I have at least two more rounds of revisions left. One will be another read-through to correct typos, wording, and anything else I can find. The other will be made while reading the book aloud to make sure it flows and doesn’t come off sounding like nails on a chalkboard.

Things have been hectic, but here’s a quick recap of what I’ve been up to and where I’m going.

• In August and September I was busy as the officer in charge for the Multi-National Force change of command.
• In October, things were hopping as we transitioned to support General Odierno and his staff.
• In November, I handed over the reigns to my replacement. I spent my last month in country working with the Visitor Operations Bureau, planning and coordinating visits for VIPs.
• In December I returned home to the states.
• In January, we moved to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas–for school, not prison.
• In February, I started classes at the Command and General Staff College.

And now it’s March. I can’t say that things are slowing down, but at least I am getting into a routine, and I plan to start my revision of The Eighth Day next week. I’m also training for a marathon, working on my Masters, lifting weights, and trying to keep up with my school work … not to mention all of the movies and television shows I need to catch up on after spending a year deployed. I’ll be spending the rest of the day relaxing and catching up on Lost with my wife, tomorrow I hit the books, and Monday I start my routine of school, working out, studying, and writing. ]]> http://josephjohn.me/2009/03/2009-state-of-joseph-address/feed/ 0 http://josephjohn.me/2008/08/the-elements-of-fiction/ http://josephjohn.me/2008/08/the-elements-of-fiction/#comments Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:19:47 +0000 Joseph http://josephjohn.me/?p=234 Character, setting, theme, point of view, and plot. These are the elements of fiction, the fundamentals on which agents and editors judge your novel. Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses in these areas. You might be best at character development and setting, whereas another author might be a master of plot and conflict. Few are masters of all of the elements of fiction, but a weakness in one area can destroy an otherwise exceptional novel.

For example, let’s say you excel at setting the scene and theme and focus on those elements. Character development and plot are your weak points, so you procrastinate, waiting until halfway through your novel to start building your characters and advancing the plot. The end result will be a book that feels uneven and choppy, floundering in the water like a man cast overboard in the middle of the ocean.

It is also important to know why you are writing and for whom you are writing. Are you writing to entertain or to comment on the human experience? The kind of book you are writing will dictate which elements of fiction upon which you need to focus. Plot-driven genre novels spend less time on character development and more on plot, creating the riveting page-turner. Novels that play on the reader’s emotions will focus on the other elements of fiction and leave plot to develop more slowly.

The art of bringing all of the elements of fiction together is the craft of fiction. Let your strengths shine in your writing and work to improve and polish those areas in which you are weak. The more you write, the more you will improve.

Sunday Grab Bag [Wylie Merrick Literary]

Publishers send novels to reviewers. Stacks of them. Truckloads of them. They fill up the coffee table. The garage. The living room. Next thing you know, the reviewer has to buy a second house just so he has a place to put all of the novels he is reviewing.

To narrow down the list and maintain their sanity, reviewers read the back cover copy to determine which novels they will and will not review. And the same thing goes for agents. They get so many query letters that many will use the pitch paragraph to determine which authors will get their attention. Make sure yours stands out.

You also might try writing the pitch paragraph–the back cover copy–before you even write your novel. Not only will this help you focus your novel on the plot catalyst, but it will force the pages to live up to the hype. If your story changes direction, simply rewrite the pitch paragraph to fit.

Straight From A Reviewer’s Mouth [Pub Rants]

While she read it, I read along with her, taking notes and making minor grammatical corrections whenever they jumped out at me. I found that I have a tendency to confuse “past” and “passed.” I did some research on the difference between them, which I will now regurgitate both for my benefit and yours.

Past can be a noun, adjective, adverb, or preposition.

• Noun: what happened at some earlier time (i.e. “He lived in the past”).
• Adjective: gone by or elapsed (i.e. “This past week has been heaven”).
• Adverb or Preposition: beyond; by (i.e. “He marched past” or “He marched past the troops”).

Passed, on the other hand, is the past tense of pass, which means “to go by.” It is always a verb.

“He drove past them. He passed them on the right.”

Got it? Good.

“Write what you know” doesn’t mean you have to put characters in situations with which you are personally familiar; it means you have to put a piece of yourself in each of your characters.

Your hero has all of your best qualities as well as some of your flaws. Your villain is comprised of your dark side, your evil alter ego, the you that might have been. Each of your supporting characters is part of you as well. They have some of your hopes, your dreams, your thoughts, your habits.

This isn’t to say that you have to be a cold-blooded killer to write about one. I mean that you need to ask, If I was a cold-blooded killer, what would I do, how would I act, what would I dream? Use personal experience when possible. Did a particularly traumatic experience happen in your childhood? Maybe something similar happened to your villain, only they weren’t able to handle it, and it broke them, reshaping them into someone else.

“Write what you know” means to write with authenticity about thoughts, feelings, and experiences. In On Writing, Stephen King says that you should always tell the truth in your writing. When your character smashes his thumb while hammering a nail, is he going to shout out, “Gosh darn it, that smarts!” or is he going to drop an F-bomb? Be honest. Your readers will know when you’re lying to them, and the story will suffer.

Your story can take place in the distance past, on an imaginary world, or on another planet. Your characters can be regular people, knights in shining armor, time travellers, or mobsters. Maybe you don’t have personal experience with your setting or the circumstances in which your characters find themselves, but when you put yourself in their shoes and write what you know to be real and true in terms of motivation, conflict, and emotion, you are writing what you know, and you will find that connection with your readers–the one that keeps them up late at night, turning page after page to find out what happens next.

Write what you know. Put a little piece of yourself into your characters. This is where your voice comes from. Just as your own personality and experiences make you unique, they will make your writing original and unique as well.

Write What You Know [Rachelle Gardner, Literary Agent]

Leonard lists 10 rules that he uses to remain invisible as an author when writing a book. To show rather than tell. Even today, these commandments remain relevant.

1. Never open a book with weather. Open with people. If you want to use weather to create atmosphere, talk about a character’s reaction to the weather. Otherwise, the reader will likely flip through the pages looking for your characters.
2. Avoid prologues. And for the love of God, don’t open with an introduction, followed by a foreword, followed by a prologue, followed by chapter one. Prologues are usually back story. Drop them in your novel somewhere more appropriate.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. The dialogue belongs to your characters. Verbs like grumbled, gasped, cautioned, and lied all steal the dialogue from your characters. Remember, you want to remain invisible.
4. “Never use an adverb to modify the verb ‘said’,” he admonished gravely. To use an adverb in this way–or in any way, for that matter–is a mortal sin. Leonard mentions a character from one of his books that explains how she wrote historical romances “full of rape and adverbs” as if the two were equals on the atrocity scale.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. Use no more than three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the word “suddenly” or the phrase “all hell broke loose.” Coincidentally, writers who do tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Used in moderation, it can add spice to your story. But if you start loading up on phonetic accents and pouring on the apostrophes, you’re going to overload your reader’s taste buds.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. In Hills Like White Elephants, the only description Ernest Hemingway gives for the “American and the girl with him” is this: “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s it. That’s the only physical description in the entire story. He lets his readers come up with their own images of the characters, guiding them by tone of voice, not written description and unsightly adverbs.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things. Needless and excessive descriptions are like a large pool of stagnant water in the otherwise rapidly flowing river that is your story.
10. Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip. Think thick paragraphs of prose. Think going into the character’s head when the reader either already knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. Think weather.

There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday (yeah, yeah–avoid prologues, I hear you) where one of the characters sums all of this up quite nicely. He says, “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks … figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that … Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle … Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

If your writing sounds like writing, rewrite it until it flows like thought or speech. If the rules guidelines of grammar get in the way, out they go. Don’t let what you learned in English class disrupt the rhythm of narration. Remain invisible. Don’t distract the reader in order to make complete sentences with all the syntax correct and commas placed just so.

Let your characters do the narrating for you. Let them bring the scene to life. Let them tell the reader who they are and what they see and how they feel about it. In the meantime, you, the author, are standing in the shadows, watching all of this unfold. Invisible.

WRITERS ON WRITING; Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle [The New York Times]

In a query letter, I wouldn’t mention it. However, if an agent asks to see more, let him know that other agents are also reading your novel. Many agents will specifically ask if anyone else is looking at your manuscript. That’s because, if an agent asks to see a full or partial, he’s interested. You may not have hooked him yet, but he’s nibbling at the bait.

As a point of etiquette, don’t sign with an agent without notifying any other agents that have requested a full or partial. You don’t have to give them a chance to read it and respond, but have the courtesy to let them know that your novel is no longer available so they don’t waste their time reading the manuscript for nothing.

Ask Daphne! About other agents [KT Literary]