Writing

The Monster, Part 1

Posted on by Beth Hull

Have you ever written something, a letter, story, poem, Facebook or Twitter post, and, sometime later, thought that was the stupidest thing I ever wrote? If so, you’ll empathize with me here. Of course, in my standard confessional style, I’m going to share something Private and Personal, something collected from that sticker-covered filing cabinet, something melodramatic, juicy, and juvenile.

And then I’m going to tear it apart with my Critiquer Teeth.

So. Here goes.

The Monster

Kimberly whirled first to the left, then to the right. But the monster was nowhere to be seen.1  She sensed something in the air.2 Slowly, she turned around. There was the monster, not any more than twenty feet away, it’s3  jaws dripping with saliva. It was facing to the right, it may not have seen her yet. But then slowly, agonizingly slowly, the monster turned to face her, it’s4  cruel olive green face twisted with anger.

  1. Good, I like this in medias res, although the language could be a little more original.
  2. What? A smell? A movement? Describe, girl!
  3. ugh, I hate that its/it’s error, although I think we’ve all been guilty at some time or another
  4. again?!

There was nothing for Kimberly to do. Nowhere for her to go.1  She was tied to the tree, impossibly tangled in the coarse yellow rope.2  How had she gotten here? It was all James’ fault.3  They had had a fight. Oh, how she hated it when they fought! They had been walking through the forest, with the sunlight weaving through the trees4, creating a romantic and peaceful aura. Then came the fight. The awful fight.5

  1. By the way, where the heck is she? We should know this already.
  2. Okay. Good. The tree…what tree? In her front yard? In a foreign country? In an alternate universe?
  3. I think it should be James’s, not James’, but honestly I feel like a minority on following this rule, so we’ll let it slide here.
  4. nice image
  5. Yeah, we get that it was a bad fight, she hates fighting, and so on. MOVE ON.

It was the biggest fight that they had ever had. Kimberly thought about it and shuddered.1  James wanted her to go to college in Nevada with him, but what she really wanted was to go to Florida. They had different career interests, and there wasn’t one college that offered good classes for both.2

  1. Really? The fight is making her shudder, and not that saliva-dripping monster in front of her? And the fight isn’t…interesting.
  2. Yawn.

And then what happened?1 James had stomped away, leaving her alone and lost in the forest. His temper was just too much.2  His fury would blind him from thinking logically, and now look what resulted from it!3  The sorceress came and took Kimberly to her house. The sorceress needed food for her pet monster, and Kimberly was pretty handy, all alone and vulnerable. So the sorceress tied Kimberly to a tree in her back yard and left her there for – for what? What was this…thing?4 

  1. I don’t know? Are you going to further bog us down in boring backstory by telling us? Of course you are.
  2. You know, writer, my patience is wearing thin and if we don’t get back to that monster, I might tear Kimberly apart and cook her myself.
  3. Look at what? Did we finally remember the monster? No….
  4. Dude, you’ve killed the tension by taking us into all this backstory. Killed it. Deader than the monster is going to be.

Slowly, the monster sauntered1  over to where Kimberly was tied up. It looked at her hungrily.2  Oh James, this is all your fault, but I won’t care as long as you save me! Kimberly prayed silently as the monster stepped up even closer.3

  1. sauntered? This is the kind of verb used for a disinterested shopper forcing herself to browse the aisles of an auto parts store. Try stalked, if you want to really wring the melodrama out of this thing.
  2. Other than being green with big teeth, what does this monster look like? I’m having a hard time feeling scared, picturing the one-eyed dude from Monsters, Inc.
  3. And this is the absolute worst part of the whole story. Helpless princess in the tower syndrome. I need my man to save me. Ugh. Let’s pretend someone else wrote it.

Well kids, that’s all for this week. This’ll be a story critique in three parts. More on Kimberly’s underwhelming (un)adventure next Friday! Oh wait, no, not next Friday, I’ll be out of town. The Friday after, then! I know, the suspense! The intrigue! Try to contain yourselves.

For Part 2 of The Monster, click here.

Will Write for Food

Posted on by Beth Hull

Yes, there is trouble in my paradise of free mornings while my angelic little tyke is at preschool. The course my husband teaches got cancelled (damn economy, it was only a matter of time before our family was impacted), so I’m going to be looking for work.

Which led me to wonder: what exactly can I do?

  • write stories (good ones, sometimes)
  • read lots of books, and read fast
  • bake chocolate chip cookies
  • consume vast quantities of chocolate chip cookies
  • critique and edit manuscripts
  • complain about my messy house
  • shush a three-year-old until she finally decides to go to sleep for the night
  • I can totally make friends with cats (just ask my neighbor’s cats – they fell in love with me today when I was locked out of my house…long story)
  • teach English
  • arrange coffee dates with friends
  • compose lullabies (and check dictionary.com when for the millionth time I cannot be sure of how to spell “lullabies” – turns out I was right the first time)
  • write endlessly about myself (last I checked, there was not much of a market for memoirs of people who haven’t really done anything unusual or groundbreaking)
  • speak some Spanish, less French
  • type a gazillion words per minute
  • wear stylish new reading glasses
  • realize when the list is getting boring, and stop a few bullets after that point.

shamlessly advertising me, in my stylish new reading glasses, doing some scholarly lip-pursing

So if anyone out there wants to pay me to do any of those things, well, I’m your girl. Available in the mornings, during not-so-quiet play time, and after eight p.m.

The Query-Go-Round

Posted on by Beth Hull

The only thing keeping me strong with revisions is the thought that I might someday be done with them. I love revising, I do (where else in life can you hit the DELETE button on your mistakes before anyone else can see what a moron you are?). But sometimes revising seems endless, especially when you are anal retentive neurotic obsessive a teeny bit of a perfectionist like me.

So I have this list:

There's more, of course, but I don't want to give my brilliance away for free.

The list is three pages long, and I’ve checked off many of the (super quick) tasks over the past two and a half weeks. As soon as everything is crossed off, I will give the manuscript to some poor, unsuspecting super-lucky friends. While they read it and give me frequent updates on how awesome it is, I will be readying myself and my (super-brilliant) manuscript for the Query-Go-Round…the most uncomfortable part of wanting to be published. (Once a writer has published something, there is probably a whole new batch of horrors, but I don’t know anything about those yet. Thankfully?)

This will be my third trip on the Query-Go-Round, and I think I’ve learned a few things from my first two trips.*

First Lesson: A list of agents and a query letter are not enough.

Yeah, there are a few agents out there who don’t want anything except your pitch and maybe a few sample pages. But there are so many others, and some of them look fabulous, who ask for a synopsis. I limited my options with manuscripts 1 & 2 because I didn’t write synopses (yes, the plural form of synopsis is synopses). So this time I’m going all out: a one-page synopsis, a two-page synopsis, and a “detailed” synopsis, which, according to various sources, could be anywhere from twelve to 50 pages long. I’m going to shoot for ten.

Second Lesson: The synopsis is only painful if you don’t show it who’s boss.

Seriously. Once I stopped referring to it as the Dread Synopsis, things got a little easier. Then easier still when K in my critique group brought in a book jacket blurb. I don’t remember the book at all, but the jacket cover told quite a bit of the story, and it sounded actually interesting (unlike every previous synopsis I had attempted). The trick, we decided, is to infuse the thing with melodrama. My reasoning here is that a) I’m really great at melodrama, just ask any friends from high school, and b) you can always back off on the melodrama once it’s in there. But if you start with a dry recount of your story, nothing will give it life.

Third Lesson: Do your research.

It’s so much easier to query an agent when you know that he or she is a) actually looking for new clients and b) represents manuscripts similar to yours that you actually admire. Nothing is more awkward to me than telling an agent she should look at my manuscript because…because… I always look at the Acknowledgements page of books I love, because their agent (usually acknowledged) loved the same book, meaning we have similar taste, and naturally, she will love my book too. (Maybe not my first or second books, but definitely my third book.)

Fourth (And Last) Lesson: Don’t freaking give up after ten rejections.

I don’t know if I gave up too soon or not. It felt right to give up on manuscripts 1 & 2, because they didn’t feel like the Best Thing Ever. Why would I want to try to sell something that wasn’t my best? At the same time, maybe it was too early for the second manuscript. I could have revised for character, but werewolves seemed already overdone…I mean, I didn’t even want to read about them anymore, & I used to think they were the coolest.

With this manuscript, though, I plan to query agents in groups of five, then take what information I get back (assuming nobody offers to represent me on the spot, which, given my winsome charm and manuscript of awesomeness, is quite possible)…what was I saying? I’ll take whatever feedback I may get, and mull it over, consider revising, and revise or move on to the next wave of agents. Possibly. It’s an evolving process, and I’m learning from it all the time.

________________

*Because I am not yet a Published Author, I don’t feel qualified to give writing advice. However, I’m really good at getting manuscripts rejected by literary agents, so I think I can talk a little about that.

Finish that Manuscript! (A Board Game)

Posted on by Beth Hull

All you need is a die, and some colored bits of cardboard you can pretend are laptops or notebooks. Click on it to enlarge the view.

That’s all I have to say; I spent too long making this thing as it is.

ETA: I’ll be off to the mountains this weekend with family, so radio silence until Tuesday night. Have a great weekend, everyone!

Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

Posted on by Beth Hull

The set-up: Dash finds a red notebook in the shelves of his favorite used bookstore. Inside Lily (or her brother and his boyfriend) has written a series of challenges intended to weed out unworthy suitors. Instead of putting the book back after he has proved himself worthy, Dash keeps it, writes down more challenges, and gets the book back to Lily.

Main characters’ goals: Two main characters. Dash’s goal is to meet and fall in love with Lily…well, he’s half in love with her already after reading her challenges in the notebook. Lily’s goal is to have a merry Christmas, and to live up to the girl she has become in the notebook (a slightly added challenge because the notebook version of herself is more daring, more opinionated…just more).

My reaction: Dash is a bit of a pretentious ass, but he has vulnerabilities, too, so he’s still sympathetic. While his delight in words and language is not unbelievable, he doesn’t sound like your average teenager. Lily is also above-average intelligent, but I sympathized with her more. Is it a girl thing? I have no idea. I liked Dash, I really did. I loved that the thing he wants more than any other worldy possession is the complete Oxford English Dictionary. But Lily, she’s awesome.

Also, it’s a little bizarre to read a Christmas story when the outside temperature is pushing 100 degrees.

Of interest to writers: I was just reading on Maggie’s blog that in order to collaborate with another writer, you have to work well together…which I take to also mean, you have to like the person. This is Cohn’s and Levithan’s third collaborative YA book (they wrote the turned-into-a-movie Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, as well as Naomi and Eli’s No Kiss List). I heart all of my writer friends, I truly do, but I don’t think I could collaborate on a whole novel.

Bottom line: It’s quirky and funny (the mall Santa who makes Dash molest him is my favorite highlight), and kept up my hope in the world.

Reminds me of: The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen