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This is either a really huge candy cane or a really small reindeer.

The post Daily Drawing: Reindeer 13 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

It’s a little known fact that Reindeer love a nice cup of hot chocolate.

The post Daily Drawing: Reindeer 12 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

This reindeer is really fond of his antlers. And justifiably so.

The post Daily Drawing: Reindeer 11 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

This reindeer does not like being ridden– but how do you say no to such a happy elf?

The post Daily Drawing: Reindeer 10 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

Here’s a happy reindeer frolicking in the snow. Has it snowed yet where you are? If so, I hope you enjoy it as much as this guy does.

The post Daily Drawing: Reindeer 9 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

I think this guy is warming up for the big Christmas delivery.

The post Daily Drawing: Reindeer 8 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

This guy doesn’t seem very happy. I wonder what his problem is?

The post Daily Drawing: Reindeer 7 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

Reindeer. Snowdeer.

The post Daily Drawing: Reindeer 6 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

Here’s a cute reindeer for your Monday morning.

The post Daily Drawing: Reindeer 5 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

And we end the week with this reindeer and his wonderful antlers. Have a great weekend, see you back here on Monday!

The post Daily Drawing: Reindeer 4 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

Christmas can be stressful, even for a reindeer.

The post Daily Drawing: Reindeer 3 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

Here’s a happy reindeer! I think this must be “Prancer”– look at how he walks.

The post Daily Drawing: Reindeer 2 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

How can December be here already? Where has the year gone?

This is the 12th month of my “daily drawings” and this month will be devoted to Reindeer! Tune in every weekday for more of these guys.

The post Daily Drawing: Reindeer 1 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

It’s the final turkey of the month, and I end things as we began them: with a contented turkey with no cares in the world. See you tomorrow for December’s theme.

The post Daily Drawing: Turkey 21 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

It’s the day after Thanksgiving! And this turkey is very happy to see it!

The post Daily Drawing: Turkey 20 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

It’s Thanksgiving! (Or, it is for those of us in America.) Here we see the Turkeys who survived have much to be thankful for and are dancing with joy.

I’m told that some of my depressed turkeys from the last few days have made people feel guilty about consuming a bird during the holiday. But I hope my pen and ink sketches haven’t put any serious doubts in anyone’s mind. And I hope you’re having a wonderous holiday whatever you do or eat.

The post Daily Drawing: Turkey 19 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

This turkey has given up hope and is waiting for the inevitable. I hope you’re having a much better day!

The post Daily Drawing: Turkey 18 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

This turkey is checking to see if his crash diet was enough to save him from the dinner table. What do you think? Is he safe?

The post Daily Drawing: Turkey 17 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

As promised, here’s your second turkey of the day, to make up for missing one last week. And this nervous guy really wishes he wasn’t here. Poor guy, the countdown to Thanksgiving is too much for him.

The post Daily Drawing: Turkey 16 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

Here’s one turkey who won’t take Thanksgiving lying down. Just look at those muscles!

I missed getting a drawing up last Friday due to illness (which, I think, is the only time I’ve missed due to illness this year– a pretty good record, if I do say so myself.) I plan on having a second drawing later today to get me back on schedule.

The post Daily Drawing: Turkey 15 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

Don’t worry, this isn’t a post about dress code for writers. If there was such a thing, 3/4 of my wardrobe would be out the window. I’m basically in my pajamas right now, with an additional layer of dog hair to make the outfit fancy. This is a post inspired by several editorial client manuscripts where I’m noticing characters going about their business with an overall lack of tension. This post builds on the idea introduced in last week’s post, about making subtle changes that could yield more tension. If you haven’t read that one, go check it out, then read on here.

You don’t want a character who is freaking out all the time, because that will be exhausting. They care too much about everything, and everything is a big deal. if you find yourself with this type of character on your hands, this is going to backfire pretty quickly. If everything is at a level 11, you lose the ability to make it matter after a while due to the Law of Diminishing Returns. As they say in The Incredibles, “If everyone is special, then no one is.”

That leaves us with a character who doesn’t care as much as they could. They are too casual. There are two ways to be too casual: about things that don’t matter, and about things that do. You may have one of these characters if people have told you that they’re having a hard time relating to the story or getting worked up about its events. If you’ve received the comment that your readers are having trouble caring.

First, your issue could be a character who is mellow in a mellow situation. For example, a character named Jane is about to take a test. It could go like this:

There was an exam coming up in pre-calc. Whatever. Not only did she have no plans to ever touch a math textbook again, but the teacher had offered to drop everyone’s lowest test grade. Jane didn’t even break a sweat, and went back to scribbling in her art notebook.

If Jane doesn’t care, why should we? The outcome doesn’t matter, she doesn’t seem at all worried, it’s a non-issue. The fix would be to make Jane care, even a little bit. Even if she wants to seem like she doesn’t. Inject tension into how Jane feels versus how she’s behaving. Compare this example to the original:

Jane scribbled in her art notebook but she couldn’t help watching the clock out the corner of her eye. Pre-calc was coming up, and that damn midterm. Whatever. At least that’s what she tried to think. Even though she didn’t care about math, her mom would. And she didn’t want to fail, because that meant more math practice, maybe a tutor. Jane sighed and stopped drawing. Maybe she could cram a few more minutes of studying in. Everyone else was doing it.

Here, we get a subtle shift in Jane’s thinking. She really doesn’t care, but there’s tension now because she won’t let herself fail the exam on principle. Whatever her real reasons are, there’s now a little battle going on. She feels conflicted. There’s tension. Jane’s overall stance on the exam hasn’t changed–it hasn’t suddenly become the Everest of her high school career. But at least she cares now, and notice also that the very fact that she does care bothers her. Or she feels like she’s forced to care. Either way, there are multiple layers of tension.

Tension comes from uncertainty, fear, anxiety. With the revised example, I’ve added an undercurrent of doubt. She knows this exam isn’t the end all and be all, but she wants to do well on it anyway, and she worries she won’t. Even if a character feels confident, you can always add a shade of tension. We all have these darker feelings, even in moments of great light. Use that to your advantage. Friction means tension means stakes means reader engagement!

This brings me to my next, more obvious, idea. You can certainly dial up the tension by changing the character’s attitude toward something. Why not take it one step further and change the something to have higher stakes? Instead of blowing the exam off (too casual), she has a more complex and interesting relationship with it. If you’re not going to present the event in a layered way, why even bother describing it? You’re giving a lot of manuscript real estate to what amounts to a throwaway. Surely there are other things you could be narrating that stand to get more of a rise out of Jane. Maybe an art competition.

One of my favorite things to remind writers is that they are creating a world from scratch. They make up the characters, the events, the circumstances. If a character is bored, they are also boring the reader. If they don’t care, the reader has to struggle to latch on to the story.

If you suspect that a character is either being too casual about their circumstances or stuck in circumstances that are too casual, take control, add some small tension, and beef up the moment. Or cut or change it. But don’t let the story tension peter out. If all else fails, have them thinking about something else that’s coming up, and plant the seeds for tension down the road.

Not every turkey can be as composed as yesterday’s bird.

The post Daily Drawing: Turkey 14 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

This turkey stoically accepts his fate. Thanksgiving is coming no matter what.

The post Daily Drawing: Turkey 13 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

This turkey hopes that if he sneaks away quietly, he’ll escape Thanksgiving.

The post Daily Drawing: Turkey 12 appeared first on rob-peters.com.

I’m working with a client on a Synopsis Overhaul right now. Quick plug: If you haven’t checked out my freelance editorial website in a while, I have added this new service, as well as Reader Reports. I won’t bulk up this post by describing them here, but they’re two great options for getting feedback on your novel’s development as or before you write it (in the case of the Synopsis Overhaul) or getting my eyes on your entire manuscript, along with comprehensive notes, but without the investment of a Full Manuscript Edit. Check them out!

There’s a proposed scene in my client’s outline that doesn’t quiiiite work. Of course, she is free to write it and see if she can make it work as she develops her draft, but I had a reservation about it. Basically, her protagonist, let’s call him Sam, does something illogical. The issue is, he has been planning this illogical move for a while. He’s a smart kid in a heavily guarded environment, and, for a smart kid in a heavily guarded environment, the plan makes no sense because he should know better, and he would get caught immediately.

But in the manuscript she’s planning, he completely ignores common sense and does his plan anyway. I told her in the synopsis edit that I didn’t buy it. The plan is so foolhardy and out of character, and so improbable in his environment, that I really would struggle believing its feasible. I called it the Improbable Thing.

In writing fiction, we create the fictive dream, right? We create a world and a character and a set of circumstances and actions that function with a certain logic. There’s enough logic there that the reader can suspend disbelief and “go there” with the story. Here, I was having trouble “going there” because my own logic kept calling out that this was too far out to believe.

My client is really attached to this plot point, and she doesn’t want to remove it from the story, which I completely understand. First of all, I’m not going to tell her to axe it at this early juncture. When I work with clients on developing a novel outline, I don’t rule anything out. They are free to write a draft of the novel as they wish, and see if it works. It’s tough to work with just an outline, because I don’t get to really see the manuscript in question. I just get to see its bones. Who knows how the final version could flesh out? But that’s what makes synopsis work exciting! It’s all about possibilities and tweaking things so that the actual manuscript comes into sharper focus.

So, if it’s not fair to say, “Yeah, cut it, it’s a disaster” at this point, then what? How do you work around a plot point or character development that seems improbable? In writing her back about whether or not to axe her beloved plot point, I had a great idea for this post.

If you’re faced with an instance in your story that people aren’t “buying” (or you’re worried they won’t buy), it’s time to think about the context. The present may still be good, but what if you put it in a different wrapper? A brilliant potential solution.

What if, in this case, Sam doesn’t plot the Improbable Thing in advance? He wants to accomplish XYZ, but he doesn’t think that it’s possible. Then, he is in the right place at the right time, and the opportunity to do an Improbable Thing comes up. He only has an instant to think, and so he thinks, “What if this is crazy enough to work?” This could be just the new context my client needs. It accomplishes two things:

First, it adds a layer of impulsiveness to the Improbable Thing. It wouldn’t have worked as a plan, because it makes no sense as a plan (too many holes). But it could totally be sold as a last-ditch, impulsive, emotional effort, and I’d buy it because if Sam is being impulsive, then he’s not thinking clearly.

Second, if Sam is right there saying, “This is too crazy to work, but I have no other choice,” then the reader feels reassured. We see him questioning it, right as we’re questioning it, so the reader and protagonist are on the exact same page! We’re a team! Nobody thinks this could work, which opens up the possibility that…well…maybe it could! It’s that leap that will help the reader suspend disbelief. And then I’m “going there” with Sam instead of rejecting the Improbable Thing.

If there are moments in your manuscript that you’re really struggling to sell, if you think they’re too far out there to make sense with plot or character, but you like or need them, think about context. By changing the wrapper, you can still give the reader the present, it will just be surrounded by a different situation or motivation or expectation. It’s up to you to create that experience and make it believable.

Of course, some things are just not going to be a good fit, no matter how hard you try. But others might just be, well, crazy enough to work, as long as you frame them right.