#asthecrowwrites

[asthecrowtries]

Preorders for the @malevolenttarotzine are open until August 15!

Not only can you get the tarot deck full of amazing fan art and some fun merch, but there's a guidebook available with minifics to accompany each card. Here are small samples of two I worked on for the project.

Master of my Fate (A Malevolent Tarot Fanzine)

A non profit zine dedicated to the Malevolent Podcast!

[asthecrowwrites]

Revision - Murder Your Story

So you’ve finished your first draft. You put in those long hours, and now you have a somewhat complete story. Maybe it’s a short story, maybe it’s a novel. Whatever the length, you can give yourself a pat on the back.  Congrats.

Now to the hard part: Revision.

Revision is the most mystified and dreaded part of writing. A lot of writers hate it. Many new writers fear it, don’t understand what it is, or how to do it. It isn’t something left to your editor. It isn’t something you only need to worry about once you’re Published™. Revision is part of what makes a piece of writing great.

So how do you revise? More so, how do you revise effectively?  

GET YOURSELF IN THE RIGHT MINDSET

Writers must have two minds. One side of yourself is the muse, the inspired artist, pouring words out onto the page in a raw explosion of vibrant ideas. The other is your “inner editor”. I always imagine a grouchy, balding, middle-aged man in a suit. If you’re a good writer, you have them nicely labeled and stored away for when you need them. When you’re drafting, you break out that muse and hog tie the editor. Now it’s time to get that grouchy office worker out and let him do his job.

What this means is you need to examine at your work critically and constructively. We’re often taught as writers to give constructive criticism to others, but in reality, we tend to have little experience giving it to ourselves. Prepare yourself. Sit with your story and remember what first inspired you to write it.  Remember your drafting experience where you felt your story was getting off track. Be prepared to let parts of your story die and be prepared to let it change. Our stories evolve as we write them. No matter how much you plot your novel out, it will get away from you. How you choose to reign it in or let it go free will affect your story.

Be honest with yourself. It is okay if you don’t love your first draft. Chances are it will not be the glorious vision your muse planted in your head. It might not even be close. But you and your inner editor can make it great even if it’s not the same.

READ IT

Read. It. All. Read it out loud. Read it to your roommate. Read it to your partner. Read it to your cat. Read it to your grandma (You should call her sometime). Just don’t read it in your head, to yourself.

Why? Reading it out loud forces you to read every word, on its own. It forces you to slow down and pay attention. You pick up the grammar slips, or where the tense changes, or where you begin three sequential sentences the same way. It makes you more conscious of the language and forces you to perceive the story as a reader. It makes you aware of the flow and dialogue. If you do nothing else, read your story out loud.

BREAK OUT THE RED PEN

Once you have done that, or while you do that, redline it. Take your red teacher pen and go through it. Comb through and find those common mistakes. You can find apps, such as Grammarly, or Hemingway, to help with this search. Tense slips, passive voice, and problem words can weaken your story. Rewrite those sentences. Strengthen them

TRIMMING THE EXCESS

Now you are past the technical aspects, and it’s time for the hard part, where you and your inner editor get to work. your first draft will have unnecessary material in it, and you must cut it out. Go through every sentence, paragraph, and scene, and ask these questions.

1. What is its function?

2. Does it accomplish that well?

3. Is there a better way?

This is where you will find a lot of your word count vanishing. Sometimes your sentences will be too expositional and won’t be entertaining enough to warrant including in the story. Maybe you introduced a character in an uninteresting or cliché way. You could have an entire character who does nothing important. Cut them. If it doesn’t do its job if it doesn’t have a job in your story then it doesn’t belong there. As the writing adage goes “Kill your darlings”.

SHORING IT UP

The last part is shoring up the weak points. Look at your description. Where is it too simple? Where is it too verbose? Examine your character arcs. Map them. Where do they fall off? Where could you add more to them? What characters need more scenes? Map out your tension. Where does it fall off? Where does your story feel off, or weak? Reinforce these weak points. Add more scenes if you need them, but be aware, every scene you add you will need to revise later.

Give yourself another pat on the back. You now have a second draft, and it’s looking good.

Now do it again. Scripturiently, —The Murder

[asthecrowtries]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

A quiet, clear night gives John and Arthur time to look at the stars and reflect

[asthecrowtries]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Did you dream? He couldn’t suppress the eagerness from his voice. “Yes. I did.”  What did you dream about? Arthur was silent for long enough that John thought he might not answer. He scratched at the ground in frustration. Finally Arthur spoke up. “Home, I dreamt of home.” Arkham? “No, England.”

Trapped in the prison pits, a dream and conversation of something John wants but can't call his own.

[asthecrowwrites]

The Second Commandment of Writing: Write What You Know?

This continues my series in which I tackle the great pieces of literary advice. Any writer who has ever studied the craft has stumbled upon this phrase. Some writers swear by it. Some writers protest it. But how many understand this phrase? First, we must understand what it doesn’t mean. “Write what you know” does not mean to restrict you to autobiographical stories. It does not restrict you to memoirs. Nor does it restrict who or what you write. If you are a twenty-something millennial, then it does not force you to only write twenty-something millennials. If you are a teacher or a fast-food worker, it does not limit you to writing fast-food workers. “Write what you know” is not a restriction upon your creativity or ingenuity. Those traits form the heart of any writer’s work.

What does it mean then?

I view this literary idiom as having multiple applications and interpretations.

You Know Emotion

Writers should draw upon their emotional experiences to create realistic emotions and actions within their characters. When you are writing a character who is frustrated or scared, recall a time when you yourself were incensed or terrified. This is something akin to ‘method acting’ (another widely misunderstood term). You use your own memories of those emotions to solidify your understanding of the character’s mindset.

The question arises then; How do I write a character who is feeling something I’ve never felt?

This is where an author’s creativity comes in. Imagine you are writing a character who has just committed a murder. You have (presumably) never committed a murder. How could you ‘know’ what that character was feeling? You mutate and magnify your own experiences. An author is reliant upon empathy. You have never committed a murder, but perhaps when you were young you broke something. You tried to sweep the pieces under the rug so that your illicit behavior would go unnoticed. You can recall the initial panic, the paranoia, the fear of punishment, but also the thrill when you felt you might have gotten away scot-free. A good author takes those memories and magnifies them to fit the situation.

Write What You (Can) Know

We writers are fortunate to live in the modern era. The internet is the greatest asset for modern writers. There is a great wealth of knowledge at your fingertips.

Before you write a character, you should do your research. The more distinct their lives are from your own the more research you should do. Research their career. Research the terms and skills they use. If they come from another place in the US, perhaps there are region-specific phrases you can familiarize yourself with. Perhaps there are different cultural beliefs, or cultural traditions your character would know.

As a writer in the modern era you can know almost anything. Write what you know, but research, and know what you’re writing.

This also plays a part into writing fantasy and sci-fi; You may not know what it is like to walk through the streets of a medieval city, but you can research it. You may not know what it is like to be an engineer aboard a space ship, but you can research what it is like to work on a car motor, or a NASA spacecraft. You should also be just as detailed in your research of your own world. You should understand your world just as much as if you were writing any modern or historical setting.

Write What You See

Writers are notorious for borrowing people from their lives and inserting them into their stories. It is something we are accused off constantly. Everyone wants to know what character is based on them. But it is never that simple.

The people in your life are extensions of your experience and understanding. You may not know how to write a character coming home from war, but perhaps you have an uncle who is a veteran. You can base part of your character upon him and his behavior.

You can also base it off another character in other media you have consumed. As writers we should not feel bad while doing this; it is the natural way literary ideas evolve and propagates themselves. While it is important to understand your characters, a writer should have an equal ability to interpret and understand other writers’ characters, and reverse engineer them.

In the same way, you can interpret and understand people as characters, and reverse engineer their actions to be aspects of your character. Perhaps you notice someone on the bus, looking at their phone every five minutes, nervous about missing their stop. You notice their clothing, their foot tapping, the way they put their book away about five minutes before their stop, just to be sure. You can throw these into your vast library of character traits for later use.

As a writer you must know an entire world well enough to tell a story in it, be it the real world or a fictional one. “Write what you know” is often misconstrued as being a limitation upon the author, meant to restrict and confine one’s writing. Rather it is an instruction to write actively, thoughtfully, and emotionally. The second commandment instructs us to use our emotional and situational knowledge to breathe life into our stories.

As “Write what you know” is a counterpoint to itself, my next post will tackle the third commandment of writing: Avoiding Passive Voice.  

[asthecrowwrites]

Show, Don’t Tell - A Counterpoint

Show Don’t Tell–A Counterpoint

 This post continues my series tackling the commandments of creative writing. My last post explained what is likely the first rule most writers learn: “Show, Don’t Tell”. We show readers through evocative detail, through sensations, rather than telling them. In almost every instance “showing” is preferable.

But, as with every rule exceptions exist. The main benefit that comes from telling, rather than showing, is the brevity. Orson Scott Card wrote about this in his book “Characters and Viewpoints”. His stance on the predicament of Show, Don’t Tell puts a different lens on it. When you “show” a reader a scene, you give it in detail, expanding upon every instance, sensation, and action. You dwell on the minute details. When you “tell” a reader a scene, you do it in summary, painting in broad strokes rather than with a fine brush.

A “shown” scene is multitudes longer than a “told” scene. Think of it akin to the “zoom” on a camera. A scene with a high zoom focuses on the smallest details within a character’s actions. A scene with a low zoom is more general. For more dramatic or important scenes you should zoom in as much as possible, but for other scenes that level of detail is unnecessary. For example, if your character gets fired you would show him confronting his boss. He pleads for his job. Then he has a long shameful walk as he packs up his desk and exits the building. You should write these in great detail. However, the drive home is uneventful, and could be summed up in a single sentence, instead of elaborating on every single passerby in grand detail. When you “tell” the boring or less important scenes you can pace your story and focus on the scenes your readers want to read.

I have also found another use for telling. Showing places you in the character's mindset. Telling does the opposite, removing the reader from the character and creating a distance between them. When you switch between them in prose it creates a sudden dissonance, a literary vertigo. You can use this startling disconnection as a tool. Consider the following section:

He had fallen off the ladder. That was obvious. His legs were bent at odd obtuse angles, his foot pointing this way, his knee pointing that way, like a somewhat abstract sculpture or ballet dancer. His eyes stared straight up. Something about them made him look more like a wax sculpture than a corpse. His bathrobe was wide open, like a royal cape. It looked like someone had spilled fruit punch on the cement, right below his head, had let it run down the driveway and into the grass. Maybe that was his crown.

He was dead all right.

The paragraph is showing. I describe the body thoroughly using comedic tones. The line at the end is telling. I use it as the punch line of a joke. It helps make the scene more comedic by removing the reader from the tragedy of the situation. However, consider if the death was painted more tragically. The telling sentence then could emphasize that matter, to remove the emotion from the scene and let the reader experience the cold bitter truth of this character’s death. To perceive it removed from the moment as an absolute.

I would never claim “Show, Don’t Tell” is a bad rule, or  something we shouldn’t follow. It is one of the most important things to keep in mind while writing, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be mitigated, or maneuvered around. However, if you want to break a rule, it is best to understand it first, and understand what you do in breaking it, and why you are breaking it.

With my next post in this series, I intend to tackle the second most common writing advice you will hear; “Write what you know”. Scripturiently, Crow

[asthecrowwrites]

The First Commandment of Writing: Show, Don't Tell

There are certain rules in writing. The old literary canon handed these down to us, and these old adages are as biblical commandments to writers. If you want to avoid literary hell, you follow these rules. In this series I plan to tackle some of these “sacred” laws of good writing, explain them, and why they are so regarded and universally praised. I also intend to explain when and where it is acceptable to break these rules.

The first rule you learn as a writer almost universally is “Show don’t tell.” This is a concept we treat as one of if not the defining attribute of good literature. But what is showing? Why is it superior to telling?

The concept of “Show, don’t tell” is frequently attributed to a Russian playwright named Anton Chekov. He wrote:

“In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes, he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.”

This is one of the earliest examples of the principle, but only captures part of what we perceive as the modern rule. In Chekov’s case, he was calling for a certain style of descriptive prose, in which the writer immerses the reader in the environment through small, defining details, instead of being told about it. We do not see it is night. We perceive the night through the darkness, the shine of the moon, the glimmer of stars, the chill in the air.

As an example, consider:

“The forest was dark and ominous.”

This is a telling sentence. It tells us everything we need to know about the scene, but it does it in such a plain and unevocative way. Compare that to the following, showier sentence:

"The hollow spaces between the trees offered nothing to my eyes, but still seemed to hold something. Like a lump in the throat. Like a moment between lightning and thunder.”

Rather than being told the forest is ominous, you feel the apprehension. You are shown the forest, experiencing it with the character, rather than being told about it.

A large part of this is avoiding telling words. Words such as “felt”, “heard”, and “saw”. For example; “I smelled cookies,” is far less evocative than “A warm hint of cinnamon, chocolate and vanilla hovered in the air and brought a child-like smile to my face.”

However, visceral, grounding descriptions are only part of what we look for. The rest of the theory comes from Ernest Hemingway (You’ll see that name a lot in this series, as we attribute many aspects of modern American literature to him). Ernest Hemingway defined his writing style as “The Iceberg Theory”. He described the principle as “The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”  His style focused on omission and conciseness of language. I will probably broach reductivism styles later, but for now, let’s return to the topic.

The iceberg theory makes up the other half of the “Show, don’t tell.” mantra. While Chekov concerned himself with descriptive language, Hemingway focused on themes and characters. His style and theory stated that we should not tell the thoughts, motivations, and emotions of the characters, but convey them through their actions in the story. The actions of the characters are the visible tip of the iceberg. The writer never directly states their motivations, emotions, or relationships. These elements make up the bulk of the iceberg which we leave obscured beneath the surface, and out of view of the reader.

We do not perceive someone as “angry”. We do not see floating neon signs telling us emotions. We experience and understand their anger through their actions. The way they grind their teeth or set their jaw or clench their fist. These show us their anger.

This also goes beyond just the way a person feels. Consider:

“Jeremy walked down the stairs into the kitchen. He didn’t want to talk to his dad. They didn’t get along well. His dad drank his coffee and rinsed out his cup while Jeremy poured himself a bowl. Jeremy left and returned to his room.”

This is very much giving us the whole iceberg. We know Jeremy and his father have a tense relationship because the writer tells us this explicitly. Compare to:

“Jeremy kept his eyes down as he entered the kitchen. His father gave a grunt from the kitchen table. Jeremy grabbed the box of cereal from the cupboard and poured himself a bowl. He didn’t meet his father’s gaze. As his father stood up, Jeremy clenched the bowel tighter. His heart raced, but his father just walked to the sink to rinse out his coffee cup. Jeremy released the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. He took his bowl and retreated to his room.”

This paragraph describes the same scene. Notice the difference. While the first tells you about their relationship, the second focuses on their actions. Smaller details enable us to draw our own conclusions. We understand their relationship far more because of it.

Last, this principle of “Show, don’t tell” applies to themes. I will not elaborate on this much because I feel like it is self-explanatory. You should not need to explain or directly state your themes. When a story tells you its theme, it invalidates the entire journey and removes the readers’ capacity for a more personal interpretation. It is a capital sin.

Now there are times when it is better to tell. I intend to cover these in my next post in this series. In summary, “Show, don’t tell” asks the writer to portray their characters, scenes, and themes in a manner that allows for the reader to interpret them independently, rather than be told them and told how to interpret them. Telling imposes the authors perspective and understanding upon the reader. Showing enables the reader to experience the author's world in the most authentic way possible. It is one of the guiding concepts behind how we interpret modern literature.

[asthecrowwrites]

Announcement to My Followers

The writer previously behind this blog has been killed by a murder of crows. It has been converted. I, as the most creatively inclined of my flock, will continue to blog about writing and likely expand to other fiction and writing-related topics. I hope to be more consistent than my predecessor. Scripturiently Yours, ---The Murder