Category Archives: description

July 12, 2016   sharon   description, editing, sample pages, writing  
5

Coco Chanel’s Guide to Sample Pages

If you follow us on our Facebook page (and you should!) you’ve already seen this post from the Penguin Random House blog about what editors want to see in a winning first page. I gave it a read and realized a lot of these things are what agents look for, too, when we’re reading the sample materials that come with queries. We talk about queries a lot on this blog, but your sample pages (we ask for the first 25 pages) are just as important. Even if you have a killer query with a great story concept and impressive writing credits, your writing itself still has to hook me! So I thought I’d talk in a little bit more detail about how to apply the PRH editors’ tips to your writing.

The first suggestion is A Powerful Opener, which is really about the rest of the tips all coming together – the Attention-Grabbing Characters you’ve dreamed up, the Well-Realized World they inhabit, conveyed through your Authentic Voice, which stems from your Unique Perspective.  Often new writers think a powerful opening means packing their most majestic, glorious prose chunk full of with their favorite four-syllable words into the opening lines of the book. And that’s a fair instinct! But overwriting can actually take away from your Authentic Voice. One well-chosen perfectly placed word can actually do more to convey emotion, place, or personality than three or four well-chosen words; one word doing the job on its own carries more of your Voice as a writer than if you gather two or three together to get your point across. Coco Chanel said, “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one piece off,” and the same thing applies to adjectives in your sentences. Take one off!

Another key to a Powerful Opening is understanding where the story starts. I’ve mentioned before on Twitter my pet peeve about manuscripts that start with the character waking up in the morning, or start with the narrator telling me how they thought it was going to be just another ordinary day. Figure out where the stakes of your story appear – your Attention-Grabbing Character’s first conflict or obstacle or unexpected event – and then back up just far enough to show me who the character is and what their world is like.

Is your story about a poisoning at a cocktail party? Don’t begin with your hero making breakfast that morning, or skip to the moment when the victim clutches their throat. Open when your main character gets to the party and sees their frenemy or love interest standing by the chips and salsa. Open with your protagonist running into their love interest at the wine store on the way to the party and inviting them along. Open with your narrator getting lost in the host’s apartment complex and reacting with the rage, despair, or sense of adventure that is key to their personality. These are all ways to show what kind of place they live, what their friends are like, how much money they make or whether they know a lot about wine, all of which are more important to how the story unfolds than describing to me what they look like while they get dressed in the morning. You want me to get invested in your characters – Attention-Grabbing Characters! – as quickly as possible, and I do that more quickly by seeing their lives in action.

I hope this has been a little bit helpful in taking the tips on a great opening page and applying it to your writing. I look forward to seeing your strong queries and irresistible sample pages in my inbox soon! And let me know in the comments what your favorite tip is for starting your manuscript off strong, or if you’ve learned anything else about writing from Coco Chanel.

 

May 24, 2016   mhoogland   advice, chat, description, fantasy, Mike H, opinion, science fiction, setting, style, what we're looking for, writing  
3

What I’m looking for in fantasy

Science fiction and fantasy, more so than other genres, rely on worldbuilding. And worldbuilding is hard. Novels in this genre don’t just need the usual—good writing with complex characters and compelling plot—but they also need to introduce readers to a believable new world, whether that new world is completely foreign or nearly identical to ours with one or two minor changes. So how can authors accomplish this?

Personally, I find that descriptive imagery goes a long, long way to immersing me in a new world. For example, the opening lines of Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World go like this:

“The palace still shook occasionally as the earth rumbled in memory, groaned as if it would deny what had happened. Bars of sunlight cast through rents in the walls made motes of dust glitter where they yet hung in the air. Scorch-marks marred the walls, the floors, the ceilings. Broad black smears crossed the blistered paints and gilt of once-bright murals, soot overlaying crumbling friezes of men and animals which seemed to have attempted to walk before the madness grew quiet.”

There’s a lot to unpack in the those first four sentences, but the main takeaway is this: Jordan doesn’t simply write that the palace had been destroyed, or even that holes in the walls let bars of sunlight in. Instead he paints the reader a picture with strong language and a focus on the smalls details, the little individual pieces that make up the whole. “Rents” and “holes” have two very different connotations, and based on the other word choices and contextual clues, one can reasonably guess that the palace has seen terrible violence recently. Jordan never explicitly says this, but the tone of his writing establishes a certain mood and allows the reader to draw inferences, making him or her an active reader and a willing participant of Jordan’s world.

This excerpt also does a great job demonstrating the old “show don’t tell” adage. Its vivid imagery accomplishes a small measure of worldbuilding by enabling the reader to visualize the world, which is an obvious, yet very crucial, aspect of worldbuilding. If your story takes place on a different planet, I want to be able to imagine what that planet looks like. If your story opens in a palace courtyard, I should be able to see that palace courtyard in my mind’s eye.

None of this should come as groundbreaking, but it has been some time since I’ve been transported to a different world like Jordan’s. And I hope to visit another someday soon. I’d love to hear from our readers. Which worldbuilding techniques do you prefer? Anyone have a favorite author particularly adept at this skill?

November 19, 2014   Miriam   awards, description, fun, Miriam  
3

Bad sex

I’m sure I’ve mentioned here before how much I relish certain kinds of bad writing.  Whether it’s found in queries so incoherent they make you want to request the manuscript they reference to see if the actual pages can possibly be as gawdawful (I do not recommend this as a tactic for getting your foot in the door), a passage so ripe in an otherwise well written novel that you question everything you ever believed about the author’s talent, or a subject so tricky that even otherwise skillful writers royally muck it up time and again when attempting to capture it in simple, lucid prose.

Sex is one of those subjects that turn good and even great authors into flailing amateurs.  It’s so hard to depict well that there should be dedicated writing courses teaching young MFA candidates how not to  screw it up (no pun intended).

That said, bad sex writing is a particularly fun subset of bad writing, and the 22nd Bad Sex in Fiction Awards once again celebrate that badness.  So, wander on over to the Literary Review for a peek at the nominees for “Britain’s Most Dreaded Literary Prize.”

Can you come up with anything similarly cringeworthy?

August 02, 2013   Rachel   characters, description, Rachel S., YA  
0

Series of friends

Though if I were to encounter them now, I would be annoyed and bored to tears, the reliability and formulaic construction of most of the book series’ I read growing up were some of the things that kept me coming back for more. There was comfort in the set-up, the fact that somewhere in the first couple chapters of a Baby-Sitters Club, Sweet Valley or Nancy Drew book there was going to be a description of Claudia Kishi’s bedroom with candy hidden all over it, Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield’s blue-green eyes and long blonde hair or Nancy Drew’s titian hair and blue Mustang convertible.

The characters were so set in their ways that you knew you could count on them. There was a certain style, demeanor and personality that you could immediately attribute to each one, and to an eleven-year-old girl, that really made each of them feel familiar and more like friends than products of a factory of ghostwriters pumping out a book a month (and believe you me, if there wasn’t a new one of each on the shelves each month there was a really disappointed little Rachel scrutinizing that shelf just one more time).

Not only are the descriptions repetitive for the sake of connecting the books together, they are detailed. There could be no mistaking the outfits or physical features of any of the main players, which, it turns out, I have more fun with now than I ever did then. When Buzzfeed posted this article today detailing some of the favorites of the YA series world (okay, plus Harriet the Spy) I couldn’t help but giggle at the lengthy, perfect descriptions. However excessive seeming, I’d like to think they were and still are necessary to evoke the same connection to the characters and tone of the series as a whole.

An older blog, What Claudia Wore is another gem, and I had to scramble to find it today to present it to you. Paragraph-long depictions of Claudia’s zaniest outfits are posted, and though I remember being envious of her “funky” and “cool” style, I’ll admit that it was Dawn who I always wanted to be the most. A blog for her outfits would be far less entertaining, alas, but does lead me to my final thought on the subject.

The uniformity in style and personality left no room for interpretation, which, I think, works really well in the books’ favors and why they became as popular as they did. The girl you pictured in your head was the exact same as the girl your friend pictured, too. It was always so easy then to definitively say which babysitter, which Wakefield twin you not only wanted to be, but were (especially important since there are few people more self-involved than teenage girls).

I always went with Dawn and Elizabeth, but that’s just me.

September 16, 2011   Rachel   description, fiction, food, Rachel S.  
11

Turkish delight isn’t very good in real life.

I didn’t eat breakfast this morning (not unusual) and am spending my morning glumly munching on broken pieces of vaguely stale sourdough pretzels left at the bottom of a giant tub in the office kitchen (also not unusual). Fantasizing about all the food I would like to be eating, I remembered this post I read on The Hairpin the other month detailing a variety of fictional foods that everyone always muses upon wanting in real life. While it’s easy for a food to appear appetizing in a movie (strangely, even cartoon meals get the mouth watering on occasion), literary descriptions of what a character eats can be just as powerful, despite the lack of visual aid.

The article’s authors list Edmund Pevensie’s Turkish delight, Anne Shirley’s cordial and Harry Potter’s Butterbeer among their desired fictional treats, and I will attest to desperately wanting all of them at some point in my life as well. Often times, the food I read about is your normal, every day sort of meal, but the context of the story or the way the author words the description are often enough to make me look up from my book for a minute and wish really hard that I was eating the same. I recently read Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses for the first time, and for some reason, every single time those characters sat down to eat, I wanted everything. It was never all that special—often a tortilla or steak and potatoes, and Mr. McCarthy is never one for the flowery language, but mixed with all the hard work, gruff talk and horse wrangling that was going on, the meals always seemed so deserved and satisfying that I never wanted a plate of eggs so badly.

Food is so universal that in describing it, a writer has the advantage of not really needing to go very far—the mere mention of a flavor or ingredient and the reader’s own sense memory will insert emotion and taste into the words without much help. How then, does a simple phrasing turn the response from, “oh, I suppose that sounds nice” to an intense desire for the described food, so much so that it lingers years after the book has been read and finished? I still think about the muffins Jack and Algernon argue over in The Importance of Being Earnest and the tomato sandwiches Harriet M. Welsch was so fond of in Harriet the Spy and no real-life version of these relatively simple foods will ever compare.

What are your literary gastronomic weaknesses? Are there any foods you’ve gone out of your way to try simply because of the way a books described the taste?

April 08, 2011   Rachel   description, Rachel S., reading  
8

So good it makes me sick.

I’ll admit right up front that I am a very squeamish person. Blood and guts and gore will never appeal to me, in any kind of format—I’ve fainted in doctor’s offices and classrooms when presented with surgical inevitabilities and graphic videos. It’s entirely embarrassing, but try as I might to suck it up or focus on something else entirely, it doesn’t always work, and then there I am on the floor, disoriented, with someone’s face stuck right up in mine frantically wondering whether I’ve died or whatever other sorts of things people just fall over for.

I would have been better suited to the Victorian age, smelling salts in hand at all times.

I’ve grown used to these possibilities and thus steer clear of the more literal scenes in medical television shows and documentaries, and will timidly ask a person to stop talking about a particularly gruesome operation or accident. However, this morning, for the first time, I had to close the book I was reading and take a few deep breaths before opening it up again. There had been no warning, and I suppose the diseases and hospital procedures that were being described weren’t especially horrible, but they were written so darn well that the reality was right there, in clear picture in my mind. The usual wave of nausea followed by blurred vision and a strange floating feeling in my brain came over me. I tried to ignore it, frustrated with myself, because I was really enjoying the story, but I was also getting dangerously close to falling off my chair and probably knocking coffee all over the place in the middle of a fairly bustling café early in the morning, so I did the responsible thing and stopped reading for a moment. Afterward, better able to handle the words with this bit of preparation, I proceeded cautiously, feeling only a little bit sick until all talk of it had passed.

Usually, good writing takes a physical toll only in the form of tears or laughter, and while I’m wholly impressed at this new level of visceral narrative, perhaps a personal disclaimer on the front cover of: “RACHEL. PLEASE DO NOT READ OR PERHAPS ONLY SKIM PAGES 28-34 AND ALSO PAGES 49-52. THIS IS FOR YOUR HEALTH. THANK YOU.” would have been helpful.

In any case, this got me thinking about how much a novel, or I suppose, any written account, can affect us on such a human level. Music, film, theater and art of course have all been noted to do the same in many cases, but I feel that literature has often been neglected in its profound effect on the physical being. Perhaps because it’s almost fully a private enjoyment? I don’t know the answer to that one, and I don’t really expect anyone to be able to explain it, but I do ask if you have had a similar experience with a piece of writing. A physical manifestation of a usually solely mental or emotional reaction to a book—has this ever happened to you?