The Present Tense Voice

Most books are written in past tense. But lately I've been reading more and more in the present tense. THE HUNGER GAMES is a prime example and it's probably my favorite YA novel to date. The present tense voice gives a sense of urgency, as if it's happening right now. I feel like I'm living with the character, experiencing first time emotions right along with her. I love it.

I've experienced with the present tense voice before. My first novel was in 1st person alternating between the two main characters. One spoke in past tense (because she's immortal and reflecting on her extended life) and one spoke the present tense (because he's mortal and everything is happening now for him). I think it worked, it presented great contrast. But I've never written a whole novel in present tense. I'm curious to experiment with this.

I wrote a short story in present tense. It's also in third person. Here is the opening paragraph:

She gazes through her black and white telescope and sees what she wants to see. A gush of wind blows dark hair over her forehead, blocking her view of the starry winter night. She brushes the strands back with her fingers, careful not to touch the scope. She has it positioned and zoomed exactly the way she wants it.

Now which sounds better? Past or present?

She gazed through her black and white telescope and saw what she wanted to see. A gush of wind blew dark hair over her forehead, blocking her view of the starry winter night. She brushed the strands back with her fingers, careful not to touch the scope. She had it positioned and zoomed exactly the way she wanted it.

Of course I'm gonna say present tense because I wrote it that way. But what if this were an entire novel? I feel like present tense 1st person works. But can present tense 3rd hold up? And then I worry that some agents will look down on the present tense voice just like many look down at 1st person narratives. I think choosing the correct voice for your novel is crucial to how it reads. I don't think THE HUNGER GAMES would have been as page-turning had it been written in past tense.

Short Stories and Grad School

I'm applying for grad schools. MFA in Creative Writing! I want I want I want!

Last year I submitted 3 chapters from a novel. I don't think that was the way to go since I got rejected from all the schools I applied to. So this year I'm submitting 2-3 short stories. I've narrowed it down to 5. And I've let a lot of people read them and everyone is giving me different advice about which two are the best. So, just based on a one sentence blurb about each one, which 2 or 3 would you pick?

Short Story #1- During a blizzard, a young woman reunites with her ex-boyfriend and discovers how he really died.

Short Story #2- A teenage girl digs a hole in the backyard and her cute, next door neighbor suspects she's burying a body.

Short Story #3- A young woman with a cutting problem, reunites with her deceased brother everytime she cuts too deep.

Short Story #4- Two sisters, one dying of leukemia, enjoy the rush of a passing train, but the rush is less and less impressive the sicker the one sister becomes.

Short Story #5- A young woman tries to convince her star-gazing sister to come to the hospital to say good-bye to their dying father.

I will.

Hiding

Good writers write what they know. Or at least do a damn good job pretending they do. You can associate related memories, feelings you've had to enhance the truthfulness of the scene. Personal experience.

Lately, people who have been reading my novels and short stories have been asking the same question afterward: Is this based on personal experience? And I think to myself, why are they asking? Am I putting too much of myself into my characters? And if so, is that harming my writing? Or making it better?

I will say that all my leading characters have somethings in common with one another and with me:

1- We want love but we're terrified of it.
2- We're geeks. We love comic books, video games, and superheroes.
3- We're daydreamers.
4- We often feel lonely, even when we're around other people, but excel at hiding our loneliness.
5- At the end of the day, we pray things will get better. And we feel less insignificant knowing that others are in the same boat as we are.

I'm in an over-analyzing mood. And it's been a tough week. I'm worried I'm slipping away from reality by putting all my personal problems into these fictional characters. I know to be a good writer, you gotta basically shed your skin and expose yourself truthfully just like an actor. But when you step away from the computer, away from the fictional world, what's left? And when you are truly all alone, without the comfort of your leading guy to save the day, do you feel good? Or do you feel sort of fake? Hiding behind a mask. Not wanting to face the truth that you've chosen to express yourself to a fictional character rather than a real person.

Honestly, I would like to talk more to people. Not just about my feelings, but about people, about the world. But everyone is so wrapped up in their own lives, hiding behind their own masks (cell phones, facebook, twitter...) that they are doing the same thing that I'm doing. Hiding. Faking the smile. Not interacting with one another. Friendships dying because people don't call each other anymore. They just text and text and text. And it never feels as good as a phone call or hell, seeing the person face to face. It doesn't. Just like when you read a good book. That great feeling you get afterward doesn't last forever. You need to experience good things for yourself. True love. Great friendship. Exciting adventures.

So with this somewhat long entry, I encourage everyone to write their own story and live it fully. Don't worry about how it's going to end. If you start with a bang, and keep it going, the ending will come out just the way it's supposed to. Or maybe it'll be something else. A whole new genre just waiting to unravel like a rolling red carpet.

The nevending editing process

I can't write anything new right now. Do I want to? Well, yes, of course I do. I have like 5 books in synopsis form dying to be turned into a 80K works of genius, but they're gonna have to stay in synopsis form for a couple more months.

I am editing two novels and several short stories right now. The one I wrote a year ago is roughly 25 chapters. Guess how many I've edited in the 2 last weeks? ONLY 3! Why? Because I keep going back and re-reading and asking myself that super important question: "Is this helping to move the plot forward or is it just an attempt to make it lengthy?" Then I look closely at sentences, those long adjective/adverb ones and ask: "Can I shorten this sentence and still keep the meaning?" This process is neverending. At the rate I'm going I won't be done editing this book until the New Year!

Then there's my recently finished novel I'm doing hand-edits to. And wowowee. Plot wise, it's good but not great. Characters are nice. But the writing itself is so so-so. I feel like I'm reading something I wrote in high school. And in the back of my head I'm thinking, this sucks because I wrote it in 1st person and it truly would do better in 3rd. SO, eventually I'm gonna have to change a 96K book to third person. Which will again take me months and months to do.

So, no new writing projects for me for a longgggggggggg time. I have editing to do! And editing can be fun. Just LONG!

Plays into Stories

So, I've been debating what to submit for grad school applications this year. I have three short stories. I just wrote two more. And looking at the five, there's only one that I think is worthy, story-wise and quality-wise. So, what the hell do I do? Write a new story? Gosh, but writing non-genre fiction is so tough!

Then I made the realization that I have about 6 ten-minute plays that are pure realism that would work perfectly as short stories! So these next few weeks I'll be experimenting with that. I must say, it's interesting going from a script to a story. You have to fill in what the actors would be thinking, what they see/feel, but with this one particular story it works fine with it 80% dialogue.
:-)

Get your weed whacker out and chop those words!

I probably shouldn't write a critique or recommend a book before I finish reading it, but in this case I must. The book is called "GETTING THE WORDS RIGHT" by Theodore A. Rees Cheney. The first chapter talks about reducing. Cutting whole chapters, paragraphs, even characters from your novel. If something doesn't push the plot ahead, it isn't needed. You may think your passage about so and so's great uncle bill is so poetic and pretty, but if you can delete it and the plot isn't affected, then go ahead and delete it.

Words are my biggest enemy when it comes to writing. I like to use a lot of them. And most of the time, I don't need that many words to get my point across. I often write "wordier" when I'm in 1st person, especially when writing through the eyes of a teenager. Here's a sentence from my YA novel that's too wordy:

Panting like an asthma patient, I turned on my bed light and touched my body to make certain it was still there and not covered in blood.

This sentence goes on forever! Let's make it better, shall we? By chopping it down!

Panting, I turned on my bed light and touched my body. I was still in one piece; there wasn't any blood.

Hmmm, much better, don't you think? 27 words to 21 words. Not a huge cut, but doesn't it flow better? I don't have to say "like an asthma patient" because when you pant, you can't breathe right, so why include the asthma thing? I also don't need "to make certain."

Here's another one:

In fact, combined with my blue comforter and brown dresser and nightstand, it looked very earthy.

TO...

Combined with the blue comforter, brown dresser and nightstand, it was earthy.

And here's a really wordy one!

Smiling like a bubbly cupid-struck heroine, I returned to my table of anxious friends where I was overwhelmed by a million questions all at once.

TO...

Cupid-struck, I returned to my friends where I was overwhelmed in questions.
OR
Cupid-struck, I returned to my friends anxious to overwhelm me with questions.

See where I'm going with this? It helps to go through your writing and highlight all the long, wordy sentences. Then copy and paste them to a blank word document and look at them out of context. It helps so much!

Now, I know what some people maybe thinking. I just completed my first draft and it's 80,000 words. Now I have to go through it and chop out a bunch of stuff? The answer is: yes!

The novel I'm currently revising was originally 82K. A perfectly acceptable length for a YA novel. Now it's 73K and will continue to decrease the more I edit it. Is that a bad thing if it goes too low? Say to 60K?

Well, if you end up chopping your book in half that probably means your book wasn't that great to begin with. You probably had a lot of extra junk added in because you didn't know for sure where you wanted to go with the book, so while your brain fumbled through ideas, your fingers typed all this extra crap in, thinking it was doing something beneficial. It's okay though. We all do it. And sometimes it takes a long time to figure that out. Me, it took me a year to realize what a mess I'd made of my novel. I had a good idea. One agent said she loved the "potential" of my novel. Which means underneath all those lengthy words I had a seed. But the seed couldn't grow because it was being suffocated by all the weeds (the extra words). Now that I'm "weeding" out those words, I see the beginnings of a flower. And soon I'll have a garden. :-)