Writing Tips

Let Go and Enjoy the Story

October 5, 2018October 4, 2018Uncategorized, Writing Tips

by Mike Martin, @mike54martin

All fiction requires the reader to suspend belief in order to follow the story. You have to pretend that you are in a different location with people that you don’t know in order to experience the full effect. Those who can’t do that often claim that they don’t like fiction books or stories, but I think it may be that they just don’t know how to let themselves go and be captured by the story or the characters. I also think they are missing out on a great deal of fun!!

What most people don’t realize is that writers have to do the same thing. Suspend our belief in the ordinary and escape to another reality, inside our heads. In my Sgt. Windflower Mystery series I use the very real town of Grand Bank, Newfoundland, as a backdrop for my stories. It settles the stories in a solid foundation of place that many people who have read the series now think they know. I hope so. But the setting is truly just the beginning. Because, with the exception of a few historical facts and bread crumbs, the rest is all imagination.

The main character, Sgt. Windflower, came out of the fog one night in Grand Bank and started telling me his story. All I did was write it down. Once I did that, all these other characters came along and I started writing their stories too. My main job today is to try and keep them all happy and allow each of them the appropriate time to tell their part.

If that’s not enough to stretch your imagination, there’s more. Two of Windflower’s family, his aunt and uncle, turn out to be dream weavers. They can interpret dreams, their own and others. Windflower learns how to do that too, and soon he is awake while he is dreaming and understanding the messages that come to him. I know it sounds crazy, but it really happens, at least to Windflower. He uses it to access the spirit world, the other side.

At first, Windflower appears skeptical about this whole spirit and dreaming thing. Until he starts to realize that there might actually be messages and information about himself that he can learn. That’s when he decides to ask his relatives to teach him how to do it. After a while he comes to see that reality might be more than just what we can see in front of him. Once he accesses this power, his life becomes richer, and of course, the story gets better.

The other thing that is happening in the Sgt. Windflower Mystery series is that the spirit world starts to become more visible. In the latest book, Darkest Before the Dawn, there’s a ghost. Or maybe there’s a ghost? That’s up to Windflower to discover, or for readers to decide. You don’t get to see the ghost. That would be too easy. But if you look carefully you just might see the signs.

This all gets me back to the first point. You have to suspend your belief in order to enjoy the story. That is true in all fiction, and more particularly in mystery fiction. So, don’t rule out Windflower’s dream weaving abilities or the possibility that an old ghost is wandering around the old B & B that he and Sheila have bought. If you do, you might miss half the fun.

Darkest Before the Dawn is available in print and e-book versions worldwide through Amazon and in Canada through Chapters/Indigo and other fine bookstores. And from Ottawa Press and Publishing.

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Mike Martin was born in Newfoundland on the East Coast of Canada and now lives and works in Ottawa, Ontario. He is a long-time freelance writer and his articles and essays have appeared in newspapers, magazines and online across Canada as well as in the United States and New Zealand.

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Making Your Book Memorable

October 1, 2018September 16, 2018Uncategorized, Writing Tips

By Jeffrey Eaton, author of the “Murder Becomes” series, @murderbecomes

Each year, more than one million books get released by publishing houses and self-published authors. You read that right – more than one million books. Every year.

How do we make our books stand out in a crowd that immense? Well, it’s not easy, and even the most relentless marketers get no guarantee their efforts will result in their titles rising above the ever-increasing din.

There are, however, a few techniques we can employ that will at least increase the odds people will notice our novels and then remember them when they’re looking for something to cozy up with on a cold winter’s night.

Here are three things we’ve done with the “Murder Becomes” series to build renown for the books over the past four years:

When You’ve Written Too Short

September 21, 2018August 2, 2018Writing Tips

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

I’ve written several books that were pretty short. I realized they were short (around 50-53,000 words) and took a closer look at the stories. I didn’t see a good way of adding anything to the books that would make them any better. They were just really lean books that still allowed for character development and a solid mystery. I left them as-is and published them.

I even wrote short for Penguin once or twice. They didn’t say a word about it, simply reduced the price of the paperbacks a dollar and let them stand as they were.

But occasionally I’ll write short and go, “Okay. This is too short.” And I’ll find ways of adding elements to the story that will genuinely make the story richer and have more depth. My most recent release is an example. It worked so well that I thought I’d share the couple of approaches I took to make it work.

Flesh out summarizing narrative. This was something that my editors at Penguin would frequently (rightly) bring up with me and really should be done regardless of whether you’ve written short or not. I’d have a sort of placeholder bit of narrative that basically just summarized what the character did for the rest of the day as some transition. But going back through in another draft, there’s always an opportunity there to add something meaningful. I realized that readers would likely be interested in what my sleuth’s life with her brand-new husband was like. How had life changed? What was difficult? What was better? It gave me the chance to sketch some of this in and develop my character a bit more, as well. This approach even provided some light conflict for the story.

Get into the character’s head. (More about this approach in my post, “Empathizing With Your Character”. Take a look at supporting characters: is there an opportunity for development there that can add something to the story or shed light on the protagonist? Is there a good subplot that could add conflict to the story and dimension to the main character?

Further reading:

5 Fun and Easy Ways to Lengthen Word Count by K.M. Weiland

What to Do When Your Novel’s Too Short by Janice Hardy

Do you ever write short? Do you find ways to lengthen the books or just release them as shorter books?

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That’s What She Said: 3 Dialogue Tips

September 10, 2018August 19, 2018Writing Tips

by HL Carpenter, @hl_carpenter

We think about how much writing styles change over the years every time we open one of the books on our reading shelf—a book that was published in 1908. Of the many differences between today’s style and the approach used back then, we find the evolution of dialogue especially interesting.

Here are three stylistic comparisons.

“We’re not fans of fancy dialogue tags,” they said.

In today’s style, if “said” isn’t enough after dialogue, the sentence needs to be reworked. The reader should know what’s going on from the words, not because the writer has added a description of the way the words are supposed to sound.

In the book from 1908, dialogue tags are not only fancy, but at least one of them appears to be made up.

Examples include:

“Now, Orde,” said he, “here is where you come in.”

“Look here, Joe,” he objected.

“Not a bit,” negatived Newmark.

“But, Mother,” expostulated Carroll.

Based on comments from editors, good dialogue avoids overuse of character names. “Not that we would know personally of course, Elizabeth,” they said. :)

Think about real life conversation. How often do you use the name of the person to whom you’re speaking? You probably don’t include given names in every sentence. Applying that habit to fictional conversations can make the narrative flow more smoothly.

The book from 1908 follows this practice as well. Typically, the author includes given names when the conversation includes multiple participants.

We think avoiding words no one ever uses outside of crossword puzzles is a good idea…unless your hero is a naturally pompous speaker. “I really must request elucidation on that prohibition,” the hero said.

Here again, the idea is to model real-life conversation.

The dialogue in the book from 1908 comes across as stilted, though this is likely due to today’s less formal conversational habits. Here’s an example:

“In a moment,” replied Gerald. “Have patience. I have come in the last twenty-four hours to a decision. That this happens not to affect my own immediate fortunes does not seem to me to invalidate my philosophy.”

A final note: No matter how writing styles change, a solid, engaging story can overcome the drag of datedness. The book we used for this comparison is the tale of a turn-of-the-nineteenth century riverman, published in 1908 and written in the terminology and mores of the time. Not our usual choice of reading material.

And yet— We’ve read the book before, but we once again found ourselves drawn into the story while writing this post.

In the end, a book that talks to the reader is the best dialogue of all.

About HL Carpenter

Mother/daughter author duo HL Carpenter write family-friendly fiction from their studios in Carpenter Country, a magical place that, like their stories, is unreal but not untrue. When they’re not writing, they enjoy exploring the Land of What-If and practicing the fine art of Curiosity. Visit HLCarpenter.com to enjoy gift reads and excerpts and to find out what’s happening in Carpenter Country.

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About Walled In:

When her father is accused of fraud, seventeen-year-old Vandy Spencer discovers her entire life has been built on a heart-shattering deception.

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Twitterific Writing Links

August 26, 2018August 25, 2018Writing Tips

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Twitterific writing links are fed into the Writer’s Knowledge Base search engine (developed by writer and software engineer Mike Fleming) which has over 45,000 free articles on writing related topics. It’s the search engine for writers.

Have you visited the WKB lately? Check out the new redesign where you can browse by category, and sign up for free writing articles, on topics you choose, delivered to your email inbox! Sign up for the Hiveword newsletter here.

I had a book release last week. :) Cleaning is Murder launched Tuesday.