Always a Lost Cause

La Estrella is a village 24 kilometres from Mosqueruela and the same again from Vilafranca. From the first town the track is of dirt and very bumpy, largely impossible without a 4 x 4 or walking boots. From the other, it is well asphalted, but narrow, a spectacular drive that twists and turns with deep ravines at the side.

For the last 30 years only two people have lived in this village; Martin, 79, and Sinforosa, 82. For company they have 25 cats called Michurrin, 3 dogs called Pichurrines, 4 hens, a rooster, 35 bee panels, and until 8 years ago, 22 horses.

The village is very unusual.

A simple scattering of houses it is not. The buildings are indeed few, but extremely well built, petering out from a generous square presided by a magnificent church, a blue-tiled copula and all the trappings that go with such.

At one point this tiny village bustled with life, a constable prowled the bars, a residing priest took confession and two teachers ruled over the schools.

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Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician now known as an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures. Described as the “savior of mothers”, Semmelweis discovered that the incidence of puerperal fever (also known as “childbed fever”) could be drastically cut by the use of hand disinfection.

Doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings. Semmelweis’s practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death.

This is the Statue of Semmelweis in front of Szent Rókus Hospital, Budapest, Hungary

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10 awesome cat breeds

“Simple warnings no longer work,” police colonel Pongpat Chayaphan said

“This new twist is expected to make them feel guilt and shame and prevent them from repeating the offense, no matter how minor.

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The Jindo Miracle Sea Road Festival

Once a year at Jindo Island in Jeollanam-do, the sea mysteriously parts and visitors can walk through it from the main island to a smaller nearby island called Modo. The path is nearly 2.9 kilometers long and up-to 40 meters wide. 

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so my uncle works for google and I went down to visit him once and he took my family on a tour of the google headquarters just for fun. there was tons of cool stuff and art and a random jungle themed room and the most crazy ass 360 degree google earth screen thing you ever saw

but you’d kind of expect all that right

but then I started to notice something kind of weird

there was a weird amount of rubber ducks? like. a WEIRD amount of rubber ducks. like typical yellow ones and camo ones and huge pink ones with bows and tiny donalds and pirates of the carribean themed ducks and bejeweled ducks with no explanation on nearly every surface

so i asked my uncle why there were so many ducks and this is what he said:

“google has a suggestion box for employees to use, and one time this guy got hired at google who had previously worked for another company. the other company also had a suggestion box but they never actually listened to any of the suggestions, so the new employee assumed that google would be the same way. so as a joke, he put a suggestion in the box at he google hq that said something along the lines of "great office but needs more rubber ducks.” a week later, 5000 rubber ducks arrived in the mail"

google read this guy’s bullshit suggestion about ducks

and actually listened to it

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thank you for the kind words! and what a great question.

first, i have a resource that i think is very valuable for reading as a writer, which is The New Yorker Fiction podcast. (unlike the magazine itself, the podcast is not paywalled.)

the premise of the podcast is that a writer picks a story from the New Yorker archives and reads it. it's not their work, but work they admire. each episode has three parts:

the author is introduced by the new yorker fiction editor and they talk a little about why they chose the story (generally for some specific aspect of craft) which sets the listener up with something to be paying attention to or looking out for.

the author reads the story.

the fiction editor interviews the author about the story, which tends to take up about half the podcast. they tend to go *really* in-depth into craft.

i know the new yorker is generally synonymous with pretension, but what i find particularly compelling is that, in listening to writers fangirl (gn) about the work of other writers, it really chips away at that assumption of pretension, because even if you hate the story, even if you think it's trite or maybe just goes right over your head, you still get to listen to someone who loves it, and why they love it.

there are a ton of episodes, so here are 3 i really liked to start out with:

Edwidge Danticat Reads Zadie Smith

David Wright Faladé Reads Madeleine Thien

David Sedaris Reads George Saunders

if you find a story you really like, or love the way an author speaks about writing, you can then go to their website and find their other short stories and interviews.

now for a method you can try to improve your reading as a writer skills:

think of 1-3 things you want to improve in your own writing. let's say dialogue, imagery, and character.

whenever you read a story (or any fiction), note how those 3 things are working in the story separately. they'll probably fall somewhere on the spectrum of "wow, i never knew it could be done like that" to "that's the opposite of what i want for my own writing." many stories will fall in the middle, and there's nothing noteworthy that really clicks with you. that's fine.

but for everything on either side of that spectrum, you now have two questions to ask yourself: why do you love/hate it? and more importantly, what effect does it have on the impact of the story?

imitate that writer's approach as a prompt for yourself.

here's an example:

let's say you read a story where the dialogue is not in quotes. it's also not italicized. let's say you find that obnoxious. why might you find it obnoxious?

well, it's a style choice that affects clarity. sometimes it's hard to figure out who's saying what, or if something is even being said at all or if it's just part of the narration. that doesn't mean that particular style choice is bad, just that you don't like it. and that's okay.

now write a story (it can be very short, or you can even just play around with your existing WIP) where you write dialogue without quotations or italics, no punctuation at all to indicate something is being spoken aloud.

while you're writing, note the challenges you're having and what you enjoy about the approach (if anything).

you'll find with this particular exercise that you have two options: 1) make *very* clear dialogue tags (he said, she asked, etc.), or 2) summarize what's being said instead of writing the dialogue itself, which is called indirect discourse.

even if you hate what you come up with and vow always to use quotations for dialogue, simply doing the exercise will improve your ability to write dialogue, because now you're far more conscious of the way it's rendered on the page.

Dialogue with facial expression, or any sort of movement, can be tricky to capture. One of the reasons I think it’s difficult is because we, as authors, need to capture near simultaneous actions. With that said, it isn’t impossible. It takes a bit of practice, and the willingness to think things through. If you do, you’ll end up with more realistic dialogue and not just a list of tags with -ing verbs. Here are my tips.

Think things through. No really. What is your character feeling? What are their motives? Are they interacting with anyone else? Think about the order of their actions, too. Do they move, speak, and then have a secondary action?

Moar detail. Capture more detail in their facial expression. Do they wrinkle their nose? Squint? Stare in wide-eyed wonder? For your example, What kind of grin? Smug? Lecherous? Broad? Provide this information to your reader.

“Xander, I can’t even believe you,” he said as a broad grin spread across his face.

Moar detail, (part deux) Use more descriptive words to capture the movement or facial expression. A smile can play or dance across a face if someone is happy or flirting. Or if they’re angry or sad, their face can contort, warp, or twist. Getting this level of detail adds another layer of depth. For example:

A smirk danced across Xander’s face as she glanced up at him. “Well, I have my ways.”

Body language. People speak with their entire body. So you need to capture not only the words, but what their body is doing, too. The phrase, “That sounds fine,” said with arms crossed and brows furrowed is going to convey a very different message than the same phrase accompanied by an approving nod. 

Split the movement and the dialogue into their own sentences, like I did in that above example. Not only will you give yourself a bit of breathing room to capture the expression fully, but you’ll vary your sentence structure– which is a good thing. Monotony sucks. 

Vary your ‘saying’ tags. Did your character mumble, groan, yell, stutter, gasp, offer, or rage? Instead of hunting down a word frequency calculator, CTRL-F (or CMD-F if you’re on a Mac) and type in those verbal tags, and your machine will find every instance of that word being used. Be wary of using any one word too many times. Switch things up.

Secondary effects. Think about accompanying effects, too. If someone is really yelling, is spit flying from their mouth? Are their cheeks red from a stream of tears? Again, think things through a couple steps.

Use markup sparingly. Markup referring to bold, italics, and underlining in dialogue. While some markup does have a place- capturing an inflection or tone change in a character’s voice without a tag, for example- it’s a frequent mistake for new writers to rely on markup instead of using their words. Don’t take the easy way out. 

No interruptions. Throw most of this out the window for quick exchanges or arguments between two characters. You don’t want to tags slow things down…

Unless another character joins in. Then you’ll want to reintroduce tags to make things clear…

Or it goes on for awhile. All conversations, even hours long arguments, have an ebb and flow to them. If you see a long bit of dialogue, it’s time to break it up and get some info about how and why they’re saying things. 

Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. To show you these principles in action, here’s a (draft) snippet from one of my latest chapters in my WIP, Sirens. I’ll put my thoughts in square brackets –> [   ]. 

“Don’t start,” the Catwoman warned. After the past twenty four hours, she was in no mood to rehash another unpleasant memory. [Instead of just ‘said’, I picked ‘warned’ to better capture her tone. I also provided a snippet of why that tone is relevant.]

“Selina took her hood off after a job,” Harley tattled and shoved a tart in her mouth. [Said would’ve worked, but I knew I could do better. I was debating between ‘interrupted’ and ‘tattled’, but went with ‘tattled’ because it captures her intent. Also, Harley shoving food in her mouth as she’s tattling serves two purposes. One, it reinforces that she’s a chow-hound, but that she doesn’t think twice about throwing Selina under the bus. Tattling is a casual action for her.]

“You take that masterpiece off your head?!” Stytch thundered. [Stytch has a bombastic voice, so thundered works. I also use ‘thundered’ for her character foil, so that’s one way I tie them together.]

“Gordon trapped me in a ninety degree air duct for an hour!” [no tag needed. It’s clear Selina is responding to Stytch]

“I didn’t tell you to wrap yourself in indigo leather.” [again, no tag, because the exchange is continuing. I chose to use the italics to show Stytch’s inflection without adding a tag because I didn’t want to break the flow. Also, that’s the only italics in the whole 4,000+ word chapter]

“She’s not wrong,” Harley sputtered as bits of crust sprinkled on the table. [Harley butted in so you need a tag here to make it clear. Also, I want to reference she food in her mouth, so sputter instead of said makes sense here. I reinforced it by adding secondary action with the crumbs flying.]

Selina glowered and sank back into the chair. Arguing with Stytch and Harley at the same time was as productive as spitting in the wind. [No need for dialogue because Selina’s body language makes it clear she’s peeved, but doesn’t want to continue the argument.]

“Anyway,“ Stytch pivoted the conversation and swept the crumbs to the floor. “He said (scene continues)…” [There’s a lot going on here. First, I thought about how Stytch would move as she swept the crumbs off the table. She’d have to pivot at the waist to get the right sweeping movement. Since she’s changing the subject, she’s also pivoting the conversation so that verb does double duty. Second, it was time to get some different sentence structure in there, and I wanted Stytch to have a slight pause, so I put the tag where it is to capture it.]

One last tip. You’ll need a strong grasp of your character’s motives, personalities, and what is going on in a scene to pull off dialogue like this. If you have weak characters or plot, the dialogue will suffer. 

Hope this helps,

This is actually a really great, but really hard and subjective question. What the story of a theme is, or how it forms, is something that I, personally, didn’t really think about until It was asked. 

WHAT IS A STORY’S THEME?

Starting simple; we should discover what we even mean when we talk about creating or finding a theme. The theme of a story is not the plot, and it is not the moral. For example; 

The plot of a story is that Josie’s friend died, and she wants to bring her back to life.

The morals of the story are that messing with the balance of nature has horrible consequences and that grief is an emotion we all must come to terms with. 

The themes of the story are loss, fighting nature & the finality of death. 

THEME OR CONTENT?

There are two ways to look at this;

How can a story have a theme, without the story existing?

How can you write a story without knowing your theme?

I tend to be of the first school of thought; because I believe the story is of the utmost importance and comes before all other criteria; such as marketability, political correctness, etc. It’s not a popular opinion; but it’s mine. I believe in freedom of expression and freedom of art. I also believe that what an author wanted to say is not as important as what they did say. 

So, I try to find the theme of my story within my writing. For example; the last project I’m working on is set in the Post-Apocalyptic future of a World that isn’t our own. I didn’t know if when I got the inspiration, but, it was an idea-based inspiration. After I did research, created a setting, worked out some outlining and character; I realized my theme was staring me in the face. 

It’s about ideas; crafting and being allowed to express them. It’s about respecting history. It’s about the internet; and whether what is started there can be truly tangible. (Spoilers: you know the answer.) 

Yet, there are people who begin with the theme of the story. 

It all comes down to what your inspiration is. Some people, imagine while riding on a bus or sitting at school/work, a girl who can summon the world of dreams into reality in the palm of her hand. Then, they go and write a story about that and the theme comes later. 

Some people, get inspiration from emotion instead of a sudden idea. So, they might be going through a rough time. Let’s say they’ve been made homeless, and they decide they want to write a story about being homeless to bring awareness to those people; and give them something to relate too. People who have ever been in that situation would read it, and relate to it. However, they still need an interesting story; so then they work on that. 

FINDING YOUR THEME

Do stories need a theme? Ehh. Even if you don’t intentionally put one in there, they will end up having one. So what we’re really talking about when finding the theme of your story is simply knowing what you want the theme to be; knowing what you’re trying to say.

This is where feelings start to get hurt. Some people believe that simply having a character who does awful things in your story constitutes the author saying that these things are all right to do. But it’s so much more than that. It’s how the characters around them, and the narrative, and the words, handle that character. It’s why so many people think that books like Twilight are saying it’s okay for your love interest to stalk you. 

If you all ready have something written; Read it. 

Don’t worry. You might not know your theme when writing your first draft. There’s no reason to force it. When you read through your work, try to see what it is saying to you. 

You can also try reading other books and short stories. See if you can jot down what the plot is, the moral is and the theme is. See if you can identify the theme. Sometimes, it has little to do with the plot; but it is made obvious in events and even how the character’s talk to one another. 

Ask yourself the following;

Do I need to tell a story about this?

Am I happy with what I am saying?

I didn’t create my theme. It was there. My character’s felt it and argued over it. But I was happy with it, and that’s the main thing. I feel it reflects my beliefs, and is something I’d be proud to put out there into the world of thought.

If you’re not happy with your theme, if you think it is saying something you do not agree with; then rethink it. You don’t have to change anything about your plot or characters if you don’t want too. Just approach them from different angles. Approach the life lessons they learn, their relationships and their beliefs.

Yesssssssssssssss someone finally asked it!!!

I’ve been waiting for the perfect opportunity to explain this and show everybody my inverted pyramid :D :D :D

I present, The Inverted Pyramid of Revising a Book

Now I’ll explain each section of the inverted pyramid:

THE FIRST DRAFT

This should be self-explanatory. You write the first draft. For novels, 75-150,000+ words of the world inside your head.

PLOT, CONTENT, SCENES, AND MAJOR CHARACTERS

Go back and fix it all up. Did you tell the story you wanted to tell? Did you include scenes and events that add up to the conclusion you present?

Are there any unnecessary scenes you could delete, or scenes that are redundant to other scenes? Get rid of them. If this means entire chapters have to go, wave bye-bye.

Do your main characters have believable back stories and arcs, and do they act appropriately in character at all times?

Is there any point in time when your characters do something that they literally WOULD NOT DO? Change that up.

WORLD-BUILDING, CHARACTERIZATION, HONING IN PLOT POINTS

Now pay attention to the deeper aspects of the story. Delve into the world your characters live in. Do they react appropriately? Does any part of society influence them more than others?

What does your world look like? Delve into the setting. The cultures, the technology, the history.

Work with your secondary characters and how they interact with your main characters. What role do they serve overall? Does the main character’s journey affect them at all, or vice versa?

Tighten up plot points. Stay concise if possible.

SENTENCE STRUCTURE, FLOW AND PACING OF SCENES

Now that the major parts of your story have been patted down, you can begin focusing on the technical stuff. Start broad.

Do you have redundant sentences? Do you start multiple sentences the same way?

Throw in short sentences.

Drop the pronoun from the beginning of a sentence every now and then.

Use commas instead of ‘and’ if you find you use ‘and’ a lot.

Does the flow of sentences and paragraphs fit with the tone of the scene?

Chop sentences apart. Use quick, sharp words.

Or combine sentences and flowery language and soft words.

BETA READER CRITIQUES AND SUGGESTIONS

Now that you’ve really patted this thing down, find people willing to read your work (hopefully for free).

Ask them to point out inconsistencies. Are they confused by anything?

Beta readers can tell you when things are boring or exciting. They’ll laugh. They’ll fangirl. They’ll beg you for more chapters.

Your brain is soft from so much revising. Beta readers are fresh, and will pick out things you’ve glossed over from seeing it so many times.

Shake things up and host a video chat for you and your betas! It’s a great way to make friends :)

PUNCTUATION AND MISSING WORDS

NOWWWWW you’ve finished all the major revisions and your story makes sense!!! All that’s left to do is get the broom and sweep it up (or the vacuum cleaner, or generate a black hole from the Large Hadron Collider to suck out all the errors because that’s super-effective**).

This is the nitty gritty stuff, and I highly recommend either forcing yourself to read really, really slow, or better yet, read your book out loud, start to finish.

You’ll trip up over misplaced commas and periods.

You’ll literally hear when a sentence is awkward.

Your brain will get confused when there’s a missing word.

Fill in the gaps, hammer down the boards, tidy up the place like you’ve got guests coming over.

THE FINAL DRAFT

OMG

OMG

OMG

OMG IT’S FINISHED AND YOU CAN SHARE IT WITH THE WORLD AND BUY PHYSICAL COPIES THAT YOU CAN HOLD AND SMELL AND RUB ALL OVER YOUR FACE AND DRAW IN AND DOG-EAR AND TOTE AROUND TO SHOW PEOPLE AND SIGN AUTOGRAPHS AND BECOME YOUR OWN LITTLE CELEBRITY!!!

Email the newspaper (I’ve appeared multiple times).

Email the local TV station (I’ve appeared on live TV).

Email book talk radio shows (I’ve had a Q&A for an hour on live radio).

……..Marketing is hard.

I hope that helps!