Next Noble Pen Meeting

March 22nd, 2018 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

_To Kill a Mockingbird_ continues to be in the news, as Harper Lee’s estate sues over too many changes in a Broadway script.

Victories

Ciuin sold some Petty Theft books.

Education

It ain’t over until it’s over. ~Yogi Berra.  Make sure your story has a good ending, so the reader won’t decide it was over before reading to the end.

It is best if the protagonist is deeply involved in the resolution, as the catalyst for the resolution, and/or by being changed by the events.  It is not good for them to just watch the resolution or to be rescued; it is better if they are the rescuer but must overcome some personal obstacles to perform the rescue.

Try to have some plot twists to keep the plot unpredictable (and here). Ideally the reader will not expect the ending , but will find it to be completely natural when looking back at the events leading up to it.

Yet, the elements of the climax and ending should have been foreshadowed  without giving away the ending, so the reader does not feel cheated and cry “Deus ex Machina!”

How can you balance these opposites? Use a moderate amount of misdirection. Think like the stage magician, who misdirects you by keeping you focused on one hand while the other does the tricky work.  Give the reader vital information but distract them by immediately going into the battle, chase, or emotional confrontation. Give the important event or fact an obvious, unimportant reason to be there. Use details that just seem like scene-setting but turn out to be critical. Or let something obviously important turn out to have a different meaning than assumed. Don’t lie to the reader, or place too much emphasis on the red herring, or they will feel cheated.

Don’t just have it wrap up like a column of falling dominoes.  Make the reader feel they need to know the outcome, but can’t predict it.  Make the ending a dash to the finish line, perhaps a zig-zag one, but no more complicated than necessary.  Emphasize conflict, not description, back story, or philosophizing, in the later chapters.  Try not to need a lot of wrap-up after the climax.

Larry Brooks talks about structuring the story for a killer ending.  Vicki Hinze discusses how to wrap it up.  Here’s Laura Miller’s take on what makes a great ending.

It’s up to you, should it have a happy ending? Whether or not it is a happy one, it should be a satisfying ending.

Nobody reads a (novel) to get to the middle.  They read it to get to the end.  If it’s a let down, they won’t buy anymore.  The first page sells that book.. The last page sells your next book. ~ Mickey Spillane

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story. ~Orson Welles

Upcoming Schedule

March 22
Randy
Ciuin
Aime

March 29
Aime – short educational
Jeremiah
Randy
Open slot

Apr 5
Nick
Randy
Open slot

Apr 12
Open slots

Apr 19
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

March 15th, 2018 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

Dolly Parton talks about her nonprofit organization that sends books to children- now up to 100 million books.  (article)  (interview)

Victories

Randy found a Fisk coffin in a museum that he will photograph for his book.

The Farmers’ Market book selling group got a rejection from their application.  They tried.

Education

Riley recently gave us a good presentation on character arcs, one of many useful ways to analyze a story.  Here’s some more links on characters.

Character development early in a story in an important tool to get readers hooked.  Tom Pawlik’s article lists nine aspects of character development.  How the character talks and thinks, their background, appearance, goals, and defects all shape them and affect how the reader relates to them and cares about them.  Here are more tips.  This information should be shown gradually and not as a summary that holds up the action.

The character will probably show change during the narrative, which is called the character arc.   Change for the better or for the worse usually makes them more interesting.  A “flat arc” can sometimes be interesting, especially if they interact with other characters having more complex arcs.

There are many ways a character can change through the events of the plot.   They may change in personality or motivation.   Nancy Kress discusses character change.   Jeff Gerke explains the development of a character.   Lillie Ammann talks about creating, motivating, and changing a character in an 8-part series:  Part 1     Part 2     Part 3     Part 4 Part 5     Part 6     Part 7     Part 8.

Upcoming Schedule

March 15
Short educational: Randy
Ciuin
Aime
Stacie S.

March 22
Randy
Ciuin
Open slot

March 29
Jeremiah
Open slots

Apr 5
Nick
Randy
Open slot

Apr 12
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

March 8th, 2018 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

You’ve read similar themes in Science Fiction.  Now an anthropologist worries that the data being accumulated on everyone, along with the advances in biology, will lead to serious problems in society’s future.  Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to write the blockbuster novel that will illustrate this and get it made into a movie so it reaches the masses.

Victories

Jeremiah figured out how to turn a chapter into a full story.

Randy has rescheduled a book signing

Ciuin talked with Henry Winkler, who has been an inspiration to her for a long time, and they traded books.

Education

All writers can benefit from good beta readers.  An interesting essay discusses three types of beta readers and when you want each.  You can see the variety in our own critique group.  Which are you, Generalist, Shredder, or SpaGster, or a combination?

Here’s another take on what makes a good beta reader.  And yet another.

Upcoming Schedule

March 8
Randy
Stacie S.
Jeremiah

March 15
Short educational: Randy
Ciuin
Aime
Open slot

March 22
Randy
Open slots

March 29
Jeremiah
Open slots

Apr 5
Nick
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

Mar 1st, 2018 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

Trump has proposed a budget that severely cuts funding for public arts and culture, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the National Endowment for the Arts.  The latter is a possible target for elimination.

Victories

Randy got fan mail.

Dakota found time (from being grandma of a teething baby) to write a chapter.

Education

Can you use a real person in your fiction?  Can you base a fictional story on a real person who is not named but could perhaps be identified?

Generally one should err on the side of caution to avoid possible claims of defamation or invasion of privacy by the person or their descendants.  The more famous the person and the greater the span of time after their life, the more leeway you will have.

If the person’s identity and details are not as important as their membership in a group, it is easy to make up a character combining what you know about that person and others in the group.

This excellent article says a finding of libel is rare but you need to exercise some caution.  Even winning a lawsuit is still expensive.  They recommend either keeping true to the proven facts, especially for any negative aspect of the character, or else disguising the character so they are hard to associate with the real person.  The trouble is in the middle ground.

Here’s one take on it and another view.  Here’s a discussion of libel law as it applies to fiction.  Real Person Fiction, alias fan fiction, is discussed on Wikipedia.

Upcoming Schedule

March 1
Riley 10-minute educational
Nick
Jeremiah
Riley

March 8
Randy
Stacie S.
Jeremiah

March 15
Open slots

March 22
Open slots

March 29
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

February 22nd, 2018 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News/Editorial

Writing has the power to change minds.  But a new factor has entered.  Computational Propaganda is the use of massive collections of personal data (What did you click on today? What organizations do you get email from?) and vast computational power to deliver just the right message (maybe true, biased, or false) to each person to sway their opinion.

An essayist says “no matter what your political inclinations may be, if you value a healthy functioning democracy, then something needs to be done to get ahead of computational propaganda’s curve.”

We all need to take time to seek out a variety of opinions and sort through them to see what makes sense, and not just read what F*cebook offers us or the click-bait from other services.

Victories

Aime’s editorial was published in the Gazette.

Ciuin started editing a pastor’s book.  She made progress on Chessmaster.

Stacie S. is sending Brian Sanderson a thank you (and copy of her book) for his educational series.

Randy was asked to do a signing at a Decorah bookstore.

Education

Devlin Blake offers a list of ways to make your story boring.  If you aren’t writing a bedtime story to help readers fall asleep, then you need to make sure you aren’t doing those things.  Another article is aimed at bloggers, but can be applied to most writing.

Do your characters have an easy time of it?  That’s not very interesting to readers, who usually expect to see tension and conflict before the resolution.  Brian Klems suggests ways to Push Your Characters to Their Limits.  Here are some tools to spice up the tension with conflict.

If you’ve ever found yourself pushed to the limits of your tolerance… you find yourself doing some things that, from the outside, can be seen as quite insane. ~Brandon Lee

February 22
Randy
Ciuin
Aime

March 1
Riley 10-minute educational
Nick
Jeremiah
Riley

March 8
Randy
Stacie S.
Open slot

March 15
Open slots

March 22
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

February 15th, 2018 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

The National Book Awards took a small step to becoming more international with the addition of a prize for books translated into English.

Victories

Aime submitted a column to the newspaper.

Education

How long should a story be?  How long is a piece of string? They should be long enough to do the job without a lot of excess.  Always review your story to see if it contains padding that does not move the story along.  However, a long manuscript may not be publishable by traditional publishers regardless of whether it is the right length for the story it tells.  If your writing is tight and still too long, you may have to modify the events of the story to fit a publishable range.

The Nebula Awards define lengths for short story, novelette, novella, and novel.  Other peoples’ definitions vary.  Other formats include drabble, usually defined as a story of around (sometimes exactly) 100 words, and flash fiction, which is variously defined as less than 300 or 1000 words.

The average book sold through Amazon in 2014 had 64,500 words.  Chuck Sambuchino offers a detailed guide that recommends 80-100 k words for most novels and memoirs, with sci-fi running slightly longer.  Westerns and books for younger readers tend to be shorter.  Here’s another guide , and a third, that mostly agree, and define lengths for other formats.  Wikipedia goes into the details of counting words, which you can digest for details after getting your story into the right length range for your market.  Whatever MS Word reports tends to be used nowadays unless someone has specific counting software.

Upcoming Schedule

February 15
10-minute educational – Stacie S.
Aime
Stacie S (submission carried over)
Ciuin

February 22
Randy
Ciuin
Stacie S.

March 1
Riley 10-minute educational
Nick
Jeremiah
Open slot

March 8
Randy
Open slots

March 15
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

February 8th, 2018 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

Cracked Walnut is a traveling literary group based in Minneapolis. They will be doing a prose and p**try reading in Cedar Rapids, 7 pm Saturday Feb 3 at Peoples Church, 4980 Gordon Ave NW (a block west of Jacolyn Park). See link for information.

–//–

Prolific author Ursula K. Le Guin died recently at age 88.  She first submitted to a science fiction magazine in 1940 at age 11 and got her first rejection .  She was published several years later and over a long career turned out over a hundred pieces: short stories, collections, poems, novels in several genres, and non-fiction books.  One of her non-fiction works was recently released.

Victories

Aime wrote two speeches and a draft of an editorial.

Ciuin finshed reading a book.

Education

Word repetition, or “echo word” is a too-common, although not major, flaw in most people’s first drafts.  A little attention to substitutions can quickly make improvements.  This article offers some examples of rephrasing.  Repetition can also be a useful tool  when done carefully.

A search will find many tools to point out repetition, for example this one.

Do not fall into the trap of simply choosing the next word in a thesaurus, because synonyms all have nuances of meaning and using a poor choice will convey the wrong meaning.

If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing. ~William Safire

Upcoming Schedule

February 8
Randy
Stacie S
Riley

February 15
10-minute educational – anyone?
Aime
Stacie S
Ciuin

February 22
Randy
Ciuin
Open slot

March 1
Riley 10-minute educational
Nick
Jeremiah
Open slot

March 8
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

February 1st, 2018 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

The authors planning to have a booth at the Cedar Rapids summer Farmers Markets will have a meeting Feb 1 at 6:30 at Scott’s Restaurant (just before the Noble Pen meeting) to discuss planning and fill out the application.

–//–

Cracked Walnut is a traveling literary group based in Minneapolis. They will be doing a prose and p**try reading in Cedar Rapids, 7 pm Saturday Feb 3 at Peoples Church, 4980 Gordon Ave NW (a block west of Jacolyn Park).  See link for information.

Victories

The Farmers Market group has 14 authors involved and are finalizing plans for displays.

Aime edited one third of Scourge.

Jeremiah finished reading a 700 page fantasy book.

Ciuin was recommended by someone she had helped in the past and another author now wants her to work with him.  If she takes the job, it would involve typing a handwritten manuscript and ghostwriting the middle of his novel.

Education

Participial phrases can be tricky to apply correctly.  The participle is a verb form (action word) which most often, but not always, ends in -ing.   Participial phrases are attached to a complete sentence to modify or supply additional information about the subject or object noun (person or thing) of the sentence.  Here a discussion of participial phrases.

For example, “Rowing the heavy boat, John soon tired.”  The participial phrase “Rowing the heavy boat” is not a sentence because there is no subject person to do the rowing.  “John soon tired” is a sentence, but needs the added phrase to explain why John, the subject of the sentence, became tired.

The phrase should be set off with commas from the sentence as above, or in “Pulling into the driveway, the noisy car alerted the occupants of the house.” The noun should always be the nearest one to the phrase that modifies it.  It would be incorrect to write “Pulling into the driveway, the occupants of the house heard the noisy car” because the phrase appears to modify the nearest noun, occupants, not the intended noun, car.

The present participle implies simultaneous actions.  “Walking into the building, John opened the heavy door” obviously violates the order of events, since he can’t walk in until after he has opened the door.  “Chugging her beer, she laughed in his face” can’t happen all at once; pick an order and rewrite accordingly.

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

February 1
Stacie S. 10-minute educational
Nick
Stacy H
Riley

February 8
Randy
Stacie S
Open slot

February 15
Aime
Stacie S
Open slot

February 22
Randy
Ciuin
Open slot

March 1
Nick
Jeremiah
Open slot

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

January 25th, 2018 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

You may be interested in an event about “Turning Inspiration into Story”, to be held 1-4 pm Saturday Jan 20th in Marion.  See link to register for free.

–//–

The first of this year marks the 200th anniversary of the publication by Mary Shelley of Frankenstein, a strong candidate for the title of First SciFi Book.  This essay takes it as a warning of what technology could do to us.

Victories

Randy now has six reviews on Amazon with an average of 4.5 stars.

Stacie is at 60k words and expects to finish at 80-90k.

Education

Many tools can help with the initial editing of your story by pointing out things a human might miss.  A quick on-line search finds many tool offerings, free or for sale.

MS Word includes a grammar checker.  As with any tool, it isn’t always right but will point out things to consider.

Grammarly is a browser or MS Office add-on that checks whatever you type.  It is context sensitive, which is an advantage over many other tools. Some of our members use the free (nagware) version and find it helpful.

ProWritingAid offers free registration for their on-line proofreading tool that checks many aspects of your writing. They also sell a variety of tools.   You paste a section of your text into the free version window, click submit and analyze, and it reports over-used words, sentences of monotonously same length or excessive length, cliches, repeated phrases, alliteration, and other things you may want to consider changing.  It also highlights dialog tags so you can see at a glance what you used.

It helped me a lot, but became tedious after I changed the major offenses.  My biggest complaint is that it reports too much.  I even tried a better writer’s material with the same result.  The highlighting of repeated common 2-word phrases, 2-word alliterations(like “to town” or “an apple”), etc. results in clutter that hides the things I want to find and change.  The homonym finder is a nice idea but appears to have no context sensitivity so you see ALL of them.

The author of Writer’s Diet book of advice offers a free on-line test of your writing.  While not as extensive as Pro Writing Aid, another view is often useful.

There are also on-line forums where you can post work for critique by others, gain experience in doing critiques, and discuss writing topics.  One is writingforums.org where you have to do some critiques during a waiting period before you can post your own work.  Critiques there can be harsh.  An issue with such forums is that postings may be “publication,” so it is best to only post small samples.

Does anyone have recommendations for other tools?

Upcoming Schedule

January 25
Jeremiah
Randy
Ciuin

February 1
Stacie S. 10-minute educational
Nick
Stacy H
Uriah

February 8
Randy
Stacie S
Riley

February 15
Aime
Stacie S
Open slot

February 22
Randy
Open slots

March 1
Nick
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill

Next Noble Pen Meeting

January 18th, 2018 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

Should Noble Pen organize a booth for area writers at CR’s summer farmers’ markets?  The idea was discussed at our meeting.  If you want to get involved in organizing it, let us know.

–//–

The ability to produce meat without killing animals has been demonstrated, using laboratory-grown animal cells, with hope of commercializing it.  Might there be a story in that to be written about the social impact?

Star Trek has always shown concern for the social foundations of society (recall the early episode on white-black versus black-white?) and what makes us human (the Borg?), as well as suggesting technological ideas.  A new book explores how Treknology has influenced and may continue to influence us both technologically and socially.

Victories

Ciuin wrote on Chessmaster.

Education

The “blurb” testimonials usually seen on the back covers of books are a common marketing device, intended to convince the reader that this is a book worth reading.   The word blurb was coined in 1907. A search for the terms blurb request will find many articles about getting people to help you by writing them.

Noelle Sterne has some thoughts about gathering testimonials.  Here’s another view, saying the blurbs are a small factor in readers choices but still worthwhile.  Best-selling authors get too many requests to comply unless you have some  connection to them.  More advice on requesting a blurb.

Upcoming Schedule

January 18
Aime: 10-minute educational
Stacie S.
Aime
Ciuin

January 25
Jeremiah
Randy
Ciuin

February 1
Stacie S.  10-minute educational
Nick
Stacy H
Uriah

February 8
Randy
Stacie S
Riley

February 15
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill