Writing Advice

So you got your book done. You’ve edited it. You’ve published and seen a few reviews—now what?

My wife once compared the career of an author to climbing the Blue Ridge Mountains. Every time you think you’ve reached the top you see another, even taller ridge, rising ahead of you. It never ends. Now comes the time when you have to sell yourself. You’ve spent years learning how to write. You’ve poured hours into creating a great book, but now none of that matters as you realize you’re at square-one again. Now you must learn how to be a marketing genius and a charismatic salesmen.

Marketing, publicist, salesmen? Clearly if you had wanted to be any of these you would not have written novels for the last few years. Instead you shut yourself up in a small dark room, living in imaginary worlds because you’re a sensitive, introverted, self-conscious, shy, person likely lacking in confidence. And now you have to go out in public, jump up and down, wave your hands and shout, “Look at me everyone! I’m great!”

It sounds about as much fun as six-chambered pistol roulette.

It is awkward and scary unless you have that “salesman” gene, and you know the type, the person who loves talking about themselves to a group of strangers, but hates being alone in a quiet room for more than five minutes. Without that superpower, which few writers have—given that most of their time is spent alone in quiet rooms—promoting yourself is unnatural and most uncomfortable. 

All the writers I know (including myself) begin this stage the same way—with self-deprecation. “I wrote this book, you probably won’t like it. It’s not all that good. Wanna try it anyway?” With a sales pitch like that, it’s amazing you aren’t a bestseller. Still, it feels wrong to lie, to present yourself as something you aren’t, and you know you aren’t anyone great.

This creates a negative spiral. People are drawn to people who exude confidence, (the good kind at least—because there is a bad kind.) Confidence is most often derived from experience, (the bad kind comes from an artificially inflated ego.)  This is a problem, because everyone starts with a want of experience. You need confidence to get people to read your books, but you need the experience of people reading and liking your books to gain confidence.  So how do you do it?

First you must realize that you really aren’t being honest when you undersell yourself. You don’t really think your book sucks. You wouldn’t be trying to sell it if you did. You like your book. In fact, you should love your book. You should feel it’s the best book ever written. I’m not joking. Given that you wrote your book, given that you created it to suit your own personal taste, it is like a tailor-made suit. It should fit you better than any store bought suit and as such—for you—your book had better be the best book you’ve ever read, because if you don’t love your book…how can you expect anyone else to even like it? So recognize that at least one person in the world thinks your book is the best that has ever been written. Obviously, not everyone will agree with your sentiment. Not everyone liked Harry Potter either. Yet it is a mistake to focus on this single point. Logically, if one person in the world believes it is the best book ever, then it is very possible there could be dozens who would at least like it. Maybe more. Probably more. And who are you to judge what the person in front of you will or won’t like?

I did a bookstore signing where I stood at a tiny table near the front doors. I was a veteran by this time (or felt I was,) and I had a good idea who would be interested in my books and who would not. Big guys in football jerseys and old men, always ignored me. Old ladies in clusters, and women with lots of make-up, did too. So I was trying real hard to catch the eye of the geeky twenty-something guy wandering the sci-fi stacks even though a gray-haired gentlemen dressed like a corporate banker was glancing over at me.

The old business man closed the distance and started asking questions. He was just wasting my time, he would likely have a daughter who was trying to get published and want to talk about the business, and I needed to concentrate on attracting the geek. Of course, by this point you realize what happened. The old guy was intrigued and bought my books. Later he wrote me emails of appreciation (thinking I would not remember him—ha!) He loved the books, posted great reviews on Amazon for me and is a wonderful fan. The geek, when I did get to talk to him, wasn’t interested. So you never know what people will like. You can’t predict their tastes based on how they look, anymore than a person should judge a book by…well, you know.

All this is fine, but it isn’t really going to help you the first time you have to go to a bookstore to do a cold table signing, or a convention where you man a vendor’s table, or even the first time you do a reading where you and maybe two other people are there. And how miserable might you be on a panel, sitting beside five other authors, all of whom have more experience than you? How can you be confident when people ignore you, when they sneer at your books. The answer is simpler than you might think.

You fake it.

You see, humans can’t smell fear like hyenas. You just pretend that you know what you’re doing, that your book is great, that they are missing out on the story of a lifetime if they pass this opportunity by. It isn’t a lie, because as far as you personally are concerned, it’s true. You aren’t afraid to tell a friend to go see the movie you really liked. You don’t fumble over words and say, “Well, I liked it, but you probably won’t.” No. You say, “Wow, that was a great film, you should watch it! You’ll love it!” Why is that so easy, but selling your book is hard? It’s because it is your book, your creation. So for that brief moment, pretend it isn’t. Pretend it’s someone else’s book and you’re just selling it. Instead of saying, “What I was trying to do here was…” say, “The book is about…” as if you just found the thing on a shelf, read it that moment and had to tell someone how good it was. Maybe they won’t agree, but hey, you’re entitled to your opinion.

The thing is if you act confident, and if you pretend long enough, it stops being a pretense, because somewhere along the way you actually pick up enough experience to be genuinely confident. So your first few tries at anything will be disasters. Even if they aren’t, you’ll feel they were. You’ll be terrified, nervous, embarrassed, and awkward. And the only thing you’re certain about is that everyone looking at you knows this. Each one is suppressing laughter out of polite kindness, but none of that it actually true. What people see is an author—a published author. For what it’s worth, that’s still a rank with privilege. People will grant you respect. They will be impressed even if they haven’t heard of you. There are a lot of famous authors that people never heard of—you might be one of those. They don’t see a person fumbling with words, shaking, sweating and repeating themselves. They see an accomplished author, standing in front of people speaking, talking fast because they are so smart, or slowly to help the audience understand their genius. Of course they are a genius, they wrote a whole book.

Occasionally you might run into another author, or a serious aspiring writer, and they will see through your charade, but they above all people should be sympathetic. Authors rarely criticize other authors, because we know, we’ve been through it, we’ve worn those shoes and know how that feels. Besides, there is never a shortage of people willing to try and destroy what others have built. When you live in tornado alley, you don’t rip down your neighbor’s walls.

It has been my experience that when you take a chance, when you stand up and hold out your work, people are far more likely to applaud than to throw things, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the story or the writing. Contrary to what we are often led to believe, most people are generally very nice, kind, understanding, compassionate, and empathetic.  They realize the risk, they see the vulnerability, and knowing how hard such a thing would be to do, they respect the person standing there, for doing that, for having the courage to stand in the open and reach for an impossible dream.

Looking back you might catch a glimpse of that respect and suddenly, you’ll discover you’re feeling a lot more confident. Maybe you’re worth something after all. In that moment, the negative spiral reverses itself. Positive begets positive. Invisible gifts are exchanged. And while you’d still rather be writing, well, it isn’t so bad after all.

When at long last you finally manage to get published, either through a traditional house, an indie press, or by self-publishing, you will have to face reviews both good and bad. How do you deal with people bashing your work? How do you handle critics who make comments about your novel that are blatantly wrong? Comments, through intent, preconceived blindness, or lazy reading,  slam you for things you didn’t even do? Or did do and they said you didn’t? How do you deal with people putting words in your mouth that you didn’t say, or making assumptions that are completely false? Even accusing you of plagiarism?

You don’t.

When you hear/read comments that make you want to chew through steel, you just have to repeat this simple mantra: People have the right to their opinions.

It really is as simple as that.

You might think they are wrong, but in a way that is only your opinion, and how can you expect them to accept your opinion of a topic when you refuse theirs?

The thing you learn after a few years of listening to people both praise and destroy your work is that everyone has different tastes. Some people will love the very thing that someone else abhors. And there will be large groups on both sides of any argument.

Last year I wrote a post called The Best and Worst of 2010, that was passed around a bit back then. In it I cut and pasted comments about my first book The Crown Conspiracy—all from people I never met. I went to the effort of matching them so that for every comment on a specific subject, I also listed the exact opposite opinion presented by someone else.  For me it was a way of venting, for others who read it, the example was enlightening and reassuring.

The problem with writing is that it is very hard to tell what the majority of people think.

When I was in high school I was known for my art, and Mrs. Franchi, my English teacher, suggested I do a comic strip for the school newspaper. I wasn’t in the journalism class, and I wasn’t in the newspaper club. I just asked the teacher overseeing the school paper if they would publish a comic—no one had ever done it before, certainly not on a regular basis.

So I created an ongoing fantasy story, the adventures of Fobert the Fibbit and his trusty side-kicks, a bird and a dwarf, who he picked up along the way. I did a full page comic each week that was inserted into the paper. I expected instant praise, but heard nothing. Months went by and still I heard nothing—nothing good. The journalism students and the members of the newspaper team, hated me and my comic. They asserted in their self-important attempt to act like real journalists that the comic demeaned the serious nature of their work in the news. All I ever heard were insults and jokes. When finally the teacher overseeing the paper’s publication claimed I intentionally inserted the word “fart” in the text after she had approved the comic for printing (which I did not) and proceeded to berate me and insist I was a liar, I gave up. The comic wasn’t worth the effort. It wasn’t fun to work each week making something that nobody wanted and that everyone universally hated. I ended the comic series and washed my hands of the whole affair feeling depressed.

A week later, the first week the paper came out without a comic, I ran into a kid in the cafeteria—a kid I never met before.

“Are you the one who made the Fobert comic?”

“Yes,” I replied cringing.

“Why’d you stop?”

“No one liked it—actually everyone hated it.”

“I liked it.” I must have looked surprised, because he went on. “I never bought the paper before, but I bought it every week just to read your comic. It was nice that it was an insert cause I just tossed the rest. I wish you hadn’t stopped. Now I have nothing to look forward to on Fridays, well, besides getting out of school.”

He was the first, but he wasn’t the last. Other kids found me to complain that I ended the comic. A lot of them were people I only knew by sight, underclassmen, girls who I was only just getting the nerve to speak to. One was my future wife. The year after I graduated I returned to talk to Mrs. Franchi, and saw a copy of the new school paper on her desk. There was a comic in it that looked a lot like mine.

“Someone is stealing my idea,” I told Mrs. Fanchi with a decidedly irritated tone. “And not doing a very good job of it. I thought this school taught that plagiarism was bad.”

“He’s a huge fan of yours,” she said. “He loved your comic, and when you stopped he was very disappointed. This year he decided to do something about it. His comic is a tribute to your work.”

I just stood there looking stupid. And like any good teacher, Mrs. Franchi let me.

All these invisible people loved my comic, but I never knew. This was a lesson I learned and kept in my back-pocket knowing one day I would need it again:

When things are the way people want, they are content and silent. It is only when something happens that they don’t like that they become vocal.

The same thing happened again almost a year ago when I announced I was accepting a deal with Orbit Books that would delay the release of the final installment in the series. Until then I got two, maybe three comments on my blog—most of the time, none at all. And sure I had sold a lot of books, but that didn’t mean people actually read them, and it certainly didn’t mean they liked them. That post about the delayed release had over thirty comments almost all negative. I also received email and lots of forum attacks. I honestly had no idea my books were so popular until I decided to withhold one for ten months.

It’s hard to determine how appealing your book really is when you know you’ll only hear—and hear in detail—how much people don’t like it, while those who do like it, don’t say a word. I’m the same way, and this extends beyond the scope of books. I have a childhood friend who was quick to compliment others. At the time I assumed he was disingenuous, (he wasn’t) even so it made me feel better whenever he said something nice (even if I thought he was lying). As I got older I made an effort to be more like that—to tell people when I approved. I even told my friend that I admired his ability to praise so easily, when for me, it was hard and often uncomfortable. I was stunned to discover no one had ever complimented him like that before and I could see the smile I put on his face. 

For writers however, it is easy, and almost impossible not to focus on the negative when it comes to their own work. The bad reviews and comments are always so much louder. Even a great review—if it has one nit-pick—is remembered as awful, because the negative criticism is so overwhelming on an emotional level, while the nice things are always seen as the polite fluff. Everyone asks “How are you?” upon meeting. They don’t really care, it’s just a way of greeting. But if they say, “You look awful.” You know they mean it.

And as a writer, just as ignorance of the silent approvers is bad, so is focusing only on the bad.

Not long ago there was a woman who responded to what was generally a decent review of her book, but had some negative things to say as well. She responded defensively on the reviewer’s blog in a series of comments that degraded into insults. This public conversation went viral and became the poster-child for how to destroy a writing career before it starts. The idea of “any publicity is good publicity” has its limits. All the other bloggers and reviewers read it and declared they would never read her books—ever.

When someone criticizes your work, all you can successfully do, is thank them for taking the time to read it. Anything else is putting a gun in your mouth.

And just because a review pointed out flaws, doesn’t make it a bad review. I’ve had four and even five star reviews where the commentary that followed it made me believe the critic hated the book. People have ripped my novels apart and then ended by saying they were eagerly awaiting the next book. This happens a lot.

I think, as a writer you need to put yourself in the position of a reviewer. Whether they host a review site as a hobby or as a job, they feel responsible for their readers—not the authors. And this is how it should be. Their job is to evaluate books and give recommendations to readers. If they fail in this, no one will listen to them. I think there is also a fear of fan-boy stigma.  Even if you absolutely love something you feel obligated to find something to complain about, if only not to be seen as a total gushing teenage girl, bouncing incessantly in front of a stage where the Beatles are playing. Such overwhelming praise is not dignified and might not be accepted by the critical audience they write to. Nothing is that good, and reviewers who do nothing by gush, will not be taken seriously and soon ignored.

This isn’t to say there aren’t bad reviews. And when I say bad, I mean objectively bad. Reviews that even if they are full of praise, are just badly done.

The worst reviews are those that succumb to hyperbole,  give away spoilers, and provide nothing of value or insight for the reader. A good example would be this short review of L. Frank Baum’s work: “This is the worst book I’ve ever read! I really hated The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and I knew all along it was a dream.”

This kind of review is awful. Not only is it worthless to readers hoping to gain some real information to help make an informed decision, it ruins the story for all who read it. I am lucky not to have received many of these, but there are a few out there that I won’t name in the hope they will just fade away.

The fact is, I’ve read wonderful reviews by people who hated my books. People who took the time to write down detailed explanations of why they felt my books were poorly done, using intelligent examples and comparisons, but always careful not to spoil the story for those who might disagree.  One such individual I personally contacted and asked if he would be willing to expound even further so that I could make corrections. He was so surprised, he agreed.  I did make changes to the book (which were not so major as he first suggested) and as a result, he altered his review to a more positive position.  This was never my intention, but it was a pleasant result and shows what can happen if you respond to those with opposing opinions with respect and a checked ego.

So the bottom line is, never respond to a negative review except to thank the reviewer. I try not to even respond to positive reviews as, then by omission, you are showing your disapproval of negative ones. You can also make it appear as if you and the reviewer are buddies which can undermine the critic’s credibility. The last thing you want to do is hurt a reviewer who likes your books. I have written some private messages to reviewers who I feel did not just like my work, or happen to write what I felt were excellent reviews, but understood my books on a level I did not expect most people would. Hearing that someone really “got it,” that they understood exactly what it was I was doing, is fantastic. But even then I hesitate because I feel establishing a friendship with reviewers is, in a way cheating, and can make it harder for a critique to slam my next book if they feel it warrants it.

Reviewers are people too, and they have opinions on what is good and bad. Some like long books, some like short ones, some like simple books, some like complex books. If a book is in contrast to the values the reviewer holds, it doesn’t mean it is a bad book necessarily, but only that individuals who share those values will most likely not enjoy it. Just think about those friends you have whose opinions on movies you know not to take. Good reviewers understand this and restrain their comments to reflect that while they did not like it, those of other tastes, might. You don’t see them making statements like: “Worst book ever/just shows that anything can be published/evidence of how far civilization has fallen/don’t buy this book!”

Good reviewers also don’t rate a book based on the price anymore than they rate it on the cover art—although they may mention both so readers can be aware, and explain whether they feel it was worth the cash or how well the cover reflects the contents.  

It is a reviewer’s responsibility to be honest so that those who have grown to trust them (knowing their personal book-ideological slant) can evaluate whether your book is a good fit for them. And a well-done-bad review can be a very good thing for an author. It will wave away those individuals who, if they had read it, would post scathing reviews on Amazon, or make it their life’s work to denounce you as a hack. A well-done, negative review can save you from this fate because no matter how good a book you’ve written, no matter how universal the appeal, someone will hate it and it is best to keep it out of their hands.

Most reviewers don’t like posting negative reviews. Many refuse to. They simply restrict themselves to reviewing only the books they like. They are well aware of the pain they can cause, and there is a reason why executioners are rotated in their responsibility, only psychopaths have no problem hurting others. And yet it can cause even more problems, hurt even more people, being dishonest.  

This is why you never see, nor ever will see, reviews of other author’s books on this blog. I would make a terrible reviewer for the same reason I was so impressed by my friend who finds it so easy to praise others. I am both a very honest and critical person, particularly when it comes to writing, or stories in general. Getting praise from me is like squeezing water from a stone. It’s a problem I’m still working on, and one of the reasons my wife never asks me the famous, “does this dress make me look fat?”

I’d just like to end this post by thanking the 99% of all the book reviewers out there for doing a great job. As for the 1%…I’m pretty sure Dante wrote about a special plane in hell for them, which I am certain they reviewed poorly.

When I began writing these posts I started by discussing the various tools of the trade, in particular word processors, one of those being Scrivener. My computer runs Windows 7 and back then I was using MS Word and was having trouble seeing the point in using any of the writing programs. I had heard great things about Scrivener, mostly from folks with Macs. I even know of one person who bought a Mac just to be able to use Scrivener. But last year around this time I tried the Windows beta and was not impressed. I tried several of the available writing programs—those applications supposedly designed for writers as opposed to general office use—and found them all to be just a lot of gadgets that were more fun to play with than a useful tool for writing a novel. In other words, they were great for people who wanted to pretend to be writers.  And I concluded that to actually write all you needed was any basic word processor like Word or Open Office as all the extra bells and whistles only served to distract from the task at hand.

Last month, at the start of November, Scrivener ended its Windows beta and put out their official release. As I was starting a new book back then, and as I was playing with the idea of conducting a non-official NaNoRiMa of my own and as I knew Scrivener had a word counter, I tried it again.

I was pleasantly impressed.

A lot of changes were made from the year before, and those aspects that had made the program unusable by me, (the most glaring being the inability to resize the text on the screen independent of the print size,) were fixed. That was good news, but was it worth it? Could it really make writing easier, better?

The thing about Scrivener is that it is open-ended, meaning that it is simply a tool like a hammer, not a process like a diet plan. You can use it anyway you like. So if you want to tap a nail in with the wooden end—that’s fine, whatever suits your style. The question was, would this tool accommodate my style?

I sat down to find out.

I took time to watch the tutorials, I read how others used it, and talked to fellow writers Everyone else cited things like the ability to write out-of-order and then shift scenes around, or to being able to construct plots using the “index card” aspect of the program. I don’t do those things.  I start at the beginning and write to the end, which is why Word has always worked just fine. They also spoke of how the program complies the draft at the end of the project. Again, since I write from start to finish there is no need for this—another unnecessary step. They also spoke of the lack of formatting options as if that was a good thing. In the end I was about to give up as it did not appear to suit me, but then I decided to just “play” with it and see what it could do. I spent a weekend exploring the possibilities and discovered, a bit to my surprise, it is a useful program.

Three very practical aspects of this program changed my mind.

The “Binder”—the panel that appears on the left side, which works like a document index—houses folders and document trees that form the basic construction of the draft. In other words, there is a “Draft” folder, and inside that you can create folders and inside those you can create documents, in any combination you like, just as you do in your Documents Folder on your computer. The first hurdle I faced was how should I best organize my book in this program?

Friends all spoke about just writing scenes and organizing later. To me that’s just crazy talk, like saying, “just start building the house, and we’ll draw up the architectural designs  later.” Instead, I very methodically began by making a folder represent a chapter, and each document inside it a scene that would be divided by scene breaks. Scrivener is actually designed to handle this nicely. I wouldn’t say “intended” as like I said the program is open enough that you can do what you like. Instead of entitling the folders Chapter 1, Chapter 2 etc. I named them like I would for the finish book. “The Battle of Gateway Bridge,” “The Ghost of High Tower,” and so on. This let me know approximately what I was going to cover in that chapter, and should I wish to change the order of the chapters I could just drag and drop in the binder tree without having to then change the numbers.

Inside the folders I created files and entitled them with short descriptions of what I planned to cover in that section. “Opening fight”, “Hiding in the Barn.” This kind of “setup” work that I was forced to do before even starting to write annoyed me a bit until I realized that in laying out the structure for the program, what I was actually doing, was outlining my book.

This idea of an interactive, practical outline was the first really—oh! moment. This intrigued me.  Instead of writing out a bulleted list of events as an outline, I was making containers that did the same thing. Only I would later be able to use these folders and documents to make the book.

As you can see in the screen shots, on the right side is a “notes” column consisting of an index card at the top and below that a general notes window. At first I ignored these, but as I worked I saw this as a good way to replace scribbling things on pieces of paper that got lost. Soon however I realized that putting notes in each of the sections commenting what that section was about added to the idea of this interactive outline.

As I went through making my folders and section documents inside them, I put in short sentences in each section’s index cards mentioning the important points I needed to address in that section. And in the notes windows more elaborate thoughts I wanted to remember for that scene. This completed the outline just as I would have done if I were typing out a bulleted, or paragraphed list of events.

After finishing the folder-tree for the binder, I could then go back to the first document and begin writing the book. Opening that document I saw the notes I made of what I needed to write. When I finished that, I opened the next and there were the notes needed to remind me what to write there.

So instead of writing out an outline and constantly referring to it, the outline was in the book itself. I lost no time and this streamlined the writing process. I liked that.

In addition to the “Draft” folder there is a “Research” folder. This is where Scrivener expects you to put all the info you found in preparing for your novel. Fact is I don’t do a lot of research for my fantasy books. I make all of it up. Still I felt bad looking at the Research folder thinking I should have something in there. Because it was the weekend, and because I was actively, and knowingly wasting time playing with the program, I started looking for stuff to put there.

I do have some lists that I’ve used. I have lists of names that I’ve created. Lists of medieval occupations, that sort of thing, and dropping them in here saved lots of time in finding them. I put the world map in, and made a couple of new ones for specific areas. My wife, suggested that I drop the Riyria novels in there too, so I could easily check them for references. That was just genius.

But it wasn’t enough. I found I started creating family-trees, and coats of arms. I created character timelines—their lives from birth to death, crossed indexed in an excel spread sheet against major story events, and added this to the eight thousand year history of the world I already had. I listed ranks of nobility and their appropriate address, and clan histories.

It still wasn’t enough. Then I realized what I really needed to put here were character sheets and setting descriptions. This would be a huge waste of time. I never did them before, but heh, I was supposed to be wasting time, so why not? I even went so far as to drag and drop photos from the web into the character sheets as reference. And on each page I started with the basics: when and where were they born, who were their parents, what was their childhood like…as I did this a funny thing happened. I started getting story ideas. I found that as I created these character outlines, I was going back and forth to my newly minted story outline and dropping notes into the note panels adding more things I wanted to bring up. New plot twists and new directions revealed themselves.

Wow! This really helps.

I took a whole week doing nothing more than “research” (making stuff up.) By the time I got done sketching in the major players in the story and a few of the major settings, I had the whole book laid out in fairly good detail, with lots of rich background that I could draw on. 

Over the next few weeks I began writing the novel.  The process was a breeze not only because I had everything right there, easy to find and easy to access, but also because so much of the work was already done. I didn’t have to stop mid-stream and think up a name for a new character. I already did that, in fact I had a whole history of the guy which I could use if I wanted, or just have as a basis for establishing his personality in my own mind. Less questions popped up as I wrote, and as a result the writing flowed with fewer roadblocks.

I was pleased enough that I will continue to use Scrivener, but more importantly, Scrivener managed to help improve my writing by showing how creating some character outlines and setting descriptions can provide fertile beds for adding in plot building and in smoothing out the writing process.

Writing a book can seem such a huge task that the initial reaction is to just start writing, as everything else feels like a waste of time, but some preparation up front can speed the process down the line and more than make up for the initial time investment. 

Scrivener is $40 and they have a 30 day free trial. It is available for both Mac and Windows, although the Mac version is more advanced and has more features as it has been out longer. 

And no, they aren’t paying me for this.

 

I was recently asked if a writer should edit as they go or just write the novel and then go back. I think the generally held wisdom is not to look back and just plow through to the end, but I don’t entirely agree. I also don’t think you should edit as you go. I think you might see why I decided to write a blog post on this. A tweet won’t cut it.

Should you, or should you not, edit as you go?

The pitfall of editing as you go is that you end up like a car stuck in the mud just spinning your tires. Editing is a form of quicksand. Nothing will ever be perfect, and you can edit forever. Writers can spend a year working on the first chapter. Then the realization that there are twenty more chapters in the novel can seal the fate of a career. You can also spend three times the hours writing a book only to get half done and realize the plot won’t work. If you had skipped the editing, you would have saved months. And then there’s the frustration of polishing prose to a fine luster only to discover you have to cut that chapter, now all that work that you made so perfect, and all that time is lost.

So why am I not against editing until the book is done?

Two reasons. The first is that invariably you will get to a point in the writing of any novel where you hit a patch of trouble. This leads to a lack of confidence, both in the work and in your own abilities as a writer. Your mind will play tricks on you, spin you into a depression and cause you to remember everything you’ve written up to that point as crap. It is very easy to fall into a defeated state and just give up.

The solution to this mid-book doldrums is to go back and read the first chapter again. If you did a good job on it, you’ll impress yourself right back into confidence. You’ll remember what was great about this idea, and why you wanted to write it in the first place. But, it has to be good.

As a result, I always polish that first chapter as a safety net. Even if I later cut it, it served it’s purpose, and that is to ensure I have something in the work that I’m proud of, something that can inspire me to keep writing.

I don’t edit much more…until I reach the middle of the book. Once I pass the middle point I will go back and do one light pass—a read through really, but I make corrections as I read. Why do I do this?

When I write I don’t as easily commit a story to memory as when I read one. I often forget what it is I wrote until I re-read it. I also tend to forget little things that I put in and thought could be expanded later. Furthermore, in re-reading I get ideas. I see patterns emerging that I hadn’t noticed while writing. I see things I want to make certain I take advantage of.

Editing at the halfway point allows me to reorient myself, reevaluate the tone, pace and feel so that as I go ahead, I can better aline myself to conclude the book with the best possible results. It is the same as reading a book and anticipating what will come next, or how it will end. The reader will do this, so I want to do this too, and then either take the book another way, or really hit that nail hard to provide the reader with the best possible reading experience. Sometimes when you re-read you can see that the obvious best ending isn’t the way you are planning to go, but because you are only at the midway point, you still have time to make it happen.

The last point of divergence from the wisdom of not editing until the book is done, is that when I sit down to commence writing, I often read over and edit the last page I wrote the day before. I do this just to get myself back into the mood to write, and to get my mind back into the same mindset—to orient my thoughts to pick up where I left off.

Aside from these however, I would advise not editing until the book is done.

Nothing is ever easy…including responding to a tweet about editing.

I’ve already covered the basic aspects of description which works fine, but it can be taken a step further. I mentioned how you don’t want to sit down and actually describe things as if you were a scientist recording an experiment, or a coroner working up a report. Such clinical approaches to description is very boring.

The first impulse is to clean up the data-speak and turn it into something more casual.

This is easier to read but still dull, so the next impulse is to dress up the description using more sophisticated, artsy language.

This is where a lot of aspiring writers get stuck, lost in the clever wording and surprising imagery. It can be like a drug. It’s fun to play with words, to think of new ways to say old things. It is also easy to delude yourself into thinking this is great writing. It has to be, it’s beautiful, and it’s hard to do. It takes a lot more work than just saying something bluntly. A sense of mingling poetry and prose can soon follow and the effects become dramatic.

This then brings me back to the point of my original post where I suggested describing things using tiny details and general impressions. Here is the same description distilled down to one sentence using the impression method:

This sentence also uses a bit of something else, which is the real point of this post, and that is involvement and real value. A paragraph of description should never be just a paragraph of description, it should be part of the story, and provide real information that the reader can use. This helps prevent readers from just skipping that large block of descriptive text in which they know nothing will happen—it’s just description.

Too often a writer will introduce a character and feel obligated to describe them. Sometimes however you’ll read a book where the writer offers no description at all to most of their characters, and strangely, while reading it, you don’t even notice until someone points it out. In fact you thought they had, because you have a pretty clear idea in your head what they look like.

How do they do that?

They manage it by building impressions through events in the story. People’s brains are wired to look for patterns, and we have a strong tendency to settle for stereotypes. This is unfortunately why all too often people generalize about whole groups of people, picturing them as having the same attributes. So if a person acts a certain way, or talks a certain way, a visual image forms, and if that is how you want the character to appear, then you really don’t need to waste time describing them. If you portray a character through events as a nervous, sniveling, greedy, fast talking, thief, the visual of a small thin, dirty, beady-eyed, rat-like face will emerge. And then there are subtle hints. If you describe all the other characters as “looking up” at the him, you don’t need to say he’s tall.

Setting-description is a bit more complicated. Failure to provide imagery will leave your reader feeling blind, and in my previous post on description, I mentioned how focusing on just a few precise elements will cast a bigger picture, but this is still just description, and readers find description to be boring. What they like are stories. The answer is to describe the setting through stories that provide real value to the reader—that tell you about the characters or that move the story.

In this sentence, you are describing the room, but you are bringing the description back and showing how it has personal meaning to the character observing it. You learn a bit about his past as well as the present setting and this makes it more interesting to both the character and the reader. This can be pushed further.

In reading this, no one is going to miss that this killer has souvenir shot glasses on his cheap table because that point was rolled into a little story that was far more entertaining than straight description and also gave you a huge insight into the main character’s past.

This is especially important to do with significant points. I’ve read stories by new writers and I’d have no idea how old the character is, or where they were, only to find out later they said right in the first sentence. The problem is, readers miss things all the time. So if you really need the reader to know something, you need to reinforce it. You don’t want to out-right repeat yourself, or the reader will think you just forgot, which writers often do, and why editors need to watch out for this. If a year, or an age, or the name of the city is mentioned as part of a sentence, it can easily be missed.

It’s not that the reader doesn’t read the words, they just don’t register them if the focus of the sentence or paragraph is elsewhere. That bit of data was just not burned into the reader’s consciousness. In the above sentence, the focus in on this woman in a hurry to unpack, not on her destination.

There is no way any reader will not register where this woman is now, and again it is not just description. Her perspective, her excitement, comes through. This is a place she had dreamed of.

So rather than spending hours creating poetic prose to spice up dead description, that some readers might be inclined to skip, you might find it more effective to write clearly, but make what you write interesting to read by way of the content.

Remember, if it’s boring for you to write, it will be boring for the reader to read. 

I was at a book convention recently in Baltimore where a young man asked a panel of writers what he was doing wrong. He had written his first novel, edited it, written a good query letter and had sent it to all the right agents, using all the right methods…only he still wasn’t published.  He was baffled. He couldn’t understand what he had done wrong. This isn’t the first aspiring writer that I’ve met who had this perplexing problem. And it isn’t restricted to traditional publishing. Self published authors have a similar problem. They publish their first novel and it just doesn’t sell no matter how much promotion they give it. What’s the problem?

Maybe, as the panel suggested, the young writer just hasn’t found the right editor. One editor might hate a book, while another—even at the same publisher—might love it. Or maybe, in the case of the self-published author, that person just hasn’t managed to find the right reviewers. While these are possible, I have a different thought.

Practice is sometimes a necessary component to success.  

I don’t believe that the majority of authors make a commercial success of their very first novel, and when I say first novel, I don’t mean the first published novel, I mean the first novel you’ve ever written. Many authors have had huge success with their debut novel—the first book they managed to get published—but these were not necessarily the first book they wrote. Brandon Sanderson who wrote Mistborn and is now working at finishing the Robert Jordan Wheel of Time series, was working on his thirteenth novel when ELANTRIS, his first published novel was picked up. Coincidentally, I had written thirteen novels myself before Crown was published.

Now I’m not saying that you have to write thirteen novels, but expecting to be successful with your first novel I think is a bit like picking up a tennis racquet for the first time and expecting to win Wimbledon. Sure, it’s possible, just not very likely. So it might be a good idea to play a few games first, get a feel for them, for the strategy, the length, the stamina you’ll need.

The problem is that writing a book takes a long time, and involves a lot of hard work. People often think that writing a book will be fun. They often sit down and enjoy zipping through the first chapter. They might even get into the third chapter before it starts to bog down, before they begin to think, “where was I going with this? Humm. Maybe I should think the story out a bit more before just writing. Okay, so Bob, my main character will discover that…oh, no. That’s not going to work because…crap. Damn, this isn’t working out the way I wanted. Oh look, I got a new email.” And so ends the first attempt at writing a novel.

The second attempt is likely more of the same. This sort of thing happens a lot and then the aspiring-writer finds themselves at a crossroads and needs to decide which way to go:

1) Writing just isn’t for them.

2) Writing a novel needs to be approached with a bit more seriousness than hey, you know what would be fun?

This is the point where the aspiring writer takes a deep breath, rolls up their sleeves and says, “I’m going to do this if it kills me.” They set aside time and they write with a single-minded effort. They know it will be tough. They know it will be hard work so they aren’t put-off when things get rough, and with great determination they finish this epic project.

Then they celebrate. It is like finishing a marathon. They did it! They actually wrote a novel! Then a week, or a month later they read it. Or worse they let someone else read it, and discover that what they made, what they spent months, perhaps even years on, isn’t as good as they hoped. This is actually better than having their friends and family support them and say how great it is, causing them to spend years doing nothing but trying to sell a bad book.  

Now the aspiring writer is at a new crossroads, that looks remarkably like the last, but instead of two choices, now there are three:

1) I suck and need to find a new hobby.

2) Maybe if I re-write it…

3) …

Number three is the true subject of this post, and it is not what writers want to hear, but is what I think is most often the case. The first novel is a learning experience and should be viewed that way. Odds of getting it right on the first try are very slim. To quote The Matrix, nobody makes the first jump.

The writing of a first novel from cover to cover, gains you entry into a new world. You can see what it takes. You know it can be done, and you can see where you failed. You can estimate the length and can pace yourself better. You’ve learned just how much runway you have to get your story and characters in the air, and won’t be so rushed next time. You’ve discovered the practical uses of PoV, and what you can do, and what you can’t do in editing. You’ll see where you’re weak and need improvement, and where you’re strong and how to build on that.

Of course no one ever sees it that way. No matter what the age, we are all impatient to succeed. If you’re old, you’ll feel you don’t have a lot of time left to start publishing, and if you’re young you’ll look at people like Christopher Paolini, who was around 19 when he published Eragon (15 when he started writing it. He is one of those people who I believe made a success of the first book he wrote.) So failing at publishing a first novel is rarely seen as progress.

If you’re unlucky denial will set in, and you will convince yourself that your book is great and others just can’t see it. If you’re lucky, you’ll obtain honest feedback, learn from it, and realize you haven’t failed, you’ve passed your first semester, but that doesn’t mean you get a diploma. Now with this new understanding, all those things you’ve read about writing make a lot more sense.  You know you can do better next time.

With this in mind you set out to write another novel. Much wiser, you pick a different kind of plot, one perhaps less grandiose, less extravagant, one that you feel confident you can handle. You do a bit more research up front, because that was a lot of the problem before, and then you have at it again.

It is still hard. The only thing that keeps you going is that you know you can do it because you did it before (this is something else you learned, this is your edge.) Finally you finish once more, but you aren’t so eager to celebrate. You know there are problems. You wait. You give it time. Then you read it.

It sucks. You can admit that now, your previous honest critiques provides you with this insight to see beyond just what you want to see, but still it is better. You can see that too. You study the problem, analyze where you failed. The problem is that the plot broke down part way. There are five gigantic plot holes you couldn’t fill. Places you hadn’t anticipated going in. Some characters are unneeded, others you added by necessity that were never fleshed out properly. Looking back you can see how you might have worked them into the main line more from the very start. There’s so much that could have been done better, even so, even with those changes, it still would never be great. Not bad maybe, but not great, and “not bad” won’t cut it.

You could try re-writing, but sometimes, and particularly at the start, all the rewriting in the world won’t save a bad idea, and until you know enough—until you have developed enough experience at building novels—you won’t know the difference between one worth saving and one that needs to be put to rest.

A lot of the time you just need to shelve that manuscript and come up with something new. Something better. You’re a veteran of two books at this point and having more than one experience, you can see patterns, draw conclusions about novel writing and how it applies to you personally. You got stuck in the same place twice now. Twice now you failed to create a satisfying ending, or failed to make your main character believable, or you gave away too much, or too little.  You know this about yourself, so it is time to make changes to correct those problems.

Maybe an outline would help to reveal issues before they arise, save months of work by discovering those plot holes early on and what characters are important and which should not even be in the story. It is so much easier to just think of a new approach before you start writing than to completely re-write a novel after the fact.

Once more you write. Once more you finish with less than perfect results. Damn! You relied too much on the outline and the story is stiff and contrived because you failed to let the character’s personalities and the situations dictate the direction of the plot. You re-write, you spot fix, but the story breaks down further because it feels like a patched quilt.

Again. Another novel. And another failure. And another and again a failure. It is hopeless.

“Can I read it?”

“You won’t like it. It’s awful. All the things I write are awful.”

“Huh? Are you kidding? This is good. I like this. It’s better than most of the junk out there.”

Blink. “Really? You actually like it?”

“Yeah.”

“What about the fact that the car starts when an hour ago it didn’t?”

Shrug. “Cars do that. Didn’t bother me.”

“And that it was his half-brother???”

“Actually I loved that!”

“You did?”

“You should try and get this published.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, it’s great. Ahh, but you might want to proof it better. There’s a lot of mistakes.”

“Oh…well, yeah. I could do that.”

Diploma.

You still might not get an agent with that book. You still might not find a publisher, just as that panel said, it can be hard to find just the right editor who will like your work, and maybe you’ll need to self-publish to get your work out there, to build an audience, but eventually it will happen.

Hopefully it will take less tries than it did for Sanderson and myself, but the thing is, looking back, the failure of that first novel, at the time, felt so terrible. It signified hours, days, months, years wasted. Time thrown into the black hole of a dream that would never happen. But…the moment your first book is published, the instant someone you don’t know reads it and says, “This was fantastic. You’re a genius. Have you written anything else I can read?” Suddenly you realize all those years weren’t wasted at all. That was just the time it took, the practice needed. And all those crappy books you wrote along the way? Looking back at them, you can see with perfect clarity what you did wrong. And some are just awful—what were you thinking? But a few had some good ideas, characters or plots that, knowing what you know now, you can easily rebuild into a great book. The best part—most of the work is already done. Even less time wasted.

Maybe you’ll be lucky and get your first novel published, but if you don’t, it’s not the end of the world, in fact I would think it would be surprising. No one expects you to hit a homerun your first time at bat. The difference between failure and practice, is when you quit.

Next: Applied Description

I will be the first to admit, I am not a wordsmith. Many writers focus a good deal of energy on constructing beautiful prose. I used to do that, but I found it counterproductive to the goal I was after, which was to make the words disappear and the story and characters shine. I am not assaulting literary writing. I enjoy beautifully crafted language. I just determined that for the kinds of books I was working on, word-craft was not the best methodology because I have a theory that there is a sliding scale. The more eloquence you put into the language, the simpler the plot needs to be. The reason is that eloquence requires room. An author can carry on poetically about almost nothing for pages. As such a very simple plot allows the writer to run in tangents, use beautiful metaphors, and explore character quirks without the weight of having to convey a lot of mundane information clearly and precisely.

So, for a set of fast-paced action adventure novels, I did not aim for eloquence. To be honest, I can’t tell you how many times I had to go back and edit out passages that were too good. Sentences or paragraphs that I impressed myself with, and thought, wow, that’s really great writing. The moment I paused in the story to marvel over the words, I knew I had to cut them. I don’t want people noticing my writing. And I certainly don’t want them noticing how one specific sentence or paragraph was very different from all the rest. I want them focusing on the story. I wanted clear, not clever. Having said this, there is still a surprising amount of sculpting going on in the word structure. Subtle manipulations that readers and even some writers might not notice.

ACTIVE AND PASSIVE

This could have gone in the basic posts, but it fits here too.

The man was beaten by Danny. (passive)

Danny beat the man. (active)

In passive voice, the subject receives the action. In active the subject does the action. An easy way to see this is often when the subject is followed by the verb. He ran… Susan stood up… The door opened…  these are all indicators of an active sentence, and active sentences are great because they are crisp, clear, exciting, direct, and well…active. They cause writing to come alive instead of sounding dead. And they are the best way to write action. As a result, active sentences are what most writers like to use. This is not to say that passive sentences equal “bad.” Passive voice has a role to play, the most obvious being when you are describing a passive situation.

Johnny is clearly in a submissive situation here, and the style of the sentence emphasizes this. You could write, The cop cuffed Johnny, but that focuses on the cop and the action rather than the feeling of being restrained. And if you want to make the reader sympathize with Johnny the passive sentence works better.

So passive sentences relate passive moods, of characters or situations. Active makes the sentences pop and come alive.

DECLARITIVE

Then there is the declarative sentence. Technically a declarative sentence is just any sentence that states something and ends in a period, as opposed to a question, or one of emotion that ends in an exclamation, but I like to tweak definitions to suit myself.

This is in fact a declarative sentence, but I don’t place it in that category because the sentence doesn’t actually “declare” anything, it “alludes” to it.  Maybe he is opening the door, maybe he isn’t. If that ambiguousness is what you are trying to convey, fine, but all too often writers are just timid. They don’t want to declare too much, because technically, maybe the character couldn’t exactly see perfectly what was actually, truly, objectively, without a doubt, happening. This is just splitting hairs. If a character “seems to” open a door, then he had better not have actually opened it, because there would be no reason for the “seems to” if he had opened it.

As the author, you know everything, and even if the character doesn’t it is still okay to be definitive about events. Why? Because people never see someone “seem to” anything. In real life it either is, or it isn’t. Only a narrator with foreknowledge striving to relate a story as accurately as possible would use “seemed to.” In real life, a door is opened. If later it turns out it wasn’t, then at that point, the door is closed.

Bob thought Danny opened the door, but he hadn’t.

 Seemed to, is a cheap, unsophisticated attempt at suspense, or a means of hedging bets, or being technically accurate to the point of killing the story.

Unless what the guy is actually using for rope (and it really had better not be rope) plays a big part in the story later, just call it rope.

Writing in (what I define as) declarative sentences cleans up sentences by getting rid of the useless clutter of author hesitancy. Either it is or it isn’t, and as the author you should know, so don’t pretend you don’t, and if you really don’t know, you should.

BACK LOADING

Now that I explained how to make sentences clear and strong, I’m going to contradict everything I just said, because there are often times you want to flip, or mangle sentences for effect. Often this is done to emphasis the emotion, or to hold off a reveal to the end. In some ways this is like writing poetry in that, impact, or impression, are more important than clarity.

The first sentence is a good active sentence. The second, while passive is still far more straightforward, and direct. But the last sentence has more impact because the point of the sentence is held in reserve to the end, creating a punch. This is what I call back-loading. When you save the best for last and front-load suspense.

This is an even more pronounced and dramatic expression of the idea. The first sentence is serviceable, but dull and lifeless despite being active. While the second creates a story in a single sentence. Back loading sentences are ideal for adding drama. You can almost hear the bass chords play at the end of the sentence, bump, bump, bah! And the camera would zoom.

When I was in art school, I had a teacher who explained the difference between a house painter and an artist. A house painter sweeps back and forth with the brush. An artist does whatever they need to. You can push, slap, dribble, stab, whatever necessary to create the effect you want. Fiction writing is an odd cross between art and craft. While most of the time it is good to stick with the rules, sometimes it pays to paint outside the lines.

SOUND

Then there are the patterns, the music of the words. The best way to hear it is to read your work aloud, or have someone else read it to you. Too fast, too slow, awkward, or just grating. Here are a few things to look out for.

A sour note is created when you use the same unusual word twice in a single paragraph. If it is really unusual, it will stick out if you even use it twice in the same book. Common words you can get away with. For example you can use the word “the” several times in a single paragraph and no one will notice. But if you use “paradigm,” twice, for no apparent reason, it will sound strange. These are the kinds of things you most often find in proofing and should not really be concerned with in writing.

Then there are patterns to watch out for. If you start three sentences with “He was…” in a row, it will be noticeable and the sound will be off. Even if the pattern of the sentence is the same more than twice, it will be a grating sound unless repeating the beat-phrase is what you are after.

In this case, the pattern is set up with intended repetition. There is a cadence to the phrases designed to roll and then these are capped with a different and abrupt sound at the end. It could just as easily have been written:

The first displays more of a sense of frustration, while the second is faster and more exciting. It would depend on what you were aiming for.

I find it is usually best to be conscious of sentence patterns and lengths. Too many short sentences in a row and the writing is choppy. Too many long ones and it comes off slow and wordy. If you aren’t writing action, or not trying to create a specific mood of serenity, then the sentences should be an ambiguous mix avoiding patterns. Long, long, short. Short, short, long. Long, short, long. Just varying helps. Sometimes just the occasional semicolon or em dash can help. 

It’s amazing how complicated writing can be, even when you’re trying to keep it simple. 

 Next up: Dealing With Failure

Novels are by definition fiction, and fiction is made up stuff. It doesn’t matter if you write gritty police/courtroom procedural stories, or invented world fantasies, it’s the same. None of it really happened. An argument can be made that even if you were writing a non-fictional account of something that really did happen, your description would only form one perspective and would be seen by others with firsthand knowledge as “fiction.” Still, no one writes in a vacuum. No matter how fictional something is, it is always based on reality.

I write fantasy. The first books I’ve published are invented-world-fantasy, which is just about as out-there as you can get. I created a whole new world, which means I can make anything, anyway I want. I could implement Hollywood-Gravity if I liked. Magic can exist. Gods can recognizably walk among people. People don’t even have to be people, they can be something else entirely. Time doesn’t have to work the same as we perceive in our reality. There could be more colors, a seventh and eighth sense,  whatever I want. Given all this freedom one might expect far more creativity in the genre, and yet oddly, so many invented-world-fantasies take place in very similar settings most drawn from our own history.

There are a number of reasons for that. Authors are trying to replicate what they love to read; it is easier to write about something familiar; it is easier than trying to invent something completely new. All of these are writer-centric, but I feel there is another reason that is actually reader-based that holds more legitimacy—it is easier for a reader to understand. If your setting was too strange you’d either have to stop constantly and explain how everything works, or just accept that the reader won’t have a chance to grasp what is going on. To educate the reader well enough to understand the story, would be prohibitive to the timely telling of the tale. This would be a situation where the art destroys the entertainment.

There are dozens of reasons I choose to write my books in a medieval setting. Swords and arrows allow for more drama and greater flexibility than guns and bombs. Cell phones and the Internet are two of the worst inventions in the world for writers. Just a few years ago, it was so easy to build a story out of a person’s quest to find something or speak to someone. Now to do that you need to explain why they just can’t look it up on Google or call them on a cell. If your heroine discovers something crucial, she’ll be an idiot if she doesn’t just call your hero on the phone to let him know. Doing so will destroy the plot of course, but not doing so is obviously contrived and unrealistic. So historical settings make building plots so much easier. The age of knights, castles and dragons is also grandiose to the point of caricature. Billowing cloaks, towers, long gowns, primal forests, it has great built-in visuals and a wealth of pre-established forms that can be utilized to create any plot. I think only the Western can really compare in its open-source form that is both infinite in possible complexity and yet simple in essence. Between the two, I just think medieval setting are richer because it draws on a larger swath of history from more than one country.     

To get around the problem of repetition, of being seen as using the same tired setting, some writers just change the names. Knights, castles, elves and swords are just called something else. The readers is confused, but only for a little while and then they catch on, substituting in their heads what they know for the new terms. For those sensitive to traditional terms this apparently has a soothing effect, but for most everyone else it is just an unnecessary road block to understanding.

Some go through great effort to break with reality, to invent a new world so different it can be perceived as original. The problem with this, as I see it, is that readers find the greatest rewards from a connection to the story, not from a distance. Familiarity is what touches us. Witnessing an alien world, or individual can be interesting, but it often fails to move emotions. People like to make connections between themselves and what they read. When they do, it becomes personal and when that happens a wall drops, and that’s when you can get at their heart. That’s when you can make them laugh, cry, or scare the crap out of them.

This doesn’t just apply to invented-world-fantasy either. No matter what you write the more you can reflect a reader’s personal experiences, the deeper you can touch them. The obvious question is how can you do that to someone you’ve never met? How can you do that to more than one person when everyone has such different experiences? This is where what I call true magic comes in.

People are surprisingly similar. No two are exactly alike, but a lot of us share common feelings, and the deeper the feeling the more common it is. The way to tap those feelings is to be honest. To depict reality as it really is—even if that is in a fictional world.

In Stephen King’s It, and in his novella The Body (later made into the movie Stand By Me) he did a wonderful job of depicting the life of childhood. It did not matter that his setting was the fifties, the dynamic are universal and reminded me of my own youth. And it is this capturing of familiarities that has the power and magic to take the fantastical and breathe real life into it. I’m sure Mr. King was drawing on personal experience as it just rang too true to be wholly invented, and this very same thing can be done in any genre.

When I started art school my goal was to practice painting reality until I could do it so well, that I could then paint images that did not exist and make them look just as real. I don’t paint so much anymore, or rather I don’t paint with brushes much anymore. Paint has become words—so much faster and far less to clean up. Still the idea is the same. When I create a fantasy world I try to make it accessible to the reader by making it similar to what they might know rather than different. In paint I might depict a castle floating on a cloud, when both the castle and the cloud are perfectly believable the illusion is stirring, captivating. In words, if I relate the heartbreak of a dragon for the loss of its son, the feeling is what’s real, it’s what resonates. The more connections to reality the more real the writing becomes.

In real life there is copious amounts of humor, it is how many people deal with stress, how people hide, how they defend themselves, and how we enjoy ourselves, and yet I find there is almost no humor in non-comedic fiction. There is often a perceived dividing line—if it is funny it can’t have drama and vice versa. So all the effort to create gritty realism is lost because the tale feels artificial due to its own weight. In real life people have hopes and fear, goals and aspirations that often have nothing to do with what’s happening, but not always in stories. In real life people have good days and bad days, happy memories and tragedies, and even horrible places can seems beautiful at times. Yet a single-minded approach to characters and settings tell only half the story, that just doesn’t feel complete. The suspension of disbelief is hindered by the absolutism drawn by the writer trying to hype the sympathy, the fear, or the misery. This lack of combining the real and the unreal in an honest uncontrived manner, this distance between the two, can create a disconnect leaving stories interesting, but not moving, creative, but not believable.

To this end, I have often found that learning how to paint the real world well enough to be convincing, is a huge benefit. This is one of the reasons why I would advocate reading outside of your favorite genre, and even writing outside of it. If you write in fantastical worlds, learning how to write a realistic story will help lend that needed credibility. If you write in a realistic world, learning how to transpose real into the unreal results in the benefit of causing you to focus on the details that, in the real world, are often ignored, but in a fantasy world need to be accounted for.

I think it is when a writer invents a very different world that is surprisingly similar to our own, populated by people that remind us of ourselves, that fiction of any kind stops being fiction, and can truly tell us about ourselves, reminding us of something worth remembering.

Perhaps the hardest thing for a writer to develop, outside of an imagination, is their voice. It is also one of the greatest contributing factors toward making them successful. Some might call it a style, but I think it is actually more of a sub-set to style, just as fantasy is a sub set of fiction and urban fantasy is a sub-set of that and so on—so to, a voice is a specific style within styles that is unique to a writer’s personality.  

Voice is an allusive thing, and it isn’t anything you can be taught. Nor is it something you’re born with. It is something you have to develop over time, like self-confidence, which is mostly what the voice is. The courage to let who you are come through. It is the way you tell a story, the attitude of the writer.

Most aspiring writers work to be like others—their literary heroes. As such they miss the point and kill most of their chances of success. Readers don’t want to read the same thing, they want something new and they known when another author is being copied. The immediate reaction is to try and come up with something completely new, something—original. Only this is like saying that because you’re tired of the same choices of food for lunch, you’re going to try finding something to eat that isn’t in the food groups—maybe dirt? The fact is, there are an infinite number of ways to reuse story elements, but most importantly—it doesn’t matter what your story is about, how cliché, or tired so long as you bring a new voice to it.

Vampires—there I said it. How many books, movies and tv shows have reused this idea. Evil vampires, good vampires, evil vampires wanting to be good, traditional vampires, realistic vampire, funny vampires…there’s a lot of vampires out there. I thought the definitive statement on vampires was made by Stephen King back in 1975, when he applied the classic legend to the modern world in a realistic manner in his book Salem’s Lot. But then Annie Rice came along, and later Joss Whedon.

And certainly no one needed another fantasy coming of age tale about a boy destined for  greatness, mentored by a wizard, prophesied  to defeat a dark lord, but then you had J. K. Rowling. Same story, but very different way of telling the tale.

These are just as much examples of combining aspects of different stories to create a new thing, but they are also examples of voice.

Stephen King writes nothing like Bram Stoker. They both tell very similar stories using the same creature, but King brings his very recognizable voice to it. And just like a real voice, other writers can do impressions. I once re-wrote a story doing an impression of Stephen King and when my wife read it, she instantly recognized the imitated voice. King has such a strong voice it is like Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, or Peter Lorre—just about anyone can do it. I think the strength of his voice is also what made him so successful. People relate well to it.  

So what exactly am I talking about? That’s a bit hard to say since it is different for everyone. King’s voice is heavily reflective—all his characters think a lot, and in ways that are random-comparative, very blunt and personal, and steeped in their time. He pushes the technique, of how to define a character by how they see the world, to extremes, not only letting you hear the raw and deepest thoughts of a character, but also going a bit over the top. Few King characters are boring or typical, they all have extreme personalities.

Consider Arthur Conan Doyle for contrast. His Holmes series are all written in the head of Watson, but the presentation is very proper and hands-off. Watson may very well get angry, but the thoughts he thinks on paper are held in check. He doesn’t swear, or think “Man what an officious little prick Holmes is being,” the way a King character might.

Ayn Rand has a grandeur to her tone. Everything, no matter how insignificant is raised up to lofty heights. Hemmingway is the opposite of both King and Rand. I don’t think he ever even uses character reflection as a tool. His voice has the monotone, fact-based baritone of a news anchor or Joe Friday. And then of course there is one of the most definable and imitated voices of all—Raymond Chandler, who defined the tough-guy reflective voice to such a degree that it has become synonymous with film-noir  detective stories, even those written by other authors like Dashiell Hammett, who had completely different styles.

The fact that I can describe these author’s voices is a testament to their strength. By contrast many writers sound alike. They often hide their voice, too timid to let it come through. They write the story with no flourish, no style. J. D. Salinger, didn’t have that problem. Catcher In The Rye starts out with a ton of flourish.

Still, a voice isn’t something you can learn from anyone. It has to come from inside you—the accumulation of your own personality, your own view of life, your own attitude toward storytelling, and the distilled sum of all that you have managed to glean from other authors. Oftentimes, it is invisible to you until someone else points it out.

I copied the styles of dozens of authors looking for my voice. I failed to find it. It wasn’t until I was saturated with the experience of understanding the various methods and tones of other writers, but then cast them all aside and gave up looking in order to just write for myself, that I found it. And like listening to your own voice on a recorder, I didn’t recognize it and I’m still trying to define what I am hearing as me.

I’ve had other writers imitate me—I know this because they told me they were stealing my style. First I was flattered. Second—my style? I have a style? I read their imitation and just like hearing an impressionist, I thought, “really, that’s supposed to be me?” Then I thought about it and realized they’re right, I do do that, don’t I? Until that moment, I never realized I had a specific voice, but I realize now that those aspects of my writing are the things that come most easily, so easily, I never noticed. But those are the things that people point to—not what I thought were wonderful prose, not the great metaphors—those things I struggled with—no one cared about those things.

I know writers who achieved their first publication, and freeze up as they consider their next piece. After years of struggle, or trying every combination possible, like Edison and his light bulb filament, they finally captured lightning in a bottle. But how can you do that a second time, when you aren’t sure how you did it the first time? The pressure mounts when you realize that the second piece you do, whether it is a book or a short story, has to be better than the first just to be seen as “as good,” because everyone else is asking the same question that the author is asking themselves. “Can I do it again, or was that just a fluke?” The common mistake is that a sophomore author tries to write as good as they can, going back to imitating others, when what made the first work great was that they knew how to write. For that one moment they discovered their own voice and it clicked. The trick then is to trust in your voice, relax and just let it come through. I think that when the writing comes easy, you’re on the right track. You might not think it is significantly beautiful or impressive, because it is not similar to the style, or voice of other authors that you might admire or respect, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t good. Most likely, you won’t ever see just how good or distinct your voice is until someone else points it out to you and says, this—this is why I love your writing, and I just wish I could do that, too.

At this point you might blink and say, “Really? You liked that?”

“I love that. How do you do it?”

Then you’ll scratch your head. “I dunno. I wasn’t even trying, it just sorta comes out that way a lot of the time. It just feels right when I do it.”

So developing your style, or your voice, I feel is something that comes with time, with study and experience. It is the journey to find yourself in your writing, and once found, to accept and embrace what you discover. I know this sounds a bit metaphysical, but it sort of is. Writing a story is a bit like being Dr. Frankenstein. You collect parts from other bodies and sew them together, but when you’re done, all you really have is a piecemeal corpse. You need to breathe life into it, and to do that you have to give something of yourself. You need to draw from your own experiences, painful, happy, embarrassing, angry moments and have the courage to place them on a page. If you make yourself cry, you’ll touch others. Make yourself laugh and they will, too. Once you learn this, you’ll keep dumping more and more of yourself into the words and without knowing it, when you read it back it becomes a mirror, and that reflection, that thing you see, that is your voice—that is you. 

Next up: Combining the Real and the Unreal

Recently I touched on the importance of making a good first sentence, and a compelling opening scene. The focus of that was to provide the gravity to pull in a new reader or persuade an editor to put your manuscript in the “to be read later” pile. That’s all very important, but what happens when that editor or that reader finally get around to reading the next fifty pages?

I consider writing a book similar to coaxing a wild animal into a cage with bits of food. You put the food down on the ground in a line to the cage. Or if you prefer, and have seen the movie ET, you’re trying to lure an alien with Reeses Pieces. The problem is that you have a limited amount of candy, so the question becomes how far can you space the placement of food and not lose ET prior to getting him to the shed?

A great opening to a story is like offering a nice bit of candy. People taste it, like it, and hope for more. If you give them another, they will stand where they are and eat it, but you don’t want that, you want them to move. Besides, after too much candy, they will get full and no longer want to eat. So instead of giving them a second, being that they are humans and not a squirrel or rabbit, you can promise them one—if only they will go over there.

The fireworks at the start of a story catches a reader’s attention. Mentally they might think, “Okay, that wasn’t bad, I’ll give this writer a few more pages now and see if they can maintain my interest. You now have sort of a loan of time with which to build an interest. The investor is still very skeptical however, so you’d better show them something soon.

As I said another bit of candy won’t work so well, you need something more substantive. The best, I feel, is an interesting question or compelling proposition. In a mystery story, it would be the puzzle that the client tells to the sleuth—the mystery.

After reading that, you want to know the answer. You want to find out how this is possible. You’ll go looking for that next Reeses Pieces.

Only that can’t be the whole thing. If the answer to that one question is the sum of your story, it is like spacing the candy too far apart. If I have to wade through three hundred pages for just that last treat, I’ll get bored and stop. So you need to add more treats.

If you reveal that the man was shot before entering the box, but then discover that the man in the cement box wasn’t actually the woman’s husband, you have allowed the reader to have their Reeses Pieces, but then promised them another. This end-to-end reward and promise method works well to move a reader much the way Spiderman swings through a city, shooting one web while swinging from another. Still I find it too simplistic. An extra layer or two can really help make the story richer and the need to turn the pages that much more intense. So running several mysteries at once, staggering their paths of reward and promise differently than the first ensures that the reader stays riveted. If done well, there will be short-term puzzles, longer questions, and story (or series) length mysteries. Each one working as a sail to catch the wind of a reader’s interest and move them forward.

In addition to the mystery, you’ll need conflict. Most stories are all about conflict. The protagonist has a goal, and the antagonist is in the way of that causing conflict. This is possibly the most basic definition of a plot. Without it, you don’t have much of a story. I’ve actually read pieces that lacked conflict, short fiction mainly where events happen, and a character reacts, but there is no dispute, no struggle, and the writing simply ends at some point.

My rule for determining if you have a plot or not is to see if you can describe the story without describing the events that make it up. If you can say, “It’s about Bob, who is desperate for money so he robs a bank.” That’s a story. If on the other hand your description is, “Bob has a hard life and I reveal that over the course of the story,” and feel that doesn’t really describe the story without explaining the events…that’s not a story, that’s a detailed character workup.  Or if you say, “It’s about a world where they have suddenly lost the use of electricity.” While this has an implied conflict of Man Against Nature, it isn’t so much a story as it is a setting for a story.  

This said, there are many books on the market that according to this breakdown would not classify as stories, which are very successful, so clearly this isn’t always a problem. I would venture to guess that stories with plots are more commercially successful, where as those without tend to be more critically acclaimed. I’ve actually heard rumors that lit professors denounce plots as inconsequential and annoying as they merely get in the way of the important aspects of a book which are theme, symbols, meaning, etc.

Conflict between characters will also generate a desire to read. Hatred for an antagonist can turn pages just as effectively as concern for a protagonist. In recent years there has been a resurgence of authors killing their protagonists and letting the antagonists win. This can result in readers throwing books, or in the case of The Princess Bride: “You mean he wins? Jesus, Grandpa, what did you read me this thing for?” On the other hand, a hero that wins the day, is a bit like a spoiler.

No matter how you chose to do it, conflict should be a large aspect of your story if you want to keep the reader reading.

If Mystery is the cerebral part of this equation and Conflict is the physical aspect, then Tension is between the two. Tension is created when the two conflicted elements enter into the same proximity. Nothing has to happen, it is often best when nothing does, but the tension it causes will rivet the reader. This is derived from the conflict and can help keep the reader’s attention even when nothing is really happening, or can’t happen.

Suspense is lengthening an exciting scene, building emotion. The enemy draws near, the clock ticks, just seconds are left, but in the narrative those moments will take three pages to complete. And a reader will read every word, and ignore phone calls, dinner and sleep to finish them. 

Using each of these elements, Mystery, Conflict, Tension and Suspense and layering them like shingles so that they overlap leaving no gaps where something is not nagging at the reader to turn the next page, is how, as a writer, you keep your reader with you, how you get ET into the shed. No matter what your theme, genre, or how profound your message, if you can’t entertain well enough to cause your audience to finish your work, nothing else matters—you need to give your readers a reason to read. 

Next week: Voice

So far I’ve spent a lot of time explaining a lot about the mechanics of writing, techniques and mistakes to avoid, but how do you actually handle the conception of a story? How do you build one? How do you create a complex, inter-weaving, multi-layered, emotionally-moving, laugh-out-loud-funny, scare-the-crap-out-of-you, story?

As it turns out it is remarkably similar to the formation of a snowflake. Both are complex structures that seemingly appear out of nothing, and while they all look the same—no two are ever really alike.

So how is a snowflake born?

Snowflakes then are nothing more than structures built onto bits of dust. Now imagine for a moment that in this analogy, dust is an idea. I’m not talking about grand ideas, nothing so elaborate as amber encasing a mosquito that feasted on dinosaur blood making it possible to access dino DNA and clone them in modern times. Those are the “what-ifs” of novels. What if an obsessive compulsive detective begins looking into the murder of his own wife to discover real vampires living in San Francisco? That’s the kind of thing you get from watching an old episode of Monk followed by an old episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. No. I’m talking about what happens next, when you face that blank glowing white box of your word processer. Where does all the other stuff come from? A fully formed novel doesn’t just plop out of an author’s head. There is a process of growing it like an ice crystal, but ice crystals can’t form on nothing, they need a bit of dust, an idea.

One of the best ways to provide this is to start in a logical place and ask yourself a simple question like, who is your main character? Even that is too big a question, so you break it down to what does he or she do for a living? Maybe the story is actually a what-if about a virus that kills most of the world’s population in just a few months, so really what your character does for a living might not seem terribly important. They can do anything because they won’t be doing it for long.  So you pick something at random. You think about people you know, people you meet over the course of an average day and what they do. You just had lunch at a Ruby Tuesday and so you decide she will be a waitress at a chain restaurant.

Boom! You just made a bit of dust.

This is now a platform you can build on. The character is a woman who is on her feet all day, meeting people. So one of the most important things in the world to her are comfortable shoes. You just made a character attribute that grew out of the dust speck. Building on that you realize she never wears heels, she rarely dresses up. Great, you now have a mental picture of this person that you did not have before.

Staying with the original bit of dust, you can continue to build off that. Since you know where she works, since it is the one setting you have, the first scene of the story is now going to take place in the restaurant where she will meet her love interest. He will flirt with her while all around the other patrons are sneezing and coughing more than normal. Must be flu season? Over the course of the story, as the virus spreads, less and less people will come to the restaurant. Until it is only her and the love interest who will have a touching scene on the night before the restaurant closes. Is one or the other sniffling?

Voilà! The first fifth of the novel has just been fleshed out. That one particle of information, that was so irrelevant when you conceived it has led to a huge plot advance—just think what might have happened if instead of going to Ruby Tuesday, you had just gone to a Seven-11 for a gallon of milk.

One particle of dust provides the foundation on which you can slap extensions. You start with one idea about a character. That idea leads to the next. If the character works in a library, they can be very bookish and read all the time, or you can play against type and make him hate books, or better yet—he’s illiterate. At this point you need to explain why. That leads to other answers and other questions. Soon you have a pretty defined character. Now if you want to try weaving a story, flesh out several characters and a few settings, and see where unexpected connections occur.

1. Protagonist: An orphan boy, actually the illegitimate grandson of a wealthy man who’s daughter ran away from home.

2. Setting: The streets of a bustling, dirty city filled with crime.

3. Antagonist: A hoodlum who uses orphans to steal form the rich.

Put these three together and you can weave them so that the hoodlum ensnares the poor orphan to rob from a rich man’s house…who turns out to be the boy’s grandfather, causing the story to have a happy ending. (Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens is almost like this.)

Sometimes people have what some might call writer’s block. They just can’t think of anything. (Note that different people have different definitions of this affliction. Some consider it when they can’t think of any ideas, for others, they have ideas, they just can’t bring themselves to write, being too easily distracted.) The traditional solution to this problem is to just start writing. Write anything. It doesn’t matter what.

How does this help? Random writing can accidently result in random bits of dust forming, that your writing mind can start building ice formations around.

Writing throws up dust. Dust forms the nucleus of an ice crystal. Ice crystals gather more ice crystals, growing in all directions until at last, when they gain enough weight they fall as snowflakes. And if you create enough flakes, very soon, it will begin to snow. 

 And there’s nothing quite so lovely as a blanket of new fallen snow.

That’s the bell. Next week—A Reason to Read

 

What’s the most important invention of all time? One person claimed it was the computer. The next said no, computers wouldn’t work if not for electricity, so electricity was more important. The next claimed electricity could not have been invented without writing which allowed the sharing of ideas, so writing was more important. Finally, someone said, you could not have had writing without language. So language was the most important invention of all time, because it came first and without it, none of the other inventions of mankind would have been possible.

This idea of one thing enabling the next and therefore by this virtue being more important, is what makes the beginning of any story the most important part. To put it in a more practical sense, editors, slush-pile workers, and general readers have a tendency to only look at the first page, or even the first few sentences, of any book before deciding to either drop it or keep it. So unless that first page is good enough to grab your reader, you’ll never have the chance to invent electricity, or a computer.

There are three things to keep in mind when starting a story.

1. Start your story where the story starts.

2. Ground your reader immediately

3. Make the first sentence kill.

I was recently at the Baltimore Book Festival and heard author Toby Devens talk about how when she wrote My Favorite Midlife Crisis (yet), her editor told her that her book started on chapter three, and asked why she “cleared her throat” for three chapters before getting to it. Toby loved her first three chapters, but trusting her editor decided to cut the chapters and sprinkle that info throughout the rest of the book, after doing so she realize how much better the book became.

This is not unusual. Most authors have discovered this phenomenon, this tendency to have to settle into a story before starting it, and then having to go back and trim off the front end excess. I’m not sure I’ve ever written a book that began where I first started writing. Avempartha had the first chapter and a half cut. Nyphron Rising used to start on what is now page 101. And Theft of Swords had a whole new section added to the first chapter of what was The Crown Conspiracy.

Most of this is due to the writer’s misplaced desire to establish a foundation, to present some basic information they feel the reader will need to fully appreciate what comes next. This is also called, Setting the Stage. This is the most logical concept in the world and is also one of  the worst things you can do, because by the time you’ve adequately set the stage to begin your story, your reader has already grown bored and closed the book. The solution to this problem is to start with the event—the “action”—and (just as Toby did) sprinkle what used to be the stage setting, in the cracks. Hook the reader, get them interested, then and only then, present them with the information, which by that time they are dying to know.

So many books begin with a lifeless description that says nothing. This is particularly prominent in invented-world fantasy where the author likes to jump right in and start educating you  about their world.

Get my point or need I go on?

In this story, which I just invented as an example, but which is typical of the beginning of about eighty percent of invented-world fantasies, the story would go on for about thirty pages of this sort of thing until in the third chapter or so, after little Firth has grown up a bit you might read:

This is where the story actually starts. All that other stuff, all those thirty pages covering the history of Firth’s tribe and the world as well as Firth’s youth, can all be sprinkled in along the way of the story, being brought up when the story requires it. A funny thing can happen if you do this. You discover there never is an appropriate place to add all that back story and world building —what’s more you discover you don’t need it. All that junk just isn’t necessary for the story. It’s great for you, the author, to know as it helps underpin the reality of your world, but other than that it is just extra stuff that weighs a story down. It is the scaffolding and sheets that need to be removed once the building is up. Some readers have developed a taste for excessive world building that extends far beyond the scope of a story, but I feel this writing style is what keeps fantasy from reaching more mainstream readers, who would prefer not to have an invented history lesson to go with their story.

And if you’re writing a thriller, well…you’d better thrill right out of the gate. The floor needs to drop out from under your character’s feet and he/she needs to be in near constant free-fall at least through the first few pages. I’ve never written a romance, but I’m actually thinking a sex scene would be a great way to start one. If you’re doing a mystery, start with the unanswered question.

There is a flip side to this that you need to be aware of. Starting with “action” (action is in quotes because I don’t actually mean physical movement, but an event-of-note,) can be detrimental to the story if there is no context to give it value. Which leads me to the next thing to keep in mind.

It can be extremely irritating to a reader if a book begins in a nebulous space where nothing is defined. This is one of the reasons I hate the relatively recent trend to create prologues, as prologues are almost always designed to be nebulous things. Moments out of context where the subjects, actions or settings are often never identified.

This story starts with heart pounding action, but for all its urgency, it isn’t compelling because we have no idea about anything. Who is this person? Where are they? When are they? What’s happening? What’s at stake? None of it makes sense, and unless answers are very soon forthcoming, frustration will cause the reader to close the book.

It is therefore important to ground your reader, plant their feet securely on a stable footing. I always imagine that when I open a book I am being teleported though a random portal and will appear somewhere inhabiting the body of someone else. Just like in the old tv show Quantum Leap, the first thing I want to know is who I am, when and where I am, and what am I doing and why. Until I know this I feel disoriented and I am not focusing on the story so much as trying to answer these questions. Sometimes this “reader in the dark” technique is useful—most often I see this used successfully in short fiction where discovering what’s going on is the story. Other than that, starting a book and keeping your reader hooded like some poor hostage will likely cause them to have similar feelings about the experience. The best way to provide the needed information is by using the techniques in the previous blog post—multitasking—to present the “action” while at the same time slip in these essentials that provide the event with context and, as a result, value.

Consider how much more the previous scene would mean if it began:

And finally…

If the first page is the most important because it comes first, the first sentence is the most important of the most important. The holy of holies. This, all by itself, can be the difference between someone publishing you, or reading you. At that same Baltimore Book Festival author Michel Swanwick explained how experienced slush pile editors only read the first and last sentences of a manuscript before deciding what pile to put them in, “read later” or “reject.”  The first sentence is also, as in sports talk, one of those stats that are remembered and quoted.

These are just a few of the classic first sentences of novels.

Oddly enough, one of the most famous first lines ever, (and a lot of people’s favorite) I personally feel, is one of the worst. That would be Charles Dicken’s Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…

That’s usually all anyone knows, and most think that’s the whole sentence. It’s not. This is the full sentence:

That’s one sentence, a total of one hundred and nineteen words. Com’on grammar Nazis are you going to tell me this sentence is not rife with errors? The man’s not even using semicolons to separate complete sentences. The real problem I have with this sentence is that, aside from being an insane run-on, it ultimately says nothing of value beyond what could have been encompassed in “It was a day like any other day,” which is about as tedious a beginning to a novel as I can think of. So the man wrote over a hundred words to say something that wasn’t necessary.

Before I get hate mail from Dicken’s fans, I should mention I love Dickens. I also recognize that he wrote in a different age—it was a time of elaborate exposition, it was a time of wordiness, and times have changed—reader’s tastes have changed with them.I’m pretty sure if someone submitted this as the first line of a modern manuscript, it would be rejected fairly fast.

So the first sentence of your book should be a thing of beauty that can be taken out of context and still rock people’s worlds.