, my lord, is dead.” That word dead at the end of the sentence resonates with special power.

2.              Watch those Adverbs. Use adverbs to change the meaning of a verb. At their best adverbs spicy up a verb. At their worst they express meaning already contain in it. Consider these two sentences.

I smile happily.

I smile sadly.

Which one works best? I think the second sentence as the word smile contains the meaning of happily.

Consider applying these two principles to your writing and start noticing how your writing changes dramatically. 

Check these two books: 

See if you can stand Irvine Welsh's style and use of grammar in his famous novel Trainspotting

Check Roy Peter Clark talks about one of his favorite tools: "Order Words For Emphasis."

Why You Need to Show and Tell

One of the first writing tips you’ll receive as an apprentice writer along with have your main character always want something is the show don’t tell advice. Show don’t tell? What does this mean? Basically it means that by showing you are creating a picture in the reader’s mind as oppose to just enumerating a bunch of facts about something. Because fiction’s main purpose is to create an imaginative world for the reader is necessary then that our writing is vivid and evocative rather than informative.

In his book, This Year You Write Your Novel, novelist Walter Mosley argues that the highest possible praise for the fiction writer is a complement like “the words came right up off the page.” He says that when the reader feels that he is actually experiencing the sensations and emotions, the life and atmosphere, the novelist is showing rather than just telling. He offers some good advice that all of us should consider when we are writing our stories:

            “It is often better if you use images and physical descriptions rather than mere informative language to present people, places, things, and events in your novel. To be told that someone is violent or seems to be violent is too general; the reader is left to come up with their own notions of Piggott based upon their personal experience with violence.”

Is telling a bad thing? Telling is a great and necessary element in your story. Am I supporting both then? Yes, I am. Telling creates a balance. You don’t want to write your entire story show-writing from beginning to end. You will tire your readers. They need to take a rest from all the action, and that’s when you tell-writing. Telling is necessary when you need to summarize, or create background for one of your characters. So, How do you choose when to show, and when to tell? I’ll borrow Alice LaPlante advice from her book Method and Madness. “Ideally, these two elements of writing are organically intertwined. That is, what we tell doesn’t just echo or repeat what we show. We use the two together to achieve whatever effect we want. When a section of “telling” can be eliminated without taking away from a creative work’s meaning, then by all means cut it, and allow the showing to carry the piece. But the opposite is also true: often we can tell something more efficiently, elegantly, beautifully, or subtly than we could hope to do if dramatazing it. in such cases, we should eliminate the dramatization, or scene, in favor of the narration.”

Now go write. 

Check out this two amazing books where you will find both; showing and telling equally balanced.

Junot Diaz The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

Check this brief interview with Junot Diaz

I HAVE NO IDEA, I SAID. Dialogue in Fiction

I’d like to talk about dialogue today. I’d like to start by saying right off the bat that dialogue isn’t as simple to write as one may think. Dialogue must be one of the most difficult elements in fiction to do well. I personally hate to write dialogue because most of the time my dialogues come out fake. When we write dialogue there are a few things we need to remember: 

1) Dialogue must be instinctive. In other words dialogue must not sound fake or that we are trying too much. 

2) Dialogue must be competent. Dialogue must exposed features of the personality of your characters and also slowly present some clues about the plot. 

And 3) Dialogue must be real. This is the most difficult thing to pull off. A dialogue that is real means that your readers are able to recognize the personalities of your characters through dialogue.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez said once that the reason his novels don’t have much dialogue is simple because he isn’t good at it. Now, Gabo is a literary genius and because of his tremendous narrative abilities he can get away with no writing dialogue. Unfortunately for the rest of us who are not genius, at least I am not one, we have to learn how to write dialogue and incorporate it into our narratives.

The best tip I can suggest to you all in regards to dialogue is simply to read fiction (read your favorite writers) with lots of dialogue and write it ‘til your fingers bled. 

Check out this book from one of the masters. A master piece of dialogue is found here in this collection. "Hills Like White Elephants." 

Ernest Hemingway, The Short Stories. 

Listen to this teacher talk about dialogue

The Importance of Setting

Have you asked yourself why we fall in love with a novel or a short story? I have a theory. We tend to remember and endear stories, (some people can recall almost every detail of it), not only because of their characters, but also its settings. I would venture to say that the reason why the plot of a story stays in our memory is because of a perfect combination of well- rounded characters and the perfect setting. Think of the novels you have in your top ten list and I can guarantee the reason those novels are so vividly fresh in your mind that you probably reread every year (I read Garcia Marquez’s Of Love and Other Demons once a year) because it seems that we were there along with the characters living every minute of the story with them.

Know how to choose the ideal setting for your story is very important to create a feeling of unity, and more important to create the right mood for your story. In his book The Nighttime Novelist, Joseph Bates has great words of wisdom about setting. He says: “setting – the time, place, and space of your story- isn’t simply four walls you’ve dropped your character into so he’ll have someplace to sit, nor is it a larger, objective, impersonal world that only just happens to include the people you’re focusing on, tangentially. Setting is directly related to your character, another way of revealing and deepening our understanding of him and his quest.”

Although the mood and nature of a story can have a setting that doesn’t exactly fit with the genre of the story, (it is always better idea to create a setting according to the mood of your story) give your setting always a sense of place so you can achieve suspense and excitement.

Check out these two novels: Blindness by Jose Saramago

The Shadow of the Wind By Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Watch Carlos Ruiz Zafon talks about The Shadow of the Wind