Google Street View

I hadn't been paying attention to the street view addition to Google maps until yesterday when a co-worker pointed it out to me. I immediately clicked on my own address and was amazed to find a picture of my house in almost real estate listing quality. The picture was taken on a Wednesday. I can tell that because my empty garbage container is still out front. The container being empty means the picture was probably taken after 10 AM. From the foliage in my yard I judge it to have been taken in late summer 2007. The amazing thing is the seamless 360 view of the area and the ability to "walk" through the neighborhood to see the other houses. It almost seemed like an invasion of privacy.

I next entered my son's address in Lewisville. Again got a real estate view. This appeared to have been taken in late fall or winter. I can't tell what year. It's late afternoon, shortly after school has gotten out. I know this because, after "walking" a few blocks, I come to a crossing guard and some children with book bags. A little farther on, I find a school bus.

Street view doesn't hit every street. I tried to "walk" from my son's house to my other son's apartment, a mile and a half away. I made it to within two blocks and then was forced to turn up a different street. It's possible that, by taking the long way around, I can yet reach my son's apartment, but I decided to save that for another day.

Street view looks like an amazing tool for writers who want to get a feel for their location and can't get there in person. I put in the address of the hotel we stayed at in Rome last summer and, Holy Mother of God, there it was clearer than my own travel photos. I walked from there down to the Circus Maximus like I did during our stay there. This is either the writer's greatest helper or worst enemy. I could spend hours revisiting all the places I saw in Rome and exploring new ones.

The only disappointment is that there is no street view for Honolulu yet. That might be a good thing.

New Blog Link Added

For all of you who are revising a manuscript, The Blood-Red Pencil Blog is a must. It's run by a group of editors who know whereof they speak. You owe it to yourself to check them out.

Lessons from Italy

Mary Fran and I recently returned from the trip of a lifetime to Rome and Florence. Visiting those two storied cities, the fount of our civilization and the birthplace of the Renaissance, I could not help but reflect on art, history and culture. In Florence, we had the good fortune to have a guided tour of Uffizi Museum, established by the Medici family to house their collection of medieval and Renaissance art.

You could spend a significant part of your life in the Uffizi taking in all of the art. Our guide, Elena, did not try to show us everything. She had an agenda, a story about art she wanted to share with us. We began in a room of altarpieces from the middle ages. All of them represented the Madonna with child; one of them was by Giotto. The Giotto was beautiful, but also typical of medieval painting. It was flat, completely lacking in perspective. The Virgin’s face was detailed, but a blue robe, under which no anatomical features were discernible, represented her body. Because of this Giotto is sometimes considered a primitive painter.

We moved from Giotto quickly to other painters who continued the theme and then to Botticelli, Da Vinci, Raphael and Michealangelo. The paintings gained perspective and the themes became secular. The Michelangelo was the last painting. The Tonto Doni, also known as The Holy Family is the only Michelangelo painting in the Uffizi. It is a family portrait of a Florentine nobleman, his wife and child. Like Giotto’s, it has three central characters, mother, father and child. The woman is even draped in blue like Giotto’s Virgin. But unlike Giotto’s, Michelangelo’s painting has perspective, the anatomy of the central characters is clearly defined, and the theme is secular, though resonating to the spiritual.

Elena’s message, which she had repeated several times during the tour and again at the end, was that without the middle ages there would be no Renaissance; without Giotto, there would be no Botticelli, Da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo.

I brought along a couple of books for the long plane rides. One, which I read on the way home, is by Steven Torres, The Concrete Maze. It is a compelling and disturbing mystery story about a man’s search for his teenage daughter and the person who abducted her. Torres is a fine writer who has not received the recognition he deserves. Maze is only his third book and I believe a breakout book is not far off. At the end of the book, the publisher included some questions for book clubs, an interesting feature I’d like to see more of.

The first question grabbed my attention because it melded with my thoughts on this trip. It asked readers to consider how the story fit into the hardboiled, noir tradition of Chandler, Hammett, Ken Bruen, James Sallis and Sara Gran. It was the same point Elena made, only different. Without Chandler, Hammett, Bruen, Sallis and Gran, there would be no Torres.

It seems like a contradiction that art, which results in original works created by artists, writers and musicians working alone, depends on communication and sharing among a community of artists, often across generations and even centuries. Artists study each other’s works. They know the classics of their genre and they know the cutting edge.

Picasso famously said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal,” a quote that was stolen by T.S. Eliot and Steven Jobs, among others. Don’t get me wrong. Stealing another artist’s work isn’t a good thing, but great artists and writers use other people’s work as a starting point from which to take the idea to a new place and to a new audience. Just as Michelangelo did with Giotto, Torres takes Chandler to a new place. I think that the next time any of us find ourselves discussing writing with other writers, we should be asking, not What are you writing, but What are you reading?

Manuscript Makeover by Elizabeth Lyon, a review

Manuscript Makeover: Revision Techniques No Fiction Writer Can Afford to Ignore
Elizabeth Lyon
The Penguin Group, New York, 2008
347 pages
$14.95


It was at a conference for new writers in Austin that I saw a lot of shocked faces when literary agent Jim Donovan proclaimed that they could not imagine how much revising is necessary before a manuscript is ready for publication. How much revision? Elizabeth Lyon cites Dean Koontz who did thirty-one drafts of his novel, Whispers. Every author will have a different experience, but all will find that the largest part of the labor of writing is in revising.

So where do you learn how to revise? Book upon book and course upon course will teach you the techniques of writing, but when it comes to revising, you are on your own.

Until now.

Now comes an indispensable book for fiction writers from writer, editor, and teacher, Elizabeth Lyon. The book is Manuscript Makeover. The subtitle says it all: Revision Techniques No Fiction Writer Can Afford to Ignore.

Makeover is more than revision; it's a transformation, a matter of style. All too often, authors approach revision as a technical problem. They delete; they add; they rearrange. They correct grammar, replace weak words with strong ones, and vary sentence structure. Sometimes this produces real transformation, but sometimes it produces only cosmetic changes.

In Manuscript Makeover, Elizabeth Lyon addresses the essence of style and how to transform an ordinary first draft into a distinctive manuscript. Editors are looking for style, not sentence structure. They want an exciting story with an original voice. Lyon's book gives you practical revising techniques to bring out your style and voice. Each chapter begins with a brief statement--she calls them options--of what you can expect to get out of the chapter. Each chapter ends with a checklist of things to look for in your manuscript. These checklists themselves are worth the price of the book.

In Part One: Style Speaks, Lyon presents two approaches to revision--the inside-out and the outside-in approaches. She distinguishes between voice and style. Voice is the writer's natural use of language to create authentic characters and unique storytelling. Style is choosing words to create a desired effect. By making use of inside-out techniques, such as riff-writing which is a kind of directed, free writing, and deep listening by which you attune yourself to your reactions as you read your own work, you can cultivate your natural voices. Where inside-out is a process of internalizing your writing, outside-in relies on wordsmithing to sharpen your style. The outside-in techniques will be familiar to most writers. Everyone using this book must read Part One. The distinction between inside-out and outside-in opens the door to a deeper understanding of the creative process, which will ultimately lead to more effective revision.

In Part Two, Lyon presents the craft of writing, beginning with a brief overview of genres. The different genre categories have been, and continue to be, dissected elsewhere. If you want a comprehensive analysis of genres, don't look here. The purpose of the chapter on genres is to drive home the point that to be successful, you should pick a genre in which you want to write and read widely in it. The rest of Part Two deals with plot, dramatic structure, journeys--the hero's and the heroine's--movement, pacing and suspense. To me, this is the heart of fiction. The checklists that follow these chapters take up eighteen pages on their own. I foresee many writers photocopying them to keep as handy references by their computers.

Most people assume that scene equals plot, but, as she did in Part One, Elizabeth Lyon shakes our assumptions. She defines scenes in Part Three as ". . . character-driven action toward a goal that occurs in a particular time and place." If you want to write compelling fiction, do not skip the chapters on Character-driven Beginnings (chapter 11) and Character-driven Scenes and Suspense (chapter 12). In this section, she also discusses aspects of character that beginning writers struggle with--viewpoint, dialogue, personality and voice.

Finally, in Part Four, Lyon discusses the basics of copyediting, querying and marketing.

Manuscript Makeover gives us a step-by-step guide to the art and craft of revising. Considering all of the techniques inside, any one of which will make our writing better, this is a book that belongs, not on every writer's bookshelf, but on every writer's work table.

An interview with literary agent Nat Sobel

Poets and Writers Blog has a very interesting, if sobering, interview with Nat Sobel. Anybody who is thinking of becoming a writer, anybody struggling for success at writing, ought to read this.

http://pw.org/content/agents_amp_editors_qampa_agent_nat_sobel

New Blog Link Added

Check out Latham Shinder's blog on writing. While you're at it, check out his novel, The Graffiti Sculptor, about an ax-wielding young woman who carves healing statuary. The blog is at http://lathamshinder.blogspot.com/. You can click on the link in the Holoholo sidebar.

Grammar Girl

This article appears in the June newsletter of the Brazos Writers.

Who would've thunk when Apple introduced its cool little music player, the iPod, which adorns more teens than piercings and tattoos, that it would open the door to a new information medium, the podcast?

Who would've thunk one of the most popular podcasts would be about grammar?
That’s right. In an internet culture that’s awash in sex, sports and games, Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips For Better Writing has racked up more than 3 million downloads.

Once a week, Grammar Girl delivers a free podcast on some aspect of grammar in a voice that is as warm and friendly as the seventh-grade teacher’s of our dreams. Each episode lasts about five minutes—long enough for her to make the point and reinforce it with some examples, and short enough that you can listen to two or three at a sitting. Recent episodes covered such topics as the use of ellipses, starting a sentence with “however,” and ways to overcome writer’s block.

Okay, those are stuffy topics. But if you think grammarians are stuffy, have a listen to Grammar Girl. She has the moxie to take on Eric Clapton to illustrate the difference between “lie” and “lay”. Hey Eric, it’s “Lie down, Sally.”

iTunes is free at www.apple.com. It works on Macs and PCs and you don’t need an iPod. You can subscribe to Grammar Girl on the iTunes store or on her website, www.qdnow.com, where you can also read the transcript of each podcast. For me, a grammar lesson is so much easier to take when spoken by Grammar Girl.

Crimespace--a community of mystery readers and writers

I just joined Crimespace, an online community for mystery readers and writers like Myspace. If you want to join me, my address is http://crimespace.ning.com/profile/metroy

Autocrit review

I'm a sucker for online writing help. I'm also a sucker for applications based on statistical analyses of published works. Most tend to be disappointing, but now and then a gem comes along. Autocrit is one of those gems. Its power comes from a statistical analysis of published literature that produces limits for words that are considered overused. "Was" is one such word. Obviously you can't write without it, but weak writing has too much of it. How much is too much? The simple answer is it's too much if it exceeds what is typically found in published works, publication being the standard for excellence. The folks behind Autocrit found the average usage for each of the overused words and used that to set limits of how much would be acceptable.

Hee is my review of Autocrit as it appears in the Brazos Writers Newsletter.

Once in a great while, an elegantly simple application comes along that has the potential to transform your writing. Autocrit (www.autocrit.com) is one such application. It is the personal editor, writing partner, and critique group that catches every flaw and unabashedly displays it.

Autocrit is intended for fiction writers of all genres. To use it, go to the web site, paste your text into the window, and choose an analysis. Almost instantly, Autocrit returns a report.

My first experience was humbling. I entered part of a novel I'd revised through nine drafts until the writing was so tight it squeaked at every page turn. Or so I thought. Autocrit checked my text against a list of commonly overused words and reported that, on most of them, I'd exceeded the limits (actually an average) for published fiction. Next Autocrit highlighted the overused words in red. My chapter looked like it sprouted measles.

What Autocrit offers are guidelines. The transformation occurs when you decide what to do about the flaws Autocrit spots. Weak words don't exist in isolation; they hide in weak sentences and weak paragraphs. After running my 90.000 word flabalooza through Autocrit, I had a buffed-down 76,000 word tome.

Autocrit's most useful feature, the analysis of overused words, is free. Free users, however, are limited to a small word count, fewer functions, and 10 submissions per day. For a big revising project, an annual subscription is well worth the $24.95. Now, nothing leaves my desktop without passing through Autocrit.