HOW TO OVERCOME TRICKY GRAMMAR

I trust that you all know the difference between who and whom, and I trust that typos are the only reason you use the wrong it’s. It happens to the best of us. For most writers, if you can just maintain your focus (perhaps with caffeine and frequent breaks), you’ll get the basics right. The following problems, however, may have you scrambling for a refresher.

1. Half can be both singular and plural.

Typically, subjects and verbs agree: If the subject is singular, the verb is singular. If the subject is plural, the verb is plural. Easy peasy. However, sentences that start with half don’t follow this rule.
Half alone is singular: My half of the pizza is pepperoni. Yet although half is the subject in a sentence such as Half of the pizzas are missing, we use a plural verb because of something called notional agreement. It simply means that although half is singular, half of the pizzas has a notion of being plural, so you use a plural verb. Follow this rule when half is the subject of a sentence: If half is followed by a singular noun, use a singular verb. If half is followed by a plural noun, use a plural verb. Half of the pepperoni is ruined, but half of the tomatoes are missing.
Compound words that start with half are quirky too. They can be open, closed or hyphenated (e.g., half note, halfhearted, half-baked). There’s no rule that applies across the board, so you’ll have to check a dictionary.

2. Companies are not exactly people.

Companies are entities, but they are run by men and women, so you could make an argument for referring to a company as who, particularly since U.S. courts have ruled that companies are people in most legal senses. Nevertheless, the standard style is to refer to a company as an entity and use the pronouns it and that: We want to buy stock in a company that makes hot air balloons.
If you want to highlight that people in the company are behind some action or decision, name them and use who: Floating Baskets was driven to bankruptcy by its senior directors, who took too many expensive Alaskan joyrides.

3. American is a flawed term.

American is the only single word we have to refer to citizens of the United States of America (U.S.-icans?), but technically, an American is anyone who lives in North America, Central America or South America.
In the U.S. we, the people, have been calling ourselves Americans since before our country was even founded (as have our detractors). Although all people of the American continents are actually Americans, most readers in the U.S. and Europe assume that an American is a U.S. citizen, since that is how the word is most commonly used.
Despite its failings, use American to refer to a citizen of the United States of America. No better term exists. Feel free to feel guilty.

4. The word dilemma can be, well, a dilemma.

The di- prefix in dilemma means “two” or “double,” which lends support to the idea that dilemma should be used only to describe a choice between two alternatives. The Associated Press Stylebook and Garner’s Modern American Usage not only support that limitation, but go further, saying that dilemma should be used only for a choice between two unpleasant options.
Nevertheless, Garner also notes that other uses are “ubiquitous.” Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage and The Columbia Guide to Standard American English say it’s fine to use dilemma to describe any serious predicament, and The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style takes an intermediate position. What’s a writer to do? (Is it a dilemma?)
Unless you’re writing for a publication that requires you to follow a style guide that limits dilemma to a choice between two bad options, it’s not absolutely wrong to use dilemma to describe a difficult problem, even when alternatives aren’t involved, or to use dilemma to describe a difficult choice between pleasant options. Still, you’ll seem most clever when you use dilemma to describe a choice between two bad options. In other instances, before using dilemma, ask yourself if another word, such as problem, would work better.
Also, a cursory search of the Internet reveals that lots of people are confounded by the spelling of dilemma. Many were taught to spell it wrong. In fact, I was taught to spell it dilemna in school, and when I got older and checked a dictionary, I was shocked to find that the word is spelled dilemma. Further, the only correct spelling is dilemma. It’s not as if dilemna is a substandard variant or regional spelling. Dictionaries often note alternative spellings and sometimes even nonstandard spellings, but dilemna doesn’t even show up that way. As far as I can tell, nobody knows why so many teachers got it wrong. Perhaps a textbook typo is to blame.

5. Earth isn’t treated like the names of other planets.

In English, the general rule is that we capitalize the formal names of things and places (e.g., Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco), so we capitalize the names of other planets: Jupiter, Mars and so on. For some unknown reason, however, we treat earth differently. Sometimes it’s capitalized and sometimes it’s lowercase, and there doesn’t seem to be a hard-and-fast rule.
Typically, when earth is preceded by the, it’s lowercase, and when earth is listed with the names of the other planets, it’s capitalized—but you can find exceptions to even these patterns. (Of course, when we’re just using earth as another word for dirt, it’s always lowercase.)
If you’re a writer, check your publication’s style guide to see what it recommends. If you’re writing for yourself, the most important thing is to be consistent—so just pick a capitalization style and stay with it.

6. Gone missing might be annoying, but it isn’t wrong.

Gone missing is a Briticism that has made its way to the U.S., where reporters use it mostly to describe missing persons. Although journalists and newscasters seem to love gone missing, it’s easy to find vocal readers and viewers who hate it.
Haters argue that a person must go to a location, and missing isn’t a place, and that an inanimate object can’t go missing because it can’t take action alone—but English has never been so literal. In a tight labor market, jobs can go begging (be unfilled), for example, even though begging is not a location and jobs can’t take action. Other peevers suggest that gone missing necessitates an action on the part of the person or item that has vanished. Again, we have parallels that undermine the argument: Milk goes bad, for example, without taking any action on its own.
Gone missing is not wrong. The Oxford English Dictionary places it in the same category as the phrase go native, as in, We had high hopes for our new senator, but after he was in Washington a few months, he went native (i.e., adopted the same habits and attitudes as people who’ve been there a long time).
Even if you hate gone missing, you can’t legitimately criticize it as grammatically incorrect. But on the flip side, if you’re a fan of the phrase, be aware that it annoys enough readers that you should think twice before using it in your writing.
7. Kinds is always plural.
You have one kind of peanut butter but three kinds of jelly. Use the singular (kind) when you have one of something, and the plural (kinds) when you have more. Since these and those indicate multiple things, you have to use a plural: kinds. These kinds of situations always perplex me. (These kind is wrong.)
Watch out for the problem. Even though it seems straightforward, good writers often get it wrong.

8. Until is ambiguous.

If you have until March 4 to submit an entry in the National Grammar Day video contest, does that mean you can still turn it in on March 4, or is March 3 the last acceptable day? Unfortunately, the word until doesn’t make the meaning clear. People can interpret it different ways.
One of the most stress-inducing deadlines is the annual tax filing cutoff for the Internal Revenue Service, which makes a point to specify that the April 15 filing deadline includes April 15. It also refers to April 15 as a due date, not a deadline.
If you’re following instructions, don’t assume until means through. Turn in your item a day early or get clarification. And if you’re writing instructions, make them clear by using a word such as through or stating a specific day and time. The IRS doesn’t rely on an ambiguous word such as until, and neither should you.

9. Next is also ambiguous.

Just like until, next is ambiguous: Some people think next Wednesday means the next Wednesday that will occur, and other people think next Wednesday means the Wednesday in the next week, regardless of what day it is now. The sitcom Seinfeld even did a scene in which Jerry and Sid argued about the meaning of next Wednesday versus this Wednesday.
There is no definitive meaning for next Wednesday, so you should avoid using next to modify a day of the week. Be more specific in your writing.

10. The plurals of abbreviations aren’t always logical.

Acronyms are abbreviations that are pronounced as words (NASA), and initialisms are abbreviations for which you say each letter (FBI).
Even though it doesn’t make perfect sense, you make initialisms and acronyms plural by adding an s to the end no matter what part would be plural if you wrote out the whole thing. Therefore, even though you would write runs batted in, the plural is RBIs.
In the past, some publications used apostrophes to make acronyms and initialisms plural, so until a few years ago, it was common to see something like RBI’s or CD’s in The New York Times. But these days, the major style guides recommend omitting the apostrophe.

11. They and their may soon be acceptable singular pronouns.

English has a big, gaping hole: There’s no pronoun to describe a person when we don’t know the sex. (I’ve tried it with babies, and it hasn’t gone over well!) In days gone by, he was acceptable as a generic pronoun, but today it’s not. All major style guides recommend against it.
To fill the gap, many people consciously or subconsciously use they, as in, Tell the next caller they win a car. Doing so is allowed by some current style guides and actually has a longer history than most people realize. Even Jane Austen did it. For example, here’s a quotation from Mansfield Park in which Austen pairs a plural pronoun (their) with a singular antecedent (each):

Everybody around her was gay and busy, prosperous and important; each had their object of interest, their part, their dress, their favourite scene, their friends and confederates: All were finding employment in consultations and comparisons, or diversion in the playful conceits they suggested.

Although many people consider using they as a singular pronoun wrong, I suspect many of those same people use it that way in casual conversation without even realizing it, and that the singular they will become fully acceptable within the next 50 years.
Today, using they as a singular pronoun borders on acceptable. You can choose to do it if you aren’t bound to follow a style guide that opposes it, but be prepared to defend yourself. The safer route (when you can’t           just rewrite the sentence to make the subject plural) is to use he or she, or to switch between he and she (which you may have noticed is the style followed by this very magazine).
When switching between he and she, however, make sure you separate the examples enough so that you don’t confuse your readers. (Weren’t we just talking about a woman?) Also, I’ve recently started getting complaints from men who’ve noticed that writers switching between he and she tend to use he for the bad guys and she for the heroes. If you’re going to switch back and forth, give us some vixen ax murderers and hunky human-rights activists every once in a while.

12. Possessives of possessives can get messy.

When you have to make a possessive name possessive, you’re technically supposed to add another possessive marker to the end:

Kohl’s’s earnings were up last quarter. (The Chicago Manual of Style possessive style)
Kohl’s’ earnings were up last quarter. (The Associated Press Stylebook possessive style)

Avoid these kinds of sentences, though. They may be technically correct, but they look horrible. You can usually rewrite the sentence to make it better:
Kohl’s reported higher earnings last quarter.

13. Apostrophes can occasionally signify plurals.

We all cringe when we see a greengrocer’s apostrophe (banana’s $0.99), but did you know that in a few uncommon instances, we do use apostrophes to make things plural? In most cases, the apostrophe helps avoid confusion; single letters are one example. The first apostrophe in Dot your i’s and cross your t’s helps readers distinguish between multiple copies of the letter i and the word is. A less logical example is the phrase do’s and don’ts. Different style guides recommend different spellings (dos and don’ts, do’s and don’ts, and do’s and don’t’s). When writers use an apostrophe to make do plural but not to make don’t plural, the only reason for the apostrophe is to provide visual balance. Yet, it’s allowed.

According to Writer's Digest

How to Create Powerful Imagery in Your Writing

We’ve heard the old montage “Show, don’t tell” so many times that it’s become stale–and what does it mean, anyway? It’s an easy phrase to utter, but how do you achieve resonant, meaningful description that will make your words come alive? This simple checklist, from The Writer’s Little Helper by James V. Smith, Jr., is a concise list of best practices for creating rich imagery that will have your readers clamoring for more.

• Paint the image in small bites. Never stop your story to describe. Keep it going, incorporating vivid images, enlarging the action, and putting the dialogue in context.

A sponge carpet of pine needles covered the trail. It cushioned their soles and absorbed the sounds of their footsteps.
Rhonda stopped short and whispered, “Something’s coming. There. To the right. A bear?”

• Incorporate images into action. Suppose I had written:

A million years of discarded pine needles lay on the forest floor, carpeting the trail.
That’s description. Static. The author’s talking. Can you hear him reading from an encyclopedia? The difference in the first version is tying their walking to soundless footsteps. This clears the way for Rhonda to hear and see.
She pointed at a looming hulk, for all the good that pointing would do in the ink of night.
Bill grasped her arm. “No. It couldn’t be.”
But the crashing of brush told them it could.
“Yes. Get up a tree.”

• See through the character’s eyes. Hear through her ears. When you can, use the character’s senses instead of the author’s. It’s called character point of view.

She felt her pulse both in her throat and under the grip of that hand of his crushing her forearm. His breath. She heard it in short, chattering bursts. She smelled it, too. Fear stunk.

• Use the tiny but telling detail.

She tore free of his grip and leaped off the trail. A spider’s web tugged at her face. Any other time she would have screamed. She ran into a tree, a rough pine bough slapped her breasts, and needles stabbed at her eyes. Any other time she would have cursed.
The spider’s web. Ever ran into one?

• Choose action-bearing verbs. Cushioned, absorbed, stopped, whispered, pointed, grasped, tore, leaped, tugged, screamed, ran, slapped, stabbed, cursed. These words do so much more than say what is. They indicate first fear, then panic.
• Choose action-bearing non-verbs. Looming is a verb form used as an adjective. Crashing is used as a noun.
• Invent fresh viewpoints.

She climbed blindly. And so quickly. Like a ladder. That was scary. If she could scale this pine so easily, couldn’t the bear climb it, too?
She drove her head into a branch. But the sound of crying wasn’t hers.
“Help. It’s got me.”
Bill. Oh, God, Bill.
The bear had him. Still she climbed, seeing nothing but sparklers of pain in her head.
He shrieked at her from the dark below.
She did not—could not—respond.
This is the viewpoint of a woman in panic and pain. When she looks into the darkness, she sees only sparklers. Clearly, she’s so frightened, she’s only trying to save herself.

• Create an image without saying so.

The pine limbs now bent like those of a Christmas tree. A fresh breeze chilled her skin.
“Bill,” she whispered. “Speak to me, for God’s sake, speak to me, Bill.”
But he did not. All she could hear was snorting and thrashing. She put a hand to her mouth. She thought she might scream but nothing came out of her mouth. Fear of attracting the bear kept her quiet. The pitch on her hand glued her lips shut.
And, yes, the shame. That silenced her, too.
The thin limbs bending and the fresh breeze tells us Rhonda has climbed high into the tree. The chill tells us she’s been sweating. And the pitch, though she and we didn’t notice it in the climbing, is there on her hands and face.

According to Writer's Digest. 

THRILLER WRITER

STEPS TO STARTING A THRILLER

Want to write a thriller, but stuck on the beginning? Novelist Daniel Palmer uses his own experience and that of his father (bestseller Michael Palmer) and lays out the essentials to get you on your way.

Step 1. Choose your rhino.

Michael Palmer once was asked to describe writing a book. His answer? Writing a book is like following a recipe for rhinoceros stew. The first step of which is to find the rhino—which isn’t your plot, character or hook. It’s that huge idea that defines the book, such as a deadly virus. Daniel’s latest rhino was identity theft.

Step 2. Formulate the What-If question.

Daniel said to think of this essentially as your elevator pitch—that pithy, snappy description of your book you should have at the ready should you be stuck in an elevator with an agent or editor. Cap it at two sentences, 25 words. It needs to be as tight as possible, and it shouldn’t delve into things like characters or plot twists. “I spend days doing those two sentences, and I would urge you to do the same with yours,” Daniel said.
One What-If example from Michael’s work: What if everybody involved in a surgery six years ago is being murdered one by one?

Step 3. Answer the What-If question.

The answer to this pivotal question is what’s known as the MacGuffin: the reason people think they’re reading the book. (MacGuffins can be a confusing subject, but they’re key.) Ultimately, Daniel said the answer is that it doesn’t matter—people read to the end of a book for the characters. But you need something to keep them flipping pages. The MacGuffin is simply that tool that gets them to stay with the characters.
Daniel said when you have the answer to your What-If, you should file it away and forget about it for a while. If you focus solely on the MacGuffin, your book will be plot-heavy and bogged down by it, and you’ll have lost your readers.

Step 4. Figure out who you’re going to write about.

“You’re looking for your character who’s got the absolute most at stake, and that’s the person who you want your story to be about.” Daniel said to develop your arc as they go along, chasing the MacGuffin, and they’ll change and grow.

BONUS: Step 5. Write on.

Daniel likes to think of plot as a “cannibal’s stew”—a simmering cauldron into which you drop your character in. Once he’s inside, it boils. But you don’t have your character simply jump out—you slam a lid on the cauldron and nail it shut so your character has to figure out how to survive the plot.

Article from Writer's Digest

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SIMPLE WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER

SIMPLE WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER

1. Nix the adjectives.

“Treat adverbs like cloves of garlic,” Coulter said. “A few go a long way.” Moreover, listen to the way your prose sounds—“If you wouldn’t say something aloud, then don’t write it. All you’ve got to do is read it aloud, and therein lies the truth.” Coulter added that nothing any of us write is set in stone—you’re allowed to tear up the bad stuff, and start anew.

2. Avoid other words for “said,” and avoid redundancies.

Cut “She joked.” “He quipped.” “Damn you to hell, he yelled furiously.” As Coulter said, it’s like writing, “I’m sorry, he apologized.” You don’t need all the excess word fat. You want to be as straightforward as possible. Coulter said every time you use a substitute for “said,” the reader blinks—and you’ve pulled him out of the scene. Instead, you want constant forward motion. “Never let him escape with weak writing. … You’ve got to trust yourself that what the characters say will indicate clearly what they’re thinking and feeling.”

3. Excise the exclamation marks.

In Coulter’s opinion, you’re allowed three per book. Ditch the rest. Good prose shouldn’t require them, except in rare cases. “Three is all you get, so use them wisely.”

4. Forget the euphemisms.

Blue orbs for eyes? Nope. Coulter said to make your prose nuanced—you want the perfect word to convey your exact meaning, and you don’t want your readers to get stalled out for even a millisecond.

5. Don’t fall into stereotypes.

“Make your characters unique and true to themselves”—especially bad guys. “Make them real.” And concerning physical appearance, make your characters stunning knockouts only if that’s a key factor in how fellow characters see them. Coulter once gave a character a broken nose to prevent him from being too handsome. “Have a very good reason for whatever you do.” And give characters some sort of “tag,” some quirk that will make them real.

6. Use caution in sex scenes.

They’re difficult to pull off. Coulter’s advice: “Do not, on pain of death, do nitty gritty body parts.” “And do not overwrite.” “Don’t use dialogue that would make the reader barf.” Make the scenes funny and fun.

7. Avoid endless introspection.

Pacing is key, Coulter said. And too much introspection kills pacing. Furthermore, she said that if a character can say something aloud instead of think it, then by all means say it aloud.

8. Skip over-the-top violence and language.

Have an intense violent scene that doesn’t actually do anything for the plot of the story? Cut it. “If you’re doing it for shock value, it’s gratuitous and you don’t need it.”

9. “And above all, don’t take yourself too seriously.”

 

Article from Writer's Digest

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CREATE STRUCTURE IN YOUR WRITING

CREATE STRUCTURE IN YOUR WRITING

The thing about Lego bricks is that you can build just about anything you can imagine–if you’re patient enough. People have built whole cities out of Lego bricks. The problem is that you have to figure out yourself how to put the things together. While there might be instructions on how to build a specific kind of Lego castle, there are no instructions on how you can build the castle that exists in your own imagination.
Planning your story is the same experience. You have a sense of what you want it to be, how you want the pieces to fit together, but actually getting this brick to fit next to that one…. Pretty soon, you start to wonder how the hell Arthur C. Clarke and Larry Niven and Frederik Pohl and Richard Matheson and Jack Finney and Anne McCaffrey and C.J. Cherryh and Connie Willis can make it look so easy.

David goes on to suggest this exercise, which I share with you below. (A sidenote: What’s particularly amusing about it is that he is the writer of the episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” from Star Trek: The Original Series, which is, in my opinion, one of the best Star Trek episodes ever.)

Get yourself a stack of index cards. Write a one-line synopsis of each specific scene that you think should be in your story, one scene per card. Don’t worry about writing them down in any specific order. Just write them down as fast as you think of them:

• Lt. Uhura brings a tribble aboard the Enterprise.
• Lt. Uhura first gets the tribble from a local merchant.
• Uhura’s tribble has a litter of little tribbles.
• Scotty discovers tribbles in the air vents.
• Kirk finds a tribble on his captain’s chair.
• Kirk and Spock beam over to the space station. Kirk opens up the storage compartments and lots of tribbles fall down on his head.

But this isn’t enough for a complete story. You need a second plot line too, something to complicate the first one: 

• The Klingons want shore leave, but what they really want is … to disrupt the plan for Sherman’s Planet.
• The Klingons are on the speace station. A barroom brawl breaks out.
• Kirk investigates the fight. He bawls out Scotty and restricts him to quarters. Scotty is glad for the chance to read his technical manuals.
• The plan for Sherman’s Planet is that Earth will plant a new grain. If nothing earthlike will grow, the Klingons get the planet.
• The Klingons are here to poison the grain.
• The tribbles eat the poisoned grain, reproduce like crazy and fall on Kirk’s head, but McCoy discovers that they’re dying.

Now, take all these separate cards and shuffle them together and start laying them out on the kitchen table in the order you think they should go. First organize each plot line in its own thread. Then you can go back and forth between separate threads, picking up the next appropriate scene from each.

When you have all the cards laid out in order, go through them as if you’re reading a comic book or a storyboard and see if they read like a story. Is this a logical or inevitable progression of events? If it isn’t, start moving the cards around–no, this one needs to go before that one; this scene has to follow that scene, this group goes here, not there. Oops, I need a scene to fill in between this one and that one, I need another scene to foreshadow.

Keep doing this–adding, cutting, rearranging–until you think you have all the scenes the story needs in an order that works.

What you will discover is that everything is connected to everything else. As the various pieces of the story start fitting together, they affect each other; so you will have to make continual adjustments as you go.

Some people like to do their outlining on a computer, but the actual physical act of writing scene synopses down on cards and shuffling them around on the kitchen table is still one of the best ways to get a sense of the rhythms of story structure, because it allows you to treat scenes as units.

A story is a set of motivational units, strung like pearls on a string. Every scene must serve a specific purpose. Every scene should propel the story forward. Every scene must make the next scene inevitable.

So what do you think–is this sound advice? For my money, I say it is. I especially like what David has to say about treating each scene as a “motivational unit” and being able to see, from a visual perspective, those scenes that don’t move the story along, and therefore are necessary to cut.
Do you employ this technique, or something similar, when creating a structure for your novel or story? Or do you disagree entirely with this approach? I’d love to hear about your own methods.

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INSIDE THE MIND OF YOUR YOUNG ADULT READER

POSTED BY WRITER'S DIGEST

INSIDE THE MIND OF YOUR YOUNG ADULT READER
There’s something crucial that I want you to remember about YA, and that’s the all-consuming nature of being a teenager. It’s that sense of possibility. That feeling of your heart welling so big it could explode. It used to happen for me when I was driving around my hometown, late at night, in my wizard-purple Ford Taurus (before the hip redesign, thankyouverymuch) and the perfect song would come on the radio. Everything felt so big and so important in that moment, like all the parts of the universe had finally—yet fleetingly—clicked into place.
Remember the electricity of adolescence? You have your first love, your first heartbreak, your first truly selfless act, your first betrayal, your first seriously bad decision, your first moment of profound pride, the first time you’re a hero. These milestones space out as we age, but when you’re a teenager, they all happen in very close proximity to one another.
The decisions you’re making feel like they will have ramifications forever. You feel by turns invincible and vulnerable, inconsequential and permanent. All of these experiences are ones you’re having for the very first time, and you’re packed into a group with hundreds of other teens who feel the exact same way (though they hardly ever let on). So you’re also isolated and craving community, which is why you search for a book that feels like it’s written just for you.
It’s, in a word, intense.
I like to quote a YA-before-it-was-YA novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky, which was published in 1999 for the adult market (my, how times have changed). In one scene, his teen characters go through a tunnel and emerge into a beautiful view of city lights. The narrator, Charlie, says:

“And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.”

Romance and Darkness
Teens feel everything very intensely, and two things in particular: An interest in romance and darkness. If you’ve been in the teen section of a bookstore recently, you’ll know what I mean. It seems as if every cover greets you with the same combination of a pouting girl, a brooding boy, and the colors purple and black.
Paranormal and dystopian are such forces in the marketplace that I’m dedicating this entire section to explaining them. First, the discouraging fact: These genres are on the wane, so I wouldn’t dive into them right now if I were you. A lot of publishers are committed to paranormal and dystopian trilogies through 2014 and even 2015, and they’re not signing up many new projects in these veins.
A lot of readers and writers (and yes, editors and agents) are getting tired of these genres and wondering why they took off with such velocity in the first place. When I think about teen readers and their mindset, the reasons become clear.
Romantic relationships are a huge obsession for teens. Most teens, however, lack real-life romantic experience. Teen boys inviting you over to play Xbox and teen girls texting through dinner dates at The Cheesecake Factory must leave a lot to be desired. Since there aren’t many dashing Edward Cullens willing to die on the fangs of vampires for today’s teen girls, these hungry readers turn to fiction to flesh out their rich fantasy lives.
Teens also don’t often feel empowered. Their lives can seem like a track from AP classes to test prep to sports to volunteer work and the message they hear is: If you get off this track, fail the SATs, or don’t get into the right college, then the rest of your life is in jeopardy. They feel trapped and helpless. Most want control, so the kick-butt aspect of paranormal (vampire slaying, zombie battles, etc.) is attractive.
Finally, teens are exploring the dark side of their personalities around the time they hit fourteen or fifteen. They get interested in suicide and serial killers and other darker shades of humanity. Death-related worlds and characters help them explore that through fiction. One of the biggest hits of the last five years is Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why, a book about one girl’s suicide and the reasons behind it.
Some teens start to see the darker underbelly of life during high school—a friend starts cutting, someone gets pregnant, a classmate dies—and they use fiction to explore these issues in a safe way. The recent trend toward dystopian is an extension of this, and a way of dealing with the anxieties of living in a world full of economic depression, war, and terrorism.
When you think about your teen readers, keep the above in mind. Whether your romance is paranormal or not, know that your (mostly female, per the previous chapter) audience craves stories about crushes and relationships. Even if your story doesn’t have a darker shade to it, acknowledge that your readers are dealing with a complex world where everything isn’t always unicorns and rainbows.
I would not counsel you to include one of the stock paranormal elements in your manuscript—vampires, werewolves, fallen angels, demons, mermaids, Greek mythology, zombies—because of overcrowding on the shelves and general fatigue. If you simply have to do paranormal, find a unique twist or uncover an underutilized mythology or creature. A fantastic new take on “angels,” for example, is Laini Taylor’s The Daughter of Smoke and Bone.
On the other hand, if you can, do try and include some kind of love interest. You don’t have to write an all-out romance, but you’ll be missing a huge potential selling point if you don’t acknowledge this part of your readers’ lives. As you will soon see, the romantic element in your story can range from an unrequited crush to falling deeply in love.
Themes and Big Ideas in Young Adult
When you know the teen experience and can place yourself in your target readers’ experience, you’re that much more likely to write a book that resonates with them on a deeper, thematic level.
Let’s go to the shelves for a look at how YA writers have incorporated theme into their teen characters’ narratives. First up is McLean from Sarah Dessen’s What Happened to Goodbye. She moves around the country with her restaurant consultant father, trying on new names and personalities in each town. As she lands in a new spot, she contemplates her predicament:

Sure, it was always jarring up and leaving everything again. But it all came down to how you looked at it. Think earth-shattering, life-ruining change, and you’re done. But cast it as a do-over, a chance to reinvent and begin again, and it’s all good. We were in Lakeview. It was early January. I could be anyone from here.

Teens often feel like their identities aren’t quite fixed yet, like they could rip themselves up and start all over again if they wanted to. Honor that and see if you can’t incorporate it thematically.
Next up is teen-mindset-master John Green and his book Paper Towns. In it, an earnest teen boy, Quentin, or Q for short, falls for a hipster named Margo Roth Spiegelman, a teen so disillusioned with her suburban life that she runs away. Being the stand-up (lovesick) guy, Q spends the rest of the book trying to save Margo from herself.
A lot of teens see the world or society and want to change it. Here, Margo speaks about her claustrophobic Florida town:

All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I’ve lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.

And here’s Q trying to put himself into Margo’s Converse All Stars a little later in the story:

And all at once I knew how Margo Roth Spiegelman felt when she wasn’t being Margo Roth Spiegelman: she felt empty. She felt the unscaleable wall surrounding her.

These teens see the world and interpret it intensely. They feel deep longing and pain and love and searching. Understanding these qualities about adolescence will make your literature for these readers richer and deeper.

Improving Your Writing Style

 IMPROVING YOUR WRITING STYLE

 Focus on the whole as well as the parts

Any time you add or revise some words, reread what surrounds them to ensure that everything else still fits. Often, a change in one place will necessitate a change in another. Naturally you must focus on each line as you create it, but as soon as you have the first draft in place, back up a few lines and read through the earlier text again. You will sometimes find that the latest addition doesn’t fit in quite as it should—perhaps it restates a point already made, or doesn’t make a smooth enough transition from what came before.
As you form each new sentence, keep going back and rereading it from the start to ensure that all its elements mesh together. As you form each new paragraph, keep rereading it from its first line to see how its sentences fit together: perhaps the topic shifts enough that the paragraph should be broken up, or perhaps a particular word now is repeated too many times within a short space.

Put your work aside for a while and then come back to it

You may be confident that you have polished your words into their final form, only to find that when you look at them a little later, problems jump out: illogical connections, clumsy sentence structures, a strained-sounding tone, subtle grammatical errors. A lapse of time enables you to come back to your work with a more objective eye. A day or more away is ideal, but even a few hours can make a difference.

Have someone else look your work over

Any writer, no matter how skilled, can benefit from getting a second opinion, because by definition one is always too close to one’s own work. Given that any writing is ultimately intended for other people’s consumption, it only makes sense to find out how other people perceive it. The individual whose opinion you seek need not be a better writer than you, since the goal is not necessarily to have this person correct or revise what you have done. Rather, it is to provide you with feedback on how your points and your tone are coming across. If your critic doesn’t get your jokes, or finds a character you meant to be funny and sympathetic merely irritating, or can’t follow some instruction because you left out a step you thought would be perfectly obvious to anybody—at least consider the possibility of making changes (and do your best to remain on speaking terms afterward). A professional editor is ideal, but if this is not practical or affordable, select someone whose opinion you respect and who represents your intended readership as nearly as possible.

Read your text aloud

This strategy is likeliest to be helpful if your writing is intended for oral presentation, but can be useful for other genres as well. Hearing your own words, as opposed to looking at them, may change your impression of them and expose weaknesses such as pretentious-sounding terms, wooden dialogue, or rambling sentences.

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 Improve Plot/Climax in Your Writing

Many beginning novelists think of the climax of their story as one single, explosive event. While that’s true to a degree, the climax of a novel actually has four components:

1. The run-up to the climactic moment (last-minute maneuvering to put the pieces in their final positions)
2. The main character’s moment of truth (the inner journey point toward which the whole story has been moving)
3. The climactic moment itself (in which the hero directly affects the outcome)
4. The immediate results of the climactic moment (the villain might be vanquished, but the roof is still collapsing).

A word on setting before we begin: Many times, all four of these will happen as a stand-alone set piece, a huge scene (or series of scenes) that constitutes the endgame. Often, this is done in a location we haven’t seen yet. In those cases, the final act, which we’ll call Act 3, is easy to identify.
Battles and monsters and betrayals have tried to bar their way, but Frodo and Sam finally arrive at Mount Doom. The whole Cracks of Doom sequence is the climax portion of Act 3 in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
After all the ups and downs, the Nazis really are going to open the Ark of the Covenant. The entire mountaintop sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark is the set piece that comprises the climax portion of its Act 3.
In these stories and more, there’s an actual location element to Act 3. It’s as if the set designers have built a special arena just for the final showdown. I actually quite like the feeling that the curtain fell on Act 2, the stagehands have taken off the old set and are preparing something new and wonderful, and then the curtain rises to show us the climax of the play.
But there’s nothing that says your climactic moment has to be in a different location. If it’s a sports story, for instance, the climax may occur in the same place as much of the rest of the book: the court or field. If the characters have been trapped in an elevator for the whole book, the climax will most likely take place in the elevator. So long as you cover all the elements, you’re fine. But why not take it to a new fun location?
Think about your story a moment. You may have a good idea for where the big showdown needs to happen. And even if you’ve thought of a place, considering other options will help you find surprising wonders or can verify that you have, indeed, found the right place for this crucial action.
What is the ultimate setting for the final conflict in your book? If you’re writing a thriller about a killer who preys on children, could the final standoff occur on a playground? If you’re writing a romance about flirtatious ornithologists, could the final will-he/won’t-he moment take place in the world’s largest aviary? If it’s a pirate story, the climactic scene had better be on the high seas.
There’s an appropriateness about your story regarding the “right” location for the big scene. Where is the perfect place for your book’s climactic sequence?
If you’re still not sure, perhaps looking at each element of the climax will help you decide.

The Run-Up to the Climactic Moment

Act 3 is the whole book in miniature. There’s a beginning, middle and end. Rising action, climax and falling action. Things have to be set up for the big event, the big event happens and then there is the fallout.
If your Act 3 takes place largely in a new location, the run-up begins when the hero arrives at the new location. So somehow you’ve got to get from the last item on your Act 2 map to this location. Maybe at the end of Act 2 your hero can set out for the Act 3 location: She heads to the launchpad, he runs toward the stables, she picks up her sword and strides toward the villain’s lair.
If your Act 3 does not take place in a new location, you can still indicate the hero’s intention to purposely walk toward the final confrontation. The “Let’s roll” moment can be when the curtain comes down on Act 2.
Act 3, then, begins in the next logical point on that journey. He arrives at the airport. She reaches the
underground silo. He blasts through the wall and begins his assault.
Now your Act 3 has begun. The rest of your task in this portion is to get him from that starting point to the climactic moment.
Again, it’s a simple matter of connecting the dots. Well, once she enters the lair she’ll have to do some looking around. She’ll probably encounter guards of some kind, who she’ll have to fight or outwit. She’ll get deeper into the bowels of the den. We’ll need lots of description of what she’s seeing and smelling. Somehow she’ll have to encounter something that leads her to the right place. Her goal will be in sight and she’ll move toward it. But then of course the villain and his chief henchmen will appear. She’ll deal with all the other obstacles and finally come face to face with the villain, who is about to do the dastardly deed that will doom the realm. She draws her sword and charges in!
Or, well, he gets to the airport and jumps out of his car. But because of his character, he can’t bear the thought of going up against the Department of Homeland Security, so he politely gets back in the car and finds a proper parking space and places his parking stub on the dashboard. Meanwhile the airline closes the door on the plane. She’s on board! He runs across the parking garage and enters the terminal. He checks a screen to see what gate she’s at and off he goes. And so forth, right on through to the climactic moment.
What will happen in your book? What are the final adjustments needed to set up the climax? Write them down.
See how this part is writing itself? After you make a few key decisions, everything else is a matter of servicing and enabling those decisions.

The Moment of Truth

The main character’s moment of truth in her inner journey needs to take place late in the story but still before the external climax. This is because what she decides to do or become in her moment of truth affects how she will behave in the climactic moment.
Let’s say a character has been a coward the whole time and now, with the villain about to make off with the treasure and the girl, he has a choice to make: man or mouse. If he decides to go with the old way and remain gutless, he’ll probably escape his own danger, be rejected by the villain’s henchmen as a coward, lose the girl and the treasure … and hate himself forever. If he decides he’s not going to crawl away one more time, then he’ll face a new set of consequences for that choice. The villain and his men will fight him, he may still lose the treasure and the girl, but he will have done so as a hero.
What your main character decides in her moment of truth has everything to do with how the climax of the book plays out. It doesn’t mean that if she makes the “right” decision she’ll automatically win the day (though that is usually what happens), but it does tell you how she will act in the climactic moment of the external story line.
So think now about your hero’s moment of truth and how it might impact the climax of the novel. You’ve probably decided whether he’ll choose the new way or the old way, so think about how that would look given the big walls-falling-down climax you’re designing.
While you’re at it, why not consider what it would look like if he were to choose the other way? If you’ve decided he’ll choose the new way, go ahead and think about how it would go if he were to choose the old way.
At this moment in Act 3, probably more than anywhere else in your novel, the inner journey and the outer journey are interconnected. The “plot” that is the story of your character’s internal transformation here intersects the outer plot that has made that transformation possible. The moment of truth decides it and the climax illustrates what she decides.
So it should be in your novel. Your hero’s moment of truth determines her behavior in the climax.

The Climactic Moment Itself

It’s finally here, the moment we’ve all been waiting for: your chance to pull out all the stops and get a little crazy.
Your characters will certainly be flirting with desperation, bordering on temporary insanity. Like a pressure cooker about to erupt, it’s all been building to this. Now it’s time to blow everything up.
You’ve already taken early shots at envisioning this moment. Do you have any refinements now that you’ve thought through Act 3 more carefully? What is your external climax going to look like? Make it crazy. Turn up the heat until you don’t think the story can bear it anymore—then triple it! All novel long, you’ve been heaping abuse on your hero to try to get her to change. Now it’s your chance to grab two handfuls of grief and drop it on her head.
The more dire you make it for the hero here at the end, the more heroic you make her—and the more you engage your reader. If the whole book up to her moment of truth has been about getting her to contemplate a transformation, this part is testing her transformation.
Or maybe it’s not a test of her decision; maybe it’s just a seemingly impossible task that must be done with time running out. It’s the last stand and the aliens are closing in. The good guys are falling like flies and the only hope for any of them to survive is for our hero to make it to the air lock and blow all the aliens away. Can he do it? He better, or else …
Keep your or else firmly in mind here. Remind yourself of the stakes. If the hero doesn’t X, the villain will Y. The climactic moment will be all about the or else.
If you’re writing a more gentle story that doesn’t have aliens or evil masterminds about to destroy the world, you can still ramp up the tension in the climax.
At the end of Never Been Kissed, Josie is standing on the pitcher’s mound with the clock ticking down. She has wounded her would-be boyfriend but has attempted to redeem herself by writing a confessional article for her paper. She hopes Sam will forgive her and come to the ballpark before the clock counts down to zero. Everyone in the crowd is right there with her, hoping he’ll come, but there’s no sign of him. She’ll lose the one thing she most wants if he doesn’t come. But he’s not anywhere to be—wait, who’s that? There he is!
That nail-biting moment didn’t involve a single mutant, dragon or zombie, but it did an excellent job of raising tension and producing an admirable climax to the story.

The Immediate Aftermath

What happens right after the climax? I’m not talking about the falling action in which characters sit around drinking mint juleps. I’m talking about those seconds immediately after the climax has transpired, for good or ill.
The bridge is still going to collapse. The train is still going to crash. The recital is still going on. They’re still surrounded by mutants and zombies. The main villain may have been defeated, but the walls that were falling down on the hero’s head before are still falling down.
What needs to happen immediately after the climax?
Many new authors want to end the climactic scene as soon as the villain gets tipped into the bottomless pit, but that’s a mistake. For the reader to get closure on the moment, you need to complete what you’ve started. You need to get the hero out of that dangerous place.
Show him grabbing the heroine’s hand and sprinting out of the cavern just as it collapses. Show the hero clambering aboard a fishing vessel to be taken to safety. Show the hero stepping behind a concrete wall just as the house finally explodes.
Or, in those softer stories, show the boy finally hitting the home run. Show the woman nailing the high note. Show the man recovering the puppy at long last.
Play out the logical end of the scene that contained the climax.
What will that be in your story? After the hero does the big thing to save (or doom) the day, what happens immediately afterward? Resolve the moment.
When you’ve done that, you’ve finished everything that goes into the climax portion of Act 3. All that’s left is to tie things off and enjoy that mint julep.  

Article from Writer's Digest

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STRENGTHEN YOUR MINOR CHARACTERS

 STRENGTHEN YOUR MINOR CHARACTERS

Supporting characters better our understanding of the main character and the circumstances she finds herself in, whether long-term (I need to solve this homicide case) or short-term (I need a ham sandwich). And if your supporting characters aren’t working toward an understanding of the main character or situation in some way, you might ask yourself what they’re really doing there, hogging time and space in your book. Your novel isn’t an open house for complete strangers to walk through as they wish. Everything you spend time on must be for a reason, including those minor characters who appear to be simply passing through.
That said, your supporting cast can’t seem like they’re only hanging around to provide information or further the plot. Rather, your secondary characters, even the ones who appear in the book for only a couple of paragraphs and then are gone forever, must appear in those paragraphs as independent people with personalities, motivations and desires of their own … and you often have to accomplish this in just a few choice words or lines.
For example, let’s start with a simple premise and conflict—a man and woman on an uncomfortable dinner date—and consider what that situation calls for in terms of supporting characters. They’re at a restaurant and are unhappy with their relationship, for whatever reason, though the tension in the scene comes from their being unwilling or unable to express their unhappiness, from their silence and bottling it up. So a secondary character working with and against this problem might be a waitress who, unlike our two quietly suffering characters, comes over and tries to say everything. One who is simply trying to be cheery—and trying to make a sale—and whose fake outgoingness helps highlight our main characters’ quiet desperation. The waitress might not pick up on the fact that the two are having a fight of sorts and might start suggesting every dinner- or drink-for-two on the menu, clueless to the tension between them.
We’d find ways to deliver her character clearly from the way she speaks, acts, dresses—loud, overbearing, pieces of flair on her suspenders, lipstick on her teeth—and we’d see that she has a clear, simple motivation all
her own: taking an order and trying to push tonight’s special. But her actions in following through with the motivation give us a way of seeing the main characters and their predicament in fuller, if depressing, terms.
(Note, too, that we’d have even more minor characters in the scene—young couples in love, old couples in silence, an obnoxious kid’s birthday party—and that all of them, even though rendered quickly, would be serving the same function of showing our suffering couple more clearly.)
This is the case for every minor character you make part of your cast, whether the character comes in once to fulfill a specific function, and then leaves or becomes a recurring one, someone who plays an important role
in building the story as part of a subplot.

Rounding Flat Characters

If you find yourself having trouble seeing your characters, whether major or minor, as full people in their own right, here are a few questions you might ask to help nudge them in the right direction.
What’s the character’s internal motivation; what does he or she really want? This might particularly be a question to ask of a flat protagonist, the result of a main character who seems motivated by nothing but plot-level or external circumstances. Remember that your hero is also a person like you
or me … and consider what we’d feel in a similar situation. (And don’t forget that even minor characters have motivations, and lives, of their own.)
How might you locate a character’s internal motivation and conflict if they seem to be absent? If your character’s motivation seems purely external, perhaps as part of his obligation or job—if you’re writing a detective novel, and the character has simply taken on a new case—try to consider what it is about the character, personally, that informs his or her professional work, how it influences his ability to do the job, or speaks to the reason he entered this profession in the first place. Also consider how this particular job is different from yesterday’s job, or tomorrow’s, or last year’s. Presumably part of what makes this job or case different is that it is personally different, there’s something personally at stake. How might that be the case?
What peculiar traits might you highlight about the character to make him seem fuller? I don’t mean that giving a monocle and a handlebar moustache to a character automatically makes him full. Instead, consider what unusual or distinctive features might exist for your character naturally … and might help us see him or her.
Are you playing both with and against type? No character is 100 percent good or evil, kindhearted or callous, capable or clueless, so consider not only how to set up our expectation of character but also how to subvert that expectation, how to complicate our view of a character. Hannibal Lecter would be a lot of fun to share a glass of wine with, discussing art and music and philosophy and the finer things. So long as he didn’t kill and eat you.
How is the heart of the character, the motivation, evident in a work you admire? Consider this with any novel or work that means something to you, no matter the genre. Try looking back at the characters (major or minor) you find compelling and play armchair psychologist a bit, looking at how the external and internal motivation and conflict play with, or play off of, each other.

Staying on Track

If in the second act you find your novel veering off course either because a minor character has come in and tried to run the place, or because your minor characters seem to be doing nothing but sitting on your couch, eating your food, not really contributing, you should put them to the test: Determine why they’re there, if they can be brought in line somehow, or, if not, how you might excise them from the novel.
Minor characters who become personal “darlings” for the author can be very hard to kill, and often a writer will find some way to justify keeping around an inactive but favorite minor character based on very thin reasoning, such as saying that the character adds comic relief (yes, but comic relief to your depressing post-apocalyptic gothic revenge story?) or that the character adds a romantic element (yes, but does your chainsaw-murderer bipolar antihero really need a love interest?) or, or …
If an inactive supporting character does indeed seem to fulfill some function like this—but is otherwise inert—you might see if another better-established supporting character could fulfill that role just as easily. Or you might consider streamlining several supporting characters into just one who does the trick.
Ultimately who stays and goes is not up to you as the author but up to your story. When in doubt, try to listen to what the story is telling you to do and follow that advice; it’s almost always going to be right.

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THE NOTION OF WRITING FICTION

 THE NOTION OF WRITING FICTION

Change is hard. The future is uncertain. That’s definitely true in book publishing, where new media is rapidly altering the way that books reach readers and the ways in which authors promote them. Yet strangely, many manuscripts we consider at my literary agency feel stuck in centuries past.
Now, a certain amount of derivative material is to be expected. Trends are eternal, as are their inevitable declines. Gumshoe detectives, Gothic romances, sword and sorcery, sagas, glitz and glitter, supernatural horror, cyberpunk, and many other sub-genres drew in novelists and for a while fed them. The same is happening today with urban fantasy, paranormal romance, and dystopian young adult fiction.
What worries me more are manuscripts that employ the pace, narrative patterns, character types, and even themes of past decades. It’s not that flash fiction is the wave of the future, or that we should toss out techniques used by Austen, Dickens, James, Hardy, Verne, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, or Updike to make their novels great. No, but when novels are chained to the past, they cannot speak to the present.
Mechanically mirroring our times isn’t automatically better, of course. For instance, shelves today are crowded with protagonists who are haunted, detached, wry, and lost. Heroes and heroines in the classic mold haven’t vanished, but in our age readers respond well to wounded daughters and paranormal ops. Consequently, they crowd bookstore shelves. They may reflect our sociological makeup, but they’ve become clichés.
The characters who resonate most widely today don’t merely reflect our times, they reflect ourselves. That’s true whether we’re talking about genre fare, historicals, satire, or serious literary stuff. Revealing human truths means transcending tropes, peering into the past with fresh eyes, unearthing all that is hidden, and moving beyond what is easy and comfortable to write what is hard and even painful to face.
Get out of the past. Get over trends. To write high-impact 21st century fiction, you must start by becoming highly personal. Find your voice, yes, but more than that, challenge yourself to be unafraid, independent, open, aware, and true to your own heart. You must become your most authentic self.

The notion of writing fiction that is highly personal and filled with conflict, emotion, and intensity is at the core of Don’s book. His approach to fiction writing is one that encompasses both those authors seeking commercial success, as well as those who write for the love of the craft; that is, literary writers.

On one side of the divide are literary novelists, whose bases of operation are MFA programs and literary journals. On the other are commercial storytellers who rally at writers’ conferences, train in genre-specific organizations, and bivouac in an online tent city of blogs. The values of these two nations are very different. They seem to despise each other.
Literary novelists create art. They treasure fine writing and seek to capture the world the way it is, making it alive in the minds of their readers. Critical acclaim is their reward; royalties are a rare byproduct and faintly distasteful. Formulas for writing make them suspicious. True art springs organically from within. Novels are honed through a painful process of draft, critique, and revision. Outlines are prisons. Plot is a dirty word. For literary novelists, writing is a lonely pleasure that must be its own reward.
Commercial storytellers want to spin stories that delight readers. Their novels thrill, scare, and stir through a mastery of craft. Strong common values underlie their fiction. Advances, royalties, and best-seller status are measures of success. (Movie deals are nice, too.) Stories that stretch reality are okay if readers buy in. Outlines may not always work for commercial storytellers, but crucial to success are peer support, industry savvy, and self-promotion. Most of all, writing is a joy. Day jobs are for quitting.
Okay, I exaggerate, but you see my point: There are two philosophies of fiction writing. Each champions different intents, processes, and outcomes. Both can produce good fiction, but when adhered to religiously, neither produce novels that reach a vast and diverse audience.

Whether you take a commercial or literary approach to writing, the philosophy remains the same: In order for fiction to be competitive and respected, one must write high-impact fiction.

Clever twists and turns are only momentarily attention-grabbing. Relentless forward-driving action, high tension, and cliffhangers do serve to keep readers’ eyeballs on the page but don’t necessarily engage their hearts. By the same token, a dutifully rendered reality (reviewers call such writing “closely observed”) may cause readers to catch their breath once in a while but the effect doesn’t last long. Not enough is happening, and when it does it feels underwhelming. How then can commercial novelists construct plots that have true power? How can literary writers conjure events that give their work long-lasting effect?
The answer in all cases is to create events of enormous impact. If an event is external, excavate its inner meaning. If a moment is internal, push it out the door and make it do something large, real, permanent, and hard to miss. Whatever your assignment, you won’t find it easy. It’s not natural to you, since your tendency is to hold back.

Article from Writer's Digest

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Namedropping: Finding Solid Names for Your Unique Characters

 I chose to change names of characters in my book to protect my family's identity.  Here is an interesting and informative article from Writer's Digest.

The auditorium was dark except for a pool of light at the center of the stage. One of my all-time heroes, Joyce Carol Oates, was giving a guest lecture at my school, Michigan State University. As her book jacket photos suggested, she was a waif, standing there so pale behind the microphone, with a voice like a small stringed instrument.

I was an intense young writer of short stories, and to this day I remember part of her lecture word for word.

She spoke about her deep feeling for her characters, and her commitment to creating just the right character names for each one. I thought of how her characters stuck into me like darts, and I realized that some of their power came from their names: the creepy Arnold Friend in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” The doomed Buchanan in “Wild Saturday.” The primeval Sweet Gum and Jeremiah in “The Death of Mrs. Sheer.”

Getting the names right requires patience, she said, and sometimes it’s hard. She said that occasionally in her sleep a character she had invented but not named would appear before her and stand in silence. Oates extended her thin white arm, hand cupped. “And I ask, ‘What is your name? Tell me your name!’”

Since then, I’ve taken character naming very seriously. It’s something far too many writers neglect. The best authors know that a fitting name for a character is a precious gift to readers. Some names resonate as miniature poems, whether masculine or feminine:

•  Dracula (Dracula, Bram Stoker)
•  Holly Golightly (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote)
•  Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee)
•  Becky Sharp (Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray)
•  James Bond (Dr. No and others, Ian Fleming)
•  Scarlett O’Hara (Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell)
•  Mr. Skimpole (Bleak House, Charles Dickens)
•  Mrs. Gummidge (David Copperfield, ditto)
•  Little Toot (Little Toot, Hardie Gramatky)
•  Cinderella (folktale, timeless)

Like Oates, you’re rarely going to come up with that terrific name instantly; you’ll have a character who demands to be born, and you’ll have to start writing him or her (or it) without a name. In such cases I use “Evil Cutie” or  “Brother A” until I can really work on a name.

I’m against using nonsense names as some authors do for ease of typing during their draft phase. “Jiji,” for instance, uses just the first two fingers on your right hand, in the central part of the keyboard, and it could definitely save you keystrokes during the course of a long novel, especially if your character ends up being “Charlotte Summerington.” However, there is more to writing fiction than saving keystrokes. Every character’s name interacts with you as you write, melding with your ideas and feelings for the character. You don’t want to stay dissociated from your characters’ names for any longer than necessary.

Dickens is great to study for character names. He wrote most of his novels as long magazine serials; their character-packed success depended on every name being quickly and easily distinguished in the reader’s mind—and held there from one month to the next. Contemporary British authors must have inherited some of his DNA, because they tend to be terrific namers too (more on them in a moment).

If you think about it, character names come in two basic breeds: those with carefully crafted meanings, and those that simply fit your players like a silk suit, inexplicably perfect. We’ll look at both kinds, along with strategies for creating them.

TYPE 1: Layered Names

First up are the “meaningful” names, which pull back the skin of your characters and can be analyzed quite like
literature itself:

Ironic Names

Large chunks of Alexander McCall Smith’s bestselling 44 Scotland Street series concern the difficult life of Bertie Pollock, an Edinburgh schoolboy. Two of his schoolmates are lads named Larch and Tofu. Though minor characters, they’re there for a distinct purpose.

The names interact with a savory irony. Tofu and Larch’s names obviously have been bestowed by parents with finely tuned ideals. Political correctness abounds: One boy’s name is a legume paste, the other a tree. Yet the characters, we learn from their actions and words, are as shallow and phony-hearted as their names are sophisticated.

Smith gives us, by contrast, the simple, direct, honest Bertie. He is worth more than both Tofu and Larch put together. His is an ordinary, unpretentious name; his surname, Pollock, is a common fish. Bertie, then, is the humble everyman who must endure everybody else’s idiotic, self-serving vanities.

But for pure triumphal irony, can anything top the Veneering family, of Dickens’ classic Our Mutual Friend? Such a vaguely grand-seeming name for a vaguely grand family. Simultaneously, of course, their name clues us in that they are nothing but surface. And we enjoy watching them try—and fail—to live up to their banal aspirations.

Ironic names are easy to create: Just think of your character’s opposite qualities and brainstorm liberally. Let’s say you’ve got a clumsy guy who lives with his parents and aspires merely to avoid work and download porn. You could give him an ironic name like Thor or Victor or Christian or even Pilgrim. Or you could give him a first name that’s a family surname, like Powers or Strong.

Authors who want to use ironic character names should strictly limit themselves to one per story or novel.

Symbolic Names

We love symbolic names—sometimes. Carson McCullers, in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, manages a good one with John Singer, a deaf-mute who essentially acts as the prophet in the story. Harry Angstrom, the hero of John Updike’s Rabbit books, has, I think, a particularly good symbolic name. First of all we have angst right in there. Then, as you’ll remember from science class, an angstrom is a teeny-tiny unit of length. An allegory for a man who feels his life is too small—and who by his actions shows that he might also be a bit insecure about a certain part of his anatomy?

Be warned, though: Symbolic names are treacherous shoals for authors. Way too many novels (first or otherwise) feature bad guys named Grimes and heroes with some form of truth or justice incorporated into their names. Also, we have too many heroines with the word sun in their names, more detectives called Hunter or Archer or Wolf than we can count, and multitudes of good guys with the initials J.C. (Jesus Christ).

Here’s the key: Symbolic names work only if they’re not heavy-handed. Challenge any symbolic name with the question: Would a 12-year-old get it during a first reading? If yes, trash it! Keep looking for something subtle, based on your character’s deepest traits, or use another approach, like:

Connotative Names

A connotative name suggests without being explicit.

For instance, in Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” the handsome hunting guide is straightforwardly named Richard Wilson, while the client he cuckolds has the fussy name of Francis Macomber. (For some reason in Western culture, Francis sounds sissy-ish, perhaps because it’s similar to the feminine form, Frances. A fair number of spoiled pantywaists in literature bear that name; Scout’s nauseating cousin in To Kill a Mockingbird springs to mind.) In the end, however, Macomber achieves true heroism (albeit briefly!), while Wilson is stuck with Macomber’s sexy, monstrous widow, Margot.

Another example: Draco Malfoy in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Here we have the root suggestions of dragon (draco is Latin for it) and malformed, malice and malfeasance. A great many other Rowling characters are perfectly named.

You can make up connotative names by asking yourself questions like these as you brainstorm your characters: What expression is on his face when he looks in the mirror in the morning? If she were an animal, what would she be? If this character were a building or a political party or a piece of furniture, what would he be? How is her self-image at odds with reality?

Phonetically Suggestive Names

Dickens again. In his masterpiece Bleak House, he tells the story of the mother of all lawsuits, “Jarndyce and Jarndyce.” And the suit drags on, and your flesh creeps as that name hammers at you throughout the book: jaundice, jaundice, jaundice.

Ayn Rand’s despicable character Wesley Mouch (weasly mooch) from Atlas Shrugged is a pretty good example of a name that sounds like an epithet.

Let’s make up a phonetic name that fits a character. What if we had a coach who gambled on his basketball team? Well, it’s about winning and losing, and it doesn’t matter which if you can make money betting either way. Winning, Winton, Win, Lose, Fail, Failer.

How about Winton Fayhler (win failer)?

FOR MORE EXCELLENT ADVICE FROM ELIZABETH SIMS, CHECK OUT:
Seven Rules for Picking Names

Type 2: Plain Names

What of names that have no hidden meaning, but just play off the ear like powerful verse?

•  Howard Roark (The Fountainhead, Rand)
•  Anna Karenina (Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy)
•  Frankenstein (Frankenstein, Mary Shelley)
•  Blanche DuBois (A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams)

Such names are the holy grail of authors. You know them when you see them—the rhythm, the grace, the style!—but defining them is almost impossible. Fortunately, it’s also irrelevant. What we need are ways to generate those lovely combinations of consonants and vowels.

Judging by successful character names, it seems a strong first syllable in both first and last names works well, regardless of the number of syllables. (Harry Potter, Jo March, Robinson Crusoe.)

Here’s how you can generate pure plain good names:

Collar them in your dreams.

Awaiting inspiration is perhaps the most organic way to name your characters, though it could take some time. Seriously, though, often you’ll be working with a character and his name—complete, perfect, incontrovertible—will simply pop into your head. It can happen while you’re writing, or weighing plums at the grocery, or drifting in dreamland. Accept these pieces of luck as your due. Expect them.

Get bookish.

Remember phone books? Leaf through yours, and try putting different first and last names together. Phone books, however, are usually limited regionally. If you live in a small town in Minnesota, for instance, you’re going to find a whole lot of Johnsons and Olsons but not many Garciaparras and Hoxhas. I keep a couple of baby-name books handy when I’m in the early stages of an outline or draft. I also save commencement programs.

Surf the Web.

You can go online and find helpful reference sites that list first names and surnames by national origin, and you’ll find sites that tell you name meanings, etc. You’ll also find assorted sites that simply generate names. Browse around.

Surf the Original Web.

For real inspiration I suggest going over to your local library, where you’ll be amazed at the wealth of name stuff you’ll find in the reference department. Besides general encyclopedias, which are rife with names from all eras, you’ll find encyclopedias on every specialized subject from military history to music, sports, radio and television, steamships and railroads, law enforcement, crime and more. All of these books are crammed with names. The real pay dirt in your library is in the genealogy section. Here you’ll find books packed with names from all over the world, along with dates, cities and other location names, too. You might even get ideas for characters right out of those books—or whole plots, for that matter. That’s the serendipity of browsing, the fostering of which physical libraries are still unsurpassed.

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 If there is a topic that you would like for me to post, please feel free to let me know and I will try to cover that topic in a future post.

You can also ask questions, give feedback or just state your opinion about any post you read here by simply commenting using the comment section at the bottom of the post.