Category Archives: Writing

Structure: Souza Marches

Hear me out.


I played flute in high school, in the marching band, and was soundly terrible. That isn’t the point. The point is, the one oeuvre of music I took away was the underlying structure of the Sousa march.


Every American has heard a Sousa march, and I would wager, many non-Americans have heard them, too. John Philip Sousa was an American born composer, with a German mother, who created many iconic songs that are still blasted by the barely musical and actually musical alike. Why? Because they’re fun. They have the oom-PAH feel and the typical rising action to blaring climax journey, the scattered woodwinds and the screaming brass. Every. Single. Time.


The secret to surviving the flute contribution of the Sousa march is to play the exact same part on repeat, on full blast – no matter what the rest of the band is doing. The first time, the brass establishes the main tune. You play your piece. No one can hear you. The second time, the brass plays a dissolution which feels exactly like it sounds. It’s as though the sound is unwinding itself and falling apart. In the dogfight, you (the flute) play your part. No one can hear you except for the high notes, so that you poke off the rose stem as a series of aural thorns. The third time, the brass joins in with a rising threat of imminent blare and then it’s blastoff! No one can hear you. Play your heart out, anyway.


In written form, try including the counter theme a few times. The first time, maybe it’s a conversation. Or an authority figure no one likes. The second time, maybe it’s the muddy middle with a contained sub-plot (secondary story with the exact same characters) that play out something you wanted to say about the main plot or want the reader to know about the main plot before you make your big point. The third time, maybe no one can see it. Maybe not even you. It’ll still be there.

Sunday Check-In 4

How it’s going: It still isn’t. I have revised a short work, written a picture book, and revised an essay. I even broke out a novel I wrote 4 years ago and fully developed the revision scope. Basically, I’m doing everything but the work I solemnly swore I would do for the 100 day project. I have cleaned my oven.

The point of the 100 day project is to practice a skill for 100 days while working toward a larger project. I have to say that I have written more in this one month than the previous 6 months. I have created as many new works in 4 weeks than all of last year. I have begun sending works out again. I’m killing it, so long as it is not the project I said I would actually do.

Count: 1,156/80,000

Check List:

Writing prep – x
Writing – in progress
Edit prep – o
Revision – o
Query – o
Pitch – o
Agent list – o

Mistake 10: Enough – Villains and Antagonists

In Draft No. 4 by John McPhee, he mentions the process of greening. Greening is what other writers would probably call trimming, or reduction, or editing; the process of reducing a manuscript by a certain number of words. Nearly everyone has done this exercise, whether a paid-for product or just a graded project. Nearly every writing seminar I’ve attended has mentioned some version of reducing your cast list. But that’s not always what my writing really needs.

In an embarrassing number of drafts, my villain was the same. And the antagonist was the same. I had one of each and the story went through a requisite number of hoops before strolling across the finish line.

Remember being fifteen? I bet you can think of one person in every facet of your life who you just couldn’t stand. Band, science class, Girl Scouts, the after school job, the weekend job, your extended family, that person you were brutally forced to share a bathroom with – that’s a lot of antagonists. One or two of them were probably villains.

In moving from point to point in my story, my protagonist needed a motivator to either get away from the current conflict or move toward a new conflict. Eventually, I adjusted my cast list. I added two new villains to create a two-pronged headache for the protagonist with two plot goals instead of one. I allowed two other characters to evolve in their positions to become antagonists. I also took the reins off the supporting characters. With hidden motivations and secret histories that have existed long before teenage protagonists, supporting characters became antagonists to each other and accidental supporters of the protagonist, until my casual straight line narrative turned into something of a chaotic grudge match.

Which was an issue for the next draft.

Practice: Inhale, Exhale

I learned this opener and closer trick from Linda Sue Park, at a conference many years ago. Not that many years, but more than I would like to count.

The first and last sentence of your story make the first and last impression on your reader for the time that they inhabit your story world. The reader opens the book and takes the first breath of your story, and is enraptured all the way to the last sentence, when they exhale for the final time before closing the book and saying goodbye to your characters and their journey.

When you have finished your work, there’s a good chance you know what your last sentence needs to be. Or maybe your first sentence is perfect and you’ve kept writing two pages beyond where you should have stopped because you can’t find the ‘just right’ words. Consider that you already have the inspiration you need to create this purposeful art. The opener introduces the reader to the initial character perspective, the closer demonstrates the new, hard-won perspective. Take a look at Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian for an opener/closer duo.

Alternatively, if you have a great opener and closer, check that your character journey has come full circle from a normal world to a new normal post-story turmoil. For a movie version, take a look at Finding Nemo (post-prologue), where Nemo’s father is first terrified to allow his son out of the home, to the much more relaxed closing scene.

Rhythm: The Stop

Gilmore Girls’ actress, Alexis Bledel, once talked about using a dialog coach to practice for the high-paced chatter style of Amy Pace’s drama. I assume everyone else did, too, but the article I read when I was in my teen fan binge period had a picture of Rory.


I really enjoyed Gilmore Girls while it ran on TV for a few reasons. My mom and I could watch something that wasn’t Murder She Wrote for the Third Time and it had enough angst to soothe my tortured teenage soul.


Years later, I caught a similar affected rhythm in Life, starring Damien Lewis, a couple other great people, and a kickass ending that turned the show from a deep think mystery into an incredible character study.


It isn’t the rapid-fire back and forth that makes you sit up and listen to the characters in either show. It’s the sudden stop. That space is the impactful moment.


Consider Barns Courtney’s “99” if you don’t feel like watching roughly 7 seasons (all-together for Gilmore Girls and Life combined, minus the new Gilmore Girls. This could have been a footnote) of television. It slaps, but the neat parts are where the sound ceases and we continue into the next rollicking phrase.


The rapidfire exchange in prose has a different sudden stop. Either the long winding sentences have a sudden short interjection, or the short staccato style sentences give way suddenly to a long, winding, run-on sentence of effervescent vowels and sibilant consonants.


Consider, also, a helpless passenger in a getaway vehicle on a hilly road. Sometimes the impact is when you hit the ground; sometimes it’s when you launch into the air.

Conversation: Bridge of Birds

My all-time favorite trilogy took some time to obtain. The first was published in the year of my birth and went on the win the World Fantasy Award. It was the author’s first novel. Years later, it would take me three countries and four months to locate all three volumes for a complete set.


Some years after that, I found another complete set at a bookstore two blocks from my then-apartment. Go figure.


Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart has a long and storied history which I highly recommend perusing, but it is not the subject of my post today. The idea of having a conversation within a novel is not new. Normally, we call this dialog. Alternately, think of this conversation as demonstrating two versions of a topic you which to display in order to convey either the superiority of your point or to analyze many facets of the topic you are thinking about as you create.


There are a number of ways to discuss your topic in-depth. Plot and subplot are the most usual manner where the plot is the main point you wish to make and the subplot is the counterpoint played out in a smaller fashion or unsuccessfully so that your main point is the stronger contender in the reader’s mind. Think of a story where something is done twice in some scale. Odysseus is attacked by a cyclops and his men are ruthlessly murdered, after he and his men invaded the cyclops’s home. Some time later, Odysseus returns home and slaughters the strange men within. In the case of this story, the subject highlighted is perhaps when is a crime a crime, or when is an acceptable when performed by some person but not another?


In Bridge of Birds, the conversation revolves around love. Every storyline, every recurring minor character has something to say about love, though not always with words. Some are saying something about familial love, some about romantic love, some about faith which is another kind of love. What love can co-exist? What love is superior? Is any love more than another?


I would caution the writer not to assume that the conversation they put on the page is the only one the reader hears or sees. Additionally, art is accidental. Craft is purposeful. If someone sees something and you didn’t mean to put it there, a few tweaks that make it look purposeful might make you look real artistic. That someone could be a beta reader, or just your future self. Future me is one of the smartest people I know.

Space: The Joy Luck Club

I read The Joy Luck Club for pleasure, before it was assigned for pain. I mean, technically, my English teacher assigned it as summer reading and I chose the work because I’d already read it, but there is some kind of evolution that happens to a work you have read before and now MUST read.


Amy Tan’s multi-voiced novel is similar to a mosaic novel and not much like one at all. For one thing, the framing device is much of the story, for another, I didn’t know the category existed when I was twelve. Thus, the novel exists in the same space as a favored, half-forgotten childhood memory. Condensed, dreamlike, and witnessed as a passer-by rather than a participant. That is not to say that her protagonists and supporting characters are no longer intimately familiar, just that my first reading has taken place so long ago that I can no longer tell you what exactly happens or exactly how I felt at any one point in the book. I can only look back, and, without truly understanding who I was then, think of green spaces and angry children and unrelenting parents. Somewhere in there is a great joy. I have also tangled the book I knew first with the second time I knew it, reluctantly, and the movie we also had to watch, and a couple of quizzes that I absolutely loathed.


What I meant to say was that Tan’s stories within the book occupy the same time and space as one another, though they are lived generations apart. Her flashback style feels similar to approaching someone you know but can’t remember why, and then in reaching out to shake their hand, you are struck with the memory of the first meeting and that first smile. Thus there is this smile with two layers, one buoyed with the joy of seeing someone again and one of self-congratulations of that knowing epiphany right before your hands connect.


Someone will read your story. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s your future self and all your audience. When you close the book, and you exhale that story world for the final time, what space will the story inhabit in your memory? The length of a bus ride? The length of one awful revelation (Memento)? The length of a dream – within a dream – within a dream (Inception)? Or a tremendous life-changing journey to a parallel world and the universe shaking revelation that physics is actually quite fun (Diane Duane’s So You Want To Be A Wizard)*?

*I had a deep-seated, frothing hatred of science in general until this book. Just, in general. Even the word made me twitch. Full disclosure, I am now a scientist. Reading: the gateway drug.

Structure: China Mountain Zhang

The first time I realized I was reading a mosaic novel, I had deliberately sought it out. It took a few trades in the online book networks to find it, but finally I held a battered copy of China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh in my hands. I had no idea what I was getting into but by the end I still had no idea what I had really read. It was good. If I were to recommend it today, I would say: it was very good.


The premise of the novel supposes that China is the ruling superpower on Earth and takes a wide ranging look at how this affects Chinese citizens, Chinese Americans, space colonists, naive young people, and people who think they are too old to be naive.


A mosaic novel treats each chapter as a short story in the same world. I believe I have seen the term “loosely connected” somewhere in relation to this form, though I cannot remember where. McHugh uses the form to give us a different perspective on the world so that we sample coming of age and Outer Limit-like episodes set within the same confines. However, all characters interact with each other and each others’ consequences until what we really have is a journey of self-knowledge and acceptance.

Anything more is a spoiler, so go hunt down your own copy.


Mosaic novels exist onscreen in a very popular format if one is a horror addict like myself. The horror anthologies, of the eighties and nineties, usually use the smaller films within to affect the larger framing device characters so that the true horror is one that the audience sees coming (as is true in all good horror – we call this feeling dread).


I chose to do a mosaic novel for the 100 Day Project because I thought a. It will be really fun and b. It will be challenging and c. I don’t know what I’m doing.

Sunday Check-in 3

How it’s going: It isn’t. I have revised 2 previous works and written a short draft of a new work. All three went to my beta reader. The only thing I haven’t worked on is this piece.

Count: 1,156/80,000

Check List:

Writing prep – x
Writing – in progress
Edit prep – o
Revision – o
Query – o
Pitch – o
Agent list – o

Mistake 8: Talk Smart

There’s the work and then there’s talking about the work. I knew an artist who dropped out of her graduate program because she hated talking about her work so much. Her love for her art became littered with think-piece-like witticisms until her passion evaporated. I know that tiredness. Most artists probably do.


If you take seminars and attend conferences to learn about marketing your work, sometimes people will say they want high concept. Or the elevator pitch, or comparables, or the brutal “but what’s it really about?”


In high school English, there were two teachers. You either got the sex fiend or the death obsessive. I got death. Once we had a poem about – well, something – and one student really nailed what the teacher wanted. She said death. We said music and autumn and rebirth and can’t it just be a walk? And she sat there and chanted death death death.


He pointed wildly and shouted, “Yes. Death!”


He did let us spin for a good three minutes first.


There’s two points I’d like to make here. Firstly, your work boils down to a single sentence just for you. Secondly, people will take away what they want to take away.


I didn’t know how to talk about my work for the longest time. If some poor soul asked me, I would launch into a plot summary, the query pitch, a rattle fast recitation of the cast list. At a party filled with not yet published writers, one told me about his coming of age story with two made up genres and a neat slotting into place in current events that was so glossy that I opened my mouth to say, “You got that out of a magazine!” Luckily, total sobriety grabbed me by the throat and I did not.


Point being, there are no rules. Mashup the genres. Tick the buzz word boxes. The only one you must know by heart is the one for you. That single sentence will be the reason you wrote this book. The real reason you turn back to it until its messy potential matches the shining promise of that neat, square, written on your heart concept.


Draft 23 approached the concept because I sat down and wrote it out first. I wanted to know what if the chosen one was trapped with the monsters. I wanted to explore prison and games and outplaying the game makers. Draft 24 was a series of tweaks to make the nearly there draft into a novel that was about something, instead of just a series of things that happened.


There’s a small chance I could have done that exercise around draft 3, but I didn’t.