Tag: descriptions

Writing Exercise of the Week:  What’s Going On Here?

Posted on by Ian Dawson
Is it a picnic, and no one brought food? Or are they concerned the bird is headed for their clean cars?

As the old cliché states, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”  For some reason, this statement popped into my head today and gave me an idea for today’s writing exercise.

Let’s get started!

Search the Classics

Use Google or Bing and search for “classic paintings.”  Feel free to add descriptors like “classic African American paintings” or “classic Latin American paintings.”  You’re looking for paintings that present a scene with people in a location doing things.

What Do You See?

Once you’ve found a painting to use, scrutinize it, asking yourself questions as you do:

•          What happened before this scene took place?  What led to these events?

•          Who are these people?  What are their relationships with each other?

•          Where are they?  Why are these people gathered in this location?

•          What is each person thinking about during the events depicted in the scene?

•          What is the significance of the events or actions displayed in the scene?

•          How do you think the scene ends based on what is shown in the painting?

•          Why are these events in the painting taking place?  Why are these people present?

All of the answers – and any responses to questions you come up with on your own – should be from your imagination.  Don’t research the painting or the artist or go down the rabbit hole of art historian interpretations.  This should be from your creative mindset and viewpoint.

Tell the Tale

Using your imaginative answers, write a 1,000-word story about the scene portrayed in the painting.  Utilize the visuals to describe clothing, characters, location, and other details.  You want to flesh out all the different story elements from your creativity.

You can make the tone funny, tragic, heroic, terrifying, mysterious, erotic, etc.  Whatever you decide, it’s all based on your personal creative interpretation of the painting.

Repeat the Process

Find another painting and do the exercise again.

You could also use the same painting and create a completely different story.  How might you interpret the images in a way that’s the opposite of what you initially came up with?

Why Am I Doing This?

Much like an artist uses paint to create vivid images and scenes, as authors, it’s our job to create them through words.  By utilizing the power of words to interpret a painting, we can elevate it further by adding a new creative context and additional meaning based on our own imagination and creativity.

Happy Writing, and I’ll see you next time!

When Writing a Novel, Don’t Rush Your Story

Posted on by Ian Dawson

We live in a society where the majority of people want things fast, and they want them now.  From food to other products, people demand immediacy, and any time period above that can often result in one-star Yelp! reviews or complaints on social media. 

Even with entertainment or news we’ve become accustomed to soundbites, YouTube clips, and quick hits on the News app on our phones, giving us the gist with no real depth or further information.  And the majority of society is just fine with this.

So, what happens when you are planning out a novel or screenplay with that mindset of how the world is with its lack of attention and need to get things fast?  It can make a writer think they have to deliver story, character, and more at a breakneck pace, which is contradictory to what the point of a novel is.

SLOW IT DOWN!

Your story can be fast-paced, but if you start to rush through chapters just to get to what you think is the “fun stuff” it can cheat your reader – and yourself, the writer – out of delving deeper into the world you are creating.  Take your time and deliver chapters that have meaning to the story, develop character, and bolster the themes you want to communicate.  Don’t be afraid to slow it down a bit.

As a writer, I often find myself doing this, especially if I know that something really fun, action-packed, or exciting is coming up soon.  You get the feeling to just gloss over things in order to get to the fun stuff.  But if you cheat the story, you cheat the reader, and that’s the last thing you want to do. 

The big sequences should be earned, and the reader needs to feel that they have taken a journey with the characters where both get the big sequences when they are deserved in the story.  Not because the author got impatient and wanted to jump ahead.

That being said, if you are a writer – like myself – who likes to write those sequences when they pop in your head, don’t be afraid to just write them.  You can always write the connective tissue that comes before and joins the fun stuff to the rest of the story.  This can also help you as you write the chapters prior to the scene create momentum that drives the story and the reader toward the big event.

It’s also key when you’re writing to give your reader as much information about what’s going on as possible.  Utilize the five senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell.  And also the sixth: thought.  As the author you can describe all of these things and use them to teleport your reader into the world you have created for them.  Put the reader there with your characters, in their heads, and make them feel like they are part of the story.

Novels are meant to be long.  They are meant to take their time to tell stories that have a lot of moving parts, the delve into the psyches and inner-workings of the characters, and give the reader an immersive experience.  While we do live in a world where it seems like less is more and faster is better, don’t forget that novel readers don’t want to take a trip in a car going 150mph, they want to take the train with it slower pace and multiple stops. 

Take your reader on a journey they don’t mind being on for a while.  They’ll be happier when they get to the final destination, and as the writer you will be satisfied that you wrote them a quality that took its time a really delivered.

What do you think?  Does taking your time and developing story, character, and description still matter?  Or have readers become impatient with novels that take their time?  Leave a comment and let me know.

The Field – From Word Doc to Paperback, Part Two

Posted on by Ian Dawson

My mind was made up, I was going to self-publish The Fieldas an eBook.  I began to research different methods and companies that specialize in taking a manuscript and turning it into a professional finished product.  I came upon www.BookBaby.com and after a few clicks knew that they were the company I wanted to partner with.

I emailed my editor, Kathleen, and told her that after long last I was going to publish my novel.  She suggested I reach out to cover artist Steven Novak at http://www.novakillustration.com.  I did and after a couple email exchanges, I decided to use his services for my book cover.

Things were starting to fall into place.

Steven sent me a list of what he needed in order to get an idea of how the cover should look.  This being my first time doing this, I went WAY overboard with the materials I sent him.  Luckily, I’m sure he has dealt with first-time authors before so he whittled my over-the-top ramblings into an initial cover concept.  We then worked over the next two days to fine-tune the cover into what the final cover became:

TheField

I was very excited with the final product, and was excited to share it with people.  Now that I had the cover, I could take that and the manuscript and begin the process on Book Baby of creating an eBook.  And that’s exactly what I did, but before I did anything, I copyrighted my manuscript.  This is a very important thing to do that I highly recommend to all self-publishers. While you do retain the rights to your work when you publish with Book Baby, it’s always good to have the official copyright on your side as well just in case.  Visit the site here: https://www.copyright.gov/registration/ (FYI, it doesn’t let you do it on the weekends or holidays)

Copyright in, I submitted my manuscript and cover to Book Baby.  There is a lot of other extra information that it’s important to have on-hand as you go through the process:  a short description of your book, a long description of your book, and metadata keywords.

They use this information on the various sites like Amazon, Apple iBooks, and Barnes & Noble.  Some use the short version of your novel’s description, others use the longer version.  Think of either one as the blurb that you would want on the back of your novel if it was a hard cover or paperback.

My original short description:

When fourteen-year-old Daniel Robinson is abducted during a summer game of hide-and-seek, his life quickly changes from one of fun to one of survival.  Daniel must find the courage and strength to escape his two captors and get back home no matter what it takes.  Will Daniel make it out alive, or is this one nightmare too real to escape?

My original long description:

A summer of adventure becomes a summer of terror when fourteen-year-old Daniel Robinson is abducted by two older boys during a game of hide-and-seek with his best friend Kyle.  Daniel soon finds himself at the mercy of his captors, doing whatever he can to survive and escape before his fate is sealed.  Can Daniel make it out alive, or is this one nightmare too real to escape?

As Kyle comes to the realization that something bad may have happened to Daniel, he sets out to find his best friend and bring him back to safety.  With nothing but his teenage instincts to guide him, will Kyle’s quest to find his best friend result in a happy ending or end in tragedy? 

In his first novel, author Ian Dawson draws from his real-life experiences to create an action-adventure story about unconditional friendship, courage, and determination.

Welcome to The Field.

Metadata are keywords that Amazon and other sites use to categorize your novel based on its content.  That way people looking for books about the topic you have written about are likely to have it pop up when they search. Once Book Baby has these three things, they tweak them to make them for better search optimization on the various sites.  Tomorrow I will let you know what metadata Book Baby and I decided on, and how I decided on the pricing for my eBook.