Words Deferred

"Rules" of Writing

2011-03-21T08:00:00.002-05:00

A couple months ago, I started a thread on the Writers Stackexchange for people to post what they thought were some of the best "rules" of writing. It's accumulated several interesting answers and links. One of these links brought me back to an article I had previously read and forgotten about, an excellent little feature in the Guardian where they simply asked a number of talented writers what their rules were.

Many of these lists are interesting in and of themselves. Some of the rules are absolutely genius, while others strike me as obvious or complete garbage. Some directly contradict each other. What's really interesting is to look at the article as a whole. All of these authors have had success by some measure or another. But their methods and their outlooks on life and on writing are obviously quite varied.

There are as many ways to write as there are writers. It's easy to get bogged down wondering if you're "doing it right," when there really is no wrong way. As Neil Gaiman says, "Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down."

Radical Honesty (in Writing)

2011-03-11T08:00:00.001-06:00

A while ago, I came across an article in Esquire about "radical honesty." (I don't normally read Esquire - Jeff Atwood tweeted it.) The idea is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: avoiding all the little white lies, fibs, and whatever else we justify them as. Even the ones we tell our kids to protect them. Even the ones that make others happier than the truth ("do these jeans make my butt look fat?").

I won't say whether or not we should all follow the philosophy it describes in every aspect of our lives, but there is one place where radical honesty always makes a difference: in our writing.

I'm from the American Midwest. I don't want to generalize, but we're stereotypically a stoic, quiet people, descended from Scandinavians, frequently Lutheran. We have a phrase to describe the cultural personality here: "Minnesota Nice." We don't like to rub people the wrong way. We don't like to talk about our problems (or other people's). When someone asks you how you're doing, you say "fine." Not great. Not terrible. Fine.

I can't speak for everyone, but my upbringing was typically Minnesotan. And there are lots of things we don't talk about. Health issues and personal problems. Politics. Homosexuality. Any sexuality.

While some people, families, and geographic areas are going to be more repressed than others, just about everyone has at least one issue that they feel a little awkward about. And when you feel awkward about something, you tend to lie to yourself. When you lie to yourself, it bleeds into your writing and makes it weak.

Say you're uncomfortable talking about sex. You would feel strange, or maybe outright uncomfortable, writing a sex scene. But what if your story involves a couple of adults who are falling in love? Consciously or unconsciously, you shy away from anything that might lead toward sex. Maybe the characters would go down that road, and maybe not, but ultimately you've closed off a possibility. Every scene is a room with hundreds of doors leading in different directions. Each one you lock leaves you with fewer possibilities.

You can fight this, right here, right now. Assess yourself. What makes you uncomfortable? What would you feel weird writing about? What topic would you be embarrassed for your grandma to read? Write down a whole list of them, if you have to. Then come up with a scene that centers around that issue and write it. Nobody else has to ever see it, but you need to write it down. You need to know that you can.

Try writing two or three scenes, even. Sometimes it's hard to unlock those doors. Just remember, if you care about your writing, you have to be fearless. Fearless writing is strong. It feels truer. It starts doing things you don't expect it to do.

Someday, your characters will pull you down that path. Instead of pushing them back, you'll follow, and on the other side of that door, you'll find an amazing story.

It Pays to be Self-Employed

2011-03-04T08:00:00.000-06:00

When you work for someone else, two things generally happen. They pay you, and they make money. If they're a functional business, they make more money from your work than they lose to paying you. When you work for someone else, you're almost always being paid less than you're actually worth.

Many writers dream of writing for a living. If you're smart though, you quickly realize just how much work it would be. It's frightening to think about supporting yourself, and perhaps a family, with nothing but your words.

If you dream of writing for a living, don't give up. It's possible. Not easy, but possible. Don't let someone else, some faceless corporation or soulless cubicle farm, reap the benefits of your hard work just because the alternative is scary.

Yet Another Blog

2011-02-25T08:00:00.012-06:00

I mentioned previously that I've been looking for a new blog series to work on, and I wanted to do something on gaming. Well, I decided to take it a step further.

(I'll still be posting here weekly.)

A Master Class in Fight Scenes, with Robert E. Howard

2011-02-18T08:00:00.011-06:00

As part of my goal of reading 50 short stories this month, I've been reading volume one of The Best of Robert E. Howard.

REH wrote pulp fiction in the 20s and 30s, and he's known for action-packed adventure stories. Nearly every one of his stories has a fight scene, and he writes them quite well. So as I've gone along, I've started to read the book as master class in fight scenes.

Many people seem to struggle with fight scenes. I know I've had some issues, personally. I don't write that many of them, and they can be difficult to get right. On one hand, fight scenes are one of the most direct ways to show conflict - characters disagree, and they duke it out with pure physicality. On the other hand, fight scenes can't be purely physical - they have to be imbued with emotion to be meaningful.

In addition to that dichotomy, the writer has to decide how much descriptive detail is enough, and how much is too much. A fight scene that lacks detail won't create any tension. A fight scene with too much detail can quickly bore the reader to tears.

REH's fight scenes tend to follow a pattern, and it's one that addresses these concerns very well.

Start with descriptions of the characters and their emotional states. How do they react to the upcoming fight? Are they excited? Scared? Angry? How do they show it?
As they leap into battle, give a few sentences of detailed description. Swords clash, parry and counter, guns are fired, etc.
After the first few sentences, zoom out from the action a bit. Describe how the characters move and fight in a more general way. For example, character X fights fast and wild, while character Y stays on the defensive, only counterattacking when he sees an opportunity.
Zoom back into detailed description as the fight finishes. What does the killing blow look like? Howdo the characters feel about the fight's conclusion?

I like this style for a few reasons. The description up front reminds the reader exactly what these characters are fighting for, and it makes the fight emotional as well as physical. The detail at the start of the fight makes it feel visceral. By zooming out in the middle, we avoid having to sit through pages of detailed description without feeling like we missed out on any action. Then we zoom back into detail to lend excitement to the finale.

I know some writers are dead-set against patterns and prescriptions, but I encourage you to at least try this one the next time you have to write a fight scene. Although you could call REH's fight-scenes "formulaic", they don't feel repetitive (and this is coming from someone who's read at least 5 of them in the past two days). He simply found a very efficient way to pack the necessary components into a slick package.

Janet Fitch Writes

2011-02-14T08:00:00.001-06:00

...and she does it pretty dern well.

This is one of the best "no-nonsense solid writing advice" blogs I've come across in quite a while. Her 10 Writing Tips and Thoughts on Dialogue posts are good places to observe this. Once you're done with those, go read the rest.

Blogs and Essays

2011-02-11T08:00:00.115-06:00

Lazy Friday spur-of-the-moment late post!

I enjoyed the series on real-life settings that I've been running for a few weeks, and I've been thinking I'd like to start running short series most Fridays. Unfortunately, I haven't come up with a new series yet, so today's post is going to be a mish-mash.

I've come across a lot of interesting writing-related blogs and articles lately, so I thought I'd link a few.

Nathan Bransford recently ran a contest for the best first paragraph of a novel, and it accrued 1500 entries! You can read the winner and the runners up here. They're all pretty good. Also interesting, one of his readers went through every single entry and talked about what she learned.
Tom Dupree discusses his experiences as an editor at a publishing house. It's an interesting read, and helps put a human face on a job that doesn't always have the best reputation among aspiring authors. I'm looking forward to the next part in the series.
J.S. Bangs has a blog about writing that I found through Writers.StackExchange. Insightful commentary on writing and technology.
Clay Shirky has an interesting blog looking at technology and its effects on the present and the future. He is unabashedly optimistic about the ability of technology to better our lives.
Paul Graham, while not as prolific as most modern bloggers, has a number of extremely deep and well-thought-out essays on technology. This essay on the word "hacker," and the motivations of those who "hack", is fascinating.

Secondly, I've decided to go on a reading binge. I just haven't been reading much in the past few months, and I've missed it. Since I like doing little challenges, in the remainder of this month I'm challenging myself to read 50 short stories. Then, in March, I'm going to read as many books as I can manage. I'd like to make a dent in my massive backlog of novels, but I'll also be reading some books on writing, so expect to see some new reviews.

Winner-Take-All...but for How Long?

2011-02-08T08:00:00.001-06:00

I recently came across a blog post from a few years back. The gist is that technology companies rise to prominence: IBM from early computers to the 80s, Microsoft through the 90s, and Google in the 00s. IBM was expert at selling business solutions, and they still are. They couldn't keep up in the personal computer market, however. Microsoft out-maneuvered them, and it turned out that software was more important than hardware when it came to selling PCs. With the advent of the web, Google came into its own, dominating not only search, but online advertising. IBM and Microsoft still exist, and they still even dominate their core markets, but the internet is the future, and it's unlikely that anyone can wrest it from Google.

However, it's also interesting to note that the blog article was written in 2007. In the interceding years, the landscape has changed yet again. 2007 also happens to be the year the iPhone was first released.

I suspect that Apple is becoming the new king of the hill. Each time the crown has passed, it has been because of a massive shift in technology. First, computers (IBM), then personal computers (Microsoft), the rise of the internet (Google), and now, mobile computing (Apple). However, Apple is more than simply "mobile". Apple has ushered in an era of miniature computing. Granted, there are now hundreds of "smart" mobile devices that aren't Apple products, but Apple built the consumer market for these products. Right now, it's a menagerie of smart phones, music players, tablets and netbooks, but these varied devices are already beginning to blur and merge.

The internet affords limitless access to information and requires very little computing power to access. Thanks to Moore's Law, microcomputers are now powerful enough to handle most of the basic tasks the average computer user requires. Those big boxes on the desktop are becoming excessive for many tasks.

Within a few years, I suspect the average user will keep their primary computer in their pocket. The only limitation to these mini-computers is their input and output. Tiny screens suck, and tiny keyboards and touchpads are even worse for any sort of serious input. But paper-thin screen technology is beginning to look promising, especially combined with advances in ultra-flat, flexible circuitry. Imagine you take your smartphone to a restaurant, a library, a bus. Any surface can be a cheap screen: a table, a wall, or the back of the seat in front of you. Your phone connects to the nearest screen in seconds with bluetooth or wifi.

Apple got in on the ground floor. They are a major reason miniature computers have become the latest trend. They have already made ridiculous profits, and they're poised to make more. But what about the currently reigning king of the technology hill, Google? Their domain is internet, and internet is no small part of mobile computing. Google also has its own contenders in the mini-computer arena: Android and Chrome OS.

Google is smart, and they play to their strengths. Both of their mobile platforms are open-source and free. Google makes ambitious products and gives them away. They make their money from advertising, and every new widget is just another place they can sell ads. Chrome OS is lightweight, designed to be little more than a portal to the internet. It's a simple idea. Perhaps too simple. As much as Google has pushed internet applications, there's still only so much you can do inside a web-browser.

Android, on the other hand, is the biggest rival of Apple and their iProducts. In the private consumer arena, it's the only rival worth mention. The battle lines here are interesting. Android is designed to be as open as possible, inviting handset manufacturers to produce lots of Android phones in all manner of make and model. Google doesn't care if an individual Android phone does particularly well, because there are dozens of them, and plenty more on the drawing board. Google makes it easy to create applications for their operating system. They don't worry about making any money from any of it. They'll recoup it all by selling ads.

Apple's ideology is largely opposite. They jealously guard their hardware and software secrets. They meticulously craft technological artifacts that make consumers drool. They control everything from the circuits to the software, and everywhere along the way, they charge a premium. They create devices designed exactly to Apple specifications. If you like those specifications, their products are elegant and easy to use. And expensive.

So, the interesting question now is whether Apple will win this market in the long run, or if Google will retain its crown.

Real-life Settings: Ghost Towns

2011-02-04T08:00:00.002-06:00

As humans, it seems like we're constantly building. Entropy does its steady work, systematically wearing down the universe, and we stand against that force. We create to spite time.

Sometimes, though, time gets the better of us. People inevitably die. Towns and cities are lost to disease, famine and war. Even entire civilizations collapse, given long enough. However, I love looking at the remnants of these lost bits of our past. There's something eerie and strangely beautiful about places where people once lived, abandoned and ravaged by time.

One of the best-known abandoned areas in recent history is the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. It encompasses the 30 kilometers around the doomed power plant. Although Chernobyl itself was sealed off - literally entombed in concrete - the radioactive material released from the plant contaminated this huge area, forcing the then-Soviet government to evacuate over a hundred-thousand people. People had no warning and no opportunity to collect their belongings. Now, decades later, the possessions of the zone's former citizens remain where they were left.

Some excellent photo series on the zone can be found here, here, and many other sites.

My favorite ghost town is closer to home, in Centralia, Pennsylvania. It sounds like fiction. A little coal-mining town locates its dump in a used-up strip mine. A controlled burn on the dump, executed by the town's volunteer fire department, finds its way into leftover coal veins and burns its way into the ground. Deep beneath the town, it smolders for decades, unable to be put out. It spews noxious gases and tremendous heat, and it shatters the very earth the town was built on.

Ruin crept slowly into Centralia. It took years before people realized the full extent of the danger and moved away. A few residents still remain, even today. Smoke pours from the ground now. Most of the buildings have collapsed. The streets and yards are criss-crossed with chasms and sink-holes. And deep underground, the fire slowly burns. It may continue to burn for centuries.

Photo series of Centralia here. There's also a massive flickr group.

Gunkanjima, or Hashima Island in Japan was also a coal-mining community. Buttressed by concrete walls against the sea, and filled with plain, uniform concrete structures, the island looks more like a prison than a place people would call home. In its hey-day, the early 1960s, it may have had the highest population density in the world.

Coal from Hashima was used in the industrialization of Japan, but eventually petroleum became the fuel of choice. By the mid-1970s, the entire island was abandoned.

Articles (and pictures) here and here.

Finally, there is the abandoned town of Kolmanskop, in Nambia. It was founded in the desert because of the abundance of diamonds in the area. The early miners became extremely wealthy. Being mostly German, they built up an extravagant small town in German style, with impressive amenities for such a small settlement. However, time went by and the diamonds became scarce. Abandoned in the mid-1950s, the desert has sought to reclaim it. The town is still a tourist destination, but most of the original buildings are filled with several feet of sand. Some are completely buried.

More info and pictures here and here.

This marks the end of my series on interesting real-life settings. Hopefully you enjoyed it. I personally find these sorts of places endlessly interesting, and I could probably do many more posts on the topic. However, this is mainly a writing blog, and I've covered most of my favorites.

If you're interested in discovering more strange, amazing or abandoned places, there are a few great resources you can follow-up on.

Atlas Obscura is a site that covers all sorts of interesting places.

Artificial Owl specializes in abandoned places and urban decay.

Urban Explorers is a site for those who want to find the hidden wonders of the urban world.

Next up, a new Friday series, possibly about video games.

Learning Writing Lessons from Games

2011-01-31T08:00:00.000-06:00

As a gamer and a programmer, I've long been interested in game design. This is a short video where Tom Chatfield explains 7 ways that games reward the brain. He shows how games are designed to provide incremental rewards to the player, making them feel satisfied about playing, while also giving them incremental goals to keep them motivated.

While watching this, I began to think about how the principles he talked about could be applied to writing. Granted, gaming and reading are very different experiences, but writers do share some goals with game designers. We want the reader to feel satisfied about reading, and we also want to motivate them to read on.

So, how do these principles apply to writing? In games, the player usually has a virtual representation: an avatar. This is the person on-screen that the player identifies with. In the game world, the avatar is me. When the player does something amazing in the game, they don't tell their friends, "I made the guy on the screen do this cool thing." They say, "I did this cool thing in the game."

Readers have a similar association with strong characters. They identify with protagonists. They share their struggles, their failures, their victories. They empathize. This is what keeps us reading.

Experience Bars Measuring Progress

This seems like a very game-centric concept. You can't very well have an experience bar on every page of your book, measuring your protagonist's progress. But what is the actual goal of the experience bar? It is designed to quickly and easily show the player how much they've progressed, and how far they have yet to go.

You can do something similar in a novel. Your characters are on some sort of epic journey, whether it be physical, mental or emotional. Throughout the book, they're making incremental progress. Though they may not know where they're going to end up, they probably have a goal. So remind your readers about this. Have your characters reflect on their progress. Doing this once or twice can really ground the reader, and it can prevent them getting lost in complex, twisted plots.

Multiple Long and Short Term Aims

Most complex characters have multiple goals they're working toward, just as you or I do. Rare is the person who works unwaveringly on a single project, devoting their life to one thing. Most of us have a few things we'd like to accomplish - this week, this year, and before we die. Give your characters several goals to strive for, some easier and some harder.

The reader identifies with the characters, and feels satisfaction when they can succeed at something challenging. With multiple goals, a character can succeed at something (or even fail) without losing that Ultimate Goal, that quest that encompasses the entire book.

Reward Effort

Characters have to experience failure. A book about someone who succeeds at everything isn't very interesting. Every protagonist has some primary conflict that they're trying to overcome. On the road to success, there have to be some setbacks, some roadblocks, or the journey isn't worth reading about.

That said, you have to do more than beat your characters down. There must be difficulty. There must be failure. But the character should also get something out of it. Perhaps they've failed, but they've learned a valuable lesson that will help them succeed next time. Perhaps they've discovered some vital information, or realized the strength they never knew they had. They have a reason to persevere through the difficulties and failures, because every one still gives them something that will ultimately help them achieve their goals.

Readers love characters that persevere, and the knowledge that they're making progress toward their goals despite hardship will keep the pages turning.

Rapid, Clear Feedback

Everything a character says and does has a consequence. Sometimes, it should be quickly apparent. Other times it will not be obvious for some time. But the actions of your characters affect the people and the world around them. Don't show your characters doing something that has no consequence.

An Element of Uncertainty

There are no guarantees of success in life, and there should be none for characters either. Without the chance of failure, there is no challenge, and nothing to keep the reader engaged. This can be simple difficulties on the way to the goal, or it can be taken to extremes, such as having an important character die partway through the book or a series. When something like that happens, the reader knows there are no guarantees. The characters are not only fallible, but mortal as well. The more there is to gain or lose, the more engaging the story will be.

Real-Life Settings: Living Structures

2011-01-28T08:00:00.001-06:00

Every day, the human population becomes increasingly urban. Almost everywhere in the world, people flood into cities, leaving behind rural life. Meanwhile, rainforests and other last bastions of untouched nature are withering away. However, there are still a few places where human construction can mingle and merge with nature, sometimes in fascinating ways.

In Cherrapunji, India, locals have been creating living rope-bridges from the unusual native trees. Many of these bridges have been in use for centuries, and they get stronger with age.

In Papua New Guinea, the Korowai and Kombai people live in tree houses built dozens of feet off the ground.

On the other hand, if you have a few million dollars to spend, you might prefer a tree house like this.

Dropbox for Writers

2011-01-24T08:00:00.070-06:00

As a writer, one of the scariest things to think about is losing your work. You put innumerable hours into that novel - writing, editing, adjusting the fonts, and editing another seven times. Do you back it up? How often? If your computer caught fire right now, how much would you lose?

Dropbox is an incredibly useful tool for backing up your work and putting your mind at ease. You just install it, and specify a folder to back up. Everything put into that folder gets immediately copied to their servers. You can log into their website to see everything that's saved, and download it. You can even make things public, if you want to share with others.

The real magic, however, happens when you install Dropbox on several computers. The Dropbox folder on each computer is synched to the server, so any time you add or change anything, that change is copied to all your other computers.

I use a laptop on the go, and a desktop computer at home. I even have my files at work too. I don't have to email documents to myself anymore. I don't have to put things on a flash drive. Everything is up-to-date on all my computers, and ready for a quick edit whenever and wherever I have an opportunity.

Dropbox is free, to a certain extent. You could pay for a monthly subscription and a very large limit, but for writers, it's probably overkill. When you sign up, you start with 2 gigabytes of storage. That may not sound like much, but text files are very small. I have dozens of short stories, several novels, and all sorts of notes and other documents in my Dropbox, and I'm not even using 10% of that.

If 2 gigs isn't enough, you can get 250mb for completing the quick online tutorial, and another 250mb for every person you invite who signs up for the service. You can send them an email, or just post a link (like I did above!). This can net you up to 8 gigabytes, if you have a lot of friends who do what you tell them to.

Now please click on my link.

Real-Life Settings: Kowloon Walled City

2011-01-21T08:00:00.009-06:00

Kowloon Walled City, despite its name, was not a city in and of itself. It was a section of Hong Kong with a long and sordid history. At its peak, it was one of the most urban, densely populated places on Earth. Though entirely surrounded by British Hong Kong, it remained (theoretically) under Chinese control. The Hong Kong Triads, who exerted the most actual control over the area, used it for prostitution, gambling, and the drug trade.

The city was built entirely ramshackle, with the new intersecting and building over the old. There were no building codes. Most structures had no foundations or utilities. Built on the ruins of an old fort and completely lacking adequate space for the number of inhabitants, the roads became alleys, narrowed, and in most places were built over completely, leaving dark tunnels as the primary ways to navigate the city. The other option was running the roofs, which were frequently connected to their neighbors, or accessible by ladders.

This cross-section drawing of the city gives some idea of the amazing overcrowding. This video shows an inside view of the city alleys (interesting part starts around the 6:00 mark). This short series (german documentary with subtitles) shows an in-depth view of the city in the late 80s.

Eventually, the government of Hong Kong evicted the whole population of the city. By 1994, the entire area was demolished, replaced by a park. There are now only a few remnants of the old city remaining, and the rare bits of video and pictorial evidence that have survived.

TED: Ideas Worth Spreading

2011-01-17T08:00:00.000-06:00

Most writers I know are polymaths. We're interested in everything from mythology to technology. We learn about everything we can, because frankly, everything is pretty interesting if you dig deep enough. And you never know when a random fact you learned a decade ago will be perfect for your latest story.

Normally, we learn through text. We read voraciously, from books, magazines, and the internet. But TED offers an appealing alternative. It's a website devoted to "riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world." It's an archive of hundreds of interesting talks on almost any topic conceivable, by smart, thoughtful people. They tend to be short and digestible, and there's something very appealing about watching an expert discuss a topic that they're absolutely in love with.

Take a look through the archives, find something interesting. Give your eyes a break from all that reading and have a listen.

Real-Life Settings: Big City Underworlds

2011-01-14T08:00:00.001-06:00

In the last post in this series, I talked about Beijing's Underground City, so I'd like to compliment that with some links to other interesting underground sites that have been forgotten by time.

Some of the most ancient tunnels are in the long-standing cities of old Europe. The catacombs of Paris are among the oldest.

Subway systems also tend to leave behind lost branches and forgotten stations. Many cities with old subway systems have sections that have fallen out of use. London has many abandoned stations that also intersect with old sewer and drainage systems. New York has a few as well. With the threat of terrorism, these places are getting more locked down, but there are still a few intrepid urban explorers who find their way in.

Heck, even Disney World has an underground tunnel system - or more accurately, the entire park was built up one floor, leaving room for the secret passageways beneath.

Next time, I'll talk about a place that's aboveground for a change.

Why I Like Twitter (and not Facebook)

2011-01-10T08:00:00.001-06:00

If you want to get a hold of me, Facebook is not the place to do it. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, Facebook is just an app on my phone where people occasionally reply to my Twitter posts. Why?

My reasons, let me show you them.

Maximizing vs. Minimizing
Twitter is minimalist. It's designed to do one thing, and do it well. It allows people to post very short messages, and allows other people to read them. That's pretty much it. You can read a tweet in a few seconds. You can catch up on a reasonable feed in a few minutes a day. Anything extraneous has to be a link to somewhere else.

Facebook was once simple like this. Those days are distant memories. If Twitter is minimalist, then Facebook is maximalist. It wants to be everything to everyone, a surefire recipe for disaster.

When I log on to Facebook, I get messages and events and app invitations and group invitations and page suggestions that some algorithm thinks I'll like. I get to see the things said by people I follow, but I also see all the responses to the things said by people I follow, even if the responses are from people I really don't care about. I get advertisements and a crazy HTML 5 chat appliance. I get avatars up the wazoo and inline pictures and video. There are three or four separate little menu areas and dozens of widgets, with duplicated content and functionality everywhere. The page seems designed to perplex a first-time user.

Opt-in vs. Opt-out
Much has been made of Facebook's terrible privacy policies, but I find that the difference between Facebook and Twitter in this regard can be very neatly summarized. Facebook is opt-out, and Twitter is opt-in. This goes beyond privacy into almost every aspect of these sites.

I can sign up for Twitter and follow a single person. When I go to my Twitter page, I'll see posts from that one person and no others. The only exceptions are "retweets," which are the Twitter equivalent of telling your followers "I find this single post, from this one person, interesting." I pretty much only see what I want to see, as determined by me clicking the Follow button. I opt-in.

On Facebook, there are a million things coming at you, even if you only follow that one person. I can understand the advertisements. Twitter will have them too, eventually, if they want to remain solvent. But the apps, the comments, the suggestions for new friends and groups and pages and games...I didn't ask for any of these. Facebook gives me everything and I have to opt-out of the stuff I don't want. One. Thing. At. A. Time. If they even choose to give me that option.

A Difference in Philosophy
The ultimate result of these differences is that my Twitter account is almost exactly what I want it to be. It's the Zen garden of social media. Facebook, on the other hand, is some of what I want and a lot of stuff I'm not interested in. Even worse, it took much longer to get it to that semi-tolerable state than it did to reach near-perfection in Twitterland.

Best of luck to you other 500 million Facebook users. Enjoy your Farmville and Mafia Wars and groups and pages and chat. I'll be sitting here in my Zen garden, surrounded by polished boulders and carefully raked sand. I'll still visit you, once in a while, to see the responses to my Twitter posts.

My One and Only Only Political Rant

2011-01-08T16:08:00.000-06:00

I don't normally talk politics, and I don't plan to make it a staple of this blog. In fact, I'll promise you right now that this is my one and only political post. It pretty much covers my feelings on politics, at least American politics.

The news and the internet are currently saturated with stories about US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona. She and several others have been shot. Already people are pointing fingers. Arguments between Republicans and Democrats are nothing new, but a terrible situation like this tends to bring everything to a head.

If you follow the news, you'll be reading and hearing a lot of opinions in the next few days. But there's one thing you are guaranteed not to see or hear: someone saying "you're right and I'm wrong." Think about that. Everyone will be shouting their opinions, and nobody's opinion will change. This is why American politics is broken.

Granted, I don't expect everyone to be convinced by someone else's argument. Hopefully we each base our opinions on as much fact and evidence as we can muster (without devoting our entire lives to politics). But you have to at least listen. You have to remember that other people are human beings too. You are the same. You have to be willing to say "I don't agree with you, but I respect your opinion. I believe your motives are good, even though we don't see eye-to-eye."

What I would like to see, what would give me some hope that America isn't going to continue to devolve into self-righteous decrepitude, is a little compromise. Just a little.

For those of us who may have forgotten, I'd like to define compromise. Compromise is a deal between two groups that disagree. It's a deal where you don't get everything you want. People in politics occasionally use this word, but they forget that last part. You can't compromise and still get everything. That's not how it works. We're a society where everybody wants everything. Too bad. You can't have it.

Here's your homework assignment, America. Find someone you disagree with. It shouldn't be too hard. Now try to come to a compromise. Try hard. Be ready to give something up, something you really don't want to. Remember, that's what compromise is.

Don't worry if you don't succeed. It's the effort that counts. The other person may not be interested in compromise. The goal here is to remind America what compromise looks like, because too many of us have forgotten. We need to remind people that there's an alternative to closing your ears and blindly hating. Compromise is a hard alternative. But you know what? It's a hell of a lot better than shooting people in the head.

Series: Real-Life Settings - Beijing Underground City

2011-01-07T08:00:00.015-06:00

One of the most amazing settings I've ever encountered is the city of Ambergris, where many of Jeff Vandermeer's stories take place. Living, breathing settings like this, full of genuine strangeness, are always mesmerizing to me.

However, truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, and there are plenty of strange places right here on Earth. In the course of my unfocused research, I've come across a number of interesting places like this. So I'd like to start a short series highlighting a few interesting ones. Hopefully they'll pique your interest, and maybe they'll even inspire a story or two.

This week's setting is Beijing's Underground City.

From the Wikipedia article:

"The Underground City, also known as Dixia Cheng, is a bomb shelter comprising a network of tunnels located beneath Beijing...The tunnels comprising Dixia Cheng run beneath Beijing's city center, covering an area of 85 square kilometres...At one time there were about 90 entrances to the complex, all of which were hidden in shops along the main streets of Qianmen.

"The Underground City was designed to withstand either a nuclear or conventional attack. The complex would enable Beijing's population to hide from air raids, and could allow China's leaders to flee safely to military bases in the hills. The government claimed that the tunnels could accommodate all of Beijing's six million inhabitants upon its completion.

"The complex was equipped with facilities such as restaurants, clinics, schools, theaters, factories, a roller skating rink, a grain and oil warehouse, and a mushroom cultivation farm...There were more than 70 sites inside the tunnels at which water wells could be dug. Elaborate ventilation systems were installed, with shafts that could close to protect against water and chemicals, and gas and waterproof hatches were constructed to protect people in the tunnels from chemical attack and radioactive fallout. The complex also had thick concrete doors, which help protect the tunnels from intruders or a flood.

"The tunnels were built by more than 300,000 local citizens, including school children, and were mostly dug by hand. Centuries-old city walls, towers and gates...were destroyed to supply construction materials for the complex."

It's hard to find much in the way of actual pictures, but this article has a few, and you might find a few more through Google Image Search.

It's surprising to think that such vast structures exist, hidden and almost forgotten, even by the people who live on top of it. But Beijing isn't the only city with this kind of secret. Far from it.

Tune in next time...

The Dangers of Close-Mindedness

2011-01-03T06:00:00.003-06:00

I love the internet. It provides an endless supply of entertainment, news and information. It is also the biggest technological gold mine in human history, and many big companies have an interest in controlling it. Governments also have much to gain by controlling internet content, as the recent headlines with Wikileaks have illustrated all-too-well. That's why I'm a big supporter of net neutrality. Without net neutrality, we have to worry about the companies who control sections of the network charging extra money for whatever content they feel like, or even blocking legal content that they simply dislike.

So, when I first heard about Comcast trying to charge a "toll" to the company that streams Netflix movies to your computer, my first reaction was, "that's exactly what I expected from those damn Comcast people. They're ruining my precious internets."

Then, I dug deeper, looking at Comcast's responses and a number of articles on the feud. I still have little love for Comcast, but as it turns out, they have a pretty good point. Level 3 wanted to start sending the vast amounts of Netflix streaming traffic through Comcast's lines, and they wanted to do it for free. Comcast wanted a new agreement, to be paid for the fairly expensive services it was rendering. This turns out to be fairly common among the backbone internet providers.

The point of all this is not who is right or wrong. The issue is complicated, and I don't claim to have the "correct" solution. The point is that I had strong opinions on the topic, and that skewed my views on a story I actually knew very little about.

These sorts of biases are human nature. Sadly, I'm sure I've maintained similar opinions in the past, simply because I didn't bother to dig deeper than a short, overly-simplified news story. As writers, we need to actively fight these impulses. We need to look at the world as objectively as we can. I don't claim we'll be able to see the purest truth all around us, but if you're watching instead of judging, you'll start to pick up on the things that others overlook.

Those things are pure gold, when it comes to writing stories.

Resolution #2

2011-01-01T08:00:00.011-06:00

Don't drink so much Coke. Or at least drink something sugar-free.

(I drink so much Coke, I should frankly have my own line item on the Coca-Cola quarterly earnings report. It's probably not a good thing.)

Resolution #1

2011-01-01T08:00:00.009-06:00

I will read the ~90 books I own, but have never read.

Terry Pratchet - Advice on Characterization

2010-12-29T06:00:00.001-06:00

"A great deal of character work lies not in describing the characters, but in describing the shape that they leave in the world. How they react to other people. How they face things. When they keep silent. The manner in which they say things. Character does not consist of telling the reader what color a person's eyes are and how tall he is. You do not need pages and pages of physical description to get a character. You can get nearly all the physical description you need by one thing that character says that makes people think, 'Aha! I know exactly what kind of person would say something like that!'"

Nathan Bransford, Agent No More!

2010-12-27T06:00:00.004-06:00

Flags to half-mast!

I'm a little late (okay, a month!) on reporting this, but it's still big news. Nathan Bransford, one of the best-known agents in the entire blogonet™, has quit the business. He claims it has nothing to do with all the crazy writers or terrible manuscripts...

Nathan has long been known as a technophile, and accepted a job at Cnet. He plans to continue blogging though, and should still have plenty of insight into the volatile and varied industry of publishing.

Writers StackExchange

2010-12-22T19:56:00.001-06:00

Yeah, I know, I made a big deal about coming back to the blog, and then I wandered off again. Unfortunately, life has been busy, and the blog is one of the first things to suffer. That's the downside to not having a set schedule. To make up for it, I'll queue up a few of my ramblings. That should keep the posting regular for a while, at least.

Today I'd like to talk about a resource that's rather near and dear to my heart. Writers StackExchange is a Q&A site for all things writing-, editing-, and publishing-related. Why the funny name? Because it's part of the StackExchange network. StackExchange is a network of Q&A sites designed to get great answers to your questions. You can read about their philosophy here and here. Suffice to say that it works well. I've seen it turn the original site, StackOverflow, into a repository of software development knowledge that gets over a million hits a day.

The key to StackExchange sites is that they're largely in the hands of their respective communities. They're proposed, moderated, and kept running smoothly by the people who use them. The Writers StackExchange site is currently in its beta phase, which will determine if it goes on to become a full-fledged site or gets shut down.

So go check it out. Ask a question or two. Answer someone else's question if you're able. I think you'll find that it's already becoming a great, knowledgeable community. I'd like to see it continue to grow and prosper.

(Also worth checking out: English.SE, where some fine linguistic minds discuss the finest details of my favorite language, and Gaming.SE, the site for console, computer and mobile gamers to ask their questions - chances are good you'll run into me in their chat service a few times on any given day.)

Back from Hiatus

2010-10-26T21:38:00.000-05:00

Hello, blog. Haven't seen you in a while. How have you been?

Sorry for wandering off like that.

Having been gone for a couple of months, I feel like I ought to explain myself. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what to say. My blogging had been faltering for a while, and although I tried a few different schemes to put some life back into it, eventually I just had to stop.

It wasn't fun anymore. Coming up with new posts felt like drudgery. Having to stay on-topic felt stifling.

The hiatus began around the same time I stopped writing. Like the blog, it had become an unpleasant job -- something I felt I ought to do, rather than something I wanted to do. At the root of it, I think, was a desperate desire to be successful, and that's a recipe for disaster. When you feel like a failure because you can't put a thousand words on paper every day, you're doing something wrong.

As it became more difficult for me to write, I started coming up with rules and requirements. I had to write so many words per day. I had to write at certain times. I had to write certain things. I did the exact same thing with the blog. In both cases, it was a dismal failure. The creative part of my mind already felt boxed-in, and I was just shrinking that prison, somehow managing to make writing even more of a miserable chore.

Well, fuck that.

Today marks the end of the hiatus. I'm going to blog again. I'm going to write again.

I'm done with rules and quotas. I'm through with restrictions. This blog is a writing blog, but it's also my blog. From now on, I'm going to post whatever I feel like. Some of it will still be about writing. Some of it won't.

NaNoWriMo is almost here again. I told myself I wasn't going to participate this year. I don't have a novel plotted out. I'm busy. I have short stories I should be revising. I have a lot of excuses. But now I've changed my mind. I'm going to write a novel this November, or at least 50,000 words of one. I'm not going to worry about not having a plot. I have ideas, and a recently acquired desire to have fun writing.

And for now, that's good enough.

The Elements of Style

2010-07-26T21:21:00.000-05:00

Looking back on my old posts, I was amazed to discover that I've never mentioned The Elements of Style. As I have said in earlier posts, my rule of thumb for books on writing is: the shorter they are, the better they will be. The Elements of Style is the ultimate support of this theory. At just under 100 pages, it's probably the most important book on writing you will ever read.

Strunk wrote this book with two key concepts in mind: aid the reader, and strive for simplicity and clarity. Most of the rest of the concepts in the book stem from these. The book itself is broken into a few sections, and each section outlines a handful of rules or principles for better writing.

It starts with Rules of Usage, basic rules that help avoid common problems. These are the sorts of things that seem obvious upon reading, but are all too easy to get wrong unless you keep them in mind while writing.

The next section lays out Principles of Composition, starting with the general (overall design, paragraphs, voice) and moving into the very specific. For example:

#17: Omit Needless Words. "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts."

The book continues with Matters of Form, covers a number of Words and Expressions Commonly Misused, and finishes with An Approach to Style.

Each point is self-contained and covers no more than a couple pages. It's easy to read in small portions, but it can also be easily completed in a sitting or two. I make a point of re-reading it at least once a year, and each time, I rediscover a principle that makes my writing better.

Author's Journey: Length, Genre and Format

2010-06-27T21:43:00.000-05:00

The previous posts discussed the reasons for writing and some ways to keep motivated. Putting words on the page is the primary goal of any writer. But this guide is for the writer who also wants to become published, and Publishing is on the other side of the creek from Writing. There are rules for writing (although many can be bent or broken). Likewise, there are rules for publishing, and these are often less forgiving.

There's one good thing about this: you can learn as you go along. You can keep putting words on the page regardless of your level of publishing knowledge. However, there are a few rules that it's good to keep in mind while you're writing, because these rules can significantly affect the chances of your story being accepted or passed over.

The first two things to think about are length and genre. These go hand-in-hand in several ways.

Genre

When you write a story, you should think about what genre you're writing. This doesn't mean that you should alter your story to fit your perception (or someone else's) of a given genre. Forcing your story into genre conventions will only make it feel unoriginal and derivative. Instead, look at your story and ask yourself what genre(s) it fits. For some, this is easy. For others, it can be very hard. It's likely that your story has some elements of more than one genre. Look for identifying characteristics.

For example, does your story center strongly on a new technology, or future events? These are common in Science Fiction. Is there a single mystery that the characters spend the majority of the story solving? That's a Mystery story. Is the setting a made-up place, significantly different from the world we live in? It's probably Fantasy. Is the plot fast-paced, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance? You've got a Thriller on your hands.

But what's the point? Why does it matter what genre(s) you're writing, if you're not supposed to change your story to suit them?

Simple: you need to know who your audience is. Editors, magazines, imprints and entire publishers often deal only with a limited set of genres. You need to know who you're submitting that manuscript to, once all the words are on the page.

Length

The genre you're writing in also has an impact on the length of your story. For example, there are very strict word count limits on different types of children's fiction. Other genres are more lenient, but there are still limits. Manuscripts longer than 120,000 words are fairly common in Fantasy, but a manuscript that long in other genres may be considered unsellable.

In short fiction, this is even more of a factor. In most cases, it is very very hard to sell stories over 10,000 words to magazines. A story with 2000-5000 words will probably have a much better chance of being seriously looked at.

If you're writing mostly in one or two genres, it pays to read up on the common range of word counts for novels and short stories in that genre. Many publishers (especially magazines) have ranges specified in their manuscript guidelines. Check out a few and see how they compare.

Manuscript Format

So far, it seems like the rules of publishing are terribly variable, depending on the genre and the publisher. Unfortunately, that's true. However, when it comes to formatting your manuscript itself, the rules are fairly simple, and fairly uniform.

The main point of all manuscript formatting is to make the agent or editor's life a little easier. They look at hundreds, even thousands of manuscripts per month, and they can only accept a handful for publication. New writers often think that it's good to be different - that it will pay to stand out from the pack. The fact is, if you do something unusual with your formatting, it tends to come across as unprofessional, and it increases the odds of your manuscript being rejected out of hand. With all those manuscripts on their desks, agents and editors are looking for any reason why you're not publishable. Don't give them one. If you want to stand out from the pack, you need to wow them with your writing. The formatting should be invisible, to better let your writing shine through.

There are a number of good articles on manuscript format on the web: Writing World, Wikipedia, SFWA, and many others. However, there is one rule that trumps any of these articles. Always, always, always follow the formatting guidelines specified by the publisher you are submitting to. Editors know how they want to read. Give them what they want. If their formatting guidelines are incomplete or absent, fall back on the standard manuscript format. Ultimately, most editors and agents will still read a poorly formatted manuscript unless it is egregiously awful. That doesn't mean formatting isn't important.

It's hard to write beautiful prose. It's hard to write a story that grips the reader from the first word to the last. But it's easy to get formatting right. Make sure you do, and then get back to putting words on the page.

The First Five Pages

2010-06-13T21:02:00.000-05:00

I have a rule of thumb about books on writing. The shorter they are, the better chance they have of being useful. With Lukeman's First Five Pages, this rule proves accurate again. It clocks in at just under 200 pages, with nineteen short chapters that each focus on a specific problem, and it's an excellent guide to revision.

Each chapter covers a number of points on its topic of choice, including related manuscript problems and suggested solutions. Lukeman usually includes examples of these problems, but many of them are completely absurd. This is perhaps the one aspect of the book that could use some improvement. I would have much preferred some more realistic examples, perhaps even from actual manuscripts. On the other hand, he also includes examples from well-known novels that illustrate the right way to do things, and these are generally much better.

Overall, this list of common problems is an excellent one. All writers should own the book, if only for this convenient checklist of things to look for in their revisions. Lukeman offers exercises at the end of each chapter to help clean up a manuscript, or practice cleaner writing in the first place.

The subtitle of this book is "A Writer's Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile", and the advice within certainly won't hurt in that regard. Lukeman is a veteran literary agent, so he has plenty of first-hand experience with the common reasons that are used to dismiss manuscripts. However, it's obvious that Lukeman isn't trying to write a book on how to get published. He's writing a book about how to write well, and he's passionate about it.

"The ultimate message of this book," he says, "is not that you should strive for publication, but that you should become devoted to the craft of writing, for it's own sake. Ask yourself what you would do if you knew you would never be published. Would you still write? If you are truly writing for the art of it, the answer will be yes. And then, every word is a victory."

How to be Creative

2010-06-02T20:53:00.050-05:00

Hugh MacLeod is the author of GapingVoid comics. He's been drawing them for years on the backs of business cards. In this essay (PDF), he provides us a brilliant look at creating art in a world that values material success above all else.

Hugh backs up his points with anecdotes from his own life. He started by seeking fame and success, but eventually, he came to understand that the creative act itself was enough to make him feel fulfilled. It was only after he stopped trying to be a huge success that he was free to enjoy his art, and success found him.

The Author's Journey - Motivation

2010-05-31T20:11:00.000-05:00

Writers love to talk about writer's block. The muse, they say, just refuses to cooperate. The creative juices aren't flowing. I'm tired. Also, I don't feel good.

For most writers, this isn't an occasional condition. It happens on a weekly, daily, or even hourly basis. Usually, it happens when a particularly thorny section comes up: something the author doesn't really want to write. Other times, the writer may sit down with a pencil or keyboard and just feel completely uninspired.

These little moments differentiate a dedicated writer from a wannabe. A wannabe will stop writing, sometimes without even realizing it. They'll start on a bit of research, or try to find "the perfect music" to inspire that scene. Or they'll get seriously fed up and watch TV. The serious writer will keep plugging away, because the serious writer knows that it probably won't be any easier tomorrow.

This sounds like a pretty depressing take on writing, but it's not all bad. There are plenty of wonderful little moments in a writer's life: finding the perfect word or turn of phrase, discovering interesting qualities in a character, or finding that perfect plot twist to throw your characters into disarray. But this is only one side of the coin. The other side is the mundane, difficult and occasionally monotonous work of writing and editing. And it is work. You can't have one without the other.

There is no easy solution to fighting writer's block. Like many other aspects of writing, it simply requires perseverance. Keep putting words on the page, even if they seem awful. They're only words, after all. They can always be improved upon later.

There are ways to help yourself persevere. I've written a number of posts about motivation and writer's block. Ultimately though, it comes down to you. If the urge to write is strong enough, you'll seek out the strategies that work for you, and you'll keep at it.

The Author's Journey - Why Write?

2010-05-23T15:52:00.001-05:00

If you're reading this guide, you probably already know you want to be a writer. However, before you dive in, it's worth thinking about what you want to get out of your writing. There are many different kinds of writers, and many different goals you can choose to pursue.

First, ask yourself what would make your writing 'successful'. Do you want to have a published novel? Do you want to see your short stories or poems in magazines? Do you want to support yourself financially with your writing? Do you just want to write as a hobby, and not worry about publishing at all? Of course, there are as many reasons for writing as there are writers, but asking questions like these will help you understand what your goals really are, and decide if this guide is right for you.

This guide is designed for those who want to improve their writing and get it published, the old fashioned way, by publishers. If you just want to write for fun and have no interest in editing, revising, and sending out manuscripts, that's perfectly fine. You can stop reading this right now, and go start having fun writing. Self-publishing or vanity press is also not discussed here. For most fiction writers, self-publishing is not worth the money. It's a full-time job (probably several) to market and promote a book, and it is difficult to sell yours all by yourself - especially if you're a first-time author. 99% of authors who self-publish will never make back the money they spent. However, if you just want some copies of your book for friends and family, or if you're writing non-fiction and have a platform like professional speaking to sell from, self-publishing may be exactly what you're looking for. If so, best of luck, but you won't find any advice in this series.

Once you have some idea of what your writing goals are, you should think about time. How much time can you dedicate to writing, realistically? When do you want to achieve your goals?

There's always more to do than there is time to do it. If you're serious about writing, you will have to find the time to write. If your goals are ambitious, like "sell a novel in the next two years", you may have to make sacrifices to get enough time to write. Look at your other hobbies, your work schedule, and your time with family and friends. Decide what you're willing to give up to succeed in your writing. Life will be easier if you think about this beforehand, rather than finding out several months later that your goals were too ambitious for your timeframe.

While you're thinking about timeframe, you should be aware that getting published is hard. Really hard. If your goals include getting published, you may want to give yourself more time than you think you'll need. You should also begin preparing yourself for lots of rejection. Even for the very best authors, rejection is part of the game. Perseverance is the most important attribute a new author can possess.

In addition to thinking about goals and timeframe, go write. Right now! Yes, we haven't even started talking about the mechanics and structure of writing, but it doesn't matter. All you have to do is put one word after another, over and over again. We can worry about if they're the correct words in the correct order later.

One of the most important things to learn as you begin your writing journey is that there's always something new to learn. Don't wait to become a 'good writer' before you start taking writing seriously. Writing itself is the most important learning exercise. The more you do it, the better you will get. Of course, books and guides like this can also be worthwhile. (I wouldn't write this if I didn't think so.) As a writer, guides like this are like vitamins. They're supplements, and they're good for you. But the act of writing is like food. As an author, you need it to survive.

So start writing. You can learn as you go.

The Author's Journey - Introduction and Contents

2010-05-17T19:47:00.003-05:00

This post is designed to be a convenient table of contents for the Author's Journey series, as well as a list of articles yet to come. Sections without links haven't been written yet and are subject to being reordered or completely changed. Nothing is set in stone.

If you have an idea for a topic, please comment on this post.

Note: the table of contents has been moved to this static page.

A New Series for New Writers

2010-05-17T19:38:00.001-05:00

It's been a little quiet around here lately.

I originally started this blog so I could highlight great resources for writers, but life has been busy lately, and I haven't been finding a lot of new resources.

Rather than let the blog go stale, I will be starting a new series called The Author's Journey. I'll continue to do a new post every Sunday for this series, but additional posts for writers' resources may still pop up mid-week.

The Author's Journey will be my attempt to summarize what I've learned over the years about the process of writing, editing, and the intricacies of the publishing process. There are lots of writers, editors, agents and other publishing professionals with blogs these days, and there's more information available to new writers than ever before. Unfortunately, this information is spread out across the net. My aim is to pull as much of it together as possible.

I'll put up another post that will serve as the table of contents to keep everything organized, and I'll start posting for the series next week.

Why Write Short Stories?

2010-04-18T20:04:00.000-05:00

There is something very appealing about the novel as a form. A novel (at its best) is a long, deep, profound experience between the author and the reader. It can cover huge swaths of space and time. It can plumb the deepest recesses of its characters' psyches. And now, perhaps more than ever, writing a novel and having it published is the mark of a "true" writer and the ultimate writerly achievement.

There are plenty of people who do not write, but might admit with a little prodding that they would like to write a novel. Some day. Others will go so far as to say "everyone has a novel in them." We even have National Novel Writing Month, where the teeming masses are encouraged to take that novel and apply it to paper.

Yes, there are still those who advocate for the screenplay, be it stage or screen. There are also those who admire poetry most. But overall, in today's society, the novel is king of literature.

Where does this leave the short story, the novel's runty cousin? What of novellas, novellettes, and even flash fiction? Nobody says "everyone has a short story in them." Thousands of people across the country are not gathering in little groups in libraries and cafes to participate in a National Short Story Month. In fact, I suspect that quite a lot of people who read authors like Hemingway, Poe and Updike in their high school or college English courses would even tell us that short stories were relevant...Way Back When...but they have little importance today. After all, who the heck reads short stories except people in English courses?

I do, and I think that anyone who is serious about writing should too. While you're at it, write a few short stories, before you take another crack at that novel.

Why should you read short stories? I read them for several reasons.

They are, by definition, short. I don't always have time for a novel, but I can often fit in a short story.
I like to support (and discover) new and talented authors. Many people's first published works are short stories. By supporting magazines, websites and other venues that pay authors for their short work, I can help keep the literary landscape rich and vibrant.
Short stories are perfect for studying craft. In many ways, they must be more tightly written than a novel. They can get away with less. Short stories must be laser-focused, and many of them are showcases for a particular literary technique. Novels are big, complicated constructs, and it is usually a challenge to scrutinize one particular aspect of a book.
Short stories are a unique form, and a magnificent short story feels quite different from an amazing novel. Ignoring short stories, you miss out on different and unique literary experiences.

Of course, if you can learn the craft of writing and have a good time reading short stories, there must be benefits to writing them as well.

Again, they are, by definition, short. Novels typically take months or years to write. A short story is more likely to take a few days or weeks. It is easier to revise. Since it can usually be read in one or two sittings, it is much easier for others to critique, which makes it easier to get feedback. Feedback is pure gold to the aspiring writer.
It is ripe for experimentation, because it has a lower cost of failure. It's much easier to let go of a failed story than a failed novel. It is often easier to fix a broken story than a broken novel.
There are more venues for short stories than novels. I won't say it's easier to sell a short story, but there are certainly many more short stories published each year than there are novels.
Writing them will make you a better writer. Nearly everything you learn from short stories will be applicable to novels.

The novel is most visible form of literature in modern society, and in many ways it is the most respected. Of course we're drawn to it. But, it isn't always the best thing for us to write. The next time you sit down in front of the keyboard, before you give in to the siren song of the novel, stop for a moment and consider writing a short story.

Backups, Challenges, and Sharks

2010-04-11T22:52:00.000-05:00

Backups

My computer died recently, with little warning. Thankfully, the problem turned out to be the power supply, and with a new one in place, it's now up and running again. I have a separate laptop that I use for writing, but this little incident reminded me of the importance of frequent backups. Flash drives and external hard drives are dirt cheap these days. Get one, and make sure all your digitized work is on that drive, as well as a computer somewhere.

If you think it was painful writing that novel first draft, wait until you lose it and have to start over from scratch...

Challenges

Previously, I talked about trying weekly writing challenges as an exercise to increase productivity. So far, it's been a mixed bag.

At first, I came up with a list of possible challenges, but many of them weren't pure writing. They were things like "create two characters who would totally oppose each other", or "extrapolate a society based on one or two defining characteristics". These have value for characterization and world building, but they don't specifically put words on the page. Since that felt a little like a cop-out, I added "and write X thousand words, too."

That turned out to be a bad idea. Instead of being a challenge, it started to become a to-do list, and lost a lot of the variety that made it fun. So, I think it's a good idea to have word-count challenges (i.e. write 10,000 words in a week), but it's also good to have the more abstract challenges that deal with characterization, plot, and other types of brainstorming. The trick, then, is to balance from week to week, to ensure that you're still getting words on the page.

The other adjustment I made was to stop running weekly challenges Monday to Monday and start running them Wednesday to Wednesday. This is because the Critters workshop that I participate in is set up on the same schedule. Any challenges to do X critiques were complicated by the fact that a new batch of manuscripts would be available mid-week. So, it's worth thinking about what "week" works best for the sorts of challenges you might be interested in.

Sharks

Finally, I wanted to point out a resource for writers who are learning how to query agents. Query Shark is a blog where writers submit their query to be critiqued by a professional literary agent. Even if you don't feel up to submitting your query for a critique, you can still learn a lot by reading the past entries.

Weekly Challenges

2010-03-21T15:27:00.000-05:00

Last week I talked about ways to recharge the writing batteries. As with anything else that requires a lot of mental effort, sometimes we just need to take a break from writing. However, it's often too easy for those little breaks to get longer and longer. And once you've stopped writing, it's hard to get started again. Even for the best writers, going from idea to a completed draft of any length is time-consuming. It's tempting to borrow that writing time for other things.

Some blame the muse. "I would like to write, but I just don't feel inspired." Unfortunately for most of us, if we only wrote when we felt inspired, we'd be lucky to get a few pages a month.

I have struggled with this problem. Life is busy. I have a full-time job outside of writing, and now I have a baby to take care of, and a house to keep up. Time just slips on by.

What's really frustrating is that I enjoy writing. When I get up the gumption to sit down in front of the keyboard and type, it's usually a positive experience. Once I've started writing, it's not so hard to keep going. It's getting started that is the real difficulty.

I've tried writing plans that prescribe a steady rate, but I have a hard time sticking with them. When I have some short challenge though, and I'm working toward a goal, I do much better.

So, I'm trying another experiment: weekly challenges. I've written up a list of small challenges. They range from fairly easy to very difficult. Each week, I'll pick one and try to beat it. My list includes some easy ones so I can use those when I know I'll have a busy week. I'll try tougher ones when I know I'll have more time. Many have word-count goals, but others include brainstorming or writing exercises. By having varied goals, I hope the system won't grow stale. I can always add new challenges whenever I think of them.

I'll be testing this out for at least a month, and I'll document my progress here. If it works well, I'll post my list of challenges for anyone to use. I may also make a little program that randomly generates weekly challenges from a list of possible components.

But first, we'll see how well it goes...

Recharging the Writing Batteries

2010-03-14T23:18:00.000-05:00

It's been over a week since I finished 7S7D, and I feel a little bit burnt out. I've barely written anything since. I don't have much desire to start revising, and I have even less ambition to write something new.

I don't think the challenge itself is the problem. I've done NaNoWriMo several times, and I've gone through plenty of other periods of high-speed writing. 7S7D was probably the most intense week of writing I've ever gone through, but I had my outlines, and I felt well prepared.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, the ambition to write just goes away. It happens to everyone at some point. The question is, what can we do about it? Below, I've composed a list of options to recharge the writer's batteries.

Do something physical
One of my favorite places to think about writing is when I'm mowing the lawn. Unfortunately, in my neck of the woods we've still got a month or two before it's lawn-mowing season. Shoveling is an alternative. If you're one of those crazy people who jogs, you could do that too. Biking is another good option, and google maps now has biking directions. How convenient.

Enjoy Nature
These days, we're completely surrounded by technology. With laptops and smart-phones, you can surf the net, facebook, and twitter almost anywhere. Sometimes it pays to get away from all of it and just hang out with some rocks and trees. Take a day trip. Go to a local hiking area or national park. Do some fishing.

Read Something Different
Most fiction writers have a favorite genre, and typically we read within the same genre we write. Try reading something from a genre you rarely look at. If you can find a knowledgeable friend to recommend something, even better! Or, read some nonfiction on a topic that interests you. Surf wikipedia, or head to the local library and pick up some books. It might also be a good time to try some unfocused research. You might also find inspiration in a book on writing.

Try Silence
Our world is busy and loud. As a new parent, I am all-too aware of how difficult it is to find quiet time. Sometimes, though, it's absolutely necessary. You may be able to find a quiet room or corner in your own house. You might have to go somewhere. Coffee shops are a great option (you can enjoy the smell even if you don't want to buy $5 coffee). Libraries and bookstores are also good. Try to just sit and let your mind wander. Sometimes 30 minutes of silence can go a long way.

Take a Break from Words
As writers, we tend to fill our lives with the written word. Sometimes, this can contribute to brain overload. Try taking a day or two away from words: don't write (not even on the blog, facebook, twitter, etc), and don't read any books, stories, magazines, web articles. This can be challenging, but you may find that the time away from words makes them so much more enticing when you come back to them.

Critique
You may already be in some kind of critique group. If you're not, look into it. Try critiquing a few manuscripts written by others. This takes different brain muscles than writing your own stories, and it is a sure way to improve your own style and help you look at your own work with a more critical eye. Try submitting something you've been working on to be critiqued. If your critiquers are good, you'll gain new insights into your work.

Re-channel that Creativity
Try a different creative pursuit besides writing. Do some drawing (or doodling, if you prefer). Try painting, sewing, crocheting/knitting. Sing, or if you play an instrument, spend some extra time with it. One form of creativity often inspires another.

Spend Time with Family
Writing is a very solitary process. You sit alone with the computer, typewriter or notebook, and spend hours putting words together. Your family is (hopefully) kind enough to support you in this endeavor, and put up with all the time that those words keep you away from them. So remind them how much you appreciate their support. Spend some quality time with your spouse, child(ren), parents, or whoever you're closest to. Go out for dinner. Have a game night. Go camping. That keyboard will be waiting for you tomorrow.

The Value of Unfocused Research

2010-03-07T20:25:00.000-06:00

In interviews, writers often talk about the large amounts of research they have done for a novel. In most cases, they come up with the plot of the novel first, and direct their research to flesh out specific bits. Sometimes, research for one book leads into ideas for another. With short stories, often one or two ideas are enough to make up the brunt of the story, and research inspires writing more than the other way around.

However, whether you write short stories or novels (or both), I believe that unfocused, random research is vital for the brain machinery that generates story ideas in the first place. In fact, you do unfocused research all the time, often without realizing it. You do it when you watch strange people on the bus, or have awkward conversations with that weird guy from accounting. Every little experience can be research that will inspire the next story. But why stop there?

Thanks to the internet, unfocused research is amazingly easy these days. Of course, you can always search google for terms that interest you, but there are other tools on the net that are also worth checking out.

1.) Wikipedia. I've noticed that some people have an inherent distrust of articles that anyone can edit, but the fact is that 99% of the content on wikipedia is clear and accurate. Moderators, locks and constantly scanning robots do an excellent job at fixing graffiti and malicious edits. In most cases, it won't replace a history or text book for in-depth research, but it's fantastic for jumping across topics. Links between articles often allow going from one interesting article to another. I don't know how many times I've gone to wikipedia and ended up with 10 or 15 tabs of interesting articles open, one linked to the next.
If you don't have a specific topic you want to look for, I suggest trying the Random button or looking at Featured Content.

2.) StumbleUpon. This great tool comes as a plugin for several web browsers, or you can use the website. Click a button, and go to a random page based on the interests you chose. You can give sites a thumbs-up or -down, which improves the results you see and also increases the accuracy for everyone else with similar preferences.

3.) Twitter (and to a lesser extent, Facebook). When people find interesting things, they often post about it. I like Twitter better than Facebook for link hunting. You have to keep everything short and sweet on Twitter, which means it doesn't take long to read through a lot of tweets. Also, posting links is far more common on Twitter. Follow the right people, and you can easily learn 5 new things before breakfast every day. @wired, @doctorow, and @GreatDismal are a few of the accounts I follow that often post great links.

One final warning. It's great to go out and seek new info, because you never know what will turn into the next story. Just make sure you don't spend too many hours on wikipedia, or twitter, or stumble...like I did while working on this post...

7S7D - Conclusions

2010-03-03T07:00:00.001-06:00

The results of the experiment:
7 Days
7 Stories
26550 words
120 pages

I began 7S7D with the idea that it would be a sort of NaNoWriMo for short stories. I didn't want to set a word limit -- that doesn't make much sense for short stories. One story a day strikes the right balance. It's doable, but still challenging, especially as someone who works full time.

Ultimately, 7S7D was a much more concentrated writing experience than NaNoWriMo. I averaged about 3800 words a day, considerably more than the 1667 required to win NaNo. However, it didn't really feel like twice the daily work. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that you're writing multiple things. Each day has a new beginning and a new ending. Each day, there is a tangible accomplishment: a brand new short story. To me, this is much more of a reward than a brand new chapter or half a chapter, which is the typical daily reward for NaNoWriMo. I also was able to schedule my two longest stories over the weekend.

7S7D wasn't just an achievement for achievement's sake. It was also a great self-guided learning experience. Most stories share a basic structure, regardless of length. Writing seven stories, in some ways, is much better practice than writing one novel. Here are some things I learned, in no particular order:

The conflict is the most important piece of the story. The earlier you know what the central conflict is, the easier your life will be.
You need to know all your characters, or again, your life will be difficult. And your story will be boring. You don't need to write bios. You don't need to know their hair color or eye color or zodiac sign (although knowing those things is fine). Ultimately, you need to be able to have mental conversations with your characters. If you can do that, you can find out what they would do in any situation.
Most of the time, the old adage "show, don't tell" is correct. Sometimes though, what happens next isn't very interesting. When that happens, for goodness sake, don't spend all that time showing. Tell the reader what happened, and move on to the next interesting thing.
If the next part of the story is boring, leave it out entirely, if you can get away with it. You can get away with it surprisingly often.
It's usually easier to fix a mediocre story than write a great one on the first try.
Characters are illuminated by their actions.
If a story feels like it's falling flat, try changing the POV, tense or voice. A terrible first person tale might be awesome in third person.
Sometimes, you can have lots of great bits of dialog, interesting concepts, and fun characters, and when you mash them all together, they still make a crappy story. Those bits may be meant for different stories.
Mysteries are hard to write. Some people may be able to write them without an outline. I'm not one of them.
Sometimes, writing a half-formed story will reveal new ideas and it will expand into something better than you expected. Other times, an idea that seemed bulletproof won't work at all when its on paper.
Don't trust how good you think a story is when you're writing it. Come back a week later.

To conclude, I'm glad I went through with 7S7D. I think every writer should give it a try. I learned things. I challenged myself. And I have seven more stories than I did last week.

Now I just have to edit them...

7S7D - Day 7

2010-03-01T22:12:00.000-06:00

Story - Winding Down
Length - 4150 words / 19 pages

Whew! I finished!

Interestingly enough, today's story and the story from day one were the most fun to write. Fitting bookends to the experiment. This story was about 650 words longer than I originally expected, but it jumped onto the page relatively painlessly. It's not exactly comedy, but it has its funny moments. It's about a world inhabited entirely by robots, but it's not exactly futuristic. If you're very lenient, it might qualify as steampunk.

In any case, I think the 7S7D experiment was a resounding success. Next post, I'll tally the statistics and explain what I learned throughout the process.

7S7D - Day 6

2010-03-01T00:25:00.000-06:00

Story - Red Eyes
Length - 7100 words / 32 pages

Another pretty hefty story to write in one day. This one was much less painful than Saturday's. Down deep, it's the relatively standard police story, where one officer has to go against his training and his comrades to do the right thing. With a few sci-fi twists.

I haven't written much police procedural, but I feel like I have a pretty decent grasp of it. I've read plenty of those types of stories, and Lee Lofland's great book on the subject gave me plenty of ideas to work with. I plan on brushing up on some old noir detective talkes when I come around to editing this. I suspect that style would fit in nicely here.

7S7D - Day 5

2010-02-28T13:58:00.000-06:00

Story - Salt Tower Murder
Length - 7000 words (exactly!) / 31 pages

I'm posting this on Sunday because it was almost midnight on Saturday when I finished. I had purposely saved my two longest stories for Saturday and Sunday, but that didn't do me much good since I started at 7:30 PM.

This story is a murder mystery, and the first one I've ever written. I find the pacing difficult on a story like this. How many clues do we need? How many false leads? The story has to give the reader enough information that the revelation at the end makes sense, but it also has to be complex enough that the reader isn't likely to guess the outcome halfway through. I suspect the most important thing in a murder mystery is the characters. If the reader believes that any one of the characters has the motivation and the ability to kill, then it's much easier to feed in little clues that advance the mystery without giving it away.

Since this was my first attempt, this story will take some revision to get right. The skeleton is there though, and a lot of nice bits that I think will make it into the final story.

7S7D - Day 4

2010-02-26T23:32:00.000-06:00

Story - Indigo Jones and the Mystery of the Overdraft Notice
Length - 2050 words / 10 pages

Well, I finished a story, but at least 90% of what I wrote tonight is crap.

I've had this character in mind for a while, and I always envisioned him as a comedic character, wrapped up in all sorts of the craziest sort of conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, this story didn't end up being very comedic, and as someone serious, the character completely falls flat. As a bonus, there's a little frame story with the narrator that was probably more interesting than the story itself.

I still think the character might work, and the story too, but maybe not together. I'll let them stew for a bit and see how I feel when it's revision time.

7S7D - Day 3

2010-02-25T21:39:00.000-06:00

Story - Brass Angel
Length - 2550 words / 11 pages

Today's story was the hardest yet. This is the second story (along with yesterday's) that's from a strong first-person point of view, which is something I rarely do because it's so restrictive. On the one hand, I suppose it's good practice. On the other, it makes every sentence twice as hard to write. Even worse, this story was from a child's POV, and I'm afraid I didn't do a terribly good job getting the voice to sound right. This will probably require a lot of little re-wordings when it's time to revise.

Almost halfway through this experiment, I feel kind of like a bum spending my entire evening writing every night while she takes care of baby and whatever else needs doing. I can't express how much I appreciate her putting up with my writing shenanigans.

7S7D - Day 2

2010-02-24T21:23:00.000-06:00

Story - The Bluefinch and the Chipmunk
Length - 2500 words / 11 pages

This one was twice as long as yesterday's, and not quite so easy to write. 7S7D is starting to feel more like a challenge. This story was basically one continuous scene, which makes things easier in some ways, but also requires figuring out how to transition over the little bits of time between important plot points.

Although I didn't plan it this way, it turns out I'm actually experimenting with a lot of new techniques in these stories. I'm still enjoying the experiment. We'll see how I feel when I get to the big stories this weekend.

7S7D - Day 1

2010-02-23T19:30:00.000-06:00

Today I started a little writing experiment I call 7S7D, where I write a short story every day for seven days. I've been outlining and thinking about these stories for a while, so I feel pretty well prepared. A couple of them are going to be under ten pages, but at least two are going to be more challenging, probably in the 5-10k words range (20-40 pages).

I plan to write a blog for each day/story, so you can observe my incredible success (or rapid descent into madness). So, without further ado:

Day 1:

Story - Dr. Clipboard's Miracle Wonder Drug

Length - 6 pages / 1200 words

I started with one of the shorter stories. As you might guess from the title, this is one of the strangest things I've ever written. Both the content and the delivery were pretty unusual for me. This was also the most fun I've had writing in quite a while, and a great experience to kick this experiment off.

Questions for a Troubled Draft

2010-02-23T09:00:00.000-06:00

Every writer gets "stuck" at some point. Some call it writer's block. Sometimes, it's just a matter of thinking a little (and possibly rereading the story so far), and the next plot point reveals itself. Many times, though, you've already taken a wrong turn, and it's time to backtrack. This is one of the hardest parts of writing, when you know something isn't right, but you're not sure what it is.

Here is a small list of questions to ask yourself about your story. Most of them are based on basic principles of fiction - the sort of things you're liable to hear in a creative writing course. Don't hold that against them; they often work.

1.) Do your major characters undergo a change between the start and end of the story?

2.) Does the protagonist have a lot to lose?

3.) Is there obvious conflict? Could the story benefit from additional conflicts? What if a character wants two things that are mutually exclusive?

4.) Do your characters have it too easy? Can you think of any bigger, more unpleasant obstacles for them to overcome?

5.) Are you using the most effective viewpoint and tense? Think about how it would read from different characters' views. Who is telling the story, and who are they telling it to?

Video Games Make Me a Bad Writer

2010-02-21T08:00:00.001-06:00

Gaming is one of my favorite hobbies. Like many people in my generation, I've been playing since I was a small child. At times, I've played so much that it probably bordered on addiction. I've also gone without for long periods. However, when I begin to feel that I'm not writing as much as I would like, it's usually because I'm playing games more often than I should be.

Gaming can be dangerous, because it offers the illusion of accomplishment. You make it to the next stage. You beat the boss. You level up. You feel as though you've gotten better somehow. But most gamers, when they look at it objectively, will realize that the accomplishment is hollow. Having succeeded, life is really no different.

Although gaming is my particular time-sink, there are plenty of others that can pull you away from writing, or other important activities in your life. We live in a culture of entertainment, and it does not encourage healthy prioritization. We are constantly goaded to seek fulfillment in the fastest (and often shallowest) ways possible. Many people spend hours a day watching TV, or sitting on Facebook. These activities all offer the illusion of activity. "I need to know what happens in the next episode." "I need to see what all my friends are up to." But will there really be any significant consequences in your life if you simply eschew those activities? The honest answer is usually "No."

The only way to combat this is eternal vigilance. We can usually feel when we're not prioritizing our lives as we should, even if we don't like to admit it. The first step is simple awareness. Often that is enough to start a change in behavior. Sometimes, though, you have to actively fight to break those habits.

One thing I have found to be particularly effective is a simple change of scenery. The mind ties habits, especially addictive ones, to locations, objects, and associated activities. Many writers have two computers. One is for writing, and it has no internet, no games, no interesting stuff at all. Just a word processor. Others have a "writing office" or study that they use solely for writing. It doesn't have to be a real room, just a place that is dedicated to that activity. It could be a coffee shop or a card table in the basement. The important thing is that it is only used for the activity of writing.

Others, like Randall Munroe, have come up with more extreme ways to break bad habits. Only you know what works for you, and it may require some trial and error. It's worth it though. Your family and your writing will thank you for that extra hour per day when you take it back from Facebook.

Two Blogs and some Writing Advice

2010-02-07T11:00:00.000-06:00

This week I want to highlight two of my favorite author blogs: Neil Gaiman and John Scalzi.

If you've been living under a rock for the past few decades, you may not have heard of Neil. He 's the sort of writer who creates award-winning novels, graphic novels, non-fiction, poems, essays, screenplays, short films, and pretty much anything he feels like. He wears nothing but black and newspapers call him things like "literary rock star" and "most accomplished storyteller in the English language today".

Gaiman occasionally talks about the writing process, which is interesting. Most of his posts, however, are just little windows into his "literary rock star" life. Besides writing, he lives in a big old haunted house, he keeps bees, hangs out with popular musicians, and all sorts of other interesting stuff.

I'm not normally a celebrity-follower, but for Gaiman I make an exception. I can't help it: he's too entertaining. Even his off-the-cuff posts tend to be excellent.

Scalzi, on the other hand, isn't so much of a globe-trotting literary super-celebrity. He's more like a lovable, humerously belligerent everyman. His posts almost always induce at least one chuckle, and often outright laughter. I'm not sure how he actually manages to get any writing done, since he blogs constantly. He seems to always have his finger on the pulse of the writing world.

The third resource I'm highlighting this week isn't a blog, per se. It's a column called Chopsticks, written for IGMS by Mette Ivie Harrison. This is a great series of articles on the craft of writing, and I'm amazed I didn't find it sooner. Although the magazine is fantasy and science fiction, these articles are mostly genre-agnostic. I highly recommend them.

Mythology: a Writing Resource

2010-02-01T20:43:00.000-06:00

Almost everyone can name a few ancient myths. Most high schools teach a bit of Greek and Roman myth. Anyone with an English lit degree has read the Iliad and the Odyssey. Maybe you even saw the movie version of Beowulf.

Most people think of these old stories as nothing more than relics of a simpler (perhaps less enlightened) time. In an era where even the books and movies of our parents are often considered trite, it's no wonder that thousand-year-old stories are largely ignored.

Writers should know better.

Mythology is a showcase of techniques and patterns that have been applied successfully to thousands of stories. Yes, many are simple by the standards of modern novels. To a studious writer, though, this is an advantage. These are stories refined to their barest essential components, streamlined by thousands of retellings.

Some topics, conflicts and characters show up over and over again. These are often the sort of timeless ideas, problems and people that can be as easily identified today as they were hundreds or thousands of years ago. Some myths are much more unique, and understanding what makes them stand out among so many other myths can also be enlightening.

It's also important to remember that there were hundreds of cultures around the world with rich mythology. Westerners often look to Europe for inspiration, but the other continents have mythological traditions that reflect their own traditions. In Asia: Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Slavic, and Babylonian myths. In the Americas: Inca, Aztec, Olmec and many other tribes. In Africa: Egyptian and many tribal myths. In Australia: Aborigine. And, of course, the European mythology of Rome, Greece, Britain, the Celts, the Norse, and Germanic peoples.

The mythology resources online are getting better and better. Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Mythica are two of the best jumping-off points. Still, mythology is a broad field, full of specialized studied. For more detailed information, large libraries will yield treasures that are hard to find on the net.

If you find a particular culture fascinating, but have trouble finding resources, you might also want to check the course listings at your local universities. A one-simester Aztec course I took in college proved more enlightening than all the books on Aztecs I have ever read.

The Writer's Notebook

2010-01-24T15:00:00.000-06:00

Different writers like different tools. Some like the old-fashioned methods: typewriters, writing long-hand on paper, with an honest-to-goodness pen. Others have the latest and greatest laptop, with dozens of software programs to increase their productivity. However, I believe that there is one tool that every writer must have: the Writer's Notebook.

That's right, it's so important, I added Unnecessary Capitalization.

The writer's currency is ideas, and the Writer's Notebook is a literary savings account. You save as much as you can, hopefully gain a little interest, and when it comes time to write, you make a withdrawal. Keep your notebook with you, and you'll always have a place to put scenes, quirks of character, little ideas, and even big, earth-shattering ones.

The Writer's Notebook pays off in several ways. First, and most obvious, is that you don't have to worry about forgetting anything. You might think you have a good memory, but if you don't have a Writer's Notebook, chances are good that you've forgotten some things. Ideas often come in packs, and time tends to nibble away the little tangents even if you are able to hang on to the central concept. On a number of occasions, I've looked back at the old ideas in my notebook and discovered that I remembered only part of a really fun story premise.

The second function of the Writer's Notebook is to be an idea blender. Stories rarely pop into my head fully formed and ready to be written. Usually, several ideas come together after stewing a while in my unconscious. By keeping all your ideas in a central location, you can stir that mental pot. Every couple of weeks, I like to go back and look through the old ideas, and every now and then, a couple of those ideas get together in my head and form something worth writing. Sometimes it takes years for an idea to find its story.

There's a third function of the Writer's Notebook that I only learned about recently: anthologies. Some anthologies have very open-ended requirements, like a genre or sub-genre. However, there are lots of anthologies that are much more specific.

This past week, I found a really interesting shared-world anthology. Basically, they sketch out a rough setting, and your story has to take place within that scaffold. Unfortunately, the deadline for submissions is the end of the month, less than two weeks from the date I found out about it. My Writing Notebook was invaluable here, because I was able to look at all those ideas and see which ones might fit into the shared-world scaffold in interesting ways. After a day or two of stewing, I had my idea, and I will be submitting a story to that anthology. Without the Writing Notebook, I doubt I would be able to pull that off in such a short time-frame.

So, whether you're a pen-and-paper writer or a MacBook toting technophile writer, the Writer's Notebook should be a vital tool in your literary arsenal.

A Brief Note on Labels

2010-01-23T20:22:00.001-06:00

When I first started this blog, I wasn't entirely sure where it was going. Things were a little shaky, topics were random, and I pretty much labeled a post with any proper nouns I saw at a glance. Now, I'm eight months into this experiment (wow!) and settled into some recurring themes. The archive is getting big enough that it might start to be a pain to find a specific post. To make things easier, I've added a few labels and removed others. This should make it easy to find any post by scrolling down to the Topics section on the right side of the blog.

Terry Pratchet

2010-01-17T18:00:00.000-06:00

If you're an avid reader of modern fantasy, comedy, or good books in general, you've probably heard of Terry Pratchett. If Douglas Adams is the undisputed king of sci-fi comedy, Pratchett is the emperor of comedic fantasy. There are two happy differences between Adams and Pratchett. Pratchett is still alive and writing, and he's ridiculously prolific, churning out several great books every year.

Thud! is not his most recent book, just the most recent one I've read. (His latest is Making Money, which is currently sitting in my massive "to read" pile).

As usual, the book is easy reading. It's not necessarily fast-paced, but it draws you in. And as I read, I was struck by how deftly Pratchett pulls off a number of writing techniques. Not only is he fun to read, but I highly recommend him to authors who want to study an expert writer at work.

Like many of Pratchett's stories, this one is structured as a mystery. People are doing mysterious things in the city of Ankh-Morpork, and Commander Sam Vimes of the city watch has to find out why. There are some very conspicuous clues early on, and Pratchett carefully weaves them together throughout the book. No gun is left on the mantle.

Even more impressive though, are the clues that aren't so obvious. As the conclusion came together, I realized that many little puzzle pieces had been presented to me, and while I didn't think of them as clues at first sight, they were written in such a way that they stuck with me. I never had to go back and remind myself what happened. That is a testament to Pratchett's skill.

In addition, he's a master of characterization. There are a good half-dozen main characters in this book. The long-running Discworld series offers Pratchett the advantage of building characters over several books, but he doesn't abuse that advantage. You don't need to have read any previous books to understand a character.

Even more wonderful than the main characters are the secondary characters, even those that would be throw-aways for many other authors. Just as an example, Sam Vimes runs across an old woman during his investigation. She has dual personalities, but they both get along rather well with one another, even if they do occasionally keep secrets. That's a fairly complex character to be introduced, utilized, and then forgotten about, all in one or two pages.

I encourage everyone who hasn't read a Discworld novel to run to their nearest library or bookstore immediately. Pratchett's novels, and being able to watch his long and constantly evolving career has been one of my greatest joys as a reader.

If you're a writer, when you get to that last page, head on back and start again, with an eye toward what a master can teach you.

Monomyth

2010-01-12T19:07:00.000-06:00

Sorry for the late bloggery. I'm still getting the hang of life with baby + actually getting stuff done.

This week, our topic is the "monomyth" (sometimes called the hero's journey). Monomyth is a plotting framework that was first detailed in 1949 by Joseph Campbell. It has become more popular in recent years, but still isn't widely known, so I thought I'd add it to our list of writing tools.

The main idea of monomyth is that many stories, from ancient myth to modern novel, follow a similar plot structure (as detailed here or here). Many stories contain some of the steps, few contain all of them. And, since the monomyth is defined for a single protagonist, it can become much more complicated if your story has several important viewpoint characters.

The original guide to monomyth is Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. If you're not interested enough to buy the book though, there are plenty of related sites online.

Like any framework or system for writing, take what's useful from it, but don't forget to inject your own creativity. Some stories and movies that used the monomyth framework have been criticized for their lack of originality. You need not include every step.

A Busy Start to the New Year

2010-01-04T19:00:00.000-06:00

Well, 2009 has come to a close, and 2010 looks to be an interesting year. My son, Linus, came into the world with just three days to spare in '09. We're still getting used to having the little guy around, lack of sleep schedule and all of that, but he's wonderful. I already have a hard time remembering what life was like without him.

In writing news, I'm working on a new project. It's akin to NaNoWriMo, but focused on short fiction. I'm calling it 7 Stories, 7 Days, and it's just like it sounds. I'll write one short story per day for a week. Like NaNo, outlining is done beforehand, and revision after. The week is just for writing the first draft. I'll post a progress update when I get into it.

I'll try to scout out some writing resources for next week's blog. Hope everyone had a great Christmas season and is enjoying the new year.

Baby time!

2009-12-28T13:22:00.001-06:00

No new blog this week. We're having a baby.

The Writer's Complete Fantasy Reference

2009-12-20T15:00:00.000-06:00

Unless you're reading the OED, never believe a book that claims to be a Complete Reference for anything. The Complete Fantasy Reference is no exception. It is a wide, shallow survey of topics, and seems to purposefully avoid delving into any details. Unfortunately, like many of the books churned out by Writer's Digest Press, it just feels...soulless to me.

There are ten chapters, focusing on the real-world bases for common fantasy constructs. Far too much of the text is taken up by lists, which struck me as a cheap way to fill out pages. Four entire chapters (Commerce, Trade and Law; Creatures of Myth and Legend; Arms, Armor and Armies; and Anatomy of a Castle) are nothing but glossaries for a specific topic and offer no real analysis.

As expected, the primary focus is the traditional high fantasy setting, cemented by Tolkien and based on midieval Europe and Nordic myth. The chapters on world cultures and magic spend some time covering the Americas and a little bit of Asia, but don't get any deeper than terms and quick definitions. Since most readers are far less familiar with these cultures and mythologies than medieval Europe, it's unfortunate that there wasn't more.

Overall, the book will serve best as a light reference of terms, and a jumping-off point for deeper research. Don't buy it expecting to become an expert in...well, anything. If, however, you'd like a desktop reference to guide your internet searches and library checkouts, it can still be useful.
Be aware though, if you're already confident in your research skills and have an internet connection, you could just as easily do without.

Reading Like a Writer

2009-12-13T19:57:00.000-06:00

Most books on writing tell you what not to do. Classes, books and workshops are almost always focused on the "rules" of writing. There are those who are willing to admit that great writers break the rules, but usually it's just lip service. Nobody wants to tell new writers that frankly, they can do whatever they can get away with. This is Prose's message, and it's refreshing.

Her contention is that it's more important for a writer to learn what to write than what not to write, and the way to do this is to read great fiction and study each word, like an engineer disassembling a machine to see how it works. She starts with a chapter on word choice and expands into sentences, then paragraphs, and finally into the broad lenses of narration, character, dialogue, etc. The central theme of the book is always words and how they fit together.

Examples from short stories, novellas and novels are liberally sprinkled throughout each chapter to illuminate Prose's points. These are helpful, but the scope is a bit too limited for my taste. Prose makes a big deal of reading widely, but the pieces showcased are all literary fiction, and most of them are decades, if not centuries, old. There is little modern fiction, and nothing that so much as skirts the edges of genre fiction. Science fiction is mentioned exactly once, in passing, with a vaguely derisive tone. But, as sad as it is, I suppose this is to be expected from the lit fic crowd.

Still, the examples illustrate the points they were intended to illustrate. In the sea of books on plotting, characters, and other macro-structural elements, the focus on micro-structure, on words and details, is refreshing. Equally important is the emphasis on what can be done, rather than what shouldn't. The message is positive: there have been innumerable authors in the past who have done amazing things with words. You can too.

Blinded With Science

2009-12-06T12:50:00.000-06:00

One of the genres I write in is science fiction. In addition to the usual story elements (plot, character, etc) science fiction requires the author to look at existing technologies, trends and cultures, and extrapolate how they might affect society ten, fifty, or a hundred years from now.

Good science fiction authors study the ways that technologies and cultural shifts have occurred in the past. They also look for exciting new advances, things that seem likely to change our lives when they become commonplace. By looking at cutting edge technologies in the light of similar past technologies, they try to predict future possibilities.

Whether or not the above made any sense, the important takeaway is that science fiction authors need to keep up with the latest science news if they want their writing to be fresh and exciting. I'll go over a few science news resources that I find useful.

Discover magazine is probably the easiest resource to use. They cover science news in a layman's-terms format that is very easy reading and doesn't require you to be an expert in a given field. This is also the one deficiency of the magazine though: sometimes, a little more detail would be nice, even if it gets technical.

Scientific American magazine trends in the opposite direction. They have more of a journal format and cover topics a little more deeply. As a consequence, it's sometimes dry reading, but always informative.

Wired magazine is a pop-technology news source that keeps things lively, but doesn't delve too deep into the technical details. They seem to be the most tech-savvy of the three magazines, and have a great web presence. Most of the interesting stuff comes out of the Science section, but the Danger Room and Epicenter blogs are also worth reading, covering military and business technology respectively.

Finally, I should mention Twitter. Besides telling everyone what you had for lunch, Twitter is the best aggregator of real-time news content in the history of man. Following the right people on Twitter ensures that you'll learn about the latest life-changing technology within minutes of the article being published.

The magazines listed above all have Twitter feeds: @DiscoverMag, @SciAm, @Wired (and @WiredScience). Science fiction authors Cory Doctorow (@Doctorow) and William Gibson (@GreatDismal) will also point you toward lots of interesting articles.

Scrivener

2009-11-29T22:32:00.000-06:00

It's over!

I had a great Thanksgiving, with lots of great food, family, and writing. I finished about 50 pages and got my 50,000 words with a whole day to spare.
It helps to have a four-day weekend (and no internet) to finish off the month.

I tried two writing tools this November that helped considerably. I already reviewed Write or Die. The other tool is called Scrivener.

In the past, I've tried one or two other writing tools designed specifically for writers, and I haven't been happy with any of them. The problem with all of them was that they forced the user to outline or write in a specific way. Scrivener is different.

First, it's flexible. It allows you to organize any number of files and folders in an expandable tree hierarchy that 99% of computer users will recognize instantly. This makes it easy to switch between different chapters, or between your draft and your notes. You can also rearrange and combine files with a click.

Setting up each chapter as a separate file and then being able to combine them is useful for organization, but the other great outlining feature is the cork board. This view allows you to see every file in a selected folder as a note card. This lets you associate titles, summaries, or any other section-specific information with each chapter, and this information can also be displayed as a sidebar. This makes it easy to see your outline at a glance and rearrange at will.

It also does a good job with formatting, even supporting some unusual options like footnotes, but it probably can't compete with a word processor like Word or Open Office when it comes to detailed formatting. Scrivener does support a variety of formats for export, so it's easy to move into another program once the writing is done.

Scrivener is currently Mac only, but PowerPC and Intel processors are supported. It costs $40 normally, but there are discounts for students and NaNoWriMo participants. For NaNoWriMo winners, it only costs $20. When my one-month free trial expires, I plan on buying.

NaNoWriMo, Week 4

2009-11-23T18:43:00.000-06:00

NaNoWriMo progresses: only one week left. I'm currently at 30000 words, plus whatever I can get through tonight. I may not write that consistent 1667 per day, but I'll hit 50k by the end of the month (or die trying). Hopefully the four-day weekend will make it easy.

For anyone else who's finding themselves getting behind (and perhaps fighting writer's block), LK Hamilton recently had a couple of posts on her blog enumerating ways to get the plot unstuck and deal with plot and character problems. As always, what works for one person may not work for another, but she's written something like 30 books and plenty of bestsellers, so it's worth reading.

Aside from writing, I've mostly been sleeping, working, and enjoying my birthday presents: the first 3 seasons of 30 Rock on DVD. Now if you hear me shouting "I want to go to there", you'll know why.

Write or Die!

2009-11-08T21:22:00.000-06:00

This is going to be a brief post about a fun little tool I found through the NaNoWriMo website. It's called Write or Die! and there's a reason its creator goes by the name of Dr. Wicked.

The idea is simple. For NaNoWriMo (and many would argue, any first draft) getting words on the page is much more important than getting the right words. But every writer knows, it's hard to turn off the inner editor. Changing a single word turns in to rewriting a sentence, or a paragraph. Before you know it, you've spent a half hour rewriting a section that won't make it into the final draft anyway.

Write or Die! teaches quick, nonstop writing in much the same way as that nun in Catholic school who slaps your hand with the ruler when you screw up. Depending on your level of seriousness, you can choose different settings. You're given a text box, and you start writing, working toward a specific word count. If you stop typing for more than a second or two, the colors get angrier. If you don't get back to work (and you chose the really evil settings) your typing will start to undo itself word by word. This is a slightly terrifying experience, and you will quickly develop a Pavlovian response. You may develop a compulsive urge to type every time you see the color red.

I know very well that this tool is not for everyone. However, I'd encourage every writer to give it a try. You may be surprised to discover how much of your 'writing' time is spent with your fingers at a standstill. I suspect long-term use will increase anyone's efficiency, at least when it comes to first drafts.

When you're doing your revisions, I suspect you'll be better served by Word.

NaNoWriMo 2009 Begins!

2009-11-01T20:05:00.000-06:00

It's November 1st, and that means it's time for another year of literary abandon. If you haven't signed up yet, there's still time: www.nanowrimo.org.

This time around, I'm writing a steampunk story, with an arabian nights sort of twist. I've never written steampunk before, and I think this will be the most challenging world-building exercise of any story I've written.

I stayed up Saturday night to do a little midnight writing. It just feels right to start off the event at the exact moment the writing can begin. Then, this (Sunday) afternoon, Kelsey and I went to a write-in at the local library. It looks like the Twin Cities NaNoWriMo scene is hopping: there were probably thirty people who showed up for the four hour event.

Between my midnight writing and the write-in, I clocked in at about 2500 words. Not outrageously prolific, but a little bit of a head start on the daily 1667.

The Daily Writer

2009-10-25T19:43:00.000-05:00

Each page of The Daily Writer relates to a single topic and provides an exercise. Unfortunately, the book is designed to be as general as possible, and as a result it covers too wide a range of topics. The exercises ask you to work on novels, short stories, essays, poems, and other forms. While some people may like the variety, I would prefer to see two or three versions of this book that focus on fiction, nonfiction and poetry.

There are a couple ways to use the book. You can follow the title and do an exercise per day. If this helps motivate you to write regularly, then go for it. Personally, I found some of the exercises useful, and others much less so, and I tend to pick and choose the ones I want to devote time to. You could also use the book simply as a series of writing prompts to use when the creative part of your mind needs a jump start.

Ebooks, Dragons and Rising Conflict

2009-10-18T19:34:00.000-05:00

I delved into the ebook scene recently. I didn't buy a Kindle, or any other ebook reader. My device of choice: the iPhone. It's priced similarly to other readers, but has the advantage of being a device of many talents - phone, browser, gaming platform, camera, and ebook platform to boot.

Yes, the phone screen is small. It might hold a fourth of a standard paperback page. Honestly, I thought this would be irritating, but when I actually started reading it didn't bother me at all. The backlit screen is also an asset (the Kindle's obsession with the paper-like screen means no backlight).

However, the biggest advantage of the iPhone is the ability to have books in your pocket all the time. I can buy and download in seconds. I can read in the car, on the elevator, at lunch, and anywhere else I have a couple minutes to spare. I discovered that I can read incredibly fast on the phone, because I can utilize all those little moments in the day that would be wasted otherwise.

I wasn't sure I'd like reading on the phone at first, so the books I downloaded from Amazon initially were the free offerings. The first of these was His Majesty's Dragon, by Naomi Novik. This was a smart move on Amazon's part, because it's the first book in the Temeraire series, which is currently five books and growing. I've read the first three.

The Temeraire series is alternate-history fantasy, set in the Nepoleonic Wars. But this time, there are dragons. Novik does something I've never seen before: she envisions dragons used almost as machines of war by European armies. Each one carries not only a captain, but an entire crew of fighters and gunners. Ground crews and harness craftsmen form an additional layer of support. Dragons aren't super-beings, determining battles entirely with their own power. Instead, they are just another strategic asset in each military conflict. This interpretation strikes me as very believable, and it makes for interesting battles, as well as interesting dynamics between the dragon corps of England and the rest of the army and civilian cultures.

The series is easy, fun reading, but there is one thing that Novik does remarkably well. Every story needs rising conflict: that constant "out of the frying pan, into the fire" series of problems that the characters have to deal with. She is an expert at it.

In the Temeraire books, rising conflict is often personified as Napoleon. No matter what England or its allies do, Napoleon is always one step ahead. Every time they think they've scored a victory, they discover they've been playing into his hand.

As a writer, it's always helpful to keep this idea in mind. As the characters move through the story, think to yourself, "what would Napoleon do?" Every time they think they've succeeded, pull the rug out from under them. Even when they think they've sunk as low as they can, make their situation worse. That's what keeps the story interesting. That's what keeps the reader turning pages.

Twin Cities Book Festival

2009-10-11T21:00:00.000-05:00

Kelsey and I went to the Twin Cities Book Festival this weekend, which was a lot of fun. The new and used bookseller sections were crowded, but it was interesting to see all the small press booths.

We caught the last few minutes of the "Future of Poetry" panel, but it seemed like the sort of pretentious literary preening I could do without. Granted, I'm nowhere near a poetry expert, but I feel like poetry should be a "punch you in the stomach" visceral experience, not an exercise in linguistic analysis.

After that, we went to Nicholson Baker's session. He read a passage from The Anthologist, which seemed like the sort of lighthearted literary novel where you don't really go anywhere, but you have a lot of fun along the way.

Next, we saw Robert Olen Butler, who did a reading from his latest novel, Hell. It was fun, but I got the feeling that reading the book would be like watching Family Guy: so many pop culture references that I probably wouldn't get half of them.

He also talked about Twitter as a marketing medium. As part of Hell's release, he created the @TweetsFromHell and garnered hundreds of followers.

Finally, he talked about college-level creative writing programs. He said (I paraphrase) "most programs teach students parts 2 through 10 of the writing process, but they don't teach them the first thing about writing" and this also applied to lit criticism classes. These classes teach the analysis and dissection of art. To Butler, this is good, but (paraphrase again) "they should tell students at the end of the class, forget everything you learned in this class." Internalizing good technique can help, but analytical writing doesn't produce art.

In fact, the gist of all this was that writing (and reading) must first and foremost be the creation (and appreciation) of art, and true art garners a visceral, sensual reaction. Stories can't come from the application of analysis and application of rules, they have to come from "the place where you dream."

I couldn't agree more.

The last thing he talked about was a fascinating teaching project (Butler is a creative writing professor at Florida State). Over the course of 17 short (1-2 hr) sessions, he wrote a short story from initial idea to final polished draft. Through the entire process, he had a webcam recording, so you can actually watch all of his writing and editing in real time. He also added a few explanations and comments along the way.

The entire series is about 30 hours long, so I haven't watched through it, but it sounds incredibly illuminating, and I plan to watch the whole thing when I have time. You can find it here.

Next up was Christian Bök (pronounced "book"), which was a bit of a mind-boggling experience. If you don't know anything about Bök, he's best-known as a sound poet (though he pointed out he does do other things - he just doesn't want to bore his audiences with his more "Episcopalian works").

While Bök is best known as a writer, he is every bit a performer. He is able to speak gibberish at a mile a minute, and it is fascinating to behold. Sound poetry was popular among the post-WWI Dada artists, and he performed several pieces from that period. He also read some of his own work, including excerpts from his five-chapter book Eunoia (free online version). Each chapter is named after a vowel, and it is the only vowel in the words of that chapter.

He also talked briefly about a recent project, where he is inventing a poem that can be enciphered into DNA. This DNA poem will be built in such a way that it encodes a protein, and this protein, by the same cipher, will be yet another poem. Oh, and it will be implanted into a bacterium. This bacterium is an extremophile that can survive deadly radiation, intense heat and cold, and the vacuum of space. It self-repairs mutations in its DNA, and thus has remained essentially unchanged for millions of years. It is possible that this creature, with the poem embedded, could survive until the sun burns out, thus ensuring the near-immortality of Bök's work.

This is the sort of man that he is. Also Canadian. So that was pretty interesting.

The final session was billed as "Publishing Workshop: From Idea to Manuscript to Book." Unfortunately, the entire thing turned out to be about small-press POD and self-publishing (i.e. paying to be published). Conventional publishing was entirely ignored. I stayed for about half the session, which mostly consisted of the panelists describing their wonderful books. I was a bit disappointed.

Still, it was definitely a great event and a great day. I highly recommend it to anyone who lives in or around the Twin Cities.

Police Procedure and Investigation

2009-10-04T16:39:00.000-05:00

The entertainment industry has taken a great deal of interest in law enforcement in recent years, with police procedural dramas, crime scene investigators, and courtroom dramas saturating the prime-time airwaves. Unfortunately, while these shows are careful to cultivate an image of realism, they're often not as accurate as they'd like you to believe. Sometimes the entertainment factor trumps realism.

I'd like to think that the readers of the world are looking for more credibility in fiction than in TV shows and movies. That means lots of research for the writer who wants to depict law enforcement in their book or story.

Police Procedure is a great desk reference, covering topics from procedure to police academy to courts to prisons and jails. Lofland makes this easy reading with anecdotes from his decades of police experience. He also points out many of the common fallacies that have been spread by pop entertainment.

This book is a must-have for murder mystery writers, but I recommend it for any writer who plans to incorporate a police perspective in their work. It will be invaluable when you can't remember what rank a homicide detective is likely to be, or how many weeks it takes to get through police academy, or what the difference between prison and jail is.

Interpersonal Relationships in SF & F

2009-09-27T19:36:00.000-05:00

A recent article on the Critters site claims that "great" science-fiction and fantasy tends to devote more words to the characters' interpersonal relationships than mediocre fiction does. It also claimed that SF and F as a whole spends much less time on interpersonal relationships than general or literary fiction. Depending on what you read, this may or may not surprise you.

Firstly, I think it's worth noting that the study which inspired the linked article was done in a scientific way, but was by no means rigorous. It's likely that the conclusions are true, but not exactly certain.

The point the article tries to make is that devoting more of the story to your characters' relationships will make it better. Regardless of the scientific merit of the study, this assertion is worth considering.

I looked at two of my own pieces under this light: the novel that I just finished (but haven't thoroughly edited) and a short story that I'm in the process of writing.

In the novel, a number of my characters benefited. It's easy to look at a character's individual conflicts, and even the ways a character changes through the book, but not properly analyze the relationships between the characters. However, after devoting some thought to this, I think it's fair to say that if your characters are changing, their relationships with one another will too. I've found that in some cases, the change in relationships is the most illuminating way to reveal the changes in characters.

I was also surprised to find that delving into relationships was extremely useful in the short story. There are only two main characters, but looking at their relationship, and their relationships with the minor characters as a whole, revealed the interesting aspects of the plot to me in a way that I didn't understand when I started the project.

Imogen Heap - Ellipse

2009-09-23T10:00:00.000-05:00

I've been a fan of Imogen Heap for years, so I was a little surprised to discover that her latest album has been out for a month and I'd gone and forgot about it. Remedied with a download.

The last thing I heard by Imogen was Glittering Cloud, off the album Plague Songs
(about the 12 biblical plagues of Egypt). That song was everything I expect from I.H., and I had high expectations of this album.

Unfortunately, the reviews that I've read seem pretty mixed, as is the album. It's the same amazingly versatile voice, the same complex mixing, layering and electro-shenanigans, but it just doesn't have the same mind-blowing effect as some of her earlier work. There are a lot of great little bits (and I'm sure I'll find more as I listen to it a few times), but many of the songs just didn't gel for me.

Most of the tracks are worthy of 3 stars. They're good, moody background music - something I can listen to while I write, without being distracted. "First Train Home" was heavily hyped, but I didn't think it stood out from the rest (I enjoyed the instrumental version more).

One notable exception is "Aha!", with bass-heavy instrumentation, twitchy melody and a stringy ending. All of it comes together into something pleasantly dark, with a dash of klezmer and parts that reminded me of children's toys.

The undeniable star of the show is "Canvas". The more I listen to it, the better it gets. Guitar, piano and violin are juxtaposed to eerie effect. The drum is a heartbeat. The poetic lyrics are stark and pristine.

The music video for the song is exceptionally artistic and reflects it perfectly:

There are two versions of Ellipse on iTunes and Amazon: the standard album for $9.99 and another with instrumental versions of all the songs for $12.99 (note: it's more expensive on Amazon for some reason). I opted for the latter, and I'm glad I did. You get double the tracks for 30% more, and I thought some of the instrumental versions were more enjoyable than their counterparts.

If you're already a fan of Imogen, you'll have to buy the album. If you're new to her, I'd suggest starting with Details or Speak for Yourself.

The Portable MFA in Creative Writing

2009-09-20T12:00:00.000-05:00

Raise your hand if you believe any book that claims to pack two years of graduate school into 280 pages. (You in the back, put your hand down, this is serious).

I will say right now, I do not have an MFA in creative writing, and unless I suddenly come upon enough money to support my family for the rest of my life, I probably never will. Instead, I read this book, and I actually enjoyed it.

The authors of The Portable MFA all teach at the New York Writers Workshop, and they're quick to point out that MFA programs are not all they're cracked up to be. They make it quite plain that such programs are not necessary for writers, and can actually be extremely detrimental.

The introduction conveniently lists all the useful lessons you're likely to get from such a program:
1) Write what you know; don't write what you don't know.
2) Flashy style and language without a story to tell is "all dressed up with nowhere to go."
3) Writing can't be taught.
4) Cut out adverbs.
5) Never use the word "always."
6) "You will never be fictionists."
7) Don't write screenplays; they will destroy your ability to write prose fiction.
8) There are kinds of stories.

So...why write the rest of the book? And why read it?

For starters, the authors don't claim to have it all figured out, and they seem to genuinely want to help aspiring writers, not just make a sale off of them. They tell you what the established 'rules' are, but they also offer examples of great writing that breaks them. The only real rule is that you can write "whatever you can get away with, but you'll find you can't get away with much."

The book is split into five sections, by five authors: Fiction, Personal Essay/Memoir, Magazine Writing, Poetry, and Playwriting. If you find that discouraging, don't. I rarely write anything but fiction, and I found that section extremely usable, and the other sections offered interesting insights into other types of writing. The book is a great jumping-off point for any of these types of writing, and it's probably even better if you're looking to expand your repetoire or just experiment.

Each section offers several exercises to try and an extensive reading list. Of course, these lists of "great literature" are biased toward the authors' preferences, and they're fairly limited in genre (I didn't recognize any SF/F). However, if you're like me and you read in mostly one genre, it's worth exploring some other areas of literature, and these lists are great for that. Although I've only read a couple of the novels and stories mentioned, almost all the ones I recognized were fantastic. I have no reason to believe the rest of the list won't be of the same quality.

I think this book is one of the few that should be on almost every writer's bookshelf. It's unpretentious and lays out the kind of 'refresher rules' that are good to remind yourself of once or twice a year. Its broad view of writing also serves as an important reminder: regardless of what you write, you're not in a vacuum. There's a huge world of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and play out there.

Anansi Boys

2009-09-16T10:00:00.000-05:00

Let's admit, right up front, that if Neil Gaiman typed up 350 pages of repeated A's, we would all head down to the local bookstore and buy the paperback edition for $15. He has become an institution, an icon in the world of fantasy fiction, and it's not without good reason that his books are consistently at the top of the bestseller lists.

I just read Anansi Boys (yes, I'm a little behind the times). The mythological themes were similar to American Gods, but the tone of the book was much more light-hearted and comedic.

My main complaint was the level of backstory. The plot doesn't really get going for 40 or 50 pages, and there are a couple of spots where Gaiman lists information in a very encyclopedic way. The little turns of phrase and plot points are amusing, but it takes a while before the story really feels like it's progressing.

However, once I got into the story, it was the usual Gaiman genius. This time around, he seemed to be channelling the ghost of Douglas Adams, with lines like this:

"You're no help," he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only a lime: there was nothing special about it at all. It was doing the best it could.

I'd wholeheartedly recommend the book, and I'm sure I'll continue reading everything else the man writes. My only worry is that Gaiman has reached the Stephen King level of literary rockstardom. I hope his editors don't become afraid to point out the few spots where he can improve. Here's hoping he'll just keep getting better.

Freelancer's Guide

2009-09-13T16:11:00.000-05:00

If you ask an aspiring writer what their biggest dream is, you'll probably get one of two answers. Either they will say "getting my novel published", or if they're dreaming big, "being able to write full-time".

Unfortunately, it's not easy to make a living writing fiction. However, there are plenty of people who would like to try. Do a Google search for the title of this post, and you'll get more than 16 million results.

The guide that I like, however, is Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Freelancing Guide. She's a very successful, talented pro writer, and she's been doing it for some time. She's giving her advice for free (but appreciates donations), and she has a nice list of things to think about before taking the plunge.

I encourage anyone who's considering becoming a full-time writer to read her articles. She goes over some of the things that you should think about, including taxes, insurance, time-management, and more.

After reading, you'll probably have a list of things to figure out before you quit your day job. Still, you'll be much better prepared, and if you do decide to give it a try, you'll be much better equipped to succeed.

Nathan Bransford

2009-09-06T10:00:00.000-05:00

A month or two back, I posted about the Ms. Snark blog. That's a great resource for getting the agent perspective, and still probably my favorite agent blog of all time - even though it's only an archive these days, never to be updated again .

However, there are many other literary agents who are still active on the blog scene. Nathan Bransford is one I follow regularly on his blog and twitter. He's got the right mix of writing advice, industry info, and good old fashioned fun to keep the blog lively. He posts a lot. He's also very sympathetic toward the hordes of unpublished writers, which I'm sure can be challenging for someone who regularly deals with the slush pile.

For anyone who's still in the early stages of their writing career, I recommend the "Essentials" list on the right side of his blog. From there, you'll probably find plenty of other interesting posts to go through.

Posting Schedule

2009-08-30T19:27:00.000-05:00

Because I have a lot going on these days (don't we all?) my posting schedule has been irregular at best. Don't worry, blog. I still love you. You have not been forgotten.

What? Don't believe me? Fine. From this point forward, I'm going to post every Sunday. Sometimes I may post more than that. Come hell or high water, or even vacation, I will post on Sunday though.

If, for some reason, you just can't wait for the comfort of my words, you can always check out my twitter account at http://twitter.com/samueltjohnston. It may not be a plethora of useful information like this blog, but it will update daily.

Critiques

2009-08-30T18:07:00.000-05:00

I mentioned critiques in the previous post. This is a subject big enough for several posts, but for now I'm going to just describe some of the advantages of giving and receiving critiques, and offer some options for critique groups.

First, we should be clear on what a critique is. A critique is a (preferably detailed) explanation of a reader's experience with a story. It should be more than just a thumbs-up/thumbs-down review. It should also be more than just praise -- no story is perfect. The majority of a critique should focus on things that could be improved. Improvement is the whole point of critiquing.

The obvious goal of a critique is to help the writer (the critiquee?) improve his or her story. However, there are lots of benefits to the person critiquing which are often overlooked.

Critiquing someone else's story helps you improve as a writer. You begin to develop an editorial eye for everything you read, including your own work. You start to notice common mistakes and weaknesses, which helps you avoid them in your own writing. This process isn't always obvious as it's happening, but it will make a major difference in your writing.

When you get your own stories critiqued, it also helps you in multiple ways. Your critiquers will show you holes in your plot, bad word choices, and the parts of your story that are unclear or just plain boring. Every writer misses things, usually because they've written and rewritten the piece, edited it and read over it repeatedly. The writer also has the story perfectly presented in their mind, and sometimes its easy to see that story instead of what is actually on the page.

So, getting critiques helps you clean up the weak points in your story. Once you've gotten used to being critiqued, you'll also begin to anticipate some of your readers' questions before they're even raised. You'll get better at reading your own stories as a reader, not just as a writer. You'll also begin to build up a thick hide, which is a must for any writer. Get used to criticism. Embrace it. Use it.

Since there are so many benefits, how does one start giving and receiving critiques?

Friends and family. This is where beginning writers frequently turn. However, this can be dangerous. These people like you. They don't want to hurt your feelings (hopefully!). You also probably love them, so it may hurt a lot more to get negative feedback from them. Friends and family tend to be soft critiquers, unless you can really train them to not hold back.
Your better half. As far as I am concerned, a spouse is an invaluable resource to a writer. Granted, you can encounter the same problems I mentioned about other friends and family if you're not careful. However, your spouse probably wants you to succeed in your writing as much as you do. Since writing tends to be a very solitary affair, you might be surprised how appreciative your husband or wife is to be included in the process. Make it clear that you want their criticism, and feel free to tell them what sorts of issues to look for. After they read, discuss the story with them. As you grow as a writer, your spouse will get better at critiquing. Writing stops being a solitary experience where you abandon them to go type for hours. Instead it becomes a fun, collaborative effort.
Workshops and local critique groups. I have little personal experience with these, so I won't say much. If you can find or found a group that works well for you, go for it. For many of us though, this isn't a very practical option. (If anyone has any personal experiences they'd like to share, please comment. I'm curious to hear what your experiences have been like.)
The Internet. This encompasses a wide range of options, but again I'll only cover what I have experience with.
The type of online group that's easiest to find are is the sort that allow unrestricted posting of stories and unrestricted reading and commenting. The largest example is probably Fictionpress, but there are several similar sites.
The main problem that I have with these sites is their lack of structure. Most comments on a story tend to be fluff and very rarely offer any useful criticisms. There's no advantage to offering someone a good critique. In many cases, people are outright offended by well-meant, honest criticism. Many of the people who use these sites don't aspire to professionalism, they write solely for fun. Don't misunderstand me, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I just think it's not a very nourishing environment for writers who want to push themselves to improve.
The other major problem with these sites is that anyone can read your story. My understanding is that publishers may perceive this as using your first electronic publishing rights, and possibly others, and may make it harder to sell your work.
Online critique groups. Unlike the other internet sites, these groups require you to join the group before you can access manuscripts. They may enforce other rules as well, like requiring regular critiques. They tend to be populated by serious writers. They also eliminate some of the inefficiencies of writing groups that meet in person. I'm a member of one such group, Critters, so I'll explain that in a little more detail.

Critters (www.critters.org) is a critique group for science-fiction, fantasy, and horror writers. Members may submit one of their works into The Queue, and each week the twenty or thirty manuscripts at the top are available for critique. There are only a couple rules. A critique must be at least 200 words (not counting quoted material) to get credit. Each member must submit at least 3 such critiques for every four weeks of membership. Members whose ratio is too low cannot have their stories critiqued.

This relatively simple system works well, and is mostly automated. Impressively, it's run by a single person, but it serves hundreds of active members. Because participation is enforced, you can easily get 5-15 genuinely helpful critiques of a short story (there is a slightly different system for novels). The requirement also helps motivate you to do critiques yourself, gaining all the associated benefits.

As you can probably guess, I highly recommend this sort of online critique group.

Motivators

2009-07-22T00:10:00.000-05:00

Like many writers, I have bouts of intense laziness. I enjoy writing a lot, but sometimes it's tough to plunk myself down in front of the keyboard when I could be outside, or reading, or playing games and watching TV.

For some people, the problem is writer's block, but it's easy to get distracted even when you know what you want to write. The majority of us have day jobs, and it's just not always a happy prospect to work 8+ hours, then come home and concentrate on writing.

I've found two things that help me self-motivate, and they both come down to making goals with deadlines.

First: graphing.
On the Critters.org site, there's an article on writing motivation (http://www.critters.org/writing-productivity.ht), and one of the things they suggest is to make goals and chart them. I graph the number of words of fiction I write every day. My default goal is 1000 daily. The chart is posted in my living room.

For some people, having the chart out where others can see it may be a big motivator. This mostly depends on how worried you are about what people think, and if you live with people who are willing to mercilessly mock you every time you miss a goal. Personally, I don't live with anyone who will call me out if they see a 0 words day on the graph. However, when I miss a day or two, I notice it much more now, and I have the desire to bring that line back up.

I also graph the number of critiques I do in a week, but that's a subject for a different post.

Second: NaNoWriMo
For those who aren't in the know, it stands for National Novel Writing Month (http://www.nanowrimo.org). It started as a crazy idea among a few friends and blossomed into a non-profit organization and a sort of cultural movement.

It's exactly what it sounds like. You write a novel (the first draft anyway) in a month. For NaNoWriMo purposes, a novel is a single story 50k words or longer. The whole thing goes down every November.

There are a lot of great benefits to writing a novel in a month, especially for aspiring writers. Pros may not find the 1667 words per day too daunting, but it can certainly be a challenge when you don't write for a living.

Writing that much, that fast, teaches you to squelch your inner editor for that first draft. You may find your story carried in strange directions you didn't expect. Personally, I love this. I don't like to outline too heavily before the first draft so I can feel free to explore the paths that open up in the writing process.

It also gets you into a good rhythm. If you miss a day or two, it's tough to catch up. The time limit forces you to write on a daily basis. For people who only write one or two days a week (as I used to do), this can make a surprisingly big difference. With a deadline looming, you may find little times to write that you hadn't thought about before: your lunch break, the bus ride, after the kids go to bed. You may find that you have more time to write than you thought.

Besides the main event in November, there are several spin-offs.
National Novel Editing Month is March - Edit 50 hours. (http://www.nanoedmo.net)
Script Frenzy is in April - Write a 100 page screen/stage play. (http://www.scriptfrenzy.org). Another novel writing month is in July, in case November didn't work or you couldn't get enough. (http://www.julnowrimo.com)

Ms. Snark

2009-07-08T07:00:00.000-05:00

To many unpublished authors, agents and editors are mysterious figures, lurking in the shadows of publishing. They are unknowable and impossible to fathom. To those who have sent their work out to a few places, they're often treated with contempt. They clearly know nothing if they rejected the author's fabulous masterwork, right?

This post is a bit late to get on the bandwagon for Ms. Snark, as she actually stopped writing the blog a couple years ago. However, it's still a great resource for anyone who hasn't encountered it before.

Ms. Snark is the pen name of a literary agent who is...well...snarky. The blog offers some great insights into what it's like to be an agent. It explains the reasons for some of the practices that seem irrational, stupid, or downright mean to many aspiring authors.

Ms. Snark also spent a lot of time explaining proper etiquette and formatting of cover letters and manuscripts. She expounds on what makes a good or bad agent, and what scammery to watch out for. Lots of other stuff about writing well and getting published, from all different sides of the industry.

Granted, some of this stuff is opinionated, but that's okay because Ms. Snark tends to have interesting opinions. Lots of other agents and editors have blogs, and I haven't gotten hooked on any of them. The great thing about Snark is that she has great personality. She provides useful information, but she's also just plain fun to read.

Duotrope's Digest

2009-07-05T14:45:00.000-05:00

If you write short fiction, you should know about Duotrope. It's a web-based listing of publishers sorted by genre, length, pay, response times, etc. It is kept up to date and it is free (donation supported).

I prefer Duotrope over the similar WritersMarket specifically because of its different business model. WritersMarket is funded by paid subscriptions, and when I did subscribe there was a steady stream of advertisements sent my way. The overall feeling I got was that, yes, they provide a useful service, but the primary goal was to separate me from my money.

Duotrope just sits quietly over there, waiting until I need it. I get the feeling that the people behind it just wanted to make something useful. I'd much prefer to donate to a lovingly crafted site than pay for the heartless, corporate version.

Some other useful features on Duotrope include a personal submissions tracker (requires creating a login) and a submission deadline calendar for the publications they follow.

OSC

2009-06-29T20:06:00.000-05:00

Orson Scott Card is one of my favorite spec-fic authors. He writes well, and he's prolific. He is also a great writing teacher. If you write science fiction or fantasy, you should check him out.

Normally I don't give much credence to those who claim their systems will make you a better writer. Lots of personal experience has taught me that every writer is different. What works well for one person will be awful for another. However, it can be beneficial to read about the techniques different authors use. You can only develop your own system by trying different things and finding the bits you like.

OSC's lessons are very personal. Some of them are pulled directly from correspondence with other writers. He tells you what works for him, and he explains why. He makes some good arguments against using some of the techniques that are spewed forth in thousands of creative writing classes across the country. Most importantly, he really enjoys reading and writing, and his love of the craft comes through.

There are two specific resources I would suggest: Uncle Orson's Writing Class and How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Opening Statements

2009-06-29T19:39:00.000-05:00

My intent with this blog is to post links and topics that will be useful (or at least interesting) to writers. I may also post about my own writing.

I'm 24, and I've been writing fiction since middle school. I mostly write speculative fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, horror).

My job in software development currently pays the bills, so that will likely creep in from time to time as well.

So come on in, check things out. If you like it, tell your friends. If not, you can keep that to yourself.