Month: October 2023

Making Your Words Count

I went to a gathering of local writers from Devon and Cornwall last week. Although I have been living back in the UK for five years, I have been a bit of a recluse. A lot had to do with Covid and the self-enforced isolation that seemed not only to curb my freedom, but my confidence too. It’s only now that I am slowly putting out feelers and making new writer friends.

Anyway, about twenty of us met in a lovely restaurant in Exeter and I found I was sitting next to a writer who epitomizes the word “prolific.” I won’t list the number of books of all genres (from Sci-Fi to Romance and non-fiction to ghost writing), that she churns out annually but what stopped me in my tracks (actually, I almost choked on my Halloumi fries) was her goal to write HALF A MILLION WORDS a year. And she casually said she usually comes close.

My first thought was that she had to be a robot. My second, maybe she uses ChatGPT, or maybe she’s a “first line writer.” I use that phrase because my former husband wrote for a TV show and was once accused of being a “first line writer” which upset him greatly. For those unfamiliar with the term, it’s an insult literally saying, “writing the first thing that comes to mind.” I did ask my new writer friend (who was also very nice which made it hard to dislike her) her process. Was she a Pantzer? Did rewriting, editing, and proofreading count towards the magic 500,000 words but nope, I was assured her words were all brand new.

So what’s wrong with me? If I’m lucky, on a good day, I could write nine hundred new words. I’ll probably go back and rewrite them a few times. My books under contract ask for 70,000 to 75,000 words (relatively small if you are used to 80,000 and above). Once, I wrote two books in one year so that topped at 140,000. I never used to be obsessed with my word count until that lunch.

To make myself feel better, I did a bit of research. In my defence, I still have a full-time job, a sick mother, two demanding dogs and – fanfare of trumpets – I’ve just become a grandmother for the first time … so I’m a little busy.

Even so – here are a few famous authors and their daily word counts.

  • Tom Wolfe: 135 words. As you can imagine, each book takes a very long time to write.
  • Ernest Hemingway: 500.
  • Graham Greene: 500. He said that when he has written his 500 words, he stops – even if it’s in the middle of a scene.
  • Ian McEwan: 600.
  • W. Somerset Maugham: 1,000. Maugham said there was no set formula on writing. “There are three rules for writing a novel,” he said. “Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
  • Peter James: 1,000. Once you start writing a book, make time to write every single day. Find a comfortable number of words for you to write each day and stick to that number. I am comfortable with 1000 words.
  • Margaret Attwood: 1,000-2,000.
  • Mark Twain: 1,400 to 1,800. Twain believed that location was important to his word count. I write very well on transatlantic flights, so I think he has a point.
  • Lee Child: 1,800. He says it takes him about six months from the first blank screen until the end.
  • Stephen King: 2,000. As a side note, if you haven’t read his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, or you haven’t read it for a while, it’s worth revisiting. Stephen says that following this would add up to about 180,000 words in three months … well on track for the annual 500,000 goal but what about rewriting? Speaking of Ernest Hemingway, he famously said that “All writing is rewriting.”
  • Nicholas Sparks: 2,000. He says his is a daily goal which takes him about five or six hours to write.
  • Anne Rice: 3,000.
  • Arthur Conan Doyle: 3,000.
  • Michael Crichton: 10,000. Okay, this one got my attention. He’s up there with my new writer friend.

POSTSCRIPT: Okay … yesterday I was part of an event at the Torquay Museum called Crime at the Coast – sitting next to me was another prolific author who writes four, 70,000-word cozies a year, screenplays for her TV job and a standalone. I didn’t have the courage to ask her if she topped half a million words a year but one thing is certain, I’m just desperately slow.

So … what about you? Do you write to a daily word count?

SHADOWS OF THE PAST

 by Miko Johnston

My first book, A Petal in the Wind, begins a family saga that encompasses a half century. As each subsequent entry in the series carries a subtitle, my fifth and last book, which I’m writing now, will be called Shadows of the Past.

That phrase took on new meaning recently when my husband Allan and I traveled to Europe.

Our trip began in Prague, where much of my series takes place. I spent a day walking in the footsteps of my characters, visiting their homes, businesses and the landmarks mentioned throughout the pages. I’d selected most of the locations on Google Maps, so seeing them for real was, shall we say, enlightening. It took an hour to find U Seminaire, the location of the bachelor pad I’d used for the man who eventually marries my protagonist, Lala. I’d chosen it because it seemed like a quick walk from the Charles Bridge. In actuality it sits underneath the bridge, entangled in a labyrinth of short blocks and alleys. Somehow the building’s image got reversed on Maps – it’s on the opposite side of the street. Ouch. The little greenbelt across from Lala’s mother’s apartment, where ladies sat on benches underneath the shade trees and gossiped, actually sits below street level, though trees do line the sidewalk and there are benches. And the “gentle slope” of the street where Lala’s family lived for twenty years turned out to be a heart-pounding climb on a good day, and treacherous during inclement weather. Sigh. Still, as I stood in front of the building, seeing it for real, I felt thrilled.

In my fourth book, Lala launches her design career by converting a series of buildings into a world-class hotel. Ironically, the palace (the Czech term for a fine home), which I’d chosen for the location is now an actual hotel, and we decided to book it for our visit. It turned out the be the finest hotel I’ve ever stayed in, and although I have no right to take pride in that, I can’t help but feel delighted. On a slow afternoon I cornered the hotel staff and peppered them with questions about the building’s history, particularly during the Second World War. What began as a brief history lesson turned out to be a wild series of stories and gossip, which will inevitably solve some plot issues.

Three days later Allan and I bid ahoj to Prague and boarded a train bound for Poland. After an overnight stop in Katowice, the largest city in the region known as Upper Silesia, we took a cab to the nearby city of Bytom, the hometown of my father and his entire family. Back then Upper Silesia was part of Germany, the city known as Beuthen. As I walked along the streets, I tried to picture what his life must have been like. I gazed at the people who passed, wondering if I’d see any signs of familiarity in their faces.

The picturesque parts of the town – with some remarkable architecture and a delightful town square, partially rebuilt after being bombed in WWII – surprised me, but other areas wore the hard reality of over a half-century of decline. I saw it in the run-down buildings left to rot and the pervasive trash, especially cigarette butts, in the street. I also saw it in the faces and the body language of so many, but most strikingly in the older folks, who’d lived through Nazi occupation, followed by decades of Soviet rule, only to be largely ignored by the European Union. They bore a sense of quiet despair, of resignation to the bleakness in their existence. The only signs of joy were in little children interacting with pigeons in the town square, swarming with them, chasing them or karate-kicking them away. I saw no faces that resembled mine, nor any signs of my past in the city. It had been wiped clean.  

Our next stop in Poland was Krakow, a city Allan has always wanted to visit. Rich in history, it has a beautiful castle on a hill overlooking the Vistula River, and the largest town square in Europe. I went for a different reason. On our second day there we boarded a bus to tour the two largest and most infamous Nazi-era concentration camps, Auschwitz and Birkenau.

Entering into the first camp, with its ARBEIT MACHT FREI (“Work sets you free”) sign over the entrance gate, I wondered how I would react, or feel. I’m still not sure, to be honest, other than the eerie familiarity of what I heard and saw – from decades of studying photographs accompanied by written accounts, of documentaries and movies filmed on location, and stories I’d heard from survivors, including my father. For many, the trip was a history lesson. For me, it was akin to visiting the cemetery; I lost an estimated ninety members of my family there.

After a brief break, the tour continued to nearby Birkenau. Unlike Auschwitz, which to me felt small and claustrophobic, Birkenau is huge. You’ve seen it in many movies: a long low building with railroad tracks leading to a central tower, open at the bottom to allow trains to enter with their human cargo, like a gaping maw ready to devour all who arrive. Alongside and beyond the entrance, what seems like miles and miles of barbed wire fencing surrounds a huge open area interspersed with low barracks and guard towers. In the distance I could see different tour groups traversing the grounds, and for one brief moment I pictured them in the striped uniforms and hats of prisoners.  

Prior to abandoning the camp in January 1945, days ahead of the advancing Russian forces, the Nazis burned the meticulous records they’d kept of all who were brought to the camps and blew up the gas chambers. Only piles of rubble remain. Many, many piles. They left behind the prisoners too weak to continue; the rest (including my father) went on a forced march from one concentration camp to the next, always trying to stay ahead of the Russians, whom they rightfully feared more than the other Allies. It took several more months until my father was liberated, but at least the Americans freed him. Had he stayed behind in Auschwitz, he would have lived the rest of his life under the thumb of the Soviets. After what I saw in Bytom, I’m grateful he had the strength to wait.

The entire tour took seven hours and, although it allowed for a few bathroom breaks, it did not include a meal. The irony was not lost on me.

We left Poland and continued our travels, with France the next destination. There I stumbled upon traces of history that will influence my writing, and my life, but I’ll save that for a future post.

I can’t say these experiences will enrich the final chapter in my saga, but I can say I truly feel as though I’ve walked in the shadows of the past, both my characters’, and mine.

 

Miko Johnston, a founding member of The Writers in Residence, is the author of the historical fiction series, “A Petal in the Wind”, as well as a contributor to several anthologies including the about-t0-be-released “Whidbey Island: An Insider’s Guide”. Miko lives in Washington (the big one) with her rocket scientist husband. Contact her at mikojohnstonauthor@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

Teaching Seniors to Write A Memoir

by Jill Amadio

Invited to give as class on How to Write Your Memoir at the Westport, CT senior center, I agreed, somewhat reluctantly. It would be six 1-hour sessions and limited to 10 people. I almost wrote ‘students’ which, I suppose, they are, but somehow the idea of a group of elderlies didn’t seem to fit.

Having written what I now regard as a rather staggering number of biographies and autobiographies when I pulled all 18 of them from my bookshelves to show the class and let them know I felt confident to consider myself qualified to a certain extent, I realized that no matter how young or old such students would be, I had over the years accumulated the knowledge and experience to write and be published. Thus I would share my insights as an instructor. Of course, six hours is a laughably insufficient time to teach someone how to write their life story but I decided that covering the basics could start them on their journey.

All but six of my books were ghostwritten. The remainder were authored by me or co-authored – often a surprise as my contracts specifically identified me as the ghostwriter and thus hidden and forbidden to reveal who actually wrote the story. I am usually mentioned at the end of the ‘author’s’ Acknowledgements page, with a simple ‘Thank you to Jill Amadio.’ I am still waiting for a client to add – ‘for writing my book for me.’

One traditional publisher insister I be listed as co-author, much to the chagrin of the client’s boyfriend, and a UK publisher graced another book with my name as co-author without asking my permission. Quibble? Ha! It was a delightful surprise which earned me author talks at area locations including to a large group of auto racing drivers and vintage car collectors.

However, this first teaching gig to seniors gave me a few pre-class jitters. Would I have to speak very loudly if they were hard of hearing? Would they be able to read the handouts, meaning I’d probably have to print them in 18-point font? Would they find me boring and self-serving by passing around my hoard of books to establish my credentials?

I need not have worried. The first class was a group of extremely enthusiastic six women and two gentlemen who sat at our conference table with pens and pads ready to jot down my golden advice. I’d created a syllabus, and explained the subject matter each of the six sessions would cover. I also told everyone that they could interrupt me at any time with questions. I thought that if they held their questions until afterwards they might forget them.

All went well and I was bombarded with queries about all aspects of writing, not just memoirs. By the way, I had decided to lump the telling of life stories under the term ‘memoir’ because these days it appears to include biographies and autobiographies, and to my mind has a more important ring to it. Time was when ‘memoir’ meant a telling of a slice of one’s life, a particular incident, but these days many media outlets, for example, have called Prince Harry’s whiny-fest book, ‘Spare,’ by that description (whiny-fest is my own opinion)

My only admonition to the class was that they should not give in to temptation and use their book as a bludgeon against relatives, friends, employers, or others who have, perhaps, wronged the writer at one time or another. I hope they will remember this advice from Omar Khayyam’s poem, “The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on. Nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it.”

As I prepare for my second class, next week, I will explain that bringing in several elements of mystery writing can lift a life story by adding tension and suspense, to name a few. Settings and characters can be enhanced with the addition of the writer’s detailed emotions, feelings, and personal point of view. I had told the class about the rhythm of writing and the very next day there was Tammy Walker’s excellent post on our site!

While researching my subject I came across a marvelous list of more than a hundred descriptive verbs. Using them is a great way to bring a scene alive – as we do in our mystery and thriller writing.

Interestingly, as a final note, there was a general consensus from the class when I announced there would be no prompts to be written. Many writing classes include a prompt at each class, whereby students are given a subject, a phrase, or a sentence, and must write a page around it. To my mind, this is a waste of time that can be better employed writing your book. Everyone agreed with me! However, I do encourage journaling as one way to loosen up that creative s spirit.

Do any of my fellow Writers in Residence have any relevant tips?

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A few of Jill Amadio’s ghostwritten biographies.

Listening for the Rhythm of What Your Characters Say: Applying Poetry Writing Techniques to Writing Dialogue

by  Guest Blogger, Tammy D. Walker

           Writing dialogue can be difficult.  First, there’s the content of what the characters say.  And then, there’s the subtext, or what the characters are trying to communicate to each other without saying something that might be too awkward or imperiling for them to say directly.  And, also, there are the actual words that need to go between those harrowing quote marks.

            As readers, we want what characters say to sound realistic, even though, as writers, we understand that the best-sounding dialogue in the context of a story might strike us as odd if we heard it in real life.

            So how do we balance all these moving parts to make them work as solid dialogue?

            One solution I’d like to offer is to use techniques from crafting poetry.

            Before I started writing mysteries, I’d had a couple collections of poetry published, and I studied the form in grad school.  And while I find writing poems and novels to be quite different in most ways, I did find that the “ear training” required for writing poems has helped me fine tune my dialogue writing process. 

            Though most of the poems we encounter are in print, poetry is still a very auditory art, meant, for the most part, to be read aloud.  So when I’m thinking about how to construct dialogue, I apply the same sound-related techniques in writing poems as I do while writing dialogue.  Though dialogue in fiction, like poems, isn’t generally read aloud, we should still consider its sound and how that sound serves the story.

            Writing poetry requires the poet to not only think about individual words but also their arrangement in syntactic units, in lines, and in juxtaposed groupings.  As fiction writers, we can apply these ideas to writing dialogue to give our characters words that make them more compelling to our readers.

Countering Some Possible Objections

            Let’s just get something out of the way, first: Poetry has a reputation among the general public for being obscure, enigmatic, and perhaps also stodgy.  Which, I think, is unfair.  The poems most of us encountered in high school are throw-backs to previous centuries, when flowery language twisted harder than barbed wire to fit the perimeter of some rigid form might well have kept all but the most diligent reader out of the green pastures of meaning. 

            Okay, maybe I took that metaphor too far.  But I think you’ll get my meaning. 

            Contemporary poetry, and that leading up to it in the last century, relies on plainer language.  Sure, there’s metaphor, simile, and all the other techniques we learned about in freshman English class, but there’s also a directness and freshness to language used now.  Victorian poems were written for Victorian audiences; poems written in the 2020s were meant to be read by, well, you and me.  In general, the language is accessible by your average reader. 

            So, for the most part, the language in this poetry-techniques-in-dialogue should be what your character would use in day-to-day life.

            Unless you don’t want them to, of course.

What the Characters Say

            So, that out of the way, let’s get to content.

            Before I write either a poem or a scene, I first think about what the content of the poem or the scene and outline what needs to take place.  For a scene, of course, that means thinking about what the characters want and how they’ll either achieve that or how I can thwart them.  For a poem (and yes, I outline my poems before I begin drafting) I think about the arc of the poem, or what argument the speaker of the poem will make.

            (A note on terms: even though many poems are autobiographical–or even confessional–many aren’t, including almost all of mine.  The “I” of the poem is the speaker, who may or may not be the poet, so it’s useful in this context to think about the poem as spoken by a character, even if that character functions more as a narrator than a in-the-scene actor.)

            Since most of my fiction these days is cozy mystery, I’ll use examples from that genre.  Let’s say we have two characters, Curtis, an art collector and one of the suspects in my novel Venus Rising, and Amy, a librarian intent on solving the mystery of a painting at the center of the book’s mystery.

            Amy joins Curtis for dinner in his suite.  She wants to know more about his art collection, but, of course, being a good amateur detective, she can’t ask her pointed questions directly.  But she’s there to gather information.  Curtis, on the other hand, just wants to impress Amy.  So this gives me both Amy’s content–she wants information–and Curtis’s–he just wants Amy.

How the Characters Say It

            So now we know what the characters want to say.  But Amy can’t tip her hand about her suspicions just yet, and Curtis can’t come on too strong.  Let’s go back to a few ideas from poetry about wording, rhythm, line length, and syntactic units. 

            Curtis wants to woo Amy, and his language is more song-like.  The rhythm of the words is more lilting.  He calls Amy “A vision in aquamarine,” and later asks “Champagne for my lovely companion?”

            To which Amy replies, “I don’t drink.”  Her words here are clipped and emphatic.  (She’s caught on to Curtis’s intentions by this point, and she has no interest in him.)

            The rhythm of the words in this short example show how differently the characters are approaching each other.  The words themselves are also worth noting, as Curtis uses Latinate language (“vision,” “aquamarine,” and “companion”) to inflate is dialogue, whereas Amy’s more Germanic retort punches back.

            Line length is also key to establishing rhythm and the perceived speed at which the dialogue is spoken by characters.  While dialogue isn’t split by line or stanza breaks in the way poems are, it can be split by tags (“she said,” for instance) or by the end of a sentence.

            Longer lines tend to quicken a reader’s pace.  Shorter lines, conversely, slow it.  Poems such as H. D.’s “We Two” cause us to stop more often at the ends of short lines: “We two are left: / I with small grace reveal / distaste and bitterness[.]”  Poems with longer lines draw us forward at a quicker pace.  W. B. Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” does just this: “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, / Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings[.]”

            So as I’m writing dialogue, I think about whether I want the character to speak quickly, perhaps revealing their anxiety, or slowly, to reveal their uncertainty.  And then, from there, I’ll decide whether to use longer or shorter words in longer or shorter phrases, and how I’ll either break them (or not) with tags, interruptions, or actions.

            In this example, I wanted to show Amy’s distaste for Curtis, even though she can’t reveal the fact that she does not like him just yet, since she needs to know more about his art collection.  She backtracks a bit and later says, “Sparkling water would be lovely, thank you.”  I wanted to move her more toward Curtis’s rhythm and longer lines, so that she doesn’t reveal her suspicions too soon.

Concluding Remarks Using the Best Words

            One of the concerns of poets in the early 20th century was that the language of poems had been, too often, contorted to fit forms, and that the resulting work sounded contrived and unnatural.  This carries forward through contemporary poetry, and poets do strive to make the sounds of the words, lines, and syntactic units fit with, complicate, and enrich the arguments of their poems.         

            This concern with the naturalness of language is also useful to fiction writers crafting dialogue.  We want the content of what our characters say to sound natural.  Considering the content in light of poetic sound craft can give the characters compelling things to say in a way that enriches the characters themselves and their movements through the story. 

            Which is an aim that, I hope you’ll agree, sounds good.

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Bio: Tammy D. Walker writes mysteries, poetry, and science fiction. Her debut cozy mystery, Venus Rising, was published by The Wild Rose Press in 2023.  As T.D. Walker, she’s the author of three poetry collections, most recently Doubt & Circuitry (Southern Arizona Press, 2023).  When she’s not writing, she’s probably reading, trying to find far-away stations on her shortwave radios, or enjoying tea and scones with her family.  Find out more at her website: https://www.tammydwalker.com

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Tammy D. Walker’s article is posted by member, Jackie Houchin  (Don’t you want to run out and buy her cozy mystery to see how she does this?  Wow!)