TUESDAY TIPS: The Seat of Knowledge

NOVELISTS ARE ODD PEOPLE when it comes to budgets. They think nothing of dropping better than $2,500 on a MacBook Pro with Retina display, and in a way that makes sense (as one novelist told me, "Eric Clapton buys great guitars, and I buy great laptops."). But then when it comes to what they sit in while they use that laptop, they will settle for some of the cheapest junk that the office-supply store (or Goodwill) has to offer.
   I know, I know. I have admitted here, previously, that I do much of my own first-draft writing sitting on a worn piece of wicker patio furniture.  But that's composition; the stuff  that I do early in the morning, before the sun comes up, when I am surrounded in a fog of birdsong and inspiration.
   During the rest of the day, when I'm editing, answering correspondence, doing nonfiction writing and just performing office stuff, I am in a desk chair. And I'm in it a lot: about 2,000 hours a year is a pretty good estimate. That's a lot of backside milage.
   Now, before you send the email, I should point out that I have tried some chair alternatives. I have tried working standing up (which made me feel like I was working the counter at McDonald's), and I tried one of those big rubber ball things (for about 20 minutes, after which it felt stupid). And the kneeling-chair made me feel as if I was Anne Boleyn in the chapel.
   So I decided I needed a good chair and, seeing as I usually hold onto a chair at least twice as long as I hold onto a computer, I figured that, for my chair, I should budget at least half of what I would budget for a computer.
   With $1,500 as my budget, then, I went chair-shopping, and wound up selecting (for well under my budgeted amount) the Humanscale Freedom Headrest, adding the gel seat and gel armrests as options. It looks durable and well-designed, and every time I lean back in it, I feel as if I am about to get my teeth cleaned or have a shave (not that far a stretch; the caricaturist Al Hirschfeld used a barber's chair as his office throne). At the desk, I can adjust it so it feels ergonomically perfect before the keyboard, and I keep a footstool behind me, so I can swivel around and put my feet up to do some reading ... or take a nap.
   I'm not spending any more time in the office than I did previously, but I'm getting more done, and feeling more refreshed when I knock off at the end of the day. So I'd say the chair is paying for itself. In fact, it probably did so in the first month.
   And I'm really enjoying the naps.
   

FRESH ON FRIDAY: Thank the One Who Brung Ya

MAYBE SHE DID IT to shut me up, but my grandmother taught me to read. 

   I only remember five books in our house, growing up. There was a pocket-sized volume on tree identification (used by my father when he worked trimming trees for the phone company), The Illinois Blue Book (free for the asking from the state every year, it taught you that corn and strip-mined coal were two of the most important commodities on earth, and that Abraham Lincoln was a leading candidate for sainthood), a dictionary, a huge Catholic Bible with all the apocrypha, and A History of Marine Corps Aviation in World War II, displayed proudly because it included a snapshot that my father had taken on Guadalcanal. 

   And because the last one had airplanes it it, I wanted to read it, so my grandmother taught me.

   When I was four years old. 

   Using the Bible. 

   We started with Genesis, and by Revelation I could read as well as she could. Only after that was I treated to my reward, the Marine history, which, after Leviticus and Numbers, was pretty lively stuff.

   This posed something of an issue for my teachers in elementary school. They handed me Fun with Dick and Jane, I polished it off in about five minutes and asked why the guy wrote so weird, and for the next several years, while the rest of the class practiced reading, I sat in the corner reading the encyclopedia and (once my teachers had made sure I was not spending all of my time ogling pictures of bare-breasted tribal women) a few decades worth of National Geographic.

   So my grandmother taught me to read.

   But it was my mother who taught me to love books.

   She was, and is, a reader and, long about the time I was five, introduced me to the local library, which was less than a five-minute bike ride from my house. And she made it her business to not only love books, but to love the books I loved. If I brought it home from the library, first I read it and then she read it, so I could have someone with whom to discuss it.

My mother last Christmas;
I'm betting she's asking
Santa for a new book. 

   In this fashion, my mother became an expert on every expedition to Mount Everest, on the principles of rocketry and aviation, on wilderness survival and the heroes of the Old West and, much later, on the works of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

   What's more, she also encouraged me to write. And when I began writing, she was (and remains) a perfect pre-reader, largely because she understands where I'm coming from, because she laid my childhood literary foundation with me.

   So what about you? Do you have someone in your life who started you on a love of reading books, and a passion for writing them?

   If you do, and you're still blessed enough to have them with you, be sure to tell them how much that has meant to you.

   And remember, Mother's Day is coming.

   So go out and buy them a book.

TUESDAY TIPS: The Match-Cut

IN 2009, BETHANY HOUSE published my book, Pirate Hunter, which is a novel composed of two stories—one historical and one contemporary—that echo and parallel one another but never quite intersect. 

   To distinguish the two, I wrote the historical story in third-person, and kept the contemporary story in first person. But that still left the issue of how to go from one story to the other without jarring the reader.
   And, to accomplish that, I used a technique from cinema—a technique known as a match cut.
   A match cut echoes an element from one scene with a similar element from another. The classic example is comes at the close of the first scene in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." In that match cut, a ancient primitive man uses a bone as a weapon; he tosses it into the air in victory, and it is replaced by a futuristic space station in earth orbit. 
   Match cuts can also be more subtle. One often used by filmmakers is to move the camera from a cityscape up to the clouds or sun above the city, and then bring the camera down from the sky to the next setting—say, the countryside.
   To accomplish something similar in fiction, I closed the first chapter of Pirate Hunter with a historical character being asked a question, and then opened the second chapter (300 years later) with a contemporary character attempting to form an answer to the same question. 
   Or, at the end of another chapter later in the same book, the historical character is tossed off a dock into the sea, and the following chapter opens with the contemporary character having just leapt into the water on a scuba dive.
   The technique worked well. Readers told me they never felt confused by the transitions. And more than one reader told me that part of the fun of reading Pirate Hunter was wondering what match-cut I would use to make the next temporal shift.
   Cinema uses many techniques that are borrowed from literature. But the match cut is proof that, occasionally, there is a film technique that works equally well in a book.

FRESH ON FRIDAY: Does That Sound Right?

I HAVE SAID BEFORE, and will say again, that it is a mistake to think of writing as recorded thought. The characters of the Roman alphabet combine to form phonemes, so writing is actually recorded sound.
   That being the case, a good way of editing is to listen to your manuscript, rather than merely reading it.
   In days of yore, the best way to do this was to have someone else read it to you or, lacking a volunteer, to read it yourself into a recorder and then listen to it. But today, you can let the computer do the reading for you.
   Here's how I do that:

1. Print out a copy of whatever it is that I am editing.
2. Bring my manuscript up on screen and highlight the part I want to edit.
3. Enable text-to-speech (there are various ways of doing this on various operating systems, but text-to-speech is an accessibility option on most modern computers).
4. Tell the computer to start reading.

   I don't read along with it, not for the first read-through. I just listen. I'm making sure the sound of my writing complements the sense of that part of my novel. I'm also keeping an ear open for clinkers: awkward-sounding sentences or phrases.
   I listen all the way through and then listen again, following along on the page this time. When I hear something that needs changing, I'll pause the reading and mark it on my printed copy. And then, once everything is sounding right, I'll trim and tighten and edit for grammar and punctuation.
   The final step is to listen to the edited piece, to make sure I haven't introduced anything that sounds funny, because funny-sounding writing is bad writing.
   If you haven't made a habit of listening to your work, editing this way can be revelatory. And it's a good habit to get into.
   Because I'll say it one more time: writing is recorded sound.

TUESDAY TIPS: Past Less Than Perfect

PAST PERFECT, WHICH your grandmother may have called "pluperfect," is an English verb form writers use when they are already writing in past tense, but need to refer to something that happened prior to where they are in the story.

   Here's an example:

   Jerry entered his father's study. He had been there only once before, but things were little changed.

   See the "had been?" That's past perfect. And, both grammatically and stylistically, moderate use such as this is fine.

   Now ... what do you do if you are writing in the past tense already and have to jump further back in time for, say, a chapter or so?

   In a case such as that, it is still grammatically acceptable to use past perfect. But stylistically, there are two groups of people who are going to have problems with that.

   Unfortunately, those groups are your editors and your readers. 
   With many people, flocks of "had" in a piece of fiction are the literary equivalent of nails on chalkboards. So what do you do when you have are in past tense and you need to flash back even further in time?

   One alternative is to restructure the story so it doesn't require the flashback.

   Or, if doing that introduces a spoiler or is otherwise unacceptable, you can look for a way to tell the story in plain old past tense, but make sure the reader knows you've moved back in time.

   In my 2008 novel, Wind River, I had just such a situation. It was written in past tense, and one of the characters needed to reveal something that had taken place several years earlier. So I had him begin to tell the story to another character, inserted a chapter break, and then let him continue through that chapter, less the quotation marks.

   It worked; readers got what was going on, and I received not a single word of complaint about the technique.

   There are probably other ways of getting around long streams of past perfect. Think for a while and you'll come up with them.

   After all, that's why we call the process "creative writing."

   

FRESH ON FRIDAY: In a Manner of Speaking

WHEN YOU GET TOGETHER with others to develop an idea, do you 'flush it out" or "flesh it out?"
   Although the proponents of each saying will argue passionately that theirs is the only correct way of putting it, both sayings are actually correct.
   To "flush" something out is to push it from hiding into the light of day, as in, "we sent the dogs into the thicket to flush the fox out."
   And to "flesh" something out is to put meat on the bones.
   But to proponents of "flesh it out," "flush it out" sounds vulgar. And to those who say "flush it out," "flesh it out" is simply macabre.
   Moreover, which one you use is generally a matter of where you were raised. When I worked in Detroit, "flush it out" was all I ever heard. But when I worked in New York City, "flesh it out" was the norm.
   To a writer, differences such as these are valuable, because they jump out at people who are not accustomed to hearing them, and identify the speaker as coming from a different place. And in an era in which television has homogenized all regional accents to the point where everyone sounds as if they are from California, that's a valuable tool.
   For instance, I have friends from New Hampshire who, in addition to still having a discernible regional accent, refer to a shopping cart as a "trolley." Older people in Georgia call every form of soft drink a "coke," whether it's a Coca Cola or not. And in the Midwest there is no such thing as a root-beer float; around there, it's called a "black cow."
   The list goes on. In downstate Illinois, where I'm from, when country people take a ride for no particular reason, they are "blowing off some stink." and when a woman wants to ask another woman if her baby will fuss if picked up, the question will be, "Does your baby make strange?" But I rarely use either of those sayings, as they make me hear banjo music. 
   Dialect can be difficult to write in, and accents are even more so. But by judiciously having one character use one of these sayings, and allowing another character to react accordingly, you can reflect regional differences without resorting to writing that sounds corn-pone or forced.

TUESDAY TIPS: What's in a Font?

THERE MAY BE A FEW holdouts in publishing-world who still require hard-copy queries and manuscripts, but if there are, I have not encountered them. All of the editors and literary agents that I know are fine with receiving their submissions as email attachments; most actually prefer things this way, because digital manuscripts are less of a pain to log, sort, share and store.
   Now, I've said before that most newer novelists obsess way too much over the formatting particulars of the manuscript: margin size, line spacing and so forth. Your goal is effortless legibility, and as long as you achieve that, you're golden. 
   But there is one thing you should give some thought to, and that's what font you are using.
   Why? Because not all computers have the same font library. And font usability may vary depending on which particular printer a computer is using as its default. 
   So even though you may be over the moon about 12-point Myopia Obscuro (no need to Google; I made that one up), unless your recipients have the same font, their computers are going to substitute something else for it, and the substitution might be ghastly. It may even be one of those limited fonts that use plain rectangles as placeholders for things like apostrophes. 
   And you don't want that.
   Now, I know what you're thinking. Adobe PDF was invented just to circumvent this sort of dilemma. But PDF, although acceptable for a one-page attachment, is a bad choice for a multi-page proposal or a manuscript, because it has a longer printer processing time, and you will make no friends at the publishing house if it takes them an hour to print out a single copy of your proposal. 
   And if what you are sending is the draft of a book that is already under contract, what the publisher wants is a document in a ubiquitous word-processing format: i.e., Microsoft Word.
   So if you are sending something to a publisher or an agent, use a font that every computer will have. I use 12-point Times New Roman and recommend you do the same. If you (or the recipient) have a phobia about serifs, then Arial is a good, ubiquitous sans-serif choice. 
   Even then, things such as line breaks may vary slightly on the receiving end, but the manuscript will arrive looking essentially like what you composed on your screen. 
   And that's good, because it's your writing that you want to be outstanding. Your typeface shouldn't stand out at all.