And Lydia Loretta Stark Was Dead. Again.

November 16, 2007 — Pat Bertram

 Court TV and Gather.com are searching for the next great crime writer.

My novel, More Deaths Than One, is not a detective story, and it certainly is not a cozy mystery, but it is the story of a crime: identity theft. This theft is an actual theft of a man’s identity, not a paper one.

When Bob Stark returns home after spending eighteen years in Southeast Asia, he discovers that his mother Lydia Loretta Stark is dead again. When he attends her second funeral, he sees his brother, his college girlfriend, and . . . himself. Accompanied by a baffling young woman, he sets out to discover the truth.

I am not asking you to vote for me; I am begging you. There are a lot of great entries in the contest, and I need every vote I can. (A vote is a rating of 10 stars; nothing less counts.)

Thank you.

You can find my entry here:

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977138910

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Seeing the Story World Through the Eyes of Our Character

November 15, 2007 — Pat Bertram

Our characters are more than just the creatures of our story world, they are the lens through which readers see into that world. It is possible to tell a story without using this lens, but the resulting story world can be gray and lifeless. Characters interacting with that world and each other give it color, make it seem more real.

I learned this the hard way.

I had a character who supposed to appear to be an insignificant little man though he was rich, had a couple of influential friends, and once was a secret agent. Despite several rewritings, I could not make him come alive. He was dull and boring rather than the mysterious character I wanted him to be, and even when the information about him unfolded during the course of the novel, it too was uninteresting. No matter what I did, I could not make him or his past three-dimensional.

In desperation, I created a love interest for him. (It seems like an obvious solution, but originally I wanted him to be a loner.) When I began to see him through her eyes and her amazement, all of a sudden he burst into full color.

Using one character’s viewpoint to show another character also allows us to be enigmatic when it comes to characterization. If we as the author/narrator were to describe a character as being kind, he must be so; if another character describes him as being kind, he might be kind, but he also might be kind only to her and mean to everyone else, or he might be abusive to her and she interprets it as being kind because she is not used to having anyone pay attention to her. While learning about him through her eyes, we also learn about her.

In this same way, when we see the story world as the character sees it rather than how we as the creator of the world envisioned it, the scenery comes alive. The day might be bleak, but if the character sees this bleakness and thinks what a wonderful day it is, we learn about the weather, and we learn about her.

And we make the story world come alive for readers. We make readers a part of the story because they identify with the characters. They see the world through the characters’ eyes.

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Writing Suspense: More is More

November 14, 2007 — Pat Bertram

Suspense is a hard thing for most authors to write. They don’t want to give away the story too soon, yet if they don’t tell enough, they will bore us readers. We need to know where the author is going, we need enough clues to be able to participate in the journey, and we need a stake in the outcome. If a character agonizes for pages about a decision she has to make without us knowing what the problem is, we won’t care. We will skip ahead or, even worse from the author’s viewpoint, toss the book aside.

For example, while getting dressed for an appointment that she’s dreading, a character is dropping things out of nervousness and arguing with herself or another character about keeping the appointment. We might have empathy with her indecision, might even wonder what’s going on, but there is no real suspense because we have no stake in the matter.

If we find out she’s getting ready to go to the doctor to learn the results of some tests, the suspense is a little greater, and we have a little more empathy, but the scenario is still not detailed enough to build tension.

If we find out she has uterine cancer and needs to meet with the physician to decide on a course of treatment, that raises the stakes for both the character and the reader. And the tension level rises.

But if we find out that her mother died an agonizing death even after undergoing years of treatment for uterine cancer, and she is trying to decide whether she is willing to undergo the same treatment or whether she would rather live out the remainder of her days the best way she can, then the author has created real tension, and we care. We wonder what she will do, what we would do in her place, how we would feel if we had to make the same decision. It gives us a personal stake in the outcome, and we keep reading to find out what she is going to do.

As an added bonus, we get to know her better and can empathize with her even if we don’t agree with her final decision.

So, by not withholding story points, the author can create tension, develop a character, and please us readers. Not a bad day’s work.

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Writing is About the Choices We Make

November 13, 2007 — Pat Bertram

When we choose to write, we are faced with a universe of choices where all things are possible. Many would-be writers never put a single word on the page because the number of choices to be made seem insurmountable. First, we have to choose what to write about. The topic can be anything: love, abuse, super novas. Next we have to choose how to present the topic. As fiction or nonfiction? As a blog? A poem? A short story? A novel? 

By making these decisions, we begin to limit our universe of choices. A blog has certain criteria to be met; it must be brief and interesting or we run the risk of losing our readers. A short story can contain complex ideas, but a novel has the scope for us to develop those ideas more fully.

Suppose we choose to present the topic as a novel. Now there are more choices to be made. How are we going to write it? First person or third? Sassy, sarcastic, serious? Who is going to be the main character? What does she most desire? Who or what is stopping her from fulfilling this desire? What does she look and act like? What are her internal traits, both her admirable ones and less admirable ones? Who are her allies? Who are her mentors? 

And those choices lead to other choices. What does the character need? (As opposed to what she wants.) Is she going to get what she wants or is she going to get what she needs? For example, maybe she wants to be a homebody, to marry the boy next door, but what she and the story need are for her to become a senator and possibly leave the boy behind.

And so the choices continue, each choice narrowing the story’s universe a bit more.

Some writers love the choosing, the creating, but I love when the weight of those choices become so great that the answer to all future choices can be found in past ones. The character might need to fight off an attacker, and when we try to choose between success and failure, we realize there can be only one outcome. Because of who she is and what she has done, she cannot succeed. To succeed might mean to kill, and she cannot kill anyone even to save her own life.

When the story gets to the point where it seems to make its own choices, it takes on a feeling of inexorability, as if there was always only one way to tell the story.

But, in the end as in the beginning, writing is about the choices we make.   

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To Prologue or Not to Prologue

November 12, 2007 — Pat Bertram

I am not a fan of prologues.  Some writers have the appalling habit of augmenting a poor beginning with a prologue that is not really a prologue but a more of an interlogue, a section taken from the middle of the book. While this might create suspense and keep us reading through a less than stellar beginning, it is not really necessary to the story since the material is a duplication, and we feel duped when we reread it during the course of the book.

I don’t even have much use for true prologues, which present events that happen before the story begins. If the material is important, it should be included in the body of the work.  

Despite that, I used a prologue in Light Bringer.

In a previous post, I spoke of my comma usage in the work. I suppose I could go through and rethink all the commas, but in the end I’m not sure it’s worth it; a publisher who also has a prejudice against prologues might want me to get rid of the entire piece. It is a true prologue in that the events take place thirty-five years before the present day action, but it has a major fault: I introduce a character who does not appear again in person, only as the subject of conversation. Since I do the same thing in the first chapter, I could be creating confusion about whose story this is.

While rewriting the book, I considered getting rid of the prologue but I kept it for three reasons: I wanted readers to experience for themselves the events that precipitated the story,  it was the way I originally conceived it, and I loved the image of tiny footprints in the snow. The prologue might seem like a darling, a word used by William Faulkner to describe the parts we love but that have no real function in the story, and maybe it is. But Light Bringer is my work, my creation, and until I find a publisher, I can do whatever I want with it.

And right now, I want the prologue.

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Conflict: Desire Thwarted

November 8, 2007 — Pat Bertram

Someone googled “How do you determine the conflict in a story” and ended up at my blog. Although I have written about conflict before, I had not addressed that particular issue; I wasn’t even sure I could come up with a simple answer if I had to. Then I realized that to determine the conflict, first we have to know what conflict is. In a story, conflict is desire meeting resistance.

Many authors, professional and amateur, confuse bickering with conflict, but unless there is an element of desire, such as one of the characters wanting information that the other doesn’t want to give, then there is no conflict, merely disagreement. I made that mistake in Light Bringer. I had a lot of historical information I needed to impart, so I had a group of people arguing about it in the hope that it would seem more immediate, but since there was no desire, except the relative low tension one of the characters wanting to be heard, it came across as bickering. I kept the section because it was a more interesting way of presenting the material than a lecture, and it did show the personalities of the characters, but there was not the immediacy conflict would have brought to the piece.

In a novel, there are many conflicts.  Characters can be in conflict with each other, they can be in conflict with the environment, they can be in conflict with themselves. As disparate as these conflicts seem, in essence they are the same. Characters wants something and someone or something is preventing them from getting it. The greater the forces keeping the characters from fulfilling their desires, the greater the conflict, and hence the greater the tension. Time constraints add urgency to a conflict, and become a source for conflict themselves, as when one character needs (desires) to rescue another before a bomb goes off.

So, to determine the conflict, figure out what the characters want and who or what is keeping them from getting it. It’s as simple as that.

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What Kind of Book is This?

November 7, 2007 — Pat Bertram

 In 1977, Elmore Leonard wrote Touch, a story about a stigmatic healer. Even though he’d already developed a name for himself, he received more than a dozen rejection letters. His publishers finally accepted the book in 1978, but were not very enthusiastic about it and kept postponing publication. In 1982 Leonard took back his rights, and five years later he found another publisher for the work.

In the introduction to the book, Leonard wrote: “If the author isn’t well known, or if the publisher isn’t able to label the book, place it in a recognized genre, he’s got a marketing problem, or so they tell me. It seemed easier in the past to try to sell me as some distinguished though deceased writer’s second coming rather than simply as me. But Touch refused even to be categorized.”

Many of us trying to be published have the same problem: we simply wrote our books as they demanded to be written, and they do not fit into a recognized category. As one editor wrote me when rejecting Light Bringer: “It is a very original concept and the writing is good, but I’m not sure where on the shelves this story would appear. Is it science fiction? Thriller? What?”

I thought I had answered that question when I called it a psychological thriller. It’s not really thrilling since there are no chases, no fights, no violence, but it is psychological in that the story is about a search for identity.

I suppose the alien baby and the bug man make it seem like science fiction, but no science fiction fan would recognize it as such. It takes place is today’s world, and if it weren’t for those two little oddities, the work would be considered a psychological thriller, or a mystery, or perhaps historical fiction if one accepts as true the Sumerian’s belief in a twelfth major heavenly body in our solar system.

Although I do understand that it’s important to know where on a bookstore’s shelves a book would fit, I do not see it as a reason not to publish it. Listed in blog categories is one called “uncategorized.” Why can’t there be a similar noncategory for books?

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On Writing: Telling and Showing

November 6, 2007 — Pat Bertram

Like many new writers, I have a hard time with “show, don’t tell,” but today I came across a graphic example of the difference between the two.

I was reading an article in a sports magazine about a baseball player who was an all around good guy. He was honest, had integrity, was kind, was raised right by his parents. This “telling” of his virtues continued for page after page without once “showing” us an example of his honesty, integrity, etc.

At the very end of the article, though, the writer finally showed us who the athlete really is. After receiving a $400,000 signing bonus, this very fine, honest, upright athlete went to Wal-Mart and bought the furnishings for his apartment. He kept the receipts (taped them to the merchandise so he wouldn’t lose them) and returned the used products in ninety days.

If the article had been about screwing Wal-Mart (or rather the Wal-Mart customers who would have bought the used merchandise thinking it was new) then this example would have fit. If the article had been about the athlete’s frugal ways, then the example would also have fit. But in a story about a person of integrity? No.

One of the lessons I gleaned from this is that if I am going to tell, don’t show. What I might think is a good example, readers might not, and I run the risk of alienating them.

The other lesson I learned is that I shouldn’t try to foist my feelings for a character’s action on readers by telling about the action. I need to simply show the action and let the readers decide how it makes them feel about the character.

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Describing a Scene in an Interesting Way

November 5, 2007 — Pat Bertram

One of the search engine terms somebody used to find my blog was “Describe a Scene in an Interesting Way,” and I thought it would be a great subject for today’s post.

The trap even the most successful writers fall into when describing a scene is to simply list the objects in a room or landscape, and a few adjectives thrown about for color or texture do not make the description any more interesting. Writers often cheat by pretending to see the scene through the character’s eyes, but it still comes down to being nothing more than a list.

We are not children padding our flimsy essays with adjectives and adverbs. We are adults who know that the number of words seattlein a story mean nothing; it’s only what the words mean that counts. And in description, those words must count twice: to give us a feel for the setting, and to give us a feel for the character.

Description by its very nature is static; we need to find ways to make it flow with the story. One way is to have the character interact with the setting: to sit in a mahogany armchair with a faded green cushion; to hear the deep notes of the grandfather clock in the corner; to feel the texture of the oriental carpet underfoot, to smell the old leather bindings of the books. Without ever stepping away from the character, we know what the room looks like, including the parts that were not described.

Another way to describe a scene is to pick one significant item and describe it. Perhaps the dusty lace curtains, or the stains on the ceiling where the roof leaked. Even better would be to show what the curtains or stains mean to the character.

We can also describe a scene by showing contrasts. Yellow is brighter when it is next to purple than when it is next to green. Green is brighter next to red than it is to blue. The color combination with the strongest visual impact is black on yellow. I’m not suggesting that we use color in such a way; these are merely examples of how one thing looks different when it is next to something else. Those dusty lace curtains may be in an otherwise spotless room. Or they might be scrupulously clean in a dusty room. Either way, it says more about the character than just describing the curtains or the room.

Describing scenes by sound rather than sight can give the scene movement. We do not perceive sound as being static. A train whistle in the distance is not always the same pitch, is not always the same volume. Even taste seems more dynamic than sight; for example, the taste of the smoky air on a winter day. And smell is the most evocative of all the senses; perhaps the smell of lilacs makes one think of grandmother’s house.

However we decide to describe our scenes, we need to keep our characters in mind. They and their problems are the story. The scenes need to reflect this, to be a part of it.

When we get to the point where we can suggest our character’s inner conflicts by the way we describe the scene, we will be on our way to mastering our craft.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Follow Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

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He Said/She Said: Speaker Attributes

November 4, 2007 — Pat Bertram

For my study of bestselling authors, I have switched from a romance novelist to a thriller writer. Thrillers are more my style, so I expected to enjoy myself, but it’s not happening. In his own way, the author of the thriller is as terrible a writer as the author of the romances, which doesn’t say much for the taste of the people who buy these books.

Perhaps I’m too fussy now that I have a basic knowledge of the craft, but some elements cry out for commentary, such as his speaker attributes.

His characters never just said something. They agreed, cautioned, reminded, mimicked, answered, contributed, guessed, explained, responded, admonished, confessed, encouraged, clarified, blurted, pointed, winced, replied, corrected, acknowledged, returned, laughed, challenged, chided, objected, contested, quipped, offered, moaned, complained, repeated, stammered, pleaded, inquired, mumbled, interrupted, confirmed, addressed, countered, advised, completed, allowed, supplied, ordered, asked, continued, chided, answered, whispered, teased, requested, hollered, echoed, declared, informed, spoke, bellowed, spit out, thundered, hissed. All within a few pages. Whew!

The best speaker attribute, as we all know, is the word “said.” Like “the,” our brains barely register it, so it doesn’t yank us out of the story world. But the few times this thriller writer used “said,” he ruined it with an adverb. A professional, he should know that the only time to use an adverb with “said” is when the character’s words are at odds with his mood, such as: “I had a great time,” he said sadly.

In many cases, the writer would have been better leaving off the speaker attributes entirely, particularly when the dialogue was between two characters. It’s not difficult for a reader to figure out which character is talking when there are only two of them. And, to remind us who is talking, all the writer would have had to do was in insert an occasional beat.

Beats, those small actions that accompany a character’s dialogue, help set the stage, tell us about the character’s personality, and vary the rhythmn of the dialogue. Overdone, the beats are as distracting as any other speaker attribute, so the secret is to pay attention to the flow. Do you want short snappy dialogue? Don’t use beats. Do you want to slow things down a bit, keep the dialogue from seeming too disembodied? Use a few beats.

If the thriller writer had followed these simple rules, his work would have been much more enjoyable for me. But I guess I shouldn’t complain. He did give me a topic for today’s post.

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