How Far We Haven’t Come

Posted on by Erin Bartels

Remember how I was so pleased in my last post to be able to work on something new? Well my brain swiftly switched gears back to something old. Something incomplete. Something festering.

Back on December 10, 2013, I wrote a blog post entitled Adventures in Shameful American History that discussed a number of cultural and historical realities I was struggling with as I completed research for a novel I was writing called The Bone Garden. It was before the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Freddie Gray, before the unrest in Ferguson and the riots in Baltimore, before the massacre in Charleston.

In January and February of 2014, I wrote the first draft of a novel that turned out to be frighteningly timely. It traces the race relations within several generations of one white family, from auspicious beginnings as participants in the Underground Railroad, to a mixed bag of love and hate during the Civil Rights era, to a new reconciliation in the modern time. For the next year, I worked hard on that novel, revising it multiple times, editing it to a high gloss. But there was always a problem with the modern-day timeline. I fixed some of it, but it still never felt quite right to me. It wasn’t as good as it could be. Compared to the other two timelines, it seemed…too easy.

The day after the shooting in Charleston, I attended a prayer vigil at Union Missionary Baptist Church in Lansing, Michigan. The crowd was relatively small in number but great in spirit. There were mostly African American worshipers, but a fair number of white worshipers as well. The Spirit was moving and pain was released and anger was expressed and sorrow was felt. It was deeply emotional and raw.

Growing up in a white small town in the Lutheran church, I had never been part of a service quite like that before. I’m a Baptist since I married a Baptist pastor, but it’s not a “shoutin’ church,” if you know what I mean. It’s not a charismatic congregation. It’s pretty tame. But I have been privileged to join together with other churches in the city every year, usually during Holy Week, to worship together. Stiff white Methodists and shouting black Baptists and proper Presbyterians and calm Congregationalists, all worshiping together. These have been some of my most memorable times in the house of God.

Even so, this prayer vigil was qualitatively different. It was a lament.

I drove away from that service with a heart that was still heavy. Yes, I believed God would give comfort to the bereaved. But it still happened. There was still a terrible racist person who murdered nine people, including some in their seventies and eighties, for no reason other than his idiotic, misguided, backward, reprehensible beliefs. Beliefs that were taught. And are taught. All over the place. Still.

And I realized what bothered me about the modern-day storyline of The Bone Garden. It wasn’t true. Fiction — good fiction — tells the truth. And I wasn’t doing that. I wanted my modern day white characters to be better than their fictional predecessors. But they aren’t. Yes, some are more understanding and more accepting and more loving. But others are not. They cannot be. Because Dylann Roof exists. Thousands of Dylann Roofs exist, and more of them are being trained up every day. And I do a disservice to the truth to ignore that when writing this story.

So I’m back at it, working hard to make things real. No matter how difficult it is for us to stomach. We look back at our parents’ generation and think that we are better than them. We would never support segregation or turn the other way when peaceful marchers were set upon by dogs and attacked with fire hoses. We would never have let 100 years pass between the Emancipation Proclamation and Selma.

But is that the truth? Obviously not. That Confederate flag flying high in South Carolina? It’s not down yet.

An Incredible Weekend with Literary Agent Donald Maass

Posted on by Erin Bartels

Phew! What a week and what a weekend. By the grace of God, the prayers of many, and the workings of modern medicine, I was able to function on Friday and Saturday for Write on the Red Cedar. I also managed to get quite caught up today at work, despite almost a week of painful delirium where I think I may have answered a dozen emails, all with a mere sentence if possible. And now I am almost at 100% again.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAOne of the highlights of my weekend was driving Donald Maass from the airport to the Kellogg Hotel and Conference Center, chatting about my writing. Don gave a fantastic, uplifting keynote address Saturday morning before launching into two hours of instruction on Writing 21st Century Fiction. As insightful and winsome as he is in writing, he is even more so in person. I was lucky enough to sit by him at lunch while our table shared stories of family, publishing, MSU shenanigans, and Michigan’s natural beauty.

After lunch, Zach and I answered questions about traditional publishing at a “roundtable” discussion, which I think was helpful and enlightening for the participants. Then I presented a workshop I’ve done at the Breathe Christian Writers Conference called Finding Your Writing Rhythm. I felt a little rushed with only 45 minutes, but I got some good feedback from attendees and, best of all, my voice held out.

Next I attended a great workshop on character led by author Kristina Riggle. She had some wonderful insights about how to create characters that walk off the page and feel like real people.

After a quick agent/author panel, I tried my first real solid food in nearly a week and managed not to choke (huzzah). Then I settled in for four hours of Writing the Break-Out Novel with Donald Maass. Wow. Writers, if you ever, ever have a chance to sit under this man’s teaching, you need to do it. Don is engaging and funny and challenges you–commands you, even, but in the nicest of ways–to think differently about your writing, to forego the easy solution for the creative solution, to raise every aspect of your craft to the next level, to take control of your fiction and thereby take control of your reader’s emotions in order to create fiction that moves and sticks with people.

I have a notebook full of ideas that Don drew out from me through his probing questions and exercises. I’m excited to get back into my first draft of I Hold the Wind and to get The Bone Garden back out to make even more improvements.

But I think the most important thing that Don said, for me at least, was this (I’m paraphrasing): You have the time. No novel is so timely that it can’t wait a few more months or a year or more for the author to make it better, to make it as good as it can possibly be. Don’t be in such a hurry. I’m going to try to take that to heart this year and truly enjoy every minute of the process of writing rather that always wishing for the next step to be here.

There is time. There is always time.

Revising Your Manuscript: Clarifying Motivation

Posted on by Erin Bartels

Last week I shared the story of a shooting near our house. If you haven’t read that post, hop on back and read it first, then move on to this one.

When the dust settles after a tragedy in which the human will was involved–as opposed to a natural disaster–the very first question we ask ourselves is Why? What drove the villains of innumerable wars and genocides and school shootings and kidnappings and murders to commit such heinous acts? We want a reason, even if it’s an inadequate one, for the crime. And when we don’t get it, it makes the tragedy more frightening. Whatever the reason, it is so much easier to process and understand if it isn’t random.

When it comes to storytelling, motivation is key to understanding characters, accepting the plot, and fully immersing ourselves in the story. If there’s no clear reason for an action, the reader will be continually on the lookout for it. Now, if we want to make unclear motivation part of the tension for a while, that’s fine. But if we never manage to explain to a reader why a character, say, betrays his brother or cries when he sees a field of ripe wheat or sabotages his best friend, we’re betraying their trust in us as storytellers.

In high school I was in a number of plays and musicals, and beyond the very obvious difference of one having musical numbers and one not, I noticed a very pronounced difference in stage direction. In a play, if I stood up and walked to another spot in the “room” for no apparent reason, the director would call me on it. I needed to have a reason to change my position beyond me just feeling like the audience would be bored if I sat the whole time I was delivering these lines. In fact, it was so ingrained in me that it has affected my enjoyment of other productions! A common problem when memorizing lines and movements for a play is to answer the question What’s my motivation? because, of course, as an actor you are given lines and stage direction in a non-organic matter. To you, they did not arise naturally. Someone else wrote them out and you have been tasked with performing.

In contrast, the director of the musicals needed little reason for movement beyond the need to get people into the proper spots to start the next dance number. If you’re manipulating events in your manuscript just so you can get to the next scene that you planned, step back a moment and examine each character’s motivation. Would someone really act that way, say that line? Why? What would drive them to do that?

Using my example of the recent deadly shooting from the post on tension, after the shooter was taken into custody our questions changed from Who? and Where? to Why? Why the pharmacist? Was the shooter attempting to steal drugs? Was he under the influence of drugs? Why his neighbor? Had they been at odds?

The day after the shooting I was attempting to organize my desk (because deeper thought eluded me, preoccupied as I was with the events of the day before). This process involved going through a stack of items to be read and filed, including several issues of The New Yorker. I was flipping through them for articles and stories and comics I wanted to rip out and keep when I ran across an article about Adam Lanza’s father. I didn’t want to read about Sandy Hook, especially after the experience of my son’s school being on lockdown. But for some reason I began to read anyway. The article essentially attempted to explain what created a killer and a scenario like Sandy Hook. It talked about Adam Lanza’s childhood and teen years, his slow descent into a mental prison, the enabling actions of his mother, the frustration and despair of his father, everything, it seemed, except personal motivation. And that’s because that’s all we’re left with when a mass murderer kills himself and leaves no explanation. We’re left to grasp at wisps of clues and will never know the full truth.

But as writers, we must know why our characters are behaving the way they are, doing the things they’re doing, saying the things they’re saying. Read through each scene of your work in progress. Are the motivations of your characters clear? You don’t have to tell the reader outright why someone did something. You just have to make it easy enough for them to figure out on their own.

In my current manuscript, I wasn’t happy with one aspect of the ending. A young character committed a heinous act because I needed another character to suffer the consequences of their actions. The only problem was, I didn’t give this young character enough motivation. I tried adding a bit here and there, but what he did was so awful, my sprinklings of motivation were not enough, and I knew it. Rather than change the ending so that my other character didn’t suffer the consequences of her actions, I simply switched the young man’s target and made the consequences to the other character accidental. Problem solved.

Not everything needs an explanation of course. You don’t need to tell us why your protagonist rescued a dog from a shelter. It’s a pretty common thing humans do because most people like pets. However, you might have a reason for your protagonist choosing a large and imposing dog rather than a little yippy one. Or choosing a dog rather than a cat. That may factor into the plot or it may simply tell a reader something about the character that’s important.

Remember, if your character moves stage left, there had better be a reason for it or the spell you are trying to cast will be broken. Your audience will remember that they’re reading a book. And that’s exactly what we don’t want them to do.

Revising Your Manuscript: Solving Plot Problems

Posted on by Erin Bartels

You know when you watch a movie and you find yourself asking “but why wouldn’t he just…” and you can’t enjoy the rest of the show because everything hinged on that one thing that doesn’t make a lick of sense?

Congratulations! You’ve identified a plot hole. Spend much time on IMDB.com and you will find thousands of threads about plot problems in popular movies. Some of them are little, and rabid fans quickly explain them to the not-so-observant watcher. They’re the potholes, something we Michiganders are intimately familiar with this time of year. They make the ride clunky, but they’re not going to ruin the trip altogether.

Others are, well, like this.

li-ott-sinkhole620

For the pothole type, you probably just need a patch. You find a reasonable explanation for why this character did X or why Y caused Z and you work it into the story. For the sinkhole type, you may need to do some intensive structural repair and rerouting.

The sinkholes are the things we wish we could ignore because fixing them could alter everything else in our story. So we pretend they don’t exist, convince ourselves that we’re worrying about nothing, and in the meantime they swallow up the whole story because no one can get past them. Sometimes we need others to point them out to us, so we know–for sure, now–that yes, this is tripping up everyone else as well.

As painful and labor-intensive as they may be to fix, they must, must, must be fixed. And here are a couple ways we can approach them:

1. Go back to the beginning and prepare us.

Want to keep that plot device? Then you need to go back and lay out for the reader why it has to happen that way. Give the reader signposts and clues and reasons. If adequately done, then when we come back up to where that sinkhole was, you may find that it’s disappeared. Everything makes sense and falls into line and we go trucking right along to the next chapter.

2. Go a completely different direction.

Just can’t get your mind around how to salvage your plot and not fall into the sinkhole? Turn around and go another direction. Choose that direction according to the natural flow of the story. What would really happen next? And next? And next? Make that happen. Maybe you’ll get to the place you had wanted to be in the end anyway. Or maybe you’ll discover an even better ending in this new direction. I like it when the latter happens, because those are the endings that can both surprise us and still feel inevitable. They never feel tacked on.

What about you? How have you handled big plot holes in your own work? Do you find they tend to pop up in the same places, like the muddled middle or the ending that you just never quite thought through until you found yourself there and had to wrap this blessed tale up? I’d love to hear from you!

Revising Your Manuscript: Cutting the Fat

Posted on by Erin Bartels

When it comes to revision, writers have a lot to say about what to leave in and what to leave out. Kill your darlings is a common way of describing the process of cutting out the parts that are pretty or clever but do not move the story along. But there are other things to cut out as well if we want our writing to sing–the boring stuff, the repetitive stuff, the needless stuff.

Long exchanges in dialogue that you might have in actual life, but that no one wants to read about.

Words we all use when we speak, like um, well, yeah, so, but, etc. that slow our dialogue down and require all sorts of commas (which also slow the reader down).

Words that happen too often. In my current work in progress, it was “ma’am.” I think I cut about a hundred of those out after a beta reader pointed them out to me!

Overexplanation of the setting. This may be hard to gauge, but consider that, in most cases, your reader doesn’t need to visualize a room or vista exactly as you do to understand what’s going on. None of us goes into a room and then catalogs in our heads everything in it. Pick one or two features that make a place unique or represent a place’s ethos that a character might notice. Need an example of overdoing the setting? Read the first chapter of A Separate Peace. Mr. Knowles, we get it! It’s a private school in the Northeast with old brick buildings. Now put away the map and move on.

Needless physical description of characters. Eye color, hair color, height, weight, body type, manner of dress. Does it matter? Sometimes. But sometimes it is plain overdone. What do readers have to know in order to understand your character? Can they see it in action as a character changes? I’m of the opinion that a reader can identify more with your protagonist if they are not over-described. Because the moment a protagonist is a willowy blonde with “eyes of violet that changed with her moods” I think, well, this person is certainly nothing like me. Or anyone. Because eye colors may look different depending on the color of someone’s shirt, but seriously, it’s not an optic mood ring.

How do you tell what needs to be cut? Usually, you need other readers who are not so close to the story to show you where you’re making them yawn or sigh or scream in exasperation.  Each sentence should serve to move the plot forward, help readers understand something about a character or the setting that is truly germane to the story (and in most cases it is more engaging when you can show it rather than tell it), or speak to the story’s theme. When you (or your reader) find something that can be removed with absolutely no harm to the story, it’s probably not needed.

Cutting the fat is how you get your story down to its true essence, which helps the reader better interpret and understand the point you are trying to make. None of us will ever do it perfectly. But try to keep it in mind as you read through your manuscript. You may be surprised by just how much you can lose without losing your story. And once all that dross is consumed by the fire, what’s left shines all the brighter.

Here are some links to other sites with great advice on cutting useless words in particular:

Common Redundancies

Five Tips on Cutting the Clutter

Five Words You Can Probably Cut Altogether (Mostly)

 

The Intentional Writer: Finding the Time, Space, and Inspiration You Need To Write

Posted on by Erin Bartels

I’ve mentioned it a few times on the blog and now here it is. Inspired by the presentation I gave at the Breathe Christian Writers Conference last October and bringing together some of my best blogging and writing about writing, I offer you The Intentional Writer.

Intentional Writer ebook CVR FINAL

It’s available on Kindle now and I will soon be working on formatting the print edition. Here’s the description of what you’ll get inside:

You can make creative writing a regular part of your life—without making it a rigid daily requirement.

If you are trying to make creative writing a more intentional—and yet not tyrannical—part of your life, The Intentional Writer will help you to pursue your goals, hone your craft, and get your work out there into the hands of readers. This entertaining and informative book will help you analyze your motivations for writing, put yourself in the path of inspiration to keep your ideas flowing, deal with both internal and external distractions, reshape your surroundings and your schedule to aid your process, and take your work from first draft to final publishable product.

From encouragement and insight to the nuts and bolts of storytelling and editing, you’ll find something in the following pages that will change your writing rhythm for the better.

Just Because It’s Good Doesn’t Mean It’s Bad

Posted on by Erin Bartels

For much of middle America, spring is a mixed blessing as the same warm air that brings the flowers back also brings severe weather.

Living in an area with only mild tornado activity and no hurricanes or tropical storms (one of Michigan’s many excellent qualities), I love a good rainstorm and I especially love the sound of thunder. When the skies darken and the atmosphere rumbles and tumbles around me, I get a feeling in my gut that is hard to describe. A bizarre sort of mixture of deep awareness of the season and of the power inherent in nature, fond childhood memories of watching storms with my dad in the open garage, and that vague nagging instinct to seek cover. Just a pinch of terror to season it all. Gives me goosebumps just writing about it.

There have been times in my life when I have worried about the weather. A few tense cross-state car rides in whiteout conditions (once with a vanload of youth groupers for whom we were responsible). The first tornado warning I experienced with my infant son in the house. I recall our Little League coach telling us not to hang on the metal chain link fence while menacing clouds glowered and jagged lightning danced on the horizon lest lightning strike, travel through the metal, and kill half a dozen of us in one fell swoop. But during most storms I am safely tucked away inside with a plan worked out for staying that way in case of emergency (interior basement room, away from the windows, stocked first aid kit, etc.).

However, I remember vividly a summer storm when I was 13 or 14. Our softball and baseball games were all canceled and parents were whisking their ball-capped kids from the field and driving down country roads bordered by ditches, heading for basements at home. The reason I remember this day is two-fold.

First of all, the air was different. Whereas a winter storm might cause a whiteout, what we were experiencing as my mom drove me back into town after dropping a friend off at his house was a greenish-brownout. The air was thick with dirt and organic matter that was being stirred up by a supercell not far from us. The thing about those videos of tornadoes on YouTube is that you can only see the actual tornado if it is a good distance from you. Once it’s close, you can’t always see it. That’s the scary part.

Second, and much worse than the eerie air swirling around the car, my sister was unaccounted for. Well, we knew she was at a friend’s house, but that was not good enough for my mother. She needed to see her eldest daughter, to have her in our own basement, not someone else’s. So we cut through the dense air to pick her up and bring her home. As a mother now, I can more easily imagine what my own mother must have felt during those soul-tense moments.

The rest of that day is a blur. The next morning trees were down all over town, but I don’t actually remember the worst of the storm. In fact, I don’t even remember actually seeing Alison get into the car or rushing inside our house or going to bed at night. But I remember that car ride between the softball fields out in Hampton Township and the house-lined streets of Essexville.

When you read really good fiction, the same thing happens. You are left with a feeling, sometimes hard to describe but real nonetheless, that you can’t get from mere recounting of events. There are a number of books that I adore that I could not easily summarize for someone else because what happened in the book is not what I remember. I remember how I felt when I read it. There are other books for which I could give a plot synopsis to a friend who asked what it was about. But if I’m recommending a book it is almost never because of plot and I tend to say little about what happens (which always sound so sterile when recounted to another) and more things like, “I can’t explain it to you. You just have to read it.”

A good storyteller can cause physiological reactions in a reader’s body through black marks on a white page. The process is astonishing and awe-inspiring to me. Letters are arbitrary. Phonics are meaningless. Words alone convey some form of reality, but not in whole. But when those letters and sounds and words are strung together in an artful way, more than meaning is produced.

I’ve read a lot in recent years about how authors should remove the parts of their writing that they think are the best because they are probably overwritten and self-indulgent. Not so fast! I’m here to declare that not every story is best told with spare language. Granted, some certainly are and the most talented writers (in my mind) can use very little language to convey deep emotion. Still I would not recommend arbitrarily deleting those passages just because it is currently popular to do so. Maybe have some beta readers test them. Find out what clicks and what doesn’t. Some probably are overwritten. But some of them really may be excellent writing that works and helps to tell your real story. What I mean by the “real” story is not the plot, not what happens, but what you want the reader to feel, what you want him to remember long after that last page.

It’s the difference between this…

Photo credit: Weather Wiz Kids (http://www.weatherwizkids.com/weather-tornado.htm)
Photo credit: Weather Wiz Kids (http://www.weatherwizkids.com/weather-tornado.htm)

And this…

Photo credit: I dunno. It's sort of fuzzy where this originated, but I found it here: http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/national-geographic/images/6968510/title/tornado-wallpaper)
Photo credit: I dunno. It’s sort of fuzzy where this originated, but I found it here: http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/national-geographic/images/6968510/title/tornado-wallpaper

Strive to write in such a way that your deeply held emotions and experiences are made alive and immediate for your readers. Pick out the details that say more than you could say in a paragraph of words and make those details hardworking representatives of the whole. This will keep your good descriptive writing in your story without overdoing it.

For example, in my story of the car ride to get my sister and get home before the tornado struck, I could spend paragraphs describing the weather, how tornadoes form and the destruction they can cause, my own thoughts and the thoughts of my mother, spelling out everything for the reader so there would be no mistaking what happened. But that’s not what made the ride memorable. I don’t remember my own thoughts and I don’t have access to my mother’s thoughts. I was not thinking about the physics of tornado formation at the time. I don’t know if my sister was worried at her friend’s house or whether she was relieved at the sight of her mother pulling up in the driveway to get her.

What I remember is the way the air looked and that feeling you get in your gut when you don’t feel safe. That’s it. So if I were to tell that story, that’s what I would focus on. And if I did it well, I would hope that I could get a reader, even one who had never been in a similar situation, to know what it felt like. And I could probably do it in just a few sentences if I worked hard at it. It might start as a couple overwrought paragraphs, but being a copywriter by trade, I think I could get it down to three really hardworking sentences. I certainly wouldn’t discard it altogether.

You’ve read scenes like that, or even entire books. They make you forget you’re on your couch or tucked under your covers. They pull you in completely. That’s great writing. And that’s what I hope we’ll both create–and keep.

Taking My Own Writing Advice (or, My Terrible Epiphany)

Posted on by Erin Bartels

I hope you won’t mind if I direct most of this post at myself. Because, frankly, I need a good talking to/kick in the pants/smack upside the head.

Myself in a Mirror

Listen, Erin, you have some problems. It seems like everyone compliments your writing (all those agents who declined to take you on had very nice things to say about your technical skill) but there are some serious problems with your manuscript for A Beautiful Fiction that, even if you self-publish, you’re going to want to fix. You know what these are.

Problem 1: Beta readers find it difficult to sympathize with your protagonist.

Your rationale: My narrative voice is detached in an attempt to counter the tendency in a lot of modern fiction to tell too much and therefore not allow the reader to think at all.

Solution: Uh, DUH! Switch from 3rd person to 1st person so you can let people inside your protagonist’s messed up head! (Yes, this will mean rewriting the entire 85,700-word manuscript.)

But that’s not all is it? How about…

Problem 2: Story takes too long to get going.

Your rationale: It just wouldn’t make sense to start later or move things along faster because the storyline would be completely implausible.

Solution: Start at the point the action is intense, then flash back a bit here and there to fill in the details. Seriously, it took you this long to figure this out? For crying out loud, you just wrote a blog post about this very technique for a different story!

(Yes, I admit, it was when I was rereading my own blog post [hanging my head in shame] that I realized this advice could be applied more broadly in my own work.)

There are probably other problems in that manuscript, but two is enough to work on for now. So get your butt in gear, Erin, because you have got a LOT to do now.

Sheesh.

In my defense, though, I will say that had I not stepped away from that manuscript for about six months, I would not have come to realize these possible solutions to my problems. Now that I can look at it more objectively, I can get back to work and make A Beautiful Fiction beautiful indeed.

The Editing Secret You Know (But Are Trying to Forget)

Posted on by Erin Bartels

Balancing the Baby

The observant among you will have noticed something rather off about the photo above. The rest of you are wondering why I would post a boring photo of my fireplace. If you are in the second lot, look again. See it now?

That baby should not be there. And really, it’s a pretty poor Photoshop job anyway, so you may be suspecting that the weeks-old baby on the mantel is not in actuality sitting up there under his own power. Two photos taken, one with my husband on either side, holding up our infant son several years ago, knit together quickly to make it appear that the boy just jumped up there on his own and was casually relaxing. In hindsight, we should have used a tripod.

I post this photo to illustrate a writing truth that you have probably already heard, but of which we all need to be reminded now and then. Sometimes you write a scene, a chapter, or an entire book and place a baby somewhere it doesn’t belong. A turn of phrase you are particularly proud of that really doesn’t fit the tone of the rest of your work, a supporting character you love but can’t justify because he doesn’t move the story along, a bit of melodramatic indulgence in place of hardworking, compelling storytelling.

These are the babies on your mantel. They don’t belong there. You need to remove them. And you know it (usually). If your babies blend in too much, perhaps a reader with keener eyes can help you identify them.

You don’t have to toss your babies out in the cold and forget about them. You just can’t leave them up on the mantel. It’s distracting. Tuck them away in their cribs until you find a better place for them in another work. Keep that turn of phrase, that great character, that bit of melodrama in your notebook; they may all someday turn into new stories where they fit perfectly.