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B’day & New YALSA award & Rev Tip #10 (setting)

(Excuse me, family business first) HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JESSICA!!

(Thank you.)

The nominees for the 2010 YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults have been named and I am really excited for two friends, Deborah Heiligman (Charles and Emma) and Tanya Lee Stone (Almost Astronauts) whose books both made the list.Huzzah!

Revision Tip #10

I need to clarify yesterday’s tip.

A Facebook Friend wrote in to say my advice contradicted what Barry Lyga wrote on his blog.

(I’ll wait while you hop over to Barry’s page and see what he wrote.)

(Really, it’s OK. I just made tea. The fire is warm. Go on! Shoo!)

(….)

(Are you back yet?)

Barry and I agree more than we disagree. We are both striving for the balance between tight writing and clear writing. Neither one of us wants you to waste words and page space on dialog or description that don’t move the story forward.

But I see opportunity to use what he calls "blocking" as a way to move the story forward. It’s all in the details. There is no point to just throwing in descriptions of actions simply to avoid a page of dialog that bounces back and forth between two people. (For the record, my first drafts are often page after page of dialog.) The key is to find THE EXACT RIGHT ACTIONS that will help your characters show what’s going on inside them in addition to telling.

This is where choosing the right setting for a scene helps.

I’ll give you an example from CATALYST. There is an emotionally loaded scene in which the main character, 18-year-old Kate, is talking to her younger brother. The two of them have just come from a funeral for a small child who was a neighbor. The brother is pestering Kate for details about their mother’s funeral, which happened when he was an infant.

In the scene, Kate is cleaning the kitchen. (Their father is the minister, they live next to the church, the congregation gathered at their house after the funeral for a meal.) She is wiping clean, sanitizing, scrubbing, putting things into boxes, sweeping up – all actions that really show what she is trying very hard to do with the memories and feelings about the death of her mother. In the climax of the scene, she puts the last container of food in the refrigerator and slams the door so hard that family photos and the drawings by the dead child all fall off the door of the fridge.

That dialog could have been set in many different places, but I deliberately chose the kitchen because of the opportunities it gave me to create subtext for Kate. Putting action into dialog sequences ensures you don’t have talking heads on the page, and it allows you to give the reader more information than just the dialog alone, if you are wise about your choice of action and setting.

Does this make sense?

Questions? Thoughts?

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Revision Tip #9 – My Kingdom for a Verb

Does your draft have dialog that goes on for pages? Feels like a screenplay more than a novel?

You (or more accurately) your characters need some action: Verbs, my friends. You are in need of verbs.

Step 1: Choose a dialog-heavy scene.

Step 2: Brainstorm abut what kinds of actions the characters might be doing while they are having this conversation. F. ex., mom and son arguing at the grocery store about if he can borrow the car Friday night. Potential actions: picking out groceries (be specific!), checking labels, returning groceries to shelf (possibility for character development! Does this character go to the trouble of returning item where it belongs or not?), smelling squeezing, poking. More character development: are items neatly stacked in cart, or thrown in?

Step 3: Insert actions into dialog.

Step 4: See where you can trim dialog by allowing characters’ actions to speak louder than their words.

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Skype visits & Revision Tip #8 & Washington Post column

Sorry for posting so late today. I just finished a fun Skype visit with 5th graders from Upton Elementary School in Upton, Wyoming. The kids had all read CHAINS and had oodles of questions about the book and about FORGE (which comes out in September, 2010, BTW.)

This is what the kids looked like to me.

And this is what I looked like to them! The kids each came up to the computer camera and microphone to ask me their questions, which was nice because I was able to see them so clearly.

I wish the Skype technology were a little better; the three visits I’ve done have had annoying bursts of pixelation issues. It has to improve soon, right?

Pixelation issues aside, I love Skype visits. Why? My publishers don’t want me visiting schools right now. They want me to stay home and write. But I really miss connecting with my readers. Skyping allows me to have the best of both worlds.

Are you interested in having me Skype with your students? Email Queen Louise to set it up: queenlouise@writerlady.com. We are really interested in doing more of these, so pass the word!

In other news, Professor Jim Blasingame of Arizona State University brings up the TWISTED censorship In Kentucky in his Washington Post blog. I am not thrilled with the headline (which Jim did not write) because it vastly overstates the issue, But the column is great, especially when he references the wise words of (United States Library of Congress Living Legend Award winner) Katherine Paterson.


Revision Tip #8

Read each scene and highlight each mention of a sense other than sight. Any scenes that only have visual details need to be revised to sneak in one or more of the other senses. If you are having a hard time with this, picture the scene in your mind. Now imagine you are the character, and close your (the character’s eyes) what other sensory information is still available?

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Revision Tip #7 – fully developed characters

Characters who are important enough to interact with your main character regularly need to be multi-dimensional, not flat.

What is a flat character?

One that only has one set of attributes, who always has the same kind of emotional response to situation. Check the words you use to attribute a character’s speech; if s/he is always sneering or whining or laughing, then you might have a problem. Multi-dimensional characters have different facets to their character. Even the bad guys have good moments, and the good guys can be jerks sometimes. What is interesting are the circumstances that make a person act slightly out of character.

Unreliable teen narrators (like Melinda in SPEAK) make this harder on the author, especially when writing in the 1st person POV. The narrator is still maturing and has a limited scope and understanding of the world. It is helpful to craft a few scenes where the reader can assess more about the situation than the narrator does.

If your character is a chord instead of a single note, your story becomes richer.

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Revision Tip #6

Today we have a guest blogger, our own near and dear Bookavore. She manages a bookstore now, and has had some kind of bookselling job ever since she turned 16. Bookavore reads twice as many books in one year as I do in 10, so I consider her my in-house book expert.

She recently wrote a post about two things she is sick of seeing in books, particularly YA novels: sloppy writing in regards to race and two-dimensional characters. It’s called "In which I get frustrated and plead with authors." You need to read it right now. But brace yourself. She doesn’t pull any punches.

What do you think about her ideas?