Show Don't Tell

This is the advice given to most writers when it comes to, well, everything. Telling your audience that the protagonist likes to eat pizza on the weekend isn't as effective as having the person simply order the pizza and enjoy eating it while watching TV.

I just read a post by Paperback Writer, where she relates a story that happened to her in a restaurant. She'd recently had surgery and her eye was affected by it. Her waitress believed - due to the 'shown' information, that her husband had hit her and treated the couple accordingly. Paperback Writer concludes with the moniker that we need to be aware that our readers may not see our hints the way we intend, and that sometimes we need to tell to get the right message across.

This actually brings up a different question for me. How much of stereotypes, how much misinformation about people, races, cultures, religions is due to literature showing rather than telling? We've been trained to take a few pieces of often disjointed information and pull together a so called composite picture from that.

If you saw a woman, sitting with her back to the room at a restaurant, wearing sun glasses that - once removed - prove she's sporting a black eye, what conclusion would you jump to?

What about the black man standing in line behind you, one hand in his coat pocket, obviously covering something? Would your first thought be that he's holding his wallet because it's a bad neighbourhood? Or would you think it was a gun - because that's the stereotype we've been trained to assume is the truth?

How about the Muslim woman wearing the hajib. Do believe she's wearing it because her husband is forcing her to or because she's a pious woman who honestly prefers it?

And why are we too afraid and ashamed to ask and discover the truth?

I'll never forget reading Black Like Me by John Griffin. I shook my head at a lot of the racist slurs being perpetrated against the African American population as described in his book. Growing up in Canada, born after the civil rights movement ended, I had never heard these things before. Nor had I realized how many people believed such slurs to be the truth. Or how many people continue to perpetuate such insidious lies rather than discover - or accept - the truth. The truth that people are inherently all the same. We have the same needs: food, shelter, heat and love, the same wants: to provide for our families, be successful and find happiness.

Maybe we need to discover a better way of writing. One that doesn't require jumping to conclusions. Or perhaps we need to realize that jumping to conclusions about characters in a novel is harmless - while doing the same with real people can be devastating.

Book Expo America 2009

I just came back from BEA in New York City. It's a forum for new ideas, mixing publishers, booksellers and more in conference sessions and a trade show. And boy, did it ever give me ideas. I'll be busy with my scififanletter blog over the next few weeks, but I intend to start planning and writing my novel in conjunction with that, so stay tuned for what I hope will become regular posts.

Back to the Drawing Board

Several years ago I started writing a fantasy prequel to a novel I'd completed. I took a break and wrote my chick lit because the romance was flowing and the fantasy was not. Once I'd finished the chick lit I thought it would be easy to get back into the fantasy. It was and it wasn't. I had the drive to write but the story just wouldn't budge. I wrote chapters - invented whole new scenes I hadn't planned on writing - but the actual story just wouldn't move forward.

So I decided it was a flawed idea and quit. Or thought that perhaps the idea was simply too big and I didn't have the skills to write such an epic story at this point in my career.

I've since come to the conclusion that I was too hasty in that pronouncement. The problem was: my timeline was simply too long. The chick lit took place within a few months. My previous fantasy was just over one month in duration - from the start of the novel until the end. This fantasy had the temerity of taking place over several years - years in which nothing happened. So there was a lot of detailed action, nothing and then more detailed action. I simply couldn't figure out how to make that 'nothing happened' realistic while at the same time explaining that, yes, of course stuff DID happen, it just wasn't important enough to write about.

The solution? Reduce the timeline. Why does this war have to take place over 8 years? Can't things progress faster while still showing the horrors of what war can do? Yes. It won't be a short timeline - it is a war after all - but it will be a timeline I can confidently write. This novel has too many good elements for me to simply toss it by the wayside. A few days to reconsider my outline, and then I can get to writing again!

Spelling

It's tough trying to get a foot in as an author when you're not the best speller. There's only so much help spell check can give. Sometimes the errors are simple typos. Sometimes they're not. The odd thing is, you can read quite well over the errors without (for the most part) losing the meaning. Yes, there are times when a letter seriously affects the meaning of the word, at which point you lose a lot of credibility, but it's amazing how much you can read with typos.

I read a chain email once that, using typos, explained that humans only need the first and last letters of a word to be correct for their brains to tell them the words, even if all the other letters are scrambled. Incredible. And yet, as impressive as our brains are, we like words spelled properly. It drives me nuts when I see posts using short forms that don't 'officially' exist. Or even non short forms, that just seem 'cool'.

And it's strange. When I read books (and other things) I hate finding typos. It feels like the person was being sloppy when, in fact, their eyes probably passed over the words, reading them as if they were spelled correctly. And it's so easy to miss letters and mistype them yourself. I find with my own work I often have to let it sit for a while and then print it out to find typos. If I edit on the computer I tend to read what I want the words to be rather than what they are.

In the writing business it's important to catch spelling mistakes before you post or submit work though. Editors look for any reason to disregard you, and bad spelling - even just one typo - seems to be a favourite reason to send work to the discard pile. It almost doesn't seem fair. Yet, from their point of view, if you have one typo you'll surely have more...

So, does anyone have tips on editing so that they can catch these tiny (or not so tiny) errors? Do you use spell check, beta readers, let the work rest for a while or some other tactics?

Bad Blogger!

Looks like I haven't posted here in several months. Oops. In my defense I've been busy planning a wedding (mine) and had to get all the preliminary work done fast. Now I've got a bit of breathing room.

So...

For months I thought I'd post chapters from my chick lit. I know, I know. I'm a SciFi nerd and fantasy freak. Why did I write a chick lit? I can't tell you either. I didn't want to write it. I purposefully tried to get all the chick lit ideas out of my head so I could go back to my nice respectable fantasy but it just wouldn't let go. I like my chick lit - though I've rethought a few things and will probably be editing it sometime in the next few months (ah for more time in the day).

To keep things simple I'll post the chapter in a new post. While I've had several working titles, the one I like the most is:

Dating Plan Desaster

Enjoy.

Calling It Quits

How do you know when to throw in the towel? I've been working on this particular manuscript (a prequel to a completed manuscript) for over 2 years now. Granted, one year of that time was spent writing my chick lit novel. And another half year was spent trying to type a word here, a paragraph there. I've come to the conclusion that the reason this story is no longer flowing for me is because it's flawed. And rather than spend the next 10 years trying to complete it, it's time to close the folder and move onto a different story. Maybe in 10 years, when I'm a better writer, I'll be able to come back to this manuscript and fix it so that it works, but I don't have the skill to do that now and it's time I realize that and stop staring at the blank screen wondering if I'm cut out to be a writer. I know I am. I've finished two novels. So if it's not me, it's got to be the story. Part of the problem could be the fact that I've been working in this world since I was 12 and, as I'm significantly older than 12 now, it's time for me to do something different, something fresh. Another concern is that the more I learn about writing and sales and the more I read other people's novels the more cliched my ideas for that world sound. I did come up with the ideas for it when I was younger, so while they have evolved over time they're certainly dated. As I said, it's a flawed manuscript. But it's hard to just throw out a year of your life. I spent a lot of time on that manuscript. I love the characters. I did some fun things. I have some great passages. But is it worth stagnating over? No. So it's time to move on.

Logo

Yesterday I put up a logo on this page that I designed last year for my business cards. Unfortunately, in my haste to try something new, I posted the WRONG image (an earlier attempt at my logo that I didn't like as much). Seen here:



Notice the tail is a bit stubby and the image is choppy. The writing is uneven and slightly unclear. Though I did get the appostrophe tongue, which I liked, the image is less than stellar.



The image I should have had up was this one, which is a bit wider than tall, and better defined. I figured out how to type the words rather than free hand them, so they look much clearer and are level. Given my lack of skill in using my imaging program it's also less dark than I'd have liked, but I couldn't figure out how to make it black. And when it printed I got little bluish dots around the letters, as the background wasn't perfectly white and the image not as crisp as it should have been.



It's unfortunate that I had the wrong image up because my boyfriend, who is much better at computer graphics than I am, therefore took the worse of my two images to touch up into the beauty that's displayed on this blog. Here's one verson of his finished image in gradiated black, and a second in red. He added a shadow effect that I think looks pretty cool and made the background transparent so it wouldn't interfere with the background colour of the blog.
If I'd realized my error earlier I could have made this process easier on him by giving him a better image to start with. Instead, without complaint, he spent a fair bit of time reworking the image I didn't particularly like - and making it into an awesome logo.

I have the best boyfriend in the world. :D