With a title like that, I knew both cats needed to be in the picture. He was the pinkest of cats, he was the brownest of cats! Overview:
I purchased “It was the Best of Sentences, it was the Worst of Sentences” by June Casagrande a few months ago, but times are crazy and I’ve only just finished it. It’s a small paperback, 207 pages if you include the appendices, and focuses on sentence level editing. It’s $14 in the US, and often sites the Chicago Manual of Style vs the AP Style Book, so if those style books are out of your price range, this could be a handy shortcut. My Experience: Despite being all about grammar and sentence construction, it’s not a dry read. Casagrande never criticizes you for having made mistakes in the past, not does she set ironclad rules. Everything is laid out clearly, in simple language, and with explanations that made me say, “Oh, that’s why we do that?” The most mind-blowing chapter for me covered subordination. I’d never heard the term and it made so much sense! This book made me feel more power over how to construct a sentence. I highlighted a ton of it and am keeping this for years to come. If someone had told me to read this I might have laughed. I know how to write a sentence! Look at how many I’ve already written! But this was a look behind the grammar curtain about the why. How to make a sentence do exactly what you intend. I leveled up because of this book. Is It Worth It? It’s a short book, paperback, and reasonable price. It’s a great shortcut to the big style books, and is full of great information. Even if you think your skills are beyond a book about sentences, give it a chance. And have a highlighter ready. This book is absolutely worth it! Please consider buying from your local bookstore for this or any other book purchase this year. Indie bookstores are struggling, and need your support! Not sure which bookstore is near you? Try websites like Bookshop and IndieBound. Have you read this book? Did you love it too? Let’s discuss in the comments!
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This the home page for One Stop for Writers. The image on the right changes. Overview:
One Stop for Writers is a website to help writers create characters and worlds and plot their novels. It’s powered by thesauruses, like the Emotion Thesaurus that I already decided is worth the price. Overall, the website offers fifteen thesauruses—all of the published ones and several others. At One Stop, you can create many different things to help you plan your novel. The Character Builder develops a personality, emotional wound, inner and outer motivations, fear, quirks, life, and physical traits. Character’s Fear is a similar page focused only on one character’s fear and what personality traits stem from that. Character Arc Progression asks for information from the Character Builder, but also has you consider a resolution. Emotional Progression has you lists events that occur and the emotions of the character, and how you plan to show (not tell) the emotions. Setting-at-a-Glance has you describe your setting with the five senses, as well as lighting/time of day. Emotional Value of a Setting adds symbolism and forces you to consider deeper aspects of scene that will theoretically reinforce the emotions of the characters. Scene Map (informal and formal) asks you for information about what is happening in the scene. The formal version asks more questions. The Story Map is a very general plot outline with major elements listed, generates an interactive imaged with acts 1-3 or stages 1-6 indicated. The timeline is great because you can write events as they come to mind, and then drag them around in whatever order you need. Last is the Worldbuilding Survey, which can be used to create planets down to a single household and everything in between. All of those have the thesauruses built in to offer suggestions that go together. For example, you select an emotional wound, and the website suggests fears that may stem from it. There are also worksheets and templates you can download to work offline, however these lack the connection to the thesauruses. The site also offers 47 checklists and tip sheets. Checklists can help you do things like add conflict or create a good flashback. Some of the lists include positive traits or when to show not tell. Many are also tutorials for how to use the various thesauruses, although that’s not very difficult. The website has excellent how-tos, including videos and screenshots. Most of it is very user friendly. There are cost tiers to consider. There’s a 2-week free trial, which you should absolutely use if you’re thinking of paying to play. Of note, with the free trial you cannot download pdfs of what you make and can only make one item in each category. It’s easy enough to get around those issues though, since you can copy/paste from the website into word and can delete info and remake subsequent items. I’m not being sketchy by telling you this, the website creators tell you that in the how-to-use section. Otherwise the pricing is: $9 for one month, $50 for 6 months, and $90 for one year. My Experience: I used my two-week free trial to work on the concept I had for a potential NaNoWriMo project. I’ve never done heavy outlining like this site offered, and thought the structure could be useful. Of the 15 electronic thesauruses, my favorite is symbolism thesaurus, because that’s my weakest skill. A few of them, like the texture thesaurus, were not very full, and I probably could have listed all of those entries myself. I enjoyed the character builder. It worked from the emotional wound outward, so that the character’s personality came together in an organic way. The suggests from the thesauruses were great and helped to easily build a round main character. However, if you have the print thesauruses, I think they’d cover the same information, though would be slower to navigate. Some of what you can make feels redundant, for example the Character’s Fear page is already something you fill out in the Character Builder. Perhaps it’s a short version meant for side characters. I decided to test if using this website helped me write a stronger first draft of a scene. I wrote the opening scene of my NaNoWriMo project after creating two characters, completing one Worldbuilding Survey, one Emotional Value of a Scene sheet, and a Story Map. Then I took this scene to my critique group. My critique group didn’t notice a drastic change in first draft quality from my previous WIP to this scene. They also didn’t pick up on any of the additions I made using the Emotional Value of a Setting sheet. I’ll admit that may be because I was not heavy handed with those suggestions. I did six hours of prep work on One Stop for Writers, but then I wrote 1000 words in a little over 30 minutes. Is It Worth It? If you are new to plotting, want to try plotting, or want to beef up your plotting, it’s a great resource. If you already have a plotting method that you love or if you are a panster for life, this won’t be terribly beneficial for you. I love that the site offers a free trial before getting pricey, because then you know what you’re paying for. If you’re willing to copy/paste and delete/redo then you can probably do all the planning you need during your free trial. It requires a lot of time to make what you need, but if you’ve got the time to use it, it’s fun. Overall, the free trial is for sure worth it. I don’t think the one-year trial is worth the price, unless you are an insanely prolific writer and constantly planning your next novel. The one-month trial may be helpful, but six months I can’t imagine being that useful. At least you can try it for free before beginning your next project. With one week left before NaNoWriMo begins, anyone needing help plotting may want to check this out now! Have you tried One Stop for Writers? Have you used a subscription? Did you think it was worth it? Let's discuss in the comments! The first daffodils of spring. They didn't wonder if they were ready to bloom, they just did it. Photo by Kate Ota 2019. One of the hardest parts of writing with the intention to publish is knowing when your work is ready to be sent out. Whether that’s to agents, publishers, or to readers as a self-published book is up to you. Anyone about to endeavor on that journey, no matter which path, always asks the same question: is this ready? Here are some ways you can determine the answer.
You Read It Through and Only Make Minor Changes Periods, commas, a semi-colon, deleting that semi-colon, minor spelling errors. These tiny changes are a sign you’re done editing. No book is perfect, and if you’re going the traditional publishing route, many more eyes will be on this, so don’t stress that comma. If you’re self-publishing, you can consider hiring a professional copy-editor to catch anything else you don’t in this stage. You’ve Fixed Problems Noted by Your Beta Readers Especially if they only offered minor suggestions, or you decided not to take their ideas of larger changes. Once you know other people have seen it and overall enjoyed it, you can be more confident sending it out. You Can’t Think of Anything Else to Change, but You Don’t Think It’s Good Enough If you and your beta readers don’t have more ideas for how to improve the book, may I suggest it’s because there’s nothing that needs improving? This state of mind is just you not feeling confident enough in your work. Take a deep breath, tell yourself it’s great, and move forward. If traditionally publishing, your future agent or editor may have suggestions you like and incorporate—but maybe they’ll like it just the way it is. You Want to Say it's Ready, but Feel Like You Need to Keep Editing for X Amount of Time or You’re Not a “Real Writer” This is called imposter syndrome. Everyone gets it at some point, and it’s the worst. There is no standard amount of time for you to take on edits as a writer. Yes, there are some general sentiments out there, like it should probably take you more than a few days, and anything over ten years raises questions. But honestly, any timeline is fine. Got a full-time job and only write for thirty minutes at night on a good day? Gonna take you a while. Furloughed from work with no kids but also financial stability and therefore have all the time in the world to write right now? You’ll probably move faster than you expect. Don’t feel like you have to toil and lament in order to be “real.” You wrote words, therefore you’re a real writer. Published or not. Take the time you need to edit, and if you’re done, you’re done. You Secretly Know You’re Done Editing, but You’re Scared of the Next Step There is no pressure to get published. Scared to share your work? Don’t. You don’t need to publish to be happy. If you finish your edits, you can walk away from the project. If you want to be published, you’ll have to swallow your fears and get some emotional-armor ready. Yes, publishing is full of rejections. From agents, from editors, from reviewers, from readers. It’s a lot of work no matter which path you take and thinking you could fail at something you’ve been dreaming of is scary. You’ll automatically fail by never trying. So, don’t sit in the editing stage, claiming to be fiddling with this or that in order to put off the inevitable. Go forward and query. Go forward and submit. Go forward and figure out self-publishing. Whatever it is you’ll do next, go do it. What other ways can you tell you’re ready to move on from the editing stages? Did these help you decide to take the next steps? Let’s discuss in the comments! Anxious about querying/Pitch Wars? Take a deep breath, look at these flowers, and then read my blog post below. Photo by Kate Ota, Stuttgart Germany, 2013. With Pitch Wars just around the corner, Twitter is flooded with people asking for help writing their queries. Queries are a really tough format because they need to be short, include enough information to make sense, be interesting, and have voice. It’s no easy feat, but as someone who has queried two novels in the past and had some success with requests, I can offer basic tips to get you started.
Format and Content If an agent’s website (or for Pitch Wars, a mentor’s website) doesn’t specifically ask for a certain format, the following is what’s generally expected: Dear [Agent, be specific with their name here! For Pitch Wars: Dear Mentors], Plot/character paragraphs (no more than ~3 paragraphs): This must include: Who is the main character? What do they want? What choice must they make/problem must they solve? What are the stakes? Generally, don’t go beyond the 20% mark of the novel in terms of content. Metadata paragraph: [Title] is a [age group] [genre], complete at [word count]. It is [comparison title 1] meets [comparison title 2] and would appeal to fans of [comparison title 3, ideally the most recently published]. Bio paragraph: Tell the agent about yourself. Do you have publication credits, a popular website, a degree in writing or English? What’s your day job? Does the day job relate to the content of the novel? (It doesn’t need to!) Do you spend your free time doing anything else besides writing? Do you have cute pets? Don’t go overboard here, two sentences is enough. If you have a ton of pub credits (like a bunch of short stories in anthologies or magazines) pick three which had the widest audience or were most recent. Thank you for your time and consideration, [Your name] Total length: for Pitch Wars it’s 250 words. For agents in general, don’t go much more than that. 300 would be the max. Some agents like to know why you chose them. This information will not make sense in a Pitch Wars query, since you’re sending to all your mentors at once. However, for an agent, any specifics you want to include should go first, and should be to the point. Don’t say “because your website says you rep my genre.” They know they rep your genre. If you include personalization, make it specific. “You rep my favorite book, X, whose female lead has magic powers like my character, Y.” “You tweeted that you’d love to see more witches, which are abundant in my novel, Z.” Common Query Questions What’s the right word count for my genre? Check out this article from Writer's Digest. Can I see some real examples? Check out Query Shark, the website by agent Janet Reid. Read as many posts as you can! What if my novel has multiple POVs? You can mention it has multiple POVs in the metadata paragraph. You can either introduce some of your POV characters with their own short paragraphs or explain one central plot and character. If there are more than three POVs, focus on one central character because they query will not have enough space for everybody. I don’t have any publication credits, do I say that? You don’t need to. You can either not mention it at all, which the agent (or mentor) will understand means you don’t have any credits or you can phrase it as “this would be my debut novel.” What if I self-published before this? If you self-published the story you’re querying, it doesn’t qualify for Pitch Wars. Many agents also don’t want to work on a previously self-published work. If you are querying a different project from what you previously self-published, that’s fine. Some agents want to know how that self-pub fared; some don’t care. Some will hold bad sales against you. Usually their website offers insight into their self-pub-past preferences. How do I find comparison titles? Comp titles are the hardest part for me. I generally go for content/tone comparisons because those give the most information about what the reader is going to get. You can also have comparisons for style, if you have an unusual format (like verse or complex timelines), or specific elements (it has the world building of X with the quirky humor of Y). Finding specific titles is a matter of searching and reading. In the Before Times, you could ask a bookseller or librarian about new books in your genre with elements you have in common. Nowadays, it’s up to good ol’ Google. Amazon has the most up to date information about best sellers in obscure genres, but don’t compare to mega best sellers. If you say it will appeal to fans of Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Bible, no one will believe you. On the other hand, an obscure comparison will be meaningless. Find a happy medium with comp titles in your age range and genre: It has rich world building like K.A. Doore’s The Perfect Assassin and would be found on the shelf with Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning. Choose titles that have sold reasonably well and came out in the last 2-3 years. You can push that for an older comp if it’s absolutely perfect, but try to keep it to one old comp and the rest are new. What if I use a pen name? If you have a pen name, you can sign your query with that, but an agent will eventually need to know your legal name to sign with you. Make sure the name you sign with matches your email’s name. Can someone else query for me? I suppose they can, but I’ve never read anything from any agent that suggests they like that. Usually, they advise against it. If someone wants money to query for you, run away. Fast. Do I need to hire a professional editor before I query? No. And doubly no for Pitch Wars, editing is the name of the game. However, your manuscript should be as polished and clean as you can make it. I highly recommend joining critique groups to help with this, and beta and authenticity readers are also a huge help. However, paying a professional editor is not necessary. What if my project is the first in a series? This is tricky, you don’t want to gush about how you’ve written all 18 of a series before the first even sold. It scares agents. If it’s the first in a series, you would include in your metadata paragraph that is has series potential. If it is not in a series, the phrase to use is it’s a stand-alone. I have really intense world building, how do I fit that into the query? You can slide in hints of the world building, but you’ll have to save the complexities for the synopsis and the book itself. The query needs more about the main character and the plot than the world building. If the agent (or mentor) reads your query and can’t name the character, their want, their choice, and their stakes, they won’t care about the world building because they won’t know what happens. Do I say how it ends in the query? No. Generally, you only discuss content that’s in the first 20% or so of the novel. Act 1, if you’re into that structure. The stakes mentioned can hint at what would go wrong later, but you shouldn’t tell us if it actually goes that way. You do, however, discuss the ending in the synopsis. Synopses will be a separate post. I'll end by reminding you that no matter what you read, even if you read it here, whatever the agent's website says they want is the correct thing to send them. Follow their rules! They have a reason they want it their way, so just do it! Want help on your specific query? DM me on twitter and I can take a look. Have a question I didn’t cover? Write it in the comments and we’ll discuss! The purpose of voice is to stand out, like this flower against the fence. Photo by Kate Ota in Siegen, Germany 2013 One of the things agents always talk about on twitter or their websites is voice. They want it! Please send it! And you may be left thinking what is voice? How do you develop that in your writing? I have an explanation and tips for how to develop it yourself.
What is Voice? Voice is, at its core, unique and specific word choice, punctuation, and sentence structure. These elements play together to create a narrative style that is unlike what’s been done before, or is at least interesting to read. For example, pick up a random textbook. The goal of that book is not to entertain, it’s to clearly convey information. Therefore, the word choice is going to be generic, the sentence structures are likely going to be similar, and anyone in the entire world could have written it. Which is the point. A kid is reading that textbook and you don’t want them distracted by the writer’s interesting turn of phrase. Now look at, for example, The Lightning Thief, the first Percy Jackson novel by Rick Riordan. It’s written from the point of view of a twelve-year-old boy. That book oozes Percy’s voice. Interesting word choices, variable sentence structures, unique similes. That writing style won’t be found just anywhere, and that’s the point. Voice can be the voice of a character, the voice through the book as a whole (if there's more than one point of view), or the voice of an author across their works. I believe developing your voice as an author starts with the voices of your characters, which together will be the voice through the book. Below, I focus on tips for how to develop the voice of a character. Develop Your Voice Tip #1: Monologue as Your Character The best way I’ve found to fall into my character’s voices is to talk aloud as if I was them. If you’re feeling shy about your at-home audience, you can do this in the shower or write it down as it flows out of you. Whatever you do, don’t over think it. This monologue is not going in your project. It’s an exercise to help you explore. Take what you know about the character’s personality and extrapolate. The words they use will match their mood and education level, the sentence length will match their energy level, the punctuation will match their breath. Imagine how they’d discuss what they love, what they hate, where they live, and the people around them. Do this exercise as long as you’d like until you get a sense for how this character speaks. Then try writing narration and dialogue from them. Does that voice sound unique? It doesn’t need to be other-worldly or wild, it just needs to sound like it’s coming from an interesting person. Model it after an interesting person’s speech pattern, if that helps you. If you think any random character in your book would sound like the voice you just played with, try again. Tip #2: Decide which rules to break Voice often manifests best when the speaker breaks a few classic writing rules. The basic rules will get you to textbook or essay level writing, but to be more than a bone-dry info-dump, you need to play a little. One of my favorite rules to break is to use fragments. Sparingly in narration and frequently in dialogue. That was a fragment, by the way. Did you notice it had a little more humanity in it than a full sentence? Sounded more natural, more conversational. Hence why I use them more in dialogue than narration. Some characters will use a little more purple-prose in their word choice than others. For example, a professional artist will probably have more flowery word choice than a lawyer, who might be more direct. Some characters may even use more adverbs, run on sentences, or make grammatical mistakes (that last one is for dialogue only and should really be used sparingly, unless you want your readers to think you are the one making the mistakes.) It’s important to know the rules before you play fast and loose with them, and be sure you’re doing so on purpose. Tip #3: Once You Have It, Write It Down After discovering how your character monologues and which rules they tend to break, write down their specific quirks. This will help you remain consistent through your project. I have character consistency sheets that can help point you in the general direction of helpful things to write down. This can be before you’ve written your project or after you’ve finished your first draft, whichever you find most useful. Compare voices you’ve developed for each of your narrators, or for the speaking voices of various characters. If they were all in a scene together and all speaking, could you differentiate their dialogue through their voices alone? Ideally, yes! Did any of these tips help you develop the voice of your narrator or other characters? Do you have a favorite method for finding the voice of a novel? Let’s discuss in the comments! This is from a hike near our new house. You can see why we moved. Photo by Kate Ota 2020 Wow what a hiatus! I’m back, folks! And to pay homage to the move I just made, here’s a post talking about a common theme in novels: moving! What do books get wrong? What can we learn from those mistakes? Let’s take a look!
Classically I think of YA or MG when I think of a novel with moving at the opening. (Twilight for example!) Teenager moves to new place, usually a small town, and starts school the next day. Except no. You do not move one day before school or work starts, that’s insanity. Not only is it not enough time for you to unpack and breathe, but you need time to register for school. Work can’t be the next day, you need time to go to the DMV and also go the Bed Bath and Beyond 8,000 times because you keep forgetting you need something. Please, don’t follow the advice of a thousand YA and MG novels. Give yourself—and your characters—a week, minimum! (But feel free to not write about that week if it’s not plot relevant, it could get boring watching the MC sit at the DMV.) Usually a character moves to town and meets tons of people the first few days, including their eventual BFFs and rivals. This might happen in school, but as an adult? It really depends on the place. I’ve lived in tons of apartments where I couldn’t name a single neighbor. But with our house, I met a few the first day we came to the house as owners. Friends in the Southern US said neighbors dropped by their new house and greeted them as they moved in, even helped lift furniture. (I will credit my current neighbors that they didn’t do this because we’re in the coronavirus pandemic and they’re responsibly social distancing.) This may be more of a Thing in small towns, and certainly is a small town trope in novels. In a big city, I don’t think this trope is as believable. Work to come up with more creative meet-cutes for your characters than someone greeting the new neighbor. It’ll make your work stand out in the crowd. Characters never mention the last box. Yes, the box that remains sort of packed because everything else got unpacked first and you have been able to avoid needing anything in that last box. It sits for months. Maybe a year. Until one day you have to break down and unpack it. The Incredibles mentioned this box, when Helen called Bob and let him know the last box was unpacked after two years in the house. I feel that scene in my bones. When we moved, we hadn’t yet unpacked that box from the last move. Oops. It’s that kind of little detail that stands out with the audience and makes the move believable and part of the story instead of a tropey plot opener. Plus, unpacking or organizing gives characters something to do while discussing more interesting, plot-relevant things. And nothing ups the drama of a fight like also being frustrated over not yet finding something important they swear they packed. A short post today, but hopefully you got some good tips. Maybe this opened your eyes to something that needs to change in your project. Or maybe I just reminded you about that box you still need to unpack. Let’s discuss in the comments! If you see this at the start of the first lecture, you're watching the right one. Screenshot from the video, not my own. Overview
For those not in the know, Brandon Sanderson is the author of the Mistborn series (among others), a Writing Excuses podcast contributor, and the author who finished the Wheel of Time series after the loss of Robert Jordan. He’s big in the world of Science Fiction and Fantasy writing and taught a course at BYU on writing (with emphasis on SFF but solely focused on it.) He had the lectures filmed and put on YouTube for free. Each is a little over an hour long with thirteen lectures total. One is introductory, two focus on plot, one for viewpoint, three for world building, one on short stories (by guest speaker Mary Robinette Kowal), three on character, and two on publishing. Click here for the playlist of lectures. My Experience I learned about this series because the YouTube algorithm figured me out, I guess. I played them in the background while doing more mindless tasks like cleaning. I found them to be a little bit more basic than my current skill level, but I would have eaten them up and taken pages of notes about five years ago. I appreciated Sanderson repeating audience questions for the microphone and his organized presentations. He has a good speaking voice and made jokes. When he referenced his books, he always made sure to clarify his point as if you’d never read them, so no one will feel left out. Do make sure you’ve seen Star Wars though; he references that the most. (Although at this point, who hasn’t seen Star Wars?) Is It Worth It? If you’ve never taken a college level writing class, or if you’re looking to build on your basic foundation, it’s a great, free resource. It takes a lot of time, but offers a lot of information. You can pick and choose which topics you’d find helpful since each video is clearly labeled, although he does reference previous lectures multiple times. Even if you aren’t sure you’d benefit, you can do what I did and play it in the background while doing other things. Honestly, I don’t see a downside to watching. Kudos to Brandon Sanderson for making his college lecture series free to everyone! Have you watched Sanderson's YouTube lectures? Did you find them worth your time? Let's discuss! Weather, like this fog, can foreshadow something ominous or hidden. Photo by Kate Ota 2019 Foreshadowing is much easier to add in the editing stages than in the first draft. The trick is deciding what to foreshadow, when to do it, and how. I’ve got some tips to help.
Two Major Categories of Foreshadowing: Plot Justification vs Artsy I’ve seen others call these direct and indirect foreshadowing, but I prefer my terms since it clarifies why they are being used. Plot justification foreshadowing is necessary for your plot to work. Maybe while finishing your first draft, you realize your character needs to be good at sword fighting for the ending to work. But you can’t have that skill randomly appear at the end or your readers will feel dissatisfied. Therefore, you need to plant that seed early with foreshadowing. It could be as obvious as having your character practice with a sword in an earlier scene, or as subtle as describing the fencing trophy in their living room. Checkov’s Gun is a classic plot justification foreshadowing rule. Prophecies also fall into this category, since they (often but not always) impact what the characters do in order to fulfill or avoid that outcome. The more plot relevance something has at the climax, the more justification it needs earlier to feel satisfying. What I call artsy foreshadowing is anything that hints at future events, but if removed, the plot still makes sense. To me, this is the harder of the two to include well. Events often foreshadowed this way are deaths, romantic entanglements, and plot twists to an extent. However, smaller events can be foreshadowed, too. I include artsy foreshadowing to deepen scenes or emphasize emotions or theme. It often gives a story the feeling of being cohesive and connected without being overt. Example of Plot Justification Foreshadowing: In How to Train Your Dragon, it is critical to the climax that Hiccup knows dragons aren’t fireproof on the inside. Therefore, in an earlier scene where he’s surrounded by tiny dragons, he watches as one suffers a burn inside it’s mouth from another dragon’s fire. Without this scene, the solution to the climax—firing into the giant dragon’s mouth—would feel convenient and maybe even impossible. Example of Artsy Foreshadowing: In the Great Gatsby, the narrator witnesses Gatsby reaching out to a green light across the bay. Later, the reader learns Daisy lives across the bay and Gatsby has been in love with her for ages. Without the green light scene, the reader still learns this. They still see he moved close to her in the hopes of meeting again. The plot still works. But the artistic moment emphasizes his desire and lets the reader know earlier that there’s something more to Gatsby than his parties. The green light is also a symbol, but I’ll cover adding symbolism another time since it’s a slightly different animal. How to Insert Plot Justification Foreshadowing Step 1: Identify what needs justification in the climax/conclusion This includes skills, weapons, complications, and potentially characters or settings. The climax needs to feel surprising, but inevitable based on the MC’s choices. Foreshadowing allows that feeling of inevitability. Step 2: Find two places to mention anything major, and one place to establish anything minor For example, in Hunger Games, Collins showed us Katniss’s archery skill level in her hometown while hunting and while doing a demo for the Games judges. Then it became necessary in the Games. This gives you a three-beat pattern, which you can spread between the three acts, if you use that structure. Anything minor, especially justifying a later surprise, should have one mention so as not to attract too much attention. Step 3: Write it in place How to Insert Artsy Foreshadowing Step 1: Identify what you’d like to foreshadow Can be events, character traits, or themes. Step 2: Identify how you will foreshadow artistically The content of dreams, passing remarks, jokes, how objects and people are described, names, weather, and more can be used. This tends to be subtle. For example, foreshadowing death through someone’s dinner being burned. The death of a meal! Or by mentioning birds circling overhead like vultures. Symbols can often foreshadow, as mentioned before, so these choices can get very indirect. If you want your reader to know it’s foreshadowing, make it more obvious. If you want your reader to realize it was foreshadowing later, go for a more subtle choice. For example, the classic scene in Star Wars V where Luke dreams he kills Vader, but under the mask is Luke. It foreshadows their connection, but if that scene wasn’t present, you’d still learn Vader was his father later. However, this scene is fairly direct for artsy foreshadowing. A more subtle example is Darth Vader’s name, since Vader in Dutch means father. (Not subtle if you speak Dutch or even German, where father is Vater, but it’s a long time between name reveal and parentage reveal, some viewers may have assumed it was a coincidence.) Step 3: Find where to add artsy foreshadowing Limit this to slower, character building scenes. Otherwise, it gets lost in action. (Except when it must be repeated, like a name.) Look for opportunities in Act 1 or early Act 2 to foreshadow the climax or ending, and look for opportunities in the first half of a scene or chapter to foreshadow something at the end of that scene or chapter. More than one thing can foreshadow the same outcome, so feel free to be creative and not repeat yourself. For major events, I always recommend the three-beat: two foreshadows and then the outcome. Example: 1. Vader’s name, 2. Luke’s face in the mask, 3. Vader is Luke’s Dad. For smaller events, especially if foreshadowing within a scene or chapter, one mention will be enough. Too many artsy foreshadows could result in the reader being confused as to why all these details are important or they figure out a major plot twist early. Step 4: Write it in place Did these tips help you add foreshadowing to your project? Got any tips of your own? Let’s discuss in the comments! From my point of view, this is one of the most beautiful places on earth. Victoria Falls, Zambia. Photo by Kate Ota 2011. In this entry in my Easier Editing series, I’m focusing on how to edit for point of view (POV). There are several different ways to look at POV, from the big question of who is telling the story to the details of maintaining consistent POV in a scene. All aspects need to be checked to make sure your work is in top shape.
General Point of View You’ll want to make sure you have chosen either first person, third person, or in rare cases second person POV for your project overall. First person uses I/me/we for the main character to refer to themselves, as they tell the story. Third person uses he/she/they as the author tells the characters’ story, and second uses you, as the author address the reader directly. Some writers have third person perspectives from multiple characters (separated by chapter), like Game of Thrones by George RR Martin, and sometimes they switch between third and first when switching characters (at chapter breaks), like The Alice Network by Kate Quinn. When editing, watch for scenes that don’t match your POV plan. Never allow a character written in first person in one scene, but third person in a later one (or vice versa.) Flavors of Point of View While first and second person tend to come in one flavor, third has two major styles. Third can be omniscient, in which the inner thoughts of any character can be accessed by the narrator. This is an older style, and not popular at the moment. Limited third is when one character at a time is followed closely, with no access to other character’s internal experiences. This is almost every third person book in the last decade, at least. When editing a third person project, ensure you’ve decided on which flavor you’re using, and stick to it. The sections below will help with fixing problems you find if your third limited feels too omniscient. Depth of Point of View This is difficult to keep consistent, and may be a slower stage in editing. Point of view can be shallow or deep. Deep meaning entrenched in the character’s mind, and shallow being more removed. Deep points of view include a lot of the five senses, visceral feelings, emotions, reactions, thoughts, and opinions. Every word chosen in a scene will reflect the character’s word choice preferences. Deep point of view will hopefully allow the reader to forget an author exists, and the reader will be living in the world of the story through the character. First person is deep by nature, since it’s clear from the start the reader is within the character’s mind. Third limited tends to be deep, and omniscient is shallow. If you write deep POV, part of your editing should be to ensure you’ve remained deep consistently. Ensure every scene has the POV character’s internal experiences as well as the external. Have a checklist nearby of internal experiences to check off in each scene. Whose Story is it Anyway? When selecting the character/s who will tell the story in first person or who will be followed closely in third person, make sure you are selecting the character who experiences the most drama in the scene/chapter/book. Rotating between characters forces the writer to make this decision with every scene or chapter change, which can be difficult to decide or challenging to juggle the characters. Using only one character’s perspective means making that choice once, but also prevents other characters from offering a more exciting perspective in a scene. When editing a multi-view-point project, ensure you’ve selected the most interesting character to follow in each scene. Don’t be afraid to experiment and pick a different character to write the scene from. For a single-view-point project, ensure you’ve selected the correct protagonist, and be vigilant when looking for instances of head hopping. Head Hopping Difficult to catch, point of view errors can occur at a line level, typically in limited third or first person perspectives. This happens when the internal experiences of a non-point-of-view-character are suddenly on the page. It’s also known as head hopping. This error can be overt, like inserting another character’s thoughts, or accidental, like writing the scene as if watching a movie, instead of from within a character’s head. Consider the following example: I bit my apple then offered it to Tommy. “No thanks.” He wasn’t hungry yet. Often justified as being information your POV character could infer, this type if information is something the POV character can’t know for sure. Therefore, it’s technically hopping into the other character’s (Tommy’s) head. Take a look at the fix: I bit my apple then offered it to Tommy. “No thanks.” Maybe he wasn’t hungry yet, since he’d eaten three oranges half an hour ago. We still aren’t sure why Tommy says no, and he’s not saying why. But by going beyond a statement, and into a clear opinion, the POV character justifies their guess, giving the reader more information about the characters/scene. POV mistakes can also be harder to spot. Consider the following example: The teacher called my name, and my face reddened. Seems innocent enough. But, when sitting in a classroom like this character, can you see your own face redden? No. Other characters can see it though, thus this is a subtle POV error. Take a look at the fix: The teacher called my name, and my face burned. The burning sensation is internal to the POV character; thus, this sentence remained in their POV. The reader will instantly know the character means they’re blushing. Instead of telling, you’ve shown us—from the character’s perspective. Double win! What aspects of point of view do you watch for during your edits? Did this list help you on your editing journey? Let’s discuss in the comments! Patterns of flower petals are beautiful and, more interestingly, consistent. Just like your characters should be. Photo by Kate Ota 2019 I recently began editing my latest WIP and have been reading editing books and consuming as much how-to-edit media as possible. I decided a fun blog series may be posting methods I've found that have made my editing process easier. First up: editing for character consistency. An online workshop hosted by the Mystery Writers of America- Pacific Northwest offered a character consistency sheet to use while editing. The example given in this (amazing!) workshop was nice, but didn’t cover most of what I need while editing. A few weeks ago, I mentioned working on character consistency using style sheets in Four Tips for Helping Your Writing Without Writing. So on a day I didn't feel like writing, and with inspiration from that workshop and some editing books, I made my own character consistency sheet. Feel free to use mine or make it your own too! Please note: this is NOT a character background sheet. I specifically left off things like their family, their hobbies, or their favorite anything. However, this can supplement or draw from a background sheet you’ve already made. The character consistency sheet is about what comes up frequently on the page—their dialogue quirks, what they look like, how emotional they are, and their narrative voice. Also keep in mind that different circumstances will make your character do or say different things. This is why the lines beside dialogue options are long. Maybe they greet friends with “Hey,” their boss with, “Hello”, and their grandmother with, “Good afternoon.” Sorry these aren't downloadable, I don't have the website capabilities for that just yet.
Did you like my character consistency sheet? What are you adding to your own? Let's discuss in the comments! |
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