Domino Theory by Tia Dani

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Self-editing is tricky. For example as the author you are so familiar with your story you could absentmindedly forget to include information along the way...say an important point you thought of but, without thinking, left out.

Keep this point in mind while editing, a reader knows only what you have actually told (or shown) them on paper.

When we go back through our stories during the editing process we try to remember this and work together to make sure that we haven’t left out important details and confused our readers.  Plus, we don’t want our writing to be choppy and sound like there are two writers. We have worked very hard to create the Tia Dani voice.

We call this particular part of our editing process the Domino Theory.

Imagine you have spent hours, aligning hundreds of dominos, narrow-end up, across a flat surface. You’ve placed the black, shiny tiles perfectly so they form an intricate and unusual pattern. Once finished, your finger is poised at the beginning. You tap the first domino lightly. With pride you watch as the line tumbles gracefully, one clicking against another, until the formation comes to a glorious end.

Writing a well-designed story is very much like setting up the dominos. Each sentence, paragraph, scene, and chapter must be aligned in your intricate formation. The writing dominos you work with generally are combinations of showing vs. telling, description, view point, senses, mood, voice, plot, dialogue, characterization, humor, and motivation. If any of the writing dominos are off-centered or missing entirely, your beautiful story will falter or even fail.

Writers who understand the power of correct placement look upon their manuscript as an exciting challenge. They instinctively study a newly finished scene and ask themselves what needs adjusted, added, or deleted. Will they need a domino from their bag of writing tricks for a missing slot? Or carefully adjust an off-centered tile so it aligns perfectly with the others?

For beginners (and for those who haven’t yet developed this gut instinct), condition yourself to recognize what a missing or an off-centered domino looks like. If time is available, put the work aside, return later and reread with fresh eyes. Or have a trusted friend read the scene and ask if anything seems unclear. Don't ask them to edit, just read for clarity. After while you will begin to see a pattern of how you misaligned your work or left something out entirely. The bottom line here:  Knowledge comes with practice, hard work, and common sense. It is also called pay-attention-to-what-the- reader-sees.

For examples, let’s look at some obvious missing dominos.

Problem:  Imagine paragraphs one through twelve has Katy in the house washing dishes and talking to her mother on the phone about her lack of boyfriends. Suddenly in paragraph thirteen Katy is outside washing the car and talking to her dog about going for a walk.

Solution:  Transition Domino. Add a short paragraph between twelve and thirteen to show why Katy ended mom’s phone call and went outside with her dog. Voila! You’ve filled in the missing slot.

Problem:  Veronica is home, alone, with only a dozing cat for company. She’s just finished reading a romantic love scene in one of her favorite books and is staring dreamily into the fire. Suddenly Veronica throws the book across the room and jumps to her feet, dislodging the sleepy animal from her lap. She mumbles something under her breath then walks slowly into her darkened bedroom to get ready for bed.

Solution:  Motivation Domino. Let’s say the author used the correct dominos needed to build a believable scene; such as the five senses, description, and mood. However why did the character suddenly throw her book? The author neglected to explain poor Veronica hasn’t had a date for over a year and she feels that her chances of meeting an interesting man are nil to none.

Problem:  A scene takes place outdoors. The day is sunny, horribly hot with no wind. The characters walk and engage in a captivating conversation which has drawn the reader in, yet something feels not quite right.

Solution:  Off-centered Domino. The characters appear to be totally unfazed by the high temperatures. This scene requires one of the five-senses realignment. With a few short sentences the author can adjust the scene to show perspiration dripping from HIS brow or SHE rapidly fans her face with her hand.

Problem:  Envision a scene where Charles is hiking and has stumbled across a rattler. The snake coiled, ready to strike. Yet paragraph after paragraph, the author goes to great detail in describing the beauty of the reptile, the sound of the animal’s ominous rattle and the texture of the sand surrounding it.

Solution:  A 'mis'-aligned domino. The detail, though well-written, is not pertinent to Charles view point. Charles would not be noting sand textures here. The snake is about to strike! Try going back over the scene and weave in some extra dominos so that the emotional dominos and descriptive dominos form a dance in time with each other. It might take some work but will be worth it when completed.

Here are some important points to remember.

* A domino line can be fixed at any time by concentrating on one very important rule. For every action there must be a reaction. Use it as a mantra.

Beverly Petrone                   Christine Eaton Jones

Tia Dani is the writing team made up of good friends, Christine Eaton Jones and Beverly Petrone. Together they create endearing and realistic characters, humorous dialogue, and unusual settings. 

To find out more about the writing team Tia Dani and our books visit us at:

 http://bookswelove.com/authors/tia-dani/

 https://tiadaniauthor.wordpress.com/

 https://www.facebook.com/tiadani.author

 https://twitter.com/TiaDani 

 www.facebook.com/butterscotchmartinigirls

We've got Cows! By Tia Dani

(With apology to the writers' of the movie, "TWISTER".)

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Whenever we work at a restaurant, it means we're usually creating a new book.

Beginning a new story, always fires us up, however, sanity also rears its annoying pointy head and sniffs, "Where are you going to start?"

Since our stories are generally character driven, we first like to know our characters inside and out. We talk about who they are and what they specifically want. Once we've got their names and backgrounds, flaws, and why they are driven, then we work on where we're going with the story.

Actually sometimes a plot line will come to us first, but that's a topic for another blog later on. (Has anyone picked up we're always saving things for other blogs?)

Back to brainstorming. Our second step is who opens the story in their point of view? Normally we gear our books toward the romance genre (Dani's strong point), so we usually start with the heroine. Sometimes the hero will protest and win the argument. We're really not gender driven.

But here's where it gets tricky. Once we know the characters, know the underlying plot, we have to add flesh and blood to the story…the stuff that not only draws readers avidly into the book, but ourselves as well.

We rely on our handy dandy writing class rule. Every scene needs three parts:

1. Goal. What does the character want? CHECK. DONE THAT.

2. Conflict. A series of difficulties characters must face on the way to reaching their goal. CHECK…WAIT! HOLD ON…We're not exactly there yet.

Several minutes (actually hours) of discussion, heavy research, and some wine, maybe a lot of wine, one of us (usually Tia) yells, "We got cows!"

Imagine in the restaurant the looks we get are quite comical. "Cows? What cows?" Several people look around nervously. "Where?"

We grin at everyone and explain we're co-authors, Tia Dani, and Tia's yell, "We've got cows." is an expression for seeing difficulties (like in the movie where cows fly in the middle of a tornado.) Some nod and say, "I see." Others…look confused then go back to eating.

Now onto Rule Three: 

The Ultimate Disaster. What keeps characters from reaching their goals? By this time Tia is jumping up and down, waving her hands at a bunch of unseen cows in her mind. (Remember how she loves a great disaster.) Even Dani can't help but get drawn into the excitement. She has her own cows. With rapid-fire description, she embellishes great love scenes to go along with Tia's disaster(s).

By this time we have new people around us and we have to explain all over again.

But the really funny thing is, our waitress, who's gotten to know us quite well, strolls by and says with a grin, "Katie, bar the barn door. Tia Dani has their cows!"

                              This is how we look by the time we've finished brainstorming a book.

                                       © Graphixparanoid | Dreamstime.com - Mad Cow Photo

                                        cow photos by @ElisaLocci/DreamstimeStockPhoto

To find out more about the writing team Tia Dani and our books visit us at: 

http://bookswelove.com/authors/tia-dani/
https://tiadaniauthor.wordpress.com/
https://www.facebook.com/tiadani.author
                                                          

Monday Was Wash Day by Roseanne Dowell

      Dedicated to my mom who taught me more than how to do laundry. This was my second published work, published in Good Old Days Magazine in May 2004. 

      Bright and early every Monday, Mom and I went to the basement. As I stood by her side she taught me the proper way to sort clothes- whites, towels, colors, work pants and jeans. We pulled the old wringer washer from the corner  to the stationary tubs. She filled it with scalding hot water and turned the machine on to start it agitating. After she added whatever soap was on sale at the time, she always added a bar of Fels Naphtha that she

let me grate on an old grater. The long curls of soap slid off the grater into the water. I loved

watching the scorching water swallow them up as it agitated into suds.

Once the soap dissolved, we put the white clothes in first. Mom pushed them into the water with her wash stick, an old broom handle, being careful not to splash herself with the steaming hot water. She closed the lid. While the clothes washed, we strung the clothes line in the basement on cold or rainy days and outside in the warm sunny weather, which was limited in Ohio.

 Back in the fifties, we didn't have a dryer so everything had to be hung. Besides, Mom said there was nothing like the smell of fresh laundered clothes straight off the line in the warm weather. She climbed on a stool made especially for her and pulled that line so tight someone could walk across it and then gave it another yank before securing it with a knot.

Back into the basement, we scrubbed the two stationary tubs, and filled them with water.

Mom added bleach to the first tub and the other held plain rinse water. After the clothes washed for about 15 minutes, Mom used the wash stick and pulled them out of the washer, the water still being too hot to touch. She put them carefully through the wringer. My job was to make sure they didn't wrap around the rollers, which sometimes happened anyway causing it to pop, separating the rollers. We untangled the clothes and she re-tightened the knob. It was always very frustrating when that happened and took valuable time away from a busy day.

We let the clothes soak for a few minutes in the bleach pushing them around with the stick, so we wouldn't slop the bleach water on ourselves. After we rinsed them, we drained the bleach water and added fresh water and rinsed the clothes again, changing the rinse water after every load. We rinsed the clothes thoroughly by lifting them in and out of the water up and down repeatedly. It looked like fun until she let me do it.  I found out how hard it was and how heavy wet clothes were. It was backbreaking work. After the last rinse, Mom sent the clothes through the wringer and I guided them into a basket that sat on a bench next to the washer. The next load to go in was the towels, as most of them were light colors or white. While they were washing, we hung the first load.
I helped by handing my mom clothespins and the clothes, saving her from bending over. She

always tried to make a game of it, singing and teasing to help make it fun. About halfway through she sent me to the garage for the wooden clothes props which we hooked under the line and raised it up, so the clothes didn't hit the ground. No matter how tight Mom pulled that line, the wet clothes made it sag. The clothes props had a groove in them to hold the line so it couldn't fall out as it flapped back and forth in the breeze.

She hung the work pants with pant stretchers in the legs, to keep them taut and made the

crease. As soon as the clothes were dry, we removed them to make room for new ones.  Most days the last load of laundry was on the line by noon. It usually didn't take them long to dry. We snapped them hard when we removed them to get rid of excess wrinkles and folded them immediately, then Mom sorted them onto piles for each of us kids to put away. The clothes that needed ironed were sometimes taken off the line damp or sprinkled with water, rolled into a ball, and stored in a plastic bag. Tuesday was ironing day.

 You can find Roseanne's books at   Books We Love or Amazon