PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

Looks like blogging is becoming increasingly popular. Message today from the folks at Blogger that my comments function on BlogOut! was suspended. More users than available diskspace. Hmm. Anyway, I made the switch to SquawkBox (after leaving a help! message on RedHead's board). But I figured it out. That's the good thing about blogging. Any numb-skull (like me) can figure it out. But I'm saddened that all of my messages from the very kind folks who take time to read my journal are now gone. How to retrieve it? That's the mystery. So if anyone can help .... I'd sho' appreciate it.

Now, onto .......

A CAUTIONARY TALE .... for Writers

If you happen to be writing a novel and ever want to just pause for the cause and find out what you really know about your story just engage in writing a synopsis and follow that up with an outline. If you are new to the game be prepared for a royal mental ass-kicking. I'm talking that Spanish Harlem, Vaseline-on-your-face, girl hold my earrings.....and my bracelet too....oh and my keys too..... type of beat down. I'm talking ass-kicking, throw down, go get your crew and be back here at nine, when the street lights come on type of ass kicking. It ain't pretty.

You see, I decided that before I engage in rewrites it might be necessary to do my synopsis so that I can get this thing out the door no sooner than the rewrites are done. Also, I wanted to be sure that I had my capsule statement down --- (there's a theory that if you can't describe what your novel is about in two sentences or less than you DON'T KNOW) --- and I wanted to be clear about this whole plot. Okay, so after seven rewrites on that synopsis, I've got the entire plot down in a quite engaging way I think. Okay. So then I say to myself, Self: we need to do an outline. Chapter by Chapter. Scene by Scene. And Self says: Cool. I'm down.

Well.

What makes a novel engaging, memorable, worth-reading, good is this: scenes that are necessary to the story, scenes that progress logically, scenes that foreshadow what is to come in the near future, scenes that logically keep pace with the charachters (by that I mean, don't have your charachter acting/speaking in one way in chapter 2 and another way in chapter 13 -- keep charachters consistent in every aspect of their behavior and don't do anything that is out of charachter for that person); scenes that are active and telling in detail (not a whole chapter worth of boring exposition that has .0001% to do with the story). No one, least of all me, wants to put $24.95 down on the counter for a book that isn't well plotted OR is so damn predictable you can set the time on your clock by how long it'll take you to read it. Anyone who tells me "Oh, that book was so good, I read it in one night," is telling me, in essence, "Don't buy that book, don't waste your time." It took me the longest time to get through The Prisoner's Wife. Why? Not because I'm a slow reader but because I'm a lover of language. And ashe bandele has mad skill when it comes to language. The language is so lyrical you want to pause for the cause, turn back and read a page or two over again. Not only that, the story is engaging. I didn't read Their Eyes Were Watching God in one day. Why? Cause Zora had an acute sense of what it took to tell a story and the charachters were so special, so carefully drawn, you couldn't possibly read that story in one day. She had a way of offering up their dialect without it being insulting or ignorant.

The other thing about outlining is it helps you in the areas of Pacing and Progression. Pacing is different from progression. Here's how Noah Lukeman, author of The First Five Pages differentiates: "Pacing is the measurement of how quickly you go from Point A to Point B. Progression asks: Is there a point B? Did you arrive anywhere? Readers need to feel a sense of progression, they need to feel like they're accomplishing something, like there's a point to all this. It's possible to have gpod pacing and poor progression. It's like flying a high-speed jet that circles the globe but lets you off where you started: the pace was great, but where did you go?"

So what I'm saying is, the outline is a very trick thing. It's the meat of your story. It is: here's what's going to happen, scene by scene. And here's where you've got to know how to have an eye of God and a functioning red pen. Because no matter how much you may like a scene, no matter how good you felt when you were sitting on the edge of the beach beneath a tangerine-pink sky with seagulls overhead --- if it ain't serving the story it's got to go and you've got to put something in it's place.

Well, I've had some scenes that had to be cut. And I've had to put on my God robe and say, okay I've got to give you two people an argument here in order to foreshadow what's to come over here. I've had take my protagonist out of his office and put him downtown in therapy if we are to know his flaws early on. (Oh, and that's another thing: stories that are memorable are those in which we feel immediate connection or disconnection to a charachter. We need to know early on just what this person is about. Don't be trying to bait people and have them hold out until chapter four. It won't work. Your book will wind up on someone's overstock shelf. People don't want to play games. They want to read a good story and they want to know early on just who and what this story is about). I've had to move around my exposition. Now, there's an argument that you should steer clear of exposition as much as possible, especially in the beginning. I don't buy that. You have to first do what's right for the story. I've read plenty of novels that open up with the first chapter being 90% exposition (some of Toni Morrison's works). I think that moviegoers want immediate action and in film that is definately necessary. But movies and novels are two different animals. I would argue, however, that no-one wants to read exposition that digresses. No want wants exposition that doesn't serve the story. No one wants endless exposition. So I think if there needs to be exposition then it does need to be carefully placed, preferably between active scenes.

So anyway, I've finished outlining Part One (Book 1) and now I'm onto Book 2 where the plot begins to thicken. I think I've got it down. What I've done is I've typed out the whole outline, shrunk it to an 8 size font and stuck it onto index cards. Scene by scene. Also, beneath each scene, I have GOAL: _____. My reason for this is simple: every scene must have a goal and that's where progression comes into play. Fulfilling each goal will ensure progression. If the goal in Chapter One Scene Two is to show that Mr. Jones has stolen money, then somewhere down the line in that story I'm going to need to see the outcome of his stealing. Was he caught? Punished? How did he get caught? What did he learn if anything? So anyhow, I'm going to spread them all on the floor to see if they are logical, foreshadowing .... check the pacing and the progression and all the other things I mentioned.

I also got online and ordered the JUNG book. Here's the part that made me decide I needed to own this book:

What distinguishes the Jungian approach to developmental psychology from virtually all others is the idea that even in old age we are growing towards realization of our full potential....For Jung, aging was not a process of inexorable decline but a time for the progressive refinement of what is essential. 'The decisive question for man is: is he related to something infinite or not?'

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome,' he wrote. 'The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away -- an ephemeral apparition ... Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom that passes. The rhizome remains.' The great secret is to embody something essential in our lives. Then, undefeated by age, we can proceed with dignity and meaning, and, as the end appraoches, be ready to 'die with life.' For the goal of ald age is not senility, but wisdom.

What I am hoping to do in this outline and in this novel is to show the core humanity, the rhizome of these charachters and then show how they change, how they find the courage to change, how change is indeed possible and necessary for the progression of life.

So, back to the drawing board and more reading.

Be well folks. Be Love(d).
---ANGEL