Ripping Starlight Apart

One of the hardest things for any human to do is accept the fact that they’ve made a mistake, which is why we growl when someone tells us we’re wrong. Even worse is realizing that they’re right.

I’m not the Grumpy Writing Coach because I’m grumpy, though I often am. I’m called that because I make people grumpy by finding fault with their writing. What makes a critique hard to accept is that our writing is so personal. We invest so much of ourselves in creating the perfect story that having someone read it, shrug, and then rip it apart hurts…a lot. We forget that we learn nothing from those who agree with us. And, of course, there’s the not-so-small issue that if we can prove them wrong, we no longer are.

Making it worse is the feeling that this person, if they are right, never had to endure such pain.

So, it’s only fair that I demonstrate impartiality by doing to my writing what I would do to yours. But to do that, I need to travel in time:

Recently, while cleaning out a closet, I found a copy of one of my novels, Starlight Dancing, that was home printed and comb-bound, somewhere around 1993. I mailed it to my son, Michael, using him as a beta reader, and hopefully, impressing him with dear old Daddy’s writing skill.

What he wrote on the cover page shown was: “As revised by the author’s elder son.” He also added a dedication, supposedly from me, that reads: “I couldn’t have done it without him,” signed with my name.

He was kind in his evaluation, and, very helpful. So, when I finished the changes that he and other readers showed were necessary, I submitted the manuscript to a series of publishers. The result was a nice collection of well-deserved rejections. Though I didn’t see it that way at the time.

I’d written five novels by then, and already had enough rejection slips to wallpaper my office. Still clueless as to the realities of writing fiction. I was using none of the specialized knowledge and techniques of the profession. Like so many of us, I was certain that I was on the verge of being publication-ready—while in reality, I was a living demonstration that you’ll never learn the necessary skills of a profession by practicing with the wrong set.

So, looking at that manuscript today, nearly three decades later, I found that the approach I was using, then, is identical to that of the vast majority of what I see posted on the various online writing sites. And since doing a critique of my own mistakes won’t hurt the feelings of a hopeful writer, I’ve used the opening paragraphs of Starlight to both show how different the approach to fiction writing is from the one our school-day training guides us into, and, to point out some of the most common problems. The edit that identified and polished the errors I’ll be talking about was done in 2015. In the more than 20 years since the piece was written, I’d learned just a bit, and had signed seven publishers’ contracts before deciding to go the self-release route.

Because I no longer have the file for the original version of the story, I’ll use pictures of the printed text:

This isn’t bad as description, and my son said he liked it. But it is not Zack looking at the eggs. It’s me telling the reader that he did—a far less personal thing, and one that distances the reader from the events. But after that opening line, with him standing in that unknown place, and ready to move on, I pulled the reader aside and began to explain what happened before the story opened. But do you, as a reader, care if it’s the fourth site, the tenth, or the first, when you don’t know where we are or what’s going on? Of course not. Who cares what the narrator, who isn’t on the scene, finds interesting? It’s Zack who’s on the scene and making the decisions. So only what matters to him in the moment he calls “now” matters.

But look deeper. The first thing I told the reader was that Zack is unhappy. So before anything else, the reader will want to know why. But instead, I change the subject and blather on about things unrelated to that opening line. But…if it’s important enough to be the first line, shouldn’t it be meaningful enough that what follows results from it?

My point? Who cares about nesting sites? We don’t know what kind of creature laid those eggs, or why he’s looking for them. So… Why is Zack tracking the meteor? And where are we? Who is he? What in the hell is going on? That matters because it provides the context to make the events meaningful. But the text is presented as if the reader already knows all that. So here, in this paragraph, is where this novel was rejected. That’s it. One unprofessional paragraph and the audition is over. In the view of a publisher, if you can’t get the first page right, why read on? And here, I screwed the second line.

So, what did I replace the paragraph with in the published version?
– – – – – –
More eggs? What the hell is going on? Zack frowned at the fossilized eggs. This was the third grouping he’d found as he traced the course of whatever had carved the gully. Ruler straight, it had probably been cut by a meteorite, eons ago. But if so, the thing had come in at one hell of a shallow angle.
– – – – – –
The changes are small, but significant:

1. We begin with Zack’s reaction to finding the eggs, rather than a report that he did from a dispassionate observer.
2. The second sentence is his reaction to finding the eggs. Instead of me telling the reader that he did it, he’s reacting as part of realizing what he’s looking at. And we learn what he learns, as he perceives it. So, the narrator is no longer a distraction. Instead, our guide is working to support the protagonist.
3. I left the mention of the multiple egg finds, but shortened the description for a quicker read and more punch. I deleted mention of a forest because he doesn’t know what the scene was like. And if he doesn’t, and we’re him, we can’t either. In any case, the scene is focused on his “now” not a tour of eons past.
4. I removed the statement, “he now guessed,” and replaced it with his actual guess. Again, the narrator is in the prompter’s box, not on stage commenting.

Paragraph 2&3

This needs tightening. It’s verbose and unfocused. Saying “some time ago,” but then talking about millions of years, is the author being cute and conversational. But that slows the story, while eliminating the feel of being on the scene moment-by-moment. That long description of what had been torn away, or even noting that it was temporary, pulls focus from Zack and his eggs, slowing the narrative and diluting its impact.

And finally, the second paragraph, while accurate, is uninspired, and external.

So…what replaced these two paragraphs is:
– – – – – –
He squatted far down, arms wrapped around his knees and lost in thought. Millions of years before, during the time of the great lizards, a ball of flaming rock had come to Earth at this spot, tearing out a swatch of wilderness and creating a nesting site for a variety of fauna. The stony lumps clustered at his feet were the result of that celestial accident, but they weren’t the cause of his introspection—the meteorite was. There was no excitement in finding more petrified eggs. A meteorite, though, that, he didn’t have.
– – – – – –
1. I simplified “some time ago” to “millions of years,” then specified the era, followed by a prettier version of why the eggs are there.
2. Rather than a statement of him wanting the meteorite, I gave his reason for frowning.

Paragraph 4:

“Slowly coming to his feet?” Have you ever come to your feet slowly, for effect, when no one was there to watch? Neither would Zack.

So. Zack pulls down his hat brim, something you or I might do. But then, leaving him standing there, hand on his hat, the author interjects that he finds a hat useful. Really? Why else would he wear it? So that gets the ax.

What follows the hat-touch began as a 1000-word long dissertation on the land and its history, with the narrator babbling on about things that have not a damn thing to do with the scene. Still, it was beautiful. And I cried as I flushed it, because from start to finish, it was irrelevant to the scene and the story. They were eggs and the gully was a gully. I left these 130 words of the description because he’s looking at the scene near him, and possibly thinking about it, so a bit of scene-setting, limited to what he might think about, gives the reader an orientation on the factors that led to what he’s seeing, and make what comes later more meaningful. Foreshadowing, in other words. And, how could I toss 1000 beautiful words without leaving a just bit of it?

So, what remained is:
– – – – – – –
Coming to his feet, he pulled down the brim of his old-fashioned cowboy hat, shading his eyes. He gazed out over the wasteland before him, a humped vista of dry and useless earth, fit only for growing chaparral and cactus. It had been carved and twisted again and again, by water, weather, and even the endless slow-motion dance of the Earth itself. Since the time of the dinosaur, the land had seen both freshwater seas and the rock-gouging creep of glaciers. Before that, the country to the west had tilted skyward to form the Great Western mountain ranges, spilling its soil onto this area, only to have most of it scrubbed away by the slow passage of centuries. The land had lately known both Indians and settlers. Neither stayed. Neither learned to love it. Now, the land knew only loneliness and silence, save for Zack’s occasional visits.
– – – – – – –
Paragraph 5:

Again, the narrator is visible. And again, the action is stopped, something to avoid. Story happens, it’s not talked about. Yes, the reader needs this background, and should know why he’s there, and, the important things in his situation that will drive the plot, like the artificial heart. But calling his wife’s death discourteous? That’s the author being cute, so it, too, got the ax. So, here’s the paragraph, after the silly parts were chopped:
– – – – – – –
But he wasn’t searching for the remains of the distant past. He’d come there to die. After nearly forty years of marriage, finally ready to retire and show his wife the world, Amanda was stolen by the Covid-armed angel of death, leaving him with little reason to live. His own heart died soon after—a result of losing her, he liked to think—only to be replaced by a thing of tubing and motors, riding his left shoulder like a pet beast, humming and thumping to itself as it simulated the pulsing of his lost heart. An experimental model, not yet approved for installation within the abdominal cavity like the production model—soon to come.
– – – – – – –
It’s very like the original. But, I did get some things right.

Paragraph 6

Lots and lots of unneeded detail here. Do we need to know if the house was abandoned or for sale? Do we care that he had to pay a bribe to get it? No. He went there to die. That’s plot. That’s necessary knowledge. The rest? Gossip. So squeezed and tightened, we have:
– – – – – –
     Three months after surgery he turned his car west, looking for solitude, and for a place where an old man could die in peace. He found it in a deserted ranch house, twenty miles from the nearest town, on the eastern edge of the American desert.
     He made a deal with himself: he would charge and care for the unit, not go out into the desert and wait for the batteries to die, as he’d planned. Instead, he’d wait for fate to intervene. It had been over six months since he left the hospital, and since the unit had been serviced. He might have a day, a month, or a year. But whatever time he had was out of his hands.
– – – – – –
1. Forget that he had rehab after the operation. Everyone in that situation does. Never tell the reader what they already know.
2. Do we care whose car he used, or if he stopped home first? Of course not.
3. Do we care that he stopped to fill his wallet?  Who wouldn’t, in his situation. So that’s all backstory, and we need to get back to poor Zack, standing there, bored,  and looking at the desert, waiting for this to finish so he can get back to tracking that meteorite.
4. I cleaned and tightened the paragraph ending.

And with that taken care of, it’s time to see what Zack is doing:

Paragraph 7:

But we don’t see what he’s doing, because this is more irrelevant backstory. In fact, there are ten more paragraphs of backstory, defining Zack finding a fossilized bone, going to the museum in town to learn more, his deciding to study paleontology, what he saw on his walks, even an episode where the heart machine had a partial failure that a push of the reset button fixed. But here’s the thing: Did any of that set the scene? No. Did it develop character? No. Did it move the plot? Not really. The reader will know he studied the subject, either when he shows he’s knowledgeable about it, or by mentioning the fact of it in conversation. He didn’t die because of the machine problem, and it doesn’t happen again. So who cares? Through the six standard manuscript pages it took to spoon-feed that backstory to the reader, not a blessed thing was happening in the story, so all sense of realism was erased, and the reader has probably fallen asleep. The star of the show should have been Zack,  but in reality, it was the narrator, who was alone on stage and talking about the events, not making them real.

And when you do that, it’s very easy to fall into a mindset where you just talk to the reader, providing a history lesson, not a story. If you’ve heard the traditional advice to the new writer: “Show don’t tell,” another word for telling is nonfiction. And by showing, we really mean to place the reader into the viewpoint of the protagonist. We show the reader by making them live the scene as the protagonist.

But…there is one problem that comes as a result of trimming all that backstory. The reader does need some of it to clarify Zack’s reason for abandoning his life and heading west. One might reasonably wonder why he didn’t spend his remaining time with friends, the joys of family, volunteer work, or travel. And a bit of character development would make him both a relatable character, and his actions far more understandable. So how should that have been handled?

The answer lies in one simple but critical admonition that authors need to keep in mind: Begin your story where the story begins. Don’t open it only to take the reader back to before it began for a history lesson. Crap like that makes me grumpy. And the rejection that will bring from an agent or publisher will do the same to you.

In this case, I added a new chapter one, which opens with Zack waking in the hospital, just after the operation that gave him the artificial heart. There, in his viewpoint, we learn of his situation through a discussion, and argument, with a woman from the hospital’s Psychiatric Services. Instead of reading a summation of his life, we eavesdrop on them, as he is forced to defend his state of mind with, ”I don’t want to die. But when my heart gave out it was my time. It still is. I don’t have a reason to live, and that’s not the same thing as wanting to die.” That’s critical character development, as is much of their discussion. And as part of that argument, we learn that he has no family, that he’s a successful businessman, is financially comfortable, but, has lost his zest for life. And that places the reader in the position to understand, while at the same time, wanting him to recover it. And because it is a story, and he is our protagonist, the reader knows that he’s probably going to do that. The question is, how? And that’s reason enough to turn the page and learn of Zack and his desert hideaway.

That new opening chapter ends with him in the hospital, recovering from his heart attack, connected to a variety of medical devices. He’s depressed, and believes that he’s had an unwanted heart-transplant, which places him into the mindset that will result in him coming to where he needs to be, at exactly the right time to rescue the woman who will rescue him, then join him in adventuring. His true situation only hardens that decision. The chapter ends in the doctor’s viewpoint with:
– – – – – –
Dr. Malvern studied the man on the bed. He was stronger than he thought. His medical history, other than his heart problems, was unblemished. It was his state of mind that worried her. Still, this wasn’t a good time to tell him he no longer had a heart.
– – – – – –

° ° °

So there you are…a bit of a chop job, done on writing that deserved every cut. As you can see, the reason I’m qualified to tell you of the most common mistakes is that I’ve made every one of them. Who better to say, “For God’s sake, don’t do that.” Who better to see those same mistakes in the work of others?

But…am I the one to tell you how to write? Nope. Were I to “teach you,” you’ll end up writing exactly like me. And the world certainly isn’t seeking another writer who’s exactly like me. My talent is in seeing problems, and knowing where to find the solution, even if I’m not capable of using that information as it should be used. That’s part of the reason why I’m so grumpy.

And in the end, I didn’t do anything that you can’t do. All you need do is dig into the techniques of writing fiction for the printed word, practice them till they’re as intuitive as the nonfiction skills we’re given in our school days, and there you are.

Easy, right? Naa. But you’ll like the result. And, you’ll go back to what you have written, and find yourself shaking your head and taking out your blue pencil, wondering how you missed seeing so many obvious problems.

As for how to acquire the necessary skills, as I so often do, I recommend beginning with Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer. It’s an older book, but I’ve found none better at clarifying the hows and whys of writing fiction. A professor at Oklahoma University, the Commercial Fiction-Writing workshops he taught had a student list that read like a who’s who in American fiction. Mr. Swain is gone now, and the book has aged out of copyright protection, which means that it’s now available for reading or download on several archive sites. An alternative is Jack Bickham’s Scene and Structure. For an easier read, but one that’s nearly as good, there’s Debra Dixon’s, GMC: Goal Motivation & Conflict. And for tips on style, after you perfect the basics, agent Donald Maass has penned several excellent books from an agent’s viewpoint.

 

I Saw it First – The Grumpy Writing Coach

Here’s a small but critical issue that most hopeful writers miss, one that explains why our school-days approach to writing won’t work when we turn to fiction:

Before anyone in the story learns what happens, the reader is aware of it. Why? Because they read it, react to it, and then learn how the protagonist reacts—which means they’ll react based on their impression of the situation and their assessment of the resources the protagonist has available. Unfortunately, that reaction is where most hopeful writers will lose the reader, because it’s a rejection-point, in both the bookstore and an agent/publisher’s office.

Why? Because when a reader’s reaction differs from that of the protagonist, it means that the reader sees the situation differently from the protagonist. If that happens, you’ve just created a “wait a minute,” moment, where the reader will stop to think about the difference between their reaction and the protagonist’s. And the very last thing we want a reader to do is to stop reading and argue with the protagonist about what that character should do next.

When a reader stops, for-any-reason, they will resume reading with any momentum the scene might have had, gone.

Complicating things even more, bear in mind that every reader, because their backgrounds differ from each other, will see the situation differently. So unless you take steps to prevent it, at some point, every reader will have that “wait a minute,” moment—which is why, when writing fiction, we must calibrate the reader’s perceptions to that of the protagonist, and do that before the reader must react as the protagonist. In other words, protagonist’s view of the situation and the reader’s must match.

That way, every reader is the protagonist, in outlook, knowledge, and even personality…which means that, if there is a difference of opinion between protagonist and reader, the most likely cause is that the protagonist has had an inspiration that will make the reader say, “What? That’s brilliant! Why didn’t I think of that?”

In fact, if, the protagonist screws up because of a misunderstanding, or lack of data, we want our reader to do so, too. So later, when the protagonist realizes their mistake, the reader, learning of it before the protagonist does, will, realize it, and react, too. Fail that, and your reader will only be learning of the events, not living them.

But…do that—cause your reader to respond as the protagonist is about to—and your reader won’t learn that the protagonist has fallen in love, they’ll fall in love, too, and for the same reason. They’ll live the adventure vicariously, not learn of it. And in that difference—living the adventure, not learning about it second-hand—lies the joy of reading.

But…while it makes sense, it raises the question of how to do that, because it’s not something we received even a hint how to handle, in school. It also raises the question: How many other simple but critical issues have I missed? Or, as Mark Twain put it: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” It’s bad enough that there are questions whose answer we don’t know. It’s worse that there are questions we need the answer to, but don’t know to ask.

So…if you were hoping for a nice simple, “do this instead of that,” to cure the problem, I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you, because the answer is that, as I’ve said so often, the writing techniques we spent so many years perfecting in school are the skills of nonfiction, where fact-follows-fact, and the only goal is to inform. And for many reasons, that approach can’t work—the top one being what I just discussed. As E. L. Doctorow so wisely put it: “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” And how much time did your teachers spend on how to do that? Mine spent a big fat zero on any of the techniques of fiction, because professional skills, like those of Engineering, Carpentry, and Fiction-Writing are acquired in addition to the general skills that ready us for the needs of employment that we get in our public education years.

My goal with this article was to make you aware of the problem, and, the need to upgrade our writing skills from those of our schooldays. It’s because so many of us fall into the trap of assuming that we leave school ready to write fiction, and the number of writing careers that never materialize because of it, that’s a good part of why I’m so grumpy.

° ° °

Author’s Note:

These articles are not presented with a, “Do this and you’ll be a published author,” attitude. Anyone who tells you they can provide success via a few words on a blog page is scamming you. Instead, they’re one writer’s view of the ideas put forth by the writing teachers I admire and respect. I’ve done the series as part of what’s sometimes called a Benjamin Franklin debt. If some of what I say seems to make sense, I urge you to seek the teachers themselves, people like Dwight Swain, Debra Dixon, and a host of others, and read their advice directly.

 

Was Was Was – The Grumpy Writing Coach

Far too often I’ve seen people railing against the advice to avoid the word, “was” when writing fiction. And since there’s so much misunderstanding as to why, I thought it worth a few words on the subject.

Part of the problem is that we mostly write our stories in past tense. What people miss is that though we use past tense when describing the scene, our protagonist who’s living that scene, perceives their world in the moment they call now, their present. But if we say something like, “she was happy,” using the word “was” takes us out of the protagonist’s present, because it’s an external comment about her state of mind by the author, who is not on the scene. And that’s true no matter the personal pronouns you use, because the narrator, be it the author, or the author pretending to have once lived the story as the protagonist, cannot appear on stage with that protagonist. Why? Because they’re describing those events after they occurred. So, if you’re presenting the story in that character’s point of view, having the narrator step on stage to interject a comment about that character is a POV break. Every time you appear on stage with the players you still the scene-clock and kill any momentum the scene may have built. That matters, because once you start that clock, it needs to tick, beat-by-beat until either the scene concludes or there’s a time-break in the action.

Think of it this way: We might say:
– – – – – –
Beth went to the window and checked. The water was still rising, and was within an inch of topping the steps to the porch. “It’s still rising, Ken,” she said.
– – – – – –
That’s her observation, yes, and it’s about the moment she calls now, but presented that way it interjects the narrator, who tells us—as an outside observer— that she went, and, what she saw when she did. And as such, it’s dispassionate, because Beth isn’t on stage, only being discussed by the narrator. Were it in Beth’s viewpoint, it might be expressed as:
– – – – – –
“I’ll check,” Beth said, as she went to the window. After a moment she sighed, resignation strong in her voice. “The water’s within an inch of topping the porch steps, Ken, so it’s still rising.”
– – – – – –
Which, of the two, seems more like we’re on the scene experiencing that rising water? Which one includes Beth’s response to what she saw, to calibrate the reader’s response to her emotional landscape?

Using “was” in dialog is natural. We use it in conversation all the time. But when not in dialog, far too often, that word interjects the author. Present it as, “there was,” and we distance the reader still further from the action. Look at a few examples of “before and after,” and decide which one better supports the realism of the action:

a. There was no other conceivable explanation.
b. No other explanation fit.

a. All in all, it was a surprising meal.
b. In all, a surprising meal.

a. There was silence in the room again. This time for so long that she was worried she might have touched a taboo subject.
b. Again, silence. Had she touched a taboo subject?

a. Above, gulls called in a sky that was a pure cobalt blue.
b. Above, gulls called in a sky of cobalt blue.

So, can we use the word, “was” other than in dialog? And if so, when?

The answer is: any time the narrator’s presence on stage isn’t a distraction. A perfect example is when a time period is skipped because what happens in that time contains information the reader needs, but the action, itself, isn’t worth a live section of prose, and so, is presented in summation. For example:
– – – – – –
For the next week time dragged endlessly for Simone. Martine did his best to cheer her up, but it was wasted effort. She was focused only on the steadily growing fissure in the cliff-face above the cottage.
– – – – – –
Make sense?

Author’s note:
     These articles are not presented with a, “Do this and you’ll be a published author,” attitude. Anyone who tells you they can provide success via a few words on a blog page is scamming you. Instead, they’re one writer’s view of the ideas put forth by the writing teachers I admire and respect. I’ve done the series as part of what’s sometimes called a Benjamin Franklin debt. If some of what I say seems to make sense, I urge you to seek the teachers themselves, people like Dwight Swain, Debra Dixon, and a host of others, and read their advice directly.

 

The Great Misunderstanding – The Grumpy Writing Coach

How many hopeful writers check their sales stats on Amazon, wondering why the count of new sales for their self-published novel is still near zero?

How many are pecking away at their computer’s keyboard each night, typing a truly great story idea onto the page, while dreaming of success? How many are reading their own words as they edit, living their story and wondering why such brilliant writing hasn’t been acclaimed as it should be? But…how many times has that same hopeful writer looked at work they produced only weeks before and wondered why the words have lost the life they had when written?

And how many hopeful writers have said,  “I learned how to write in school; I have a great imagination; I love this story, so…why doesn’t everyone else?”

The problem is, you can’t fix what you don’t see as being a problem. So, unable to pin down why it’s not mesmerizing the reader, we shake our heads in frustration and try a succession of fixes: Perhaps first-person or present tense will make the action seem more immediate? Perhaps, make the language more vivid and evocative? Perhaps, tell the story in a “stream of consciousness” mode? Perhaps more description? Perhaps…perhaps…perhaps.

And while we try everything we can think of, and harden ineffective writing habits into concrete, the misunderstanding we all leave school with—the reason behind our problems—sits unnoticed, and invisible, but still, a very real, “elephant in the room.”

What is that misunderstanding? It stems from the fact that we all learned to write in school. In fact, we spent more than a decade perfecting that skill, practicing our writing techniques till they feel intuitive and natural. And because the profession we wish to practice, Fiction-Writing, carries the name of that skill within its title, we make the reasonable assumption that the skill we were given and the profession are related. But sadly, they aren’t.

Think back to your own school days. From the day they placed a pen in your hand till graduation, did even one of your teachers explain why there are significant differences between a scene on stage and screen and one on the page? More to the point, did they explain what a scene is on the page, and the elements that make one up? Because if they didn’t, and our view of what a scene is, is shaped by the films and TV shows we’ve watched, how can we write what a reader will see as a scene? On stage and screen, as in life, visual and audible events are what matters. But on the page, who cares if the car is red or black, unless it matters to the plot? On the screen, in a single glance—literally, in only milliseconds—we learn how everyone is dressed, where they are, and things like the weather, the season, and more, all in parallel with what matters to the plot. And in that same glance we know the expression every character wears, their body language, and much more.

Add to that, in parallel with the visual, we get the soundscape. So in a single glance we have context. But, if we try to give the reader all that they would hear and see were they on the scene, we’re working against a single long known fact: one picture is worth a thousand words. To give the reader what a viewer gets in a fraction of a second would take a thousand words, or to put it another way, four-standard-manuscript-pages—which takes several minutes to read, during which, nothing happens in the story. Worse yet, you’re giving the reader a static picture. And in the end, how much of what can be seen matters to the protagonist? Damn little, which is why, on the page, what matters to the reader isn’t what can be seen, it’s what the protagonist is actively paying attention to, in that fleeting moment that character calls, “now.”

Let’s go back and question our schooldays education a bit further: We’ve established that we didn’t learn what a scene is, but that’s only part of it. Did your teachers talk about how to present a conversation, and the niceties of tag usage? How about a basic issue, like why every scene but the last, usually ends in disaster for the protagonist? Of course they didn’t. Only those actively writing fiction need that information.

Here’s my point: If virtually all our writing assignments during our school years were reports and essays, how well prepared are we to write fiction on the professional level our reader expects to see? Answer? Not at all. And why is that? Why didn’t we learn more about writing fiction? The answer to that lies in one simple fact that we know, but forget: professions are learned in addition to the skills we call The Three R’s: Reading, ’Riting, and, ’Rithmatic. Those are a set of general skills, chosen to provide our future  employers with a pool of prospective workers who possess a predictable, and useful skill-set. And what kind of writing will the average business writer produce? Reports and essays. Just like the kind of writing we practiced so diligently in school. But Fiction-Writing is a profession, one for which there are four-year courses of study leading to a degree. Surely some of what’s taught there is necessary. Right?

So there you are. Almost universally, we leave our school days exactly as well prepared to write fiction as to perform an appendectomy on our neighbor. Luckily for our neighbors, we understand that we’re not ready to perform surgery. But since writing is a skill we use every day, and no one tells us that Fiction-Writing methodology is dramatically different from what we were given, and use, when we turn to writing fiction we go with what we have, of course. But who’s to tell us?

Our teachers learned their writing skills in the same classrooms as we did. Yes, like so many college students, they probably took a Creative Writing class. But, the goal of that course is to teach students to write creatively, not professionally, in any of the various writing specialties. So not only aren’t we given the skills of the fiction-writer, our teachers believe that we, like they, left our school days with the skills needed to write fiction, professionally. And while reading fiction absolutely does give us an appreciation for well written prose, it no more teaches the necessary skills than eating teaches us the skills the chef, or walking though a sculpture garden teaches us the techniques of that profession.

But since you want to write fiction, or you wouldn’t be reading this, can the problem be fixed? Of course. Every successful writer faced the same situation and overcame it. So why not you? As the great Mark Twain put it: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

So, to get rid of some of those “just ain’t so,” issues, the first thing to do is dump several ideas:

1. Our goal is to tell the reader a story.

It’s not. Our goal is to make the reader live that story, in real-time, as-the-protagonist. No one cares deeply what happens to someone they barely know. Think of yourself. Were someone to come into the room where you are and say, “Did you hear? Some guy was hit by a car at the corner.” You might react in many ways. But compare that to your reaction had this person said, “Did you hear? Your mother was hit by a car at the corner.”

If you want the reader to say yes to more than a page or two before turning away, you have to make a good start on that relationship between your reader and your protagonist before three pages have passed, and continue to maintain that bond till they reach “the end.” What happens matters little if the reader hasn’t been made to care.

2. The most important thing is a good plot, one that will grab the reader.

Plot? Who cares? In most cases, your reader will decide to buy a given book or put it back in three pages or less. And how much plot have they seen in those three pages? Damn little. So if they buy it, it’s because the author gave them “the joy of reading,” by making the act of reading entertaining. They involved the reader, and before the end of page three, made that reader lean back in their chair and say, “Hmm…. Okay, tell me more.”

Were I to give a successful writer the average new-writer’s plot synopsis and say, “write this,” the result would keep the reader turning pages. But, give the best plot ever conceived to the average hopeful writer and they’ll be rejected before the end of page one. Not because of talent or how well they write, but because, being written with nonfiction techniques it will read like a report. Of what arrives in the agent and publisher’s offices, fully 75% of it is deemed unreadable, because the author is still using their school-day skills. Of the rest, all but three are seen as less than professional. And of those final three, two of them screwed up and didn’t target the right agent or publisher for that story.

3. The various online writing sites are a good place to get advice on writing.

Think about it. Asking someone who hasn’t been able to sell their own writing to a publisher, how to write well enough to sell to a publisher makes no sense. All you’ll get from them are the mistakes that get them rejected every time they submit.

So there you go. Take the time to learn and perfect the writing and business skills of the profession and you are, literally, ahead of 99% of your competition. That doesn’t guarantee publication, because less than one in ten of them are chosen. But if you don’t take the time to learn, you’re not even in the game.

So the question is: how do you fix the problem?

There are lots of ways. There are workshops, seminars, conferences, retreats, and even cruises for writers. But since all of them expect you to have a basic knowledge of the objectives and methodology, my personal suggestion is to chew your way through a few good books on the tricks-of-the-trade. And they’re no further from you than the local library system. In their fiction-writing section you’ll find the views of successful professionals in teaching, writing, and publishing. So take advantage of that. As Wilson Mizner put it: “If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from two, it’s research.” So, since knowledge is a pretty good substitute for genius, do your research.

To quote another wise man:

“It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
~Ernest Hemingway

Author’s note:
     These articles are not presented with a, “Do this and you’ll be a published author,” attitude. Anyone who tells you they can provide success via a few words on a blog page is scamming you. Instead, they’re one writer’s view of the ideas put forth by the writing teachers I admire and respect. I’ve done the series as part of what’s sometimes called a Benjamin Franklin debt. If some of what I say seems to make sense, I urge you to seek the teachers themselves, people like Dwight Swain, Debra Dixon, and a host of others, and read their advice directly.

 

Story Ideas – The Grumpy Writing Coach

Part of a series of articles for the new writer

 
 

People sometimes ask where story ideas come from, as if by learning that closely held secret—by finding that magical font of stories—they too may drink from it, be inspired, and thus, able to append the term “writer” to their name. In fact, almost everyone I talk to about writing believes that all that separates them from success is that elusive but necessary idea…plus a bit of practice and some luck.
     If only.
     Sad but true, ideas are the easy part. We have them ten times a day, triggered by casual events and stray associations. Witness the anatomy of a story:

° ° °

      I was talking to one of my son’s classmates in high school. He asked where I got my story ideas, and as I noted above, I said that ideas are easy. When he looked puzzled, I went on to say, “Last weekend I saw Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. In it, Red Riding Hood, after an encounter with the wolf—who was charming but who saw Red as the blue-plate special on his dinner menu—realizes that, as she puts it: ‘Nice is different than good.’ That’s something we so often get wrong in life that I thought his using the fairytale setting to illustrate it was brilliant, and it’s stuck with me.
     “You could,” I said, “expand that into a million plots. “For example, our popular culture holds that someone you find pretty is desirable, and desirable is good. In romance stories, it often means that characters who strike sparks every time they meet are going to fall in love before the story ends. It might be fun, though, to stand that idea on its head. So there, in that thought, you have your story idea.”
     John looked unsatisfied with such a simple example, so to expand on that I said, “In terms of an actual story, based on that idea, let’s assume a new employee shows up at our hero’s office, a woman he finds desirable, but who drives him crazy by arguing with him about everything. Whenever they meet there are sparks. They don’t hate each other, they just have opinions that differ, and a belief that their view is “right.” So day-by-day, co-existence in the same office becomes harder.
     “But then, one night, when they’re both in the office late, and screaming at each other, the man shouts, ‘You’re driving me crazy. You’re beautiful and you’re smart, but you drive me crazy!’ And as expected, the result of that outburst is they’re all over each other, with the same level of passion they showed in arguing.
     “So the man hurries to marry his nemesis, expecting his happily ever after. But of course, being what they are, a few weeks later they’re back to arguing over everything because they are, and always will be, oil and water.
     In fact, the point of the story is about his buying into those silly societal norms, as we all do, and then having them rubbed into his face. And through it all—in parallel with that story—his best friend is the woman he really should be in love with because they complement each other in every way. But he can’t let himself see that, because she isn’t beautiful so, obviously, isn’t what he should be seeking. It takes him most of the novel to wake up and realize that she is the perfect woman for him, as he helps her become a success in everything, except for her desire for him to love her as she loves him.”

° ° °

     And just like that, in the five minutes it took me to tell that young man what amounted to a synopsis, the plot was complete and the story was written, at least in my mind. Was that hard to do? Not a bit. You could do the same. Anyone can. What was hard, was deciding how to organize and present that story to a reader. We can’t simply tell the story as an expansion of the plot description, no matter how we expand and polish it, because that would be the author talking about the story in overview, not presenting Drew from within his moment of “now,” as he learns the lessons that will bring him to realize he’s been an idiot, and should have married Zoe in the first place.
     So where do I begin the story that comes from that idea? That’s where the craft of the fiction-writer comes into play. Shall we begin with him meeting the woman he’ll do battle with—or with the model he also pursues under the assumption that pretty and nice are synonymous? No. First, we need our reader to know Drew and what makes Drew tick if they’re to understand his reaction to those women on a gut level—so that reader will buy into it his viewpoint, share it, and urge him to go after the women, as-they-would, and then, learn the lesson, as-he-does: that nice, and pretty, are very different from good. We also need to know how he and Zoe interact, to realize what an idiot he is, and how important to him she is. But even in that, the realization should come late, as it does with Drew, so that about the time we’re saying, “Drew you’re an idiot. Zoe is the one you really need,” Drew is realizing that, too. That will give the feeling that it’s us making that decision, and that Drew is following our advice.
     The most difficult task is writing so the reader, rather then just being informed, is enticed, and made to become a participant rather than audience member. I had to arrange the scenes so the stakes kept rising for Drew, and the options narrowing, until he was alone and despondent. He has no job, he has no wife, and all that’s left is the single rock that has brought stability into his life year-after-year: Zoe. That way, when Zoe’s life is threatened, and he is forced to look at what the future would be without her, Drew is forced into the realization that she means more to him than life, itself.
     So Drew, to acquit himself, and to make himself worthy of her love—as poetic justice requires—rescues Zoe and gives her reason to commit herself fully to him, as he has just done, to her.
     It’s coordinating the elements of Drew’s epiphany that are the hard part of writing, because they have to be invisible to the reader on a conscious level, while at the same time seeming necessary to what’s going on within the scene. Done right, the reader will recognize that Drew is being an idiot only when all the elements are there for Drew to make that same realization. On some level readers will be aware that in the end Drew and Zoe will get together, but because they buy into his reasons for taking his actions, will worry more about the effect of those actions on Zoe, and her reaction to them. That reader must never be aware that you’re manipulating them to urge the protagonist to do what the writer is about to have him/her do. They must never have unanswered questions that nag and pull them out of the story. And, they must never be confused or bored, not even for a single line.
     Any competent writer can spark off story ideas. The only difference between theirs and a non-writer’s is that theirs are pre-shaped by the knowledge of how to present a story idea in an exciting and natural way. And that’s craft—the learned part of writing—not talent.
     So, if writing for publication is your desire, forget the idea that you’re being held back by the lack of that great idea. Ideas are easy. Presentation is the hard part because it’s not something we learn in school, where they’re teaching us to be a responsible adult, with skills an employer finds desirable. There, we focus on how to present reports, and the basics of writing on the job. In the stories we tell each other, aloud, we’re alone on stage and playing all roles, so to speak, which requires that there be a listener who can hear the emotion we place in our voice and see that in our facial expression, to make up for there being no other actors. But none of that makes it to the page when we try to write a novel, until we school ourselves in the craft and specialized knowledge of the fiction-writer.
     So, where do I get my own ideas? How in the hell should I know? It’s how to stop them that stumps me.
     And as for the plot I outlined that day, it became the basis of the novel I call, Zoe.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Author’s note:
     These articles are not presented with a, “Do this and you’ll be a published author,” attitude. Anyone who tells you they can provide success via a few words on a blog page is scamming you. Instead, they’re one writer’s view of the ideas put forth by the writing teachers I admire and respect. I’ve done the series as part of what’s sometimes called a Benjamin Franklin debt. If some of what I say seems to make sense, I urge you to seek the teachers themselves, people like Dwight Swain, Debra Dixon, and a host of others, and read their advice directly.

 

Inside Out – The Grumpy Writing Coach

     As writers, we face a problem: We’re not the reader. This may sound obvious, but it has important ramifications. Our reader is, in many ways, unknowable, because we have no idea of who will end up picking up our work. We do know some things, though:
     Their background probably won’t match ours. Their tastes will be different. Their age group and education will be different to an unknown degree. And, there’s a 50-50 chance that their gender will be different, too. In fact, it’s unlikely that we and a given reader have all that much in common.
     Given that, how can we write anything that will be acceptable to all readers? The answer is, we can’t. It is literally impossible to write anything that will be viewed in the same way by all readers.
     So, do we accept the fact that the majority of people who read our work won’t “get it?” Or is there a way to eliminate those differences? Obviously, there is, or I wouldn’t be writing this article. The trick isn’t to make our work universally accepted no matter the reader’s background. It’s to make all readers the same.
     What we need to do is to make our reader become our protagonist. If we can make them see the situation exactly as the protagonist does; if we give each reader the same set of resources the protagonist will use; if all readers have the same desires, needs, and imperatives as our protagonist, then they will decide on what must be done next in exactly the same way as our hero will—and have that reaction before the protagonist does, and literally become our protagonist in the moment that character calls now.
     Do that and you avoid the impossibility of making the writing universal. Instead you’ll make your readers universal. So, with that as our goal, let’s see how we can make it work.

We’ve always relied on presenting the facts accurately, concisely, and dispassionately because that’s how we were taught to write. And it works well for book reports. But when writing fiction, instead of eliminating differences in viewpoint that approach encourages them. Everyone has their own interpretation of your presentation, based on what the words mean to them. Tell the reader, for example, that the protagonist is at peace, and each reader will take a slightly different meaning from the statement. To some, being at peace means there is no stress in their life. For others, that there is no war, or argument. In Islam, peace is, in part, based on submission and surrender to the will of Allah. And, there are hundreds of other shades of meaning to that one word. So expecting a reader to know our viewpoint by reading a given word is impossible unless we focus on that reader, and are able to interact with them, so as to refine our words to fit their background and preconceptions. But, make the reader know why the character feels they are at peace by making that reader view the protagonist’s world as the protagonists does, and the reader’s interpretation of the word no-longer-matters. They will feel as the character feels, emotionally, because for the moment, they will have superimposed the protagonist’s view on their own.
     Can we do this using the writing techniques we all learn in school? Hell no. Our teachers spent zero time discussing the nuance of viewpoint. They taught us how to write dispassionately, with our accuracy of observation being the most important item. Why? Because most people will do their writing in a business setting, where accuracy is critical. We were, remember, learning skills to make us useful to employers. Those book-reports we wrote were practice for writing business reports. Those essays, practice for writing papers and letters. No one explained how to use tags, how to structure a scene, or even basics such as the three questions a reader needs answered quickly when entering any scene so as to have context to make sense of it.
     Converting the reader into our protagonist requires skills that are unlike those used for telling a story in person, or for creating a story on the stage or screen. Our medium is different, and has different strengths and weaknesses. Instead of stressing fact and accuracy we stress emotional connection. Instead of presenting things from the narrator’s viewpoint we presented from the protagonist’s. Same story, but a very different approach to presenting it. And that means a very different tool-set must be used in creating the presentation.
     Our goal, remember, isn’t to make the reader know about the terror our protagonist may be feeling. Our goal is to terrorize the reader. We don’t want the reader to learn about the plot. We want them to live it, moment-by-moment. If you can make someone feel they must stop reading for a moment, to decompress, because the emotional situation is so intense they can’t handle it, you have a very happy reader.
     In the end, we have a name for this: it’s called viewpoint. And viewpoint is the single most powerful tool in your repertoire. It is the thing that makes all readers the same.
     John W. Campbell, a noted editor once wrote an article in which he presented a hypothetical situation involving an observer and a climber. It went something like this:

Observer: “Don’t climb that tree. If you knew what I know, that’s not just a tree, it’s being used as a power pole, so there’s dangerous high-voltage up there.”
Protagonist: “If you knew what I know…that I’m a trained lineman, doing my job with the proper equipment, you wouldn’t worry.”
Observer: “But if you knew what I know, that your safety gloves are from a shipment that contained defective product, you wouldn’t go.”
Protagonist: “Ah…but if you knew what I know, that we heard about the defect and have inspected them to remove the bad gloves—and that the gloves I use will be pressure tested just before I put them on, you needn’t worry.”
Observer: “But if you knew what I know…”

     Point of view is critical. In the example above, were the observer made to know the situation as the protagonist does, confusion would be eliminated and the conversation would never occur.
     Obviously, the protagonist could be wrong. He or she could be missing or misinterpreting data, as could the protagonist in our stories. But that’s okay, because both our protagonist and our reader will have the same misunderstanding and make the same mistakes, which drives our plot. And our reader will be just as surprised, shocked, or perhaps pleased to learn of the misunderstanding.

     So how do we do that? How do we gain those necessary skills? How can we turn our narrative around and make our reader view our story from the inside out, as against from the outside in? How do we change our own perspective of how to present a story?
     The answer to that is quite simple. We do that by learning all we can about point of view and the other important skills a writer needs. We add to our existing knowledge, just the way we did, grade-by-grade, as we built our current set of writing skills. And the more we know, the greater the number of viable choices we have when handling a given situation. The more we know, the better we know what a reader will respond to. And, the more we know the better we get at making our reader feel like our protagonist.
     Simple? Absolutely. Easy? Of course not. If it was easy we’d all be rich and famous. Any profession takes time and practice to perfect. So the question isn’t if it’s easy or hard. The question is, is it worth the effort? And that boils down to: should we continue to write using techniques inappropriate to the task, or should we add professional skills to our toolbox? I don’t think you need my help to answer that question.
     But still, that’s a lot of work, especially given that we won’t know if we have the potential to make effective use of those skills, and to be successful, until we own and apply them. And that’s a big if, especially since most of us are not going to have people lining up to buy our work. So in reality: do we want to be a writer badly enough to to invest lots of time, and perhaps a few dollars to become a writer as a publisher views that term?
     That’s a difficult question to answer, other than to say that if someone can talk you out of writing you aren’t meant to be one. Writers write. It’s what we do. It’s our curse and our blessing.
Something to keep in mind when making that decision: writing isn’t a destination. It’s a journey, one that lasts a lifetime. And if every day we write with a little more skill than we did on the previous day, and we live long enough…
     So…now that I’ve discouraged you with the news that you probably won’t get rich from your writing this year, let me make a suggestion as to how to begin your transformation from outside-in to inside-out writing.
     A very good article on creating a strong point of view can be found here. It’s based on the work of Dwight Swain, who is notable for having defined many of the techniques that professional writers use, in a clear and concise way. I’d advise you to read the article, think about it, and when it begins to make sense, check the fiction that made you feel as though you were experiencing it, to see how the author made the technique work for that story. And if it seems like something that would help your writing, pick up a copy of Swain’s book, Techniques of the Selling Writer. It both expands on that technique and will show you many others, equally meaningful. Read it slowly, stopping at every point where a new concept is introduced, to think about and practice that point, so as to make it your own rather than to simply learn that it exists.
     And when you finish the book put it aside for six months. Use what you’ve learned, gaining skill and competence. Then, read it again. This time, knowing where he’s going, and better understanding the concepts being introduced, you’ll learn as much the second time as you did the first.
     Will it make you a published author? Naa. That’s your job. What it will do is give you the tools with which to become one, if-it’s-in-you to do that. And that’s the best we can hope for. Maybe it will turn out to be something interesting, but still, success will still elude you. Could be. Happens to most of us. But still, new writers appear all the time. Why shouldn’t it be you? And as they say, you never know till you try.

Hang in there, and keep on writing.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Author’s note:
These articles are not presented with a, “Do this and you’ll be a published author,” attitude. Anyone who tells you they can provide success via a few words on a blog page is scamming you. Instead, they’re one writer’s view of the ideas put forth by the writing teachers I admire and respect. I’ve done the series as part of what’s sometimes called a Benjamin Franklin debt. If some of what I say seems to make sense, I urge you to seek the teachers themselves, people like Dwight Swain, Debra Dixon, and a host of others, and read their advice directly.

 

A Mirror for the Mind – The Grumpy Writing Coach

Part of a series of articles for the new writer
 
 
 

     One of the unique abilities humans have evolved is to mentally put ourselves in someone else’s place. We have the ability to watch someone doing a physical act and literally feel ourselves duplicating the action. It’s not a matter of saying, “I do this, and then that,” we physically fire off the proper neurons, but at a level that doesn’t produce overt movement. We are, in effect, debugging the procedure before we try it ourselves.
     It’s a handy ability, and allows us to learn quickly. And it’s so complete an ability that if the one we’re mirroring in our mind hurts themself we’ll feel that pain. Unpleasant though it might be, pain teaches us to be careful, and that mirrored pain teaches us what to avoid, just as would having made that mistake ourselves.
     So what does that have to do with writing? Everything. That ability to mirror action and emotion is what gives us the way to literally pull our reader into our stories as a participant. Done right, we can terrify our reader with a horror story, and make them afraid to turn out the lights—in spite of the fact they know it’s only a story. It’s why we weep when something terrible happens to our fictional friend, and feel triumph at the climax of the story.
     All the tools—the techniques we use—have one and only one goal, to evoke that empathetic ability that places our reader on the scene.
     Our hero is locked in combat, his sword weaving a protective shell around him. We could list each thrust and parry and leave it at that. But that won’t evoke the empathetic sense because it’s impersonal. Instead, as the fight goes on, we have our hero think, He’s better than I am.
     The character has that realization, but the reader mutters, “Oh shit now what?”
     Sure, our reader knows the protagonist isn’t going to die. If that happened the story would be over. So the question is, how can we avoid death? And with that realization, those thrusts and parries take on new meaning, because while we know things are going bad for the protagonist we need time. We need to stay alive till something presents itself as a solution. Now we focus on the events, while at the same time thinking over the possibilities—exactly-like-the-protagonist, which means we are the protagonist, and living that fight.
     Let’s assume that the reader thinks they know what stratagem can save our protagonist—will at least allow escape if victory is not possible. Now, in addition to fighting the battle we’re shouting to our avatar, trying to remind them of that solution. And when our hero is nicked on the hand we curse, and feel the pain. Done really well, we can cause the reader to have to stop and recover because it gets too real.
     And if in our brilliance we not only cause the reader to be shouting encouragement and advice, we provide a better solution, one the reader feels they should have thought of, we have a reader who saying, “I really like this book.” And what more can we ask for?
     Facts? Who cares? Facts only inform. But mirroring the action in our mind as we read—living the adventure. That entertains.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Author’s note:
     These articles are not presented with a, “Do this and you’ll be a published author,” attitude. Anyone who tells you they can provide success via a few words on a blog page is scamming you. Instead, they’re one writer’s view of the ideas put forth by the writing teachers I admire and respect. I’ve done the series as part of what’s sometimes called a Benjamin Franklin debt. If some of what I say seems to make sense, I urge you to seek the teachers themselves, people like Dwight Swain, Debra Dixon, and a host of others, and read their advice directly.

 

Amazon *IS* Screwing You – The Grumpy Writing Coach

     A large part of Amazon’s business, these days, is with self-publishers. They don’t sell a lot of books per author, but they will usually sell copies to friends, family, and coworkers. And every million self-published writers who moves twenty copies of their book is exactly equal to the one author who sells twenty million copies. There are millions of self-published writers, so that’s a nice source of income. But that being said, Amazon has a way to add to their profit that most writers aren’t aware of.
Like Smashwords for their electronic book releases, Amazon accepts Microsoft Word files as input for a Kindle release. The only significant difference in the two files is that Smashwords requires an inside picture and a statement that they are publishing it.
There is one more difference, though, and it’s the one making Amazon all that extra money. Unlike Smashwords, Amazon, if you take their 70% royalties offer, charges $.15 per megabyte transmitted to the customer, so if your file is just a few bytes over 1 meg in size that’s $.30 in addition to their 30% cut of the profit. Sell a million books with that extra $.15 profit and it adds up to $150,000. A nice piece of change.
That size limit shouldn’t be a problem, because you have to get close to 135k words before you break the one meg file size in a Word file. As an example, an 85k word novel, as a Word .doc document comes in at about .75 meg, and should deliver to the customer for $.15. At least it should.
That same novel, with an inside picture included, for Smashwords, weighs in at .77 meg and yields a converted epub file of .619 meg—including that that internal picture. But when Amazon gets their greedy claws on that same file it inflates to a staggering 3.05 meg. That means a $.60 delivery charge. So if you charge $2.95, which many self-pubs do, Amazon gets:
Their 30% of the profit: $.88
Their delivery charge: $.60
Total paid to Amazon: $1.48 which is roughly 50% of the profit.
That becomes more interesting when you look at most published novels on Amazon, and check their Kindle files. They nearly all have a file size of well under a meg—or did in 2014 when this article was written. Now, they’re screwing publishers in the same way. As an example, My novel, An Abiding Evil as a word file, is .41 meg. Converted to ePub format it’s only .281 meg. And when that Word file is published on Smashwords the downloaded epub file, from Smashwords is .8 meg.

     But…. That same Word file, when sent to Amazon, results in a whopping Amazon file size of 3.81 meg! And if the .281 meg epub file is sent to Amazon, instead, the result is 2.78 meg.

    So, Smashwords, who do not charge the author for file delivery, create a .8 meg file from a MS Word manuscript, but Amazon, who does, creates a file that’s 3.5 times as large.

     We could assume that the programmers working for Amazon are inept, compared to those at Smashwords, rather than it being a case of Amazon finding a way to chisel a lot of extra profit out of the self-publishers—while claiming to give the author 70% of the price. But no onw believes that. In any case there’s a way around it:
1. Clean up your file and get all the headers, tabs, and other crap out.
2. Build your table of contents (more on how to do that, below).
3. Save the file, using Word, as a Docx file.
4. Download a copy of Calibre. It’s a free program, though they would like, and deserve, a donation as a thank you.
5. Open Calibre and paste or load the DocX file you created into it.
6. Highlight your novel and select, Edit Metadata. In the metadata screen that opens, enter your book’s title, the picture you just created, your name, the tags for the novel, and the “sort” data fields: If your title has “The” as its first word, enter the title minus “the” and follow it with the title, a comma, a space, and “The” (or, for novels beginning with “A” it should read something like: Change of Heart, A). Your sort field entry for Author Name, is your last name, followed by a comma, a space, and your first. If you already have the piece published via Kindle, copy the publication date and the ISBN from the existing Kindle page.
7. Highlight the file and select the Convert Books feature. Be certain that the output file (top right) is listed as epub.
8. At the bottom right press Okay.
The epub file that results is what you send to Amazon in place of your MS Word file, and the final size will be far smaller. And with a $.15 delivery fee and a $2.95 price, their share of the profit drops to 34%. And, you make $.40 more per sale.
As always, though, review the result via Amazon’s reader, and do that before you push the publish button.

° ° °

To build a table of contents for publication, we can’t use Word’s table of contents feature. Instead:
1. Bookmark each chapter heading. Use a simple name like ch1 for chapter numbers. No spaces in the bookmark name, and don’t bother with capital letters. And while you’re doing that, you might want to center the chapter’s title and make it bold, to set it off. This makes a neater separation on smaller screen readers. Some people go up in size to 13 or 14 point, but that’s personal preference.
2. Create the table of contents page by setting it off with a manual page break at top and bottom (Typing a Command/Enter on the Mac and Control/Enter on the PC creates a manual page break). Then, as you did with your chapter titles, center the “Table of Contents” title. Again, many also make it 14 point type, bold.
3. Under the title, type out the chapter numbers and whatever else should be included in the TOC, like samples of other books and author notes, using one line per. You can cheat and copy that text as a group from another book and paste it in, to save typing. It will come with the existing hyperlinks, but you’re going to replace that, so it doesn’t matter.
4. Hyperlink each line in the table to the bookmark for that chapter. Don’t be surprised if, when the hyperlink is added, the paragraph mark at the end of that line vanishes, and must be added back it. It’s another of Word’s charming foibles. When you finish, you can test that the links are proper by hovering over each entry to see that the hyperlink refers to the proper bookmark. You are going to push the button to see it work for yourself, though, both to be certain it works and because it’s fun, which is the reason for the next step.
5. Push the Add Bookmark button to get you to the bookmark page. While you’re there, find the “Hidden Bookmarks” checkbox and turn it on. If it’s already on, turn it off and back on because there’s a bug in the code and it won’t show bookmarks that have been added since the box was checked unless you turn it off and on again (don’t you just love MS Word? And people wonder why I’m so grumpy). Delete all hidden bookmarks and close the bookmarks window.
6. You’re ready to go. Just don’t use any hyperlinks now that you’ve cleared the hidden ones or you’ll have to do it again.

 

Stories, and Why I Hate Them – The Grumpy Writing Coach

Part of a series of articles for the new writer
 
 
 

     Okay, this is another rant. Why? Because I’m pretty damn tired of reading Stories. And that capital S is there deliberately. I like stories. I just can’t stand Stories.
     Talk to any group of new writers or visit any online writers community and it’s all about Story. Look at the posted work on those communities and it’s always the same. They’re all focused on telling their Story. And that’s it. That’s the whole and only purpose of the writing, to make the reader know the Story. Except that it’s not. Writing fiction is about entertainment—interesting, satisfying, and time filling entertainment.
     Flush the idea that readers come to us for Story. Burn it. Shred it. Feed it to the hogs. Just get rid of it, because readers don’t give a damn about Story until they close the book, lean back, and say, “That was a _______ story.” (Fill in good/great/lousy/etc. as appropriate)
     Until they do that, all that matters is the writing. Think about it. I can take any situation, hand it to virtually any competent writer and say, “Write me a page about ___,” and be certain I’ll get a page that will entice the reader to continue to the bottom and then turn to the next page. It can be about a physical battle, a romantic tryst, or taking out the damn garbage. It doesn’t matter, because that skilled writer can entice you through their ability to make the scene both real and interesting to read, through their presentation skills, their command of point of view, and through their knowledge of what it takes to please a reader. That’s what sets the professional writer apart from all the wannabees. It’s not having great plot ideas. It’s not luck or “natural talent,” It’s knowing how to write for the selected medium. It’s knowing the little tricks of how to to hold a reader’s interest.
     And if you have that ability. If you can can entice your customer to read from top to bottom of the page because they want to, and do for three hundred fifty pages in a row, you’ve written something the reader will enjoy, and recommend to friends. And isn’t the entire purpose of buying fiction to find reading enjoyment on every page, from top to bottom? I don’t know about anyone else, but I sure don’t buy fiction and plow through a history lesson on the life of a fictional character just so I can find an interesting twist on page three twenty-five. That twist is a plus, not the reason I’m still reading well past bedtime. I’m doing that because of the writing.
     If your plot isn’t all that great a reader might say it wasn’t much of a story, true, but they will call it a satisfying read. And that’s what writing is all about. So give your customer a readable page, paragraph, sentence. Choose your words to entice. Think about making every single reading moment compelling, or at least more interesting than whatever a given reader might do where they not reading your book. Just, for God’s sake don’t focus on Story, because that’s history, and history is boring.
     Why? Because history is a chronicle, not a story. It’s a collection of facts, and we usually read facts to be informed, not entertained. They’re devoid of emotion because they’re about completed, and immutable events, not those events as they unfold. And I’m not talking about the use of past tense in presenting the story, I’m talking about being in the character’s moment of now, no matter the tense the writer elects to use in the telling.
     When we read history we’re not sharing the adventure and we have no emotional investment. We’re learning. We won’t worry if some action or plan of the protagonist will work because it’s already happened and we’re only being told the sequence in which it happened. But worry is something readers feed on. It’s worry that causes them to care, and it’s the trick we use, as writers, to hook our reader. If you can make a reader worry they care about the character’s future.
     Worry makes a reader speculate on what the protagonist should do, and what they, themself, would do, were they living the scene. And since the character is just as uncertain as we are, we form an emotional bond with that character because we have something in common, without realizing why, or even that we do. We only know that we want to know what will happen next. And if the writer is skilled enough to make it seem that the story is progressing in real-time (and we certainly should be) we will feel exactly the same sense of urgency the character does.
     But…if we tell the story as a chronicle of events, there can be no sense of urgency because it feels like a report, not something going on around us. And why does that matter? Because a report can be put aside. Great writing can’t.

 

Words and Music – The Grumpy Writing Coach

Part of a series of articles for the new writer
 

Words and Music

     Music has the power to move us in ways that border the astonishing. With just a few notes it can change our mood in ways dramatic. A fanfare can make us smile, while a musical joke may bring a chuckle. Music can invoke the power of the raging sea or transport us to the tranquil moments leading to sleep. And it can do that all without words.
     Couple speech to that power and the possibilities are limitless. That combination of lyric and melody can inspire us to love, patriotism, and even despair. We whistle a happy song when we pass a graveyard, and celebrate the anniversary of our birth with a little ditty. It permeates our lives. Words bring the thought and music the emotion. Together they can accomplish miracles.
     So how, you ask, does that relate to writing fiction? That’s easy. Most of us have a voice, our instrument, that’s less than impressive. There are few, a very few, who were born with an intuition of song that makes them a natural fit to some aspect of music. The rest of us, should we pursue a singing career, must develop those skills through practice and study. And because the instrument we’re given as a birthright does not usually embody perfection, most of the most successful popular singers make do with something less than that. Even Ella Fitzgerald, the first lady of jazz, and someone blessed with a voice that only a precious few possess, had to be guided into the best use of her talents. And so it is with writing.
     The problem is that as we grow through our teen years we learn to present the emotional part of our stories through the physical techniques that are also useful when performing music. As we present the facts of the story with our words, we present the melody—the emotional aspect—though sweeping hand gestures, changing expression, intonation, modulation, body-language, hesitation, and the many tricks of delivery in the storyteller’s bag of tricks. We stop and shake our heads as if in sorrow, and our audience is given important emotional information. We lean toward the audience and speak softly, and they know we’re about to relate a secret.
     But then we turn to recording our stories in print. We can record the words, yes, but what about the music? What happens to the melody played by that marvelously expressive instrument, the human voice? Where is that interpretive dance we do to tell our audience, visually, the things they absolutely need to know if they’re to understand the character’s motivation?
     Gone. All gone.
     On the page lie our words, the lyrics of our song, lifeless, devoid of all emotion.
     And the reader, the one we’ve appointed to sing our song? What of them?
     Hand me the song lyrics to, Somewhere Over the Rainbow, and the melody begins to play on the iPod of my mind before my eyes read more then the title. That’s true for almost any song we already know. But what about the song we don’t know? We’re handed the lyrics and told to sing to ourselves. But how can we do that? We don’t know what a line we’re about to sing says, factually or emotionally, until after we read it.
     How do we solve that problem when we give someone our brand new song? If we’re with them we sing it. If not, we may hand them a recording. But if neither are available? We supply the musical notation and the lyrics, the sheet music. The singer now has both, the words and music, the facts and the emotion. And in writing we have exactly the same situation. We need to present the reader with the facts of the story, while, at the same time, making them feel the emotion the character does.
     Over time, writers have developed the tricks of presentation that will give our reader what’s necessary to know our story as we do, from the inside, so to speak. Properly presented, we can make the audience feel is if time is passing, and can motivate the reader to speak the dialog as we would—as the actual character would. We can pass them the emotional part of the story by making them experience it, not just hear about it. It’s one thing to tell the reader that Sam was glad to see Ella when she enters the room, but quite another to make the reader say, “Damn, I’m glad she’s back. I like Ella.”
     The thing to remember: you’re not telling your reader a story. Your reader is a musical instrument—your musical instrument. They are both amazingly powerful and flexible, and certainly worth learning how to play. So don’t tell them a story. Take the time to learn to make them live it.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Author’s note:
     These articles are not presented with a, “Do this and you’ll be a published author,” attitude. Anyone who tells you they can provide success via a few words on a blog page is scamming you. Instead, they’re one writer’s view of the ideas put forth by the writing teachers I admire and respect. I’ve done the series as part of what’s sometimes called a Benjamin Franklin debt. If some of what I say seems to make sense, I urge you to seek the teachers themselves, people like Dwight Swain, Debra Dixon, and a host of others, and read their advice directly.

 

Show and Tell – The Grumpy Writing Coach

Part of a series of articles for the new writer
 
 

Show and Tell

 

     Hello, it’s me, the grumpy old writing coach. Today I thought I might crush a cherished belief or two. One I particularly like says that you need to show everything your character senses. That, you’ll be told, will keep you off the stage and place the reader inside the character’s head.
     Will it? Sure. Just like sitting inside a robot. You’ll be watching the world through view-screens and reading status reports from the other senses: “S/he saw… s/he smelled… s/he felt…” And how much like the character will that make you feel?
     But suppose you could be a phantom presence, instead, standing right where the character is, seeing for yourself everything the character sees—as the character perceives it—knowing everything the character knows, thinks and wants, yet still able to be yourself and make your own evaluation of the situation? And suppose that’s happening in a way that gives the feeling that time is passing? Suddenly you’re not only able to be the character, you can do better, and advise the character on what to do next. True, they’re not going to listen. They never do. But that doesn’t matter, any more then it did when you shouted advice at the TV screen last week when you thought no one was listening. In fact, if you handle it well enough, as the writer, when the reader gives that advice it will be exactly what the character wants to do, giving the reader the feeling that their advice is being acted on.
     Cherished belief number two: Tell the reader everything the character sees, senses, smells, touches, and hears, and the reader will become the character.
     But they don’t. You can’t really become the people in the book you’re reading. You can only become a character, yourself. But isn’t that what we really want to be? You don’t want to be agent James Bond, you want his job and his life for yourself.
     So what does that mean? It means you don’t tell the reader what your character sees, you tell what, of all the things they’re sensing in that instant, they will pay attention to next. Little change. Big difference.
     Then, as a reader, you experience what the character does—from the character’s perspective in time and space—and do that before the character does, so you can begin making your own decision as to the importance of events and how to respond to them. The character, and his or her reaction, will be the yardstick by which you measure your own. As a participant you’re doing something that can’t happen when you’re in that robot’s control room: You begin to create alternate, and possible solutions to the problems being posed, just as you do in your own life. Now and then you may even stop, close your eyes and daydream how the scene would go if you were living it and in control of the situation. If you can make a reader do that they’re participants, not readers. And if you do it just right they won’t have time to stop and daydream because they’re too busy experiencing the story.
     One final cherished belief to demolish today: There is no tooth fairy. Sorry.
 
So now on to grading your homework assignment.
     A while ago I asked you to look through your own writing and see that every single action was motivated by some stimulis. For those of you whose dog ate the homework. I’ll give you a minute to recheck.
     Here’s why it matters. Would you buy a story that said:

*

     A Tanager winged just above John’s head, quick and bright. Yapping and the sound of small paws hurrying in his direction pulled his eyes left. An eddy in the wind brought a trace of woodsmoke, and with it memories of softer times.

*

     It’s a series of physical world happenings unreferenced to any human reaction other than to look, and then pay no attention. It’s motivation with no reaction. It’s reporting. Lots of people trying to be writers do exactly that.
     So let’s turn that around and show reaction with no motivation. Does it work any better?

*

     Spring at last, his heart said, as he turned his steps toward the park. Maybe the last spring. Maybe one too many. A small dog, Yorkie, he guessed, was dancing in welcome, saying “Play with me,” with his shrill little barks. Painfully he bent to pet the small head. Would that I could, small friend. Straightening from the dog he closed his eyes and breathed deeply of yesterday, when the little park knew him so much better. A time when she was there to take his hand.

*

     This, by the way, is also typical of what we see from the new writer. So what’s wrong? We don’t know why he thinks it’s spring. The dog comes toward him but as far as we know he didn’t see or hear it before it’s reported in motion at his feet. And he thinks of days past, but why? Because of the dog? A flower? The season? No, he just does it because it’s pretty, and poetic. A reader would understand, but not be drawn in because they participated not at all.
     Of course you’ve guessed where I’m going with this, because in your life everything you do or think has its basis in some motivating event. You sense, and in response you react on a gut level. You then internalize the event, you think about it, and finally you take action. It may take an instant, or it could take an hour to complete.
     That next motivating act might be the result of your last reaction—a response to your heaving a brick into the wet cement, perhaps. It might be pang of hunger that pulls you away from what you’re doing. It can be anything, but in unbroken chain, cause and effect march through your life, as it must through the lives of every character in your story. And that’s the true difference between show and tell.

*

     A Tanager winged just above John’s head, quick and bright. Spring at last, his heart said, as he turned his steps toward the park. Maybe the last spring. Maybe one too many.
     Yapping and the sound of small paws hurrying in his direction pulled his eyes left. A small dog, Yorkie, he guessed, was dancing in welcome, saying “Play with me,” with his shrill little barks. Painfully he bent to pet the small head. Would that I could, small friend.
     An eddy in the wind brought a trace of woodsmoke, and with it memories of softer times. Straightening from the dog he closed his eyes and breathed deeply of yesterday, when the little park knew him so much better. A time when she was there to take his hand.

*

     In completion there is beauty

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Author’s note:
     These articles are not presented with a, “Do this and you’ll be a published author,” attitude. Anyone who tells you they can provide success via a few words on a blog page is scamming you. Instead, they’re one writer’s view of the ideas put forth by the writing teachers I admire and respect. I’ve done the series as part of what’s sometimes called a Benjamin Franklin debt. If some of what I say seems to make sense, I urge you to seek the teachers themselves, people like Dwight Swain, Debra Dixon, and a host of others, and read their advice directly.

 

What In The Hell Is POV – The Grumpy Writing Coach

Part of a series of articles for the new writer
 
 

What In The Hell Is POV?

 

     If there’s one thing that causes both me and new writers anguish it’s point of view. For them it’s the anguish of making it work. For me it’s the whimper when I read something as pleasant as fingernails on a blackboard. POV, as it’s usually abbreviated, is the single greatest hurdle in the battle to change from writing reports to writing fiction.
      We all know how to report, of course, it’s the essence of verbal communication. We tell about our day, our feelings, and our stories. Just visit Facebook and you’ll see that in action. It’s told as a report because we’re alone on stage, the star of our own one-person show. So naturally, when we begin to write fiction we tell the story as we always have.
      So why is that not enough?
      The setting for this example is easy. We begin with a single character standing on the shoulder of a blacktop road next to a field of soy plants. The character’s hands rest on a fencepost. Before them the ground is level, but it slopes away in the distance into a shallow valley a few miles wide and extending an unknown distance in either direction from the vantage point. In the distance, close to the far side of a narrow river, the shoulders of a mountain thrust upward, forming the backdrop of a truly magnificent view. As far as the eye can see there’s farmland, interspersed with wooded areas, with the tracery of roads and the border-lines of fields dividing the view into visual pixels.
      Above, the afternoon light throws a cloudy sky into relief, much of it heavy with the possibility of rain. The air, too, carries a hint of moisture on the gentle breeze, though the roadway behind is dry.
      Got all that? It’s the scene. Any character placed in that scene sees precisely the same thing. So, if you tell me, “small watercourses could be seen here and there in the valley,” it’s a report of what the writer visualizes, and what even people driving by can see. So who cares? It’s static. It’s unrelated to the character and what the character is doing. Unless I’m reading the work in search of a beautiful view, it’s a waste of time telling me about it. It’s a greater waste if the description is in prosaic terms.
      But every new writer does exactly that. They tell what there is to be seen, not what the character is noticing.
      Let’s look at something very different. We’ll look at the scene as several different characters see it by plugging them into the setting I detailed, above and talking about what they notice, not what can be seen.
 
The starving farmer:
      This man hasn’t seen rain for over a month. The valley is there for him, yes, and it’s just as beautiful as it always has been, but he sees it every day of his life, and it’s commonplace—unnoticed. He’s looking at the plants in the field in front of him and noticing the way the leaves are drooping, moisture starved and close to death. He’s noticing the clouds, poised so teasingly overhead. He frowns at the haze showing on the mountain where the breeze strikes the slope and sweeps upwards, condensing the moisture and causing it to rain on the flanks of that mountain, to run into the river and be carried away. He’s thinking of his family, and of how he’s not going to get through the winter if the crop fails. He looks, and he thinks, and everything he does is underlined by the prayer that fills his being: Please… Dear God, please send me rain.
 
The tourist:
      This person is a visitor from another country, where drought hasn’t struck. She’s an artist, here to paint, and she sees the view through the eyes of an artist. She views the roiling clouds in terms of their contrast to the serene scene on the ground. She sees the drooping plants but understands their significance not at all. She sees the rain on the mountain and feels pleasure at the way it completes the picture, and smiles over the fact that it’s not where she is, ruining her perfect moment.
 
The wet farmer:
      This lady is sullen. She stares at the rain clouds and hates every one of them. In the fine detail of her world the plants droop not with dehydration, but from drowning roots, as the result of a saturated summer and the probability of more rain conspire to push her to the brink. Her thoughts aren’t on beauty, but on giving in and accepting a man’s offer of marriage—he of the stinking breath and awkward hands. To her, rain and tears are inexorably intertwined. And everything she looks at reminds her of the decision she must make before nightfall. Beauty? There is no beauty there for her.
 
The lover:
      This man stands by the road, surrounded by glory, but he notices it not at all for itself. The fields represent life, and remind him of his lover, and the children they will have together. The vista, with its airy beauty, makes him reflect on the comfort he’s found with her. The mountains, reaching upward, remind him of her as she climaxed under his ministrations. He laughs as his eyes trace the series of peaks and his mind relives her gasps and clutchings. His focus is the coming evening.
 
The geologist. The bounty hunter. The land developer… All see the same image, and all take away only what they, uniquely, take away. And in doing so—in seeing something we wouldn’t see because our perceptions are shaped by our own needs—they take our interest.
      Each of us is unique. Each of us perceives the world in a way that’s shaped by our own needs and experiences. Each of us have a different story.
     Tell the story, not its setting.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Author’s note:
     These articles are not presented with a, “Do this and you’ll be a published author,” attitude. Anyone who tells you they can provide success via a few words on a blog page is scamming you. Instead, they’re one writer’s view of the ideas put forth by the writing teachers I admire and respect. I’ve done the series as part of what’s sometimes called a Benjamin Franklin debt. If some of what I say seems to make sense, I urge you to seek the teachers themselves, people like Dwight Swain, Debra Dixon, and a host of others, and read their advice directly.

 

Deconstructing Samantha – The Grumpy Writing Coach

Part of a series of articles for the new writer
 
 

Deconstructing Samantha

 

     Many people seem convinced that to learn to write, all you need do is read, and there on the pages lie the secrets of the masters, ripe for plucking. But can it be that easy? Can you learn to be a good bowler by watching an expert? Can we learn to cook by eating good foods? We all read, so it seems strange that so few of us achieve success of that level, if it’s that easy.
     Certainly, by reading we can develop a sense of what works and what doesn’t. And we can generate benchmarks for ourselves, with which to measure the success of our own work. But any profession has trade secrets. And any profession has a body of knowledge that must be studied and mastered by practicing until it’s automatic, because those things aren’t obvious—or intuitive.
     Reading, or even closely examining any finished product tells you little about the process—unless you know that process so well, yourself, you “recognize the tool marks.” And the whys—the necessities—of a line being stated as it is, instead of another way, aren’t obvious.
     Wouldn’t you love to have a marked up copy of your favorite favorite author’s first draft, to see what was changed in editing? How about a conversation with that author on what he or she was attempting to do, and what the role of every line is, in contributing to that goal?
     I’m not your favorite writer, and I make no claim to be a writer of great skill, but none-the-less, I’m going to take the opening scene of Samanta And The Bear and deconstruct it for you, so you can see why I did certain things. I chose Samantha for this because it sold, which means I was doing at least some things right. Plus, it’s been republished, and could use a bit of shameless promotion.
     A suggestion and a challenge: Read the scene first, without referring to the notes, to get your reaction and see if the situation becomes at all real to you. Then go to the comments to learn why I did a given thing. See how often you nod and say, “I knew that.”
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Samantha and the Bear – opening scene:
 
     It was the kind of cold that bit at her face like tiny rodent teeth—so intense that the moisture in her nostrils froze each time she inhaled[1].
     As the night deepened [2] Samantha worked her way deeper and deeper into the blankets, but there was no place left to go. She woke to find herself huddled into a heat conserving ball, shivering[3].
     The breeze that huffed around the building at dusk was now the angry hiss of wind overlaid with ice crystals[4]. The cold, unbearable then, was now beyond anything she could have imagined.
     Until tonight it was an annoyance to spend her time bundled up in layer after layer of clothing. Now, as she gathered her courage to leave the bedding she was afraid.[5]
     The van? The road was impassible, but its heater could still provide warmth[6].
     But she had no confidence in its ancient battery, and if she made the attempt and was unable to start the engine there was little chance she would survive the trip back to the house.
     Bracing herself, Samantha pulled the covers from her face, opening her eyes to near darkness. The lantern had gone out so the only light came from the burners of the stove, their flames reduced to half their normal length by the chill[7]. A glance at the windows showed new snow had drifted against the wall and was covering half the glass[8]. Sometime during the night a storm-front must have passed through the area, bringing new snow and an arctic cold.
     With an effort, she slid from the table and limped toward the stove, to warm her hands enough to change the tank on the lantern[9]. The house had no functioning heater so she was forced to sleep in the kitchen, where the stove burned constantly. It helped only a little.
     She tried to read the thermometer mounted just outside the window but there was not enough light. It didn’t matter, though. It was cold enough to kill her. Nearly fifteen below when she had crawled into the blankets, it was well beyond that, now[10].
     Ten minutes later she was trying to hold back tears. She had changed the lantern’s cylinder, but the cold was so great that she was unable to get the lantern to light[11]. Back at the stove once more, she huddled herself as close to the burners as she could without setting her clothing alight, listening to the wind and assessing her chances of survival. They weren’t good. Unless she found a way to warm her feet she would soon be unable to stand, and if she fell she would die. She estimated that she had less than a half hour before that occurred[12].
     If I could curl up in a frying pan like a strip of bacon, that would be heaven. She blinked, then, as something tickled at her cold-fogged brain. It was a stupid idea—a desperate solution to a problem that had no solution.
     But, if it works…[13]…
     Praying that she was not simply hurrying her death, she extinguished all but one of the burners. Then, on legs that were numb, and as responsive as stilts, she hobbled to the table for a chair, one with arms [14] that would support her in sleep.
     It took much of her remaining strength to lift the chair to the stove-top and center it over the burner[15]. Most of the rest was spent in wrapping aluminum foil around the periphery of the chair’s legs to keep her blankets from the flame.
     The rest of the job, moving her blankets and the dragging a second chair to use as a step-stool, were tasks she could never quite recall, but in the end she was enthroned high over the kitchen floor, the burner beneath her and warming her tented bedding.
     It took nearly fifteen minutes, but it finally came: first the jangling pain that heralded a resumption of feeling in her fingers and toes, then blessed, life-restoring heat. Not just warmth, but true heat, spreading through her like a balm, thawing her bones and restoring her soul[16].
     It was an uncomfortable place to sit and a worse place to sleep, but she didn’t care, she was warm, and nothing else mattered. Slowly, her chattering jaw unclenched, and slowly the shivering of her body subsided. Slowly, she came back to life.
     Just before she drifted off to sleep she imagined a snow sprite peering in through the window, its whiskers quivering in surprise to see the queen of winter holding court in a frozen Oregon kitchen[17]. The thought pleased her very much. I may look like an idiot, Mr. Sprite, but I won for a change. This time I won!
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
     The why of it:
 
1. The first line is the single most important one in the story, because you only get one chance at a first impression. I added this scene as a prologue to the novel, because the original first chapter, while it ends with excitement and what I think is a really good hook, began with: “Don’t forget the newspaper, Miss Hanover.” That’s hardly impressive enough to make you say, “I have to read more.” I also wanted the readers to know that Samantha is a stronger person than she appears to be in the following few chapters, so I inserted a prologue and began with a sensation that combines the cold most people have felt—cold that bites the cheeks—with the hair freezing in their nostrils, something most haven’t, to make them feel what she’s feeling. There was also a tiny hope that if they’ve never been out in –12 or lower, they would say, “Your nostril hair freezes? That’s gross… but interesting.”
 
2. I used this term, rather then something simple, like “passed” to take advantage of the connection between “deep in the night” and depth, as in the temperature being as low as it can get.
 
3. Everyone’s been there, at least so far as huddling under the covers. Again, I’m trying to draw the reader in via shared experience.
 
4. A simple line, but I rephrased it endlessly, trying to say it in an interesting way while giving a picture of the current—and past—situation, outside.
 
5. This paragraph both sets up for the shock of cold and gives tiny bit of backstory. Note that I framed it as information on the current situation, so the reader doesn’t realize they’re being fed a bit of backstory on what happened before they arrived.
 
6. I’ve coupled her actual thought with the meaning of that thought. It’s a part of my personal writing style, to show the thought and give its meaning, as if to herself. I can’t tell if it works, it just feels right to me. Others use different techniques, and there is no right or wrong way.
 
7. I placed her action before I filled in the details on the room so they could be her observations as she sat up. Note that doing it that way removes the need for the author to give the information or even put in “she observed,” etc. A little thing like “opened her eyes to near darkness,” tells us that Samantha noted darkness. Saying it as, “It was pitch black in the cabin when Samantha opened her eyes,” puts the author into the role of reporter rather then being a kind of translator.
 
8. Again, I use her action as a way to put in more of the scene-setting detail. The trick is that she now knows of what I described, and will react to it, which pulls me further from the picture. Even though I’m telling about the storm front, she’s the one seemingly observing it, so we’re inside her head, not mine. That matters.
 
9. Seemingly a straightforward action, but in reality a setup for disappointment. The next line is pure backstory, but I could see no way out of slipping it in, so I kept it as short and as related to her present condition as possible.
 
10. Adding in cause for her state of mind, here, and placing the reader there with her, as her hope has reason to ebb further. As a minor point, it’s bad form to start a story with only one actor on stage, for any length of time. Faced with the challenge of a single person on stage I created a second one—her enemy—the weather.
 
11. I’ve been there, too, as a scoutmaster to a troop waking up in a cabin in which the temperature was –12°f. The obvious solution is to hold the tank over the stove to warm it, but I wanted the reader to shout that to her, and realize that she was too cold to think straight. And if they didn’t think of the solution they see that she’s in trouble and say, “Oh shit,” along with her, so it still works. You need to be aware of the state of mind of your readers, both those who know less then you do about a given subject and those who know more.
 
12. The problem has been stated, and now we add in a deadline and penalty, to make it acute.
 
13. Strangely, I was painted into in a corner till she mentioned curling up in a frying pan. Samanta thought of the way out, not me—which is why you want to know your characters, and let the action flow from the way they would behave, not the way your plot seems to indicate.
 
14. A friend pointed out that she would tumble out of any chair that had no arms, so I mentioned arms on the chair to reflect that. You need readers to catch what you miss, and there will be a lot of that, because you see the scene in your mind, and know what’s supposed to happen. Unfortunately, what you typed may not be what you see.
 
15. My wife nearly killed me when I put a kitchen chair on our stove, to see if what I was having her do was possible. Pointing out that I’d put cardboard under the legs to keep from scratching the stove didn’t help much. I didn’t sit on the chair, though. A modern stove would support me but be damaged. An old time stove would handle the load easily. In any case, Samantha was past caring, at that point. Note that I didn’t dwell on the actual job of readying the chair because it has no importance to the story. It’s the result, a place to sit, that counts. I put in the aluminum foil business, though, because without it her blankets might burn—or at least some people might think so and would question that.
 
16. The pain was added because people who had been that cold complained that I didn’t mention it. And of course, it’s told from her point of view so you can feel her triumph.
 
17. This was added later, as a foreshadowing. The man is real, a neighbor, though she’s still too fogged with hypothermia to realize that.

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Author’s note:
     These articles are not presented with a, “Do this and you’ll be a published author,” attitude. Anyone who tells you they can provide success via a few words on a blog page is scamming you. Instead, they’re one writer’s view of the ideas put forth by the writing teachers I admire and respect. I’ve done the series as part of what’s sometimes called a Benjamin Franklin debt. If some of what I say seems to make sense, I urge you to seek the teachers themselves, people like Dwight Swain, Debra Dixon, and a host of others, and read their advice directly.

 

Batman Is My Role Model – The Grumpy Writing Coach

Part of a series of articles for the new writer
 

Batman Is My Role Model

 

     People sometimes ask me what books they might read to learn the craft of fiction writing, and I usually suggest, Dwight Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer, or perhaps Debra Dixon’s, GMC: Goal Motivation and Conflict. But lately, I’ve been telling them to read a comic book, because everything that matters can be found there. Batman can teach you how to write.
     People often look down on comic books, and those who write them as unworthy, but many of them are master writers, who know their craft, and know what really matters, so far as getting a story told.
     So let’s look at a typical comic book and see what makes it tick:
 
     When we enter the story things are going well. Our hero, Atomic Wedgie-Man, has a nice supply of criminals to thwart, who never seem to wise up to the fact that they can’t win. So, life is good. This is pretty much what you can expect at the beginning of any novel. We meet and get to know the characters. They have dreams and plans for a predictable future, but we know that’s not to be. Things will go to hell pretty rapidly, because it’s the nature of stories to have that happen.
     And sure enough, on a routine patrol Wedgie-Man encounters a problem, the foe who refuses to be classified. Our hero tries the usual things, but they prove ineffective, and because of some unexpected ability or device, the criminal escapes. It’s more annoying than troublesome. But still, our protagonist seems to have lost the skirmish. He needs to treat his wounds, salve his damaged pride, and decide what to do next.
     In a novel, we often call that the inciting incident. Your protagonist’s comfortable and stable world has been knocked over. Perhaps he’s just met the woman who makes him say “wow!” and she seems uninterested. Perhaps the pilot of an airliner has just learned that one of his passengers is a madman. Whatever it is, uncertainty has just entered the story and a new long-term goal has been introduced. It might be revenge, survival, or a date for the prom. But no matter what it is, it’s something the protagonist both wants and needs. And, it’s something with just a bit of urgency to it, which brings with it what the reader feeds on: tension.
     So, with a new plan and renewed dedication, Wedgie-Man reenters the fray. But, victory is not his, and his nemesis not only wins again, our hero must retire from the field or lose everything. Things have just gotten a whole lot more serious. Our protagonist may be wounded. He may escape thru some “just in case,” contingency he carried into battle. But make no mistake, he has lost the battle, and knows it.
     As in our novel, despite everything our hero has done, the girl he favors still thinks him a fool. Worse, she’s showing interest in the man who wants her only to thwart our hero.
     And that sequence continues: regroup and rethink, try the new plan and fail again—in scene after scene, as the stakes are raised and the focus inexorably narrows. One by one the options fall away. In fact, things become so serious, and so personal, that Wedgie-man questions his own dedication, and the need to continue—as do we. As readers, we may even suggest he say to hell with it. Yet, what choice does he have? One by one, as we watch, his options disappear, till all that’s left is to run or risk all in a hopeless final confrontation. But flight, while it may be attractive, isn’t one of his options. Perhaps the city is held hostage, endangering many lives. Perhaps a woman who Wedgie-man loves or respects will be harmed if he fails to act. Whatever the reason, he has no choice but to continue, though the situation appears hopeless.
     And so we have the black moment, when the climactic battle has been joined, and our hero is on the threshold of defeat. In that moment, in desperation, our hero looks around seeking something, anything, that might be used to turn the tables. And there it is, the lucky break that poetic justice says must be there. It may be a piece of discarded chain lying within reach. It might be a handful of dust snatched from the floor. It could be the admission or compromise the protagonist swore never to make, thus changing his definition of what he will and will not permit himself to do. For Wedgie-man, it might be a chance glimpse of the antagonist’s waistband protruding at the back of his pants as he bends over to administer the death-blow. But whatever it is, we take advantage of the hero’s one true and reliable weapon, dumb luck, in order to snatch victory away from the antagonist. A reach, a grab, a quick pull and Atomic Wedgie-Man is once again victorious.
     And that climactic moment, as always, brings us to our feet, cheering. Our hero has prevailed, and all that remains is the denouement, where the hero learns what the prize is, for having been steadfast and heroic.
     Okay, laugh if you will, but that sequence encapsulates humanity’s hopes and dreams, and has been bringing cheers from listeners, viewers, and readers for thousands of years. It’s what made the movie Rocky so memorable, and it fueled every Batman film. It played out in The Devil Wears Prada, and in every Nora Roberts novel.
     But is it simply a formula? Is it, “Do this,” followed by “Next, do that,” with no talent or creativity involved?” Does it reduce our writing to a sheeplike, “me too,” status? Of course not. Godzilla and Changeling both follow that same path, as did, Lord of the Rings, and, Harry Potter. Does that mean there’s no creativity that went in their creation? No. A great deal of creativity is required to convince the reader that this story is unique, and not at all like those they’ve already read.
     Are they simply different tellings of the same story? Yes, they are, in the respect that there is constantly rising tension, interrupted by places where a reader can “catch their breath,” followed by the climax and the denouement, playing out as they always have. But are they lifeless retellings because of that? Of course not. They’re a recognition of human nature, and desire. They’re what has often been called the hero’s journey.
     Can we vary from the formula? Sure, if we do it knowingly and with purpose. But would you want to invest hours in following a protagonist who, in the end, turns out to be unworthy of the time you’ve spent with him/her? Do you want the story to end, after the hero has been steadfast and resourceful, in defeat with no hope of redemption, and the hero unchanged from when we met him/her? Maybe, as a change of pace, and if the author can deliver an exciting and satisfying reading experience. But, read that as a steady diet? Absolutely not.
     So what should you be looking at to learn how to write? I’ll still go with the two I usually recommend, first, but for a good overview of how and why it works, go read a comic book.

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Author’s note:
     These articles are not presented with a, “Do this and you’ll be a published author,” attitude. Anyone who tells you they can provide success via a few words on a blog page is scamming you. Instead, they’re one writer’s view of the ideas put forth by the writing teachers I admire and respect. I’ve done the series as part of what’s sometimes called a Benjamin Franklin debt. If some of what I say seems to make sense, I urge you to seek the teachers themselves, people like Dwight Swain, Debra Dixon, and a host of others, and read their advice directly.

 

Care and Feeding of Peeves – The Grumpy Writing Coach

Part of a series of articles for the new writer
 
 

Care and Feeding of Peeves

 

     At times, it seems the job of a grumpy writing coach is a lot like that of a zookeeper, because of the number of pet peeves I have to feed and care for. And lately, the biggest one, the podium peeve, has been a positive pain in the neck.
     I’ve been making the rounds of the various writing venues, and counting the stories that are told as a transcript of the storyteller at the podium, against those in which we seem to literally be with the character, as observers and participants. By my count, it’s close to ninety-five percent told as if the reader were sitting across the table from the writer.
     Now, good sense would seem to say that they’re on to something, and that if so many people write that way they must be right. Certainly, the reviews people give each other on such sites would seem to say that. Unfortunately, a look at the bookstores says that while many books are written in omniscient mode, few are written as an extended one-sided conversation between writer and reader.
     So the question arises: How can intelligent people make such a dumb mistake? Why don’t those stupid editors realize they’re wrong and embrace the majority viewpoint?
     It’s the answer to that question that’s the subject of this particular rant.
     First, I need you to perform a thought experiment. You’ll like it because we’re about to make you a famous storyteller, one who fills theaters with people anxious to hear what you have to say.
     Ready? Here we go:
     Tonight’s storytelling performance will be especially good, and the house is sold out. It’s a story that has love, betrayal, adventure, and a host of subplots that will grab the audience where they live, and bring a standing ovation at the conclusion—and it has every time you’ve performed it.
     There’s only one problem. It’s a half-hour before curtain time you’ve come down with laryngitis. You can’t even whisper. So what can you do? Cancel, and refund the ticket price? It looks like that’s the only choice, until…
     The stage manager says he has a great idea. His nephew has volunteered to take your place. The boy’s not a trained storyteller, of course, and he’s neither read nor heard the story. In fact, he’s never been on stage before. But he loves to read, though he stumbles occasionally on unfamiliar words.
     Unfortunately, because of the short time before the curtain goes up, and your uncooperative throat, you can’t even give the boy stage directions, or pointers on how to present the various characters. So it’s going to be a cold-read of the words of your presentation, by someone without a clue of how you want it done.
     
     So, here’s the question: Given that situation, what do you think the chances are that there’s going to be a standing ovation tonight? What are the odds the nephew will duplicate your expression, body-language, tone, delivery, and those little pauses you toss in for emphasis? How about where you just sigh, give the audience a long suffering look, and then spread your hands in the eloquent shrug that’s your trademark? Will he know to do that—and where?
     You had better be saying “really good,” because that is precisely the job every writer assigns their reader. And that’s exactly how much training they have for the job.
     That reader takes your words and will apply the proper voice to it as they read—but only if you make it clear exactly what that voice is. And if you don’t, they’ll have to guess, and do that before they even know what a given line will say.
     So… Would you like to know why you can’t use a transcript of you telling the story, directly, and why the techniques of the fiction writer are a lot more than just fluff? It’s because the reader can neither see nor hear you. It’s that simple—or should be. Somehow, though, no one ever seems to get it—other then those pesky editors who keep rejecting our stories.
     Since the reader can neither see nor hear you, how can you talk to them? You can’t.
     How can you let them know about your protagonist, and what their life has been like? You can’t.
     Who is there to bring the reader up to date and introduce the opening of the story? No one. You just open it. You raise the curtain, cue the actors, and you get out of their way while they perform your little play—or better yet, live it.
     Is it beginning to dawn on you that you haven’t a clue of how to do that? It should. It’s what I’ve been telling you for all along. Face it. You can’t write. Your mother can’t write, and your neighbor is even worse. Why? Because writing fiction is no more a natural skill than was learning to place words on the page in the first place.
     There you sit, ready to write your story. You’ve even diagrammed it, so you know every character, every thought, and every expression on everyone’s face. All you need do is record it. But in what medium? You have a choice. It could be told on film. It could be a play. You might tell it verbally. Or, you could turn it into a novel.
     Now, if you write it as a screenplay, do you need specialized knowledge? Of course. And if you write that film script can it be used for a stage version? Of course not, the constraints of the media differ. Having a slow motion fight on stage would be pretty silly, for example. But slow motion is an effective tool in filmed work.
     My point? Why would you believe that storytelling and novel writing use exactly the same techniques? Given that you were taught nothing about making a film in school, why would you believe you were given what you need to write a novel—or a story to be told by the campfire?
     But we all believe we know everything about the act of writing. Every single one of us, even our teachers believe that. When we sit down to write that story we’ve mapped out, we never doubt, for one second that while we would need to learn the craft-set used for what amounts to brain-to-screen translation, we already own the brain-to-novel set, and the brain-to-storyteller set. But we don’t. What we do own is the brain-to-gossip set, and the brain-to-office-writing set. And it all boils down to something I’ve already said, in quoting Mark Twain, who was an extraordinarily perceptive man: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
     So you want to be a writer? Great. I applaud you, and encourage you to go for it. The world needs more crazy people. And you want to be a published author? Fantastic. But here’s a secret: Experience is a stairway, one that leads upward. But education? That’s the Star-Trek transporter that allows you to zap past whole flights of stairs.
     If you’re looking for a shortcut to success—the magic bullet that rockets you to the top—turn to another writer, W. Somerset Maugham, who said, “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
     So what can you do? Where do you turn for a writer’s education that will give you the tools you need but won’t bankrupt you? Start at your local library, there’s a wealth of information there, written by those who know from experience what works and what doesn’t. And while you’re there, look for a book titled, “Techniques of the Selling Writer, by Dwight Swain.” It’s the book that every writer needs to have in their library, because it covers the basics of how to approach the job—the nuts-and-bolts elements that all stories have in common. It tells how to get out from behind the podium and into the prompter’s booth, giving direction and purpose to the actors without getting in their way. And if Swain’s work isn’t there, look for Jack Bickham’s, Scene and Structure, a book almost as good.

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Author’s note:
     These articles are not presented with a, “Do this and you’ll be a published author,” attitude. Anyone who tells you they can provide success via a few words on a blog page is scamming you. Instead, they’re one writer’s view of the ideas put forth by the writing teachers I admire and respect. I’ve done the series as part of what’s sometimes called a Benjamin Franklin debt. If some of what I say seems to make sense, I urge you to seek the teachers themselves, people like Dwight Swain, Debra Dixon, and a host of others, and read their advice directly.

 

Am I Ready to Submit My Work? – The Grumpy Writing Coach

Part of a series of articles for the new writer

Am I Ready to Submit My Work?

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
~ Mark Twain

     At some point every writer asks the same question: “Am I writing for myself? Friends and family say they like my work, but would someone who doesn’t know me—someone knowledgeable about the craft—say the same thing?”
You write, you polish, you edit, and you even submit your work to a publisher or two hoping for lightning to strike. But in the end one thought circles, needing an answer: “On a scale of from one to ten, where seven is publishable and ten is godhood, how close to eight am I?”
That question brings you to the grumpy old writing coach, with your work in hand, hoping for a bit of advice and maybe a number on that one to ten scale—hopefully some praise, too. That’s as it should be, but you need to be aware of one important fact: Of the first time offerings, virtually every single one displays the same recurring problems. The words change. The story changes, but invariably, the problems are the same.

It’s Not My Fault
Not only are the problems the same, when I point that out, what do I hear? “No Jay! Take a closer look. My work is the exception. I have a natural talent for writing. Everyone tells me so.”
Uh-huh, but it also could be that instead of trying to argue the reader into liking the work the writer should be asking: “Why? What could make everyone screw up in exactly the same way?”

Blame The Schools
The answer to that is a classic Catch-22 situation. The people who plan the school curriculums aren’t fiction writers, and haven’t a clue that writing fiction requires as much training, experience and practice as any other profession. And of course, the teachers presenting that “creative Writing section of the curriculum are training those who will take over their job when they retire, perpetuating the problem. Undergrad creative writing courses in our colleges are very often no more than a continuation of that training.
A well kept secret: The successful writer is not someone with a knack for storytelling, though that does help. The successful writer is someone with a knack for using the tools of the writer. Why? Because craft is the horse your talent must ride. Given that, it makes a lot more sense to be riding Pegasus than the puny little pony issued by your school system.
A second secret: In school they’re teaching you to write reports, not fiction, and reports require the fact-based techniques of the non-fiction writer. Schools were created to provide employers with a standardized work force, remember, and fiction has little place in office writing, other than in stockholder reports, and advertising, of course.

But… but I’m a great storyteller… really
You might be the most brilliant storyteller of your generation. But without the necessary tools—without the emotion-based techniques of the fiction-writer—new writers are forced to graft their existing verbal skills onto the non-fiction tools they’ve learned in school. But can we do that? A storyteller is alone on the stage, taking every role. It’s damn hard to be all the people in a conversation, so the storyteller increases the role of the narrator, until the story becomes an interpretive dance, in which the choreography includes body-language, tone, delivery, facial expression, and cadence. Of necessity, the storyteller talks about the story, because one can’t very well stab a character, be stabbed, and be the bystanders, too. And of course the techniques of the non-fiction writer appear to mesh with that because they’re fact-based, too.
When the audience can see and hear the storyteller that approach works. And as they say, the best place by the fire is reserved for the storyteller.
But… pluck out that marvelously flexible instrument that is the human voice. Remove the visual portion of that dance. Remove everything but the words the reader sees when they open the page. What’s left? A parade of facts about the story that will drone in the reader’s head like the voice of a text-to-speech program: It’s the lecture hall, when the reader expected to ride a roller-coaster. Think of yourself in an office with me, trying to tell your favorite story by scribbling it on paper slips and handing them to me. How much emotion and excitement would there be in what I got?

Am I tricky enough?
Desire is fine, but if the only tool you own is a hammer everything is going to be whacked on the head, because everything is going to look like a nail. So, let’s see how many tools you own.
• When we begin writing there are a host of tricks and techniques we assume we already know, through osmosis, because we’ve been reading for most of our lives. But, because art conceals art, we see only the result of using those professional skills. Look at some basic terms below. If you don’t recognize and use them all you may be in trouble:
Black moment, info-dump, Motivation-Reaction Units, three act structure, inciting incident, backstory, climax, scene and sequel, fly-on-the-wall, omniscient, third person limited, scene-goal, tag, prose, exposition.
• Do you have the feeling that if given your choice you’d rather submit something other than your first chapter, because all the background material you had to include makes it a bit less exciting than you would like? It’s a common new author problem. Simply put: Start your story where the story starts, and feed in backstory unobtrusively, and only as needed for the reader’s understanding of that story at that point. We forget that people read when they have time, like at lunch break. So it could be a week since they read the point you expected them to remember from previous chapters.
• Look through the work. Do you have more than a handful of exclamation points in the novel? In most cases, lots of bangs say you’re trying to put excitement into prosaic language through delivery tricks, like gluing on glitter.
• Do you use the word “had,” in the sense, “He had been thinking about it all morning,” in your work? If so, you need to rephrase the line in more current terms, because everything after “had” can only come from the author, and the reader wants to walk in the character’s footsteps, not yours. There is an old expression, that says to really know someone you need to walk a mile in their shoes. The goal of fiction is to make the reader make the journey in the character’s shoes, not just know where they went.
• Does your story read like something you would relate after saying, “Wait till you hear this,” told all in the storyteller’s voice? That’s as exciting, emotionally, as reading a transcript of a boxing-match announcer at work.
• Do you, in your voice as author, talk about a character, or something within the scene, as though you were there watching? Did you feel the need to explain something to the reader that wasn’t obvious? This is the second most common cause of rejection.

One Strike And You’re Out
Sad but true: when an agent or editor looks at your work you have one chance. Bore or confuse them for one single line and it’s over. So, in continuation of the points above, open your story to page one and let’s check for what an editor may find as a rejection point. And when I say rejection point, make no mistake. I mean that editor stops reading right then.
1. A “told” story: It reads like one side of a phone conversation. It’s a storyteller’s dance without the dance steps. This is a problem with the vast majority of work submitted by new authors.
2. Backstory: In an attempt to bring the reader up to speed the author talks about the characters rather than opening the story with action, so the first chapter is a history lesson. Zzzzzzz.
3. The info-dump. The author calls for a freeze-frame, locks the characters in place, and then pours in buckets full of backstory, area history, and a host of things unnecessary to the action that we’d much rather be experiencing. An info-dump of backstory is boring to read, just as the name implies.
4. The explainer: The author, an invisible character in the story, follows the characters around and volunteers information and gossip about them to the reader. And strangely, though they politely wait until it’s over, none of the characters seem to notice, and none ask who that stranger in their bedroom is.
5. The big bang: Having gotten a discount on exclamation points at the grammar store the author sprinkles them ten to a page rather then ten to a novel.
6. The beauty pageant: The author in trying to be poetic uses three paragraphs to say, “It was a nice day.”
7. Said-Book-itis: There was once a small tome that listed all the alternatives to “he said,” and the writer is trying to hit them all.
8. The philosopher: The story opens with a dissertation on why the story is being told.

Everyone Writes Crap, We Just Write Less Of It As We Progress.
The odds say you’re still reading because you need advice on filling that tool kit and in making that effort you’ve spent on creating your story work for you.
So let’s get the bad news out of the way, first: You can’t fix the story, you’ll probably have to rewrite it… from scratch… twice. (Lord, I love telling writers that, especially when they whimper)
The good news is that unlike most professions, once you know how to use the tools of the writing trade, the experiences you’ve been accumulating for years, through just living, give you things to write about.
More good news is that the university-trained fiction writer has no major advantage over the person who takes a more humble but diligent approach. That’s because successful authors and writing teachers like to write about what works for them. For less than the cost of dinner at a nice restaurant you can have a conversation with writers like Ben Bova, Stephen King, and Debra Dixon. For the same price, editors like Sol Stein, teachers like Dwight Swain, agents like Donald Maass, and a host of others, will sit at your elbow and whisper their secrets in your ear as you write.

Writing Is A Journey, Not A Destination.
So what do you do? You get to work collecting the tools you need, and perfecting their use as you slip them into the toolbox. If you have no more training than English class and maybe a freshman creative writing course, you might want to take it as a given you need to spend time with a book or two on writing technique. If grammar is your weakness, let Strunk and White’s Elements of Style be your Bible.
And when you think you have things under control, workshop a few pages, posing the question most new writers forget to ask:
“If you found this in your bookstore among the new books, would you pay the going rate for it? Would you choose it over what you usually find there If not, why not?”
Take a deep breath, then, because the answer might sting a bit. It will, though, tell you what you need to know, rather then what you hope to hear.
And when you get response, always remember Shel Silverstein’s observation that if you pay attention to the good reviews you also have to listen to the bad ones.

The most important thing:
All of us—every single one of us—start out not knowing which end of the crayon goes on the wallpaper.

* Lots of writers haven’t heard of this one (though if they’re selling they’re using it), but it’s an important point. There’s a pretty good article on it here: http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/art/scene.php

 

Wolves In Hiding – The Grumpy Writing Coach

Part of a series of articles for the new writer
 

Wolves In Hiding

 

      Thank you for your recent submission. Unfortunately…
 
      So begins the response to that fragile carrier of your hopes and dreams—the query letter.
      We’ve all been there, and it hurts. It hurts a lot. But it’s how the writing game goes, so we shrug, hone the query, and fire off another batch… and another—while depression deepens and self-worth hovers one notch above absolute zero.
      Then it happens, you discover the ad in the back section of Writers’ Digest: Agent accepting new clients. And best of all they’re looking for unpublished authors! Sure, your daddy told you that if something sounds too good to be true it probably is. But hell, if we had an ounce of brains we wouldn’t be writers, would we?
      With trembling fingers you stuff a query into an envelope, cross your fingers, and hurry to the post-office. A week later back comes amazing news. They like you! They like your work enough to want to see more. They like you so much that your brain turns off, and you never question that terribly reasonable explanation of why you should also send a shovelful of money along with the manuscript. “The sample chapter was wonderful,” they gush. “But since so few unpublished authors have it exactly right the first time, we need to see the entire manuscript, just to make sure the loose ends are tied up.” And surely you can’t expect a busy agent to give up precious time without charging you a teeny little service fee, can you? Well can you?
      You sure as hell can. The simple truth is that an agent or editor who makes a living through selling other people’s writing can recognize writing skill in a paragraph and marketability within a page. You prove that true each time you take a book from the rack at your local bookstore. When was the last time you read more than a few pages before you decided not to buy? The difference between you and an agent or publisher is only that they shop from the comfort of their desk.
      No reputable agent charges a fee for reading. Engrave that statement in stone above your desk. They’d love to charge, if for no other reason than in retaliation for having to spend so much time wading through crap submissions. But they don’t, because the rules of The Association Of Authors’ Representatives, the AAR, forbids that.
     And reputable agents don’t, as a rule, recommend a specific editor to an unknown writer who’s making a submission, though they may suggest editing. Edit Ink*, the most notorious example of abusing that suggestion, paid a commission to the agent or publisher who recommended a client. A submission to one of their shill agencies (never a member of AAR) was likely to bring a letter suggesting that they might be interested… after editing. And, “oh yes, we’d suggest you use our good friends at Edit Ink.” The insidious part of that is that the agency—who made a fifteen percent commission if you took the bait—and Edit Ink are in different parts of the country. There couldn’t be an unsavory connection there, could there? There were millions of dollars charged for editing work done by college students and new grads working at minimum wage rates, money that will never be recovered.
      Book-doctors are another thing to avoid if you write fiction. Why? Use your brain. If someone could take your book and fix it so it would sell, they’d be selling their own work and making a lot more money. And forget the idea of giving your manuscript to a published author in return for cover credit for supplying the story idea and rough draft. All new writers lust after that one, but any competent writer can fire off ideas faster than you can record them. It’s writing well that’s hard. That author would have to know your story as well as one they wrote, in order to meaningfully rewrite it. Starting from scratch is easier and more profitable.
      Read those advertisements carefully for the scam tip-offs, like the mention of representing poetry or short stories. No reputable agent represents poetry. The fifteen percent agent’s commission on what the average poet makes on a sale won’t pay postage for the submissions. And no reputable agent is interested in short stories because the effort of selling a three-thousand word short is exactly that of a selling one-hundred-thousand word blockbuster. Any agent who claims to sell either poetry or short stories is to be avoided, and those who request a “one time reading fee” or money in advance for reproduction and mailing, are to be laughed at.
      So how can you tell if you’re ready to submit your work professionally?
      • Study writing. Craft is invisible, but necessary, and as I mentioned a few issues ago they didn’t teach it in grade school. Some of my personal favorite books on the subject are: Techniques of the Selling Writer, by Dwight Swain; GMC: Goal Motivation and Conflict, by Debora Dixon; Sol Stein on writing, by Sol Stein; and Writing the breakout Novel, by Donald Mass. And if you’re broke, look for Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones in your library. It’s an older book, but a good solid introduction to writing technique.
     But, those are just a few. Everyone has their own favorite, and there are many available.
      • Do your research. Don’t submit a two-hundred-thousand word family saga to Precious Gems, or fiction to an agent who specializes in cookbooks.
      • Join a critiquing group—one composed of writers whose work you respect—people with skills matching (and hopefully, exceeding) your own. Your local library is a good place to find notice of what’s available. Almost nothing is as useful as the feedback you get from a writer of greater skill.
      • Find a grammar fairy to touch your manuscript with stardust. You want nothing to distract the editor’s eye from your glorious prose.
      • Study under the masters. Once you know what you’re looking for, analyze your favorite authors to see what made you like them. Look at how they handle dialog and characterization. Do they favor long sentences or short? Rewrite one of their scenes in your own style, and then compare the two for content and readability. Did you tell as much in as few words? Did you stay as focused? Do your words flow into the reader’s mind as smoothly?
 
      The odds are against us succeeding. That’s a given. The success rate for manuscript sales by a new author is less than one in one-thousand—with good reason. No one is searching the stores for a book with your name on it other than your mother, so editors are looking for something extraordinary, not a “good enough,” novel. They already have more “good enough” writers than they need.
     But in spite of those odds, lightening does have to strike, so it could well be you. That kid shooting baskets in the playground could wind up stuffing them in as part of a professional team, and you could be the next great author to be discovered. So keep on studying and keep writing. If nothing else it keeps us off the streets at night.
     Just keep your eyes open and your wallet closed.
 
 
 
* Now out of business. To see a history, visit http://www.sfwa.org/beware/cases.html

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Author’s note:
     These articles are not presented with a, “Do this and you’ll be a published author,” attitude. Anyone who tells you they can provide success via a few words on a blog page is scamming you. Instead, they’re one writer’s view of the ideas put forth by the writing teachers I admire and respect. I’ve done the series as part of what’s sometimes called a Benjamin Franklin debt. If some of what I say seems to make sense, I urge you to seek the teachers themselves, people like Dwight Swain, Debra Dixon, and a host of others, and read their advice directly.

 

Craft? What’s that? – The Grumpy Writing Coach

Part of a series of articles for the new writer
 

Writing Craft? What’s that?

 

     Hello, it’s me, your grumpy old writing coach, pressing my arthritic fingers to the keyboard in order to destroy your new writer aspirations of fame. It’s my only remaining hobby, but that’s okay, because it’s also a service to humankind. If I can talk you out of writing I’ve saved you long boring nights at the computer, and I’ve saved many, many editors the annoyance of having to read your crap. Plus, I sleep better knowing I’ve destroyed someone’s dreams.
     Today’s lesson is: your writing sucks. Please feel free to respond with poison-pen letters. I find a day without one depressing.
     Okay, on to the bashing. You’re a creative person, or you wouldn’t be interested in writing fiction, so let me start with a thesis:
 
          1. Creativity without craft is nothing.
          2. The craft of writing fiction is taught in damned few high schools.
          3. It therefore follows that you have no craft.
                    Therefore: You are nothing.
 
     The world is filled with people who have not a shred of creativity, and require none. The cabinetmaker who’s spent decades honing woodworking skills, but who builds only tried and true designs, enjoys well-deserved acclaim. The doctor who treats you with care, compassion, and knowledge is a prize. The technical writer who produces readable and concise manuals is the ideal employee. Even the hack writer who turns out mindless, formulaic drivel gets by with no creativity. But: Picasso, with creativity but without craft, would have been a cipher, useless. The Mensa member driving a taxi because learning craft in some field is beneath him or her, is a taxi driver, no more. Picasso was, first, a fully competent journeyman artist. Adding creativity to that platform yielded a map for the less creative to follow.
     Take the tightly disciplined writing of the journalist, add a bit of genius, and you have Hemingway. Take John Smith without craft and you have “John who?”
     The vast majority of people suffer from having gone to grade school. They’ve been taught how not to write fiction by people who can’t. Worse yet, they’ve been tested to be sure they’ve not accidentally done something right. Finally, patted on the back for being ignorant, they’re turned loose, secure in the belief that they’re ready for a career in storytelling—a celebration of the blind leading the blind. And if you, as a member of that great mass of “they” go into education you have the honor of perpetuating that stupidity.
     My point should be obvious: Writing, like any craft/profession, is complex, arduous to learn, and is the horse your creativity must ride. The good news is that it’s fun to learn—as much as I hate to admit that anything is fun.
     Okay, so you stink at writing, your mother stinks at writing, and your friends do, too. And it isn’t going to get better with time and experience, I’m pleased to say.
     Why? Because no matter how hard you throw an egg down the damn thing still breaks—and always will until you begin to work on the real problem, in this case craft—or lack of it.
     New thesis (not because I’m trying to prove a point, I just like to be argumentive): People don’t read because they like the story, they like the story because of what they read.
     Ask anyone why they open a book and you’re going to hear, “For the story.” That’s a lie. They read for the misery, the suffering, and the disaster heaped on disaster. They read for the blood. They wallow in suffering, and a really good murder has them drooling. Try selling a story in which a nice guy meets a nice woman, has a nice courtship, lots of nice kids, and a pleasant retirement. See if anyone wants to pay to read that.
     But take the husband and give him a secret career as a spy-chaser. Let his wife catch wind of it after more than a decade of thinking him a mild-mannered salesman, and you have the makings of a story in which their teen aged daughter ends up suspended from the nose of a VTOL fighter-plane staring at the pilot and saying, “Daddy?” Isn’t the plot of True Lies, more fun than, Mary and John Grow Old Together? Except… if Mary has a lover, who is really…
     So why do we read? To worry, of course. To be interesting, a book has to be more fun than our own life. It has to be more dangerous, too. If we decided to try a bit of spying we would probably end up looking like a colander and leaking gore—and maybe radioactive blood. Not exactly the most desirable outcome.
     But by becoming Ian Flemming’s Agent 007 we can not only take absolutely insane risks, we’re guaranteed to live through it—even if we die. With a book in her hands the mousy bookkeeper who has come home to an empty apartment and a boring life can romance the man who in life wouldn’t even notice her. She can put on the skin of the woman she only wishes she could be, and live the adventure that would leave her quite dead in real life. With a book providing the wings she can fly!
     Okay, now that I’ve demolished your dreams of selling that manuscript you’ve been typing I feel a little better, so I’ll go see what’s in the fridge, or maybe taunt Dog-Breath for a bit. When the happy mood fades I’ll come back and maybe annoy you some more. Till then, an assignment:
     The setup: Our lives are an unending chain of linked events. You have stimulus, followed by response, which causes the next stimulus, which causes…
     The task: Take a look at your writing and ask yourself if every single act by your characters—every thought, movement, and decision—is a response to some stimulus your reader will be aware of before the act occurs.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Author’s note:
     These articles are not presented with a, “Do this and you’ll be a published author,” attitude. Anyone who tells you they can provide success via a few words on a blog page is scamming you. Instead, they’re one writer’s view of the ideas put forth by the writing teachers I admire and respect. I’ve done the series as part of what’s sometimes called a Benjamin Franklin debt. If some of what I say seems to make sense, I urge you to seek the teachers themselves, people like Dwight Swain, Debra Dixon, and a host of others, and read their advice directly.

 

Am I A Writer? – The Grumpy Writing Coach

Part of a series of articles for the new writer
 

Am I A Writer?
 

     You love to read or you wouldn’t be here thinking about writing and selling your work. And one of the things you love about it is the feeling that you are right there on the scene, sharing the adventure, and the moment-by-moment problems. At times you may stop and think of how you might have handled the situation differently than the protagonist, and what the result of that would have been. You are, in effect, writing your own version of the story as you play, “what if.” You are, in that moment, as much a writer—in the creative sense—as is the person who wrote that story.
If you’re like most people, you believe you have at least one novel within you—characters who reside in your mind, just waiting to be given liberty, via the keyboard and the word processor.
     Perhaps you’ve acted on that idea, and turned out a few paragraphs, a chapter, or maybe even an entire novel. And if you have, the all-important question occurs: Would someone be interested in publishing those words? It’s that question that I’m addressing today, in my role as The Grumpy Old Writing Coach, a position I play with enthusiasm and great skill—at least the grumpy part of the job. Hell, I have people who hate me all over the globe. Helps me sleep better.
 
So, do you have what it takes? Let’s look at the possibilities:
     First, there’s the idea that the ability to write on a professional level is God-given, an inherent condition of birth, or a chance alignment of the planets that uniquely affects the chosen person. Lots of people believe that. But if they’re right, you’re well and truly screwed. You don’t have it and nothing you can do will change that.
     But neither you nor I believe that, if for no other reason than that we’ve both proven too many people wrong, by doing what they said we couldn’t do. And the good news is that the people who sell novel after novel don’t believe it, either. Let’s look at a few who succeeded: On that subject Ernest Hemingway said, “It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.” Stephen King’s view is, “While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.” And, Larry Brown’s comment was, “There’s no such thing as a born writer. It’s a skill you’ve got to learn, just like learning how to be a bricklayer or a carpenter.”
     So the good news is that you and I… or at least I, can learn the skills of the professional writer. I’m not too sure about you as yet, but we’ll work on it.
     Next is the idea that we can take the writing skills we learn in high school, add a bit of practice and a story idea, and there we are, writing like a pro. I’m damn glad we don’t train brain surgeons and bridge designers that way.
     “Just keep writing,” our friends tell us, “Do that and your writing muscles will get stronger with every word.” Yeah, sure, I believe that. We spent twelve years having teachers try to beat the techniques of office-writing into our heads without too much success, and we’re going to raise that to a professional level of fiction-writing by doing nothing more than writing exactly as we’ve been taught—over, and over, and over…
     If you believe that one, then the successful authors I’ve quoted above are dead wrong on how to become a writer. And given that they seem to have had some success, just maybe they know something we don’t. In fact, my favorite quotation comes from Mark Twain, who observed, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
     There’s also the school of thought that says to read, and read, and to analyze your favorite authors to see how they do it. Can that be done? Sure. It works at least as well as using Tarot cards to know when you have it right. It’s kind of like expecting to become a great chef by eating in a fine restaurant, then going home and reaching for your spatula. But what cook, good or bad, can call themselves a chef without having worked with one, or at least owning a set of cookbooks to act as guides? What engineer can design and complete a project without having learned the necessary engineering practices? Can a wanna-be doctor learn to take your blood pressure by wrapping the cuff around your neck and then pumping it up to see what happens? Hell no. In the words of Rosanne Cash, “Self-expression without craft is for toddlers.”
     And finally, there’s the belief that you can turn to one of the many writing sites on the Internet and get good sound advice from others who’ve been unable to sell their work. After all, who better to commiserate with? Who understands your situation better? Who will never make you feel bad by telling you that the rejections you receive are anything but bad luck?
     So, who’s right? Everyone is—at least a little. You do need a God given talent for telling a story. What good are all the skills without that golden voice to give it wings? But on the flip side, what good is that golden voice when using a media where the reader can neither see nor hear you? Craft is the horse your talent must ride. Given that, it makes more sense to capture and bridle Pegasus than plod onward on the back of the sturdy dray horse we’re issued in school.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Author’s note:
These articles are not presented with a, “Do this and you’ll be a published author,” attitude. Anyone who tells you they can provide success via a few words on a blog page is scamming you. Instead, they’re one writer’s view of the ideas put forth by the writing teachers I admire and respect. I’ve done the series as part of what’s sometimes called a Benjamin Franklin debt. If some of what I say seems to make sense, I urge you to seek the teachers themselves, people like Dwight Swain, Debra Dixon, and a host of others, and read their advice directly.