How Writing Novels Helps You Pass Your AP English Test

So today I took the dreaded AP English language and Composition test. I'm technically not allowed to talk about anything on the test because I signed the little "I will not talk about any of the stuff on this test until it's released" section on the booklet that you had to sign to take the test, so I will not do that, but I will tell you that the multiple choice was harder than I thought it would be, but the essays weren't that bad.

Probably because going into the test I was not worried about the essays much at all. Not only were the essays just about the only think we worked on all year in my class, but even before the class my essays were already pretty good.

Guess why?

As this is a writing blog, I think you can all manage to guess the answer to that.

Even though essays and novel are rather different writing forms, you'll either be surprised or already know how much extensive narrative writing skills can help you write good essays. 

At the bare minimum, you've got the writing mechanics down. You know how to form a sentence and that sentences form a paragraph. Even with spell check, you should have a good enough grasp on spelling an punctuation that the grader won't cringe.

If you're really dedicated to/good at writing, you also probably know how to develop an idea. Good essays aren't just thesis, evidence, idea, conclusion. (Unless you're in my 7th grade English teacher's class. In that woman's class you conformed to the strict format or she would fail you on the spot. So if you are in the younger grades (7/8) stick to the format and have hope for a future in which you can break free from suck limited writing. There is hope, I promise.) 

They have flow. The idea is developed and supported and expanded, just like a plot or a character. A Character is typically introduced and developed in the readers mind, then some of their background is explained so that we can understand them, then the character ( if dynamic) grows as a person/character.

Usually when writing a novel, you start to use a lot of different methods and structures and sentence lengths ect. It would be really boring to read a book with the same sized sentences and the same sized paragraphs and the same words. Unless it's a purposeful styles, "he said","she said" books are boring.

In short, you develop a certain repertoire of skills that don't just apply to narratives. They work and even should be used in essays. it makes them much better.

And of course, writers are more familiar with taking constructive criticism. Or at least you should be. So we're a lot better at taking a grade lower than we wanted because we can take that to improve our writing better than most kids who are used to getting As on everything.

We also tend to be a lot better at sitting in one place for 2+ hours, doing nothing but writing.

That helps a lot.

Knowledge is Power!

(Schoolhouse Rock reference intended)

AP tests.

Death.

I’m taking less than half as one of my other friends though. She’s taking five, two of which are on the same day. Now that is death. But I’m pretty close. Not to mention the fact that my other teachers/classes don’t seem to acknowledge their existence and are giving us the same amount of homework and tests as we’ve always had.

Joy.

But of course this not a blog where I complain about my school life, though it does cut into my writing time which I guess makes it relevant.

I cannot stress how much I recommend have writing buddies. They say make friends with people who share your same interests, but especially when those interests include serious writing. Those are the friends who will know your pain, give you sympathy, help and sometimes ideas. They understand what you want to do, why you want to do it, and a lot of time two people can figure out a lot more info about publishing and such than one can. And now even agents are looking for referrals rather than unsolicited material, so if your friend manages to get their foot in the door they can refer YOU. That’s how Cassandra Clare got her first publication. Her friend Holly Black had gotten a publishing deal and referred Clare to her agent. Now she has over 8 books with millions of copies sold each, a movie, and at least 4 more on the way. If you still need to be convinced, check out the full article on it, Writing Buddies.)

If you read a bit around on this blog, you’ll know that my Writing Buddy also happens to be my best friend. In fact that’s another reason why I haven’t been as faithful updating this blog the past week or so, I’ve been working on her birthday present with every spare minute I haven’t been studying. It’s finally in the mail (a week late- HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARGARET! You’ve got 3 years left to get your two books. You can do it!). But she’s not my only writing friend, and one of the things that I’ve noticed, being able to compare the two, is that writers know a lot of weird stuff.

I know that might sound weird, but it’s true. We know a lot of weird stuff.

I have no interest whatsoever in going into the medical field, much less becoming an OBGYN doctor, yet I know an astonishing amount about preterm births. I am also very much not Jewish, nor do I have any family or close friends who are Jewish. Yet I know quite a bit about Jewish funerals. And I know far more about malaria and how it affects a person than anyone other than someone working on a malarial vaccine should know. Why? Because I researched all of these for a story.

There is no reason that my other friend would know so much about modern day pirates or Somalia. Most people I know wouldn’t know where to point on a map to find Somalia. Except that she has a character who is a Somalian pirate.

It doesn’t always have to be stuff found researched for a story though, it can also be stuff that’s just been picked up reading or in school. I will never forget where the latissimus dorsi muscle is in your back because my teacher described it as “the wing shaped muscle” but I misheard her as “the muscle where the wing attaches.” Now I knew that I had misheard, but I’ve certainly never forgotten. I believe that historical fiction is probably the best way to learn history.

Sometimes we run into stuff we don’t know though, or something that we’re not sure about because we’ve seen it on TV, but can you really trust Hollywood at all? (usually the answer to that is no. If you think you know something because you saw it in a movie, please research it before you try to put it to paper. When it comes to information always assume that Hollywood is a liar.)

The internet is probably everyone’s best friend in this case. There is no end to the information you can find out with a Google search (I would have said a quick Google search, but some information is very far from a quick Google search. I’ve spent hours trying to get a simple question answered while people just keep on telling me stuff I already know. New mommy websites, I love you.) But just like Hollywood, you have to be very careful about the answers you find. Make sure that they’re correct.

What is your source? Are you looking on yahoo!answers, or are you looking on The World Health Organization’s official website/reports?

• Dot orgs are usually much safer than dot coms, I think we all know that having grown up in the Information Age.

• If you’re looking for historical information like stuff people would be wearing or dressed in, I would suggest finding a website for roleplayers- sorry. Reenactors. Especially on the American Civil War, you will be able to find out just about anything you want to know about that war from hard core reenactors.

• Medical information should usually come from a website sponsored by a hospital.

• Don’t trust Wikipedia, unless it’s a highly specialized topic. Yes people can edit what it says on Wiki, but who’s going to both modifying highly specialize/scientific information?

• I’ve found that you can usually find a lot of statistical information from either the UN an/or its various break off branches, or if you’re looking for information about the US, PewResearch.org is a great place to go.

• Then there’s also the New Mommy type websites. Websites that are designed to help people figure out what to do when they have no idea. This category would also include First Aid websites too.

• New articles, if you can find one related to your topic are… usually pretty good. It depends on what your topic is and who wrote the article. Usually they’re pretty good. Usually.

And you can always try to find someone who knows what they’re talking about. When I was doing my writing project on incompetent cervixes, there was no one better to ask for help than my OBGYN Aunt. Asking actual people is really nice because you get to ask them questions and they will answer that specifically. And let us not forget the still very valuable source of information called BOOKS. We’re all trying to write one, right?

If you’re looking at the right sources, you can find out all sort of relevant information to your topic… and lots of other cool/weird information that you can impress/freak out your friend with later.

Did you know that parasitic flatworms have the most complex reproductive systems of an animal?

Reblog: How to Diagnose Your Novel's Strengths and Weaknesses

I had some time today because I didn't have any homework, so I thought that I would take the opportunity to work on my novel. In doing so I decided to look up a favorite article of mine, and realized that I should probably share it with all of you! I love some of the ideas that it proposes.

Darcy Pattison's "The Incredible Shrunken Manuscript: How to Diagnose Your Novel's Strengths and Weaknesses". http://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/31-FE3-NovelRevision.html

"Without reading a single word of your novel, I can tell you some of its strengths and weaknesses by using the “Shrunken Manuscript” technique. The technique was born accidentally several years ago, when a friend asked me to critique her manuscript. We were a bit short on money at the time and I didn’t want to print out a couple hundred pages to read. Instead, I single-spaced the manuscript, reduced the font and then printed it out.

What I saw amazed me. Chapters that covered ten pages were now encapsulated on just three pages. It was easier to see how Act I led into Act II. Instead of flipping through hundreds of pages to check a fact, I had only a couple dozen pages to go through.

I decided to be really radical. I eliminated all white space at the ends of chapters and reduced the font to only 6-point, or even 5-point, until I had an entire 50-60,000 word novel in less than 30 pages.

I’ve heard the complaints: you can’t read a manuscript at that font size. You don’t need to. .

How to Use the Shrunken Manuscript Technique

Here’s how the process works. Identify something you want to visualize about your manuscript. I often ask students to identify their five strongest chapters, with strongest defined in any way they think is helpful for their manuscript. Then, take a bright marker and put an X over the strongest chapters. Yellow markers don’t tend to work as well as blue or pink. Finally, lay the manuscript on the floor in three rows with about ten pages in each row.

Now, step back and observe.

For example, if you have two strong chapters at the beginning and three strong chapters at the end, you have the dreaded sagging middle problem. If you have two strong chapters in the middle and three at the end, then you must question the opening: perhaps you started the story too early. An absence of X-ed chapters toward the end means you need a better climax.

At first, students were skeptical that this Shrunken Manuscript technique worked. But they were working in groups, and within each group, writers had exchanged and read manuscripts. When I identified one story as having a sagging middle, I asked the writer’s group if that was true of the manuscript. They said yes.

So, what are the rules of the Shrunken Manuscript? Actually, everything is arbitrary, based on rules I made up as I worked with the technique.

1. 30 pages. For me, 30 pages are about all I can take in visually at a time. Manuscripts up to 60,000 words can be shrunken to 30 pages; sometimes you need to put the story into two columns, which shrinks it even more. For manuscripts over 60,000 words, divide the manuscript in half and repeat the exercise for each half.

2. Mark 5-6 items. In 30 pages, it works well to mark 5-6 successful chapters. You could do more or less, but then you start to fudge on your criteria for a strong chapter.

3. Make your own key. While I like to mark chapters with a marker, others use stickers, glitter, beads and more.

4. Mark anything you want. The technique is flexible and can be used to consider anything in your story. Here are some suggestions, but feel free to adapt as needed:

• How often do the protagonist and antagonist go head to head? The conflicts should be spread out consistently through the novel and it must definitely happen in the climax scene. 
• Where does a certain character appear and how much space is devoted to that character? Here, you wouldn’t mark entire chapters, but scenes in which the character appears. What’s useful here is that you can easily see proportions. If Character A only appears in short scenes, so only 10% of the story (or 3 pages total) features Character A, then A shouldn’t be the main character.
• Dialogue versus prose. Because dialogue is often short, it tends to leave open space on the shrunken manuscript, making it easy to gauge if you are prose heavy or dialogue heavy.
• Does your setting vary across the story? Use different colors to mark the different settings. Often, writers want a setting to recur, with the subsequent events in that setting contrasting or supporting the previous events. This allows you to pinpoint exactly when the settings occur in the story.

In other words, this technique is good at evaluating the big picture of a novel, the overall structure, pacing, interactions. (See complete instructions on Shrunken Manuscripts here.)

I wondered if there were other useful techniques for seeing the big picture, and this is what I found.

Spreadsheet Plotting

Scott Westerfield and Justine Larbalestier use an adaptation of a spreadsheet to track a novel’s plot. Larbalestier says, “A novel is a large document containing a whole world with a population that can range from one (boring navel-gazing novel about a man trapped inside a unicycle) to billions or more (space opera where the Empress of the universe destroys a whole planet and the reader follows the last day of each inhabitant of said planet). Keeping track of all of that is tricky.”

Basically, you can decide to track chapters or scenes. Then for each scene/chapter, you fill in columns that ask Characters Present, Goal of Scene/Chapter, Setting, Timeline, Action v. Sitting Around, Word Count, and virtually anything else you want to chart. Depending on how obsessive you are, you can play with the spreadsheet software and do things such as highlight character names in different colors. Be sure to use consistent terminology, such as always calling a place “the picnic area,” and not changing it to “the park.” If you stay consistent, then you can use the spreadsheets sorting capability, letting you see at a glance how many scenes/chapters take place at the picnic area.

Both the spreadsheet plotting and the Shrunken Manuscript Technique are useful for revising a long novel because you can see different items at a glance. But they aren’t the same.

Shrunken Manuscripts can show you proportions at a glance, for example, how much space is devoted to Character A. You can find out the same information in spreadsheet plotting, but you must add up numbers: it’s not visual. With Shrunken Manuscripts, it’s also easy to mark multiple issues at one time by using different colors or other keys.

Spreadsheet plotting allows you to scan the actual content of chapters just by glancing down a column.  If you have one column for the emotional impact of a scene/chapter—perhaps assigning a 1-5 for emotional content—you can easily identify how the emotional arc is progressing. So, either content or progressions (plot, narrative arc, character arc, or emotional arc) are easier with spreadsheets.

From Shrinking to Exploding

On the other hand, when Kirby Larson, winner of the Newberry Honor medal (given to the most distinguished book published in children’s literature that year) for Hattie Big Sky, hit a wall in her writing, she took it to heart.

With the help of her friend and co-author, Mary Nethery, she taped large sheets of paper around the walls of her office. Then around the room, she wrote the major plot lines and started working with them. After two days of working BIG, she had her plot and working outline for revision done.

Working big or small, changing the manuscript’s size helps an author see the story better.

Characters

We’ve talked about techniques for seeing the overall shape of a story. What about techniques for seeing different aspects of the story? Here’s one for characters. Everyone knows that characters should run a story and that interesting characters make for interesting stories. But did you put an interesting character in your novel right from the start?

Read the first five pages of your story. Done? Stop!

Turn over page five and write down everything you know about the main character from those first five pages.

Does your list look something like this?

• 20 years old
• secretary
• likes red nail polish

If that’s all you know after five pages, you’re in trouble! By the end of five pages, readers should know much more about your main character, or they are likely to abandon the story. By page five, I like to be able to list at least a dozen unique characteristics, bits of trivia about the character, likes or dislikes, life issues, fears, etc. Do you give the reader a hint about the character’s inner life, not just a physical description? Do you give the reader a view of the setting through your character’s eyes?

By the end of page five, the reader should be hooked—by your characters.

Suggestion: Repeat the evaluation for a section near the middle of the book. Maybe you need to throw out the first couple chapters because you were learning who your characters are. If the results are just as dry and sterile though, you’ll definitely want to study characterization.

Dialogue

The difficult thing about dialogue is that it simulates speech, it begs for the ear. One way to test your dialogue is to pick a section of your novel with lots of dialogue. Remove the actions, thoughts, and speech tags, rewriting it as a play or script. Then, ask a couple friends to read it aloud. If you have the capability, either audiotape or videotape this reading.

Here’s an example from The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin, Chapter 9, with all speech tags and actions removed:

Grace: Oh, there you are. Come, dear, let’s go to your room and I’ll fix your hair.
Grace: Have you eaten?
Turtle: Mrs. Baumbach made me a dinner.
Grace: Your poor father’s probably starving; he’s been so busy on the phone, changing appointments and all.
Turtle: Daddy’s eating in the coffee shop; I just saw him there.
Grace: I think you should wear your party dress tonight; you look so pretty in pink.
Grace: You know, sweetheart, I’m rather hurt that you won’t tell your own mother about your clues.
Turtle: My lips are sealed.
Grace: Just one eensy-beensy clue?
Turtle: N-n-n.

Notice first, that Turtle doesn’t answer each time Grace, her mother, speaks. Dialogue isn’t just about the words used, but about the interchange between characters and that can involve silences.

Listen to the recording and evaluate the dialogue: Are the intonations natural, not forced? We don’t need explicit transitions like repetitions or explanations; instead, the intonation provides the coherence needed. Grace sounds overly cheerful as she tries to placate her daughter and worm the clues to the story’s mystery from her. Turtle sounds straightforward, until she realizes her mother’s intention and then resorts to monosyllables. Grace is characterized as a person who will flatter and be kind to get what she wants. Turtle is characterized as a perceptive person who sees under the surface to her mother’s intent. Short sentences are fine. Though none are used in this selection, even sentence fragments can be used effectively in dialogue, if the intonation patterns are right.

Another quick exercise is to cut-and-paste one character’s dialogue into a separate file. Read through it for consistency, making sure the character sounds like the same character throughout. You can tell this is Character X, not Character A. Or, without identifying the character, ask someone who has read your novel to identify the character who is speaking. If they guess the wrong character, you’ll want to look at that character’s dialogue closely in the next revision.

Scenes

Finally, a quick check of your scenes is a good place to start evaluating your novel’s strengths and weaknesses. Scenes are contained units of action with a beginning, a middle and end. Sometimes, one scene takes up a chapter and other times, several scenes combine to create a chapter. Scenes open with some sort of conflict, which gives characters a goal for the scene. The middle complications intensify the conflict and the ending usually features a disaster, somehow making the situation worse for the character. Scenes usually include four elements: action, dialogue, narrative and interior thoughts.

Did you write in scenes? To find out take out a chapter of your novel and put a box around the scenes. Yes, take out a bright marker or pen and mark up the chapter, boxing every scene.

For example, in Lizzie Bright and Buckminster’s Boy, by Gary D. Schmidt, Chapter 3 has these scenes:

• Turner’s father, the minister, punishes him for several misdeeds. (2 pages)
• Turner suffers in his room from the summer heat. (Half page)
• Turner survives supper without a misstep. (One page)
• Turner watches the sunset and almost likes Maine. (Half page)
• Turner seeks a place where he “can breathe”; he goes to the seashore. (2 pages)
• Turner meets Lizzie Bright, who teaches him how to bat Maine-style. (6 pages)
• At supper, Turner is lectured by his father, until his mother steps in and stops it. (2 pages)
• Turner heads to the hay meadow to play baseball, but a rainstorm stops the game. (1 page)

Several short scenes build up to the longest scene in which Turner meets Lizzie Bright, a black girl, and they become instant friends, something that will cause trouble throughout the rest of the story. Notice that Turner is at the center of each scene and each scene contains conflict, both big and small. For example, when Turner meets Lizzie Bright, he is throwing stones. She calls to him and in his surprise, his last stone is thrown overhead and comes down and hits his nose. It bleeds and his bloody shirt will get him in more trouble with the minister. In his pain, Turner refuses to answer Lizzie Bright’s questions, so she thinks he is an idiot. Besides the overall problem of not liking Maine and befriending the wrong person, Turner has smaller conflicts within the scene itself.

Could you divide your manuscript into scenes? If not, don’t panic. You’ve just discovered something about your style of writing. Many writers take a more meandering route toward a novel; however, those who write in scenes tend to write stories that are more focused, more tension-filled, more emotional. I’d recommend you at least try writing in scenes and see if it fits your style and your story. A good place to begin is Sandra Scofield’s, The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer.

The point of these exercises is to change the context for the story, from large to small, something that will make you, the author, see the story differently. Writers are too close to their own work to see the shape, to understand when and where to revise. But these methods of looking at your novel’s strengths and weaknesses will give you a starting place for your revisions."

Word to the Wise on Wit

Today we’re going to talk about one of my favorite things.

Witty comebacks!

Let us strive to be honest with each other. It’s not just me. We all love witty comebacks.

Main characters, side characters, bad guys, it doesn’t matter. We love them. Readers love them.

There’s a reoccurring theme on this blog though, that I’m going to bring up, and that is that writing is an art. And so are most of its aspects. And just like writing itself, there is an art to witty retorts. They have to be used with discretion by the appropriate characters. Snappy dialogue is great, but it can be overwhelming.

In real life, the number of times that you are actually able to come up with a witty retort in the moment are typically, unless you’re a thespian that’s really good at improv, rather rare. Even though a few minutes later you think of that perfect golden response that would have made the whole room go “Ohhhhhhhh.”

Which is one of the nice things about writing witty dialogue. YOU don’t have to come up with the comeback right off the bat, because YOU have time to think about an awesome response and it’s your character that’s coming up with it without missing a beat. It’s severely tempting. Like I said though, most people can’t come up with responses like that all the time. So is it really that likely that your characters will be able to?

I already admitted that I love witty comeback and dialogue, and I will confess that in my first draft, probably 80% of the dialogue between my two main characters was nothing but sarcasm and wit. Which was a lot of fun to write. Writing sarcasm is fun. No denying that.

However one of the things that I had to take a hard look at was the fact that pretty much anytime my character were doing something plot moving they were exchanging witty banter. And so one of the many things I’ve had to do as I work on my second draft is work on removing a lot of that and making it resembled more like a conversation two human beings would have.

I’m not getting rid of all of it by a longshot though. It’s way too much fun. And we all love the sarcastic witty characters. And it’s perfectly alright for your sarcastic witty character to be able to come up with sarcastic witty responses if that’s their character.

But there is a threshold for it. That threshold being reality.

Save Everything

Confession: I am a packrat.

Not bad enough that I need to see a specialist or anything, I promise. But I have problems throwing things away. I really do. I have written copies of stuff I wrote when I was 12 and typed copies of stuff when I wrote when I was 7. And don’t get me started on creative supplies. I have shoeboxes upon shoeboxes full of fabric and ribbon and string and beads and other random artsy stuff.

But the one thing that I packrat the most is files.

I save everything.

Don’t confuse that with I save all the time, no, I have had more than my share of not having saved and then your battery getting knocked out and losing everything. But I save almost everything I’ve ever written, even if I don’t like it. I’ve saved pretty much every piece of writing that Margaret’s shared with me.

I save scraps, ideas, projects that I want to work on, stuff I intend on never looking at again, first drafts, second drafts, diagrams that I’ve made of family trees and appearances, timelines… I save a lot of files. And I’m also slightly OCD about keeping them organized. I have lots of folders. As opposed to Margaret who just saves everything in one folder and Searches for a file when she wants it.

However, despite the fact that her computer is a mess file wise, our organization in terms of our novels and its various drafts are quite similar.

Moral of the story is save every draft you make.

One of the interesting things that you’ll find when you look at enough articles and books about editing/revising your novel, is that almost every one of them will say something about saving your drafts as you go along. The one that I have on hand is an excerpt from Gail Carson Lavine’s, author of one of my absolute favorite children’s books of all time Ella Enchanted among other children’s books, Writing Magic:

“I, too, save everything I write, so in the computer file for each of my books or short stories I keep a document titled “Extra” and I park my peerless but useless prose there. Extra is my treasure lode. I can mind it, and so can biographers!

Here’s a strategy I use in writing a first draft or in revising when I take my story down a path I’m not sure of and I don’t want to lose what I already have.

On my computer I save my story in its old version. Say I save it as “elves 1”. Then I save it again as “elves 2”. I go to the spot where my alteration begins and start writing. If all goes well, I won’t need the old version but if my new idea fizzles I haven’t lost anything. By the time I’ve finished writing and revising a book, I may be up to “elves 50”!”

I do something similar, though I just have everything to do with my book under the folder “Beguiled” and my successive drafts are Master, Master 2, Master 3. That’s the one I’m working on right now.

Every time I need to make a major change, and I’m going to continue working on the vein for a while, I create a new draft. That way I can organize my drafts by the major changes. Master was the first draft. Master 2 was just general edits (editing, not revising () Shame on me.) Master 3 I removed the entire first eight chapters of my novel because it was more or less all backstory. Once I feel comfortable enough with the beginning without those chapters and how the backstory is spread throughout the chapter I plan on making a Master 4 and giving my antagonist a serious revamp.

Separating drafts by tasks helps me to just keep things straight in my head. It also helps me focus on one task at a hand, which no matter how good you might be at multi-tasking, has been scientifically proven to be the best way to do work.

That doesn’t have to be the way you do it. Like just about everything on this blog, what’s important is figuring out what works for you. That works for me. But you really should save different drafts. It helps you to see how you’re progressing. Sometimes you’ll do something to change it and not like it and if you saved over the original or earlier drafts you can’t go back. Or sometimes you find ideas in your earlier drafts. That’s happened to me more than enough times.

Or if there’s something you liked that you had to get rid of later because it just didn’t work, if you have it saved you can use it for later.

And while we’re on the topic I would also tell you to not just save drafts, but get in the habit of saving everything. Those random scraps that you think of can be seriously useful one day. They can turn into a lot more than you think they might. And the great thing about computers is that it’s not that big of a deal to save them.

When it turns into a three inch thick pile of paper in the drawer of your bedside table and you’re supposed to be moving though…