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Monday Madness & Revision Tip #14

My local paper ran an article yesterday about my reaction to the recent book challenges. The photographer who came up here to the Forest got a great shot of the magic window. (For the record, I just turned 48 years old, not 49. Geesh.)

It is rare that the part of my brain that writes for teens has a collision with the part of my brain that writes historical fiction, but the book I’m working on now, FORGE (yes, Virginia, it is the next book after CHAINS…… and you heard correct, it should be out next fall) is causing that to happen more and more. It’s rather fascinating.

Take the quote I stumbled upon yesterday, from the journal of Continental Army Surgeon Albigence Waldo:

"Provisions and Whiskey very scarce. Were Soldiers to have plenty of Food and Rum, I believe they would Storm Tophet."

Monday morning quiz: which one of my YA novels does Dr. Waldo’s quote connect to? (answer is at the end of today’s post)

Revision Tip #14

Ever run into one of those chapters that just won’t jump through the right hoops? You try cutting it out, but that doesn’t work. You change the setting, the dialog, the plot points, and the character focus. You change the color of the sun. Nothing works.

Try this.

Back up three or four chapters. Read them very carefully. Where is the set-up to the action in your Problem Chapter?

What do you mean there is no set-up? Does the action of your Problem Chapter happen like a bolt of lightning? Probably not. It needs to come inevitably from the flow of your story. Something happened earlier to trigger the Problem Chapter. The key to fixing it lies in those earlier chapters.

That is what I spent the weekend doing. Chapter 18 needed to become two chapters. That was the easy part. But Chapter 19 was a big headache. I played a lot of loud music, went back to my primary sources, looked at the want ads again to see if I am qualified for any other job besides being an author, and then studied the earlier chapters.

All I had to do was this:
1. Add some descriptions to the introduction of a few secondary characters in Chapter 11.
2. Pick up on those descriptions for one new paragraph in Chapter 14.
(Those two changes made a bit of dialog in Chapter 17 much richer, btw. Unanticipated bonus!)
3. Now that I had planted the seeds, I could properly craft the set-up in Chapter 18.
4. And, ta-da, write the action that was so sorely needed in Chapter 19!
5. Take the stuff that Chapter 19 sets up and make sure it is dealt with in Chapters 20 – 23.

Does this make sense?

Today I will chase the windmill that calls itself Chapter 24. Wish me luck.

ANSWER TO TODAY’S QUIZ: Dr. Waldo references Tophet in his journal entry, which means the place where children were sacrificed in ancient cultures. It is also the name of the video game that Tyler Miller plays in TWISTED. (Yes, that was deliberate on my part.)

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Revision Tip #13

Given how late it is right now, you might have already figured this one out.

Revision Tip #13

When revising, sometimes you just need to turn the blasted Internet off. As in all the way OFF.

Because when revising, you have to hold a million strands of character and story and setting and voice and everything else in your head. Some days, there just isn’t room for anything else.

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Revision Tip #11

Big news: Kirkus is shutting down.

How do you think this will affect publishing and bookselling?

Hard to understand news: Some readers in Sweden are talking about WINTERGIRLS. My Swedish is not very good, but I am pretty sure they were not overly fond of the book. Can anyone do a better job translating than I did? I don’t need word-for-word, I am just looking for the overall gist of the review.

Revision Tip #11

When you wake up thinking about your characters, don’t fart around with email or television or blog entries. Get to work!

Which I am doing right now.

(Though I will come up with something more useful later today,if my brain slows down.)

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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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