I finally got to see Cedar Rapids over the weekend. This movie is getting a slow release, which is a shame because it is easily as funny as any movie I’ve seen this year and I wanted to race out to see it based on the previews, but had to wait almost two months.

Just a minute or two into the movie my wife commented that it felt like an Alexander Payne movie such as Election, Citizen Ruth or Sideways. Sure enough, while he didn’t direct it, he was one of the producers. The actual director was Miguel Arteta, who also directed The Good Girl.

A lot of people have been comparing this movie to The Hangover, but I don’t think that’s quite accurate. For one thing, the “craziness” only feels crazy because the main character is so naïve and inexperienced. Secondly, the characters in Hangover are essentially a group of four guys who are each immature jerks in their own way. The gang of four in Cedar Rapids is the opposite. They are four essentially good people who are trying to cut loose a little. You root for the characters in Cedar Rapids, especially Ed Helms. When things go wrong for the four guys in The Hangover, you really don’t mind because they’re jerks anyway.

Hangover is the funnier of the two movies, but Cedar Rapids is very funny, and a far more complete film. The characters actually grow and have genuine realizations about their life as they form friendships. To me, that makes for a better movie.

I would love to tout myself as a social media guru. It is one of those nice self-assigned titles that all the cool kids on the web are using these days. The problem is that Twitter bores me. There, I’ve said it. Twitter bores me.

You see, to have any real juice on Twitter, you need thousands of followers. To get this, you need to either be famous already, willing to follow a ton of other people, or willing to game the system using some sort of service that will get you followers. Well, I’m not famous and I don’t feel like getting a bunch of fake friends. So, that means following other people.

I don’t really know these people and they don’t really know me, so if I want to get them to follow me I have to say really interesting things in 110 characters or so (so I leave them plenty of space to retweet me). Now, I can do this. I am capable of being interesting for 110 characters. The problem is that I can’t just do this once. I have to do it several times a day if I really want people to notice.  I don’t want to spend that much time trying to be clever for 110 characters. I’d rather write something longer. Also, if I’m not interested in what a few thousand strangers have to say, then it seems wrong to follow them in the first place.

So there you go. I’ll never be a social media guru (even self-appointed) because I have better things to do with my time than try to be clever and follow a few thousand other people who probably aren’t paying much more attention to me than I am to them. I like to write things that take up a few hundred words, not characters, and I actually expect the people who come to my site to read what I wrote. I am a blogger. That will have to be enough.

That doesn’t mean you won’t see me on Twitter from time to time. There are some people on there who I do like to read and sometimes I actually have something to say. You just won’t find me there when I have nothing to say.

Here are some questions you should ask yourself when you are describing things for a story. You don’t need to describe every element of a story to a minute level of detail, but you should consider what will make your descriptions better, and what can send you off course.

What would the characters notice?

Describing a place in detail can be very good, but only if the descriptions would matter to the reader or to the character. The view outside the window of a car doesn’t matter if the main character spends the trip reading a book, unless you are trying to show what the character is missing. If a carpenter and painter are both looking at a brand new house, they are going to notice different things, and both will probably have a different view than a policeman or a teenage runaway. A happy and comfortable person may experience a place differently than a depressed or angry person.

What senses make sense?

Most writers tend to focus on visual details, which can be very important, but the way something smells, sounds, tastes or feels can also improve on the experience. Food is an item that lends itself to all five senses. Try to give details that involve more than one sense. Crowded places can often be described more effectively using sound and touch. Smell can be a very useful way of demonstrating a radical change in environment, especially for the worse. Danger and despair almost always have a strong odor.

What does the story require?

If you are writing a story about the lives of two wealthy people, you are going to want to portray that wealth through your descriptions of your environment. If you are writing a story about a poverty-stricken area, you’ll want your descriptions to capture the desperation of the situation. You should use description to reflect the moods and attitudes of your story as well as the people in it.

What are the spatial relationships?

It doesn’t always matter where people are things are in relation to each other, but there are times when that minor detail can mean quite a bit. Are two people sitting next to each other or across from each other? If they are next to each other, are they touching or creating space? Are they comfortable next to each other or uncomfortable next to each other? If they are sitting across from each other, does their difference in perspective give them a radically different view? One person may be staring at a wall while the other one stares out a window.

Are items arranged with a specific order or are items placed haphazardly? These things don’t always matter, but you should be ready to describe them if they do. If the characters are of different heights (Such as a father and a young daughter) does the difference in their perspective change what they see significantly?

What is the reality?

When you write a description, each character may have a different perspective on where they are, but there is a certain reality to the place as well. There are things that will exist, and may matter, whether the character observes them or not. It is important to reflect the character’s views, but it may also be important to show how skewed that character’s perspective may be.

For the reader to know that a person is surrounded by beauty, but doesn’t see it, it must be clear that the place is objectively beautiful. Also, depending on your story, you may be dealing with real-world settings that your audience may be familiar with. Make sure that your descriptions match what is really there, or if they don’t, be able to show why they don’t. For example, the Eiffel Tower is, for the most part, brown and gray. If you describe it as green, you had better have a reason to do so.

Is this the End?

Every story has to end. The most important thing that has to happen before a story ends is that the central conflict of the story has to be settled. The protagonist wins. The protagonist loses. The protagonist realizes that she has both won and lost. Whatever the case, the crisis is settled. What then?

Say a Little or Say a Lot?

In movies, you frequently see them end the story at the moment, the very moment, when the central conflict has been settled. Sports movies are famous for this. The Karate Kid ends just after Daniel has defeated his nemesis Johnny to win the karate championship. He is literally still standing there with his arms in the air as his instructor Miyagi looks on with pride. There is no denouement whatsoever. It ends at the moment of triumph.

On the other end of the scale you have the Lord of the Rings Trilogy (both the books and the movies). It can be argued that half the final book (and movie) are denouement. We see how the conflict has changed each of the central characters and we follow them as they return to their former lives or find that they cannot return to their former lives. The World According to Garp (the book, I never saw the movie) actually takes the time to follow each of their characters all the way to their various eventual deaths. It tells you how their lives played out in the aftermath of the central crisis.

All of these choices are valid, but there are definitely consequences to each choice. A brief, or nonexistent, denouement runs the risk of the reader not really feeling that the central conflict had a significant effect on the characters. They may end up feeling as if their time has been wasted or feel that the characters haven’t really changed. An especially long denouement, by contrast, runs the risk of leaving the reader bored. Once the tension of the crisis has been released, the reader knows that the conclusion is coming. The longer you take with the denouement, the longer you will have to keep the reader’s attention without having the tension of the conflict to keep them invested.

Be Fair to your Readers

One of the most controversial denouements is the end of the Harry Potter series of books. Because the series lasted seven books, the readers were invested in many, many characters. People wanted to know how all of these characters turned out. What readers got was a twenty page denouement, set years later, that answered very few of the lingering questions. This upset most readers — quite understandably. When you spend several thousand pages discussing the lives of a set of characters, you should expect that the readers will be invested in the outcomes for each of these characters that they have grown to love over the years.

My simple advice is that a denouement should last long enough for the reader to feel satisfied, but no so long that the reader gets bored. Make sure that the central themes of your novel get at least a moment of reflection in the denouement and that your readers are clear about how the novel has changed your characters.

How Articulate Are Your Characters?

Most writers are articulate. Because they work with the written word on a daily or near daily basis, and because they have a love of language, most writers express themselves well. Just because a writer is articulate, however, doesn’t mean that a character should be articulate. Adjusting your language to suit a character, especially in dialog, is vital to creating a realistic depiction of that character and vital for differentiating that character from others in the story.

Words Reflect Background

When most people think about writing realistic dialog, they think about things such as regional accents and vocal patterns. Those things are important, but it is just as important to adjust your dialog to the specific background of the characters. For example, people know that there is a Boston accent, but most people don’t realize that the Boston accent varies greatly according to where in the city that person lives and what their economic and educational background is. Not everyone from Boston sounds the same. A well-educated Boston lawyer is not going to sound like a poorly educated bartender at a local dive.

Don’t Distract the Reader

Another mistake people make in tailoring dialog is to go too far into an accent and ignore such things as speech rhythms or word choices. J.K. Rowling, for example, uses very exaggerated accents. In the early books, before the story got particularly dark, the exaggerated accents seemed to work reasonably well considering the stories were fantasy and the intended audience was mostly children. By the final books, however, when the story was very dark and the intended audience was much wider, the exaggerated accents seemed much more unsuitable and distracting.

Unique, Not Extreme

The key with dialog, especially with accents, is to make each person’s style differentiated enough that they sound unique and identifiable, but not so extreme that people are paying more attention to the words being said than they are to the intent of the statement. Try to think of what is distinctive about the way each person speaks, and why their word choices make sense for them.

Some Things to Consider

• Is the character concise or long winded?
• Does the character use words they don’t fully understand?
• Does the character have influence from different regions (such as a person from Texas now living in California or vice-versa)?
• Is the character used to public speaking?
• Does the character have any particular patterns or phrases that stand out?
• Is their something about the character’s role (Boss, employee, teacher, parent) that makes a difference in the way that character speaks in different situations?

Editing a poem is in many ways like editing any other work of writing. The central goal is to eliminate any errors you have made, to improve on words and passages that aren’t quite as good as they could be, and to work to make the poem hold together as a single unit. You would follow much the same process with an essay or a short story. It is the differences though, that matter. Here are some things to look for when you are editing a poem.

• If your intention was to use a particular meter, how well did you manage to carry out that meter? Sometimes you have to read through a poem several times before you pick up on minor mistakes. You may also want to give some thought to other people’s accents or speech patterns.
• How does the poem look on the page? When using a consistent meter, lines generally turn out to be about the same length. If you aren’t using meter, however, line length can vary widely. There’s no rule against this, but make sure any drastic variations are intentional and not unintentional.  Random line or stanza lengths can make a poem feel scattered and disjointed. There may be cases in which this is your goal, but be sure that this is something you are doing on purpose and to achieve a particular effect.
• Examine your word choices. Avoiding clichés and tired phrases can be difficult. Ask yourself whether or not the images, descriptions and statements feel fresh and original. Try to eliminate stock phrases or vague descriptions. Eliminate any words that seem outdated or overly formal. Are the words in your poem the same words you would use in a normal conversation?
• Read the poem aloud. Sometimes writing can look good on the page but be very difficult to read aloud. Some word combinations just don’t flow off of the tongue very well, and until you hear it, it can be difficult to catch those problems.
• Look for overly explanatory passages. It is easy to fall into the trap of explaining or preaching to your reader rather letting them come to their own conclusions. Those passages can seem heavy handed and should be eliminated whenever possible.
• Is there any part of the poem that could be cut? There are generally two areas in which you can cut. Passages that are uninteresting and don’t contribute to the overall poem and passages that are so vivid that they overshadow the rest of the poem. Sometimes you have to cut out your favorites. A line that stands out can be good, but it can also distract from the rest of the poem. Consider your choices carefully.

Today’s Poetry Prompt

Write a poem that uses exactly the same number of characters on every line. You can pick the length, but once you start you have to stick to it. For an extra challenge, try writing about an event that has happened in the past 24 hour.

My brain is not as logical or cooperative as I would like it to be. My writing process is an excellent example of that. When I sit down to write a poem, my brain isn’t necessarily ready to help. On occasion, it has just the right things to say, but just as often it has nothing. I sit and stare. I hope for inspiration. I force myself to start putting words down. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not.

On the opposite side of that coin, my brain is perfectly happy to start thinking about poetry when I am in no position to write a poem. The perfect phrase will hit me while I’m driving to work. A topic will come to me in the middle of a meeting. When I’m knee deep in a project, my brain focuses on an image or a pattern, and I want to write it down or take a picture of it. By the time I can, the thought has often retreated and I struggle to recapture it. The way to capture these stray poetic moments is with a journal.

In the days before technology exploded, a journal was a book that people kept. They wrote in it at the end of the day or the beginning of the day or some other time that they set aside. A few people may have taken it with them everywhere, but most would settle for finding a time once a day (or once a week) to write in their journal. That was when they could record their thoughts.

While it was possible to keep a journal using a typewriter, most people found using a typewriter to be a more formal occasion. If they were in front of a typewriter, they wrote poems or stories rather than keep a journal. A rarer but sometimes used tool was the tape recorder (we have digital versions now). The person spoke into the tape recorder and later reviewed it, retyped it or had someone else take it down. It was an interesting solution, but not a common one.

The computer gave us a new tool. Now it was easy to type into your journal. Typing is generally faster than writing with pencil or pen, so it freed people up to write more. The blog is an extension of computer-based journaling. Blogs allowed people to quickly publish their journals online for all to see. Eventually blogs began to take on more and more uses, but the first use was as a journal or diary.

Today a new form of journaling has taken hold. The phone has become a journaling device. My Blackberry, for example, has a small but effective keyboard. There are plenty of features on the phone that I can use for journaling. There is a notebook, a Google word processor, am email program, and a texting feature. Any of these can be used to keep a journal. One advantage of the phone is that most of us have it everywhere we go. No one is surprised to see a person carrying a phone or even typing into one. People are more surprised when you don’t carry your own phone.

With the new phones, I can now write an idea down almost anywhere, at almost any time. Sure, I can’t enter my idea while driving (they are even passing laws against this) but on most other occasions it is there and ready. I can type in that brief thought and keep going.  I can even take a picture of the object of my inspiration. I don’t use it for long-form writing, so it really isn’t like the journals of old, but for short-form work it does just fine.

I’m not suggesting that anyone choose a phone over a notebook or start their own blog. These are all different systems with different appeals. We have options, and options are good. The important thing is that you find a way to capture your thoughts so you have them the next time you sit down to write a poem and nothing comes to mind.

Today’s Poetry Assignment

Write a poem as if it were an entry in someone’s journal or diary or even their Twitter account. If you want an added challenge, limit your stanzas to 145 characters so they mirror the limitations of texting.

Article By David Jace

I started writing novels before I was in high school. The problem with that sentence is, I started, but never finished them. Until now. In April of 2008 I finally finished writing a novel. Now that I’m counting the years, I realize that I spent over half my life, nearly two-thirds, failing to complete novel projects. I spent plenty of time writing. I would reread and rewrite those first few chapters countless times, and then do the same with the next idea that came to mind. They may have gotten better, but they never got finished. What changed is that I realized a couple of things about myself and then acquired a couple of tools to apply to my work. And now I would like to share them with those who might benefit from it.

I recognized that I am an explorer. I want to go see the sights never before seen and discover what lies over that next hill. This is great for keeping an open mind, which I value. However, whatever lies beyond that next hill… hasn’t been written yet. That’s my job. I can’t discover what’s out there, I have to decide what’s out there. When I eagerly wait to see what the character is going to do in the next scene, the story stalls and he never makes it there. If I can’t wait to find out “whodunnit,” then no one did.

In effect, I have realized that in order to succeed, Writers Must Be Gods. We have created a world. We have populated it with animals (or machines). And we have formed people, characters, from the dust of our minds. And if you’re doing NaNoWriMo, you’d better do it in less than 7 days! This sequence of events sound familiar to anyone? We are the one and only god of our creation and it is up to us to write the future. We must decide the End days, and what the signs are that lead up to it.

Every one of my characters gets to the end of the scene, turns around and says “Hey, big guy, what now?” It’s my job to decide on a course of action and give him an answer. I’m not saying I have to have every detail ironed out in advance. (Even if I did, it would probably change along the way.) I am saying that if you don’t know where your story is going, it’ll never get there. It might be a mystery to you at first how Elena, the beautiful seamstress, ends up in love with Timmy the Robot, but you know they’re fated to be together. You may not know how you’re going to kill Jefferson MacGregor, but you know he’s gotta die.

So, realize this. Recognize and revel in the inherent power of being a god. Characters are born, live, die, cry, and celebrate at your whim. The entire world is your playground, and you can do anything you want within it. When you are writing, you have to be a Creator first, and then you can discover the details.

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I don’t have my own blog or website, but if you are interested in me as a person, or reading a little of my non-blog writings, feel free to look for me on myspace: www.myspace.com/bengaleyes

Article by Lillie Ammann

When a writer contacted me to edit his 164,000 word novel, I told him publishers don’t like books that long. We discussed the possibility of breaking the novel into two separate stories. However, when I read the manuscript, I realized the word count could be cut dramatically. He was appalled at the thought-he’d worked hard on every one of those words, and he knew each one had to be there.

We agreed to experiment with the first chapter. Although I usually use Track Changes to show my suggestions, we decided I would send him a clean copy with all my recommended changes incorporated. If he thought cutting words destroyed his story, we would start over.

He called me after he read the revised first chapter. “I thought you were going to cut it down. Everything is still there.”

“Everything important is still there,” I answered. “But all your words aren’t there.”

Since he couldn’t tell I’d cut anything, he gave me permission to continue.

This is the process I used to cut his novel from 164,000 words to 118,000 words. You can use these same steps to lose excess wordiness from your own writing.

• Eliminate repetition. “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them” may be good advice for giving a speech. However, a novelist seldom needs to repeat information.

If a scene is described in action, inner thought, and dialogue, cut out the repetitions and leave the action. Although you should show more than tell in a novel, sometimes you need to tell. If one character needs to convey information that the reader already knows, simply say Character A told Character B about …

Trust your readers. If they’re smart enough to read your book, they’re smart enough to remember the defining event in the protagonist’s life. You can connect a thought or an action to what happened before without repeating all the details.

• Eliminate unnecessary words. Write in active voice rather than passive to make your writing readable and interesting in fewer words.

You can cut almost every instance of some words-such as very and that.

Use strong verbs rather than weak verbs supported by adverbs. He trudged is both more descriptive and shorter than he walked slowly and heavily.

Don’t overuse adjectives. Be specific. The red Corvette is more effective than the flashy, fast, brightly colored sports car.

• Eliminate backstory. Almost every manuscript I’ve read from beginning writers-including my own!-begins with too much history before the real story starts.

Begin with action and let the readers meet the characters as we meet people in life. We learn their names, see what they look like (if we meet in person), maybe find out a few details such as what they do for a living. But we discover more about them only as the relationship develops.

After several rounds of editing the long novel, we removed the first four chapters. We introduced what readers needed to know when they needed to know it instead of bogging them down with history before anything happened.

• Eliminate anything that doesn’t reveal character or move the plot forward. This novel was filled with tidbits of information, cute dialogue, interesting characters, and amusing incidents.

“We’ve never heard of this character before. What part does he play in the plot?” I asked.

“Well, this is the only time he appears. But this was just such a funny scene.”

“How does the scene fit into the rest of the story?”

“Well, it really doesn’t. But it’s so funny!”

Cut! If you’ve included a character or a scene or a quaint historical fact just because you liked it, get rid of it. Of course, you can have a character who appears only once-if he does something that moves the plot along or that shows something about your protagonist. But if the character or scene doesn’t add to the story, eliminate it.

In short, when you edit to cut your novel down to size, remember the words of Elmore Leonard: “I leave out the parts that people skip.”

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Lillie Ammann is a writer, editor, and consultant specializing in working with self-publishing authors. She blogs at A Writer’s Words, An Editor’s Eye.

Just a goofy trifle to polish off the night:

6 Ways to Tell You Were Hungry When You Wrote Your Last Short Story

1. Your three characters are named Peter, Skippy and Jif.
2. You devote one paragraph to your main character’s appearance, and two pages to his Hoagie.
3. You spend most of the morning picking mozzarella and crust out of your keyboard.
4. The killer’s weapon was a garlic press
5. You used your first draft as a napkin
6. The last paragraph is just the word Brunch typed over and over

Thank you and goodnight!!!