Why I still read Ms. Snark
By Deanna | November 29, 2009
Yes, I know Ms. Snark’s blog is dark. It has been for over two years now. If you’re a writer and never discovered her, you should take a look. The archives are full of amazing and helpful information.
But that’s not the main reason why I go.
There are things in writing that are easy to master, if you put your mind to it. We begin to learn the first layer in grade school: spelling, punctuation, grammar, paragraph structure, beginnings, middles, and ends.
The next level most people don’t truly conquer, because they stop writing as soon as they are no longer in the presence of an evil-minded teacher who forces them to. It’s about the story telling: characters, setting, theme, and plot. People who love reading and writing in high school and college begin to see these elements in stories even when not writing a two-paged essay on them. They become eager to apply these concepts to their own work, layering them into their stories with equal attention.
Many literary-minded college courses and even professional workshops stop at this point, although some will move on to smaller pieces of the puzzle: scene structure, dialogue, transitions, pacing, and more poetic word-smithing techniques such as alliteration, consonance, and rhyme–all good pursuits.
I was stuck at this level for decades. I kept taking classes, joined critique groups, and read books. But one additional layer needed attention. And it wasn’t one you could easily come by, because it was large, unwieldy, subjective, and ever changing: writing to the audience.
I think one reason that this is ignored in the literary world is that it sounds like selling out, burnt on the edges in the fire of commercialism.
But when you’ve poured your energy, time, and hope into novels, all written on spec, with the optimism that it will one day be traditionally published, it can be a cold hard dash of reality when the letter come back, often as a quarter-page form, saying your story isn’t competitive in today’s market.
What? How can that be? YOU are part of the market, and you LOVE this. And second, it’s a form letter. It means nothing.
Actually, it’s a form letter because it’s so common. Many of us have great ideas, many of us can string words together that communicate what we want to say. But very few of us can make that message resonate with the readers we are trying to reach.
I see it every day in critique groups or in writers who post their query letters online for review. I’m no expert, and I can still see that they don’t have a handle on their story. Their summaries wander. They can’t write a one-sentence premise about the plot. They know very much what they WANT to do. And this is often worded in their letters in phrases like, “This book reminds us that…” or “Readers of this story will remember what it is like…”
We write sentences like that because we are frustrated by our own stories, our inability to show the lives of characters who will communicate a message without preachiness or head-smacking. And that last layer of the novel, which is part of every word on the page, is what ultimately causes the novel to fail, either at the query level, because the agent can see the writer isn’t communicating this part, so it’s doubtful the book will be any better, or at the novel level, when an agent has requested the work and stops reading around page 50 because the book just isn’t rising as it should.
Ms. Snark, in her query bashing and crushing responses to reader questions, cut through the literary high-brow and got straight into the issue of does this book work for the reader it was intended to impact? She did this with humor, with biting candor, and intelligent analysis. She made us able to look at our own work more critically, to slip on her stilettos and step back from our emotional attachment to what we’d written and see it from a difficult-to-please point of view.
It’s a debilitating blow to realize you’ve spent a year, or several years, on a novel that doesn’t work. But only when we fail can we figure out what we don’t know. Until you’re querying, putting your tender babies into the world, it’s not easy to know what you’ve done wrong.
But Ms. Snark can educate you ahead of time, before you burn through the agent list, without dealing with the hard reality of rejection in your inbox. Go, and read, and learn from her, not just once, but every year or two. We can’t absorb everything until we’ve moved to the next layer, when all the things we’ve fixed about our work reveals the next set of weaknesses.
It’s not an easy process and there aren’t any short cuts. But reading Ms. Snark can cut a lot of time out of the write-revise-rejection period of your authorly rise to success. And you can laugh along the way with Killer Yapp and hearing that once again, Ms. Snark has read something that makes her want to set her hair on fire.
So, what are you waiting for? Discover her again. I’ll see you there.
________
Once more, I apologize for keeping comments closed. This web site has been around since the dawn of the internet (when it was just me and Al Gore) and therefore is a magnet for foreign-language comment spam, which, loosely translated, all says, “Buy our grossly-inappropriate-for-this-blog leisure toys!” If you want to comment, visit my LiveJournal or friend me on Facebook.
Topics: Writing | Comments Off
Write a lot? Try 10,000 words. In one day.
By Deanna | November 16, 2009
Remember those commercials, “How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?”
Of course you do. You’re just that old.
Other than being a brilliant use of alliteration, rhythm, and outrageous trademark repetition, the old Tootsie Pop ad justified all the silly questions in our lives. It didn’t matter that the old owl only took three licks and bit into the lollipop (Don’t try THAT at home. You’ll break a tooth. Really.) We could investigate ourselves to find the answer to this timeless question, simultaneously wrapping our happy tongues around pure sugar satisfaction.
So what if we’re suckers.
My question today: how many hours does it take to write 10,000 words? And not 10,000 words of gibberish. Real words. Real dialogue. Real story.
See, I was way behind on NaNoWriMo. As in, well, 10,000 words behind. And I had this marvelous day where my parents had been here and just left. So my house was CLEAN! And I’d killed myself catching up on my work before they arrived. And I’d played LOTS with the kids.
I had no guilt. And no chores. And best of all, no kids! (Off with dad.)
And so I set a goal that was rather obscene. 10,000 words in a day. It seemed pie-in-the-sky, unrealistic. I figured I’d fatigue around 3K, the most I’d ever written in one sitting before.
But I knew I could punch out a thousand per hour. I also knew it was like saying you can type 100 words a minute. Sure, maybe for one minute. Or even five. If pushing, maybe fifteen. But could you sustain this level for a long haul?
The answer: yes.
Caveats: I had an outline. A good one. And on Friday, I found a change of direction in voice that I felt crazy passionate about, the sort of outrageous exuberance that leads to lofty goals. I just didn’t have time to implement it.
Until today.
So yes, I wrote 10,042 words today. If you’re doing NaNoWriMo and you’re behind, take heart. It can be done.
But now my fingers hurt and I’m hungry. And my butt may be permanently shaped like my chair.
I think I deserve a Tootsie Pop. How many licks will it take to get to the center of chewy chocolatey goodness?
The world may never know.
Topics: NaNoWriMo, Writing | Comments Off
Franken-yummy
By Deanna | October 22, 2009
It’s the time for ghouls and witches, and other traditional characters now banned from schools, but my favorite bit of the Halloween season isn’t costumes or candy or parties, it’s – FRANKENBERRY!
My favorite cereal of all time began disappearing from the shelves in the 80s. But when Wal-Mart first began opening superstores with groceries, they also carried the strawberry and pink-marshmallow sugar-fix. So I could get it when I wanted it, if I was ready to brave the horrors of a big box (not to mention the good People of Wal-Mart.)
But then, a few years ago, I traversed to my nearest discount superstore to discover that only Count Chocula remained in stock (BooBerry never stood a chance, little blue kernels of chemical waste that it is.)
Thankfully, Target and other holiday-centric stores will snap up cartons of the Franken-goodness starting in early October. And so many of my friends know that I love it, they will pick up a box for me when they see it.
So my day starts with a breakfast-of-champions, with 8 grams of whole grain, 13 vitamins and minerals (13, really? I love this cereal), and gee, let’s not look at the sugars.
I’d invite you over for breakfast, but honestly, unless you bring your own pink box emblazoned with a happy cartoon Frankenstein, I’m not sharing.
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The fourth grade critique group
By Deanna | October 6, 2009
I should have asked them sooner.
The fourth-grade class hustled to pack up their bags and sit on the floor around my chair, more motivated than they had been all day.
I hadn’t served as a substitute in ages (although last time had been memorable), but their teacher had taught my daughter, and personally asked for my help. I tucked the pink hair away as best I could and at the last minute tossed my middle grade manuscript Jinnie Wishmaker into my bag.
The students had worked quickly and quietly in order to get a chance to hear a story no one had ever read. I told them I needed help editing my book, because something was wrong with it, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. This happens, I explained, when you edit your own work.
I didn’t really know what to expect when I began reading aloud. The class had been antsy all day. But the idea that they were doing something “for real,” not just as an assignment, really motivated them to finish their work and pile onto the carpet to listen.
I reminded them what was important to the beginning of a novel: a character that interests you enough to read a whole book about. And a story that doesn’t just sit there, but moves forward, and makes you worry about what will happen next.
So they settled in, twenty nine-year-olds curled around backpacks and lunchboxes, more riveted than I ever expected. The opening scene unfurled, a girl and her younger bother plotting to run away rather than to be taken to live with their snobby rich aunt and uncle, characters taken from a page of Roald Dahl, where the grown ups are hyperbolic and the kids represent the voice of reason.
At the end of first chapter, I asked them what they thought.
“Is Jinnie going to be mean the whole time?” a boy asked. “She seems mean.”
“Yeah,” a girl said. “She’s angry.”
I couldn’t believe it. Why hadn’t I seen it? The Jinnie I knew was sensitive and fairly shy, but in this first impression, with just her little brother to tug around, they were right. She was mischaracterized in the opening scene.
The story had been through four critique group grillings, read by five or six other writers, and even several agents had nurtured it though some revisions, and yet still, I hadn’t seen it until now. No one had been able to just say it.
We lined up by the door, my head buzzing. I knew I could fix it. And I couldn’t wait.
One of the boys tapped my arm. “Ms. Roy? Will you be back tomorrow?”
I had no idea. “Not unless your teacher still needs me. Hopefully she’s better.”
“If you come back tomorrow, will you read some more? I want to know what happens.”
Are you kidding? “You can count on it.”
Topics: Books, Writing | Comments Off
Raindrops keep falling on my bed
By Deanna | September 13, 2009
You know it’s been a long drought when you forget you have a leaky roof until you are reminded two years later.
It began at 3 a.m., as all annoying events should.
Plop.
What?
Must’ve been a dream.
Plop.
Nope, my forehead is wet.
Plop.
Oh geez.
I got up to turn on the light. The rain had been relentless for three days.
I peered at the ceiling. You could still make out the trail of the repair job, spackled and repainted, from when carpenter ants invaded, broke through the plaster, and began landing on my bed.
I’d take the rain any day.
But apparently the damage was more extensive than we realized, as at the very end of the old ant trail, water had seeped through the paint, creating a slit that looked like a winking eye, and–
Plop.
I didn’t think I had enough room to move the bed away from the drip. I certainly wasn’t going to fix it or call anyone. It was the middle of the night. I was tired.
I did what any reasonable person would do–went into the bathroom, got a big fat beach towel.
And slept beneath it.
Topics: Day in My Life, Humor | No Comments »
Glorious Nuptials
By Deanna | August 30, 2009
The majority of my photography-related work can be found at my studio site, but this is a special case, the marriage of two of my best friends. I had the great honor of photographing their ceremony.
We went to Canada since it is illegal for these two wonderful people to get married here in Texas or, for that matter, the majority of this country.
I don’t see a day very soon that this issue will change here, but we can keep working toward that goal.
Topics: Photography, Poignancy | Comments Off
Trespassing, stealing, and risking life and limb
By Deanna | August 5, 2009
I first became a hardened pomegranate thief when I was ten.
The superintendent lived across the street from our school. On the edge of his back yard, surrounded by a fence, was a lovely heavy-laden pomegranate tree. And, you know, it wasn’t like he was our English teacher or something. He couldn’t flunk us, right?
So during the summer, when the fruit was ripe, my friends and I would make a loose, clumsy tower of pre-adolescent bodies to steal them right from the tree.
We couldn’t wait to go home and properly soak the pomegranate so the seeds would separate from the inedible pulp, but scraped the scarlet beads out with our hands, bursting most of them and staining our fingers. We often could not stop at one and would return a few hours later for more. We got caught once, the squeak of the screen door heralding our doom. But we were fast, and took off in different directions. It was escape or death, because the evidence was undeniable.
Recently, my friend Anton held a reading for his latest screenplay, a suspense film bordering on horror, along the lines of The Orphanage. Pomegranate seeds played a big role in the movie, symbolic, frightening, blood-red, and sensual, all things the story conveys in its theme.
But everyone kept spitting the seeds OUT.
This was strange to me. You EAT the seeds. You don’t spit any part of them out.
Widipedia agreed with me, saying the seeds are ingested whole, but at the discussion after the reading, about half the group said they also spit out the seed pods after popping them for the juice.
It’s been a year since I ate a pomegranate, last season, but one of my neighbors has a tree in her yard. I stopped last summer to warn her I had a history of fruit thievery, and might purloin a pomegranate, and please not to shoot me out of the tree.
She said she’d try to remember me if she saw a figure outside her window.
And so this is how, three decades later, I again trespassed and stole, this time with the added fun of tree climbing at my advanced age, with no cohorts to give me a boost, trying to see if the pomegranates were indeed ripe right after Independence Day, as the script called for fireworks, and to determine if it made sense to spit out the seeds.
The lowest fruit was just out of my reach, so I had to grasp the spindly branches and heave myself up. I chose to do this near dusk, mosquitoes buzzing my head, in hopes no one would catch me. I finally grasped the yellow ball, even knowing from the color that it was all wrong.
And indeed, the fruit wasn’t quite ripe, bitter and hard to break, so I didn’t really get to test the seed theory. But I did covet my neighbor’s fruit, trespass on her property, and scale a tree just to answer a question. Because, you know, going to the grocery store would just be too easy.
Topics: Humor, Writing | Comments Off
Literary Lothario
By Deanna | July 14, 2009
I admit it, I’m an infidel.
Earlier this year, I was passionately in love with my middle grade novel. We were together every day, often long into the night, mutually basking in the glow of each other’s fond admiration.
Then, we hit a rough patch. She got some attention. Things looked promising for the long term. I developed expectations. But she faltered, then failed. So I ditched her. Sorry.
And so I was single again. I had options — the sequel to the middle grade, or maybe, just maybe, this sexy new manuscript I had started during NaNoWriMo.
It called to me in the night, edgy and full of appeal, rife with longing and promising of secrets. So I slipped into a new relationship and even started a screenplay version of the story.
But then, trouble. Characters behaved erratically, refusing to be reasonable. I admit — I got controlling — trying to force them into who I thought they should be. The story rebelled; I offered a fresh start. But we began to grow apart.
And today, I opened a file, something I’d written a few years ago but recently freshened up the opening for a fellowship application. I read the first 18 pages and didn’t change a word. It was perfect! Beautiful! Tantalizing.
And so I began to plan our time together, makeovers, meaningful conversations, pillow talk.
But the old story nipped at me. Not fair, it called. You can’t leave me like this, unfinished, in disarray.
I’m torn. Old love or new. Manage my problems or fly a new direction. Without a deadline, an expectation by anyone, I flit from work to work, writing only what feels good at the time, like a book gigolo.
Maybe if one of them manages to snag me for real, binds me with a contract, I’ll settle down. But until then, sweet works-in-progress, take it from Rod, it’s a heartache, nothing but a heartache, hits you when it’s too late, hits when you’re down…
Topics: Humor, Writing | Comments Off
Some days a writer feels like a lamppost
By Deanna | June 22, 2009
“Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.”
John Osborne
That warm feeling I got when my romantic comedy Heteroflexible advanced to quarterfinals in its first screenwriting competition at Blue Cat, became a warm, wet feeling when I read the script analysis.
Now, I do love my criticism. And it being emphatic is, to me, all the better. I’m known for rather acerbic critiques in my novel and screenplay groups. So I’m not really whining, just relating that odd sensation of having read both this: “When you’re insulting, you’re just insulting.”
And then advancing with the top 20 percent.
While the analysis samples on the Blue Cat site were all fairly even handed with good points/bad points in the 600 words they promise you, my reader gave up precisely 23 words with a tepid line about ”a story that hasn’t been seen before,” then waylaid me for 1017 more. (I got bonus words!)
Other great moments in my feedback were, “so incredibly stereotypical,” “I don’t buy it,” and “clearly a first draft.” At the end I was encouraged to “go back to the outline and really work on it” with a reminder that “with most scripts, your goal is to make it into a film.”
It’s hard to imagine this is also the judge who advanced it. I did some digging around to see if BlueCat had separate critics from judges, but wasn’t able to find out for certain. It seems expensive for them to have two people read it, but who knows, maybe I was early in the pile and this critic liked the others even less.
I know humor is hard to write. And the subject matter for this story is easily the most controversial I’ve ever endeavored. I run the risk of alienating everybody, even the demographic the tale holds in the highest esteem.
But I do believe in this story. And I’m finishing up the novel version, which I recently cut down to 43,000 words to get rid of distracting story elements and slow scenes, gradually building it back up to the 70K minimum for a novel. I’ve incorporated some of the more specific feedback from this analysis into the novel, but I’m not really sure how to address the generalities of being insulting and stereotypical and not believable.
The story has a long way to go yet. The screenplay has only been through two drafts, and I’m on the second draft of the book.
But before I put either version before any more critics, I’ll make sure I’m dressed in something that won’t show the wet spots.
Topics: Humor, Writing | Comments Off
Oh my G, you’re an F!
By Deanna | April 13, 2009
Unlike the Facts of Life conversations, which tend to be initiated by my six-year-old, the Bad Words talk is one that I will bring up myself. Part of this comes from morbid maternal curiosity. The rest is to make sure more Newspeak isn’t occurring (the school has banned “stupid” and “freak,” and I don’t agree with cutting out ordinary words over poor usage.)
Last time we had this conversation, we learned Elizabeth’s S-bomb. Today, as we sat on the sofa, she informed me she had two new ones.
“Lay them on me,” I told her.
She shook her head, as expected.
“Okay, so what do they start with?”
“With one you say “oh my” first.” She nodded knowingly. “It’s like ‘Oh my word’ or ‘Oh my gosh,’ but this one is bad.”
Well, that wasn’t too hard to guess. I decided to challenge her. “What if you’re praying? Can you say, ‘Oh my God’ then?”
She considered this for a moment. “I guess that would be okay.”
“So we’ve established that in some cases, it is all right to say, ‘Oh my God.’”
She fingered her hot pink dress nervously. “Yeah, okay.”
“So is it really a bad word, if we sometimes can use it?”
“You mean like stupid?”
“Right. You can say ‘This stupid pen won’t write,’ and that’s okay.”
“So you can say ‘Oh my God’ sometimes too?”
“Yes.” Hopefully she was catching on. “So it’s not really a bad word.”
“Okay.” She pushed her blond hair out of her face. “I don’t think you can EVER say the other one.”
“What’s it start with?”
“First you say, ‘You’re a–’” She stopped.
“And what does the next word start with?”
“F.”
“Freak?’
“No.”
“Fool?”
“No.”
I was quite sure we weren’t going for the big kahuna, but I thought I’d check. “You don’t say ‘mother’ with it?”
“No!”
“I give up. Just tell me the word.”
Her eyes got very big. “No way.”
“I promise you won’t be in trouble.”
She shook her head.
“What if you’re in trouble if you DON’T tell me?”
She smiled. She knew I was bluffing. “You said you know all the bad words. Figure it out.” And she hopped off the sofa. Our conversation was done.
I’m still in that golden mother stage where my kids think I know everything, and they will mostly do what I tell them, believe what I believe. I’ve got a couple good years yet.
But if you have any idea what “You’re an F–” stands for, please clue me in. I promise you won’t be in trouble.
(I don’t allow comments on this blog due to Internet trolls, but if you are on Facebook, friend me there and read what everyone is guessing the word could be.)
UPDATE: We had some great guesses on Facebook, and Irma was the closest with “fatty.” At dinner the other night, it took 20 minutes of questioning (involving her sister) before we got the answer: fat girl.
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