Tribute on a Shelf

/ Lisa / 10 Comments

I unpacked some (but not nearly all) of our books recently.  One whole, long shelf ended up being full of just Elizabeth Peters books.  Those cracked and well-worn spines represented years of an author’s devotion to the craft.  And those were just the ones she wrote under that pseudonym.  To them you can add all the many books written as Barbara Michaels (any of you give yourself nightmares reading Ammie Come Home?), and her non-fiction books on archaeology written under her real name of Barbara Mertz.  I notice her cover photos are starting to show her age, but she’s still writing.

Think about it.  All those years of struggling with plot and character and continuity in her series, and editing.  Now that’s love.

The first book I purchased of hers was back in the late 1970’s and was called Legend in Green Velvet.  It was during the time period of Phyllis Whitney, Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt.  You know, the gothic romance period.  The book was set in Scotland and since I was madly in love with anything Scottish and had just started Scottish dancing, I counted out my seventy-five cents and bought it.  Elizabeth Peters tricked me.  It wasn’t a gothic romance.  It was hilarious.  It was a mystery.  It had characters who weren’t perfect, and who were eccentric.  Needless to say, when she followed that with the first in the Amelia Peabody series, I was hooked.  All these years later I still anxiously wait for the next one, knowing that as she ages, the chances are good there won’t be more.

One of the things Elizabeth Peters has always done is insert ‘inside’ comments.  If you’ve read all her books, you understand them.  A character from one series wanders through another.  An object important to one book shows up in another.  A character says something that has to do with another story.  I know there are other writers who do this, but she does it with a gentle hand and with the humor that is in all her books.

Another thing Elizabeth is very good at is showing the protagonist in stories written in first person.  If you like to write in first person, I strongly urge you to read the Amelia Peabody series.  The books have evolved over the years, but even in the early ones written in the 1980’s, she was very strong in this aspect of writing.  Amelia has a view of herself that is at odds with the way everyone else sees her.  And Elizabeth manages to show everyone’s opinions without stepping outside of Amelia’s mind.  This is very strong in her later Peabody books.

I would say that Elizabeth Peters went a long way toward encouraging me to write.  I was writing anyway by that time, in secret of course, but she instilled in me a desire to be able to pull a reader so fully into a story, to make them laugh out loud, and to make them want to be part of the character’s family for many years.

I can only hope that she has some more books in her because I’m not ready for her to be done writing.  There’s still one more shelf to fill.

 

Sagging Middles

/ Lisa / 6 Comments

No, I’m not referring to that sag over the jeans waistband, but the slowing down of a story.  Last Thursday the writer’s group that I attend talked about the common problem of how a story starts to lose pace and ‘sag’ about the mid-way point when writing.  We talked about common reasons, such as giving away too much, too soon, solving sub-plots too soon, boredom on the part of the author.  We also talked about common solutions such as adding more conflict, adding new subplots that build on the main plot and create more difficult situations for the protagonist, and so forth.

One thing came up, however, that some members were surprised about.  I mentioned that a sagging middle doesn’t just refer to the middle of a story.  None of us had really thought about this before, and so I figured it was worth repeating here to see what other opinions might be.  A slowing down of pace, a lag in the story, a loss of the sense of the story, all those things are commonly associated with a sagging middle of a story as a whole.  And yet they can happen in the middle of a paragraph, a page, even a sentence.

A problem with a middle of a paragraph or a sentence though, is harder to spot than in the story as a whole.  I think it’s because those are smaller sags, almost something that needs to be seen with a microscope.  It requires us writers to lean in a little closer to those words in order to spot the problem.  I’ve found in a paragraph with a sag, I spot it only because my mind starts to wander, to skip ahead, or even to start revising the previous paragraph.  I have to stop myself and ask what’s wrong with what I’m writing that it isn’t keeping my attention.  I actually just had this happen about an hour ago.  Typing away, the story flowing, and all of a sudden my mind is wandering away on its own.  Sure enough, I was bored.  I went back a few paragraphs to where my interest still lie, deleted all that followed, and started over.  Great cure for that middle sag – cut it out and run off in a new direction.

Finally, a problem in the middle of a sentence needs even closer scrutiny because I’ve found the issue is usually a single word.  Or, in my case, usually because I’ve flipped the order of the sentence in the wrong direction.  Flipping it back is a quick and easy fix, but one that I have a hard time doing because I have a hard time spotting the initial problem.

Anyway, just some meandering thoughts on those sags.  What do you think?

Voice

/ Lisa / 6 Comments

I am almost totally deaf in one ear.  This means it is hard for me to tell how loud I am talking.  I make a conscious effort to keep my voice low, which means I end up repeating things a lot.  The flip side of that is that when I forget to keep my voice low, I end up with people thinking I’m stressed or angry because I speak louder than normal. And when I am stressed, my voice goes louder yet, which ends up with people perceiving me as angry when I’m not.

All this leads me to thinking about dialog.  We all know not to use dialog tags to get emotion across and to avoid things like ‘I will not,’ she shouted tempestuously.’ (I actually saw that one time.)  We all know that if we have to use a dialog tag to tell a reader what the character is feeling, the dialog is weak.

So I find myself wondering how to show an elevated tone of voice, such as me speaking louder than normal, without resorting to exclamation points, or having to tell the reader in narrative form that the character is hard of hearing.  You can describe a noisy setting and the reader assumes the character must speak up.  So using description can get the emotion behind the dialog across. You can use body language such as someone cupping a hand to their ear and the speaker then repeating their words.  But think about this.  Writing something like, ‘I knew I should have gone with you!’ implies emphasis, frustration, possibly anger, because of the exclamation point.  But if all I wanted to get across was that the character was speaking louder than appropriate and wasn’t frustrated, etc., the use of an exclamation point doesn’t work.

It all makes me curious.  How can dialog show the level of voice, without using tools such as narrative, setting, body language, or dialog tags?  I know those are all legitimate tools we have at hand, and I know they work well.  I’m just curious about how a writer could accomplish the same thing using simply dialog.  There’s the obvious dialog between two people, where one makes a statement and the other says, ‘Lower your voice’, but then it’s almost too late as the reader has already then has to re-process the first line of dialog in a louder tone.  Ah, now I’m getting off track with too many possibilities.  I’ll have to think on this a bit.

In the quiet space.