Life is a crazy little thing, isn't it, Laris?

goodmorning.

Blog on Plot coming later, we hope.

I am extremely busy.

I was extremely busy before, but that was a part-time job + internship + school kind of busy.

Now I am a full time job + school kind of busy.

It's funny, quitting a job you've been at three years. I mean it's weird. You say good bye to everybody and try not to cry as you turn in your keys. For awhile, you were on top. Now you've got to start again from the bottom.

But, excuse the expression, this is a better bottom.

I am a professional writer.

Oh yeah.

So that's the only news, really.

Thought for the day:

Maturity is admitting your parents were right.

We Could Be Heroes

Half a repost: found the national website!

NINE REASONS YOU SHOULD BECOME A DONOR

9. It doesn't cost any money

8. It only takes about five minutes

7. They don't take anything from you until you are dead

6. Your body will NOT end up as part of a display at a science museum

5. Your body can be reconstructed for an open-casket funeral

4. Minors can donate with parental consent

3. You won't be using your body after you're dead, anyway--God gives you a new one, you know.

2. Your tissues, etc., can improve the lives of up to 75 people

1. Your organs can save up to EIGHT LIVES

Let's review: you can save eight lives. It doesn't cost anything. This is a no-brainer, people.

GO HERE: http://www.donatelife.net/

The Best of Lines, The Worst of Lines (PART 2)

How Not to Start a Novel

PART TWO: The final three ways to start your book.

_____?

The question. I left the example blank because I couldn’t FIND an example. The only thing I could think of was the first line of the movie The Prestige:

Are you watching closely?

Perfect for a complex plot about warring magicians. That line is a central theme throughout. (Wasn’t same line in Prestige the book, so I couldn’t use it.)

This line option has potential (potential being a four-letter word in the writing community…like ptnl…pntl…I don’t know). Potential because it is, apparently, rare, and could make your book stand out. Then again, maybe it’s rare for the same reason “splat!” is rare.

It’s a risk, but if you must use the question, avoid making it sound like your Western Civ term paper. You don’t have to have a thesis, you don’t have to compare and contrast, and you don’t have to have a bibliography at the end. You wouldn’t want to start with the line

What was the Civil War really about?

Unless you had a new take on the cause of the Civil War. Like aliens. Actually, scratch that. There is no time it is okay to start a book with that sentence. It is lame.

Be careful; question first liners come with extra rules attached. About five:

1. The question shouldn’t have an obvious answer, like

What is two plus two? (4)

Unless you will later reveal the “obvious” answer to be false, like

What do you get when you multiply six times nine? (42)

2. The question has to be something the readers will ask themselves throughout the book. 3. The last line of the book will have to either answer the question or restate it. The question shouldn’t be cliché, like

How many roads must a man walk down?

If a tree falls in the forest…

4. Everything in the plot should boil down to the answer to that question, and, lastly,

5. The question must end with a question mark (?). Your copyeditor will have a fit if it doesn’t.

Call me Ishmael.

The command. Not an absolutely horrible way to start. This classic example sounds cool and implies a conversational tone, but doesn’t exactly relate to plot or theme. It’s also way BD, so if you’re thinking of starting with “Call me…” or “My name is…”, give up now. However, there are other, less bad commands to use. For instance,

When you are finished reading this book, burn it.

This implies the information within is dangerous or bad. This is interesting and must relate pretty closely with the plot. I don’t know if this particular one is BD, and I’m too lazy to research it. Come up with your own command.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

The statement. This is the least worst way to begin a novel. Direct. Makes a point. Connects to the rest of the book. For instance, the dialogue example from Battlefield Earth is good because it is a statement. “Man is an endangered species.” You can make just about any kind of statement and get me interested. Not a

the moon cast long shadows…

kind of statement, of course, but even

I love pickles

has potential as a great first sentence—if the main character’s fetish for briny cucumbers gets him into trouble and leads to fantastically comical, totally unbelievable adventures. (This, as far as I know, isn’t BD. Feel free to use it. Just credit me in the dedication. My official title is “Supergenius Writergirl”. Be sure to spell it correctly.)

A few more examples:

If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you are better off reading some other book.

It was a pleasure to burn.

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

Marley was dead, to begin with.

So you see, the statement rules. Still don’t believe me? Let’s do a little rundown. Seven ways to begin H.G. Well’s “The War of the Worlds”:

Splash! That was the sound of my body hitting the water as I dove for cover from the Martian heat-ray.

The moon cast long shadows over the commons as I made my way down to the pit.

It all started in 1898, when I went down to see Ogilvy the astronomer.

“The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one,” he said.

What do you think the chances are of anything coming from Mars?

Listen carefully if you want to know how we stopped the Martian invasion.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

This sounds something like an “I never would have believed six months ago…”, but it isn’t. The point of this sentence is not the time period, but the “intelligences greater than man’s” and what they were doing. It’s a statement, period. Notice the “yet as mortal as his own” and “transient creatures” parts? The entire plot is contained within this one sentence. Yeah, it’s a long sentence, but it sounds awful nice.

So, there you go. Number one rule: the first sentence should not be an afterthought. It deserves at least an hour of serious contemplation, the writing of many different versions, a few nights sleep, further review, the opinions of others, and the saying of it in your head and outloud many many times before it can be decided upon. If you don’t do this, it shows a general lack of concern for your art, your audience, and the success of your book. How many times have you read the first line of a book in a Barnebles only to snap it shut an instant later because you are already bored?

If you care, tune in next time for

Plot: Not just a Piece of Ground.

The Best of Lines, The Worst of Lines (PART 1)

*How not to Start a Book.

 I'm going to take a big risk here and give some real advice:

When writing a book, you have to start at the beginning. At least, you’ve got to get around to the beginning sometime. The first sentence is the second most important sentence in your book. But let’s face it, “Once upon a time”, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”, “First the colors. Then the humans”—all the best ones are taken. You might as well give up now. Run away and join a commune that rejects all modern conveniences like spiral notebooks and ballpoint pens. Come on. Any takers? No? Then let’s proceed.

Don’t just pick a first sentence at random. It must be well-written. It must be clever. It must be intriguing. It must speak to the human condition. And it MUST actually be relevant to the theme of the entire story. There are many ways to begin a book. They have all. Been. Done. If you can invent a new way, I will gladly bow to your awesomeness, but otherwise, you must recycle old ideas like the rest of us. Let’s take a peak into the Used bin and dust off the seven types of first liners, from worst to not so bad.

7. Splat!

Sound Effect. This one isn’t very common, mostly because it is terrible. As my brother so aptly puts it, a sound in the form of a written word, italicized, with an exclamation point at the end, is absolutely hideous. It scrapes at raw nerves. It is unimportant. This is the worst possible way to begin a book.

6. It was a dark and stormy night…

Scenic description. The commonest and second worst way to begin a book.

The moon cast long shadows over the tennis court.

or some other such thing, soon followed by

Elvira picked her way noiselessly past the rackets.

Do. Not. Do. This. It’s so overdone, it’s the sort of thing that makes me want to go all Montag. Here’s the MadLibs version:

[Article] [noun] [verb] [preposition] [noun]. [Proper noun] [verb] [adverb] [preposition] [noun].

Usually with a lot of flowery adjectives inserted at random. Even if the description is good, nobody cares how pretty (or ugly) everything looks. You wouldn’t pause in the middle of the climax to describe a shelf full of janitorial supplies purchased in bulk (again, been done), so don’t do it in the beginning, either. Lead with something ELSE.

5. Once Upon a Time…

Statement of time, either general or specific. If you are writing about a grieving boy who hears the whispers of his books, “Once upon a time—for that is the way all stories should begin—there was a boy who lost his mother” is the perfect beginning for you. Of course, it’s been done. Give up now.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

is alright but also BD.

Boring versions like: “It was 1972.”, “The year is 3009”, “Six months ago, I didn’t imagine…” should be chewed up and used as spit wads. When is not the most important thing in your book, even if it’s about time travel. Don’t lead with it.

4. “_____”

Dialogue. This of course depends largely on what is being said, but dialogue as an opener should generally be avoided. Especially interjections. Case in point:

“Ick!” Jenny said as she reached down the drain.

I don’t care what Jenny said as she reached down the drain. I don’t even care that Jenny is reaching down the drain. I’ve reached down drains before myself, and there’s nothing in the act worth reading about. Get to the story.

Only start with dialogue if that dialogue pinpoints exactly what the book is about, either in theme, plot, or general conflict. Here’s an example from Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard:

“Man,” said Terl, “is an endangered species.”

Snap. Right to the point. I’m already interested. Why is man endangered? What can he do about it? Who is this alien-sounding Terl, and why is he concerned that man is endangered? This simple statement also happens to be Terl’s first conscious step toward his extensive and sinister plan to get rich. Basically, the entire plot of the book is hidden within this one simple sentence. It really sucks. As in, sucks you right in.

Stay tuned for the three least worst ways to start a book in PART 2, sometime within the next bleem.

Ten Reasons to JUST GIVE UP Writing Your Novel

1. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
2. You’ll spend so much time sitting at your desk with your head resting on the keyboard trying to decide if it’s better to say “the wolf wandered up the road” or “up the road, the wolf wandered”, that your friends will organize an intervention to tell you that you are wasting your youth.
3. The chances of finishing a novel are low
4. The chances of getting it published are really low
5. The chances of it making any money at all are astronomically low
6. Per #3-5, you’ll waste hundreds of hours you could’ve put toward something more productive, like learning Finnish. Or, you know, getting a real job.
7. You’ll discover there’s a lot of important stuff to know that they didn’t teach you in school, and you’ll have to go around asking random people stupid questions. Questions like “are there sharks in the Middle East?” and “how wide is the average river?” you could hypothetically Google, but “if a person has a concussion, and years later is kicked in the same part of the head, would they lose consciousness? If so, could they wake up seconds later and participate in a sword fight?” is just a little too complex for a search engine. You could ask your doctor, but “a character in my book has this concussion…” sounds a little too much like “my, uh, my friend keeps dreaming he’s Spiderman.”
8. Anything you write, you will eventually have to edit. For those of you who don’t know, editing a novel is like cutting your way through a jungle using only a pen, then getting all the way through said jungle, only to realize you’ve gone the wrong direction, and you have to backtrack through dense vegetation that has already grown back. You really start to get sick of trees. And vines. And monkeys.
9. If you’re really serious and you actually do finish a novel of decent length, breath-taking descriptions, believable characters, and emotional depth, you will have to write a synopsis, which means taking the whole story and squeezing everything of any literary worth out of it until it is only five pages long, tells all the bare facts, and gives away the surprise ending.
10. Writing a novel is like living with the college roommate from Hell. They constantly cry out for attention; they interrupt your study sessions with crazy “what if we did this?” ideas, they keep you up all night mumbling prophecies in made-up languages, they never clean up after themselves, and every time you look at them, you hate them more.

Reasons to Write the Bloody Thing Anyway

1. If you don’t, you’ll burst.

So it’s your choice. Should you decide to proceed, tune in next time for:

“The Best of Lines, the Worst of Lines: how not to start a book.”