In Today’s Journal
* Flip-Flop
* Professional Critiques
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Flip-Flop
I didn’t plan to do this but I’m flip-flopping on my mentorship offer. I recently offered mentorships to all comers, but I’m rescinding that offer and closing down the mentorships again.
Those currently in a mentorship can continue as long as they want, but I’m not taking on any new mentorship students.
Why?
Because as I was answering one student’s questions yesterday, it dawned on me that I really miss teaching live seminars and mentoring students one-on-one in person.
Teaching live is interactive.
In a classroom or sitting across from a student, I can read a facial expression and immediately offer a second or third explanation to be sure the student ‘gets it’. The student gets a lot more information more quickly and without so much confusion.
Via email, there are no facial expressions to read. So if the student doesn’t tell me he or she’s confused, I have no way of knowing. Some do, and some don’t. I can still offer up second and third explanations if necessary, but the time delay is a killer.
While I’m typing a response, the student’s likely to have moved on to another question. Or maybe I’ll offer a response, and the student reads it and then comes back with new information about the original question, which of course would have changed the response had I known.
Unfortunately, health issues preclude me firing up the live seminars again, and most of you couldn’t attend anyway owing to distance.
But I still want to teach specifics of Craft. The only way to do that is to offer critiques on craft in your particular story or novel.
For example, what your specific story or novel opening needs in order to draw the reader into the story. Or how to use bits of narration to enhance the flow of dialogue. Or how to intersperse the POV character’s unspoken thoughts (internal monologue) with the narrative and or dialogue.
By and large, I’ve already done much of that in general terms in Writing Better Fiction and in TNDJ and in some other writings, but that might or might not help with your specific opening or passage of dialogue.
In teaching any of those or other craft topics I don’t want to teach how I would have written a passage of dialogue or the opening in your story. In other words, I don’t want to directly manipulate you.
Instead, through comments re what works and what doesn’t in your manuscript I want to teach you how to directly manipulate the reader.
Does that make sense?
Professional Critiques
As an alternative to mentorships, I will still offer professional critiques of openings (arguably the most important aspect of your story or novel) and/or passages of dialogue and other specific craft areas.
I’ll provide detailed comments on why your opening works or doesn’t work to pull me (the reader) into a story or novel. Same with other aspects of craft: why it works or doesn’t work.
I suspect a critique of your story or novel opening or other craft areas would probably be more helpful to most of you than an ongoing mentorship anyway.
I’m pretty good at writing openings for novels, novellas, chapters, scenes, and short stories, having written something north of 8,000 of them over the past 9 years.
(I estimate at least 60 openings per novel, at least 20 per novella, and at least two for each short story. After all, every novel, novella, story, chapter, and scene has to have a good opening.)
As I was telling a student via email yesterday,
The purpose of the opening is to invite the reader into the story (or chapter or scene).
To that end, Taking The Time necessary to enable the reader to see, hear, smell, taste and feel—physically and emotionally—what the POV character is experiencing in the opening of the novel or story or chapter or scene is what gives the reader that intimate connection with the character.
Working in concert with that connection to the character and what s/he’s experiencing, the description of the setting grounds the reader in the physical place (and in the scene) with the character.
And while I’m on the topic of openings, re the old argument about “too much or too little” description, here’s an easy rule of thumb. I’ve said this many times before:
- All description must come through the POV character’s physical and emotional senses. None of it should come from the author’s conscious-mind thought process.
- If you include what’s important to the POV character (so what he gives you and therefore wants the reader to know), you can’t (and won’t) put in too much or too little description.
- Anything you (the writer) ‘think’ should or shouldn’t be there is always too much or too little description. In other words, if the character gives it to you but it remains in your head and doesn’t make it onto the page, that’s too little.
For a thorough opening (or other) critique,
I’ll charge $20, payable in advance through PayPal at harveystanbrough@gmail.com.
Again, my purpose isn’t to tell you how I would have written your story, but if it seems appropriate I might provide a separate example from my own writing to show you what I did in my POV character’s own story.
Also, if I read your opening (or whatever) and think it works as-is so I don’t really have much to say about it, I’ll refund your $20. You aren’t paying me to read; you’re paying me to teach through critique.
Here’s a Free Tip
Remember that the opening—whether of a story or novel or chapter or scene—should include a great hook and then all (or some, in a chapter opening) of the stuff I talk about above.
One of my mentorship students wrote an absolutely excellent hook recently in her novel opening. It was a short, terse, electric sentence that would immediately grab the reader’s interest, introduce tension, and transport the reader to a particular time in history: Senator McCarthy was on a rampage.
But that wonderful hook was buried several paragraphs down in the first page.
(Full disclosure, the student later told me that was a character’s thought and he didn’t feel threatened by McCarthy. The comment was more tongue-in-cheek. Ah, new information.)
Still, if you can’t seem to find the hook for your story, sometimes you might only need to read down a little. You might have inserted it later in the story without realizing it was the hook.
I hope this wasn’t as horribly confusing as it sounded to me while I was writing it.
Questions about anything above or anything to do with writing or epublishing fiction? Email me at harveystanbrough@gmail.com.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
Examples R’Us A GREAT post.
5 Rules to Keep Writers Sane on Their Creative Journey Another great post.
The Numbers
The Journal………………….. 1160
Mentorship Words…………….. 410
Total Nonfiction…………………. 1570
Writing of Blackwell Ops 53: Jack Striker | The Next Level
Day 1…… 2035 words. To date………… 2035
Day 2…… 2217 words. To date………… 4252
Fiction for December……………………… 4252
Fiction for 2025…………………………… 758899
Nonfiction for December.………………… 7450
Nonfiction for 2025………………..……… 272580
2025 consumable words………………… 1023910
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 18
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 36
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 122
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 310
Short story collections……………………. 29