Thursday, February 11, 2010
Review: The Giver
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
How to Avoid Weak Story Endings
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A story ending SHOULDN’T:
Leave Unanswered Questions – Regardless of the length of a story, be it flash fiction or a novel, the ending should tie up all the loose plot strings. All issues, minor or major, introduced in a story must serve a purpose and move the plot forward. By the end of the story, the reader should have answers to all questions posed in the narration and have learned how the character(s) cleared all their obstacles.
Make the Reader Decide What Happened – You want your reader to feel satisfied by the outcome of the story. This doesn’t mean you need to spoon-feed exactly what happens in a play-by-play commentary. Readers enjoy having enough information to imagine what happens next, beyond The End. What frustrates most readers is realizing the story has led them to a plot intersection, and the author has placed on their shoulders the burden of deciding how the story ends.
Be Too Abrupt – Have you ever read a story that was chugging along at an enjoyable pace, and suddenly it was over? This usually happens when the climactic scene is pushed up against the ending, and the writer skipped right over the falling action. Authors need to be mindful of the pacing of events and manipulate the emotional impact each moment has on the reader. The reader should be left with the impression the ending was the natural conclusion to the story, the terrain that leveled out at the bottom of the hill, rather than feel like the plot had been pushed off a cliff.
Be Too Long – Another pacing problem occurs when the time between the climactic scene and the story’s end is too long. The story seems to fizzle out. All the excitement of earlier scenes is forgotten. If your ending is too long-winded, you risk boring your reader.
Be Illogical – Your ending must make sense on two fronts, Plot and Character(s):
Plot: Resolution of the central problem has to be achieved by means of a logical chain of events. Suspension of belief
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Characters: If during the story’s ending, a character behaves in a way that is in direct contrast with his or her established personality, with no logical explanation for the shift in behavior, the reader is going to raise an eyebrow. The character, and the ending, will feel false and contrived.
Be Too Predictable – Readers love a story with a twist. It doesn’t have to be something earth-shattering. However, a creative ending that sheds new light on what the reader believed to be true will ‘up’ the entertainment factor of the whole story. On the other hand, if the reader has suspected a predictable ending since the rising action, s/he will feel let down, and the entire story will seem uninspired and weak.
Have a “Night in Shining Armor” Save the Day – Readers want to feel emotionally invested in the main character’s future. They embrace the hero or heroine, who is flawed with conflicts s/he must rise above in the course of the story. When readers have been rooting for the heroine, cheering her on through her struggles, they aren’t going to appreciate someone else swooping in at the end of the story and saving the day.
The ending you write is important to the overall success of your story. It will show how far your characters have come since the beginning and wrap up their story. A clever ending leaves your readers inspired, satisfied, and intrigued. And even the strongest writing will fall short on the reader’s entertainment yardstick if the ending is weak.
The following article is a must-read! Willie Meikle explains ten overdone, clichéd endings that he feels, (and I agree!), should be avoided at all costs:
10 Story Endings To Avoid
I just finished reading The Giver, by Lois Lowry. (Look for my review in tomorrow's post.) The ending is cryptic and could be interpreted in several different ways. Do you like endings that ask you to interpret their meanings? Or do you prefer an ending that gives you the sense that you know what has, or will, happen? Is a "good ending" a "happy ending," in your view?
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Tuesday Teaser
Near the top of the escalator, she twisted to look down toward the fare card machines, shrunken now by distance. Her eyes fell on the man riding at the escalator’s halfway point. From his upturned face, piercing eyes peered from under the brim of his fedora, locked on her. Julie faced forward, and a sudden gust stole the air from under her nose. He was the man who’d been seated next to her, who’d spoken to her on the train. With a sharp inhalation of icy air, she thought back. She’d stood as the train pulled alongside the platform. The man had remained in his seat, as if he weren’t detraining. Julie had had to step over him. Unease was prickling the hairs on her neck. She was still new to the city, but she told herself she should trust her instincts. Something just felt wrong about seeing the man on the escalator when he clearly hadn’t intended to get off at her stop…or did he? Her weary mind sought to excuse her questions. Maybe he was unfamiliar with this part of the city and didn’t realize until the last minute that this was his stop? Perhaps his plans had suddenly changed? She glanced at her watch as she stepped off the escalator and onto the concrete sidewalk. Ten minutes, ten seconds. Not bad, by D.C. Metro standards, she thought. But the echo of another thought reverberated in her mind. Perhaps his plans had suddenly changed.
With a brisker pace than her fatigued legs preferred, Julie turned and headed north up Connecticut Avenue. Her apartment was four blocks from the Metro Station. Even if she could maintain this speed it’d take her seven or eight minutes to get there. And she wanted to get there as soon as possible.
Thirty feet from the escalator entrance the traffic light turned red, forcing Julie to halt at the intersection. She glanced over her shoulder and dread spread through her chest and squeezed her heart. The man in the fedora had arrived at street level. He scanned the south side of Connecticut Ave., and then turned his sweeping gaze north. His survey stopped cold when his eyes fell on Julie, and without looking away, he began to walk toward her. Julie’s head snapped forward, feeling a balloon of panic burst in her gut. Just across the intersection, her darting eyes spied the pastry shop with its glowing sign lit by wavy orange heat lines rising from a garish neon blue muffin. A shrill ringtone shattered the air next to Julie and a startled yelp escaped her lips. The woman to Julie’s right didn’t notice. She glanced at her phone, smiled, and flipped it open. “Stephanie! Great to hear from you…”
Julie stared at the woman’s smiling profile as a momentary sense of calm washed over her. Stephanie. A sign from Stephanie. I should go to the bakery; I’ll be safe there, thought Julie. Maybe it was silly to think her sister was sending her messages from beyond, but so what? The man had to be just feet from her now, only the crowd of pedestrians preventing him from reaching out and grabbing her. Her heart pounded at the thought as the light changed. She bounded off the curb and dashed across the street. Moments later, she slipped into the bakery to the welcoming chimes of little bells hung above the door.
“Good morning,” a robust woman behind the counter called out.
Blindly, Julie moved in the direction of the woman’s voice, watching the whole time over her shoulder and out the storefront windows. The man in the fedora appeared, walking slowly, peering inside. Julie reached the counter but didn’t turn when the woman addressed her again.
“Miss, is everything okay?”
The man with the fedora slowed his pace, looked in with the pinched expression of a game show contestant who's blurted the wrong answer. Or was that the strained look of someone tempted by the rich smell of coffee but running too late to stop? The moment was too fleeting to sort through. She thought she saw one side of his lip curl up into a smile, (or was it a sneer?) before he walked on and out of view. Only then did Julie release her held breath.
Monday, February 8, 2010
More Awards!
Thank you to Christine Danek for the Honest Scrap award! I just love her site, and I hope you visit it today!! For this award, I'm supposed to tell you all Ten Honest Facts about myself. (*gulp*) Okay...here it goes:
1. I worry I'm delusional and my writing actually sucks. (All right! We're off to a great start, lol!)
2. I won't join FaceBook because (with the exception on one or two examples) I'm horribly un-photogenic.
3. I've lived on three continents with my husband.
4. Even though I push my kids to learn French, I quietly regret letting them in on what has always been my husband and my secret code.
5. I have, on more occassions than I care to admit, eaten an entire pound-bag of M&Ms.
6. Rap music is my guilty pleasure and I can sing most of Ludacris' lyrics.
7. I hate housework.
8. I was sad both times I saw my children's first sonogram images and learned they weren't twins.
9. If I could afford to buy all the clothes I wanted, I would dress everyday like Jennifer Aniston in "Along Came Polly."
10. I support my kids' desire to try new things, but at her request I signed my daughter up for softball today...and I'm so not looking forward to the upcoming season!
Yikes -- now you know a lot more about me (*blush*). I'd like to pass this award on to:
Terresa Wellborn
Sarah Ahiers
Summer
Roxy
Emma Michaels
Thank you so much to Kimberly Conway for this awesome award! Visit her site, if you haven't met her already, it's a beautiful blog!
I'd like to pass this on to some of my new BlogSpot friends, each of which has inspired me this week:
Natalie Bahm
Julie Dao
Tiffany Neal
Natalie Murphy
KM
Also, I want to thank my friend, Piedmont Writer for the Happiness Award! I had just gotten it the day before, but I will be sending it out to blog friends this week. In the meantime, visit Piedmont's blog -- she's got a wonderful, authentic voice and her documentation of the query process, where she is right now, will help writers of all stages in the game.
Thanks to all of you for these awesome blog awards!! I appreciate my new friends so much :))
Review: The Hunger Games
In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to
participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV.
Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she steps forward to take her sister's place in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before -- and survival, for her, is second nature. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life against love.
Acclaimed writer SUZANNE COLLINS, author of The New York Times bestselling Underland Chronicles, delivers equal parts suspense and philosophy, advernture and romance, in this searing novel set in a future with unsettling parallels to our present.
I couldn't put The Hunger Games down. Collins created a harsh, post-apocolyptic world where a cast of vivid characters captured my attention in the first chapter and clung to my fancy until the final sentence. Heroine Katniss Everdeen was smart and adept, fiercely loyal to her sister and best friend, and a true survivor. I rooted for her unwaveringly. Her allies became my friends: Gale, Prim, Cinna, Peeta and Rue. Her adversaries became my enemies: Cato, Clove, Glimmer, and the other tributes. I was drawn into Katniss' world where oppression and deceit were the norms, and the near-constant tension was excruciating. This was one exciting read!
Collins is an author who clearly understands the concept of high stakes in fiction. The premise for The Hunger Games could have been inspired by the realily television show "Survivor." It's plausible to imagine Collins thinking, I could write a book about a survival game where instead of voting players off the island, you eliminated them by actually killing them. The last player standing wins more than a million bucks, she wins her LIFE.
Like "Survivor," her version includes a television audience (viewing is mandatory) and all the pageantry that goes into an Olympic-level sporting event, including stylists whose job is to project through the player a certain character; costumes that portray the personality of that character; and constant surviellance by camera crews that capture every moment, real and construed, for the audience.
As if the concept of watching a fight-to-the-death game of survival on television weren't intense enought, Collins raised the stakes again: She made the players children. In her futuristic country of Panem, the totalitarian government requires that one girl and one boy between the ages of twelve and eighteen be chosen from each district to participate. No child can refuse; no parent can protect his family. And everyone must watch or be cruelly punished.
This was one of those stories where I constantly found myself thinking, How the hell is Katniss going to get out of this situation? And each time her thought process worked through what I fathomed as hopeless, and she came up with a clever course of action that, with some luck along the way, got her through to the next crisis.
The only time I questioned the narration was in the relationship between Katniss and Peeta. It was hard for me to answer Collins' calling to accept whole-heartedly Katniss' naivity towards Peeta's feelings for her. Katniss misreads every look, every inkling that pointed to Peeta's true emotions. Although her whole life growing up in District Twelve was bleak and carnal as far as finding food and other means to survive, I couldn't help thinking these kids were nonetheless teenagers. Where were Katniss' raging hormones? How could she be so physically close to Peeta, kissing him, with his energy so tuned into hers, and not react to him? It was hard for me to buy into, even though I found myself believing all along (even if Katniss was, again, clueless) that her heart belonged to Gale. In fact, I can't wait to read Catching Fire to learn what happens next with Katniss and Gale.
I'd read many shout-outs around the blogosphere from YA writers, accolades for The Hunger Games. I officially lend my voice to their cause: Read this book! You won't be disappointed. But beware, don't start it if you can't devote time to reading that week. I devoured it in two days, and I'll bet you'll find yourself unable to put it down too.
The Hunger Games, Copyright 2008 by Suzanne Collins
Published by Scholastic Press
ISBN - 13:978-0-439-02348-1
Did you read this book? What did you think of it? Would you recommend it to others?
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Why Fact Is Important In Fiction
Yesterday, I learned a great deal about my WIP's protagonist, JK. More specifically, I realized her occupation -- which is important to her central conflicts -- won't work. I have to scrap most of her scenes and go back to revise her character arc outline.
You see, JK is deeply affected by a death that occurred in her early childhood, and her sub-conscious obsession leads her to ignore her true passions and pursue a career as an end-of-life caregiver.
At least, that was the plan until yesterday. I'd scheduled a meeting with a hospice nurse whose daughter and mine are in the same class. She in turn invited her collegue, and the three of us sat down at the private care facility they operate. I'd arrived prepared with fifteen or so questions to guide me through the interview.
I needed to understand how patients come to be under their personal care, and what exactly their jobs entailed. But those things weren't what I was most interested in learning. The questions I couldn't wait to ask were: What was it like the first time you witnessed a patient die? Do you become emotional when some patients pass? What's the worse death you've ever witnessed? Morbid, right? As I'd anticipated, the direct experiences they shared with me shed light on how I can craft JK into the character I envision her to be.
Unfortunately, I also realized that JK is too young to be a hospice nurse. I see her nearing her mid-twenties, at that confusing time in a person's life when she must face her childhood demons or resign herself to a lifetime under their oppression. The nurses told me it's unheard of for a nurse straight out of school to be hired by a hospice organization. There must be a minimum of clinical experience in a hospital setting, they said. I learned this when they responded to this question: What personality characteristics do you possess that helps you the most in your job as a hospice nurse? They both answered, "Self-confidence." During follow-up questions, they explained the patient's family members look to the hospice nurse as the expert, the one who garners their sense of security at a time when they feel helpless and frightened. A hospice nurse calls all the shots, relying on her ability to quickly assess a situation and prescribe a course of action. Unlike a hospital nurse, who isn't allowed to change a Band-aid without a physician's order. They both agreed that a nurse fresh out of school is simply unqualified to perform the tasks thrown at a hospice nurse.
So, I have some decisions to make. Either I have to alter JK's age so that she's worked in the field long enough to be a hospice nurse (which undermines most of what I already know about her), or I have to change her career path. Perhaps she's finished undergrad work and taking a year off before nursing school? During that time, maybe she's working as a Home Health Aide in a hospice environment. No matter what, I have a lot of rewriting to do.
One thing is for sure: Yesterday, I felt like a novelist. Conducting research was exciting and enlightening. I captured sights, smells, and sounds from the facility. I talked briefly to two of the hospice patients. I've been invited by the nurse to follow her on rounds one day next week, where I'll record as many descriptions and emotions as possible.
What kinds of research do you do for your novels? What tools do you bring along: notebook and pen, audio or video recorders, laptop computer, camera? Do you have any advice for me as I continue my research?
Friday, February 5, 2010
Awards!!
Thank you so much *Roni* for my first ever blog award!! I found so many awesome authors to follow on BlogSpot by stumbling onto Roni's site when I first arrived in January. She's a fantastic writer with an upbeat blog voice, full of information and inspiration, and if you don't know her yet, click HERE to visit her today!
For this award, I'm supposed to answer the following questions with just one word. Harder to do on some than others... Here we go:
Your cell phone: Envy-3
Your hair: Epic Battle of Blonde vs Gray
Your mother: Shy
Your father: Annoyingly Republican-Idealist
Your favorite food: Breakfast Fare
Your dream last night: Forgotten
Your favorite drink: Margarita (on the rocks, with salt please)
Your dream goal: See my book in Barnes and Noble
What room are you in: Office
Your hobby: Painting
Your fear: Cancer
Where do you see yourself in 6 years: Not living in GA
Where were you last night: Home
Something you aren't: Tattooed
Muffins: Chocolate Chip
Wish list item: iBook
Where did you grow up: Physically: upstate NY; emotionally: Centra Africa
Last thing you did: Made a cup of coffee
What are you wearing: Gym clothes
Your TV: Off
Your pets: Betta Fish named Mr. Odie
Friends: Meeting me at the gym in an hour
Your life: International
Your mood: Upbeat
Missing someone: My kitten James, passed away on Monday :(
Vehicle: SUV
Something you aren't wearing: Earrings
Your favorite store: Barnes and Noble
Your favorite color: Blue
When was the last time you laughed: 6:05 a.m.
Last time you cried: Monday (see “Missing Someone”)
Your best friend: Hubby
One place you go over and over: Writing.com/
Facebooking: Never
Favorite place to eat: France
I'd like to pass this award on to three of my new friends:
Erin Kuhns at Musings of a Writer Chick Living in Paradise
Piedmont Writer
Jenna at One Mystake at a Tyme
Thank you to *Natalie Bahm* for the Happy 101 Award! I was so surprised and, well, happy because I've just me Natalie. She is super sweet and I love her energy already. Her site is fab; if you don't already, sign up to follow her HERE today!
With this award, I'm asked to list ten things that make me happy:
1. Road trips with my hubby and kids
2. The creative writing process
3. Hiking in the mountains
4. Beach combing for spiral seashells
5. Rainy days [so I'm happy today :)]
6. Picnics
7. That first sip of piping hot coffee
8. Wearing a new outfit for the first time
9. Pushing myself in the gym
10. Thanksgiving and Christmas mornings
I'd like to pass this award on to more of my new friends:
Kimberly Conway
Michelle Reynoso
Lisa and Laura
This has been a blast! I'm enjoying this new blogging project more than I ever imagined I would. Thanks everyone, for welcoming this new kid to the block!!