Have done no writing yet. But my youngest does stop-motion videos, and he and I put together his most recent one–a process that took four days and about twenty hours.

First a note on “Genie In a Bottle.” I got it wrong, but I was in a bookstore that didn’t have the book, and I was working from memory.

I’ve never made any bones about the fact that I’ll learn from anyone who can teach me. There’s a screenplay writer named Blake Snyder who wrote a book called Save The Cat! It’s strictly about screenwriting, it’s about his method of categorizing screenplay genres and developing screenplays, and all of this fits within the rigid format of the commercial screenplay. If you read it thinking it applies word for word to writing novels, you’ll end up wearing an unnecessary straightjacket while you write.

But if you remember that you as a novelist are not in any way constrained by the three-act, 110-page format with strict A and B stories screenwriters must follow (if they hope to sell), it becomes one of the best guides to good storytelling I’ve ever come across. And it was by sitting in the bookstore working out the beats of a screenplay from (admittedly poor) memory that I figured out how to redo “C” so that it would work as a story.

Snyder takes you through ten genres he’s come up with–ways of categorizing stories. Again, novels are MUCH more flexible than what he presents for screenwriters, but again, if you keep that in mind, you’ll find that most of what you’ve written either fits pretty well into one of his ten genres, or you’re stuck on it because it isn’t working as a story.

So that’s a long way of saying that my “Genie in the Bottle” note at the top of the page is my misremembering of his classification of “Out of the Bottle” stories, of which “C” is (more or less) one. “C”, however, fuses elements of “Rite of Passage” stories (another of his genres), which I can do because I’m writing a novel, and which probably wouldn’t work too well for a screenwriter because I have the glorious elbow room of 100,000 words in which to create A, B, C, and D stories, themes and subthemes, and because, writing a novel, I don’t have to worry a bit about budgets, special effects, being rewritten by credit jumpers, or any of the other miseries that await screenwriters.

In any case, “C” does involve time travel. It knowingly breaks some very specific and nearly universal rules of time travel stories. Because I know the rules, and have a critical REASON WHY, I think I can get away with it, but we’ll see.

“C” doesn’t have anything to do with Cadence Drake or Badger. I haven’t given up on them, but they’re not what are keeping me up nights.

And… I’m having a wonderful time working this all out. Thank you, and thanks for letting me know about your secret projects. They’re exciting stuff, and I hope you have as much fun with yours as I’m having with mine.

As for what I’m doing online at this hour on Mother’s Day… we’re under a tornado watch, and Matt stayed up for hours watching the weather. I’m standing watch now so he can catch a few hours’ sleep.

Every writer needs to have a secret project, I think. Something that you’re revved about, something that drives you completely crazy, something that you keep on the hard drive and tinker with and dream about and work on when you’re stuck on the things that are paying you money.

I’ve had a number of secret projects. One became Fire In The Mist, one became Glenraven, one became Midnight Rain.

And this one is “C”. They always have to have a code name, you see. That’s part of the fun. The code name, the sense of mission, the fact that this is something that you’re writing just for you. (Though of course you’ll try to sell it when you’re done; let’s not get crazy.)

Well, “C” has been sitting on the hard drive for a good long time now, ignored while I wrote to deadlines and wrote courses, and I’d pretty much forgotten about it. And then…

Two days ago, I went into the bookstore to wait while my guys went shopping for a Mother’s Day present for me. I didn’t want to read anything, though, didn’t want to look at books, wandered up and down the aisles feeling restless, not seeing the covers of anything on the shelves, just pacing and trying not to be too obtrusive about it. I landed in front of the blank book section, on a whim picked up two large Moleskine notebooks (Hemmingway used them, you know, and they won’t ever let you forget it, either.) Have never owned a Moleskine notebook—my usual notebook costs about a buck and a half at Wal-Mart.

But I went over to the little sit-around-eating-expensive-pastry section of the bookstore and bought a bottled water so I wouldn’t be taking up one of their tables without spending any money on their stuff, and peeled the plastic wrappers off my new notebooks, and opened them up. Sniffed the pages. (Yeah, I’m a page-sniffer.) For the record, Moleskines smell better than Wal-Mart notebooks. For the price you pay, they damned well ought to.

Got out a pen. No clue what I was going to write, but I wanted to put ink on paper. The restlessness was very sure this was what I wanted to do.

And the little voice in the back of my head whispered “C”.

I thought, Why not? It was stuck, it had gone silent on me, but there was still something about it that itched between my shoulder blades and right behind my eyeballs, and I had to think there was something about that story that was worth writing.

So I started with a cluster diagram.

And I started with a question. I got a lot of ideas.

These converted into the better part of one written outline done sitting at that little table at the bookstore, and then a complete second draft outline, very different from the first one (and from the stuff I clustered, which is why I’m willing to post that) which I wrote down in a two-hour white heat yesterday.

I never knew the middle of the story before. I had vague ideas about the ending. Now I have all of that, and I know HOW and I know the REASON WHY. And I can see all the pieces, and how all the pieces interlock.

“Excited” does not begin to describe me at the moment.

The course is done, it’s in the shop, and it’s available now.

So… what’s in Page-Turning Scenes?

• The two critical parts EVERY scene must have? (Page 13)
   
• The FIVE types of conflict that will make writing your stories easier, and keep your readers hooked. (Page 14)
   
• The short, simple story PLAN technique that will keep you from writing the wrong book. (page 16)
   
• The TWO absolutes that apply to every form of conflict and every scene. (page 23)
   
• The special scene technique that lets you grab your reader’s attention and totally mislead him WITHOUT cheating.(page 25)
   
• The great conflict trick that lets your reader see something go wrong, and know it’s gone wrong, and makes him NEED to keep reading to find out why. (page 26)
   
• Internal conflict that shows your reader your hero’s anguish–and that makes him empathize–WITHOUT resorting to a bad replay of Hamlet’s monologue. (page 28)
   
• 28 types of conflict between your characters that AREN’T arguing. (page 33)
   
• Conflict between characters on the same side of your issue. (page 35)
   
• The ONE kind of conflict that can provide your entire story and everyone in it with a reason to go on. (page 37)
   
• The way to know which are good scenes and which are bad scenes BEFORE you write them. (page 43)
   
• An answer to the problem of TOO MANY ideas. (page 58)
   
• The easiest way to spread out the good stuff over an entire book, and not show your whole hand in just one scene. (page 60)
   
• A step-by-step method for getting your hero OUT of the corner you got him stuck in. (page 64)
   
• Straightforward directions on how to dump your boring scenes while identifying and saving what matters in them. (page 71)
   
• TWO simple, fun, easy ways to write in "breathers" for your readers that DON’T include letting them put the book down. (page 75)
   
• Five ways to write scenes that suck readers in even when your story is NOT about life-or-death issues. (page 81)
   
• TWO types of great transitions that will spice up your pages and let you leap all of time and space (or as much of it as you need to) in two sentences? Just two. (page 86)
   
• The SIMPLE way to use flashbacks, flashforwards, dream sequences, and other scenes that jump your story through time. (page 91)
   
• THE FOUR SECRETS to when and how you’ll use step-by-step action to make your scene gripping, urgent, and must-read…and when you must NEVER use step-by-step action. (page 92)
   
• The FIVE STEPS to misdirecting most of your readers most of the time? (Though Abraham Lincoln was right. You CAN’T fool all of the people all the time.) (page 95)
   
• The FOUR ways to choose the right viewpoint character for every scene. (page 98)
   
• The HOW, WHEN, and WHY behind introducing and using secondary characters. (page 100)
   
• SEVEN ways for getting real emotion from your head into the scene. (page 107)
   
• The dialogue technique that will save you (and your readers) from the dreaded Talking Heads Syndrome. (page 107)
   
• Description that readers NEED, that creates OPPORTUNITIES for plot twists, and that keeps your story moving without EVER bogging it down. (page 109)
   
• The FIVE senses–plus any others you can invent–used the right way, at the right time, and for the right reasons. (page 112)

I’ve kept it as lean and to the point, I’ve done everything in my power to answer every question you asked, and I think you’ll be excited by what it can help you do with your writing.

Pick Up Your Copy Now

E-book, 118 pages, and lots of techniques, explanations, examples, and exercises to show you EXACTLY how to make your scenes compelling, exciting, and critical to your story.

Cranky Phone Guy is deep in the quicksand. At least he’s really funny about it.

I’ve written an additional 4000 words today, filling in exercises for Pacing and adding an entire new section on Transitions. So when the course goes on sale next week (Monday for list members, Tuesday for everyone else), it’s going to have some bugs my beta-testers didn’t have a chance to test.

And some new ones I’ve accidentally added during revision.

And some I’ve either missed or—in a few cases—left in because of the differences between writing for correct grammar and writing for breathability.

But–the new sections turned out really well. I’m really excited about them.

Getting close now.

Aaaaaghh! I should have details, but I am so grateful for what I do have that I’m posting it anyway. Have not heard from the AFK in ages, because he’s been doing missions—he warned me in advance that this would be the case, and in theory I should have been at least relatively calm, because he has so far been okay, even while doing missions.

But I’m a mom, and theory falls down hard in the face of reality a lot of the time, and I have been…worried. I’ll leave it at that, because my kind of worried does not just drive me crazy, but also the people around me, and, well…yes.

I have been worried.

So.

We went out to dinner at Ryan’s yesterday and then, because I wanted to see Ben Stein’s EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed, a documentary in which my personal interest was my distaste for the current trend to teach Darwinism as religion, we went to the movies. We have not been to an evening movie since the midnight showing of Transformers. This one was well worth seeing, but I still wish I’d had better timing in pushing to see it.

[ –DIGRESSION FROM THE AFK STORY– ]

I rate EXPELLED in two parts, first half, and second half, give the first half a C- for use of emotional manipulation and poor, poor presentation of the actual argument, and give the second half an A- for getting its head out of its ass and actually presenting the issue along with the consequences of the issue, while still unnecessarily defaulting to emotional manipulation when the arguments were strong enough to stand on their own two feet. I loved the moment when Richard Dawkins, evangelist of atheism, admitted that he could allow intelligent design if we wanted to posit that really, really smart aliens seeded the worlds with life…if THOSE aliens spontaneously generated. (Aliens, dude? Really? That’s the best you can come up with?)

For my money, the alteration of species over time via natural selection and punctuated equilibrium is well-documented in the fossil record, as well as through observable changes in species on the planet demonstrable in our lifetimes. The spontaneous generation of life from inert primordial soup has not been proven, and until humans can replicate it, claiming spontaneous generation of life as science without one shred of evidence is as ludicrous as claiming that God created the earth in seven days and all life on it in the last few. The instant you demand faith to explain what science cannot, and demand that all other possible explanations be ignored in favor of your faith-based one, you have a religion, whether you get all red-faced and stomp up and down and call it science or not.

[ –END DIGRESSION– ]

Anyway. While I was watching the movie, I missed two calls back at the house from the AFK. Two.

So I know that he’s okay, and not one damned thing more. But I know that he’s okay, and that’s huge. Not just for me, but for my guys, both of whom I have been driving crazy by worrying.

Added some hours later:

The Kid just got through. They got hit this time out, but everyone is okay. And his biological father—the molester (felony, convicted, plea-bargained down from MUCH worse charges)—is not doing well, and the Kid is having a hard time dealing with it. This particular issue is a lot more complicated than it sounds. But basically, when the molester dies, it is the death of hope. Hope that the molester will say he’s sorry for what he did, that he’ll take responsibility, that he’ll, even just for a day, be the father and human being he should have been instead of the lying, abusive creature he was. The death of hope is not an easy thing to face. Not for any of us.

I’m just about to a sanity point. Just about finished with a whole bunch of work, just about to have a breather before the next work starts.

That’s a good time to ask questions and think about the answers. So.

You probably know I do a writing newsletter. (Holly Lisle’s Writing Updates)

Odds are fairly high that if you’re reading this, it’s because you receive it. What I’d like to know is, What is the ONE thing you most hope this newsletter will include?

The things I could think of were:

1. Useful articles about writing in general
2. Articles about writing SF or Fantasy specifically
3. Information about upcoming courses
4. Discounts for current and upcoming courses
5. Answers to your questions
6. Or something else I’ve missed entirely

I cannot write to please everybody. But I can target the newsletter to better meet the needs of most of the people who receive it. So please tell me how I can make it the newsletter you can’t wait to read twice each week.

What will THAT newsletter have in it?

The first draft of How To Write Page-Turning Scenes is finished.

It came in at 92 pages (which means it’s a full course, not one of the Critical Skills short courses I’d planned to make it), and after I finish putting in the beta test worksheet, I’ll upload it into the February Sucks bundle so that my February Sucks buyers can do the unofficial beta.

This post will be the place where unofficial beta testers can comment, ask questions, and add to the “I wish the course had this” wishlist.

I’ve chosen six official beta testers from the 27 applicants—I got an incredible response, considering that the beta has to be done over the weekend, the course is long, and I need the results back to be before I start work Tuesday morning, at 6 AM my time. (Yes, I am a morning person.) And that I warned people of this BEFORE they volunteered. (I’m not a CRUEL morning person. To real people, anyway.)

I’ll revise it all next week, while also revising THE SILVER DOOR (Book II of Moon & Sun), and will have it up for sale on Tuesday, March 6th, if all goes well.

And here’s a little snippet–the complete answer to the question, “How do you avoid Talking Heads dialogue?”

The Walk and Talk

From How to Write Page-Turning Scenes, by Holly Lisle

The problem: two people talking to each other on a page and nothing else happening at all.

The cure for the common Talking-Heads Dialogue problem (where your characters might as well be talking to each other in a white room during pea-soup indoor fog) is the Walk and Talk.

It goes like this:

1. 1. You choose a location where your two characters can be doing something.
    
   Mending a saddle, baking cookies, watching girls on a beach, whatever. They are ENGAGED in the world.

 

2. 2. You get them to talking about the thing they have on their minds, which is unrelated to what they’re doing.
    
   For example, they’re watching girls, but they’re talking about the physics exam they both have to take the next day, which they probably should be studying for.
    

    

3. 3. And then you work what you actually want them to talk about in between the action that they’re doing.

We’ll go back to Bob and Kate, (and the universe in which Bob plans to kill Kate) for this example:

Bob and Kate hacked away at the vines blocking the entrance to the Temple of Ick.

“You know your cousin Elsie called the other day about the will,” Bob said.

“I didn’t know. Why didn’t you tell me?” Kate yanked away a long, thin vine and wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her leather glove.

“I told her to mind her own business. She was asking a lot of questions about why you inherited a map, and wondering if maybe you would show it to her and the rest of the cousins. I said while she was wondering about that, you were wondering why she got an actual money bequest, and maybe she’d like to trade.” Bob backed up and began flailing at the ground with his machete. “Coral snake,” he said after a minute.

“You kill it?”

Bob squinted at the ground. “Yeah, but watch out for the head. It’ll still be able to bite for hours.”

“Appropriate,” Kate said. “Sounds kind of like Elsie.” She grinned a little, even though every muscle in her body felt like one big bruise. “Nice job dealing with her, by the way.”

Bob smiled. It was the first good smile she’d seen on his face in…she couldn’t even remember how long.

He shrugged and said, “You and I always did agree about your cousin Elsie. She’s a worse snake than anything we’ll run into out here.” And then he went back to cutting away underbrush, and the moment passed.