Some Tips on Voice-Finding

Today we follow up on what I wrote earlier this week.

Jeremy Morgan asked:

"I fear that my voice (my worldview in particular) will come out as a 'tell' and that it will be off-putting to readers. (I know, I know, be true to yourself and write!) But the fear is still there. Any tips on conquering (or at least allaying) that fear?"

Now, Jeremy's answered this question partially - that the key to this is to be true to yourself and write, but I know there are a lot of people saying, "Easier said than done." So let's talk about it.

For starters, it may be easier to say to be true than it is to actually be brave enough to be honest and write without a veneer or cover, but it's doable. Everyone can do it. We may not all do it at the same time, it may come easier to some and harder to others, but everyone can do it. 

The Fear
The fear can be found in the second half of Jeremy's first sentence: "that it will be off-putting to readers" Lots of things can be off-putting to readers, and it's up to the reader(s) to choose whether or not the thing you've written is upsetting to them. 

Sure, there are topics that lead to that choice faster than other (religion, politics, racial commentary), but whatever you wrote is just words. Words have only the power imbued, so the interpretation is wholly subjective. 

The point: The reader chooses whether or not to be offended. Do not make that decision for them. Do not pretend to have already made that choice for them before you start writing. Just write. Write and be brave. Write and be honest. 

To fight the fear, I have some tips.

The Tips

Write as if you're the (only) audience. I often tell people to think of their audience when writing salescopy or promotional material, so that they can find a sympathetic rather than an aggressive starting point. Here, I ask you to write as though YOU are the audience. I don't mean write to yourself (No, "Dear self: blah blah blah", that's a different exercise), I mean write as though you're the sort of person who the material targets. What would you say to someone exactly like yourself?

What's the worst that could happen? Let's say you write whatever it is you're writing. What's the worst case scenario? That it never gets published. Then you'd never have to worry about your voice upsetting people. Let's assume it gets published. Are you really going to care at that point though if ten people from the middle of nowhere didn't like it? You've had one book published, you may be well on your way to a second, so what's the worst that could happen? (The trick here is to distinguish the practical possibilities from the irrational -- people not liking your work is not the same as starting a controversial global discussion about whether or not pigs fly or whatever your work is about)

Remember why you're writing. Are you writing because you have something to say or some story you want to birth unto the world? Or are you writing to please others? Note: one of those two questions is a path to frustration and disappointment, choose wisely. Writing for the right reasons is critical. What are yours?

I know I promised a dozen tips Jeremy, but I think those 3 are going to be the ones you want to keep close at hand. 

Happy writing.

By request - Query and Summary Letters

Dee Solberg asked about query letters and summary letters, in terms of their construction and how to navigate the apparently bizarre demands from one publisher to the next.

A word first about those demands - they've never struck me as bizarre. Just like going from one store in the mall to another has never bothered me about where they put the registers or whether or not they wear name tags. Every place is different, and entitled to make up their own methods for accomplishing the same end goal - which in this case is getting your work published.

Now, a tangent: Do you know why those needs are so different? Mostly for two reasons - First, to see if you follow directions (you'd be shocked by the number of people who don't) and second to see if following directions discourages you from going forward. Publishing on the whole, is a test of endurance, (writing is the test of skill) and there are many stages of hurry-up-and-wait as well as stages of I-cannot-believe-I-have-to-rewrite-this that turn publishing into a very intense pursuit. I would also like to point out that you (the author to-be-published) should avoid taking this time to start developing the philosophy that you're competing with other writers. This is not about scarcity or about some game of book-musical-chairs. There are PLENTY of chairs and the music NEVER stops playing.

So what's step one? Where do I begin?

Step one is something that doesn't go down easily, but if you commit to it, life gets exponentially better. Step one is 'make sure the project is complete'. I know, some people reading this are going to grab this magazine or that website over there and point to examples that say flat-out you can query a partially completed 'thing'. Yes, you can. You possess the ability to package pages together and get it sent to a destination. That is an option.

But doing that, moving ahead to acquire all the bells and whistles of publishing (the elements often thought to bring legitimacy: an agent, a publisher, a partridge in a fruit bush) without finishing your work puts you on someone else's schedule. And that new schedule likely is unaware that your children may have sick days, school plays and sports practices. Or that your spouse might decide to rewire the house and leave you powerless on a Saturday afternoon. Or that you have two jobs and a mortgage and the phone bill and the credit card and you want a vacation and what about the grocery shopping.....etc etc.

By finishing your work ON your schedule, you make their schedule INFINITELY easier, no matter who the "their" is.  Take the extra time (which shouldn't be a problem if you've disciplined yourself to a good writing schedule, right?) to make the project the best it can be before it leaves you, and everything thereafter is much simpler.

Okay, I did that, but what's up with queries?

I do a lot of workshops about queries. Here are the basics.

• Start where the action of the story is. I don't mean action like where the first emotion is felt or where the first verb is, I mean start telling me the story at the good parts. The parts that are going to make me want to hear more about it. Practice this - summarize your favorite movie. Now out loud, talk about it. Those scenes and facts you're saying? Those are the things that show where the action/meat of the story is. 
• Find out how many words the whole thing has. Put that number and the title (which you'll put in ALL CAPS) in one of the last two or three sentences at the bottom of the page. 
• You have between 200 and 300 words (I aim for around 225-240 max) to seduce the person into reading the manuscript. That's the job of a query - to entice the reader to go to the manuscript. Not give away the story. Not bore people to tears. Just excite the person into wanting more information.
• Do not give away the ending. If you tell the whole arc of the story, there's no reason to read the manuscript. Remember, you're supposed to be seductive. Telling the reader how this is going to end is not seductive. 
• This query is about your story NOT you. I'm now beating a dead horse, but the query letter is not the place to list all your great publishing or personal successes. (The document for that is called a resume) The query letter is about this story, and its merits, not the struggle you went through to put it together. I'm sure it's a very harrowing tale, but it's completely irrelevant to the quality of the story or a reader's interest in making the jump from query to manuscript. 

That's the basic template. You get those pieces set in your query, whatever other demands come down the road at you are cake. 

And what about story summaries? 

That's a different animal. Here you want to treat the page like a candy bar or a cake - and that having one piece (the summary) makes you want to have other pieces later. Like ten seconds later. Or at midnight. Or for breakfast the next morning. 

You still start where the action is, you still need to know how long the whole manuscript is, but now you have about DOUBLE THE WORD COUNT (400 to 600, I like a cap of 550) to demonstrate in tiny version what happens in the big version. 

Think about movie trailers. That's a small piece of a larger cake. You now get to do that by writing. Look at your outlines, your notecards, your bullet points. Identify the big action beats, the funny beats, whatever beats make you proud of your creation, and find a way to string them together. The magic here lies in how you make use of the words and ideas available to you. 

And in non-fiction?

For the love all that you hold dear, DO NOT drown the document in headings. Not everything needs to be broken out and explained. Do you know how that comes across? Like the sniffly desperate kid in your class who used to eat paste and who just had to keep yapping and explaining. (In my elementary school, his name was Chas or Charlie or Chuck or something)

Likewise don't go the other way and have two or three headings and then big blocks of text underneath them. That looks more like you just don't know what you're doing and you're desperate. 

Instead, try this. 5 headings.

1. About the book (the length, the genre, etc)
2. The Characters
3. The Plot
4. The Author (that's you!)
5. How You Plan To Market This

If you're writing a book that lacks characters or plot (hi cookbook authors!), then change into "Reasons For This Book" and "Recipes". The point is that you don't need a TON of headings. You just need organization. Critical here are items 1, 4, and 5. Especially 5. 

Why is 5 important? Because the more you know about how you're going to get that book into other people's hands, the easier that will happen and the better it will be for everyone involved. If that means you need to educate yourself on how to market or publicize, do it (Here's a starting point, come ask me questions! Email or Twitter). Also, the heady days of disposable income are for the moment gone. So take the initiative and make something happen with your work. 

Any other advice? 

Yes. Two things.

I. There's no one road to this goal of yours. Even if you and I do the same research about the same topic and go to the same people to ask the same questions and query the same book, we're going to get different results. There is no one way to get published. There is no "right" way, there is no "wrong" way. One way is NOT better than another. What matters here is the answer to the binary question - Published? Yes/No. Having said that though, remember that publishing is NOT legitimacy. Getting published does not make you a better person or a superior one or smarter or kinder or more loved or anything like that. It's just something you did, like yesterday when I did laundry. There are lots of ways to accomplish it. 

II. There comes a point where you have to stop asking for help and start doing it. Lots of people and books and websites offer great advice. And you can spend many many days/weeks/months/years searching through them all - but NONE of them have the one magic bullet answer for you. It's the sum total of what they say, what you choose to take with you and choose to leave behind that shapes you. 

Yes it's great to ask for help. But there is such a thing as asking for help about a thing IN PLACE of doing that actual thing. This industry, this craft, this art, is PACKED with people who bloat the lanes and passages with poor habits, wrong intentions, poor writing and unhelpful attitudes and advice. This industry is thick with people who aren't going to ever get past the "talk about writing" phase. 

What separates the successful from the unsuccessful is yes, in part talent. But also the fact that the successful actually wrote. And got edited. And re-wrote. And published. And repeated this whole process. 

If you're doing this to be successful, that's the path.

If you're doing this to prove other people wrong, you're going to be disappointed.

If you're doing this to prove your own self-worth, you're going to be SUPER disappointed.

If you're doing this to be rich, you're going to be doing this a long time.

If you're doing this to be more famous than other people, you're going to be disappointed AND doing this for a long time. 

Dee, I hope this answers your question somewhat.

Happy writing

By request - Cliffhangers, Endings and "Tying It All Together"

Today's post come from a request made on Twitter by @AprilBrownWrite. Her site is here, and worth a look (also she's really nice, and you should say hi.)

If there's something you'd like to talk about, or want to know more about, you can email me a suggestion or send me a tweet - I'm always looking for new content and new ways help you write better.

April had a question about cliffhangers and how to end things. She wrote me a rather nice email about it, with some pretty good examples, but I think it's easier if we just start with broad topics and then work towards specifics.

So let's lay some groundwork.

What is a cliffhanger?

1. A 'cliffhanger' is caused when you break up an action beat and deny immediate resolution. 'Immediate' here means that in sentence A, you set up the situation and then in Sentence B, you resolve it. These are most often very visual or evocative beats (beats are scenes or moments, I'm going to use that word a lot), and other media (like television) has taught us that cliffhangers are great moments to go to commercial. Books, to date, lack commercials, so often people tend to put cliffhangers at the end of chapters (we'll talk more about that in a minute).

2. A 'cliffhanger' is only as good as the setup BEFORE the action, and the intensity of the resolution AFTER. This might be unclear, but there are ways to illustrate it. The thinking behind a cliffhanger is that you want the reader wondering how the character(s) will get out of whatever situation they've entered. Will Mace Hunter escape being kidnapped by Red Shark's goons? Will the damsel in distress ever get off those damned railroad tracks?

But that's the cut-away-to-commercial moment. That's the cliffhanger itself. It doesn't have any meaning as a cliffhanger until we see it in context. We worry about that damsel on the railroad tracks because prior to that, she was kidnapped in the dead of night by the bad guy. We feel tension for Mace because we watched him get overwhelmed by goons and saw him get sapped from behind. The setup to the cliffhanger moment is critical, if you want us to believe the danger is real.

That's half of it.

The other half is what happens when the character acts to get out of the predicament. If all the damsel has to do is roll to her knees and stand up, the danger isn't so great. If all Mace has to do is jump out of the car in order to make good his escape, then it's less perilous than previously indicated. If the resolution to danger/cliffhanger is not well-developed, then the danger wasn't clearly stated, and the reader isn't going to think it's worth getting scared over.

There is an exercise I recommend. You'll need a note card.
1. Turn the notecard vertically (longways)
2. Divide it into thirds (draw horizontal lines)
3. In the middle third, write the cliffhanger
4. In the bottom third, write the resolution
5. In the top third, write the setup.

So, a cliffhanger for a scene with a damsel tied to railroad track looks like this:

I. Woman is kidnapped
----
II. Woman tied to tracks
----
III. Woman escapes (rope use)

This isn't where you detail it all out, this is where you give yourself a little note of reminder to make sure the setup leads naturally to the danger which segues to the resolution. I tend to find it easier to go from danger to resolution and then reverse-engineer (or hack) the setup to make it sufficiently intense or emotional or whatever the scene needs.

Now, if that's what a cliffhanger is, what do we do with it?

The first rule of cliffhangers is - Not everything is going to be a cliffhanger. It just...can't be that intense all the time. Remember this - "When everything is special, nothing is". You do not need a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter, or at the break in every action. Poor is the reader who believes that your story would be made better by doing this. Find them, shake a fist at them, and tell them they've watched too much TV and probably read too much poor writing.

The second rule of cliffhangers is - They're supposed to be risky. There are no "little" cliffhangers. Just like no one is ever "a little bit pregnant" or "the teensiest bit murderous", little actions do not warrant cliffhangers. Cliffhangers should make you gasp and worry and turn the page excitedly to see what happens next. (Note: I learned this rule as "No one gives a shit about Timmy making toast.") Go big or go home on your cliffhangers.

The third rule of cliffhangers is - There should be a cost. To get out of a risky and dangerous situation, the character should be tested. It should exhaust them to have to climb up a sheer mountainside, it should drain them to have to run as fast as they can to save the other character, it should hurt when they got shot, taking the bullet for their loved ones. A cliffhanger without a cost is just another action beat.

If those are the rules, where do we put cliffhangers?

The short version - put them where they best serve the story. For most (90%) of cases, that's usually at the end of Act 2 or just before the highest point of climax.

The longer version - put them where they matter. NOT at the end of every chapter, or every third chapter when you switch narrators. Use them too much, and they lose impact. Use the cliffhanger as a tool to make the story matter, and to test the characters, not as a way to force the story along or make/force the reader to keep going in the story.

So what does that make all those other endings? If they're not cliffhangers, what are they?

They're endings. Things can just end. It's okay. I promise. What matters is how you daisy-chain these endings into the startings of whatever comes next (I mean otherwise, what, you're writing 4th edition D&D? - gamer joke) so that you're not writing a series of "bubble scenes" but rather a contiguous stream of actions, reactions, and development to make a single complete big bubble of your story.

If you feel that your endings (the physical ones, the emotional ones, etc) HAVE TO BE cliffhangers in order for them to matter in your work, then, honestly you've failed them. You've let them down as scenes in your story and you're not doing your job as the best writer you can be in telling the best story you can.

A well-crafted story should have lots of things that matter, but not all those things are going to be cliffhangers.

So how many cliffhangers should I have in my story?

I don't know, author. Why don't you tell me how many breaths I should take today? There is no magic number. In some stories, you only need one. In some stories you can have one per character arc. In other stories there's one for every character arc, one of the plot and one for theme (I'm looking at you, hundreds-of-pages-long-fantasy-novel-series).

If you've mapped out the story (not the same as outlining it), then you should be able to see where the arc(s) move(s) should take you and the reader from beginning to end of book.  Tying it all together is NOT the job of the cliffhanger, but the cliffhanger should signal that SOME element(s) of the story is/are about to change.

I hope this has explained cliffhangers a little bit, April and all those other people who don't know what to do with them. If you need more information, just ask.

Happy writing.