Polishing prose for a micro-post contest

Another blogging writer (or is that writing blogger?) Aimee Salter has a prose challenge on her blog "Seeking the Writing Life." She's requesting that writers submit 150 words of anything they've written that is potentially better than her post. Writers need only leave their entry as a comment to the post to participate.

I just rewrote the beginning to my NaNo novel, RACE CARD. The book opens with the protagonist in the midst of a nightmare. It details a recurring dream she's had since she witnessed skinheads beating a black man to death in Luxembourg City as a teen. Since the character is in a dream state, it's highly sensory and surrealistic by intent. Because I was limited to 150 words, I couldn't include the next line which includes her alarm sounding and ending the nightmare. Of course, the style of my post is much different from hers. This is even a different style of writing for me, but I like to try new things and with any luck, I'll get some feedback on my entry.

I enjoy this kind of challenge. And I like participating, especially when it's sponsored by another writing blog. You can enter, too, by posting 150 words of prose by midnight tomorrow.

Here's my novel start:

The indigo sky deepened to black tendrils that snaked to the ground, winding across the flagstones and encircling her ankles. Within seconds, they thickened to tethers and raced up her legs and midsection, lashing her to the nearest tree. Their loose rubbery ends nipped her like waves plashing a ship in a gale.

Two white megaliths materialized in the gloom. First, they grew legs, then arms that shoved her as they passed, storming toward a lone black figure staggering in the wind. One of them lifted the man and hurled him to the stone path as the other one faced her.

“Watch,” it screamed from the maw in its torso. Blood poured from the man’s head. “Look!” it commanded, as the creatures pounded and kicked him.

The lifeless man’s blood lapped her ankles then rose with the speed of a rain-engorged river until its metallic tang engulfed her mouth and nose.

# # #

I didn't hit 50K, but doing NaNo still made me a winner

I'm enjoying seeing the NaNo Winner badges on friends' websites, even as their default pics on Facebook, and am proud of them for their success. This is my fourth year that I participated. I didn't hit the 50,000 word mark, but thanks to the NaNoWriMo campaign, I still feel like a winner.

Here's why...

NaNo helped me focus

I don't lack for ideas to write about. I struggle with focus. Thank goodness I only have a talent for writing fiction, not like some of my friends who also are poets, or I'd be more scattered than I am. Before NaNo 2010, I had four other books started, each stalling out around 25,000 words. However, each of those books is viable and worthy of completion. After NaNo, I added 6,000 words to one novel and more significantly, nearly 20,000 words to another. Participating in NaNo definitely helped me focus. The focus began from external sources--the badges, the word meters, the buzz among writers on the Internet--until I became sufficiently dug in and was able to internalize my focus. This constituted a breakthrough because I had essentially given up on this book because of some harsh critics early on. NaNo gave me the wherewithal to pick it up and give it another go.

NaNo helped me write smarter this time

Because of all the helpful blog posts about how to prepare for NaNo, my time was more productive than ever. Before I sat down to write the 20K on RACE CARD, I did a beat sheet, laying out every plot point from beginning to end. I also reexamined my structure, to make sure I had the major plot points and the moment when "all hope is lost" in the right places. Once I had that beat sheet, all I had to do was carve out time to write. On each project, the books moved forward more prudently than they had in the past. I won't have to do a lot of rewriting as a result. Did the beat sheet change midwriting? Sure, it always does. Writing, not outlining, is my way of thinking. But overall the product was much stronger as a result.

NaNo strengthened my resolve

Thanks to NaNo, I became reinvested in each book, convinced of their worth, and became recommitted to finishing each one. Prior to NaNo, I was feeling not only conflicted but a little too lackadaisical. Sure, I guess I would eventually finish the books someday. Now, I know I'll finish each, and I won't have to spend a lot of time doing heavy rewrites because they are stronger works this time around.

I may not be a category NaNo winner. I can't post an official winner badge like many of my deserving friends. But make no mistake, this November I feel as though I've brought home the mirror ball trophy! Thanks to my Wilkes cohort for the constant encouragement and to so many fellow writers for the great tips and cosmic energy around writing. All very good things for this fiction writer.

Kush'ah'da'week...

Wiz Khalifa & Rick Ross Cover For "The Source"

Shoutout to Wiz for making the cover of "The Source"...Keep grinding and putting out classic's Wiz...Oh and "How Fly 2" PLEASE!!!...#GangGang....

-Tokyo Jai

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"You can tell me.I'm a doctor."

REST IN PEACE.

Frank: That's the red-light district. I wonder why Savage is hanging around down there.
Ed: Sex, Frank?
Frank: Uh, no, not right now, Ed.

 

Frank: It's the same old story. Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, girl finds boy, boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl, girl dies in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day.
Jane: Goodyear?
Frank: No, the worst

Jane, since I've met you, I've noticed things that I never knew were there before... birds singing, dew glistening on a newly formed leaf, stoplights.

Five tips for writing action scenes from "The Fugitive"

Harrison Ford as Richard Kimball

No matter when it comes on, no matter how late it is, if I'm channel surfing and I find the 1993 film The Fugitive starring Harrison Ford and directed by Andrew Davis, I flip it on. There's only a handful of movies that never bore me--that are like opening gifts each time I stumble upon them--and this is one of those films.

As a rule, I'm not an action movie die-hard (pun totally intended). But there are certain qualities about this movie--the clever screenplay, the acting, the main character's refusal to give up until he discovers who killed his beautiful wife--that impress me each time I watch it.

My newest book culminates in an action scene. I'm on the second revision, and as I tuned in the last twenty minutes of  The Fugitive last night, I was for the first time, watching it as a storyteller, looking for parallels between the conclusion of the movie and the last scene of my book (before the denouement).

Spoiler alert: Yes, I give away the end of the movie. Big deal. If you haven't seen The Fugitive by now, you must've been living on another planet or have lived in a cable-television-free bubble your whole life.

Here's what I learned:

1. Make your hero heroic. When Harrison Ford's character (Kimball) discovers that his colleague and friend is behind his wife's murder, he doesn't merely pay him a visit at his home or his office. He walks into the lecture hall of the upscale hotel where his friend is delivering a lecture at a conference and confronts him during his speech--something a regular joe would probably never do. Another interesting choice is that as distraught and infuriated as Kimball is, he uses words as his weapons first, then his fists--because it's a much more effective scene if it replicates a playground brawl between childhood friends first. Also, it prolongs the action, giving it a chance to escalate. Think outside the realm of possibility and make your human hero do something you and ten of your friends would never have the guts to do.
2. Use dialogue, too, not just action. In The Fugitive, you have two highly educated characters, doctors, trying to kill each other. Of course, they're going to have dialogue--and they do until they are hiding from each other in the laundry room. I have two better educated characters fighting each other, too, so dialogue must be deftly incorporated into the scene in addition to the expected action that qualifies it as an action scene.
3. Give equal literary attention to the antagonist's reaction. Though the story is told from the hero's viewpoint, the camera (and or the screenplay) in the action scene is an equal opportunity device. Give the antagonist's reactions to the hero's actions equal weight. For instance, the hero pushes the villain into a bookcase and books fall on them and all around them. The villain, lacking a conventional weapon, reaches down and picks up a book and hurls at the hero with all the force he can muster. Actions will be strengthened by an equal and opposite literary focus on the reaction.
4. Allow the scene to escalate--and choose a setting that will let you do that. The fight between the two doctors begins with words and moves to a hotel room where shoves, swings, fists, and furniture are all used (and in some cases destroyed) while they're trying to kill each other. So, the hotel room is completely trashed. Bad enough? Not nearly. The hero and villain end up on the roof (while Chicago police in a helicopter are trying to fatally shoot Kimball), fall through a skylight, landing on the elevator several stories below, which starts off and drops them off in the laundry room of the hotel. Amidst dangerous machinery and overhead girders not to mention the cover provided by the oversized racks and other equipment in a hotel laundry room, they stalk one another. By the time they two characters discover each other in the laundry room, you're as physically exhausted and emotionally spent as they are. The upscale hotel is the ideal choice for this scene--offering so many dramatic possibilities.
5. Make sure the reader feels the hero suffer and knows that they could die. In the final confrontation with the villain, make sure the hero gets beaten up and battered. They might even need to get stabbed, shot, or suffer a concussion or a fractured skull or lose something or someone important to them. The reader needs to feel that the stakes have never been higher. This is no time to allow your hero an easy victory. Whatever it is that makes your hero vulnerable, make sure your antagonist has discovered that weakness and exploits it. In the end, their victory might have to be pyrrhic, or one with devastating costs to the hero.

As I go back to revise the climactic confrontation between my hero and the story's villain, I intend to keep lessons learned from The Fugitive in mind. Also, I like when good guys win, which is something that makes the movie a favorite, too, and I intend to have a similar, affirming outcome.

G.O.O.D. Friday's Boutique Collection

Shoutout to Greg Street and LiveMixtapes.com

-Tokyo Jai

d-_-b


Download Mixtape Free | LiveMixtapes.com Mixtape Player

First post...."My Beautiful Dark Twitsted Fantasy" Devil In A New Dress...

Kanye West dropped another album full of Inspiration for every artist in the industry and any fan of Good Music..."No pun intended". My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is some of his greatest work to dated in my opinion.I'm satisfied with all five of his albums.

-Tokyo Jai

d-_-b

From my camera...

    -- Betty Brosmer --

                                                           

Too many plot twists?

Can a popular mystery have too many twists? As much as I like a good twist--one damn good twist--I can say without equivocation that after the third significant twist occurring in the last two chapters of a book I was rather enjoying, I felt ground down and a little exploited.

I just finished reading Sins of the Brother by Mike Stewart. Why was I reading it, you ask? It's a ten-year-old book. I'm finishing a suspense novel, and I wanted to see how others who wrote in the genre handled dialogue attribution, sensory detail, and in this case, a mystery told from a single POV throughout, which is precisely my challenge. Though tempted to throw in a few scenes from someone else's POV to ratchet up the tension, i.e., the murderer's, I've chosen to stick with one POV (yes, unlike blockbusters like The Da Vinci Code). But that's a topic for another post.

Anyway, I found Sins of the Brother a good read and surprisingly literary only because I wasn't familiar with the author. He's a very capable writer.

So, why all the kvetching about the twists at the end of this book? Because I'm guessing some of them were added to propel the reader to read the next book in the series featuring the same protagonist. And I may read the next book, however, I wanted more satisfaction at the end of this book, not more twists just to get me to read his next book.

Now, maybe the writer didn't have a choice and the editor wanted to transport readers to Pretzel City en route to buying his next release. Or maybe he did have a choice. If it was his choice, apart from his publishing house's wishes, then he gave me one too many.

It reminds me of singers who go off on a vocal riff during a recording--think Christine Aguilera, if you're not sure what I mean. One riff sounds good so ten riffs must be ten times as good, right? Wrong. The nine other riffs devalues the effectiveness of the one good riff.

My understanding is that this was Stewart's debut novel. Since it was his first book to be published, if they twisted his arm to twist his readers into knots at the end, maybe he was reluctant to argue with them. Or maybe it was his idea entirely.

Sometimes less can be more. He already worked a few great twists into the end of that book. What if there had been two more twists in "The Necklace" after Mme. Loisel learns the necklace she borrowed was nothing more than costume jewelry? That happens to be one of my favorite story endings of all time. Any other twist on top of that would have ruined de Maupassant's perfect literary twist.

Sometimes the novel you write doesn't gel with the one you had in your head. Even if it turns out to be well written as Stewart's was, dumping every last conceivable twist into the story isn't going to fix such a problem. Sometimes cliches are cliche for a reason: Discretion can be the better part of valor. All of which goes to say that I'd rather see the writer serve the story than the series.

What do you think? Are you a the-more-twists-the-better kind of reader? A no-holds-barred-on-the-twists person?

Fakesgiving!

 

My friend Casey has had a Fakesgiving potluck dinner for the past 6 years.Ora and Scarlett played dress up with Casey's daughter, Eva and I attempted to relax and catch up with some friends.

Casey and her prize turkey

I can only hope that this is the first thing I see when I die...

The young McCuller's

They weren't sad. Just good timing.

Have a great holiday break, let someone know that you love and appreciate them and

RAISE HELL!!!

Five Big Nevers from George Orwell

In the past week, I listened to two audio books. One uses lots of fresh figurative language--it's a thrilling police procedural, so the attention to comparisons surprised me. The other uses lots of expressions you and I have seen in print before also known as clichés.

They can feel comfy, easing into metaphors or similes that we've all heard before--like pulling on a well-worn sweater. I'm not sure how the second writer got away with using so many clichés in a published work.

All I know is unpublished authors are held to a higher standard than those who have work in print. Yes, rules are made to be broken. However, it's still worth rereading your WIPs and looking for the FIVE BIG Nevers from George Orwell.

Never say never, you say? Valid argument. Then how about rarely.

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

Out of the entire Serengeti of writing advice available on the Internet, I thought these were five predators worth pursuing. (Just so you know, I could have said “pantheon of writing advice,” but then I would be violating number one of the big five, so I tried to go for something fresher since I violated number four in saying “were worth pursuing”.)

If we could at least edit our work adhering to these five rules, our writing would improve. How about you, Scrivengale readers? Are you stalked by any of these big five?

I just want to do hoodrat stuff with my friends...