23 July 2023, Writing - part xxx388 Writing a Novel, Seoirse, Editing, had
Announcement: Delay, my new novels can be seen on the
internet, but my primary publisher has gone out of business—they couldn’t
succeed in the past business and publishing environment. I’ll keep you
informed, but I need a new publisher.
More information can be found at www.ancientlight.com. Check out my novels—I think
you’ll really enjoy them.
Introduction: I wrote the novel Aksinya: Enchantment and the Daemon.
This was my 21st novel and through this blog, I gave you the entire
novel in installments that included commentary on the writing. In the
commentary, in addition to other general information on writing, I explained,
how the novel was constructed, the metaphors and symbols in it, the writing
techniques and tricks I used, and the way I built the scenes. You can look back
through this blog and read the entire novel beginning with http://www.pilotlion.blogspot.com/2010/10/new-novel-part-3-girl-and-demon.html.
I’m using this novel as an example
of how I produce, market, and eventually (we hope) get a novel published. I’ll
keep you informed along the way.
Today’s Blog: To see the steps in the publication process, visit my
writing websites http://www.sisteroflight.com/.
The four plus one basic rules I
employ when writing:
1. Don’t confuse your readers.
2. Entertain your readers.
3. Ground your readers in the writing.
4. Don’t show (or tell) everything.
4a. Show what can
be seen, heard, felt, smelled, and tasted on the stage of the novel.
5. Immerse yourself in the world of your writing.
These are the steps I use to write a novel including the
five discrete parts of a novel:
1.
Design
the initial scene
2. Develop a theme statement (initial
setting, protagonist, protagonist’s helper or antagonist, action statement)
a.
Research
as required
b.
Develop
the initial setting
c.
Develop
the characters
d.
Identify
the telic flaw (internal and external)
3. Write the initial scene (identify
the output: implied setting, implied characters, implied action movement)
4. Write the next scene(s) to the
climax (rising action)
5. Write the climax scene
6. Write the falling action scene(s)
7.
Write
the dénouement scene
I finished writing my 31st novel, working title, Cassandra,
potential title Cassandra: Enchantment
and the Warriors. The theme
statement is: Deirdre and Sorcha are redirected to French finishing school
where they discover difficult mysteries, people, and events.
Here is the cover proposal for Cassandra: Enchantment and the Warriors:
|
|
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Cover
Proposal |
The most important scene in any
novel is the initial scene, but eventually, you have to move to the rising
action. I am continuing to write on my 30th novel, working
title Red Sonja. I finished my 29th novel, working
title Detective. Writing number 31, working title Shifter. I just finished 32nd novel, Rose.
How to begin a novel.
Number one thought, we need an entertaining idea. I usually encapsulate such an idea with a
theme statement. Since I’m writing a new
novel, we need a new theme statement.
Here is an initial cut.
For novel 30: Red
Sonja, a Soviet spy, infiltrates the X-plane programs at Edwards AFB as a test
pilot’s administrative clerk, learns about freedom, and is redeemed.
For novel 31: Deirdre
and Sorcha are redirected to French finishing school where they discover
difficult mysteries, people, and events.
For Novel 32: Shiggy
Tash finds a lost girl in the isolated Scottish safe house her organization
gives her for her latest assignment: Rose Craigie has nothing, is alone, and
needs someone or something to rescue and acknowledge her as a human being.
For novel 33, Book girl: Siobhàn Shaw is Morven McLean’s savior—they
are both attending Kilgraston School in Scotland when Morven loses everything,
her wealth, position, and friends, and Siobhàn Shaw is the only one left to
befriend and help her discover the one thing that might save Morven’s family
and existence.
For novel 34: Seoirse
is assigned to be Rose’s protector and helper at Monmouth while Rose deals with
five goddesses and schoolwork; unfortunately Seoirse has fallen in love with
Rose.
Here is the
scene development outline:
1. Scene
input (comes from the previous scene output or is an initial scene)
2. Write the
scene setting (place, time, stuff, and characters)
3. Imagine
the output, creative elements, plot, telic flaw resolution (climax) and develop
the tension and release.
4. Write the
scene using the output and creative elements to build the tension.
5. Write the
release
6. Write the
kicker
Today: Let me tell
you a little about writing. Writing
isn’t so much a hobby, a career, or a pastime.
Writing is a habit and an obsession.
We who love to write love to write.
If you love
to write, the problem is gaining the skills to write well. We want to write well enough to have others
enjoy our writing. This is
important. No one writes just for
themselves the idea is absolutely irrational and silly. I can prove why.
In the first
place, the purpose of writing is communication—that’s the only purpose. Writing is the abstract communication of the
mind through symbols. As time goes by,
we as writers gain more and better tools and our readers gain more and better
appreciation for those tools and skills—even if they have no idea what they
are.
We are in
the modern era. In this time, the action
and dialog style along with the push of technology forced novels into the form
of third person, past tense, action and dialog style, implying the future. This is the modern style of the novel. I also showed how the end of literature
created the reflected worldview. We have
three possible worldviews for a novel: the real, the reflected, and the
created. I choose to work in the reflected
worldview.
Why don’t we
go back to the basics and just writing a novel?
I can tell you what I do, and show you how I go about putting a novel
together. We can start with developing
an idea then move into the details of the writing.
Ideas. We need
ideas. Ideas allow us to figure out the
protagonist and the telic flaw. Ideas
don’t come fully armed from the mind of Zeus.
We need to cultivate ideas.
1.
Read
novels.
2. Fill your mind with good
stuff—basically the stuff you want to write about.
3. Figure out what will build ideas in
your mind and what will kill ideas in your mind.
4. Study.
5. Teach.
6. Make the catharsis.
7.
Write.
The development of ideas is based on study and research, but
it is also based on creativity. Creativity
is the extrapolation of older ideas to form new ones or to present old ideas in
a new form. It is a reflection of
something new created with ties to the history, science, and logic (the
intellect). Creativity requires
consuming, thinking, and producing.
If we have filled our mind with all kinds of information and
ideas, we are ready to become creative.
Creativity means the extrapolation of older ideas to form new ones or to
present old ideas in a new form.
Literally, we are seeing the world in a new way, or actually, we are
seeing some part of the world in a new way.
The beginning of creativity is study and effort. We can use this to extrapolate to
creativity. In addition, we need to look
at recording ideas and working with ideas.
With that said, where should we go? Should I delve into ideas and creativity
again, or should we just move into the novel again? Should I develop a new protagonist, which, we
know, will result in a new novel. I’ve
got an idea, but it went stale. Let’s
look at the outline for a novel again:
1.
The initial scene
2.
The rising action
scenes
3.
The climax scene
4.
The falling action
scene(s)
5.
The dénouement scene(s)
The initial scene is the most important scene and part of
any novel. To get to the initial scene,
you don’t need a plot, you need a protagonist.
I’m now writing Seoirse, and since I retired from my day job,
I’m back to a chapter a day. I could
likely write two chapters a day, but my brain gets tired. I think it’s important to report again on how
to write a novel. Let’s start at the
beginning.
I already developed the protagonist for this novel: Seoirse Séamas
Wishart. That is his name in
Gaelic. His common or English name is
George James Wishart. Why the
difference. It all has to do with the
worldview of my novels. The worldview is
reflected and therefore the supernatural exists. We are mainly writing about the common and
mythical supernatural in the world. I’d
like to say that whatever the basis for the usual supernatural in human thought
exists in the reflected worldview of this and my novels. Thus there are vampires, werewolves, fairies,
the Fae courts, dragons, gods, goddesses, and other mythical creatures. They aren’t the world. They world of my novels is the world you see
around you. The supernatural aspects are
generally unseen, unknown, and rare.
They exist like the supernatural exists in the world today: generally
unseen, unknown, and rare. That’s the
basis of the world in my novels.
This is where I am with Seoirse. I’ve been writing a chapter a day. That means I’ll likely have a completed novel
in less than a month. That’s what I
usually do when I have an idea and a novel to write. I’m also writing pretty exclusively when I
should be working on a publisher or an agent.
Here is a list of parts of words and words you can use to
search your documents. I’ll discuss each
of these.
-ing
had
-ly
were
was
gotten
even
said
got
utilize
had – had is a
great word, the problem with had is not the word itself, but the types of verb
forms it is used to create in English.
This is a holdover from Anglo-Saxon, so there is not problem with had as
a verb, but there is a problem with had in forming some common verb tenses. So, what’s the problem?
In English we have three basic verb tenses: past, present,
and future. Within these there are four
basic forms of the verb: normal, participle, perfect, and perfect
participle. That’s what most of us
learned them as, but “modern” education to further separate children from other
languages and language studies renamed these: simple, continuous, perfect, and
perfect continuous. The rest of the
world still use the old style of verb tense description, so, like nouns,
children in USA schools can’t comprehend the basics of language and language
instruction. Oh well. Let’s talk about verb tenses.
We usually write fiction narrative in the past tense. Dialog is usually written in the present
tense, but the tense in dialog matches specifically the speaker’s intent for
the communication.
If we are writing in past tense, we need some way to
indicate an event occurring before the narrative. That is achieved by the perfect and the
perfect participle (continuous) tense. I
discussed the use of the present participle (continuous) tense yesterday—that’s
what all the explanation about -ing was.
I recommended you limit the use of the participle (continuous) tense as
much as possible. What about the perfect
and the perfect participle (continuous)?
Here is what we expect to see in past tense narrative:
Bob helped me write the paper.
Since the entire novel is being written in the past tense,
implying the present or future, although this verb form is past tense, it is as
if the novel’s past tense is the present or future. If we need to move a past tense narrative into
the past one of the ways is with the perfect tense:
Bob had helped me write the paper.
That’s great, but did you noticed the had? Had is the verd added to create the past perfect
tense. Instead of adding a had, we could
write:
Bob helped me write the paper yesterday. Or Yesterday, Bob helped me write the paper.
You might say, you added another word, yesterday, and I’d
reply, yes I did, but as an author, I also made the sentence and the action
much clearer for the reader. The act of
helping me write a paper occurred in a specific time not just amorphously in
the past. You still get the point, but I
didn’t need to use the past perfect. Are
there times to use the past perfect?
There are. If you have
an extended narrative about the past, like a flashback, Arlo Guthrie Jr.
recommends you use the past perfect for a few sentences and then go back to the
past tense until you yank your reader back to the present, so to speak.
In some cases, the narrative screams for the use of the past
perfect tense. However, most of the
time, the past perfect can be replaced with the past tense and the narrative
will be cleaner, clearer, and less wordy.
That’s not just my advice, but also Arlo’s. So, what do you do?
I search for all the hads.
There are hads that are just past tense for have—those are generally
okay, but I advise replacing all your hads with stronger verbs. Verbs and about action and had is about the
most milk toast verb you can choose. Every
had is an opportunity to chose a better verb.
Then the perfect tense. I advise
looking carefully at the use of the perfect tense. If the narration screams for the use of it,
go ahead, if not change it to the past tense.
Your readers will thank you. Your editors will thank you. Your text will read cleaner and better. You mostly can’t go wrong. My prepublication reader has asked me to put
back in a couple of past perfect tense verbs and I complied. That’s what good editors and prepublication readers
are supposed to do. As I wrote—if the
narration screams for the use to the past perfect, use it.
By the way, if you look for hads, you will also find the
past perfect participle (continuous) tenses like this:
Bob had been helping me write the paper.
You’ll also find these when you search for the -ings. In my book this is a double no-no. It’s a proper English construction, but it
gums up the narrative. Just as it
implies, it is a continuous verb tense—the tense implies the action was ongoing. You don’t need this in a past tense
narrative. I dump all of these I
can. They all have their place, but
there place is usually not in the past tense narrative of a novel.
About dialog. You can
improve your dialog by reducing the participle (continuous), perfect, and the
perfect participle (continuous) verb tenses.
I look for them and generally reduce them when necessary, but realize, speech
in a dialog is very different than the narrative. Conversation moves through all the tenses and
generally, dialog in a past tense narrative is in the present tense not the
past tense. Using the proper tense in
the dialog makes the writing shine and sound correct. For example:
Bob smiled, “I’m going to the fair.”
That’s the present tense participle form. You can’t turn this into the normal (simple)
past tense without losing the entire meaning:
Bob smile, “I went to the fair.”
That’s not what he said or meant. How about this:
Bob smiled, “I go to the fair.”
That’s present tense, but it doesn’t sound right. No one says, “I go to the fair.” You would expect the modern English speaker
to use the present participle tense, “I’m going to the fair.” This implies the action of being in motion in
some way to the fair.
Enough of the perfect tense for today. Here’s my advice in case you didn’t get it
already—the take away. Get rid of all
instances of perfect tense unless the narrative absolutely requires it. Note, the dialog may really require the use
of the perfect tense, but check each occurrence to see if you are misusing or
over using it—usually in grat dialog, you aren’t.
I want to write another book based on Rose and Seoirse, and the
topic will be the raising of Ceridwen—at least that’s my plan. We shall see.
More
tomorrow.
For more information, you can visit my author site http://www.ldalford.com/, and my individual novel websites:
http://www.ancientlight.com/
http://www.aegyptnovel.com/
http://www.centurionnovel.com
http://www.thesecondmission.com/
http://www.theendofhonor.com/
http://www.thefoxshonor.com
http://www.aseasonofhonor.com
fiction, theme, plot, story, storyline,
character development, scene, setting, conversation, novel, book, writing,
information, study, marketing, tension, release, creative, idea, logic
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