Guest Author Mithran Somasundrum on Characterization

"Action is character," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a notebook, meaning that showing a person's actions, and more importantly his choices, is the clearest way to delineate his personality. But there is a distinction between character and characterization. It's one thing to make a man seem brave, petty or violent. It's something else to make him seem real. The best short description of characterization I've ever found was a quote on the back of a novel whose title and author I can't even remember. While they've gone out of my mind, the quote, by V. S. Pritchett, remains.  "[Author X]," he wrote, "knows the fantasy lives of his characters." 

When great writers look at the works of others, they often end up discussing themselves; and Pritchett's statement could just as easily have been a description of, and an explanation for, the vitality and life in his own work. Throughout the whole of his long writing career, you feel Pritchett had a direct line to the cinema playing behind his characters' eyes.  The cinema where they were the heroes and happiness unfolded.

While we judge the people we meet in fiction by their decisions, we believe in them largely because of what comes out of their mouths. Which ties good characterization inextricably into the art of writing good dialogue. "Good" doesn't necessarily mean clever or long. "You killed Miles and you're going over for it," is good because it's true to Sam Spade's hard-headed, uncomplicated view of his life. However, given that the main purpose of the pages of a novel—any novel—is to make you keep turning them, dialogue needs to be more than just true.  It needs to be interesting. 

The fuller section of The Maltese Falcon that I've just quoted is,

"I don't care who loves who. I'm not going to play the sap for you. I won't walk in Thursby's and who knows who else's footsteps. You killed Miles and you're going over for it."

This has a great rhythm and power, without moving outside the vocabulary Spade would use or the kind of ideas he’d express. Another writer of great hyper-real dialogue is Saul Bellow. His characters use ordinary idioms and phrases, but often at such a pitch of emotion their thoughts go tumbling into each other. From The Victim, when Leventhal finally decides he's had enough of Allbee leeching off him:

"You dirty phoney!" Levanthal cried huskily. "You ugly bastard counterfeit. I said it because you're such a liar, with your phoney tears and your wife's name in your mouth, every second word. The poor woman, a fine life she must have had with you, a freak like you, out of a carnival."

People reveal themselves in anger; they lose hold of the image they want to present to the world. But it's impossible to write a novel in which everyone is angry all the time. So the writer needs to find the smaller signs where people give themselves away. Great examples of these are scattered throughout Paul Theroux's collected short stories.

Theroux is a great describer of groups. Whether it's a reception at a London Embassy, the muggy heat of a Malaysian polo match, or four poets strolling through a frosty Amherst night, Theroux's group scenes bristle with life. This isn't because his characters are constantly screaming at each other—although their tempers do fray and irritations do flare—but rather because he creates the impression of separate human minds running on very different rails. Theroux's people talk to one side of each other, they enter conversations pre-armed with a view of the world, their minds snag monomaniacally on an idea and then refuse to let it go.

How much mental space an author needs to achieve this is moot.  Graham Greene often said he knew his characters had become real when they became capable of surprising him.  In contrast, Nabokov described his characters as "galley slaves."  And yet to the reader Humbert Humbert remains as disturbingly real as his desire for Dolores Haze. 

The issue of authorially-granted freedom has often led to novels being labeled as either plot-driven or character-driven; but the fact is, any wholly alive story is set moving by the hungers and self-deceptions of its people. The plot of The Maltese Falcon ticks along like a Swiss watch. But it's the low cunning and mutual suspicion of Joel Cairo, Brigid O'Shaughnessy and the Fat Man, and the almost amoral nature of the "blond Satan" (Sam Spade) they turn to who set the book ticking.

Who would you recommend as a great example of characterization, either to learn from or simply to enjoy?  Which writer and which of their works?

Mithran Somasundrum was born in Colombo, grew up in London and currently lives in Bangkok.  His short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, The Sun, Inkwell, The Minnesota Review, Natural Bridge, and GUD, among others.

Author Holly Michael on Ghostwriting

I began ghostwriting immediately after I quit writing. That’s right. When rejection letters, numbering in the hundreds, angered me into avowing my one-sided love affair with writing, I quit. Not only did I quit, I announced it to God with fervent fist-raising. I bolted that door shut. After my drama, I cracked the door a teensy weensy bit, in case God wanted to sneak in, work a miracle, and change my mind.

A few hours later, an editor with Guideposts for Teens magazine called. She wanted an essay I’d submitted a couple of months earlier. Someone other than my mother and maybe even God, liked my writing. Immediately, I pitched an essay I’d written about my struggle as a teenager overcoming the drowning death of my sister.

They published “Guilty” a few months later. A patient editor worked with me to understand Guidepost’s formula. Once I got that down, she offered regular ghostwriting assignments.
My first job took me near Little Rock, Arkansas, to interview a teenage boy who had survived a plane crash. I wondered how I, a mom in her thirties, raised in the north, could write in a teenage boy’s southern voice. As a natural born people-watcher, I listened to the way he spoke, his dialect, his mannerisms. Voices have tones and tempos. I compare ghostwriting to acting. You must incorporate the same techniques an actor would in taking on a role. You have to get in to the head of a person and understand how he or she would think, feel, speak. Is the person you are writing for friendly, formal, chatty, distant, quiet?

A more difficult assignment was an older woman who had survived a holocaust. I imagined her emotions as a terrified teenager, so many years ago.

For more than ten years, along with other freelance jobs, I interviewed teenagers, took photos, and wrote their stories for this magazine. As my young children matured into teenagers, they became a great help. When I wrote a story for a high-school basketball player, I showed it to my teenage son,Jake. He said, “Mom, no one says, ‘I shot a three-pointer. Say, ‘I busted a tre.’” Tre didn’t survive my spell check, but I trusted Jake.

In any writing, you have to study the voices of the characters (either real or made-up) and learn their lingo. Before the magazine went to an online edition only, I interviewed a teenage girl in India who had survived the tsunami. My husband is a pastor, and he and I were in India for mission work two weeks after the 2004 tsunami hit. The girl we interviewed didn’t speak English. My husband, a native of Tamil Nadu, translated her horrific journey of being swept up in the huge wave and carried through the streets of her village. Watching Tamilarisa’s mannerisms and tuning into her shyness and sorrow helped me write from her point of view.

Though I couldn’t speak her language, I understood the pain and anguish of a teenage girl who had lost a loved one in a drowning death. The assignment brought me full circle with the first story I’d pitched to Guideposts about my own teenage experience of suffering the loss of a sister who died from drowning.

Empathy is a key to writing from another point of view. You must hear the emotion behind the words.

I took what I learned from ghostwriting into further freelance writing work: writing a biography for someone, full time work as a features writer for a newspaper, and other freelance jobs.

Now, entering the world of fiction writing, I use what I’ve learned. A novelist must use various voices. In CROOKED LINES, my upcoming novel, I write from the point of view of two teenagers coming of age in totally different cultures: A boy from India and a girl from the Midwest United States. I carry them through to middle adulthood. My current WIP is I’LL BE SEEING YOU, a novel about a man in a coma and his children who come together with their own issues and agendas. It’s fun and challenging to write from the perspective of an elderly man in a coma.

I’m also looking forward to a future project. Jake, my son is a diabetic who is preparing for the NFL draft. He says after he gets drafted, he wants to write a book about kids, sports, and diabetes. If all goes well and we begin this joint venture, I’ll return to ghostwriting roots. If you want to read more about Jake and me, check my blog:
http://writingstraight.com/2012/02/19/nfl-aspirations-and-novelist-dreams-follow-the-fairytales-as-they-come-true/

Subscribe or keep checking back for updates to what happens with the novelist and the NFL player. Holly’s novel, CROOKED LINES, is in the quarter finalists of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. You may download the first three chapters for free as well as rate or review it here:
 http://www.amazon.com/Crooked-Lines-2012-Entry-ebook/dp/B007GEJ7LG/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1332444396&sr=1-1

Guest Author Francene Stanley on The Birth of a Novelist

          As a child in Australia, I grew up entertaining my two younger sisters with stories. Enthralled, they watched me dancing the role of Cleopatra, dying from the bite of an asp. Lost in the wonder of fluidity and the attention of my audience, I thrived.

With the passage of the years, when the body goes through the most amazing transformation from child to woman, I used this grace in my walk. I attracted an action man, strong, handsome and charismatic. Perhaps instinct drew me to a partner who would provide healthy children. Deep inside, I rejected the little voice warning me not to let him control me. I discovered that turning a blind eye to his rages would appease his jealousy. I committed to love and all it entailed—through sickness and in health.

By the time I reached twenty-four, three wonderful children occupied my time, and any chance of a career sailed right past me. Caught up in The Good Life, I taught my children to respect and consider others. Together, we collected rubbish on the beach, helped the aged and strove to be the best we could be.

My husband worked at an advertising agency, so I didn't see him much during my twenties. With his charm and talent, he caught everyone's attention while I acted as his side-kick. But the pressure of work caused him a nervous breakdown. My stepfather offered the chance to leave city life behind and move to a little seaside town—a place where my husband could relax and heal while building sand-hill protection with a view of the ocean crashing on the shore. Here, I went through another transformation. Although he recovered, I saw my husband's bullying with new eyes.

Fantasy became the powerful instructor I needed, the means to transport me into another world, one distant from his demeaning tactics. I read my grandmother's early, extensive collection of science fiction as well as Ayn Rand's novels and Edgar Cayce's readings on the afterlife.

When the children left home, my love went with them. I committed to keep faith with my pledge and continue to strive for my best.

My husband's illness pinpointed bipolar. Although he'd latched onto the sympathy of the first real friend in my adult life, he still wanted my support. When he moved in with my ex-friend, he gave me a freedom I wasn't ready for. Full of sorrow and torment, I forgave myself.

With no expertise, I worked as a nanny, eventually travelling to England. All alone in London, I survived amongst borrowed luxury. But my spirit longed for love. A prince in the guise of an accountant appeared.

Free at last, I explored other ways of expressing myself. First I wrote songs—at least fifty. Seven of the best, produced as demos, molder in files without me ever acquiring the necessary drive to get a producer's interest. Poetry, so similar in rhyme and beat, involved me next—a hundred tomes. The frustration of writing and writing, with no chance of airing the result, caused a change of direction. I wrote my life story for my family.

Right. Done. But what about all I'd learned during my wonderful life?

Use my story as the base of a novel. Show how a gentle, naive woman CAN survive in the face of aggression. Demonstrate how to use the power of the mind to overcome every obstacle with time, space and patience—as Edgar Cayce advocated.

And that's where fantasy came in. An inherited star moonstone ring sweeps Liliha, my heroine in Still Rock Water, away in random visions to help someone in distress. She's so much more than a woman borrowing the story of my life. Liliha took over and created her own circumstances. Her story will inspire each reader during the ride to the joyful ending.

Due to be released soon by Solstice Publishing, Still Rock Water comes first in the Moonstone series. The three books to follow will involve the reader in love, heartache and a fresh start for Liliha.

Francene's blog:
http://francene-wordstitcher.blogspot.com/
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003255760473
https://twitter.com/#!/FranceneStanley

Guest Publisher and Author Nell DuVall on the Importance of the Basics in Writing

What makes a writer? Ideas help, but knowing how to express them and to enthrall readers matters. Integral to that is learning how to write and develop a good story that holds the reader's interest. To communicate we need words, the right words used correctly in the right place. Spelling, sentence structure, grammar, and proper punctuation are necessary. The author's obligation is to provide the best version of their material in the cleanest form possible.

 Competition for agents and editors is fierce. More authors than ever before are submitting material. Wasting their time with an unreadable manuscript will place you on their DO NOT READ lists. Once authors have a reputation for sloppy writing, they risk losing the opportunity to submit to that agent or editor again.

 Agents and editors want a rousing story told in a unique voice, but will never find it if a manuscript is loaded with errors. Publishers in particular want material ready to print. Most publishers expect the manuscript to be clean and free of errors. Copyeditors are an increasingly rare breed. Good ones command premium salaries.

 Here's a quote from Etopia Press's Executive Editor Annie Melton.

"Self-editing skills. This is a different skill set entirely. Self-editing requires you to put aside your ego and take a good, hard, objective look at your story under harsh lighting conditions. Read Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by King and Browne. Do the exercises and don’t make excuses for why the rules don’t apply to your particular story. They do. Even if you’re already published, your writing can always be tighter. Stronger. It’s amazing that I still reject stories over and over for the stuff in this one writing reference alone."

 So, what's an aspiring author to do? Read, listen, and learn. What are agents and editors buying? Study the published stories like the ones you want to write. What draws you into the story and keeps you reading? Do agents or editors offer any guidelines or style manuals? If so, use them.

 Most people learn the rudiments of English grammar in school. However, less emphasis is placed on the mechanics of language than on free expression. If authors are lacking in any of the basics, they should remedy their lacks. Additional classes, books, style guides, and critique groups can help, but first make use of the tools available.

 Wordprocessors offer spell checkers and grammar and style advice. Use the tools, but also be aware of their limitations. Words spelled correctly but used improperly will remain unless the author reads and corrects them. The tools suit most, but they do not always work well on fiction.

 Hiring editorial services is possible, but costly. One useful means is to read a piece aloud and see if anything doesn't sound right. If it sounds off, chances are it is.

 Punctuation is a difficult area for most writers. Plenty of punctuation books and style manuals are available. Use them. Misplacing punctuation can change the entire meaning of a sentence or an entire piece. The following example from Lynne Truss' Eats Shoots & Leaves, provides examples. One such shows how punctuation changes the meaning of 'a woman without her man is nothing.'

A woman, without her man, is nothing.

A woman: without her, a man is nothing

 Another source of help is a good critique group, provided you make your piece as clean as you can. Critique groups, whether formal or informal are formed to help authors refine their material to the publishable level. However, with error-filled manuscripts, it is difficult to grasp the author's intent or to focus on a poorly written submission. The cleaner a manuscript, the more likely the author is to get useful feedback. Many critique groups are comprised of other authors who may not have strong editing skills. Good ones are invaluable. Too, critiquing others also makes the writers more aware of any similar faults in their own material.

Good writing takes effort. It doesn't just happen. Learning the craft of writing will make material publishable and readers happy.

Nell DuVall at a booksigning

World traveler Nell DuVall has visited all the continents except South American and Antarctica. She participated in marine surveys and archeological expeditions in Scotland, Ireland, the Channel Islands, and Turkey. Train to Yesterday was her first published novel. This year three more will published: When Lilacs Bloom, another time travel romance, and Beyond the Rim of Light, science fiction, in May, and Selvage, a murder mystery in August. She has a book of short stories and appears in two anthologies. She also regularly reviews speculative fiction for www.SFREVU.com and mysteries for www.Gumshoereview.com under Mel Jacob. Her nonfiction Domestic Technology provided a chronology of household technology. A member of the Internet Writing Workshop, she administer the Lovestory list. She also founded a small POD for illustrated children's, Sprite Press (www.Spritepress.com)

Guest Author Mark Budman on Word Counts and Concise Writing

Word Count: Pretty Unsexy?

What could be less sexy than the word count of a literary work? Even the serial comma or a dangling participle wouldn’t. At least the former went to Harvard (or was it Oxford?) and the latter could be funny. Yet the word count speaks volumes in spite of its diminished sexuality. The right word count can make a difference between the boring amateurish novel and a modern masterpiece. Yes, a literary masterpiece can be long. Oft mentioned by the defenders of gargantuan manuscripts are War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy—560,000 words in length, The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later by Alexandre Dumas, père—626,000, and In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust—a whooping 1,500,000 words. More modern examples are Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling at 257,000 words and Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace at 575,000 words. All these are examples of literary and/or commercial success. But should a masterpiece be long?

I saw the same question repeated in many writers' forums again and again. My novel is 150,000, 200,000, 250,000 words. No agent wants to see it, and no serious publisher wants to touch it. How do I make it shorter? My question for those writers is: how did you manage to make your manuscript long in the first place? My answer is: make it short to begin with.

An example from a war novel: “The cars bore the food, clothes, weapons and other tools of war.” But of course they were. The supply trains do that. That is their raison d'être. It would be worth mentioning if they didn’t bear the food because, let’s say, the general thought that the troops would fight better when hungry, or they didn’t bear the weapons because, let’s say, the soldiers used magic.

Don’t describe what the protagonist had for breakfast unless the menu sheds some new light on him or her. Don’t say: “I’ll be brief.” Just be brief.

Dear author! Be concise. Cut mercilessly. Cut the adjectives, the obvious, the irrelevant, the secondary characters, the dead-end plot lines. Better yet, don’t create a bloated monster that needs its stomach stapled in the first place. Write only what is necessary to propel your work forward, to develop your plot and characters. Stop and ask yourself: “Is this chapter, page, paragraph, sentence, word really necessary?” Cut them, re-read and move ahead.

But make sure that you get rid of the fat and not the muscles. Otherwise, “I want sex” or “Give me food” would be fine examples of concise but worthless stories.

Even if you are a novelist and don’t stoop to writing short stories, consider writing flash fiction as an exercise. Come up with a retelling of a famous plot and set up an artificial word limit. Say, retell War and Peace in 500 words, but do it with a plot twist or two and make sure you still have a coherent, appealing story and not the cliff notes. You will not be sorry. Even if you don’t become a flash fiction writer, you still could use the skills you would acquire in writing flashes as stepping stones. They would help you to grow as a novelist. I mean, to grow in strength and your appeal to the reader and not in girth.

Mark Budman was born in the former Soviet Union and is fluent in Russian. His fiction, poetry and book reviews have appeared in such magazines as Mississippi Review, Virginia Quarterly, The London Magazine (UK), McSweeney's, American Book Review, The Bloosmbury Review, Sonora Review, Another Chicago, Sou'wester, Turnrow, Southeast Review, Mid-American Review, The Literary Review, the W.W. Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure, Short Fiction(UK), The Warwick Review (UK), Flash (UK), Neo (Portugal) and elsewhere. He is the publisher of Vestal Review, the longest-running flash fiction magazine in print. His novel My Life at First Try was published by Counterpoint Press to wide critical acclaim. He co-edited the anthologies You Have Time for This (Ooligan Press) and Sudden Flash Youth (Persea Books/WW Norton). He is at work at two new novels, and puts together an anthology “Condensed to Flash: World Classics.” This anthology will feature world classics condensed to 500 words or fewer.

See Mark's novels and other work at: http://markbudman.net/
Order his book on sale now at:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/158243400X/ref=dp_olp_new?ie=UT

Barry Aitchison, beloved friend and fellow writer, may the muses of Heaven allow you to continue blessing us with your wisdom and inspiration. We'll miss you!

Barry Aitchison, author of Miss Alice Merriwether's Long Lost Cakes
www.barryaitchison.com/default.html

Does your book cover have you stumped? See what artist Carole Lane James offers

My career designing book covers began with my love of graphic design. As an artist, it seemed a natural progression from paintbrush to keyboard. I worked in the field of menu design for restaurants for several years. The chefs made the entrees, and I snapped pictures and applied them dramatically on the menu with the goal to entice each guest into choosing the more expensive menu items.

Of course, the food alone couldn't make guests feel special. The art for the entire menu incorporated designs to give viewers a sense of atmosphere, from the front cover to the back page.

Book covers should do the same—entice readers to open the cover and become a part of the story. If the cover doesn't catch their eye, they don't read further. Give them a reason to open the book and turn the page.

When I began writing my first book, I had a picture in my head of my protagonist. I would sit back in my chair and stare at my words with a vision of the cover buzzing in my brain. I decided to create a book cover for my manuscript-in-progress. I couldn't get myself to wait until the writing was finished--my fingers itched to put out a correlating design. Besides, the artist in me needed the escape and to create visually for a while. As the chapters grew on the pages, the graphic image in my mind would change and grow. I fell in love with designing covers, right then and there.

The heart of the story needs to be the first thing a reader sees on the cover. That's not always an easy task with the miniature size the cover is reduced to when shown on a Kindle or other e-reader. By the time I began my second book, I was hooked on designing covers for others, too.

Every story leads me to a final design, telling me the depth, darkness or light to portray the words, beyond the first glance. My inspiration stems from the words on the page; they tell me where to begin. From there my imagination takes it to the final product. With so many authors publishing e-books today, it is essential that covers grab the readers’ attention while customers scroll through the list of books to choose from, which offers only a very small view.  

I love to watch that blank page come to life, telling a story, inviting the reader in. If someone is flipping through a snapshots of books, I want the cover to stop them long enough to take a better look at what’s inside.  I use many different styles to convey the type of book it is.

Cover art by Carole Lane James 

Happily Ever After is the novel I'm working a cover design on for talented romance author Christina Cole. The book will be released around mid March. Christina has been a joy to work with. She had an idea of what she wanted on the cover, and together we created a design that conveys the story and visually tells the heart of it.

The demands today on the pocketbooks of many struggling authors often don't include a budget for a well designed cover. I plan to meet the needs of those who can't afford a big-name designer by filling this niche with quality yet affordable graphic designs. Some traditional publishers also now require authors to pay for their covers. I can accommodate this need as well. I design each cover around the individual story; no two are alike, and the rights are retained by the author or publisher.

Every book is a work of love and endurance and deserves a good cover design. Authors work hard and put so much into their writing, the covers need to reflect their dedication. And that's what I want to do for them. Visit me at 

http://lanejames.blogspot.com/#!/2011/10/lane-james-reverie-theodora-and-her.html

www.carolelanejames.com