Painting With Light

What Rules Do You Follow?

June 29, 2014

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Sometimes It’s Hard to Know
The wealth of advice available (including in this blog), may seem overwhelming at times to a new indie author.

Think about some of the things you’ve been told are literary no-nos. Prepositions at the end of sentences. Split infinitives. Double negatives. Sentence-beginning conjunctions. Sentence fragments. Run-on sentences. Poor dialogue attribution.

If you’re at all like me, you’ve already read Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, and the AP Stylebook. When you read them, the whole writing process often seems to boil down to a series of dos and don’ts that must be followed at all cost.

In a sense, all of what you’ve been told is true. The absolute worst thing you can do is scoff at the rules and decide they don’t apply to you … because no matter how amazing your writing is, you need to understand the basic guidelines for your craft.

The reason? The person reading your work expects you to.

Reader Expectations
All readers have certain expectations, and these expectations all tend to fall in line with the rules. Now, does that mean amazing, rule-bending things won’t happen or can’t be done?

Not at all.

One of the interesting things you discover, the more you read, are the many fabulous writers who choose to either ignore, or at least bend, the rules.

They’ve already made that great literary leap of faith. Elmore Leonard, the famous Michigan crime writer, once said: “I try to leave out the parts readers skip.”

You may also have heard of Cormac McCarthy. He’s a brilliant author who’s written some wonderful books like The Road and Blood Meridian. He’s also famous for using almost no punctuation, sometimes to the point his books become difficult to follow.

Yet his writing works.

That’s because there are two ways to break a rule: knowingly and unknowingly. Mere ignorance of a rule is not an adequate excuse for breaking it, and you can’t use an exception to the rule as a basis for how things should be done.

Not without a lot of practice and a thorough understanding of your craft. For that, you not only have to write … you have to read.

One of my favorite authors, Ray Bradbury, is famously quoted as saying “There are worse crimes than burning books; one of them is not reading them.”

I like to paraphrase that and say one of the worst sins an author can commit is not bad grammar or sloppy spelling … it’s failing to understand what might be done, before he/she writes at all.

Show; Don’t Tell
You’ve heard me spout about this before, because it’s the one writing rule I think you should keep. Stephen King advocates it, but he was far from the first to do so.

You’ll find the famous quote by Anton Chekhov (Russian playwright and master of the modern short story; 1860-1904) as the basis for my writing web site, Broken Glass: “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

Ernest Hemingway was also an advocate. He encouraged writers to create vivid scenes through action and dialogue, allowing the reader to interpret significant details.

If there is a proper caveat to any of that, it’s to be careful about becoming so consumed by “showing” that your characters lose all of their emotional nuance.

You most certainly want the reader to become involved with your characters; to believe in them as people. It’s hard for readers to do that when there’s no indication at all of what’s going on in the minds of those characters.

Write What You Know
Before I call a halt to my entry today, I thought I should mention this “rule” as one of those you most certainly can bend. The write-what-you-know adage does not mean you should limit your fiction to only your personal life experiences.

Read and research voraciously. Be open to the strange and unfamiliar. Then use your experiences, both real and visceral, as a springboard into another era, another moment in time or into the mind of your character.

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Just received my Kirkus Review for REICHOLD STREET: Skillfully written and emotionally charged! Read the full review here.

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You can find my books as eBooks or paperback on Amazon, or at Barnes & Noble. You’re also invited to visit my web site, BROKEN GLASS, or like my Book of Face page. You can also follow my shorter ramblings on The Twitter.

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Tags: award-winning author, award-winning writing
Posted in Award-Winning Fiction, Storytelling | 5 Comments »

How Do You Excite Readers?

June 24, 2014

An excellent question.

Regardless of the genre in which you write, the best way to make your stories come alive is to write exciting, clear, descriptive prose and believable dialogue.

If that sounds like work, I suppose you could always try what I described in my last post. Grab a bare live electric wire … and hope you live to tell someone about it. It was definitely exciting.

However, it’s not something I would recommend.

I was fortunate to have only brushed the bare wires, not grab them … which could have created a whole different and, in my view, quite unwelcome outcome.

My brush with electrical stupidity didn’t mean the big nasty that electrocution could be … it just threw me to the ground and caused me to make a complete tear of the rotator cuff ligaments in my left shoulder.

The orthopedic surgeon figures with a couple hours of surgery, six weeks of immobility and months of rehabilitation, I’ll be something (hopefully) approaching normal again.

Given my history of normal, that could scare some people.

I’ve been through a similar scenario once before and remember the weeks of discomfort it meant. I’m not looking forward to it. The good news is I recovered … and I can now tell when the weather is going to change by the ache in my arm.

I also once broke the elbow in the same arm, trying … and failing … to prove I could still play football with seventeen-year-olds. I can’t, but at my age that’s not a bad thing. Is it?

I figure with this latest injury I’ll at least now have the weather-change info in stereo.

Unfortunately, it also means my writing and typing process is considerably slowed. I’ll be forced to type with only my right hand. I know for many this isn’t a problem. I’ve seen some of you type, and you’re only using a couple of fingers anyway.

But for me it’s a real problem. I wanted to get the third book of my Reichold Street trilogy published before the end of the year. Certainly by the first quarter of 2015.

And I do know how to type, so this slows me down considerably. I’ve already thought about recording my thoughts and transcribing them later but, while this is a good way to review my work, I find it cumbersome to begin that way.

Perhaps I should use this time to do some of the things I’ve been meaning to do … like go to book-signings, visit reading groups, talk to classrooms and generally get out and hobnob with some of the folks I’d like to reach with my books?

Perhaps I could do a reading for some of them and talk about how I come up with ideas?

Without both arms to gesture with as I talk, I’ll effectively be whispering … but, perhaps, they’ll pay more attention that way.

What do you think?

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Tags: award-winning author, award-winning writing, indie writers
Posted in Award-Winning Fiction, Lifestyle, Storytelling | 3 Comments »

And The Reason Is…?

June 11, 2014

Photo courtesy BigStock

“Things happen for a reason.”

My father used to tell me that all the time when I was a kid. Usually right after he discovered some chain of events I’d set in motion had culminated in a flooded basement, or a broken window.

I’m sure I’ve said something similar to my own kids (now grown men) once or twice over the years.

It came to my mind again last Saturday, as I sat on my deck … laid on it would be a better term … wondering what the hell had just happened, and why did my shoulder hurt so much?

Seems I’d overlooked a basic prerequisite for working with electricity (other than have a licensed electrician do it) … turn off the power.

I was changing some rusty, 28-year-old light fixtures on the back of the house. One of the two was finished and, as I went to work on the second one … controlled by a different circuit … I remember thinking I should go inside and check the light switch.

But the light wasn’t on (turns out the bulb was burned-out), and that particular sliding door is one we never use … ever.

There’s a sofa in front of it so we treat it like a big window and the light is seldom turned on anyway … so, I forgot all about that basic safety prerequisite.

Everything was going along fine. I had sliced through the caulking that sealed the fixture to the house, loosened the screws holding it to the electrical box, and removed the wire nuts that connected its wiring to the circuit.

I even took the time to place all the wire nuts on top of the garden storage chest just outside the door, so they wouldn’t fall through the decking.

As I returned to the fixture, my left hand brushed against the now bare wires and …

You guessed it, didn’t you?

I felt the tingle on the back of my hand, and the next thing I knew I was laying on the deck. I remember falling, and bracing myself with my left hand as I went down.

I also remember thinking: Whew! That was close!

Then there was the impact. My left shoulder hurt like hell from the stress of stopping my 200+ pound body from planting my face on the deck boards. It was a mini-hell trying to get up.

My shoulder still hurts when I try to lift it, although it’s much better today than it was Saturday or Sunday. I have an appointment with my orthopedic surgeon, to assess the damage.

I’ve had accidents before which tore my rotator cuff (other arm), so I know the drill.

Thankfully, this injury seems to far less serious than the last one (which was hurt after snowmobiling with friends up north).

Why am I telling you this, and what in the hell does it have to do with writing?

Well, I’m probably looking for a little sympathy … but it’s also a good segue into a writing mantra for all indie writers (with apologies to the Boy Scouts):

Be prepared.

Read the acknowledged good books that are out there. Study how the author has gathered … and kept … your attention.

Study character development. There’s a neat (if I do say so myself) free pamphlet about it available right here on this blog (you may need to come back to it, if you’re a subscriber, since I think your subscription only shows the blog post, not the whole page).

Learn how to tell a story. I gave you a valuable link in my last post to On Writing, by Stephen King … the best-selling book on how to write that’s ever been written.

Research dialogue, so you’ll understand how to craft it yourself.

And by all means, if you feel like fooling around with electricity yourself someday, remember to turn off the circuit first. It’s a lesson I knew, but overlooked … and will never forget again.

I might not be so lucky twice.

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