SFRB Recommends #79: The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maass #writing #craft

While writers might disagree over showing versus telling or plotting versus pantsing, none would argue this: If you want to write strong fiction, you must make your readers feel. The reader's experience must be an emotional journey of its own, one as involving as your characters' struggles, discoveries, and triumphs are for you.

Topics covered include:

• emotional modes of writing
• beyond showing versus telling
• your story's emotional world
• moral stakes
• connecting the inner and outer journeys
• plot as emotional opportunities
• invoking higher emotions, symbols, and emotional language
• cascading change
• story as emotional mirror
• positive spirit and magnanimous writing
• the hidden current that makes stories move

Readers remember books that make them feel. A good romance novel needs to make sure it evokes the right feelings at the right points in the story. How do you make the HEA satisfying? How do you convince the reader that the leads love each other?

Maass goes through many different techniques to up the emotional punch of a scene, character, or overall plot. Some may apply more to your work than others. There are enough of said techniques, though, that most writers should be able to find some effective.

This recommendation by Lee Koven.

SFRB Recommends 64: Writing for Story by Jon Franklin #craft #writing

The new "nonfiction"—the adaptation of storytelling techniques to journalistic articles in the manner of Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, and John McPhee—is an innovative genre that has been awarded virtually every Pulitzer Prize for literary journalism since 1979. And now Jon Franklin, himself a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and undisputed master of the great American nonfiction short story, shares the secrets of his success. Franklin shows how to make factual pieces come alive by applying the literary techniques of complication/resolution, flashback, foreshadowing, and pace. He illustrates his points with a close analysis and annotation of two of his most acclaimed stories, so that the reader can see, step-by-step, just how they were created.

Franklin can be a bit pedantic and some of his references and phrases may be dated, but this book is an excellent guide to story structure, despite centering on nonfiction. Readers will learn a very concise way to outline (twenty-one words for your whole novel). Although the advice is prescriptive, it can work for a story you're trying to revise as well: figuring out how to revise and restructure a story that you wrote by the seat of your pants can help a lot.
While the macro focus of the book is on act structure, Franklin also has some useful things to say about how to vary pacing within a scene by using different kinds of narrative.

Recommendation by Lee Koven.

SFRB Recommends 46: On Writing by Stephen King #writing #craft #memoir

“Long live the King” hailed Entertainment Weekly upon publication of Stephen King’s On Writing. Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer’s craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King’s advice is grounded in his vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported, near-fatal accident in 1999—and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery. Brilliantly structured, friendly and inspiring, On Writing will empower and entertain everyone who reads it—fans, writers, and anyone who loves a great story well told.

The first section of this book is a memoir that recounts King's early life and experiences with books, and how they shaped his work. The rest of it is common-sense craft and encouragement. King's 'pantsing' approach may not work for everybody, but the rest of the advice applies to a broad audience. I haven't read much King myself, and you don't need to have done so to get a lot out of this book.

The most eye-opening part for me is a first draft he shares with us and how he revises it. He shares his reasons for the changes, unafraid to show us that even an experienced writer's first draft needs plenty of work.

If you're leery of investing in yet another book about writing, On Writing is widely available at libraries. King has done PSAs about using your library, so I think he'd approve!

Author site: Welcome to Stephenking.com

Recommendation by Lee Koven.

"HEARTH AND HOME" SFR: EARTH AS ANCHOR FOR A WIDER UNIVERSE

Look familiar? Think again.

One of the most exciting things about writing science fiction romance is the broad, unbounded field on which we can play.  As SFR writers we can--and do—travel to other planets, visit neighboring galaxies, live among alien cultures, have friends and enemies in alternate universes, in the past, in the future.

So why would anyone stay home?  That is, why would anyone write a science fiction romance set on Earth, here and now?

My science fiction suspense romance Unchained Memory, just out from INK’d Press, is such a story, set (mostly) on the Earth of today, an environment familiar to any reader who picks up the book. The book has no steampunk past, no dystopian future, no tentacle love, no battlestars.

But very quickly, my human hero and heroine discover the world they live in is not as benign as it seems. They are forced to recognize that the stuff of science fiction nightmare—alien abduction, mind control, interstellar slavery—is a very real part of the world they thought they knew.  They have to adjust their world view to include this new perception.  And so do my readers.

Like any SFR story, Unchained Memory opens the door to a new universe and asks readers to leave their current beliefs about things as they are at the doorstep. The Earth of my novel is at the center of a hidden battle between an interstellar slave-trading empire and the organization of abolitionists dedicated to fighting that empire. This is the universe of my Interstellar Rescue series, about the brave (and sexy!) men and women, some of them human, some of them not, who defend the Earth from those who would exploit it.  

In creating my universe I had to determine all of the same things other SFR writers do—how do we travel among the stars, what kind of economic and cultural circumstances would allow for the slave-trading Minertsan Consortium, what other alien races might we encounter, what would the mining or agricultural planets look like, and so on. Once that worldbuilding was accomplished, I could set my stories anywhere within the universe. I chose to begin on Earth, closest to home, before I set my readers off into their new, expanded cosmos.

It doesn’t take long before the readers of Unchained Memory are asked to buy into the basic assumptions of the Interstellar Rescue universe. What happens to my heroine, Asia Burdette—and what she uncovers with her hero, Ethan Roberts—challenges all her old assumptions about the world and replaces them with features of the new one. This revelation is not only an explanation for Asia and Ethan, it’s also an introduction to the vast, unexplored universe of the series.

Of course, I can’t say too much about how I do this in the book. I will say in future books in the series (Book Two, Trouble in Mind, launches in Fall, 2015; Book Three, Fools Rush In, in early 2016) we’ll spend more time off-planet, taking a close-up look at the villainous, slave-trading Grays and even engaging in a few space battles!

All the while, defending “hearth and home”, fighting the threat to Earth and to innocent victims of the Grays everywhere, will be a recurring theme.

Donna S. Frelick was an RWA® Golden Heart® Double Finalist in 2012 in the Paranormal category for the first two novels in her SFR Interstellar Rescue series. She currently lives in Virginia with her husband and two talkative cats.  Find her at http://donnasfrelick.com; blogging at http://spacefreighters.blogspot.com; and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/DonnaSFrelickAuthor.