The Confabulator Cafe

Category: Mechanics

  • It’s All a Matter of Perspective

    Let me assure you that, despite being stuffed and mounted, this buffalo is very much alive and performing at Walt Disney World. Photo from http://disneyatdisleelandiablog.blogspot.com/2011/04/country-bear-jumble.html

    When it comes to point of view in a story, you don’t have a lot of choices.

    You can go first person — “I ran naked through poison ivy and got a rash on my butt.”

    Second person, engaging the reader directly — “You opened the door, shrieked when you saw the dead buffalo bleeding on the carpet, and dialed 911.”

    Or third person — “He wept when he discovered there was no more cheese in the house, for cheese was now illegal in the state of Alabama.”

    There are variations, of course, mostly a little weird. I once wrote a short story in first person plural.  I did it because I had an assignment in a writing class to write in a PoV I’d never tried before. It was sort of a hive-mind kind of thing, effective in this one instance, but not something that should be done often. Really, first, second, and third person are your big choices.

    So, what’s my favorite? That’s today’s question, right?

    I don’t play favorites. When I start writing a story, I choose what I think is going to be best for it.

    Sometimes, mistakes are made. (more…)

  • My Point of View on Point of View

    As I’ve developed my writing style, I’ve played with several different points of view in order to figure out what works best for my way of storytelling.

    For a long time, first person was my poison. It was easy to write that way – it helped me relate to what happened to the character. Besides, when I first started writing, I was writing about all of the adventures I wished I could have myself, so I was the star in all of my stories.

    (more…)

  • Shutting Out the Voices With a Single Point of View

    When we talk about the events of our lives, we often switch tenses without thinking about it. We easily transition from the present to talking about the past. But we rarely shift point of view, because our lives are from our own point of view and no one else’s.

    View Point
    Sometimes a single point of view offers more clarity.

    But art, unlike real life, affords us the opportunity to write from different points of view. As writer gods, we can peek into the minds of multiple characters and see what everyone is thinking at a given time. It’s an omniscient power that some writers embrace.

    Writing from multiple points of view allows the author the freedom to do almost anything in a narrative.  For one thing, a story can have multiple stories in multiple places. Think, Game of Thrones, for instance.

    I used to be a writer god, creating worlds filled with characters — each with a story to tell. The result was the most boring, bloated crap anyone would never want to read. My first manuscript was like Stephen King’s The Stand, but with multiple characters and storylines that all converged — in Kansas. And it had a religious message. And it was bad. Really bad.

    (more…)

  • Love Me! Confessions of an Attention Whore

    I have two sons. One is a quiet, reserved kid, but the other … not so much. My younger boy needs an audience. He craves affirmation the way some people crave ice cream, and he will go to great lengths to get it. (The attention, not the ice cream. Though he’s a fan of that as well.)

    I’d be lying if I said it didn’t drive me batty sometimes. This is a kid who will go through multiple iterations of the same routine just to get a reaction out of you, and if your response isn’t quite what he’s looking for, there’s a good chance he’ll cry.

    In case you’re wondering what exactly it is the 5-year-old is crying about, allow me to quote him directly.

    “Because you didn’t think I was funny.”

    (more…)

  • All the POVs in the world, and you had to walk in to mine.

    “It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.” – Carl Jung

    Point of view is a great tool for spicing up writing. A plot might be a totally different story from a different perspective. The classics are third and first person.

    My preference is for a first-person or third-person limited point of view. I’ve never been a fan of omniscient narrators. They don’t connect well to normal life. I stick close to a specific character and let the audience learn what drives him. Other characters are more interesting when viewed through the eyes of someone with their own prejudices.

    A limited perspective allows the reader to learn with the character. When the protagonist says “Aha!,” the reader says it, as well. When a character is hurt by his failures, hopefully the reader understands. (more…)

  • The POV Viewpoint (26 May 2012)

    How writers approach the point of view in a story is often as important as the characters or the settings themselves. It can allow readers to look at a tough social issue through the eyes of an innocent, as in To Kill a Mockingbird. Or it can range across a huge cast of characters telling a story that spreads across the country, as Stephen King did with his post-apocalyptic novel The Stand.

    This week, we asked our writers at the Cafe to discuss their personal preferences when choosing the point of view for their own stories. While their answers are sure to vary, they are likely to have one thing in common: personal preference based on experience.

    So grab a cup of your favorite beverage, and join us this week. And be sure to share your own point of view about the subject with our writers.

  • Your Editor: The Frenemy You Will Love to Hate

    When I first started working at my current job, the HR department emailed everybody what they considered a fun game— find all 10 spelling and grammar errors in a page of text, and you could win a gift card.

    I found fourteen.

    OK, so at least two “errors” were more in the realm of stylistic choices— Oxford commas and so forth— but I won the gift card. And then I became my bureau’s copy editor.

    My style of editing is fairly instinctual. I’m looking for one thing above all else— does it make sense? Would a reasonably intelligent and half awake member of the target audience be able to understand it? I do look for ambiguous language, typos, grammar errors, and logical consistency, but I’m also looking at language rhythm and flow.

    Sure, you can study this. You can sit down with a grammar [0] and styleguide and memorize the rules. But the best way to learn what good writing looks like is to read lots and lots of good writing. Read it obsessively. Read it until the rules of language have seeped deep into your bones.

    Also, read bad language [1]. Try to figure out why it is bad. How would you improve it? Is it confusing? Does it ramble? Does the logic flow? Are there spelling errors? Is it utterly lacking in capitalization, punctuation, paragraph breaks, and other bourgeois affectations [2]? Your goal is to become on of those douchebags. You know the kind I mean. As your edit-fu grows strong, and for extra credit, try turning your attention to any newspaper’s Op-Ed pages.

    Editing your own work is phenomenally difficult. It is impossible to edit and compose at the same time, so don’t even try. They use physically different parts of your brain, so you’ll have to do each in a separate pass. You may find it useful to use a different technique for each pass— for example, I compose on paper, but edit on the screen, then proofread again where possible on paper.

    Also, you will have to create a physical and mental distance between yourself and your work. After you have finished writing it, stick it in a drawer for a while. For a blog post, a couple of hours. Term paper or feature length article, a whole day. Your novel? At least a month.

    Your best editing tool will always be another person. Not a close friend, not a family member, not someone who wishes to spare you hurt feelings. An honorable enemy is best [3]. Someone who is willing to be brutally honest, explain in exacting detail where and how you’ve screwed up, and assassinate your children in front of you. Someone who is willing to tear your ego into little tiny shreds and stomp them into the mud. Choose for your editor the nastiest, most vicious drill sergeant you can find, with all the gentle sweetness of a hungover wolverine. Learn their favorite drink, because you’ll be buying a lot for them.

    Read their comments very, very carefully. Then stick the whole manuscript back into the drawer. Get mad. Rant, rave, wail, moan, gnash your teeth, tear your hair, and clutch your pearls. Tearfully explain to your very best friend that your sunovabich editor Just Doesn’t Get It. Get drunk and have the same conversation with the smelly guy sitting at the far end of the bar.

    A week later, when you’ve finally gotten over yourself and the hangover has abated, pull your magnum opus back onto your desktop and reread your editor’s comments. Figure out where they’re right, and why they’re right, and how to fix it.

    Congratulations. You’ve now achieved the rewrite.

    [0]  Allow me to recommend The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: A Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager and the Doomed by Karen Elizabeth Gordon.
    [1] The Internet being a particularly rich trove.
    [2] Dear Random Netizen: Typing in all lower case was individualistic and stylish when e. e. cummings did it. On you, it just looks like you don’t know what the shift key is for.
    [3] Think the Poker Game of Mystery Writers on the TV show Castle. They’re always eager to tell Castle he’s full of shit.

  • Exercises in Failure & the Editing Process

    I hate editing. I have failed every goal I’ve ever set when editing. I stumble in the same spot every time.

    It’s not killing my darlings. Whatever, kill those bastards. I never liked them anyway.  (Oh my god that’s such a lie, please, come back, babies.) I like going through the novel and finding the things that worked. I like those moments when you realize, “Wow, this is a legitimate novel,” and the moments where you throw the manuscript across the room and scream, “I WILL NEVER WRITE AGAIN.”

    Here’s my process. (more…)

  • Editing Is Polite

     

    Throughout most of my writing life, I have been a very rude writer, with a belief that my prose deserved to be read in its full early flowering. My twelve grade college composition class was probably the last time I edited with an particular fervor.  There I did learn to interrogate all writing that I do, as I do it.
    As a result of this, in college I submitted a lot of first drafts for final copies.  The unfortunate truth is that my first drafts were still better than most finals, and I was able to earn A’s and B’s without putting much effort into the editing process.  To this day, I maintain that the easiest way to become a fluid, competent writer (if not a great artist or sculptor of the written word) is to read a lot of good writers and practice thinking in complete, complex sentences.
    Still, this means that my editing secret used to involve no editing at all.  Part of this really is from a crazy, Jackson Pollack impulse that first thoughts are most intense, that writing is the process of recording thoughts upon the page, spilled out in a gorgeous mixed metaphor of color on the page or screen.
    After teaching college English, though, I had more than my fill of reading the work of students who chose the same chaotic  process, with somewhat more dreadful results than my choppy but readable unedited prose.  So, I knew that I had to learn how to edit.  Since that revelation, I have tried a few things, but haven’t hit on a routine yet.  When editing my second NaNo novel, I tried editing sentence by sentence first. I soon realized that I hadn’t taken care of blazing plot holes, so all time spent on sentence-level edits was wasted until I did a major restructuring.
    On my personal blog, I occasionally review books and discuss ideas by people who are currently incarcerated.  So I have had to start doing legal edits there–leaving my writing for a day or two and then rewriting it to make sure that I haven’t gotten carried away with rhetoric and accidentally advocated for something illegal. Usually, these edits force me to focus what I was really trying to say, as well, a side benefit of dabbling in the ideological fringes.
    Right now, I am resisting my urge to ramble and learning how to delete my beloved tangents. Even in this entry I have taken out a couple of paragraphs of related stories that I found terribly interesting but which were undeniably off point.  I am coming to an understanding of how rude it is to force readers to find their way through my thicket of tales, that the polite writer must get to the point and direct each paragraph to the topic at hand.

  • Do as I say, not as I do

    I’m a bad boy, apparently (In the world of NaNoWriMo. Which doesn’t make the “bad boy” title all that interesting. It’s like being the coolest kid at the comic book store: there isn’t that much competition). I do things during November that are frowned upon by the NaNo Powers-That-Be (myself included). I’m a rule-breaker. Who woulda thunk it?

    What’s my crime? I edit while I write.

    It’s a terrible example to set for my fellow November novelists. Editing during the writing process only serves to slow you down, and that’s not what NaNo is about. But I do it anyway. I can’t help it. I tweak, I twist, I tinker. I worry over words, and turns of phrase, and paragraph structure. Every day I re-read the previous day’s work and make adjustments. Sometime I go back even further to add, remove, and rearrange. While some people write linearly, my process is constantly looping and evolving as I progress through the story.

    The result, luckily for me, is a pretty bad-ass first draft.

    Unfortunately, it’s also where the brakes typically engage, completely interrupting the creative process. My first draft, while good, is never perfect (wouldn’t that be something?) and yet I find it very challenging to tear it down and build it back up. It’s like remodeling a perfectly functional house because the flow’s not quite right: some people could easily do that, knocking down walls and rearranging the kitchen appliances. I, however, see a functional house first, and can usually only bring myself to slap a new coat of paint on it (spelling and grammar, or word choice tweaking), or, occasionally, and with great reluctance, removing extraneous stuff. Actual structural changes? Like reframing a character or altering the plotline? Nuh uh. Not up for that.

    It’s perverse, actually, that having an effective process for writing a first draft is actually a handicap when I move on to the editing process. One would think I would learn from previous years, and realize that perhaps I should spend less time editing during my writing, and save it for the actual editing stage.

    One would be wrong, of course.

    Though, actually, thinking about it, things may be looking up with this year’s manuscript. I think it’s a function of a) being incredibly busy during the initial writing process, and b) never really feeling all that attached to the story. At the time of the initial draft, I was disappointed by both of those factors: I didn’t really love my story, and I didn’t have enough time to dedicate to it to get it to a loveable state. Now, however, I feel more free to make the drastic changes that drafts deserve. Need to nix a scene or two? No problem. Character attitude needs a one-eighty? You betcha.

    So, something new. An opportunity for structural editing, due to indifference about the initial process. Odd. All that said, I’m still not done with either the initial draft or the first edit, which are happening in a hodge-podge whenever I can spare the time. But I’m hopeful that, with time, I might end up with a more polished and saleable product at the end of the day. Time will tell.