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Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

writing technique

Exercise: Writing the logline

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Getting my logs in a line

I visited +HannahHeath’s blog recently and read her great post on writing loglines for novels. It galvanized me to work at mine a second time. So here’s my loglines for all my Student of Jump books.

In Time Passed, Students of Jump Book 1


Logline: An accidental inventor of time travel
takes his desire for anonymity back 200 years, but his struggle to live as an
average Joe demands he accept the expectations present at his birth and use
them to recreate society and put into motion what he jumped into the past to
avoid.

No-time like the Present, Students of Jump Book 2
Logline: The abandoned daughter of a time traveler takes
her skill of testing prototypes to their breaking point and applies it to a
time jumper sent to check on her, convincing him he must take her forward in
time to demand answers from her father whose guilt for leaving her and devotion
to her dead mother is both less and more than she could have expected or
imagined understanding.

Next Time We Meet, Students of Jump Book 3
Logline: Recently trained to travel in time and set to
take a honeymoon in the past, an anachronistic building contractor and his
quick-witted wife find the leisure life lacks challenge, so they take on locating
a missing and notably annoying physitech, placing them in the cross hairs of the
kidnapping entity as they jump through time chasing clues of uncertain reliability.

That’s the Trouble with Time (publication date sometime this summer), Students of Jump Book 4.

Logline: When a student of jump taking his first
solo time traveling assignment meets up with a determined renegade fighting
the world government for freedom from oppression, he finds losing his jump unit
is just one problem he has to fix, quickly followed by how he can protect his
heart from being the next thing he loses, especially when she keeps throwing it
back at him.

Follow this link if you are looking to revamp your own loglines and need a refresher course.
Hannah Heath: How to Write an Awesome Logline for your Novel

#writing
#loglines
+HannahHeath

Reading the Heinlein biography, part 1: an immersion in the writing process

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I have been a fan of Heinlein’s for more than forty
years.  When he was alive, I watched
constantly for his next publication, and I have read nearly everything he has
written and a great deal of what has been written about his work.  Learning only recently that there was an
official biography about him leaves me rather late in following up my past
diligence, but I am glad I didn’t find these two volumes by William H. Patterson, Jr.,
until this month.  Now was the time for
me to read about Heinlein’s writing experience and process. 
I learned so much more about writing and my favorite author
reading these texts. I found numerous levels of understanding about the
process, organization and publication of writing, working with agents and
editors and publishing in general (though, of course, there have been changes,
the human element should not have altered much).  There was also the personal element of being
a writer, champion of ideas and role model that was just as provocative and
informative, but that will be for another post.
Below is a list of what I found important to Heinlein’s
process, important to any writer’s effort to write well.

  • Use index cards to organize and maintain ideas. Sure there are numerous electronic
    organizers, but I like the inspiration that comes from being able to shuffle, redistribute and overlap
    ideas on a 3×5.      I am definitely going to work with this
    approach. Heinlein used index cards to jot down ideas and even carried them around with him when working on a story. When enough ideas started to
    come together, they were kept in a group, and he would refer back or add to them
    as his story grew.  The system gained
    structure as his ideas and completed writing grew.  So they (his wife Virginia Heinlein came up with his indexing
    structure) set up a filing system that
    categorized the ideas and identified each published or work in progress.  Each book or WIP acquired its own indexing
    number. I am going to use his system to
    build one that will work for me.
  • Gather research: he was constantly researching
    science, technology, engineering, etc., to ensure accuracy in his writing.  I do
    research, but I think I need to develop this process more and in a less
    isolated manner – both broad and deep so there is more overlap and more
    connections built and therefore more material for writing.     
  • Read up on a lot of topics: Heinlein was not
    afraid to read a tome far above his level of understanding. He was known to
    seek out specialists in his field of interest and have them teach him what he
    needed to know so he could understand in-depth writing in the field he was
    curious about. This is an area I need to
    work on.     
  • Gather a cadre of authorities to tap. No explanation needed here. 
  •  Let ideas stew, even for years.  Some books half written sat around waiting
    for the right idea, the new understanding or experience before they were ready
    to be completed.  He fought for every
    piece he wrote to get to its end, but he also was ready to recognize when
    something just was not ready for prime time. 
  •  Have an overall plan for a book.  For some writers this is not a useful tidbit.
    But for me it is. I realize more and more
    that I am playing catchup with my stories about two thirds through.  I knew where I wanted to start and where I
    thought it would end.  I often have a set
    of events I expect to fill the middle with on the way to start and finish, but
    I realize at that 2/3rds point that I failed to consider the reader interaction
    that goes with the connecting of these two points.  I think that is what that overall plan means
    to me.  I need to have the bones
    organized earlier for my books.  Even if
    I deviate in the process of writing, I will have still worked out much of what
    the intercourse will be between the story and the reader that is essential.     
  •  Use mythologies and connecting images or
    principals in a work.  The underlying
    pieces are so essential.  
    Heinlein would work out what mythology or images he wanted to imbed in his
    stories to link events and ideas together within a work.
  •  Making use of personal experience. I suppose
    this falls under “write about what you know,” but I think it is
    deeper than this, and I think writers naturally incorporate their own
    accumulated bundle of tragedy, comedy and drama. We all can take an experience
    and pick out the magic pieces that add depth and authenticity to our work. 
  •  The benefit of a participating spouse: providing
    ideas and feedback and being a resource of information.  Heinlein was fortunate that both ex-wife
    Leslyn Heinlein and his wife Virginia Heinlein were willing to be a part of his
    writing process and business. Not all writers have a spouse who is willing to
    provide this deep of a commitment. Mine
    hits at about the 5 percent when it comes to involvement, but he is
    tremendously supportive. He uses the word “work” when he asks what I
    am doing as I am typing on the computer. 
    He’ll say, “Is that for school or are you working?”  I love that. And he’s growing in this
    area.  After all, he is the one that made
    sure the plans for our house included an office for me.     
  •  Reading inside and outside your genre.  Heinlein kept up on both scientific writings
    as well as contemporary fiction.  He believed it
    advanced his writing quite a bit and resulted in his hybrid Science Fiction
    style which ultimately changed the scope of the genre. I write also contemporary short story and poetry, read for pleasure and
    read for study, but I could still enlarge on this. (I read three biographies in
    the last month, and that is more of that genre than I normally read in a year.)     
  •  Don’t be afraid and even seek to write something
    different, challenging or disruptive. 
    Several of Heinlein’s works, according to his bio, he did not expect to be
    accepted for publication. They were just too different:  Stranger
    in a Strange Land, Time Enough for Love,     and Number of the Beast. But they were accepted and each were met with near instant success. 
  •  Don’t be afraid to create your own genre. Heinlein
    moved away from the strict confines of what constituted Science Fiction. (What
    was new and different in his time is very much the norm of our own.) 
  •  Submit to small presses and lower-end magazines
    to begin with. Submit?! Okay, I am
    working up to this. There is a time commitment here because of the research,
    selection process and keeping track of what is out and where it has been. I am
    going to squeeze it in. I promised myself and I am going to do it.     So
    Submit! 
  •  Submit repeatedly and continuously. Since we’re
    on the subject, Heinlein just kept things heading out the door until it found a
    buyer. Just keep flinging them off the
    merry-go-round until they land on their feet.     
  •  Take all criticism under consideration and
    follow what feels right.  I like this
    especially about Heinlein.  His stories
    had to meet his internal critic and his external (spouse).  Once it passed those two road blocks, he
    fought for it.  He took criticism that
    would make a work better but routinely refused to castrate or turn a work into
    weak milk. None of my current work is a
    challenge to society being largely written for entertainment, so this mandate does not apply too heavily to my work.
    But should I write something that pulls hair, I won’t let myself be forced to
    back down in order to keep a segment of society from having to take off their
    rose-colored glasses.     
  •  Join groups that augment or support your
    genre/subject/intentions.  Heinlein
    wasn’t much for writing groups, but he did form his own quasi-feedback
    groups.  Lucky stiff, he had Pohl,
    Azimov, Savage, the Smiths, Bova, the Sturgeons etc. They talked shop, shared ideas, helped develop
    plots, kept each other informed of new technology and writing aids.  Heinlein once bought another writer a
    typewriter because he felt it had been such an aid to lightening up his work
    load and time spent in production. 
  •  Keep organized files and sift through them.  This is much related to an earlier point, but
    the reason why it is separate is that one must do more than just organize the
    works and ideas.  You must review them,
    add and combine.  If they sit in a drawer
    than all they will ever do is sit in a drawer.
#writing
#Heinlein
#writingprocess

Learning from the masters: Listen to the voices of Harper Lee’s Scout

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Time links past with present

Harper Lee had quite a task creating the narrative voice of  Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird.  Sure Scout was a six-year-old girl who ages about two years in the course of the book; what’s the challenge?  Seems easy enough — in that short span of years there is not much change.  But Scout is also the narrative voice of an adult, and how does one impart the perspective of a reflective southern woman?  How does it remain evident that young Scout and the reflective adult spring from the same root?

  The following week the knot-hole yielded a tarnished medal.  Jeb showed it to Atticus, who said it was a spelling medal, that before we were born the Maycomb County schools had spelling contests and awarded medals to the winners.  Atticus said someone must have lost it, and had we asked around?  Jem camel-kicked me when I tried to say where we had found it.  Jem asked Atticus if he remembered anybody who ever won one, and Atticus said no.
   Our biggest prize appeared four days later.  It was a pocket watch which wouldn’t run, on a chain with an aluminum knife.
   “You reckon it’s white gold, Jem?”

We have a narrator, the adult Scout (Jean Louise) and the character who supplied remembered dialogue, young Scout.  The two voices are distinctly different ,yet they maintain a connection with the story.  The narrator introduces the event just to where we can imagine the moment, and the young Scout takes over, supplying the in-the-moment reactions and character interactions.

It looks easy when you expose the strings underneath, but it is not easy.

Six-year-old Scout had a pretty good vocabulary, but she also uses country dialect “reckon” and frequently her sentences will be missing the subject and have an abruptness to them as though she is in a hurry to express herself before Jem can shut her down or steal her thunder.  “You reckon it’s white gold, Jem?”  The older narrator Jean Louise takes her time, drawing out the moment.  “The following week the knot-hole yielded a tarnished medal.”  There is an easy, relaxed feel to her sentences, an ownership and a patience the younger Scout had not mastered, but near the end of the book, the reader can see she is beginning to learn that such patience exists and has value and place.

The flow between the two is seamless because the adult narrator’s viewpoint drops off when Scout speaks and picks up after, as though they were twins finishing each one’s sentences, although those sentences are separated by a distance of thirty years or more. 

That is one of the beauties of reading To Kill a Mockingbird:  enjoying the flow and the grace of the connection between the two Scouts.  We see the meaning behind events when Jean Louise speaks and the confusion, fear, surprise and revelation those same events bring out in Scout.  There is no ledge, no separation felt, yet the reader steps back and forth between them.

#narrative voice
#writing