Category: Editing Rant

Other Cool Blogs: Writers of the Future 5/24/2017

Erin Penn

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

David Farland explains why some stories don’t make the cut in the Writers of the Future competition. His ten points match many of my points for rejecting a manuscript.

#5. A Major Element is Left Out.

I love the breakdown of elements needed to create a story: character, setting, conflict, theme, and treatment. Miss any one of these, and the manuscript won’t hold together. The example he gives is the white box treatment to setting, but any element missing destroys the cohesion of the story.

#7. There Simply isn’t a Story.

When I worked on an anthology, many of our submissions were character descriptions. Who the person was, their personality traits, what they have done. Like describing a co-worker to a new person, or a character to a roleplaying dungeon master,

#10. Chronological order flow.

Have I done an Editing Rant on this yet? If not, I should have.

“Carrie dressed in her best silk blouse and skirt for her date, after spending the afternoon shaving her legs and taking a shower, hoping it wouldn’t be too much.” – Did you get whiplash on that? Everything is reverse of the actual chronological order. A better write would be “After spending the afternoon prepping for her date by showering and then shaving her legs, Carrie dressed in her best silk blouse and skirt combo, hoping it wouldn’t be too much.”

Backtracking during a statement halts a narrative dead in the water. Don’t do it. Mr. Farland describes the issue very well in his article.

All of David Farland’s 10 Points to Avoid in Writing Short Fiction (5/24/2017) can be found here: https://www.writersofthefuture.com/dave-farlands-10-points-to-avoid/

Editing Rant: Transitions

Erin Penn

Image courtesy of ddpavumba at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This rant is based on a book I picked up while free on Kindle, and I am still annoyed at the time it took to read this.

It had absolutely no transitions. The characters suddenly transported from room to room.

Don’t want to deal with the woman being pregnant – put her to sleep with drugs (oh, but for the birth, the medical-center can’t give painkillers?). Skip to the next scene, skip to the next emotional highlight, skip, skip, skip to the end. The whole thing felt like it was on fast forward. 

No transitions and as boring as fast forwarding through a TV show.

While walking through doors, climbing into cars, and traveling between places is also boring, transitions are needed to let the reader know locations changed, time passed, and emotions may have calmed (or ramped up). Keep the transitions short. No need to bury the reader in the mundane, especially if writing a flash or short story, but do include an “end scene” moment and a “begin scene” moment which tie the two scenes together.

In An Infidelity of Hearts (11/24/2019), I have two scene transitions to execute.

The first between the table and the cage – which is done with a combination of the woman announcing she was leaving and draining her drink and a sharp scene break with “***” and she is suddenly at the cage. If I had closed the scene after she laid her cards down, winning the trick, but before she announced she was cashing out, that jump would have been too abrupt. See how it reads when I remove the transitional words between the scenes.

Smiling at the professional, she laid down her cards one-by-one. Nine, ten, page, jack, and finally queen high. All of the same suit, as red as her gown. Nicknamed an Infidelity of Hearts on this planet, as the king had been replaced by the jack and page in the queen’s chambers, spread before her.

***

The cage transferred her winnings back to the account where the money started, after Carin told them which tips to give to the tables she had worked that night.

The second transition is between leaving the club and waking up captured. It is a mashup transition, serving several purposes: a fast forward over the boring (walking alone and waiting to be jumped), providing backstory (why she actually was there), and entering the next scene (where she woke up).

I could have done the table to cage to walk to waking up without transitions, but that hurky-jerky story would not have been a pleasant read.

WRITING EXERCISE: Look at your present work-in-progress (WIP) and examine one of your transition moments. Why do you need it and what happens when you remove it? Is it a long transition, and does it serve more than one purpose?

Editing Rant: Prologue Use

Erin Penn

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Oh, good grief.

Why do I have a prologue for a short story? No – oh, no – why are there prologues for three short stories in this collection someone is trying to sell my publisher – and the fourth short story has a flashback? Do you not understand how short stories work? …. What prologues are for?

I get it. Fantasies have prologues, but not.every.single.time. Especially in a short format where laser focus is needed. Just because (fill in the blank, famous-and-now-dead high fantasy author) used prologues back in their day, does not mean you get to use them now.

Well, this one is an easy decision. My publisher hates prologues. Unless there is a great reason to have it – and I have seen them used properly once in a hundred uses – the submission is a reject. Only six more to read today. (Yes, I want to accept submissions, but I have two slots this year and a hundred submissions. Bad prologues go into the “no” pile.)

For the most part, what I was seeing are prologues used as a big info backstory dumps for lazy writers who can’t figure out how to integrate backstory into the narration (I’ve touched on how to do backstory integration elsewhere). That said, if done right, providing a hint to the story which raises questions instead of just answering questions which haven’t been asked yet, prologues are useful. One example I read was a beautiful pre-story explaining something that affected every decision the point-of-view (POV) character made, but she did not know how this childhood event changed her as a person. The reader sees it, but the POV character doesn’t know and cannot know and therefore cannot share it in the primary narration.

Another good use of prologues is in murder mysteries where you meet the victim and witness the event of the murder before the detective character shows up. In both this case and the previous case, the camera through which we are witlessness the main story does not have access to the information. Also in both cases, the prologue was written like part of the story – action-oriented. In the info dump case, the long history of everything which went before on the fantasy world told by a historian is BORING, and often irrelevant to the story. I love worldbuilding, but not reading it dry. I didn’t like dates and places in history class when I was in school, and I don’t like them now. I do love history though and have been part of a recreation hands-on group for years.

So don’t do info dumps – not for prologues and certainly not in short stories. You might need to write them up during the first draft, but remove them and set them aside during the second draft.

I’ll close with an exchange I had with some editors.

***

Erin Penn: I’ve never realized just how bad prolog-itis is until I started reading slush.

Editor One: LOL

Editor Two: It is an epidemic.

Erin Penn: Affecting over 50% of the population.

Editor Two: We need a vaccine.

Editor Three: It’s particularly virulent in fantasy authors…

Editor Four: And like most bugbears of writing, the infestation of bad ones ruin the possibility for a really good one. Because it is possible to have a good prologue, but almost nobody does.

People want to dump all that exposition in early so they don’t have to worry about it any more – they want the Star Wars opening crawl through space. The thing is, if they can just restrain themselves, they DON’T have to worry about it. If the story matches the exposition, the exposition will come out as the story unfolds.

Erin Penn: Stealing for a some-day blog post!