the writing life

6 Tips For Becoming A Better Writer

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This post by Eric Barker originally appeared on Business Insider on 11/11/14.

U want 2B a better writer?

Good writing is often looked at as an art and, frankly, that can be intimidating. No need to worry. There are rules — even science —  behind writing well.

Our brain works a particular way; so what rules do we need to know to write the way the brain best understands?

To find out the answer I gave Steven Pinker a call.

Steven is a cognitive scientist and linguist at Harvard. He’s also on the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.

Steven was recently ranked as one of the top 100 most eminent psychologists of the modern era.

His latest book is “The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century“. And it’s great.

Below you’ll learn:

  1. The two key elements that will improve your writing.
  2. The biggest mistake we all make — and how to fix it.
  3. The science behind what makes writing work.
  4. The most pleasant way to improve your knowledge of grammar.

And a lot more. Let’s get to work.

 

Read the full post on Business Insider.

 

Should I Be Writing This Genre?

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This post by Tamela Hancock Murray originally appeared on the Steve Laube Agency blog on 12/4/14.

Often I talk with new authors writing in lots of genres. This is fine if it’s part of your personal writing journey and learning process. I want my authors to enjoy what they’re writing. But when you get serious about publication, know when to choose and what to choose.

One mistake is to write strictly to market when you don’t like the genre. I love to tell the story of a friend who said she knew someone who decided that vampires were popular. This story is timeless, isn’t it, since vampires seem to occupy some place in literature at any time. Anyhow, supposedly he went home to work on a book about vampires. simply because he thought vampires could make him money. I haven’t seen his name on any book, and he started writing about vampires two decades ago. I speculate that he never saw success because he was writing about a topic he saw only as dollar signs. I believe readers will feel this from you whether you know it or not. So choose a topic or genre you have a genuine interest in and love for.

Here are a few questions to think about when choosing your genre.

 

Read the full post on the Steve Laube Agency blog.

 

Can Science Fiction Writers Predict Technology’s Future?

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This post by Peter F. Hamilton originally appeared on New Republic on 10/17/14.

The October 1945 edition of Wireless World magazine carried an article from a young Arthur C. Clarke called “Extra Terrestrial Relays.” It was the concept of using satellites in geostationary orbit, 35,786km high, around the Earth, to beam radio signals from one continent to another. Remember Sputnik didn’t go into orbit until October 1957, and that only reached a height of 577km. So in 1945 the article was received as a grand idea, theoretically possible, but by the standards of post WWII rocketry, severely impractical.

Nonetheless, the first communication satellite to use this orbit (now named the Clarke Orbit) was Syncom 3, launched in August 1964—19 years after Clarke’s article. An article which was detailed enough to receive a patent had he sent it to the patent office instead of the magazine. Today, communication satellites are a multi-billion pound industry. Clarke drew together a number of sciences: orbital mechanics, radio design, rocketry, and extrapolated the combination perfectly. It’s one of the best examples of what people see as a science fiction writer’s job: predict the future.

If only it were that easy.

 

Read the full post on New Republic.

 

The Books Of Revelations: Why Are Novelists Turning Back To Religion?

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This post by Philip Maughan originally appeared on New Statesman on 11/27/14.

There is a sense that, in recent years, novelists have formed part of a rearguard action in response to Richard Dawkins’s New Atheist consensus. Philip Maughan talks to Marilynne Robinson, Francis Spufford and Rowan Williams about God in literature.

Close to the end of White Noise, Don DeLillo’s 1984 novel about a professor of Hitler studies who will do just about anything to ease his fear of dying, an elderly nun reveals the secret truth about faith. “Do you think we are stupid?” she asks Jack Gladney, bleeding from the wrist at a Catholic hospital following a botched murder attempt. “We are here to take care of sick and injured,” the old nun explains in a halting German accent. “Only this. You would talk about heaven, you must find another place.”

All the crosses, devotional images of saints, angels and popes that line the walls of the ward exist merely as set dressing. “The devil, the angels, heaven and hell. If we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse,” she says. “As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak.”

“I don’t want to hear this,” Gladney moans. “This is terrible.”

“But true,” the nun says.

Perhaps this goes some way to explaining the unlikely popularity of religion in contemporary fiction. So far this year we have seen the strange sanctification of a thalidomide victim who died in childhood (Orla Nor Cleary in Nicola Barker’s dazzlingly manic In the Approaches), an avowedly atheist dentist lured to Israel by the leader of an underground sect (Joshua Ferris’s Man Booker-shortlisted To Rise Again at a Decent Hour), a high court judge, Fiona Maye, ruling on whether a hospital has the right to administer a life-saving blood transfusion to a teenage Jehovah’s Witness (Ian McEwan’s The Children Act) and, most recently, the voyage of a prim evangelical on a mission to outer space (Michel Faber’s Book of Strange New Things).

 

Read the full post on New Statesman.

 

7 Things to Do When NaNoWriMo Is Over

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This post by Joe Bunting originally appeared on The Write Practice.

For those of you who have held strong this November, you’re almost there! Only two days left in November. Regardless of whether or not you’ve won, the fact that you have made writing a priority this month is a huge accomplishment.

Now that November and NaNoWriMo is almost over, here are seven things you can do afterward.

 

1. Mourn

If you feel defeated or frustrated, that’s okay. After November, take some time to mourn your month, your novel, and how far you fell short of your dreams.

Creating never goes as we want it to. There are always sentences that don’t sound right, plot points that don’t fit, characters who aren’t real enough, and far too many moments when you just couldn’t find the right words.

Before you start writing again, deal with those emotions. Mourn. Grieve. Then, let it go and move on.

 

2. Take a Retreat

You may not have had time for anything but writing this month. Take a weekend or a week to catch up on all those things you missed out on during November. Go for a run or a hike, watch some TV, go to bed early, hang out with friends and family, and do it all without feeling guilty that you should be writing (for a little while, anyway).

The real danger here is that you might binge on cheap pleasures that don’t actually give you rest. Instead, focus on resting your body and mind. Get yourself into a healthy place so you can refocus on your creativity.

 

Read the full post on The Write Practice.

 

1 of N does not equal N And Never Complain, Never Explain

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This post by Bob Mayer originally appeared on his Write On The River site on 11/21/14.

Arrghhh. Math. Sorry, but it’s the best way I can explain this concept. What this formula means is that just because you can go to the bookstore and buy a best-selling book written by so-and-so, the famous writer, that does not mean you can write a similar book and get it published. What I’m talking about is those people who sit there and complain that their book is just as good as such and such and, damn it, they should not only be published but have a bestseller. Also, those people who look at book number 5 from a best-selling author and complain about how bad it is. Yes, there are many book number 5’s from best-selling authors that if they were book number 1 from a new author, would not get published. But the primary thing that sells a book is author’s name. I’ve always said Stephen King could write a book about doing his laundry and it would be on the bestseller list. Stephen King earned being Stephen King and to misquote a vice-presidential debate, I’ve read Stephen King and you ain’t no Stephen King. Neither am I.

Another thing people do is they see a technique used in a novel and use the same technique, and then get upset when told it doesn’t work. They angrily point to the published book that has the same technique and say, “SEE.” Unfortunately, what they don’t see is that that technique is part of the overall structure of the novel. It all ties together.

 

Read the full post on Write On The River.

 

10 TIPS FOR NANOWRIMO – Good Habits & Motivation

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This post by Dee White originally appeared on her Dee Scribewriting Blog on 11/8/11.

Last year when I did NaNo, I got off to a flying start and had around 20,000 words written in the first week.

I was driven by the pressure of getting those words down. My mind was full of the writer’s greatest question, What if? But in this case, my “What ifs” had nothing to do with the story I was writing. I worried, What if I got sick and didn’t feel like writing for a week? What if my hands got too sore from typing and I couldn’t type anymore? What if I ran out of ideas? What if something happened to my computer?

So I felt like I needed to get it all done upfront just in case. It meant long hours, not much sleep, less family time and too much stress.

This year I decided to pace myself – to take the risk that something might come up, that I might have a bad week, that for some reason I might spend a couple of days writing nothing,

And I have to say it’s all working better for me. The ideas are flowing easier because the brain isn’t under so much stress, the body feels better because I’m not using caffeine to keep it upright. And although I’ve written way fewer words than last year I feel calmer and more positive that I will reach my goal of 50,000 words.

 

10 TIPS FOR NANOWRIMO

So what are my 10 tips for NaNo so far?

 

1. Set yourself realistic goals. Don’t go for ‘pie in the sky’. If there’s no way you can write 2000 words in a day then don’t expect it of yourself.

 

Read the full post on the Dee Scribewriting Blog.

 

Ebook Publishing Gets More Difficult from Here – Here's How to Succeed

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This post by Mark Coker originally appeared on the Smashwords Blog on 11/19/14.

First the good news.

For indie (self-published) authors, there’s never been a better time to publish an ebook. Thanks to an ever-growing global market for your ebooks, your books are a couple clicks away from over one billion potential readers on smart phones, tablets and e-readers.

As a Smashwords author, you have access to tools, distribution and best practices knowledge to publish ebooks faster, smarter and less expensively than the large publishers can. In the world of ebooks, the playing field is tilted to the indie author’s advantage.

Now the bad news.

Everything gets more difficult from here. You face an uphill battle. With a couple exceptions – namely Scribd and Oyster – most major ebook retailers have suffered anemic or declining sales over the last 12-18 months.

The gravy train of exponential sales growth is over. Indies have hit a brick wall and are scrambling to make sense of it. In recent weeks, for example, I’ve heard a number of indie authors report that their sales at Amazon dropped significantly since July when Amazon launched Kindle Unlimited (I might write about Kindle Unlimited in a future blog post). Some authors are considering quitting. It’s heartbreaking to hear this, but I’m not surprised either. When authors hit hard times, sometimes the reasons to quit seem to outnumber the reasons to power on. Often these voices come from friends and family who admire our authorship but question the financial sensibility of it all.

The writer’s life is not an easy one, especially when you’re measuring your success in dollars. If you’re relying on your earnings to put food on your family’s table, a career as an indie author feels all the more precarious.

At times like this, it’s important for all writers to take a deep breath, find their grounding, remember why they became an author in the first place, and make important decisions about their future. It’s times like this that test an author.

Don’t fail the test.

Back in December, in my annual publishing predictions for 2014, I speculated that growth in the ebook market would stall out in 2014. I wrote that after a decade of exponential growth in ebooks with indies partying like it was 1999, growth was slowing.

I wrote that the hazard of fast-growing markets – the hazard of the rapid rise of ebooks – is that rapid growth can mask flaws in business models. It can cause players to misinterpret the reasons for their success, and the assumptions upon which they build and execute their publishing strategy. Who are these players? I’m talking about authors, publishers, retailers, distributors and service providers – all of us. It’s easy to succeed when everything’s growing like gangbusters. It’s when things slow down that your beliefs and underlying assumptions are tested.

I urged authors to embrace the coming shakeout rather than fear it. Let it spur you on to become a better, more competitive player in the months and years ahead. Players who survive shakeouts usually emerge stronger out the other end.

 

What’s causing the slowdown?

While every individual author’s results will differ from the aggregate, I think there are several drivers shaping the current environment.

 

Read the full, lengthy post, which includes further analysis and specific action items, on the Smashwords Blog.

 

Magical Thinking: Talent and the Cult of Craft

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This post by Michael Bourne originally appeared on The Millions on 11/18/14.

In August 1954, just months after he graduated from Harvard, John Updike had his first story accepted by The New Yorker. He was 22 years old. Three years after that, having spent a year studying drawing in England and two years as a staff writer at The New Yorker, Updike gave up his office job and set out his shingle as a freelance writer. For the next half century, he pumped out a steady stream of award-winning novels, poetry, criticism, and stories, often averaging more than a book a year.

Updike was an excellent student — all A’s from 7th to twelfth grade, summa cum laude from Harvard — and a ferociously hard worker, but he had little formal training in the craft of writing. In fact, as Adam Begley notes in his recent biography, Updike, the future two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner was rejected, twice, in his bid to take English S, Harvard’s most prestigious creative writing class taught by Archibald MacLeish. Yet from 1957, when he left the staff at The New Yorker until his death in 2009, Updike supported four children through two marriages without ever holding down a job other than writer.

Interestingly, Updike’s mother, Linda, was also a writer. Like her son, Linda dedicated her life to the craft of fiction, spending 25 years revising Dear Juan, a ponderous historical novel about the Spanish explorer Ponce de Léon, which remains unpublished to this day. She did eventually publish 10 stories in The New Yorker, along with two story collections (one posthumously), but Begley goes to some length to assure readers that without her famous son’s help rescuing her stories from the slush pile, they likely never would have been published. “I had only a little gift,” Linda once told an interviewer, “but it was the only one I got.”

 

Read the full post on The Millions.

 

Writing a Book? What if HOW You Tell the Story is More Important Than The Story Itself?

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This post by Ash Ambirge originally appeared on The Middle Finger Project.

I know your dirty little secret. (Not that one. God forbid anyone on the internet finds that one out.)

You want to write a book.

This means three things:

You’re paralyzed with fear that it’ll suck.
It’ll suck so bad that the entire world will snub you and right after that, they’ll revoke your social security number and put you on display as an example of what NOT to do as a human.

You’ve gotten really good at procrastination.
“I should really potpourri that one cupboard underneath the sink in the powder room in preparation for the guests we might have over for New Year’s 2015. Better now than never!“

You worry—like 24 hours a day worry—that no one will care what you have to say.
You don’t even feel important enough to sit in the dunk tank down at the local fair, let alone write a book and have anybody care.

The good news? People look in the medicine cabinet, not in the cupboard underneath the sink. Duh.

The bad news? You will always feel this way…no matter how many things you’ve written, and how many people have loved it.

 

Read the full post on The Middle Finger Project.

 

I Am Not For Everyone (And Neither Are You)

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This post by Jessica Lawlor originally appeared on her site on 11/17/14.

You know what can really hurt sometimes?

Getting negative feedback about something you’ve created. Losing followers online. Unsubscribes from your newsletter. Hearing that someone has said something mean or untrue about you.

Here’s an example: last week I crafted my first-ever Get Gutsy blog community survey. For the most part, the results have been fantastic. I’m learning A TON about what you want, what you enjoy and what could make the Get Gutsy experience even better for you.

However, on the flip side, there have been just a handful of comments that made me stop in my tracks and go “HUH?!” But after that initial sting and singing “Hater’s gonna hate, hate, hate” in my head a couple of times, I tell myself to get over it.

I remind myself of the following:

I am not for everyone.

As much as I’d love for everyone to like me and my blog, it’s simply not the case.

We cannot let the opinions of others’ define our worth.

You are not for everyone, too.

 

Read the full post on Jessica Lawlor’s site.

 

The Creativity Myth

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This post by Kevin Ashton originally appeared on Medium on 10/29/14.

In 1815, Germany’s General Music Journal published a letter in which Mozart described his creative process:

When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer; say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. All this fires my soul, and provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost finished and complete in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. When I proceed to write down my ideas the committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is, as I said before, already finished; and it rarely differs on paper from what it was in my imagination.

In other words, Mozart’s greatest symphonies, concertos, and operas came to him complete when he was alone and in a good mood. He needed no tools to compose them. Once he had finished imagining his masterpieces, all he had to do was write them down.

This letter has been used to explain creation many times. Parts of it appear in The Mathematician’s Mind, written by Jacques Hadamard in 1945; in Creativity: Selected Readings, edited by Philip Vernon in 1976; in Roger Penrose’s award-winning 1989 book, The Emperor’s New Mind; and it is alluded to in Jonah Lehrer’s 2012 bestseller Imagine. It influenced the poets Pushkin and Goethe and the playwright Peter Shaffer. Directly and indirectly, it helped shape common beliefs about creating.

But there is a problem. Mozart did not write this letter. It is a forgery. This was first shown in 1856 by Mozart’s biographer Otto Jahn and has been confirmed by other scholars since.

 

Read the full post on Medium.

 

The Writing Class

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This essay by Jaswinder Bolina originally appeared on Poetry Foundation on 11/12/14.

Sometime in the early 1970s, my parents got into a still-infamous row after one of them splurged two dollars on a houseplant the other insisted they couldn’t afford. That spat took place a few years before I turned up, but they’ve laughed about it so often, I almost remember being there. It fits into my real memories of other squabbles they had in that shabby apartment we lived in on the north side of Chicago, the worn green carpet in its kitchen, a claw-foot tub without a shower in its single bathroom, scuffed paint on its walls, their arguments tumbling through whole evenings. It fits into my memory of what money meant to their otherwise happy marriage. Sundays we’d go in the used Oldsmobile from one market with a sale on tomatoes to the other where a gallon of milk sold for 10 cents cheaper. On the way home, we’d forgo the bright new gas station for the gloomy old one where unleaded cost a few cents less.

These are some of the ways my immigrant parents survived recessions, layoffs, and the disappearance of entire industries from the U.S. economy. This is how they earned, saved, and invested enough to move us into a brick split-level house with a two-and-a-half-car garage in the suburbs by the time I started secondary school. Though my father clocked into the same hydraulics parts plant as a machinist for more than a decade and my mother did data entry for an hourly wage at a financial publishing company, they could afford to buy me a set of encyclopedias and an Apple computer. They could pay for tennis lessons and give me a stereo system with a CD player and a double-cassette deck. They could send me to the private academy instead of the public high school.

This is how I lived a socioeconomic reality almost entirely separate from theirs. While my parents scrimped and stressed daily as part of the working classes, I went to a school with honors societies, study abroad programs, and AP courses. I went to college. I managed to turn my philosophy major into a high-paying job at a software startup south of Silicon Valley. Higher education had kept its promise of onward and upward mobility, which seemed easy enough in the bloated turn-of-the-century tech economy. Still, after less than six months at the startup, I decided to apply to MFA programs in creative writing. This didn’t make sense to my mother and father. Though we were far removed from the ragged apartments of my childhood, their class consciousness remained rooted in those earlier struggles. It told them we weren’t the kind of people who did certain kinds of things. Abandoning a salaried job with stock options for a graduate degree offering little hope of future employment or reliable income was chief among these, but I liked the integrity in my plan. If a degree in poetry dumped me into bohemian poverty, I thought, so be it. At least I was being earnest in my pursuit. I was that kind of people.

 

Read the full essay on Poetry Foundation.

 

Research Rejection, Part III

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This post by Stephen Brayton originally appeared on his blog on 10/24/14.

I posted the idea for this blog on Facebook wanting some comments and asking if other authors had experienced rejection. My thanks to David Schlosser and Bob Dunbar who responded with an example each. I can’t make up this stuff so I’ll let them tell their short stories in their own words:

David Schlosser:
I once wrote a scene in which a veterinarian sedates a bad guy and contacted the head of the US association of veterinary anesthetists to conduct research. He was polite and responsive until I asked what sort of chemical cocktail a vet would have access to in a vet clinic that would knock out a human. Then he said (IMHO, wisely, though it hadn’t occurred to me until he said), “Because I don’t know you, I don’t think I should answer that question.”

Bob Dunbar:
When I was doing research for my novel about the Alamo, a colonel in the Mexican army refused to allow me access to their archives, claiming that the Mexican army had never massacred anyone at any time during its history.

 

Read the full post on Steve Brayton’s blog.

 

Worlds Without End – Interview With Ursula K. Le Guin

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This article by Sue Zalokar originally appeared on Real Change News on 11/5/14.

Sci-fi legend Ursula K. Le Guin discusses the limitless power of imagination

Ursula K. Le Guin started writing when she was 5 and has been publishing her work since the 1960s. Throughout her career, she has delved into some of the most insightful, political, ecological and socially important topics of our time. She has created utopian worlds and societies. She boldly challenged gender barriers by simply doing what she was born to do: Write.

Her first major work of science fiction, “The Left Hand of Darkness,” opened a new era in the field for its radical investigation of gender roles and its moral and literary complexity. At a time when women were barely represented in the writing world, specifically in the genre of science fiction, Le Guin was taking top honors for her novels. Three of Le Guin’s books have been finalists for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and among the many honors she has earned, her writing has received a National Book Award, five Hugo Awards and five Nebula Awards.

In Paris in 1953 she married Charles A. Le Guin, an historian, and since 1958 they have lived in Portland. They have three children and four grandchildren.

After some correspondence, Le Guin invited me to her home to talk. I arrived bearing fresh-picked berries from Sauvie Island. She took me into her study and showed me the view she had of the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980.

Urusula K. Le Guin: It was the biggest thing I’ve ever seen, and I don’t want to see anything that big again. It was just inconceivable.

 

Read the full interview on Real Change News.