Rewrite This Sentence

Just as doctors sometimes make the worst patients, authors sometimes make the worst editors of their own work. Yes, there are certain mandatory principles a good writer has engrained in their craft, but few are completely innocent of infractions, and I'm not talking about grammar. I'm talking about the "awkward sentence."

As all writers know, writing a good sentence is more than stringing together words in a technically accurate manner. Of greater importance is voice, that siren song of the metaphysical mermaid, that illusive element that pulls the reader in. Without voice a story is just an inanimate instrument that nobody wants to play.

Voice often comes from a little rule-breaking, the author's preogative to use a bit of creative license, but where does one draw the line? Sometimes this creative license weighs in a bit heavy with the use of words that, yes, might be as the character would speak, but if that character's awkward sentence trips up the reader, it will wake them up from the magic spell the author has thus far cast in his story-telling.

Even a well-known author can be guilty of this. I've chosen an example from a book recently published by an NAL imprint of the Penguin Group. (I don't wish to cite the work or author, because otherwise he's magnificent and I wouldn't want him to think I was picking on him.) The sentence certainly conveys a thought, but to me, even a mermaid who adores maelstroms and wild streams of consciousness, this sentence formation is a little too chaotic. It tripped me up just as I was starting to enjoy the story. The real killer is the repetitive "one" and too many words ending with s too close together.

What do you think? How would you rewrite the following sentence?

"Every one of these choices one of my humans makes requires a reassessment of his or her future."

Writing Fiction From Experience - Write Every Day!

by Lee Libro
Author of Swimming With Wings

Does one have to be old and well-seasoned in order to write good fiction? No, there are thousands of young authors demonstrating otherwise on a daily basis. In my case, however, it took several years for me to develop the craft, because I felt I needed life's experience from which to draw.

When I first started writing, I was very young and had no life experience, which I felt would provide me with the content needed for a good story. Without time to have reflected upon what experience I had thus far accrued, I felt this placed me at a great disadvantage in the world of writing fiction. Though I felt compelled by a theme or a glimpse of a character, these were often fleeting. Content and continuity slipped away like sand.  I struggled to find good solid building blocks to complete a story.

What I learned was that grammatical expertise and storycrafting are two completely different animals. It doesn't matter how old you are if you can master both. I had the creative vision and technical expertise to write, but my first attempts at the craft felt hollow and unwieldy. Even though my life was indeed filling up with experience, putting all the bricks into place needed mortar to make it stick. I learned that translating an idea into fiction would also take reflection and a good dose of relaxation in order to let it go and make something new, breathing a life of its own.

One needs several building blocks to successfully craft a story, not just experience from which to draw content. After all, what is content without accurate grammar, themes, voice, dialogue, plot and pace. I didn't consider myself a true writer until I fully understood the roles of each of these. However, even with these building blocks, a piece of fiction is dry and unstable without mortar, or magic (as I often refer to in my blog, http://www.literary-magic.com/). Most often referred to as voice, theme or the figurative, this magic is essential in the art of storytelling.

At the ripe age of 50, I finally made the leap from short story writing to writing a novel. As the mother of five children and a supporter of spiritual diversity, I wrote Swimming With Wings, an expression of the soul-seeking, gypsy-like route many take to find connection, and also the way to make sense of religious conflict in our world. Though the story is not strictly a romance, it tells the story of love between a religious fanatic from the era of the 1970's televangelists and a new age, free spirit, and is aimed at readers who find religion all too intolerant and structured, especially as they grow to find connection through the less dogmatic arenas of spirituality. These were all topics I grappled with up until my 20’s, and also as I took on the responsibility of raising other human beings, my interpretation of humanity became clearer.

Though Swimming With Wings was born from my experience, it is purely fictional. The novel evolved from my short story, “The Resurrection of Marcia Mueller” because the idea deserved a much deeper story arc. However, despite knowing this, it was written in a very organic manner. I started with a loose synopsis, which I believe allowed for greater creativity as I wrote. My only fixed points were character based, except for the beginning and ending events. So in essence, I let these characters loose in a world launched by the effects of the tragic drowning of Lark and Peter’s fathers and set them off on a journey to reach the final scene. With the secondary characters, such as Peter’s grandfather, the mystic light healer, I interwove stories from the past as a backdrop to compare and contrast with what was occurring in the present.

As I wrote, I constantly reassessed the plot logic and consistency of details and because I’m also an artist and am visually oriented, I laid out key points in the plot on large color-coded sticky notes on a big storyboard that I could easily rearrange. The dual timelines made this especially tricky. Giving the story life required the right pace and proper interlocking of the present with the past.

People have asked me if the story was based on any of my own experiences, and while I would say that many of the elements are directly drawn from my life, the story is completely separate from my own. I’ve known people in my life who share characteristics with my characters, even the natural mystic, Salvatore Roma, who “could raise the dead: birds, squirrels, mice,” as he’s introduced in the first line of the story.

After the long journey to write my novel, I now look back and think I wasted a lot of years waiting for life experience to accrue before I could write good fiction, when really the real key is just to dig in. That's where the real experience lies. The true experience needed is in the writing! So write every day!

Title: Swimming with Wings

Author: Lee Libro

Brief Synopsis:  Lark Jennison is a free thinker and imagines she has wings! What does she have in common with a light healer who can raise the dead and the suspected gypsy-turned-evangelist who share her hometown? A story of human brotherhood released only through the colliding dogmas surrounding their shared tragedy from long ago. Through this coming of age love story and the solving of a mystery, a cast of soul seekers ultimately tells the story of brotherhood and the forces that shape belief.


Genre/ Description : Literary Fiction/ New Age /Romance

Paperback - 277 pp

ISBN: 9781450580434


Available at:


AMAZON  , also in Kindle format

Barnes and Noble

Powell's Books


or at any library or bookstore in the U.S.A.

Query Rejections - Life of Pie

Here's a great analysis of one agent's reasons for rejecting queries. The mermaid especially finds the pie chart exciting. As you may know, we sea creatures, frequently navigate by sonic cues, but visual ones are equally helpful.

Life of Pie

Writer's Contest - The Fulton Prize for Short Story Writing

Adding a new contest to my writer's contest page today. Sharpen your pencils all you short story writer's!

The Fulton Prize

Hosted by: The Adirondack Review

Prize: $400 and publication in the review.

Guidelines: Unpublished short stories up to 10,000 words in length. Submission via e-mail.

Deadline: July 31, 2011

Entry Fee: Entry fee is $10.00 for one story, $15.00 for two stories, and $20.00 for three stories.

Details and PayPal Link:The Fulton Prize for Short Stories

Why do you write fiction?

I get that question on nearly every interview and because it seems a simple one, I always feel the need to provide a simple answer. On recent interviews, including My Twitterview that only allowed the usual tweet length of 140 characters, I've found myself responding quite bluntly with "I write because I want to" or "I write because I can." On the other extreme, given a bit more free reign, I answered with what I thought might approximate the profound sense I get when writing, "I write because my internal world of ideas and characters slosh up against the floodgates of my mind and the pen or keyboard is their release." Now there's an answer that would make anyone think that my writing is a bad case of incontinence or a mental disease. So why do I write? I write in order to exercise my potential and feel connected.

To form words into sentences one after the other certainly one must adhere to mechanical rules, but even with them all polished, spitshine-edited and impeccably correct English, there's an ephemeral element in writing that can't be gauged by grammatical science. Words can be like dutiful soldiers conveying thoughts precisely, but unless they have soul, that magic that somehow, like osmosis, wells up from your creativity and quietly seeps in between the lines as you write, well then the connection falls short of its potential. I write because I'm compelled to convey that literary magic, the full bloom of my internal vision.

Tell me ...why do you write?

The Quantum Physics of Writing

So you're writing a novel and the chapters are readily flowing from your stream of consciousness to the page, (maybe even with a little help from the Metaphysical Mermaid.) Maybe you have an outline, whether mentally drawn or mapped out methodically on paper. You've developed your characters, defined your plot, have a firm idea of your theme and the conflicts to be resolved.  You may use very specific tools for story development, or like E.L. Doctorow, you may approach it as if,  "It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." Regardless of how your writing takes place, there is an essential principle at work in all the best books and that is what I call the quantum physics of writing. 

While not all writers use the same process and not all writing is produced methodically, every good story has a core from which all other story elements derive. Just as it's theorized in quantum physics that the universe is held in a grain of sand, that every subatomic particle is a microcosm of the whole, like a fractal, so too are the best novels developed with elements that contain or repeat in some aspect, a reflection of the core message of your novel.

The core may also be referred to as the theme, i.e, the central insight that the author offers the reader. But theme doesn't just appear in a single sentence or a literal explanation in any one chapter. The thematic core emanates throughout the story advancing alongside both character and plot development. In the most powerful stories it is everpresent and demonstrated in the greatest number of elements in the story while relating them to one another. Sound anything like quantum physics now? Theme is both a particle and a wave, both element and substance.

When a book conveys to the reader a powerful message that lingers well after the last page it is most likely achieved by a writer who has mastered the art of seamless construction, connecting all the elements, character, plot, theme, dialogue, etc. The bonding agent or thread, so to speak, is the quantum principle of writing.  

In line with the quantum principle of writing, is the snowflake model of writing, which teaches that story development grows from a magnification or echo of the central idea of your story. This method guides you through the process of breaking your story down into a basic unit and then building up on that unit by structuring parts that extend from it. Yet even this method, if not coupled with the quantum principle of writing will produce a story somehow disjointed in the end.


So how does one achieve mastery of this quantum physics of writing? Is it a conscious process or is it spontaneous? How does one grow the perfect microcosmic story with the quantum particle seeded in every element?

The quantum principle of writing is not something that can be taught. I believe it comes through your story organically, but this is not to say there aren't ways you can improve your writing based on my analogy of this ephemeral talent. Simply by becoming aware of just a few key indicators of the quantum principle at work, you can strengthen your ability to harness it and create the seamless impact that makes a story powerful.

Below are just a few prime ways that writers harness the quantum principle of writing and achieve what I call Quantum Impact:

Ending chapters with a closing beat. When a chapter ends it should strike a balance between ending the action thus far without interrupting the narrative arc too forcefully. The reader should get a sense of a closing beat. A closing beat is a minor reflection of the overall story arc, as if the chapter is unto itself a smaller story. Yet it presents this closing beat while providing a reason to proceed to the next chapter.

The use of lexicon or consistency in language to evoke mood. A dark mystery or thriller will be written with straight-to-the-point dialogue and language. Romance will use description with soft, sensual words. The lexicon of language helps set tone and atmosphere so, for example, if you are trying to develop a scary scene, light conversation or jokes will detract from it. If creating sadness, word choice should call to mind the colors and tones of melancholy, a slower heartbeat. Any digression from the mood and you'll lose your reader.

Providing consistency in character behavior. Believability is the key to creating characters that readers will care about. Delivering the quantum impact of the story often comes most directly from the inner dynamics of a character, but in order for personality to ring true, the history, wants, desires, fears, job, relationships of the character must be consistent with the overall make-up of the character. A good source for understanding temperament classifications is Please Understand Me by David Keirsey.

These are but a few examples appearing in my book,  The Quantum Principle of Writing, a work in progress. 

Plot Versus Character by Jeff Gerke

In a recent blog hop, bloggers were asked, as readers, what was more important in a story, character or plot. Most of the bloggers' answers were that they preferred a character-driven story over a plot driven story, reasoning that the outcome, that is, finishing the book, is insignificant if they don't care about the characters in the story.

All novels are built on both character and plot. Surely no good novel can stand strictly on one or the other. As a writer, the question you should ask yourself is, which stands out more clearly, character or plot, and in so doing does it strengthen the story, or does the predominance of one create neglect for the other. Striking a balance is the key to good writing.

A character-driven story propells the reader through the story by creating a bonding process between the reader and the character. While all stories have a character or characters in them, all stories are not primarily driven by their characters. Writers who lean more towards writing the character-driven story know that characters provide a palpable sense of the "world" they've created by connecting with the reader through empathy or aversion.  Such strong emotional ties to the character keep the reader engrossed in the story, but if the character doesn't have strong motives and direction, the novel will lack tension and tend to be somewhat boring.

A plot driven story keeps you on the edge of your seat with perfect pacing and a clearcut direction using cause, effect and poetic justice. For example, mysteries and thrillers enthrall the reader with a set of twists and turns, spellbinding them to proceed through a series of passages until the final puzzle is pieced together. One may care deeply about the outcome, but without a sense of real characters, the reader may feel a bit cheated. Cardboard characters proceeding through the obstacle course of your plot won't remain indelible in their minds.

Again, the real question is not so much which is more important in a story, but what kind of writer are you, a plot writer or a character writer. Bravo if you've mastered one or the other. But how do you develop the one that is not your forte?

Jeff Gerke's book Plot Versus Character is a no nonsense guide to help writers to recognize on which side their strength lies and implement tools with which to balance both plot and character development.

If your strong suit is creating characters and you want to gain an edge in your plot writing, Gerke offers clear-cut exercises on how to do so. If you already know how to write gripping plots, but are weak in character development, this book will show you how to seed elements into your characters' makeup so that plot and character intertwine seamlessly. You'll soon find both plot and character popping from the page.

Either way, whether you think you are strong in plot or character development, you'll find all new lenses with which to analyze your writing, and you'll find a whole new level of expertise just waiting for you to unlock.

While there are many books and essays written on plot and character development, I haven't come across any other that encapsulate the process more concisely and offer applicable examples, exercises and no-nonsense approaches. Jeff Gerke's Plot Versus Character is a must read for writers whether you are already published or aspiring to write that first novel. Available at all bookstores and online book-buying sites.