Your Voice, Please

The issue most novelists face isn’t a career like tinker, tailor, sailor, or spy, but, more likely, the residual from being or having been doctor, lawyer, or teacher. What might those last three share in common? A style slanted toward instruction coupled with “the curse of knowledge.”

First about that style. At least somewhat academic and professorial, there’s a plethora of multi-syllabic verbiage, as opposed to “lots of big words.”  The lofty tone is often characterized by passive voice, rather than “passive voice occurs frequently.” Contractions, unfortunately, are usually avoided. Sentences are long and complex but not necessarily rhythmic.

Determined to foster the meticulous understanding that previous professions demanded, novelists sometimes “tell” and then “show,” or “show” and then “tell”—just to make sure. Finally, educators and professionals often applaud this structure: Here’s what I’ll say, now I’ll speak my piece in detail, and, oh, since you perhaps missed it (possibly because you spaced out due to the endless repetition), I’ll just go over it one last time. 

First of all, novels need storytelling, suspense, and secrets. Edifying isn’t part of the recipe. In fact, what E.B. White said about poetry applies equally well to the novel: 

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

And yet, ironically, the novelist obsessed with being clear at any cost might misstep anyway. Sadly, “the curse of knowledge” often interferes. As Steven Pinker explains,

I think the curse of knowledge is the chief contributor to opaque writing…It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that readers haven’t learned their jargon, don’t seem to know the intermediate steps that seem to them to be too obvious to mention, and can’t visualize a scene currently in the writer’s mind’s eye. And so the writer doesn’t bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the concrete details—even when writing for professional peers.

Although Pinker’s emphasis here is nonfiction, the task of guiding readers through a fictional world can present an even greater challenge. After all, to compose a scene, novelists must know tons about setting, background, arc, motive, stage business, and conflict. No scene will be successful unless writers collect far more than will ever make it into the book. 

But here’s the problem. The prepping that helps a novelist create a better page increases the difficulty of assessing what readers don’t know or can’t follow.

So what’s the solution? You can’t undo the fact that you used to win cases or still consult or occasionally volunteer to teach here and there. You can remember that a novel isn’t a brief, a lecture, a lesson plan, or a diagnosis. So.

~ Walk in your reader’s shoes as often as you can.

~ Informalize your voice. 

~ Build bridges.

~ Provide grounding.

Tip: Great storytellers neither teach nor preach.

Such Stuff as Scenes are Made on

In the fourth act of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the magician protagonist says:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

Scholars disagree about exactly what has “ended.” Magic? Story? Wakefulness? Life? In any case, Prospero advises that wisdom—and story—intertwine reality and magic. Of course Prospero didn’t add that story blends scene (live-time presentation) with summary (abbreviation of the less dramatic, supporting parts). Yet that mix is a huge part of story magic.

Alas, it doesn’t always happen. Novelists find it easier to condense drama as summary and expand the mundane into scene. But that gets readers thinking about “little lives” and “sleep.” Make your readers happy by plotting with a combination of scene and summary.

~ Hook readers at both ends of the scene.

Though readers want some setting pretty quickly, push the hook as close to the first sentence as you can. It’s not just for readers. When scenes never get off the ground, it’s because the writer knew neither the source of the tension nor where it was headed.

~ Show how the scene advances the protagonist’s arc.

Never let a central character exit a scene unchanged.

~ Create palpable adversity.

If the characters merely shrug and agree to disagree, this shouldn’t be a scene. Raise the

stakes. A lot. Raise them with someone actually doing something.

~ Save scenes for high drama.

Most adults have coffee and drive away in their cars every weekday. Do readers truly want to encounter this over and over? If you need it at all, do it as summary.

~ Develop skill with summary.

Efficiency isn’t inherently tedious. In fact, done properly, quite the opposite. But until you compose intriguing summaries, you’ll put everything in scene. Here’s how to keep your voice when writing summary.

·         View this as a skill—one you can learn. You mostly just need practice.

·         Trace the passage of time with character emotion.

·         Choose specific, concrete language.

·         Emphasize how one event caused the next.

·         Set up the next conflict.

Tip: A mix of scene and summary is the stuff that fiction’s made on.

Flirting with Boredom

Fiction offers an unspoken contract: Writers try to anticipate what readers want, and generally satisfied readers forgive novelists for not always anticipating correctly. Maybe that seems unrelated to boredom or flirting. But boredom has everything to do with the eye of the reader-beholder, and novelists who refuse to flirt are doomed to boring others. Take no risks, and you’ll never say anything new or exciting.

Certain things are boring about 98% of the time:

~ Repeating. Once is great, twice not at all.

            Angry to the point of fury, she raised her clenched fist at him.

~ “Doubling.” Don’t clarify unnecessarily.

            Ann had made a decision, and she turned to go.

~ “Showing” and then “telling” (or the reverse). Pick one or the other.

            His deep sadness caused tears to fall from his eyes.

~ Judging. Save the editorials for your friends—or, better yet, your journal.

A person who wanted tropical sun and humidity, even in winter, was clearly nuts.

~ Lecturing. Save the info-dump for your nonfiction book, your friends—or your journal.

Aristotle, master of science, philosophy, poetry, and human nature, continues to affect us millennia after his death.

After you’ve eliminated boring habits, start flirting. Be playful. Inject sexual innuendo, and invite rather than fulfill. Fiction readers adore humor, sensuality, and the chance to reach their own conclusions. Of course novels flirt a bit differently than people do.

• Ground the story.

Setting for its own sake can bore, but setting that gives the characters a home intensifies the plot and highlights the themes.

• Tease.

Leave scenes incomplete. Sustain problems, mysteries, obstacles, and secrets till the last possible moment. Answers can bore. Questions rarely do.

• Differentiate essential material from tangential.

Learning about monarch butterflies sounds educational, except in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, where understanding them clarifies their symbolism, beauty, and value. Nothing boring there.

• Set up.

Maybe preparing readers for the climax feels meticulous or over-zealous. But the opposite feels like a miraculous rescue, i.e. no fun at all. Flirt with foreshadowing.

Tip: Seduce us by making us wonder what you’ll do with the details. After all, that’s where the devil resides.

Clichés, Dull Knives, and Sharp Tools

A cliché is like taking a butter knife to a hunk of steak or a pristine golden pepper. If you want to discard fat or pith, you’ll need a honed instrument. If you want to engage readers, you’ll need honed language. How else can you trim the excess to reach the good parts?

What’s a cliché? A metaphor or expression that’s “dead as a doornail.” Clichés may seem harmless as a sheep in sheep’s clothing. But unless they’re somehow refurbished with evolved genetics and meaning, they’re at best an irritant and at worst an enemy of language, story, and theme.

Tip: Clichés are more treacherous than they seem.

If the character, event, or expression is the first thing that comes to mind, it’s the last thing you want on the page. A trope (dead metaphor or over-used plot device) not only spawns yawns from readers; it’s the enemy of the story that only one person can tell.

Where do clichés come from? According to Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd in Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction,  

The world brims over with temptations for the writer, modish words, unexamined phrases, borrowed tones, and the habits of thought they all represent. The creation of a style often begins with a negative achievement. Only by rejecting what comes too easily can you clear a space for yourself.

Clichés can “creep in” and “do damage” from “top to bottom.” They’re part of our language, our culture, our consciousness.  They can infiltrate fiction at the level of character, scenario, description, or metaphor. Kidder and Todd observe that:

When metaphors are fresh they are a form of thought, but when they are stale they are a way to avoid thought. “Tip of the iceberg” offends the ear as a cliché, and it offends reason because it is imprecise, if not spurious…

Decimate every clap of thunder” and kiss beneath a full moon. Trust that new stranger in town as you would the plague. Clichés are a plague, a threat to writer origination of events and conclusions and to reader interaction with the clues a good novelist provides.

What’s the “tried and true” cliché test? If it’s “the first thing” that “pops into your mind,” hesitate. Is this “yesterday’s news”? Could you plot this scene differently? Add complexity to this character? Describe the villain, damsel, mentor, surf, robin, or train station in a way no one else could—because no one’s thought about it the way you have. That takes effort. But you’ll like the moment better. So will your readers.

After all, isn’t that what fiction’s for?  In The Writing Class, Jincy Willett reminds that, “Only in art were there clichés; never in nature. There were no ordinary human beings. Everybody was born with surprise inside.”

Spread some surprise.

Compassion and Characterization

People admire compassion. We love stories of other mammals protecting their offspring—and ours. We’re all for compassion, though sometimes more theoretically than literally. And this reality impacts both the characters we create and reader response to the characters we create.

For example, evaluate your feelings for this character from Emma Straub’s The Vacationers: “Franny always wanted to carry in the most impressive-looking dish, no matter that everyone knew she’d cooked everything on the table.”

The sentence probably doesn’t encourage you to like her much. But what if, after thirty-five years of marriage, her husband just slept with a twenty-three year old? And, worse, that it’s common knowledge in her circle and at his former job? Our response changes, because no one’s immune to betrayal, vulnerability, the nightmare of public humiliation.

Characters aren’t just what they do, but also why they do it. In Ian McEwan’s Solar, protagonist Michael Beard gets divorced five times, has endless affairs (simultaneously), lies about his politics, steals research, and frames his wife’s boyfriend for murder.

There’s no one to love in this novel, yet it works from beginning to end. Some of that’s great writing. The rest? A little empathy for Michael Beard, who “had to have his wife back, and dared not drive her away with shouting or threats or brilliant moments of unreason. Nor was it in his nature to plead. He was frozen, he was abject, he could think of nothing else.”

When a character, however egocentric, resonates with the egocentricity each of us strives to quell, we respond not with contempt but compassion. Both inside fiction and out, we react very differently when we understand why so-and-so behaved that way. We react very differently when we have lots of information instead of merely what’s obvious.

What’s that got to do with you as a novelist?

~ Have your characters yearn, because that’s so human. But never let them whine, because that’s so annoying!

~ Include backstory not because you did your “writing homework.” Help readers understand character motivation. That’s the only reason for backstory.

~ Make your characters screw up. Then either let them save themselves or let your readers wish the characters could.

~ Play with irony. Readers enjoy predicting a particular outcome. Later? Reveal that the truth lies elsewhere.

~ Use your most private emotions. Those are everyone’s most private emotions.

Tip: Supply enough insight to surprise readers with how much compassion they feel—and for whom.

The Little Writer That Could

Whether writing children’s books, fantasy, mystery, or anything else, novelists agree about one thing: Writing is hard. Gadzooks, look at all the things a writer must worry about: a hook to start and end every chapter, complex plot and deep characterization, transitions and point of view. Then you have to put it all together so it sounds as if you accomplished it effortlessly, rather than slaving over every word the way you probably did. Whether the feedback comes from a writing partner, critique group, or you yourself, the goal might feel like climbing Mt. Everest.

In “Mind the Gap” from David Jauss’s Words Overflown by Stars, Betsy Sholl, former Poet Laureate from Maine, observes that, “It only takes one little stammer, one little break in the flow, to become aware of how speech negotiates between our private consciousness and social engagement.”

Writing is hard because it communicates a unique individual vision to someone receiving it through words alone. That’s a challenge. So every time even a single word falters, it’s a metaphorical “stutter” that readers detect immediately. And if writers are any good, they, too, can hear it. Sadly, the more carefully you read, and, of course, write, the more sensitive your ears to even the faintest hint of stammer.

What’s the antidote? You could train yourself to be more careless? Read faster. Write faster. In general, worry lots less about the burden of graceful “social engagement.”

You don’t want that? Quality is your goal? If you’re certain, begin by curtailing those brutal, ugly, and self-defeating messages about what you can’t do. For many, developing patience about one’s goals and weaknesses is a tall mountain to conquer. Most folks with high standards are not only harder on themselves than they need to be, but harder than they should be for optimal productivity and creativity. “Can’t” is as dirty a word as any four-letter one out there.

Replace defeatism with a healthy dose of realistic self-analysis.  Aside from relinquishing “I can’t,” many writers consider identifying strengths quite daunting. Wit? Elegant sentences? Enthralling plot? Dynamite scenario? Write down your assets. All of them.

Now for the mountain. What’s up there? Whatever you identify as your own personal “stutter.” Inorganic plot? Stereotypical characters? Dreary syntax?  All but the weakest writers know well in advance what’s needed to conquer that mountain of difficulties. You even know what you must do to reach its peak. Your peak.

Beautiful writing emerges from a merger of talent and technique. You can sit before your computer until your butt’s sore, but unless you believe in both your talent and ability to hone it with technique, maybe fiction isn’t the mountain for you to master. The best training in the world won’t help if with every sentence you’re thinking “I’ll never make it to the top, never revise the way I want. I can’t.”

Tip: “I think I can” isn’t age-specific, and works as well for writers as for everyone else.

What about the Dialogue No Character Ever Speaks?

Dialogue shapes novels. There’s an unspoken dialogue between a novel and its readers that shapes the quality and impact of fiction.  In Novel Voices, Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabelais interview Siri Hustvedt, who has this to say about the dialogue that keeps us reading fiction:

The reader situates himself somewhere between the immediate here of the world in which he reads and the there of the book. He enters a state that is between himself and the voice of the book. Reading is also entering a dialogue of sorts because a book is nothing until it lives inside the reader, who makes the book come to life.

You can’t have a dialogue without both parties participating. But readers can’t do that unless some things are unsaid, some points never made. How else can readers interpret through the lens of their own memories, experiences, and appetites? Of course no one wants a novel to be an empty blackboard, awaiting the reader’s imprint. But no one wants every detail laid out, either, because that makes it impossible for readers to discover meaning for themselves.

Which factors let readers participate in the experience of fiction?

~ Plot events.

This is restricted to what the characters actually do or execute or say. What they contemplate, how they commiserate, whether they circumnavigate—all that excludes the reader, because it’s talking to rather than with.

~ Dialogue between characters.

Again, this is restricted to what the characters say rather than what they say “lazily,” “cheerfully,” “thoughtfully,” or “stormily.” Once you add adverbs or any other filter, it becomes a lecture—not a dialogue.

~ Subtext.

           

Pose questions that sound like questions and seemingly definitive statements that imply questions. If you like, write down exactly what the character wants to say. Afterwards, though, revise until your characters sound like real people—dropping hints, insinuating threats, and generally playing games.

           

~ Ambiguity.

Much as you’d like to, never, ever “tell” readers exactly what you want them to notice, believe, defy, or applaud. Drop clues. Unfurl your plot. Make your characters suffer enough to change. What will readers absorb from that? It’s up to them.

Tip: Let readers participate in the dialogue. After all, it’s why they’re there.

How Much Do People Want to Change?

Not much. Every New Year’s brings promises of writing more and eating less, of visiting the gym, giving or tossing items you never use, and finishing the draft. If any of those happen, it’s usually because—something happened.

Tip: Inertia is powerful. Events drive characters, people, and novels.

What about the people writing the novels? All have the best intentions. They plan to write daily, revise based on critique, research agents early on, take the necessary steps to make the dream come true. Yet somehow, potentially wonderful novels linger unfinished, unrevised, and unagented. Sometimes reality interferes. But more often, inertia does.

What gets a novelist moving? An event. Your best friend gets an agent, writes “The End,” transcends a rejection slip. Alternatively, your worst enemy gets an agent, writes “The End,” transcends a rejection slip. You’re ready to act, so don’t drift back to getting it done whenever you do. Because without another event, who knows?

Events control people—and characters—in a way that good intentions rarely can. Of events, the inciting incident is among the most provocative, seductive, and inflammatory. Whether the protagonist answers the call or vows to resist it, the world is forever changed. As Hamlet said, “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.” Like most protagonists, Hamlet knows that he’s been called to act.

That’s what the inciting incident is. Too often, though, writers assume that the inciting incident is for the reader—a hook to explode the plot with a giant bang. That, too, of course, but the inciting incident is mainly for the protagonist. Without an impetus like his father’s ghost appearing to Hamlet, the protagonist simply rails against injustice. And stays stuck.

How can a novelist combat inertia?

~ Choose your inciting incident carefully.

It needs sufficient oomph to carry your entire novel.

~ Substitute event for syndrome.

People and characters will tolerate a fair amount of dissatisfaction without taking action. But guess what? Readers won’t.

~ Clarify in your own mind (not on the page!) how you want your protagonist to change.

Is it from selfish to generous, snobbish to compassionate, or passive to proactive?

~ Eliminate inert brooding, worrying, planning, and fantasizing.

None of those remove the protagonist’s difficulties or fulfill the protagonist’s dreams. Plus it’s no fun to read.

~ Be the protagonist of your writing life.

Look for events that motivate you. Do postponed deadlines have consequences? Hmmm. If not, should they?

Ideas are glorious. But action gets things done—both inside and outside of fiction.

To Do (or Not to Do)

A novelist who shrugs off the need for active verbs could sink in the same boat as novelist who neglects plot—and for the same reason. Events must unfold in the physical world, the emotional one, or, ideally, both. Reduce everything to syndrome or possibility or state of being, and nonfiction becomes a preferable reading and writing choice.

Examine the evolution of the verb “do.” “To do” now compiles priorities to accomplish. On the novelist list? Capture action with active verbs. Because the noun “to do” signals commotion, stew, fuss, quarrel, agitation, uproar, stir, tempest in a teapot, hurricane, squall, tumult, or storm. Fiction originates right there. As Charles Baxter said, “Hell is story friendly.”

Tip: A scene without “to do” isn’t much of a scene.

Feeling isn’t doing. Neither is worrying. Neither are sentences like: “Anne felt angry,” or “He was astonished by the amount of confusion,” or “Wandering listlessly, he got in touch with how lost he really was.” No “to do” there. No good verbs, either.

Note how verbs invigorate the opening of Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters:

She smiled, wondering how often, if ever before, the cat had felt a friendly human touch, and she was still smiling as the cat reared up on its hind legs, even as it struck her with extended claws, smiling right up to that second when it sank its teeth into the back of her left hand and hung from her flesh so that she nearly fell forward, stunned and horrified, yet conscious enough of Otto’s presence to smother the cry that arose in her throat as she jerked her hand back from that circle of barbed wire. She pushed out with her other hand, and as the sweat broke out on her forehead, as her flesh crawled and tightened, she said, “No, no, stop that!” to the cat, as if it had done nothing more than beg for food, and in the midst of her pain and dismay she was astonished to hear how cool her voice was. Then, all at once, the claws released her and flew back as though to deliver another blow, but then the cat turned-it seemed in mid-air-and sprang from the porch, disappearing into the shadowed yard below.

Verb Checklist

ü  Skip the distancing auxiliaries: “is, be, am, are, was, were, been, has, have, had, do, does, did, may, might, can, could, shall, should, will, would, must.”

ü  Snare the verb: “sweeten” instead of “add a sweetener.”

ü  Banish dead metaphors. Find another way to illuminate that idea.

ü  Replace vague abstraction with concrete verbs: prop, besiege, wither, decimate.

ü  Jazz things up. Sizzle, curtail, unravel, kvetch, and pounce.

   But jazz up every verb, and you sound demented. Add just enough to electrify—to do, to act. Verbs repair weaknesses and incite commotion. That incites great scenes.

Seeing the Magic, Making the Magic

Say it’s winter, and you’re lucky enough to be on a southern beach instead of imprisoned in a northern cold front. Say you like that beach enough to put it in your novel. The easy, obvious course is describing the easy and obvious. Here goes: hundreds of folks glistening with oil or tanning lotion splay out on beach chairs facing the sun. Behind them, the waves lap rhythmically, soothingly. It’s true. Absolutely.

But who cares?  No one, really. No magic here. Only the easy and obvious.

Tip: To convey something magical, first you must see—not just skim the surface, but really see.

It’s actually harder to see than to craft sentences about what you’ve uncovered. Seeing is far more than half the battle.  Happily, looking deeply and creatively is a skill. Like any skill, it’s something you can learn. All you need is patience, practice, and determination to keep seeking what’s initially invisible.

A writer I know remarked on wanting to find what’s beautiful and special about any location. Even though many admire mountains and ocean more than farmland, finding magic wherever you are makes you a better novelist.

That’s the whole trick: looking past pedestrian clichés and tired, superficial imagery to the mystery and magic. In that world—which is actually everywhere—magic surrounds you, encompasses you, infiltrates you. Replace sunbathers (yawn) and raucous gulls (yawn, yawn) and lapping waves (not yawn but ouch!). How about a sliver of moon accompanying a star or two when your protagonist’s the only one in the hotel pool at 5 a.m. Or a protagonist who, with only blessing for compensation, walks the beach, forking litter from seaweed and broken coral, stowing other people’s refuse in a giant garbage bag.

~ Find the magic of fantasy.

If you’re lucky enough to imagine what elves lovingly whisper during elf trysts, or the spell an elderly       wizard casts when he knows his long life is winding down, then you transcend the ordinary.

~ Find the magic of reality.

Every novelist needs magic, and not all of us can or want to conjure elves, wizards, or unicorns. But magic is everywhere. All you have to do is really look, and you’ll begin to really see. Abracadabra.

There it is. Yours for the taking—yours for the giving. A version of blessed.

The Novelist’s Neglected Child

The middle child syndrome is prevalent enough to earn entry in the Urban Dictionary.  Dr. Touraj Shafai defines this as a child “not getting enough attention and love because the parents are busy and providing more attention and care to the oldest and the youngest children.”

Does this reflect how novelists sometimes view their work? “I’m busily revising my opening till it’s practically perfect,” one writer tells another. “The end is what turns me on” is the reply. “Fireworks! Transformed characters! Completed arcs!” Many novelists revel in either the inciting incident or the climax, neglecting the middle brainchild.

It could be that the middle drags along, lacking direction, constantly rambling about the past, and describing everything while doing very little. Your listless one can evoke exhausted listlessness in its originator. Yes, the middle is the difficult position, and difficult is usually the least loved.  The middle offspring faces:

·         Sluggishness.

·         Redundancy.

·         Arrested development.

·         Obsession with the past.

·         Stagnation.

·         Precocious urge to figure out and solve everything—instantly.

No wonder the novelist wants to concentrate on the thrilling potential of the youngster or urbane sophistication of the one beautifully grown.  But like a good parent, a good novelist loves all three offspring, and as equally as possible.

There’s hope—plenty of it, actually, for the middle, the one raising those offspring, and those encountering them in a book that works from start to finish.

Tip: The middle is where all the fun happens.

You can bring out the best in your under-appreciated middle with:

v  Defeat.

Are you coddling the middle of your novel like a sensitive child? If so, stop.  Make trouble. Trap. Corner. Ravage your characters. They might object, but your readers never will.

v  Motivation.

Which events and pressures cause the protagonist to change and grow?

v  Foreshadowing.

How can you hint—neither invisibly nor obviously—what’s ahead?

v  Surprise.

Is the middle one a little obstreperous? If not, time to encourage that. After all, psychologists are divided over whether it’s a desirable or difficult position to hold. Go for desirable.

v  Resonance.

How can the middle integrate what precedes with what follows? Echoes are great fun. Let readers enjoy them.

v  Insight.

Isn’t the fun of the novel the journey rather than the arrival? That’s where this child really shines. Take advantage.

Love the beginning, middle, and end equally—and your readers will, too.

Connotation and Why You Care

Words have their own “lives,” much the way characters act naughty or nice behind our backs when we’re not looking. The lives of our characters are offshoots of our intentions as novelists. Words, though, have lives of their own—perhaps ones we never planned. This doesn’t mean we get to ignore the history of the words we choose. Just the opposite, in fact.

Let’s say you want your character walking on a starry night. Great. Just remember that Vincent Van Gogh planted a very particular image. Don McLean’s song further accentuated that, and new versions continue to flourish.

Why does this matter to novelists? Because the standard paradigm affects how readers read your scene. One choice is avoiding that language altogether. The other is intentionally harnessing or revamping the meaning a particular phrase evokes.

Let’s say that Lelia, your protagonist, flees the house during a heated argument and heads down a country road lit only by stars. Like Van Gogh’s, these stars seem gigantic and turbulent. They signal fury and madness spinning out of control above a peaceful village. If that’s how your protagonist feels, all you need is, “Slamming the screen door, Lelia stepped into the starry night.”

But what if she doesn’t feel that way at all? Maybe Lelia dashes outside, looks up at the stars and finds inspiration. This marriage isn’t a happy one, and every distant point of light reinforces this new-found clarity. She’s had enough. She’s moving out. She’s moving on. If that’s so, either describe the stars some other way or help your readers see what Lelia does. Perhaps she thinks of Van Gogh and then smiling, shakes her head. The guy who cut off his ear had it all wrong. This is pure “Wish I may, wish I might.”

The familiar phrases that leap into every writer’s mind arrive there because they’re so familiar. So identify any wording that conveys iconic, archetypal imagery, however accidentally. Then make conscious choices. Build on tradition, reverse it, or simply mention “stars” rather than “starry night.”

Tip: Train yourself to notice the connotations that your readers do.

Give Thanks for Writing

Writers often grumble. You can’t get an agent. If you’ve got one, she doesn’t answer your email or he’s not placing your book. You’re terrific at plotting, but you don’t like your voice. Or you consider your voice really pretty good, but how does that help if you can’t plot?

Writing and writers have our share of troubles. Maybe more than most, maybe not. There’s the revising world, the publishing world, the being-off-in-your-own-fictional world. But during the season of taking stock and counting blessings, it might be useful to pause and appreciate what writing gives us instead of what it fails to.

Few novelists do it only for the money. Instead, the desire to communicate, clarify, and characterize usually motivates. And if we’re writing because we have something to say and want to entertain or create beauty or make music or laughter, then what would we do without it? How would we fill that hole? What else could make us whole?

The burning desire to write—and to write well—is a source of pleasure. A writer friend and I had this email conversation comparing writing to a table you’re polishing . The process is going really well until—you find a gouge. Maybe no one but you would even notice. But you know it’s there. You apply some quick fixes—burying rough edges, masking the shape, thickly shading or texturing, hacking, overdoing, and finally rationalizing that only you will ever know.

None of that works. Because you will always know. So you’ll remain dissatisfied until it’s fixed, until you reproduce the perfect image you see in your head—of a table, a scene, an exchange of dialogue.

Don’t fret. This is nothing to complain about! The perseverance to strive for perfection isn’t a setback or burden. It’s a gift. You care so much about your project that you’re willing to give it your all, no matter how long that takes. Doesn’t that make every day one to feel thankful for?

Tip: Before you write for anyone else, write for yourself.