Crap Someone Should Have Told You Writers By Now

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

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

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

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”

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

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

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

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

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.

 

The Seven Deadly Sins of Prologues

This post by Kristen Lamb originally appeared on her blog on 7/14/14.

To prologue or not to prologue? That is the question. The problem with the prologue is it has kind of gotten a bad rap over the years, especially with agents. They generally hate them. Why? In my opinion, it is because far too many writers don’t use prologues properly and that, in itself, has created its own problem.

Because of the steady misuse of prologues, most readers skip them. Thus, the question of whether or not the prologue is even considered the beginning of your novel can become a gray area if the reader just thumbs pages until she sees Chapter One.

So without further ado…

 

The 7 Deadly Sins of Prologues

Sin #1 If your prologue is really just a vehicle for massive information dump…

This is one of the reasons I recommend writing detailed backgrounds of all main characters before we begin (especially when we are new writers). Get all of that precious backstory out of your system.

This is a useful tactic in that first, it can help us see if a) our characters are psychologically consistent, b) can provide us with a feel for the characters’ psychological motivations, which will help later in plotting.

I have a little formula: background–> motivations –>goals–>a plan–>a detailed plan, which = plot and c) can help us as writers honestly see what details are salient to the plot.

This helps us better fold the key details into the plotting process so that this vital information can be blended expertly into the story real-time.

Many new writers bungle the prologue because they lack a system that allows them to discern key details or keep track of key background details. This makes for clumsy writing, namely a giant “fish head” labeled prologue. What do we do with fish heads? We cut them off and throw them away…unless you are my mother’s Scandinavian family and then they make soup *shivers*.

 

Sin #2 If your prologue really has nothing to do with the main story.

 

Click here to read the full post on Kristen Lamb’s blog.

 

How Short Story Writing & Flash Fiction Gets Judged in Competitions

This post by Zena Shapter originally appeared on her site on 7/24/14.

As some of you may know, I recently judged the Australian Horror Writers’ Association’s short story and flash fiction competition. It involved reading 154 stories and over 385,000 words. At 12pt Times New Roman font, spaced at 1.5 lines, that was 1,066 pages of writing. Whoa!

I’m so glad I read it all though – thank you for sending in your wonderful stories, everyone! It was a fabulous experience. So fabulous, in fact, that I asked my writers’ group – the amazing Northern Beaches Writers’ Group – what insights they might like to have into the judging process, what might be useful to know when writing to win. I’ve answered their questions below. Hopefully you know all this already, but if you don’t then I hope it helps in some small way.

 

What do judges look for in a story?

The most important thing to realise about competitions, and slush piles, and submission calls, is that the reader reading them has a heck of a lot of reading to do. They are also, generally, reading in their spare time. So sometimes I would sit down with my laptop and a glass of wine at home, and have 30 stories to read but only an hour in which to read them.

I never managed it. 10 stories per hour was my maximum. Still, in that hour I wanted to read as much as possible. Some stories made this easy for me – they flowed well, had an interesting character doing something interesting, and showed me the action happening scene-by-scene, so I thanked them for it with my scoring. Other stories made the hour hard work, with their telling and info-dumping and my struggling to understand what was going on, and they were also scored accordingly.

 

Click here to read the full post on Zena Shapter’s site.

 

Quick Lesson on Hyphens

This post by Maria Murnane originally appeared on the Createspace Community Blog on 7/15/14.

Adjectives modify nouns or pronouns (What a pretty house! She is tall).

Adverbs modify verbs (She types quickly), adjectives (She is extremely tall) or other adverbs (Please type more quickly).

When an adverb modifies an adjective (e.g. “she is extremely tall,” no hyphen is necessary. I see many authors make this error in their book descriptions and personal bios. For example:

  • The world in this story is inhabited by fully-functional robots that act like humans (INCORRECT)
  • The tale takes place on a currently-active landfill (INCORRECT)
  • When he’s not writing books, John works as a highly-trained specialist managing labor disputes (INCORRECT)

 

Click here to read the full post on Createspace.

 

One Weird Old Trick to Undermine the Patriarchy

This post by Michelle Nijhuis originally appeared on The Last Word on Nothing on 12/18/13.

My five-year-old insists that Bilbo Baggins is a girl.

The first time she made this claim, I protested. Part of the fun of reading to your kids, after all, is in sharing the stories you loved as a child. And in the story I knew, Bilbo was a boy. A boy hobbit. (Whatever that entails.)

But my daughter was determined. She liked the story pretty well so far, but Bilbo was definitely a girl. So would I please start reading the book the right way?

I hesitated. I imagined Tolkien spinning in his grave. I imagined mean letters from his testy estate. I imagined the story getting as lost in gender distinctions as dwarves in the Mirkwood.

Then I thought: What the hell, it’s just a pronoun. My daughter wants Bilbo to be a girl, so a girl she will be.

 

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

 

12 Tips for Writing Blog Posts That Get Noticed

This post by Jodie Renner originally appeared on The Kill Zone on 7/14/14.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t possibly get to all the blogs I’d like to in any given day. We’re all busy people, so we want to know within seconds whether a blog post will offer anything of value to our hectic lives. And we might even get annoyed at time-wasters that meander or don’t deliver on their promises.

Blogging is a great way to build a community feeling, connect with readers and writers, and get your books noticed. I’m honored and proud to be a member of this award-winning group blog, The Kill Zone, where my fellow bloggers, all savvy, accomplished writers, offer daily value and entertainment to writers, and our community of eager participants enrich every post with insightful comments.

But if you’re just getting started in the world of blogging and want to build a following, the most important thing to remember is that it’s not about you. It’s all about offering the readers value in an open, accessible style and format. A rambling, unclear, too formal, or overly long blog post can be irritating or boring – a turnoff. And can jeopardize your reputation or blog.

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes 12 specific tips with details on each, on The Kill Zone.

 

Unlocking the Story-Box

This post by Sophie Masson originally appeared on Writer Unboxed on 7/14/14.

“Where do you get your ideas from?”

It’s the classic question you nearly always get asked, as a writer, and there are always the classic answers to give back: something you’ve experienced, read about, observed; a place, a person, an overheard conversation, a newspaper report, a dream, an emotion, a picture, a fairy tale, a poem. These are my usual kinds of triggers, some happened on by chance, others more deliberately sought. But there are other kinds of triggers: objects, things that by their very presence seem to fire off the story-nerve. And they can be the most exciting triggers of all. That’s certainly been the case for me very recently.

I’m back in Europe at the moment and the other week, in London, on my way to the British Museum, I took a wrong (or right!) turn and came across an antique shop. In the window were trays of old coins, small figures, and old jewelry—very old jewelry, for as soon became clear, this was a shop specialising in objects from the ancient world, in particular Greece, Rome and Egypt. Some of the things were very expensive indeed, but a few were in the affordable range, so on a whim, I decided to go in and have a closer look. And there was the ring.

 

Click here to read the full post on Writer Unboxed.