Tag Archives: diane holmes

fiction

Where Should I Start My Story? (the truth)

by Diane Holmes, (a) Chief Alchemist of Pitch University, (b) lover of learning, and (c) writer of fiction, non-fiction, and the occasional manifesto.

FEARS

Where to begin: Isn’t this the worst question ever? 

questions It’s so important (readers won’t read on unless you nail the opening), so frustrating (why isn’t it right yet?), and so "unprovable" (this one is 93% right, woohoo!). 

And heck, even if you do happen to stumble upon the right place to start, you’ll never know it. 

It’ll still look like lame words on a page.  You’ll rewrite it into something worse. (Oh, the agony.  The shame.  The total irony of being a writer and finding out that Words. Are. The. Enemy.)

SANITY

The idea that there’s a perfect place to start at story is wrong.  There are many perfect places to start a story.

We writers get confused, because we study stories that are already written, and we talk about how opening X is the perfect opening for a specific book.  As if it’s the only opening that could ever exist.

But in truth, what we’re really noticing is that a particular opening did work very well, and the writer avoided a sucky opening.

So, if there are many perfect openings and many sucky openings, how do you find at least ONE perfect opening?  How do you know where to start your story?

And this, my friend, is where all the advice fails us.

ADVICE THAT DOESN’T HELP THAT MUCH

Pretty much all the advice out there falls into this category for me.

Example 1:  Open "in medias res." 

You mean “anywhere” anywhere, as long as it’s in the middle of things will do? Boring things, violent things, things that don’t matter? 

Of course it is Latin, so it sounds smart. 

Example 2: When things change!  (Or at the Inciting Incident or In The Ordinary World of the protagonist, etc.)

There’re lots of changes, so which one?  But more importantly, doing this doesn’t make it a "right" opening.  You’re not guaranteed an opening that works for the reader.  There’s nothing here about quality, nothing about the needs of your story or the hopes of the reader.

Example 3: Open with the character and setting, and make sure to get across everything we need to know, plus a really good hook!"

Thanks for the laundry list.

But isn’t this advice sort of like telling a chef to make sure to use food, probably a protein and a carb?  Oh, and vegetables are nice, too?

THE TRUTH

Open any place where you can…

(a) enter with a JUICY piece of story information (character, plot, setting, anything!)…

(b) that captures the reader’s IMAGINATION and…

(c) ultimately PULLS her into a story JOURNEY…

(d) that SPANS the book or script or whatever.

A NICE EXAMPLE:

‘Gone Girl‘ By Gillian Flynn

When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with. The very ?rst time I saw her, it was the back of the head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it. Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians would call a ?nely shaped head.You could imagine the skull quite easily.

I’d know her head anywhere.

DOES IT WORK?

(a) Whoa, a husband who obsesses about his wife’s head and can imagine the skull quite easily.  Now that’s a creepy-interesting character.

(b) This isn’t going to turn out well, is it?  I’m already imagining stuff that could happen.  Bad stuff.  Oh, noes.  Maybe it’s already happened….

(c) I’ve got to find out where this goes, because I know this links directly to the story I was hoping for (when I read the back blurb):

On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick Dunne’s clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River.

(d) I’m being pulled into the story question that matters, the one that will be resolved by the time the book is over:  What happened to the wife?

Plus there’s all that mighty fine prose.  That’s a bonus for sure.

Put it all together and bam!  The reader and the story are well served.  And they’re joined together for all the pages to come.

And that’s how you start a story.

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clip_image004Diane writes two alternating columns for Freelance-Zone:Fiction-Zone: Leaps in Fiction Mastery and Marketing-Zone:Marketing-Zone: Marketing Yourself and Your Book.

advice, Business, fiction, resources

WRITERS: 8 Amazing University Classes You Can Take For Free

by Diane Holmes, (a) Chief Alchemist of Pitch University, (b) lover of learning, and (c) writer of fiction, non-fiction, and the occasional manifesto.

As our very own Joe Wallace begins his Recording Arts For Film program at Tribeca Flashpoint Media Academy in Chicago,

  • I celebrate his multi-tasking insanity and
  • I seize the opportunity to take Free, WORLD-CLASS, (online) University classes, through the innovative site Coursera.

Take a look at these 8 classes to power-up your BUSINESS and WRITING.

Set Your Words On Fire

#1 Modern & Contemporary American Poetry

Al Filreis, University of Pennsylvania

This course is a fast-paced introduction to modern and contemporary U.S. poetry, from Dickinson and Whitman to the present. Participants (who need no prior experience with poetry) will learn how to read poems that are supposedly “difficult.”

Next session: 10 September 2012 (10 weeks long)
Workload: 5-8 hours/ week

About the Instructor:

Al Filreis is Kelly Professor; founder, and faculty director of the Kelly Writers House; director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing; co-director (with Charles Bernstein) of PennSound; and publisher of Jacket2 — all at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been teaching since 1985.

Among his books: Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-60; Wallace Stevens and the Actual World; and Modernism from Right to Left.

He has also (with Beverly Coyle) edited the letters of José Rodríguez-Feo and Wallace Stevens (Secretaries of the Moon), and has edited and introduced a new edition of Ira Wolfert’s Tucker’s People. He hosts an ongoing podcast series,PoemTalk, a collaboration of the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, and the Poetry Foundation. He is currently working on a book about poetry and poetics in 1960.

He has won every major teaching award given to faculty at Penn, and in 1999-2000 he was chosen as the Pennsylvania Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation.

Write With the Power of Myth

#2 Greek and Roman Mythology

Peter Struck, University of Pennsylvania Continue reading WRITERS: 8 Amazing University Classes You Can Take For Free →
editorial, fiction

Revealed: The Secret Ingredient That Practically Forces Your Reader To Share Your Writing

3 Comments

Fiction-Zone: Leaps in Fiction Mastery by Diane Holmes, Chief Alchemist of Pitch University

Do you wonder why some writing is shared in email, talked about among friends, passed around person to person?

I read a lovely little “shared memory” by Dr. Robert M. Todd that begins…

Indiana Dunes

When I married my wife in 1952, I was taken into her immigrant family in Whiting, Indiana.

Dr. Todd quickly pulls the reader in with elegant, simple, details.

He writes about being accepted into his wife’s family and by his wife’s Uncle Al, who isn’t an uncle at all.  Uncle Al is a boarder, a concept we’ve lost in our current culture and now find foreign.

And Dr. Todd describes him like this:

He was born in Lithuania, which was taken over by the Russians in its conquest of the Baltic States.

As a young man before World War II, he decided to escape from the communist occupation.  He snuck out of Lithuania, often crawling through fields and swimming underwater in rivers to avoid detection.

He worked on a freighter, shoveling coal into the furnaces to create steam. That was how he got to the United States.

Uncle Al ends up living with Dr. Todd’s in-laws, becoming family in a way that captures the immigrant experience of America, and also becoming the best of us, the most generous, the most loving.

It’s a good story.  You can read it here. It will only take a moment, then scroll down below Dr. Todd’s watchful gaze.

Dr ToddThe Secret Ingredient.

So what is the secret ingredient of writing that must be shared?

It’s the unexpected hurdle of not speaking English.  It’s the surprising information that adds depth and meaning to our understanding of what happened.

How did he do it?  we ask ourselves.

How did Uncle Al befriend so many while unable to communicate with much of the world around him.  How did he speak the language of caring for his fellow man and make the world around him his dearest family and friends?

How do any of us, when we’re alone in the world, make our way?

The simple gestures of a new suit, a paid insurance bill… these are nice, but it’s the moment we realize the effort that went into being Uncle Al, that he’s alive to us.

He amazes us.

He makes us look within to see if we have what he had.  Do we have what it takes…

  • to hold our breath underwater long enough to escape war,
  • to search for a missing brother in a country as big as the United States, and
  • to care that deeply about the new people you meet even if the language is foreign and we never master it?

Now that’s writing worth sharing.

(Thank you, Dr. Todd.)

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clip_image004Diane writes two alternating columns for Freelance-Zone:Fiction-Zone: Leaps in Fiction Mastery and Marketing-Zone:Marketing-Zone: Marketing Yourself and Your Book.

fiction

4 Ways to Incorporate Unity of Tone

Fiction-Zone: Leaps in Fiction Mastery by Diane Holmes, Chief Alchemist of Pitch University

I just invented a new term in fiction!  Unity of Tone.

(Okay, I invented it until I Googled it.  Turns out other people invented it too.  Darn other people. Although, everyone is using it in different ways.  Well, I’m right, in case you’re wondering.  After all, I should know because I did invent it.)

What is it?

unity

Unity of Tone is the essential tone evoked across all craft-of-writing elements and native to them (part of their creation), including character, plot, “how the story’s told”, language, dialogue, and so forth.

(“So forth” makes me sound so grand, don’t cha think?”)

How does it work?

An example.

I read a wonderful mystery (which I mentioned before!) by the brilliant Steve Thayer.  The novel’s called Wolf Pass, and it’s set in 1962 with flashbacks to WWII, because the two stories are linked.

The plot is summed up on the back cover:

A railroad engineer is shot at long range by an unseen marksman–and soon afterward, his sexy young wife meets a similar fate.

Deputy Sheriff P. A. Pennington–a former Army Ranger sniper–falls under immediate suspicion. But he has a suspect of his own.

Though he hasn’t seen the man since World War II, Pennington is convinced that an old wartime nemesis–Nazi colonel Christian Wolfgang Strangl–is to blame. Back then, it was Pennington’s sharpshooting that disrupted the operations of a crucial Bavarian railroad pass commanded by the colonel.

Now it’s 1962–and the Wolf is at the door….”

The Charleston Post calls it a “wild ride” and USA calls it “quirky and refreshing,” but it is NONE of these. These don’t describe the tone at all.

The NYT has it right when it says,: “A graceful stylist,” but that leaves you thinking it might be graceful in the way of the Old South.

What I remember is the tone of bleakness, the lyrical language reflecting the mood of being “shell shocked” and kind of “broken.” Everything and everyone is tenuous, as if life and death might accidentally collide and death would easily win.

Both the past and the present are frozen in time, just waiting for the violence to shatter the present moments that existed then and still exist now.

I remember how the main character seemed to hold all of humanity, all the loss and preciousness of life, in his heart and yet at a distance, as if that’s how you survive it better. And that’s how the town had survived. In fact, it’s how the world had survived the war.

This story could’ve been told using many different tones. The main character would’ve had any temperament. The dialogue could’ve flowed along using any number of rhythms, sensibilities, or lines of discussion. And the setting could’ve been anywhere in the whole world.

So how does what I remember as his Unity of Tone line up with his choices?

Let’s look at some specifics.

1) Unity of Tone in Setting

Thayer chose Wisconsin for it’s distance from much of the US population and for the history that ties the story together.

Back during WWII, the town, Kickapoo Falls, had a Nazi detention camp, Camp McCoy.

This history, this distance, this isolation from progress are important to every aspect of this story, as is the tenuousness of the people found here and disappearing rural life you fight hardest for.

Thayer describes the setting like this:

In all my life the hills never changed.  They were born of glaciers, mountains of ice that reached two miles high.  <snip> But too often over the years, unmitigated evil found its way into those beautiful hills.  Then violence would shatter this hushed and peaceful world, and spill down into the villages nestled in the valleys.  Like my hometown.

2) Unity of Tone in Inciting Incident Continue reading 4 Ways to Incorporate Unity of Tone →

advice, fiction, Marketing yourself

Freelance Burnout, I Gots It.

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by Diane Holmes, Marketing-Zone: Marketing Yourself and Your Book, founder of Pitch University.

paycheckThe Reality of The Dream.

DISCLAIMER:  If you’re still “super excited” about your writing, and know you’ll be “one of the best-known writers in the world,” skip this post.

You’re still living the dream.

Everyone else, follow me.

When you decided to become a writer…

… exactly how many YEARS did you expect to WORK 80-HOUR WEEKS (or on your 12-day vacation, like Jake Poinier )?

… how regularly did you expect to get REJECTED?

… did you think you’d BE MAKING LESS than your first corporate job out of college?

… did you picture yourself, years later, STILL being offered a LOWER RATE than you’re worth (see Joe Wallace’s article on negotiating your rates) , or having to explain, yet again, why your writing HAS VALUE?

…did you think of your DREAM as “that lovely source of UNRELIABLE INCOME?” (as Catherine Tully says in “Don’t quit your day job.”

But the heart wants what the heart wants.

And it wants to write.

dead cupid

Years later, when you’re a better writer than you’ve ever been, how do you deal with the realities of your writing career?

Seriously, shoot me now.

Is it that you’re still having so much fun that the rest pales in comparison?

What do you do when the fun has flatlined?  What do you do with reality when you’re burned out by it?

Burnout Resources

1) This HELPGUIDE is one of the better articles on the nature of burnout.

2) The Four Stages of Burnout.

3) Interesting definition of Workaholism vs. Work  Engagement.

4) Megan Hills’ excellent blog explores Burnout. As Megan says, “Burnout is the new black.”

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Diane Holmes Crop 1Diane writes two columns for Freelance-Zone: Fiction-Zone: Leaps in Fiction Mastery and Marketing-Zone:Marketing-Zone: Marketing Yourself and Your Book.

She’s the Founder and Chief Alchemist of Pitch University

editorial, fiction, Marketing yourself

Part 3: The 8 Things Writers Should Do to Influence Readers (and Make a Sale)

Fiction-Zone: Leaps in Fiction Mastery by Diane Holmes, Chief Alchemist of Pitch University

Passion

You have 2 clever tools to Svengali readers and potential clients. “Come to me… come read my writing…”

Your Writing + You = Career

Turns out both you and your writing are alluring.  Oh, baby, oh, baby.

But in order for you to be seen as alluring, you need to be able to let your passion for your writing show, and that, it turns out, is quite a difficult skill for many of us.

Do you know the art of communicating Passion…

…and inviting your potential customer to share it with you?

yes no head

(And why are we all bald in this little quiz?  Just go with it.)

This is PART THREE in a series where we look at the 8 ways you share your passion with your  potential clients/readers.

And now, the last 3 languages of influence (aka passion).

#6 Connection.

Learn to speak about your connection to the people around you, to causes, and to the world… not just to your writing.  Nothing is more alluring than someone who actually likes people.

People do make the best readers.

#7 Shared Vision.

Be your own cause, your own revolution by sharing the vision you have for “how things work” or, at least, how they could work.

See the hope that doesn’t exist yet.  See problems and solutions in a new way.  Writers have a unique way of building a universe in their head.  Sometimes the only thing that people lack is the ability to see things in a new way.

Share your mind, your vision, your practical knowledge with others.

And yes, something that relates to your writing is good.

But even if it’s not related to your writing, be interesting.  Have an interesting mind.  Look for the points of “new thought” that overlap between you and others.

Those points of overlap are sparks.

#8  The Hold-Your-Breath Moment of Magic.

Much of our best life experiences are being in the right place at the right time.  If you’ve ever been brilliant in the wrong time or place, you know what I mean.  It goes nowhere.  You’re passed over, roughshod, and left like roadkill on the side of life’s highway.

And as much as this is true, the best of life is also how you see all those wrong places and times, how you see the highway and the tread marks that cover your body.

Look for these magic moments.  Seize them.  Relate them to others.  Invite your readers along.

This is the stuff readers want to hear about in author interviews:  the magic of the world and of how you see it.

We live a lot of normal in our everyday life.  But we celebrate the WOW that wakes us up, inspires us, shows us who we can be, or just lets us know that that being alive is wow in itself.

Here’s a teacher, speaker, and ultimately an author who gave us all a WOW moment. May you find your own wow moments and share them with the world, or just a single reader.

Let’s get out of so much normal and have more wow.

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clip_image004Diane writes two alternating columns for Freelance-Zone:Fiction-Zone: Leaps in Fiction Mastery and Marketing-Zone:Marketing-Zone: Marketing Yourself and Your Book.