Norman Maclean's dream come true.

Yesterday, the Pulitzer* committee decided (for the first time since 1977) not to award a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I'm not on the committee and can't speak to the decision, but a lot of other book people have used the occasion to commemorate some of the terrific novels that were published in 2011. I'd love to hear your suggestions, of any genre, in the comments.

Norman Maclean was snubbed by the Pulitzer committee in 1977 for A River Runs Through It. Despite being passed over for the award, though, Maclean got to live out what I think is many, many writers' dream. Maclean himself described it as "Probably the only dream I ever had in life that came completely true."

Go here, to the always-worthwhile Letters of Note blog, to see for yourself-- but you might want to queue up the Cee-Lo Green first. (Cee-Lo is NSFW.)

(*A pet peeve of mine: it's pronounced "PULL-litzer," not "PEW-litzer.")

Write the hard parts.

SPOILER ALERT, if you're not caught up on the following:

Bones (TV)

Mad Men (TV)

Brilliant advice from my SJGA colleague Lindsay Ribar, whose debut YA novel The Art of Wishing will be published by Dial Books for Young Readers next year.

As a friend of mine noted after seeing Lindsay's tweet, we've all experienced this from the reader's or fan's perspective: it's immensely frustrating, as a fan, when a longed-for moment between characters happens "offstage." My friend singled out the TV show Bones, which finally hooked up the two protagonists after SIX SEASONS, but didn't tell the audience for several episodes that the long-awaited hook-up had in fact happened. Why would you, as a creator, do this to your most loyal fans?

Here's another example: on Mad Men, the most recent episode ("Mystery Date") seems to have finally gotten rid of one of the most-loathed characters, someone the fan base has hated since at least his most infamous appearance back in Season Two. This was done in more or less the final scene of the episode, and the fan base consensus seems to be that the scene in which it happened was utterly cathartic. When something important happens, we want to witness it for ourselves, not have to be told about it after the fact. And indeed, TV and movies have trained us not to believe in the finality of something (like a character's death) until we've seen the body. Having an event reported to us, even by a character we deem reliable, doesn't "count" in the same way.

Don't click on this link (or the previous one!) unless you have nothing to do for the next three hours. I'm not kidding. http://tvtropes.org

As a writer, you have a contract with your audience: trust me to tell you the story, and I'll tell you everything you need to know.

I know those scenes are the hardest to write. It's so much easier to let someone recap the big dramatic moments after the fact. But doing so is a disservice to your audience, and it undermines the trust you've worked so hard to build in your readers.

Write the hard parts. Write the secret parts. Write everything your readers want to know about the story, whether your characters want you to reveal it or not. Especially if they'd rather keep it to themselves.

Monday morning thought.

“Consider the postage stamp: its usefulness consists in the ability to stick to

one thing till it gets there.”

-Josh Billings

More writing tips from elsewhere.

Lots of good stuff here.

"Leave out the parts readers tend to skip," indeed.

Fun quiz

Are you an introvert, an extrovert, or an ambivert?

Most writers, in my experience, tend to be introverts-- maybe it's easier to glue yourself to the keyboard (or the notepad and pen) if you enjoy alone time-- but one of the complexities of publishing in the modern era is how much publicity and promotion we ask authors to do in service of their book. It's part of the job, but I think it's hard for a lot of people. It would be for me!

What was your quiz result? I am "likely to be an introvert," which is the understatement of the century. What parts of the process are hardest for you?

Five tips for revising your novel.

1. Write a synopsis of the novel-- the whole thing. There are two good ways to do this, for the purposes of this exercise: one is to reread the novel and jot down notes as you go about what needs to go in the synopsis. The other technique is essentially the opposite: write a synopsis of the novel without rereading. Is every chapter of the work present and accounted for? Does anything jump out at you, structurally or otherwise? How many walks at the beach/the woods/the streets of Manhattan does your main character take?

2. Read the novel aloud. The whole thing. You can find someone to read it to or just read it to yourself, but it really does need to be read out loud. I always find sentences I trip over by using this technique, which is a pretty sure sign that the phrasing in that bit could use some fine-tuning.

3. Similar to #1, but suitable for more "visual" people: create a storyboard. Does too much of the action take place in one location? Does the story jump around too much? How's the flow from one scene to another?

4. Make a list of all your characters' names. Most writers, if they've chosen character names they like, will unconsciously return to the same set of sounds (phoneme set? I never took linguistics, and don't know enough about the terminology to effectively look this up) over and over again. So you get novels that include characters named Jessica, Erica, Annika, Veronica, and Monica. Morgan, Aidan, Evan, Damien. If the names are too similar, it's hard for your readers to tell the characters apart. (Watch out for recurring first letters, too-- the "J" is especially common in my experience.) Time to do some renaming. On the plus side: if you decide to have a(nother) kid, you've got a starter list of possible baby names. So there you go.

5. Print out a hard copy and go through with a highlighter, marking all the dialogue tags. Are there too many? Not enough? How flowery do they get? If a writer uses dialogue tags like "exclaimed" too frequently, it tends to be a sign that they're not very confident that the emotion behind the character's statement is effectively communicated. If this sounds like you, and if you're right to be concerned, it's the dialogue itself that really needs work.

Eyes the color of the ocean.

This morning, I got out of bed, washed my face, looked in the mirror and sighed. I haven’t had a hair cut in ages, and trying to do anything with my shoulder-length, dishwater-brown hair is hopeless.

I just put you to sleep, didn’t I?

It’s a boring way to start a blog post, but it’s a worse way to start a novel.

Much like New Year’s Day, a morning feels like a new, and natural, beginning; the perfect place to start. But unless you’ve got a very good reason for starting there—meaning the narrative absolutely must begin with the alarm clock—you’re more or less guaranteeing that your novel’s going to take too long to get going, and you’re going to lose the reader’s interest as a result.

I can think of a few exceptions to the “no mornings” rule:

-a story that takes place in the course of a single day (Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day)

-a story in which hitting the snooze button or forgetting to set the alarm (or something else that happens in that very first early morning scene) sets off a chain of events that form the core of the story (the 90’s film Sliding Doors)

-a story that starts off being about the banality of the protagonist’s life (the film American Beauty) or the opposite of that (Kafka’s The Metamorphosis).

I’d love to brainstorm some more examples in the comments—I’m sure you’ve got some great ones!—but suffice to say that most of the manuscripts I see that start with this trope are not doing so successfully.

Likewise the character’s appearance. Unless an element of that appearance—a missing limb, perhaps-- is the single most defining characteristic of that person, why on earth should it be the first piece of information you give your reader?

Awful examples of this one abound—and could start their own Bulwer-Lytton style contest, if one doesn’t already exist. Maybe we’ll run a “bad character descriptions” contest (your own inventions, not ones you’ve found elsewhere) sometime soon.

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you know that I’ve (as of a year or so ago) started taking on a lot of romance and women’s fiction clients. I mention this because it feels like romance, as a category, should be the easy exception to this: of COURSE it matters what the characters look like, because the whole point is that it’s a love story. Especially if you’re telling a “love at first sight” story, it may well feel like, yes, the heroine’s auburn hair IS the most important detail to lead off with.

I think you’re wrong.

I’m not saying you should never give your readers a physical description of your characters. I am saying that when you give us that description, you need to find a way to make it feel organic, like that moment in the story is the only possible moment at which to deliver that information. For romance, why not the moment when the hero/heroine first lay eyes on one another?

One last thing, a Tip for the Day, if you will, that a friend and colleague alerted me to. The modern world is full of resources for writers in the most unexpected places. When you’re writing your description of your titian-haired detective, and a phrase pops into your mind, start typing the phrase into a Google search bar. If Google “suggests” the description you had in mind, that’s a pretty good reason to come up with another one.