Here’s the second episode I recorded with the Writing Excuses guys.
In the first podcast we talked about putting and not putting ourselves in our writing and making characters who don’t all sound like the author. In this one, we talked about how to not repeat ourselves in ways that make the reader feel like they’re getting the same old same old.
As usual, the guys had some great insights. Check it out: How to Not Repeat Yourself.
National Geographic ran an article in the March issue titled “Wolf Wars.” It has a great interactive map. You’ll want to read the whole article, but I want you to look at something.
First, here’s a picture of a wolf in Yellowstone licking his or her chops over a recent elk kill. Looks real friendly, doesn’t it. Here, poochie, poochie, poochie.
A few facts. Wolves can grow up to six feet long (tip of nose to tip of tail) and three feet tall. They weigh on average about 80 pounds but can be as heavy as 150-190 pounds. Wolves can reach 40 mph when chasing, but the use their stamina more than speed. Regardless of how they catch you, their jaws are strong enough to crush bones. You want more facts? Go to this wiki article on canis lupis. The point is that they are large, smart predators. At the top of the food chain. These aren’t little doggies. They’re killers. And they are mighty hard to socialize with humans (read the wiki article).
Of course, it can be done. Not far away in Heber City, Utah lives Doug and Lynne Seus (yes, that’s the name–gotta love it!) who train wild animals for movies. The company is called Rocky Mountain Wasatch Wildlife. I know you’ve seen one of their animal “actors,” Bart the bear, in many movies. The Seuses also happen to train wolves. A friend of mine grew up in Heber with the daughter of Doug and Lynne. She visits from time to time. Last summer she went down and saw the wolves. My friend was told that she had to carry any children she might bring.
Why?
Because the children are food. That’s why. And when she went out there, the wolves were tracking those children every minute with their eyes. Freaked her out. In fact, another friend got so freaked she took her kid back to the main house and didn’t come out again. Folks, these are wolves that work with humans ALL THE TIME.
I know the nature programs often make it seem like wolves are harmless, but they’re predators. Just like grizzlies, tigers, or crocodiles. Wolves are dangerous. A pack kills up to two elk a week. That’s a lot of eating. But they’re all up in Yellowstone, right?
Um, no.
Holy schnitzel!
If you didn’t read it above, they’re estimating about 1,645 wolves in 217 packs. And that’s just the ones that have been officially documented. You know there are more out there that haven’t been seen. Look at the one all the way out by Casper, WY. Those bad boys can travel. In fact, the NG article says that wolves stake out a territory of about 200 to 500 square miles (a circle of that size has a radius of 8 to 13 miles). They travel on average (AVERAGE!) 60 miles from their pack when seeking a mate or new pack. Although one was recorded traveling 500 miles.
Okay, so given the maps and sightings above, how is the John Brown family doing down in Laketown?
The map below marks Laketown, UT with an A. I marked over that the packs shown in NG in red and others reported in pink. I also show orange rings 20 miles apart.
The “unofficial” sighting just inside the 80 mile ring was by my brother-in-law. The wolves were killing a bunch of his neighbor’s ewes he was taking care of. I didn’t say “eating” because they were killing far too many to eat. Wolves looked up at brother-in-law on four-wheeler. Assessed him. No whimpering, no cowering, no doggie wagging of tails. Just a frank assessment–human, danger or lunch? Said wolves sent a herd of the willies galloping up brother-in-law’s back. Freaked him out. He high-tailed it out of there and called the Feds who found that pack and killed them about fifteen miles away. But that sighting was before 2003. The sighting just outside the 100 mile mark was by some neighbors around 2007. The sighting down by Manila, UT was reported in a news report by KSL news in 2008, just two years ago.
Okay, so I think it’s pretty safe to say that we probably have wolves in our backyard. And if we don’t, they’ll be here in a year or three.
Go read “Wolf Wars” in the the National Geographic. It’s free. Then tell me how you’d feel with a few packs in your backyard. Are you all warm and comfy? Here, little doggie . . .
So I’m thinking that when the girls or I go hiking, which we do all the time, we need to carry more than a walking stick. More than a paintball gun used to scare the deer out of our garden. I know that even with all the packs shown above, I haven’t heard about wolves attacking humans, but is it wise to assume they just freak out when they see humans and all run away–“that’s a eight-year-old human girl, she will make me wear the cone of shame. I do not like the cone of shame.”
Or will it be, “Hum, possible lunch over there, let’s check it out. Ooh, look at the fat one. I bet he’s tasty.”
What do you think?
I’m very pleased to announce that Podium Publishing, the folks producing the audio versions of the Dark God books, has cast Alex Wyndham as the narrator for the Dark God series. Production is scheduled to take place in March and April.
Wyndham is an actor from the UK who has played television and film roles and narrated a number of audio books. Wyndham is the real deal. Just give the samples below a listen.
You can listen to other samples on Audible by clicking on his name or by going to his Bee Audio profile.
Folks, I cannot wait to see what he does with the books.
The Dark God is rising…
And now for something for your typesetting hearts.
You know what orphans are–A short line appearing at the bottom of a page. Sometimes the first line of paragraph appearing at the bottom of a page.
You know what widows are–A short, paragraph-ending line appearing at the top of a page.
But what’s the last word or part of a word of a paragraph stranded by itself on a line?
I went to the store, looking for
Paul.
I could never find an answer. Some called it an orphan as well.
But David Blatner revealed the name in the comments of his post What Are Your Favorite Word and Character Space Settings for H&Js?
He actually coined the term years ago when he couldn’t find a name, and I love what he came up with and am going to use it forever.
He calls them “runts.”
Ha!
BTW, those settings he mentions in that article are awesome. Drastically reduced weird hyphens, which reduced time formatting.
Furthermore, I noticed something in the big time author Stuart Woods volume I happen to be reading. And then I checked it against a James Patterson and a Lee Child.
1) They don’t care about most runts. As Blatner said, there’s a runt zone, but the zone where they control for runts appears to be less than 5 characters if that includes the end punctuation.
For example, I just opened a random page of the Woods book and see the following runts:
a) results.”
b) entry.”
I flipped to another page and saw:
a) said.
b) trunk.
c) them.
And the thing is that I DIDN’T notice them in the least while I was reading. Only when I started looking for them.
Of course, there were no runts that were smaller than those. Nothing like “tie.” or “do.” or “for.”
2) They don’t control for orphans either.
3) They DO control for widows. However, when you’re not controlling for orphans and most runts, controlling for widows is easy. And sometimes the control is just to increase the tracking just a tiny bit to make it span the whole line.
I spent a number of hours on Saturday formatting my book only to find when I finished that I had set the leading at 18pt instead of 16pt. That meant I had to reformat the whole bleeping thing.
But I adopted the Big Boy rule, allowing all runts that end at or beyond the first line indent of the paragraph. I ignored orphans. And I controlled for widows. And it took me a fraction of the time and still looks great.
Here’s to runts and orphans!
For those who missed the live show, you can find the recording of the Dungeon Crawlers Radio interview here or you can find a link on the DCR site. I had a great time with Malak, Revan, and Joe. Talked about the current and upcoming series and some other stuff.
I finished two chpaters this week. I’m quite a bit behind my stretch schedule which has me finishing the beginning of August although not too far behind my my conservative schedule which has me finishing the end of September. A few more weeks and we’ll see if I’m giong to meet the stretch schedule.
A lot of these first seven chapters are the same scenes as from before. Well, the same idea. But because enough has changed in the situations and because I’m writing some of the scenes from different points of view I have to rewrite them. So while I hope to catch up with some copy and paste from the last draft, I just am unable to do that here.
I thought I’d share one of my key methods for writing scenes. Here’s what I’ve found: when I can visualize the scene, it’s fairly easy to tell the reader what’s going on and to structure it in a way that achieves my purposes. When I can’t visualize it, I have nothing to tell. So for me the first thing I have to do is to see what’s going on. Then I can report as if I were there. Or if it’s from a more deep point of view penetration, I can report from my character’s eyes.
So the sequence is to visualize (do the things that help me get that visual, feel, sound, etc.) then report in a way that will transport the reader and present the things I feel I need to present because they’re cool or because I want to generate a specific effect.
This is why I use the sketch/draft method. I sketch things out to get an idea of what’s going on first. Sure, I’ll discover details as I write. I’ll sometimes realize my first idea was off or wrong or won’t work. But if I don’t have an idea in the first place, I simply can’t write. It’s all a blank screen. One of the biggest causes of writer’s block is simply a lack of invention–of not having anything to write about because nothing’s in the mind of the writer.
First have something to say. Then say it.
Of course, you have to come up with the scenes in your mind before you have something to say. That takes some exploratory drafting, sketching, creative Q&A. You can see Orson Card doing some takes here in his writing lesson “Beginnings“, trying to help flesh it out in his mind.
The main tool I use to sketch is the summary–a bullet point or chapter outline like a posted about last week. However, sometimes it’s not enough. Sometimes I need an actual map to block out who does what and where. This week, for example, I was writing about Sugar coming into a village. She needed to enter then encounter some dead bodies. I spent something like 45 minutes typing hardly anything and then realized-duh!-I don’t know what’s going on, where she’s going, why. I can’t see this place at all. I needed helping visualizing it first, not in super detail, but enough so I could report.
So I took five minutes to sketch a simple map of the village, where she was when she entered, and where she was going, what was likely in the yards, the fences, etc. Once I saw it, I could then report, just tell what I saw as plainly as I could to the reader. I know these scenes fairly well, this being the FOURTH FREAKING DRAFT of this novel. And yet I’ve had to do some drawing for two scenes so far (the other drawing was for an ambush that wasn’t in the last draft). Because again, things had changed. And I had to see it before I could report it.
Other tools that help me visualize and hear are actual photographs of things or people. Or audio of people’s voices. I was struggling getting a character in my mind for my short story LOOSE IN THE WIRES. I was listening at the time to Susan Grafton’s O IS FOR OUTLAW and when the actor performed this one character, suddenly I HEARD it. Boom, the guy came alive in my mind. Once alive there it was relatively easy to put him down on paper. Again, I was just relaying it to the reader.
So I believe that what a writer must do is bring the situation to life in his or her mind first. It won’t be everything in exact detail. There’s a lot to be discovered in the writing. But it will be enough that it will feel like you’re simply telling something you saw or experienced.
While writing, of course, I have objectives for my scenes. Sometimes I’ll do exploratory drafts, not having any goal except to see what happens and invent something cool. But that’s usually in my pre-draft stage. At this point I have a rough idea of where the story is going to go. I’ve already done a lot of the inventing. Now I have to translate it to scenes. And so I find having a quick list of objectives for the scene, along with my brief summary of what I’m expecting to happen, helps me visualize as well.
Here are two examples of what a list of scene goals might look like for me. These were for two scenes in draft 3 of CURSE.
Example 1:
- This is the time for her to make her HEROIC CHOICE. I want a heroic moment.
- Terror of Legs being lost
- Legs seeing her for the first time the next morning—he IS going to experiment because Urban is gone. Does he give something to her, his weave, twisted—Flax helped me.
- Some tenderness
- Last time with Mistress until the final battle
Example 2:
- Skir battle coolness. Need some surprises
- Ayten dragging off souls
- Sees it below on the ship
- Seafire
- What cool skir thing could there be?
- Whirlwind
- What would happen if a skir dived?
- Some missiles, stones in the wind
- First sight of that. She ship has slingers etc.
- Sugar having to choose to leave people, see the beginnings of harvest
- Oh Crap moment at end—this is going to be bad
- This is the setup for the next scene where She and Urban are spying and after the assessment, he says, we need to go. And she’s in indecision, and he says I will wait until, and then I will leave.
They’re fairly simple. Of course, I have other goals in mind that I don’t need to write down–“start and end with a hook,” or a rest, depending. “Transport the reader might be another,” meaning make sure I use what I know about presenting details. Another might be “bring the character on in an interesting way.” And because I generally know the big picture of what’s going to happen, I can focus on these other details as I write.
Research is also a monster method for visualizing and for zing. I can’t tell you how much it has helped me in the past and on my current projects. In the thriller I’m working on where the main character is ex Special Forces, I could barely visualize anything. Some I’m reading books about it and talking to people who are in Special Forces and watching films about it. There’s no way I could build a story I cared about and believed in without research. I’m going to be doing a ride along with a cop, visit our state prison, and maybe talk to some ex-cons for this as well.
Tim Powers came to the Writer’s of the Future workshop I attended many years ago. He talked about many things. But research was one of them. In fact, one of the idea generating methods discussed in the workshop, one on which Hubbard himself had written a fine article that we read called “Search for Research” (click the Next or Continued link at the bottom to continue through all the pages of the essay), was about the power of research. So Powers recently did an interview about the latest Johnny Depp Pirates release , which is inspired by his book of the same title (which I read and loved), and restated what he did so many years ago:
Q: What inspired you to write On Stranger Tides?
A: I was already hooked into using real historical places for settings. And so I thought, you know you loved Treasure Island…And I thought I bet you can set a nice fantasy story in among the pirates, Black Beard, that crowd. So I read a million books (that is probably fifteen books) about that particular crowd of pirates that were in the Caribbean in 1718 like Stede Bonnet, Black Beard, and Anne Bonny.What I always do when I’m writing a book is first I read all the history and biographies and things like that that I can find. And I look for stuff that’s too cool not to use. ‘Ooh that’s neat. Look at that. I like that.’ And I’ll write it down. And then I’ll find something else and say, ‘Oh wow this is great. You got to have a scene happening in this place. Oh you gotta use this guy.’ Eventually, I’ll have twenty or thirty things that are too cool not to use. And it’s kind of fun then because you say, ‘Well okay, here’s twenty or thirty parts of your book. You just have to connect the dots.’ And so I thought, ‘Ok, what was Black Beard really up to?’
So to sum up.
A couple of updates.
First, the narrator for Bad Penny contacted me today, told me how much he enjoyed narrating the book, that it’s in post production and the audio should be done next week. I can’t wait.
Next, I’m progressing on The Drovers. Next scene up is a night time battle with a korrog. It’s going to be a blast.
Finally, I just got out of my ankle boot for a surgery I had a few weeks ago. It’s time to go back to lifting weights. I’ve also read an interesting book called The Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung. I’ve been testing it out, and the results so far are positive. More on that later.
