Well, I wasn't a finalist. But I still felt very good about the contest, because my dialogue snippet was, in my eyes, just as good as some of the stuff that was chosen. Sure, there's a certain amount of personal bias here, but I've been in the position before of reading other people's writing and saying "Damn...I'm just not that good," and that didn't happen, so overall I'm feeling pretty good about my dialogue. That said, it can't hurt to turn the responsibility for judgment (which, incidentally, should be spelled with two 'e's, in my opinion. Someday, after I'm respected the world over for my writing, I'll write to the Oxford English Dictionary and see about remedying this....) over to others. The following is my dialogue snippet, and below that I'll post my favorite snippet of the finalists, and you guys can let me know whether I'm way off base in thinking I'm not much worse. Hell, if anyone wants to pick apart either or both entries, please do.
___________________________________________________________________
My entry:
Cole's eyes burned and his right hand clenched into a fist. On his left side, Dil snaked her arm through his and leaned against him. Her hand found his and their fingers intertwined. She spoke quietly.
“What's wrong?”
He frowned, staring darkly at the fire. “Everything.”
Beside him, he could feel her shake her head. “Everything but us.” She lay her head against his shoulder, staring with him into the embers of the fire.
His fist relaxed, and after a moment he smiled sadly. “Everything but us.”
He heard a sound to his left and lifted his eyes to see Leramis get to his feet, staring towards the mountains.
Quay immediately stood from where he had been crouching, his eyes darting to face that direction. His voice sounded almost panicked. "What is it, Leramis?"
The necromancer stayed silent for a moment, his eyes narrow. No one moved, and he frowned. "The Renegades' struggle is over. I can't sense any more fighting."
Cole's heart froze and there were a few seconds of silence before Dil spoke, her voice almost shaking. "Who won?"
Leramis shook his head. "I don't know. The only power I can sense now is Sherduan's."
Cole heard only his heartbeat. After a moment, he spoke.
"What does that mean?"
Leramis shook his head again and stared into the night. "I don't know."
My favorite of the finalists, from a writer whose blogger name is Polenth:
"Davie, dearest? That's a very bad idea."
"Why?" asked Davie. He stopped the drill an inch from his head.
"Dying is terribly unpleasant."
"I won't die. My mind isn't bound to my physical form. This will prove my independence from mortal flesh!"
"I'm sure it will, dear," I said. "But you'll get blood on your clothes. What would your mother think?"
He lowered the drill. "She'd be angry."
"Exactly. Why don't we prove your independence from mortal flesh some other way?"
"There isn't another way."
I sighed. "You could go on a quest or sing about it, like a normal young man. You're making my job very hard."
He scowled. "You just don't understand."
"Of course I do, poppet. Come on, let's get some doughnuts. You'd miss doughnuts without a body, wouldn't you?"
"I suppose." Davie looked at the drill. "Fairy Godmother? Can I drill holes in the doughnuts?"
"Yes dear. If it stops you drilling holes in yourself, go right ahead."
___________________________________________________________________
Let me know your opinions. If anything, I think mine probably just had too much description and not enough speaking for a straight-up dialogue contest---but hey, that's how I write, and I'm pretty happy with it.
Thursday, 22 May 2008
Wednesday, 21 May 2008
Popularity and Quality
Okay, so today I'm shamelessly stealing from myself. There's a discussion over at Kristin Nelson's blog about whether or not a popular book is automatically a good book---or as she puts it, whether or not millions of readers can be wrong. It's a subject that I've given a good deal of thought to, and after I reading through the comments I decided to weigh in. I liked what I wrote, so I'm posting it here as well.
First, about the theory that marketing money=success: That's not always true---there are examples of publishing companies throwing money behind books that did miserably. I can't name any, because the books did miserably, but I have heard publishers in editorial meetings talking about "making sure it's not another xxx". Also, the books that get money get it because the publishers liked it. They generally, in their list, have a bunch of good books---books they think will sell, have an audience, and are written well enough. They select the most likely to succeed of those books. So by the time a book gets selected for a big marketing push, it's been through two intensive screening processes---first to get picked up at all, then again to get picked as a lead title. Having gone through all that and come out on top, of course it's likely to succeed once it gets a marketing push.
Second, about whether popularity=quality. I don't know that it does, but I'd add the caveat that I've never seen quality without popularity. People are talking about how time gives us our classics, weeds the good books out from the bad, etc. If we look back a few hundred years, are there any classics that weren't popular with the unwashed masses? Shakespeare created the "blockbusters" of his day, but we revere him. Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters wrote what was, at the time, pulp fiction--but try to find an English course on their time period that doesn't feature them on the reading list. Just another point to consider.
First, about the theory that marketing money=success: That's not always true---there are examples of publishing companies throwing money behind books that did miserably. I can't name any, because the books did miserably, but I have heard publishers in editorial meetings talking about "making sure it's not another xxx". Also, the books that get money get it because the publishers liked it. They generally, in their list, have a bunch of good books---books they think will sell, have an audience, and are written well enough. They select the most likely to succeed of those books. So by the time a book gets selected for a big marketing push, it's been through two intensive screening processes---first to get picked up at all, then again to get picked as a lead title. Having gone through all that and come out on top, of course it's likely to succeed once it gets a marketing push.
Second, about whether popularity=quality. I don't know that it does, but I'd add the caveat that I've never seen quality without popularity. People are talking about how time gives us our classics, weeds the good books out from the bad, etc. If we look back a few hundred years, are there any classics that weren't popular with the unwashed masses? Shakespeare created the "blockbusters" of his day, but we revere him. Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters wrote what was, at the time, pulp fiction--but try to find an English course on their time period that doesn't feature them on the reading list. Just another point to consider.
Tuesday, 20 May 2008
The Interweb and Formatting
So agent Nathan Bradsford is running a contest on good dialogue over at his blog. The rules are that entries must be less than 250 words, including both dialogue and supporting description. It's a pretty cool idea, and I can't wait to see the winning entries (there are over 200 for him to choose from so far, so they should be pretty good), and see him pick 'em apart to describe what's good about them.
Naturally, since there are some good prizes in the mix (partial critiques, query critiques, a 10-minute phone call) for the winners, I figured I'd enter. After combing through my various short stories and my novel, I finally found an appropriately sized entry that's decent. Not spectacular--my dialogue tends to be a lot of exposition followed by good, memorable short phrases, a formula that doesn't lend itself well to the 250-word length format, but I figure there's nothing to lose.
I struggled like hell with formatting though. He's only taking entries as comments in his blog, meaning that normal formatting just doesn't work, because the lines are so short, and to indent a paragraph would be to lose like half a line. So I had to try to rework my snippet for the internet, which I've done before (I got my start writing on message boards, actually), but not for a looooong time.
Eventually I got it looking halfway decent and fairly readable, but I realized that it just doesn't flow the same way it does on the page. An unfortunate realization given that it's a contest about good dialogue, and flow is key, and one that also made me gulp as I look ahead towards the day when my novel gets typeset and the formatting gets all fubared again, with much more important consequences. I don't know whether authors get a chance to re-edit after their book is typeset (and I imagine that policy changes from publishing house to publishing house and even book to book), or even how much format can change from manuscript to book form, but they seem like fairly important things to know. More questions for my next internship, I suppose.
Naturally, since there are some good prizes in the mix (partial critiques, query critiques, a 10-minute phone call) for the winners, I figured I'd enter. After combing through my various short stories and my novel, I finally found an appropriately sized entry that's decent. Not spectacular--my dialogue tends to be a lot of exposition followed by good, memorable short phrases, a formula that doesn't lend itself well to the 250-word length format, but I figure there's nothing to lose.
I struggled like hell with formatting though. He's only taking entries as comments in his blog, meaning that normal formatting just doesn't work, because the lines are so short, and to indent a paragraph would be to lose like half a line. So I had to try to rework my snippet for the internet, which I've done before (I got my start writing on message boards, actually), but not for a looooong time.
Eventually I got it looking halfway decent and fairly readable, but I realized that it just doesn't flow the same way it does on the page. An unfortunate realization given that it's a contest about good dialogue, and flow is key, and one that also made me gulp as I look ahead towards the day when my novel gets typeset and the formatting gets all fubared again, with much more important consequences. I don't know whether authors get a chance to re-edit after their book is typeset (and I imagine that policy changes from publishing house to publishing house and even book to book), or even how much format can change from manuscript to book form, but they seem like fairly important things to know. More questions for my next internship, I suppose.
Monday, 19 May 2008
Pictures vs. Words
So, everyone knows that a picture is worth a thousand words, or so the saying goes at any rate. I suppose that's true in many ways---particularly when it comes to things that aren't central to the focus of a scene. For instance, in a picture of a person standing in front of some monument, you can see all the people milling around them, which nobody is usually interested in. To describe all of these people in words would take forever and waste the time of everyone involved, but in a picture they're easily accessible for anyone who for some reason is interested in them.
There are some things, however, that cannot be captured in a picture. I discovered this when visiting St. Chappelle in Paris. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's an old royal chapel covered in huge stained glass windows located right near Notre Dame , and one of the most beautiful churches in Europe.
I had the good fortune to visit it at sunset, which meant that the sun was pouring directly in through the western windows of the chapel, causing them to glow almost as if they were producing the light themselves, and casting rainbow-like projections of them on the stone wall opposite.
No picture can reproduce this effect. I tried about ten thousand different ways with my camera while I was there, and so far searching the internet hasn't yielded results either. None of them even come close to reproducing that glow. The only things that can approximate it are my old, oft maligned words. Good news, I think, since I'm trusting my career and dedicating my life to that medium.
There are some things, however, that cannot be captured in a picture. I discovered this when visiting St. Chappelle in Paris. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's an old royal chapel covered in huge stained glass windows located right near Notre Dame , and one of the most beautiful churches in Europe.
I had the good fortune to visit it at sunset, which meant that the sun was pouring directly in through the western windows of the chapel, causing them to glow almost as if they were producing the light themselves, and casting rainbow-like projections of them on the stone wall opposite.
No picture can reproduce this effect. I tried about ten thousand different ways with my camera while I was there, and so far searching the internet hasn't yielded results either. None of them even come close to reproducing that glow. The only things that can approximate it are my old, oft maligned words. Good news, I think, since I'm trusting my career and dedicating my life to that medium.
Friday, 16 May 2008
Fruit Trees
So, as discussed in my last blog post, I saw some fruit trees in Rome. More specifically, as I was wandering through the forum I noticed not only what looked like an orchard, but also a few random lemon trees scattered around the place.
And at that point I realized that the world of my novel was completely lacking in fruit trees. Maybe it's because I grew up in Colorado, where we don't have many fruit trees, but I never really noticed that in warmer climes they have 'em scattered around all over place, or gave any thought to the idea that different regions specialize in producing different kinds of fruits (vegetables too, I suppose).
It then occurred to me that these are the kinds of things that Creative Writing degree programs are woefully lacking in teaching you to notice. Creative Writing with a capital CW, i.e. what they teach in high school and college (college moreso than high school), is meant in most cases to prepare you to write literary fiction--as I've been told a decision that resulted from the fight to get universities to offer degrees in the subject at all. That's all well and good, but writers of literary fiction don't often need to worry about whether the world they're creating has fruit trees. This means two things: that fruit trees are mostly irrelevant to the curriculum, and that most of the teachers of said curriculum have never had to worry about fruit trees anyway, and might not even know about their merits.
I say these things a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I think there's some truth to them. I think the most valuable part of my Creative Writing degree track has been to teach me that I shouldn't have bothered with it in the first place---most of what I learned in my Creative Writing classes isn't applicable to what I write, and most what I've learned in college that is I learned from other classes, or from bending the curriculum by sheer force towards projects that I knew would benefit me.
Just a bit of advice for those thinking about studying Creative Writing, as opposed plain old, lowercase 'w', writing.
And at that point I realized that the world of my novel was completely lacking in fruit trees. Maybe it's because I grew up in Colorado, where we don't have many fruit trees, but I never really noticed that in warmer climes they have 'em scattered around all over place, or gave any thought to the idea that different regions specialize in producing different kinds of fruits (vegetables too, I suppose).
It then occurred to me that these are the kinds of things that Creative Writing degree programs are woefully lacking in teaching you to notice. Creative Writing with a capital CW, i.e. what they teach in high school and college (college moreso than high school), is meant in most cases to prepare you to write literary fiction--as I've been told a decision that resulted from the fight to get universities to offer degrees in the subject at all. That's all well and good, but writers of literary fiction don't often need to worry about whether the world they're creating has fruit trees. This means two things: that fruit trees are mostly irrelevant to the curriculum, and that most of the teachers of said curriculum have never had to worry about fruit trees anyway, and might not even know about their merits.
I say these things a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I think there's some truth to them. I think the most valuable part of my Creative Writing degree track has been to teach me that I shouldn't have bothered with it in the first place---most of what I learned in my Creative Writing classes isn't applicable to what I write, and most what I've learned in college that is I learned from other classes, or from bending the curriculum by sheer force towards projects that I knew would benefit me.
Just a bit of advice for those thinking about studying Creative Writing, as opposed plain old, lowercase 'w', writing.
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