Write

Articles about craft.

Raising Questions in Our Stories

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This post by Elizabeth Spann Craig originally appeared on her site on 8/24/15.

One thing that can trip up even experienced writers is giving everything away in the story too quickly.

It’s always a temptation for me. I tend to want to reveal things too quickly in my story. I want to explain everything as it happens so that readers won’t be confused.

But when I reveal too much, I end up halfway through the story without enough material to make a full-length novel.

Areas where it may help to raise questions:

Questions about character behavior. Sometimes character motivation isn’t clear. But as long as that character is behaving consistently, readers will want to learn why the character is acting that way.

 

Read the full post on Elizabeth Spann Craig’s site.

 

Writing For Children

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This post by Diana Hurwitz originally appeared on The Blood-Red Pencil on 8/12/15.

“I have an idea for a children’s book. Who should I pitch it to?”

I see this question often on writing forums and it takes willpower to refrain from posting, “Whoa, back it up, Nelly.”

Writing for children is hard, hard work. I do not advise attempting it without a thorough understanding of children’s literature. The best place to start is the Society of Children’s Writers and Illustrators.

Children’s literature has multiple categories based on age. There are board books, early picture books, standard picture books, easy readers, transition books, chapter books, etc. Picture books in particular have specific page and layout restrictions. There are language expectations based on target audience. You can find a list of categories at Write For Kids.

At the very least, you should peruse Writing Children’s Books for Dummies and the current version of the Children’s Writers and Illustrators Market book.

Go into a bookstore and head to the children’s section. The first thing you will notice is it is full of “classic” children’s books, the books parents of baby boomers read to them. Then there are successful series by writers such as Mercer Mayer’s Little Critter series and Stan and Jan Berenstain’s Berenstain Bear series.

 

Read the full post on The Blood-Red Pencil.

 

Fueling the Muse—How to Mentally Prepare for “The Novel”

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This post by Kristen Lamb originally appeared on her blog on 8/27/15.

NaNoWriMo is kind of like Christmas for writers—suffering, drama, no sleep, heavy drinking and really bad eating habits. Also, we start talking about NaNoWriMo months before it actually happens.

If you are a new writer and don’t know what NaNoWriMo is? It stands for National Novel Writing Month and it is held for the duration of November. The goal is to write 50,000 words in a month.

In a nutshell, it gives a taste of what it is like to do this writing thing as a job, because for the professional writer? Every month is NaNoWriMo, so there is NO BETTER indoctrination into this business.

NaNo shapes us from hobbyists to pros, but we need to do some preparation if we want to be successful—finish 50,000 words and actually have something that can be revised into a real novel that others might part with money to read. Genre obviously will dictate the fuel required, but today we’ll explore my favorites.

Movies

I like watching movies to strengthen my plotting muscles. Unlike novels, screenplays have very strict structure rules. Also, it takes far less time to watch a movie than read a novel, so movies can be fantastic for practice (and also our goofing off can have a practical application 😀 ) .

Study plot points. Sit with a notebook and see if you can write out each of these major points in one to three sentences.

 

Read the full, lengthy post, which goes into full detail on plotting / story arc in the novel, on Kristen Lamb’s blog.

 

I Smell Your Rookie Moves, New Writers

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This post by Chuck Wendig originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 8/26/15. Warning: strong language.

I am occasionally in a place where I read work by new writers. Sometimes this is at cons or conferences. Sometimes it’s in the sample of work that’s free online or a fragment from a self-published work. Sometimes I just roll over in my bed and there it is, a manuscript by a new writer, haunting me like a vengeful incubus.

I would very much like to yell at you.

Now, listen, before I begin the part where I scream myself hoarse about the things you’re doing wrong, I want you to understand that we’ve all been there. We’ve all done it poorly. Doing it poorly is the first step to, well, not doing it poorly. I have written my fair share of HOT PUKE, and it’s just one of those things you have to purge from your system.

(Though here we also enter into another caveat: HOT PUKE is not actually a delicacy. You do that shit over in the corner, barfing it up in the potted plant so nobody sees until morning. You don’t yak up today’s lunch in the middle of the living room and then do jazz-hands over it: “Ta-da! The Aristocrats!” What I’m trying to say is, your rookie efforts are not automatically worth putting out into the world, especially if those efforts cost readers money to access them. The mere existence of a story is not justification for its publication. Don’t make people give you cash for your inferior efforts. Get it right before you ask money to reward you for getting it wrong.)

Here, then, are some things I have noticed in drafts by new or untested writers, and these are I think standard errors — and they’re ones also that tested authors sometimes stumble into, so peruse this list, see if you have stropped up against any of these sins like a randy tomcat, and then fix your business. Get it? Got it? Good?

Let the yelling commence.

 

Read the full post, which includes many specific writerly mistakes with illustrative examples, on terribleminds.

 

How to Find an Editor as a Self-Published Author

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This post originally appeared on Jane Friedman’s site on 8/18/15.

In today’s guest post, indie author Teymour Shahabi explains how to find an editor for the draft of your self-published book and what to look for in an editing relationship.

– – – – –

In traditional publishing, submitting your draft to an editor is an inevitable step on the road to bookstore shelves. But how much editing is required for self-publishing? Does a self-published author need to find an editor? And if yes, when and where, and how?

First things first:

Do you need an editor?

The answer is yes.

The greatest benefit of an editor is that he or she is not the author. An editor is someone else. Some editors are professional writers, but every single one of them is a professional reader. As a writer, you’re probably a voracious reader, but you can never be a true reader for your book. By bringing forth a book into the world, you’re asking other people to read something you’ve never read. If you sincerely want the book to be the very best that it can be, then you must ask someone else to read it first. You owe it to your book, to yourself, and to your readers.

What an editor does is discover your characters, your situations, and your images without seeing any of the creative process that brought them to life. Where you might see all the crossings-out and labors, all the accidents and decisions, the editor sees only a page. This is the clarity you need, and you can never achieve it for your own writing, simply because you envisioned it first. The editor will tell you what an attentive, an educated, and, most importantly, a new reader will experience while reading your book.

When should you hand your manuscript over?

 

Read the full post on Jane Friedman’s site.

 

Improve your Work Space, Increase your Productivity

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This post by Marie Leslie originally appeared on her site on 6/10/13.

Do you start your work day with the best of intentions–and then find, hours later, you’ve gotten nothing done?

Your problem just might be your desk. If you improve your work space, you can also improve your productivity.

For most people, your desk makes up the biggest part of your work space. Organizing your desk to eliminate distractions can help you improve productivity. If you need to clean the desk start with the that. Need some help with a desk-cleaning project? I can get you started here.

If your desk isn’t piled too deep with stuff you might just need a little help to improve your work space. Here are four tips to put you back on the path to work space productivity.

 

Ditching desktop distractions can help you stay focused on your work.

 

Read the full post on Marie Leslie’s site.

 

S.A. Hunt: The Fine Art of Building People

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This post by S.A. Hunt originally appeared as a guest post on Chuck Wendig’s terribleminds on 8/6/15.

And now, a guest post by a fella named S.A. Hunt, who is a cracking author you probably aren’t reading. His newest is Malus Domestica — I just opened this book up the other day thinking I’d just take a peek, and next thing I knew, I was like, 30 pages in. Amazing prose. Reminds me of some of the most classic horror writers. Hunt has a storyteller’s ear, as you’ll see below.

Some people collect action figures.

I collect people.

I don’t know how you feel about that first point. Action figures. Some of you will probably think it’s childish, or a waste of money, or both of those.

Some of you might throw down a dollar for that janky old Optimus Prime or loose-hipped Skeletor that you used to have twenty-five years ago, lurking in a thrift shop’s toy aisle. Some of you will drop a paycheck on a superdeluxe polyresin Batman from Korea with a cloth cape and thirty-six articulation points and four interchangeable faces so realistic you’d swear the figure contained an actual miniaturized human soul.

I still live where I grew up, a stone’s throw from the real river featured in Deliverance, but I wasn’t that quintessential uphill-both-ways kid that had to play with sticks and bugs, although I did own an impressive armory of gnarled branches. One of them was a three-foot stick as straight as a pool cue with a top end that hooked like a dragon’s talon. I hung a soapstone pendant inside the crescent, burned sigils into the shaft with a magnifying glass, and called it my wizard staff.

No, I had a whole entourage of action figures. He-Man and M.A.S.K. and Dino-Riders; Thundercats, Silverhawks, Ghostbusters, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; X-Men, Ronin Warriors, and Batman, and finally, the ultimate bauble, LEGO. I loved them all, usually to the exclusion of the world around me. Whenever I had a tiny plastic Leonardo (the original Playmates line, of course, bow-legged and wielding brown swords) or Wolverine (yellow and blue spandex, with retractable claws) in my hands, that was the only thing that existed for me.

(Speaking of Leonardo’s swords, in middle school my Harley-riding father, who could pass for a Sons of Anarchy extra and whose only hobbies were turning rattlesnakes into belts and keeping Anheuser-Busch in business, would buy me an honest-to-God samurai sword at a swap meet. As schoolboys are wont to do, I accidentally stuck it in my thigh in eighth grade—the first of many self-inflicted war wounds—and ruined a pair of pants. But that’s another story for another day.)

Some of the best parts of getting a new action figure was reading the story on the back. You might say it was their BACKSTORY, hahaaaaa.

  • This blue guy is the team’s mechanic, trained in the art of Ninjitsu from the age of four
  • This girl was raised by howler monkeys and was taught how to melt steel with nothing but her voice
  • This one can fly and talk to birds because he is the son of the bird god
  • This dude with permanent goggles rides Tyrannosaurs in his spare time and his favorite food is eggplant casserole
  • This man is made of snakes because fuck you

And then I’d ogle the pictures of the other toys in that crowd of heroes and villains and wonder what their backstories were. Sometimes I would make them up. Moss Man spent too much time swimming in the moat and now he’s covered in moss. Slithe is six years divorced. The only thing that can beat this giant glow-eyed skeleton demon full of naked viscera is a quick wit. Lion-O prefers to bathe himself.

 

Read the full post on terribleminds.

 

How to Use the Passive Voice Correctly

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This post by Kimberly Joki originally appeared on the Grammarly Blog.

The passive voice is a misunderstood entity in the world of writing. It is unfairly judged by many authors. Some writers, without taking the time to get to know this grammatical structure, avoid it at all costs. Others use it ineffectively because they do not understand how it works. How can you get to know this mysterious literary device?

First, let’s start with an explanation of what passive voice is. Passive voice sentences mention the thing or person receiving an action before mentioning the action itself, and may omit the actor altogether. For example, consider this sentence:

The leaves were blown by the wind.

The leaves receive the action of being blown. In the example, the agent is specified with the preposition by. However, the agent could have been left out of the sentence: The leaves were blown.

When is it proper to use passive voice? Consider these instances.

 

Read the full post on the Grammarly Blog.

 

The Psychology of Writing and the Cognitive Science of the Perfect Daily Routine

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This post by Maria Popova originally appeared on Brain Pickings on 8/25/14.

How to sculpt an environment that optimizes creative flow and summons relevant knowledge from your long-term memory through the right retrieval cues.

Reflecting on the ritualization of creativity, Bukowski famously scoffed that “air and light and time and space have nothing to do with.” Samuel Johnson similarly contended that “a man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.” And yet some of history’s most successful and prolific writers were women and men of religious daily routines and odd creative rituals. (Even Buk himself ended up sticking to a peculiar daily routine.)

Such strategies, it turns out, may be psychologically sound and cognitively fruitful. In the altogether illuminating 1994 volume The Psychology of Writing (public library), cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg explores how work schedules, behavioral rituals, and writing environments affect the amount of time invested in trying to write and the degree to which that time is spent in a state of boredom, anxiety, or creative flow. Kellogg writes:

 

Read the full post on Brain Pickings.

 

Genius Time

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This post by Jennifer Crusie originally appeared on her Argh Ink site on 7/10/15.

I looked at Lavender Blue‘s first act and realized it was 46,244 words long.

That’s too many.

I’m not really that fixated on numbers, but I know that readers are going to need to be turned into a new story long before the halfway point. I’m not sure how long this book is going to be, but 46,000 words is definitely the halfway point or close to it. (It was contracted at 50,000 words, but that ain’t happening). I need the murder at the halfway point, end of Act Two, so really, just no on that length.

So I did what I always do. I made a list of the scenes with their word counts, which showed me that eight of them were really transitions, not scenes (too short, no conflict) and then studied the remaining, twenty-five actual scenes, looking for what I could cut (over 10,000 words had to go which was around four scenes).

 

Read the full post on Jennifer Crusie’s site.

 

What Personality Features Do Heroes And Psychopaths Have In Common?

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This post by Scott McGreal originally appeared on Eye on Psych on 6/28/15.

A recent research paper attempts to answer the question: “Are psychopaths and heroes twigs off the same branch?” Psychopathy is usually thought of as one of the most malevolent manifestations of a disturbed personality structure as it is associated with selfishness, callousness, and lack of concern for others. In spite of this, in recent times people have begun to look for a positive face to psychopathy, or at the very least, to some of its component traits. The evidence for this is rather mixed, but there does seem to be a connection of sorts between at least some traits and behavior loosely associated with psychopathy and heroic actions that help others. Bold, fearless traits are associated with heroic behavior, but callous traits such as meanness and coldness are not. More puzzling is that people with a history of antisocial behavior are more likely to engage in heroic acts to help others.

Psychopathy is composed of a cluster of several different component traits that interact with each other to produce a disturbing whole. According to the triarchic model, psychopathy comprises a combination of three main traits: boldness, meanness, and disinhibition (Patrick, Fowles, & Krueger, 2009).

 

Read the full post on Eye on Psych.

 

There Is No Map for Grief: On the Work of Art

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This post by Lidia Yuknavitch originally appeared on The Millions on 7/8/15.

Trauma brought me to the page, it is that simple.

When my daughter died in the belly world of me, I became a writer — so that all the words that cannot name grief, all the words threatening to erupt from my belly and uterus did not explode up and through my skull and face and shatter the very world and sky.

Oceans of other people’s compassions have washed over me, but those of us who have lost children, we are a living dead tribe. We smile and nod and thank people for their concerns and efforts. The labor of our lives is actually quite simple: stay alive. So that others might go on.

Wounds make artists. I wrote a book from the body of my dead girl.

There is no map for grief, but there are bridges to others.

When I was 30 and finishing a dissertation on war and narrative, a box arrived via UPS to the door of my home. The sender was my aunt — my father’s sister — a woman I had become estranged from over the years for her ill treatment and unkind words toward me, my sister, and my mother. The box was about the size of a small television. I removed the brown paper and tape carefully…then wondered why I had been careful? The cardboard box under the brown paper had a red lid. I wondered why. When I opened the red lid a hundred photos and yellowed papers and documents spread before me like hands. Nothing from my aunt — there was no explanation for what was inside the box.

 

Read the full post on The Millions.

 

How to Become the Artist You Were Born to Be

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This essay by Bernard Hiller originally appeared on The Huffington Post on 7/10/15.

By becoming authentic. WHAT’S STOPPING THAT?

Ask yourself, what did you have to do to be loved, as a child? Most kids are not encouraged to believe in their uniqueness. If you had to behave like someone other than yourself, then you stopped being your authentic self. And, what is authenticity? Sharing your passion with others and making your soul visible to the world.

Below is a list of common traits that prevent you from living your life and fulfilling your destiny.

 

1) Being a People Pleaser.
Behaving or doing something you don’t really want to do-in order to make someone else happy. People pleasers neglect their own needs and wants and inevitably become angry and frustrated. You’re hoping the other person will validate you, but you just end up being resentful.

Start loving your Needs and Wants. The better you feel about yourself, the more you are willing to invest in yourself. If you don’t invest in yourself, nobody else will.

 

2) Living in the Past or Future.

 

Read the full essay on The Huffington Post.

 

How Important Is It to Be a “Famous” Writer?

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This post by Lauren Sapala originally appeared on her site on 5/12/15.

For many years it was my dream to be a famous writer. Like, a REALLY famous writer. My idol was Jack Kerouac, and while that was partly because I loved the beauty of his writing (and still do) it was also because of the recognition he achieved. Never mind the fact that fame only contributed to his tragic downward spiral, that’s a story for another day. The point is that I wanted what he had—status, notoriety, and success.

I knew that if I had those things I would be happy.

But a funny thing happened on the way there…I noticed that when I concentrated on using my writing to gain recognition from outside parties, my writing suffered. I suffered too. Writing that way wasn’t much fun. And I also realized that I had no idea what outside parties wanted from me. I would think I had a grand idea for a little while, and then it wouldn’t seem so great. Or I’d try to write something that was really “current” only to find the times had already changed and that thing wasn’t “in” anymore.

 

Read the full post on Lauren Sapala’s site.

 

Key Steps to Writing a Book

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This post by Christy Heady originally appeared on her site on 4/15/15.

Aside from implementing good storytelling and following stellar punctuation rules, when a writer begins the process of writing a book and wanting a successful writing career he or she must keep a few points in mind. These points are not taught in school; rather, they are fruitful lessons I have learned along the way to becoming a best-selling author that I want to share with you.

 

#1. You must love what you do.

When I began writing my first book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Making Money on Wall Street, I absolutely loved the topic. In fact, I loved it so much it helped me embrace the fact I lived in a tiny apartment with no air-conditioning and washed my hair in the kitchen sink since I did not have a shower and had only a pint-sized tub. I had a dream and a purpose and my love for that kept my focused and on toward financial success.

 

Read the full post, which includes four additional, specific steps with commentary, on Christy Heady’s site.