Alan Peterson runs the Meet the Thriller Author podcast. He recently met with me to get my advice for new writers. The interview is now up on his site. After that, you’ll want to listen to some of the others. He’s talked to some great authors.
The last slot was filled just a few minutes ago, almost exactly 2 days after the announcement. Ten hardy souls have joined me for this journey. The goal is to finish 10 novels that are crackling with zing. I’ll report progress as we go. But now it’s heads down again because I’ve got my own novel to finish.
I received the proof of SERVANT from CreateSpace today. Folks, it is georgeous. Inside and out. The cover, title page, Isaac Stewart’s map, headers, front and back matter, chapter titles, the poems. I’m so pleased.
Most readers will look at it and say, hey, looks like another book. But that’s the point. The interior is designed to give a great reading experience and fade into the background, letting the story come to the fore. The cover is meant to grab and give the feel. I think both do their job splendidly.
Of course, you know what this means, don’t you?
It means that next week we will have a new release day with the new release discount pricing. You may wonder why I don’t just do it now. The answer is that there are some copy edits that need to be made. Things you never catch until you see the story in book form. That’s why you always get a proof. As soon as we’ve made those updates, I’ll announce the sale.
Mr. Edward Bear (pseudonym) shared an awesome secret for sussing out quote issues in a previous post. He’s back with a nifty way to help spot spelling issues. It helped me spot a number of inconsistencies in Bad Penny, which I recently fixed. Take it away, Mr. Bear.
* * * *
Last time, I mentioned checking spelling and spelling consistency, and this note is to fulfill my promise.
To begin with, I’ll admit freely I do not recommend just running a spieling chucker over the text. And yes, I’m using the phrase deliberately. The spelling checker in the program I’m using to write this just waltzed right past it, despite the fact that neither word makes sense in this context. I got started trying to get some mileage out of spelling checkers a while back, when I realized that OCR scanners will work like hell trying to find a word and probably will come up with a word, but it will be the wrong word. Over at Project Gutenberg, they use the term “scanos” as an analogue of “typos.”
The other adversary is consistency of spelling and usage. Examples might include “canceled” and “cancelled” or variant possessives, such as “Jones’” and “Jones’s” in the same text, or simply variant spellings of the same character’s name, such as “Erik” and “Eric.”
So what do I do for these sorts of problems?
What you need is a list of all the unique words in the story, and it’s easy with a dollop of regex. (See the first post on this topic. The one I’ve taken to using is the following:
[^-‘‘’\w\d\r\n]
This one I can explain, since I wrote it. 🙂
What it says is to look for any individual characters within the brackets([]). The leading caret (^) says “Nope, they should not be in this list.” Following that are the hyphen(-), the straight quote(‘), and the opening and closing curly single quotes(‘’). After that, it’s any character that would normally be in a word (\w), any digit (\d), any carriage return(\r) or any new line aka paragraph terminator (\n).
And what you do with the above is to set Textpad (see previous post again) to replace all of them with a newline (\n) character.
Here’s what the search and replace box in Textpad looks like for this:
Notice that the “Regular expression” box is checked. And then you choose “Replace All”.
The result is to turn this:
Once upon a night we’ll wake to the carnival of life
The beauty of this ride ahead such an incredible high
It’s hard to light a candle, easy to curse the dark instead
This moment the dawn of humanity
The last ride of the day
into this:
Once
upon
a
night
we’ll
wake
to
the
carnival
of
life
The
beauty
of
this
ride
ahead
such
an
incredible
high
It’s
hard
to
light
a
candle
easy
to
curse
the
dark
instead
This
moment
the
dawn
of
humanity
The
last
ride
of
the
day
For a book, this means what you have as a multi-thousand line long document and LOTS of repeated words. The next step is to lose the repetitions by sorting the list. For TextPad, you’ll find Tools->Sort on the menu bar, and I generally set the sort up as the following:
This is a case-sensitive sort and “Delete duplicate lines”, of course, gets rid of all the duplications of words like “a”, “an”, and “the”.
For the above text, you get:
It’s
Once
The
This
a
ahead
an
beauty
candle
carnival
curse
dark
dawn
day
easy
hard
high
humanity
incredible
instead
last
life
light
moment
night
of
ride
such
the
this
to
upon
wake
we’ll
34 unique words.
And here’s the payoff for all this funky text munging: Run a spelling checker over this, and it will find typos, of course, but it will also generally complain about most names, which aren’t generally kept in spelling checker dictionaries, and it will also show you words and their variants, nestled fairly closely together. Here’s an example from one of my projects:
Swiss-born
Take
Talking
Tallmadge
Tallmadge’s
Tarelton
Tarleton
Tarleton’s
Tavern
Tecumseh
Tell
Ten
Thames
The spelling checker landed on Tallmadge and its possessive form, but do you notice the “Tarelton” on the list? That’s the time for the Aha!, and you can fix the “Tarelton” form. The same thing applies to possessive variants and any other variant form you find.
As with the last post, I’ll be peeking in on the comments and answering any questions that come up.
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.
I’ve just learned that Kroger Food has decided to carry Servant of a Dark God on a trial basis in its Utah Smith’s grocery stores. If it sells well, they will take it nation wide.
Folks, this is a BIG opportunity for SERVANT. To put this in perspective, Barnes & Noble, the biggest book retailer in the nation, currently operates 775 retail bookstores. For first time novelists in my genre, they usually stock 2-6 copies of a hard back book. (BTW, if after eight weeks the book has sold decently, they will model the book for the store which means when they sell out, they order some more. Other books that aren’t modeled are not reordered or are sent back to the publisher.) Kroger, on the other hand, operates 2,500 + grocery stores with book sections in them. That’s more than three times the size of B&N! That gives so many more readers the chance to preview the book. Heck, to even know it exists.
If you know someone in Utah who was thinking of buying SERVANT, let them know now’s a good time to get it at Smith’s. My fingers are crossed.
Also, if you spot the books while shopping at your local Smith’s, please let me know. I’d like to know how widely they’ve been distributed.
I was saddened today to learn that Dave Wolverton, best known by his pen name David Farland, passed away this week.
Dave was such an incredibly helpful mentor to me. It was the workshop he held at BYU back in 1993 that made me think I could actually write stories that entertained people. It was that workshop that prompted me to start submitting to the magazines.
And when I finally got my first publication, he was involved. He was the initial judge for Writers of the Future when my story won a first prize. And he was there, helping lead the writer’s workshop in Cocoa Beach, Florida and cheering all of us on.
Later, when I started writing novels, it was his thoughtful feedback that helped me improve my second novel to a publishable level. He believed in it enough to write a recommendation for me to Tor Books. When they decided to publish me, it was Dave that agreed to take me on tour with him. I enjoyed hours and hours driving with him, chatting, laughing, and signing at bookstores in Washington, Oregon, and California.
He was always interested. Always friendly. Always willing to talk and share his expertise. And always had great stories to share about his life.
As an entertainer, his stories thrilled me. In college, I was swept away by SERPENT CATCH, PATH OF THE HERO, ON MY WAY TO PARADISE, and THE GOLDEN QUEEN trilogy. My wife and I had so many delightful hours reading that trilogy to each other.
I still remember going to the bookstore in Pleasanton, California in 1998, hoping to get a copy of RUNELORDS when it was first published, being so excited when I found it on the self, opening it, and reading the first pages. They completely enthralled me. Blew me away. I felt like I was in the cinema. I loved that series and was always waiting for the final book.
I loved Dave’s stories. I appreciated so much his many kindnesses to me and his good humor.
May you rest in paradise, my friend, until the trumpet sounds.
