The character of Luke Foster was created almost as an act of defiance. I have occasionally been criticized for writing people who are “too nice.” The rationale being that the characters are unrealistic or that there isn’t enough conflict when everyone gets along. I’ve typically found these opinions easy to dismiss. And not because I’m just that stubborn.
My characters feel realistic because they remind me of people I know. I’m lucky enough to have friends and family who really would give me the shirts off their backs. I write nice because I know nice.
The criticism was on my mind though when I sat down to begin work on Jealousy & Yams. It made me consider trying something different. My original idea was to give the main characters flaws that made them initially unlikable. I thought they could be people who sort of deserved each other… that it might be a fun challenge to see if I could make them grow on the reader by the end of the book. I gave up that idea pretty quickly.
I’m simply not interested in reading a book if I don’t like the main characters and I spend a lot more time with the characters I write. I don’t want to write about people who pick fights and cause unnecessary drama. While I do believe people are entitled to second chances, I’d rather spend my time with those who don’t need a second chance. A hint of my original plan still shows up in Summer. I don’t think she starts out particularly unlikeable, but the reader is supposed to wonder what she’s up to.
For Luke, on the other hand, I completely abandoned any thoughts of making him anything other than a perfectly nice guy. I considered giving him a bad habit or a wild past. That’s when the defiance kicked in. I thought, “You know what, I happen to like nice guys and I don’t care what anyone else says. I’m going to make this guy the nicest one yet. He’s going to be so nice that even the other characters notice and comment on how nice he is.”
In Anne of Green Gables, someone asks her if she’d really want to marry a wicked man. She says, “I think I’d like it if he could be wicked and wouldn’t.” I think that’s what most of us want. Luke isn’t nice because he has no backbone or because he isn’t capable of terrible, horrible things. He’s nice simply because he chooses to be nice. And I chose to make him that way.
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Fixing the Fixable
In my first proofreading pass for Jealousy & Yams, I found a sentence that read, “We put a put on the building.” Oops. Of course I fixed that as well as the many, many other errors I found. I hope that by the time my other proofers and I are done, the book will be 100% free of mistakes. I can’t guarantee that, but that’s the goal.
Very careful editing and proofreading is not about being nit-picky and it’s not about trying to prove I don’t make mistakes. I absolutely do. It’s about keeping the reader engaged in the story. The reader is kicked out of the dream world of the book when the author says something she didn’t mean to say. I know because it happens to me when I’m the reader. These are some recent examples of it happening to me. Everything in italics is a direct quote from a published work.
When her normal sparkling green eyes lit up, his heart would practically stop. Now, they were a deep, intent brown.
I think the author meant to say normally here, which means usually. Normal means ordinary. Calling someone’s eyes ordinary and sparkling in the same breath feels a little… counterproductive. And just as I’ve gotten over that, those eyes change color. I believe at this point I’m supposed to be appreciating how much the hero likes the heroine’s eyes. But I’m not. I’m wondering if they’ll be blue the next time he looks at her.
When the students handed in their test…
Now I’m wondering why all the students get to work on the same test. That’s not how it worked when I was in school.
The organist began playing. She was thankful it interrupted any further chance of continuing their discussion.
I’m thinking it’s kind of rude for the organist to be happy about interrupting people. Also, since this is the only time in the whole book that the organist is mentioned, I’m surprised that we’re suddenly inside her head.
[She] stood up and began to get her pajamas around.
Around what? The room? I don’t understand why this character is suddenly making a mess or why the narrator is so calm about it.
“This silence treatment is driving me nuts. You went to great links to ignore me today.”
Do they call it a silence treatment on the West coast, or somewhere else I’ve never lived? Even so, if she was on the golf course, how would he know he was being ignored?
…he would have spent doing nothing of great importance to kill time.
Here I simply think someone needs to look up the meaning of kill time. Or possibly the word superfluous.
…more cleavage than was already visual through her satin shirt.
Since I wasn’t reading a fantasy novel, this mention of a woman who apparently sees with her breasts really came out of left field. Yeah, I know she meant visible, but that doesn’t stop the ridiculous image from popping into my head. I’m supposed to be annoyed with this character for being flirty. Instead I’m amusing myself with the different body parts the woman might use to hear.
…she thought about the curly, red-headed, child.
This says that the child is curly, not her hair. I have to pause for a moment to imagine what a curly child would look like.
There was just something about a big, soft-haired pup licking your face that made her cave in to his sweetness.
There are too many pronouns in this sentence. I don’t know who is caving to whose sweetness and I really don’t know what a dog licking my face has to do with anything. I’m not in this story.
Three years of concealed, unadulterated love, hanging in limbo, threatened to ruin his future happiness, should he make the wrong decision.
I don’t know. Should he make the wrong decision? Normally I’d say no because wrong decisions tend to be, you know, wrong. But now that the question is out there I’m going to have to think about it.
“Now that it’s getting sickening; what’s the problem?”
I’m going to guess that the problem has to do with something getting sickening. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds like a problem. Even within the context of the book, I had no idea what this sentence was supposed to say. I can only assume that autocorrect is to blame.
I’m not naming these authors or their books because I’m trying to make a point without embarrassing anyone. (I will, however, say that it only took two books to find this many examples and that I cut a few when the post was getting too long.) My point of course is how distracting it is to try to read a book full of typos. I hope I’m careful enough to do readers the favor of telling the story I intend to tell. There will still be people who don’t enjoy my books and those people are entitled to their opinions. My hope is to have removed all the issues that are not a matter of opinion. Using enormous in place of huge is subjective; using effect in place of affect is not.
Very careful editing and proofreading is not about being nit-picky and it’s not about trying to prove I don’t make mistakes. I absolutely do. It’s about keeping the reader engaged in the story. The reader is kicked out of the dream world of the book when the author says something she didn’t mean to say. I know because it happens to me when I’m the reader. These are some recent examples of it happening to me. Everything in italics is a direct quote from a published work.
When her normal sparkling green eyes lit up, his heart would practically stop. Now, they were a deep, intent brown.
I think the author meant to say normally here, which means usually. Normal means ordinary. Calling someone’s eyes ordinary and sparkling in the same breath feels a little… counterproductive. And just as I’ve gotten over that, those eyes change color. I believe at this point I’m supposed to be appreciating how much the hero likes the heroine’s eyes. But I’m not. I’m wondering if they’ll be blue the next time he looks at her.
When the students handed in their test…
Now I’m wondering why all the students get to work on the same test. That’s not how it worked when I was in school.
The organist began playing. She was thankful it interrupted any further chance of continuing their discussion.
I’m thinking it’s kind of rude for the organist to be happy about interrupting people. Also, since this is the only time in the whole book that the organist is mentioned, I’m surprised that we’re suddenly inside her head.
[She] stood up and began to get her pajamas around.
Around what? The room? I don’t understand why this character is suddenly making a mess or why the narrator is so calm about it.
“This silence treatment is driving me nuts. You went to great links to ignore me today.”
Do they call it a silence treatment on the West coast, or somewhere else I’ve never lived? Even so, if she was on the golf course, how would he know he was being ignored?
…he would have spent doing nothing of great importance to kill time.
Here I simply think someone needs to look up the meaning of kill time. Or possibly the word superfluous.
…more cleavage than was already visual through her satin shirt.
Since I wasn’t reading a fantasy novel, this mention of a woman who apparently sees with her breasts really came out of left field. Yeah, I know she meant visible, but that doesn’t stop the ridiculous image from popping into my head. I’m supposed to be annoyed with this character for being flirty. Instead I’m amusing myself with the different body parts the woman might use to hear.
…she thought about the curly, red-headed, child.
This says that the child is curly, not her hair. I have to pause for a moment to imagine what a curly child would look like.
There was just something about a big, soft-haired pup licking your face that made her cave in to his sweetness.
There are too many pronouns in this sentence. I don’t know who is caving to whose sweetness and I really don’t know what a dog licking my face has to do with anything. I’m not in this story.
Three years of concealed, unadulterated love, hanging in limbo, threatened to ruin his future happiness, should he make the wrong decision.
I don’t know. Should he make the wrong decision? Normally I’d say no because wrong decisions tend to be, you know, wrong. But now that the question is out there I’m going to have to think about it.
“Now that it’s getting sickening; what’s the problem?”
I’m going to guess that the problem has to do with something getting sickening. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds like a problem. Even within the context of the book, I had no idea what this sentence was supposed to say. I can only assume that autocorrect is to blame.
I’m not naming these authors or their books because I’m trying to make a point without embarrassing anyone. (I will, however, say that it only took two books to find this many examples and that I cut a few when the post was getting too long.) My point of course is how distracting it is to try to read a book full of typos. I hope I’m careful enough to do readers the favor of telling the story I intend to tell. There will still be people who don’t enjoy my books and those people are entitled to their opinions. My hope is to have removed all the issues that are not a matter of opinion. Using enormous in place of huge is subjective; using effect in place of affect is not.
Monday, February 24, 2014
The Difference Between a Yam and a Sweet Potato
The title of this post was a working title for Jealousy & Yams. Even though I changed my mind – for various reasons – I thought I should point out that I know this difference exists because my cover shows the word yams on top of a picture of sweet potatoes.
I made this cover like I’ve made most of my book covers…
Step 1: Decide on a vague idea for the cover.
Step 2: Take tons of pictures of something related to that vague idea.
Step 3: Pray that one of those pictures looks something like a book cover.
Step 4: Ruin it with bad font or special effects.
Step 5: Start over.
Step 6: Make several versions of the same basic cover and show those to others for feedback.
Step 7: Be mocked for lack of artistic ability.
Step 8: Try again.
Step 9: Settle on a cover that is okay at best.
Interested in the specifics? For this latest book, I thought sweet potatoes might work so I planned to mash some for dinner. I arranged them in piles before and after washing. I took pictures of them peeled and unpeeled and whole and chopped. I snapped a few of them in the boiling water and I got one last shot of the peels – the garbage – only because I had captured everything else.
The image I liked best was of the sweet potatoes in the pan. They turned a brighter orange while cooking and I thought the eye-catching color might make a good cover. Unfortunately, one of the first people who looked at that version said it made him think of sex. I guess the bubbles in the boiling water looked like soap. He could not explain to me why soapy vegetables are sexy. Perhaps it’s a guy thing. Since I write clean fiction though, I couldn’t risk giving others the wrong impression. That cover went into the figurative scrap pile.
My second favorite image turned out to be the peels. Since that picture was mostly an afterthought, it turned out to be a bit blurry. No problem. We like sweet potatoes. I made some for dinner again the next week and snapped lots of pictures of my garbage pile. On another whim, I included the peeler.
Originally, the peeler was aimed downward. This made people think murder. No one has ever been murdered in any of my books. (Sorry if that’s a spoiler.) Inverting the picture made it clearer that it was a kitchen tool and not a murder weapon.
I set a precedent for font with Andrew's Key, the first book in the series, so that part was easy. The color, however, proved challenging. An actual artist would likely look at that picture and know what color would work best. I think I tried at least six different colors. I wanted to pull something from the background and nothing seemed to have enough contrast to make the words readable. I eventually used the very shiny part of the peeler. I'm still hoping people will open the book before they judge it.
It’d be great if I could stick to writing and pay someone else to design the covers. Even if this was in my budget though, I’m not sure how well it would work out. I’m afraid I would still have vague ideas about what I wanted and I’d drive the artist nuts trying to explain what was or was not working for me. Case in point: I recently created a new cover for Weathering Evan and I’m not going to tell you how many times I made my cover model change his shirt. Lucky for everyone, all this crazy indecision stays in my head when I’m writing.
I made this cover like I’ve made most of my book covers…
Step 1: Decide on a vague idea for the cover.
Step 2: Take tons of pictures of something related to that vague idea.
Step 3: Pray that one of those pictures looks something like a book cover.
Step 4: Ruin it with bad font or special effects.
Step 5: Start over.
Step 6: Make several versions of the same basic cover and show those to others for feedback.
Step 7: Be mocked for lack of artistic ability.
Step 8: Try again.
Step 9: Settle on a cover that is okay at best.
Interested in the specifics? For this latest book, I thought sweet potatoes might work so I planned to mash some for dinner. I arranged them in piles before and after washing. I took pictures of them peeled and unpeeled and whole and chopped. I snapped a few of them in the boiling water and I got one last shot of the peels – the garbage – only because I had captured everything else.
The image I liked best was of the sweet potatoes in the pan. They turned a brighter orange while cooking and I thought the eye-catching color might make a good cover. Unfortunately, one of the first people who looked at that version said it made him think of sex. I guess the bubbles in the boiling water looked like soap. He could not explain to me why soapy vegetables are sexy. Perhaps it’s a guy thing. Since I write clean fiction though, I couldn’t risk giving others the wrong impression. That cover went into the figurative scrap pile.
My second favorite image turned out to be the peels. Since that picture was mostly an afterthought, it turned out to be a bit blurry. No problem. We like sweet potatoes. I made some for dinner again the next week and snapped lots of pictures of my garbage pile. On another whim, I included the peeler.
Originally, the peeler was aimed downward. This made people think murder. No one has ever been murdered in any of my books. (Sorry if that’s a spoiler.) Inverting the picture made it clearer that it was a kitchen tool and not a murder weapon.
I set a precedent for font with Andrew's Key, the first book in the series, so that part was easy. The color, however, proved challenging. An actual artist would likely look at that picture and know what color would work best. I think I tried at least six different colors. I wanted to pull something from the background and nothing seemed to have enough contrast to make the words readable. I eventually used the very shiny part of the peeler. I'm still hoping people will open the book before they judge it.
It’d be great if I could stick to writing and pay someone else to design the covers. Even if this was in my budget though, I’m not sure how well it would work out. I’m afraid I would still have vague ideas about what I wanted and I’d drive the artist nuts trying to explain what was or was not working for me. Case in point: I recently created a new cover for Weathering Evan and I’m not going to tell you how many times I made my cover model change his shirt. Lucky for everyone, all this crazy indecision stays in my head when I’m writing.
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