More BEA Consolation!

Going along with Beth's post yesterday - I've got three books to give away! It would be more, but I've got 2 12-year old granddaughters - they always get 1st dibs!

Here they are!

POSSESSION by our own lovely Elana Johnson  (ARC)
REVEALERS by Amanda Marrone   (paperback)
THE ADORATION OF JENNA FOX by Mary E. Pearson   (paperback)

To enter:

Leave your contact info in the comments

Please note: this is for USA only (sorry!)

And - I will announce the winners next Tuesday! Oh - and be sure to check out Beth's post yesterday - she's giving away 8! yep - eight books! Enter to win those, too!

BEA Consolation Week! (Free Books!)

Are you as bummed as me that you didn't get a chance to go to BEA? Or, did you go to BEA, but you still want more books?

In case you're not sure what BEA is, it stands for Book Expo America, and it's one of the largest events in the book world. Lots of important business happens there (I'm told), but the most I see is tons of book bloggers rolling in with (apparently) truckloads of awesome new books. And I am filled with envy. I love shiny new books!

When all of us at the League started talking about our BEA-book-envy, I'll admit I turned a guilty eye to my bookshelves. Here I was bemoaning my lack of books when I had several ARCs and paperbacks that I'd been meaning to giveaway! So...that's what we're going to do all this week on the League: giving away a stack of books every day this week.

Today, I'm going to offer up eight books for you! These are all either ARCs that I don't need because I now own the hard copy of the book, or paperback books that I happen to have duplicates of. Some of them have been read--but they were gently used.

Here's the stack I'm offering up for you (if you squint, you can see a few words of A MILLION SUNS on my computer in the corner of the second picture)!

XVI by our own Julia Karr (ARC copy)
NIGHTSHADE by Andrea Cremer (ARC copy)
MATCHED by Ally Condie (ARC copy)
THE REPLACEMENT by Brenna Yovanoff (ARC copy)
POSSESSIONS by Nancy Holder (ARC copy)
WAKE UNTO ME by Lisa Cahc (ARC copy)
CLASSY by Derek Blasberg (paperback)
VAMPIRE ACADEMY by Richelle Mead (paperback)



To enter: 

• Leave a comment in to this post. I will announce winners in exactly one week, so make sure you comment before then! 
• I'm sorry, but this contest is open to the US only--shipping this many books would be cost-prohibitive otherwise

Writing Week: Everything I Need to Know, I Learned in Fifth Grade

No, really. I teach elementary school, and in the early years of my career, I taught a 5th grade writing class. In Utah, our students take a writing test called the Direct Writing Assessment. I graded them for 8 or 9 years.

Now that I write in addition to teach, I'm realizing that all that stuff I taught to ten-year-olds? Actually valuable. So let's fall back on our roots a little.

The Writing Process:

1. Pre-writing. Some of us spend a lot of time here, outlining and researching and filling out character sheets and whatnot. Some of spend very little time here, deciding instead that the discovery approach to writing is best.

2. Drafting. Some of us spend a lot of time here, getting in a few hundred words after a long day at the office. Some of us spend very little time here, getting as many pages written as fast as possible. But no matter what, in order to write a book, you have to, well, write the book.

3. Revisions. Some of us spend a lot of time here, fixing and rewriting and adding details. I'll admit that most of my writing time is spent actually revising or rewriting what I drafted. Others of us don't spend a lot of time here, because we nailed what we needed to from using an outline or by taking the time during the drafting stage to revise at the same time as write.

But everyone revises. Usually more than once. And more than twice. This is also the stage where most of us turn over our MS to trusted critique partners or beta readers. Then we do some more revisions based on their feedback.

4. Edits. I'll go on record and say that I think revising and editing are the same thing, but in 5th grade, this is where I would teach the students to make sure the punctuation was correct. The capitalization. The paragraphing. When I get to this stage in my novel-writing, I actually check for chapter placement, indentations, style, etc. It's really formatting more than editing.

What about you? Do you think revising and editing are the same thing?

5. Final draft. This is when you sit back and exhale loudly and say, "I'm done. I've done the best I can do, and I'm done."

Then the real fun begins. The querying. *wink*

What else is in your process? Does your process look like this at all? I'll be back another day to discuss the Six Traits of Writing that we use to grade the DWA.

Writing Week: Just a Smear of Exposition Please

As may be evident from Memento Nora, I’m not a huge fan of exposition.  Not, big, heaping chunks of exposition, at least. You know, those info dumps about character, setting, plot, etc. that sometimes clog up the flow of the story. 

I like my story with just a smear of exposition.

In fact, when I think of exposition, I think of this scene from She-Devil. Mary Fisher (Meryl Streep) is meeting with her editor about her newest book, Love in the Rinse Cycle. Her editor says she doesn’t want to publish it. Why not? There’s this whole chapter just on laundry. It’s a metaphor, Fisher shrieks.

A little exposition is necessary, but more than a smidge (maybe a dollop) here and there slows down the pace of the story. I’m a cranky reader. Unless that exposition is highly entertaining, informative, and essential to the plot or character development, I start skimming.  (If something is in italics, such as a letter, forget about it.)

Some writers are very good at exposition. Take Douglas Adams.  He can tell me about the history of the pan-galactic gargleblaster or the evolution of Vogon poetry all he wants.  His exposition builds the world, sets the tone, moves the plot forward, and is often the most fun part of his books.  Most of us aren’t Douglas Adams (or Terry Pratchet or Neil Gaiman), and that kind of exposition may not be appropriate for your story. Plus, if you’re writing a first person point of view, your character may not aware (or care) about all these pesky world details.

My approach is to start with the bones of each scene, the dialogue and action. Then I interweave much of the world-building into the scenes, layering on the details in bits of dialogue and/or action with a stray sentence or two of description. Everything serves a double duty. The reader is smart enough to catch what’s going on without over-explaining it.

However, I will admit that some times you may need to use a lump of exposition to:

• Establish voice and style. If you’re using a storytelling voice with an omniscient narrator, exposition makes sense. The narrator will know more than the characters.
• Slow down the action. You do need to give the readers a break every once in a while.
• Work in key information that won’t fit in any other way. 

That’s my two cents. How do you guys feel about exposition?

Writing Week: Windows on the World

Hi Everybody,

So this will be a short and somewhat exhausted post now that I've gotten home from my very first day at BEA. For any that don't know, BEA is this ridiculously massive book expo held in NYC. It's just miles of booths from every major publisher, as well as talks, panels, signings, breakfasts and dinners and after parties. I was lucky enough to be sent there by Scholastic and had an absolutely kick ass time meeting all kinds of folks, signing books, and snagging as many advance copies of books as I could.

Here's a thought that occurred to me during the day that seemed to connect to the writing week we're doing here on the blog. 

All of us see and experience the writing and literary world through a certain window. If you're here in NY, that window may be the people you know and the events you attend or, if you're outside of NY, then maybe your window is Twitter or Facebook or your Google reader feed. Whatever your window is that's where you get your info on what books people are looking forward to, what types of books people are wanting more or less of, general book world gossip, all that.

For me, my window is a smallish number of friends in publishing combined with Twitter and my Google reader. What occurred to me today is how narrow that window really is. At BEA I encountered so many people that I had never met before, never seen on twitter or on their blogs, and there were all so energetic and enthusiastic and many had heard of my book, or were looking forward to it, or had already read it.  I literally never would have guessed there was so much awareness, and enthusiasm, unless I had looked into the world through this new window.

So if you find yourself stressing because it feels like people aren't excited about the kind of story you want to write, take into account how narrow your window is. Is it open wide enough for you to find your people? The people who are craving the sort of story you want to write, who are talking about the things you want to talk about.

Ultimately this is an argument for being yourself, for doing what you want to do and being confident in the fact that there are more like you out there, it's just about casting as wide a net as you can to find them. Follow some new people on twitter, read some different blogs, go to that conference you've never been to before, step out of your comfort zone and expand that window. You might be surprised at what you find.

Reading aloud...

to yourself!

One of the great joys of being a kid is having someone read you a story. (Audio books are a reasonable substitute for adults, right?)

One of the great tools in a writer's toolbelt is reading aloud - your own manuscript, that is!

I often find that when I read my own work out loud I find numerous mistakes in rythmn, word choice and/or pacing. You'll find missing words, misplaced words, and various other little stinkers that are often missed by only proof-reading.

It's a good exercise & one I heartily recommend!

Writing Week...is for the Birds

Thank you all for responding to the poll we had up last week! We got some really great feedback and immediately started bouncing around some ideas. I'm not going to spill the beans, but I *am* going to say that I'm simply ridiculously excited about what we're cooking up for the summer months!

Meanwhile, the top thing that people asked for was more theme weeks and more posts on writing, so in an effort to mash the two together, we're going to do a writing theme week! :)

Yesterday, for the first time ever, I saw the Alfred Hitchcock movie, THE BIRDS.

I had never seen this movie before, but I knew the basic gist: birds go crazy and attack people--en masse, killing them. In all honesty, the plot actually isn't that much more complicated than psycho-murdering-birds, which, of course, got me thinking about why it's such an (in)famous piece of Hitchcock's filmography.

After watching the movie, I went straight to IMDb for the trivia associated with the film, and realized that Alfred Hitchcock does two very smart things in the writing of this story:

Hitchcock Smart Thing #1: Sometimes, Good Writing Is All About the Details You Put In the Story:

• There's a whole backstory where it's revealed that the leading man has mother issues (a nod, perhaps, to Hitchcock's previous film, PSYCHO?). But...it's not really relevant to the plot at all. In other words, the fact that there's some weird stuff going on with the mother really doesn't have anything to do with the fact that there are crazy birds trying to kill people. BUT. What it does do is important. 
• First: it made me curious about the story. It's such a specific detail to the story that I thought it must be relevant. It felt like a gun on the mantlepiece. It made me sit up and pay attention.
• Second: it made the characters feel more real. True, the fact that the son has mother issues wasn't relevant to the plot. But it was highly relevant to the characters. It made little things, like the leading lady's hesitation to help the mother, feel much more vivid and realistic.
• Writing Lesson: Add details about your characters to make them more real. Not every single thing has to be of service to the plot--take the time to emphasize characters, too, even if it doesn't progress the plot. It will make the story feel more real.
• Example: I think, honestly, this touches on a lot of issues people have been bringing up recently about minority characters being underrepresented in stories. You can have a book where the character is a race other than Caucasian, or is handicapped in some way, or is gay, or portrays any other minority without the plot hinging upon the story. Certainly race, sexuality, and abilities would effect a character--but the plot doesn't have to hinge on it. Making your main character a minority in some way would actually add a lot of depth to the story. 
• The background is where good writing shines. There are several scenes in the movie that give you a fear of birds; something as simple as birds fluttering down to stare into the window is made ominous by Hitchcock's touch. The most famous example is probably a scene at the school:

Crows on the Playground




The Birds

— MOVIECLIPS.com

In case you can't watch the video, the picture to the left does a good job of illustrating what I mean. Basically, as the leading lady sits down outside of the school, birds silently perch on the playground in the background. If you watch the scene, you'll notice that very little happens. For a couple of minutes, all the leading lady does is light her cigarette and look pensively in the distance. And the birds don't do anything odd, really, certainly nothing threatening. They just sit there.

And that's what makes it so darn compelling. Rather then tell us that the birds are scary (by, say, launching immediately into the birds attacking people), Hitchcock merely presents the information and allows us to make up our own minds as to whether the birds are scary or not.

• Writing Lesson: Graphically illustrating what the scene looks like and trusting your readers to determine the emotion that scene portrays is better than just telling the reader what s/he should feel by 
• Example: Don't tell us a character is bad or good--show it. And don't show it right away. Present the character's actions in small, everyday situations, and build him up from there. 

Hitchcock Smart Thing #2: Sometimes Good Writing Is All About The Details You Leave Out

• Somewhere in the first half hour or so of the movie, I realized there was no soundtrack. No music--at all. It was a little disorientating at first, actually. There were scenes--such as when the school children run away from the birds--that I could imagine other directors would have filled with a very dramatic musical score. A kiss had no softly playing romantic music behind it. A death wasn't heralded by trumpets. In all honesty, it made the entire film feel more like a documentary rather than a work of fiction. And I liked it. I found that the entire film was more dramatic simply by cutting out the dramatic music and putting me in the scene. 
• Remember, Hitchcock's film before this was PSYCHO--made famous in part because of the loud "EE! EE! EE!" noise when the killer strikes in the shower scene. Hitchcock was known for sound effects and music through that film--he turned it completely on it's head for this one
• Writing Lesson: It's good to shake up your readers in some way through a stylistic choice. And it's good to shake up your own writing by doing something different. 
• Example: As a personal example, I had never written in first person present tense before writing ACROSS THE UNIVERSE. The style of writing was unique to me--which made me even more eager to explore it. And while there's stille more book being published in this style, it still is a somewhat rare style for readers, too.
• SPOILER WARNING... In the very last scene of the movie, the characters drive off--and it ends. The ending is abrupt, and surprising. There's no "THE END" blaring across the screen, no assurance that the people truly escape, no answer to whether or not the bird plague is over--or just beginning  It's an ambiguous ending at best--and it totally works for the film. At first I was mad. "Is that it?" I said. Surely not. But as I thought about it, I realized how appropriate the end was. The true terror of the film wasn't in the bodies the birds had already amassed; it was in the idea that this was all still going on, that it never truly ended.
• Writing Lesson: If you can make a story so vivid that your reader will believe in it after s/he closes the book, your job is done, and done well. Also: less is more. When in doubt, cut, cut, cut, until all you're left with is the truth of the story.
• Example: The best writing is simple. You don't need writing with flair any more than Hitchcock needed fanfare at the end of his movie: slice away everything else so all the reader has left is raw emotion.