Taking Life Risks

In October 2006, I quit my job as a telemarketer sales rep for a web hosting company. It was the job I’d been holding down since college graduation, a job I got because everyone else was getting .com jobs in Silicon Valley. But it made me miserable and I couldn’t write a word when I got home. So I quit. It took me about two weeks to really muster up the courage (plus, I was waiting until after the really cushy company anniversary party came and went… Take the free food and drink while you can get it, I say, especially if you’re about to be unemployed!) but I did it.

There was no other job lined up, no shining recommendations coming my way since I’d been a lousy, lousy hawker of useless products salesperson. Considering that I was young, and yes, I had unemployment benefits, and no, I didn’t have a family to support, some might not see this as a great accomplishment, but it was.

It taught me something very simple very early on: if you jump, the ground will rise up to meet you. If you believe it will, that is. That’s why I’m a big proponent of taking life risks. Taking a life risk means facing the thing you’re most afraid of, whatever that means to you. For some, it’s tattooing a snarling tiger on your forehead and moving to Brazil. For the less bold of us, it’s quitting a lousy job or sending a query to your Dream Agent or writing the idea all your friends think is stupid. (And unless your friends are editors or agents, don’t listen to them when it comes to books.)

In the few years since I quit my job and walked out of my cube with a box, a plant and a deflated orange yoga ball, I’ve learned the following:

If you don’t take the risk, you’ll always wish you did.
Nobody can believe in you or your work more than you. That’s where everything else needs to start.
No matter what you’re doing, you could commit to it even more.
You will fail and you will fail hard. But if you get up, that means you’ve learned from it.

After I quit my job, I tooled around and wrote for a while with the money from my last paycheck. Then I got a job three days a week at a restaurant. After that, the restaurant took me on as a prep cook and I got to show up early in the morning, before anybody else, and walk into a kitchen with the stainless steel glinting all around me. I got to shuck oysters, peel carrots, put the caviar away. It is, to this day, the best job I’ve ever had. Then I got another job, and another one. And none of them involved explaining what a web browser is to grandmas who just wanted to put pictures of their grandkids on “that world wide web everyone is always talking about.”

It’s your life and you’ve only got the one. If something sucks, especially about your creative life, fix it. Until you do, the only person suffering is you.

Describing Emotions With Physical Cliches

Without further ado, here are the Four Horsemen of the Prose-ocalypse with regard to describing emotions:

Eyes
Hearts
Lungs
Stomachs

describing emotions, showing emotions in writing — She darted a menacing glance over her shoulder at the Four Horsemen coming for her lazy writing…

What do I mean? These four areas of the body are the well-worn favorites of writers everywhere when it comes to describing emotions of any kind. Count how many times you’ve seen the following (or similar) phrases.

Well-Worn Favorites in Describing Emotions

She darted a menacing glance over her shoulder.

He cast his eyes to the ground.

My heart clenched in my chest like a giant fist.

His heart knocked against his ribs like a caged bird.

She let go of a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding.

Timmy gasped for air like a drowning man.

The sound of his raspy breathing was the only noise in the otherwise death-silent room.

A gnawing feeling radiated from her guts.

Acid roiled in my stomach, threatening to make an exit up my esophagus.

And on and on and on. Now, that’s not to say that describing emotions in this way is inherently bad. It’s not. But as writers, you should always be thinking about how to describe emotion in creative ways. There aren’t many areas of the human body that act as emotional centers. Eyes, hearts, lungs and stomachs are the four biggies. A lot of stuff happens at these hotspots as a character moves through the emotional character arc of a story.

Innovate How You’re Showing Emotions in Writing

But every time you’re showing emotions in writing with eyes darting, a heart clenching, breaths catching in throats or guts rumbling, just know that these Four Horsemen appear in almost every manuscript. It is your job to put a fresh twist on describing emotions and giving your readers new images (read more about how to write emotions in a story).

Just because you know everyone struggles with this problem and just because you want to easily jump to showing emotions in your writing doesn’t mean you can get complacent and fall back on the stuff I’ve outlined above.

I issue you a challenge and throw down the gauntlet! What are some fun ways you mix up describing emotions in your manuscripts?

Characters need to be believable and relatable in order to hook readers. Hire me as your book editor and we can hone in on your protagonist together.

How to Write Thoughts in Fiction and Formatting Thoughts

If you want to go deeply into your character’s experience, or interiority, you will want to write their thoughts. And how to write thoughts in fiction includes formatting thoughts correctly. Here are some, well, thoughts on both topics.

Formatting Thoughts

There are several schools of (ahem) thought on how to write thoughts and then format them in fiction writing. One is that all verbatim thoughts are formatted in italics. The second school is that verbatim thoughts can be left unformatted as long as you use a “thought” tag, for example, “she thought” at the end of the phrase. This isn’t my preferred because I struggle to get writers away from excessive dialogue tags in general.

I would say just italicize your thoughts and then forget about it, but there’s more nuanced discussion of formatting interiority here.

How to Write Thoughts Tip

Can we please put a manuscript moratorium on the following phrases:

I’m so bored, she thought to herself.

I need a cheeseburger, he thought in his head.

Of course a character thinks something to themselves. They’re the ones thinking it! They don’t think it to someone else unless they can communicate telepathically (in which case this moratorium doesn’t affect your book). Normally when someone has a thought, it is directed to his or herself. And, usually, unless there’s something creative about their anatomy, they think in their heads!

That makes logical sense to you, right? So why am I seeing so many characters thinking to themselves?! Or thinking in their heads?!

The correct thing to write would just be “she thought” and “he thought.” Or, better yet, italics and nothing at all. Simple, effective!

If ever you find this in your WIP, highlight it and then … press the delete button.

Interiority (getting deeply into the character’s experience) is the cornerstone craft concept that I teach as a novel editor. If you’d like to explore and master it, read my book!

Writing for Children and Young Adults — Why it Matters

“Why are you writing for children and young adults?”

This is a question I’ve had to answer frequently in my career. It got me thinking that I should write down my answer and see if anyone agrees with me!

writing for children, writing for kids, writing for young adults, why i write — Writing for children and young adults is a way to hand them a road map that just might help them navigate adolescence.

Writing for Children — a Way to Keep Learning and Growing

As most adults grow older, it seems that their world narrows. Doors and windows, possibilities and opportunities, that used to exist when they were kids seem to close or disappear. People make up their minds, stop learning, evolve more slowly or not at all. On the other hand, growing up is all about change. Ideas aren’t set in stone, minds change every day, people explore the world before forming their opinion of it.

Young adulthood is such an engaged and dynamic time in someone’s life. Writing for children and young adults is a way to hand them a road map; a way to help them through the volatility. I also know that if I keep my imagination there, my world will never narrow. I’ll never stop learning and growing, and that’s exactly the kind of life I want to live.

Writing for Children — My Story

My young adulthood is a prime example of this. I immigrated to California from Moscow when I was seven, essentially leaving one childhood behind. To this day, I feel like the ten years afterward, from age seven to seventeen, were some of my most significant. Not only did I have to come into my own as a young adult, but I also forged an identity, juggling between my Russian heritage and my future as an American. Twice the growth, twice the change.

It was such a rich, painful, life-altering time and that’s why writing for children and young adults is important to me… to capture and share those moments. To keep their memory alive in my life because that’s one of the only links I have to my first childhood and the first girl I was, the one that’s still intact somewhere, flying on a rickety Aeroflot plane over Siberia, on her way to a new life.

Are you writing for children or young adults? Hire me as your children’s book editor and I’ll help you polish your project so it’s the best it can be.

How to Write Action Scenes

More writers should be wondering how to write action scenes. Because the more action sequences I read, the more I’m convinced that they’re the Achilles’ heel of even the most seasoned writer (with the exception of thriller writers, of course). Lovely and agile prose sometimes tends to fall apart when an action sequence is called for.

How to Write Action Scenes With the Movies in Mind

This is a difficult situation for writers who have to contend with an action movie world. Cinematography can do things that prose can’t. It can show us five quick moves from a martial arts sequence in the space of one second.

Take this example from page 83 of SKULLDUGGERY PLEASANT*, a perfectly lovely book that came out with HarperCollins in 2008, written by Derek Landry, a screenwriter, as it happens:

He screamed and let her go and staggered back, cursing, and Stephanie rolled off the car and ran to the Bentley.

Give that sentence a coffee break, it’s been working too hard!

How To Write Action Scenes with Flow

As you can see, there’s a bit of conjunctivitis going on (and no, I’m not talking about pink eye, I’m talking about an overload of conjunctions). The author’s “and” addiction sends way too many images shooting at the reader and we can’t quite make a clear picture of the action sequence. Put this sentence in a group of similar sentences and we’ll get whiplash.

Tips on How to Write Action Scenes

This is a reminder to check back on all of your action sequence chapters and run through these revision techniques:

Clarity. If you hadn’t written it, would you be able to tell what’s going on? So much, well, action happens in an action sequence that clarity is of the utmost importance.
Consistency. Just because they’re in an action sequence, characters should still act and speak like themselves. They should not develop any surprising but convenient powers or skills in the heat of the action.
Sentence variety. The heavy emphasis on writing descriptions in an action sequence usually means that style takes a backseat. For example, you get an entire paragraph of sentences that start the same: “He grabbed his gun… He volleyed over the wall… He slid into the driver’s seat… He skidded to a halt to smell the roses…” Make sure your sentences have structural variety. Your readers will get bored with all the “Subject verb” construction, or of any other sentence tic that you develop.
Brevity. Even if your plot calls for the longest action sequence in the world, make sure there are pauses in between bouts of action. Break it up with some snappy dialogue, let the character take a breather. No one can be an action machine 24/7, that includes the reader whose heartbeat has been (hopefully) racing for the last ten pages. Let them take a rest. Some readers are great at reading action sequences, other gloss over them (I have to admit, I skimmed most of the Quidditch sequences and the big finale fights in the HARRY POTTER series, because I am just not that great at reading action scenes and keeping all those pieces and images in my head.)
Believability. Alas, every action sequence must come to an end sometime. Make sure yours ends in a believable way. No “how convenient!” scrapes. No deus ex machina**. And don’t be afraid to let something go wrong or to let someone get hurt. There are always winners AND losers in an action sequence. Give us a taste of both.

There you have it. Now go forth and blow our action-movie-addled minds!

* This awkward action sequence aside, you should definitely read SKULLDUGGERY PLEASANT or any of its sequels if you write MG. It’s a great mix of action and adventure that appeals to girls and boys, realistic and fantasy lovers alike.

* Latin: “god from the machine.” This term refers to “a plot device in which a person or thing appears or is introduced suddenly and unexpectedly and provides a contrived solution to an apparently insoluble difficulty” (nice, articulate definition from Wikipedia). This means that if something feels like a “cop out” in your book…if ane scape is too easy or too good to be true…your reader will probably think so, too, and you’ll lose credibility and authenticity points with them.

Plot and action can be hard to master in a vacuum. Hire me as your manuscript consultant, and you’ll never write alone.

How Many Characters in a Novel?

Many beginning writers wonder, “How many characters in a novel?” And, unfortunately, many writers approach this question by assembling a character horde. They simply have way too many characters. Worse, they seem to always be possessed to introduce these characters in large chunks. (Ah! I’m writing a scene where my main character arrives at a new school… here are twenty new secondary characters for her to meet!)

How Many Characters in a Novel?

If you find yourself tracking your characters or having to go back and look up the name of the character you want to use…if you find yourself boasting that you keep track of your cast with a spreadsheet (and you’re not writing high fantasy)…I beg you to slash the cast list.

When you’re considering “How many characters in a novel?”, keep in mind that characters on a page are people that your reader can’t see or hear. That’s where your job comes in. Because you’ve got a pretty big barrier to reality — the character is alive only in words, your reader has never seen them and oh, yes, you made them up! — you have to work that much harder to flesh out this person and make them realistic (tips on writing believable characters). In real life, a person can walk down the halls at school and notice some dorky girl named Cathy in some gross penny loafers and then remember her. Or they can spot a friend from grade school that they don’t really talk to anymore and try to avoid them. In a book, the reader has a more limited attention span for these types of secondary characters. And if Cindy or the old friend don’t appear again, there’s almost no need to mention them if you don’t have to.

Valid Reasons to Introduce Characters

They’re going to be instrumental in the plot.
You want to characterize an environment by introducing us briefly to one or two of its characteristic inhabitants.

Both are totally valid. You want to introduce us to the girl who your Nerd Herd MC is going to beat out for Homecoming Queen, because she’s involved in the plot. You also want to introduce us to some of the dumb jocks hanging out in the cafeteria and throwing bananas at each other because you want to provide dumb high school foils for said MC.

Cutting or Combining Characters

If you find yourself with too many characters, ask yourself honestly if anyone in your brood can be cut or, better yet, combined. One writer friend of mine ended up combining her MC’s two best friends into one person. And she did it, because it made the book stronger in the end. The characters she’d written were too similar and served similar functions to the MC. That’s another great thing to look at. If all your secondary characters serve the same function (support main character, irritate main character, bully main character), do you really need many iterations of the same thing?

If you were to look at your manuscript with a cool, objective editorial eye, which characters could you get rid of altogether? Which characters could you combine? Nothing disorients a reader more than being introduced to three, five, ten or more new secondary characters at a time. Sadly, I’ve seen this a lot lately.

Strive for Clarity and Simplicity in Your Writing

Don’t forget that you’re the one creating characters in your story. You’ve got the added bonus of having “seen” them before. As a reader, though, we’re going in completely blind. The disadvantage of having a lot of characters is that it’s almost impossible to flesh them all out to the level where they come alive. When we’re considering “How many characters in a novel?”, I’d rather have fewer characters who are much more fleshed out and involved in the plot, than lots of secondary characters who appear for a scene or two, don’t pop up again and remind me more of furniture than of human beings. (Even more tips for how to create characters in a novel.)

Strive for clarity, simplicity and not to overwhelm your reader.

Struggling with when and how to add secondary characters to your work? Hire me as your manuscript editor and we’ll work through it together.

Plot Points to Nail Your Dramatic Arc

Writers, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, of all people, about creating plot points for a dramatic arc. But maybe I will, just so we’re clear. When you’re creating a plot, dramatic arc looks like, well, an upside down check-mark, actually, more so than an arc, with the pointy part making a mountain near the end.

dramatic arc, plot points — Dramatic arc: The story starts off on ground level, then slopes up nicely until the climax (the mountain) and then slopes quickly downward to a nice resolution.

Benefits of Creating Dramatic Plot Points

A large part of this nice, inverted-check-mark shape, is the sloping. As your plot points build on each other, the story tension and the stakes and the action rises toward a climax. Yes? Yes. Then, after an exciting climax, things decelerate quickly and we have a satisfying conclusion.

The key point of getting that great building action in your plot points is that the reader is aware of what’s at stake. (Need help raising the stakes?) They know what the characters want and they know, pretty much, what is going to turn into a dangerous situation near the end. In other words, they have an idea where your story is going and what your climax is going to be about, pretty much after the first 50 pages. Some people would ask: “Doesn’t this make your novel predictable?”

No. A strong dramatic arc gives the reader something to fear, something to anticipate, and something to care about. And if they know what could possibly be at stake and what kind of danger could possibly transpire, they’ll be that much more eager to read and find out exactly how it all goes down for the characters that they’ve grown to empathize with.

The One Thing You Never Do

This brings me to the one thing you never do in a manuscript (there might be more of these, but so far, this is the high and exalted One Thing).

Do not introduce plot points (an event or person or thing or consequence) in the last 50 pages (or so) of your manuscript if that event/person/thing/consequence will become instrumental to the climax. (The only viable exception to this is introducing a villain who has, up to this point, remained hidden or shadowed or otherwise dark and creepy.)

Ideally, the same stakes and goals and characters and threats that you build into the dramatic arc from the very beginning of the manuscript should be the forces involved in the climax. The whole point of the climax is that you bring everything that you’ve worked so hard developing and making irresistible together…and that comes from the reader having spent a whole book with these plot points and really, really caring about what happens to them.

Why to Avoid the One Thing

If you introduce plot points a few pages away from the climax and hinge the climax on that thing, you’re going to lose some readers because they simply don’t care. For example, if your dramatic arc has been building up to a battle for the main character to avenge their father’s death for the whole book, then you interrupt the story ten pages before the battle with some bad guys who burst on the scene and want to steal the Magical Decanter of Shmegoo (that we’ve never heard of before in the book, or only heard in passing once or twice) and then make the battle about the Decanter instead of the hero’s father, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Starting your idea with a character outline might be helpful in avoiding this problem.

By all means, introduce new complications, villains, conflict in a story as your book develops. But don’t introduce something that becomes instrumental in the climax near the end of the book and expect us to care about it. More often than not, your readers will be let down in a big way.

Are your plot points building an arc the way they should? Hire me as your manuscript editor and I’ll give you hands-on plotting advice.

Past, Present and Future

Sometimes a writer forgets that their characters have pasts and futures, just like all of us do. There’s not an hour goes by that I don’t, personally, think about something in either the past or the future. It can be something mundane or something huge that I’ve either lived through or am dreaming about.

A lot of the time, especially when I’m writing a first draft or an early revision, I forget that my characters must be like this, too.

Every character must feel the weight of the past, present and future at every moment.

Not in an overbearing or obvious way, of course. Please don’t take this as free license to write something like:

Just sitting in chem lab, Judy felt ready to explode: not only was her embarrassment at the audition yesterday still fresh in mind but the callbacks would be tomorrow! To top it all off, her stomach rumbled so loudly that people all the way across campus could probably hear it.

But there is something compelling about keeping all three of these balls in the air at the same time. A lot of manuscripts suffer from a lack of tension. There’s not a very clear feeling of what is at stake in the moment. Sometimes, adding a past and mixing it with over the future just might be the ticket to increasing tension.

Changing a Manuscript’s Narrative POV or Tense

A writer makes many decisions when it comes to approaching a manuscript. We have to decide on our characters, our plot, our setting, our descriptions … all that content jazz. We also have to decide several storytelling issues. Is this story going to be told in past tense or present tense? Will it be told in first or in third person narrative point of view? If it’s going to be in third person, will it be third person limited or third person omniscient*? Which character’s POV** will tell the story? Will I have one narrative point of view or alternating points of view? And on and on. Sometimes I wonder why I didn’t take up brain surgery instead.

narrative point of view, pov, manuscript tense, past tense, present tense — Decisions, decisions…

Narrative Point of View Choices Can Be Wrong

Believe it or not, though, almost every choice I’ve ever made about a manuscript has been wrong at some point. That’s totally okay. It’s a huge pain in the butt and you wonder if you are just the densest person on the planet when you realize your error, but there’s only one thing you can do: change it. (There’s also Secret Option B: eat a sheet pan of tiramisu.)

In terms of difficulty, here are the above changes, ordered by degree of difficulty from easiest to hardest:

Tense
First to third or third to first narrative point of view
Third person limited to third person omniscient or vice versa
One POV to multiple POV’s or vice versa

There are tons of changes a writer makes to a manuscript, of course, but the above four are the big “universal” changes that are likely to affect the entire thing. I’ve repeatedly, REPEATEDLY, made the first two changes to several manuscripts. In fact, with one manuscript, I went from first to third and then back again to first, like a total dunderhead.

How to Change Manuscript POV or Tense

If ever you’re faced with one of these huge changes, take heart. The only way to do it is to put your head down and power through. Besides, every single time you read through your work, it gets stronger. You’ll notice a sentence that sounds off, you’ll see that some new thread could easily be woven into the story here, here and here.

Also, there’s a great psychological effect to making these huge, whole-MS changes … you’ll get comfortable with ripping it apart and making it messy for a little while. After that, you’ll be more willing to do bigger revisions, if it comes to that, which it most likely will, and you’ll handle them with more aplomb! And doesn’t everyone want more aplombfulness in their lives? =) (Plus, the deeper you can get into POV in writing and your characters’ heads, the better.)

* In case you’re wondering. Third person limited is narrated in the third person (he ran down the hallway, etc.) but it follows one character (most likely the main character) the closest. It can also see into that character’s thoughts and feelings but not anybody else’s. Third person omniscient, which is more difficult to pull off successfully, follows many people, can access all of their thoughts and feelings, and gives them equal weight.

** POV stands for “point of view.” Every time you follow someone’s thoughts or feelings, as in, say, the third person limited example above, you are in their POV. A book can primarily follow one person or have multiple POV’s (usually broken up into sections or new chapters, as in The Luxe series by Anna Godbersen), and this term applies to books written in both first and third person.

A great book I’d prescribe in writing narrative point of view is Writing the Intimate Character by Jordan Rosenfeld. A must-read if you’re making big POV decisions.

If you’re still struggling with POV, tense, or revision, hire me for freelance editing services. I’m well-versed in these and all other craft topics and we can tackle big changes together.

Avoid Writing a Static Character

Character arc — or how your character changes throughout the course of your story — is critical to developing compelling fiction. Believe it or not, I have read manuscripts where the writer seemed to ignore character arc completely and came up with an almost entirely static character.

static character, active character — Are your characters changing with the events in your story, or are they a static character despite what you throw at them?

Your Character Arc Should Be a Journey

This is a huge question, with an easy answer. First, consider this quote:

“A story is a character’s journey from innocence to experience.”

Dunk that in your morning coffee.

Without any kind of change or narrative arc, you have a static character. They do not change, they do not learn, they do not care, and therefore, it is very difficult for the reader to care. However, your number one job as a writer is to make readers care.

More practically, you are asking readers to invest hours of their lives in your story. If your character arc goes from point A to … point A, readers may not necessarily feel like they’ve gone on a satisfying journey. Sure, there’s something in fiction called the “antihero,” who seems almost stubbornly against changing. Isn’t a static character one of the evils of modern life, after all? But this type of characterization is a big risk, because antiheroes tend to come off as bored (and therefore boring) or too misanthropic to be truly relatable. (Writing a character outline might help you avoid writing a static character.)

Character Arc in Children’s Books

The antihero tends to be more of an element in adult fiction, anyway. Since young people, young readers, and therefore young characters are living in such a dynamic period of their lives, they almost can’t help but change (more on young adult fiction). Take this to heart.

A static character might play in moody literary fiction or short story, but it’s a tough prospect in most children’s books. The obvious exception is nonfiction picture book, for example, where the character arc isn’t the main point of the story. Otherwise, you’re on the hook for putting some a dynamic protagonist on the page. Sorry! Dig deeper into what makes a great character here.

Hire me as your manuscript editor and I’ll guide you towards creating characters that readers will connect with.