CONTENTMENT COTTAGE

WELCOME! In the midst of each life's chaos exists a place of calm and sunshine. I call mine Contentment Cottage. It is the place where I write my stories and find the peace of God. I've posted my "Ice Pick" reviews and will continue to add some of what I call my "Ice Crystals": poems, articles, essays, fillers, and recipes.

Friday, August 31, 2007

THE ICE PICK

Making the Perfect Pitch : How to Catch a Literary Agent’s Eye, edited by Katharine Sands. Waukesha, Wis., The Writer Books, 2004. 287 p. $18.95. Includes: index and "Selected Resources: How To Find & Contact an Agent." ISBN: 0-87116-206-7.

This book is a collection of interviews with agents and articles by them telling both what they themselves are looking for in a submission and giving general advice on how to make a good impression when querying.

Much of the advice is the same basic information you hear over and over, but if you are new to the game of trying to get an agent, it may be very helpful to you. Things like: don’t query an agent before finishing your novel or non-fiction work; don’t allow spelling or grammatical errors to ruin your query letter; don’t send to agents who don’t deal in your genre or subject; don’t send candy or dog-doo (or any other weird thing) with the query; don’t tell the agent you’re the next J.K. Rowling or you’ve written the best thing ever written; don’t say you’re going to make him or her rich; don’t lie about anything; and don’t give up after "a mere thirty rejections."

I think I was most impressed with the differences in what agents want or expect. Some recommend just launching into a description of your book or "a single attention-grabbing sentence." Others want you to first state that you are writing to them because you would like them to represent your work. One warns against calling your book a "book," saying that technically it’s a "manuscript" until published, while others don’t seem to care. Some of them are turned off by the very thing the next agent wants. It is confusing and discouraging and made me realize why it is so tough to get an agent. There is, after all, only so much research you can do about an agent before you send something out.

But as I continued to read, certain patterns appeared and I started taking notes, trying to think how I could make my own query letter better.

In the end, of course, it is your writing that will sell or fail, but if you can’t get an agent’s attention in the first place, he or she will never see your manuscript to be able to judge your sparkling prose. You have to somehow make that dull query contain some of the same charm, vigor, and color that shines in your novel. There are hints and tips and advice galore in this book to help you make that happen, and if you think you are ready to start sending out your work, this book may save you a lot of time and a lot of grief.

{Published in SF and Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, Sept. 2005.}

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Saturday, August 25, 2007

THE ICE PICK

I Have This Nifty Idea : Now What Do I Do With It?, selected and edited by Mike Resnick. Holicong, Pa., Wildside Press, 2001. 405 p. $22.00. ISBN: 1-58715-481-1.

Although Resnick never mentions it, the idea for this book was suggested by our own Kathleen Woodbury, and like her OSPS : Outlines, Synopses, Proposals That Sold, it is a collection of novelists’ submissions to agents and editors that resulted in sales.

If you’re struggling with a synopsis, outline, or proposal for your own novel and wondering how published science fiction authors wrote theirs, this book shows you exactly what they did.

Some of the synopses are from well-known authors, others are from first-timers. They include: Robert Silverberg, Katharine Kerr, Jack Dann, Jack L. Chalker, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Walter Jon Williams, Laura Resnick, Charles Sheffield, Mike Resnick, Susan R. Matthews, Joe Haldeman, Jack McDevitt, Robert J. Sawyer, David Brin, Terry McGarry, Barry N. Malzberg, Alan Rodgers, Stephen Leigh, and Kevin J. Anderson.

Most of the synopses are long, but there are a few short ones, and some bonuses, as when Katharine Kerr gives her story "in a nutshell," in a two-page "Quick Summary," and also in a longer synopsis.

Most are formal proposals, but some are "informal letters to friendly editors," and most are for stand-alone novels, but there are trilogy synopses and even movie synopses, as well.

Where one or two examples in a how-to-write book can show you some of the techniques or formatting you need to know, this book, like SFFW’s own OSPS series, actually shows you how to put a synopsis together that works. (In fact, several of these authors contributed to OSPS. Mike Resnick himself was featured in Issue #2.)

In studying these synopses you see the general rules authors follow, like using third person present tense and telling how their books end. But the examples show you much more in the wide variety of approaches to the synopses, e.g., you can see that some authors dive right into the story, others give a great deal of background information first; some do chapter-by-chapter, others do not.

Although this book may be more valuable to read and study if you’ve read the particular novel featured in the synopsis, it is still extremely helpful to see how these authors encapsulated their stories, and it might even encourage you to buy some of the books you haven’t read and read them.

{Published in SF & Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, May 2005}

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Thursday, August 23, 2007

THE ICE PICK

Revision : a Creative Approach to Writing and Rewriting Fiction, by David Michael Kaplan. Cincinnati, Story Press, 1997. 1st ed. 226 p. $18.99. Includes: index. ISBN: 1-884910-19-x.

Why revise a story once it’s written? "Dedication to revision," says Kaplan, "is what makes the difference between a mediocre writer and a good one, and often between a good writer and a great one."

Re-vision, at its best, means to re-see and re-imagine our work, and that’s what this book helps us to do. For most people revision means correcting boo-boos, rearranging text, or fixing up spelling and punctuation, but Kaplan shows us how to reach into the heart of the story and to make it the very best we can.

We may revise for style to find "the most graceful way" to tell our stories, and revise for structure to tell them "in the most coherent and dramatically effective way," but we should also revise for meaning to discover what the stories are really about.

Too many writers simply put down the first idea that occurs to them without exploring how they might make it better. Kaplan believes that the most important steps in revising actually occur before the story is written, while we are still mulling it over, playing with characters and plot in our minds, trying out different angles and ideas in our heads.

Most authors, he says, even those of us who eschew outlines, usually "know roughly where we’re going." Kaplan suggests trying out different characters, viewpoints, settings, situations and possible sequences of events, conflicts, etc. to develop story possibilities. He recommends recording our ideas on index cards, slips of paper, tape, or notebooks or journals so that we don’t forget the "seeds" that might be used in the story we’re currently thinking about or another one later on.

Once we start writing our first draft, we will of course get ideas that cause us to re-see, to re-envision our story. He recommends that we keep going and just get the story down before going back and making changes. He addresses "common first-draft anxieties" and suggests solutions for them.

In subsequent chapters he discusses the process of revision for the finished first draft: how to create strong openings and endings; how to recognize and cut what is not essential; how to figure out what must be added or expanded; and rearrange the plot chronologically, psychologically, and dramatically.

He includes chapters on polishing the finished story and on even on revising a story after it’s published when it’s being reprinted. And he explains different ways to handle revision: some authors like to cut and tape their drafts, others mark up and retype theirs, still others revise directly on the computer, etc. Some authors begin at the beginning of the story, while others work on the middle or the end first. "Part of becoming a skilled writer," Kaplan says, "is discovering what revision methods work best for you."

Kaplan also discusses how getting other writers to read and critique our work helps us to re-see our stories.

This is a wonderful book. Illustrated with the author’s own work, it is written with great clarity and simplicity and is full of practical advice. I especially liked his occasional "summing up" sections, and wish he had more of them.

"Revision," says Kaplan, "is an art, it is a craft, and moreover, it is a way of deepening your understanding of your fiction. Revision is the key process of writing. It’s where stories are made. If you do not believe that, then you need this book. If you do believe it, but feel . . . at a loss for how best to proceed with revising, you need this book too."

I agree with that.

{Published in SF and Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, Apr. 2005}

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Thursday, August 16, 2007

THE ICE PICK

Putting It Together : Turning Sow’s Ear Drafts into Silk Purse Stories, by Mike Resnick. Berkeley Heights, N.J., Wildside Press, 2000. 184 p. $17.50. ISBN: 1-58715-175-8.

This fascinating book has a very different approach to helping you improve your stories.

Instead of the usual how-to-write rules, inspiration, and/or advice, Resnick has taken two of his own stories and shown his earlier drafts, plus the final drafts of three other published stories along with his discussions of various points with fans and other writers.

This is a fun book just to read, but it is not an easy book to use.

If you are a serious writer wanting to improve your craft, you need to sit down with the stories, examine them, and take them apart to learn how they were constructed and how Resnick improved them with his successive drafts, and understand how and why he approached and solved things the way he did.

His replies to the questions asked him about his stories are priceless in themselves, telling far more than just about that particular story.

For example, "Every single [thing] must serve the needs of the story or be jettisoned." "You don’t have to climb on a soap box and lecture to a reader to get your point across. Give him two events to compare and contrast." "You choose words to say exactly what you want, not approximately."

You learn a lot too, just from understanding that even an expert writer, like Resnick, doesn’t start out with a polished, perfect story, but must revise and rework his ideas and his stories to achieve the results he wants.

His three drafts of "The Land of Nod" demonstrate this very clearly, as he comes closer each time to making the story work and to realizing his vision. He speaks of being "dissatisfied with this the entire time" he was writing the first draft, although "the opening was fine," and "the end was what I wanted," but "everything in between [was] pretty poor." And then he shows how and what he changed to repair the story.

This book is a real treasure, and you can learn a lot from it.

{Published in SF and Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, Mar. 2005.}

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Wednesday, August 15, 2007

THE ICE PICK

On Becoming a Novelist, by John Gardner. New York, Norton, 1999. 150 p. $12.00. Includes: index. ISBN: 0-393-32003-0.

A distillation of John Gardner’s twenty years of experience teaching creative writing and the wisdom gleaned from writing his own twenty-five books, this delightful book has rightfully become a classic work for anyone who wants to write novels.

Written with clarity, passion, humility, and a fine sense of humor, Gardner at once instructs and inspires. It is "not essentially," he says, "a book on craft, though here and there I give what some may find valuable pointers. . . . I try here to deal with, and if possible get rid of, the beginning novelist’s worries."

With thoroughness, wit, and elegance, he presents advice and encouragement.

For those concerned with whether to outline or not, he recommends outlining, but says, "some respectable writers simply pour out onto paper everything that comes into their heads, then sift, edit, rearrange, and rewrite until a story of some kind emerges; others plan carefully and stick to the plan as closely as possible, so long as the characters don’t object. . . . The real message is, write in any way that works for you."

He discusses how to break writer’s block, how to "get faith in yourself," and when to give up and quit. ("The true novelist is the one," he says, "who doesn’t quit.") He talks about the difficulty of trying to get down on paper what you see in your imagination and about not only how sometimes the writer enters a "strange, magical state" where the words pour from a "deep, flowing vision" and the writing "comes alive," but how to make that happen more often.

In regards to the rule to "show, don’t tell," he says, some things "can be summarized or implied. In general the rule is simply this: Anything necessary to the action’s development must be shown dramatically. . . . [And] with rare exceptions the characters’ feelings must be demonstrated."

He warns against staying with a writing class that makes you feel miserable, saying, "A bad writing class doesn’t only fail to teach writing, it can make one give up."

Too much "intellectual analysis" of your writing "may become crippling." At some point a writer "feels his way to the solution; rather than drawing back from the fictional dream to look at what he’s doing, he solves the problem by plunging deeper into the dream."

"Nothing is sillier," Gardner says, "than the creative writer’s dictum ‘Write about what you know.’ But . . . the true writer’s scrutiny of imagined scenes both feeds on and feeds his real-life experience. . . . Your personal observation of how things happen in the world--how character reveals itself . . . [in the] most trivial gestures . . .--can turn a dead scene into a vital one." The trick is for the author to "get it down . . . without cheapening or falsifying," to write "down exactly what he sees and feels, carefully revising time after time until he fully believes it, noticing when what he’s saying is mere rhetoric or derivative vision, noticing when what he’s said is not noble or impressive but silly. . . . Detail is the lifeblood of fiction."

"Good fiction," says Gardner, "sets off a vivid and continuous dream in the reader’s mind. . . . All writing requires at least some measure of trancelike state: the writer must summon out of nonexistence some character, some scene, and he must focus that imaginary scene in his mind until he sees it as vividly as, in another state, he would see the typewriter and cluttered desk in front of him, or the last year’s calendar on his wall. . . . One has to be just a little crazy to write a great novel."

"It’s true," he says, "that most books for beginning writers are not very good, even those written with the best of intentions, and no doubt this one, like others, will have its faults. . . . This book is written for the beginning novelist who has already figured out that it is far more satisfying to write well than simply to write well enough to get published."

It is impossible for me in a short review to give more than a hint of the treasures in this book. Gardner’s enthusiasm is contagious, and the book is a quick, enjoyable read.

I love this book and I think you will too. I recommend it very highly.

{Published in SF and Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, Feb. 2005.}

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Friday, August 10, 2007

THE ICE PICK

The Science of Science-Fiction Writing, by James Gunn. Lanham, Md., Scarecrow Press, 2003. 232 p. $16.95. Includes: index, Notes from the 1998 SF Writers Workshop, and Syllabus for a Workshop. ISBN: 1-57886-011-3.

Most professors of English seem to hate science fiction or consider it to be beneath contemptible notice. James Gunn is different. A prolific science fiction author himself, Gunn loves science fiction, and it shows. In addition to having taught fiction writing and science fiction, he has conducted a very popular and long-running Writers Workshop in Science Fiction.

In this book, which is a distillation of his thoughts and advice, he begins with the basics of "Writing Fiction" and leads us through scene construction, characterization, dialogue, setting and description, and the creation of suspense. He even has a chapter on "How to be a Good Critiquer and Still Remain Friends."

"The value of the critique," he says, "is only partially to provide feedback for the author; perhaps the most important part is to develop critical skills that can be applied to your own work."

Among common weaknesses found in stories, he says, is that the writer must "understand that a story is not simply a series of interesting events, or even of problems solved . . . [nor] simply an account of personal stress," but that it involves challenges to be overcome and a change within the character which allows the overcoming to occur in a believable way.

The second part of the book deals specifically with writing science fiction. "We must," he says, "understand why science fiction has needs different from other fiction." This is a fascinating discussion about what science fiction is, and is not, about where it came from and where it may be headed; about where ideas come from and what to do with them after you think you’ve got a good one; and about the kinds of heroes, heroines, and villains that populate science fiction stories.

He gives a concise list of eleven recommendations (p. 98-9) for the beginning writer that pack more good advice in a short space than I can remember seeing any where else. For example, number seven: "Write in scenes; visualize them completely; bring in other sensory detail when possible."

The third part, which takes up nearly half the book, is composed of biographical essays about the classic science fiction authors: H.G. Wells, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore. This part is fun for those of us who enjoy reading about the masters, and it helps us with our own struggles when we read about their problems and how they overcame them. We also see what has been done in science fiction and how the field has changed and grown.

His appendices include notes from a SF Writers Workshop given by him in 1998. Reading these reflections is the next best thing to actually being able to go to one. And if you are in a critique group or running a workshop yourself, his Syllabus for a Workshop may be invaluable. In fact, you could use the syllabus and create your own personal workshop.

"Here you have it," says Gunn, "forty years of reflections about the fiction-writing process and how to teach it, and the ideas I have shared with my students about how to do it effectively and how to get it published afterward."

{Published in SF and Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, Jan. 2005.}

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