how to write

How to Write a Book or Blog (The 6 Danger Stages You Need To Overcome)

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This post by Ali Luke originally appeared on Write to Done on 7/24/14.

You’ve probably had the experience of starting a novel or blog with great intentions…

…only to find that, a few months later, you’ve barely made any progress.

Maybe you started strong but lost momentum.

Maybe you jumped ahead when you should’ve paused.

Or maybe you got discouraged and gave up.

And you wonder: how to write a book (or blog).

I’ve coached many writers in workshop groups over the past few years, and I’ve noticed that there are six key stages when projects often stall or go wrong.

Here’s what to watch out for.

 

Danger Stage #1: Once You’ve Got a Great Idea

Let’s say you’ve got a new idea you’re excited about. Perhaps it’s a great premise for a novel, a topic for a blog, or a prompt you want to work on for a short story.

Writers tend to make one of two mistakes here:

They jump straight in, full of enthusiasm, without planning. They make a great start, and might get a few chapters into the novel or a few posts into a blog…but then they get stuck.

They wait – and wait – until the “perfect moment” to begin actually writing. They put off starting until they’ve got past family commitments and a busy spell at work…or they read about their chosen field of writing without getting any words down on paper.

 

Click here to read the full post on Write to Done.

 

Whisper, Don't Shout

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This post by Jill J. Marsh originally appeared on her site on 8/25/14.

How to get sound onto paper.

An issue I’ve wrestled with for some time, especially when it comes to characters’ voices.

Several recent books irritated me enormously with an excess of signposts as to speech style. Every utterance written semi-phonetically was boring and hard work. An excess of ‘local colour’ turned character into caricature before the story even began. Every single person in a broad cast using the same vocabulary but with different adverbs equalled monotony.

The reason the books above failed is for exactly the same reason writers should show, not tell.

Leave space for the reader’s imagination. Inference is a powerful and natural phenomenon.

Do not tell. Do not shout. Whisper and let us follow the clues. We may end up in different places. That is our prerogative.

The complexity of rendering voices, accents, speech impediments or verbal tics on paper while not getting on the reader’s wick is both tricky and simple. I often write characters who speak other languages than English. How close to native speaker should they sound? Would adding mistakes in English add authenticity or distract? A key character has a peculiarity of expression – should I explain or risk incomprehension?

 

Click here to read the full post on Jill J. Marsh’s site.

 

Bubble Vocabulary: The Words You Almost Know, Sometimes Use, But Are Secretly Unsure Of.

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This post by Seth Stevenson originally appeared on Slate on 4/29/14.

Shibboleth. Casuistry. Recondite.

A little while back, I was chatting with a friend when he described a situation as “execrable.” He pronounced it “ex-EH-crable.” I’d always thought it was “EX-ecrable.” But execrable is a word I’d mostly just read in books, had rarely heard spoken, and had never once, in my whole life, uttered aloud—in large part because I wasn’t exactly sure how to say it, and because the nuances of its definition (beyond “bad”) escaped me.

Since we have a trusting, forthright relationship, I decided to broach the topic. “Is that how you pronounce that word?” I asked. “And what exactly does it mean?” Here my friend confessed he was not 100 percent certain on either count. He added that, earlier that same day, he’d pronounced avowed with three syllables and then immediately wondered if it might only have two.

We’ve all experienced moments in which we brush up against the ceilings of our personal lexicons. I call it “bubble vocabulary.” Words on the edge of your ken, whose definitions or pronunciations turn out to be just out of grasp as you reach for them. The words you basically know but, hmmm, on second thought, maybe haven’t yet mastered?

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes a Bubble Vocabulary quiz, on Slate.

 

Writing A Relationship

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This post by Adam Ganz originally appeared on The Last Word on Nothing on 8/20/14.

About a year ago I sat in the Members’ Room at the Royal Society as Professor Judith Howard FRS, once a doctoral student of Dorothy Hodgkin’s, explained how crystallographers worked in the early days. She showed me how Dorothy would begin by calibrating the black circles in an X-ray diffraction pattern by eye, to begin the long process of assembling from the shadows cast by an X-ray beam the complex three-dimensional arrangement of atoms in the molecule. Hanging on the wall outside was a Henry Moore drawing of Dorothy’s arthritic hands, the hands she said she thought with.

What intrigued me [was] seeing the combination of skills she needed, not only mathematics but hand and eye co-ordination and vision to work out how the thousand atoms in say the Vitamin B12 molecule fitted together. It was somewhere between chess and Rubik cube- a giant jigsaw puzzle where she couldn’t see the picture, or even all the pieces.

I met Judith as part of my research for a radio play about Dorothy Hodgkin and Margaret Thatcher, two extraordinary women who reached the pinnacle in their chosen spheres –and were about as different as any two women could be.  From 1943 to 1947 Hodgkin was the then Margaret Roberts’ s chemistry tutor at Somerville College, Oxford from 1943 -1947 when Hodgkin was working at the cutting edge of X ray crystallography. In her fourth year Thatcher worked in Hodgkin’s lab on a molecule called Gramicidin S, which originated in the Soviet Union and had some antibiotic properties.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Last Word on Nothing.

 

Historical Fiction with Catherine Czerkawska # 1

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This post by Catherine Czerkawska originally appeared on the Edinburgh Ebook Festival 2014 site on 8/11/14.

1 THE CURSE OF PRESENTISM

Thanks to Valerie Laws of Authors Electric for helping me out with the term presentism. I wasn’t aware of it, but it neatly encapsulates a point I want to make – and it seems like as good a beginning as any to this residency. Here’s a useful Wikipedia definition: Presentism is a mode of literary or historical analysis in which present-day ideas and perspectives are anachronistically introduced into depictions or interpretations of the past. A quick scan online will reveal plenty of blog posts and other pieces pontificating (with some justification) about anachronisms in historical fiction as well as in film and television programmes. Sometimes they can be deliberate. The judicious use of anachronism in movies like A Knight’s Tale where the fuss and adoration surrounding participants in these Mediaeval tournaments is beautifully paralleled by that accorded to gladiatorial athletes like Ice Hockey players, manages to be both accurate and illustrative of a genuine truth about the times. We recognise the parallel and extrapolate from it. It’s also enjoyable and entertaining. There are novels as well as movies where these deliberate anachronisms are used to illuminate some kind of parallel between past and present culture and society. In many ways they involve the opposite of presentism, using present day ideas and preoccupations to elucidate the past.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Edinburgh Ebook Festival 2014 site.

 

Writerisms and other Sins

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This post by Alexander M. Soltai originally appeared on Notes From An Alien on 8/11/14.

Dare I say it—there’s too much crappy advice for writers on the Web.

Far too much of it aims to teach the rules of genre-writing rather than the ways to write clearly.

If a writer is trapped in someone else’s mold, their true creativity will be strangled.

My all-time favorite fiction writer (after my Best Friend) is C. J. Cherryh; and, I’m going to share some of her writing advice.

She’s written more than 60 books since the mid-1970s and won multiple awards.

One of the most interesting things about her is that even her most adoring fans say she’s challenging to read…

Yet, it’s not because she’s lost in florid prose or chained to a genre-muse.

She does write in certain “genres” but she creatively bends them to her writing-will—never a tortured trope, never a borrowed plot, never a bunch of hackneyed characters…

 

Click here to read the full article on Notes From An Alien.

 

Crap Someone Should Have Told You Writers By Now

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This post by Rebecca T. Dickson originally appeared on her site on 9/4/13.

Sometimes, you don’t need preamble. Sometimes, you need someone to give it to you straight.

Hi. *waves*

This is for every writer on this whacked out planet.

• Your early work will suck.

• Your later work, in its early drafts, will still suck.

• No one cares about your writing unless you’re at (or near) the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

• Seriously. You could win the Pulitzer in literature and your friends would be, like, “Yeah, she’s writing or something boring like that. What a waste of time.”

• You cannot please everyone.

• YOU CANNOT PLEASE EVERYONE.

• So don’t try.

• Write for yourself. Failing that, write for one person.

• Listening to ten other people means ten extra people in your head when you write.

 

Click here to read the full post on Rebecca T. Dickson’s site.

 

No Shoes, No Shirt, No Fiction: Let’s Get Out of the Restaurant

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This post by Rebecca Makkai originally appeared on Ploughshares on 8/4/14.

“I need to tell you something,” he said. He twirled his spaghetti around his fork.

She sipped her wine. “What is it?”

“Well.” He shoved the tangle of spaghetti in his mouth and chewed.

She fiddled with her spoon.

Suddenly, the waitress appeared. She had a grease stain on her apron. Her nametag read Renee. She symbolized harsh reality. “Can I get you somethin’ more, hon?”

He smiled and shook his head. He returned to his spaghetti. The waitress walked off, probably thinking about her ex-husband.

“What is it?” she asked him, tearing off a hunk of bread.

“I think,” he said, stirring his spaghetti in its blood-red sauce, “that we should stop perfunctorily setting fictional scenes in restaurants.”

Okay, a major caveat: Both of my novels have restaurant scenes. If you write, you’ve probably set scenes in diners, in coffee shops, in cafés, in bars, in fancy French bistros.

Here’s why you do it, why I do it, why we all do it:

-The restaurant is a semi-private, semi-public space. People can have a conversation, but there’s always the threat of exposure, of embarrassment.

 

Click here to read the full post on Ploughshares.

 

Advice For Young Writers

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This post by Nathan Bransford originally appeared on his blog on 7/21/14.

I often receive e-mails from young writers in high school and even younger, and I’m always so impressed with them and even a little bit jealous. I had no idea I wanted to be a writer when I was in high school and I rue all those years I could have spent honing my craft. And even if I had known I wanted to be a writer, I didn’t have the Internet to reach out to other authors and learn more about what it takes to write a novel.

These young people are getting such a head start on their careers, and I can’t wait to see the incredible books they produce.

There’s a long tradition of writers offering advice to young writers, perhaps none greater than Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. I can’t top that, but here’s my own modest contribution to the genre.

Here’s my advice for young writers:

Don’t write for the writer you are now. Write for the writer you’re going to become.

Writers aren’t born, they are made. It takes most writers years and years to hone their craft, and it’s helpful to have had years and years of reading experience now. By the time you’ve reached high school you have lived enough to have tasted the world and it may feel like you’re ready to channel it all into a novel, but don’t expect that your writerly success will come immediately.

 

Click here to read the full post, which goes on to share more specific advice and tips, on Nathan Bransford’s blog.

 

The Secret Rules of Adjective Order

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This post by Katy Waldman originally appeared on Slate on 8/6/14.

It is a lovely warm August day outside, and I am wearing a green loose top. Does the second part of that sentence sound strange to you? Perhaps you think I should have written “loose green top.” You’re not wrong (though not entirely right, because descriptivist linguistics): An intuitive code governs the way English speakers order adjectives. The rules come so naturally to us that we rarely learn about them in school, but over the past few decades language nerds have been monitoring modifiers, grouping them into categories, and straining to find logic in how people instinctively rank those categories.

If you’re someone whose reflexes scatter the moment you try to lift the veil on your unconscious, this fascinating little-known field (little-known fascinating field?) will drive you nuts. On the other hand, thinking about how adjectives work may bounce you to an epistemological Zen state, wherein you can contemplate amid flutes what it means to partake of Redness and whether former child actress means something different from child former actress. Adjectives are where the elves of language both cheat and illumine reality.

Maybe I am overqualifying this article about qualifiers (or is that the point?).

 

Click here to read the full post on Slate.

 

THE OWL: Pulling the Ultimate “All-Nighter”

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This post by Bob Forward originally appeared on the Brash Books blog on 7/14/14.

The Owl books were a lot of fun to write. The concept of a private detective who didn’t sleep spawned itself almost naturally from my lifestyle at the time.

I was young enough (and dumb enough) so that I would routinely stay awake for three nights in a row. I’m sure you’ve been there. You start by pulling an all-nighter for some test or work deadline. Then you stay up a second night celebrating the successful completion of aforementioned test or deadline. At which point, you are running on fumes and probably not making the best decisions. So you decide to stay up a third night just to see if you can do it.

 

Justice Never Sleeps

Somewhere in there (probably during one of those third nights) I created a character who never slept at all. I realized such a character would have a lot of advantages, especially in a climate such as Los Angeles. Every day I’d read about some fugitive from justice apprehended while hiding in a hotel or a relative’s home. They were always caught staying somewhere. They had to – they had to sleep.

But a man who didn’t sleep wouldn’t need to stop. He could sit down to rest, but he’d always be on guard. He wouldn’t have to go unconscious for a third of his life. He could do things. Exciting things.

Like, y’know, kill people.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Brash Books Blog.

 

How to Write a Novel: 7 Tips Everyone Can Use

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This post by Jennifer McMahon originally appeared as a guest post on Writer’s Digest on 5/22/13.

1. Write the story you’d most want to read.

Don’t write a story just because you think it might be a bestseller or that it would make Great Aunt Edna proud. Think about the books you love, the ones you really lose yourself in. If those are mysteries, then don’t try to write an historical romance or a quiet literary novel. It might not be anything genre-specific that you love, but a certain voice, or type of story, or kinds of characters. Write what you love. Do me a favor — right now, today, start a list of all your crazy obsessions, the things that get your heart pumping, that wake you up in the middle of the night. Put it above your desk and use it to guide you, to jumpstart your writing each and every day.

 

2. Begin with character.

Make her flawed and believable. Let her live and breathe and give her the freedom to surprise you and take the story in unexpected directions. If she’s not surprising you, you can bet she’ll seem flat to your readers. One exercise I always do when I’m getting to know a character is ask her to tell me her secrets. Sit down with a pen and paper and start with, “I never told anybody…” and go from there, writing in the voice of your character.

 

Click here to read the full post on Writer’s Digest.

 

The Book That Wasn’t: 5 Fiction Writers Talk About their Novels in Drawers

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This post by Chloe Benjamin originally appeared on The Millions on 7/28/14.

“For every book I publish,” a writing teacher once told me, “there’s one book I don’t.” At the age of eighteen, armed with a truly bad novel and a rather absurd sense of optimism, this line did not exactly resonate. But as I amassed rejection slips of every size—and once my first novel was rejected by a pantheon of New York publishers—I realized that nearly every writer has a novel in a drawer: a manuscript that, due to any number of reasons (rejection, timing, chance, diversion) never quite becomes a fully-formed book.

By the time an author’s debut hits bookstores, it’s very likely been preceded by a string of books that weren’t: doomed half-novels; slivers of inspiration that curled up and went to sleep; baggy short stories that grew into novellas, then stubbornly refused to grow any more. Some become first drafts, but never find the right agent; others find an agent, but not a publisher. In general, Novels in Drawers are an unruly breed, prone to shape-shifting and border-crossing. Some NIDs lie prone for years before being resurrected and, miraculously, finished; others have their characters or ideas recruited to breathe new life into a different manuscript.

What are we to do to with our books that weren’t? How can we learn from them, and when should we let them go? Below, five fiction writers on the story they still haven’t been able to tell.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Millions.

 

Narrative Voices – Part Two: Third Person Limited

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This post by Debby Harris originally appeared on The Blood-Red Pencil on 7/18/14.

As noted in my previous post, in First Person narration, the angle of vision is “single-track”. The central character is also the story-teller who addresses the reader directly, uses first person pronouns for self-reference, and recounts events in his/her own words.

In Third Person limited narration, the angle of vision is similarly “single-track”. There is only one focal character, and our access to plot developments in channeled through his/her personal perceptions, experiences, and discoveries. But there the similarity ends. In Third Person Limited narration, the focal character is being viewed through a telescope wielded by the author. And this makes a Critical Difference.

In Third Person Ltd. Narration, the character is oblivious to the fact that he/she is under observation. Meanwhile, the author plays the role of an on-the-scenes reporter operating under cover. Like a Nato observer, he/she uses third person pronouns when reporting narrative developments to the reader – ostensibly without bias.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Blood-Red Pencil.

 

Vulnerable Characters: How to Write Compelling Characters

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This post by Jean Oram originally appeared on her The Helpful Writer blog on 12/13/13.

What makes a character so compelling you have to laugh and cry with them through the book’s adventures? That you get so involved in it all that the author creates a fan instantaneously?

One of the things that really works–particularly in romance–is a vulnerable main character. If you don’t believe me…think of Wolverine from X-Men. In the movies he has a vulnerable side that makes women swoon.

To quote author Julie Farrell “Both Beth and Mandy [from Jean Oram’s Blueberry Springs series] have a great balance of being ‘feminine’ and powerful. And sometimes being strong means making yourself vulnerable. It’s not just about arm wrestling! … Those are the times where the rewards are greater. When you go to the place where you confront what you fear the most, you’ll come out the other side totally transformed.”

Didn’t she put that so well? It struck such a cord with me and really put words to what was swirling around in my head. In fact, our conversation lead me to look at the books I was currently reading and which heroines had really dragged me into their journies lately.

And yep. Vulnerability was top of the list.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Helpful Writer.