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Articles about craft.

I Buy Your Book, You Owe Me A Good Read

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This post by Ally Machate originally appeared on Shelf Pleasure on 2/17/13.

It’s so easy to download an inexpensive ebook that I’ve become much more willing to try self-published titles than when I had to pay $14, $15, or even upwards of $20 for the print version. Digital technology has broadened the possibilities for people to express themselves and for us, as readers, to find more books to enjoy. The downside, however, is that this new marketplace has created a troublesome reality for all book lovers: Almost anybody who wants to publish a book can. And frankly, too many of these books aren’t ready for public consumption.

I sat down one Saturday with my Kindle and my coffee, envisioning a lovely relaxing morning read. But here’s how it went: I started and stopped four books in about an hour. With a couple, I only read a few pages, but the other two I gave more of a chance. I knew the author of one and I’d read something good about the other in a blog roundup.

And yet, with all four of these books, the authors had not polished their skills, nor had they sufficiently polished their manuscripts. I’m not just talking about misplaced punctuation or bad spelling, either. I’m talking about basic plot holes; two-dimensional, clichéd characters and situations; unnatural and awkward dialogue; and unbelievable, contrived scenarios that didn’t arise naturally out of the events of the story.

 

Read the full post on Shelf Pleasure.

 

10 of Literature’s Greatest Comeback Books

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This post by Emily Temple originally appeared on Flavorwire on 10/24/13.

Though Tom Wolfe’s last novel, 2004’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, fell flat for many readers and reviewers — Michiko Kakutani called it “disappointingly empty” — some critics are heralding his new effort, Back to Blood, which hit bookstores this week, as his comeback book. Only time will tell, of course, but the idea got us thinking about a few other important books that have pulled some of our favorite authors back from the brink of oblivion (or worse, bad reviews). After the jump, read about the many ways authors have dusted off and recharged their careers with a well-placed tome, and as always, add any we’ve missed in the comments [on the original post, here].

 

1. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

The 1940s were not good for Hemingway. He described himself as being “out of business as a writer” from 1942 to 1945, and fell into a depression fueled by physical problems and the fact that many of his friends — Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Max Perkins — were dying around him. In 1950, he published Across the River and Into the Trees, which was roundly panned. The following year, as if in furious revenge, he wrote The Old Man and the Sea, which was to be his last book, and some say his best — in any event, it won a Pulitzer and firmly re-established his literary reputation.

 

Read the full post on Flavorwire.

 

Where Do I Write? All Over The Damn Place

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This post by Elisa Albert originally appeared on Guernica on 10/30/14.

On community, urban sprawl, infant mortality, and the Albany food co-op.

1. Office at home

Set up your office and get to work, a friend instructed a few years back, when I complained about the novel, which had plateaued at halfway done and was now just sitting there. I half-heartedly poked at it a few times a week, but the momentum was gone. So I put down an old Ikea kilim, cleared out clutter per the Feng Shui guru, hung pink string lights and cute scrap flags someone sewed me as a gift and a photograph of a feral house in Detroit (which has a thing or two in common with downtown Albany). Suspended some tillasandia with twine. Now I had a nice quiet little room to sit in and contemplate the stalled novel.

Just doing the work is the whole battle, we always say: making contact. Sit with the novel, be in it. Turn off the internet so you have nowhere else to go. Only rarely is it satisfying. Rarely is there a great chunk you can point to at the end of a day and say, here is what I did today! More often there’s the vague fear you’ve made no progress at all. Where did those hours go? Where is your work? What is this adding up to? You have paid someone else to be with your child while you did this bullshit? The thing continues and continues to feel like a wreck. But it’s your wreck. And you are working on it, even when it seems like bullshit, eating your time and appearing none the better. No effort is wasted, says the Bhagavad Gita on a post-it I stuck to the bottom of the giant computer monitor. But God, some days are a slog.

 

2. Leaning against doorjamb while boy plays in the bath

 

Read the full post on Guernica.

 

Using Critical Reviews as Resources

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This post by Elizabeth Spann Craig originally appeared on her site on 10/24/14.

Wired’s founding executive editor Kevin Kelly stated that if writers and other artists have “one thousand true fans” then they’re able to sustain a living from their art.

I don’t honestly know how many true fans I have (and I prefer calling them readers instead of fans) but I know I get nearly-daily emails from readers.

And I do know one true ‘fan’.  She is, actually, my number one fan (no Stephen King reference intended).  She is also my number one critic.  Since she doesn’t have a public presence, I won’t call her out by giving her name online.

She started emailing me over a year ago, giving me feedback on various books in various series. She has mentioned reading each of my books numerous times.

I’m almost positive that she knows my characters better than I do.

 

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

 

The Problem of Entitlement: A Question of Respect

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This post by Steve Almond originally appeared on Poets & Writers on 8/20/14.

This past spring I took a position as a visiting writer at a well-respected MFA program. My students were by and large intelligent and serious, but there were a few moments when I found them—what’s the word I’m looking for here—exasperating.

One day before the fiction workshop, for instance, we got into a discussion about the Best American Short Stories series, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. To my astonishment, a number of students made comments indicating their disdain for the annual anthology.

“Wait a second,” I said. “The stories in those collections are always great.”

There was an awkward pause. Then one of them said, “You’re being ironic, right?”

At this point, I sort of lost it. I told my students that they had every right to dislike particular stories, but that dismissing them entirely was foolish. Then I added something along the lines of, “Why don’t you guys publish a story in Best American and then you can sit in judgment of them.”

It was not my finest moment as a teacher. (And, for the record, I later apologized to the entire class.) It was an impulsive reaction to what I’ve come to think of over the years as the Problem of Entitlement.

I mean by this that a significant number of the students I’ve encountered in creative writing programs display a curious arrogance toward published authors, as well as an inflated sense of their own talents and importance. The same attitudes often prevail in those online precincts where new and emerging writers congregate.

 

Read the full post on Poets & Writers.

 

Blindness Basics For Authors

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This post by Melinda Primrose originally appeared on her Primrose Path site.

Writing a blind character seems to be much harder than everyone thinks. There are many mistakes being made that I think a little research would go a long way to fixing. Most of the blind characters I’ve seen, either in books or in film media, fit one of two stereotypes. Either the blind character has superhuman abilities because of their blindness or they are completely helpless. Most blind people, in fact, fall somewhere between the two. How do I know this? you ask. I am blind myself.

I was given the label “legally blind” when I was 25. In my younger days, I had 20/20 vision with my glasses. The short version of the long story, which I may go into some day, is that many different diseases attacked my eyes and caused vision loss. Since my initial diagnosis, I’ve had over a dozen surgeries to try and keep what vision I have.

WAIT!

You said you were blind, you say.

I think that is the first thing most people get wrong about blindness. It’s not an either you have vision or you don’t Kind of thing. In the United States, legally blind is defined as:

 

Read the full post on Primrose Path.

 

Single Quotes or Double Quotes? It’s Really Quite Simple.

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This post by Andrew Heisel originally appeared on Slate on 10/21/14.

If you are an American, using quotation marks could hardly be simpler: Use double quotation marks at all times unless quoting something within a quotation, when you use single. It’s different in the greater Anglosphere, where they generally use singles in books and doubles in newspapers. It’s still pretty simple, but nothing so straightforward as here.

Yet some of us don’t seem happy with what we’ve got. For several years now in teaching writing classes to college freshmen, I’ve noticed some students adopt another rule: double quotes for long quotations, single quotes for single words or short phrases. They’ll quote a long passage from Measure for Measure accurately, but when they want to quote one of Shakespeare’s words, a cliché, or some dubious concept like “virtue,” they’ll go with single quotes.

It took me a while to understand what was going on, but after thoroughly studying it I developed a rigorous explanation for this staggering decline in standards: kids today.

But then I looked up from their papers to find this usage in the manuscript of a friend’s novel. Then I saw them in another friend’s manuscript—this time, of an academic book. Then I turned to the Internet and they were everywhere—in a local news story, in a paper by a college professor, in a blog on social marketing, in a blog on the education system, on the website of the Children’s Literacy Foundation. In each case, the same short/single, long/double quote rule was followed.

 

Read the full post on Slate.

 

Let's NOT Start At The Very Beginning

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This post by Lorraine Mace originally appeared on The Writer’s ABC Checklist on 1/29/13.

This is going to be a novel approach to talking about writing a novel (excuse the pun). I’m calling in my alter ego, Frances di Plino, to guest post over the next few weeks on the subject. The reason I’m not making the posts as Lorraine Mace is that I haven’t yet had a novel published under my own name. Frances, on the other hand, is not only a published author of a crime/thriller (Bad Moon Rising published last year by Crooked Cat Publishing), but she is also in the throes of finishing off the next in the Paolo Storey series, Someday Never Comes. All of which means that Frances, rather than Lorraine, is the person best placed to give tips and advice on the long, hard slog to your first published novel.

So, bye bye, Lorraine, for now, and hello to Frances.

Let’s not start at the very beginning (even though it’s usually a very good place to start, as Maria sang in The Sound of Music).

This week’s question is: have you started your novel in the right place? Some good advice, given to me more years ago than I care to recall, was to start your opening chapter as close to the action as you possibly can.

You want to get your readers instantly involved in the plot and in the lives of the characters. You need the readers to be invested emotionally and intellectually in what happens next. Open with dialogue, action, or both, but make sure you hook your readers from the first paragraph.

 

Read the full post on The Writer’s ABC Checklist.

 

Things You Should Know When Writing About Guns

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This post by Chuck Wendig originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 10/14/14. Note that it contains strong language.

[NOTE: The below post is not meant to be an endorsement for or a prohibition against guns in the real world in which we all live. It is a discussion of firearms in fiction. Keep comments civil… or I’ll boot you out the airlock into the silent void.]

Guns, man. Guns.

*flexes biceps*

*biceps which turn into shotguns that blow encroaching ninjas to treacly gobbets*

CH-CHAK.

Ahem.

If you’re a writer in a genre space — particularly crime, urban fantasy, some modes of sci-fi — you are likely to write about some character using some gun at some point.

And when you write about the use of a gun in your story, you’re going to get something wrong. When you do, you will get a wordy email by some reader correcting you about this, because if there’s one thing nobody can abide you getting wrong in your writing, then by gosh and by golly, it’s motherfucking guns. Like how in that scene in The Wheel Of Game of Ringdragons when Tyrion the Imp uses the Heckler & Koch MP7 to shoot the horse out from under Raistlin and Frodo, the author, Sergei R. R. Tolkeen, gets the cartridge wrong. What an asshole, am I right?

You can get lots of things wrong, but you get guns wrong?

You’ll get emails.

As such, you should endeavor to get this stuff right. If only to spare yourself the time.

 

Read the full post on terribleminds.

 

10 Things Every Writer Should Do

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This post by Karen Ball originally appeared on the Steve Laube Agency site on 4/16/14.

I’m a list person. In part, that’s because said lists serve to bump my memory when it gets…um…lost. But I also just love lists—especially lists of things you should (or shouldn’t) do. So here, for your perusal, are my top ten things every writer should do every day:

1. Stretch your word muscles. Learn a new word. Read a new writer. Do a crossword puzzle. Flip through the dictionary. Do the Reader’s Digest Word Power test. Something to test and strengthen your word skills.

2. Spend at least 15 minutes in silence. No words, no music. Just…be still. It’s hard to hear the Master’s voice in all the chaos that fills our days. Purpose to spend at least a little bit of time—other than when you’re asleep—in silence.

3. Read Scripture. Now, I’m not talking about your devotions. I’m talking reading them as a writer. See how the stories are told. Savor the beauty of the songs. Study the heroes and villains. There’s a wealth of gold to be gleaned in them thar pages.

 

Read the full post on the Steve Laube Agency site.

 

Time Travel and the Problem of Paradoxes

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This post by Graham Storrs originally appeared on momentum on 10/21/14.

Graham Storrs joins us on the blog to discuss all things TIME TRAVEL.

“Paradox is the poisonous flower of quietism, the iridescent surface of the rotting mind, the greatest depravity of all.” – Thomas Mann

What, you’re not a quietist? Never mind, we’ll come back to that.

As a writer of time travel novels, I spend a lot of time with paradox. It has become a friend. A shabby, disagreeable friend, I have to say, but one for whom I have an inordinate fondness. There are two ways of looking at paradox. Either it is a hideous monster of purest logic that prevents all possibility of time travel, or it is a sly creature of silken charm that whispers in the writer’s ear, urging creative trickery to make that story possible.

To be clear where I stand on the physics, let me just say that time doesn’t really work the way story-writers want it to. We don’t really travel in time. We travel in spacetime. Yes, you can describe space as a dimension something like the spatial dimensions to get a geometrical description of spacetime and, yes, it does seem as if you can move (in one direction) along that dimension at different rates. But consider this, if time is slowed in the vicinity of massive objects (which it is – ask Einstein), why does the Earth (a much smaller mass) not race ahead of the Sun in time, eventually leaving it far behind?

 

Read the full post on momentum.

 

Writer’s Block – Getting Unstuck

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This post by Kemari Howell originally appeared on Kbuuk on 10/13/14.

As a writer, there’s nothing worse than getting stuck, or dealing with writer’s block. Yes, rejection and the like is awful, but at least at that point on the writing timeline, you’ve accomplished what you set out to do.

There probably isn’t a writer that hasn’t suffered the unpleasant ailment of writer’s block—whether it is as small as figuring out the POV for your story, or as big as hitting the middle-of-the-novel slump. And getting unstuck can be incredibly difficult.

Imagine that you can’t even get to the finish line…that someone has glued your feet to the ground just before you reach your goal. You can see it—the end—you know it’s there, but you are unable to move, paralyzed by some unseen force (often it’s your own self-doubt). You’re stuck and you don’t know how to go about getting unstuck.

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. – Sylvia Plath

 

Read the full post on Kbuuk.

 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Grammar

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This post by John E. McIntyre originally appeared on The Baltimore Sun on 10/3/14.

Online, discussions of grammar tend to display confusion about what the subject is, and the usual admixture of rubbish and emotion does not help.

There is, of course, the confusion between grammar as grammarians and linguists discuss it technically, and spelling and punctuation. But other, unstated meanings are often involved.

A post by Lucy Ferriss at Lingua Franca, “Grammar: The Movie,” identifies some of the additional meanings that surface in a new documentary.

 

Spelling errors: If you write it’s for its in your cover letter or resume, or confuse there/their/they’re, you’re probably not going to get the job. But these are merely spelling errors, as likely the result of carelessness as ignorance. Of course, they’re obvious, so easy to spot that even a manager can see them, but they are still trivial.

 

Bad writing: Lord knows there is plenty of slack, inexpert, and impenetrable writing to be found, but that is not a problem for grammarians to address. Academic writing, for example, is notoriously wordy and opaque, but it is usually grammatical.

 

Read the full post on The Baltimore Sun.

 

NaNo Prep

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This post originally appeared on the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) site. With NaNoWriMo kicking off on November 1, now is the time to start clearing your decks and preparing for a very intense month of writing if you intend to participate.

Ready to start planning your November novel? Our NaNo Prep resources are for you.

From now until NaNo, we’ll provide resources to inspire, challenge, and prepare you to write that novel. Look to our blog, forums, Facebook, and Twitter for updates on new stuff, or bookmark this page (we say put it right on your browser bar so you remember your noble noveling intentions).

Let’s start by addressing some of the burning questions you might have:

You’ll find the answers sprinkled along the prep route below. Read on!

 

1. Make a commitment.

Intention is everything. Decide right now that you’re going to write a novel in November, then tell everyone you can. We’ve prepared a few ready-made social media messages for sharing:

 

Read the full post on NaNoWriMo.

 

What You Need To Know About Your Second Draft

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This post by Chuck Wendig originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 10/8/14. Note that it contains strong language.

Writing is when we make the words.
Editing is when we make the words not shitty.

The poor sad widdle second draft.

I’m in the midst of one of these right now, and while you see a lot of attention given to the first draft and to the overall editing process, you don’t see quite so much attention given to the second draft specifically. But there should be! The second draft is a peculiar animal. Interstitial. Imperfect. It’s frequently the growing pains draft, where two limbs grow and two limbs shrink and by the end of its hormonal transformation it’s the same creature as before but also, entirely different. The second draft is the teenager of manuscripts. Awkward, pimply, full of faux confidence and bravado, and something-something pubic hair.

Okay, maybe not that last part?

Anyway. Let’s talk a little bit about the second draft.

 

Psst! You Didn’t Write The First Draft

Yeah, no, I know you actually did write the first draft, but shh, shhh, we’re trying to be tricksy hobbitses here. By the time you get to the second draft, your best way forward is to somehow convince yourself that Some Other Asshole wrote this book. Because you can be cold, clinical, dispassionate when you’re attacking the draft if you think it’s not yours. It’s like having children — you can look at other people’s kids and be all like LOOK AT THOSE SAVAGES HANGING FROM THE CEILING FANS, but then you see your own kid drinking out of the toilet like a dog and you’re like, awww, he’s pretending to be a puppy — he’s gifted.

You’ve gotta treat this book like it’s some rando’s kid. Baby Rando.

Rando II: First Blood.

Whatever.

 

Read the full post on terribleminds.