Lynn Viehl's The-Novel-Notebook

At this year’s Missouri Writers’ Guild Conference, I attended a breakout session by Shawntelle Madison, author of Coveted, one in a series of urban fantasy/paranormal romance books from Ballantine Books featuring a New Jersey werewolf with hilarious hoarding tendencies. Her session focused on creating a synopsis that can help sell a story to an agent or publisher. I’ll write more on that later, but for today, I want to focus on an online source she mentioned called The-Novel-Notebook, by Lynn Viehl (you can Google it). This terrific aid can assist anyone who writes fiction.  

I’ve mentioned in earlier posts that I use outlines of all sorts and sizes. The-Novel-Notebook is like an extensive outlining tool that helps writers plan their stories, visualize settings and bring characters to life. The 48-page Novel-Notebook features a series of worksheets for anyone who wants to keep track of everything that happens in his or her book or story. I’ve always found that answering specific questions and filling out worksheets is easier than trying to keep everything in my head.

Some of the topics included in The-Novel-Notebook include writing about the premise of the novel, and asks writers to describe the story in a short paragraph, and challenges them to reduce that to 25 words, then 15, then 10 (think elevator pitch).

Another section covers setting, which includes space to write about climate/season, population, government and landmarks. Individual character worksheets keep track of names, physical descriptions, birthdates, families and personality traits. Time-period sheets prompt the writer to include specific details about culture, entertainment, transportation and clothing pertinent to the era.

Following the pdf sheets available for downloading, Viehl shows us how she used them in her own work, which gives writers insight into how she created the worlds featured in her books. Thanks, Lynn Viehl, for sharing this valuable tool with other writers, and thanks, Shawntelle Madison, for telling us about it!

Write soon,                 

Mary     

Verisimilitude

The suspension of disbelief is called “verisimilitude.” Besides being a great word, it’s an important aspect for writers to consider.

Many years ago David Duchovney was a guest on a talk show, and he mentioned a movie he had starred in titled Return to Me (2000) about a man whose wife was killed in a car accident, and whose heart was transplanted into another woman. The plot revolved around Duchovney’s heartache, and subsequent love for the woman who received his wife’s heart.

He said he heard from many people who told him that the story was not believable, and that it could never happen. The funniest part of the interview was that he said not one person had ever said that to him during his years of filming “The X-Files,” the series about finding extraterrestrials.

Readers or viewers won’t buy into a story if they don’t believe the premise, the plot or the characters. Why did viewers believe the plots about aliens, but not about a man loving two women with the same heart?

Genre can also play into the suspension of disbelief. Martial artists and action heroes may be able to  perform feats beyond the realm of possibility, but the same is not true for the “best friend” in a romantic comedy.

Suspension of disbelief is the ability to create a world that is believable, and accept the premise as being real for the duration the story. The story must be consistent within the premise, however extreme. The magic in Harry Potter isn’t possible in this world, but the magical wizardry is consistent within its own world, which makes it believable. Readers and viewers went along for the ride as the wonders of his world were revealed to him. His discoveries were our discoveries. We soon learned, as did Harry, that anything was possible.

Be consistent when creating worlds for your characters to inhabit. They can be unusual, but they have to be consistently unusual!

Write soon,

Mary

Department of Redundancy Department

Do you repeat yourself? Do you say the same thing over and over again? Tautological phrases repeat what has already been said using different words (which defines the second sentence of this paragraph). Eliminating tautological phrases can strengthen your writing.

According to Wikipedia, tautology is considered a fault of style and was defined by Henry Watson Fowler (1858-1933) in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), a style guide to British English usage, pronunciation and writing.

Delete the following phrases to strengthen your writing:

Free gift

Planning ahead

ATM machine (the M stands for machine, so if we write ATM machine, we are actually writing Automatic Teller Machine machine)

Unsolved mystery

Honest truth

Complete opposite

6 a.m. in the morning

End result

True fact

Fall down

Unconfirmed rumor

Short summary

New Innovation

What tautological phrases do you use in your writing, or see in the writings of others?

Write soon,

Mary

Futureme.org

Reader’s Digest recommends futureme.org, a site that allows you to send an email to your future self. More than 1.8 million people have sent emails that will arrive tomorrow, fifty years from now, or any time in between.

So what will you say to your future writer self? Congratulations on the Pulitzer? Or maybe you can send yourself a slice of life essay about what’s going on in your life now, or a letter of encouragement, or goals you will have accomplished by the time you read the email. Doesn’t matter, because it can be whatever you want. You can read other letters on the site to get some ideas. While you’re there, tell your future self I said hello!

Write soon,

Mary

Not your usual writing contest

The last thing I wanted to do today was drive my son and his friend to the mall to see a movie. There was no good reason, except that Sunday is about the only day that I don’t have to run around town completing tasks and errands and accomplishing other annoying objectives like driving to work.

As soon as I dropped the boys by the theater entrance I turned on the radio, and I'm so glad I did. If I hadn’t been in the car, I never would’ve heard this fun story from NPR’s Studio 360 host Kurt Anderson, who was a minute or so into a story about attaching stories to worthless stuff.

I love stories about stories. I’ve written about the value of stories and why we tell them (see my March 18, 2011 post). But the gist of this story about stories was that selling items of little or no value with an interesting but fictionalized backstory makes the items more valuable. In an experiment, they hired writers to make up the stories, and quantified their results by auctioning off the items on eBay. They sold the items for a lot more than they were worth, and the stories were then collected in a book titled Significant Objects.

The good news is that they are sponsoring a contest in which anyone can go to the website, see pictures of three items picked up from the thrift shop they visited during the show, and write a fake backstory. The winner of the best story for each item will receive the item as a prize!

I’m attaching a link, http://www.studio360.org/2012/mar/23/in-search-of-significant-objects/ so you can listen to the interview, watch the video, and create a fake backstory!

Write soon,

Mary

"I write, therefore, I am"

Today’s guest post is by Joe Schwartz, a local writer who spoke recently at Saturday Writers. His bio and links to his work are located at the end of this post. Thanks Joe!

When I first read the Don DeLillo quote, “I don’t know what I think until I write it down,” I felt enlightened. The truth of that statement is magnificent for those so inclined to write. Even more so for those who are searching for the answers to their lives through the art.
            

            Any counselor worth her salt will tell you the first thing they want you to do in the process of healing is to journal. To the non-writer this is a challenging task and almost impossible. I wish I could reach out to all those overwhelmed by the task and tell them they should try and write fiction.

            I wrote my first novel four years ago. If you have ever sat down with this goal in mind it can be intimidating, overwhelming, and the most rewarding thing you may ever do if you can cross that finish line known as ‘The End.’ Each time I have been moved to an emotional kind of refreshment in myself. That is to say, I feel with each novel or collection of short stories, that I have once again put myself in harm’s way and lived to tell about it.

            Many people don’t realize fictional stories are laced with truth. It is the world as it has revealed itself to one specific individual, and reading a great book is no different than studying a painting or watching a ballet or seeing an amazing movie. There will be only one first time for any of these things. Great art is like a child’s first ride on roller coaster – it will define them for the rest of their lives. The exhilaration, the anxiety, the fear, the thrill of the ride, and the ecstasy of having cheated death will be deeply coded in the sub-conscious of the rider for the rest of their life.

            My first time going to the literary amusement park by myself was a marvelous shock. I was still naïve enough to believe stories all had happy endings and that only bad guys died, if anyone at all. How innocent I was when I first read ‘Of Mice and Men,’ I find almost laughable. It was the first book to have a deep emotional effect in my life. It is still the gold standard to me for all my reading. Sometimes I have to wonder if Steinbeck had me in mind when he wrote that extraordinary book, and yet, I know he did not. He was trying to write social commentary through a parable palatable for the masses, but disarming enough not to be recognized by the administration he was trying to reform. Certainly he had no idea that a fourteen-year-old kid in St. Louis was going to read it some fifty years later and have a mental big bang explosion that would begin to shape and form and define his universe of ideals.

            I learn something about myself every time I write. Once, I had to stop writing a novel for two years because I could not tell if what the character was describing, if this world he had crawled from of physical and verbal abuse was his alone or if I had opened a locked door in my mind. To be more succinct, it totally freaked me out! I later went on to finish the novel and am quite proud of the work I accomplished. To answer the former, yes, there was some serious vein of truth in my childhood that was revealed to me, but by my exploring it through a fictional character, by allowing him to explore the dark crevices of my mind where I feared to go, I had in fact established my own personal superpower that was unafraid and able to overcome the worst of my memories while I sat most safe and comfortable at my kitchen table being amazed as the words seemed to type themselves onto the face of my computer screen.

            If you write, I bid you good luck and good writing. Be honest, i.e. write what you know, and you will create an art made of truth and beauty indefinable by yourself, that can revealed exclusively to you by your audience. If you read, then I beg you to see in between the lines, to discover the real person hiding behind this mask called fiction.

Joe Schwartz is a writer living in St. Louis writing exclusively about the Gateway City. He has two published books to his credit 'Joe's Black T-Shirt' and 'The Games Men Play.' There is no bigger challenge or delight to any author than being read. That being said, read Joe for free using the coupon codes 'Joe's Black T-Shirt' FX56M & 'The Games Men Play' CF46N @Smashwords.com. That is 36 stories for the low price of absolutely nothing! In advance, thanks for reading.
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/90731
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/106232

Never give up

Do you ever think you’re too old to write a book? If so, you are wrong.

I just came across the story of Captain James Arruda Henry, a 98-year-old first-time author. A 98-year-old first-time author is a story in itself, but it’s even more amazing when you consider the fact that he was illiterate until his mid 90s!

Henry is a retired lobsterman in Mystic, Conn who self-published “In a Fisherman’s Language,” which contains 29 stories about his life. According to his website http://fishermanslanguage.com/ the stories were collected from his earliest memories of his grandfather’s farm in the Azores to a snippet of his daily life today. “James shows how a life powered by commitment, hard work and determination can redefine a person at any age.”

You can order a copy from the third printing through his website or Amazon.com.  The book is also available for Kindle.

Write soon,

Mary