Saturday 13 November 2010

The One-Sentence Pitch

"Shiny happy people holding hands..." -R.E.M., Shiny Happy People

I have a great breakthrough to report: I have finally, finally, finally nailed the one-sentence pitch for my story down. And I have some news to share regarding how I did it.

For years, the one-sentence pitch has been one of the things I struggled with most when describing Soulwoven. What is it really about? Like, really, really about? At its broadest, its most basic, in one sentence? For a long time I fiddled around trying to sum up the first book and wound up with very broad, very bland descriptions: "A group of characters has to save the world from necromancers trying to release a dragon."

And I looked at the sentence and thought, well, yes, that happens. But it's not really what the book is about, is it?

So after a writer's conference and my time working in publishing and my experience writing reader's reports I decided to try focusing on one character, and I wound up with this: "A 2o year-old swordsman fights to save the world even as he discovers that the power he has to do so comes from that which is destroying it in the first place."

Better! Serviceable, even. But that's a thick, meaty sentence. It's a little convoluted, hard to understand. You have to read it twice. If I were telling it to you out loud you might say, "Wait, what?"

Then I decided to treat all four books of the story as what they are: one story. I zoomed way out, and asked myself not what the first book of the story was about but what the whole story was about, and I came up with this: "The choices of three brothers shape the destiny of a world torn between loving and hating itself."

Mmm. Yummy. Vague but interesting. The kind of thing that sticks out as you read through the zillions of one-sentence synopses on Publisher's Marketplace every day.

And it came from zooming out. Way out. As far out as I could get. Because I was out that far, there's so much more packed into every part of the sentence: "What choices? Who are the brothers? What destiny? What world? Loving and hating itself? Explain!"

And questions lead to page-turn, and page-turn is what the craft of writing is all about.

Sunday 7 November 2010

Reading Out Loud

"Ah-hoo! Werewolves of London," Warren Zevon- Werewolves of London

J.R.R. Tolkien read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy out loud to C.S. Lewis before it was published. I don't have a C.S. Lewis to read to, but one of the biggest revelations of my last year has been the utterly inimitable experience of reading my novel out loud to people, and what that means for my writing.

Put shortly: you really have to stand behind what you write when you read it to someone's face. The little voice in your head (which I've heard called the Inner Editor elsewhere on the blogosphere, and which, for the record, I am a fan of) that tells you when something is wrong gets a lot louder when your precious self-esteem is at stake. It's easy to tell yourself "Oh, that's okay, I'll come back and fix it later," when you're reading to yourself, even out loud. It's a lot harder to say that to a friend or a significant other. There have been a couple of chapters which I have had to stop reading and just say, "Okay, I thought this was ready for you, but it's not. Sorry. Can we try again tomorrow?" And that's a good thing.

You also get an amazing chance to gauge which parts of your story are interesting and which are boring. If you're reading to a room of people, you feel the atmosphere change. When it's good, they're on the edge of their seats, their eyes are wide, they're leaning forward, they get upset if you pause to fix a typo, and it feels great. When it's bad, they're looking around the room, checking their watches, yawning, fidgeting, and it doesn't really hurt so much as tell you, "Okay, this spot right here. This paragraph, this sentence, this word, is where I lost them," which is incredible. If you're only reading to an audience of one it's even easier (especially if that one is someone who'll snuggle up close to you while you read).

So once you're ready to edit your story, find people to read out loud to, no matter who they are. It's an invaluable tool that I think writers often skip nowadays in favor of the workshop approach, and that's a sad thing.

Sunday 10 October 2010

C'est Funissement

"Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars?" B.O.B. - Airplanes

Saw this linked today on Neil Gaiman's blog and laughed out loud so many times watching it I had to kick it back out again.

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Neil Gaiman
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes2010 ElectionMarch to Keep Fear Alive

Roffles!

Tuesday 5 October 2010

And he's back!

"We dance across til we drop, the bells keep time and never stop..." Carbon Leaf - Lake of Silver Bells


And here's to a brave new year...just before it ends. But taking some time off from the blog has been good for me. Simply put, I spent more time living and writing and less time talking about them, and that was good. But I have things to say again, so I thought I'd say them. In the meantime, an abridged review of things that have happened since last I wrote:

I bought a car for $700 and put 10,000km on it driving around New Zealand for four months. I worked for a fantastic (indie) bookshop, where I read everything from Sun Tzu to Robert Rankin to Geography textbooks. I finished Book One of Soulwoven, then decided I ought to wait until I finish all the books (three to four, I'm expecting at this point) before publishing any of them. I climbed some mountains, hiked some trails, took lots of pictures, got into great shape, got mushy again, returned to the U.S.A. (where I discovered it's a lot more difficult to live than in New Zealand), spent a summer in the woods writing and doing little else, returned to the town I went to college in to be with the one I love, discovered how to live on minimum wage, and watched helplessly from the sidelines as the publishing company I interned for hurtled off a cliff.

Phew. That's not even everything. But I'm writing well these days, somewhere around halfway through Book Two of Soulwoven, meaning somewhere around halfway through the whole story, and that's exciting, especially since I only finished Book One about six months ago. And that's a good thing. So here's to more writing, and hopefully some more blogging to go with it. :-)