Woolly Gray

Does simplicity mean cardboard characters? Must a streamlined plot be populated with stick figures?

No!

Don’t let anyone tell you different.

Don’t let your scheming, yellow-bellied, desperate-for-a-honking-large-royalty-check insecurities tell you different.

Stuff your ears with woolly bits if you must. (FYI: I have woolly bits for each day of the week. Sunday’s are Dover Gray in color.)

Until tomorrow…

Chloe in her Dover Gray

No Skimping Here

When streamlining a writing project, keep all shears, pruners, hatchets, and chisels away from your protagonists. They are the story.

Make the main characters real. Make them quirky. Make them funny and sad, wry and dry, silly and oh-so not silly.

The words and effort you’ve saved from all that honing of plot, pile enthusiastically onto your lead actors.  Never skimp here, my friends. Never.

Until tomorrow…

Chloe    

The Feeding of Foibles

Location. Location. Location.

In a further attempt to streamline my next novel, I am anchoring 99 percent of its storyline to one locale. Instead of puddle-jumping around the globe as my plots normally do, Twisted Intent’s story will only call Cimarron County, Oklahoma home.

This should somewhat limit the research bug (a dastardly creature who would eat me out of years if allowed).

Yes, all foibles will be kept to a strict diet this go-around.

Until tomorrow…

Chloe

Weapon of Choice

Streamlining a plot into a razor-thin weapon of efficiency and movement has never been me. Instead, I tend to bludgeon a reader over the head with bulky, unwieldy knots of storyline. This works, but it can work better.

So, my next effort will be a love child of both plot philosophies. I expect the labor pains to be grotesque at times, but the result, I hope, will be endearing… Now, I’ve just got to puzzle out how a sword and a mace have sex.

Until tomorrow…

Chloe

The Jack & Jill Quandary

With the Women’s Fiction arena now clear in my sights, it’s time to decide which of two story arcs do I ride into the party.

Plotline #1: Streamlined story; very complicated people. (i.e… Jack, a recovering alcoholic and borderline schizophrenic, and Jill, a narcissistic personality with deeply-seeded people issues, went up the hill to fetch a pail of water…)

Plotline #2: Very complicated story: streamlined people. (i.e…. Jack and Jill went up the hill in an effort to evade their own government which has turned inexplicably on its own spies and marked the pair for death; while there, the couple feigns fetching a pail of water while signaling their compatriots, an underground network of redeemed assassins.)

Of course, Plotline #1.5 would be ideal, but that would mean a novel approximately 450,000 words long… Um, no.

Aargh!!

I’ll keep you updated.

Until tomorrow…

Chloe