Tag Archives: Fiction Writing

Bad Breakup

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Breakup

This time around, letting go isn’t easy.

Today I’m sitting on my patio with the final draft of a project titled NANTUCKET RAMPAGE, Terror On The Island Ferry, which I am sending out for editing. I’ve been working with these characters for months, so it’s a bittersweet moment. I’m always happy to finish a novel, but this is a one-off story and I don’t see any way to use these people who I have come to love in another book:

Dana McSorley is a high-spirited sailor with a red pony tail and a tragic past, who carries a razor-sharp sheath knife in the small of her back.

Ship’s cook Justin Boudreaux serves gumbo straight out of the French Quarter in his galley while playing cards and hustling pennies from the crew.

Chief Engineer Bo Diddley Jacobs is a thoughtful and hard working old man who defends his engine room from the terrorists like a young lion.

Maritime cadet Todd Bell is a teenager with a passion for ships and the sea struggling to fit in with the older crew.

Katarina Dalca is the Romanian beauty who puts her life on the line to speak for the passengers who have become hostages to a white nationalist cult.

Before this project I was mostly writing books in a series, and the beauty of that is that the core characters are yours to keep. You know them like old friends; their traits, habits, and speech patterns are totally predictable and when you confront them with a new situation (another plot) they write their own stories. The next volume in the series will always give them another chance at shame or redemption, and love or loss, which makes the writing fun.

Not so for this project. Once the book is published the characters are no longer mine. I don’t want to let them go, but they are done with me because they only work together, as the offbeat crew of the ferry NIGHTHAWK. And some of them have to die.

.

 

First Draft

03 Saturday Feb 2018

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I am totally stoked about writing and self-publishing right now, because I cleared two giant hurdles today.

First, I finally finished the first draft of a project I’ve been working on for months, and some of it was pretty tough going. Characters are half the battle, but this was a sequel, so they already had their voices and it was easy for them to carry the story much of the way. But the flip side is that I’m writing thrillers, so throttling the clues and reveals to a pace that will hold the reader’s interest is equally challenging to characterization. A sentence in the next to the last chapter can change everything that came before, so leaving a twisting but steady trail of breadcrumbs to the surprise ending sometimes requires backtracking and revision.  That’s why I try to rough-out each scene, print it out, and add it to a stack of loose paper. Then I can come back, make changes with a pen, and then go back to the computer and smooth out the narrative scene by scene and chapter by chapter. At some point the dialogue and action are semi-polished and fit together on a tight timeline, and that’s my first draft. I  clip it together on the computer and print it out as one big document, along with a cover which is usually finalized by my graphic artist by then.

I have a comb binder that I used today to seal the deal on the first draft, so now I have something that looks like a book and feels like a book that I can hold and read and reflect upon.  There’s plenty of work yet to be done, but I can carve on this manuscript for spelling, grammar and continuity, from cover to cover. I can get help with the Spanish phrases and hand it to my first readers for their perusal. Most of all, I can turn the pages and read it again and again myself, which I like to do before sending the final draft out for line editing and formatting.

So binding the first draft together this morning was a big deal, and that would have been a pretty darn good day in itself. But an eMail from Amazon made this a banner day for all self-published authors.

Up until now, author copies–for the cost of printing and postage alone–have been available for paperbacks published in Amazon CreateSpace, but not in the Kindle Store, where we’ve had to pay Amazon prices for our own books. This has been a real problem for author/publishers like myself, who would very much like to offer the eBook and paperback versions of our work on one sales page in the Kindle Store, which makes it easier and more cost-effective to advertise. Considering the margins that we work with, every penny counts.

Huzzah! As of this morning I can purchase my own books from the Kindle Store at “cost” to gift to friends or to offer for sale in my hometown bookstore, because believe me, there is nothing like strolling into a bookstall and seeing your titles on the shelf next to the heavy hitters.

So yea, I’m amped up for the next book.

doug@dscoooperbooks.com

 

We Actors

16 Saturday Dec 2017

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tragedy

Have you ever noticed how many good writers have done a little acting or played in a band or orchestra? Whether it was a school drama club, a garage band or an Off-Broadway production, writers often have a history of performing in front of an audience.

I think we writers are all actors and directors at heart, since our craft requires the same pace of rising and falling emotion, and timing, as a stage play. We pull scenery and actors out of our imaginations and then act out our stories–on stages which exist only in our minds–before we put them on paper.

This can be a problem.

I don’t know about you, but I could never write in a public place, because I can’t resist hum-mumbling the dialogue as it appears on my computer screen. I’d be embarrassed if anyone ever saw how animated I can be when I write, nodding my head, raising my hands and scratching my brow. Also, I like to have LOUD jazz or rock ‘n roll music playing when I’m searching for the words, although, since I like to be seated at my writing station by 5:30 am, the neighbors are not always big fans of my work ethic.

So, maybe you could think of your writing as a non-simultaneous performance art. Sure, there is a little time delay between you and your audience, but once you publish, we can still see into your soul.

doug@dscooperbooks.com

Sixty Page Novels

30 Wednesday Aug 2017

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I once read that many neophyte authors get sixty pages into their novel before they find themselves lost in the labyrinths of storytelling and get discouraged. Sixty pages may be anecdotal, but it sounds about right to me, and I ought to know, because I’ve spent decades discarding stillborn books. Lord knows how many pages I’ve tossed into the recycle bin, but the bundles usually did seem to average sixty to one hundred pages.

After my accident I had plenty of time to write, so I rolled my wheelchair up to the dining room table and started writing scenes and dialogues for a novel, in no particular order, whenever inspiration struck. When I pulled it all together, the result was 1,760 typewritten pages! That technique got me past the sixty-page barrier, but the result was awful. I could have spent years polishing that manuscript as a no-name unpublished author, but instead I started writing shorter “quick-reads” to see what self-publishing was all about. My first book was only 15,000 words and used characters based on some of the kids I knew when I was living and flying on Cape Cod, decades earlier, to play off the Chappaquiddick Incident. Flight From Katama taught me how to finish stories and publish them on Kindle and Createspace. I’m not getting rich or famous, but I am enjoying the writing immensely.

So would you think that my days of not finishing a story are over? Hardly! Sometimes you just need to decide that a project isn’t working and move on to something else. The beauty of writing in the electronic age is that you can easily use some of those gems later, in another setting.

The key point, for me, is to keep writing something, every day.

When I was a teenager I’d get so enthused about books that I would write to the author. Every one of them wrote back, but only one offered to meet me. Dick Bach was a Flying Magazine editor and author of Stranger To The Ground, an aviation classic and a book that really moved me when I was sixteen years old. Dick lived in Iowa but he just happed to be in New York working on a new book about JFK Airport when we met for lunch. It was going to be an in-depth study of a major metropolitan airport, although he lamented that the Arthur Hailey novel Airport had just been made into a blockbuster movie, so he would probably put his project aside and work on something else. Then we spent a few hours talking not about airplanes and flying, but about metaphysical matters; self-levitation, suspended animation, walking through walls, and so forth. As far as I know, Dick never wrote the book about an airport.

Of course, Dick Bach was Richard Bach, and his next book was Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which shocked the publishing world and launched millions of people on voyages of self-discovery.

So we should all have the courage to put our pet projects on the shelf and launch onto something new.  We can’t go wrong if we just keep writing, writing, and writing.

 

The 7-36-21 Challenge

19 Saturday Aug 2017

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It’s all been done before – let’s get that straight from the start. Google estimates that 129,864,880 books have been published in the modern era, with 62,000 new novels (by some estimates) appearing each year, worldwide. So for those of us who dare to write novels, screenplays, epic poems and comic books, coming up with something fresh and new isn’t easy.

Of course, readers like to know what they are getting when they open a book, so we mostly classify our writing into genres for marketing purposes, such as mystery, thrillers, romance and so forth. But the real driving force behind writing is our theme. What are we saying about courage, discovery, death, escape, love, loss, good versus evil, coming of age, or any other aspect of the human condition? How do we craft a plot and dramatic situations to express our theme?

While there may be a plethora of themes, English writer Christopher Booker has proposed that all fiction can be boiled down to seven basic plots. In his aptly named book The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (2004) Booker offers these categories of plots (with my examples):

(1) OVERCOMING THE MONSTER: Beowulf to Star Wars, (2) RAGS TO RICHES: The Prince and the Pauper to Cinderella, (3) THE QUEST: The Iliad to Lord of the Rings, (4) VOYAGE AND RETURN: The Odyssey to The Wizard of Oz, (5) COMEDY: A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Bridget Jones Diary, (6) TRAGEDY: Macbeth to Breaking Bad, and (7) REBIRTH: Beauty and the Beast to How The Grinch Stole Christmas.

That may be, you say, but surely there are an infinite number of situations for our characters, are there not? Isn’t this dilemma I’ve imagined for my protagonist unique?

Actually, no. In The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, Georges Polti (b. 1867- d. 1946) established an enduring list of dramatic situations, used by writers and playwrights to this day. Some examples are Ambition, Madness, The Enigma, Deliverance, Murderous Adultery, Conflict With a God, and Crimes of Love. The list is available in several places online, so if you keep it handy you will quickly recognize each situation in the writing of your favorite authors and in your own work. That way when you are writing a scene or a dialogue, it may be new to your characters, but deep down, you will know that a million other authors have written about the identical dramatic situation.

By the way, it was Crimes of Love (a Lover and a Beloved initiate a romantic relationship which breaks a taboo) that got me thinking about this, because my next book opens with a flashback of two teenage cousins getting randy in a the courtyard between their family homes. It wasn’t until I went back to review the text that I realized I just wrote  about a Crime of Love! How cool is that?

Now, I don’t pretend to be a literary talent, by any means. I self-publish simple eBooks and print-on-demand paperbacks, with a modest but faithful readership. What little I know about writing has come from a lifetime of thoughtful and voracious reading. So when I sit down at my station in the morning I know that it has all been done before. All I can do is try to write truthfully and clearly in my own voice, which is as unique in the universe as your own. I hope you do the same. It helps us both to know where the guardrails are; namely seven basic plots, thirty-six dramatic situations, and twenty-one letters in the alphabet to work with, every day.

I’M WATCHING YOU

01 Tuesday Aug 2017

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“Where did you come up with this story?” A friend commented, after reading my new novel, Whom Fortune Favors. “I never knew you had this much imagination.”

Now, I’ll take a compliment any day, even if it is not quite accurate. So I didn’t correct my friend by saying that when it comes to writing fiction, I’ll choose observation over imagination every time; because stories worth writing are everywhere around us, in our families and friends and the untold trials and triumphs of the people we see every day. Far from sitting at home imagining things, we writers are more likely to find inspiration by thoughtfully listening to someone who despises us for who we are, or how we look, or for the ideals we hold. Our best stories happen when love and understanding overcome ignorance and hate.

If you identify as a writer, you’ve probably already met someone with “a great idea for a book.” They may sit at the bar and relate the action and events of a complex plot until your eyes glaze-over. That’s imagination. But these barstool authors seldom describe the depths of their characters; the motivations, obsessions, fears and compulsions of the people they are writing about. That’s observation. And observing the human condition is the only way to give depth to characters whose voices will advance our plot through dialogue.

Of course, writers like Ray Bradbury, J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling can floor us with imaginary landscapes and creatures. But I believe that they are actually the keenest observers of all, because when I read Harry Potter I am in the head of a pre-adolescent with an unhappy home life who is discovering his magical powers. Hermione, Ron Weasley and Draco Malfoy are as real as the kids playing next door, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Dumbledore and Hagrid in mufti at the local supermarket. When Rowling writes dialogue, I’m in that conversation. That is why J.K. Rowling is a genius; she makes her characters so genuine and familiar that we hardly notice that the magical spells and fantastical beasts are not real.

That is what observation does for us – it gives us insight into the human condition – and helps us to understand how people react to events and relate to each other in the crisis points and sweet moments of their lives.

Isn’t that what we really want to write about?