Joseph Nassise

With my first Rogue Angel novel, THE LOST TOMB, due in just a few days, I haven’t had time to put together a column for this month. Instead, I’m going to share one of the few short fiction pieces I’ve done during my career. (It takes my longer to write a short story than it does a novel, so I don’t do all that many of them.)

“Roadside Memorials” was written for the Roc anthology, LOST ON THE DARKSIDE, which came out back in 2005. The editor absconded with the money due to the contributors and to this day I don’t believe any of us have been paid, but that shouldn’t prevent others from enjoying the work.

As this is a longer tale, I’m going to put the majority of it after the cut. Read on, if you like…

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“Roadside Memorials” by Joe Nassise

A DRUNK DRIVER KILLED MY FRIENDS!

So read the sign now standing at the corner of Thunderbird and Main. It stood in almost the exact spot where Martin had pulled the bodies of two teenagers from the smashed wreckage of their yellow Nissan Xterra just two days before, shouting its message out to any and all who passed by. Around it was a haphazard collection of candles, flowers and photographs, laid out in commemoration of the lives that had ended so abruptly there.

“Freakin’ morbid, that,” his partner Giles said, but Martin barely noticed. He couldn’t take his eyes off the memorial, stunned by the size of it. It had to be six feet square and the accident wasn’t even 48 hours old yet. Where the hell had all this stuff come from? It was disturbing, uncanny even, how swiftly such memorials could appear. Back home in Philadelphia, he’d never heard of the practice, had never laid eyes on even one such marker, but here in the southwest they were practically guaranteed to show up whenever there was a fatal accident. They sprang up overnight like ravenous weeds. He wasn’t certain where the tradition had come from or what those who created them hoped to achieve, he just knew that being around them made him uncomfortable. It didn’t matter where the accident had taken place – back roads, city streets or the long stretches of road bisecting the desert – time and time again he would see them there, like soldiers standing solitary vigil in the darkness.

“…don’t see what good it does.”

“What?” he asked, as the marker swept behind them in the distance and he belatedly realized his partner was still speaking.

Giles waved a hand toward the rear of the ambulance. “Those stupid memorials. Those folks are dead, right? What good do those things do them?” He snorted in disgust. “Besides, I’d rather have folks visiting me in the cemetery than in the middle of nowhere. Who wants to be reminded they’d died in the middle of a freakin’ car wreck?”

Martin nodded, turning away from the window as the memorial slipped away behind them in the distance, but he wasn’t really listening. It had been a long night; three car accidents, a knife fight, and two heart attacks, the most activity they’d had in one night in weeks. And we aren’t even halfway through our shift. All he wanted to do was get back to the hospital and crash out for awhile before the next call came in.

At 36, Martin Jones was already tired of his so-called life. He spent his days sleeping, his nights cleaning up the messes left behind by other people’s mistakes. Gone was the idealism that had gotten him into the EMT business in the first place, washed away by too many stupid accidents, too many senseless beatings, and more than his fair share of horrible car wrecks. It didn’t help that his days were other people’s nights.

Tonight was worse than usual, however. He’d felt an odd sense of unease all evening and the weirdness surrounding that roadside shrine didn’t help. It was almost as if he could sense something, something looming just beyond the horizon; at any moment he knew it was going to come charging in to swallow everything whole.

It wasn’t a comfortable feeling.

As Giles droned on, Martin leaned back in his seat and wearily closed his eyes. Tonight’s shift couldn’t end fast enough as far as he was concerned.

Read more…

Like many writers I know, I’m a pack rat when it comes to information. Anything I see or read or hear that I think might be useful for a story at some point or another gets clipped or bookmarked or jotted down for safekeeping.

The trouble with this is that until recently I didn’t have a useful way of storing this information for future use. My magazine or newspaper clippings went into one big file folder, making it near impossible to find anything quickly. My internet bookmarks were more organized, but there were so many of them that even that system became clunky after only a short time. And I won’t even mention what happened to all those notes jotted down on napkins or the nearest scrap of paper.

Clearly I needed a better system.

And I found one in Evernote.

Evernote bills itself as allowing you to “easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at anytime, from anywhere.”

So far it has lived up to its hype.

Evernote is now my way of capturing information that I might want to use at some point in one of my books. Maybe it is a web full page or a snippet of text from one. Maybe it is a photo, be it from my digital camera, my cell phone, or someplace like Flickr. Maybe it is an email or a portion of a chat log. Scanned information. To do lists. You name it and Evernote can capture it.

Evernote has a desktop application (for both Windows and Mac) and a web application. Anything you add to it can be synchronized across all your devices, from your desktop to your laptop to your mobile phone. I have it set up so it provides links from both my email application (Outlook) and my web browser (Firefox) so all I have to do is highlight and click on the link to capture the information I want to save.

Once the information is in Evernote, you can file it using a variety of methods and this is where the true versatility of the app comes into play for me. Multiple notebooks allow me to file information for different books projects together in one place regardless of the type of data I’m saving. Or I can choose to file similar data together – all my photos in one notebook, all my web clippings in another, etc. Either way, a robust tagging system lets me search for similar clippings across multiple notebooks.

The Search feature is particularly cool, as it searches not only the text in your notes, but also the text in any pictures you might have saved. I use Bloglines as my news reader and tend to save a lot of articles in their built in Clippings service, but the additional ability to search through images for text provided by Evernote has caused me to begin saving my latest clippings direct to Evernote instead. As time goes on I’ll probably move my older clippings there as well, since I can find things easier that way. There is nothing more annoying that knowing you’ve saved something and not being able to find it!

 

Evernote is in beta right now and you need an invitation to try it out. You can go to their website and sign up (it didn’t take me long to get an invite this way) or, you can leave a comment on this post and I’ll pick five random winners to receive an invitation direct from me.

(All images taken from the Evernote homepage and Copyright 2008 Evernote.)

Last month I began a short series on Beginnings. We identified the six key things a good novel beginning should accomplish and covered the first, hooking the reader, in a bit more depth. This month I want to tackle two more of the six – establishing a bond between the lead and the reader and presenting the story world.

Establishing a bond between the Lead and the Reader

The second thing a beginning should do is establish a bond between the Lead character and the reader. This can be done in a variety of ways, the most common being identification, sympathy, likeability, and inner conflict.

Identification, or empathy, is when we can relate to the character because of who they are or the experience they find themselves in. The more the reader can identify with the lead, the more real the experience feels and the greater the intensity of the story. A story about a man who has lost his job would generate identification and empathy in anyone who has ever been in the same position.

Sympathy goes beyond empathy and focuses on the emotional bond the reader has with the character. Awful things have happened and the reader genuinely feels sorry for the character. You can establish sympathy by putting the character in jeopardy, by having them face some grand hardship, by making them the underdog, or by giving them some sense of vulnerability. Take Rocky, for instance. We cheer for him and want him to win the big fight against Apollo Creed because we see him as the underdog, the guy who can’t possibly win. I use the issue of facing some grand hardship to introduce my character Knight Commander Cade Williams in HERETIC, book one of the Templar Chronicles. Cade has lost his wife to a supernatural event and has to deal with his loss and his burning need for revenge daily.

Likeable characters are those that we might like to be around, whose company we might enjoy. A witty character. An amusing character. A character who cares for others. Frodo in the Lord of the Rings. John Maclean from the Die Hard films. Even the serial killer Dexter, from Jeff Lindsay’s excellent series, might fall into this category.

Characters who are absolutely sure about themselves, who plunge ahead without any doubts or fears are boring. No one goes through life that way. Give a character a sense of inner conflict, of doubts and emotions, and you’re almost sure to engage the reader.

Presenting the Story World

This aspect of a good beginning goes beyond just establishing the time and place of the novel. Yes, it should tell the reader those things, but it should also focus on showing the reader what life is like for the lead character.

Showing the reality of the character’s situation not only helps present the story world, but also provides support for the establishing that bond we just talked about, as well as presenting certain elements that might assist in hooking the reader.

John Ridley’s excellent pair of novels, THOSE WHO WALK IN DARKNESS and WHAT FIRE CANNOT BURN feature a future LA where super powered humans are listed as illegals and hunted by special tactical squads from the LAPD. In the very first chapter, Ridley has the hero, Soledad “Bullet” O’Roark, face off with her team against a pyrokinetic who can toss fire around like a beach ball. The action immediately sets the stage and lets the reader know just what kind of world O’Roark is forced to deal with day by day. We see that reality for the lead character is harsh, unforgiving, and very deadly.

I do something similar with the opening of HERETIC, letting the reader know very quickly that the Templar Order still exists operating in secret as a combat arm of the Vatican, charged with defending mankind from supernatural threats and enemies. Without establishing that right up front, the reader would be lost by the events that quickly follow.

Next month we’ll continue our look at beginnings by examining how to introduce the opposition and some common mistakes writers make with their beginnings.

Face it. The first five pages (sometimes the first five sentences) are going to make or break your book. They will be the first pages that a prospective agent or editor will read. Later, once the book gets picked up, they will be the first pages that a prospective book buyer will read.

So how do you make those five pages, and the rest of the beginning of the book, so good that the editor, agent, or prospective reader wants to keep reading?

A good beginning must do six things:

1) Hook the reader

2) Establish a bond with the Lead and the reader

3) Present the story world

4) Establish the general tone of the novel

5) Introduce the opposition

6) Get the reader to keep reading

Let’s take them one at a time.

Read more…

I wanted to talk this month about Middles and offer some advice on how to keep yours from sagging.

No, I’m not talking about belly fat. That’s a different blog. I’m talking about the middle of your book, the place where you have the greatest chance of screwing up and losing your reader.

Nine times out of ten, if you are going to lose a reader, it will be in the middle of the book, in that long, seemingly endless stretch that ties your terrific beginning to your fabulous ending. Think about it – how often do you put down a book in the first ten pages? How about with only ten pages to go? Not often, I’d wager. But think about all those books that you got a third, or even halfway, through, only to lose interest. You put it down and move on to something else. Why is that? And how do you keep it from happening with one of your own works?

The middle of the book is essentially a series of scenes that ties the set-up you created in the beginning with the result you’ve devised for the ending. It must be designed specifically to keep the reader moving forward inexorably toward that ending. If it bogs down, loses cohesiveness, or otherwise fails to achieve its objective, you run the risk of losing the reader. And that’s a cardinal sin.

What keeps a reader reading, what keeps them invested in your story, is their desire to see the Lead outwit/outfight/outthink the opposition and reach their goal What gives them the emotional experience they crave is the conflict between the opposition and the lead in pursuit of that goal.

The Opposition

The opposition does not have to be a person. It can be an organization, a group, a force of nature, whatever. Nor does it have to be evil. It simply needs a compelling reason to stop the Lead. The more compelling the reason, the harder the opposition will work. The harder the opposition works, the more difficult it gets for the Lead to succeed, which in turn produces more drama.

The Glue

Along with the opposition, the other crucial ingredient is the reason the Lead sticks around, the glue so to speak. If the Lead can simply walk away from the conflict, the reader will wonder why he doesn’t do so. And at that point you’ve already lost the battle. You have to figure out why the Lead (and the opposition for that matter) can’t simply withdraw from the conflict. And you have to make that reason believable.

Writing the middle of your novel will then simply be an exercise in writing various scenes of confrontation, most of which will end up with some kind of setback for the Lead, forcing them to analyze the situation anew and try something else.

But Joe, I hear you ask, how do I keep that from getting boring?

That’s easy. You can stretch the tension, raise the stakes, or do both at the same time.

Stretching the Tension

Simply put, this means to never let a thrilling moment escape with just a whisper. Play it for all its worth. This is one skill Alfred Hitchcock had in spades and is what makes him a master of suspense even now, so many years after this death.

When it comes to stretching the tension, I first ask myself one question – What problem has the potential to lay some serious hurt on my Lead? That forms the raw material of the scene as it gives us something to be tense about. Once I’ve determined that, I can go about stretching it.

James Bell suggests two ways to stretch the tension in his book Plot & Structure – stretch the physical or stretch the emotional.

Physical peril or uncertainty is always a sure fire way to hold a reader’s interest and you can make that bond even stronger by slowing down. Go through the scene beat by beat in your head, as if you are watching a movie. Then write it down, alternating between action, thoughts, dialogue, and description. Milk it for all its worth.

Bell suggests three key questions to ask yourself as you do this:

1. What is the worst thing from the outside that can happen to my character?
2. What is the worst trouble my character can get into in this scene?
3. Have I sufficiently set up the danger for the reader before the scene?

Of course trouble doesn’t always have to be physical. It can be emotional as well. When your character is in the throws of some emotional turmoil, don’t let them down easy! Ratchet things up as much as possible.

To stretch inner tension, ask yourself these questions:

1. What is the worst thing from the inside that can happen to my character?

2. What is the worst information my character can receive?

3. Have I sufficiently set up the depth of emotion for the reader before the scene?

Raising the Stakes

One question any good novelist should constantly be asking themselves is Who cares? In other words – Is this scene I’m writing going to make the reader care about what happens? Is there enough going on to capture the reader’s interest? What does the lead stand to lose if they don’t solve the central problem of the novel? Is that enough? If not, what can I do to change it?

There are three common ways to raise the stakes in your novel. You can raise the physical stakes, raise the inner stakes, or raise the societal stakes.

Raising the physical stakes is probably the easiest. What physical harm can come to my lead? What new threat can be raised against him? What other character can I introduce to make things more difficult? How will this person operate? What will they do to make things difficult for my lead?

Raising the character stakes involves looking at the inner conflict of the lead. This has the added effect of adding more dimension to your novel as well, deepening the story while at the same time raising the intensity. Ask yourself how things can get more emotionally wrenching for my lead? Is there someone the lead cares about that can be brought in and tied into the trouble? What dark secrets from the lead’s past can be revealed here?

The third way of raising the stakes is to examine the social aspects at play. Is there some major issue my lead is involved in? How can I bring that to the forefront? What complications does that issue add to the mix?

Easy Fixes

If you find that your middle is lagging, here are some suggested ways to help you re-energize it:

1. Analyze the stakes – what can I do to ratchet up the tension?

2. Strengthen the glue – what can make the conflict more compelling?

3. Add another layer of complication – how do I make things more difficult?

4. Add another character – who else might have a role to play here?

5. Add another subplot – what other plot thread might shore things up?

6. Push through it – is it the writing or just me?

While suggestions 1-5 are self-explanatory, I did want to say something about #6. There is often a point in writing the novel when you think everything you’ve done to date is just utter crap. For me, that usually happens around page 200 (or 2/3 of the way through the work.) Suddenly the characters suck, the writing sucks, everything sucks. At that point it is time to step away from things and get some perspective – before changing anything!

I’ll usually take 24 to 48 hours off from writing. I won’t work on the book. I won’t look at the book. I’ll even try not to think about the book. I’ll go do something I really enjoy, doing all I can to relax and take it easy. Then, and only then, will I come back and give it another look. Usually by then I’ve gained some perspective. If I still think it sucks, I’ll try to find ways to fix it and at that point my subconscious usually has had enough time to figure out just what needs to be done.

So there you have it, some tips and techniques for helping you deal with a sagging middle.

Good luck and keep writing!

A few months ago I was chatting with friend and fellow writer, Jon Merz, about ideas for a book to work on together. It just so happens that we are both martial artists and follow the sport pretty avidly. Mixed martial arts, or MMA as it is known, is the fastest growing contact sport in the US, with a fan base that makes Nascar fanatics seem tame in comparison. Knowing this, we brainstormed different ways we might combine our passion for mixed martial arts with our passion for writing and came up with the idea to do a non-fiction expose on one of the major MMA organizations.

Jon had just finished writing The Complete Idiots Guide to Ultimate Fighting and by chance happened to know one of the senior executives at the International Fight League, a major MMA organization and the only one who approached the sport as with a team, rather than individual, concept. The IFL is a truly innovative organization when it comes to MMA promotions and we believed they would be an excellent partner to work with, so we arranged a meeting and pitched our idea to their top execs.

The folks at the IFL loved what we came up with and enthusiastically endorsed our concept. They gave us unparalleled access to the organization, from the day-to-day operations to the coaches and fighters themselves. Whatever we needed, they said, just ask. With their complete backing, Jon and I took our proposal to our agent.

Like the guys at the IFL, our agent was excited to take the project out to publishers. A sure hit, he called it, a blockbuster if he ever saw one. And he wasn’t just blowing smoke up our asses – he loved the idea as much as we did and after working in publishing for more than thirty years we were confident that he knew what he was talking about.

We turned the proposal into an event, sending it to a dozen publishers with a specific deadline attached, and sat back waiting for the offers to come in. This was it, our ticket to the big leagues, we thought.

Trouble was, we forgot that getting a deal isn’t as easy as just convincing an editor that the book is a good one.

For those who have never been through the process, here’s how it works. A writer puts together a proposal and send it off to the editors he’s carefully selected (or, as in our case, let’s his agent do so). The editor decides if he likes the proposal and, if he does, agrees to take it to the editorial board meeting. At the meeting, the editor pitches the book to the representatives from the various departments – editorial, marketing, sales, art, etc – and tries to convince them that one of the precious slots they have open on their publishing schedule should go to this project.

We heard from several editors who agreed that the project looked excellent. They informed us that they would be pitching at the next editorial meeting and would get back to us as soon as they knew something more. Convinced that we would have a deal in place, Jon and I travelled to the Open Tryouts that the IFL was hosting to build up their roster for the 2008 season, figuring it would make a terrific chapter in the book. We interviewed prospective fighters and some of the IFL top coaches, we took a few hundred photographs, and generally had a great time.

Meanwhile our enthusiastic editors were being shot down by, of all people, the sales departments.

See, there are only a handful of books out right now on mixed martial arts. Of the five I can think of off the top of my head, three of them are personality books, meaning they focus on select individuals in the sport rather than the sport overall. The other two happen to be instruction manuals. Which meant there wasn’t anything our there for the sales departments to compare our book to, to help them figure out what to expect with regard to sales, returns, and the like. In addition, there wasn’t any statistics that they could point to in order to show that the millions of fans who tuned into the weekly television shows and pay-per-view specials would pick up a book about the sport.

It didn’t matter what ammunition we provided to the editors – and trust me, we had it all, from network ratings data to growth projections for 2008 and beyond – each and every time the book was presented the sales departments shot it down, claiming that they weren’t sure that they could sell it.

And just like that, our brilliant idea died a quiet little death through no fault of our own.

We’d written a terrific proposal. We had the complete backing of a major MMA organization who was offering us unbelievable access to every aspect of the 2008 season. We had hand-picked editors who routinely bought sports-oriented books and publishers with an excellent track record of promoting such works with enthusiasm. In short, we’d done everything possible to make the project a success.

And it still wasn’t enough.

Sometimes, timing is everything. If one little cog of the publishing machine jams up, the whole thing can swiftly go out of whack and that’s exactly what happened to us. The idea was new and original, the sport was relatively new, there hadn’t been more than a handful of books on the sport with which to compare it – all the things that got the editors excited about the project were exactly the things that made the sales departments nervous. If there had been a track record of best-selling mixed martial arts books, we would have struck gold, as every other department was as excited about is as we were. But since there wasn’t, all it took was that one No to send us packing.

What’s the moral of the story? Remember that convincing the editor that your project is a good one is only the start of the battle. There’s an entire team involved in publishing and you need each and every one of them on your side in order to be successful.

We’re quite happy to announce that the RSS Feeds for our site have been fixed and should now be operational.  Thank you all for your patience, suggestions, and assistance in resolving the issue.

If anyone experiences any problems, please let us know in the Comments to this post.

Best,

Your friendly neighborhood administrators

I was involved in a message board discussion the other day about how I set up a series bible. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, a series bible is a summary of all the information you need to write multiple books (or television shows or films or what-have-you) in the same setting/story world. Since I do the same thing for my stand alone novels as I do for series work, I thought I’d share that process with you all.

The first thing I do is assemble all of my organizational materials into a three ring binder. I use tabbed dividers so that I can find things easily once the project has begun. I usually use the same set of tags on every project – Characters, Setting, Plot, Timeline, Research, Unanswered Questions, and Reminders.

– The Characters section contains all of my character summaries, my back-story notes, and a physical description sheet that allows me to easily reference things like eye color, height, weight, etc. I also make a habit of cutting pictures out of magazines or off the web to remind me of what certain characters might look like and I keep these with my notes for visual cues when it comes time to develop descriptive passages.

– The Setting section contains all of my setting sketches (one page summaries of everything I know about a particular place or setting) as well as any miscellaneous notes I might have lying around discussing how those setting relate to each other. As with my characters, if I have any images that I’ve saved, I put these in the binder as well.

– The Plot section contains my one paragraph, my four paragraph, and my four page plot summaries, as well as my individual scene breakdowns. I think I’ll talk more about these in my next essay.

– The Timeline section contains my spreadsheet mapping out exactly when things happen in the storyline. If I need to keep track of more detailed events (such as the exact timing of some of the events during the murders in my forthcoming novel THE WITCHES’ HAMMER,) I’ll also draw up one page sheets that outline these as well.

– The Research section contains not only my original list of research topics, but also the research itself. When writing my Templar Chronicles trilogy, I wanted my modern extrapolation of the Templar order to be as close to the original as possible, so this section actually grew so large as to necessitate its own binder. Do whatever feels right to you but remember, you shouldn’t be spending so much time researching that you never get around to actually writing!

– The Unanswered Questions is, appropriately enough, full of unanswered questions. These can be specific research issues (also filed in the Research section) or they can be character and/or plot issues that I haven’t yet worked out. Putting them in their own section and making a point to review it every few days keeps me from forgetting to answer them in the manuscript.

– The Reminders section is particularly important. The last thing I want to do is stifle my creativity and forward momentum by constantly going back and fixing things in my first draft. Instead, I keep notes of anything I need to fix, add, delete or otherwise adjust on a legal pad while I write each day and then transfer those pages into my binder when I’m finished each session. That way I know I won’t forget to come back and do them, which in turn allows my creative side to just get on with finishing the rough draft.

Once I’ve got my binder in order, I’m ready to get to work.

Since I write my chapters entirely out of order, this level of detail ahead of time is necessary for me to achieve my goals. I map out each and every book this way, taking one or two months to get it all squared away. The benefit, however, is that the actual writing time is greatly reduced as I’m not trying to figure out where I’m going while in the process of getting there.

So, how do you organize your books?

Welcome to the new look and feel for Storytellersunplugged!

After 2 and 1/4 years of that old plain vanilla, we decided it was time to bring a new face to your favorite writing blog. Some of the changes we’ve made include:

• New style and layout
• Improved search functions
• Better tagging and indexing
• Bookshelves with the latest works by our contributors, linked to Amazon.com and other virtual bookstores, all accessed through their Contributor pages (please note these are rolling out all week – only a few are presently active, so keep checking back)
• Alphabetized contributor pages
• A new blogroll (which we be greatly expanded over the next day or two

Still to come are an improved RSS process, which will not only allow you to create feeds for the site overall (both posts and comments) but also allow the creation of feeds for individual authors or post subjects. (This should be live by the end of the week – the framework is in place, as you can see from the icons, but the mechanics still need some work)

Please let us know of any difficulties you might be having and what you think of our new look!

Best,

The Admins – Joe Nassise and Dave Wilson

I’m currently suffering from a rather bad case of lateral epicondylitis. Typing has become a major difficulty for me over the last several weeks, which means this month’s essay is going to be limited in size and scope as a result. Rather than try to come up with something halfway coherent while muddling through my pain meds, I decided the time might be more wisely spent asking questions of our readership as to what you might like to see here on Storytellersunplugged in the near future.

If you read this blog, please do us a favor and comment after this post. Let us know what you like, what you don’t like, and what you’d appreciate hearing us talk about in the future.

So, some questions….

What do you like most about the site?

 

What do you like least?

 

What topics would you like us to cover in the next ninety days?

Do you like the straight essay style or would you like to see some variety – book reviews, author interviews, short fiction, round-robin stories?

What do you think of the podcasts? Would you like to hear more of them?

Would links on the bio pages to the contributors’ latest works be beneficial?

What specific questions about writing/publishing would you like someone to answer?

What do you want to tell us that I didn’t think of here?

The ball’s in your court, folks.