Darlene Ryan | For Writers

Articles For Writers

Everything I Need to Know About Writing I Learned in Kindergarten •  Getting Motivated
Getting Started  •  Building A Career •   The Internal Editor • Creating Characters
Weeding Out the Words •   Editing 101 •   Ten Ways to Help You Keep Your Writing Resolutions

Everything I Need to Know About Writing I Learned in Kindergarten

I admit it. Like most writers I have a stack of how-to writing books—books on breaking in, breaking out, writing a winning proposal and developing a killer style—so many “rules” that sometimes trying to figure out which advice to follow makes me feel as though my head’s going to start spinning around the way Linda Blair’s did in The Exorcist.

But some of the best writing rules I’ve found came from a bunch of five and six year-olds I met when I read to their kindergarten class. Now when I finish writing something, these are the standards I judge it by.

1. A story has to have a beginning, a middle and an end, or it’s not a story.
2. It should be funny or scary but not just regular.
3. Stuff should happen, not just people talking all the time.
4. Don’t make it boring.
5. A good story is when you can see the pictures in your head.
6. Use words that everybody knows.
7. When you get to the end you should stop, because if you don’t it’s annoying.

Getting Motivated

Hugh Grant hanging out with Destiny Brown. Donald Trump’s hair. Britney Spears’ lack of hair. If this were Jeopardy the question would be: “What the heck were you thinking?”

Take another look at your current manuscript. Are readers going to ask you that question? At some point in your story will they throw up their hands or just throw the book across the room?

Motivation. It’s one of the ways readers become invested in a character. Science fiction writer Nancy Kress was the fiction columnist for Writer’s Digest magazine several years ago. I can’t remember her exact words, but she explained motivation more or less like this: In real life people do things for silly, illogical and outright weird reasons. Or for no reason at all. But in a novel, characters need good reasons for what they do--if you want to keep readers hooked. Believable, realistic characters—characters who feel like real people instead of paper cutouts, don’t just react to drive your story. They behave like the people you created them to be.

Have you ever watched one of those hokey old movies where the heroine is alone in an isolated house when the power goes out? And of course, what does she do? She heads down into the pitch-dark cellar to check the fuses where the serial killer/vampire/escaped-prisoner-with-a-chainsaw is waiting. And watching we groan or throw our popcorn at the screen because who does that? In fact, who hangs out alone in creepy isolated houses in the middle of nowhere in the first place?

If you want your main character to do something that she (and anyone with any common sense, like your readers) wouldn’t normally do, you need to give her some compelling motivation—a reason that makes sense for that character in that circumstance.

Maybe the heroine is at the spooky house in the woods because she’s hiding from her ex who dislocated her shoulder and broke two of her ribs the last time she saw him. Maybe she heads for the basement when the lights go out because she knows he’s in the house, she knows he’ll follow her down there, she’s banking on that because she’s set up a little booby-trap on the fourth step from the top.

Or maybe the heroine is at the house because she needed a week away from her mother who keeps trying to get her to marry a nice boy and make babies before all her eggs shrivel up to dried out DNA. And maybe she heads to the basement when the power goes out because she knows there’s a quart of Rocky Road down there in the freezer and she just got off the phone with Mom.

Motivation can get tricky in mysteries where the main character isn’t involved in law enforcement in some way. Remember Jessica Fletcher? Okay, I confess I watched the show, but c’mon, the woman fell over a dead body every week and managed to catch the killer as well. After a while people should have been running the second they saw her coming. This is where you need to watch out for the lame excuse masquerading as motivation. If I see the guy who murdered my best friend while I’m shopping for shoes at the mall, yeah, I want him caught. But I’m going to dial 911, not chase him through the end of season clearance racks at the Gap.

Tim Cockey, author of the Hitchcock Sewell mysteries (Hearse of a Different Color, Backstabber) made Hitchcock an undertaker so the character would have a legitimate reason for being around so many dead people. Add to that a weakness for beautiful women in trouble and a deep loyalty to the friends who make up Hitch’s “family” and Cockey has some decent motivation for his character always being tied up in a murder investigation.

Margaret Maron’s Deborah Knott (Hard Row, Bootlegger’s Daughter) is a judge with a huge rowdy family, a husband in law enforcement and a father who’s often on the wrong side of the law—lots of ties to crime and lots of motivation to get mixed up in murder.

Keep in mind motivation is different for everyone. A mother won’t do something that puts her children at in danger, but she’ll face any danger to protect them. A loner will take different risks that someone with a big circle of friends. A younger person will probably take more chances that someone older--who is more likely to act on loyalty and longtime friendship.

Give your character a logical reason to act, a legitimate reason to get involved. And if you’re sending her down into the cellar make sure there’s a quart of Rocky Road down there in the freezer.

Getting Started

In general, writers fall into one of two groups; those who outline and those who don’t. I’m an outliner. When I start writing I already know a lot what’s going to happen in the story. Writers who don’t work from an outline--seat-of-the-pants writers--just start writing and discover the story as they go.

I outline because I’ve learned the hard way that if I try to wing it, I’ll never get to the end of the story. It’s why I have to follow a map when I’m traveling, so I can actually get to Montreal or Boston, instead of ending up at the Museum of SPAM* in some town I’ve never heard of. The one time I wrote a book without an outline I ended up with a story I couldn’t sell and no clue how to fix it. Every writer learns—through trial and error and a few melt-downs in front of the computer—what works best for her. (Or him.)

All my books begin with a what-if. In the case of Responsible, my latest young adult novel, the what-if was, What if you did the right thing and it messed up your life? I started thinking about this person who had tried to do the right thing and Kevin Frasier began to take shape. He was tall and needed a haircut. His mother was dead. He was a mediocre student who didn’t really fit in anywhere.

Some writers create pages of background for every major character in a book. Not me. What I need to figure out before I start writing is who the person is—what does he need, what does he want? Kevin wasn’t a jock, a brainiac or into drama. He was a bully by default.

Once I knew Kevin I could work out the rest of the story. At this point in the outlining process I know where the story starts and how I want things to end. And I usually have a couple of what I call “crisis points” figured out for the middle. I start with the first scene, work toward the last scene and keep asking, Now what? Having those crisis points figured out for the middle makes it easier to work my way through the giant black hole between the beginning and the end of the book. After I’ve figured out the main story points, I go back and think about the other characters in the story.

I write down everything that occurs to me as I’m outlining--lines of dialogue, even an entire scene—but for the most part the outline lacks all the details that make a good story. Here is how a scene from Responsible was described in the outline. Just two sentences: Kevin sticks a dead mouse in Erin’s locker. Erin confronts Nick and stuffs the dead mouse in his pocket.

Here’s the same scene from the finished manuscript:

I slid the burger box out of my pack.

There was a mouse inside, gray and black with a long hairless tail and blood, dried brown on its neck. I looked at it, curled in the bottom of its Styrofoam coffin and I thought, I could just shut Erin’s locker and tell Nick I hadn’t been able to pop the lock after all. No. No. I could tell him the janitor had been doing the floors and I couldn’t even get to her locker.

I looked down at the grungy gray and yellow tiles. Nick wouldn’t believe that. No one would believe that.

I could just shut the locker, throw the box in the garbage and go home. Of course I’d never be able to come to school or go anywhere else ever again. I’d heard rumors about what Nick did to guys who went up against him. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get a mouse like this stuck in my locker. I’d probably be the mouse, curled up in a ball with blood on the side of my head. It was me or her. What the hell else could I do?

I hauled my sweatshirt down over my fingers again and picked up the mouse. I thought it would have been stiff, but it was as floppy as a stuffed toy. I set it on Erin’s math book, right at the front of her locker so she’d at least see it first thing. That way she wouldn’t be feeling around for her books and get a handful of dead rodent instead. She was going to freak no matter what.

I felt like the mouse was looking at me, sitting there on the middle of the locker shelf. A cold shiver rolled from my shoulders all the way down my back. “Sorry,” I whispered as I closed the locker door. I wasn’t sure if the sorry was for the poor dead mouse, or for Erin.

I couldn’t get going in the morning so by the time I got to school it was almost first bell. Nick was standing at the bottom of the main stairs with Zach and Brendan and some geeky kid from grade nine who talked way too much. I thought his name was Oliver. I knew Nick was just hanging there waiting to see what happened when Erin opened her locker.

I walked over to them. I just wanted to go to my locker or homeroom, but it would have looked weird if I had. I didn’t look down the hall. We’d know soon enough when Erin opened her locker.

Nick was going on about video games and playing Doom Master. He thought he was hot stuff because he’d gotten to level six in the game. I’d gotten as far as level fourteen. That wasn’t something I’d ever told him, though.

I didn’t see Erin until she was right behind Nick. “Uh, Nick,” Zach said, pointing. I looked around. It seemed like half the school was hanging around, watching. I wondered if Nick had put the word out.

Erin was holding the mouse up by its tail with her bare hand. If she was scared I couldn’t tell. In fact, she was sort of smirking. “Geez, Nick,” she said. “I thought you could come up with something better than a dead mouse.”

Then she reached over and stuffed the mouse in the pocket of Nick’s Zipperhead tee shirt. “Here you go,” she said, giving the pocket a pat. Yeah, she was definitely smirking.

Nick jerked. He grabbed the mouse out of his pocket and hurled it down the hall. It landed with a splat by the water fountain. He wiped his hand on his jeans. He was breathing hard and there was sweat on his forehead. Erin wasn’t afraid of a dead mouse but Nick sure as hell was.

How long an outline ends up depends on the book. I’ve written outlines as short as two pages and as long as eighteen. I keep going until I know the story. And by that time I’m usually getting itchy to write the book. For me, this is part of the creative process. There are a zillion decisions to make writing a book. I like to get a lot of them out of the way before I start writing.

There really is a Museum of SPAM. It’s in Austin, Minnesota

Building A Career

What’s the difference between being a writer and building a writing career? It’s a lot like the difference between your original idea and the finished manuscript. If you’re in this for the long term here’s a list of things I’ve learned the hard way, things your mother would tell you, except she’s not a writer.

1. Writing for a living is not the same as getting published no matter what. The desire to have your book in print—to be able to wave it in the face of all those nay-sayers who’ve delighted in telling you it was never going to happen—can be enough to make otherwise intelligent people act as though their brains just fell out of their noses. If what you want is to make writing your career, stop pouncing on every gimmick and dubious opportunity that pops up. Set goals. Make a plan. If you don’t take your writing seriously neither will anyone else.

2. Writing is a profession. Behave professionally. Trashing your agent, your editor, your publishing house, or that writer you know who just signed a contract with a lot of zeros, in any public forum, will come back to bite you. With pointy teeth. In a place that hurts a lot. A conference is a public forum. So is a book signing, a workshop and a critique group. So is a blog. When that big vein in your forehead starts throbbing think twice about where you blow off steam.

3. Writing is a business. Educate yourself. Agents, publishers, genres, trends, marketing-- find out the basics about all of it. Read. Take workshops. Go to book signings. Make friends with librarians and booksellers and other writers. Ask questions. It takes years, a lot of studying, a lot of hands-on work, and more than a few shocks to become an electrician. Building a writing career isn’t a whole lot different.

4. Other writers are not the enemy. The publishing business is not like a cake. If Sandy and Liz and Julia and Sharon and Lonnie get to a cake first it’s likely there won’t be anything left by the time I show up—especially if it’s chocolate. But if Sandy and Liz and Julia and Sharon and Lonnie all get book contracts it doesn’t mean there’s no longer anyone who wants my book. I admit I’m not that highly evolved a person that I haven’t felt some twinges of jealousy, or eaten half a cake when a writer I know signs with the hotshot agent or gets a multi-book deal. But the feeling doesn’t last. And it gives me the push to get back at it, so that next time I’ll be the one with the good news.

5. Published writers don’t have some inside knowledge that gets them published and keeps you out. There’s no secret handshake or special code we add to our correspondence. We don’t say, “The scarecrow walks at midnight,” when we meet an agent or an editor so they’ll know we’re part of the club. We just write. We write the very best book we can. Then we send it out into the world and start writing another one.

6. Write the book. This one seems so simple but it’s also what messes up a lot of writers. You have to finish the book. And that won’t happen if you never get past chapter twelve. “But there’s this voice in my head that keeps telling me it’s all a pile of dreck,” I’ve heard more than one writer say. It’s your head. Ignore the voice. Kick it out. Tell it to go do something anatomically impossible.

And that’s it.

Go write.

That’s what it takes.

The Internal Editor

One of the things you have to deal with on a long project, like a book, is the Internal Editor, that annoying little voice whispering in the back of your head that’s never satisfied with what you just wrote. The Internal Editor is a sneaky, ingratiating creature who always wants you to go back and “fix” the last thing you wrote. I always picture him, and you’ll notice I say him, as the guy you hooked up with in high school who you knew deep down inside was going to be trouble.

He’s the guy who kissed up the side of your neck and whispered in your ear, his breath warm on your hair. Then the next thing you knew your underwear was on backwards and you weren’t really sure what had happened.
Ignore him.

Keep writing.

Don’t listen. Keep writing. Eventually he’ll go stick his tongue is some other writer’s ear.

Just keep writing.

Creating Characters

The best characters are the ones you remember after you’ve finished the book. They feel almost alive. You know how they think, you know what they’re going to do to make things worse before they do it.

“You should always know more about [your characters] than your reader will,” writer Lynn Viehl says. She’s right. You need to know your characters’ secrets to make them come alive. That’s what makes the difference between a character who feels like a real person and one who has about as much life as a paper doll.

This is where some writers get stuck. They know all the surface things about a character; how long her hair is, what color eyes she has and every item of clothing in her closet, but they don’t know what her secrets are. Ask yourself what your character is hiding. Ask yourself what she doesn’t want anyone else to know. For example, maybe in that closet she has three pairs of jeans that are size eight, plus a pair size four and a pair that’s size fourteen. A woman with three sizes of jeans in her closet is a different person from the woman who has five pair, all a perfect size six.

Maybe you’ll share some of your character’s secrets with your readers. Maybe you won’t. Knowing them will help you figure out who she is and how she’ll act. Maybe all your readers get to know is that your main character has long, blonde hair, while only you know it’s courtesy of L’Oreal. You may tell your readers that your hero has a university degree but keep to yourself the fact that he flunked kindergarten.

What scares your character? What embarrasses him? What is he afraid of losing? What does she lie about, even to her closest friends? What happens in her nightmares? What makes her laugh? Who broke his heart?

When you can answer these kinds of questions you’re a lot closer to knowing your character and your character is a lot closer to life.

Weeding Out the Words

A couple of months ago Lynn Viehl had a great post about weed words—words that come up over and over (and over) in our writing. Most of us are probably guilty of overusing the same few descriptive words—really, terrific, great, wonderful, exciting and probably. What Lynn was talking about were object words. Things. She admitted to what she termed “my obsession with doors. You can tell when I've rushed too much on editing one of my novels because of the thirty or more door references in the story.” She also admitted to a fondness for water and window sills.

Sharon Wildwind says if she’s not vigilant her characters tend to shiver a lot. Janet Koch confesses in her last manuscript “I had people whirling and spinning all over the place. And lots of throats were mentioned--throats being cleared, breaths being caught in throats, fear rising in throats.”

My most persistent weed words are action words; hands running through hair, walking and very weirdly, vomiting. People in my books tend to have a lot of hair and they’re always running their hands through it. It makes sense that hair would show up a lot in my writing because I am a little hair obsessed. What I dream of is hair like Angelina Jolie’s or Jessica Simpson’s. What I have is hair like Clay Aiken circa the early American Idol days. Which my mother tried remedy with a succession of Toni home perms. Picture Clay Aiken with an afro and you’ll get the picture. No wonder everybody in my books is always touching their gorgeous hair. (Note: the results of all those home perms have nothing to do with the actual Toni home perm and everything to do with the fact that my mother believed if twenty minutes would result in soft, gentle curls then forty minutes would yield fabulous, bountiful curls.)

All the walking that shows up in my writing has a certain logic as well. I walk a lot. I always have. What I can’t figure out is why my subconscious always has to have someone heaving in a book.

I never seem to see my weed words when a book is in manuscript form. When I’m doing re-writes I’m zealous about looking for the overuse of words such as probably, slowly, a lot and really. But I don’t seem to see the all the times a character is walking along pulling her hands through her hair. Or vomiting. Or maybe the truth is that I see them but every single occurrence seems essential to the story. At least at the time.

So what are your weed words? Do your characters whirl or shiver? Do you have a thing for hair? Or doors? Or queasiness?

Editing 101

Step One:
Write the dang book. The entire book. All the way to the end. Finished. Done. Completed.

Step Two:
Go back and read Step One. Finished means the whole story has been written, not just the beginning and the ending, and some notes about the abyss known as the middle. All of it. It doesn’t matter how badly it’s written. You can’t edit what hasn’t been created.

So you’re working on the book. What happens if a third of the way through you suddenly realize Rick should be Rhonda? Or the cabin where you set the story needs to be by a river instead of a lake? Keep going making the change from where you are forward. From now on Rick is a petite blonde who hides tofu ice cream bars in the freezer and can’t walk in high heels, instead of a six foot three African-American with an addiction to Boston cream donuts. And from now on the cabin is next to a rushing river, swollen with the spring run-off, instead of a lake so still the surface reflects the trees like a mirror. On an index card or a notepad write a reminder: Chapters 1 – 6 change Rick to Rhonda, Chapters 2 – 5 cabin on river instead of lake.

Step Three:
Once a book is finished I try to take two or three days off before I start any editing. That breathing room helps me look more objectively at what I’ve written. When I’m ready to edit, the first thing I do is look at my notes and see what things I need to fix. This is the point at which I go back and give Rick a sex change, turn the lake into a river, and do any foreshadowing I forgot in my outline.

Step Four:
I like to do my actual editing on a printed copy of the manuscript—for some reason I catch more mistakes on paper than I do on a computer screen—but before printing anything I run a spell check to look for grammar and spelling errors. And I use Word’s Find feature to search for words I tend to overuse, like very, just and almost.

Because I’m always looking for ways to use less paper I print this draft out on what I call scrap paper—pages that have already been used on one side. Then I sit down with my copy of the manuscript, a pencil, and a notepad.

As much as I can, I like to make all my notes on the printed copy of the manuscript. The one exception is notes about any new scenes I need to write. I’ll mark the manuscript where a scene needs to be inserted, but notes about the scene go on my notepad. For example, let’s say I decide I need to add a scene at the end of Chapter 3 that shows Rhonda’s fear of heights. In the manuscript, at the end of the chapter I’ll write “A.” On my notepad I’ll write A again but with an explanation: Scene with Rhonda in the attic showing her fear of heights. If I need to add another scene it’s labeled “B” and so on.

Step Five:
Once I’ve been all the way through the manuscript it’s back to the computer to write any new scenes and type in all my revisions. When I’m finished I run spell-check again and print out a new, corrected copy of the manuscript. This copy I read out loud. It’s the best way I’ve found for catching mistakes. I make corrections on the pages as I read and then on my computer copy.

Step Six:
I only use this step when there’s something that bothers me about a book. Maybe it’s just one scene that reads “wrong.” Maybe it’s an entire chapter. I copy the pages into a new file and send it to my friend Susan with a whiny email that says, “This sucks. I’ve forgotten how to write and I’m going to Wal-mart to apply for a job.” In a couple of hours I’ll get an email back written in the same tone one would use with the very young, the very old, and the very deranged, with a reminder that a blue vest would not flatter my figure and a suggestion such as, “Do you have to kill this character?” or “The transition between scenes was a little abrupt.”

And I realize she’s right. (She always is and I always smack myself in the forehead and think, why didn’t I see that?) I fix the problem scene, make sure the pages are numbered properly and everything is formatted the way it should be, and then send the book off to my editor.

Now right before your manuscript leaves your hands or your computer on its way to an editor, you may be hit with the urge to read it just one more time. I know a writer who ended up re-reading the first chapter of her manuscript twelve times looking for errors.

(Okay, that was me.)

Have confidence in your ability and try not to give in to the feeling.

Ten Ways to Help You Keep Your Writing Resolutions

Having problems plotting?

1. Kris Neri teaches classes for the Writers Program of the UCLA Extension School (www.uclaextension.edu). And she’s the author of the Tracy Eaton mysteries. www.krisneri.com Click on classes

2. Laura Baker and Robin Perini’s novel building technique, Discovering Story Magic, is “a three-step method to writing a story they can’t refuse.” Robin and Laura have taught their process at workshops and writing events across the country.   www.discoveringstorymagic.com

3. Literary agent Donald Maas teaches workshops throughout the year based on his book, Writing the Breakout Novel. www.maasagency.com/appearances.html

Stuck on the dreaded synopsis?

4. Shelia Kelly aka Lynn Viehl, aka S.L. Viehl, aka Rebecca Kelly, aka Jessica Hall, has sold more than three dozen books including the popular Darkyn and Star Doc series.     www.fmwriters.com/Visionback/Issue 15/workshop.htm

St. Martin’s Press sponsors four contests for mystery and suspense writers.

5. a. St. Martin’s Minotaur/Malice Domestic Competition for the best first traditional mystery novel,
    b. Best Private Eye Novel Competition sponsored by St Martin’s Press and the Private Eye Writers of America,
    c. Hillerman Mystery Contest sponsored by St Martin’s Press and the Tony Hillerman Writers conference,
    d. St. Martins Minotaur/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel competition
http://us.macmillan.com/Content.aspx?publisher=smpminotaur&id=4933

Should you blog? Do you need a website? Should you give away free copies of your book?

6. J.A. Konrath is the author of the Lt. Jacqueline Daniels thrillers. Check out his free e-book of Market tips on his website. www.jakonrath.com   Click on For Writers

7. Marketing guru Seth Godin writes the most popular marketing blog in the world. His book, Unleashing the Idea Virus, is the most popular e-book ever written with more than 2 million copies downloaded.
www.sethgodin.com/ideavirus/01-getit.html

Stuck on the details?

8. Lee Lofland is a veteran police investigator and expert on crime scene investigations and police procedures. www.leelofland.com Check out Lee’s blog, The Graveyard Shift.

9. For medical and forensics questions visit The Writers Medical and Forensics Lab, created by Dr. D.P. Lyle
www.dplylemd.com

Looking for help on where to put the commas or whether it’s “a lot” or “alot?”

10. Dr. Grammar is a website dedicated to helping writers.
www.drgrammar.org