Gah!

Oh my damn, look at this ugly lamp.

What some people find beautiful, or once did, appears hellish to others.  It’s true of lamps, clothing, furniture and people.  Styles change, preferences shift.

When you see something that strikes you as ugly, your first reaction may be to recoil as though the object is coming at you.  In the case of this lamp, that’s exactly what I did, rounding the corner of the flea market booth.  I believe I even said “Gah!”

It’s fun to walk through the flea market and look for objects that once embodied the finest décor.  My personal preference is nineteenth century, which is a bit hard to find in such humble establishments for an amount of money I can afford.  Would that I could go back in time and purchase them at Victorian prices with my current salary!

Ugly things tell us a lot about ourselves. Why don’t we like a certain fabric, texture, color?  How is it that we prefer blond hair on a guy or gal and find brown or red unseemly?  What makes us decide what ugly is?

Writers like to tell us what their characters prefer.  Heroes and heroines are always pretty people, played in movies by real-life beauties.  How boring and bland that can be.

Why not try making someone a little less than perfect?  Think how much more interesting that character would be.   Case in point: Quasimodo, Victor Hugo’s tragic bellringer in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. (Yes, campers, it was a book long before Disney got hold of it.)

I read a Clive Barker novel, Coldheart Canyon, where the heroine was an overweight, average fangirl who had a thing for the hero, a film star.  I loved her because she wasn’t tall, gorgeous and windswept or named Kate.  She did kick butt when the chips hit the fan.

My bank robber in Rose’s Hostage is extra good-looking, to disarm the captive.  The ugliness comes from the violence of his world.  In the somewhat literary novel that’s bumping around in my head, the protagonist isn’t at all handsome.  In fact, he might be considered ugly, but that isn’t why he is special.  (Can’t tell you; I’d have to kill you.)

Or a character could have a taste for ugly things.  Maybe they remind him of a more innocent time, maybe he’s a complete nerd with a yen for macramé owls.  You decide.  Make the choices reveal something about him.  If he’s repelled by a deformity, the reader will wonder why.

Throw a little ugly in your WIP.  Contrast is a good thing.

Rain rain, go away...I need to mow!

In meteorology, saturation is a state of 100% humidity, when the air cannot hold any more vapor.  Chemistry is the same, a solution so completely imbued that nothing else will dissolve into it.

We experience saturation on a daily basis when the Internet brings us more information than we can possibly digest. With so many writers putting so much out there, how do you grab the attention of a reader who might have already seen the same kind of material several times before he gets to you?

Interesting Headline

• Your headline has to be an attention-getter.  One way to do this is to put in words that engender controversy or a difference of opinion:

Should Indoor Cats be Declawed?

Maybe only cat owners would be interested in this, but there are thousands of cat owners all over the country.  People with a strong opinion on the subject will be drawn to the title.  Make it even more “WTH” by twisting it a bit:

Should All Pet Cats be Declawed?

*Disclaimer: I am against declawing and this is just an example, so let’s not get into an argument over it.

• Another way to do this is to offer a solution to a problem, or useful information. People love lists, so a number is a good attention getter.

4 Ways to Keep Your Cat from Killing your Computer

Potential reader?  Anyone with a cat who has stomped on a keyboard or knocked over a drink!

Good lead paragraph

• It needs to let your reader know he has come to the right place, and promise more.

Look at these posts on wiseGEEK and Suite101.  The first starts with an answer to the question, followed by more in-depth information.  The second identifies the problem and then promises a solution.  Both paragraphs summarize the post, but they have a sentence that is designed to make you read more:

“ICE agents have a wide variety of duties under the law…”  Hm, what duties? You could stop here, but if you want to know what those duties are, you have to keep reading.

“Fortunately, there are several things you can do to make your cat’s trip in an airline approved pet carrier more comfortable.”  Ditto.

• Like the twist in the headline, you can make your lead paragraph a little WTH to get people in.

So starting with the headline:

4 Ways to Keep Your Cat from Killing your Computer

Your cat just plopped down on your keyboard, erasing the last twelve pages of your novel!  Why does he do that? To get your attention, of course.  You love him but now is not the time.  Below are four ways to train your cat not to touch your laptop.  Some of them require YOU to change your habits.

Now, put in four ways you can get your cat to stay the hell away from your computer.  They better be good, because your reader may be just inches away from calling Animal Control.

Use keywords

• Scatter them throughout the article, making sure to get one in the headline and the lead paragraph so the reader will know he has come to the right place.

I’m not fond of blog posts that use tons of keywords, because they often end up looking like this:

Fatal Cat Diseases

There are many types of cat diseases that can be fatal.  Some of the most dangerous cat diseases are rabies, feline leukemia and feline infections peritonitis. Your vet can advise on the best way to prevent these cat diseases.  Owners of cats with cat diseases need to take special care of them. 

Keywords are useful for search engines, so when the reader Googles “cat diseases” your post will come up.  But you don’t want so many that it makes the copy hard to read, or sounds like you’re trying too hard.

Examples, comments, stories bring the post to life

• If you want people to come back, make it personal.

Obviously, if you’re writing content for pay you’ll have guidelines that may not allow for this.  In your own posts, you can do whatever you want.

4 Ways to Keep Your Cat from Killing your Computer

Your cat just plopped down on your keyboard, erasing the last twelve pages of your novel!  Why does he do that? To get your attention, of course.  You love him but now is not the time.  Below are four ways to train your cat not to touch your laptop.  Some of them require YOU to change your habits.

1. Unplug the computer!  I discovered my cat loves to nap on a warm, plugged-in laptop.  He’s not as likely to do it when it’s cold and dark.  When I’m not using it, it goes off.  Saves energy too.

2.  Use aversion training when the cat approaches the computer.  Don’t let him come up on your desk; make that a no-fly zone.  I used a little spray bottle of water or an airhorn.  These work  well to discourage a cat if “No!” isn’t doing the trick.   No hitting or screaming, please. 

3. Give them plenty of distractions.  Gently remove them from the area and give them a box of tissue, toys or a paper bag to play in.  It’s much like distracting an infant from something you don’t want him to have. 

3.  Establish an alternative area for loves and pets.  The couch is a good place.  When you sit down to watch television, the cat will associate the couch with attention and will seek it out there.  Pay more attention to the cat when you’re not working. 

With time and patience, you can teach Kitty to stay off your computer. 

Got any tips to catch a saturated reader’s eye?  What makes you skip a post?  Share in the comments.

Today is the 146^th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, and the 99^th anniversary of the sinking of the luxury liner Titanic.  RIP. 

Here’s another flower picture, but it has a purpose beyond making you wish you had a pretty garden, I promise.  My lilac bush would probably have bloomed more if I had remembered to deadhead it last year before it made seed pods.  And it’s tall and skinny, more like a tree.  I’ll have to encourage the suckers at the bottom to make it fill out.

Lilacs are the best-smelling flower in the world.  They have a sweet, powdery scent that somehow manages not to be cloying.  They smell purple, the way that peonies smell pink and roses smell red even when they’re not.   It’s so sad they don’t last very long.

Smell is the most powerful of all the senses.  Olfactory memories stored in our brain can be accessed instantly by a wafting, familiar odor.  The lingering smoke ghost on an old coat tucked in the very back of the closet, a whiff of your grandmother’s perfume in a crowded department store, the deep richness of freshly turned earth that catapults you back to your first garden.

Once, in high school, my drama class attended a speech tournament, and we found ourselves in a hallway at a college student union, near the cafeteria.  The short space had an attic smell, of dusty wood and old fabric, which smelled exactly like my great-grandmother’s house.  I stopped dead and just inhaled, while my classmates yelled at me to hurry up, come on, we had to be at the next event.  No really, you go on.

So many writers choose visual terms to describe things, probably because we’re seeing the action in our heads, like watching an internal movie.  It’s easy to forget that characters have other senses.  They will perceive the world through other means:  sound, touch, taste.

At one point in Rose’s Hostage, Libby is blindfolded and handcuffed, and she can only listen and smell.   She catches a bit of someone’s body odor, hears trains rumbling when they change getaway cars and the thud of her fellow hostage falling when they get out of the vehicle.

Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is all about smell.  The protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is born in mean circumstances with a gift:  an incredibly powerful sense of smell.  Alas, he has no scent of his own, and people react to him strangely.  He drifts through a world of odors, both putrid and sublime, and learns to hold them through the art of perfume-making.  Trouble starts when he finds the scent of a virgin girl enrapturing and desires to capture that.

The book is unique because it contains almost no dialogue.  A decent film with Alan Rickman was made from it.  Usually narration doesn’t work in a movie but it does here.  It’s impossible to translate the scents visually, and it does lose something when you can’t imagine them as in the book.  Smell-O-Vision would have been great for this one.

In prose, the only thing a reader has to go on is your description.  Mix it up a little by including smells.  Maybe your protagonist can walk into a bakery and smell a cinnamon bun that reminds him of the neighbor kid’s mother, the object of his most exquisitely tormented adolescent longings, who used to bake them.  He turns and sees a pale reflection that looks just like her in the shop window.  But it couldn’t be her; she died in a boat accident twelve years ago.

Write a scene using just sight.  Then rewrite it with just smell, then sound, etc.  See where your other senses lead you.

I didn’t make this picture, obviously.  But it’s a better way to open this post, which is about humor.

What strikes us as funny?  There are several kinds of humor.  Here are a few:

Slapstick

This is a very old form of humor, physical comedy characterized by broad and exaggerated action.  Slipping on a banana peel is an example of slapstick.  The late great John Ritter, playing Jack Tripper on the 1970s-80s sitcom Three’s Company, did a lot of slapstick on that show.  Huge reaction shots, hitting his head frequently, falling and breaking things were par for the course.

Puns

Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.

Most consider puns the lowest form of humor.  A play on words gives the joke a double meaning—the conventional one, i.e. silkworms make silk, it ends up in a tie—and the funny one. “Ha ha, the worms are in the tie.  Get it?”  the jokester says, and punches you in the arm.

Parody

Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a King Arthur parody by the amazing English comedy troupe.  Parody tells a familiar story in a new way, adding humorous elements that may be serious in the original.  For years MAD magazine (sadly gone downhill since the death of publisher William Gaines and the departure/demise of some of the Usual Gang of Idiots) had at least one parody of a popular movie in its magazine.   Or see this, a parody of a popular fashion item.

Black humor

This is when people joke about something that isn’t funny, like 9/11 or really gruesome accidents.   The worse the incident, the blacker the jokes.  There are two kinds of black humor:  one relieves tension or is generally funny.  Jokes cops make at a murder scene is an example of the former.   Another example is black comedy in films, designed to make you laugh and squirm at the same time.  It’s common in horror movies like Return of the Living Dead (also a parody) and Ravenous.

The other ticks people off.  Gilbert Gottfried’s recent remarks about the Japanese earthquake/tsunami disaster, the ones that got him fired from his job as the AFLAC duck, offended people.  Now they’re looking for a new duck.

Irony

A lot of people have trouble with this one.  It means the opposite of what you are saying, or of what is expected in a situation and what actually happens.  An example would be saying “Lovely weather we’re having,” in the middle of a blizzard.  I find the comic I posted at the beginning ironic, both because the star does the opposite of what she wants and because THAT’S MY LIFE.

Roald Dahl was the master of irony.  One of my favorite Dahl stories is “Parson’s Pleasure,” in which a crafty antiques dealer dresses as a clergyman and fakes people out of their treasures, then sells them for a handsome profit.  He gets the tables turned on him quite well.  Listen to Geoffrey Palmer read this classic Dahl tale here (in two parts).  It’s also in his story collection Kiss Kiss.

A person who likes sarcastic remarks will have a very different personality to someone who prefers slapstick or black humor.  The type of humor a person uses can reveal character.  If you are struggling to define a character in one of your works, try writing different scenes of him using different types of humor, or making a list of things she might find hilarious.   Your basic mean girl would laugh if her rival fell down the stairs, but a more gentle soul might prefer family-friendly puns, for example.

What’s your favorite kind of humor?  Funny movie or book you like the most?  Is there something you find funny that no one else does?

The Internet is a wonderful tool for writers, but it can also be a curse.  It’s got everything from craft to submission to research.  The trick is to winnow the good information from the chaff, and not get trapped for hours in a web of bad links.

I typed in “what to do about writer’s block”  and got a ton of advice.  But which website has the best information?  How to check its efficacy, especially if you are doing research?

#1

Is it a reputable site with clearly labeled credentials?

If you’re looking up crime information, start with the FBI’s website.  Why here?  The Federal Bureau of Investigation is one of the most well-known law enforcement agencies in the world.  Their reputation precedes them.

Any website that can’t or won’t tell you anything about who designed it or is running it probably isn’t worth your trust.   The FBI lets it all hang out.  They don’t hide their contact information.   They post serious publications.  And you can sign up for nifty email updates on law enforcement topics.

#2

Look at the URL – is the domain a .gov or .edu or .org?

.com is the usual domain for businesses.  If the site is selling something, chances are information you find there is for marketing purposes.   It might be good content, for example from a pest control company that has expertise in rodent elimination.  But information out of the scope of the organization may not be reliable.

.edu is a university or college, .gov is government, .mil military, and .org is organization, usually non-profit.

#3

Is the website well-designed, and is there a contact for the webmaster?

Visit some of the sites at Web Pages that Suck.  Would you trust the information you found on these?  How do you know it’s not faked by some troll from his mother’s basement?  Beware also of websites filled with ads.  There’s probably nothing there you need.

#4

Is the information verifiable and are there citations?  Is it recent?

You can double-check information across several different places.   Any publications posted should have Works Cited lists backed up by authoritative sources.  Academic publications are also subject to peer scrutiny, which verifies the solidity of research.  University students can get access to educational databases that contain lots of peer-reviewed papers and journal articles.  Check with the university library.

Any research older than five years from the current date may not be applicable, depending on the field of study.  Less than that and you’re probably okay.  Wikipedia is a good start, but because anyone can edit it, it’s not generally accepted as a source.  Check the links at the bottom of articles for something you can cite.

#5

How is the tone of the website?  Is it professional, or declamatory?  Does it come off as strident or hateful?

If you’re looking up effective cancer treatments, it’s probably safe to discount a website that tells you “An Amazon shaman invented this substance many years ago! Has cured everyone it touches!”  Others aren’t so easy.

An example one of my professors in college used was a professionally-designed website containing derogatory content about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  At first glance it appeared educational.  Reading it told a different story.   Although it was well-written, it dripped with bigotry.  It was hate speech masquerading as research.   Not acceptable source material, unless you were using it to illustrate racism.

#6

Does the website ask for any personal or financial information to access content?  If so, run away.

This is not the same as free registration to use a site.  And some subscription sites like Ancestry.com that perform a service are okay.  They will tell you exactly what you are getting and have privacy policies and contact information.

When in doubt, try Googling “[site name] scam” or “complaints.”  You may then evaluate the warnings and go from there.

Once you spend some time navigating around good ones like Mayo Clinic and How Stuff Works, you’ll get a feel for how a reputable website looks and smells.  Now the only other thing to avoid is wasting time surfing when you’re supposed to be writing.

Back to work!

These neat little guys are door hardware on the Mission San Xavier del Bac near Tucson, Arizona.  More than 300 years old, this beautiful church is one of the only examples of authentic Spanish Colonial architecture in the country.  It’s loaded with history.  There’s plenty to think about.  Who made this unique hardware and why choose a mouse and snake?

History presents writers with a plethora of opportunities for storylines, characters and subjects.   You can change the outcome of a known event or make up a new one, fitting it into real-time happenings as an interesting distraction.

Numerous authors have plumbed the mines of history for stories.  The focus can be as broad as simply setting a love story in medieval France, thus using the period as backdrop, or it can narrow in on a specific event, place or person.

If the period is the star, the characters will be much more influenced by it. In Jean Auel’s Earth’s Children series, the life of the young Cro-Magnon girl Ayla, her childhood with a Neanderthal tribe and her relationship with a Jondalar, a man of her own kind, plays out against the Ice Age in Europe.

Ayla and Jondalar travel extensively and meet many other peoples, learning such things as fishing for giant sturgeon and hunting mammoths.  Along the way, they invent the atl-atl (a spear-throwing device), the needle and other important things.

Auel does more than just set the story in pre-history.  Giving significant discoveries to her characters grounds them in the period much better than simply dressing them in skins and dropping them in front of a cave lion.

The narrow focus sometimes includes actual historical figures who share interaction with the main character.  Usually if famous people are in the story, they’re not protagonists.  Faye Kellerman’s book The Quality of Mercy is a notable exception.

She used William Shakespeare as a protagonist and we see plenty from his vantage point.  Another POV character provides us with a window into life in Elizabeth I’s court, but the royal chamber is not as important as the people.

Research is incredibly important for historical fiction.  There will be readers out there who know your subject and they will point out your errors.  Auel’s extensive study of her Paleolithic setting makes the books a learning experience as much as entertainment.

I’ve been examining the Victorian era, mostly for miniatures, but there are a ton of interesting developments in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth century that have great fictional potential.  Take a look at your favorite period.  What can you find there?

You can search history for little-known characters whose perspective on a world-changing event makes it fresh, or make one up.   Alternatively, you can completely change the course of events and speculate what would have happened, say, if Hitler had won World War II, or if someone discovered the real identity of Jack the Ripper (already done to death, but give it a try if you dare).

Even an object or building can suggest something to you.  What could I do with that mouse and snake door hardware?  I have a few ideas already.

What’s your favorite historical period to read about?   What makes it so appealing?

Today’s random Saturday post concerns the Joss Whedon TV program Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the story of a young woman with a mission to kill the undead while still trying to have a life.  If you’re a Buffy nerd, you may have noticed references to this show here and there in my posts, when I write example sentences.   If not, I hope you’ll get my point here even if you’re not familiar with the example.*

I didn’t watch this show when it aired.  Certain Someone made me catch up via Netflix and DVD and now I’m hooked.  We watch together over the Internet since we’re long distance, and are up to Season 6.  Although he’s seen all of them, I’m not finished yet so please no spoilers in the comments!

Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy Summers. Yes, I took a picture of my TV!

Buffy is a lesson in story conflict.  We start with a teenager in a new school, a handicap itself, who finds she has super strength and a destiny she must keep a total secret.  Buffy’s not like other slayers; she doesn’t embrace her role.  She wants boys and friends and proms.  Instead, she has to kill the vampires and the demons drawn to the Hellmouth underneath Sunnydale, California, and save the world more times than she wants to remember.

External conflict in Buffy is, of course, monsters always trying to kill everybody.  Each season boasts a Big Bad the group, known as the Scooby Gang, spends several episodes overcoming.  Villains both horrifyingly evil and hilariously bumbling abound.  If Buffy can’t beat them up, she has to ask for help.  Like Harry Potter, she doesn’t like to put her friends in harm’s way, despite their eagerness to assist.

Internal conflict can come from wildly divergent character traits.  There’s a name for a perfect character—Mary Sue.  You’ll find her in both fanfiction and mainstream stories as well.  She’s gorgeous, accomplished, flawless, tragic and boring.

Buffy may be beautiful, but she’s whiny and doesn’t communicate well.  She ran away once.  She’s insecure, stubborn and self-absorbed.  But she’s an intensely loyal friend, and she truly cares about the people she’s trying to save.  We relate to her because of her shortcomings and we admire her because she is really capable, even though she doesn’t think so.  She gets in her own way all the time.

Just when things work out, something else happens.  It’s a compressed micro-slice of life.  We often have time to enjoy the good before the bad shows up.  On TV, there’s no time for this.  If Sunnydale were all sunshine and roses, we’d get bored and change the channel.

A character’s goal shouldn’t be too easy.  But there’s another element engaging us, an essential one.  The Scooby Gang is growing and changing.  They’ve moved on from high school to college, to adult issues (losing a parent, taking care of a younger sibling, impending marriage).  Personalities shift.  Someone struggles with newfound power, another reveals a previously unsuspected (and shocking) soft side.   They disagree.  People leave.

Combined, the monsters and the emotional conflict make for an entertaining mix, spiked with comedy to lighten the mood here and there.  You can’t help but tune in again to see what happens.  Will Buffy and the Scooby Gang find a way to kill the demon?  Can a love affair with a werewolf really work, and how?  Is magic going to help this time?  What if it doesn’t?

Keeping things static kills suspense.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer doesn’t cop out and rely on fancy new monsters to liven things up.  They’re pretty much the same every time.  It’s the conflicts within and between the characters that move the stories along.

People are complex and surprising.  Let your characters argue.  Let them make bad decisions, stupid choices, big mistakes.  And then help them find their own ways out of the messes you’ve made for them.

*Subliminal footnote: RENT IT….YOU KNOW YOU WANT TOOOOO…

When changing after work this afternoon, I turned on the bedside lamp and noticed a cool effect.  I have a green candle in a silver saucer-type holder on the dresser next to my bed.  I put some glass beads I found outside around it.  It looks pretty on the lavender  cloth on the dresser’s top.

In front of my jewelry box and next to the candle I put a collection of Lewis Carroll’s greatest hits.  The pink cover is gilded in spots, such as Alice’s hair and other highlights.  A few of the glass beads had fallen off the saucer and caught the light.  With the gilt cover of the book, they made a fanciful picture.

This is a bit staged, as I moved everything off that end of the dresser and scattered the beads around the book, playing with the light to get it just right.  I think it looks like bubbles around the book.

Colors change in the light.  In fact, without light colors don’t exist.  That discovery astounded me and was my first encounter with the transient nature of the world.  In a few moments, an ordinary pair of objects made a silly and childlike picture.  The moments pass quickly, and they should be enjoyed and savored.

When you look at something and it looks like something else, how do you describe it?  Like this?

I put the glass beads around the book, where they reflected the light in cool contrast to the warmth of Alice’s hair.

You can do this:

Cheshire hovers over the girl, surrounded by ethereally iridescent bubbles of gleam, with Humpty and the Rabbit guarding.  Alice looks askance at the steam droplets, which have escaped from her kettle and are growing.  Even in this place, how could this be normal? No one else is concerned.  They haven’t noticed how golden the light has become, the herald of yet another change.  She braces for yet another topsy-turvey physics lesson.  Dear me, how tiresome.

Watch, see the light in the day, first thing in the morning, both sunlight and artificial.  See how it changes things.  Familiar becomes strange, ordinary sublime.  Reality fades to fantasy and back again.  See it, mark it, and use your best language to capture it.  Let it change how you think about what you see.