Creating a Great Setting Writing Exercise

There are so many elements to creating a great setting like utilizing all five senses, using setting as an opportunity to foreshadow or mirror events, using symbolic elements, etc... but today, I think it'd be fun to play a game of "what do you see?". When entering a room, there's no way you're going to notice the same thing as your best friend, and if you do, it's likely you won't describe it the same way. So... here's a picture. What do you see? How would you describe it? How would your main character? His/her love interest? His/her parents? If they all notice the same thing, you're not writing real enough characters. What we see/ choose to see in our settings in life says a lot about us. So here goes, what do you see here?

YA Book Pick: CINDER by Marissa Meyer

Once a month, we choose an outstanding YA book to review. We want to spotlight books of interest to aspiring writers, as well as highlight some of our favorite books and authors!

This month's Book Pick is CINDER by Marissa Meyer.

Synopsis (from Goodreads): Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth’s fate hinges on one girl.

Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world’s future.

First Line: "The screw through Cinder's ankle had rusted, the engraved cross marks worn to a mangled circle."

This first line gives you an immediate impression of the main character. She obviously has something physically different about her, or she wouldn't have a screw through her ankle. The author also plants the idea that Cinder is poor by mentioning that the screw is rusted. It makes me want to read on and find out why!

Highlights: Although "cyborg Cinderella" is a good enough hook for just about anyone, this book is also a good example of the dystopian genre. It's set in the future, after a world war has devastated much of the world and completely changed political boundaries. The author did a good job of avoiding the dreaded infodump, instead doling out bits of information throughout the book that kept me hooked and interested.

The main character is mechanically inclined and very competent, which I liked a lot. No damsel in distress here. The romantic plotline is also well-crafted. The protagonists' attraction to each other is believable, and so are the reasons they are kept apart.

The book ends on a dramatic cliffhanger, which made me want to pick up the next book immediately. From the synopses, it looks like the other books in Meyer's series each follow different fairy-tale characters who end up interacting with Cinder and each other. This seems like an intriguing way to do a series that might be more interesting than just following the same character throughout multiple novels.

A Good Read For: Writers of fairy-tale retellings, this would be a great read for you. The author loosely follows the Cinderella story, but she adds so much of her own spin that I honestly forgot about it after a while. She did an excellent job of blending just enough of the familiar with interesting new concepts to keep the reader hooked.

SCBWI LA 2014...In Quotations and Pictures!

* I attended the SCBWI summer conference again, and had yet another amazing time. Here are some of my favorite notes from the conference:

Stephen Chbosky & Jay Asher

* "Every scene needs to either ask or answer a question." --Jay Asher

* Stephen Chbosky talked about how studying Chinatown in film school influenced his use of subtle (not obvious and clunky) and well-placed "red herrings."



* Maggie Stiefvater creates unforgettable characters by "painting portraits" of them with language. She's

Maggie Stiefvater's art

constantly striving to "solve for 'x'," which means to figure out what the essential feature of the person is (yes, she takes the "x" from someone she's met in real life). She's always trying to find the most simple defining point, and then she builds a character's complexity up from there. 

* Meg Rosoff wanted us to be brave. To write about what is deep and true and to learn enough about yourself to write the story only you can write.

Meg Medina & Linda Sue Park
Diversity Panel

* Panel on diversity: If you're writing about a culture outside your own, you should have a passionate personal stake in what you're writing about, research needs to be intensive, and extensive, and it will probably take years. Don't just throw a "diverse" character you don't understand into a book because we need more diversity; it can be highly offensive. It's especially bad when a stereotype slips in and perpetuates a false truth. Personal note: I was really proud of SCBWI for including this panel, and I did hear mixed-reviews on it (I don't think that's a bad thing; it's a tough conversation, but one that needs to happen). Where is the line? When can writers write outside their own race/culture? I hope that the conversation continues at length until all our kids are well-represented in literature. Kudos SCBWI. Kudos. 

* Favorite comment on diversity panel: Linda Sue Park wishes business side would stop saying "they" don't buy books. Instead, realize it's an untapped market with $1 Trillion in buying power. There is a marketer smart enough to figure out how to do it, and when he/she comes around, they're going to make a killing.

 * Sara Sargent urged writers to figure out what their characters most desired, feared, loved, etc. and then use that knowledge to torture your characters. We may not love drama in our own lives, but we do love reading about it.

Judy Blume has a packed house
hanging on her every word

* "I was brave in my writing in a way I wasn't in my own life." --Judy Blume

On my way out, guess whose car this might be???

Using Dialogue to Determine If Your Character's Voice is Unique and Distinct

My current WIP has been undergoing some pretty major revisions, including a POV change and rewrites to a few characters. In some cases the changes are simple - changing a HER to an I, and so on and so forth. But in other instances I've had to completely rewrite scenes because the characters have changed pretty dramatically.

It was while rewriting a scene that I accidentally stumbled upon a great tool for checking character voice: dialogue.

 That might seem obvious since dialogue is literally a character using its voice to speak, but let me tell you how you can use it as a quick voice "test."

In earlier drafts, I had written a character named Aunt Minnie who was the best friend of my MC's late grandmother.  Minnie was an eighty-year-old sweet grandmotherly-type, with a playful attitude and a flair for making inappropriate comments.  I loved Aunt Minnie, but ultimately decided to rewrite her into my MC's actual grandmother, nicknamed Gams.

Gams is also an eighty-year-old grandmotherly type with a flair for making inappropriate comments. BUT she's also a former principle dancer at the New York Ballet Company, owned her own dance studio until she had to retire, and was my MCs original dance instructor.

I assumed that I could leave most of the scenes between Aunt Minnie and my MC the same even though the character was changing, with a few minor tweaks here and there.  But when I started reading the dialogue I realized that it no longer fit.

It takes an immense amount of focus and discipline to get accepted into a revered ballet company, and to become a principle ballerina at that company takes even more discipline. When Aunt Minnie spoke she was funny, almost childlike in some ways, and her laissez faire voice no longer worked when I started to piece together the kind of woman Gams was: focused, determined, and perhaps even a little critical. In short, they were two distinct characters with different motivations who needed two distinct voices.

Here is a quick trick for checking to see if your character has a unique & distinct voice:

Imagine a new character that is like your original in almost every way, but give them a slightly different back story and/or hobby.  For example, maybe this new character has a tiny chip on their shoulder because their parents are going through a divorce, where your current characters parents are happily married.  Now go back and read some of this character's dialogue, but with the slightly modified character in mind. Would the existing dialogue work with the newly imagined character?  If the answer is yes, you are likely suffering from a lack of voice, and you might want to take a step back and figure out how to infuse your character's uniqueness into the way they speak.  If the answer is no, congratulations!  You have written a character with a unique POV that is reflected in the way they think and speak.  In other words, you've created a distinct and unique voice for that character.

Give it a try and let me know how it goes.

Happy writing!

Industry Month In Review: Amazonian Changes

Take a break for a few weeks and the industry changes again!  It's been quite the month with my new baby on board but it feels good to be back in the swing of things.  And not a moment too soon! Less than two weeks ago, Amazon announced it's new Kindle unlimited service.  For just $9.99 a month, members would have access to over 600,000 Kindle e-books.

For the reader, this sounds like a goldmine.  All the books you can read without worrying about wasting your money on books you might not enjoy.  Russ Grandinetti, Kindle Senior VP exclaimed "With Kindle Unlimited, you won't have to think twice before you try a new author or genre - you can just start reading and listening."

It also seems like an opportunity for those who self pub.  Even at low price points, it's difficult sometimes for readers to pull the trigger and purchase a title they aren't familiar with. The new unlimited service would eliminate this hurdle. 

However, upon closer inspection, there may be a few issues that need to be addressed.  Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords notes in a recent Huffington Post article the drawbacks of Amazon's new service. The issue is exclusivity.  Indie authors wishing to be a part of the service cannot be a part of other competitive services such as Oyster and Scribd. 

"Exclusivity...is not necessarily great for authors and readers.  Exclusivity starves competing retailers of books readers want to read, which forces readers to move their reading to the Kindle platform."

Coker goes on to state that "Authors who cycle their books in and out of KDP Select (an option of Amazon's self-publishing platform) will have a more difficult time building readership at Amazon's competitors.

Even with all the selection, readers may still find it difficult to find books they really want to read.  Anick Jesdadun of JConline compared "The library of 600,000" to that of a "small bookstore with a few current titles attached to a block-sized bargain bin of obscure stuff mixed with classics that are in the public domain and available for free online anyway." 

Already, we're seeing the effects of the new service on what Amazon subscribers are choosing to read and it's having a direct impact on Amazon Kindle's best-seller list.  Digital Book World noted that prior to the launch of Kindle Unlimited, there were "15 ebooks that would have been part of Kindle Unlimited that were top 100 best-sellers on Kindle; the week following, that number has ballooned to 45."

It will be interesting to see how this plays out but given Amazon's prowess to date, I suspect that whatever happens, they will continue to be at the forefront of change...at least for now.