One pair of boots at a time – how to get all the things in a scene right and not go mad

By Roz Morris | February 8, 2010

You can only wear one pair of boots at a time. Most people can’t write great dialogue and description in one go. The secret is to have several runs at a scene.

 I’ve had an interesting email from Jonathan Moore, who’s in the thick of a first draft. He says: If I start a conversation I find it really hard to switch back to description. The dialogue runs, script like, until the scene ends.  If I try and switch back to description it seems impossible to think of any details that would be relevant. I’m aware that normal prose manages this, but is it as effortless as it reads or does everyone feel the gear stick crunch as they force their pen back to describing what’s going on in the room?

The answer, Jonathan, is yes they certainly do – and you’ve described it rather well. When you’re in the characters’ shoes it’s hard to concentrate on anything but what they’re saying and doing. To write relevant, resonant description as well requires another complete run at the scene.

 So forget about description when you’re concentrating on what characters are saying and doing. Let the pacing be sluggish while you weave the right mood. Stride through it again to shape the structure.

Which you do first is a matter of taste, but usually I dive into the dialogue and action, then go back and fine-tune the atmospheric details including the physical setting. But sometimes I find it helpful to set the structure first and work within those straits.

Jane Espenson said that when she was writing fight scenes in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, she would think about which emotional beats the scene should hit – what the characters were talking about or trying to do while they slugged hell out of each other. Once she’d got that right, she slotted in the nitty gritty of who got hit and how. Some of the other writers preferred to approach their fight scenes the other way round. (If you want to know more about fight scenes, you might like this post by Dave Morris.)

The crucial point is, dialogue, story beats, structure and description are all different ways of experiencing a scene and you can only wear one pair of boots at a time. Or most people can.

Do you separate the elements of a scene like this? Do you have a preference for which you tackle first?

If you want a helping hand with writing and polishing your novel, there are plenty of tips in my book, Nail Your Novel. You can buy a hard copy here for £5.99 or download the ebook from here – and the ebook is still totally FREE!

Posted in Rewriting, Writer basics 101 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Is your scene cluttered with irrelevant blather?

By Roz Morris | January 31, 2010
 

Mirabilis_Year_Of_Wonders_Ep8_p5

Idle chatter?

It’s easy for a scene to be too sparse, but have you added too much idle chat or inconsequential noodling?

Darcy Pattison’s been talking about dissecting a scene to make sure it has a function and structure, and meanwhile husband Dave (that’s Mr Morris, not Mr Pattison) has had an interesting catastrophe. He discovered that one page of his graphic novel Mirabilis had gone up on the web without the dialogue.

He was just about to howl blue merde, then realised the sequence worked pretty well on the strength of the pictures alone. Which he greeted with mixed feelings as he’d written plenty of precious dialogue for it. (Judge for yourself with the pics above – and if you hop over to his site you can rub it in by telling him which you prefer.)

Of course graphic novels don’t work the same as prose because the pictures are there to tell the story, but the whole escapade got my spider sense tingling.

Often when we’re writing a scene we can embellish it too much and obscure what’s going on. We might give our characters a lovely bit where they’re doing one thing and chatting about something completely different. For instance, removing a dead body and reminiscing about the time the hearse ran out of petrol in the middle of Scotland. Or talking about what to do about the errant husband, while brutally grooming the poodle. The contrast can be funny, lifelike and even powerful, but only if the reader can see which are the important story details.

When you do this, ask yourself – can you still see what’s happening amid the oblique chat? Have you given the emphasis to the husband or the poodle? Removing the body or the expedition to Scotland? If you cut the poodle or the Scotland anecdote, does it still work just as well?

Now I’m not saying you should prune all the life details out of a scene. But it’s easy to add a lot of blather that gets in the way. Instead of dressing the set, you clutter it.

But one person’s clutter is another’s well chosen decoration. Writers who do dress the set cleverly do it with dialogue or action that seems to be oblique but is thematically resonant. For instance, the dialogue at the end of Terminator, which appears to be talking about the weather – ‘there’s a storm coming’. And Woody Allen is a master of thematic set-dressing – in Cassandra’s Dream the two reluctant killers are waiting in the victim’s flat and hear the victim’s mother leave a message on the answerphone saying she’s looking forward to seeing him. It makes them feel even worse about what they’re planning to do.

If you’re going to add something to the scene to bring it to life, can you make it enhance the scene instead of being largely throwaway?

Have you enhanced a scene in this way? Can you suggest other good examples you like?

Posted in Inspirations Scrapbook, Rewriting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Has your idea already been done?

By Roz Morris | January 26, 2010

Ideas for a novelCan you ever have a new idea? What makes an idea yours?

I came across this picture the other day. It’s the items that were on my dressing table when I moved house a few years ago. A belt I found in a vintage shop. A box from an MCM scarf; a gift, which I filled with odds and ends. A black and gold bracelet with expired elastic, unwearable but kept because I bought it when I first moved in with Dave. A trinket box acquired on a forget-about-it getaway after my horse had a catastrophe. Just visible in the right-hand corner is a Ganesh mask I was forever going to hang somewhere. Some of these things I haven’t seen since this photo. But they are what I used to see every morning.

 I get this same feeling when I go back to my books after a break, both the published ones and the works in progress. Behind the plots, characters and settings I see reminders of what was going on in my life at the time, what was happening to friends, what I was working on, what I saw every morning, like the contents of that box. It wouldn’t be apparent to anyone but me, but this cocktail of detail seeped into the book, coloured the take I would have on an event, influenced the voice and narrative drive.

 Why am I bothering you with all this? Well, a recent post by Jennifer Roland was tackling the thorny issue of original ideas. One of her questions was, what if you find out someone else has had a similar idea to one you want to explore?

A pretty demoralising discovery. What do you do?

It all depends how the idea is used – by the other writer and by you. Generally once you’ve had an idea, you work on it and what you end up with is as individual as the collection of items on someone’s dressing table.

However, there is an exception: if your mutual brainwave is the ending. An end is usually some form of surprise, and if yours is the same as someone else’s… well, no surprise. No one will sit up and smack their forehead if the villain turns out to be the hero’s father. The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd is a good read but has a twist that any cinema fan would recognise. If you find out your big payoff has been done before, you must change it. Yes, it’s painful, but if you’d known earlier that someone else had used it you wouldn’t have, right?

You don’t necessarily have to take it out altogether. If you really want to explore that idea, try putting it much earlier – for instance, the first plot point where something changes. Or even the beginning. Then sketch out what it might lead to. You never know, it might be the best thing that ever happened to your novel. After all, the initial spark of an idea is just the start of a long journey.

And of course, I’m not talking about stealing ideas. There are people in this industry who say ‘there is nothing new under the sun’, usually to justify ripping off someone. Possibly they never have ideas, do not understand true creativity and arrogantly assume we are all copying each other. One of my current dressing-table items is a pair of boxing gloves and when I hear the word ‘homage’ I want to use them.

As writers, we want to entertain and enthrall our readers. Readers don’t mind if you tackle the same idea as another writer, if you mine an idea and make it unique to you. But they really don’t like it if it looks like you’ve stolen an idea. Just as you have to know when to replot because your story is weak, you need to be aware of when your reader might say ‘they did that in such-and-such’. We revise for all sorts of reasons, and this should be one of them.

This is why there is plenty new under the sun, if you look. Even if circumstances force you to rework.

(If you like collections, check out artist Catherine Andrako’s A Thousand Clapping Hands, whose post Caretaker of the City of Lost Things inspired this one.)

Have you ever found that one of your ideas had already been done by someone else? What did you do about it?

Posted in Inspirations Scrapbook, Rewriting, Rules, The writing business, Writer basics 101, Writers' Emergency Rescue | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 16 Comments

How to tell your friend their novel stinks

By Roz Morris | January 21, 2010

Oh no, not lexical repetition too!

Giving an honest critique is easy if there’s plenty you can praise. But what if it’s a real mess?

If a friend shows you a novel they have been working on, it’s an act of great trust. This work has been their most private companion, in their heads and in their souls, for many months; perhaps even years. If you are one of the first people to share it, that is a privilege. If you are asked to comment, that is very special.

Those of us who work with critique partners know this already. And we also know the job is easy if the novel is good. We can praise with enthusiasm, reward the trust and all is well. Very often it won’t be perfect, because all writers have blind spots and every novel is a leap in the dark. That’s fine, we can cope.

But what if it’s a total stinker?

Even a novel that looks dreadful will have good points – and not just the amount of dedication that has gone into it. But the good points may be very hard to see. A flaw such as wooden characterisation or an off-putting tone can make a novel such hard going that it looks unsalvageable. Often when I’ve read manuscripts that look like disasters I find – with relief – that some aspects work well. So to be a useful critic you need to compartmentalise your responses. Consider each of these in isolation – plot, pacing, story arcs, inventiveness and so on.

Now you probably have something nice you can say, and it’s genuine. What’s more, it is not just to sweeten the negative comments; it is useful feedback. Don’t forget that a writer needs to know what does work as well as what doesn’t. 

And do emphasise this. If you have a lot of criticisms the writer will tend to focus only on how crushed they feel, and not hear the positives. If they’re new to this game they may even have felt the novel was finished – and now you are telling them it is not.

So now you know how to make them feel better, how do you tackle the real problems?

First you must understand what the writer is trying to achieve. Don’t tell them how you would write the book; that will make them feel brutalised. Take time to discover what kind of story they want to write, what effect they want. They may not know this yet, and you can ask questions that could help them clarify.

At this stage, you may need to consider if you are the right person to empathise with the writer’s aims. Suppose you prefer thrillers but your writing buddy has written a sensitive portrait of a marriage. When they seem to be focussing on slow details, will that irritate you? Conversely, if your friend has written the thriller, will certain requirements of the genre – such as devoting an entire prologue to a character we are never going to see again – look to you like clumsy writing?

Then it’s important how you make your comments. If you tell your friend that parts of their novel are bad, that’s a sure way to make them defensive. They will probably feel you’re judging the murky parts of their psyche that invented the story and characters. Focus instead on what has been made from the material.

What I do is talk about elements that don’t work yet and explain the effect they’re having – because they certainly do something, just not what the author intended. Then I can discuss possible ways to make them work better.

You don’t necessarily have to prescribe solutions to the problems. Writers often resent this anyway, unless they’re unclear about what you mean or they’re really lost. They would rather come up with something that’s true to the spirit of their book and their vision. And don’t expect them to do it on the spot, they’ll need to mull it over. 

Sometimes it’s difficult to be both honest and sensitive. The answer is to be truly useful. Find out what the writer wanted to do, help them to see how to do it. This might be with their current manuscript or with something else – possibly not even a novel but some other creative form. But then you will really have helped them.

Posted in Rewriting, The writing business, Writer basics 101, Writers' Emergency Rescue | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Become a native in the world of your story

By Roz Morris | January 16, 2010

Bringing your story alive takes time – you have to get to know it, like a new city

Last year my friend Sandy Spangler uprooted from the UK and moved to Vancouver. She sent back emails about finding her feet in a totally new city, including this picture. It was January and her apartment was surrounded by freezing fog, so that whenever she looked out of the window she didn’t see other buildings but a blank wall of mist. When she was out, every street ended 50 yards away, in eerie white nowhere.

Struggling through the first revise of Life Form 3, I’ve been feeling like this. Although I have a beat sheet of events and characters I know, I feel lost. The individual scenes are vivid, but I can’t see the coherent whole or feel the pulse that is pulling everything along.

This week, after rather a lot of stumbling, the fog began to lift. I had a scene where my main character stays up all night. I changed where he did it – instead of being alone, he was in the same place as another character who is asleep. It probably doesn’t sound a lot, but in joining two characters’ private moments I suddenly understood how their worlds fitted together. I had crossed over from being a stranger and become a native. (And created a nice frisson…)

This moment is always the one I yearn for in a new book. When I suddenly feel I know how life works for the people in my story. These are the bits I haven’t written or planned consciously but are the fabric of my characters’ lives. Where they hang out, whose days are similar to whose, where I can send them to do particular things. At that point, I feel I have got to grips with the world of the novel and can really start to use the story I’ve created.

Becoming at home in your book is like making your home in a new city. To start with you’re a stranger easily lost. Nothing joins up and it’s huge and sprawling. But give it time, keep exploring, and one day you’ll relax into it and it will make sense.

It’s as if you start out every story as a stranger and become a native.

Posted in Rewriting, Writers' Emergency Rescue | Tagged , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Tagged!! Now I’ve got to tell you the last thing I wrote, the first thing I wrote, and a lot of stuff in between

By Roz Morris | January 12, 2010

A good friend and fellow writer, Cat Woods, has just paid me the huge compliment of tagging me on her blog, Words From The Woods. In case you haven’t come across tagging before, it means I now have to answer a few questions about my writing… 

1)What’s the last thing you wrote? What’s the first thing you wrote that you still have?
I’m currently revising Life Form 3. I can’t tell you anything about it as it’s not fit for outside eyes yet, but I’m really excited about it and keep wanting to say its name. Return of the repressed, I guess.

The last thing I delivered to an outsider was The Unseen Hand, a ghosting project for 9-12s.

The first thing I wrote that I still have is a short story, Odin’s Ravens. It’s about a young woman, Polly, remembering when she was six and stayed with her eccentric uncle, a writer. On the day she arrives, uncle goes swimming in a secluded lake and someone – or something – steals his clothes. The ‘thing’ then turns up at the house and proceeds to sabotage the novel he’s working on and generally causes poltergeist mayhem. Polly befriends it, and is surprised to discover it arrived in the house at the same time as she did. Gradually Polly realises it’s connected with the past history of her family.

Actually, it doesn’t sound too bad, explained like that, but I’m sure that if I looked at it I’d see plenty of reasons to rewrite the whole thing.

2) Write poetry?
I dabbled in it when I was a kid, and in songwriting too, but found them too limiting. I tend to have ideas that take many thousands of words to explore. Even my short stories always came out long!

3) Angsty poetry?
When I was a teenager I wanted to be Kate Bush. So I wrote angsty lyrics with weirdness.  I wrote the music as well. I can still remember them, distressingly clearly.

4) Favorite genre of writing?
I adore stories about people having bizarre relationships that are full of profound resonance. For instance, Santa Evita by Tomas Eloy Martinez and The Four Wise Men by Michel Tournier. I suppose it’s literary fiction with a twist. It’s what I love to write too.

5) Most annoying character you’ve ever created?
Tiff, a rebellious teenage girl on an outward bound course. She had been stuck there by her parents and hated it, so she whinged about being cold and wet all the time and then went off by herself in a pothole so that the organisers would have to rescue her. When our heroes uncover a drugs factory in the hills, Tiff eats the evidence. She causes chaos the whole time and was great fun.   

6) Best plot you’ve ever created?
I wrote one about organ snatching in India. It featured a family in a desperately poor village. The mother tries to sell one of her kidneys to a rich businessman so that she can provide dowries for her three daughters. But she’s found to be too unhealthy. Her eldest daughter arranges in secret to go in her place but at the last minute gets scared and tries to back out. So the businessman kidnaps her.

The easiest plot I ever created was for Mirror Image, my first ghosted novel. I came up with the plot in 45 minutes and then sat down to watch an anthropology programme by Desmond Morris. Then I wrote the synopsis as quickly as possible, sent it to the publisher and they loved it. It was the easiest synopsis/planning stage I’ve ever had. Sometimes if you whack it down it comes out just right. (Most of the time it doesn’t, though…)

7) Coolest plot twist you’ve ever created?
I read about Carlos the Jackal and thought it’d be great to have an incredibly resourceful villain. When he eventually got trapped, I had him cut his own hand off. Years later Prison Break did something similar!

How often do you get writer’s block?
I don’t really get blocked. I get fidgety. Some days I can’t settle to work on my current project and it’s usually because my subconscious knows there’s a problem I haven’t yet faced. Once I break through, I snatch any excuse to run to the computer and do a bit more.

9) Write fan fiction?
Not any more. But when I was a kid I was deeply into Dr Who (Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker incarnations) and Sapphire & Steel, and tried writing many stories about strangeness. Most of them were too complicated to ever get published.   

10) Do you type or write by hand?
Type. My fingers do the thinking for me. Plus, my handwriting is truly dreadful, and when I make notes I frequently find I can’t read them. When I was at school we were compelled to use fountain pens, but I made such a mess that I got a special dispensation to use felt tips, which were usually regarded as slovenly.

11) Do you save everything you write?
Yes, I am a compulsive hoarder. I have often found that early versions of stories or chapters are very useful at later stages in a revise. I also make multiple back-ups.  

12) Do you ever go back to an idea after you’ve abandoned it?
I don’t abandon ideas. If they’ve run up against a dead end, it’s usually because they need another ingredient or a different slant. I usually find that something that didn’t work one way comes alive with different characters.

13) What’s your favorite thing you’ve ever written?
A story called Ever Rest, set in Tibet. Everyone who read it really loved it and said I should turn it into a novel. So that’s one of my WIPs.

14) What’s everyone else’s favorite story you’ve written?
Apart from Ever Rest, a lot of people liked Basnelli’s Skeleton, a story about a daft but sinister art phenomenon.

15) Ever written romance or angsty teen drama?
Mirror Image was an angsty teen horror romance, written under the pen name Maria Palmer. Originally my husband Dave was going to write it, but for various reasons I wrote it instead. I enjoyed it so much I did another for fun. I definitely have a taste for drama – I could never write one of those novels where nothing much happens. And I am a huge romantic – although I like to lace it with something rather offbeat.

16) What’s your favorite setting for your characters?
It’s always whatever I’m working on. At the moment it’s an area of the Surrey Hills, the setting of Life Form 3 (see, I said it again). But another setting I’m quite chuffed with is Vellonoweth, a sleepy village I invented in the West Country which is completely normal except for its decommissioned nuclear power station. And its spiritualists.

17) How many writing projects are you working on right now? A ghosting project I’m going to do a rewrite on; an adult novel I’m collecting ideas for; the next Nail Your Novel book.  And shall we mention that other thing again?

18) Have you ever won an award for your writing?
No, sadly. It’s one of the perils of being an invisible ghost. Although I do still have the English Essay cup I won at school. Hope they don’t read this as I should have given it back.

19) What are your five favorite words?
Oveleth (an old-style oven as big as Stonehenge), triessu (an elaborate dress worn for the saddest day of someone’s life), podos (toe marks in a second-hand shoe from the original owner), emardie (embittered by working with Emu).

These are the strange poetic offerings of word verification, which seem to cry out for meanings. I’m starting a hashtag list for them on Twitter – @dirtywhitecandy #wordverificationlexicon, so do come and play. My fifth word is helytola and I’d like to know the meaning. Can anyone help?

20) What character have you created that is most like yourself?
In some ways my characters are all like me, because to write them with truth I have to put myself in their shoes (feel those podos). Or they’re like people I know and have made outrageous suppositions about – but no harm done as they would never be recognisable. All my significant characters spark from something real – but then I embroider.

21) Where do you get your ideas for your characters?
Everywhere. Something someone says will itch in my brain and I’ll think, what if you said that to such-and-such a person? I quite often look at what people wear and wonder why they chose those things. Superficial but satisfying.

22) Do you ever write based on your dreams?
When I worked full time I used to write a dream report every morning, and Dave would read it before he started writing for the day. It was great discipline. I found them a few months ago and they were surprisingly creative, so I might do it again.

23) Do you favor happy endings?
I favour the right ending – the one that is the most satisfying resolution to the problem. In the genre novels I’ve ghosted a happy ending has often been necessary, but it has to be earned.  

24) Are you concerned with spelling and grammar as you write?
I am a detail nerd. I work part time as a magazine sub-editor, so I have an internal spelling and grammar checker running from the moment I open my eyes. It drives me nuts if I see illiterate posters and signs. I think people should be allowed to carry marker pens and correct them.

25) Does music help you write?
Definitely. I’m hugely sensitive to it, and putting music on is like mainlining a scene’s atmosphere. It can make all the difference to me getting into a story or not – and to the way I write it. It guides me to a better understanding of my characters’ mental state and what they want or fear. 

26) Quote something you’ve written. Whatever pops in your head.

‘Two divers are swimming through the underwater garden, planting eels in the rockery.’ The opening line of My Memories Of A Future Life, the adult novel I have on submission.

And finally I’m tagging three bloggers to continue the game: 

  1. One for the soul – Life At Willow Manor – I love her quirky, poetic world
  2. One for the intellect -  Brainy Writer – by a neuroscience researcher with her own unique take on writing
  3. One from a lady with many titles on our shelves and much wisdom to impart Help I Need A Publisher

Choosing only three was tough as there are so many creative people whose answers I would be fascinated to see, so I’ve tried to find ones who might not have played yet. 

Anyway, that’s quite enough from me from one post. Have you been tagged, either now or previously? Put the permalink in a comment below so I can see what you said and everyone can get to know each other a bit better!

Posted in The writing business | Tagged , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

Querying an agent: is the meat of your story in the right place?

By Roz Morris | January 8, 2010

If you’d rather not send an agent your beginning, is a little voice telling you something?

Take a look at this horse. It’s roughly right… but there’s something wrong. But the artist may well have hoped we’d look at the best bits and forgive the wonky ones.

When you send your novel into the outside world it has to be as perfect as it can be. So if you wish you could send the later chapters out instead of the first ones, stop. Are you perhaps not as confident in the beginning as the later parts?

This post was provoked a comment on my previous one, about prologues. Michaele Stoughton of This Could Be A Problem (link) asked if, when querying agents about her YA novel, she should send the first few chapters or the ‘real meat’ of the story.

(Those of you with a sensitive disposition can be reassured that this talk of meat will not cause the horse any harm.)

Back to the meat. In a good story, particularly YA, the ‘real meat’ should be there from the beginning. The story should continue with more meat, all the way to a thoroughly meaty end. In fact, if you read the middle out of context, it should be so darn involved that you can’t get the full impact of what’s going on.  (And neither would an agent, so it makes no sense to send them chapters from once the story’s got going.)

I once saw a blurb that said ‘read page 120 – you’ll be hooked’. What about pages 1-119? Was the author just warming up? But don’t take your cue from published writers who get away with anaemic beginnings and other bad habits. I wouldn’t pick up that book and neither would an agent.

If you feel your opening chapters won’t wow, you need to do something about them.

Michaele may not have asked for that reason, of course. But she has raised an interesting question. Often, realisations come to you when you break out of your editing cocoon and consider how your novel would compete in the outside world. The doubt might seem tiny, and you may feel you had the thought almost by accident, but it’s your instinct at work and telling you something valuable.

Are you taking time to get your story warmed up?

Posted in Rewriting, The writing business, Writer basics 101 | Tagged , , , , , , | 13 Comments

How to write a good prologue

By Roz Morris | January 3, 2010

Are you thinking of using a prologue in your WIP? Read these rules first…

I’m struggling with a prologue for Life Form 3. I’m sure it needs one. But readers are wary of prologues. They know it means the bit they have to read before the proper story. Like the opening crawl in Star Wars (left), it might be just background. It might involve characters we never meet again. Or it might be an excerpt from later taken out of context, and therefore tricky to understand. Readers often find prologues a chore and would prefer it if you started with chapter 1, telling them all they need to know as they go along.

So before you write a prologue, try to manage without one.

You might be surprised. Even stories that don’t begin at the beginning, like Daphne Du Maurer’s Rebecca, can be told straightforwardly. Chapter 1 of Rebecca starts with the narrator dreaming she revisited her old home Manderley and gives a few tantalising details about what happened there. The next chapter brings us to the present, of the narrator and Maxim living in lonely exile, and more reminders of the turbulent past. By chapter three, we have a powerful need to know more – and that’s where the narrator takes us back to where it all began. Just because the story is a reminiscence does not mean it has to have a prologue.

But there are good reasons to use a prologue. The most common are:

*to fill in back story that can’t be given any other way

*to show a significant event that doesn’t fit with the chronology

*to start with something more exciting than what really happened at the beginning.

There are bad ways to do all of these. Here are some prologues that do them well.

Back story 1 Jeanne DuPrau’s The City of Ember starts with a scene that takes place hundreds of years before the main action. It is very brief, both in terms of the wordcount and the style. The characters are called the chief builder and the assistant builder; they don’t have names because we will never see them again. We don’t even see what they look like – not even whether they have beards to stroke in a thoughtful way. The dialogue is sparse and to the point, and many of the events afterwards are summarised. Crucially, it’s over in two pages and we’re into the story.

Back story 2 A back story prologue doesn’t have to be formal prose. John Whitbourn’s A Dangerous Energy takes place in a world where the Protestant Reformation in sixteenth-century England never happened and magicians have been key historical figures. This could have made the dullest prologue imaginable, but Whitbourn presents the information as a question paper for the Oxford University history degree: ‘Describe the main events of the Great European War of 1708-1820 and account for the Holy Roman Empire’s eventual success’. Two pages of questions like this and he’s summarised several hundred years of alternate history, very engagingly.

Significant separate event Iain Banks’s The Bridge begins with a driver trapped in a car after an accident. The rest of the narrative is a fantasy world in a coma, seeded by the memories buried deep in his mind. The car accident took place in a different world and a different state of consciousness from the rest of the story, so there is a good reason to set it apart, and to let the themes and imagery be interpreted as issues for the entire book.

The flash-forward to something more exciting Donna Tartt’s The Secret History begins with a scene from the middle of the story. A body is found, then we see the day the narrator and his friends committed the murder. Chapter 1 then goes back to how it all started.

You have to be careful using the flash-forward. Many tedious prologues consist of scenes pasted in from the middle that make little sense out of context and are there to beg the reader to stay until the story warms up. If you are writing the prologue for this reason, you might be better sharpening the rest of the story instead.

Donna Tartt gets away with it because the rest of the book is structured around this life-changing scene.  Chronologically, the murder is in the middle of the book. What happened before is book 1; afterwards is book 2. This allows her to break the action and not repeat what we have already seen (another cardinal sin of the flash-forward). It is also emotionally resonant as it dramatically echoes how the narrator’s life is irrevocably changed by this moment. (And in the prologue she has been sketchy about the details. She does just enough to let you know what you are seeing and where it is.)

Here are three rules for prologues:

1 Prologues must be short and sharp.

2 Prologues must be significant and resonant

3 Prologues will not prop up a weak beginning

Are there any novels you think have used prologues to good effect?

Posted in Rules, Writer basics 101 | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 15 Comments

On this day in 2008… and this year’s Writer’s Digest blog awards!

By Roz Morris | December 29, 2009
Nominations for the best writing blog awards… close 1 January 2010

I must be one of the few people who like receiving Christmas round-robin letters. If I get a card from someone I haven’t seen all year, I’d rather know what they’ve been up to. Whether boastful or boring, it’s way more interesting than getting only their signature. Of course my own news looks rather repetitive – ‘book, another book, um yet another book…’.

 But I do find it fun to look back to this day in 2008, and consider what didn’t yet exist. Chiron O’Keefe at The Write Soul  is in this mood too, suggesting that to spur yourself on in 2010, you should list all your writing achievements for 2009 on the first page of your diary.

So here’s what I would put in mine. On this day in 2008, my WIP Life Form 3 was little more than a shaky synopsis. Now I am revising the full manuscript with mounting excitement. One of my 9-12 ghost projects was a draft with major flaws. Now it has been read by agents on both sides of the Atlantic, who have given such perceptive feedback that it is shaping into something really special. I’ve added two genres to my ghosting repertoire that I’d never written in before – adult chick-lit and pre-teen romance. I’ve had two major ideas for adult novels that are so exciting I can hardly decide which to work up first. Nail Your Novel, the book, didn’t exist at all except as a much-followed routine in my head. Now hordes of you have given me great feedback about it and I’m planning the next in the series.

 In 2008, this blog was not even a twinkle in my eye. Now the blog world and all of you who comment and send me emails are an essential part of my writing life. And there are a lot of blogs I’m very glad I found.

 Anyway, I’ve just found out that Writer’s Digest are currently seeking nominations for their 101 best writing blogs of 2009. There are loads I’m going to be bringing to the judges’ attention. And if you’ve been a Dirty White Candy regular and enjoyed the content, would you zap a quick vote in my favour? The deadline is 1 January 2010, and nominations should be emailed to writersdig@fwpubs.com. Be sure to include“101 Websites” in the subject line.

In the meantime, I wishyou a happy, prosperous and productive New Year. And tell me here – where were your WIPs this time last year?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

How to avoid exposition – the Dirty White Candy way

By Roz Morris | December 21, 2009

4 cups granulated sugar, 1 cup light corn syrup, 1 cup water, 1/4 tsp salt, 3 egg whites beaten, 1 cup crushed amaretti biscuits, 1tsp vanilla

If you simply must explain a process or procedure in your story, make it into a bit of an adventure. Like this recipe…

I wanted to do a festive post. Many blogs I follow offer recipes for brain-stimulating confections, Holly Cupala and jmartinlibrary to name but two. With a handle like Dirty White Candy it surely was my duty to create a signature goody. Especially as no one can tell me what the real stuff was.

I imagined the photo that would accompany the post. Heaps of something yummy, mainly white, streaked with trademark ‘dirt’. Perhaps chocolate. Or coffee.

 I polled some friends. ‘Suggest a recipe that could be Dirty White Candy.’ Try divinity fudge with a twist, said one. How about bashed up biscuits instead of nuts? Perfect.

 Only, in order to take the sumptuous picture, I would have to make the darned stuff. And, as any of you fudgemeisters will know, this entails faffing with molten sugar and thermometers.

 I don’t have a sugar thermometer. I have never dabbled in such things. Years ago, chemistry A level put me off heating sugar vigorously. It’s a short step from caramel to tar-plating your pan. But I am an optimist. And I had set my heart on posting a festive recipe for dirty white candy.

 I am also not patient. I could have waited to buy a proper thermometer, but I wanted to do it right away. Besides, knowledgeable souls said a bowl of iced water might do. That’s all I needed to hear. After all, I have chemistry A level. Surely I could manage.

 I’m not saying I felt totally confident. I chose a pan I didn’t mind ruining. I read the instructions several times, even though they seemed simple. Put sugar, corn syrup, salt and water in a pan and heat until boiling. When it’s soft ball, dollop a spoonful into the beaten egg whites. Somehow, keep beating the egg whites with one hand and your volcanically hot sugar with the other. Steady the pan with your tail, if you have one.

 I started. The sugar melted and in seconds was bubbling violently. Cripes, it was a monster. I spooned gobbets into the iced water until one drop formed a tiny pearl. Hooray, soft ball. Or maybe beyond. (Wished I got that thermometer; black tar was possibly moments away). I whisked a bit into the egg white and it took on a glossy appearance, like meringue. So far, so good.

 Now I had to keep stirring everything, while testing for light crack, or something. Here my confidence got shaky, as did my multitasking. A spoon in each pan AND dropping stuff into water? That required three hands. And the testing instructions were alarmingly vague. It would leave streaks in the air when you pulled the spoon out, apparently. Even better, it would happen VERY FAST and if not turned out immediately would stick in the pan like a pot of set glue. As if the first stage hadn’t been fast enough. Eek.

 By now I had no idea what I was doing. Every time I dropped it into the water it looked the same. But wasn’t it supposed to change VERY FAST?

 Perhaps it had already.

 I lost my nerve, whipped it off the heat, whupped it into the egg whites, shook in the bashed biscuits, spread it on a tray and heaved a sigh of relief. Whoo, I made dirty white candy. No blackened disaster, and no glue.

 Except it didn’t set. It remained there like a big white splat. I had peaked too early.  

 ‘Um, what is it supposed to look like?’ said Dave.

 ‘Divinity fudge,’ I said.

 ‘And what does that look like?’

 ‘Actually, I’ve no idea.’

 (In England, we don’t have divinity fudge.)

 We prodded it. Ate spoonfuls (several in fact). We left it, in case it wanted time to think. It developed a light skin, like custard does, but that was as solid as it got.

 I’d come this far. Darn it, I wanted my signature candy. But in no way could I cut this up and display it on my prettiest plates, as cake gurus insist you must. Pretty plates wouldn’t hide the truth.

 I wondered about doing it all again. No; without a sugar thermometer there might be worse outcomes than a big white splat.

 Dave said: ‘Let’s smear it on ginger biscuits and make it look as though it’s worked, then you can take the picture.’ We did. It looked like sticky white stuff smeared on biscuits, (although it didn’t taste bad). I reckoned even if we didn’t have a clue what divinity fudge looked like, you guys would spot the subterfuge.

 We ate spoonfuls until our teeth felt like they were wearing socks. Considerable amounts remained. We squashed it into a bowl and stuck it in the fridge. Next morning it had not transformed. It reproached me every time I went to get the milk.

 In desperation I spooned dollops onto a baking sheet and shoved it in the oven at 200C. In 12 minutes they had swollen into golden cookies, light as clouds, and sticky within. Delicious.

 And so, after much ado, I can present to you, dirty white candy… the cookies! Happy holidays. Or as we say in the divinity fudgeless world, merry Christmas and a happy new year. It’s not what I set out to make, but hey that’s part of the fun.

 Stories are like that too. The best scenes or anecdotes, expositional or not, don’t turn out as anyone expects.

 How have you handled scenes that were in danger of being exposition?

And have you tried making my cookies ;-) ?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments