I am Living the Dream

amazon.com/author/denisebarker

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you pales in comparison to what lies inside of you. Ralph Waldo Emerson
When you give someone a book, you don’t give him just paper, ink, and glue. You give him the possibility of a whole new life. Christopher Morley
The best inheritance you can leave your kids is an example of how to live a full and meaningful life. Dan Zadra

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

The Nine Cs of Effective Writing - POST AMENDED 2016.07.06

I'm a copy editor, which means I'm the spelling and grammar police.

But I am so much more. I've expanded my list of writing criteria to become The Nine Cs of Effective Writing, which are:

Continuity
Clarity
Conciseness
Communication
Consistency
Coherence
Correctness
Chronology
Credibility

I'll address each herein.

First is continuity. It's the same thing in books as it is in TV or movies. If the guy has blue eyes, they should remain blue throughout (barring any disguises or affinity for wearing colored contact lenses). The best way to track this is to keep a book bible (for each book). Have a page for each character, main or minor. List their hair color, eye color, other defining characteristics. Of course a good copy editor will catch these errors too, but, as "they" say, two heads are better than one.

Second is clarity. That means making your sentences easy to read at the first pass by the reader. You never want to confuse your reader, as that pushes the reader out of your "book bubble." You've just disrupted the believability of your story. Not a good thing.

Third is conciseness. This helps to avoid a lot of evil (like manifold adjectives or useless adverbs). For instance, a "car" does not present the right visual image in your reader's mind as compared to your own vision. If you see a red Jaguar, then write "red Jaguar" at its first mention. The mind works in pictures. Using generic terms (man, house, job) doesn't cut it. You're an author. You're creative. Surely you can convey what's in your mind to your reader's mind better than "car" or "man" or "house" or "job." Instead write "red Jaguar," "a sexy movie star look-alike," "a Southern Colonial," "a Fortune 500 CEO."

Fourth is communication. Communication is key. True communication is Rule Number One. No matter how many grammar rules and correctly spelled words you may utilize, if your reader has no idea what you are trying to say, you have failed to communicate. This should be your ultimate goal, even if you have to break a few eggs to make that omelet. This works from the sentence level as well as at a whole-book level. This means, you never want your reader to be confused, having to reread one sentence to understand what you meant.

But you also don't want your reader wondering, after reading your book to the end, what the story was about. Think of each tale you tell as a term paper that is so much more fun to read. You have a point. You need to support that point, even if you have two characters, one acting out what otherwise would be his debate of the pros and the other acting out his debate of the cons. Even if you let the reader decide which is right for himself/herself (say about abortion), the reader at least knows your book was about the pros and cons of abortion. Don't let them be confused at any level, from individual words and sentences to the basic premise of the whole book.

If there is plot/premise confusion by any reader (whether a CP, a beta-reader, or a paying reader), I'd suggest the author go back to review his/her main character arc, the critical plot points, the overarching scene progression. The problem may be at the core of the story, not just how it's presented.

Fifth is consistency. This enlarges on the first element, continuity. This covers characters' names, geographic places, trademarks, etc. If you have a character in your book named Stephen (with a PH not a V), then make sure you haven't reverted to Steven at some point in the book. When I catch these errors, I usually default to the first usage, as I presume that was the author's intent. But, if I do a word search of each spelling and find 197 occurrences of "Stephen" as versus 433 of "Steven," then I'll go with the majority usage and inform the author of this.

Sixth is coherence. This relates to overall communication, item four above, but more as to the interaction of all levels of the story. It's about linking. If you write, "His eyes were blue. That made him a murderer in my estimation," then you better explain how you got from Point A (blue eyes) to Point B (he's a murderer). There must be a causal link within your books (usually presented beforehand). Even if this particular viewpoint is not shared by the readers, you at least must make it plausible. Remember my debate team remark from earlier in this post. Say you have one person who had a very unhappy childhood, who might spurn all familial relationships or even romantic ones, whereas someone else with an equally bad childhood might run to replace it with a good family relationship of his/her own making. Each reaction could easily come from the same bad event and yet both be totally believable, even while being polar opposites. So don't forget cause and effect. It's integral to effective storytelling.

Seventh is correctness. That's when you know whether to use there, their or they're. Or a host of other homonyms (too, to, two, for instance). But it's also knowing the innate difference between being electrocuted and being shocked. In the first event, you die. In the second, you live to tell the tale.

Eighth is chronology. Granted, the "Out of Gas" episode of Joss Whedon's superlative Firefly series is out of linear chronology, but he handles this well, so that the viewer is not confused or lost in the process. Most authors can't accomplish this to the level that Joss does. But that's a plot presentation example. I'm speaking more about chronology within one sentence. Like, don't put "after" clauses at the end of your sentences. Incorrect Example: I left, after we ate. It's jarring to the reader, because it is out of order and makes them reread the line a second time to get the true gist of things. The reader should only be reading each line once. So put the events in their proper order. Corrected Example: After we ate, I left.

Another type of mishmash I read is where three events are out of order, whether as one sentence or as three separate sentences. Incorrect Example: He hit my right cheek, after swinging hard, once he entered my apartment. What? Here's the corrected example: Once he entered my apartment, he swung hard and hit my right cheek. See the difference? This is the only way this could have happened within the laws of physics.

The last is credibility. If you have an unreliable narrator, your reader will not believe your story. An unbelievable tale is a recipe for disaster, with the reader stopping abruptly. While your story may call for a melodramatic character or two, do NOT make your whole story melodramatic. Avoid this at all costs.

And, for God's sake, spell-check your document before you hand it off to anyone. This includes your CPs, your beta-readers, and especially anybody you pay to help make your work even better. You are in the big leagues now, a professional. Act like it! You are no longer an amateur, a greenhorn hobbyist, who only plays baseball at the company's annual picnic.

Yes, I can tell if you spell-checked your doc or not. Even though Microsoft Word does not always follow the preferred spellings of Web11, spell-checking will reduce the overall misspellings. So if spell-check takes more than two minutes, I will know you haven't spell-checked it yourself.

If you can accomplish all this, you are one extraordinary author, and I would love to work with you. You are the dream author us copy editors lust for, getting not only a first glimpse of truly awesome writing and great storytelling but also making our job truly enjoyable on all levels.

Best wishes to all on your writing endeavors. And, if we don't communicate again before the holidays, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

#copyeditor+

"If your vocation isn’t a vacation, then quit, leap, change careers."

Denise Barker, Author, Blogger, Copy Editor
Books that Build Character(s)

http://denisebarkerauthor.blogspot.com/

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

An Ode to A&E's The Glades

Another one of my favorite TV shows has ended. It joins the ranks of Firefly, Numb3rs, GCB and Murder, She Wrote. Of course there are more I could name, but fewer people may even remember them.

And I realize that a TV series can entail horrific hours. That Murder, She Wrote lasted twelve seasons with its middle-aged main characters was a wonderful tribute to our Baby Boomer generation. And while I loved the glitz and glamour of Jessica in her New York surroundings in the later seasons, my favorites remain those with Dr. Hazlitt and the other Cabot Cove residents.

But back to my current loss.

I love all the main characters. Director Manus, Carlos, Jeff, Daniel and Ray are truly so wonderful. Even Ray's mom and Jim's parents are home runs. Callie is such an animated actress, I could watch her alone. But put her together with Jim (what's not to love there?) and they electrify any scene.

I even loved to hate all the pretty girls trying to woo Jim away from Callie. Like Matt Passmore's real girlfriend at the time of Season One, Rachael Carpani, who plays Heather Thompson.

I must admit I still look at her and am reminded of her character, Jodi, from McLeod's Daughters. Once they killed off Claire in Season Three, I quit watching that show, back when I still had cable. But I dig out the DVDs and rewatch the earlier seasons every now and then.

As a mostly pantster author who is character-oriented, I found so much to learn from and admire within The Glades. Here are a few tips I garnered from this fabulous show. I'm dealing mostly with Season One here as those are the episodes I've almost memorized as I've watched them that often.

I liked the contrast-and-compare thread going on throughout Season One when it came to "destroying a man's family" (as Jim and Callie dance around that issue) which is found in many of the episodes, like "Marriage Is Murder" (murder of divorce attorney) and "Cassadaga" (the community of psychics).
Another continuity thread that was used well dealt with Jim's wanting to break eighty, which was there from the beginning, in the pilot. Remember his voice mail message about not being able to answer the phone because he's either trying to pursue justice or break eighty? It's in the opening spot for the series, repeated in each episode. It showed up throughout Season One as Jim carried around a putter everywhere he went. I think in "Exposed" we see a close-up of Jim's "candy" dish on his desk at work. Instead of filled with candy, it has golf balls and tees in it. Kudos to The Glades's prop manager/set designer and its writers/directors.
I don't think Ray shot Jim; I think Ray's mom did. Remember when Jeff turns thirteen and she offers to take him shooting, stating she's a pretty good shot? Granted I'm not up-to-date on all of Season Four as I'm watching via Hulu and Netflix. But this reminds us authors to have multiple possibilities available to our readers.
As much as I hate the fact that A&E canceled this show, there is a certain irony that the pilot intro'd us to Jim as the man shot in the butt for not sleeping with his boss's wife and in the final episode he is shot because he did sleep with another man's wife. This is called bookending for us authors.
And Ray. I love Ray. Now on paper, his police record, I don't. But in person? Who would not love to listen to Ray's crooning voice that reminds me of Elvis Presley? And the way he treats Callie is so sweet, both in prison and out. Once he's free and she wants a divorce and he's living in the halfway house, he's being the ultimate in patient. He doesn't seem to ever get angry or mad or impatient. He's thoughtful, considerate, seems to truly love Callie and Jeff. Yet there he sits in prison. For armed robbery. Armed. That makes him pretty dangerous. I just wonder if he ever shot anyone, if he ever used that gun. Still it is pretty scary that Callie, just by signing her joint tax return with Ray, could be found legally criminal as well. Ray is a complex character, like real-life people. We may love him but hate what he does. Such a great conflict to dump into a marriage. On paper that is. Not in actuality.
But then I get mad at Ray for what he leaves Callie with to handle on her own: Just getting together the money to pay the three years' worth of unpaid house taxes or risk losing her home is irritating enough. Add to that the rat fink agent that wants to trade sex with Callie for not reporting her as a co-criminal involved in Ray's madness. Plus raising Jeff alone. Trying to cover for Ray and not tell their son what Ray really did. Not to mention her efforts to be a doctor. That alone is stress-worthy. Like the speech Callie gives Jim in the "Booty" episode (recovering the finds of the Magdalena), a spouse should make married life easier, not harder.
As an author, I noted that the Florida Glades serves as a very interesting character in this series. Granted some books I've read use a cheesy travelogue approach to writing. That is not what was done with The Glades series. I felt like I was being introduced to a new friend and finding out more and more intriguing elements to that person. Like the shipwreck treasure hunters, the Seminole Indian element (reflected in a lot of the names for towns in Florida), the alligators, the hurricanes, the muck, the sugar cane fields and all that their harvest entails, plus Cassadaga aka The Psychic Capital of the World really exists. But since I'm a Louisiana gal originally, I gravitate to areas with moss on the trees and swamps. It's wired into my DNA.

This is by far a truncated list of what I've loved about and learned from this fantastic series. There may be more posts on this to come. But for now I need to get to paying work.

Fellow mourners over the demise of The Glades are welcome to share their delights and insights regarding this show and its characters via comments below.

Sigh.

Denise Barker, author + blogger + copy editor

amazon.com/author/denisebarker

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

I Love Joss Whedon; I Want More Firefly

I just finished rereading Joss Whedon: The Genius Behind Buffy, Creator of ... Firefly and am even more enamored with Whedon than before. I've got multicolored tabs looking like four layers of fringe sticking from all three unbound edges of most of the 171 pages of this book.

Afterward I handwrote the best from my flagging efforts and further distilled those 4.5 double-sided pages by underlining the best of the best. Here is my overview of that condensation:

Joss, The Person

He's incredibly smart, deeply and widely read, loves to learn, with a superior imagination. Found his true happiness/passion in writing, while finding acceptance and a place where he could be himself at college. He has both a childlike fascination with his surroundings and yet a worldly view. His own dichotomy makes him interesting. He's responsible for so much yet so generous with his time. Joss inspires loyalty. And fandom, I might add.

His honesty pulls me to him. He calls a bomb of a movie a bomb. He has been known to tell people in his script-doctoring days that this script doesn't need doctoring, it needs to not be done period. He's not afraid to address run-ins he's had with various people.

IMO, he stands tall.

Joss, The Genre-Buster

He has created new genres by mixing and blending his faves. He loves sci-fi; he loves Westerns; it follows that he would blend the two (and more) into Firefly. Supposedly NYPD Blue had three genres in its makeup, but Joss upped his own mix to be four for his Buffy series, combining horror, action, comedy and heart-wrenching emotional drama. When well balanced, the seasons were accepted readily by the fans. When too dark—showing a definite imbalance—the fans were not as connected to the characters.

Yet the main impetus seemed to be to bring legitimacy to fantasy and humor, as Joss sees the individual genres as meaningful.

Joss, The Stereotype Annihilator

Besides genre-busting, he's a stereotype annihilator. Like with Buffy, in the opening scenes of the series, he took the typical blonde walking in a cemetery to be attacked by the vampire and turned her into a blonde vampire. Ha!

He made Willow, Buffy's BFF and pseudo-sister, into a complex woman, not the typical nerdy sidekick. Zander is the "everyman" persona, all about loyalty, while Giles, the father-figure and mentor, rounded out the main characters.

Joss made a "silent" episode (entitled "Hush") which was a compilation of twenty-nine minutes without a spoken word. That takes guts and genius. He pulled off a musical in Season 6. Then in Angel, he had an opera episode. Joss attacks the notions of stereotypes head-on.

He made those same twists in Firefly. Made no sound in space so the thrusters are silent. Made no aliens. Those reavers are men gone bad. No alien planets, just Earth over and over again.

Joss, The Plot Developer

Joss is about details, making continuity important to his series and his fans.
Alternatively, he foreshadows main events, some two years in advance. Talk about a big-picture planner.
He avoids too much background info on his characters so there is room for them to grow, in whatever direction.
Real and universal issues invade his plots that all ages enjoy. There is a true reality to his work, no matter the genre(s).
Joss finds the heart of the story, the emotional intensity, which became the core strength of the Buffy series. While we may all admire Superman and the heroic action, with Buffy, we have a sixteen-year-old we can all relate to [as once having been a teen (or for younger fans, yearning to be a teen)] and your heart breaks for her as she becomes a runaway, for instance.
Like taking Angel with all his evil deeds and endearing him to his audience once more by having Angel seek redemption. Another foreshadowing example setting up the spin-off series.

Joss, His Mythology aka Series' Mission Statements: The Core of Things

In Buffy, the dark side of Buffy emerges in reaction to the intensity of her fear.
In Buffy, her victory has consequences and shows us a superhero with scars; she's human and vulnerable, no matter how strong.
In Buffy, family can be difficult and cruel, but you have the power to create your own family. "It's not about blood."
In Buffy, it was about strong independent women and a lot of pop culture thrown in.
In Buffy, the joy of female empowerment was a recurring theme.
In Buffy, "make them cry" was Joss's advice.
In Buffy, the ultimate sacrifice comes with a price.
In Buffy, the underdog tries to save the world.
In Buffy, one of the questions was: how does one get from childhood to adulthood? Addressing teen angst, alienation and feeling like an outsider.
In Buffy, the series grew along with its characters, so a later question was: how does one negotiate the periods of adulthood? All about adult life and relationships.
In Buffy, Willow's story was about weakness, addiction, loss. How life hits you in the gut right when you think you're back on your feet.
In Buffy, the mantra was bigger than life.
In Firefly, life was portrayed actual size.
In Firefly, it was about politics and economic depression and a civil war in outer space. No pop culture allowed.
In Firefly, it is about life when it is hard, the struggles. Note that Joss recognized the hand-to-mouth viewers were not represented on TV. [Funny, because then later came a US version of the British series Shameless (another fave series of mine) which delved even deeper into this no-collar crowd.]
In Firefly, the harder things are, the more times your ethics and moral structure are going to be tested.
In Angel, twentysomethings are looking for meaning in a confusing world.
In Angel, his own purpose was to find redemption.

Joss, His Thoughts on Creating a Cult Show

Don't think about that; think instead about what is the most compelling thing to me right now? Like with Firefly, it was first the adolescent metaphor. With time it became getting a chance to look at life from a lot of different points of view. "That's why we have nine regulars."

Joss, The Writer

In addition to all of the above, here are more writing tips to be gleaned from Joss's successes:

When you kill off people the fans do not know yet, the writing has no emotional value and it bombs.
We are not to give the fans what they want but what they need. Thus Joss's compulsion to kill off much loved characters.
Make the characters interesting, complex individuals. Buffy had four main characters (MCs). The Angel spin-off had five. Firefly had nine.
Joss said that with his nine Firefly MCs, each had their own agenda and that made for easier writing: nine people looking into the blackness of space and seeing nine different things.
Foreshadow. Give subtle clues. Make more layers. [Break the supposed "rules."]

A Rabbit Trail: Archetypes

What about archetypes?

There are many variations, but I happen to like these eight for their alignment of four pairs of opposites. One online site said that we carry all eight within us, in varying degrees depending on circumstances, which is an interesting concept. That they represent:

Protagonist = our initiative
Antagonist = our reticence to change
Contagonist = our temptations
Guardian/Mentor = our conscience
Sidekick = our self-confidence
Skeptic = our self-doubt
Emotion = our passion
Reason = our intellect

For those fellow authors who like the archetype example, I thought it'd be fun to align the standard eight with the nine Firefly characters and see how they match up.

Protagonist = Mal mainly, with Zoe and Jane, even Book, the Man of God, had a gun 3x or so
Antagonist = the Alliance, the centralized government
Contagonist = Jane/various episodic villains/Mal & Inara's ongoing fake antagonism /reavers
Guardian/Mentor = Book/Zoe/Inara/with Mal as a protector to his crew
Sidekicks/Humor = Jewel/Jane/Summer/Walsh/Mal can be quite humorous also
Skeptic = Jane/Doc/Zoe/Walsh (Mal is largely a huge skeptic)
Emotion/Chaos = Jewel/Summer/Inara (as a mother figure)/Walsh (at times)/Doc (at times)/Mal, for all his crusty curmudgeonistic ways, has great heart

Reason = Inara/Walsh/Doc/Zoe (Mal's is more like street smarts/experience talking, when he knows the reavers set up a bomb when Serenity docked with that seemingly empty ship in space, or that Patience is gonna shoot him again, etc.)

Granted, you may assign them differently. But compare the above personal example from me to an online example with another nine MCs, this time from Star Wars:

Protagonist = Luke Skywalker

Antagonist = the Empire

Contagonist = Darth Vader

Guardian/Mentor = Obi-Wan

Sidekicks = R2D2 + C3PO

Skeptic = Hans Solo

Emotion = Chewbacca

Reason = Princess Leia

They all fit into one slot, with the exception of the two droids. But look again what Joss did for his nine. They crossed over within the generic eight archetypal categories.

What can I say? Joss is the master of mixing it up, shooting it down and linking up interesting combos.

We should do the same.

P.S. I'm rewatching the Firefly DVDs and realized that Mal easily has seven of the eight archetypes resident within and visually portrayed in the series. And when you think of him refusing to acknowledge his feelings for Inara, well then he becomes his own worst enemy, fulfilling the eighth stereotype of the antagonist. This may well be the best writing advice from Joss: make your hero human. Don't hesitate to show his faults. And if he has many (don't we all?), then each one serves to snag the attention of particular fans based on differing fan bases. Absolutely brilliant!

Denise Barker, author + blogger + copy editor