Contest prize change

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 42

I went to the post office during my lunch hour yesterday to buy money orders, but when I saw the line stretching outside the door, I did a 180. All those people with Christmas packages reminded me I have three I need to get in the mail myself, so I figured if I have to stand in line, it makes more sense to just do it all at once. Course that means I have to actually get the gifts I've bought boxed up. I don't know why that small step seems to take so long.

But I promise, contest winners, the prizes will go out in the mail this week.

Which reminds me of some fun news--one of Brian's goals is to increase the prize amounts, and he decided at the last minute to take a small step in that direction now. Effective immediately, third place will get $25 in addition to an autographed novel.

It'll probably be a year or two till we bump up all the prize amounts, but that is part of the grand scheme. Don't worry though--the contests will always be free to enter.

Post-contest letdown

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 37

Usually prize-awarding time puts me in a good mood, but after these recent comments, I'm feeling guilty. We certainly never meant to discourage or sadden anyone with these contests.

If you entered but didn't win, take heart. Think of all the people who say they want to write but never do. You overcame that hurdle. Then you showed courage in sending out your work. I know that isn't easy.

My dad, a seasoned freelance illustrator, came to talk to my freshmen about the creative process a couple weeks ago, and he reminded them (and me) this: every artist out there with an impressive list of achievements has a much longer (usually secret) list of rejections and disappointments. There will be stretches of time when you aren't rewarded for your efforts, so you have to be patient and persistent.

I'm not trying to discourage you further; I'm just trying to say that everyone who sets out to be any kind of artist has obstacles constantly springing up in front of them. Most eventually give up, but some keep stubbornly finding ways over and around those obstacles.

There's so much of this business you can't control--whether it's winning a contest, getting a work accepted for publication, or landing a grant. The only thing you can truly control is yourself and your work. If you refuse to give up, if you commit yourself to honing your craft and doing your best work, if you continue to send out your work, then you are a writer, and no one can tell you otherwise. The external validations are bound to follow.

Quick contest update

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 35

Time flies fast during the holidays. Then too, we've been having some computer problems which have put me more in a pen-and-paper mode of experiencing time. From an electronic perspective, I haven't posted in ages, though it really doesn't feel that long to me.

Contest judging for the short-short story contest has been completed! I know we're running late with the official announcement, but we haven't heard back from all three winners yet. So remember to check all your email accounts if you entered. Hopefully the news will get posted soon.

The tortoise and the hare

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 23

An observant contestant pointed out that the Best First Chapter guideline page still listed March 1, 2007 as the deadline. I apologize for failing to catch that when I updated Brian’s site. I am going to use aging as my excuse. Every year, I get a little more absent-minded, and then too, I can’t seem to wrap my brain around the fact that it is 2007, which must have prevented me from realizing that next March will actually be 2008. Where do all the years go?

Back to the writing exercise from earlier this week…besides noticing that you wrote more when you were just observing (and not evaluating as you went along), you might have found that the quality of writing from the second part of the exercise was better.

Therein lies the conundrum of first draft writing. Do you spill it all out fast, NaNoWriMo-style, to prevent paralysis, or do you go at a slow and steady pace, editing yourself as you go along?

Different writers use different strategies when it comes to a first draft. Some prefer a more polished draft and can’t stomach the thought of writing dozens (or even hundreds) of pages that might end up on the cutting room floor, while others don’t mind ruthlessly slashing and burning a messy first draft during revisions.

Play around with both the tortoise and the hare approach. If you’re perpetually frozen with fear of failure (or any other writers' block-creating thoughts), try the speedy, free-writing method. Charge straight ahead without so much as a glance in the rearview mirror.

On the other hand, if you don’t have a problem accumulating pages but have more trouble structuring your writing into a cohesive whole, you might want to invest more time on plotting notes beforehand and on revising as you go along. It will take you longer to reach the end of your first draft, but odds are that when you do, it won’t be quite as much of a baggy monster.

November is NaNoWriMo

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 22

There are quite possibly more people writing novels during the month of November than any other time of year, thanks to the popularity of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

In order to ‘win’ NaNoWriMo, participants write a complete novel—defined as 50,000 words—during the month. Here’s a quote from the website: “Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.”

That kind of free-writing mentality can be useful for cranking out a first draft. Some writers can’t turn off the editors' voices in their heads and end up with writers' block, terrified of making a misstep.

Here’s a writing exercise that quickly illustrates how this approach works. (I didn’t make it up, but alas, I can’t remember where it came from.) Go to a good people-watching spot. First, watch one couple or one small group of people interact. Jot down every single gesture you observe. Do this for 10 minutes.

Next, choose another set of people to watch, but this time, write down only the gestures that you find intriguing. Take 10 minutes again.

You’ll probably find that you wrote a lot more during the first ten minutes than the second. That’s because your inner editor was temporarily silenced. Once you started judging whether your subject matter was good enough to warrant writing about, that slowed you down and decreased your output. More thoughts on this next time...

And hey, if you’re participating in NaNoWriMo this year, remember you have till March 1 to polish up your first chapter and submit it to the InnermoonLit contest.

Happy Halloweiner

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 21

Hope you had a wonderful Halloween!


Brodsky's thinking, There are so many little trick-or-treaters out there. Can't I eat just one???

The reading period continues

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 21

We're knee-deep in Halloween preparations, but we're also slowly making our way through short-short story entries. I like going slowly and not reading more than a few entries a day so that we can give each one extra time and focus. I guess if we ever get deluged, we'll have to speed up our reading, but for now it's nice to take a leisurely pace.

November is just around the corner, though, so final decision time is not that far off. Be sure to keep an eye on your email for the full contest results.

A note about Ellen

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 20

Last Tuesday, Brian and I happened to catch the infamous Ellen episode as it first unfurled. I’m still amazed at this story’s legs and wish there were some way to analyze this viral sensation and harness that power to bring this much public attention to more important issues (or, you know, to Brian’s novels :) ).

The vital ingredients seem to be: a celebrity’s on-air breakdown (which felt very staged, but I can’t decide whether the tinge of falseness contributed to the trainwreck factor or not), a cute puppy, sad children, and two warring factions, both with a sense of righteous anger. It was like the perfect storm of celebrity gossip. Or maybe people are just that bored with the usual celebrity gossip cycle of public intoxication, rehab, couplings, and break-ups.

Anyway, I have to say that Brian and I seem to be in the minority of people who weren’t manipulated into taking Ellen’s side here. The rescue organization’s rules may seem stringent, but these groups create their rules in response to real instances of human neglect and abuse, not because they want to keep dogs away from good homes. Believe it or not, there are malicious and dishonest adopters out there who intend to harm animals, in addition to the more common problem of people with good intentions who, for whatever reason, decide they aren’t willing to commit to an animal and end up abandoning their pets.

The two rescue groups that saved our dogs Kasay and Brodsky had different levels of safeguards and guidelines in place, but they took lots of time to make sure we understood them, as I’m sure Mutts & Moms did with Ellen and Portia. Clearly, these volunteers are motivated by genuine concern for the animals’ well-being, and I think they deserve our admiration. They devote a great deal of time, energy and often their own personal funds to make sure the dogs they rescue stay out of the foster home/dog pound cycle for good.

As Brian used to say when he was teaching, the sad thing about rules is that once you make them, you have to abide by them. There will always be someone who wants to break the rules and face no consequences, but once you make allowances for one person, you have to make allowances for everyone. The issue that seems beyond argument to me is that Ellen knew the rules and chose to enter into a contract with this particular organization. Since this was her second attempt at adopting a dog from this group (she returned a previous dog, also due to cat relation issues), the group was obviously reasonable and willing to give her a second chance.

We admire anyone who volunteers with this type of group and hope this debacle hasn’t sullied the collective reputation of rescue groups.

Responding to critique: the emotional part con't.

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 18

OK, I hope you weren’t waiting with bated breath or anything, because I don’t really have any gimmicky trick that will help you accept criticism gracefully other than this piece of common sense advice: let some time pass.

Time is the best way to silence the defensive voice in your head. If you’re getting oral feedback from your reader, don’t interrupt. Let your reader talk, and take copious notes. Set the notes aside for awhile till the negative comments lose their sting and you can really digest them.

Time is the key to being able to evaluate your writing objectively. More experienced writers tend to have more callouses built up than beginners. That’s part of what I mean. But each new piece of writing needs a little time to breathe too. When the ink on the page is still wet and you’re feeling euphoric about what you’ve just written down, that’s not the time to call in your reader for a critique. Wait a day or a week or a month—however long it takes for you to achieve that slightly detached, cold-light-of-dawn perspective.

Time also gives you a chance to do some solo revising. Rough drafts are meant to be rough. You aren’t worried about perfection; you just want to get the words flowing. And that’s the way it should be. Your work has its own life cycle, and before you show your newborn to even one other person, you might want to clean it up a little and throw a diaper on it.

In her book The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp talks about failure as an integral part of any creative endeavor. She distinguishes between private and public failures, saying the more you fail in private, the less likely you’ll be to fail in public (which of course is much more painful and embarrassing). The more you edit your work alone, the fewer mistakes your reader will find. In turn, the more help you can get from a reader before sending your work to an even greater public, the greater your chances for success.

Responding to a critique: the emotional part

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 18

When someone tells you something you don’t want to hear, it’s natural to respond with defensiveness. If you get some less-than-glowing feedback as part of a critique (and believe me, I know how much even the mildest criticism can sting), you may be tempted to either argue back or take the passive approach—pretend to agree, then proceed to ignore and dismiss the suggestions.

That response isn’t helpful to anyone, and it’s an urge all writers must fight. Not only is your piece of writing not going to improve in a vacuum, but if you blow up at your reader, you could end up with hurt feelings on both sides and a permanently damaged relationship.

You should trust your reader’s judgment and taste and be certain that he wants to help you improve and is not just saying mean things for the fun of it, and if you don't...well, you need to find a different reader. On the other hand, if you did trust his skill, integrity, and motivation to start with, you have to believe that whatever criticisms he’s offering are given for the sake of improving your writing, not to make you feel bad.

Next time I'll have some advice on how to combat this defensive reflex so that you can get as much good as possible out of a critique.

Putting theory into practice

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 18

Let’s say you have a skilled and trusted reader or two to help you edit your work. Now comes the hard part: taking their advice. It’s hard to edit someone else’s writing—to figure out where its weaknesses lie and suggest fixes. But when you are the writer getting critiqued, implementing that advice is even more difficult, on both emotional and intellectual levels.

Brian and I are currently in the middle of an editing project for a writer who is refreshingly open to suggestions and quite adept at revising, which I guess is what brought this issue to mind. If you’ve ever taught English or writing or participated in any kind of workshop or critique group, you know how rare it is to find writers, like the one we’re fortunate to be working with now, who are able to use constructive criticism to really improve their work.

Let’s talk about the simple, intellectual side of this issue first and leave the sticky emotional part till later. There’s no doubt about it: big-picture fixes are hard to implement. Completely changing a character’s motivation or reordering a series of events in your story or correcting a logistical error with a plotline are all far easier said than done. Your ‘fix’ may end up being less effective than the original version or may cause unforeseen problems with the story later on, making your whole house of cards collapse.

Brian has a good trick to circumvent that problem: whenever he’s planning a big revision, he also keeps the older version of the file intact in case he decides to reverse the changes later on. Thanks to the computer, this is pretty easy to do. Now I don’t suggest making a different version of your file every single time you revise, only when you’re undertaking major surgery. Keeping more than two or three versions of a file can get too confusing.

Once your big-picture problems are out of the way, though, even the small-scale fixes can be tricky to make. Just entering line edits can be tedious and creates opportunities for even more typos to sneak their way into your work.

Revising your work will probably take even more time and energy than writing the first draft did, so be prepared to give it all the care and patience it needs during the polishing phase.

The forest and the trees

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 18

Last week, I said writers might find it helpful to have separate readers for higher-order and lower-order concerns. Brian and I have worked a handful of times on editing jobs for other writers, and that’s exactly how we operate.

Brian is excellent at the higher-order stuff: honing in on issues of pacing, structure, dialogue, characterization, and so forth. He’s also great at suggesting ways to fix big-picture level problems. I can often sense when something’s amiss on this level but am not good at knowing exactly how to fix it.

On the other hand, I have become a pretty good line editor over the years. I try to pay attention to tiny details, like noticing if a character’s eyes are brown on page 10 and blue on page 200, or keeping up with how much story time elapses between plot points, what season it’s supposed to be, and so on. Comma and spelling errors tend to jump out at me now as if lighted by neon.

With me holding my magnifying lens up to the tree bark, Brian is free to concentrate on the forest--although truth be told, he also picks up a lot of grammar errors. We tend to edit on our own, then consolidate all the marks onto one copy, and I always feel validated when we both mark the same errors.

Of course, when it comes to higher- and lower-order concerns, sequence is important. You really don’t need to be worrying too much about minutiae until your later revisions. There’s no point agonizing over every punctuation mark when entire chapters may need to be cut or completely rewritten in order to fix a higher-order concern. Always revise with an eye toward the big picture first.

Brodsky the Wonder Dog

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 17

When you have multiple dogs, one thing you quickly learn about is sibling rivalry. When Brodsky gives us a disdainful look if he thinks Kasay’s gotten a bigger treat (and vice versa), it takes me back to the days when my sister and brother and I used to count our jellybeans to make sure nobody had been slighted by the Easter bunny.

My mother wasted an unknown portion of her life counting out jellybeans (or whatever the treat du jour happened to be) and dividing by three. Now it’s our turn, except with easier math. I felt guilty about devoting an entry solely to Kasay last week. I don’t think Brodsky has a secret laptop with internet access and lurks here, but just in case…today is his turn in the spotlight.

We knew about Kasay’s health problems when we took him in, but Brodsky was supposed to be the healthy one. He was the easy one: more mature, less whiny when left alone, less destructive, fewer housebreaking accidents. Sure, his ribs were sticking out, his coat was very coarse, and he seemed extremely subdued, but we figured he’d soon gain weight and chalked the rest up to his nature.

We found Brodsky online from a different rescue organization, one that isn’t nearly as well-organized and fastidious as Crossroads, and a few days after he arrived, I noticed that he had intestinal worms. I was a bit perturbed at his rescue group for not giving us his vet records immediately and for neglecting to tell us about his condition. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise though, because when I took him to the vet for treatment, they discovered he also had heartworms, which of course can be life-threatening.

The vet began immediate treatment of the intestinal worms and scheduled a two-day stay for Brodsky to receive his heartworm treatment: two shots of a form of arsenic. The treatment itself is dangerous, but the vet felt he was in the early stages and could receive both shots at once. Apparently, in more advanced cases, the shots have to spread out over several months.

Of course we were worried about our poor guy, and in the meantime, his old vet records finally did arrive in the mail (which showed that he’d tested negative for heartworms two months prior—I later learned it’s not unusual for it to go undetected in the very early stages), along with medicine for the intestinal worms. We ending up being so thankful that Brodsky’s foster parents hadn’t brought this along when they dropped him off; otherwise, we wouldn’t have had a reason to take him into the vet right away, and we might not have discovered the heartworms until it was too late.

Brodsky responded well to his hospitalization, and within a month had put on weight, developed a much smoother and shinier coat, and shown more energy and exuberance than we’d thought he was capable of. At his six-month follow-up, he was declared heartworm-free. Here he is in all his wondrous splendor.

Before (on the left): super-skinny and not about to leap around like some other dogs we know.


Now: Smooth, shiny, chubby, chock full of vim and vigor:

Finding a first reader

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 16

No matter how much of a grammar perfectionist you may be, every writer still needs some editorial feedback and assistance. It’s impossible to be completely objective about your own writing. Not to sound like Captain Obvious here, but you can’t know how readable your work is without asking the opinion of someone who doesn’t live in your own head.

Your first reader can be a friend, spouse, family member, colleague, workshop classmate, writers’ group, online buddy, or even a relative stranger. A good reader is very hard to find, so explore all those avenues if you’re in need of one.

Your reader should be fairly well-read in your genre so that they have a general sense of what works and what doesn’t. You don’t want a yes-man who is either blind to your flaws or afraid to point them out. Nor do you want someone overly negative who might run roughshod over your sensitive artist side and permanently deflate your dreams.

It might be that you need several readers to balance each other out; for instance, one who’s great at seeing big picture issues with story and character and another who has a microscopic eye for line editing. Just beware of getting input from too many different readers, or you could run into that whole irritating pleasing-no-one-because-you've-tried-to-please-everyone phenomenon.

Style sheets

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 16

If the English language were our mother, she would be the cool, laid-back kind, the kind that inspires longing and envy in children with strict parents. There are some haphazardly put-together rules, but if you really want to, you can break a lot of them and still not be “wrong” or get into any real trouble. Sewwww-weet, huh?

But that wishy-washy, namby-pamby type of parenting comes with its own set of frustrations. I'm sure you've heard Dr. Phil and his ilk say that children crave discipline and order. I don't know whether I agree with that, but I know how frustrating it is to try to teach grammar. Just when it looks like a lightbulb has gone off and your students understand the rule you're explaining, you have to do a 180 and include the many exceptions to that rule.

Black-and-white, hard-and-fast rules can be comforting. But no, our mom is a freedom-loving hippie who doesn’t believe in such things and is full of waffling exceptions: “‘i’ after ‘e,’ I say! Well, OK…except after ‘c’…or in long ‘a’ sounds like 'weigh' and 'neighbor'…” “A comma must always come before the coordinating conjunction in a compound sentence! Unless it’s a very short clause and there’s no risk of confusion, in which case, you can leave it out if you want to…” “Sentences shouldn’t be started with a conjunction or ended with a preposition…unless enough people start doing it...or it is appropriate for your purpose and audience...then it’s OK.”

It’s enough to make you long for a stricter language.

As a writer, you have the freedom to decide so many things: alternate spellings, whether you use or omit the last comma in items in a series, phonetic spellings, etc. It seems more professional, though, to have some consistency within a manuscript so that your choices seem deliberate, not random. I don’t mind ‘canceled’ or ‘cancelled,’ but somehow it bothers me when I see an author switch back and forth in the same piece of writing.

That’s where a style sheet comes in. I first learned about this wonderful tool when I was working on the Stripmall project. A style sheet is simply your own personalized usage manual/dictionary that can help you be consistent when faced with alternate spelling and usage situations. Phonetic spellings, slang terms, and proper names (particularly those you make up) can’t be looked up in the Prentice Hall Handbook, so make yourself a running list that you can refer back to when it’s line editing time.

It’s a great idea to make a semi-permanent style sheet for yourself with your general preferences listed, but you also need a customized sheet for each book or story that includes any unusually spelled or fictitious proper nouns. Usually a style sheet for a novel ends up being just a page or two, which is ideal for quick reference.

Kasay the Wonder Dog

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 16

You may have noticed Kasay’s Harry Potterish scar in the last dog entry and might be a tad curious about its origins. That means it’s flashback time.

When Kasay was pulled off death row by the wonderful folks at Crossroads Animal Rescue, he had what appeared to be some small wounds on his back. His loving foster mom, Julie, took him to the vet for treatment. As the techs shaved Kasay’s fur to treat the wounds, they discovered extensive infection. More and more of the skin fell away, and before long, the majority of his back was one big open wound. The diagnosis wasn’t conclusive, and we’re still not sure if it was a chemical or sun burn, spider bite, or infected bite from another dog. Julie and her family spent two months tirelessly nursing Kasay back to health.

Here he is all shaved and bandaged and coned up.

When we adopted Kasay, the wound was about 90% closed up. He had to sleep wearing his cone for a short time and was always cooperative about letting us disinfect and care for the wound.

Most of his fur grew back, but he still has this distinctive battle scar to remind us that he is a courageous warrior with amazing powers of regeneration.

My grammar bio refuses to die

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 15 - We're stuck again! I hope this isn't a technical problem but just a natural lull in submissions.

It was many years before I found myself standing in front of a class again, teaching Freshman Composition. Fortunately for me, Brian has taught various college-level writing classes and helped me tremendously, sharing all his lectures and giving me tons of advice, support, and both figurative and literal hand-holding. This experience forced me to finally take the time to learn the proper usage of commas. Brian shared his NAYFOBS mnemonic with me (the same idea as FANBOYS, but so much better. The sillier the mnemonic device, the easier it is to remember), and I was able to mark student papers and teach them the rules.

Finally getting back to the second part of that advice I mentioned last week...Am I saying that every writer should teach? No, although there’s no better motivation for learning something than teaching it to someone else. What I’m saying is that I think reading will only take you so far. You will pick up a lot of good practices, and reading hones your ear for language, but you will still have your grammar weak spots. (Mine were pretty common: comma splices and faulty parallelism. And I have a tendency to spell led l-e-a-d.)

Try to identify your weaknesses, then commit to fixing those bad habits. You could take a class or get some one-on-one tutoring, or you could buy an up-to-date writer’s handbook and teach yourself to correct your work.

I like the Prentice Hall Handbook. It’s well organized and the grammar lessons are easy to understand. You can get a used copy at Amazon for under a dollar (plus shipping, of course). If you live near a college or university, you might even be able to snag a free one. Our English department routinely puts dozens of instructor’s editions of textbooks out in the hall on their “free books” shelf. Professors get so many free copies from publishers hoping they’ll adopt their books, purging is an ongoing process. As long as you have a trusty reference manual of your own, you don’t have to memorize the rules but can refer back to it as often as needed.

My grammar bio cont.

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 15

When Brian asked me to work as a typist and copy editor with him and three of his MFA classmates on their collaborative novel Stripmall Bohemia, I was nervous. In addition to the Yoko vibe I felt as the sole girlfriend butting into the four guys’ project, I was not at all confident about my abilities. Not only was my grammar knowledge limited, but I was a self-taught typist as well.

But I muddled through and, all in all, I think I helped the boys out. During that project, my typing and editing skills did improve, but the truth is, Brian is such a stringent reviser and self-editor, proofing his work didn’t force me to address all of my grammar deficiencies. I continued to make mistakes in my writing that he was far beyond making in his.

Teaching is what made me face the grammar dragon head on.

My first teaching experience was a high school course called Teacher Cadets, a sort of pre-education course for seniors to help us decide whether this was a career we wanted to pursue. In the spring, we traveled to another school for an hour a day to do observations, culminating in our teaching one lesson.

I was assigned to a sixth-grade language arts class which, much to my chagrin at the time, consisted entirely of grammar instruction. Reading had been separated into a different class period--one that didn’t align with my class schedule. The lesson I ended up having to teach was ‘who and whom.’ I was so nervous that I overlearned the lesson and, to this day, that is one grammar rule I’ve got down pat. On the other hand, I couldn’t tell you one thing the teacher taught during the 20 or so classes I observed.

This is getting long-winded, so I’m going to split it up to keep your eyes from crossing.

My grammar biography

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 15

For the sake of providing some background and context to this issue, I have a nerdy confession: I’m a little disappointed that I’ve never been asked to diagram a sentence. My grandfather used to work as the art director for a publisher and sometimes sent us language arts textbooks. I remember as a 3rd grader reading the chapters on diagramming with true awe: a mixture of fascination and horror. This was mysterious, complex, big-kid stuff, like algebra or chemistry.

I believed that one day I’d know all the fancy words for parts of speech and learn how and where to draw those lines and symbols, dissecting sentences with a full understanding of exactly what made them tick. Somehow, things didn’t work out that way.

The Chomskian idea of innate linguistic knowledge I referred to in my last entry has been so much in vogue the last few decades that formal grammar instruction has virtually been done away with. [We don’t need to teach grammar—the kids pick it up naturally from reading!] My last grammar lesson was in 7th grade—from then on, English classes consisted solely of reading and analyzing fiction, poetry, and drama. We had to write essays and papers, but we were pretty much on our own as far as figuring out language mechanics. I’m sure I made the same small errors over and over, but I never had the kind of teacher who took points off for minor errors, so I was never motivated to correct myself.

In college, there was a grammar/history of the language course offered, but I’d heard rumors of how difficult it was from the secondary education-track English majors who were required to take it. I studied my catalog and discovered that, since I wasn’t seeking teacher certification, I could substitute a literature class on 20th century American poetry for the grammar course. I told all my fellow English majors about this loophole and single-handedly caused a spike in registration for that poetry class, which consisted of meeting at our professor’s house one night a week to eat soup and gossip about the lives of well-known poets. Don't get me wrong--I enjoyed the poetry course, but it wasn’t long before I was regretting my cowardly registration choice.

There I was in the mid-1990s, an English degree in hand but no real grammar know-how beyond the ‘this sounds correct’ basics I’d intuitively picked up along the way. I was occasionally asked to proofread something for a job and felt like a fraud but muddled my way through, marking egregious errors and ignoring whatever I wasn’t sure about. Then one day, my boyfriend (yep, he’s the one) enlisted my help with editing his novel, and suddenly the stakes were higher than they’d ever been.

What to do if you need help with grammar: Part 1

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 15

The good news is that many contemporary linguists agree that we learn grammar through usage, not instruction. My prescription for you, if you have problems in this area, is twofold.

First, read. Read a wide array of books, including those biggies you pretended to read in high school but never did. Reread your favorites. You will begin to subconsciously develop an ear for proper usage.

I caution you to make your reading broad so that you don’t inadvertently start to mimic any one writer’s voice. That sort of mimicry is not necessarily a bad thing and, in fact, is probably inevitable for writers just starting out. But if you’ve been at this enterprise for a decade or more, it’s time to develop your own unique voice and avoid the derivative.

I’ll hold off on the bad news for the time being, except to say that I’ve come to believe you can’t become completely proficient with language just by reading. Some instruction is in order.

Things the dogs learned this summer: Part 2

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 14

The dogs are on a bit of a different learning curve, so each will have to give his final lesson separately.

Lesson #4 from Kasay: Ice eating is a delicious way to stay hydrated.

Lesson #4A: But be sure to save some of your ice for later. It will make a lovely midnight snack.

Lesson #4B: Doh! Where’d my ice go?! Oooohhh yeah…I mean, DON'T try to save it for later. I don’t know why I can’t keep that one straight. Must develop a mnemonic device…Chew it fast, for it won’t last? ICE = It Can Expire? Eat it when it’s dealt or it will melt?

Lesson #5 from Brodsky (see above three pics): Hamming for the camera is a sign of immaturity. Keep your face turned away from the paparazzi at all times.

Oh no! They caught me! How embarrassing. [Or maybe he is humiliated by his owner's socks-with-sandals fashion faux pas. Hey, I was just trying to keep the skeeters off my ankles.]

Lesson #5A: Best to have a good sense of humor when cornered. Punching out the paparazzi only leads to trouble, or so my parole officer tells me.

DD: Things the dogs learned this summer: Part 1

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 10

We got the tiniest sheen of drizzle last night—the first time it’s rained in weeks—and it knocked the edge off the heat. Today it’s not supposed to reach the 80s, and it hasn’t been that pleasant in months. So this is a good time to look at the summer of '07 in the rearview and see what lessons it held. For the dachshunds, of course. I am beyond learning much about summer except it seems to be getting longer and hotter.

Here we go. You might want to take some notes on this.

Lesson #1: Weeds grow even in a drought. Help your owner with the pruning chores.

Lesson #2: Eat plenty of green leafy vegetables for hydration and antioxidants.

Lesson #3: In the summer, it's best to stay on top of the blanket.

The grammar wars con't.

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 7

So which side do we represent in this war? Are we judging entries with the eagle eyes of the rules keepers or the freewheeling nonchalance of the grammar bohemians?

Brian and I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, between those two extremes but admittedly closer to the former camp than the latter. If the grammar and mechanics errors in a piece are rampant, we do lower the presentation score. Someone who wants to be a writer but has no understanding of the fundamentals is conveying laziness and a lack of respect for the medium.

It’s like a painter who doesn’t know how to mix colors. You can’t cut corners and skip ahead from basic skills to advanced execution. You have to put in the effort and learn how to use your artistic tools, and your tools are words. Expecting someone else to fix it all for you later is not only arrogant but naïve. No one else is going to care about your work as much as you do.

Improper use of language is a burden on your reader. You know what you’re trying to say, but if you completely ignore the rules of language, your reader will likely become frustrated and have to read each sentence multiple times, mentally inserting the proper punctuation and filling in the gaps in order to make sense of your work. If that is the case, you have failed in your attempt to express yourself. And don’t tell me you had to reread Shakespeare or Faulkner’s sentences in order to understand them. There is a difference between writing that is difficult to read because it is complex and writing that is incomprehensible because it follows no known conventions of language.

Now that I’ve ticked off the grammar bohos, let me add that we understand that grammar is ever-changing, and we don’t cling stubbornly to outdated rules or feel the need to enforce rules just for the principle of the matter. Too, we know that formatting and punctuation errors beyond the author’s control sometimes happen in cyberspace, so we are not taking five points off for every misused comma or anything like that. We don’t penalize for minor errors that don’t interfere with readability (or, of course, that seem intentional and effectively serve a function in the entry). Grammar mistakes tend to fade into the background and be forgotten in the presence of a well-crafted, original plot, fascinating characters, and sparkling dialogue, and those higher-order concerns are what jump out at us most of all.

But when we read an entry that excels in those other categories but also doesn’t have any glaring errors, it shows us that the piece has been carefully edited, that the writer is probably well read and knowledgeable about his craft, and that he has put as much time and passion into the revision as he put into the writing, and we find that impressive. Those are the entries that get an immediate ticket to the ‘yes’ stack.

The grammar wars

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 5

Grammar: such an oddly touchy subject among writers. There are two warring camps on this subject.

There are the rules keepers—those writers who feel they know the rules and become agitated at others’ errors. Some extremists are frozen in time, insisting people adhere to outdated rules. These old-school purists do not approve of splitting infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions, despite what the latest edition of the Holt Handbook permits. They take care to avoid any such manual published within the last few decades, so they neither know which former grammar no-no’s have become acceptable, nor do they want to know.

Ironically, rules keepers are plagued with a curse. Anyone who writes about grammar or rails against some usage pet peeve in print will have, embedded in her diatribe, at least one grammatical error. I remember when Brian first pointed out this phenomenon to me years ago, and I have yet to see it disproven. It is some kind of inevitability, perhaps a joke the universe plays on us to remind us that perfection is unattainable.

The copyeditors (professional rules keepers, no less) of a nearby major metropolitan newspaper have a contest each year to see who can locate the first typo or grammatical error in the latest edition of the AP Stylebook (you know, journalists’ grammar bible). It never takes them more than 30 minutes to find one. C’mon, I bet you can locate one in this very blog entry, though I promise I haven’t intentionally put any in.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are the grammar bohemians who play free and loose with language. They don’t worry about grammar, either believing it’s a waste of time and something for lowly proofreaders and editors--not true artistes--to fret over, or thinking their intentional disregard of grammatical conventions is essential to their unique writing style and conveys some deeper meaning. They see themselves as iconoclastic rebels, and they view the rules keepers as dull pedants.

The winning ingredients: presentation

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 3

Now here’s a mysterious category from the scorecard. Are we judging entries based on the quality of the paper they’re printed on or the fanciness of the packaging in which they arrive? No—it’s all online, remember.

So are we referring to submissions that come in with the formatting intact versus those that somehow get garbled in transmission and end up with triangles and accent marks where all the normal punctuation marks should be? No, we don’t hold mysterious formatting glitches against you.

‘Presentation’ simply means the entry’s language—its diction, syntax, tone. Entries that are well written receive high marks in this category. Keep in mind that ‘well written’ can mean rich and poetic writing or it can mean sparse, invisible writing, depending on what seems appropriate for a particular piece of fiction. As always, there are no black-and-white, one-size-fits-all rules where fiction is concerned.

Also falling under this category are


grammar and mechanics.

//cue the blood-curdling screams and horror movie music//

But we’ll talk more about that later.

Ding dong!

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 1

This wicked summer is now officially dead (good riddance to triple-digit temperatures), and that means it’s changeover time for the writing contests. Final tally on entries for the Best Short-Short Story Contest: 197. We just barely beat last year’s number, but at least we did exceed it!

Here they are--our reading materials for the next few weeks:


Oh, and I apologize if I sounded harsh about early Best First Chapter entries last week. I didn’t mean you or your entry were disqualified forever and ever as part of some weird grudge against earlybirds, I just mean if you submitted before September 1, you need to resubmit during the submission period in order to qualify (9/1/07-3/1/08).

A note about anonymity

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 165

As is the practice with most writing contests, we judge entries anonymously. Since ours is a fee-free online contest, we have the luxury of requiring that very little identifying information be attached to each entry.

But what if that one piece of information—your email address—compromises your anonymity? If your real name is embedded in your email address, should you open up a new Hotmail account and go incognito?

Of course you can, but you really needn’t bother. That is, unless you’re someone we know—a friend, relative, or former student, say. That’s the point of anonymity, to keep us from being biased in case anyone we know should ever enter.

Rest assured, if your name appears in your email address, we don’t Google you, or keep track of whether you’ve emailed us a question, or keep up with whether you’ve entered before, or really pay much attention to the address at all.

Like I’ve said before, I record the addresses when the entries come in, but when our reading period begins, we honestly don’t pay attention to the address on the entry. So don’t worry about going to a lot of trouble to establish a secret identity. At least not for our sakes.

Deadline is approaching

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 141

Consider this your friendly reminder that the deadline for this year's short-short story contest is Saturday night at 11:59 p.m., EST.

I was hoping we'd get more entries than last year (194) but at this point it doesn't look like that's going to happen. There's usually a last-minute rush, though, so who knows. C'mon and get those puppies sent in! Anybody out there have 50 pieces of flash fiction lying around? ;) Or one will do.

This also means if you're chomping at the bit to enter the InnermoonLit Contest for Best First Chapter of a Novel contest, you will soon be able to do so. And yes, if you've snuck in your first chapter early, it has been disqualified. We begin accepting entries for that contest on September 1.

Plot versus story

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 132

In Technique in Fiction, Macauley and Lanning make what I think is a helpful distinction between story and plot. (Others have made this distinction too--I just thought I’d cite this book because it gives a pretty comprehensive overview on the subject.)

A story is a sequence of events prompted by the question, “And then what happened?” whereas a plot contains events causally linked to each other, prompting the question, “Why?”

Story, of course, is the primitive granddaddy of the two. The slice-of-life fiction I referred to last week would fall under the story category. Plot is an artifice and a much more recent invention. It’s a story structured into a basic pyramid shape, consisting of establishment of characters and situation, rising action, climax, and falling action (the names of these elements vary, but this is the simplest example). Real life doesn’t have a single plot in which events build upon each other neatly, causing other events, which bring about a dramatic moment of change or crisis, after which everyone dies or lives happily ever after, depending on whether the tale is a tragedy or comedy.

In real life, it is difficult if not impossible to establish causation. In fact, if you study logical fallacies, you know that one of the most common is post hoc, ergo propter hoc, or mistakenly assuming that one event caused another merely because it happened beforehand. Maybe that’s part of what makes fiction so satisfying: we can replay the chain of events and see exactly what caused everything to go to hell in a hand basket. Sure, we guess about the causes of the things that happen to us in our real lives, but when it comes down to it, it’s always just that: a guess.

As a writer, you may rail against the practice of following any plot model and think it’s formulaic, but I know when I think back over my favorite books, they all have some kind of discernible plot structure. Sometimes it’s better to use the tried and true guidelines of your predecessors than to try to completely reinvent the wheel.

A dachshund digression that’s probably TMI

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 124

Forgive me. It’s the first week of school, and I’m having trouble focusing on anything other than surviving the madness. Thankfully the dogs' shenanigans never cease to provide fodder for the blog....

If you give it much thought at all, you probably think of urination as a simple means of emptying the bladder. Kasay would concur, but not brother Brodsky.

To him, peeing is a way of laying claim to what he believes is rightfully his. And he has his own bizarre sense of manifest destiny, firmly believing that once his stubby legs have trodden any given piece of dirt, it becomes his private property. On walks, he stores up his urine, strategically parsing it out on a shrub here, a sprig of monkey grass there. Hydrants and fence posts are his favorites. When Kasay relieves himself, Brodsky swoops in after to cover Kasay’s scent with his own.

So I had to laugh a few days ago when the karma gods paid Brodsky a visit. Our next door neighbors have a large shepherd mix named Jacob whom Brodsky can’t stand and who is often allowed to roam around off the leash on his walks.

Jacob happened to be out for his early morning potty break right when we were headed back into the house from ours. As soon as the boys saw Jacob, it was the usual mayhem: Kasay whining and straining at the leash, wanting to go make friends, Brodsky whipped into a fierce barking frenzy, straining just as hard (being considerate dogs, they want to make sure both my biceps get an equal workout), wanting to go attack. Jacob ran over and nuzzled with Kasay a minute before prancing up to our front door and peeing on the bush right beside it.

Brodsky was as infuriated as I’d ever seen him. His bark went from lion to tyrannosaurus rex level. The enemy urinating on the one bush he has to pass every time he enters and leaves his own home!

When Jacob finally went home and the dogs had settled down enough that I felt able to take a step without being pulled over, I led them to the door where, predictably, Brodsky made a beeline for the Jacob-scented shrub, intending to cover over the foul cur’s attempt at claiming his boxwood.

You’ve never seen such a disheartened dachshund as Brodsky when he realized that no matter how high he threw up his back leg, there was simply no way he could reach the much taller dog’s mark.

He’s been trying ever since, though, and will not pass by that shrub without marking it. Let’s hope we get a good rain soon, before he kills the poor plant.

The winning ingredients: plot

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 115

Some literary theorists have said all stories can be boiled down to one of two basic plots: Romeo and Juliet or David and Goliath. That tends to make the search to create plot seem deceptively simple. If you’ve ever written fiction, you know how difficult it can be to come up with a plot that is surprising yet feels inevitable, that is both unique and satisfying for the reader.

Plot is the driving force behind fiction, after all; it’s what makes a story a story. Our need for story is a primeval one, dating back to preliterate times when our ancestors gathered around fires asking, “And then what happened?”

I will admit that, for the short-short story contest, Brian and I prefer stories that are complete, with beginnings, middles, and endings, over the slice-of-life Carveresque pieces that leave us flipping the page over, wondering whether the last paragraph got cut off. For the best first chapter contest, we look for plot potential, whether a conflict has been established that’s interesting and complex enough to carry the reader through.

"Everybody Change Places!" by M. J. Amft, Part 3

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 110

Click here to read "Everybody Change Places!" Part 1

Click here to read "Everybody Change Places!" Part 2

Sometimes the hunch to try “everyone change places!” comes partway through a story. One of mine was coming along nicely. A funny, bossy mother was advising her daughter not to moon over a summer romance, waiting for a Christmas reunion. In the background (away at college) there was a sympathetic sister. The characters were lively and the dialogue bright, but who really listens to a mother or sister? Change places! I sent the girl off to college, killed off the sister, shoved mama in the background, and gave the girl a funny, bossy roommate and sold that story.

I once saw a young nursemaid at a summer resort. She was dimwitted, with a homely face and a figure like Sophia Loren’s. A young boy was snowing her but behind her back snickering about the “good time” he was going to have with her before he dumped her. I tried writing a story from her point of view, but I couldn’t identify with a stupid, slow but physically full-blown girl, and I didn’t think Seventeen readers could either. So I tried changing point of view to the boy’s side. But no one can see himself as a complete cad, and the boy began developing redeeming features, seeing the girl as an unfortunate human being, not just “a body.” Still she was out of his class, and when (on the last page) his snobbish cousins, a boy and a girl, appeared, he had to snub the girl to save face. Just before slipping the story into the brown envelope, I read it one more time. The hero seemed unbelievable. He had gone through too many character changes in too short a time, and the last-page cousins interested me more than anyone.

Out came my lethal pen. I killed off the hero. I had the girl cousin become the main character and the storyteller. She became the one who met and befriended the voluptuous dimwit. She sat helplessly by while the cad cousin made his plans, and a totally new hero came out of nowhere and wrapped the story up in a surprising and most satisfactory way. That story sold.

It is hard to mutilate your characters. It is hard to write fiction. You have to start with so little: a brief scene glimpsed; a sentence overhead; an old emotion suddenly remembered; an outstanding face; someone’s trite tale of woe or joy. From these small kernels you must create characters who are real; who act, react, and interact. But as a fiction writer you have one big advantage. If your characters are not right for the part, you can command them to change roles. They are your characters, and if it will make for a better story, you can make a handsome hero change places with an ugly girl. If there is something wrong with your mother, you can try her out as a father. If a big brother becomes too sentimental, you can tell him to be a little sister.

Be bossy with your characters. Shove them around. Be courageous. Pick up your pen and give them the order: “Everybody change places! Now!” While your pen is slashing—altering genders, changing ages, shifting loyalties—you’ll feel pain, and sometimes it won’t even work. But if it does—ah! Your labor will be forgotten in the knowledge that thousands will read your story; some will reread it; some will share it with friends; and some will never completely forget it.

"Everybody Change Places!" by M. J. Amft, Part 2

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 105

Click here to read "Everybody Change Places" Part 1

I had once known a real Ronnie, a very handsome, very wealthy Ivy Leaguer who broke a tiny bone in his wrist. That bone would not heal. For nine months casts were removed only to be replaced immediately, He was a boy who had everything, including a swimming pool, a tennis court, his own baseball diamond, and a glamorous girlfriend. But he also had that damned cast. He seemed like a good character for a Seventeen story.

So while he was off in New York having surgery on the wrist, I dreamed up the candy striper. As soon as the real Ronnie met the make-believe Gay, the story flowed as fast as I could write. But that ending…

I uncapped my all-powerful pen. With it I yanked Gay out of that red and white uniform. I made her much more beautiful, very rich, and slightly spoiled. And I broke her wrist. I pulled Ronnie out of bed, healed his bone, took away all his money and rich friends, and made him a lowly part-time City College student and lab technician. I pulled Gay’s drab visitor out of the past, stuck him in the present, changed him into a girl who liked Ronnie, gave him a nurse’s aide uniform, and christened him Jenny. I could do it. They were my characters.

When beautiful Gay left that hospital, Ronnie didn’t wait, hoping for a call. He called her. When she wasn’t home, he called again, and when she was busy he asked her when she would not be busy. And he got the message, loud and clear, got it in a way that no girl ever would; because he was a boy, with that masculine inner core of toughness, he could appreciate a final twist of irony that I added.

I re-typed the battle-scarred manuscript and sold it.

To be continued...

“Everybody Change Places!” Part 1

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 102

Despite the fact that this is going to make my entries seem lifeless and uninspired in comparison, I’m going to have a guest blogger this week. I dug up this article, written by my late grandmother M. J. Amft and published in The Writer magazine in 1969 and thought it’d be a shame not to share it. And it fits perfectly with our current topic of characterization.

I need to get a more complete bio put together, but in the meantime, here’s the ‘About the Author’ blurb they published at the bottom of the first column: “M. J. Amft has had more than thirty stories published in Seventeen. Two of these were reprinted in an anthology, Seventeen from Seventeen (Macmillan), another in a high school literature textbook, Counterpoint in Literature (Scott, Foresman), and another translated and reprinted in a Swedish teenage magazine, Bild. Mrs. Amft’s record is an encouraging one for the free-lance writer, since, she writes, ‘I have never had an agent, never had any “ins” with anyone, have never met a Seventeen editor, did all my own typing (even though I’m a rotten typist), and had to be on duty as “Mother” during all the writing.’”


EVERYBODY CHANGE PLACES!

By M. J. Amft

Your story has an instant-appeal beginning, a smooth-toned, fast-paced middle, and an end. It is slanted for a definite market, and it’s all typed, ready to go. But there is something wrong with that story.

This may be a story saved by, “When I say, ‘Go!’ everybody change places!”

No matter that your characters are very much alive. You made them, and you can unmake them. They are your characters, and you can shake them all up and turn mothers into fathers, boys into girls, minor villains into major heroes. You have the power. All you need is the courage and a pen.

My neatly typed story was the tale of a glamorous boy, stuck in a hospital bed, bored to death, and happy to have a nice little candy striper while away the dreary hours. When he left the hospital, he forgot all about her and went back to his glamorous life. You saw the story from her viewpoint, and you knew how painful it was for her. She took it philosophically—remembering that she too had treated a devoted but drab visitor of her own, when she was once a patient, in much the same way—but you knew how crushed she was that with this charming boy it was all over, permanently.

“All over, permanently!” That was what was wrong! A girl never realizes that it is all over (unless she reads a wedding announcement, and this boy was too young for that). A girl always has hope. Maybe he is trying to reach her and somehow just missing her each time. Maybe he is ill or his parents have whisked him halfway around the world. A girl can go on hoping and on and on waiting. But boys don’t have to wait and hope! Boys can, and do, pursue the issue.

“O.K., Ronnie,” I said. “You are going to be a girl, and you, my little candy striper, are going to be a boy.”

To be continued…

A tip about antiheroes

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 97

In How to Write Best Selling Fiction, Dean Koontz emphasizes the importance of a likeable main character. Then again, that advice was published twenty-five years ago…and besides, maybe your goal isn’t to write a bestseller. (Don’t laugh.)

If you decide to go the antihero route but still want to have broad appeal, I have two words for you: ironic distance. This is your subtle way of showing the reader that you are not your main character. You know she’s flawed and hateful, and you do not approve of her actions.

How does one establish ironic distance? You could go into another character’s POV and let him say what you really think about your antihero, or have someone tell off the jerk, or of course your could turn karma loose on her.

Reading about a sleaze who just keeps sleazing around damaging people with impunity may keep the pages turning, but it can leave your reader feeling depressed and dirty. Reading about a sleaze who gets a brilliant telling-off and/or a satisfying comeuppance can be cathartic and leave you reader cheering, “Thus be it ever to tyrants!”

Back to character likeableness

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 93

A recent Time article (“Antiheroine Chic” from the 8/6 issue) got me thinking about the whole sticky subject of likeable characters again. The article’s premise is that Tony Soprano single-handedly changed television forever, opening the floodgates for more complex, unlikeable main characters.

It’s funny because Brian and I, having recently Netflixed all the back seasons of The Sopranos, were talking just the other day about whether an antihero as dark as Tony would be as popular in book form. We concluded that he probably wouldn’t. A novel is a much bigger commitment of your time and mental energy than a weekly television show. I’m not sure a mass audience would want to read themselves to sleep with Tony and Carmela every night.

A novel with a despicable main character is likely to generate the dreaded criticisms, “I didn’t connect with the character,” or “I didn’t care about the character”—if not from agents and editors who reject it, then from readers. It is a tricky road to travel. Like everything writing-related, it’s all subjective, and a main character that gives one person the warm fuzzies could very well make another’s skin crawl.

Let’s continue with the example of Tony Soprano. The Time article calls him a “good-bad guy,” a “villain with sympathetic qualities.” I’d call him a straight antihero with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Still, it was hard to stop watching the trainwreck, although I’ll admit I was never pulling for T. Which I think is why it would be a hard sell as a book. Mainstream audiences don’t tend to read about someone they aren’t in some way rooting for.

Of course Brian and I are lucky; as contest judges, we don’t have to concern ourselves with marketability, just with how intriguing and believable the characters are.

DD: Doctors of Desqueakification

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 87

It’s too damned hot to think about writing today…which can only mean it’s time for another dachshund digression.

Some dogs play fetch, others hunt, or balance dog biscuits on their snouts, or leap up to catch Frisbees in mid-air, or even warn their masters of impending seizures. I’ll admit that our little guys’ arsenal of tricks is a bit more limited.

Sure, they can sit, heel, and come when called. They can even shake hands dachshund-style (while lying on their backs). But we have discovered their biggest talent: they are champion squeaky disablers. It’s quite an impressive sight, really.

For their one-year anniversary, we bought the dogs matching stuffed cows made of sturdy canvas. We’ve learned to avoid the average furry dog toys. Those are dismembered in seconds. These were heavy duty--cylindrical shaped, with no appendages to tear loose other than the two ears and the snouty nose. Which meant they lasted one whole day.

Kasay and Brodsky’s desqueaking technique is quite methodical. First, they locate the squeaker and clamp down on it repeatedly until the plastic is pierced and the noise is silenced. At least to human ears. Apparently, the dogs can still hear the plastic bladder faintly clicking deep inside and will not rest until, thread by thread, the animal’s outer layer is breached and the squeaker removed and chewed into pulp. Then comes the disembowelment, in which every last bit of fluff is removed from the incision and flung about until the floor looks like it’s covered with clouds. Left behind is the deflated outer layer, which the dogs continue to chew on indefinitely until I hide it away.

Should you disturb the dogs during their surgery for, say, a potty break, they will not be distracted from the task at hand. Brodsky is particularly single-minded and will clamp down on the toy for dear life and give you a fierce growl if you’re foolish enough to try to take it away from him. Best just to let him bring it outside while he does his business. Kasay is a bit easier to distract and will drop anything if you wave a treat in front of his nose.

Day 366 of the occupation, and the dachshunds are training me well. Not only do they devour stuffed toys at $5 a pop, they have devised yet another means of tricking me into showering them with snacks.

Here are your visual aids.
Stage One: Kasay locating the exact position of the squeaker:



Stage Three: Brodsky in the middle of a fluff-ectomy

Notes on characterization: consistency

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 85

In a piece of fiction, character inconsistencies make the character less believable and hurt the writer’s credibility. I’m not talking about quirky, unpredictable, stereotype-busting characters (those are good things), I mean unintentional inconsistencies, errors that result from the writer not knowing his character well enough, small things he probably read right over but that stick out to the reader.

For example, you might have your animal rights activist hero come home and casually kick the cat after a hard day of protesting dog fighting…or your poverty-stricken teenagers from the ‘hood might use an expensive sushi restaurant as their favorite hangout spot. Without a lot of explaining, your reader is going to suspect you don’t know much about what it’s like to be an animal rights activist or an underprivileged young person.

Hollywood is especially guilty of this as far as settings go. Have you ever noticed how, in the movies, characters who are supposed to be financially struggling often manage to live in spacious, lovely homes or apartments? Even when the setting is a really expensive real estate market like the West Coast or Manhattan? I guess these directors are more concerned about visual appeal than realism.

I think a lot of times character slip-ups are the result of a writer writing what she doesn’t know. She thinks to herself how interesting it would be to have her main character work as a NASCAR pit crew chief. She herself has never watched a single race and knows nothing about auto mechanics. And that’s fine—it will be a challenge, but with a lot of research, a good writer can pull it off. But even better would be if this writer could seek out someone with a connection to this type of person (a pit crew worker would be fantastic, but even the spouse or cousin or sibling of one would be better than nothing) who could read her draft and point out anything glaringly out of place.

All the little details of your character should add up to form a cohesive picture in the reader’s mind, so be on the lookout for these types of errors when you’re revising, and by all means, get an expert reader if at all possible. You can use an inconsistency to give your character some interesting quirks and dimensionality, but if that’s your intention, you have to draw attention to the inconsistency and explain it.

So if for example you see your no-nonsense, frugal grandmother character throwing on a pair of cashmere socks, you should probably either revise that and make her wear her late husband’s ancient athletic socks with the toes blown out or add a line explaining that granny has a weakness for fancy accessories as her one extravagance. Otherwise it just reads like a mistake.

Character names

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 82

While we don’t take them into consideration when scoring your contest submissions, I will admit I am a bit obsessed with character names. Maybe it’s leftover from my days as an English major. Unlike those science and math majors (of whom I continue to be jealous), our knowledge didn’t necessarily build on itself from basic concepts to advanced ones; the stories you read as a senior didn’t necessarily have anything to do with (or require that you remember) the stories you’d read as a freshman. Sadly, I’ve forgotten much of the literature I’ve read over the years. I have an especially poor memory for character names, so I am always glad to see unusual ones.

Cholly Breedlove, Ophelia, Addie Bundren, Tea Cake—those’ll find a spot in your brain to latch onto for a good long time. I find it difficult to get into a book when the characters all have bland names—particularly when they start with the same letter or are similar in some other way. I’m sorry, but if you have a Stephen, a Steve, and a Stephanie, I’m going to have a hard time keeping them distinct in my head. You probably know multiple people named John and Mary in real life, but it’s confusing for your reader to let your characters share names, unless of course you want to use last names or nicknames.

You can push unique names too far. A character’s name, in my mind, conveys something about the character, but it says something about the character’s parents too. The illusion you want to create is that this is a real person, named by another real person or persons, not by you, The Author. So if your heroine is a 35-year-old New Age hippie chick named Chakra, you’d better not say her parents are conservative Southern Baptists, unless you reveal that Chakra chose that moniker herself and that her birth name was something more along the lines of Charlene.

The more off-the-wall character names you use, the more memorable they will be, but the more likely it is that you need to explain the name’s origin somewhere in your story. Brian is really good at this. His hero in Morning Glory’s Long Lost Order of Worship is called Steer McAlilly. Within the first 30 or so pages of the novel, Brian tells the story of how the nickname ‘Steer’ came about. It’s a funny story and one that reveals a lot about Steer, his father, and his grandfather. So not only does the reader get an unforgettable name but also a glimpse into the family dynamics and a sense of the character as a real, three-dimensional person, not a phantasm plucked from the author’s imagination.

How I spent my summer vacation

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 82

Just back from vacation to find an inbox full of submissions. :) Only one month left for this year’s short-short story contest, so don’t tarry.

I brought two novels on the trip, but sadly they were both so bad I couldn’t get past the first 10 pages. There was a time I could slog my way through just about anything, but I just don’t have the patience for reading bad fiction anymore. Makes my skin crawl and my blood pressure go up and puts me in a distinctly unvacationy state of mind.

So we fell back on the ultimate vacation luxury in the evenings: cable TV (we have rabbit ears at home). That was exciting for the first hour, till we realized this particular hotel’s cable package basically consisted of three channels of Showtime, three ESPNs, three CNNs, and the Discovery Channel (which now seems to focus primarily on blowing things up and building things—I didn’t get to see a single cute fuzzy critter). To Brian’s dismay, none of the ESPNs seem to actually show sports anymore but consist of nonstop talking head shows which recycle their content every 30 minutes or so, CNN-style.

We did get to watch baseball on TBS. I don’t follow baseball but found it disconcerting that for four consecutive nights we watched the Giants play the Braves. I felt like we were in a time warp. Barry Bonds didn’t hit a single homer either.

We acted literary just long enough to pay our respects to Thomas Wolfe and William Sydney Porter (better known by his pen name, O. Henry) in the lovely Riverside Cemetery. They both died young, but I found myself even more saddened wondering how their careers would play out if they were writing today.

Most of Porter’s short story markets have dried up, gone under, or no longer pay enough to sustain even someone as prolific as himself. Maybe he would’ve had a career as a TV writer. But c’mon, there’s no way Wolfe’s dense literary prose would be published today. In the immortal words of some anonymous agent with a now-defunct blog, ‘Max Perkins, he dead.’ Hard to find editors willing to take chances now that all the major houses are owned by like four corporations and they don't think twice about firing anyone who doesn't bring in lots of bucks.

Ah well. We’re doing our tiny part to reward excellence in writing and maybe someday the pendulum will swing from the merely marketable back toward art’s favor.

Dachshund digression

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 69

I’m going to take a break from thinking about writing today and instead offer you a glimpse of two of the biggest characters in our lives: Brodsky and Kasay.

They provide us with a never-ending supply of amusing antics. Like all the best animal characters (Snoopy, Garfield, John Grogan's Marley), we can’t help but love them even more because of their wide naughty streaks and well-developed sense of rebellion.

Kasay’s weakness is his constant need of attention. And his obsessive chewing. Just a year ago, before the Great Dachshund Adoption of 2006, I used to read in bed most nights. Since I don’t want my brain turning to mush, I’ve tried to reinstitute this simple habit. Now that there’s a dachshund and a half on the bed, it’s trickier than you might think.

Brodsky, an veteran of unknown age (but definitely older than Kasay) who’s spent time in the pound and God only knows how many non-forever homes, is a warrior. He can sleep even in the most unforgiving of environments and would let you read till dawn.

But as long as there’s a light shining in his general direction, Kasay thinks it’s showtime. Maybe he thinks the clamp-on lamp on the headboard is a spotlight and we expect him to put on a song and dance routine. He makes weird Scooby Doo-esque yelp/whine noises, he jumps from one side of the bed to the other, he twists around on his back like a break dancer.

Last night I thought he was tired enough to give me a few minutes to read. Just when I got engrossed, arguing in my head with Rilke’s advice in his Letters to a Young Poet, I see the text shift ever so slowly to the left. I look over to discover that Kasay has crept up and gripped the corner of the book in his mouth, tugging gingerly, as if as long as he’s verrrrry quiet and sneaky, I won’t notice.

As you can see, paper shredding is one of his hobbies, so I had to give up and hide the book away. Who knows--maybe someday I’ll get that train of thought back for future writing-related blog ruminations.

Character inspiration

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 65

So where do you get your character ideas from? Sure, it's helpful to answer those character questionnaires I mentioned earlier, but how do you avoid coming up with a string of random answers that don’t gel together into a cohesive and comprehensible whole?

You might model your characters on real people you know. In fact, that probably always happens, even when it’s subconscious. Your ability to create believable characters is based on your past experience with and knowledge of real, living characters. Just be careful and try to make sure they can’t identify themselves in your work. You don't want your writing success to cost you your friends. Just ask Thomas Wolfe or Truman Capote or Pat Conroy. So be sneaky about it, for heaven’s sake! Nobody likes portraits of themselves unless the artist draws a highly idealized version of the truth.

Some other ideas for finding character types are the many and varied personality classifications out there. You may not believe in numerology, astrology, the Chinese zodiac, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Insights Discovery test, and all the rest, but they do offer detailed and mostly coherent personality sketches that might be helpful as models in the construction of your character. Read over the results pages and see if any of the types fit what you had in mind for your character.

I don’t recommend going around telling your readers that your hero’s Lifepath Number is 4 or that she’s a Capricorn with Leo rising, born in the year of the Metal Dragon, is an ENFP, or that her dominant energy is earth green. But if you’ve chosen one of these types as a basic guide, it can provide you with a handy launching pad for when you’re getting started and a touchstone when you start to lose your bearings.

Notes on characterization: You are the puppet master

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 63

Back to the likeability question for a moment…

You should have a basic idea how you want your reader to feel about each character and you should manipulate them (both the character and the reader) in order to achieve the desired reaction. Beware of unintentionally letting unlikeable traits slip into your supposedly sympathetic character and vice versa. (A little bit of intentional gray thrown into the black and white is a different matter.)

If you’re writing literary fiction, you have more room for ambiguity, but in most commercial genres, you want your reader pulling for the good guys and shaking their fists in rage at the bad guys. If your protagonist accidentally turns your reader off and your villain starts becoming the most likeable person in the story, you have a problem. Of course you can have an antihero, but the point is you need to be in control of whose side the reader is on.

This is where a trusted second reader is essential, because you need to get an objective opinion of how your characters’ actions come across. Here’s an example: I once worked with a woman who was furious because various neighborhood cats would get into her backyard and sit on her patio furniture (the horror!). She described with relish her solution to this problem: she set up baited traps on her patio and hauled her neighbors’ beloved cats off to the pound, never mentioning what she’d done when she later saw them frantically searching for their missing pets.

It was obvious that this woman was proud of her creative problem-solving skills, and were she writing about the incident, I’m sure she would paint herself as the heroine. No matter how artfully she describes what happened, though, the cat trapper is going to come across as sympathetic as Cruella De Ville. But she couldn’t see how vile her actions would look to someone else.

So grill your second reader on her feelings about each character. Of course there will be differing shades of interpretation, but take note of any reactions that are way off your intended mark so that you can fix them in the rewrite.