It has been a great year at Review Fuse. It was just over a year ago when we started planning how to build a writing community where people could consistently receive quality critiques. While not every critique has met our standards, most of our members have rated the reviews they receive fairly high. For those of you who receive the occasional poorly thought out critique we apologize. We are trying to devise additional ways to consistently get you high quality critiques.

We launched version 1 of Review Fuse in July of 2008. Most of the founders looked at version 1 and said, that is not quite what we expected. So we put our noses to the grind stone and cranked out version 2 in late October, by ‘we’ I mean Steve, Josh, and Mike. This version has been very well received and it is the base for the current version of Review Fuse.

Recently, several people have asked me, how big is Review Fuse? My response to their question has been “compared to what?” In order to enable you to answer this question, I am providing a snap shot of the size of our community at the end of 2008.

We anticipate 300-400 new members will join our community each month during the first quarter of 2008. We appreciate everyone who has helped make this site a success. If you would like to join our expanding community please sign up.

Jacob

On December 24th we released Review HQ, making it easier to look at, analyze, and learn from the critiques you receive at Review Fuse.  You can access Review HQ by clicking the view icon in the “Latest Reviews I’ve Received” section of the My Account page. Review HQ provides 3 different ways to look at your reviews:

• One at a time – This is similar to the critique view we had in our previous version. Review HQ adds the ability to easily identify which “revision” of your work you are reviewing and it makes it easy to jump to the previous or next reviews.
• All on one page – This feature allows you to view at all of the critiques for each revision of a work at the same time.  Access this feature, by clicking on the “all on one page” button on the right hand side of the navigation bar.
• Only inline comments – Displays all of the inline comments for each revision of your work.

What are your thoughts about Review HQ? Please continue to let us know how we can improve Review Fuse. You must be a premium member to access Review HQ, it is still FREE to become a premium member so please log in and upgrade now, or join Review Fuse then upgrade.

Jacob

Congratulations to M. Lawrence! His story, “Faery Lights,” is the winner of our Holiday Short Story Contest, and he is the recipient of the $100 Amazon gift certificate. Thanks to everyone who submitted stories to the contest. There we some very great stories and it was difficult to choose a winner.

M. Lawrence has been writing since the age of 13. He currently works as a freelance writer and English teacher in the Middle East. For more about M. Lawrence, visit his Review Fuse profile page or his personal blog.

Although it was not a requirement of the contest, M. Lawrence has granted us permission to post his full story here on the blog for your holiday enjoyment. We hope you like it as much as we did. Happy Holidays and be sure to watch the blog for more contest announcements in the future.

Faery Lights

Lonely places can make a man pure loco, if he’s there long enough. Way I figure it, McDonnell had finally snapped. He showed up at my bunk at oh-dark-thirty and tapped me on the head. Said he was going out to hang Christmas lights.

Only he said “faery lights,” ‘cause that’s the way they say it over where he’s from in Scotland. He had a whole mess of them hung in a big loop over one shoulder, and he must’ve mistaken disbelief for admiration when he saw me staring at them.

“I made them meself,” he said. He’d gotten bulbs from God knows where and jury-rigged them every half meter or so to a long coil of insulated wire he’d scrounged up.

“Great, McDonnell,” I said. “I hope you didn’t rip that wiring or those bulbs out of something we need. Don’t want to find myself without oxy in a week ‘cause the warning bulb is twinkling outside.”

A hurt look came into the hulking man’s eyes. “Thought you knew me better than that, boyo,” he said. “The bulbs are spares. So is the wiring. We’ve got plenty and you know it. Besides, it’s just for Christmas and Hogmanay and then I’ll take it down.”

“Well go have your fun, and don’t freeze anything important off,” I said. With a grunt of annoyance, I turned over in the bunk.

“You’re a good man in most every way, Clay,” McDonnell said. “But you sure can be an arse when it comes to the holidays. If you need me, I’ll be outside.”

After he was gone, I lay there in the bunk for a while, eyes open, thinking over what McDonnell had said. He’d made it sound like I was some kind of grinch. Whatever. I closed my eyes, pushing down my irritation, and mentally ran through the day’s schedule.

I was reaching up to undo the bunk’s webbing when I felt a tremor pass through me, and the whole station groaned. I ripped open the webbing, but before I could get my stick-seal moccasins on the floor, McDonnell was on the station intercom, calling in from his suit helmet.

“Clay! Did you feel that?”

I lurched out into the hallway outside the bunkroom. “Yeah, I felt it,” I shouted. “On my way. Don’t get your panties in a wad. Probably just Shireen letting off a little steam.”

I loped along with the peculiar gait stick-seals force on you, but made it to the control room in record time. The seismic detection board was whooping like a roughneck on a three-day bender. In a few seconds, I managed to push enough of the flashing buttons to get the infernal thing to calm down. Didn’t help that I had a crazy Scotsman shouting over the loudspeakers the whole time, asking for a report.

“All right, I got it!” I finally yelled. “Looks like a 4.3 event.” I studied a topological model of the area on the screen in front of me. “You coming back in?”

“Not yet,” came the reply. “I’m almost done with the faery lights and I want to finish up.”

A fresh wave of annoyance pierced me like a hot knitting needle. What right had he to waste his time on something frivolous like that? He could have been killed when the station shook. Then I’d have really been up a creek. I swallowed a sharp reply.

“All right. Come in as soon as you can. I’ve got a scheduled ice-coring to do later.”

“Thanks, Clay. Knew you’d understand.”

I grimaced as I shut off the ‘com channel. Didn’t help he was being so nice about the whole thing, to boot.

•••

I was suited up and ready to go out when McDonnell finally came back through the airlock. His pressure suit and faceplate were rimed with frost, which melted almost instantly when he hit the warm station interior.

McDonnell twisted off his helmet, revealing a bearded grin.

“They’re gonna be beautiful, Clay,” he said. “Once I hook ‘em up to an electrical source, they’ll shine just like the town square back in Banff on Christmas Eve.”

I raised my own helmet up and with a firm twist, locked it onto the neck ring.

“That’s great, McDonnell,” I said. “Merry Christmas and all that. Happy now?”

I brushed past him into the airlock before I could see the hurt look that was undoubtedly coming over his face.

“I didn’t get everything done on the maintenance schedule for modules D and E,” I said, not bothering to add that his absence was the reason. He knew. “See if you can get to that while I’m gone. I’ll be back in two shakes. Shut the airlock door, willya?”

He shut it, all right. More like slammed it.

•••

I spent the next three hours in the shadow of an ice boulder as big as a three-story building, drilling deep. I grinned as I drew out a nice long core sample, pure and pristine, its layers clearly demarcated. This was what I’d come out here for, away from people to cold, pure white and utter darkness. It was perfect. Too bad McDonnell had to keep bringing old Earth traditions here and screwing things up. I sighed with exasperation. The man was a brilliant engineer, and the mission couldn’t get along with him, but still—

I sealed up the core sample and stowed it on the little one-man rambler that had brought me here. Firing up its little electric motor, I began to wind my way back through the maze of gigantic ice blocks.

As I topped the last ridge and saw the station, I hit the rambler’s brakes. The station had been transformed. From end to end, its white painted pipes and panels were all wreathed in twinkling white lights. The dim ghost of Sol had sunk beneath the horizon hours ago, leaving only the baleful light that reflected from the colossal limb of the yellowish-brown orb that dominated our sky. Against the twilight, McDonnell’s faery lights flared out, looking like little lightning bugs as they flickered in the thin atmo. I keyed the radio transceiver in my helmet.

“McDonnell, I’m coming in. Just topped the ridge.”

“Clay!” McDonnell’s voice came on, sounding breathless in my ears. “Thank God you’re back. Come in, quick! Something’s happened!”

•••

“You saw what?” I tried to keep the raw skepticism out of my voice, but I was fighting a losing battle. Across the control module’s conference table, McDonnell’s eyes blazed at me.

“I ken ye’d nae believe me,” he said, his Scots accent grown thick nearly beyond comprehension from his excitement. He shoved a photo viewer over to me. “Take a look a’ these, and maybe ye’ll see I’m not some kind o’ numptie.”

I picked up the photo viewer and quickly leafed through the images stored on it, figuring I could ask him later what “numptie” meant. “Did you take these out the porthole in module D? These aren’t your Christmas lights, are they?”

“Look for yourself, Clay. They came after I switched my lights on, after my lights started blinking.”

I held the viewer closer to my eyes, staring at the swarm of light specks that contrasted with the black outside the porthole.

“Once they showed up, the wee lights started blinkin’ just like the faery lights I hung. Same rhythm. On and off, on and off. I took these pictures, and then they just left.”

I set the viewer down and cradled my forehead in one hand. “Where’s that eggnog you made? You know, the stuff that has more nog than egg in it.”

“You don’t think I’ve been takin’ some nips from my stash on the sly, do ye? I wasn’t pished.” He sounded shocked.

“No, McDonnell,” I said. “I just need a stiff one before I report this to Titan Base, and that egg nog is the closest thing we’ve got on the station right now.”

When McDonnell came back with one for me and one for him, I sipped as much through the wide bore straw as I could, gasping out loud as I felt the stuff burn its way down my esophagus.

“All right, I’m ready,” I said.

When I stood up, drink in hand, it happened. For a brief moment, I thought that the McDonnell family eggnog had hit me harder than I’d figured on. The room heeled over like the deck of a ship on the slope of a monster wave. Despite my stick-seal moccasins, I fell, missing out on a beautiful concussion only because of the low grav. Behind me, I could hear McDonnell yelling something in a Scots accent so dense that I couldn’t tell whether it was a curse or a prayer. All around us, the station creaked and groaned as its massive bulk slowly shifted. The behemoth that was our home began a terrible slide forward and down. A shower of sparks cascaded from the ceiling, and we plunged into a darkness mitigated only by the glow of the icy wasteland outside filtering through our portholes. Above me, a pipe wrenched too far out of alignment burst, sending a shower of scalding hot water down onto my neck and back. I screamed and writhed and lost my grip. Hurtling forward with the station’s momentum, I met up with a metal floor cabinet that wasn’t traveling as fast as I was. The resulting blackness was predictable.

•••

I awoke, my mouth feeling as parched as Odessa in July. Wincing in pain, I raised my head from the decking. As I surveyed the wrecked control room around me, my memory returned. I rolled over, gasping aloud from the searing agony of my burned neck and back.

“McDonnell!” My voice was loud in the unnaturally silent control room. Except for the slow drip of the ruptured pipes above me, the place was as quiet as a tomb.I croaked out his name again. My gaze found his crumpled body. Crawling to his side as fast as I could, I gently turned him over onto his back. His chest moved and his pulse was strong. I exhaled in relief. He’d come around in a few minutes with nothing more than a whopper of a headache.

When McDonnell opened his eyes and groaned about twenty minutes later, I was sitting near his head, my back against the station hull. He looked at me and blinked slowly.

“What’s happened? What’s going on?” he asked.

While he’d been unconscious, I’d thought of all kinds of nice long detailed explanations to that inevitable question, but I really only needed two words.

“We’re screwed.”

He raised himself up on one elbow, holding his head with the other hand like he was afraid it might fall off.

“What d’ya mean?” he asked.

“We fell into some kind of sinkhole,” I said. “Shireen’s eruptions must have created a weakness in the ice crust beneath the station.”

He started to speak, but I stopped him.

“Hold on. It gets worse. Our oxy and power generating modules were smashed by the ice avalanche that we’re mostly buried by right now.”

“The reserve tanks?”

“Stripped off on our descent,” I said. “My guess? They’re lying down in the crevasse under us somewhere.”

“How much oxy do we have left?”

“Less than 12 hours, I think. We lost a bunch when the station fell and some of the modules sheared right off.”

McDonnell struggled to his knees.

“We’ve got to start a distress call,” he gasped out, his chest heaving. “There’s a helium-3 transport ship that is scheduled to pass right over us on its transit to pick up mined gas. They’re not supposed to stop here, but if we signal–”

I gripped his shoulder as he began to haul himself to his feet.

“Don’t bother. I tried it. All communications are out. Our antennas were all torn off by the avalanche, too.”

“Can we get them back? Rig something up?”

“What do I look like, some sort of djinn? They’re way down in the crevasse. There’s ice debris sitting on top of our upper hatches, and the lower ones are buried. We can’t get out by ourselves.”

“Somebody’ll come check on us when we don’t report in,” he said.

I just shook my head. “We just made a report, remember? We’re not due for another 10 hours or so. By the time they mount a rescue mission from Titan base, we’ll be–”

“Don’t say it,” he said. He put his face in his hands.

I began mentally composing a little homily about how sometimes you just had to accept cold hard facts like death with dignity, but before I could say anything, he raised his face to meet mine. His eyes shone with tears, but there was something else there, too.

“My faery lights,” he said.

•••

It only took McDonnell fifteen minutes to program a simple relay switch into the lights’ electrical system from the control board. We chose the oldest distress signal known to man: three short, three long and three short. When it was done, he joined me by the porthole in D module where I sat watching the lights. Like me, he had donned his pressure suit. The heaters in them would keep us warm once the station lost environmental.

I glanced up at him as he ducked through the door of the module. “What’s the ETA on the transport ship?”

“It should be here in another 8 hours, give or take,” he said. “Its planned trajectory should take it right over our position. If this works, the crew will see us all lit up like a Christmas tree.”

“If this works.” I shivered. It had to be my imagination, but it felt like the module was already growing colder. The station lights were completely out here, and we sat in darkness, our only illumination coming from the strings of lights hanging outside and the faint blue light that filtered down into the crevasse from above.

“We’re deep down in the sinkhole,” I said. “The transport’ll never see us or our lights by themselves.”

“Don’t worry, Clay. They’ll come.”

McDonnell lowered himself, clumsy in his pressure suit, setting his helmet onto the floor beside him. He sat in silence, and the lights outside the thick glass alternatively bathed his face in a warm yellow glow, then plunged it into darkness every other second. After a while, he began speaking in a quiet voice.

“When I was a bairn, my dad was a fisherman on the North Sea. I don’t have to tell you that it was dangerous, thankless work, no matter the time of year.” He scratched his beard thoughtfully. “When my dad was gone on a long fishing trip, my mum always worried about him. The first night he was gone, she’d put a candle in the window of our house, the one that faced the cold, dark sea. And she would light that candle every night until he came home.”

He turned his face to me, and in the sole illumination from the electric lights outside, I could now only see half of it.

“Somehow, I feel like we’re doing the same thing now. Lightin’ a candle, holding out hope against the cold and the dark. Against death.”

“Your dad always come back?”

McDonnell frowned at me, at the strangled tone of my voice, but he answered softly.

“Aye.”

“Well, they don’t always come back, you know?”

I told him then of my own childhood, recalling another Christmas night. The house behind me festooned with blinking lights, and me standing there in my PJ’s, yelling till my throat was raw after a swiftly departing set of car taillights.

“I waited for him every Christmas after that, but he never came back. Never.”

I ran my hands through my hair, clutched it until my scalp hurt. “So you can see why I don’t get the warm fuzzies when I think about your precious holiday.”

“Clay, I–”

“Don’t you pity me,” I snarled, “I don’t need anything from anybody—especially that.”

Visibly wounded by my barbed words, McDonnell fell silent. I closed my eyes again, feeling hot pricks of water behind my lids. We sat silent in that darkness for a while, and I must have dozed off, exhausted, for the next thing I heard was McDonnell’s voice calling to me.

“Clay, wake up! They’re here!”

Groggily, I opened my eyes and squinted up at the porthole. Outside, McDonnell’s lights kept up their steady rhythmical blinking. But beyond them—

I was on the front lawn of my childhood home, and I had a jar in my hands. All around me, in the summer night, glowing fitfully in the green grass between my bare toes, and flitting from mailbox to tree to sidewalk, was a myriad of fireflies.

And now, impossibly in the subzero cold out there, they had come back. Hundreds of thousands of them, glowing little dots of light, each flashing in sync with our own creations of wire and glass, telegraphing our distress call to the world above. I drew in a long, shuddering breath and rose to join McDonnell at the porthole where he watched them. His half-open mouth made a circle of fog on the surface of the glass as he breathed, and I stood beside him in the cold of module D and watched the intricate dance of the little faery lights outside. They couldn’t know what message they were carrying for us—they were at best glowing imitators no more intelligent than many of Earth’s own sea dwellers. Yet even so, my heart swelled to see them. For their message, whether they knew it or not, was one of hope.

As the radio crackled to life with the transport ship’s response to our call, I swallowed my pride and looked McDonnell straight in the eye.

“Merry Christmas,” I said. This time, I meant it.

We recently added poetry and articles/essays as submission categories. We appreciate the Review Fuse members who helped us develop the review frameworks for these categories. Are there additional categories you would like us to add?

A new category often takes a few weeks to start running smoothly. The first members submit to a new category often find themselves stuck in review purgatory, all alone with no one to critique. We try to alleviate this problem by asking authors we work closely with to submit to these new categories. We appreciate your patience and help as we get these new categories running smoothly.

Jacob

The Review Fuse team is debating which feature to develop next. We would like your input about which of these features would help you benefit the most as a writer or from the peer critique process. Would you please rank the following 4 features in order of usefulness? Please feel free to add other features to your comments.

• Writing Lessons
  • We would provide a weekly writing lesson that focuses on specific writing skills. This would include topics like how to develop a captivating beginning for a story or how to create memorable characters. These writing lessons could be submitted for critique by your peers after completing the lesson.
• Verbal Review
  • This would allow a reviewer to read your piece out loud and interject their thoughts and comments vocally. This would only be available for users with microphones. We would let the author choose if they will accept verbal reviews. The verbal reviews would be available for download as MP3s.
• Create your own review frameworks
  • When you submit a piece for review you can develop your own review framework for the piece, allowing you to ask reviewers to address specific areas in your work.
• Writing analysis
  • Our servers would inspect your writing and programmatically identify issues like:
    • Is my writing too complicated?
    • Am I being repetitive?
    • Am I over-reliant on particular words and phrases?
    • How advanced and readable is my writing?

Thanks for your help. If you have not had a chance to do so please join our free writing community.

Jacob

by Annette Lyon

Several years ago I sat at a general session of a writing conference during a Q&A. I was surprised at the kinds of questions asked, things that were, I thought, obvious.

Then it dawned on me that four years prior, I hadn’t known the answers to those very same questions. Of course not; I had to learn them just like everyone else. I had really learned a lot over the last few years.

In the same vein, I’ve been surprised recently at some manuscripts that have crossed my editing desk, or rather, I’ve been surprised at the format of some of them. They’ve had some really basic problems, and I finally clued in why:
The writers just hadn’t learned yet. It’s not like there’s a writer fairy that bestows knowledge about things like formatting the moment you declare you’re a writer.

So in light of that, I thought I’d do a refresher on some basics about manuscript formatting. It’s something I think we often overlook, focusing instead on craft. But really, how your work looks will be the first thing the agent or editor ever sees.
If it’s wrong, you’ll look like an amateur, and that’s not the best way to make a good impression.

While publishers and specific types of manuscripts vary (screenplays, etc. are very different), in your average novel, you’re pretty safe using all of the following:

• One-inch margins. That means all around: top, bottom, left, and right. A bigger margin (say 1.25 inches—1.5 at the most) is fine, but never go smaller than one inch.
• Twelve-point font. Don’t go bigger, and don’t go smaller in an attempt to fit stuff onto the page.
• A standard font, like Courier or Times New Roman. In the past, Courier was the standard, but that was in the days of typewriters, when editors needed a good way to estimate word counts. Courier was good for that, since every letter takes up the exact same amount of space, whether it’s an I or an M. Nowadays, Courier is still fine, but Times New Roman is also popular and accepted—and for some editors and agents, preferred, since it’s a bit easier on the eyes. Just don’t use some funky script or cutesy font.
• A header at the top of each and every page. On the left side, it needs to have your title (or an abbreviated version of it) and your last name, such as: SPIRES OF STONE/Lyon. This way, if manuscript pages get separated from the whole, the editor will still know which work—and which author—it belongs to.
• Page numbers, beginning with 1, on every single page, preferably top right.
• Basic contact information on the first page, top left. Including your name, address, phone number, and e-mail address. You can also include a fax number. Single space this part.
• Approximate word count. Either immediately under your contact information or flush right at the top of the first page.
• Indent the first line of every paragraph by tabbing over once. Never, ever use the space bar to indent a paragraph.
• Create a new page for the beginning of each chapter. That doesn’t mean hitting “enter” sixteen times until you reach a new page. It means using control-enter to create a hard-page break.
• Use italics instead of underlining, which is another fossil from the typewriter age.
• Don’t use all caps or bold. Leave those for blogs, e-mail, and non-fiction.
• Do ellipses properly. Always be sure there are only 3 dots, and each one has a space before and after it, like this . . . (Sometimes Word will try to smash them all together. Undo it.) The one exception is if the ellipses land after a full sentence. Then you’ll have four dots, because the first one (with no space before it) is acting as a period.
• Know how to create an em dash, and use it properly. Don’t use a hyphen (or two hyphens) in its place. In Word, use control+alt+the minus key or type two hyphens, the next word, and a space. The hyphens should turn into an em dash.
• Use plain white paper.
• Print on one side.
• Put ONE space after a period. Two spaces is another hold-over from typewriters. Today publishers expect just one.
• Double space throughout (except for your contact information on the first page).
• Don’t include a copyright notice. That makes you look paranoid and unprofessional. Editors and agents know the copyright laws and that the moment you set your work into a tangible form, it’s already under protection by law.

You want the editor to notice your story, not your formatting. If you follow these basic guidelines, the formatting becomes invisible, and you’ll look polished and professional for that very first impression.

Annette Lyon is Utah’s 2007 Best of State medalist for fiction and 2007 Whitney Award finalist. Her sixth novel, Tower of Strength, will be released March 2009. She edits for Precision Editing Group and blogs at The Lyon’s Tale.

Several members have asked us for a way to communicate with those who review their work. In order to better meet your needs Steve added a new feature to accommodate this last week. We intentionally made it a little hard to find because we want just a few people to try it out before we added prominent links to this feature on the My Account page. If you would like to be one of our testers please follow the steps outlined below and let us know what you think about this feature by commenting on this post.

1. Click on the “view icon” for either the “Latest Reviews I’ve Received” or “Latest Reviews I’ve Given” on the My Account page. See screen shot 1.
2. If you chose the “view icon” from the “Latest Reviews I’ve Received” section, please take a moment to rate the review if you have not already done so.  See screen shot 2. We use review ratings as part of our peer matching criteria, if you tend to give good reviews we will match you up with people who also tend to give good reviews and vice versa. By the end of next month review rating will be a much more significant factor in determining your peers for the assigned reviews.
3. Screen Shots 3, 4 and 5 show the two users interacting by posting messages to each other. Screen shot 5 also shows that you can choose to “redo a review.” This is primarily for new members who give low quality reviews on their first attempt. We wanted to provide a way for them to repent of this misdeed.

The “discuss this review” feature will become more prominent and easy to use over the next few weeks. Please let us know if you like it and how we can improve it. If you have not had a chance to do so please feel free join Review Fuse, after all it’s free.

Jacob

We recently made a significant change to the way we assign reviews. Previously, we never assigned a member to review the same work twice. However, after several authors dramatically changed their stories to incorporate review feedback, we decided to allow authors to review the same story if it had been edited. Was this a good or bad idea? Please share your thoughts.

by J. Scott Savage

I have three tools of the trade I use a lot. In Stephen King’s great book, On Writing, he describes a toolbox every good writer should carry. You may not need every tool every time you write, but it’s great to have them when you need them. Some tools you use more than others. For me, my Phillips screwdriver, pliers, and hammer are isolation, disorientation, and misdirection.

These are the tools I break out when I want to raise the tension in one of my novels. They are often the key components of a thriller, but as you’ll see, they are just as important in other genres as well.

First of all, let’s take a look at how these tools fit into the toolbox as a whole. In any story with a plot (so really anything other than hardcore literary fiction, which according to Orson Scott Card is just another genre) your main character must have a goal. Preferably a noble goal, so the readers will root for them, but that is not a hard and fast requirement. Second, your reader must care about your protagonist. Third, there must be some kind of negative consequence if the protagonist does not accomplish their goal.

Pretty basic stuff, right? In order to save the townspeople, Sir Coughalot must duel the dragon, find the cup, and return it to the palace before the plague of bad breath is complete. I’m not sure how much we’d like a hero named Sir Coughalot. And his quest seems a little boring. But it’ll work for an example.

The problem is, Sir Coughalot is a knight, and we all know knights slay dragons every day. Also, he probably has a squire and bunch of friends with swords and shields. So we lay down the book with a yawn and say, “Ho hum. Maybe there’s something good on TV.” That is an author’s nightmare. I can’t have you laying down my book to run off and see who makes it to the next round of American Idol. Even if the cute kid with the weird hair sings just like Freddie Mercury.

In order to keep you hooked, I need to raise the stakes a little. I need to pull you into my web of fiction. (Wow. That sounded kind of cool. We need an author superhero who catches guys in his web of fiction. “Stand back, evil nemesis. I have a historical romance and I know how to use it.”)

Anyway, back to raising the stakes. One of the easiest ways to make you care about my character is by taking away his or her supports. In our story about Sir Coughalot, I need to get him away from his co-knights, and maybe even his squire. Isolation is used a ton, but there is a reason so many fantasy novels start with an orphaned child. What is more vulnerable than a baby left on a doorstep? Of course it works even better if the baby is left on the doorstep of a family that is mean to him and makes him sleep under the stairs while his mean older cousin gets two rooms to himself.

There are books which do not use this tool. For example, my friend James Dashner has a novel called The 13th Reality in which the boy goes on his adventure with his father. But even then, James uses the tool of isolation. He makes sure the dad is more like a big kid. Dad does not step in and save the day at every turn. So what we really have is more like a sidekick than a true parent figure. In Lord of the Rings, Samwise stays with Frodo, but the rest of the fellowship cannot come. It’s handled very skillfully, but in truth it’s just a tool to further isolate the protagonist. (Of course, the first isolation is when Gandalf leaves.)

Okay, so in our story, we could have everyone else be afraid of the dragon. But that’s pretty cliché (like the rest of the story isn’t, right?), so instead let’s say that the cup is rumored to turn anyone who sees it into a stick of gum. That should scare away all the other knights. The squire stays on, but he’s never been all that bright. And besides, he likes gum. We have now used isolation to up the ante.

Our next tool is disorientation. Let’s go back to our hypothetical misfit living under the stairs with a mean family and a bully cousin. His life is pretty miserable, and he certainly doesn’t have any friends, but at least he is used to it. In order to really create some interest on the part of the reader, we need to raise the stakes again. We need our readers to not only like our protagonist, but to actually begin the process of putting themselves in his place. A cool way to do that is to put the protagonist into a world he is unfamiliar with. And so much the better if the reader is unfamiliar with the world as well.

I write fantasy novels, but let me point out that when I say world, I am not specifically referring to another planet. It could be the world of high finance. It could be the country mouse going to the city. It could be that 99.9% of everyone on Earth dies. All a new “world” requires is that the protagonist finds herself in a place that throws her off balance. This is why Harry Potter goes to Hogwarts. It’s why Frodo leaves the Shire. It’s why Prince Raoden is thrown into Elantris. It’s why Luke Skywalker ends up in a swamp with a little green Muppet.

Let me use another example from a movie my younger readers may not be as familiar with. In the movie Jaws, the protagonist must stop a great white shark from munching its way through an entire town of tourists. We isolate him by turning the townspeople against him. Then we disorient him but making him afraid of what? Water, of course! Then we put him out on a boat with a crazy captain.

The other great thing about putting our protagonist into a new world is that we, the readers, get to discover the world right along with him, wondering over the flying brooms and laughing at the missing stair riser. Of course when they get to their new world, they might start making friends again, lessening the isolation. But there are plenty of ways to turn the people in the new world against them as well, right? So let’s send our knight to a land where dragons live in peaceful villages and knights are the ones that attack and terrify. And just for fun, let’s make the dragons people-size and the bad knights huge, terrifying creatures. That puts our little knight right in the thick of it.

Last but not least is misdirection. Going back to Harry—I mean, our hypothetical misfit—how do we make sure the reader doesn’t guess who Voldemort is? This is a slight problem because the obvious choice would be the new teacher, right? Okay, so we need the reader to completely discount Professor Quirrell. How do we pull it off? Misdirection. Get the reader to make an assumption which will keep them looking the wrong way.

In this case, JK Rowling introduces Professor Quirrell early in the story as a nervous little man who is overcome with wonder at meeting the great Harry Potter. This does two things. First, it makes the reader create a mental image of Quirrell as someone so non-threatening we can’t even consider him as a suspect. Second, she makes the introduction just as we are entering the world of magic. She distracts us with all the cool other things so we don’t have time to consider why she took all that time to introduce a character of such little importance so completely.

Of course the second part of misdirection is giving the reader an alternate target to focus on. If only JK Rowling could have come up with a slimy, mean, back-stabbing type of character who skulks around the school. Someone who surely has it in for Harry. Oh wait. She did! Snape was the target she wanted us to focus on while Quirrell worked quietly in the background. Of course it turns out that Snape was even more misdirection for future novels.

To wrap up our story of Sir Coughalot, we could have the squire actually be a bad guy all along. He could be just waiting for his chance to turn our poor knight into a package of Hubba Bubba and steal the cup for himself.

So there you have it. Isolation, disorientation, and misdirection. Fun tools. Powerful tools. But use them carefully. You wouldn’t want to put an eye out.

J. Scott Savage is the author of five novels, including his most recent, Farworld, the first in a fantasy series for young readers. Visit him at www.readfarworld.com

We have asked published authors if they would be willing to write about their experiences as a writer and what led them into a writing career.  The response has been very overwhelming and we will shortly begin adding their posts to our blog.

If you are a published writer feel free to submit your url in the comments of this post and we may contact you asking you to be a guest blogger as well.

steve