_______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ The Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ Publisher: Randy Ingermanson ("the Snowflake guy") Motto: "A Vision for Excellence" Date: May 3, 2006 Issue: Volume 2, Number 3 Home Pages: http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com http://www.RSIngermanson.com Circulation: 4939 writers, each of them creating a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ What's in This Issue 1) Welcome to the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine! 2) Dialogue and the Art of War--Part 2 3) Time Management -- Strategic Thinking 4) Tiger Marketing -- What's a Metatag, Anyway? 5) Scenes and Sequels and Multiple Points of View 6) What's New At AdvancedFictionWriting.com 7) Steal This E-zine! 8) Reprint Rights _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 1) Welcome to the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine! Those of you who have joined in the past month (more than 350 of you are new since my last issue), welcome to my e-zine! You can find all the previous issues on my web site at: http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/html/afwezine.html You should be on this list only if you signed up for it on my web site. If you no longer wish to hear from me, there's a link at the bottom of this email that will end your misery. I'll remind the rest of you that our goal is nothing less than Total World Domination. And we're getting closer! This past month, if my scan of the web is correct, the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine became the largest fiction-writing-only e-zine on the web! That's a nice milestone. We'll hit an even nicer one soon. When this list reaches 5000, I'll hold a drawing from among those of you who have referred someone else to this list. The winner gets an iPod Nano! Remember, your name gets entered in the hat once for each person you refer, so the more people you tell about this e-zine, the better your chances. I expect to hold the drawing within the next week. In this issue I'd like to continue where I left off last month on the art of writing dialogue. In the last issue, we talked about the hazards of Real Conversation. This time, we'll talk about the nuts and bolts of good dialogue. I'd also like to talk about a very practical issue that has always been a problem for me and might be for you too: managing that pesky time. I'm still battling the scheduling monster, but this past month I've tried some new things that are helping me. As always, I've got a few things to say about Tiger Marketing and how you can get the web working for you. I considered calling this month's column "Metatags for Dummies," but all my readers are outrageously intelligent, so it wouldn't be appropriate. A better title might be "Metatags For Smart People Who Haven't Learned HTML Yet." One of my readers recently asked me how to think about Scenes and Sequels when you have multiple points of view. It's a good question and deserves a longish answer. I'll give it here. _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 2) Dialogue and the Art of War--Part 2 Dialogue, as I said last month, is war. It's not fought with guns and tanks. It's fought with words. But it's all about the same thing. Conflict. If you don't have conflict, then you don't have dialogue. Dialogue, by the way, is a series of a special kind of MRU, in which rational speech figures more prominently than normal. (If you've never heard of MRUs, then you can find out all about them in the following article on my web site:) http://www.rsingermanson.com/html/perfect_scene.html Last month, I gave an example of poor dialogue by a writer we'll call "Tom Clancy." This month, just to show that I'm a fair-minded guy, we'll work through an example of sharp and snappy dialogue, and we'll call this writer "Tom Clancy" too. It's a common name, after all. This excerpt is from the book PATRIOT GAMES. The setting is the UK in the early 1980s. Our hero, Jack Ryan, is in London on holiday and just happens to see an assassination attempt in progress against Prince Charlie and Lady Di. The bad guys are some IRA terrorists armed with grenades and AK-47s. Jack barges in barehanded and foils the attempt, wounding one of the terrorists and killing another, thereby saving the royals. For this service to the crown, he is given an honorary knighthood. In the scene we'll be analyzing, Jack is the star witness in the trial of the terrorist he wounded. He's given his testimony, and now the barrister for the defense is launching a cross-examination on him. The lawyer's goal is to discredit Jack. Jack's job is to stay calm and not have his testimony voided by losing his temper. He wants this terrorist put behind bars for good. "Tom" has set things up nicely. The conflict is sharply defined. The two characters have opposing goals and the stakes are high. If the barrister, "Red Charlie" Atkinson, succeeds, then his client walks free. If Jack convinces the jury, then the hood goes to jail for life. We begin with Atkinson addressing Jack in the witness stand: "Doctor Ryan -- or should I say Sir John?" Jack waved his hand. "Whatever is convenient to you, sir," he answered indifferently. They had warned him about Atkinson. A very clever bastard, they'd said. Ryan had known quite a few clever bastards in the brokerage business. Randy sez: Atkinson begins probing Jack by referring to his recent knighthood. The goal here is to make Jack seem snooty to the jury, who are all commoners. Jack counters by making it clear he's not too stuck on himself. Notice that "Tom" is writing here in well-formed MRUs. The comment by Atkinson is objective and external. Jack's response is interspersed with interior monologue, since we are inside his head. "You were, I believe, a leftenant in the United States Marine Corps?" "Yes, sir, that is correct." Atkinson looked down at his notes, then over at the jury. "Bloodthirsty mob, the U.S. Marines," he muttered. "Excuse me, sir? Bloodthirsty?" Ryan asked. "No, sir. Most of the Marines I know are beer drinkers." Randy sez: Atkinson now goes for the throat. His goal is to persuade the jury that Jack is a violent man (he shot two terrorists, after all) and therefore not to be trusted. Jack parries this with politeness and humor, making Atkinson look silly. Jack has scored a point with the jury here, as we see next. Atkinson spun back at Ryan as a ripple of laughter came down from the gallery. He gave Jack a thin, dangerous smile. They'd warned Jack most of all to beware his word games and tactical skill in the coutroom. To hell with it, Ryan told himself. He smiled back at the barrister. Go for it, asshole . . . Randy sez: Oops, a couple of boo-boos here, "Tom." First, you're showing the cause AFTER the effect in the first sentence. The cause is the laughter from the gallery. The effect is Atkinson spinning back toward Ryan. This is a minor glitch which takes your reader ever so slightly out of the present, since the flow of time is temporarily reversed. The second problem is that you need a paragraph break after Atkinson's action (in which he gives Jack a thin dangerous smile) and Jack's reaction (his interior monologue). A break would cue the reader to switch from the objective to the subjective. Again, it's a minor glitch. A visual cue for the reader is nice but not essential. We pick up with Atkinson pressing his attack. "Forgive me, Sir John. A figure of speech. I meant to say that the U.S. Marines have a reputation for aggressiveness. Surely this is true?" Randy sez: Another attempt by Atkinson to make Jack look bad. There follows some more back-and-forth in which Jack explains what a bunch of good guys Marines are and Atkinson expresses skepticism. We'll pick up a few pages further on, when Atkinson tries to make Jack the aggressor against an innocent Irishman bystander who might very well have been coming to the rescue of the royal family. "I don't suppose you've been told that my client has never been arrested, or accused of any crime?" "I guess that makes him a first offender." "It's for the jury to decide that," the lawyer snapped back. "You did not see him fire a single shot, did you?" "No, sir, but his automatic had an eight-shot clip, and there were only three rounds in it. When I fired my third shot, it was empty." Randy sez: Atkinson is working Jack hard, playing off the fact that Jack didn't actually see the terrorist firing the gun. Jack is responding with both humor and logic. He's doing a fine job and the lawyer is getting angry with him. There aren't many wasted words in this dialogue. No small talk. No convenient exchanges of information. Just war, straight and simple. That's good dialogue. Nice job, "Tom." _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 3) Time Management -- Strategic Thinking 98% of all people have trouble with time management. The other 2% are liars. OK, I made up those statistics. But you believed them, didn't you? Which means they're probably close. And which also means you're probably in the 98%. Am I right or am I right? I'm right. I know because . . . I'm in that 98% too. Lately, I've been getting frustrated with all the things in my life that aren't getting done. Sure, I can make the excuse that I have way too many irons in the fire. But that doesn't change the fact that I'm chronically behind. It would be REALLY nice if I ever got SOMETHING finished. As I mentioned in the January issue of this e-zine, I've been using some cool software lately to manage my horrible To Do Lists. The software is called Life Balance, and you can find it at http://www.llamagraphics.com/ Life Balance is great -- I use it every day to help me choose the 15 tasks or so (from a list of more than 100) that I'll tackle for the day. Some of these come up every day (gotta do my daily backups, gotta deal with the snail mail, gotta floss). Others come up every week or every month or whatever. And a lot of them are one-time deals that I just need to get done Someday. The trouble is that making a To Do List is tactical. It's a day by day thing. Yes, it's important. But it's not enough. You can forget to see the forest because you're too busy looking at trees. I've realized in the last month that I need to find a way to keep that pesky Big Picture in mind. I need to learn to plan strategically. This is not easy for me, because I'm a tactical kind of guy. Strategic thinking comes hard for me. When I got laid off from my last job, my unemployment counsellor told me I should spend 15 minutes every day thinking strategically about the day. And 4 hours every week thinking strategically about the week. And a whole day every month thinking strategically about the month. He didn't say anything about strategic thinking for the year. I'm thinking maybe a week per year would be about right. I'm thinking Waikiki would be a great place to think strategically. I'm thinking that if I get this strategic-thinking stuff working every day and every week and every month, maybe I'll have the bucks to do that yearly strategy thing in Waikiki. Or wherever. But one thing at a time. I'm just a newbie at strategic thinking, so I decided to start small. Here are a few things I did to get myself rolling. First, I made a list of all the Big Tasks for the month of April. Big Tasks are things that can't be done in an hour or two, and usually not in a day. I had a bunch of Big Tasks I wanted to get done in April. For one thing, I had to get my taxes finished. For another, I had three different consulting jobs I'd promised people to do. Then there's that minor job of getting my house sold. Not to mention several Tiger Marketing projects I've been promising myself for months (and promising you!) that I'd get done. The next thing I did was to estimate how many hours each of the Big Tasks were going to take me. The result was kind of scary. I calculated that there was no possible way to get it all done in April. I'll be lucky to get all of them done by the end of May. That's depressing, but at least I know the ugly truth. Then I prioritized the Big Tasks. Some of them had deadlines that just wouldn't budge. Taxes can't be late, no matter what. Consulting jobs have due dates. Tiger Marketing is kind of free floating, but the longer you put it off, the longer you wait to earn money. Finally I went to work on the Big Tasks. And that's where the process broke down. I got some of the Big Tasks done. SOME of them. But I learned a ghastly truth about myself: I'm easily distracted by other stuff. I didn't get nearly as much done as I had planned. About this time, I got really irritated with myself. I realized that I had no idea where all my time went. So I did something bad. Something horrible. Something so inconceivably wicked, I shudder to confess it here now. But the truth must be told, however bitter. I started tracking my time. Oh, the horror! Every day, I took a clean sheet of paper and I tracked the starting time and ending time of every task I spent more then 5 minutes working on. Tracking time is excruciating. It's boring. It squashes your Inner Butterfly. Tracking time is the worst sort of bean-counting. I did it anyway. I hope I don't have to do it forever, but for the moment, I think it's necessary. Because if you don't know where your time goes now, then you'll never be able to make any kind of accurate predictions for the future. At the end of the first week, I looked at my timesheets and I realized there was some good news. I was spending about 7 and a half hours a day doing real productive work. I was also spending a lot of time doing "nonproductive work": Writing email. Reading the newspaper. Eating. Doing various other "normal life" kind of things that are none of your darn business. When I call this "nonproductive work," I don't mean to denigrate it. It's all fun stuff. It's healthy, even. It's good to have some down time. All I mean is that it doesn't earn me any money. "Productive work" is what earns me money. And my timesheets told me I was getting in about 7 and a half hours per day of actual productive work. That's good! It told me I'm not the lazy dog I thought I was. It also gave me a yardstick to estimate how many days it'll take to do those strategic Big Tasks I want to get done. So I've made a big step in thinking strategically. I'm measuring where my time goes. But that's only the first step. The problem I noticed in looking at my timesheets is that I wasn't focusing very well on the Big Tasks I'd planned to do. I was getting sidetracked on other Big Tasks. Important stuff, yeah. But sidetracked is sidetracked. There's another step I needed to take in order to start being EFFECTIVE in my strategic thinking. I'll talk about that step next month. _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ 4) Tiger Marketing--What's a Metatag, Anyway? Over the last year, I've written a number of articles on Tiger Marketing -- the art of using the internet effectively so that it brings you people who are naturally interested in your writing. Last month, I showed how my friend Colleen Coble solved a problem with the way Google described her site. The problem was that if you searched on Colleen's name, her home page was listed first but the description was not at all accurate. The solution was to put the appropriate "metatags" into her web page. It worked. However . . . I heard from some of you that you really aren't sure what those pesky "metatags" are. So I thought it might be good to slow down this month, catch our breath, and talk about how web pages work and how metatags fit into the picture. This is going to be elementary, so if these buzzwords mean something to you -- HTML, CSS, GIF, JPEG, JavaScript, Flash -- then skip this column. A web page is a complicated thing. Pictures. Words. Headlines. Links. Maybe some text fields to fill in or some buttons to push. Possibly some animation. It all seems like magic, if you're not a web geek. How does it work? How does your browser know what to show and how to show it? The answer is that it reads a long sequence of codes that tell it exactly what to display and how to display it. Let's take Colleen's page as an example. If you click on the following link, your web browser automatically takes you to her site: http://www.colleencoble.com Instead of looking at all the words and graphics on the page, let's look at the magic codes beind the page. Every web browser lets you see these. Go to the "View" menu on your browser and look for the menu entry that shows you the codes. In Internet Explorer, the menu entry is "Source." In Firefox, the menu entry is "Page Source." In Safari, the menu entry is "View Source." The common word here is "Source." For computer geeks, the word "source" means a human-readable set of instructions to the computer. "Source code" is what programmers type in when they program a computer. Select the appropriate menu entry in the "View" menu of your web browser. A window will pop up with a lot of text. It's not terribly obvious what it all means, so I'll explain just a bit of it -- enough so that at the end of this column, you'll know what a metatag is and why it's there. The first line of Colleen's source code for her home page is very simple: That's all. When your computer sees this, it knows that the document is meant to be displayed in a web browser and that the rest of the document will be encoded in "HyperText Markup Language." The buzzword "HTML" comes from the four letters I capitalized. OK, so what's "hypertext?" That's easy. Hypertext is a document that can contain links to other documents. Links are the things you click on to bring up other web pages. The reason web pages are so powerful is that they contain links to other pages. That's good for two reasons. First, you can distribute information among hundreds or thousands of pages. Second, some of those pages can be on other people's computers. And what's a "markup language?" That's also easy. A markup language is a system of codes that tells a computer how to layout text and graphics on a page. So HTML -- HyperText Markup Language -- is a system of codes that tells a computer how to layout text and graphics on a page, including links to other pages. A web page normally has two parts: a "head" and a "body." The head comes first on the page, and it contains information that won't be displayed. The body comes next and it has all the information that should be displayed. Why have a head, if it's not going to be displayed? Well, you have a brain that's not on display either, but you still need it. A web page needs a head for the same reason. The head is the brains of the web page -- it gives your web browser information it'll need in order to display the page correctly. Let's look at the first few lines of the head for Colleen's home page: