Making a Story your Own

It's really funny, because I don't read romances very often, but because of a strange set of circumstances, I ended up reading two concurrently.  I just finished, and was amazed at some of the similar details.

In one book, a woman moves from a big city to a small town.  She's accompanied by her mother figure (a grandmother who pretty much raised her) and the nieces and nephews she's just adopted after her sister died.  She's very good at her job and ends up helping save the police force through elaborate outreach and community participation.  The house needs repairs, which the love interest is happy to do.  The love interest is also very good with the newly adopted children.  He happens to be the police chief.  

In the other, a woman moves from the big city to a small town.  She's accompanied by her mother figure (the foster mother who pretty much raised her) and the niece she has just adopted after her sister died.  She's very good at her job and ends up helping save the town through elaborate outreach and community participation.  The house needs repairs, which the love interest is happy to do.  The love interest is also very good with the newly adopted child.  The other main character's love interests happens to be the sheriff.   

And… in the first book, the main character is Daisy and one of her adopted daughters is Grace.  In the second book, the main character is Grace and her adopted daughter is Daisy.

Crazy!  

They were published close enough together that I don't see how this could be anything but total coincidence.  

But despite the similarities, these were very different books, so it just goes to show that you can make a premise (or even an entire story) your own. 

The Problem with the Flesch-Kincaid Test

I just read an article (an excerpt from Ben Blatt's book, Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve) lamenting the dumbing down of literature over the years.  

It used, as proof, the Flesch-Kincade Grade Level Test.  The author collected all the digitized versions of New York Times Bestsellers he could find, from 1960 to 2014.  Then he ran them through the Flesh-Kincaid test.  His results showed a consistent downward trend in reading level of our bestsellers, from an average 8^th-grade reading level in the 1960s to an average 6^th-grade reading level in the 2010s.  He used this to claim that books are getting simpler and "less wise," but I think that's vastly over-simplified.

Take a look at these three passages and tell me which one you think is hardest to read and which is easiest:

1) A hadron's "sea" quarks don't change its quantum numbers. 

2) Penelope's playmates—rhinoceros and hippopotamus—unfortunately received no invitations to the environmental education convention, so Penelope, extremely embarrassed, created handwritten invitations, decorated expensive envelopes, and personally delivered them to rhinoceros and hippopotamus. 

3)  Whence hails the scythe of angst? The id ebbs. Death trysts with aught. Wrest the mote from your eye. Sage and lithe, heed the cues. Ward off the murk and thrive.

Finished?  What did you think? Well, I'll tell you the results of the Flesh-Kincaid test. 

1) (The Hadron's quarks) Grade level:  3.3.  That's 3rd grade in the US system. 

2) (Penelope's playmates) Grade level:  29.9.  Yes, 29^th grade.  Like…a second doctorate?

3) (Whence hails the scythe)  Grade level:  0.  Um…kindergarten?  

The Flesh-Kincade readability test (which the article didn't  use) is a little more moderate, but its lowest grade level seems to be 5^th grade.  And you guessed it:  the opaque third passage should be comfortable reading for a 5^th grader, according to this, and the one about quarks is perfect for 6^th graders.  But don't let your kids get hold of the passage about Penelope's poor playmates.  It can only be read comfortably  by college graduates.

How?

The problem with this test is that it uses exactly two factors:  sentence length and how many syllables in each word.  It doesn't account in any way for the difficulty or familiarity of the words themselves and certainly doesn't delve into the difficulty of the concepts behind it or the clarity of the writing.  While these examples are extreme, it does show the flaws of the test.

The truth is that sentences, over the years, have become shorter.  But I don't necessarily view this as bad or "dumbed-down" writing.  It's just a different style.  To me, one very important aspect of writing—non-fiction OR fiction—is clarity.  If you can convey complex ideas in a way that's easy to read, then I think that's better writing than conveying complex ideas in a way that's difficult to read.  Long, convoluted sentences are more challenging, and take greater attention spans and perhaps greater education, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily better.  A curvy road with random speed bumps and potholes is more difficult to drive than a straight, newly paved road.  But does that make the curvy road "better?"  To some people, yes, because straight roads bore them, so they like skirting the potholes and wrenching the steering wheel back and forth like a video game.  To others, it's not better, because they like getting to the destination and being able to enjoy the scenery as they go instead of concentrating so hard on the road.  Then there's the whole, "Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do."  I'm not saying either way is good or bad.  But it's unfair to suggest that shorter sentences and shorter words mean the writing is less sophisticated.  It's just different.

As for the Flesh-Kincaid test, I think it's a good tool to evaluate whether your text might have too long of sentences for ease of reading, but beyond that, I don't think a whole lot of it.

By the way, the Flesh-Kincaid grade level of this post: 7.3.

The Flesh-Kincaid grade level of Shakespeare's Macbeth:  6.8. 

Seriously, if you're a Shakespeare afficionado, there's no way you'd consider this post more sophisticated than Macbeth, and if you're not a Shakespeare fan, there's no way you'd consider it more difficult.  Numbers, unfortunately, do sometimes lie. 

Read what you love and write what you love! 

NaNoWriMo 2020

I haven't posted much this month (okay, not at all), but I'll blame it on NaNoWriMo.  This year I'm a rebel.  Instead of writing a 50,000-word rough draft of a novel, the original goal of NaNoWriMo, I'm revising my 2018 novel, which got pushed to the back burner.  

It's a fun middle grade story set in a world where you don't really want all your dreams to come true.  Especially if they're feisty saber-toothed swamp pigs who get you in a lot of trouble.  

For more on NaNoWriMo, check out their website:  nanowrimo.org

   

Writing lessons with Brandon Sanderson

I recently discovered these writing lectures by Brandon Sanderson, famed fantasy author, filmed and posted (with permission) free on Youtube.  I've only begun, but they seem very interesting and useful.  Check out the first one here.  Others follow.

NaNoWriMo Rebel

This year for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), I'm being a rebel.  Instead of writing a new novel, I'm revising one of my previous novels that I really like but haven't been able to finish because of the difficulty of weaving the two timelines together. 

I really like the novel.  It's probably my favorite so far.  By the end of November, I hope to have a finished product (or at least a penultimate draft that just needs a bit of line editing and polishing).

Good luck to all you NaNoWriMo writers--and rebels--out there!



 

A review of my story, "Foreign Bodies."

I just got a mention in an article by Karen Burnham in Locus Magazine.  She reviewed recent science fiction and fantasy in Deep Magic, Constellary Tales, Samovar, and Strange Horizons.  That included my sci-fi story, "Foreign Bodies," published in Deep Magic.  It's one of my favorite tales from my Colony series. 

Read here to see what she said about my work:  Focus Magazine:  Karen Burnham Reviews Short Fiction

Yearly Anthologies

If you like short stories, check out my post on Writers on the Move about yearly anthologies.
For writers, it's a good way to study the market and the craft.
For readers, it's just a good reading.

https://www.writersonthemove.com/2019/01/using-anthologies-to-study-market.html

NaNoWriMo vs. Blog

I hadn't realized how long it's been since I've posted.  I guess NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) has taken up all my writing energy.

I just passed 50,000 words on my NaNoWriMo, so I completed the main goal!  Yay!

If any of you writers out there haven't heard of NaNoWriMo, check it out for next year.  It's a fantastic motivator:   https://nanowrimo.org/

But never fear, I'll start posting more in the new post-Nano month of December.  

Semiosis by Sue Burke

As soon as I heard about this book, I knew I had to read it.  And it didn't disappoint.  I loved the premise—both the tiny colony trying to survive on a strange planet and the idea of this planet having intelligent flora. 

I really enjoyed the story being told over multiple generations by different characters, and how, until closer to the end, each chapter was almost like a short story.  I loved watching the culture developing and changing, while still mostly holding true to their peaceful aim.  It was a bit of light in a dark world. 

Because of the changing points of view, I did occasionally feel a bit distant from the characters and sometimes mixed up minor actors, but I wouldn't have had it told any other way.

The fascinating premise was somehow both the book's strongest point and the thing that made me unable to give it 5 stars.  I didn't have a hard time believing an intelligent plant.  I did have a bit of a hard time swallowing the plant being so quick-thinking and quick to adapt, since plants are a life form that live in what we would think of as slow motion.  I also couldn't quite believe its facility with human language, and I thought the plant sounded too human—though also quite plant-like in some ways.  I loved the way it changed, but things like the "humor root" just felt too easy.  Still, such a unique viewpoint and premise.  And who knows:  maybe this is how an intelligent plant would really be.   Maybe I'm thinking too much like an animal. 

Semiosis is a very, very interesting book, and I absolutely loved the imaginative plants and animals and the sentience of so many things.

I strongly recommend it to people who love nature and its amazing variations, both real and imagined.

This is a definite 4.5 stars.  Almost 5 stars.

After I wrote my review, I read some by other people.  One reviewer talked about how it was very enjoyable because it didn't have a standard story arc.  

I hadn't thought about it in exactly those words, but that's probably why I enjoyed the first several chapters more than the last few.  As I said above, they were more like interconnected short stories in the same universe, and I loved the ride.  I never knew what to expect from the next chapter, and they focused on different aspects of life on Pax.  I liked how there weren't a lot of clear-cut bad guys.  I never knew which characters would be important in the future--or even which ones would survive.  It was very unpredictable.  Then, when it started getting more "let's defeat the bad guys in a big action-packed climax" it lost some of its unique beauty.  

Then, of course, I read another review that said they didn't like the book all that much because, basically, it didn't have a standard story arc.

You can't please all of the people all of the time.

Buy it here on Amazon.

Author Interview with Eleanor Glewwe

Several months ago, I read a great middle grade novel called Wildings.  I loved the sad and twistedly relevant premise, the creative setting, and the powerful but not preachy themes of prejudice and segregation.  And...very refreshingly...the characters fight for social change without violence.  I highly recommend the book.  Recently I read the companion book, Sparkers, which was written before Wildings and which also takes place a few years before.  I decided to reach out to the author because I like her work so much.  She obliged with an author interview!

So, without further ado, I present Eleanor Glewwe and her answers to my questions:

-Did you have the idea of Wildings before you wrote Sparkers?  Or did your characters and land just beg for more of their stories to be told?

No, the idea for Wildings came much later, when Sparkers was on its way to being published and I was starting to write my next book. I originally intended to write a direct sequel to Sparkers, with the same main characters, but my agent and editor encouraged me to write about new main characters, and through brainstorming I came up with the idea for Wildings. I think of Wildings as a companion to Sparkers, set in the same world, a few years later, but with new protagonists. I was glad I got to give Caleb, the little brother from Sparkers, a bigger role in Wildings, and it was also fun to show what the main characters of Sparkers were like when they were older.  

-Were there any big differences between writing Sparkers and Wildings?

Writing the two books was very different. I wrote the book that would become Sparkers when I was fourteen and revisited it a few times over the years. So the path from the initial draft to publication took about nine years (though I was spending time on a lot of other things in those nine years). On the other hand, I was contracted to write Wildings, so I had to produce it much faster. I started writing it toward the end of my first year of grad school and was editing it into my third year of grad school. Also, since I had an agent and an editor through the whole process of writing Wildings, from conception to final draft, I had input from others from the beginning, which I didn't have writing Sparkers. 

-Who is your favorite character to write?

Hm, maybe Marah, the protagonist of Sparkers, because she's probably the most similar to me. But I also really liked writing Azariah in Sparkers, Caleb in Wildings, and Aradi Imael, the music teacher, in Sparkers, because her character was inspired by a beloved music teacher I had. 

- If you could sit down to dinner with any writer, living or dead, who would it be?

Right now, I would pick Madeleine L'Engle. Her books are so warm and humane, and I think she would be an excellent conversationalist about children's stories, speculative fiction, and religion. 

-Tell us a little about your road to publication.

As I mentioned, I originally wrote Sparkers (it had a different title then) when I was in high school. My sophomore year of college, I accidentally found out about an Amazon-sponsored novel contest, which had a YA category and for which the top prize was a publishing contract with Penguin, I believe. I decided to enter the contest with the novel that would become Sparkers. The contest had thousands of entries and many rounds, and I made it much farther than I expected and got positive feedback from contest reviewers. I also met some other young writers on the contest message boards and decided it would be wise to try to get an agent (before that, I'd been considering submitting directly to the few publishers that take unagented manuscripts). The summer after the contest, I did a lot of online research (mostly reading publishing industry blogs), and then I started querying agents. There was one in particular who asked me to do a couple of revise and resubmits, and my senior year of college he offered me representation. We went on to do more revisions, and the year after I graduated from college, we sold Sparkers. 

-What are you writing now?

I'm sort of working on what I hope will be my next novel, though I'm spending more time on grad school and dissertation writing these days. This project is YA fantasy, set in a different world from that of Sparkers and Wildings. But like those books, it features a lot of music. 

-How can readers find out more about you?

My website is www.eleanorglewwe.com and I blog there pretty regularly. 

-Do you have any books you'd like to recommend?

I'm a huge fan of Rachel Hartman, author of Seraphina, Shadow Scale, and the just-released Tess of the Road. I also really like the Frances Hardinge books I've read, Cuckoo Song and The Lie Tree, and I want to read her more recent books. I love The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley. And last fall I really enjoyed reading Philip Pullman's highly anticipated new book set in the world of His Dark Materials, The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage. 

Thanks, Eleanor, for your answers and your time.  I look forward to reading your next book.

To my blog readers, if you're interested in these books, click here:

Read Sparkers

Read Wildings

Literary Magazines with Themes, Fall 2017

Head on over to Writers on the Move to see my new roundup of literary magazines with themes like "community," "taste," "dancing in the wind" and "Rumpelstiltskin."

Due dates range from the end of August, 2017 to January 2018. 

http://www.writersonthemove.com/2017/08/literary-magazines-with-themes-fall.html

Quote from Ray Bradbury

For some writing advice from Ray Bradbury, check out my post at Writers On the Move.

Advice from Writers at the Glendale Chocolate Affair

I love the Glendale Chocolate Affair, partly for the chocolate, but mostly for the writing classes (sponsored by area romance writers--see the connection to February and chocolate?)   Every year I'm in the country, I go to some of the classes, and always learn something new or remember something I've forgotten.

This year I collected my favorite tidbit of advice from each class and compiled them at Writer's on the Move, a blog I contribute to about the art and business of writing.

Here's my favorite one:

From Vijaja Schartz:

Don't write linking scenes just to write them. If you do, they'll be boring. Skip all the boring scenes.

Click here for more.

Rogue and missing apostrophes

Punctuation is more important than some people think.  See my post at Writer's On the Move for the latest installment:  Apostrophes!

And seriously, if you're going to get a tattoo, get someone to proofread it first.  :)

Nanowrimo 2016

Yay!  30 days and 52,000 words written.  This year I didn't get as far along in the plot as I wanted, but I got my words in!  This is the sequel to last year's Nanowrimo novel.  It's a fun story to write.  Now I just need to finish and perfect both books.

Author Interview with me

Here's an interview I did at "Melody Klink; A Bard Girl's Tale." 

Great Quote about Music

The quote is possibly by Frank Ocean

The truth in it is absolutely brilliant

And it also applies to literature, film, visual art  

As a writer, try to tap into both your happiness and your sadness to create something that sings to people through their triumphs and despair.   

Dialogue Tags: said vs asked

I am a big fan of "said" as a dialogue tag. To me, when a writer uses too many tags like "he remonstrated," "she noted," "he uttered," or "John asserted," it draws attention to those words instead of the dialogue. It can also sound very stilted, very written. "Said," on the other hand, is invisible. 

However...I just read a novel that used it for questions, like this:

 "Where are you going?" she said. 

 "Do you want Chinese or pizza?" he said. 

 To me, this "said" is jarring. Why not use "asked?" (Again, I'm not a fan of more than an occasional use of "inquired," "questioned," "queried," etc.)

 I think the main point is that you don't want the reader paying attention to these little crutch words. You want them paying attention to the dialogue and losing themselves in your invented world. 

My dear writing critique buddy, Barbara, loves suggesting alternates to "said." And in her writing they often really work. So I guess it's all about your style and voice.

 Happy writing!

Story Generators

These random story ideas crack me up, all from Seventh Sanctum's What-If-Inator:

What if Marco Polo fought Lewis Carroll?
What if the rise of Egypt involved nanotechnologists?
What if John Adams switched places with Beowulf?
What if Annie Oakley was directly responsible for WWII?
What if Confucius was a starship commander?
What if the extinction of the dinosaurs involved corporate executives?
What if Cleopatra was a botanist?

Okay, some of these might really work for Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams.  :)

Check out my post on Writers on the Move  to see what I think of these online story generators.

Nanowrimo 2015--58,000 words written

Just validated the rough draft of my 2015 Nanowrimo novel!  

Didn't quite finish the plot, but got 58,000 good words written, and will soon finish the story too.

Got inspired.

Had fun.

Feel proud.