Lady Dae Writes: creative writing

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Editing: When is Enough, Enough?

          I didn't know what I was going to talk about today as I've been preoccupied with editing my novel and editing on one of the critique forums on the internet. But it was until I saw a girl who said she was about done with her query and wanted to know which version to send out that the idea for what to write today came to me.

          I warned the writer, just like I do every writer who thinks they're done with a piece of work that while ten more people might like it, there will be at least one person who won't and except for a few revisions, she had a pretty solid query. It was much better than what she started out with, and I got a feel for her story. I thought it could get a few bites from agents. But sure enough, a few comments later someone came up with the comment that they didn't like either one, and therefore started a complete overhaul of the query again.

          I can't say it enough. If seven out of ten like it, don't worry about the other three. A writer can't satisfy everyone and a writer can't satisfy every agent. They have different opinions too.

          So when is enough enough? I've been trying to figure it out too as I go through and proofread my novel. The few published authors I communicate with online are saying that you're never truly done until your book is published on a bookshelf somewhere and you can't take it back. That's it. It's done.

          But for those of use who are at least a year or more from publication, when do we know? Well, when we starting changing things back to the way they were before, that's when you know it's time to stop.

          See, there is a fine line between under-editing and over-editing, and when you cross either line you start making sloppy mistakes or do things that don't fit. My suggestion is to pick it up and put it down no more than five or six times. That doesn't include proofreading. But our works will never be perfect and someone will always think it can be improved. So don't worry about the few that don't like it. Focus on the more that like it, if more like it.

          Think of the big names in writing. J.K. Rowling for one. Not everyone likes her book. I mean, there are seven billion people on the planet. But enough of them, definitely not the majority but enough, liked her book and bought it so that she's a billionaire now. So think of it like that.

           We'll never be able to satisfy everyone and we as writers will never be satisfied, but when we feel that we've done all we can and we can do no more because we want to revert it back, that's enough. Live with it and be done. The reader does count, but the writer does too and I think in effort to try to satisfy the readership, we writers forget that.

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The Writer and The Storyteller

Weird title for two things that seem the same but are different. But I tell people all the time that writing and storytelling are two different things and in order to be a writer or rather a novelist or fictional writer of any sort, you need both.

This thought came from a conversation I had with my mom and dad. My mom said my dad likes to talk like he’s telling stories and that’s probably why I’m a writer and novelist, while my dad said that my mother writes and knows all that grammar and made me write all the time so she was to blame.

I disagreed with them both. My mother doesn’t see much value in fiction and is just now coming around to it, while my dad doesn’t know the nuances of the English language so I said neither of them could write one right now, but my dad could probably write one easier and more interesting than my mother could.

I’d love to give you examples, but my inner storyteller and writer won’t shut off long enough for me to come up with something that is so ridiculously boring but with good writing. So alas, I’m going to do my best to explain to you what I mean about writing and storytelling.

To know how to write is that you know how to, well, writer. And though writing usually entails storytelling because you have to be able to interest and entertain a person to get them to read your story, to know how to write does not mean a person knows how to tell a story. Here’s what I mean.

Let’s take for instance that English teacher who is a stickler for proper grammar and the technicalities or writing, but sees no value in fiction or writing for entertainment because it’s easy or has no substance. So you dare that teacher to write a short story. Chances are, though her story’s grammar and technical stuff is going to be impeccable, that’s going to be one boring story.

Why? Well first, if she sees no value in fiction, chances are she hasn’t studied or read a lot of fiction to maybe pick up a particular style. Second, she probably loathes creative devices, and third, because she’s a stickler for grammar, she’s not going to count for the fact that not many people talk grammatically and perfectly correct. It just doesn’t happen. So this person’s problem is that she probably can’t weave a story. How do I know this? I’ve met people like this who degraded fiction because they were sticklers for perfect writing.

At the same time you may have that person who is excellent at telling stories, but ask him to put that stuff on paper. The biggest problem you’re going to have with that person is organization. They probably won’t know that writing a story is different than telling it. You can’t do all the side notes that are done in telling a story in writing it down, nor will anyone be able to get through it to read it because this person is likely to just throw a story down the story without rules. How do I know? I started out that way. I was able to easily write stories, and I was always able to spin a good tale (for good and for bad), but I didn’t have the technical stuff. But considering I started writing at ten, I guess I was doing the best I could.

In any case, you can’t have one without the other.

The good part is it is pretty to easy to streamline storytelling so that you’re a great solid writer and storyteller and in fact, I think that’s just a talent that you’re just either born with or not. I don’t even know if there’s a way to teach someone to tell a good story unless it’s in them to tell it. But that’s my belief. Others may think differently.

However, I won’t say that the storytelling craft can’t be learned. I had to perfect it as does everyone. But it’s either you pick it up or you don’t to me, which is like anything really. But alas, the point of this is, that everyone who knows how to write can’t write a novel and everyone who can tell a story can’t write a novel either. You need a combination of both skills in order for a person to write good fictional stories.

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I Had Finals

The title says it all. I had finals and so the last thing I want to do is write a blog post. I really am mentally drained. I tell you I write all the time, but there really is a difference between creative writing and writing college. So it's needless to say that I'm not even going to think about school in the next four weeks.

In other news though, I did purchase the domain for my writing site and though it won't be ready for months, me and my designer are tossing ideas around for it and it's a known fact among my peers that I'm a fanatic on originality. It'll come to me. My web designer will probably think I'm crazy like my sister does when I run story ideas for her, but it'll come and work itself out.

Anywho, I'm mentally drained. Sorry for the lack of a true update. Lady Dae needs to chill.

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Write What You Know

This is another term that’s thrown around and used like a bad cliché in writing. Most of us eventually figured out that we weren’t supposed to take it literally, but there are some writers new and old who still don’t know what this really means.

I’m going to put it like this. If that were literally true, J.K. Rowling wouldn’t have written Harry Potter. Of course officially, fantasy doesn’t apply to this since fantasy is not real and anything goes with that.

But write what you know pretty much means this, if you can gather enough information about it to write it convincingly so that you sound like you know what you’re talking about, you’re free to write it. The age of the internet has really changed this saying because now writers can explore different cultures without leaving their home, given that they cross reference to make sure they’re getting accurate information. But there are some things that are just off limits depending on the writer.

For instance, I won’t go into detail about anything mechanical if you paid me. Why? I don’t know anything about the technicalities of mechanics. Sure I can fix my laptop, wii, and I’m planning to fix my garbage disposer as soon as my dad goes out of town so he won’t stop me, but when it comes to engineering and anything along that nature, you’ve lost me.

That means I have no business trying to write about a mechanic whose lifelong dream is to build his own brand of car and start a car company similar to Ford, Nissan, Honda etc. Not only don’t I know anything about cars, but I’m not that business savvy on a corporate level and since I’m pretty sure I would have to get into the details of that, I wouldn’t touch it. Nor would I write anything about the stock market (I hardly understood Wall Street), or anything about military life since that’s a whole other culture judging by the conversation I had with a classmate about his experience and what that life is like.

Basically, if I have to go to school for it, apprentice under an actual pro, or get a feel of the experience in order to portray it accurately, I have no business writing it. Now the military thing is a bit different. Since I know some people who were formerly in the military, it’s as simple as asking for an interview, but even that might take a while.

However, just because those are areas I or others may need to get personal experience in to write about, doesn’t mean you need personal experience in an area to write about it. Again, I couldn’t pull it off. That doesn’t mean another writer can’t if they can grasp the idea and understand the information, which brings me to my next point.

I used to hear this saying all the time from people. “You’re too young to write. You don’t have enough experience to write a good story. You don’t know enough.” Tsh… I know fourteen year olds that can write because their skill makes up for lack of experience and knowing.

Some things I don’t need the experience in. There’s enough information circulating on the internet about some topics that writers can write it convincingly without the experience. I’m twenty and never been married a day in my life, but I can spin a romance for married and unmarried couples pretty convincingly (tell that to the person who told me I couldn’t). And I certainly don’t need to become a prostitute or addicted to drugs to portray a character who is a prostitute or addicted to drugs properly.

I know enough people, there have been enough documentaries, and I’ve read enough pamphlets and articles that I can figure a lot of situations out, not to mention writers are pretty good at figuring out the psychology of people (meaning why people act the way they act in any given situation, which depends on a number of variables that I won’t get into) being that we have to make up and characters if we want to write stories.

My point? Sometimes “write what you know” really does mean “write what you know,” but that doesn’t mean you’re limited to your mundane life of going to school, coming home, cooking dinner, writing your novel, and life in a small town after you’ve grown up in a big city (that would be mine). Anything that you can effectively grasp or learn about without having to experience it or go to school and practice for years (and that has exceptions) is “what you know,” and anything you lack in “knowing” experience-wise, a writer can make up for in skill.

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Editing Guide from Rick Moody

Editing Guide

It’s finals week, I’m pressed for time, and I have a lot to do, hence the reason I had no blog post yesterday. I have no time today either, so I decided to post this editing guide I got from and author, Rick Moody, at a writer's conference.

1) Take out unnecessary words. Omit needless words.

2) Sacrifice your modifiers. Death to adverbs and adjectives. They get in the way of good verb and noun choice.

3) Consider the rhythm (sentence structure)

4) Get out of to have and to be.

5) Simplify tenses. Pick a tense and stick to it. Past or present. Past tense is preferable.

6) Spill your parenthetical. Do you need to digress? Maybe just continue… Try it.

7) Avoid alliteration in prose. Alliteration in prose comes off as purple. Less is more.

8) Rethink abstraction

9) Use figurative language sparingly (metaphors, similes etc…) Greek rhetorical

10) Engage all five senses. (Need to work on that). Sound, smell…

11) Cut the last sentence…? Ambiguous endings that open up to possibility of something more. Endings don’t need to be tidy. No such thing.

12) Read the passage aloud. Reveals mistakes. Read aloud to someone else.

13) Put the draft away. Get rid of infatuation with your language.

14) Do the above twelve to twenty times. (I’m not doing more than five!)

15) When you revise and then change it back again, that’s enough revising

16) Four imperative types of imagination. Recombination, substitution, and intuition… (there’s one more and I have to fine it.

I'll explain it more later. Right now, I'm in a rush.

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Communications, Informing, and Creative Writing

This topic came to mind from a scholarship my parents wanted me to apply for in school. It would have been fine to do if it were summer and I didn’t have anything to do, but to be honest, it had way too many requirements for me to try to pull together at the end of the semester, but the thing that really got me was that the prompt question was, “What inspired you to get into communications?” or something along those lines and so I told my parents, “Hey! I’m an English major. What I want to do has nothing to do with communications.” And they told me it’s English, it has to do with it. It’s all the same.

Naturally, I went to ponder that and so I asked myself in majoring in English, what was my goal? That was easy. To do something related to writing, eventually becoming an editor or maybe an agent, and even though there’s a degree of communications in that, I realized my primary goal in all that was to tell a good story and find them. If their good stories, I don’t care if the reader gets a message or understands some underlying theme. That’s fine if they do, but I want them to enjoy the story.

Ultimately, I decided not to do it. But it got me to wondering the difference between the three types of writing above. So I decided, while creative writing can be informative and have a goal of communicating a message, not all creative writing has to do that. Sure there’s usually a themes running through it, but if the theme isn’t prominent, it’s not informative. So that means my YA fantasy novel may have themes of accepting responsibilities, sacrificing for the greater good, and facing your own insecurities for the sake of the security of others, but I don’t care if you get that out of it or not. I just want you to enjoy the story. On the other hand, a story written by Charles Chestnut in the eighteen hundred called The Wife of His Youth is clearly trying to get a message across about color lines and social prejudices although you may enjoy it along the way.

The difference between those two stories is that one is using creative writing to inform and communicate a message while the other's primary focus is purely for entertainment. So in the end, I asked myself, at any point do I care whether or not I’m getting some message or theme across in my novels? No. I don’t; therefore, I could have never written an honest 700-1200 word essay on why I’m interested in communications, because it doesn’t interest me.

I thought it made a good post because people like to dump writers all into one category. People think because I write, I can write anything. But the truth is that I can’t. I dib and dab, but there are many forms of writing and have my strengths and weaknesses for different types, just like all fields do. I mean, Lebron James, Tiger Woods, and Michael Vick are all athletes, but you don’t see them trying to play each other’s sport. It’s the same principal in writing.

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Editing (For Others)

This is more rant oriented, but certainly helpful. Anyway, notice this is tilted editing for others and why is that? Well, I enjoy editing for others. I edit other people’s things from time to time on forums and while I have some major pet peeves about editing in general because we writers are nitpicks, all with our own opinions on how a story should go and what the characters should do. So a writer will never satisfy everyone and that’s okay

But (Yes! Always a but!) when everyone is saying the same thing about your writing, it’s something to take heed and I honestly get tired of the know-it-all writers who think they know everything (that was a redundant by the way, but who cares. I’m ranting) and don’t want to listen to people who know what they’re talking about. I mean, I feel like a broke record sometimes. I say the same thing to writers. Start where the story begins. This long passage of explaining is an info-dump. A query is not a synopsis, therefore I don’t need to know that the three chapters before the inciting incident is about your MC in your day to day life, moving to a new city and meeting the bullies of her neighborhood who in no way shape or form propel the story forward if the story is a fantasy and the fantasy doesn’t start until chapter four, and if that does happen in your story, you need to start thinking about cutting those first three chapters because that’s the kiss of death when the agent or editor wants the first three chapters to see if you can write.

The veteran writers out there know exactly what I’m talking about. You tell the person all these things and the writer won’t listen. Then a few months later they want to come and ask what the heck they’re doing wrong because apparently none of the agents or editors want to see their work… It always takes everything in me not to say “God damn it! I told you why before you even started trying to sell the darn manuscript.”

My point in this rant? While it is up to the discretion of the writer to take advice or not, some advice, especially when it has to do with believability, structure and all that jazz, because let’s face it, sometimes we have to cut the stuff near and dear to us in order to make the novel work. So I say a 65-75 percentile is what you shoot for in range of likeability and the ok, because not everyone will like the way you writer, so don’t worry about the other 25-35 percent. But when the majority is saying, something’s wrong. I’m telling you to pay attention. Ugh! These cocky writers get on my nerve sometimes…

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In Defense of the Writer and the Fantasy

I had no intention of writing about this, but it came to mind when my sister and I were browsing the internet last night looking at silly stuff about Harry Potter and having a good laugh, when I came across this site:

God Hates Harry Potter

I know there are probably thousands of them going around, and I’m not here to debate about religion and dispute her facts. You can go read it yourself, because it’s clear whoever wrote this hasn’t read the books and only took what they heard from others. Not only that, certain passages in the book are clearly taken out of context and anyone who’s read all the book at least once can see that. And did I mention this person actually believe in black magic? That J.K. Rowling is actually trying to start some occult and gathering follower and secretly teaching them through her books with real spells and magic? I’m so rolling my eyes right now. But you can go read the article. I didn’t get on here to talk about. I did get on here to defend the writer though.

Why do writers, particularly those of fiction and fantasy, need defending? Well it’s not defending as much as it is pointing out facts. First and foremost though, to anyone who thinks fantasy writers, myself included, are trying to start an occult. I need to point out three things.

1) Fiction is Fiction

2) Fiction is Fiction

3) Most importantly, fiction is fiction

That means that:

1) Fiction’s not real

2) Fiction’s not real

3) Most importantly, fiction’s not real!

People like the ones on that site are the opposition we writers face and not just people with extreme views like this one, but a lot of people have the impression that just because we writers write about it, we believe it or we’re trying to preach or glorify something. I had to learn this when I was younger and people would ask me if my main character shared the same faith as I did. And it is this:

Writers write whatever the hell they want!

New writers remember this. I wished I had known it. It would have made my writing a lot better a lot sooner. We can’t be afraid to write about things that might stir a little controversy or get some extreme reception like the above article. Here’s the thing about fiction writers. Our, especially fantasy writers, goal is to make the fiction, the supernatural and thing that we know not to be true to appear real. So we do our research, give symbolic names and references every now and then and mix truth, myth, falsehood, and folklore to make a story. Just because my novel may have a name from pagan influence or any other background doesn’t mean that’s what I believe in. I choose the name and give it to a character who matches the name and if it isn’t the case, I redefine it. It makes for a more interesting story and is a creative writing device! It’s not glorifying anything. It’s a story. It’s not real and the elements and themes I use have nothing to do with my religious beliefs and or lack of them, and I hate when people accuse writers of believing in something, whether it be true or not. It’s fiction and anyone who has a problem with it can get over it or ignore it. There are more important things and more serious matters to worry about than wondering if fantasy writers are trying to gather followers for a cult? Really?

Besides, bad publicity is publicity and I say bring it on. What better way to get someone to read something than telling everyone they shouldn’t read it. People don’t take such ridiculous accusations on face value… well not in cases like these (people take gossip on face value all the time). They have to see for themselves. So I say call my book worshiping the devil and needing to be banned all you want. More books sales for me… once I finish editing this damn book.

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Editing: When is Enough, Enough?

The Writer and The Storyteller

I Had Finals

Write What You Know

Editing Guide from Rick Moody

Communications, Informing, and Creative Writing

Editing (For Others)

In Defense of the Writer and the Fantasy