Autumn leaves mean NaNoWriMo plot and character development time!

While everyone else is carving pumpkins and hunting for a black turtle neck and New Balance sneakers, in between desperately trying to finish my house repairs before freezing temperatures arrive, I’m preparing for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).In the Seattle area, the NaNoWriMo fans filled not one, but two plot development workshops in a few short hours of registration. So I thought I’d put up some NaNoWriMo Preparation Tips and ideas for those of us who didn’t get to attend.

Plot Development Worksheets

First, let me provide some novel plot and chapter development storyboard worksheets. Click on the title below to download:

Novel Storyboard Worksheet : An open storyboard for making notes about events and characters by chapter

Traditional Plot Storyboard Worksheet : The traditional fiction arc broken down into the standard 20-chapters used by mass market paperbacks for decades.

Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! Storyboard Worksheet : Screenwriter and teacher Blake Snyder’s technique condensed into a storyboard format for plotting today’s high-concept fiction.

Chapter Storyboard Worksheet : Good for breaking a chapter down by scene; especially useful if you use multiple locations and character point of views to keep events in a clear sequence

Character Development and Profiling

Heroes and heroines, even just protagonists and antagonists, can often get fuzzy in the heat of trying to write a novel in a month. So I started using the Target Audience Profile worksheet that I give my marketing students to help them keep their potential customer or client in focus. Try completing the Target Audience Profile Worksheet and writing a profile of your main characters to keep on hand. It helps when trying to answer that magical, musical question “What would this character do now?”

Target Audience Profile Worksheet

Once I have a basic demographic profile of a character, I add things like family background, any key incidence in the characters life like bullying at school or winning a competition that had an impact. I find a lot of times if I’m stuck or blocked in a project, it’s because I haven’t really defined a character (or any of them) well enough to clearly know how he or she would react or respond to the situation.

Visual Techniques for Developing Plot and Characters

A number of writers I’ve met use collage to prepare for their writing projects. Bestselling romantic comedy author Jennifer Crusie has a collection of them now and here (Wild Ride Collage)  and here (this one is more about the process).Basically it’s similar to doing a visualization collage.

Begin by focusing on the title or theme of your story. Next collect images and words from magazines or other media while focusing on your theme or title. You can even collect found objects that seem to fit (I met one author who actually creates sculptures for his writing projects). Once you feel you’ve collected enough stuff to start, grab a large sheet of paper — or a box if you want to go 3-D — and start assembling your images, words, objects as it moves you. Jennifer Crusie and others talk about leaving placeholders for characters or story elements when they feel something is missing and tracking it down later.

Writeoncon.com has a video by author Tera Lynn Childs demonstrating how she makes a character collage here.

I’ve also met authors who draw or paint a scene from their story. I met several who actually create the book covers to inspire them throughout the whole process and keep the mood and another (a screenwriter) who created the movie poster.

My absolute favorite was a writing friend who persuaded a B. Dalton’s employee to give her one of their old bestseller list cards; carefully replaced the number position with her book title and name; and then hung it up in front of her workspace to keep her writing daily. She also created book covers to place in front of her workspace and individual character collages. She didn’t reach #1 before she died, but she did make it on the list.

There’s no right or wrong way to do any of this. There’s just your way. These are all simply a way for authors to use a different part of their brain in solving plot and character development. Give it a try. If nothing else, you’ll have a conversation piece.

The goal is to get to know our characters, get a feel for their story arcs, and inspire us to keep our backsides in our chairs and our fingers on our keyboards until we have our book (or at least 50,000 words and the basic spine of our book).

So NaNoWriMoers, let’s start our engines!

And feel free to share this post with your NaNoWriMo community!

Even when the message isn't very clear, clear type has a voice of authority

As a writer I consider words and reading important. But I was also trained in the visual and graphic arts and have longed been attuned to the type and fonts that create the words and make them legible — or not, that can enhance the meaning of the text — or undermine it, that can influence whether we even read a single word — or all of them. I’ve also been keenly aware for some time that we are moving from text to verbal and visual communication. Oral traditions and pictographs gave way to literacy which will eventually give way to voices (mostly computer generated) and images.

So what does this all have to do with Steve Jobs and the iPhone?

On Tuesday, October 4, the new CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, introduced the iPhone 4S. Many Apple fanatics, and less astute reporters, were disappointed that the phone lacked significant physical design changes. They missed the significance of a little feature named Siri. Bascially, Siri acts something like an artificial intelligence interface. You say something natural to your iPhone like “I have a meeting with John Doe on Wednesday at 3 o’clock” and the phone adds the meeting to your calendar and will even remind you that the meeting is approaching. You can ask it something like “Where’s the nearest sushi restaurant?” and Siri will note your present location and return a listing of sushi restaurants sorted by proximity (and provide more information on each). It can do a lot more and you don’t. have. to. speak. slow—ly. and. careful—ly. like you did for earlier voice-activated interfaces.

Just in case you aren’t certain, This (Siri) Is Big.

Steve Jobs and the Mac made us aware of how fonts and type affect what we read

It’s like going from a manual typewriter to a wordprocessor big. Or like going from hand-copied books to the printing press big. It’s game-changer, life-changer, society-changer big. It’s 1984 all over again. Trust me on this. In a society where less than 2% of the population has ever entered a bookstore, this is going to make epubs eventually seem like the invention of White-Out or the auto-correcting Selectric typewriter. Apple really doesn’t care if Microsoft Windows copies touch-screen technology or Amazon creates a Kindle iPad. The folks over at Joy of Tech got it right — Apple has developed “fusion.”

Tuesday night I started reading the book (in hardcover) Just My Type by Simon Garfield. It’s a book about fonts and their impact on what and how we read. The introduction begins with an excerpt from Steve Jobs commencement address at Stanford University in 2005 where he discusses how he came to take calligraphy classes and the lasting impact of what most considered a useless liberal arts waste of time and money had on him and his business decisions throughout his life not the least of which was the decision to introduce the MacIntosh computer with a selection of carefully crafted, for their day, set of font choices. The book later discusses how the MacIntosh introduced the world to the concept of fonts and font selection, to the idea that how the words looked affected the tone and perception of the message often as much as the words.

Which is one of the reasons I find it ironic that Apple restricts font selection on its epubs.

So I went to sleep with my head swimming with the implications of Siri and a greater respect for yet another way in which Steve Jobs dedication to fine design and detail radically affected my life.

The morning, I awoke to the news that Steve Jobs had died. I wasn’t especially surprised. We all knew he was dying and after a half a year spent dealing with a family members pancreatitis, I knew a great deal more than I ever wanted about the pancreas and pancreatic cancer.

What struck me was the irony of his death the day after the introduction of the Siri interface and the eeriness of my having read about his contribution to text and type and visual literacy just the night before. Obviously, Mr. Jobs knew about Siri and I’m certain he knew of its implications to future of reading and writing and the communication of stories and information.

May Steve Jobs rest in peace. His legacy will live on.

In the near future, because of oral interfaces, the stories that live on will be the ones that sound good with words chosen for their cadence, well-defined characters with distinctive voices and plots that make us ask “What happens next?” These are the stories that live on now, in printed text, that we read again and again and pass along to our children whether it’s Winnie the Pooh or Pride and Prejudice. 

Next week (Oct. 14-16) my town is host to the Forest Storytelling Festival. Each year the storytelling festival holds workshops in the not-quite-extinct art of telling stories: folks tales, new tales, native peoples stories and all the other oral storytelling traditions. There is always some sort of workshop focused on cadence or rhythm. In the past I’ve only caught a few of the public performances, but this year I may just have to register for the whole weekend and brush up on my oral storytelling skills.

Perhaps the problem is with the value, not just the price of paperback fiction.

The New York Times has an interesting article on the decline in sales and marketing of the mass-market paperback. The industry experts in the article attribute the largest cause to the recession and e-readers and the release of hardcover titles as reduced price e-books faster than the release of the paperback. They also implicate the discounting of hardcover titles by chain, and now independent, booksellers.

All of these are certainly contributing factors, not the least of which is the recession and the increasing loss of the middle-class and its discretionary income. Add to this the decline in readership period and its clear that the mass-market paperback is becoming less profitable and therefore less viable.

But I think the article misses two key factors:

1. the price of mass-market paperbacks and
2. the quality of popular fiction today

First, let’s talk price. We have thousands of paperbacks in our personal library at my house. My husband has an entire shelf of the old Ace Doubles which offered not one, but two novels for 60¢ (the one I randomly grabbed included Star Quest by Dean R. Koontz). Granted they’re from the 60′s and early 70′s, but the point is that the price was affordable for a quick impulse purchase.

Today, it’s hard to find a mass-market paperback novel for under US$7.00 and many come in at US$9.00 with the occasional US$9.99. In this economy, paperbacks are no longer impulse purchases — particularly when you consider the quality of recent releases by even bestselling authors.

If I’m asked to pay US$7-9.00 for a paperback, I expect at least some basic editing and something that doesn’t appear to be first draft. Forget the recent release by a bestselling author who spent the entire first chapter connecting the central character’s love of chocolate to the title of the novel and then never mentioned chocolate (or the title theme) again in complete violation of Chekov’s dictum (“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.”). How about the bestselling, award-winning mystery writer who had the lead character explain the same information four times in the first 30 pages, not because it was important to the story but because she hadn’t bothered to fix her manuscript so it wasn’t necessary?

I stopped reading that book when the author had a character begin two out of the three sentences with “now” in the same dialog — and no one caught it before publication! No one caught the name change of a character either. Not the author, not the editor, not even the first reader. As far as I could tell this manuscript went straight from typing to print with no one reading it.

The connection between price and quality is the part that everyone is missing in the discussion.

I no longer try new authors at full price. I use my library and the used bookstores. These days I often check out bestselling authors and award-winners at the library before purchasing a hardcover. I used to regularly collect the hardcover editions of authors I enjoyed, but I can no longer rely on many of them to continue to produce quality work.  And I’m not even talking about the ones who have become hack shops hiring less successful or new writers to write the manuscripts based on a story the bestselling author supposedly developed.

I’m not the only reader that is buying her mass-market paperbacks used because she feels the quality doesn’t match the price. The same story is being told in discussions with readers and booksellers online and in person.

And this reluctance to pay more than US$5.00 for even “proven” authors extends to e-books. For one thing, I know the production costs are considerably lower and for another, the quality is still uncertain. This is why so many successful self-published authors, like Amanda Hocking, price their first titles so low; it encourages impulse buying to try the author. As consulting editor, Alan Rinzler, pointed out in a panel discussion in February, 2011, Hocking “…had the quality. She knew her audience and she knew to write well for them.”

Will readers pay for good writing? Absolutely! Subterranean Press charges premium prices for their limited edition, hardcover releases and often sell out of popular, dependably excellent work by authors like Connie Willis. I still purchase anything new by Alan Lightman or Mark Salzman or Terry Pratchett or Connie Willis or any number of dependably fine authors in whatever format and price. The thing these authors have in common is that every book is the best they can make it. The books may not all be perfect, but I never have to worry that I’ll feel I’m reading a first draft or that they lack respect for their readers.

As writers we should take our cue not from publishers who knock out titles like so many boxes of breakfast cereal or bottles of energy drinks, but from authors who take the time to edit and revise until the story is the best it can be. 

Now that I’ll buy!

So what’s your opinion? Are you still buying mass market paperbacks as impulse purchases? Do you have a story about an egregious example of sloppy writing that made it into print? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Blake Snyder's Cat series makes it easy to visualize your plot

A friend of mine who writes urban fantasy novels turned me on to Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!®  The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need and his technique of developing story plots. I was skeptical at first since I’d gone through a screenwriting phase a few years back and thought I’d pretty much read and discovered everything there was to developing plot as if writing a screenplay, but I picked up some new techniques and ideas from Mr. Snyder. I’ve added a quick summary worksheet below that you can download to get a feel for the technique.

Starting in the 1980′s the the logline of a script became critical. Used for both pitching a manuscript and selling the movie, the logline is a single line description of the story and an extended or enhanced logline is a 1-2 sentence description of the story with all the critical elements included.  The goal was to creating something that could sell your script in the length of time it took to ride an elevator. By the end of the 80′s, novelists used the them to pitch their manuscripts as well.

Snyder’s basic logline template is composed of the hero (with a descriptive adjective), the antagonist (also with a descriptive adjective) and the hero’s compelling, ironic primal goal written to spark images of possibilities. For example, Die Hard’s logline would be: A bullheaded cop comes to L.A. to visit his estranged wife when her office is taken over by terrorists. The enhanced logline would something like: On the brink of a divorce, a bullheaded, street-wise, New York cop is trapped in his wife’s office building by terrorists and teams up with an L.A. “desk cop” to stop them; but when his taunts of the terrorists risks exposing his hostage wife’s identity, he must learn to adapt and change to outsmart the lead terrorist and prevent the true goal of a billion-dollar heist.

The enhances or extended logline contains all the key story elements. In his Save the Cat!® series, Blake Snyder identifies these as:

At a Stasis=Death moment (if things don’t change, something will end or die), a flawed Protagonist (the flaw proving an obstacle to the resolution) has a Catalyst (something that happens to change the situation) and Breaks into Act Two with the B Story (the subplot or underlying foundation of the situation); however, when the Midpoint (pivotal event or crisis) happens, the protagonist MUST learn the Theme Stated (whatever is the underlying theme of the story) before All is Lost (the antagonist wins) to the flawed Antagonist (the flaw being the cause of the antagonist’s defeat).

Being a screenwriter, Blake Snyder thinks in images and he breaks things down that way starting with the Opening Image and ending his story plot development board with the Final Image. He also provides a series of questions to help us develop and revise our characters and plots. For my novelist friend, who is considerably younger than I am and grew up in the much more visual world of anime, manga and video, the Save the Cat!® approach was much clearer than the Traditional Fiction Writing Story Arc or even John Truby’s 22 Building Blocks approach.

I found his second book in the Save the Cat!®  series, where Snyder does a break down of several well-known and successful movies, so useful in actually seeing his technique in action I purchased the third book in the series (which offers additional tips to avoid common problems and pitfalls). Blake Snyder has also produced a software program for screenwriting that helps you develop your loglines and storyboard your plot with the ability to create and shuffle the necessary scenes for your manuscript.

A Plot Development Storyboard Worksheet for You

Since I don’t do screenwriting any more, I decided to make another worksheet that I could use with my manuscripts to remind me of Snyder’s key concepts. You can download it here:

Blake Snyder Storyboard Concepts Worksheet

Be sure to check out Blake Snyder’s website to download his various worksheets, tip sheets and tools for things like his 15 story beats, writing comedy and writing horror. You can also get a schedule of his upcoming classes and workshops which includes not only his Screenwriting Beat Sheet Workshop but his Novel Writing Beat Sheet Workshop. All of which are far better than using my Cliff Note’s worksheet.

Harding: YA (Young Adult) is over bought. She’s looking for classic epic fantasy with a fresh take for the U.S. and U.K. markets.

Stender: Selling non-fiction today requires “a big platform.” He went on to explain an author needs to be a celebrity, preferrably with his or her own show; a popular blogger; or have a degree from a major university to get his interest in a non-fiction manuscript.

[editorial note: Having an established "social network" or marketing network was mentioned frequently during the various workshops. One new soon-to-be-published author explained how he got a book contract from and outline and sample chapter based on building a Twitter following of over 2,000 people in less than 9 months. Of course, his non-fiction title is aimed at a niche market which is composed of the people who are following his tweets.]

Booth: She’s looking for “smart women’s fiction;” she pointed out that 40% of the fiction market is romance novels at the moment.

Longden: He’s looking for a “strong female protagonist” in the manuscripts he reads. He added, “Keep in mind that editors are usually 20+ females from Ivy League schools.”

When asked how long after an historic event was it likely to have a book published about it, Harding stated, “It seems to take 5-6 years after a major event, such as a war, before you see really good things coming out.” She also noted that even if someone were to write a book immediately after the event, it would take at least 1-2 years for the title to be on the bookshelves.

There was a lot of concern among the conference attendees and some of the panelist about Google’s clout. Doris Booth in particular is very involved in following the Google Booksearch settlement and Google’s efforts in indexing titles. There was considerable concern that in the future books will have to be in the Google Booksearch to be found by readers.

Booth no longer takes paper submissions. Several other panelist admitted they prefer digital submissions to paper.

Harding stated that “the question is not oftened asked ‘What do you think?’ People submit but don’t ask for feedback.”

Longden pointed out that “it’s everybodies job to screen you (the writer) out — agents, editors, first readers, marketing, etc.”

Stender advised that first books should be around 80,000 words, although Harding pointed out that while that was generally true, she did handle an exception recently that came in at nearly twice that length.

Booth pointed out that the number of electronic books sold has been increasing from a 119% increase in 2008 with over 17 million sold to a 170% increase so far in 2009. She is expecting a major shift to electronic books dominating the market in the next 2 years.

The good news was that there is a 7% increase in adults reading literature; the first big jump in 20 years recorded by the NEA. The biggest increase came in the 18-24 year old audience.

Use specific sense-based words & avoid abstract words like "beautiful" in your descriptions

Now this is irony (unlike the song “Ironic” by Morissette)! My first post-lunch (a vast hoard of potluck foods and beverages from the Richard Hugo House volunteers and Costco) workshop was canceled, however, the workshop I wanted to attend at the start of the day replaced it. It’s enough to make me believe in being medieval (see the earlier post about Medieval in P.A.).

The Nature Writing workshop was presented by Susan Zwinger, a second generation naturalist, nature writer and avid nature journalist. Her journals are works of art by themselves with not only her lovely handwriting, but sketches, paintings and collage.

She emphasized that nature journals are useful to all types of writers, fiction and non-fiction. The point of a nature journal is a) learning to see deeply, with all the senses and b) collecting observations and details about our natural world that can add texture to our writing.

Here are some of Susan Swinger’s tips for keeping a nature journal:

Even if you aren’t an artists, stop and draw in your book. “Once you draw something, you know it intimately.” The secret is to keep your journal with you and take notes everywhere, even where you don’t expect to keep them like traffic jams.

Identify species, this means learning to use guide books. You can get out of the cliches like “the bird sang in the shrub”. Recommends Pojar for PNW plants.

Avoid meaningless, abstract word (e.g., beautiful).

Stay there for 30-45 minutes and look and use all of your senses including kenesthetics (for example slot canyons, how to move through them for people who have never seen the area can understand it).

Sense of smell is one of the most ancient so it skips cognition and goes straight to our emotional response.  Get smell and taste descriptions.

air temperature, pressure, humidity, sense of direction, taste, balance, texture, — in the field you want to get all those senses down, all the details; you can edit your choices later; you may need different details for different works

Indexing your journals as you go along makes it easy to find material at a later date — including notes you forgot you made

Other organization idea: outline journal content with different highlighters or markers (e.g., green material about ecology, orange for people notes/description) Your color code would specific to your needs.

Use guided imagery to bring back memories that may not be recorded in a journal

Zwinger recommends at University Bookstores and Art Supply specialist for journals, art and notebooks, especially in bulk, to cut the costs.

The class ended with a wonderful discussion of memory and triggering memories.

Exercise: Avoiding meaningless abstracts by uses the senses.

Pick a location and then bring it to life by picking a sense and using it to describe the environment. For example, the way Indian cities smell of mingled spices, the  “fat”, nearly tactile, warm, humid air of Houston, Texas.