Pantser or Plotter?

By June Shaw

If you write books, short stories, or plays, do you prefer to plot them or write them by the seat of your pants?

There is no right or wrong answer.

Authors do both, often depending on their preference or the stage of writing in which they find themselves. The genre in which they write sometimes makes a difference, too.

In a recent lively discussion between many published and unpublished writers and a popular literary agent, I heard unpublished writers mainly say they wrote without having a plan of where they were going. Most of the published writers, however, said they were pantsers when they first started writing, but then discovered writing a basic plot first helped most.

Our agent in attendance said romance writers were often pantsers but that mystery authors, whom she mainly represents, create a plot first.

One of my major deficiencies is organizing -- almost anything. I wish I didn't have that problem. But one friend I taught with does the opposite -- even her pantry is alphabetized. I'd like to keep parts of me and parts of her and fit about halfway between us with my home. And my writing.

I am plotting more with my novels now than I did when I first started with novels. It's a little easier for me as time passes.

What do you prefer? Sitting at the computer and dashing out words without knowing where you're going? Or having a plan ahead of time and fitting your creative words in their proper places?

Riding A Bike With The Brakes On

By Pat Browning

I’ve lived in my apartment for almost six years and I’m still picking up, throwing out and rearranging. This week I spotted a sheaf of papers underneath an end table. What it was doing on the floor is anyone’s guess but I finally picked it up.


It’s a 13-page printout I did in February of an article from The Guardian newspaper online. The headline: “Riding A Bike With The Brakes On: The First 12 Years Are The Worst.” A survey of British writers inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, the article is both funny and spot on.


Some highlights:

Margaret Atwood – You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.


Roddy Doyle – Do give the work a name as quickly as possible. Own it, and see it. Dickens knew Bleak House was going to be called Bleak House before he started writing it. The rest must have been easy. Do spend a few minutes a day working on the cover biog – “He divides his time between Kabul Tierra del Fuego.” But then get back to work.


Helen Dunmore – Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away. It’s a nice feeling, and you don’t want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.


Geoff Dyer – Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire. Never ride a bike with the brakes on. If something is proving too difficult, give it up and try something else.

Anne Enright –Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.


Richard Ford – Don’t drink and write at the same time. Don’t write letters to the editor. (No one cares.) Don’t take any shit if you can possibly help it.


Jonathan Franzen – Never use the word “then” as a conjunction – we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page.


Esther Freud – Cut out the metaphors and similes. In my first book I promised myself I wouldn’t use any and I slipped up during a sunset in chapter 11. I still blush when I come across it.

Neil Gaiman – Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing.


David Hare – Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome. If nobody will put your play on, put it on yourself.

PD James – Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.


AL Kennedy – Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.


Hilary Mantel – First paragraphs can often be struck out. Are you performing a haka, or just shuffling your feet?

Michael Moorcock – Find an author you admire (mine was Conrad) and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters.


Michael Morpurgo – It is the gestation time which counts. By the time I sit down and face the blank page I am raring to go. I tell it as if I’m talking to my best friend or one of my grandchildren.


Joyce Carol Oates – Don’t try to anticipate an “ideal reader” – there may be one but he/she is reading someone else. Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.

Annie Proulx – To ensure that you write slowly, write by hand.


Will Self – Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea forever.

Helen Simpson – The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-it on the wall in front of my desk saying, “Faire et se taire” (Flaubert), which I translate for myself as “Shut up and get on with it.”


Zadie Smith – Don’t romanticize your “vocation.” You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle.” All that matters is what you leave on the page.

Colm Toibin – Stay in your mental pyjamas all day. No going to London. No going anywhere else either.


Rose Tremain – Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.


Sarah Waters – Respect your characters, even the minor ones. In art, as in life, everyone is the hero of their own particular story.


Ten Rules For Writing Fiction – The Guardian Feb. 20, 2010 - is still in the archives and includes Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules. Read the article at:
http://tinyurl.com/ygzq42z


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Reader graphic from www.NPR.org (Books)

"Full Of Rape And Adverbs"

By Pat Browning


Elmore Leonard says that using adverbs is a mortal sin. Whether or not you’re an Elmore Leonard fan you can’t argue with his success. I’m especially interested in Leonard’s exceptions to his rules.

The Guardian, a British newspaper, recently ran a lengthy article on Leonard’s 10 Rules for Writing, followed by rules offered by British authors. You can read the entire article at:
http://tinyurl.com/yksnu69

10 Rules For Writing Fiction from The Guardian, Feb. 20, 2010, beginning first with Elmore Leonard’s rules:
*****
1) Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.


2) Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. 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."


3) Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.


4) Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".


5) Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.


6) Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.


7) Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.


8) Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.


9) Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.


10) Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.


My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
*****
Inspired by Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, The Guardian surveyed some established British authors for their tips on successful writing. Here are brief comments from some of them.
*****
Margaret Atwood
You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but -essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.

Geoff Dyer
Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.


Anne Enright
Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.


Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.


Esther Freud
A story needs rhythm. Read it aloud to yourself. If it doesn't spin a bit of magic, it's missing something.


Neil Gaiman
Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.


Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.


David Hare
Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.


The two most depressing words in the English language are "literary fiction".


PD James
Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.


Al Kennedy
Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.


Hilary Mantel
First paragraphs can often be struck out. Are you performing a haka, or just shuffling your feet?


If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.


Michael Moorcock
Find an author you admire (mine was Conrad) and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters.


Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel.


If you are writing a plot-driven genre novel make sure all your major themes/plot elements are introduced in the first third, which you can call the introduction. Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development. Resolve your themes, mysteries and so on in the final third, the resolution.


For a good melodrama study the famous "Lester Dent master plot formula" which you can find online. It was written to show how to write a short story for the pulps, but can be adapted successfully for most stories of any length or genre.


Carrot and stick – have protagonists pursued (by an obsession or a villain) and pursuing (idea, object, person, mystery).


Michael Morpurgo
It is the gestation time which counts.


By the time I sit down and face the blank page I am raring to go. I tell it as if I'm talking to my best friend or one of my grandchildren.


Joyce Carol Oates
Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.

Ian Rankin
Get lucky.
Stay lucky.


Will Self
Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea forever.


Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.


By the same token remember how much time people spend watching TV. If you're writing a novel with a contemporary setting there need to be long passages where nothing happens save for TV watching: "Later, George watched Grand Designs while eating HobNobs. Later still he watched the shopping channel for a while . . ."


Helen Simpson
The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-it on the wall in front of my desk saying "Faire et se taire" (Flaubert), which I translate for myself as "Shut up and get on with it."


Zadie Smith
Don't romanticise your "vocation". You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no "writer's lifestyle". All that matters is what you leave on the page.


Don't confuse honours with achievement.


Colm Tóibín
Finish everything you start.


Stop feeling sorry for yourself.


If you have to read, to cheer yourself up read biographies of writers who went insane.


Rose Tremain
In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.


Respect the way characters may change once they've got 50 pages of life in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things have to be altered to take account of these changes.


Sarah Waters
Writing fiction is not "self-expression" or "therapy". Novels are for readers, and writing them means the crafty, patient, selfless construction of effects. I think of my novels as being something like fairground rides: my job is to strap the reader into their car at the start of chapter one, then trundle and whizz them through scenes and surprises, on a carefully planned route, and at a finely engineered pace.


Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce . . . Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end.


Jeanette Winterson
Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether.


Enjoy this work!

Breaking the Rules

By Beth Terrell

Elmore Leonard, one of the masters of crime fiction wrote a now-famous list of rules for writers. They're excellent rules, and any writer could benefit from studying them. You could, as Leonard himself has demonstrated, have a long and illustrious career by following them. Yet, in the right hands and with the right techniques, almost every writing rule ever devised can be broken. Knowing the rules is important, but knowing when and how to break them may be equally important.

Consider Leonard's first rule:

1. Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

Notice how Leonard himself allows for exceptions to the rule. In my opinion, one of the best examples of a book that successfully opens with a description of weather is Glendon Swarhout's masterful coming of age novel Bless the Beasts and the Children:

In that place, the wind prevailed. There was always sound. The throat of the canyon was hoarse with wind. It heaved through the pines and passed and was collected by the cliffs. There was a phenomenon of pines in such a place. When wind died in a box canyon and in its wake the air was still and taut, the trees were not. The passing trembled in them, and a sough of loss. They grieved. They seemed to mourn a memory of wind.

From this description of tumultuous wind, the author breaks yet another common writing rule (though not one of Leonard's) by taking us into a nightmare one of the boys, John Cotton, is having. But that dream, in which Cotton relives a traumatic event (the slaughter of buffalo in an annual culling "hunt") that occurred earlier that day, is what impels him to lead a band of teenaged misfits, all emotionally damaged, all sons of well-to-do families, on a mission to save the remaining buffalo. If you've never read this book, I highly recommend it. This is a guy who knows how and when to break the rules.

Here's another rule:

2. Avoid prologues. They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.

Leonard goes on to give an example of a prologue that works. I think it's Steinbeck, who can get away with breaking pretty much any rule he wants to. As I mentioned last week, without the prologue to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I might not have read on. (Well, I would have, because we were discussing it at our Sisters in Crime meeting, but I wouldn't have wanted to.)

Although most of Leonard's rules, like most writing rules, can--and sometimes should--be broken, the last one is pretty much non-negotiable:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

It's hard to argue with that one, and I can't think of a single instance where you'd want to break it. Why put in anything readers are likely to skip? It's a hard rule to follow, though. If we thought it was "skippable," we wouldn't have put it in there in the first place. What I think Leonard means, though, is big chunks of description that go on and on until readers start skimming them.

There are a total of ten Elmore Leonard rules, with a bonus rule that encompasses the rest--If it sounds like writing, rewrite it. You can read the rest of them here: http://www.kabedford.com/archives/000013.html.

One of my favorite quotes about writing rules is by Somerset Maugham, who said, "There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are."

Thank goodness for that.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

By Beth Terrell

Last month, our Sisters in Crime group had our book club discussion on Stieg Larsson's novel, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It was an interesting discussion, and one of the topics touched on was why the novel was such a monumental success, considering all the rules the author breaks.

One commonly touted writing rule is "Never open with a prologue." Yet, it was generally agreed at our meeting that, in Larsson's case, the prologue was the most intriguing part of the book. But The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo does a number of unorthodox things that, in another novel, might be considered the kiss of death. It has been suggested that the book's success can be chalked up to its setting in Sweden and to the fact that it (along with the other two in the series) were published posthumously. Larsson died of a massive heart attack shortly after submitting all three manuscripts. I don't agree. If you read the reviews on Amazon.com and on Larsson's website, there are obviously other factors at work. Still, the book has a number of weaknesses that bear mentioning.

First, there's a long (very long) subplot involving a libel trial involving the male protagonist, Mikael Blomqvist. General consensus was that this subplot was not very interesting, although it did serve the purpose of making Blomqvist vulnerable enough to accept the assignment that is ostensibly at the heart of the novel (investigating the disappearance and possible murder of his client's niece some forty years earlier). The libel subplot continues again--for more than 100 pages--after the "main" mystery is solved. It creates an odd anticlimax, especially since we never even meet the villain, a corrupt industrialist. Most of the Sisters agreed that this subplot could have--and should have--been dealt with much more quickly.

Second, the intriguing and poignant puzzle set up in the beginning turns out to have very little substance. Blomqvist solves it on the basis of information that could just have easily led him to the opposite conclusion. There's another, related, mystery that turns out to be a serial killer subplot (I don't think that's a spoiler). The killer is remarkably easy to figure out. In fairness to Blomqvist (and maybe Larsson), maybe my reasons for suspecting this particular person would be less obvious if I'd been there in person and not reading it in a book.

Third, the protagonists are both problematic. Blomqvist is an unusually passive character. Generally likable but rather two-dimensional, he plods through the story not doing much of anything until the climactic moment in which he does the most stupid thing imaginable--the thing you see constantly in the kind of bad horror film where you sit in the audience and scream, "No! Don't go ALONE into the basement/attic/scary haunted cornfield!!" Despite this, nearly every woman he meets leaps into bed with him.

The female protagonist, Elizabeth Salander, is stronger and more interesting, but also less consistent. Once moment, she's a socially inept, passive victim who has been labeled incompetent and made a ward of the state. The next, she's a socially sophisticated Mata Hari type. There's no reason at all for her to still be under the thumb of the state, considering her genius and also her genial relationship with the kindly elderly man who is her guardian at the beginning of the book. Her failure to get out from under the system when she had a guardian who would clearly have helped her seemed entirely designed to make her a victim of her new guardian (a beast of a man assigned to her case when her original guardian has a stroke). Yes, she does get her revenge (in a way that's not especially believable), but not before she's put through a lot of gratuitous sexual humiliation.

Both characters demonstrate some rather serious moral lapses that aren't generally seen in protagonists who aren't deliberately set up as antiheroes, and there's a strong undercurrent of mysogeny in the book, despite Larsson's obvious intent to condemn the all-too-common abuse of women in his country. The novel's original title (in Swedish) means Men Who Hate Women, and that's a fair description of the book's theme. Blomqvist's womanizing seems to me to be an illustration of a different, more subtle brand of mysogeny, but it seems unlikely that the author meant it that way. In any case, there's no doubt the author made some unusual choices with this book, and while they didn't work for some of us (Lee Goldberg has an interesting blog post about the book here), they obviously worked for others, who made the book a bestseller through word-of-mouth.

All that said, there was much to like about the book, and it generated one of the most interesting book discussions we've had. Despite the books flaws, I'll read the next two, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. (To be honest, I would probably read that last one just for the title.)

But the question remains: How did such a flawed book become an international phenomenon? Reading the reader reviews on Amazon and on Mr. Larsson's website, it seems like the orginality of the Elizabeth Salander character, the exotic location, and the intriguing setup made the difference. Some people thought the pacing was excellent, though others found it plodding. Whatever their reasons, it's a good illustration of the fact that, if you can engage your readers, you can get away with breaking the rules.