by Ben Parris
Some people are born with an innate sense of where a story begins while others have to learn the skill. If you practice this part of the craft properly, one day you will wonder why choosing a beginning was ever a source of confusion for you. Today, however, you might have every other writing skill imaginable, all packed in your arsenal, and yet still be completely lost as to how a story should open. I want to give you some essentials for how this process works encapsulated in a brief, fresh article rather than an incomplete excerpt from my writer’s instructional manual Today You Write the Book.

The very same people who struggle with where to begin laying out the events in their novel often experience far less trouble making this decision for their short stories. In the span of a short story, there is less time for fooling around and therefore less room to make a mistake. You can’t help but get on with business, or risk going nowhere at all (there’s a hint in there).

You may have heard that your opening must contain a “hook,” also known as a reason to read further. As critical as it is to reel your reader in, refrain from making empty promises in the form of phony gimmicks that the story cannot live up to. Instead, you start in a particular place because your story very clearly feels like it is supposed to start there. Let’s examine the concept more closely and compare it with the conventional wisdom: Begin your story as near to its end as possible. Aha. Well, my job is done then, right? No, because this old adage begs two enormous questions:
a) Why should you begin a story as close to its end as possible?; and
b) What is “possible”? How close to the end can you go?

To answer those questions, let’s start with a hypothetical story timeline:
I. Trista was born in 1996.
II. Trista inherited property in McSheridan Wells, North Dakota, in 2014.
III. Four years later, in 2018, Trista won a boundary dispute.
IV. Two days after that, in an extrajudicial battle over the boundaries, half the town was dead.

We could pick one of the above points, or somewhere in between, but we’ll limit the discussion to just a few considerations for now:
1. We could argue that the story begins when Trista was born because there is no story without her.
2. We could argue that the story begins the day she inherited property because without that, there would be no property dispute to begin with.
3. And lastly, we could argue that the story must not begin with the day of the disputed boundary because it leaves no room to lay out all the backstory needed to explain why such radical things happened so quickly after that.

Is the first choice a valid argument? No because we don’t want to bore our readers; we want them excited.

Is the second a valid argument? More so than the first, because this is a demonstrably consequential event, but a tight plot has one consequential event after another, preferably tied together. A solid chain of events cannot be sustained over a continuous four-year period, and too many discontinuous events in a row are a struggle for writer and reader alike.

What about the third argument? Suppose that your opening line went something like this: “Trista didn’t know it yet, but in two days, half the town would be dead.” Then you have what is called a “clock” in fiction. Readers love a good clock: the spreading virus; the speeding bus; the crook getting away…

So are two days a possible time frame for proper storytelling? Yes, depending on your story, it can be. Some tools employed in this regard are: instant characterization, the backstory pared down to what is relevant and essential, flashbacks (if necessary), and a novice character who needs the situation explained to them (the latter is the reason that Doctor Who’s companion must keep changing).

Using the term “instant characterization” for an opening bears explanation. The quickest—and worst—way to bring a character to life is via clichés. But if you allot just a little more time to the process, you can demonstrate character in the space of a couple of pages. My prime example is the opening to Tom Clancey’s Patriot Games. The opening line is a bold one: “Ryan was nearly killed twice in half an hour.” It’s thought-provoking. Who is Ryan? Why was he nearly killed? And nearly killed twice?

Then the author backs up that claim. Jack Ryan is almost run down by a bus because he looked for traffic in the wrong direction. Here the author is emphasizing that his character is an American on vacation in England where traffic runs in the lanes opposite to an American’s expectations. Next, his family joins him, and an assassination attempt unfolds right in front of them. Ryan, who is an ex-marine, thwarts the attack and we eventually learn that the attackers are tied into the main plot (as they would have to be). Now we know that Ryan has his family at stake and that he is instinctively an action hero, an impulse bolstered by his background. Our mission to open the story is accomplished in a way that is completely appropriate for this type of book.

Does Patriot Games take place over a span of two days? No, because it is an action thriller with significant intervals required to tell the story: Ryan is shot and must recover; the bad guy is arrested and has to escape; and finally, the terrorists must develop a long-term plan for revenge while Ryan is lulled into a false sense of security. But do we start the story way back in the days of Ryan’s marine training? No, we don’t. We start with the action that changes his life and leads directly into the sequence of events that will be the main plot.

Getting back to our example with Trista, two days from our logical starting point are all we have. Unless our plot points undergo a radical change, we are all set to follow the choice that makes sense with what we have.
When you make your final decision as to where your story begins, keep the following mandate in mind: you as the author have to know why you chose the particular plot point as the starting message, and the reader has to have some idea why they are entering the tale at this point. The more solid this foundation is, the better your beginning works. If either condition does not prevail, go back and reexamine your choice.

By Jim Hohenbary

An Imagined Scenario

You just took a job in the Southwest.  A few months after settling into your new neighborhood, the guy across the street asks you: “Have you seen the mystery village yet?”  He proceeds to tell you about an abandoned village a few miles outside of town.  He tells you that it is hundreds of years old and that nobody knows who lived there or why they left.  “It seems like they just vanished,” he says cheerfully as he sifts through his mail. “You should check it out!”

On a quiet weekend, you decide to see for yourself.  You find that, although much of the village has fallen down, there are still towers, mazes of rooms, and feats of architectural engineering.  And true enough, whoever lived there seems to have left many of their material possessions behind.  Beautiful plates and bowls remain.  Shoes even.  You almost expect to find a piece of half-eaten toast still sitting on one of the tables.   And just hiking to the village, covering rocky terrain in the Southwestern heat, is an accomplishment.  You wonder, sweat staining your shirt, what kind of athletes could even come and go from this place on a daily basis.

You talk about your excursion when you return to work on Monday.  One of your associates mentions that the local indigenous tribe disavows that village.  They say it is not their handiwork.  Another associate mentions that there are actually hundreds of these villages all over the region.  All similarly abandoned.

Would you, then, speculate about what might have happened there?  Would you return to look for clues on your next free weekend?  Would you, images clicking through your brain, lie awake at night reflecting on that village, wondering what might cause the residents of an entire community to just abandon their homes?

Perched beneath the Shelter of a Cliff near You

The scenario imagined above is not all that different from the experience of settlers and explorers to the American Southwest as they began to discover the ruins of the cliff dwellers that had once lived in the Four Corners region, which roughly encompasses southern Utah and Colorado and northern Arizona and New Mexico.

Richard Wetherill, a rancher from Mancos, Colorado, who “discovered” Cliff Palace, the largest cliff dwelling in North America, in 1888, is credited with helping to popularize the use of the term Anasazi to describe its original owners.  The term comes from the Navajo language.  Some translations of the word have seemed suggestive of legend and slightly sinister: “ancient enemies” or “enemy ancestors.”  Other translations seem much more benign: “the old ones who are not us.”  Whatever the exact meaning, the name stuck to a large degree, especially in popular imagination.  Most archaeologists now refer to the ruins as Puebloan, which acknowledges their cultural connections with and claims of ancestry by modern tribes such as the Hopi, Zuni, and Acoma; but the cliff dwellers would not have answered to either Anasazi or Puebloan.  Their true names remain unknown.

Due to the scale of some of the ruins, as well as the sheer number of structures, it is hard to imagine the cliff dwellings as anything less than the remains of a once-vibrant desert kingdom.  This endows them with an aura of mystery, one that is only strengthened by the fact that many of the sites, perhaps because they are more intact than fragmentary, leave an impression of hasty abandonment.

Hauntingly Familiar

But has the absence of the cliff dwellers remained entirely mysterious?  Some aspects of their culture and history may never be fully known, but clever detective work has revealed many details.  For example, dendrochronology, the science of using tree rings for dating construction and for tracking climate change, has revealed that the region was afflicted with a protracted and severe drought.  It has also allowed archaeologists to date precisely when all construction stopped at certain sites.  Tree rings are the fingerprints that helped establish that there is no evidence of human habitation after 1300 AD at Mesa Verde, one of the best-known Puebloan sites.

In fact, the explanation that has slowly emerged regarding why the cliff dwellers abandoned their homes has an unnerving familiarity to it.  The best guess of the archaeological community, while always subject to revision, seems to run something like this:

Climate change and population growth pushed the resources and agricultural productivity of the area to its limits.  These pressures then put a strain on social order and cohesion.  Scarcity and strife almost surely followed.  Multiply these factors over many tribes/clans/factions, and the conditions were ripe for conflict and societal collapse.

Was there war among the cliff dwellers?  Did they live in fear of migrant groups and/or raiders who pushed into the territory, strangers on the move due to similar problems in their own home territories?  The evidence for significant warfare seems to be mixed, and of course, the kind of tragedy that befell one place in the region might have been successfully avoided in another.  However, the site selection for many cliff dwellings and the commonality of defensive design elements, such as easily defended chokepoints, suggests that violence may have been a constant source of anxiety in some parts of the Four Corners region.

At the end of day, unrelenting environmental pressures, and the potential for conflict and societal breakdown that comes with those pressures, probably wore down the cliff dwellers.  And finally, continued habitation simply became untenable.  The cliff dwellers did not actually vanish, but rather like any proud people, they refused to live indefinitely in a situation that would not allow them to flourish.  They simply left.  Most likely, they migrated to the south, towards water and the potential for better agricultural productivity, towards other groups with whom they had probably engaged in trade, with whom they shared more cultural similarities than differences.

It remains true that we will never know the full story of these abandoned ruins.  And the thought of an unsolved ancient mystery definitely fires the imagination.  However, the fact is that we do have a pretty good guess at the broad strokes.  We know that environmental stressors can fracture a society and spark conflict.  We know that these issues can cause entire communities to abandon their home territories.  We know enough to be concerned, a fact that should keep us awake more often, reflecting on the cliff dwellers in the night, images from our own times clicking through our brains.

 

[Ruminations such as these were the inspiration for Jim Hohenbary’s debut novel Before the Ruins]

Andre Morin

People often “dive headfirst” into a book they are reading; but a 2014 study conducted by Durham University suggests that, for some readers, book characters are diving back out of the books into readers’ everyday lives.

The study focused on the experience of readers hearing voices of characters during and outside of reading; an experience that has been likened to hallucination. Data for the study was collected from a survey made up of two parts: Section 1 featuring questions on the vivid experiences of readers hearing voices and characters; and Section 2 featuring questions on inner speech and auditory hallucination proneness.

The results of the study, which was carried out at the 2014 Edinburgh International Book Festival and included over 1500 participants, found that over 50% of people claim they hear voices of fictional characters in their head when they’re reading, and 19% reported hearing these voices in situations other than reading.

This second statistic was interesting to researchers, who found that certain participants characterized their experience with characters by way of “experiential crossing”, a term coined by researchers that “refer[s] to instances of characters and voices being experienced outside of the context of reading.” This pointed towards these voices and characters going beyond the act of reading and crossing into the thought process of people.

Certain participants’ accounts highlighted changes in their style and manner based on a character, as shown in this response:

“Last February and March, when I was reading “Mrs. Dalloway” and writing a paper on it, I was feeling enveloped by Clarissa Dalloway. I heard her voice or imagined what her reactions to different situations. I’d walk into a Starbucks and feel her reaction to it based on what I was writing in my essay on the different selves of this character.”

In some cases, such as the one above, the experiential crossing came at random times during the daily routine of the reader. Other times the crossing was a product of the reader being in a similar setting to where a character would be, such as in this account:

“The character Hannah Fowler, from the book of the same name was the voice I heard while walking with my family in the area of Kentucky (USA) where the book took place. I loved the book and heard her dialogue as I walked through the woods.”

According to researchers, this indicates that readers are often able to take fictional characters and create a “consciousness frame” that blurs the line between the self and the other. This could potentially be seen as a way in which reading helps comprehend the mind of another person. A database is formed of characters and their style and manner, and in real-life situations this can be used to understand other people and/or empathize with them.

Experiential crossing can thus be seen as “a counterpart to the more widely studied relationship between mental simulation and reader’s previous experience.” In this equivalency, readers take their experiences from the fictional and move them into reality, creating the previously described database.

Researchers also pointed out the limitations of the study and it’s conclusions. Since the survey took place at a literary festival, the sample surveyed was mostly composed of highly literate people who are passionate about literature, which potentially skews the data. An argument can also be made that since most experiential crossings were described more along the lines of a habit where people think of what a character would do in a scenario versus a controlled simulation of the character’s mind, experiential crossing would thus be related to the creation of personalities and agents in one’s head than an act of understanding or empathizing with another person.

Despite these limitations, the overwhelming positive response to the survey regarding hearing voices and characters points to a need for further study in order to better understand this common phenomenon.

So if you’re nervous about characters and voices from fiction popping up in your daily life, don’t worry, you aren’t alone; in fact, you’re most likely part of a large percentage of readers. These voices and characters are potentially helping you empathize with the people around you, and create bonds with them.

By Amy Lynn Asbury

What is a short story?

That’s easy, you might answer. A short story is obviously a story that’s short. But such a concise definition can only lead us to more questions—how short can the story be? What if it’s just a paragraph? What if it’s the oft-cited, and possibly apocryphal, six-word story by Hemingway—

For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.

Powerful in its sadness. Or the even-shorter, five-word spoof, by Ben Parris—

For sale: manuscript. Never sold.

Quite a few famous writers have debated the definition of a short story, because there has never been one set definition. Sure, if you look it up in the dictionary you’ll find one, but it’ll be along the lines of our original answer.

If we shop elsewhere for our definition, it would be fitting to draw it from the writers themselves. Edgar Allan Poe once wrote in an essay that a short story is a story that can be read in one sitting that has a single effect. Single effect means that every word and every action in a story must point to one ultimate theme, or at least one end. That’s a pretty decent definition, until you wonder just how much someone could read in one sitting. One person might only be able to read twenty pages, while another might be able to read eighty.

Anton Chekov also wrote his own definition of a short story. He stated that short stories are primarily about two lead characters and no one else, and that the ideas must be simple. We might be able to agree that short stories should have a smaller cast than novels or even novellas, but just two lead characters? That might be a little restrictive, even for Chekov himself.

Stephen King famously said, “A short story is a different thing altogether—a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.” Here he means that short stories are startling and swift, with perhaps a hint of intimacy, but without getting properly acquainted with the subject matter. Since this is a pretty vague definition and therefore inclusive, it’s one of my favorites.

My favorite attempt at a short story definition, however, comes from Michael Martone: “Where a novel is a forest fire, the [short] story is rust,” he wrote. So many things happen in a novel—there’s so much plot and so many themes, so many ups and downs. But in a short story, we get an effect. Sure, events take place during a short story, but, as Poe said, there is one effect. We see one side of events, or just the lingering remains.

I also agree with one author in particular—Francine Prose, who wrote an essay about the fact that there is no definition of a short story. There are too many variables, too many widely-accepted short stories that have a ton of characters or a ton of pages, a ton of plot or no traceable plot at all, for anyone to really define the genre.

Maybe Prose is right, and there is no real definition of the short story genre. Maybe Poe is, and short stories must work toward a single, unified effect. Or maybe none of these writers are right.

What do you think? Do you agree or disagree with these authors? And do you have your own definition of the short story genre?

Frances Lear

Whenever Halloween comes up, there’s an even bigger, scarier event looming right around the corner: National Novel Writing Month. For those who don’t know, NaNoWriMo is a worldwide writing event where hundreds of thousands of writers set out to write their own novels in one month. Not a perfect, complete novel, of course, but every writer hopes to come away with a rough draft of their novel ready for the revision phase.
Think it’s impossible? Sure, what you get at the end of the month is usually a terrible, typo-ridden mess; but there are stories in there just waiting to become best-sellers. Over the almost 20 years NaNoWriMo has been around, hundreds of novels have been published, originally created during this event. Here is a list of novels that began during National Novel Writing Month.

1. Livvie Owen Lived Here, Sarah Dooley

Sarah Dooley’s novel is set from the point of view of a 14-year-old autistic girl. Livvie comes to notice that her family, forced to move from place to place, was only truly happy in one house. The only problem is that Livvie burned the house down. Dooley’s writing is both emotional and enlightening, portraying a realistic autistic character.

2. Losing Faith, Denise Jaden

Denise Jaden captures the heartbreak and mystery of this story in well-written prose. In Losing Faith, a young woman named Brie loses her sister Faith in a tragic accident. While her life begins to fall apart, and Brie has to learn how to live in a world without her sister, she discovers that her sister’s death may not have been accidental at all. Jaden creates a mystery that leaves the reader guessing and holding on until the end, making it a book you’ll never want to put down.

3. The Beautiful Land, Alan Averill

Alan Averill’s debut novel is a mixture between science-fiction and horror, about a scientist trying to save the love of his life and the world. The Beautiful Land is an incredible novel with lyrical prose and excellent character. With the potential to confuse readers between all the different parallel worlds, Averill keeps focus and clarity, creating a strange novel that pulls the reader in.

4. The Darwin Elevator, Jason M. Hough

The first in a trilogy, Jason M. Hough’s highly-praised The Darwin Elevator explores the post-apocalyptic world and the last remains of humanity. This story is held together by tension, mystery, beautifully written characters, and amazing world-building. This debut novel is a well-deserved New York Times Bestseller.

5. Wool, Hugh Howey

Hugh Howey’s Wool was originally self-published, and quickly became a high-demand. The dystopian sci-fi series consists of five parts, three of which were written during NaNoWriMo in 2011. Howey depicts a world where mankind is struggling to survive, and unable to go outside, with perfect pacing and excellent storytelling. Considered an instant sci-fi classing, Howey’s novel is not only an inspiration for writing a novel, but for self-publishing as well.

6. Cinder, Marissa Meyer

Another first in a series, Marissa Meyer’s Cinder is a Cinderella story with a drastic twist. Set on a futuristic earth, Cinder is a cyborg in a world where humanity is threatened by an alien race. Soon, she becomes trapped in the center of this intergalactic struggle, and must be the one to save the world. This series of reimagined fairytales is refreshing and beautifully explored in Meyer’s series.

7. Fangirl, Rainbow Rowell

Rainbow Rowell’s coming-of-age story is perfect for anyone who has found themselves a little too obsessed with a particular book. Fangirl is about a young girl who grew up falling in love with a series of book that she becomes a little too attached to. Now that she’s older and moving on to college, she has to learn how to survive in the world without falling back on the book series that’s gotten her this far. Rowell’s novel is filled with realistic and endearing characters, true-to-life scenes that bring a new perspective to the typical going-to-college story.

8. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen

If you haven’t heard of this novel, you’ve probably at least heard of the film adaptation starring Reese Witherspoon. Sara Gruen’s wildly successful novel began in NaNoWriMo, making it one of the biggest inspirations for writers participating in the event. Water for Elephants is a historical novel written and researched so beautifully, it remained on New York Times’s Best Seller list for 12 weeks.

9. Wade of Aquitaine, Ben Parris

And of course our list would not be complete without Wade of Aquitaine, one of the very first Amazon Kindle Bestsellers. Displayed with its original 2007 cover art, The Ben Parris epic tells the story of literature’s first synesthetic hero, whose crossed-senses are so extreme that with the help of another synesthete from 1,200 years past, they shift Wade in time and space to solve a crisis at the end of Charlemagne’s reign.

If you are New Journalist Tom Wolfe, you use a great many exclamation points in your professional writing. It’s what you do. If you are Mark Twain, you do not. Twain said that using an exclamation point was like laughing at your own joke.

Irving A. Greenfield, Jean Auel, Stephen King and Tom Clancy use them; Jeffrey Archer, John Grisham and Eric Van Lustbader, almost never. (King is the one who skimps on adverbs)

In all formal writing, novels included, bright, sparkly punctuation was once considered the hallmark of amateurs and lazy people. Literature for young readers—all the way through middle grade and young adult—doesn’t use as much description as you would find in say, Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants. It has to move fast; it has to employ shorthand. In novels for adults, as any English teacher will tell you, you have all the room in the world for context, so you have no excuse for using elementary tools. You can put down the bullhorn because people will know what you mean without it.

But if we are talking about trends, there is an indisputable movement ruffling the feathers of English teachers and grammarians everywhere. Call it: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Exclamation Mark. Adults are pressed for time, accustomed to quick-paced forms of entertainment, and are reading middle grade and young adult books. The exclamation point, as we call it in the USA, now has an extended familiarity to adult readers for that very reason. Expectations began to change in the 1990’s. People don’t even know what you mean anymore if you don’t use them.

Then we have another trend reinforcing the first. Call it Harry Potter and the Deathly Text. Millennials are coming of age believing that if you care about the person you are talking to and the issues they hold dear, you use a lot of exclamation points to express yourself. They like their books that way too. To them, it’s not just confusing when people don’t use exclamation points, it’s also rude.

My prescription: If you are an editor over 40, allow between one and zero exclamation points per hundred thousand words. For everyone else, do what feels right. But! Don’t’! Be! Ridiculous!

P.S. Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants, copyright 2006, a marvelous best seller, uses many exclamation points.

By Jessica Frazier

BoroughCon, a multi-media multi-fandom convention is New York City’s newest pop culture event. Debuting at St. John’s University in Queens during Memorial Day weekend 2017, BoroughCon will serve anime, comics, live-action media, gaming, and cosplay fandoms over the course of four days. The convention will include panels, workshops, activities, and screenings of movie teasers.

“BoroughCon will have a more intimate setting than other conventions,” says William Freedman, BoroughCon’s chief technology officer. “Guests will have an easier time meeting celebrities compared to some larger, more established conventions.”

According to Freedman, BoroughCon will begin announcing celebrity guests starting in late August. CEO Matthew Goodison-Orr and CFO Victor Lai are using their experience from running Orlando’s KnightroKon anime convention to approach those celebrities and present them at BoroughCon. They expect to attract an array of anime and gaming voice talents, as well as comic book artists and nationally known cosplayers. This, according to Freedman, will lend BoroughCon the credibility to bring aboard household-name talent from film and TV.

For as much planning that goes into creating a convention, Freedman seems to downplay the daunting task. He wears three hats as a BoroughCon creator, multitasking with project management, IT, and publicity for the convention. Freedman has confidence that the management team, comprised of Nassau County attorneys Gary Port and George Sava in addition to himself, Goodison-Orr, and Lai, will make the convention a hit.

Each of the convention’s founders brings a unique and complementary set of skills to the team room. Goodison-Orr has deep industry contacts, Lai is an old hand at convention operations, Freedman combines experience in both journalism and technology, Sava is a highly regarded entertainment lawyer, and Port brings leadership skills developed over a 30-year career as a U.S. Army officer.

Freedman noted that his motivation for joining the BoroughCon team had much to do with civic pride.

“New York Comic Con is a huge deal, but it’s only one week a year,” he said. “There are a couple much smaller local events that don’t have anywhere near its professional gloss. And the literary conventions in New York – the ones focused on science fiction and fantasy on the printed page – are really suffering in terms of attendance and their ability to break even. Meanwhile, Boston has something along these lines every other month. I’m sick of couchsurfing under Red Sox banners.”

BoroughCon was created with the intention of giving the outer boroughs of New York City their own pop culture event. “We wanted to put together a convention distinct from everything else in the area; something for the people of New York, not the tourists,” says Freedman.

The convention is projected to attract 20,000 attendees. The creators of BoroughCon are optimistic that the turnout will be high.

“What else is there to do in New York Memorial Day weekend? [BoroughCon] is for everyone stuck in town,” says Freedman. BoroughCon purposely takes place several months after the yearly cultural phenomena, New York ComicCon. BoroughCon is scheduled to tide over fans who cannot wait until next October to get their ComicCon fix.

BoroughCon’s leadership team is also banking on the diverse group of fandoms covered at the convention to create the strong attendance rate. Freedman boasts: “BoroughCon is a celebration, a gathering of various tribes.”

For more information and updates, visit BoroughCon’s website at: http://boroughcon.com/

By CaraMarie Christy

The decision to join a critique group can be a complicated one and not everyone is comfortable with presenting their work to others. Those who lack the ability to meet deadlines or plan ahead may struggle to prepare to critique other pieces or to make the time commitment to complete their own work. Nonetheless, critique groups are an excellent source of study and obligation for those who can commit to them. Here are some of the many transformative reasons a writer should join a critique group:

Habitual Sharing- Not all writers are confident in sending their work out to publishers and agents. A critique group can be seen as a smaller form of submission where a writer can get used to seeing their work pass through different hands. In this manner, being critiqued and judged becomes a habit that is no longer as scary and impossible to deal with.

Exposure- A critique group provides networking opportunities for writers. It takes an individual activity, writing, and turns it into a community event which can lead to potential job opportunities or the creation of a small fan base. The more people invested in a writer’s work, the easier it is to produce and market content.

Accountability- It’s much easier to ignore your deadlines when dealing with an editor on the opposite end of an email than it is when you are meeting someone face to face. A good number of writing jobs these days are done through telecommuting, which can lead to failing to realize the immediacy of a writing due date. Critics expect to be able to read the works that have been assigned for that revising period. While failing to meet deadlines in work can get a writer fired, failing to meet deadlines in critique group means having to go into workshop and watching the disappointment on every critic’s face. Critique groups are also great if a writer doesn’t have an editor or an agent, because it creates the sort of urgency that gets your writing done.

Building Confidence- A lot of writers struggle to maintain their “drive” while writing. That’s why writer’s block is such an oft-Googled term. Critique groups offer a place to “tear apart” a writer’s work, while also providing space to push a writer towards their end goal of completing that work. This minute examination of the details of an intimate creation is why it’s important to end critique groups by giving the writer a morale-boosting compliment or two.

Learning- This one is so much of a given that it almost doesn’t need to be said. But the fact is that critique groups are places to pool knowledge with other writers. If a critique group were ever collectively interested in seeing how much knowledge they’ve attained over the years, concept mapping is a good way of breaking down knowledge into chunks and creating a “knowledge” diagram. A writer can also gain a deeper understanding of their own work from using concept mapping. In a separate Cmap article, we show how the popular software aid CmapTools can be used from a writer’s standpoint.

By CaraMarie Christy

CMapTools, a software used for concept mapping, defines itself as a tool used for “learning,” and shows pictures of kids using the program to research dinosaurs and space. In broad terms, however, concept maps are bubbles of text that can branch out to others in all directions, starting from a main concept. These information bubbles can be linked together through various types of lines to create a map. Concept maps are meant to resolve issues by demonstrating relationships.

To create a concept map for writing, a writer has to consider what they want to accomplish through the planning process of their story. Here are three exciting examples of the potential uses of concept maps:

Pyramid Building- A central idea can lead to the creation of a story. Many writers know this as the “what if” practice, in which questioning how the world works leads to story ideas. For example: “What if aliens came to Earth?” Let’s take two hypothetical ways that this kind of story could go with two corresponding concept bubbles branching off of the central question: Either the aliens are friendly or the aliens are attacking. If the aliens are attacking, then we ask: Are they trying to destroy the planet or are they trying to get rid of all the humans on the planet? Each choice can produce new branches leading to multiple story outcomes. In making this kind of concept map, a writer can start off with the first “What if?” question and break down their decision-making process into possible outcomes, then decide which route they would like their story to go.

Spider Web Layout- This works well for writers trying to define characters and settings. It has become common to list character traits before beginning to write a story; but breaking down the general topic of a character into concept bubbles like physical traits, personality traits, and interpersonal traits can lead to a more thorough questioning process of who a character is. Writers can take one of their characters and make them the central bubble of the concept map, with three bubbles branching off it for “personality,” “physical traits,” and “interpersonal traits.” With personal traits, two bubbles can branch off of that, labeled “positive” and “negative.” Connected to the “positive” bubble can be traits like “gentleness” or “strength.” And finally, connected to these bubbles can be moments when these traits are shown, who they are shown to, and how these traits can support the theme of the writer’s piece. The bigger the concept map, the more potential for a character to be fleshed out on the page.

Timeline- This structure is good for plotting where scenes will go in a story. The lines of a concept map, which are made between bubbles, can be labeled with how much time is passing between scenes, so a writer never has to lose track of when in a story they are. There is also space above and below a concept map timeline to chart when important items are going to be introduced in a story. For example, the One Ring in Lord of the Rings is introduced when Bilbo is stumbling through a cave before he meets Gollum. The One Ring then reappears every time Bilbo is required to be brave and serves to give Bilbo courage that he did not have when the book started. A writer can chart their own version of the Ring, or an important reoccurrence of some theme that changes their character throughout a story.

By CaraMarie Christy

Critique group work need not be limited to reading and editing writer submissions. Writers can practice their skills in a variety of ways, from writing exercises to even some games off paper. Here is a list of some well-loved writing and creative exercises that can be done during workshops:

Frame the idea of “scene”- Few novice writers understand where and when a scene, a.k.a. a piece of the written work that forwards the overall plot, begins and ends. This becomes a problem when writers don’t understand what their scene accomplishes in the overall structure of their piece. Writers should ask themselves: what does this scene achieve? The most effective scenes are mini narratives with a beginning, in which an idea is introduced, a middle, where the character faces conflict on the idea, and something learned about the idea that constitutes the end of the scene. Have writers take four colored markers and a copy of their favorite novel. For one of the colors, trace out the scene as a whole, then use the remaining colors to mark where the beginning, middle, and end are located. This game gives the writer an idea of how the pacing in scenes feels.

Write in the Opposite Perspective- Written pieces with many characters can run into the problem of limited understanding of motivation. For example, writing villains is often difficult, because many writers establish villains as evil for the sake of being evil, rather than understanding their ulterior point of view. To keep villains from sounding like soulless masses of darkness, have writers practice writing in the villain’s perspective.

Act it Out- A lot of the principles that apply to acting also apply to writing. Both require understanding motivation and tone of voice. In this famous activity, a writer gets to play director and casts fellow critics as characters in their piece. Critics should be given time to read and understand their part before attempting to act out the scene. There are two problems with this activity: the first being that not every writer is a good actor, and the second that some parts might be misread as dry and dull if the acting is bad. This game also takes a good deal of time, especially if done for every writer in a group. However, the activity does give writers some idea of how their characters look and sound to readers.

Improvisation- A writer has to understand setting, characters, and relationship set-ups in order to create a believable story. Improvisational games are great ways to get into the mindset of building different characters. One game in particular, called “three lines,” is useful for understanding how to set up a story efficiently. Three lines forces players—in three lines of dialogue or less—to establish relationships, characters, and settings. For example: “Miss, I’ll need to see some identification before you take that pterodactyl bone.” From this line we understand setting, the fact that this takes place in a museum with pterodactyl bones, that the characters in play are an officer and possible thief, and that these two are strangers as can be seen in the officer’s use of “miss.” More games that develop characters, like “freeze” and “head in a bucket,” as well as instructions, can be found at improvencyclopedia.org.

The Object Game- The internet is home to thousands of images. Googling the word “apple” gets you apples of any sort: red, green, blue, and even rainbow. In this game, have a facilitator look up a common object, and find the strangest image of that object that they can. The facilitator presents this image, such as a rainbow apple, to the group.. The group then has a set time to race and come up with as many words to describe the strange object as possible. This game is meant to break the habit writers fall into of using the same words in their descriptions. Facilitators should be sure to keep safe search on!

Line by Line- An old classic, the line by line game is one where writers collaborate to build a story, passing a sheet around a circle to see what the next writer in the group will add. This game is ancient, but still a favorite with writers looking to keep their writing fresh. The only downside to this game is that it tends to be over quickly and, depending on who is playing, the outcome can take some silly and unexpected turns.