Magical Words

You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

DavidBCoe — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:18:01 +0000

I have three stories for you. I’ll give them to you chronologically.

1) My brothers and their families came to visit us for the holidays this year and the brother who is closest to me in age stayed at our house. He and I are very close, and we lead kind of parallel lives. He’s not a writer, but he is a professional artist. We both have two kids, both have wives who make the lion’s share of the household money and who are way smarter than we are. We’re both into photography, birds, butterflies, etc.

One morning while he was staying with us, I came downstairs wearing a sweater I got last year from my in-laws. It’s blue with a high collar and a zip opening at the neck that goes down about to the chest. It’s not really a style I’d get myself, but I like it and it reminds me of my in-laws. Anyway, I go downstairs, and there’s my brother wearing a blue, high-collar sweater with a zip opening that goes down about to the chest. We laughed about it. And then he explained that he got it from his in-laws and that, while it’s not really his style, he likes it and wears it because it makes him think of them…

2) About three weeks ago, we had some nasty weather blow through the area. I mean nasty. Storms, hail, etc. We don’t get tornadoes where we live; we’re on the Cumberland Plateau, and something about the altitude kills the funnel clouds before they can form.

Except not this time. Nancy and I were standing in my office talking when we realized that we heard a really strange noise. It sounded like a steady loud roar, like a freight train. And at the same time each of us realized that though we’d never heard that sound before, we knew what it was. Sure enough, as soon as we started looking for the tornado, Nancy spotted it moving parallel to our house; not coming towards us, but going past. Turns out, it hit a forested area less than a quarter mile from our house and knocked down pretty much EVERY mature tree in an area several hundred square yards. It then crossed the highway and cut diagonally across the road leading into our subdivision. It was headed straight for the homes of two different families. But it skipped over them, took out some more trees, skipped over more houses, did a bit of damage in an adjacent neighborhood, skipped over more houses, took out some more trees, and then died out. Not a single person was hurt or killed.

3) Another weather related story: This past Thursday night it was incredibly nasty out, again. No thunderstorms this time. But torrential rain, temperatures in the thirties and gusty winds. It was like that all day Thursday and just got worse overnight.

I have one of those key fobs for my car that can lock and unlock doors, open the trunk, etc. One cool feature: If you hold down the “unlock” button for long enough, it’ll make all the windows in the car go down. Very handy on a hot summer day, when you’ve left your car in a parking lot. But not so good on a rainy winter night. Right after bringing home my younger daughter from her basketball game, I must have put my keys back in my pocket, gone back upstairs to my office to work, and sat in such a way that the unlock button on my key fob was being pressed. I had no idea. I mean, what are the chances? It’s never happened before in the three years I’ve owned the car. It didn’t happen on a cool clear evening, or even on a night when it drizzled. It happened on pretty much the coldest, rainiest night of the year.

The next morning, when we finally realized what had happened, the interior of the car was soaked. I got it dry eventually, but it was pretty much a lost morning caused by a freakish incident. (How’d I get the car dry? A combination of lots of blotting with towels, an industrial strength wet-vac borrowed from our local service station, and running the AC on max, with the heat on at the highest setting for, I kid you not, 6 and 1/2 hours while the car idled. An environmental nightmare, I know, but it saved the car from mildew hell.)

Why tell you all of this? Why post these stories on Magical Words of all places? Because we often talk about how life can be weird, but stories have to make sense. I’m not sure that I would use any of these stories in a piece of fiction. They’re too odd, too freakish; they would seem too contrived in a book or piece of short fiction. They make great real-life stories because they’re true. Turn them into fiction and no one would believe them. As a writer you can say “Well, coincidences happen,” or “sometimes fate watches out for us,” or “of course something like that only happens on a rainy night; it’s Murphy’s law.” But the fact is that in constructing stories we need to base them on something more logical than the vagaries of real life. Not always — of course you can use coincidence or fate or Murphy’s Law in your work. Just don’t rely on any one of them too heavily.

A quick note: This post comes in the midst of a massive rewrite that is demanding pretty much all my attention. I have another book coming out next week and will be blogging about that release next Monday. But I’ll get back to the “Writing Your Book” series the week after. Promise.

David B. Coe

http://DavidBCoe.livejournal.com

http://www.DavidBCoe.com

http://magicalwords.net

A Rose by any other Name…

A J Hartley — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:29:09 +0000

So I was fortunate enough to get a round of notes on my new YA adult novel from no less an author than R.L. Stine (of Goosebumps among many other things) and he pointed out that I had to rename one of my major characters. Her names was Isabella, often simply ‘Bella,’ which, he pointed out, was the same as the heroine of the ubiquitous Twilight series. I had realized the coincidence before, but a better name hadn’t leaped to mind so I had left it as it was. But Mr. Stine was (unsurprisingly) clearly right. I had time to change it, and doing a quick find/replace in my Word document was no sweat. All I needed was a new name.
This is where things got tough. The problem was that I had finished the first draft of the book almost five months ago and had been tinkering with it ever since. I now knew this girl and her name was Bella. I tried inserting alternatives and they wouldn’t work or didn’t fit. The search for a replacement—which took several agonizing days and produced only a provisional solution—made me acutely aware of how difficult naming characters can be. Today I offer a few things to bear in mind as you dish out monikers.
Things to be aware of:
1. Real or made up? If you make up a name (i.e. if you invent a new word, or invent a name from a regular word like Neil Gaiman’s Door) remember the way we respond to real people who have odd names. And if you do start making up words, ensure that it fits the world of your story, that the pronunciation is clear and that the word feels right without unfortunate associations or echoes (see below).
2. If you choose a conventional name, test it out on your friends to see what associations it generates. I wanted to call my new character Angelina, but since I see a real Angelina looking at me from every supermarket tabloid these days (not to mention Angelina Ballerina) I decided I didn’t want to battle what ever baggage that name might evoke for a reader.
3. Ethnicity. Few names can be found in all cultures, so choose what fits your real or imaginary world. I wanted to call my African American girl Danika (partly because I liked its abbreviations, Danny/Danni or Dan) but my wife (a pediatrician who knows these things) pointed out that the name has northern European roots and is rare outside Caucasian families. Right now, it’s particularly associated with a race car driver, which wasn’t the right association.
4. Meaning. The web is jammed with sites offering baby names, and these are an obvious resource when you are assigning names. Most give a short explanation of what the name means, and such information can help determine whether it’s right for your character. Some of these definitions are a bit shaky, however, so once you’ve identified a name you like, look it up in some more reliable source.
5. The irrelevance of point 4 (!) Appealing though it is to name a character something with a really cool meaning, remember how little we think of people we know in terms of what their name actually means—even if we know. Unless you find a way to explain it in the narrative (which has to be handled carefully), the meaning may not be much of a factor in determining the impact of the name in your story.
6. More likely to shape that impact is the feel of the name: what it sounds like when spoken aloud, whether it’s driven by hard consonants or broad, open vowels, how many syllables it has, or whether it ends with something tight and closing (like a ‘tt’) or flippant—even trivial—(like a ‘y’ or ‘i’). What does the name weigh? Is it light like Pippin (note the child-like repetition of the vowel) or simple and earthy like Sam (with the tell-tale honorific ‘wise’ tacked to the end?) Does it have an onomatopoeic quality, like Grond (Tolkien’s orkish battering ram) which is the sound of its iron head against the doors of Minas Tirith?
7. How does it look on the page? The appearance of a word is slightly different from its sound and can have implications for feel too. If you make up a name full of Ks and apostrophes, ask if it is ever going to feel familiar—like a real name—to a reader, no matter how many times they read it.
8. How does it combine with other names, particularly a surname or title, but also with other names in the book? All the above concerns about feel come back into play when the name is paired with another proper noun, both of which might be good alone, but dreadful together.
9. An extension of that, is it different enough from the other names in your book that it won’t get confusing for your reader? I once had a book where it seemed like every minor character’s name began with H. Maybe I’d been thumbing through the phone book and got stuck there. It was very confusing. I also had two characters who were together a lot and both had names beginning with D. I had to change one so they didn’t sound like a nightclub act.
10. How does it abbreviate? Only in the highest fantasy do four syllable names not get contracted by the people who are supposed to be their friends. Plan this out.
11. Is it—or might someone think it is—close enough to the name of someone you actually know that a reader might think they recognize them from reality? If so, change it. You don’t want your sense of a real person to dictate your character, for you or your readers, and you certainly don’t want to face a law suit over perceived defamation of character.

I’m over thinking, right? Well, maybe. But readers recognize these thinks at least subconsciously, and the name has to feel right if you are going to write the character well. Sometimes it’s good to wait, let the character emerge in the writing before giving her a name. If I give a character a name arbitrarily right out of the gate I find she will be shaped by the name I picked, and that’s a pretty random way to write a story. One dodge I use is to assign the character a generic tag like XXXX until I have written enough to know what the character feels like. A simple find/replace search can then be made. So. Any great character names in your current works in progress?

Evolution of the Novel Part 3

Faith Hunter — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:39:47 +0000

For the past 3 weeks I’ve been posting on the evolution of voice and genre, as shown in the WIP, written (and still being rewritten) by Tiffany (Tiff), a writer I have been working with for 2 or 3 years. With Tiff’s permission, I told her story and how she found a narrator’s voice and a character’s voice that was uniquely hers.

What she started out with was the voice and story-opening of a Regency Romance. But by the end of the book, that voice had changed and evolved into something darker, richer, and the character more … powerful and sympathetic, someone to cheer for.

So you don’t have to go back and look it up, this week we are showing her original first page and her first page rewrite, without my comments. (If you want to see those, you’ll have to backtrack). This lets you read straight through and let the changes strike you as they did me Then, we’ll share the *new* first page. The changes in the final are subtle, (and she will likely make more before she sends this to an agent) but I think you will agree the changes make a huge difference to the reader’s perceptions of the story, character, voice, tone and genre. Tiff’s work has begun to sparkle like a diamond.

Original Chapter One

The diamond necklace glittered in the flickering light from the fireplace, the warmth in the room failing to thaw the coldness in my heart.

“My Lady, do you wish to reply to My Lord’s request?” Jameson, the butler, stood inside the doorway, unease in his countenance.

Under other circumstances, this necklace would elicit gasps of delight and lead to a pleasant time in the marriage bed; security and affection translated into reality by my husband, Lord Richmond, in the bed beside me. But the gesture, like so many from my husband now, reeked of expectation -devoid of the warmth, the caring, the tenderness so characteristic of our early marriage.

He didn’t even give me the gift himself. We were so estranged, separated like opposite poles, that a servant handed me the wrapped box on Christmas Eve. I held the sparkling gems in my hand, allowed the cool stones to cascade through my fingers, and wept. Wept for all the disillusions of a society wife thinking she married for love, that her marriage would be different from all the rest. Wept when I realized I was wrong, that I misjudged the character of the man I married.

Despair coursed through my body, limbs trembling to act on my distress, not cower in the corner like so many frightened wives. I threw the necklace into the fire, the smack of the stones on the hearth more satisfying than the gasp from the maid and Jameson’s shocked face. I straightened my spine, turning from the hearth.

(As I said on part one: This reads like a Regency romance from the first word to the last. It reads like a love story where the two principle characters are in love, are driven apart, and then make it back together at the end after facing some obstacle.)

First Revised Chapter One

The diamond necklace glittered in the flickering light from the fireplace, the warmth in the room failing to thaw the coldness in my heart.

“My Lady, do you wish to reply to My Lord’s request?” Jameson, the butler, stood inside the doorway, shifting from foot to foot.

I clenched the stones in my fist, the hard facets digging into the tender skin of my palm. Blue light, magic light , flared from my fingertips. Hunching over, I hid the traitorous light from view.

Had they seen? I glanced behind me. Jameson remained by the door, while Mary, the maid, bustled about the room. I warred with my power, forcing it into submission, willing the blue light to ebb back into my skin. Rage threatened my tenuous control over my magic.

Damn him for humiliating me by inviting his mistress into our home.

Damn him for his betrayal of my trust.

Curse him for valuing me so little that a servant gave me his gift. The extravagant necklace I held in my hand.

My limbs trembled, power quickening with my anger, roiling like lava under my skin, waiting to explode with the first sign of a crack in my control. Fearing another flare of power, I threw the necklace into the fire, the smack of stones on the hearth more satisfying than the gasp from the maid or the shocked look upon Jameson’s face. I straightened, the pressure relieved, my power appeased with my show of violence.

This is much better, but it still tells and not shows in the last paragraph. It also still contains a few vestiges of the Regency Romance tone.

Current Chapter One (most recent revision)

I clenched the diamond necklace in my fist, the hard facets digging into the tender skin of my palm. Blue light, magic light, flared from my fingertips. Hunching over, I hid the traitorous light from view.

“My Lady, do you wish to reply to My Lord’s request?” Jameson, the butler, stood inside the doorway, shifting from foot to foot.

Had they seen? I glanced behind me. Jameson remained by the door, while Mary, the maid, bustled about the room. I warred with my power and my anger, forcing them into submission, willing the blue light to ebb back into my skin. Rage threatened my tenuous control over my magic.

Damn him for humiliating me by inviting his mistress into our home.

Damn him for his betrayal of my trust.

Curse him for valuing me so little that a servant gave me his gift. The extravagant necklace I held.

My breath shuddered, limbs trembled, as power quickened with my anger, roiling like lava under my skin, waiting to explode with the first crack in my control. Fearing another flare of power that might give me away, I wrenched back my arm. Threw the necklace into the fire. Releasing the buildup of my magic into the fire itself. The smack of stones on the hearth, the bright flare in the fireplace as flames billowed out and died back, was more satisfying than the maid’s startled cry or the shocked look upon Jameson’s face. I straightened, gasping, the pressure relieved, my power appeased with the act of violence.

The last version is dang near ready to be seen by an agent. Tiff will still need to read through and spot places where she told and instead of showed. Then, a quick line-edit, and the agent will have it in her hands…

And the process starts all over again…rewrite, rewrite, rewrite!
Faith
FaithHunter.Net