That's a pretty unwieldy title for the post!

I was thumbing through the January/February Analog this morning and read Richard A. Lovett's article, "Making Unreality Ring True: Writer's Tricks for Bringing Stories to Life." I was a little surprised at it because the article is a straightforward how-to-write piece, something I don't recall seeing in Analog much in the past.

That said, it was a darned good article for fiction writers of all sorts, not just science fiction ones. With entertaining examples, Lovett explains the basis for five writing rules that will make work stronger and more believable:
 

1. Write what you know.
2. Know what it is that you know.
3. Make good use of details.
4. Look for details in experience (yours or other people's)
5. Collect information. You never know what will someday be useful.
 

Near the end of the article, he says, "The best writers observe things. Sometimes these are details about the universe. Sometimes they are grand visions that instill the sense of wonder about which science fiction fans wax lyrical. Other times, the observations take the form of details about people or the lives we live: overlooked realities that ring true as they float across the page before us."

Lovett quotes Jane Kurtz, an award winning children's book author, who said, "Writers have good powers of observation. That's more important than imagination."

I tell writers in my classes and workshops that the skills necessary to tell believable stories are exactly congruent with the skills required of a good liar. Good liars, among other things, are masters of the specific detail, the one bit of their story that rings so specific and true that you believe there's no way they could have made it up. Their story must not be lying.

The article is a good one.  If you can get a copy of the magazine, I recommend it.

I'm not a veteran novelist.  In my career as a writer, I've written two complete novels and two significant chunks of novels that I haven't completed yet.  Most of my experience is with short stories, so, while I was writing this morning, I realized how much I'm enjoying the exploratory nature of novel writing.  I feel like (at least in rough draft) I have room to poke my imagination into the corners of my character's lives.  The writing is less pressured in some ways.  In a short story I'm always driven by the idea that every single word has to be bent to the story's ending.  Short stories are about unity of purpose, but the novel doesn't feel that way to me.  Maybe it's because the novel's purpose accretes more gradually than the short story.

In the end, I believe, every word of a novel has to work the same way every word in a short story does.  The words have the same responsibility.  But while I'm composing in the novel, I don't feel the pressure.  I quite enjoy the sensation.

Below the cut you'll find a bit from this morning's writing.  One of my view point characters, Anitchka Paraskevi, a second year teacher at Low High, is talking to a veteran teacher in the building about her classroom.  Comments welcome.
 
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As I reported earlier today, I handed out the chapbooks with students' poems and short stories in the Write-a-Book-in-a-Year Club at the high school.  The kids were really eager since they had expected the books last week.  We celebrated with donuts, cookies and soft drinks.

The new wrinkle this year is that I told them that it is traditional at a book launch for the author(s) to sign the books.  I taught them the etiquette of signing: If someone asks you to sign a book, you ask if they would like it personalized or not.  We talked about what might go into personalizing a signature, like asking how to spell the fan's name or what to say along with the signature (I often write, "I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I liked writing it"), and then they signed each others' books for fifteen minutes.

Much fun.

Here is this week's blog entry for the Write-a-Book-in-a-Year Club at the high school.  It's great fun to put together these little essays of craft and the writing life for young writers.  The web is filled with so much material to share with them!  For this entry, I cruised over to Louise Marley's web site where I knew I'd find good stuff. 

If you haven't read Louise, you should.  I really enjoyed her short story collection, Absalom's Mother and Other Stories, and I'm looking forward to getting my copy of The Singers of Nevya, which contains three novels.

Here's what I shared with the kids:

The writer Louise Marley, who is also an accomplished singer, wrote about the five lessons she learned from music that apply directly to being a better writer.  It turns out that the practices necessary to improve in music are the same for a author:

• Practice
• Study
• Be professional
• Sing with your own voice
• Persevere

Marley also stresses the importance of discipline for a writer.  As she says, “Discipline always works. An artist without it is doomed to fail. Great talent can draw attention right away; but the application of talent, the training and practice and organization, the honing and development of it, are what make it last. Talent without discipline is like a lightning storm; you never know when, or where, it might strike, and it’s a darned unreliable source of power.”

Read Louise’s entire essay.

Post your thoughts about her advice here
 

Punctuating Dialogue and a Dialogue Exercise

Punctuation rules:

-          Quote marks indicate that what is within them is exactly what the character said.

o   “Let’s go to the store for groceries!”

-          A quote mark introduces the quote and ends it, regardless of how long the character speaks. 

-          Ending punctuation marks go inside the quote marks.

o   “Larry is a great guy, but he can’t tell the truth.”

o   “Must you always invite your mother to go with us on a date?”

o   “I hope you brought the marshmallows!”

-          The dialogue tag is a part of the sentence that includes the quote. If the tag follows the quote, the first word is not capitalized. If the tag precedes the quote, the first word of the quote is capitalized.

o   “That’s a great car,” he said.

o   She said, “Would you put the cat out?”

-          A comma separates the dialogue tag and the quote. See previous examples.

-          A dialogue tag can interrupt a line of dialogue. When the dialogue continues after the interruption, the first word in the quotes is not capitalized. Notice the comma after the first part of the quote and after the dialogue tag.

o   “I wanted to see you,” Juliet said, “but my mom doesn’t like your family.”

-          In most cases, start a new paragraph when you change speakers, even if this creates very short paragraphs.

-          Do not put quotes back to back in the same paragraph so the quote marks are beside each other.

A Punctuation Exercise:

-          Choose a partner.

-          One of you will serve as a secretary.

-          Start a conversation:

o   Ask your partner a question.

o   The partner answers.

o   Follow up your question with another or a comment on the answer.

o   The partner replies.

-          Write down the entire conversation, punctuating it correctly but do not use dialogue tags or interrupting description, action or thoughts.  It might look like this:

“Are you practicing with the band tonight?”

“Yeah, we qualified for state, so we’re doing extra time.”

“Congrats! Where’s state this year?”

“Colorado Springs. The same place we did it last year.”

-          Now, rewrite it with interrupting description, action or thoughts before or after each line of dialogue. Be sure to punctuate it and paragraph it correctly. It might look like this.

Andrea tried to sound casual. “Are you practicing with the band tonight?” If Josh wasn’t busy, she would ask him for a ride home.

He smiled. “Yeah, we qualified for state, so we’re doing extra time.” His long hair had fallen across his eyes in a way that she found infuriatingly cute.

“Congrats! Where’s state this year?” She bit back her disappointment. He was always so busy!

Josh drummed his fingers on the table, probably tapping out the rhythm of one of their performance pieces, his mind clearly thinking about anything other than her.  “Colorado Springs. The same place we did it last year.” 

October 20 is the National Day on Writing.  This is an event that was created by the National Council of Teachers of English, NCTE,  “to help make writers from all walks of life aware of their craft.”  (Wouldn’t you think that a bunch of composition teachers would choose a more efficient way to name their organization, like calling it the English Teacher National Council and save the use of two “of”s?)  The U.S. Senate passed a resolution on Oct. 8, declaring Oct. 20 the National Day on Writing!

Colorado organizations are celebrating the day in a variety of ways.  The Denver Writing Project has linked to the NCTE who has created a gallery for writers to post their work at http://galleryofwriting.org/galleries/366137.  Anyone can post their poems, stories, etc. for the world to see.  It will go public on Oct. 20, but you’ll be able to post work until June of 2010.  Colorado has its own gallery at http://www.galleryofwriting.org/galleries/55020.

Douglas Hesse, the director of writing at the University of Denver and Colorado curator in the digital National Gallery of Writing, has written an interesting article about the future of writing in today’s Denver Post, entitled “Put Forth Our Best Writing Selves.” In it he discusses what he sees as the future of writing in a twitter, instant-message, chat board, text messaging, blog dominated reading environment.

Thanks for your note.  I'm glad you enjoyed the stories.

I'm envious that you are working on your writing at such a young age.  I knew that I wanted to teach when I was a high school student, and I sort of had an inkling that I wanted to write too, but I didn't get serious about it until I was almost 30.

Finishing stories can be hard, but I found mostly that I couldn't finish stories because I was too willing to walk away before they were done.  What I do now, if I don't know where the story is going next, is I go back to the stuff I've already written in the story and work on that.  So, sometimes a writing session could be advancing the story by adding new words at the end, and other times the writing is deepening and improving what is going on in the middle.  Since I don't always pay close attention to description when I'm adding new words, it almost always is productive for me to go back and make the scenes more rich.

Some other writers would give you different advice about going back, by the way, since for some people going back is the death of the story.  It is possible to tinker around too much with what you've already written and never get back to telling the story.  Their recommendation is to plunge ahead.  Push yourself to keep going to an end, any kind of end, since the real work is going to be in the revision anyway.  You have to decide for yourself what works best (or you'll come up with something entirely different that works for you).

• E-mail an announcement of the event to all my friends in the area about a week ahead of time.
• Contact my more distant friends and relatives who might be willing to have me buy the book for them at the signing (the more books the bookstore sells, the more likely they will be to let me do another one later).
• Snail-mail postcard invitations to the same set of folks (some people remember e-mails better--some like to post a physical copy of the invite on a bulletin board.  Besides, the postcards are cool.  I make the template on my computer then get them duplicated on the very nice color copier at CopyCopy.  It's about a quarter a postcard.  I mailed sixty of them).
• For this signing, I had a poster of the book cover made at CopyCopy.  It's a beautiful reproduction of the art.  At 18 X 28 inches, and mounted on foam board, it is visible from dozens of feet away and announces very visibly what I am signing.  I'll be able to reuse it at other signings.
• Make sure the signing is in all the local newspapers' "upcoming events" calendars (this may duplicate some of the bookstore's work--we talked about who she contacted).  My contact to one of the newspapers generated an interview and article about me and the book.
• Send a press release to the television and radio stations who cover the local arts scene.  In a couple of my signings in the past, the stations have covered it as a news event.  We're a slow news area.  LOL
• Contact the local book clubs.  We have six of them in the Grand Junction area.  The bookstore provided the contact addresses.
• Contact the local science fiction clubs.  We have two in the area.
• Contact the local small press publishing association.  They have monthly meetings which I have spoken to a couple of times.
• Contact the writing workshops in the area.
• Contact the high school and middle school librarians.  The schools all have book clubs, and there are science fiction/fantasy fans by the bucketful in the schools.  I also have offered to do book/author talks to their groups.
• Put up fliers at the public library on the community bulletin board.
• Contact the high school and middle school English teachers who teach Creative Writing or Science Fiction.  I make the same book/author talk offer.
• Put a postcard invite in the on-campus mailboxes of the college's English department faculty.
• Put up fliers on the college student center community bulletin board and on the English department's bulletin board.
• Let my students and parents at the high school know that I'm doing a signing.  Also announce it to the faculty.
• Brought candy to the signing.  It's amazing how many people will approach to grab candy and stay to talk about the book.
• Brought handouts for educators to the signing.
• Brought handouts with a brief description of my other books.

Again at eight o’clock,
When the dark lanes of the Forties
Were five deep with throbbing
Taxicabs, bound for the theater district,
I felt a sinking in my heart.

Forms leaned together
In the taxis as they waited,
And voices sang,
And there was laughter
From unheard jokes, and lighted
Cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures,
Inside, imagining that I, too,
Was hurrying toward gayety and sharing
Their intimate excitement,

I wished them well.
 

Or this really interesting one another student made.  Notice that he used typography tricks to emphasize the lines:
 

A Story of the West

And the real snow,

Our snow,

began to stretch out beside us

and twinkle against the window,

     and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by,

A sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air.

We drew in our deep breaths of it

as we walked back from dinner

      through the cold vestibules

Unutterably aware of our identity with this country

for one strange hour

      before we melted indistinguishably into it

Again.

It Was a Yellow Car

He reached up on his tiptoes
and peered
over a circle of heads
into the garage,
which was lit
only by a yellow light
in a swinging wire basket overhead.
Then he made a harsh sound in his throat,
and with a violent thrusting movement
of his powerful arms
pushed his way through.

I don't trust inspiration.  In fact, I barely believe in it.  Yes, it is true that occasionally the idea for a story has hit me almost fully formed, and that I've felt like a conduit for a flow of words so powerful that I could barely stand in the torrent, but in general, writing happens because I write, not because the gods have breathed something in me.

I like the idea that I'm in charge of my muse.  Here's how I took charge: I sat down to write without a clue of where I was going, but I didn't allow myself to get up until I'd written something.  The beauty of this practice is that almost always, by the end of ten minutes of writing, I'm "inspired."  Seldom do I get to the end of a ten-minute writing session where something interesting (to me) hasn't happened.

Those that study the act of writing tell me that writing is "generative," and I believe it.  I will get somewhere if I start writing.  I try not to overthink it.  Just write.

On my question of why older writers would sometimes write a name by just using the first letter and then an underline, like "Miss B_____ came to tea," the consensus is best summed up bykmarkhoover (Mr. H_____) who said, "It was a way to protect identities and sometimes to make the reader believe the place or person was real and needed to be protected,"  although I liked Mike Resnick's suggestions best: "The simplest answer is usually the best: they couldn't spell the names."