Category Archives: Fiction

Minutiae

According to Merriam-Webster.com, “Mystery” means anything that is not understood. Its origin pre-dates the bible. “Suspense” is defined as nervousness or excitement caused by wondering what will happen. It was first used in the 1500’s. “Minutiae” means trifles, details and smallness, and it dates to 1782, making it the new kid on the vocabulary block. The elements of minutiae can enhance both mystery and suspense, but they are used differently in each genre.

In a mystery, you don’t know who done it; that’s for the protagonist and the readers to figure out. The author plants clues throughout the story, and those clues are often in the minutiae, the small details in the beginning that have large consequences in the end. For example, break a fingernail in Chapter 1 and have that fingernail show up at the scene-of-the-crime in Chapter 7. Mystery readers need to be on their toes, constantly asking themselves, “Why did the author choose this minutiae to express that scene?” Readers won’t fault the author if they figure it out before the end. Instead, they will think of themselves as very clever for having done so.

In a suspense novel, the reader knows who did the dastardly deed, often from the opening chapter. There is no mystery to the story itself. Instead, there is plenty of mystique in the characters, and the readers are left asking, “Why does she always do that?” Readers don’t fault the author if the character’s mystique is double-handed or morally corrupt, so long as the author explains the minutiae in a rational way for that character’s development.

In a mystery, minutiae mystifies the storyline, in suspense it mystifies the characters and their actions.

What you choose say is just as important as when you say it. Character traits are popular with authors because these small details pull double duty with character development, and they don’t have a “sell by” date, meaning you can bring them back in your next chapter or next novel.

One place where minutiae can play a part in your novel is when you want to slow down the pace. Never use minutiae to speed up the action, like: His fist floated into Fred’s flabby gut. He heard him go oomph and gleefully watched Fred double over in pain. Instead say: He hit Fred once and watched him double over. Only use minutiae to slow down the action: The wine’s robust aroma floated in the air and competed with her perfume. He inhaled deeply, slowly; this was a night he had to savor.

Entirely new scenes and romantic moments can also benefit with a sprinkle of minutiae, to let the scene breathe. But this minutiae is only used once to full effect, then condensed for any revisits. Case in point: here’s a “first” scene from my upcoming novel Knock Softly (working title). The characters make several visits to the park and dog run with our protagonist, Edvard, and his two dogs, Rufus and Pudge, throughout the story. The dogs weigh 75 and 25 pounds respectively. (The novel goes into more detail on the dogs, too, but here such detail would only be minutiae.) This scene involves only a small portion of the 1.2-mile walk. Knock Softly is told in present tense.

Long before they arrive at the dog run, Ed has to walk the dogs past a family of oaks that proves to be home to an entire community of squirrels. The trees are a magnificent cluster whose matriarch stands dead center and at least 80 feet tall. The grounds under the oaks are well shaded and almost barren of other trees or tall vegetation. Their broad branches and long, fingered leaves steal all the sun’s rays leaving this part of the walk always cooler, darker. Rufus lifts his ears in eager anticipation and starts pulling on the leash. Ed wraps the leash around his wrist and braces for impact.

Readers revisit this part of the path again in another scene several pages later, but in the second scene, the pace is much faster and it is dialog that sets the pace. The scenery is just the canvas:

They’re getting closer to the oaks and both Ed and Rufus know it. He wraps the leash around his wrist before they get to the shadows and gives it quick jerk to let the dog know who is boss. Ed tells Jane… And the dialog follows.

All the minutiae from the first scene are present in the second, just not on the page. Left in the readers’ thought bubbles are the cluster of trees, the squirrels, and all the other previously established minutiae. To put all of that on the page again would only bog the story down when it wants to run.

And never use the same minutiae twice – that’s worse than marrying your brother-in-law in the same wedding dress.

Next Month: First Impressions
They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression, but much of fiction is character development. Development means change, and suspense means changing those first impressions. To write a great first impression in a novel, you have to first think about what your characters are going to develop into. Then figure out what kinds of darling details, social settings and backstories you need to get them there. Next month we’ll look at how to make a good first impression on the page.

Clarity

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When I dream of becoming a published author, I see myself as a stand out amongst a large populous of romance authors. My books sit alongside those written by authors I’ve admired and learned from by reading and being absorbed by the characters they’ve created and the stories they continue to roll out year after year. I want people to get thrilled when they see a new release date, from author ,Wendi Knape, and automatically click the to read category on their goodreads.com account, so I keep moving forward. Nonetheless, in my writer’s life, there are days when things weigh me down, a little voice whispering I won’t succeed no matter how many edits. However, I never let myself forget my end goal and always remember that I have a lot of encouragement from writer friends, plus all the resources in books and blogs regarding the writing craft.

With my first manuscript I didn’t stop writing to try to publish, I jumped to the next manuscript, and the next, and so on. In my experience, through writing and wise words from other authors, it’s best to leave a completed manuscript alone and come back to it to see what needs fixing.

When I moved on and was about halfway through writing book two, I went back to my first manuscript and tackled editing it several times so I could enter the RWA Golden Heart contest. All along, I’ve felt there’s been something missing from its pages, even after several edits. That I didn’t place in the contest let me know it still needed work, but now I had scores to lead me in the right direction. But still, it wasn’t a decisive critique it was just numbers relating to content.

I kept asking myself, where’s the spark that encourages the reader to turn the page? The spark was elusive, as if it was a living thing, hiding in the dark, just waiting for me to come to its rescue. I was becoming more and more frustrated each time I sat down to edit, mired in words that had gone blurry, lost in a sea of plot. The characters got what they wanted with little conflict. I couldn’t find my way out of the editing fog. Until reading, Make a Sceneby Jordan E. Rosenfeld, and nearly at the same time, a blog piece titled, The Difference between Idea, Premise and Plot, by Janice Hardy on Janice Hardy’s Fiction University website, things didn’t click. When I combined the two ideas, I got excited. Now I held the flickering spark and watched it dance on my fingertips. Fixing problems wasn’t going to be easy but it also wasn’t going to be like Atlas holding up the celestial sphere.

First, let’s look at The Difference between Idea, Premise and Plot. My idea was a good one, the premise was simple and strong, the plot was tagging along like a good pet, but it wasn’t quite pulling me forward like an excited puppy. When I got to story–which Janice Hardy added after a comment from a reader–the emotional element, the internal conflicts my characters would have to overcome, they easily overcame the problems. When I say easy, my hunky hero quickly decided he wasn’t afraid to take on the vampire protagonist–really an alien that needed to feed off human blood–to his home where he would help her find her mentor. Not only in the beginning did the protagonists acquiesce to circumstance, it was throughout that they jumped in feet first and fell in love in a blink. Usually, the reader is at the halfway point before the first love scene. Three quarters through, the protagonists discover they love each and still are keeping it from each other. The declaration of love is a highlight near the end.

If readers know what happens so soon, why should they turn pages?

What was missing?

Janice Hardy’s article allowed me to see that, though my idea was a good one, it wasn’t a complete story. Her break down from Idea, to Premise, Plot and finally her addition of Story, gave me a clearer vision as each consecutive step built on the other leading me to a stronger story concept. I even went on to develop other story ideas that I want in the series based on characters I love. When I got my hands on Rosenfeld’s book, Janice Hardy’s article only enhanced my start-up thoughts as each story came to life.

Half way through Make a Scene, I can tell you that I’ll re-read this book. It’s that good. I’m not saying this is the only book out there to help improve my writing, but Rosenfeld has a way of telling the reader, through examples and clear explanation, how to take my writing to the next level. Butterflies were flitting around in my stomach, my excitement palpable again. What Rosenfeld reiterates throughout is, “plot and character cannot be separated”[1]. I saw the holes in my story, now I could fill them.

The fixes came to me like magic causing me to write like the Mad Hatter at teatime. Narrative and dialogue I wrote, that included thoughts and actions of my protagonists meeting in opposition, help push the plot forward while still building a crescendo as the two characters come together and fall in love, simultaneously dealing with outside forces pulling them apart. Without tension, the reader will put the book down, and I definitely don’t want that to happen.

In my first draft and up until my latest draft of, A New Life, I was telling the reader some of Miseeka’s, my female protagonist’s, back-story. She already knew she would need to drink human blood. Here is an excerpt.

Her parents were blinded by their need to place her on the throne, to pass down their legacy to her. They thought him a wonderful influence on her and the Liti people. But Miseeka knew what a twisted soul he harbored. He was evil. She wouldn’t be beaten or manipulated by him again. So, her plan to flee Liti had formed and she looked for help from Healer Bacchius and other’s he trusted still on Liti.

The problem with the plan was that she would have to feed on humans. He said that Earth’s atmosphere was made up of oxygen, which the Liti could not breathe. Therefore, to survive, any Liti that resided on Earth would have to consume the blood of humans directly from, based on a human’s anatomy, the carotid artery.

It repulsed Miseeka to think she would have to feed off humans. She feared consuming all the human’s life blood. Would she have to kill to survive? She had to contact Bacchius as soon as she landed, if she survived. There were few canisters of Liti air, and it wouldn’t last for long.

While Miseeka dreamed, she could barely get her lungs to work as the escape pod, programmed for Earth, moved through the vast silence of space.

Being a first draft, this is a mess. I use passive voice, I’m telling instead of showing and the tension is nonexistent.

Now look at my latest draft, the one I wrote after reading Make a Scene. I’ll let the section of manuscript speak for itself. Just know that Miseeka has crashed on Earth and realizes she’s no longer near her ship.

Miseeka came awake, blinking and confused.

She slowly got up, swaying in the darkness, as if she was drunk. Looking down to take stock of her form, she saw a sticky wetness smeared over her hibernation suit. What happened?

More aware of her surroundings, she noticed her lungs working efficiently. Miseeka took another breath and suddenly the most delicious aroma filled her renewed lungs and her hands automatically lifted to her mouth as her nose followed the scent to meet them. She swiped at her chin and mouth, and began to lick the unfamiliar treat from her fingers without conscious thought. At one point, she groaned aloud. There was an instant reaction to the liquid she consumed, making her heart pump faster and her desire for more reach a new high. What was this ambrosia, she wondered? She moved to find the source, stumbling, losing her balance toppling onto something.

Miseeka’s mind screamed at the horror of what she had fallen upon. Dear goddess! A human. She scrambled off the male, caught in his limbs, kicking out to get away. “Let me go, let me go?” She screamed, falling over on her belly. She clawed at the undergrowth, the pine needles pricking her hands, digging into her knees, the earth turning over to reveal it’s pungent smell, when she proceeded to vomit onto the forest floor everything she had stolen, until she felt hallow and her breaths became labored once again. Her stomach cramped with the emptiness.

What is happing to me?

Her mouth gapped and sucked in the atmosphere as she tried to remain on her hands and knees, but her lungs continued to burn and her surroundings started to darken as she became lightheaded. Why couldn’t she breathe?

She fell to her side and rolled to her back. Miseeka turned her head toward the human. The man was dead. I am a killer. Her mind went wild with the repercussions; the line of thinking that suddenly came upon her caused the shakes to start riddling her body deep within. She had torn the man’s neck out and fed on him. She was a monster.

Miseeka wanted to laugh. She was now the monster she was trying to escape. She lifted her red hands blackened by the night and realized the only source for her survival, human blood.

With that painful truth, she gave in to the darkness and passed out.

Can you see the difference? By withholding information that I had given Miseeka in the first draft–she would need to feed on human blood–I’ve added a slice of heart pounding tension that ups her internal and external conflicts. Now Miseeka is worried about killing the next human she encounters plus becoming a monster, adding complications. This also bumps up Miseeka’s character development letting the reader know that she has good morals and doesn’t want to hurt anyone. I want the reader to care about her so they’ll keep reading.[2] To complicate her life even further, Kyle, my leading man, comes upon Miseeka just as she stirs from unconsciousness needing to feed. That adds even more tension. What will she do next? The reader will have to turn the page.

Between my first draft and the latest one, a lot had to change. I still want to change more. The lesson? Staring at my own work can leave me hitting my head against a brick wall with an impression of said wall on my forehead. We as writers’ sometimes need to take a step back and reevaluate, so we can get our book on bookstore shelves next to our favorite authors. If we need to find help to see how, the good, the bad, and the downright ugly really look in our manuscripts, a book about writing might do the trick. All writers’ occasionally need is a refresher course in their writing life. So why not find it in one of your favorite books on writing.

What’s your favorite go-to book on writing?

Happy writing!

[1]Jordan E. Rosenfeld, MAKE A SCENE Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time, (Writer’s Digest Books 2008) 106.

[2] Jordan E. Rosenfeld, MAKE A SCENE Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time, (Writer’s Digest Books 2008)21-28,63

What Do You Know?

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“Write What You Know.” Original Author Unknown

“Beware of advice—even this.” Carl Sandberg

Creative juices are flowing. Your protagonist takes a high-powered position in a renowned law firm to be closer to her love interest. The romance is simple for you to write, however you know almost nothing about a criminal law firm. To make the story realistic, research is necessary. Even the pros do it.

Tom Clancy, known for espionage and military based novels such as The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, The Sum of All Fears, and Clear and Present Danger, was never in the military. Clancy had a bachelor’s degree in English literature and worked in the insurance business. His fascination with the military motivated him to do the research to create his best-selling novels.

Vince Flynn, a dyslexic who graduated with a degree in economics, was medically disqualified from entering the Marine Aviation Program. He quit his commercial real estate job to work full time on his first novel, Term Limits, a political thriller. Flynn also wrote Transfer of Power, The Third Option, and Act of Treason. Having no military or political background, he did a lot of research to get essential facts correct.

Harlan Coben studied political science in college and writes mysteries, such as Tell No One, Deal Breaker, Just One Look, and Six Years.

Some best-selling authors use the knowledge of their occupations to create heart-stopping plots. Robin Cook is a physician who writes medical thrillers, i.e. Coma and Contagion. Tess Gerritsen is a physician who wrote Call After Midnight, a romantic thriller, as well as a series of novels that spawned the television series, “Rizzoli & Isles.”

Michael Crichton, an anthropology professor, studied medicine and did exhaustive research to write medical thrillers. He is well-known for Jurassic Park, Twister, and The Andromeda Strain which were made into popular movies. Crichton also created the television series, E. R.

Are you motivated enough to thoroughly research your topic of interest to complete your novel? Will you be the next Tom Clancy, Tess Gerritsen, or Vince Flynn? What are you interested in researching?

Plot, Plot, Plotting Along

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An architect needs a solid plot of land to build his house. Only a plot can render a view. All of the detailed plans and beautiful drawings are just pretty pictures without it. The same can be said about all fiction. No matter how well rounded and sympathetic – or just plain pathetic – the characters are, if the story isn’t built on solid ground, it won’t stand upright when finished.

Any story can carry tension, from a school girl’s pimple on a first date to a megalomaniac’s rise to infamy. What makes any fiction interesting is how events unfold, how the heroes conquer any obstacle thrown in their way. That’s called a Plot. Let’s build a simple suspense plot that anyone can relate to.

Our protagonists, Auggie and Clair Knight, have been filing taxes on time and more-or-less correctly all 15 years of their marriage. Our story is about the Knight’s audit.

We’ll use Gustav Freytag’s Narrative Structure and his five parts to a plot to construct our story. They are:

Exposition
Rising Action
Climax
Falling Action
Denouement

In the Exposition, we draw out the motivations and goals of our protagonists. We learn the Knights are just barely getting by on Auggie’s day job as a security guard at the marina. We get a sense of what might happen if he lost his steady income, or the home’s septic system backed up again. Exposition rounds out the main characters and gives rise to the inciting incident, that one event in the story that throws down the challenge.

In our story, the Rising Action begins when the Knights get an audit notice in the mail. Tension is introduced when Auggie can’t find some of the receipts the IRS has asked him to produce. More tension comes when Clair, an accounting grad who’s done their taxes all these years, reminds him that they’ve never reported his moonlighting income from helping friends sell boats on eBay. Some years, that amounted to $4,000 of extra, undeclared income.

The length of your piece gets determined right here. If you want a longer story, you could, for example, introduce an antagonist. Say, one of Auggie’s boat buddies or an old college pal of Clair’s. But we’ll keep this story short. You – the writer – continue to pull the threads tighter and tighter as Rising Action builds towards the day of the IRS audit. Let’s say you paint the protagonists in the beginning as mostly likeable characters. Their only real flaw is a little cheating on their income taxes. Auggie and Clair trod along, blissfully hoping the IRS doesn’t know about the boat sale commissions. The closer they get to that date, the more the Knights learn of the dire consequences they’d face – huge fines, penalties, possibly jail time and certainly a federal criminal record – if they got busted. None of which they can afford, and Auggie reminds her that he can’t hold his security job with a federal record. The Knights try to stay calm on the surface, but they worry and act nervous. Their tension increasingly rubs off on their relationship with each other, with their kids and the rest of your characters.

Freytag’s third element of plot is Climax. In our story, that would be the IRS audit. The Climax should be confrontational, a spell-binding scene that is both drawn out and shattered into sharp shards of action. This is not the end of your story, and far from the end of the action, but it should be your most realistic, best drawn scene in the story so far.

Then the author introduces the twist. Say, a slip of the tongue by Clair about how easy it is to sell stuff on eBay. This raises the IRS reviewer’s eyebrows, and both Auggie and the reader see it.

The Knights are only too glad to pay $124.50 for the few receipts they can’t produce and get out of there as fast as they can. Clair and Auggie high-five in the car and start to think they’ve dodged the bullet. They start laughing about it and bragging to each other how easy that had been. The reader feels for them, one way or the other.

What follows the Climax is called the Falling Action, and this where your story can take several twists and turns with the events you first brought out in the Exposition. Falling Action can take any direction the author likes so long as it advances the story forward.

This is the real fun stuff to dream up. Say, our heroes celebrate that night in a fancy restaurant and then get all lovey-dovey after the kids go to bed. Three days later Auggie comes home and tells Clair he’s just had the best day ever at work. Clair tells him that the septic’s just backed up into the kid’s sandbox again. Oh, and they got another IRS audit letter. This one for unreported income. Later that night, Auggie freaks out when he finds himself locked out of his eBay account. The Falling Action is the back-and-forth between winning and losing battles with all of these elements, with the ever-present IRS always looming. Our heroes fight on through the Falling Action to eventually claim victory over some, if not all, obstacles. Or they get their due comeuppance on every turn of the page, or Auggie gets very foggy and Clair becomes very clear, depending on which way you want to say goodnight to your readers.

Caution: don’t let any of your subplots take over your story. Resolve all of them, but always stay focused on the main event.

The last part of Freytag’s structure is called Denouement, or the finale. This is where all of the accomplishments of the story are summarized. If the author has done his job right, in suspense anyway, Denouement is reduced to a page or a paragraph. Why? Because all of the accomplishments will have already been shown in the Falling Action scenes. There’s no tension left, just afterglow. In our story, that would be Auggie and Clair sitting on the pier toasting warm beer under a starry night and saying it could have been worse. Period.

There’s one plot line, start to finish. Just flavor with mouth-watering prose, give it a tasty title and a satisfying ending. Let it stew in suspense for a few thousand words and you’ll have it.

Freytag’s formula is not parsed equally. In all my writing, Exposition is painted with a wide brush and is never more than 10% of the story’s length. The details of these broad strokes come out in the Rising Action, which is about 40-50% of what needs to be said. The Climax is about 2%. Falling Action is usually another 40-50% because all the Exposition and conflicts created during the earlier parts now need to be resolved. Anything not resolved by this point is Denouement.

Think of our architect friend presenting the keys to this great house when finished, after every detail has been polished. If the plot is beautifully landscaped, then what more could he possibly say?

Next Month, Minutiae. ‘Nuff said.

Note: from August 1st through August 7th, Amazon.com is promoting a sale on my two novels in their Kindle bookstore. This is a great opportunity for those who likes to e-read fiction to save a couple of bucks. Both Seoul Legacy, The Orphan’s Flu and The Freya Project will be available that week for just $0.99. (67% off Retail of $2.99) So, please tell two friends to tell two friends to tell two friends. You can read the synopsis (Amazon’s “Book Description”) by following the links above. Please note this sale is on e-books only. First edition print books are also available through Amazon. Since all print versions come from BirchwoodBooks.com, I’ll be happy to sign or personally inscribe any orders for print. Enjoy! –Phil

Print books:
Seoul Legacy, The Orphan’s Flu (trade paperback)
The Freya Project (hardcover, trade paperback, ltd. ed.)

Finding the Mind of a Villain

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Recently, a computer guru, otherwise known as my husband, replaced my hard-drive with a solid-state drive. Arriving the following evening at the local coffee shop to write, I realized all my files had been transferred to our computer network, leaving me without my manuscript.

“So now what,” I asked myself, taking a sip of my coffee.

It took a few minutes to decide what would be the best use of my time. I decided research stemming from my blog post titled Fear, appearing on June 10, 2014, sounded interesting. I wanted to delve into the psychology of a Villain. Why is he the way he is? I tapped Wikipedia for basic information, and found some good resources to read, regarding Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Frederick Irving Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory (A theory to improve job satisfaction, oddly enough).

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, combined with Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory, made for an interesting dichotomy of how I could create sanity and insanity in a character, based on my interpretation of the theories. Look at Maslow’s theory of needs that include, self-actualization, esteem, love and belonging, safety, and finally physiological needs, and combine this thinking with Herzberg’s theory, using it as a life satisfaction theory instead of a job satisfaction theory. It makes things a little clearer as to what a villain’s motivation will be and where his life diverted from happy and content to one that dips into insanity.

With the list of human needs that Maslow speaks of, each of us makes the decision to be happy or not, but what if that choice is taken away from us by outside forces. Looking back to my blog Fear, the child seeing friendly ghosts is now a teenager. The boy would have turned out sane and well balanced if left alone, but instead is locked away in a mental facility by his evil stepmother. Drugged by the doctors on a regular basis, per the stepmother’s wishes, and mentally bombarded by evil entities like the one I described toward the end of Fear, it is easy to see why the entities follow him into adulthood. He has no shields against them. The evil shadow creatures have free reign to whisper their vile thoughts and twist the teenagers mind.

Based on Maslow’s list, what does the character lose? One, I can assume the character loses self-actualization because he is drugged. Two, previous friend’s label him crazy when they find out he’s in an institution, losing his respectability causing his self-esteem to plummet. Does he find love and belonging sitting in an 8×8 white room in a drugged out haze? No. This turns love and belonging into hate. The people that were supposed to protect him threw him away. He’s no longer safe. The entities voices slither into his thoughts, his drugged state causing him to lose independent thought. Top everything off with his physiology, he’s now skinny and white in pallor, because the doctors don’t let him get out for exercise, and the character has become something entirely different.

These two theories combined create a catalyst to the characters motivation. While he’s trapped in the mental facility, ideas spin, evil overwhelms. All he can think about is revenge.

Now a man, he escapes.

Whom does he go after? You guessed it, the family that threw him away. Only the stepmother is dead and the only one left is the daughter, his only focus. To make it more interesting, the evil entities tag along with our villain, attacking the heroin in the dark alley, which I described in my blog titled Fear.

It’s amazing how an hour of research, that wasn’t planned, is now motivation to develop a story based around a couple paragraphs from a blog post. How do you think a story might flourish once you do a little research?

Happy writing!

Here are some other subjects I researched regarding psychology of the human mind.

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