1) Mood

The ‘mood’ of the scene is what you want your reader to feel throughout the exchange. Picture a scene where two characters are having dinner out at a nice restaurant. When you think of this scene initially you think it’s romantic, right? Well, what if they’re on the run and one of the characters has a gun held to the other beneath the table? What if they’re dating, but one character is about to break up with the other one? What if one character is the other’s estranged father and they’re meeting for the first time? Each of these scenarios involves completely different moods and should evoke various feelings from the reader.

2) Atmosphere

The ‘atmosphere’ is the specific detail of a setting that allows the correct mood to be felt by the reader. So, for example, let’s say the dinner we mentioned earlier was romantic. You would then mention how the candlelight casts perfect shadows on the partner’s face, perhaps an old couple next to them gazes at each other lovingly, the intoxicating mix between the smell of fresh bread and the rose on the table. All of these sensory descriptors tell the reader that this scene will be romantic. Whereas if the characters were about to break up, you could describe how the partner is fidgeting in his seat, how an overly sweet smell is making the protagonist slightly nauseous, how there’s an old man sitting alone with a severe expression one table over. This alerts the reader of the more somber mood that this scene will take on.

3) Setting

The setting of the scene involves the combination of the mood, atmosphere, and more specific information. What restaurant is this? In which time period is the story taking place? Where geographically is the story taking place? This sort of additional information should be sprinkled into the scene, especially if it hasn’t already been established in your story at large. However, be cautious not to go too deeply into these details and lose the pacing of your scene. Space out these details between bits of dialogue and more immediate scene work.

4) Point of View

Part of what dictates the setting of the story is the point of view from which the story is told. Your novel may be told just from your protagonist’s perspective or you could have multiple characters in which the story focuses on. You could also vary the psychic distance in your story or have a distant or close third person vs. a first-person perspective. Regardless of the POV you choose in your story, the atmosphere of the story should be influenced by your protagonist, or whoever’s POV is the focus of the scene. This could mean it is influenced by either their mood, their observations, or what will be happening to them during the scene. So, for example, if your character has just experienced something tragic in their life all of the things they observe, taste, smell, or feel will have a melancholic feeling to them.

5) Genre

Another aspect that can influence the setting of a scene is the genre in which the scene takes place. A midnight stroll in the woods is going to feel very different in a romance novel vs. a horror novel. In the romance novel, there would be a full moon illuminating the wooded area, an owl hooting, and a cute frog leaping across the path, and fireflies would be dancing all around. In a horror novel, your protagonist can scarcely see a thing, they’d hear a distant howl, they’d smell something that they can’t place but it gave them a metallic taste in their mouth. And in a fantasy book, there would be an array of fantastical creatures and a mystical fog coating the forest floor. Think about the genre you’re working with when you’re deciding on the mood for your setting. Then use adjectives that evoke those emotive responses from your readers.

The post Why is Setting Important? appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.

Do you feel that fist-clenching tenseness? Cultivating that feeling is a crucial part of what horror readers are looking to experience throughout your book.

1) Layers of Terror

There are a few different types of terror that horror aficionados will expect in their books. We could tell you about them, but famed horror writer Stephen King really says it best, “The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it’s when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it’s when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there…”

The best types of horror novels will have layers and will find ways to incorporate all three of these terror types. When they pick up your book, your readers want to be scared so it’s best to give them as many different ways to be scared as possible.

2) Create Continued Suspense

Another aspect of these novels that horror-junkies can’t get enough of is the continued suspense one feels when reading a horror book. This suspense isn’t created through the monster jumping out of the shadows or wreaking havoc on the town, but rather through the absence of that. Suspense is created through a looming sense of danger- we don’t know what it is or why it is or how it is, but we know it’s coming. One way to create suspense is through foreshadowing or placing lines or moments into the book that hint at what is to come later. This can be in the form of the character finding a mysterious substance at the park where a child died recently or taking a series of photos and seeing the same old lady in all of them. These devices show the reader that something isn’t right, that something is lurking in the background of this story and you never know when it will rear its head.

You can also create suspense through your characters. Perhaps there’s a character who is exhibiting some shady behavior, this puts the reader further on edge wondering if they’re in on whatever danger is lurking. The more you can call back on the danger that’s building, the more tense readers will feel. Think of the feeling you get when you’re watching a movie and a character is walking through a dark house. You know something is going to pop out and scare you, but you don’t know when. Your novel should have a more drawn out version of that feeling.

3) Balance Suspense with Calm

Even though you want to have a looming sense of suspense present in your book, you need to also give the readers moments of calm as well. Suspense is a very intense feeling and, if you don’t create a balance here, you’ll risk having a reader need to put down your book to take a breather. These moments present opportunities to build on your characters and their relationships as well. This will not only create a more enjoyable fleshed-out reading experience, but it will also make the moments where we return to the tension feel much more palpable.

4) Put Your Readers into your Protagonist’s Head

As we said earlier, your reader wants to get scared. The most visceral way you can create a scary experience for them is to make them feel like they’re going through this experience themselves. This is why a first-person or a close third-person POV works best for a horror novel. You should put your reader into your protagonist’s head and allow them to see the world out of their eyes. Suddenly they’ll find themselves in a darkened field, being chased by a masked man with a chainsaw. Which is much scarier than simply watching that happen from a safe psychic distance.

5) More than Gore

Although different facets of suspense and terror are important, the best horror stories are about more than just gore. Stories such as Us, The Platform, It, It Follows, etc. are all dealing with psychological themes as well as simply present danger. Both The Platform and Us deal with themes of classism and the resentment that a corrupt system can cause. The story It involves childhood innocence being corrupted and It Follows is a thinly veiled idea based on STD’s. A horror audience will want to see some depth from your idea, so attempt to think of a societal or psychological human condition by which everyone has been troubled or tortured. Use that idea to create your monster or killer and the parameters through which he, she, or it operates in the world.

The post Writing For Your Audience: Horror appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.

Unrealistic Dialogue

One of the most common mistakes writers make is having dialogue that sounds too literary and fluffy. Your narrative should sound drastically different than the way your characters speak because people don’t talk in abstract similes and poetic imagery. People use slang, have a finite vocabulary, and stutter or stumble over their words. Speech is an imperfect thing and if your novel doesn’t reflect that, the characters will feel dry and unrealistic. One of the easiest tricks to making sure your dialogue sounds realistic is to speak any dialogue you’re writing aloud. It may make you feel a little silly, but hearing the words coming out of someone’s mouth is the clearest way to figure out if it’s something that someone would actually say.

Similar Voices

Another common dialogue mistake is failing to differentiate your character’s voices from one another. So many books exist where each of the characters just speaks how the author speaks. Not only does this problem make it difficult to tell the characters apart, but it also affects the believability of the book because a world where every character sounds exactly the same just doesn’t feel real. Consider where each of your characters grew up- is there slang from those areas they would use that other characters wouldn’t? What is each of your character’s level of education? This will affect their level of vocabulary as well. In addition, think of their tone, if they stutter or ‘er’ and ‘um’,  or do they have specific words they simply like to overuse? Use these questions as tools to help make your characters sound more unique.

Writing ‘In-Scene’

One thing writers often overlook is how to write ‘in-scene’ to create drama. Think about a movie- when there’s less action, there are slower shots and when there’s more action, you get quicker cuts. Writing is the same way: when you want to create drama or suspense in a scene you start to write with shorter, sharper sentences. Writers often make the mistake of keeping the long-winded prose for suspenseful scenes and this ends up making them feel less dramatic.

Where are we?

Out of everything on our list, this is likely the most common writing mistake. Leaving the reader asking ‘where are we?’ because you’ve done no work to describe the scene. We know it’s easy to get caught up in the plot and forget to include these details, but in order for readers to feel fully immersed in your novel, all of their senses need to be activated- including sight. Every time you switch the setting of your story, make sure to take a paragraph or two to go into detail about what this new setting looks like, feels like, smells like, etc.

Missing Conflict

In order for your story to feel realistic, you must create conflict that is both interesting and believable. So often in books, writers create scenarios where the entire root of the conflict is simply based on the characters misunderstanding what the other is saying. This is not conflict. Conflict involves both internal and external forces keeping the protagonist from getting what they want. If the conflict just involves characters misunderstanding each other, you’re simply going to leave your readers frustrated.

POV & Tenses

Inconsistency with POV and tenses is another incredibly common writing mistake. Make sure when you begin writing your novel you choose your POV and whether the story will be in past or present tense…and then stick with that throughout the story. Nothing is more jarring than a story that keeps switching between third-person on one specific character to third-person omniscient to third-person in the mind of another character with little to no transition.

The post Common Writing Mistakes appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.

1) Don’t Dumb Down Your Writing

People often make the mistake of assuming YA books need to be dumbed down for a younger audience. But, in reality, all YA really means is that you have a teenage protagonist. Of course, there are a few restrictions on cursing and any explicit/sexual content, but aside from that, it’s like writing any other novel. And, because of the growing popularity of YA books in the adult community, you want to appeal to a wide age range amongst your readers. Therefore, when you’re going into writing, don’t worry about dumbing yourself down or editing your language (unless you have a potty mouth).

2) POV

The trickiest part of YA writing is putting yourself in the mind of a teenager. When choosing a POV, for example, if you choose the third person past tense you can’t write from the perspective of an adult looking back on the naivety of their teenage years. Although that would likely be much easier, that’s not a perspective that will appeal to teenage readers. They don’t want to read about an adult who’s already developmentally light years ahead of them; they want to read about someone who has characteristics they recognize and struggles/insecurities which they can relate to. And the adults who read this genre want to feel like they’re putting themselves back into that mindset as well.

3) Write Like a Teenager, Not Like a Stereotype

Along those same lines, one of the biggest mistakes you could make as a YA writer is making your teenage character a reflection of how you now feel about teenagers. Typically, once we’ve all passed that phase in our lives, we look back and think of our teenage selves as naive, foolish, or even downright annoying. And that feeling may even extend to modern teens in general. But, at the time of your teenage years, the experiences that you have and the mistakes you make are real, emotionally charged, and important to you. You have to put yourself back in that mindset, the one where a boy you like saying hi to you is the most important thing that happened to you that day. The one where someone making fun of the shoes you wore made you question your worth as a person. Because if you write a protagonist who is just yelling at people, being moody, and making stupid decisions that the much smarter adults warn her against…approximately 0% of teenagers will relate to that character.

4) Avoid Tropes and/or Put a Unique Spin On Them

For those unfamiliar with the genre, here are a few YA tropes that are very common among all facets of the genre (YA sci-fi, YA fantasy, YA contemporary, etc). The first is Insta-love, which is when your protagonist sees their love interest for the first time and gravity shifts and the world turns differently and everything changes in that single moment and…blah, blah, more gushy stuff. This is a trope you should avoid at all costs. While it may seem romantic initially, it’s also incredibly unrealistic and won’t align with anything a reader could relate to. Love is something that happens over time–use scenes throughout the book to build it up. Another common trope, especially among YA dystopian books, is the reluctant hero/chosen one. The protagonist is the only one who can save everyone, but he/she just wants to be a normal high school student… There are several other tropes you’ll find throughout YA (enemies to lovers, love triangle, dead/missing parents, etc). We’re not suggesting you avoid these tropes completely, but if you’re going to use them at least give them their own spin so readers don’t find them so predictable. Except for Insta-love–avoid that like the plague.

5) Avoid Archetypes

Another common mistake among YA writers is creating archetypical characters instead of unique individuals. We’ll say it again for the people in the back: teens are not stupid. They’re intelligent with growing minds. Making your characters simple and stereotypical isn’t going to make them easier to relate to. People aren’t as simple as ‘the bully’, ‘the nerd’, ‘the tough girl’, ‘the jock’, ‘the popular girl’- and teens are more aware of that now than ever. They, as well as adult readers, want to see authentic, three-dimensional, complicated characters because that’s what people are actually like in the real world (and in high school too).

6) Avoid Slang

Another thing teens can smell from a mile away? Pandering. The most obvious sign of pandering in teen/YA writing is if you try to use slang that you feel like they’ll understand. Don’t say that party was LIT, or those tacos were FIRE because, very quickly, teens will start to feel like they’re reading a book meant to mock them rather than relate to them. You need to adapt your voice to that of a teenager but remember: teens don’t speak an entirely different language.

7) Learn by Reading

As with any genre, one of the best tools for perfecting your writing is to look to other writers as examples. Checking out successful writers of Teen/YA books will help you learn what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong, and even what your book may be missing. To help you get started, we’ve compiled a list of some of the top Teen/YA books from different decades throughout history. How many have you read?

The post Genre Focus: Teen and Young Adult appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.

Remember our dialogue exercise? If you haven’t completed that one yet, follow the link here because we’re going to use it again. If you need a refresher, here are the specs:

Setting: A small dive bar, midday on a Sunday afternoon. The bar is scarce, just a few patrons. There are two younger men who seem to know each other, but it appears everyone else came alone. Most of them are older men, in their early 50’s. The bartender is a relatively handsome young man in his early twenties.

Character One: A young man in his mid-twenties. He loves classic rock and country music, just graduated from a nearby college with a degree in Creative Writing, and he grew up in Texas.

Character Two: A young woman in her early twenties, currently attending a nearby college and aiming to graduate a semester early. She’s double-majoring in business and communications and her favorite shows are House of Cards and Grey’s Anatomy.

Character Three: A middle-aged man with a military history. He has a wife and two kids, grew up in the south, loves watching Sons of Anarchy and The Sopranos. He’s currently trying to quit smoking.

1) Select one of the scenes of dialogue that you’ve already written. Select one of the two characters in that scene and write the scene from that person’s point of view. Remember, think about how they’re perceiving what is said, what they see, etc. And don’t forget to also consider how the other person in this scene is reacting and feeling about what is said, what they see, etc.

2) Take that same scene and these same lines and rewrite the piece again from the other character’s point of view. Differentiate between the first perspective as much as possible. Create misunderstandings, missed opportunities, etc., so the reader can see a clear difference between how the first and second person felt about this conversation and why.

The post Writing Exercise: Point of View appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.

1. Pick an object that is ugly, and create a character who finds it very beautiful. Have the character describe the object in a way that convinces the reader of its beauty. Now write a second version where you choose a very beautiful object from the POV of a character who finds it ugly. Convince the readers that it’s ugly. For example, a character who finds an old running shoe beautiful or another who finds a sunset ugly. The way your character reacts to certain stimuli tells the reader a great deal about who they are and what makes them unique.

3. Describe a character’s bedroom in such a way that it tells us about a person’s greatest fears and hopes. For example, a character who has a college application on their desk and has a box under their bed labeled ‘KEEP OUT’. A person’s belongings can tell us a lot about them. What would your character have in their room?

4. Root through your desk drawer until you find a strange object- an object that would probably not be in other people’s drawers. Have a character who is devastated to find this object, and tell the story of why this object devastates them. For example, let’s say you have an old grocery list in your desk drawer. Maybe your character finds this and is devastated because it was written by his nanna who passed away a few months prior. Maybe the contents make him think of all the times his Nana made him those very foods. Objects can be a great way to bring back different emotions, foreshadow, or show guilt. This is your opportunity to play around with that!

5. Do some research online and choose a piece of art you’ve never seen before. Now imagine a living room inspired by that piece of artwork, and show the room after a husband and wife have had the worst fight of their marriage. Without specifically saying what happened in the room, use the objects to reveal why the room is in the state it’s in (for example, there’s a picture of the couple broken on the floor or the contents of the wife’s purse poured onto the ground).

SaveSave

The post Writing Exercises: Objects appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.

Even explaining the term Psychic Distance can be difficult because it’s a very specific concept. Think of your book like you’re making a movie. In a movie, your POV would be the perspective of the main character and tense would be the setting (I.E. time, date, location, etc). If your book was a movie, Psychic Distance would be how close and far away your ‘camera’ is from your protagonist.

Still confused? Let me give you an example. In a movie, it would be very jarring to go from an aerial shot of a city directly to a shot of a character’s eyes opening. Because of this, filmmakers use transition shots. They’ll show a specific building, followed by the inside of an apartment,  a wide shot of a character asleep in bed, and then the character’s eyes opening.

We’re meant to do this with writing as well.  Some writers will make the mistake of writing something along the lines of “The moon was full and yellow, looming over the dark green trees in the forest. Oh no. What did you get yourself into this time, Jules?”

See the problem? The transition from describing a scene to a strongly voiced character thought is extremely jarring. Readers need the same type of transition you would find in a film. Otherwise, you leave a reader confused and wondering, “Where is Jules? What is she doing? Why is she thinking this?” You need a transition to give purpose to the thought.

Try using these transition steps:

1) The moon was full and yellow, looming over the dark green trees in the forest.
2) The young woman finally stopped running and leaned over a nearby tree. Julie’s hands were shaking and she could taste the blood in her mouth.
3) She closed her eyes and rested her hand on her forehead, contemplating her own stupidity.
4) It was actually almost impressive that someone could be this incredibly stupid.
5) Oh no. What did you get yourself into this time, Jules?

Could you feel yourself zooming in on Jules that time? First, we have a wide shot of the scene. Next, we have an action shot to establish what Julie is doing and to even give the reader a hint of the current conflict. Then we get a little closer with an action leading us to the summation of a thought she’s having from a distant third person POV.

Possibly most importantly, we have the sentence, “It was actually almost impressive that someone could be this incredibly stupid.” This is the most important transition to have here because of the language. The language, “incredibly stupid,” is no longer information that the narrator is giving us about Julie. The narrator of the story doesn’t think Julie is incredibly stupid- Julie thinks this of herself. The narrator uses language coming directly from Julie (that isn’t quite a direct thought) as a tool to brace the reader to go into the mind of the character. And, finally, we’re physically in the mind of the protagonist. The transition is even smoother when you begin each sentence with what the previous ended with (I.E. a wide shot, an action, a thought). Then, transition to the next step by the end of that sentence.

Here’s a cheat on how to do it:

1) Wide shot of the scene.
1) Begin with a slightly closer shot of the character, end with a character action.
2) Begin with a character action, end with a distant third person thought.
3) Begin with a distant third person thought, end with an almost voiced thought.
4) Directly voiced thought.

Similar to a film, these transition shots in books are crucial. It’s the difference between leaving your readers engaged and leaving them scratching their heads. Psychic Distance is a crucial part of writing consistency, even if it does sound like your college roommate’s cover band.

The post Psychic Distance: What is it? appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.