Get it While it's Hot

Jenny over on Lit Soup has a post stating what sort of books she wants to see, so if you are writing anything that falls along those lines then submit!

Thou Shalt Not Have Thy Protagonist in Thy Motivation Unit

Most important of all is the fact that your character does not appear anywhere in the sentence, either by noun or pronoun.

Dwight V Swain

Well, silly me. If I didn't have my main character mentioned in the very first Motivation Unit. This is the first Motivation Unit that also happened to be not just the very first paragraph, not even just the first line, but the very first word!

Yes, this is the Chapter I've just completely rewritten using MRU's... Methinks I have a but more work to do.

The Monday Morning Write-up

Finished the rewrite of Chapter 2. Yay!

Chapter 2 was definitely easier. I'm on the search for more info on Motivation-Reaction Units. In fact, I've done a bit of digging around this afternoon, and unearthed a few more handy links.

On More Writing, there is a sizeable excerpt from Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain. Everything I've read about MRU's and Swain has been positive. So I've decided to pick up a copy of the book. Not sure when I'll be able too, as I've just splurged on three books from Amazon.

There are many Top Ten lists of Mistakes made by writers on the Web, but this one covers the mistakes that are most likely to slip through revisions and critiques. Recommended.

Just a Quickie...

Finished Chapter 1 in MRUs. Yay!

Won't be long before I finish Chapter 2. Strangely, this chapter has not needed so much editing. I think it is because there were more obvious Motivation/Reaction splits. There was more going on in this chapter. There are people for my protagonist to react to. In Chapter 1 he was pretty much on his own, and it was a lot more difficult to spot the units and to separate them.

Or was it that I had gained more experience as a writer and that chapter was better written? Not sure on that, I'll have to see how the edits go on the other chapter before I decide on that.

The Jury is out.

Fridayitis

OK so Friday is here, Finally!

Long week for me, and certainly not the best week of my life, but hey shit happens.

So, without further ado. . .

You can’t escape this one, lots of blogs have mentioned this: Moonrat over on Editorial Ass had a funny, but ultimately sad tale. When the author, and their agent were taken out for lunch by an editor, the author demonstrated their severe lack of social skills.

Janet Reid covered it very humorously indeed, with what she would have done it she had been the unfortunate agent, and how she would have dealt with the author.

Nathan has a lively comments section going, as usual, this week on new ways of marketing books. Some interesting ideas there, and let’s not kid ourselves, publishing is far from the traditional animal it once was.

With all the doom and gloom in the publishing world, there is at least some good news! Bookseller reports that HMV and Zavvi are ramping up their book offerings. And, Waterstone's is about to announce four new stores.

That’s not it for this week, I’ll be blogging on Sunday, though not an Saturday as I am off.

Have a great weekend!

Short Update

Still soldiering on with a rewrite using MRUs.

Actually, I haven't had a lot of time to devote to it what with the real world n'all.

I'm still on Chapter 1, although this is nearly done.

The outlook is gloomy too -I don't expect to get much done over the weekend, but hey I'll still have time to blog tomorrow it's Fridayitis yay!

Motivation-Reaction Units

Motivation-Reaction Units can be quite tricky!

I've been wrestling with them for the last few days, and so far, I think it is a lot harder to rewrite something in MRUs than it is to write it from scratch. I'm still going to rewrite what I have already written, because I believe it will make my work much stronger. I am also a firm believer that if you learn something the had way, you'll learn it that much better.

Some scenes lend themselves to MRUs much better than others. The scenes, I am having difficulty with, are the ones where it is hard to identify the external motivation.

If you haven't read Randy Ingermanson's Writing the perfect scene Perfect Scene, or his series of blogs on MRUs then it is well worth checking out.

Let me allow Randy to explain how MRUs work.

The Motivation is external and objective, and you present it that way, in objective, external terms. You do this in a single paragraph. It does not need to be complicated.

The Reaction is internal and subjective, and you present it that way, exactly as your POV character would experience it -- from the inside. This is your chance to make your reader be your POV character. To repeat myself, this must happen in its own paragraph (or sequence of paragraphs). If you leave it in the same paragraph as the Motivation, then you risk whip-sawing the reader. Which no reader enjoys. The Reaction is more complex than the Motivation. The reason is that it is internal, and internal processes happen on different time-scales. When you see a tiger, in the first milliseconds, you only have time for one thing -- fear. Within a few tenths of a second, you have time to react on instinct, but that is all it will be -- instinct, reflex. But shortly after that first reflexive reaction, you will also have time to react rationally, to act, to think, to speak. You must present the full complex of your character's reactions in this order, from fastest time-scale to slowest. If you put them out of order, then things just don't feel right. You destroy the illusion of reality. And your reader won't keep reading because your writing is "not realistic." Even if you got all your facts right.

Now, the problems I've experienced are with internal motivation. Surely there is internal motivation - a thought for example?

Well, er, no, not that I've found anyway! So, this is where it gets tricky. Very tricky.

As a result, I've been struggling with some passages in my book.

But then, maybe I've been looking at it all wrong. Maybe I have to write it as a reaction, and just a reaction. Looking at Randy's series, it seems that way. The motivation may be obvious and therefore not written. For example, let's say my POV character presses a button. The presence of the button is the motivation, but maybe I don't have to write about the button until my character actually presses it. Otherwise we have a series of one line paragraphs, and frankly, they look pants.

Well I think I have it right anyway.

Here's hoping!