Next Noble Pen Meeting

January 5th, 2017 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

The NY Times offers lists from several well-known people of their favorite books of 2016.

Victories

Cassie’s sales on the holiday- themed book were really good.

Dylan is editing an old story for republication.

Ciuin is planning to publish her novel under a different pen name.

Education

An author must do a lot of self-editing to hone their work to its best.  This article discusses some of the considerations.    Here’s another view of the process.  And yet another.

You may be tempted to not do it right, and commit some of the seven deadly sins of self-editing.

You might benefit from a mechanics editing checklist.  Jody Hedlund has a list tailored to fiction writers.  She and others say many people catch different problems on paper versus on the screen.

The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its Writer. ~Zadie Smith

So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads. ~Dr. Seuss

Upcoming Schedule

Jan 5
Laura
Nick
Uriah

Jan 12
Cassie
Ciuin
Aime W.

Jan 19
Open slots

Jan 26
Ciuin
Open slots

February 2
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

December 29th, 2016 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

The Iowa Writers House (not the famous I. W. Workshop) is an organization based in Iowa City that offers resources for area writers.  They have announced spring workshop events (for $).  They have a series of free get-togethers, including one at the Cedar Rapids library on second Wednesday evenings (sorry I wasn’t alerted to prior ones).  The focus is not on critique of projects like our group, but you might be interested in rubbing elbows with other writers.

Victories

Cuin has been exchanging research e-mails with a former police chief in regards to her
current piece which has helped her a lot.  Her B+ paper got over turned to an A and she aced the course without her having to appeal it.

Uriah has fixed some of the POV shifts in his piece.

Cassie bought a cover for another story.  She started working on a novella for an anthology open call.

Education

Back in my schooling, shortly after the dinosaurs died, the English teacher had us diagram sentences.  While not exciting work, it does help teach the relationship of the words and phrases., which in turn aids creation and punctuation of sentences that are easy to read.   If the diagram is too messy, a reader will probably stumble while parsing the sentence.  I’ve forgotten the details and never done it out of school, but the concepts learned have helped me a great deal in constructing my sentences.

The basic idea is to place the subject, verb (predicate), and object (if any) on a line separated by break lines.  Then modifiers (adjectives on nouns, adverbs on verbs, and subordinate clauses if any) are attached below those words.

This page summarizes the steps and here’s another explanation.  Here are a bunch of examples.   Wikipedia has some history and an alternative diagram.

You don’t really understand something until you can take it apart and put it back together correctly. ~old saying

Upcoming Schedule

Dec 29
Dakota
Ciuin
Aime W.

Jan 5
Laura
Nick
Uriah

Jan 12
Open slots

Jan 19
Open slots

Jan 26
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

December 22nd, 2016 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

Another book explores how we make decisions, a subject pioneered by Kahneman and Tversky. The outcome has a lot to do with whether the alternatives are described in a positive or negative way.  This could be useful information as you seek to show your characters’ motivations, as well as when you negotiate.

Victories

Aime got the proof copy of her cover for Time Traveler’s Blues.

Dylan’s beta reader for Sand and Bone liked it, and offered a few markups.

Ciuin is looking into publishing Petty Theft.

Education

At the last meeting, some of us were discussing the scale of the solar system and universe.  This site offers an excellent look at scale.

–//–

Prologues are somewhat controversial, as shown by the number of discussions of them on writing forums.  See this thread.  Another thread suggests some people skip them, which could make the rest of the story confusing for them.  Often a prologue could just as well be chapter 1.  Other times they should be deleted and their information woven into the story as needed or used as a flashback.

The best use for a prologue is when it takes place in a different time or place than the rest of the story, and perhaps does not involve the main character.   The challenge is to make it interesting, since the real story hasn’t started yet, to keep it from being an info dump, and to transition easily into chapter 1.

Upcoming Schedule

Dec 22
Aime W.
Ciuin
Cassie

Dec 29
Dakota
Ciuin
Dylan (would yield)

Jan 5
Laura
Nick
Uriah

Jan 12
Open slots

Jan 19
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

December 15th, 2016 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

Polling indicates enough interest to have meetings during the end-of-year holidays, as there is no direct conflict, so we are scheduling review slots for those days.  We probably need a substitute moderator for the 22nd.

Victories

Nick finished a chapter of Earth Ends II and edited on the knight story.

Aime started a new story.

Dylan got another commission.

Cassie’s holiday themed audio book is released, barely in time for the holiday market.  She started plotting another story, and is up to 17k words on Fight to Bear.

Education

Back in October, we talked about  participial phrases, which provide additional information about the noun they modify.  Another way to supply additional information is a prepositional phrase.  Taken all together, the phrase acts as an adjective or adverb, but is not a sentence in itself.

A preposition is a relational word (from, in, on, under, behind, before, etc.) and the phrase includes a noun object or other words operating in place of the noun to complete the relationship.  For example, “The box sits under the table.”  The basic sentence “The box sits.” is technically complete, but not terribly informative.  The addition of the preposition “under” and its object “table” tell us a lot more.

Here is some further explanation and some examples of prepositional phrases.

Upcoming Schedule

Dec 15
Andrea
Aime W.
Uriah

Dec 22
Aime W.
Ciuin
Cassie

Dec 29
Dakota
Ciuin
Open slot

Jan 5
Laura
Nick
Open slot

Jan 12
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

December 8th, 2016 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

December 8th will be our annual collision with a large party group that will occupy our usual space.  Look for us in some corner, probably to the left of the door as you enter.

–//–

Polling indicates enough interest to have meetings during the end-of-year holidays, as there is no direct conflict, and so we are scheduling review slots for those days.

Victories

Riley finished and submitted his short story.

Dakota requested return of rights to her short stories that had been accepted by a publisher who isn’t following through.

Bill found a reader for his entire draft.

Education

Passive voice (Wikipedia) is usually not the most effective way to express the exciting events of a story, but it can have its place.  Excessive use will tend to slow down the pace and leave a reader uninterested.

Passive means that the person or thing the action was done to appears as the subject, as in “The letter was written by me.”  The actor is either unspecified, or relegated to an afterthought.

You can often identify passive voice by the lack of anyone doing the stated action, as in “The fort was attacked.”  But by whom?  Even if the sentence goes on to say who did it, the emphasis has already been shifted away from them.

The passive sentence “The bank was approached by the stealthy conspirators” probably has the emphasis in the wrong place.  We need to pay more attention to the conspirators than the bank, which is just sitting there.  Active voice helps us do that, as “The stealthy conspirators approached the bank.”

Sometimes passive voice is appropriate; “the letter” could be the most important to the idea being expressed rather than the writer.  “The letter was written by me, but the enclosed poem was not.”  Another use of passive voice, particularly in scholarly writing, is to talk about a result while avoiding the mention of who caused the action, which may be unimportant or unknown.  “A new cancer drug was developed that year.”  “The bank was robbed last week.”  The Wikipedia article linked above gives more discussion of when passive is appropriate.

Note that not every form of the verb “to be” is passive (Part 1).  (Part 2) In particular, the progressive (also called continuous) tenses are active, as in “I was running.”  Also note that running is still an active verb in this case, not a gerund (noun form) as it would be in “Running makes me ache.”

Upcoming Schedule

Dec 8 (in the corner)
Laura
Aime W.
Stacy H.

Dec 15
Andrea
Open slots

Dec 22
Aime W.
Open slots

Dec 29
Dakota
Open slots

Jan 5
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill