Four Things

1. Car shopping still kinda sucks; buying a house was less annoying.
2. I finally got that car-related frisson I was talking about.
3. My sister was right about everything.
4. Does anyone know how they got off the cliff at the end of The Italian Job? I'm asking for a friend...

10 Tips to Get from Idea to Finished Novel (updated): NaNoWriMo

For all those who are warming up to run the NaNoWriMo marathon, here's my annual list of 10 things that I personally try to keep in mind as I turn the idea I scribbled on a napkin into that thing we call a book.

There are ten of them, which makes a handy size for a list.

Ten Tips to Get From Idea to Finished Novel
1. Be interested in your story. 

Writing a novel is a relationship between you and a story. Before you spend hundreds of hours sitting in a chair stringing words together to tell that story, you'd better darn well be sure it's worth the commitment or it will all end in tears.

2. Feed your brain. 

Your brain generates stories from the stuff you cram in there. Give it the fodder it needs to make new and interesting stories and well fleshed-out characters. Ask questions. Pay attention to the world around you. Everything is research. Pay attention. Take notes and snapshots. You never know when you'll need that story about the kid who accidentally ordered a Harrier fighter jet on eBay, or the chap that put lasers on sharks just to prove he could.

3. Ideas are not sacred. 

Don't get so attached to an idea that you're unwilling to allow it to evolve. A story idea is less like the directions from a GPS and more like finding your way through a new city with written directions scrawled on the back of a coffee-stained napkin.

4. Write now; edit later. 

On the first draft, it's your job to put your butt in the chair and put the story on the page. The chair is the only part that's optional. Editing is inevitable, but it is a stage of its own that can wait until later. Your initial goal is to get the story out of your head; everything else follows that.

5. Take small bites. 

A big idea can choke you if you try to eat it all at once. A big idea can choke you if you try to eat it all at once. Writing anything that's as large and complex as the average novel is a lot like the old adage about eating an elephant: Start at one end and take it one bite at a time.

6. Make stuff up. 

Research can be an addictive drug. It's easy to get so wrapped up in the intriguing minutiae of your subject matter that you forget to write a book about it. If it ever gets shelved in a library or bookstore, your novel will be in the fiction section, this gives you license to fake it... within reason, of course.

7. Be a story hoarder.

Never throw anything away. Not everything you create while writing will fit the story you're working on. Hang on to those tidbits and trimmings for later use in this or another story. Some of my favorite odd moments become short stories, the rest go back in the hopper for the next go-round.

8. Step away from the television and/or the Internet.

That might sound odd coming from me, but these mediums are specifically designed to catch your attention and hold it. I've recently begun doing my writing on a computer that is isolated from the internet to combat this. My writing output tripled when we got rid of TV and as a bonus we saved a lot of money each month.

9. Use your own words.

Write with the vocabulary you have. Put away the thesaurus, it's just slowing you down and making you feel self-conscious. Finding your authorial "voice" is about telling the story the way you tell it, not the way Roget would tell it. Let your vocabulary grow organically on its own and in a way that is unique to you as you research and read. Language is a fragile thing and it will break if you try to force it.

10. Finish. 

Writing may make you a writer, but only finishing will make you a novelist. You have to finish the story, even if you have to keep writing into December and January. The inability to write a complete novel in a month doesn't make you a bad writer. Quite the contrary, in fact. 50,000 words isn't a complete novel anyway. An unfinished novel is worth its weight in paper. Keep going until you get to type "The End".  

It pains me somewhat that I can't finish that list with the words "And it's as simple as that".  It's not simple. It's work, this thing that we do. And if you learn nothing else from participating in NaNoWriMo, it should be that.

Writing is hard. Breathing life into the inanimate is supposed to be hard. Don't beat yourself up when you find that it isn't easy.  

However you choose to proceed and whether you reach November 30th with 50,000 words in the kitty or not, you will have learned something, maybe even accomplished something. I will be here on the sidelines, waving a banner and cheering you on. Revel in the words you are putting on the page. Try something that scares you. Read the things being shared by your compatriots if you can find the time. Celebrate the writing. Have fun.

Just remember, the deadline is imaginary, the prizes are fake, but the book you are trying to write can be real.

Best of luck to you all!

-Scott

Advice About Advice: Mind the expiration dates.

Yes, I'm giving advice about advice again. The thunder of approaching typewriters heralds the word avalanche known as NaNoWriMo and the explosion of writing advice posts on every site that even pretends to cater to writers.

I've been fighting a particularly nasty chest cold  recently, so about all I've been up for is reading and sorting through the books on my shelves. The unfortunate fact is that my library has as many books stacked on the floors as it does on the shelves. Which means (gulp) culling the herd.*

I'm sorry, but some of you will just have to go. Don't worry, we'll find new homes for you in the country where you can gambol and play...

In case it hasn't become clear in the past, there are a lot of books on my shelves about the craft of writing and what purport to be maps showing shortcuts through the labyrinth of publishing. Some of them are timeless. Tomes of inspiration that will never die. However, many, if not most of them are well past their expiration date.

Some of them expired before they hit the shelf. It's just that kind of industry these days.

It seems that almost every author of note from Norman Mailer to Ray Bradbury to Stephen King, eventually writes a memoir of the craft, which tracks their rise from being 'That weird kid**' to a giant in a world of words. Nearly all of these books are split about evenly between memoir and advice for new writers.

We like to think that if we follow in the footsteps of the great and the good, that we too can apply their formula and achieve success. That's certainly the conceit of most writing guides. The problem is that the industry that spat out most of the greats either no longer exists or is teetering on the brink of extinction.

As I face the decision on which of these many books to keep and which to discard, in the end it will come down -- as it always does -- to the writing. Unless you have a time machine handy, business and publishing advice from even as late as the 1990's and early 00's is essentially useless. Only the writing advice is timeless.

This is a theme I return to time and again. Just the other day, I talked about how much I liked Neil Gaiman's list of writing rules because it focused almost entirely on the writing. In order to be a writer, Gaiman tells us, you have to write something, and you have to keep writing it until it's finished. This is important because that's the only advice that will outlast the expiration date of all other advice.

Unless it's also a compelling memoir and worth keeping for that fact alone, any writing guide that doesn't boil down to this very simple concept goes in the Goodwill pile.

----

* I would like to apologize in advance to anyone in the Puget Sound region who is startled by the whoop of joy originating from my wife's location wherever she happens to be when she reads that sentence.

** As much as I try to keep away from the idea that there's some sort of universal "writer lifestyle" that we all should aspire to, there's a nearly insurmountable pile of evidence that writers tend to arise from the ranks of "that weird kid".

Writing Guides:: How many rules do we really need?

It is almost November and you know what that means: Writing advice season is about to begin.  It seems to get here earlier every year. The stores are already stocking up with new keyboards and copies of Bird by Bird.  The interwebs are humming with tweets tagged #amwriting and Pinterest boards are filling up with pictures of typewriters and inspirational quotes, some of which I created.

And the lists. Oh my goodness, the lists!

This morning, a friend sent me a link to Neil Gaiman's "8 Rules of writing" over at the Brainpickings blog. I read them because I can't resist that sort of thing, and he entered my brain and wandered the halls, flipping light switches, sliding down stair railings, and poking through the cupboards until he came to the boiler room where all the rest of the "Rules of Writing" have been camping out.

Neil's list was probably greeted at the door by Elmore Leonard's "10 Rules" and introduced around the room by Zadie Smith's "10 Rules" before taking down a copy of Stephen King's "On Writing" and settling in for a nice nap.

I hear there's a great poker game down there on Sunday nights, but they don't invite me.

Writing advice in list form may or may not have begun with Elmore Leonard's famous piece in the New York Times, but he heralded the explosion of such lists.

You would not believe how many lists there are in that tiny room. I'm not even sure myself. Most of them have more to do with surviving life as a writer than how to put words on a page, which is part of what makes Neil's list so commendable -- every item on the list is about writing.  Neil's entire list boils down to "Why are you looking for permission from me? Get out there and write something!"

Not all of them do, which is a problem in my view.

For one thing, lists are deceptive, slippery little beasts. Reading them feels like learning, as though by following the steps of other more successful writers their success will rub off on us. And creating them feels good and making tick marks next to the items is weirdly addictive. We all make to-do lists sometimes just to have the satisfaction of checking things off. I do it all the time and so do you.

Yes you do; don't lie to a blog post.

Everyone does it. Why? Because it gives us the strange illusion of accomplishing something whether we have or not. And writers make it worse because we are so prone to doing the same thing with other people's lists!

Who else does that?

And that is the danger of the many and multiplying lists, even those by authors we like or admire. Reading about writing gives us a false sense of accomplishment. Much like research and blogging, it can give us something to do instead of writing that still feels like we're accomplishing something. I hear people around me pitch list-making as an organizational tool, but I suspect that for most writers at least it's really a procrastination tool.

Which plays handily into the internet's twofold mission to facilitate list-making and disseminate pornography. Procrastination and self-gratification.

At risk of undercutting my own point, I will close with a list of my own.

SCOTT'S THREE RULES FOR WRITING A NOVEL 

1. Apply butt to chair.
2. Apply words to page.
3. The chair is optional.

Whether you are trying NaNoWriMo for the first time, or if you're on your tenth novel, that's all you need. I've said this several times here and elsewhere, but it bears repeating: any list or advice book that does not boil down to "Writers aren't writers if they don't write something" is bad advice on the face of it.

Inspirations for Book Design: A Followup

Unless I start getting more book design gigs, I doubt I'll talk much more about the nuts and bolts of the thing*. If you have questions, post them in the comments thread on this post or the previous one and I'll try my best to answer them or send you someplace that can.

Please Note: The guidelines I jotted down yesterday are neither absolute nor inviolate (except the part about legibility. If I can't read your title, I probably won't read your book.)  Professional designers break the rules all the time. Design rules are like grammar rules: in order to break them, you really need to know what they are first.

That post is purposely incomplete; it's just meant to get you started and keep your cover from getting in your way. It's a starting point; as always, the rest of the journey is up to you.

For Further Reading: Inspirational Links and Places to Get Ideas

• The Casual Optimist:  Dan Wagstaff's beautiful and minimalist blog about books, book design, and the culture of bookstores and book people. Celebrates book design in a way you don't often see, especially the minimalist, retro, and vintage stuff. My advice: Start here.
• The Book Cover Archive: Exactly what it says in the title.  Great stuff. The best of the best. Lots of images and inspiration. (Every image displays first as a thumbnail: proving my point that great design is scalable design.)
• Chronicle Books: Some small publishers get it exactly right. IMO: Chronicle is at the head of that particular pack.
• The Book Designer: a blog about books and design and how they interact. Lots of great stuff.
• Melissa Evans: For those who are wondering "Yeah, but if I do buy that copy of Photoshop, what do I do with it?" I suggest this blog. Melissa is a graphic artist with a boatload of great, easy-to-follow Photoshop tutorials. 

*Yes, I am for available to hire on a freelance basis. If you want to enquire about prices, email me and I'll try my best not to shock you with my quote.

Downhill Without Brakes: Lessons from Calvin & Hobbes

Contrary to earlier claims by a certain rabbit, everything I needed to know in life, I learned from Calvin & Hobbes.

• All you really need is someone who can actually see you.
• Relationships don't care whether anyone else can understand them.
• Make every day an adventure.
• Two words: "Rocketship Underpants."
• Subvert the paradigm; that's what it's there for.
• Your imagination is a tool that should not be allowed to rust.
• It's always more fun to get dirty than it is to clean up afterward.
• Adults don't know what they're doing either. (Shhhhh! Don't tell anyone.)
• There are very few situations in which a space helmet and cape aren't appropriate attire.
• You craft your own reality; don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise.
• All the preparation in the world doesn't guarantee success.
• "You might get hurt" is a lousy reason not to try.
• Life is a downhill ride in a wagon with no brakes. The best you can hope for is to make as big an impact as you can at the end.

The 5 Most Useful P2T Posts for NaNoWriMo

At the request of several friends who are too busy trying to hit 50,000 words to paw through the archives for inspiration, I've assembled my personal top five most useful posts for the NaNoWriMos. I hope it helps you!  (Each heading is a clickable link.)

1. Last Year's NaNoWriMo Pep Talk
   I wasn't asked to write a pep talk for National Novel Writing Month.  But writing something no one asked you to write is really the point of NaNoWriMo, isn't it?  So in the spirit of the month, I did it anyway.
   
2. Where do you get your ideas?
   Where do Ideas come from?  It's the question every writer dreads and emphatically answers with "I don't know".  Honestly, I suspect that for most writers that's a bit of a fib -- we may not know where ideas come from in the cosmic sense any more than we can tell you the meaning of life, but we generally know where a specific idea came from, or at least what prompted it.
   
3. What if I get stuck?
   Especially during the month of November (cough-NaNoWriMo-cough), I get people asking me how to deal with writer's block. I admit that used to be a real problem for me until I developed methods of dealing with it when it happens, writing around it and generally stripping it of its power to hurt my productivity. In April, 2009, I compiled my 7 favorite tips for breaking out of a literary cul de sac.
   
4. What if I'm still stuck?
   Personally, I think that a big part of writer's block is the fear of it happening much more than the actuality of the thing.  It's the bugbear under the bed, the monster in the anxiety closet of too many writer's offices.  So what do you do to disarm a bogey man?  We mock them, of course. So, in the interest of a bit of fun and making fun of the bugbears, I've generated a list of some of my favorite and most oddball advice on writer's block. If my advice doesn't help you, maybe someone else's will...
   
5. Why should I listen to you?Listen to me only if what I say helps you. There's no such thing as "One Size Fits All" in either hats or advice. Only take what helps you; discard what that doesn't.

From all of us on the sidelines this year, cheering you on: Best of luck to you all! And we'll try to keep the vuvuzela blowing to a minimum.

10 Tips to Get You From Idea to Finished Novel

For all those who are on the NaNoWriMo marathon, here are 10 things that I keep in mind as I progress from the idea I scribbled on a napkin to the moment I sit down to turn it into a book.

Ten Tips to Get From Idea to Finished Novel

1. Be interested in your story. Writing is hard work and before you commit to spending long hours sitting in a chair stringing tens of thousands of words together to tell your story, you'd better darn well be sure it's a story that interests you enough to make that worthwhile.
   
   
2. Feed your brain. Your brain generates stories from the stuff you cram in there. Give it the fodder it needs to make new and interesting stories and well fleshed-out characters. Interview everyone you meet, explore every place you go, try new things.
   
   
3. Everything is research. Accept it. Pay attention. Take notes and snapshots. You never know when you'll need the story about the kid who accidentally ordered a Harrier fighter jet on eBay.
   
   
4. Ideas are not sacred. Don't get so attached to an idea that you're unwilling to allow it to evolve. A story idea is less like the directions from a GPS and more like finding your way through a new city with written directions scrawled on the back of a coffee-stained napkin.
   
   
5. Write now, edit later. Just sit you butt in the chair and put the story on the page. Editing is inevitable, but it is a stage of its own that can wait until later. Your initial goal is to get the story out of your head, everything else follows that.
   
   
6. Take little bites. A big idea can choke you if you try to eat it all at once. Writing anything long form is a lot like the old adage about eating an elephant: Start at one end and take it one bite at a time.
   
   
7. Make stuff up. Research can be a very addictive drug. It's easy to get so wrapped up in the intriguing minutiae of your subject matter that you forget to write a book about it. If it ever gets shelved in a library or bookstore, your novel will be in the fiction section, this gives you license to fake it... within reason, of course.
   
   
8. Keep everything. Create a file on your computer (or in your filing cabinet if you're a luddite like me) of the random ideas or characters that occur to you as you're writing. Not everything you create while writing will fit the story you're working on. Hang on to those tidbits for later use in this or another story.
   
   
9. Step away from the Television and/or the Internet. That might sound odd coming from me, but these mediums are specifically designed to catch your attention and hold it. I've recently begun doing my writing on a computer that is isolated from the internet to combat this. My writing output tripled when we got rid of TV and as a bonus we saved a lot of money each month.
   
   
10. Write with the vocabulary you have. Put away the thesaurus, it's just slowing you down and making self-conscious. Finding your authorial "voice" is about telling the story the way you tell it, not the way Roget would tell it if he were writing it. Your vocabulary will grow organically on its own and in a way that is unique to you as you research and read. Language is a fragile thing and it will break if you try to force it.

It's easy to end a list with the words "And it's as easy as that!" but it really isn't all that easy or everyone would do it.

It's not as easy as that and I think that's an important thing to keep in mind at every stage.  Writing is hard.  It's supposed to be hard.  So don't beat yourself up when you find that it isn't easy.  This is job, a task like any other -- a task that must be performed before you can enjoy the results.  

Because at the end of the day (or the end of November) it's the person who puts their butt in the chair and puts the words on the page who will win the race.

Best of luck to you all!
-Scott

Don't "Breathe" a Word :: The Perils of Lazy Dialogue

There are a half-hundred words that you can use when you're writing dialogue to describe how words were said.  Lines of dialogue can be shouted, screamed, whispered, thundered, blurted, whined, exulted, cried, clarified, called, uttered, ejaculated, exclaimed, declared, denied, crowed, and breathed.

Don't ever use any of them.  They're lazy and, more importantly,  they sound like writing.

To explain, I'll refer you back to this post about Elmore Leonard's iconic list of 10 rules for effective fiction writing.  I'd summarize the Leonard's list (and my own feelings on the subject) by saying "Don't be a lazy writer or assume you have a lazy reader."  

Leonard sums them up by saying "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it." Which amounts to the same thing, really.

Rule number three on Leonard's list is "Never use a verb other than 'said' to carry dialogue".  Personally, I double the lexicon of acceptability by including "asked".  Just don't "breathe" a word. Say it.  Just say it... and then don't use an adverb to modify it (which is rule #4).

Why all the hate?

Because the word "said" is descriptive.  All the rest are prescriptive.

A descriptive word "said" or "asked" tells us what happened.  A prescriptive word like "breathed" or "exulted" or any of the rest tells us how to read the sentence that we just finished.  That's important: prescriptive words come at the end of sentences.  So if your reader obeys you, they have to go back and reread.  Talk about breaking the flow of the story.

Put another way, they're stage directions, and if you want to write stage directions, write a play.

The laziest thing a writer can do is tell the reader everything. The real work of writing is to decide what to leave out, and the real work of writing dialogue is crafting sentences that carry themselves, free of the need for phrases like "he responded snarkily" or "she shouted angrily". If you want a snarky, or shouty tone, use snarky, shouty sentences.
 
First of all, unless you overuse them., the exclamation point should tell your reader the character is shouting and the word choice and simple, short declarative sentence carries across the anger.  "Shouted angrily" is made redundant by writing the sentence correctly in the first place.

Does this mean you should never use "shouted" or anything else?  No. Like any rule, this is one that is meant to be broken carefully, wisely, and with malice aforethought.  But know that you're doing it and why.  In certain situations "whispered" might be necessary.  At times, I suppose "shouted" might even be necessary.  But I'll go out on a limb and say that the rest of that list isn't.  Not ever.

If you've read Howard Carter, you know that on some level I'm a stone thrower living in a glass house. Keep in mind that it was a first draft, but at least in that book, I seemed to be particularly fond of "whispered".

One of the first things I will do when going from that first draft you read to the second is remove those instances when I got lazy and gave too much stage direction.

The later it is at night and the more tired I am as I write, the more likely it is that these things are going to happen.  Which is why we have rough drafts that we don't show to anyone.  Because at some point we have to come back in the cold, clear light of day and find all the parts that sound like writing and rewrite them. 

The Dangers of Checklists & Writing Advice...

This post from the blog of mystery author Elizabeth Spann Craig reminds me to underline the point that any writing advice I give here is strictly my opinion.  There isn't a "right way" to do this and in the end (as I've said many times) it boils down to putting your butt in a chair and putting words on a page. 

The chair is optional. 

There are structural things that work better than others, there are ways of starting that seem to attract more readers than others and ways of ending and unfolding your story that seem to work better than others.  But you really should learn those by feel, not by rote -- by reading books, not reading books (or blogs) about how to write.

How do you start your novel?  By putting words on the page.  Even if they're the wrong ones, put words on a page.  It's like parenting, if you wait until you're sure about everything, it'll never happen.  Writers aren't people who talk about writing, they're people who write.  Everything else in writing advice columns, blogs and books borders on the waking the dread hooptedoodle.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a novel waiting for me behind this screen and I need to get back to it.

Lessons from Lists

Last year I posted a "permanent" link to the fantastic New York Times op-ed by Elmore Leonard "Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle" which was the basis of his book 10 Rules.  It's one of those articles that's worth printing out to read and re-read over and over again.  (Incidentally, if you're going to and haven't, you might want to do it soon because the NYT paywall is going up soon... unless - like me - you're planning to subscribe.)

This morning, the folks at The Guardian put up a sort of über-version of Leonard's ten rules with additional rules by other writers, including this gem from Margaret Atwood...

"...there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you're on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine."  - Margaret Atwood

That's an incredibly good piece of advice for anyone in the creative arts to keep in the forefront of their minds.  There's no pension plan for this and no one forced you to do it.  If you wanted to write, you could have finished Journalism school and had a nice secure job at a newspaper or magazine.  (ahem)

This is the sort of advice I try to give my younger friends and friends of the family who come to me in starry-eyed innocence asking me what to major in at college because they want to be writers.

Business.  I say.  Or law.  Or business law.  Or maybe engineering.  Or business engineering law... For God's sake don't major in English or literature or you're going to end up getting a degree just to teach other people who probably shouldn't be majoring in literature who will go on to teach other people who shouldn't be majoring in... Sigh.

They never really listen anyway, God bless 'em.  I've said it one and I'll say it again and again: The only real education a writer gets is the one they give to themselves by reading.

I like this bit of advice from Roddy Doyle especially:

"Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg "horse", "ran", "said"."  -Roddy Doyle

The piece of advice I dispense most often is "Write with the vocabulary you have" not the vocabulary Mr. Roget had.  He was kind of a nut anyway.  Every once in awhile at the writing center, I catch someone revising their paper with a Roget's in one hand and a red pen in the other.  Looking over their shoulder, I see perfectly innocent nouns and verbs lying dead in a sea of red ink to be supplanted by their polysyllabic cousins.

Don't do this.

Your vocabulary is an organic thing, it has to grow naturally or become unwieldy.  You may be  able to graft another type of tree onto it and get kumquats and apples off the same tree, but the unnatural feel of picking a kumquat off an apple tree will never fade.  Grafting Mssr. Roget's lists of high falutin' words onto your personal list will never quite fit either.

Which brings us to my favorite advice from Geoff Dyer:

"If you use a computer, constantly refine and expand your autocorrect settings. The only reason I stay loyal to my piece-of-shit computer is that I have invested so much ingenuity into building one of the great auto­correct files in literary history. Perfectly formed and spelt words emerge from a few brief keystrokes: "Niet" becomes "Nietzsche", "phoy" becomes  ­"photography" and so on. ­Genius!"  -Geoff Dyer

He's right, it's genius.  I periodically ask other writers why they're willing to give up their native understanding of grammar and spelling to a programmer from Microsoft.  I lived in Redmond, WA for awhile and though I love my many friends who have worked for Mr. Gates, I'm not sure I'd ask any of them how best to spell a word.

I am certain that some liberal arts majors were plucked out of the fast food joints surrounding Redmond and given a decent salary for at least a summer to compile MS Word's spellcheck functions and compile their thesaurus.  But some of the quirkier things they did convince me that they weren't happy working there because how else do you explain the furious abandon with which the program inserts semicolons into every sentence?  Subtle vengeance indeed...

Be that as it may, take the time to upgrade your word processor's dictionary and auto-correct features.  My first foray into novelwriting was a fantasy novel that contained so many Gaelic words that about fifty thousand words into the novel, I got a message from Word that there were so many 'errors' that it was going on strike.  No more errors would be tabulated until I got rid of the ones I'd already made.

(In the interest of not having little paperclip people picketing my prose, I went back and started adding Gaelic words to the onboard dictionary.)

There are many many more, but this post is getting rather longer than the article that inspired it.  Go read the article and take it to heart.

Just remember that there are no humble opinions, especially among writers.  We tend to open our yaps because we think we're right. (Accepting that you might be wrong isn't humility, it's reality)  And like all advice, take what works for you and discard what does not.

And remember Anne Enhright's advice which has the benefit of being true no matter who you are or what you plan to write:. 

"The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page."

Ten More Things...

These have been a bit shorter than usually lately and for that I apologize.  I've been preparing a manuscript for submission to an agent and my attention didn't want to be split this week. 

On the bright side, this is also showing me the things that I know, but don't practice, and the things I practice without thinking about. (As an act of self-protection, I'm not going to differentiate between the two) I've been jotting them down as they occur to me and not that I have ten of them (that didn't take long), here's an incomplete list of things to keep in mind as you are editing your manuscript...

1. Adverbs are vampires that suck the life out of verbs.  Delete them.
2. Not every word in your vocabulary was meant to be used.
3. Street people and college professors should not sound the same in dialogue.
4. Don't let your POV character wander offscreen and leave the 'camera' on a non-pov character.
5. "I love this" is not a good enough reason to keep anything.
6. Violence should be succinct and brutal and death should be final.
7. "Well, (insert name of famous author here)  got away with it, so I can too" is the top of a very slippery slope.
8. You are not your characters and your characters are not you. (It's also helpful to remind your family and friends of this from time to time.)
9. Daydreaming about Dan Brown-like success will not get you any closer to Dan Brown-like success.
10. When you get too tired to concentrate, stop.

Getting Started :: 10 Tips to Get Your Novel Going

I was reading Gretchen Rubin's blog for The Happiness Project this morning and found the list she made last Wednesday of ways to find more reading in your life. It's a fun project she has going and she came up with a great list with a lot of ideas on how to manage your time for books. 

For the past few weeks, I've been nearing the completion of one project and contemplating the beginnings of the next. Which brought to mind my own list of ten things, in this case, ten ways I've found to get from "I've got this idea..." to "So now where do I mail this completed manuscript?" 

Pursuant to my stated goal of getting you to write this year, I present to you my little list... 

Ten Tips to Get Your Novel* Started

1. Be interested in your story. Writing is hard work and before you commit to spending long hours sitting in a chair stringing tens of thousands of words together to tell your story, you'd better darn well be sure it's a story that interests you enough to make that worthwhile.
   
2. Feed your brain. Your brain generates stories from the stuff you cram in there. Give it the fodder it needs to make new and interesting stories and well fleshed-out characters. Interview everyone you meet, explore every place you go, try new things.
   
3. Everything is research. Accept it. Pay attention. Take notes and snapshots. You never know when you'll need the story about the waitress and the deep-fried Converse sneaker.
   
4. Ideas are not sacred. Don't get so attached to an idea that you're unwilling to allow it to evolve. A story idea is less like the directions from a GPS and more like finding your way through a new city with written directions scrawled on the back of a coffee-stained napkin.
   
5. Write now, edit later. Just sit you butt in the chair and put the story on the page. Editing is inevitable, but it is a stage of its own that can wait until later. Your initial goal is to get the story out of your head, everything else follows that.
   
6. Take little bites. A big idea can choke you if you try to eat it all at once. Writing anything long form is a lot like the old adage about eating an elephant: Start at one end and take it one bite at a time.
   
7. Make stuff up. Research can be a very addictive drug. It's easy to get so wrapped up in the intriguing minutiae of your subject matter that you forget to write a book about it. If it ever gets shelved in a library or bookstore, your novel will be in the fiction section, this gives you license to fake it... within reason, of course.
   
8. Keep everything. Create a file on your computer (or in your filing cabinet if you're a luddite like me) of the random ideas or characters that occur to you as you're writing. Not everything you create while writing will fit the story you're working on. Hang on to those tidbits for later use in this or another story.
   
9. Step away from the Television and/or the Internet. That might sound odd coming from me, but these mediums are specifically designed to catch your attention and hold it. I've recently begun doing my writing on a computer that is isolated from the internet to combat this. My writing output tripled when we got rid of TV and as a bonus we saved a lot of money each month.
   
10. Write with the vocabulary you have. Put away the thesaurus, it's just slowing you down and making self-conscious. Finding your authorial "voice" is about telling the story the way you tell it, not the way Roget would tell it if he were writing it. Your vocabulary will grow organically on its own and in a way that is unique to you as you research and read. Language is a fragile thing and it will break if you try to force it.

It's easy to end a list with the words "And it's as easy as that!" but it really isn't all that easy or everyone would do it.  It's not as easy as that and I think that's an important thing to keep in mind at every stage.  Writing is hard.  It's supposed to be hard.  So don't beat yourself up when you find that it isn't easy.  This is job, a task like any other -- a task that must be performed before you can enjoy the results.  Because at the end of the day, it's the person who puts their butt in the chair and puts the words on the page who will win the race.

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*I say novel because that's my chosen milieu. All the same, most of these should apply to any written fiction from plays to short stories to novels. As with anything I post here, use at your own risk and freely modify in a manner that best suits your needs. 

Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and novels of suspense. His current novel is The Palimpsest and he is working on another tentatively titled 42 Lines.

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If I had a hammer... :: 8 Tips For Recognizing When You've Gone Astray

The biggest jam-ups I encounter in the course of my writing come from trying to force an idea into a hole in a story that isn't the same size and shape. My subconscious mind amuses itself by running through my current projects, poking at the thin bits and offering up suggestions, usually when I should be sleeping.

These suggestions are the bane and boon of my existance because if I'm afflicted with an idea that's just-too-cool-to-let-rest lest-I-forget-it, jotting it in the notebook on the nightstand won't do. I have to get up immediately and shoehorn it into my current story regardless of the hour.

Yes, my wife is a saint.

All too often, this requires at least some rewriting, some juggling of storylines and sometimes scrapping or changing significant parts of the narrative altogether. It's the nature of the beast, I'm afraid. The really cool idea waits for no man (or woman). But sometimes, despite all the coffee, dictionaries, source material, writing books and sage advice in the world, it doesn't always work. Cool idea or no, the dawn still finds me with a sheaf of scribbled notes and a blank screen, blood sweat and tears staining my handkerchief.

Because there are times when an idea - no matter how good it seems - just doesn't fit. You can round the peg or square the hole, but if you do either, you have to irrevocably change one of them to bring them both into harmony.

This is the moment all writers dread -- when you realize you need to either get a bigger hammer or a different peg. Usually I find myself going through a series of progressively larger hammers until I've beaten it to death and have to backtrack to a point where both are still recognizable.

Everything's easier to deal with if it has a name, and I call this the Hammer Point. 

It's not always day-dreams and cool ideas that get me into trouble. Sometimes getting out of trouble gets me into trouble. Recently, I got into a snag by following my own advice. Those seven ideas I posted awhile back can be blessing and curse. They usually work for me, but they're no panacea. Mental tricks (like envisioning the Microsoft cursor flipping you off ) are harmless enough, but if you kill off a character or send your people on a road trip, it can end up changing the story to a degree that isn't always for the best.

Sometimes the sunrise finds me with notes but no narrative because I've been pounding the idea with a succession of larger hammers until it's not a peg anymore. The Hammer Point has been passed. These are the most common flavors I've encountered on the road to the Hammer Point...

1. The Dialogue Drug -- Clever conversation is a drug and should only be used under doctor's supervision. The difference between dialogue and chitchat is that dialogue moves the plot forward and chitchat just takes up space.
   
2. Schizophrenic Much? -- When your main characters don't act like themselves in order to sell the idea, it's inherently a bad idea.
   
3. Don't Complain -- It sometimes seems funny in the dead of the night to have a character complain if the story is dragging. It's not. If the story is dragging enough that even the characters notice, you should fix it, not make fun of it.
   
4. Don't Explain -- How much expository dialogue does it take to set the scene for your oh-so-clever idea? There's an old adage that if you have to explain a joke, it's not funny. Adages generally only grow to a ripe old age because they're true.
   
5. Creator's Remorse -- If you introduce a new character for one scene, you might find you are stuck with them. Is this gag really worth the trouble of fleshing-out and then disposing of another character?
   
6. Save Gas -- I know I said "Take it on the road" but try not to change settings just because you thought up a good gag that won't work in the setting you're already inhabiting.
   
7. Alcoholism -- There's a tendency on film and in books to have the characters drink for comedic effect or as the lubricant for a social scene. I think it's a bit trite and I even made one of my characters a recovering alcoholic just to cut myself off from this particular trope.
   
8. Will It End? -- If your new Really Cool Idea forces you to change the ending you were working toward, it's probably worth reconsidering. If it moves the end beyond the standard word count for your genre, it's definitely a bad idea.

Bu-b-b-but it was really cool idea! Now what to I do with it?

These are indicators that you should bench these ideas, not delete them altogether. Well, the character complaint should be deleted, but the rest might be recycled in the right circumstances. In fact, I have a file for each project that's called "Snippets" which get moved into a common folder on my computer once I've either finished the story or feel assured I won't find a use for it later in the story. (Incidentally, another trick for getting out of a jam is to trawl the snippets folders for ideas that might fit this story even if they didn't fit the last one.)

Sometimes a good idea that changes the characters or the story entirely can be a good thing. If a story just isn't working, something's gotta give. Maybe that hole should be square. Maybe you really did just need a bigger hammer. Maybe that off-the-wall idea was just the shot of espresso your story needed in order to wake it up and get it moving. It's entirely up to you how big a hammer you're willing to try before you decide to quit swinging and save it for the sequel.

10 Rules Redux

Last week we talked about the Ten Rules Elmore Leonard proposed for great fiction writing. Whether you're a reader or a writer, surely you too have some rules of thumb. Some measure of what makes writing good or even great... So what are your ten rules? Answer in comments.

Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules

Three presenters at the PNWA conference last weekend told us to go look up Elmore Leonard's column from the New York Times's late and sadly discontinued "Writers On Writing..." feature. So here it is for everyone, some of the best, most succinct advice I've ever seen on writing great fiction. (For copyright reasons, you'll have to click the link to read the whole thing)

Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle
By Elmore Leonard

Published: July 16, 2001

"These are rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over..."

Hooptedoodle. You have to love any headline with "Hooptedoodle" in it.

If you're curious about the rest, you can read some of what he left out (because 13 rules didn't sound as cool, I guess) at his blog: ElmoreLeonard.com or in his book on writing also called Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules on Writing. (Sadly, the hooptedoodle was apparently left out of the book.)  

Caveat lector! Something I think about this every time I recommend a book on writing, whether it's Larry Block or Anne Lamotte or Stephen King. Reading about writing doesn't make you a writer, writing makes you a writer. There's a point where you have to stop reading books (or blogs) about how to write and actually sit down to do it.

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Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and novels of humor & suspense. His current novel is The Palimpsest and he is working on another tentatively titled 42 Lines.   Email: swalkerperkins@gmail.com

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Random Thoughts On a Tuesday...

Some random things that have occurred to me on a cloudy Bastille Day that have nothing to do with Bastille Day.

Of Weddings & Shakespeare... The wedding was great. I was really nervous and sort of fumbled my way through the first stanza of the ceremony and then found my stride. It was a theme wedding so a lot of Shakespeare was in play. I sometimes wonder what the man would think of the many uses his words get put toward. A learned friend assured me that Will probably also re-purposed part of Sonnet 116 as a wedding toast at least once in his life. I find the idea reassuring.

Top Ten Lists The Times has published their top-ten list of best book sites. Those are truly some amazing sites. Most of them I was aware of, but one stands out as something I should have known about but didn't and takes its place at the top of my current list of "I can't believe I didn't think of that first". Bookcrossing. It's very much like geo-caching. Except you're stashing books rather than stuff in an ammo can. (Follow the links if you don't know what I'm talking about.) Bookcrossing is probably the best idea I've heard of in quite some time. Can't believe I didn't know about it before the Times cued me in. Oh well, it's a big internet. Just remember that books have their dignity and when they are leant, tend not to return of their own accord. (I think Umberto Eco said that or something like it...)

Keyboards... I periodically get mad and modify my keyboard by pulling out keys (especially when I keep fatfingering the numlock key on the tenkey pad) or using masking tape to modify what the keys do. Am I the only one that does this? It's very therapeutic. I sometimes take pictures of it when I do that. Maybe that would be a good "Wordless Wednesday" post. Hmmmm...