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I’m beginning to think your debts are going to cost you more than your life.

Tracey Dyck 18 Comments
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I swapped writing dares/prompts with my brother many moons ago. What I gave him turned into a six-page sci-fi thing. (Neither of us knows how to write something short, apparently.)


Later on, he gave me a dare in the form of a piece of dialogue. I didn’t have time to use it then, but I finally sat down and splattered a scene across the page this week.


As is often the case with writing prompts, the idea ran away in my imagination to happily sequester itself in my brain’s File of Future Novels. As if I didn’t have enough to write already! The Brightest Thread, my four-book fantasy work-in-progress, other ideas that can claim more seniority in my File of Future Novels than this little dare, etc. Anyhow. The first line is my brother’s; the rest is what followed.

“I’m beginning
to think your debts are going to cost you more than your life.”
I paused,
playing card balanced between my index and middle fingers, and stared across
the tunnel at Shin. He stared back, almond eyes burning dark the way they
always did when he tried to sway me. I broke the gaze and laughed long and
loud. The sound rattled down the metal-ribbed tunnel, a hollow noise.
Hollow like me.
“You’re just now
catching on?” I chuckled. “My debts are such that I could not repay them with a
hundred lives.”
Shin folded his
leather-clad arms and raised his chin, as if waiting for me to admit my
foolishness or produce a brilliant plan to correct it.
In contrast, I
slouched lower against the tunnel’s curved wall opposite him, and turned my
attention back to the playing card, a king of spades. It flipped back and forth
crisply between my fingers. For a moment the only sound was the greyish stream
of water running down the middle of the tunnel to some far-off drain.
“Kai, you have
but one life like the rest of us. Or have you forgotten?” Shin’s burning eyes
cracked his calm demeanor like lava welling up through deep crevices to split
the earth. He jabbed a finger in my direction. “And if you don’t do something
to pull that life out of the gutter, you’re going to drown and drag all of us
with you!”
I folded the
card in thirds. “Relax, Shin. You say my debts will cost more than my life, and
I agree.” Quickly, I tore a small section out, then paused to grin wickedly.
“It will cost me the kingdom.”
Shin’s hands
fell to his sides. “You mean to say that after all you’re doing—dishonorably, I
might add!—to reclaim your throne, you’re just going to parcel up the kingdom
to satisfy your debts the minute you take the crown? You’ll gain nothing.”
“That’s exactly
what I’ll do.”
“Thunder smite
you, Kai!” Shin turned away and smacked a fist against the wall. The echoing
sound was denser than my laugh—it rang with substance.
“And you, my
friend, will help me do it.”
Shin cursed.
I stood, brushed
grit off my pants, and walked down the tunnel, leaving the torn card on the
ground.
“Where are you
going?” Shin shouted after me.
I chose not to
answer. He would follow eventually. He would see things my way, and then we
could go about assembling the resources I’d stirred up over the last eight
months. If we moved fast enough, I just might have something to appease the
Guild when they came knocking at my door. If not . . . well, Shin was right.
What I owed was more than I could pay, even if I were to spill every drop of
blood in my veins. Next time the Guild came collecting, I wouldn’t be able to
talk my way out.
Too many
borrowed coins rode on my shoulders, too many favors, too many lives.
I chanced a peek
over my shoulder and smiled. Shin stood in the trickle of water in the middle
of the tunnel. He stood perfectly still, staring at something in his hand—the
card I’d left.
The card with a
torn hole where the king of spade’s face should have been.
I clenched the
ripped out face in my own hand. It was time to take my rightful place. Thunder
smite me if I failed to do so.
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Unraveling a Mess of Threads

Tracey Dyck 15 Comments
Alternate Title: How I Survived the Editing Axe
As many of you may know, my writing time over the past couple months has been all-consumed by editing The Brightest Thread, my Five Magic Spindles entry. (You can learn more about the contest HERE. I’ve also posted snippets, as well as featured my heroine and villainess for Beautiful People.)
 
 
But I’ve yet to regale you with how the actual process went, aside from brief mentions here and there.

 
First things first: I finished!!!!! At long last, fueled by sheer grit and determination and Two Steps From Hell music (pardon the name), I cut my entry down to exactly 20,000 words. Excuse me while I collapse in relief. Actually no, I can’t collapse. I have a post to share with you. Ahem.

 
I could go into all kinds of detail about how I finally came up with the idea for the story, how I read the Grimm and Perault originals, how I considered various genres before circling back to fantasy . . . But that would take too long. And if there’s one thing this contest has taught me, it’s conciseness.

 
So we’ll skip the beginning stages of my writing process, and simply say that I decided to pants this thing (as in, write by the seat of my pants, with little to no plan), which is not my usual method. What an adventure! Half the time I hadn’t a clue where things were going, and the other half of the time, I had only the most basic directions to follow.
Maybe that’s why the first draft ended up at 29,934 words. A huge problem, considering that the contest rules state 20k is the limit.
I should’ve seen it coming. My first chapter was 3k. THREE THOUSAND WORDS. Practically a seventh of the story! By the time Prince Hadrian entered the scene, I was halfway to the word limit. By the time he was anywhere close to rescuing Luci, my goodness, I had long since waved goodbye to 20k.
About two months after starting, I finished the first draft in a rush of glory and panic, ecstatic over the story I’d just unspooled . . . and freaking out over the task before me. How in the world could I amputate a third of the story? How would the tale survive? How would I survive?
I let my obese novella sit for a week and half, during which time I bemoaned my existence and wished I could pluck Aleida’s wand from the pages and use it to increase the word limit. Even 25k would be a relief!
But alas, it was not to be. And my complaining, which I’m sorry to say continued into the editing process, did nothing to help. Heh. Let that be a lesson to all of you!
 

Anyway, on September 8th, I sat down at my desk, opened the document, steeled myself, and commenced editing.
Now, here is another lesson. Do not try editing anything before reading over it first. Yes, you just wrote the thing. Yes, those words came from your brain. But you do not know them that well. You have been busy planting trees, but before you can prune them you must step back and see the forest, the big picture. I know this. A read-over has always been my first pre-editing step. Until The Brightest Thread. And I can’t for the life of me figure out why I even dreamed of skipping this step. Things may have gone more smoothly if I hadn’t.
So as I said, I jumped right into editing with high ambitions. I hefted my sharpened axe and attacked chapter 1.
And snipped off a teensy tiny few hundred words. “Well,” I said to myself. “That’s because this first chapter includes so much important setup. Surely the following chapters carry more fluff I can cull.”
Ha. Wrong.
In the name of conciseness again, I shall sum up that first miserable editing pass like this: my efforts only managed to get rid of about 3k words. Oh joy, oh bliss.
I then decided to lay down that ineffective axe and read over my existing material, something I should have done in the first place. Getting a bird’s-eye view of the story was helpful, but my next pass was still hard. I worked on it in a nonlinear fashion, combing over and over and over certain parts that I absolutely knew had the potential to shrink. I skipped from one spot to the other, targeting the easiest areas first and working my way to the grit-my-teeth-and-sacrifice-the-gorgeous-words areas. And when I thought I’d trimmed off all I could, I went back and shaved off more.
My techniques? Why, I’m so glad you asked! See, I’m not just rambling on about myself here. I really do want to offer you some nuggets of wisdom so that you have some tools next time your work falls under the knife.
  • Streamline. Streamline everything. Get that conversation right to the point. Put the characters where they need to be so that you don’t spend paragraphs moving them there. Every single scene must carry its weight.
  • Speaking of conversations (ha, see what I did there? No? Just me? Okay, never mind) . . . Ahem. Speaking of conversations, take a giant machete to your dialogue. Brevity is the soul of wit. Your dialogue might sparkle. It might amuse. It might snap with fiery spirit. But if it’s not serving to move the story along, it’s baggage. You can also use less speaker tags in favor of better action beats if that helps.
  • Attack the descriptions. You’d be surprised how many blanks a reader will fill in his or her imagination. Instead of spending a long paragraph describing the weather or a room or a person, pick one description that will pack a punch. Choose the most vivid, or the most necessary. All else must go.
  • Make a list of your scenes if you haven’t already. Having every piece of the story laid out made it much easier to see what was on the table, like having a map on which to mark out a battle plan. I even went so far as to write down the purpose of each scene. This helped me center each one around it’s reason for existence, thus trimming extra fluff.
  • Minor characters. Which ones are actually necessary? I needed that guard because he provided an important revelation for Luci, my heroine. But I didn’t need that oblivious elderly maid. She no longer exists. Poor Meris. Or another example: I needed at least one minor character to illustrate an important change in Luci’s circumstances, but the scene held two or three. I shortened the laughs (it was an amusing scene, and one of my favorites) by keeping it down to one minor character. You can also combine characters if possible. I did this once.
  • Subplots. Again, what can you afford to cut? Yes, they may be delicious twists, but if you can simplify or get rid of them, it goes a long way. I sacrificed at least one subplot concerning the villainess.
  • Enter your scene late and leave it early. Does the scene take half a page to get to the meat, the really interesting part? Start right there. Forget the intro. And make sure you end off sooner rather than later, at a place that will make the reader want to keep going. This piece of advice was huge for me!
  • Look for unnecessary words and banish them to the abyss. There’s nothing wrong with adverbs, but when every word counts, a punchier verb is often the better choice. “Whispered” is shorter than “said softly.” “Trembling” is shorter than “nervously twitching.” I Googled lists of unnecessary words and searched my manuscript for them. I was able to sluice off hundreds in one afternoon. Some examples of unneeded words or phrases are: could, start/started to, began/began to, that, then, somewhat, somehow, really, completely, very, say, all, just.

Some of this I simply realized myself. The point about starting late and leaving early I picked up from an article on Go Teen Writers. The entire post was helpful. And a couple more were given me by Rachel Heffington @ The Inkpen Authoress. (I discovered that her entry for Five Glass Slippers two years ago had been about as oversized as mine to begin with . . . yet she managed to trim it down, AND she won a place in the collection. Inspired by her success, I emailed her asking for advice, which she graciously offered. The advice about dialogue and description were largely from her.)

Because graphs are fun, and because graphs relating to wordcount data are even more fun, I made some!

This one displays my first draft wordcount as it went up to almost 30k.

And this one displays my cutting progress, as I shaved 10k excess down to zero. It was pretty intense at the end there. The last week or two, on every spare day or half-day off, I holed up in my room to work on cutting. Some days I put in as many hours as a full shift at work, emerging bleary eyed to update my family on progress.

I suppose that saying I went at it with an axe is inaccurate, because as hard as I tried to cut away entire scenes . . . I guess I’m too good at pacing? Most of the scenes were actually necessary. And trust me, I reassessed and reassessed many times to be sure. So I compressed like crazy. I think I vacuum-packed the story. I didn’t hack; I whittled. Oh, and I wasn’t just cutting: I edited too. Some of the corrections required adding words rather than subtracting.

Now I hope that what’s left is a pithy story, rich despite its brevity–not a sack of story bones with no meat left on them. I really hope I haven’t sucked it dry.

You can see how crazy the final sprint was: on October 26th, I started with 899 excess words remaining, and shrank it 54 excess words. Only 54! I would’ve wrapped it up right then and there, but at that point it was late, and I needed to sleep for work the next day. Oh, did that bite! I wanted so badly to be done. But I woke up early and managed to finish before heading out. Woohoo!

And now . . . Now the cutting is finished. I succeeded. I can hardly believe it. Every other step of the way was full of doubt. I even considered not entering the contest at all, for the sake of preserving my story. But I still have the old drafts, and if I don’t win this year, I’ll be more than happy to re-expand The Brightest Thread. There’s so much I didn’t get to explore, even in the chubby first draft.

For now, though, all that’s left is to read it over a few times to make sure it’s polished to the best of my ability, and then it gets sent to the judges!

But questers! My faithful blogglings! I FINISHED! Hallelujah!

And you have finished reading this lengthy post. So much for being concise, eh? Go on: share your own tips for shrinking stories. I’d love to hear them!

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Six (Mostly Odd) Tips for Making Up Names

Tracey Dyck 12 Comments

PREAMBLE: Before I created this blog, I had visions of regularly posting writing tips. I love soaking up more knowledge about the writing craft, and I’ve learned some things on my own journey that I want to share at some point. And here we are, with a six-month old blog, and there is not one writing advice post to be found. Today that changes!

~*~

Have you ever met a character with a name that is perfectly, utterly their own? A name that fits their soul, be it black and twisted, or good and true? A name that adds just the right flavor to the mix of personality traits and quirks and mannerisms? A name that you cannot encounter anywhere else without calling to mind that specific person?

Aslan. Frodo. Bartholomew Thorne. Katniss Everdeen. Wizard Fenworth. Sir Eanrin. Sherlock Holmes. Dustfinger. Eugene Fitzherbert. Halt. Marsuvees Black. Tris Prior. Scout. Clefspeare. Mary Poppins. Huckleberry Finn. Cinderella. Ebenezer Scrooge.

And places: Narnia, Parumvir, Dol Guldur, Araluen, Inkworld, Oz, Panem . . .

None of these people or places would be the same without the name that means them.

Have you ever struggled to conjure that Perfect Name for your own place or character? I have, many times. Specifically in fantasy, when you have the opportunity to make up words, thinking of a good name can be hard, and sometimes the keyboard smash just doesn’t work. Calling someone Lsyiutypaosk gets tiresome!

My methods of name-creation are a tad unconventional. I’m not promising they’ll produce something as legendary as any of the previously mentioned names, but perhaps you’ll find something new to try next time good old Anonymous needs a title.

(Just a clarification: most of these methods work best for fantasy/sci-fi.)

1. Baby name books/websites

Buy a book of baby names or look up baby naming sites online. Many provide name origins and meanings, which can be very helpful. If you know your character has, say, Japanese blood, you can search for Japanese names. I did this with Emi of Blood Rose, my Beauty and the Beast retelling. The best part is that Emi means beauty . . . perfect for the Beauty character, right?

Other examples of mine include:

  • Aileen // light
  • Josiah // fervent fire of God
  • Demetria (nation) // abundant and plentiful
  • Leander // lion man

Even if the origin and meaning don’t matter to you, just having long lists of names to read can give you more ideas than you could ever use.

Sarah @ Sarah, Plain & Average has a series of posts called What’s in a Name? in which she showcases names along with their pronunciation, origin, and meaning; and she includes a picture to go with it. (Great character inspiration! Go check it out!)

2. Etymology of words

This one is odd. Go to the dictionary (I prefer a physical one). Look up words that have to do with the character you’re naming. Read the etymology of the word, and see if any of those strange word-ghosts strike your fancy. Sometimes you’ll have more luck flipping through for random words and their etymologies, and using that.

For instance, my world of Alewar needed fantastical names for months of the year. For January, I looked up cold and found this before the definition:

cold ‘kōld adj [ME, fr. OE ceald, cald; akin to OHG kalt cold, L gelu frost, gelare to freeze]

My thought process: So I could use that Old English ceald or cald . . . but nah, I don’t like the sound of that. Old High German’s kalt? Nope, too guttural. Gelu from Latin? Meh . . . But gelare, that sounds fantasy-ish to me. I could use that. And thus January in Alewar is called Gelare. It doesn’t matter if readers never find out the meaning behind it. I know.

Another example: I wanted the dragons in Alewar to have polite forms of address amongst each other. Ma’am and sir are much too human, so I set about creating different words. Rather than distinguish each other by gender, the dragons emphasize one another’s breath. (FYI, they breathe either fire, water, or ice.) Here’s what I did for the fire dragons:

coal ‘kōl n, often attrib [ME col, fr. OE; akin to OHG & ON kol burning ember, IrGael gual coal]

The one that stuck out to me was kol–not only is it short, but it looks good and it’s pronounced (in my mind, anyway) exactly like coal, making it easy for readers to associate it with fire dragons.

3. Translation

Similar to #2, this method takes words that (ideally) mean something about your character, and translates it into other languages until you find something that clicks. Google Translate makes this really easy.

For a race of lizard-like creatures in Alewar, I think I looked up contradict in other languages, and found econtra. (It may have been Spanish. I don’t know; it was a long time ago.) Contradict wasn’t my first choice of word, but methods like these often find me deviating from my original search. I probably looked up evil, antagonist, and opponent first; didn’t find anything I liked; and moved on to synonyms, and synonyms of synonyms. All that matters is that I found a word that worked. The econtra serpents are now a major part of book 1.

More recently I was helping Christine rename one of her characters, a beautiful fae creature who haunts a castle. Naturally, one of the first words I translated was fairy. Because her story had a fairy tale setting, I tried languages like Welsh and Icelandic. The first yielded a mouthful: tylwyth teg. The second resulted in another mouthful: ævintýri. I suggested fiddling with it, making it Aevin or Vintyri. Christine appreciated the suggestions, but wound up finding a softer-sounding name, which fit her character much better. . . . And I took Vyntyri (with a slight spelling change) for myself.

4. Word scrambling

Less complicated and a lot more random than the previous methods is good old word scrambling! Whether you pick a word at random, or select one more deliberately, all you do is play around with the letters. Let’s say you’re naming an elven princess–you may want to fiddle with soft, melodic words. Or if it’s a villain, find harsh, dark words to cut up and put back together.

Examples from my writing: A city called Mevon came from the first part of November spelled backwards. The nation of Klandess is really clandestine with a few alterations. A character named Sir Neves Ember got his first name from seven spelled backwards. Creatures called xenyls are from scrambled letters of lynx, with an added E to make it pronounceable.

Take a few letters from one word and a syllable from another and see what happens! Spell something backwards. Scramble the letters. Sometimes it just doesn’t work, but other times it yields exactly what you need.

5. Plain old creativity

You are a writer. You are a creative being. Sometimes when you need a name, you just have to make it up.

Try to keep it pronounceable. Don’t be too complicated. Lots of vowels may look like a beautiful Tolkien-elf name, but show it to some friends first and see if they can say it correctly. Likewise, too many consonants can drag the name into gibberish territory. Apostrophes within a name . . . use with moderation, please.

Be wild. Be creative. But in the end, make sure the name works, and make sure we can say it. I include a pronunciation guide in my WIP fantasy series, but my hope is that readers (I’m talking about the nerdy sort like me that actually care to know the right way to say a made-up word!) won’t need to refer to it over and over again.

6. Keyboard smash
When all else fails . . . pound the keyboard and see what you can salvage! If nothing else, it gives you an outlet for that authorial frustration.
~*~
How do you come up with names for characters, locations, or objects? Do any of these methods appeal to you?
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Landon // a writing dare

Tracey Dyck 8 Comments

As I am still without internet access (let’s have a toast to post scheduling, shall we?), here’s a little more entertainment for you. In the spirit of the snippets I posted last week, I’ve decided to share a fuller piece of writing, but not of Sleeping Beauty. That one’s for a contest, you know–I can’t tell you everything!

What you will be reading is the result of a writing dare shared among my online group of writing buddies (affectionately referred to as the Pack) . . . This picture was sent out, and a few of us chose to write something based off of it. I was one of them. And the fragment of story that spilled from my fingertips has since latched onto my brain. Even now, over three months later, it’s still there. Percolating, I suppose–the stories I label “Wait” tend to sink into my subconscious and steep quietly. One of these days, with or without my permission, this little coffeepot will float back to the surface and demand to be made into a full-fledged novel.

But for now it’s still a tiny scoop of coffee beans, not even ground up yet. Probably not even roasted. So. Without further ado, the dare–which, contrary to my description, has nothing at all to do with coffee:

Landon awoke
with his face wet and damp leaching into his clothes.
He cracked open
his eyes, but the grey daylight sent a wave of pain rolling through his head. Where
am I? The surface beneath him was hard and unyielding, gritty with tiny
pebbles. Pavement. His left hand skimmed through a shallow puddle on the way to
his face. Shielding his eyes, he tried opening them again. This time the light
was more bearable.
Overhead, grey
clouds rushed by, scattering only a sporadic drizzle. Landon, still caught in
the muzzy half-realm of waking, watched them for a while and thought of nothing.
But the damp
pavement soon grew uncomfortable. Finally he stirred, and realized his right
fingers were clenched around something. He looked over at his hand. A scrap of
paper. Rather than being damp and wrinkled from the rain, it was smooth and
dry. A single word was scrawled across it: Arcus.
Something whined
at the edge of hearing range, almost more of a thought than a real sound.
Landon sat up. Why
am I on the street? My street? Yes, it was his street. There was his house
on the left, bordered with the riot of flowers that Mom tended every summer.
There was the birch tree in the yard—
Wait.
The tree lay
across the front lawn, jumble of roots exposed. Uprooted.
“What’s going
on?” Landon muttered. He scrambled to his bare feet. This is weird.
He scanned the
neighborhood. No one in sight. Every window dark. All was quiet, still.
Empty.
Panic jolted down
his spine. “Hello?” he called. “Hello?” Stuffing the paper in his jeans pocket,
he stumbled across the street toward his house. “Mom, are you home?”
What had
happened? Landon stopped at the fallen tree and just stared. There was
something . . . something terribly wrong. Memories struggled to return,
as if being pulled out of a slurping, grasping muck. He’d been inside, doing .
. . nothing, right? Doing nothing, or maybe sketching, and then . . .
Landon kicked
the birch trunk in frustration, and pain flashed up his bare toes. He growled. Something
had happened. Someone had knocked on the door or the phone rang. There was some
sort of interruption. Mom had been in the backyard, filling the birdfeeder, so
Landon had answered the door—or the phone—and then . . . The rest was a blank
haze.
He bolted to
porch and yanked the front door open. “Mom?” His foot brushed something.
Next to the
welcome mat lay a black-shafted arrow.
He snatched it
up. Brown fletchings, like bird feathers on one end; a roughly-made arrowhead
on the other. That barely-perceptible whine buzzed in his ears again.
Landon was about
to charge into the house to look for Mom when a voice from behind broke the
silence.
“Landon!”
He turned. A
girl ran down the street, dark hair streaming behind her. She raced up his
driveway and onto the porch, then threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, Landon,
you’re alive!”
He pushed her
off. “Who are you?”
The wide blue
eyes searching his face, the freckles dusting her cheeks, the lips parted in
surprise—and now trembling—none of it was familiar. A laughing sob burst out of
her. “I—I’m Skylar.”
He stared
uncomprehendingly.
She seemed to
wilt, like a flower with its petals curling inward. “Your girlfriend.”
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