Hello Authors!

We had a very successful Secret Santa season! Thank you to all the authors who joined the challenge and submitted stories! You all worked very hard and made your Santees happy!

I'm happy to report that our author site Unwritten 2.0 is now open!! AceofSpades is the featured author for January so go check out her interview. Also, there is a section called Meet The Admins that will give you all some insight to who we are and what we do!  In Februrary our featured author will be DaysGoBy! Here is the link: http://nfunwritten.wordpress.com/

 

 

--Courtney on Jan 03, 2015 12:42 pm 0 Comments

Hi everyone! The Secret Santa Challenge has been posted under the Challneges Category! When you post your Secret Santa story please go under the challenges category and find this years challenge! Click "Respond to Challenge" and link your story to this years category! Happy Holidays!

--Courtney on Dec 20, 2014 08:35 am 0 Comments

Writing Powerful Descriptions

By Jon Gingerich

Writing is an account of how people think. As a medium it's intrinsically empathic; it communicates patently human sensibilities. In order for a story to work, it needs to feel like real life, even when it’s actually something quite different. The more detailed and rich your descriptions, the better your writing will approximate the human experience, thereby establishing a connection with fellow minds.

The best descriptions are the ones that are completely original, easily understood and often reminisced. They're digestible yet impressionable, they say something profound but they’re palatable enough to be comprehended by anyone. It’s a difficult technique to master, an art form in itself, really.

Consider this a primer for writing good descriptions (here’s your first lesson: “good” isn’t a suitable or sufficient way to describe anything). To make things interesting  — and very embarrassing for me — I’ve dug up several of my own stories from years past to illustrate some truly awful blunders in description, each of which poisoned workshops at varying times during the earlier half of the last decade. Be warned: some major toadstools lie ahead.

Appeal to the senses

Words with strong sensory associations always increase your chances of yielding an empathic response. Why? When you appeal to our sensory faculties, you’re inviting us to imagine how something feels. Literally.

In order to maximize that empathic response, try to appeal to all the senses as often as you can. Don’t just tell us what something looks like, tell us how it sounds, how it tastes. Recent studies show words containing sensory descriptions are so powerful they even stimulate areas of the brain that aren't used to process language. When we read a detailed account of how something smells, for example, our sensory cortex gets a signal. In other words, the brain often treats real experiences and reading about them as the same thing. If you really want to place your reader in the story, your writing should take advantage of our collective faulty wiring whenever you can.

The same applies to our relationships with the laws of physics. Words describing motion can stimulate the motor cortex, which is responsible for coordinating body movements. If you really want to simulate motion, try doing this while varying the rhythms in your sentences. Want to increase action? Put your subject directly before the verb. To slow down the motion (in other words, to add emphasis), shorten the sentence. If you want to bring things to a stop, try replacing a conjunction with a comma: The fields are barren now, deserted. Here’s another trick: if you want to temporarily “stop” time, try removing the verbs altogether.

In order to maximize that empathic response, try to appeal to all the senses as often as you can. Don’t just tell us what something looks like, tell us how it sounds, how it tastes. Be specific

Avoid summary in your descriptions. Offer concrete information, engage us with moment-to-moment details, tell us about each detail, and how they affect the senses.

One of the most practical — and indeed, easiest — ways of laying out a descriptive foundation is to envision each scene before you write it. Literally close your eyes, see the scene and then write it down. For the time being, just let the image do its work; look closely at the objects in the scene, and describe them in a manner that’s as painfully specific as possible. Now — to establish storytelling authority — make sure the description is told from the proper subjective viewpoint: tell us how the character or narrator would see things from the POV you've established.

Here’s an especially bad slice of description from a story I wrote eight years ago:

Example (bad): It is hot.

“It is hot” would be fine if I were filling out a police report, or even writing a piece of journalism. But this was intended to be a work of fiction. Clearly, I hadn’t yet realized that by generalizing and not appealing to the readers' senses I missed an ideal opportunity to connect with empathizing human minds.

Example (better): The heat is oppressive, sweltering and exhausting, it sticks to the skin and makes ovens out of parking lots.

Some things to always consider when you’re writing a scene: do your word choices paint images, do they place us in the moment? Do they make us participants in the story instead of mere observers? Not only is this new sentence more specific, it brings in a few common experiences associated with heat (sticky skin, broiling parking lots), thereby placing readers into the action and increasing the chances of an empathic response.

Limit modifiers

It’s bad timing given my last example, but try to cut down on your adjectives and adverbs. Modifiers don’t specify words as much as you might think. More often than not, they actually abstract a thought, so sentences that rely on modifiers for descriptive strength are building on faulty foundations. You’ll be more successful if you instead find the verb that perfectly portrays the image you’re envisioning. When you edit your work, spend considerable time scrutinizing your sentences to make sure the action maximizes full descriptive potential.

Example (bad): They arrived at the house just behind the streaming line of fire trucks, their street alive in the opulent glow of lights and sirens, their house ablaze in a perennial bloom of orange and yellow.

Unfortunately, this story was published before I possessed the wherewithal to edit such obtuse overwriting. Looking at it five years later, the sentence would have been fine if I simply cut down on the modifiers and let the action breathe.

Example (better): They arrived at the house just behind the fire trucks, the street alive in a glow of lights and sirens, their house ablaze.

Notice how this version places an emphasis on the verbs. Moreover, there’s another advantage gained here. In the first version, the sentence ends with a description of the colors of the blaze, hardly essential information. Now emphasis is placed on the most important information in the sentence (and in this case, the entire story): the burning house. If you want to draw extra emphasis to anything, put it at the end of the sentence. Placing it at the beginning is a close second. Never bury important information in the middle.

Use figurative language

Ever wonder why metaphor and analogy are such powerful — not to mention, popular — tools? Figurative language is an unmatched ally in descriptive pursuits. It gives the writer a chance to deconstruct a specific, subjective event and recast it into something familiar.

The human mind is engineered to see patterns. Anytime you disguise a comparison as a statement (which is what happens with a metaphor) you’re bringing the subject into a new relationship. You’ve established one pattern as being analogous to another pre-existing pattern, and we begin to see a small part of the world in a different way. It takes some creative know-how to make figurative language fly however, and metaphors that are confused, off-base or cliché can ruin an otherwise stellar piece of writing. The analogous relationships you establish have to be earned.

Example (bad): The overcast September sky stared back under a blanket of ashen gray.

First of all, I could happily live the remainder of my days without ever hearing clouds being referred to as a “blanket” again (ditto for “cotton”). Description this familiar tells me I wasn’t particularly inspired when I wrote it, back in 2005. Then there’s the semantic clumsiness of it all. “Blanket of ashen gray?" Why not just write “ashen gray blanket,” or better yet, “gray blanket?” Finally, do skies really “stare back?" The figurative appeals here (clichéd metaphor, awkward personification) seem careless, even lazy. If I were to rewrite the phrase today I might say something like this:

Example (better): There was an orange burn where the sun had been, and the mutilated animal shapes of cloud lay scattered in the tear of dusk.

It’s overkill, but you get the idea. Say something that both reconstructs the subject and enables the reader to see the world in a new, yet recognizable, light.

Also, avoid well-worn words and everyday figures of speech. Describing a farmhouse as “quaint," or using phrases like “before he knew it,” are so familiar the reader treats them as boilerplate and usually skips over them entirely. Always try to describe something in a way that’s never been described before.

If you want to draw extra emphasis to anything, put it at the end of the sentence. Placing it at the beginning is a close second. Never bury important information in the middle. Get to the point

If there’s a single take-away I want readers to get from a column that focuses on description, it’s this: avoid obfuscating and pointless over-writing. It’s not the job of the writer to besiege the reader, either with a litany of unimportant details or some long-winded, faux intellectual attempt at armchair discourse. Unfortunately, it seems nearly every writer (myself included) goes through this cringe-inducing phase where we pillage the dictionary or treat our keyboards like calculators. Works resulting from this mindset offer very little descriptive assistance for the reader, and a lot of later embarrassment for writers guilty of these storytelling snafus. When it comes to description, focus on the most telling details rather than caving in to your writerly proclivities to lean on the pen. You’ll thank me later.

Example (bad): He wondered if there was some deeper meaning to it, if the heat spoke of the true workings of this city, the only place he’d known really, and if he tried hard enough he could find an answer that satisfied him, an explanation beyond what those fortunate to have everything and those cursed with nothing have always been forced to accept, if nature’s brutality revealed a final authority, and man’s need to find reason with it was little more than a grotesque delusion that he could make sense out of nothing.

What a mess! Sentences like this reveal a practice that’s very common today, where writers spin these syntactical Triple Lindies in the hopes they can somehow scare people into liking their work. There’s a sort of bullying insecurity afoot here, because the delivery seems to operate off the idea that if readers don’t like the work, clearly it means they “didn’t understand it.” In actuality, this hat trick works on very few people, and incidentally, what’s on the page here says very, very little. This section’s descriptive duties would’ve been much more effective if I had ditched the dime-store existentialism and described instead what the character was thinking, in terms more fitting of his POV. The fundamental disregard to work within the descriptive framework of the character I established — to choose authorial square jawed smugness instead of revealing things the way the character would have seen them, in other words — reveals a rudimentary mishandling of narrative. In the end, it’s the writer who suffers the most from this kind of cloying pedantry, because he/she has deliberately girded the sentences’ potential strengths with mindless clutter.

Example (better): He wondered if the heat revealed nature’s final authority, and that man’s need to find reason with it was little more than a grotesque delusion that he could make sense out of nothing.

The sentence’s newfound pith reestablishes some aphoristic value that was completely submerged in the verbiage. It’s still not a very good sentence, mind you, but it’s far less annoying than what was on the page before. Maybe someday I’ll go back and further try to clean up this mess-terpiece, but until then I’m more than happy to let my purple prose serve as a lesson in moderation and sensibility. Here’s hoping you can also learn from your mistakes — as well as mine.

---

--Courtney on Dec 01, 2014 09:03 pm 0 Comments

Hey Authors!

I have another member who would also like to create banners for anyone who is interested. You can tweet her @RubySohoFic if you are interested.  Here are some examples of her work:

 

 

--Courtney on Nov 24, 2014 06:23 pm 0 Comments

Hello Authors!

Recently I have gotten a program for my computer that enables me to make blends and story banners. I have found I can do them rather quickly and so, I would like to extend this service to all of you. If you would like me to make a banner for your story, please send the pictures of your characters and your story title to nsyncfictionarchive@gmail.com . I wil make a banner for you and email it back to you! Here is an example below:

 

Thanks!

--Courtney on Nov 18, 2014 10:43 pm 1 Comments

How to Structure A Story: The Eight-Point Arc

By Ali Hale

One of my favourite “how to write” books is Nigel Watts’ Writing A Novel and Getting Published.

My battered, torn and heavily-pencil-marked copy is a testament to how useful I’ve found it over the years. Although the cover appears to be on the verge of falling off altogether, I’ve risked opening the book once more to bring you Watts’ very useful “Eight-Point Story Arc” – a fool-proof, fail-safe and time-honoured way to structure a story.

(Even if you’re a short story writer or flash fiction writer rather than a novelist, this structure still applies, so don’t be put off by the title of Watts’ book.)

The eight points which Watts lists are, in order:

    Stasis
    Trigger
    The quest
    Surprise
    Critical choice
    Climax
    Reversal
    Resolution

He explains that every classic plot passes through these stages and that he doesn’t tend to use them to plan a story, but instead uses the points during the writing process:

    I find [the eight-point arc] most useful as a checklist against which to measure a work in progress. If I sense a story is going wrong, I see if I’ve unwittingly missed out a stage of the eight-point arc. It may not guarantee you write a brilliant story, but it will help you avoid some of the pitfalls of a brilliant idea gone wrong.

So, what do the eight points mean?

Stasis

This is the “every day life” in which the story is set. Think of Cinderella sweeping the ashes, Jack (of Beanstalk fame) living in poverty with his mum and a cow, or Harry Potter living with the Dursley’s.

Trigger

Something beyond the control of the protagonist (hero/heroine) is the trigger which sparks off the story. A fairy godmother appears, someone pays in magic beans not gold, a mysterious letter arrives … you get the picture.

The quest

The trigger results in a quest – an unpleasant trigger (e.g. a protagonist losing his job) might involve a quest to return to the status quo; a pleasant trigger (e.g. finding a treasure map) means a quest to maintain or increase the new pleasant state.

Surprise

This stage involves not one but several elements, and takes up most of the middle part of the story. “Surprise” includes pleasant events, but more often means obstacles, complications, conflict and trouble for the protagonist.

Watts emphasises that surprises shouldn’t be too random or too predictable – they need to be unexpected, but plausible. The reader has to think “I should have seen that coming!”

Critical choice

At some stage, your protagonist needs to make a crucial decision; a critical choice. This is often when we find out exactly who a character is, as real personalities are revealed at moments of high stress. Watts stresses that this has to be a decision by the character to take a particular path – not just something that happens by chance.

In many classic stories, the “critical choice” involves choosing between a good, but hard, path and a bad, but easy, one.

In tragedies, the unhappy ending often stems from a character making the wrong choice at this point – Romeo poisoning himself on seeing Juliet supposedly dead, for example.

Climax

The critical choice(s) made by your protagonist need to result in the climax, the highest peak of tension, in your story.

For some stories, this could be the firing squad levelling their guns to shoot, a battle commencing, a high-speed chase or something equally dramatic. In other stories, the climax could be a huge argument between a husband and wife, or a playground fight between children, or Cinderella and the Ugly Sisters trying on the glass slipper.

Reversal

The reversal should be the consequence of the critical choice and the climax, and it should change the status of the characters – especially your protagonist. For example, a downtrodden wife might leave her husband after a row; a bullied child might stand up for a fellow victim and realise that the bully no longer has any power over him; Cinderella might be recognised by the prince.

    Your story reversals should be inevitable and probable. Nothing should happen for no reason, changes in status should not fall out of the sky. The story should unfold as life unfolds: relentlessly, implacably, and plausibly.

Resolution

The resolution is a return to a fresh stasis – one where the characters should be changed, wiser and enlightened, but where the story being told is complete.

(You can always start off a new story, a sequel, with another trigger…)

--creativechaos on Nov 17, 2014 02:49 pm 0 Comments

This weeks Writing 101 topic focuses on writers block. I feel it is the perfect time of year to focus on this because many of us experience writers block when we are trying to write stories for challenges. Enjoy!

What Causes Writer's Block

Writer's block is often caused by conflicted feelings. We want the writing to be perfect and we want the paper done as soon as possible. We know what we know but we don't know what our readers know. We know how the memo should sound, but we don't have all the facts we need. We know everything about the software, but we don't know what an article should look like. We know what we have to say but we are afraid that it won't measure up to our expectations or to our readers' expectations.

All of these feelings are natural and normal. Everyone finds writing a challenge. Many writers, however, compound their problems by employing weak writing strategies. When these methods fail, they give up.

Weak Strategies for Dealing with Writer's Block

Using trial and error

Since our short-term memory is limited, trying to juggle in your head all the possible ways to phrase something usually means we repeat the same rejected phrases over and over. One way to avoid this is to make a quick list of alternative phrases.
lnsisting on a perfect draft

Perfectionism is the surest way to writer's block. Expecting everything to come together at once leads to paralysis and heartache. Insisting on a perfect first draft is really much slower than writing several quick drafts focused on different goals.
Waiting for inspiration

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. What seems like inspiration is usually the result of internalized hard work. In a moment we'll talk about some useful strategies for pushing "inspiration" along.

Using words looking for an idea

We all know those phrases which click so easily into the keyboard but then go nowhere:

    due to the fact that...
    it is imperative that...
    a wide variety ranging from ... to....

These phrases can be building blocks but they won't help much until you know what you're building.

Effective Strategies for Avoiding Writer's Block

Taking notes

Jot down ideas and phrases as they occur to you. Free yourself from paragraphs and sentences for the moment--use flow charts, arrows, boxes, outlines, even pictures. Right now, you are worried about getting things down before you forget them.

Freewriting/Brainstorming

When you're not just blocked, when you're stonewalled, try freewriting. Sit down for ten minutes and write down everything you can think of about your topic. The object is to write without stopping for the whole ten minutes. If you can't think of anything to say, write "blah, blah, blah" over and over. If other things occur to you as you write, go ahead and record them, even if they are not directly related to your topic. These distractions may be part of what is keeping you blocked.

Freewriting is good for uncovering ideas--it's a good way to nudge "inspiration." But the main purpose of freewriting is to get you moving! Most of what you write in those ten minutes will go in the recycling bin, but you'll be warmed up and your serious writing should go more smoothly.

Brainstorming resembles freewriting but is more goal-directed. You start not only with a topic, say PROFS, but also with a goal: What do new users need to know about this system? Then allow yourself to jot down ideas for a set amount of time without censoring any possibilities and without striving for perfect prose. When the "storm" has passed, you can rearrange ideas, put thoughts into complete sentences, edit, and polish.
Piecework

Sometimes, starting at the beginning induces Perfect Draft Syndrome. It may be easier to get started if you approach the task sideways. If you've got a plan for the article or manual, choose a section from the middle or a point you know well and start there. Then do another section. After you've gained some confidence, you can work on the opening and smooth out the transitions.

What I Really Mean Is (WIRMI)

When you're stuck in a quagmire trying to find the perfect phrase, switch to What I Really Mean Is and just say it the way you think it. Once you know what you mean, it is easier to refine the phrasing.
Satisficing (satisfy + suffice)

You "satisfice" when you take the first reasonable solution instead of searching endlessly for just the right word or sentence. If you're unhappy with the choice, you can bracket it and promise yourself you'll fix it later.

--Courtney on Nov 10, 2014 05:55 am 0 Comments