Publetariat

Publetariat’s staff is off in observance of Veterans Day, which is a national holiday here in the United States and is also observed in some other countries as Remembrance Day or Armistice Day. No new content will be posted to the site until 6pm PST on Sunday, 11/13/11, when we will resume our normal editorial schedule. Members can still post to their own Publetariat blogs, and the forum will remain open, but new registrations, moderated comments and contact form messages will not be processed during this break.

(no need to click through – this is the end of the post)  

This post, by Dean Wesley Smith, originally appeared on his site on 10/30/11.

It has been an interesting time for me and writing over the last three months that has gotten me to a spot where I can see clearly (even tired) some observations about indie publishing that without the last three months I would not have noticed. At least not now. I’ll talk about them one at a time over the next month or so.

The first observation:

The Money Doesn’t Stop

In late July and early August I worked really hard on getting some experiments ready for the World Science Fiction Convention in Reno, Nevada. Book cards and the like. I had no book deadlines and the only writing I was doing for the summer and fall was the short story challenge and getting up indie published a Poker Boy novel and a thriller I had written a few years back and done nothing with. It felt wonderfully freeing.

Now understand, I am a professional fiction writer. Not having book contracts, not having deadlines used to be the most frightening thing that could happen to me. In fact, before this year, I loved having at least five and up to ten book deadlines lined up like planes on a runway waiting for take-off, as Kevin J. Anderson calls them.

In fact, on my office wall I used to have a bunch of images of jets cut out of paper and a book title written in bold on the side of each jet image. In one color ink I had book projects I was thinking of writing, in another color book projects I had under contract.

If I finished the book and turned it in I would cut off the wheels of the plane so it looked like it was flying and put the plane on another wall. At one point I had fourteen novels in the air at the same time in that period between turn-in and publication. (Those of you who don’t understand traditional publishing time, you won’t understand how that was even possible.)

 

Read the rest of the post on Dean Wesley Smith’s site.

For those who edit books and articles professionally, occasionally you might run into a special challenge. How do you deal with works written by clients for whom English is not their native language. I certainly can’t claim to be a trained linguist; however, I have faced this challenge a number of times in my past. As a retired intelligence professional, I have been interested in other languages and have lived in other countries where languages other than English are spoken. Here is a list of languages for which some of my editing clients spoke as their primary languages:

 

• German
• Spanish
• French Canadian
• Korean
• Chinese
• Farsi
• Japanese

What can you expect if you find yourself working for such a client? First,English is one of the more difficult languages in the world. We have so many exceptions and sound alike word choices. We have been influenced by so many other languages. When you couple these with the usual writing and punctuation mistakes we see in native speaking English writers, it’s not surprising that writers from other languages have problems.

As editors, we owe these clients two important aspects. First, we want to help them get their English correct. Second, we want to try to insure we help them communicate what they really mean when transitioning from their own languages. The following are some hints that you might find useful for accomplishing these two goals:

1. Watch for patterns in sentence structure and word order. Usually these will become noticeable as you read through their work. If these sound funny or unusual, they may express how the client’s native language is structured. I have edited a number of clients who first wrote their book or article in their native language and then directly translated over word by word without considering how we arrange our words in sentences.
    
2. Watch for unusual ways of saying things. My Korean martial art instructor had funny little ways of driving points home. For example: “If you hit him here, he should be die.” He was a professional translator with a degree in English from Seoul University, yet he still used these little idiosyncrasies in word choices.
    
3. Sometimes clients will use idioms from their native languages that don’t make sense in English, just as we have many that don’t translate into their languages very well. You’ll need to ask what the client meant when you run into these. Idioms are the mark of true fluency in foreign languages. For example, I remember one phrase in German that translated into English thusly: “That place is so strange, that foxes and hares greet each other and shake hands.” This is not something I’ve ever heard used in American English, but it was common in Bayrish Deutsch (Bavarian German).

The bottom line is that editing folks for whom English is not a native language requires a lot more work and care in communicating. For this reason, I charge higher rates for such jobs because of the extra time, thought, and care they take. Such a client needs to understand this up front. It is always a good idea to ask for a sample of the work before coming to terms. I have had jobs that have required a complete re-write. They always take more time and effort. You may find you just don’t want to take it on, and that’s OK as long as it’s determined up front.

Editing non-native English can be challenging but not impossible. It can lead to frustrations, but it can also lead humorous situations. It also can open doorways into a better understanding of another culture. Although I was initially raised as an Indiana farm boy with no travel experience or exposure to other languages and cultures, that certainly changed when I went to college and into the military. For these reasons, I always provided foreign cultural opportunities to my four children, which has held them in good stead in their lives. As editors, we must be open to learning about other languages and cultures in order to improve our abilities of communicating with and understanding of people throughout the world. Editing non-native English users is a good place to start.

 

This is a reprint from Bob Spear‘s Book Trends blog.

Okay, so I maybe putting the cart before the horse, but I believe in getting a head start when I can. I’m only about half finished with my third book (first draft!) and I’ve been considering cover art. Why? Because you only get about 8 seconds to entice a prospective reader to take the time to read the blurb about what’s inside the cover.

 

Well, as this post’s title indicates, I’m not an artist. (I can draw a mean stick figure, but that’s about as far as it gets. ) I did design the cover for my first book, Fear Not!, using a photo from the drive-thru window of the Northwest Missouri Regional Credit Union where I work and Photoshop to create a rainbow. I also designed the text for the cover. However, being as it was a Bible study I felt the artwork was appropriate in its simplicity. With this Apprentice Cat being a fantasy, though, I thought maybe I should see if I could hire a real artist to design the cover.

I went to Lulu.com first because they “supposedly” have professionals who do cover designs. Here’s my problem: each Lulu sponsored designer stated that they would design my cover for a fee, but I would have to submit all the images I wanted to be incorporated in the cover. Huh? I have to give you the images? Isn’t that your job? That’s the whole reason I’m looking for a designer. Sure I could probably merge some pictures together and come up with something nice, but I want a really great professional cover.

I’m still looking for a good artist with reasonable fees, but in the meantime I’m trying to find ways to use my Photoshop and the skills I learned at Rush Printing as a desktop publisher to create a cover I can be proud of.

When buying a book, how important is the cover art to you? If you’re an Indie Author, how have you tackled the cover design?

 

 

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s blog.

flense
verb, flensed, flens·ing

1. to strip the blubber or the skin from (a whale, seal, etc.).

2. to strip off (blubber or skin).

Beware – Harsh truth approaching: We are not good enough.

 

None of us are good enough. Sure we can get good. Good enough to be published. We can continually get better, assuming we have that desire and constantly work at our craft. Which we all should, of course. But, on our own, in our little bubbles of imagination and twisted ideas, we’re not good enough. We need to be better than we’re capable of being on our own. For that, we need the unbiased, critical eyes of others.

As a writer, I work alone. It’s part of the job and it’s one of the things I love about it. I also love the community of writers I’ve gathered around myself over the years, online and in real life. And therein lies the key. I have a handful of talented writer friends who are happy to read and critique my work. I’m happy to return the favour. It’s how our world goes around. I’m actually very lucky in that the majority of writerly friends happy to critique my work are far better scribes than I.

As the writer of a story (or novel, screenplay, webserial, whatever) we’re far too close to the thing to be objective. We’ve invested our time, imagination and effort into creating it. We’ve extruded the guts of it from the labyrinthine depths of our subconscious and regurgitated it into being. Up to a point we can be critical of our own work. We can put the first draft away for a while to let it fester, then pull it out again and read it with fresh eyes. The longer you’ve been doing this, the better you get at spotting flaws and being honest with yourself. We can turn a first draft into a pretty decent final draft. But we’re still not objective enough and it’s not really a final draft at all.

I wrote a short story recently that I was really pleased with. I spent a while going over it, polishing it, getting it just right. I sent it out into the world. And it came back. And again. And again. The rejections stacked up. It’s cool, I’m used to that. Every writer is. We have hides that make rhino skin look like tissue paper and a solid fuck-you-attitude that keeps us working in the face of constant rejection. It’s the only way to work in this game. After all, it’s not necessarily the story – it could be the editor just doesn’t dig that vibe, or the publication ran something a bit similar recently, or the publisher’s cat swallowed a bee and she’s sore at the world and takes it out on a good story. That last one is unlikely, but anything’s possible.

But once something has been bounced a few times in a row, you can start to see the common denominator. It’s the story, schmuck. It ain’t good enough.

So I went to my friends seeking help. In this particular instance I was fortunate enough to get the Evil Drs Brain* on the case. Given that it was a dark and twisted fairy tale vibe, I asked Angela Slatter* to have a look at it for me. She read the story, liked it, but took her flensing knife to it with abandon. I got it back and sobbed quietly for a few minutes, then manned up and listened to her advice. It was good advice. She’d seen flaws I hadn’t, picked up things in the story that needed to work differently. She’d identified character inconsistencies I would never have seen.

The story was greatly improved, but it still needed something; we could both see that now. Angela sent it over to her other brain, Lisa L Hannett*. Lisa added her flensing knife to the mix and my story was further eviscerated, but she saw the things that needed fixing.

One of them was really harsh – the whole story had grown from a killer closing line. I came up with the final line, something I really wanted to use to finish, and the whole story grew out of that. Lisa pointed out that the final line didn’t work. The story had outgrown its seed of conception and that line had to go.

I wailed and raged, but I knew Lisa was right. The line was cut. I killed the fuck out that particular darling. There’s no room for pussies in this caper.

The story has just been sold to a very prestigious market and I couldn’t be happier.

The moral of the story? We need our friends. We need beta-readers, critiques, flensing knives flashing in the cold light of dawn. And we must listen to these people.

Hopefully it gets to the point where our writing is good enough that we can usually get something to a standard editors want to buy and then they do that last bit of flense and polish. A good editor will see the gem in the rough diamond and draw it out. But they don’t have time for much. It behoves us to make our work shine as brightly as it possibly can.

In essence: fresh eyes, beta readers, honest critique, listen to advice and kill your darlings. You know, the usual shit. It’s been said before, and it will be said again. But it needs to be repeated.

Say it after me:

We are not good enough.
We must try harder,
All the time.
And help our friends as they help us.
For this is the flensing,
And the power of the story,
For ever and ever.
RAmen. (Quick and easy, the snack of the starving, jobbing penmonkey.)

Now, go write.

* CAVEAT: Angela and Lisa were happy for me to mention them in this post and applaud their shining word razors, but they won’t critique your work. This particular flensing was done on the basis of friendship and collegiality, built up over time. You can, however, get your own friends on the case. Join writers’ groups and crit circles and help each other. You’ll all grow and improve together. Just get involved and know that you need help and that you can help others. Meet people, be nice, take advice. It all grows from there.

 

 

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. I’m going to rant a bit here, because I’m pretty much against it in every way. However, and I’ll say this again at the end because it won’t sink in with the converts, if it works for you, more power to your elbow. But what is it really working?

The principle is simple enough – for the entire month of November, you write and try to get down 50,000 words in 30 days. That’s 1,666 words a day on average. Any old words will do – if you get 50,000 or more, you “win”. What do you win? Well, probably several weeks or months of editing at best.

 

From the NaNoWriMo website we get these gems:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing… The goal is to write a 50,000 word, (approximately 175 page) novel by 11:59:59, November 30.

First point of order – 50,000 words is not a novel. It might be a children’s or very young adult novel, but even then, not really. Most young adult novels are between 50,000 and 60,000 words. Most adult novels are over 80,000 words. The vast majority of publishers will not accept a novel of less than 80,000 words.

Then there’s this one:

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. This approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Quality doesn’t matter. Lower your expectations. These are never things we should apply to our writing. EVER. The whole concept of NaNoWriMo seems to be to churn out 50,000 words of shit, just to call yourself a winner, and then try to knock it into some kind of shape afterwards.

Why not just aim for 20,000 good words throughout November? Then again in December, January, Feb and March. Then you have an actual first draft novel. And a far better one than you’d achieve using the NaNo model. You won’t have to lower your expectations and take quantity over quality. And you know what you’ve done as well? You’ve become a writer. You had a goal to write a novel and you did it. Not a goal to vomit up 50,000 words no matter what in a month and call it a win.

What do you win? Nothing, except a feeling of disappointment and an unfinished novel.

Talking about previous participants, the site says:

They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.

No. Just no. They didn’t. They may very well be novelists one day, but churning out 50,000 words of shite in a month does not a novelist make.

So yes, I’m being especially harsh. It’s hard to write a novel, trust me, I know. It’s a fucking chore to find writing time, to force that thing in your head out on to paper (or screen, more accurately). Sometimes it’s like trying to crap a watermelon out of your face. I get it, I really do. And I can see why some people appreciate the drive of NaNo to force them into a deeper writing zone.

A lot of great novels have grown out of NaNo projects. A lot of people take great strength from the whole NaNo community and the shared support and encouragement. Writing can be a lonely pursuit. I think most writers actually like that – I know I do – but we all crave community. I have many friends in the writing world and we do support and encourage each other. All the time, not just during November.

Any writer can achieve that. You start writing, you join some online forums, you join your local writers’ centre and start making friends. Join a crit group. Toughen up and listen to advice. Take any favours you can and offer your help to others in response. Before long you’re a writer with a writing community around you. That’s how we’ve all done it.

I can’t help thinking about all those would-be writers who get all excited for NaNo, shit out 50,000 words and then live the rest of the year in a mire of inactivity because they were ruined by the NaNo experience. Or all those who don’t “win” and then just have something else to beat themselves up about instead of writing.

It’s simple – writers write. Not every day necessarily, because everyone has a life, even full-time writers. But just write. Don’t mug yourself with perceived wordcounts, or pointless goals. No one wins or loses. We all write, hopefully we get published, and we keep trying to get better and get more published. Lots of little victories among hundreds of failures, but the determined and thick-skinned among us power on through sheer bloody-mindedness.

Here’s my advice. Fuck NaNoWriMo. Set yourself a new goal, a far simpler one. Here it is:

I will be a writer.

Simple as that. You write whenever and as often as you can. You keep writing whether you get down 1,666 words in a day or 6. Or 6,000. Fuck it, it doesn’t matter. Find the broader writing community and become a part of it, we’re happy to have you. And keep doing it. However fast or slow you write, just write. Finish a novel. An actual novel, not 50,000 words of drivel that might be 20,000 decent words when edited that might be part of a novel one day. Then keep going and write some more.

I see NaNoWriMo as a circus of short-term back-slapping and pointless goals, far removed from what’s really needed to be a writer. But, and here it comes again for the NaNo fans – if it works for you, go for it! I hope you get inspired, churn out 50,000 or more fabulous words and end up with the start of a novel that you go on to finish and get published. I hope it hits the bestseller lists and makes you rich and famous. I really do. But you know what? It’ll take more than 30 days. I’m just saying.

I’ll be over here, growing a moustache for Movember.

 

 

This is a cross-posting from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

In which Keri Payton of Quill Cafe book reviews offers a reader’s tongue-in-cheek advice on effective foreshadowing—NOT!

10 Steps to Anticipated Surprises

  1. Insert a character with seemingly no purpose at the beginning of the story. Have him show up at the climax or when there is a big reveal. The real reveal is that his purpose in the story is foreshadowing.

2. Have your protagonist read about or overhear certain information. Is there a rumoured Special Powered One? Surprise, surprise when it turns out to be your protagonist.

3. Use the weather and setting to reflect the upcoming mood of the scene. Bonus cliché marks if it rains and then your character receives really bad news.

4. Have a wizened mentor suggest at something ominous but not tell your protagonist anything substantial until the climax. Regardless, your protagonist is amazed and shocked at the reveal, even though the old geezer could have just told him what was going on chapters back. Cheers.

5. There should be a useless looking object that your character gets stuck with. It should be so seemingly irrelevant that it can only be exceptionally relevant. Later, it saves your protagonist’s life.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes 5 more tips, on Quill Cafe.

This post, by Mark Barrett, originally appeared on his Ditchwalk site on 10/13/11.

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

So much has been written across all mediums about point of view in storytelling that the aggregate should be classified as a type of pollution. And all the more so because such conversations almost always reference a system of categorization rather than the act of creation. To paraphrase Hills: while it’s always useful to have something to say to an academic, getting lost in critical blather is pointless.

 

To begin, any story you tell will have at least one point of view. It doesn’t matter which medium you’re working in or what your objective is. You can try to entirely scrub point of view from a story as an exercise and it will still be there. Why? Because anybody who experiences your story knows that it didn’t come from their own head, which means it came from somebody else’s head, which means it has a point of view.

Point of view is inherent in storytelling. The question, then, is how you most effectively control and make use of this always-on, omnipresent aspect of fiction. Fortunately, just as audiences are open and willing to suspend disbelief in order to participate emotionally in the fiction you create, they are generally open and willing to adopt whatever point of view you want to use. If a particular point of view makes your work better or more convincing, that’s not only the point of view you should use but the point of view your audience will want you to use.  

Following up on the previous section, Hills connects the abstract notion of choice with the concrete question of point of view:

The choice of the point of view to be used in a story may be pre-made, more or less unconsciously, by the author, as being basic to his whole conception of it. Otherwise, though, choices about point of view will undoubtedly be the most important decisions about technique that he has to make.

 

Read the rest of the post on Mark Barrett‘s Ditchwalk.

This post, by Chuck Wendig, originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 10/11/11; note that it contains strong language.

I grew up on horror fiction. Used to eat it up with a spoon. These days, not so much, but only I suspect because the horror releases just aren’t coming as fast and furious as they once did.

But really, the novels I have coming out so far are all, in their own way, horror novels. DOUBLE DEAD takes place in a zombie-fucked America with its protagonist being a genuinely monstrous vampire. BLACKBIRDS and MOCKINGBIRD feature a girl who can touch you and see how and when you’re going to die and then presents her with very few ways to do anything about it. Both are occasionally grisly and each puts to task a certain existential fear that horror does particularly well, asking who the hell are we, exactly?

And so it feels like a good time — with Halloween approaching, with DOUBLE DEAD in November and me writing MOCKINGBIRD at present — to visit the subject of writing horror.

None of this is meant to be hard and firm in terms of providing answers and advice. These are the things I think about writing horror. Good or bad. Right or wrong.

Peruse it. Add your own thoughts to the horror heap. And as always, enjoy.

 

1. At The Heart Of Every Tale, A Squirming Knot Of Worms

Every story is, in its tiny way, a horror story. Horror is about fear and tragedy, and whether or not one is capable of overcoming those things. It’s not all about severed heads or blood-glutton vampires. It’s an existential thing, a tragic thing, and somewhere in every story this dark heart beats. You feel horror when John McClane sees he’s got to cross over a floor of broken glass in his bare feet. We feel the fear of Harry and Sally, a fear that they’re going to ruin what they have by getting too close or by not getting too close, a fear that’s multiplied by knowing you’re growing older and have nobody to love you. In the Snooki book, we experience revulsion as we see Snooki bed countless bodybuilders and gym-sluts, her alien syphilis fast degrading their bodies until soon she can use their marrowless bones as straws with which to slurp up her latest Windex-colored drink. *insert Hannibal Lecter noise here*

 

2. Sing The Ululating Goat Song

Horror is best when it’s about tragedy in its truest and most theatrical form: tragedy is born through character flaws, through bad choices, through grave missteps. When the girl in the horror movie goes to investigate the creepy noise rather than turn and flee like a motherfucker, that’s a micro-moment of tragedy. We know that’s a bad goddamn decision and yet she does it. It is her downfall — possibly literally, as the slasher tosses her down an elevator shaft where she’s then impaled on a bunch of fixed spear-points or something. Sidenote: the original translation of tragedy is “goat song.” So, whenever you’re writing horror, just say, “I’M WRITING ANOTHER GOAT SONG, MOTHER.” And the person will be like, “I’m not your mother. It’s me, Steve.” And you just bleat and scream.

 

3. Horror’s Been In Our Heart For A Long Time

From Beowulf to Nathaniel Hawthorne, from Greek myth to Horace Walpole, horror’s been around for a long, long time. Everything’s all crushed bodies and extracted tongues and doom and devils and demi-gods. This is our literary legacy: the flower-bed of our fiction is seeded with these kernels of horror and watered with gallons of blood and a sprinkling of tears. Horror is part of our narrative make-up.

4. Look To Ghost Stories And Urban Legends

You want to see the simplest heart of horror, you could do worse than by dissecting ghost stories and urban legends: two types of tale we tell even as young deviants and miscreants. They contain many of the elements that make horror what it is: subversion, admonition, fear of the unknown.

 

5. We’re All Afraid Of The Dark

We fear the unknown because we fear the dark. We fear the dark because we’re biologically programmed to do so: at some point we gain the awareness that outside the light of our fire lurks — well, who fucking knows? Sabretooth tigers. Serial killers. The Octomom. Horror often operates best when it plays off this core notion that the unknown is a far freakier quantity than the known. The more we know the less frightening it becomes. Lovecraft is like a really advanced version of this. Our sanity is the firelight, and beyond it lurks not sabretooth tigers but a whole giant squirming seething pantheon of madness whose very existence is too much for mortal man’s mind to parse.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes 20 more things to know about writing horror, on Chuck Wendig‘s terribleminds.

Due to some scheduled maintenance requirements, no new content will be posted to Publetariat this evening. The site will remain online and members can still post to the Forum and their member blogs, and comments can still be posted, but no new content will be posted until 6pm PST on Sunday, 10/16/11, when we will resume our usual editorial schedule. Thanks for your patience and support. 

(No need to click through – this is the end of the announcement) 

The Self-Publisher’s Mantra
Yes, a book’s foreword, preface, and introduction are different. And each has a different purpose. But each has the same goal: To . . .
1. Make an emotional connection with the reader, which will . . .
2. Build credibility for the book’s author and the book, which will . . .
3. Sell more books. Period.
This is the mantra that we self-publishers must always keep in mind for everything we create. Everything, without exception.

Powerful Marketing Tools
It is imperative that the self-publisher always remember that these three book sections are a very powerful marketing tool for the author and the book. These three sections must make an emotional connection with the reader. They must help the reader develop an affinity, and intellectual attraction, to the writer. They must build a desire within the reader a need to hear what the author wants to say.  All three sections will be a major factor in helping the reader to decide whether they should buy the book or not. Therefore, a lot of time, effort, planning, and designing must be applied to the foreword, preface, and introduction.

When Should Each Section Be Written?
The preface and introduction of a book should be written before the book is written. The foreword should be written when the book is almost complete. Creating the preface and introduction beforehand will help the author establish in her own mind what she is trying to accomplish in the book. Therefore, when writing the book, the preface and introduction will help the author stay on course with the book’s mission. Of course, they can be edited and adjusted as the book develops or if the mission changes. But by writing them before writing the main part of the book, they will act as a basic guideline for the author as the book develops.

Help And Guidance For The Foreword’s Author
And don’t forget, the person that writes the book’s foreword will certainly be using and relying on both the preface and introduction to guide them when writing the foreword. Therefore, you will need the preface and introduction to make an emotional and intellectual connection with the foreword’s author, as well as showing and telling them about your credentials. You are trying to convince the foreword’s author that you are the right person to be writing this book. In the preface and introduction you are basically telling them how you want the book to be viewed.

Conclusion
Do not underestimate the power of the foreword, preface, and introduction to help make your book get noticed, purchased, and read. Making money from selling books is a simple numbers game. Sell more books, make more money. But as self-publishers, we want more than money. We want to create an amazing book, and build our credibility in our expertise, and have many readers benefit from our book. Creating an amazing foreword, preface, and introduction will help us achieve all of this.

This article was written by Joseph C. Kunz, Jr. and originally posted on KunzOnPublishing.com

This article, by Charlie Jane Anders, originally appeared on io9 on 10/6/11.

Writer’s Block. It sounds like a fearsome condition, a creative blockage. The end of invention. But what is it, really?

Part of why Writer’s Block sounds so dreadful and insurmountable is the fact that nobody ever takes it apart. People lump several different types of creative problems into one broad category. In fact, there’s no such thing as "Writer’s Block," and treating a broad range of creative slowdowns as a single ailment just creates something monolithic and huge. Each type of creative slowdown has a different cause — and thus, a different solution.

 

Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the terrifying mystique of Writer’s Block, it’s better to take it apart and understand it — and then conquer it. Here are 10 types of Writer’s Block and how to overcome each type.

1. You can’t come up with an idea.
This is the kind where you literally have a blank page and you keep typing and erasing, or just staring at the screen until Angry Birds calls to you. You literally can’t even get started because you have no clue what to write about, or what story you want to tell. You’re stopped before you even start.

There are two pieces of good news for anyone in this situation: 1) Ideas are dime a dozen, and it’s not that hard to get the idea pump primed. Execution is harder — of which more in a minute. 2) This is the kind of creative stoppage where all of the typical "do a writing exercise"-type stuff actually works. Do a ton of exercises, in fact. Try imagining what it would be like if a major incident in your life had turned out way differently. Try writing some fanfic, just to use existing characters as "training wheels." Try writing a scene where someone dies and someone else falls in love, even if it doesn’t turn into a story. Think of something or someone that pisses you off, and write a totally mean satire or character assassination. (You’ll revise it later, so don’t worry about writing something libelous at this stage.) Etc. etc. This is the easiest problem to solve.

2. You have a ton of ideas but can’t commit to any of them, and they all peter out.
Now this is slightly harder. Even this problem can take a few different forms — there’s the ideas that you lose interest in after a few paragraphs, and then there’s the idea that you thought was a novel, but it’s actually a short story. (More about that here.) The thing is, ideas are dime a dozen — but ideas that get your creative juices flowing are a lot rarer. Oftentimes, the coolest or most interesting ideas are the ones that peter out fastest, and the dumbest ideas are the ones that just get your motor revving like crazy. It’s annoying, but can you do?

My own experience is that usually, you end up having to throw all those ideas out. If they’re not getting any traction, they’re not getting any traction. Save them in a file, come back to them a year or ten later, and maybe you’ll suddenly know how to tackle them. You’ll have more experience and a different mindset then. It’s possible someone with more stubbornness could make one of those idea work right away, but probably not — the reason you can’t get anywhere with any of them is because they’re just not letting you tell the story you really want to tell, down in the murky subconscious.

The good news? Usually when I’m faced with the "too many ideas, none of them works" problem, I’m a few days away from coming up with the idea that does work, like gangbusters. Your mind is working in overdrive, and it’s close to hitting the jackpot.
 

Read the rest of the post, which includes 8 more ideas for tackling writer’s block, on io9.

I’ve recently published my first blog to help get the word out about my memoir, ROOFMAN: A True Story of Cold war Espionage.

http://roofmanthespy.wordpress.com/

It’s so hard to get the word out there as an independent publisher, but I’m on the right track. So far I have three prestigious book reviews and will soon be adding a forth.

Any feedback about my blog will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance,

John Pansini

My husband is a big Star Wars fan.  He watches all six movies often, though there’s a couple he watches more often than the rest.  He collects the action figures (never call them toys to a “true” collector).  He rushes to the video store that sells the comic books the same day they call him to let him know his comic is in.  And everytime a new SW novel appears in print he combs the bookstores (ranting about it being released in hard back first and having to wait a year or more for its release in paper back, but that’s another story for another blog).  All of this means that when he found his favorite SW author’s web site he, of course, emailed a link to the site to me.

Usually I look at these “helpful” links others send me with half-hearted attention, but the fact that he raves about this author’s writing made me curious.  My initial reaction to Karen Traviss’ web site was, if possible, even more curiousity because the first page link she has is to something called Critters.  (My husband, being the wonderfully oblivious man he is, assumed the author was talking about her pets or some such thing.)  After looking at her other page links, which all had to do with how to be a better writer, I figured it had to have something to do with writing.

I haven’t been so surprised at being right in a long time.  It turns out that Critters is a group of writers from novice to pro who critique each others’ work.  (Hence the clever name.)  It’s a great idea.  The only catch is that all members are required to submit a minimum of one critique per week.  The good news is that there are ways to get ahead in critiquing and ways to catch up.  The benefits of having your work honestly, and tactfully, critiqued before it hits the publishers desk or you’ve already submitted it to a POD (print-on-demand) company far outweigh the commitment in time and energy spent doing a critique a week.

The best part is that you can have your complete novel critiqued as well as smaller works.  There are special provisions for entire novels and a way to get your work bumped up to the top for critique if you just don’t have the time to wait an entire month.

While it would be nice to be able to write the perfect story from the first word, a good writer knows that editing and rewriting are a must in the craft.  Having your work critiqued by others who have no reason to stroke your ego, as family and friends do, makes the process that much better (though no less painful).  Thanks to authors like Karen Traviss, who are willing to give new and emerging writers advice, and to fellow writers like those on Critters, every would-be author has a better chance at success.

 

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s blog.

This article, by Alison Flood, originally appeared on The Guardian UK site’s Books section on 9/15/11. In it, you’ll learn about novelist Polly Courtney, a successful self-publisher who was picked up by Harper Collins and subsequently decided to go back to self-publishing due to her dissatisfaction with Harper’s branding of her books.

Novelist Polly Courtney has dropped her publisher HarperCollins for giving her books "condescending and fluffy" covers aimed at the chick lit market.

Courtney self-published Golden Handcuffs, a fictional exposé of life in the City, in 2006 after quitting her job as an investment banker, following it up in 2008 with Poles Apart, about an ambitious Polish graduate who moves to London. Their success helped land her a three-book deal with HarperCollins imprint Avon, but at the launch of the third book, It’s A Man’s World, she announced that she would not be working with the publisher again.

Instead, she is planning to return to the world of self-publishing.

"My writing has been shoehorned into a place that’s not right for it," she said this morning. "It is commercial fiction, it is not literary, but the real issue I have is that it has been completely defined as women’s fiction … Yes it is page turning, no it’s not War and Peace. But it shouldn’t be portrayed as chick lit."

It’s a Man’s World (given the tagline by Avon, "but it takes a woman to run it") is set in the world of lads’ mags, following the story of Alexa Harris, asked to head up a magazine, Banter, with an all-male editorial team. Subjected to "light-hearted" misogyny in the office, Alexa also finds herself the victim of a hate campaign by women’s rights activists.

"I’m not averse to the term chick lit," said Courtney, "but I don’t think that’s what my book is. The implication with chick lit is that it’s about a girl wanting to meet the man of her dreams. [My books] are about social issues – this time about a woman in a lads’ mag environment and the impact of media on society, and feminism."

 

Read the rest of the article on The Guardian UK site’s Books section.