Writer Brain, a Follow-on Post

So the incredibly talented Laini Taylor wrote this amazing post yesterday about having a jerky writer brain. If you haven't read it yet, you should. There's something very comforting in knowing that someone as awesome as Laini Taylor struggles sometimes with getting the job done. And I completely agree with everything she has to say, especially the part about how weird it is that the very thing that gives us our creativity is also the source of our struggles. But the thing is, my experience with this problem isn't at all like hers.

Let me explain. First up, a confession: I have never in my life written a novel out of order. I start with chapter 1 and end at "the end." Always. I am incapable of writing a story any other way. And yes, I imagine that Laini might give me a cat hiss if she were ever to read this. But the thing is, our journeys are still similar. I struggled to write something publishable for years. I wrote four whole novels of impressive (read: ridiculous) length. My first novel was 180k—can you imagine? That's two YA novels in one.

And the thing is, writing all those words was easy. I would sit down at my computer, set a word count goal, and then vomit out sentences and paragraphs until I met it. And I would do it without even thinking about it, with the critical part of my brain asleep. Kind of like this:

Trouble was, these novels, complete and whole as they were—with characters, something resembling a plot, a beginning, middle, and end—all sucked. Big time. Did you read the part about vomit? Yeah, I really meant it. I wrote those first four novels a bit like this:

But just as Laini suggests in her post, when I sat down to write The Nightmare Affair, I decided I needed to do something different. I needed to write a novel that wasn't just vomit. But unlike Laini, that didn't involve tricking the critical part of my brain into staying quiet long enough to let me get the story out. No, it meant just the opposite. I had to wake up my critical brain and force it to pay attention and do its job. That part of my brain is the smart part, the one that can find plot holes, detect character inconsistencies, even rat out the boring scenes.

And guess what? It worked. The moral of the story, I think, is that all writers need to find the way to trick the critical part of their brain into working for them instead of against them. Once you do, magic will happen. And if you're looking for another visual, I imagine it might be a bit like this (because seriously, Sherlock without Watson would just suck, and vice versa)

 Happy Writing!

***Originally published at www.mindeearnett.com. You can comment here or there***

World-Building Avengers Style (Let Your Characters Be Your Guide)

World-building is hard. World-building takes a lot of time and energy. And for a lot of aspiring writers, poor world-building is the kiss of death. Getting the world right, making it believable, is essential for your story to be successful, especially if you’re writing fantasy or sci-fi.

In my experience, the best key for unlocking the mysteries of your make your believe world is the characters. They hold all the answers as to how the world exists and why, because they already live in it — yeah? All you have to do is start asking them for the answers.

Okay, that sounds a little existential, but I really mean it. If you’re uncertain about the shape or your world, explore your characters. What’s character A’s backstory? What does he/she like to wear? Why? How did he/she get those clothes or that type of spaceship or that particular magical skill set? The more you answer these questions, the deeper and richer your world will become and the more it will make sense to your readers.

Your characters will also provide you the level of world-building you actually need to include in your story. A lot of writers I know tend to skimp on the world-building in early drafts (myself include). Consequently, my feedback on these drafts tends to be full of questions on how stuff works and why. A lot of these questions occur to me because I don’t understand why a character is behaving a certain way or how they had access to these particular resources, etc. Which means, that the answer to these questions will come through the characters themselves.

There are also those writers who love to world-build so much that they include too many, and usually pointless, details. Again, the solution here is to stick as close to the characters as possible Would character B, a teenager sneak thief and orphan, really know the name of the son of the cousin of the regional governor of Outlandia? Yeah, probably not.

 

The best visual metaphor I can use for this idea comes from the super-awesome movie you might have heard of known as The Avengers. There are many reasons why this movie is so good (the biggest of which is because it was written/directed by the Geek God of Awesome known as Joss Whedon), but one of the most critical reasons is because of all the other movies which came before it. Think of those other movies, Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, as really extensive backstories, all of which were necessary for The Avengers to make sense and for the characters and world to be believable. Do the same with your characters. Answer all the questions, explore of their reasons for being. And then remember to only include the details that really matter in your manuscript for your Avengers story.

Happy Writing!

***Originally published at www.mindeearnett.com. You can comment here or there.***

Some Thoughts on Writing a Sequel

So the website isn’t ready yet, because as usual with all things technology related, it’s taking longer than I wanted. In the meantime, I’ve been working on and off on the sequel to The Nightmare Affair. I won’t say I’ve started writing in earnest, because I haven’t. Earnest to me means dedicated, recorded daily word counts, and I’m not at that level of devotion yet. Soon though.

But I have done enough to share a couple of things I’ve run across even so early in the game. Please bear in mind this is the first time in my life I’ve ever attempted to write a sequel, which means I’m feeling my way along and learning by trial and error. Still, what I’m learning might prove helpful.

If you’re currently working on the first book in a series, here are some activities you might want to do to make writing the next book easier. Some of these are things I did automatically when writing The Nightmare Affair, and some are ones I wish I had done.

• Lay the groundwork in book 1

This is definitely the hardest activity on the list, by far. It requires that you think ahead and that you allow yourself to envision the possibility that the current story you’re working on might live long enough to make it into the next story. But once you get past the worry of whether or not the book is ever going to get published, it’s easy to lay this foundation.

Mostly, what I do is drop little details and clues here and there of ideas, character motivations, events, etc. that I might want to explore in the next book. If writing a book is like weaving a tapestry, these are threads I intentionally leave sticking out. They’re small, small enough that none of my critique partners or beta readers will complain that I didn’t explain the significance of that thread. Again, these are minor, minor details. The best example I can think of is how J.K. Rowling mentions the locket in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, one whole book before it becomes significant.

• Keep a timeline of events

This one is easy. As you go along, make a note of the relative time when something important happens as well as the time in between. If you’re writing something set in the modern world, this is extremely easy. For The Nightmare Affair, I made notes on my day calendar of when important events would take place in the story. Nowhere in the book do I reference the actual date, with the exception of Halloween, but being able to reference a real date made keeping tracks of events significantly easier.

• Keep a glossary of all names of people, places, and things

This is an activity I’ve done from the very beginning. No matter how insignificant a name might seem, I try to record it in a glossary. Names are pretty easy to forget, even for the writer. This is especially true when you’re talking about the second book. Referencing those same minor names in a second book is a nice way to provide coherency to the series. In addition to recording the name, I also copy and paste any relevant descriptions into the glossary. And trust me, remembering the appearance of characters can be tough. A glossary takes some of the brain work out of it.

• Write Chapter Summaries

It’s nice to know where exactly things happened. And this is something you should consider doing even if your book isn’t the first in a series. Writing chapter summaries will help you write the dreaded synopsis. And depending on how detailed/analytical you make your summaries, it can also give you a visual guide to how the story progresses, which in turn can help you identify areas where you’ve gone off on a tangent or when you need to hurry up/slow down.

So there you have it folks. Be sure to stick around for the website reveal and query letter contest!

Happy Writing

The Best Revision Advice You'll Ever Receive

Okay, so the title of this blog is probably not true, but I just finished the latest round of revisions on my work-in-progress and sent it off to my Agent of Awesome (aka Suzie). And now I'm feeling very...practical. Yes, that's right. Rather than be on cloud 9, I'm more on cloud 3, also known as the "cloud of good job but we're nowhere finsihed with this manuscript yet."

So this blog should be titled the most pragmatic revision advice you'll ever receive.

Are you read? It's going to blow your mind, I promise.

Okay here it is:

Version Control

Yep, you should version your revisions. What do I mean by this? Well, when you write your first draft, label it something like "Super_Awesome_Novel_draft1. Then when you start your first revision, make a copy of draft 1 and label it "Super_Awesome_Novel_draft2." Make sense?

So why is this practical advice? Because it gives you a way to undo changes if you need to. Sometimes when I'm revising I realize that something I wrote in the first draft but deleted in the second would work really well in the third. This has actually happened in every novel I've ever written. Sometimes it's something as simple as a single turn of phrase or sentence, sometimes an entire scene. Either way, it's a great way to avoid duplicating work.

So there you have it. I guess the real title of this blog should be the most boring (but still useful) revision advice you'll ever receieve.

Happy Writing!

The Road Not Taken — Revision Decisions

[Warning, spoilers ahead on the Hunger Games, Twilight, and Harry Potter]
 
So probably everybody has read the Robert Frost Poem, The Road Not Taken. You know, it’s the one that starts off “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” and goes on at length about the narrator’s indecision about which path he should take. At one point the narrator acknowledges that he would like to take both roads, but that “knowing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever come back.”
 
And the dude is right — about paths taken in life.
 
Not so much about paths taken in writing.

The great thing about writing stories is that you can go back and take the other path if you want to, and in a lot of cases, you probably should. That’s what rewrite/revision is all about.
 
Unfortunately, I think a lot of writers, especially beginning ones, have a hard time considering the path not taken when doing revisions. I know I certainly did. For some writers there doesn’t even seem to be an alternate path. We think the story is what is and that’s that, and our revising is actually more editing, aka fixing minor issues, polishing the language. In other words, not really doing anything to improve on the story itself.
 
But guess what, folks — there’s always an alternate path. Something else could happen. [SPOILER ALERT] In MockingJay, Katniss could’ve decided not to shoot President Snow. In Breaking Dawn, Stephenie Meyer could’ve decided not to go the whole killer-baby-nobody-dies, there-are-no-consequences-ever route (and think about how much better the story would be if she had). And in The Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry could’ve decided to let Sirius and Lupin kill Wormtail.
 
[SPOILER OVER] Now, I’m not saying that if these writers had chosen a different path that the stories would’ve been better. Clearly, that’s not the case with the Harry Potter example at the very least. But what I am saying is that if you know there’s an issue with a story you’re working on, considering an alternate path might very well be the solution.
 
Now the key to recognizing the existence of alternate paths is distance from the story. And the only way to gain that distance is to stick your first draft in a drawer and let it sit there for a period of time. Stephen King recommends a minimum of 6 weeks, and he’s probably right. At the very least, give it a month.  
 
I know it’s hard, and I know you don’t want to, but you really, really should. Once you’ve achieved the distance, you’ll start to see not only the issues with your story but the ways to fix them, very often by letting the story take a different path. And as an added bonus, you’ll gain the ever important practice of learning the art of patience. And if you’re writing to publish, patience is a virtue you’re really going to need. That is, if you plan on staying sane.
 
Good luck and happy writing!
 

Prewriting Activities (AKA, what to do when you don’t know what to do)

So I’ve been prewriting. A lot. Like every day for the last two weeks. I’m not a hardcore plotter by any means, but I definitely like to have an idea of where a story is going when I get started. For me, nothing is harder on my writing morale than finishing the first draft of a story only to realize I made a critical error right in the beginning and that I have to essentially rewrite the whole darn thing. Not revise, but rewrite, which is exactly as it sounds.

This is why I prewrite. I ask myself the “big questions” about the story. Things like what is the villain’s motivation for his/her villainy? Where is the story headed? What’s the protag’s arc?

Well for my current WIP, I’ve been stuck on one VITAL question for days now. And by stuck, I mean really stuck; the answer just refuses to present itself. So what have I been doing? Sticking with my prewriting activities. Here’s a list of some of them:

1.       Read

2.       Check email, Twitter, Facebook

3.       Write a crappy blog about prewriting

4.       Check email, Twitter, Facebook

5.       Brainstorm with pen and paper

6.       Research stuff on Wikipedia

7.       Check email, Twitter, Facebook

8.       Clean House

9.       Read

10.   Go for a walk/run/ride

11.   Check email, Twitter, Facebook

12.   Visit a bookstore

13.   Rifle through my pile of research books

14.   Brainstorm on paper

15.   Read

16.   Check email, Twitter, Facebook

You get the picture.

Moral of the story? Prewriting is a vital step of the writing process, but it’s not the only step. When you’ve done all these things a hundred times and then some, it’s time to start writing. Sometimes the answers can only be found within the story.

Self-directed Pep Talk over.

Happy Writing!

What Makes a Good Villain Good?

And by good, I mean bad, right?

Honestly, I have no idea what the answer is to this question. I can only offer observations from my own experiences as a story-consumer (and by consumer I mean that I like stories in all forms — novels, TV, movies, video games, etc).

Hitchcock once said, “The stronger the bad guy, the better the film.” But what does he mean by strong? Does he mean scary? Evil? Repulsive? What makes a villain strong?

For me, the measure of a villain isn’t how many people he kills, how many towns he can level, or how depraved his sense of torture is. Rather, the measure is how strong my emotional response is to him/her. The more I hate/fear/loath a villain, the better villain they are.

Given this criteria, I made a list of some of the villains who have provoked a strong emotional response in me. These are the guys I really wanted to get their comeuppance:

Dolores Umbridge, Harry Potter

Commodus, Gladiator

Khan, Star Trek

The Joker, The Dark Knight

Hannibal Lector, The Silence of the Lambs

Voldemort, Harry Potter

This isn’t a complete list, by any means, but what I realized after making it, is that my feelings for these characters tend to be either hatred (Umbridge, Commodus, Kahn) or fear (Joker, Lector), and on the rare occasion, both (Voldemort).

Most of my “fear” reaction has to do with the believability of the villain’s evil. The Joker is arguably the best example of this. He is a man of action. He blows up a hospital! He steals a bunch of money and then burns it! Seriously, I believe in this guy’s evil, and all I want is for him to be stopped as quickly as the Batman can.

My “hatred” reaction to a villain is directly connected to how much I care about the protagonist. My utter and complete loathing of Umbridge comes from how much I care about Harry and his world. Not only is she wickedly horrible to Harry, but she’s also makes Hogwarts an unhappy place to be. This is bad, bad, bad. I love Hogwarts. I want to defend it. I’m filled with righteous indignation that such a pompous, toady old lady thinks she can govern the place and make it as vile as her fluffy pink cardigan and kitty-covered office (Deep breath, Mindee. See how much I hate this woman?).

After thinking about all this badness, I’ve come up with 4 essential  ingredients for creating good (bad) villains:

1. Sympathetic protagonists whose lives/world is worth caring about it.
2. Clear motivation. The villain should want something or have some kind of goal, one which must be identified to the reader at some point. Evil for evilness sake is boring. All the villains above have clear motivations in the story. Voldemort wants Harry dead, the Joker wants to watch the world burn, Kahn wants revenge, etc. 
3. Empower your villain. At some point, the villain should have power over the protagonist or their world. Otherwise, they’re not a viable threat.
4. Activate the villain. Let them use that power over the world you’ve given them. A villain with no real power, or one who doesn’t use it, is only a caricature and a gimmick. Give your readers an undeniable reason to hate and fear the bad guy.

So there you have it, my take on villain awesomeness. But what about you? Who are some of your favorite (reviled) villains?

Happy writing

How Getting a Book Deal Doesn’t Change Everything

Don’t get me wrong, finding an agent and then selling a book does change your life. For sure. How much? I can’t really say. It’s still too early on my path to publication (waiting on my edit letter, in case you were wondering) for me to know.

But what I can say, for me at least, is that it hasn’t done diddly about decreasing anxiety, fear of failure, and overall writerly neurosis. If anything, it made them worse. Yep, that’s right. This might be because the stakes are higher now than ever before, but I’m not entirely sure.

To give you an example, I recently completed the second draft of a YA sci-fi novel (not under contract) and sent it to one of my critique partners. Lori read it and sent me her comments just like she did with The Nightmare Affair. Based on some tweets, I had a pretty good idea that she liked the story, but even still I had to force myself to open the document and face her comments.

Seriously. I really did! Even though I knew she liked it, and I knew that what she had to say would be completely invaluable for my next revision, this terrible, paralyzing dread came over me. One so strong, it took me more than 24 hours to work up the nerve to read through it.

WTF, right?

Of course, I’m now completely over it and am delighted by all the great feedback, but that initial dread was so darn hard it was literally painful. Actually, the entire process of writing the book has been hard. I threatened to quit multiple times, and I barely even liked the story when I finished the first draft. I was afraid of it, afraid of the genre, afraid of it being a complete dud, of discovering the book deal was just a fluke and I’m nothing but a hack, and so on.

Fortunately, I have people like Lori and my sister who make facing that fear worth it by being both supportive and helpful. My sister and brother-in-law read the very first draft of the YA sci-fi, and by following their revision suggestions, I ended up really loving my book by the end of it. After Lori’s feedback, I’m a bit over the moon. (Side note, this of course doesn’t mean the book will be successful in a publishing sense, but let’s not stir the neurotic stew too much right now, okay?).

Moral of the story – find good people to give you the right kind of support. One that is honest, tough, and also encouraging. Oh and then be brave enough to read those comments, process them, and incorporate them. And most importantly of all, just keep writing.

The Hook Writing Game

First off, big welcome to my new followers *waves*. Glad you’re here. Hope you stick around!

So a week or so ago, I shared my query letter with you guys, but as my agent’s super-awesome, could-not-be–better assistant, Sarah Goldberg pointed out, the query is only the beginning. The sample pages have to be pretty rock-on, too.

This got me thinking about opening hooks. Like what makes them good? And how do you write one?

I have no idea what the answers are to these questions. The best I can offer you is an analysis of some of my favorite hooks as a reader and then tell you about the hook game, aka a writing exercise for honing your hooking skills (say THAT 3 times fast, why don’t you?).

HOOK ANALYSIS

“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.” J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

This one has two things going for it for me as reader. (1) Voice. This is the voice of a storyteller, the kind that makes you want to lean back on your pillow, close your eyes, and get lost inside this world. (2) Surprise. The fact that the Dursleys are proud to be normal surprises me as reader.  I usually expect the opposite.

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” Stephen King, The Gunslinger

This one is easy. It’s got conflict, right from the beginning.  It also creates an immediate goal for the reader — I want the gunslinger to catch up. Right away, I’m rooting for the hero.

“They shoot the white girl first.” Toni Morrison, Paradise

This one has conflict and surprise, but it also sets an immediate mood. It warns me this is going to be dark and difficult. It almost dares me to continue reading.

“There are some men who enter a woman’s life and screw it up forever. Joseph Morelli did this to me—not forever, but periodically.” Janet Evanovich, One for the Money

Yowzers. This one hooks me in three ways, voice, mood (funny in this case), and conflict.

THE HOOK GAME

So from this little analysis, I’ve identified five ways to a hook a reader, through  voice, surprise, conflict, goal, and mood. And I would argue that most successful stories use all of these techniques some way or another in the opening pages.  

Now, I’m not going to claim even for a minute that I’m an expert on writing hooks. I’m really not, but I can say that I’ve spent a lot of time practicing how to write hooks. And no matter where you’re at in your writing career, practice will always help you improve.

So for practice, I recommend a little game that should be played with a writing partner (for the record, I didn’t make up this game but learned it from another writing colleague who’d learned it from someone else, etc).

Here’s how it works:

1.   For the first week, you and a friend decide on the number of hooks you will write as potential starts to stories over the next week. (When I played the game, my writing partner and I chose 10 lines).

2.   At the end of the week, share the lines with one another.  

3.   For the second week and all that follow, continue to write 10 brand new hooks, but also write 3 opening paragraphs, using any of the hooks written the previous week, no matter who wrote them.

Make sense? So every week after the first one, you’ll come up with 10 new hooks and 3 new paragraphs, all of which, if you’re lucky, might turn into genuine stories. And feel free to lower those numbers if it seems intimidating.

Now the game might sound silly, but it works. It’s both fun and challenging at the same time. Your partner will show you things you’ve never thought of before and vice versa. You’ll inspire and challenge each other.

You’ll find yourself wanting to write an opening hook so good that your partner will be unable to resist writing an opening paragraph from it. And if you play it long enough, you’ll begin trying new types of hooks, ones which employ a voice you’ve never used before or which are so strong, an entire novel might spring out from it.

Oh, and just in case you’re wondering, my current favorite hook is this one from my fabulous critique partner Lori M. Lee’s current WIP: “Death lived in a high-rise penthouse at the center of the South District.”

Yowzers…you got me there, babe.

So what's your favorite hook? And if you're in a sharing mood, feel free to post some opening lines. I'd love to read them.

As always, good luck and happy writing!

Query Letter Example and Tips

So a couple of people have asked about the query letter for The Nightmare Affair, which helped me in my quest to sign with my agent of awesome, Suzie Townsend. (Note: I refuse to use the phrase “land an agent,” because Suzie totally isn’t a fish. Seriously, she’s more of a rockstar. Maybe I should use the phrase “become a professional groupie”…but I digress).

Here it is folks, a copy of the email I sent to Suzie:

Dear Ms. Townsend:

16-year-old Dusty Everhart might make a regular habit of breaking into houses late at night, but she’s no criminal. She is a Nightmare, a magical being who must feed on the dreams of others, and in doing so experience those dreams, too. But when her latest dreamer, Eli Booker, the hot guy from her old high school, turns out to be dreaming about a murder which shortly comes true, she goes from non-criminal to reluctant crime fighter.

Dusty learns that together she and Eli posses the rare ability to predict the future through dreams. They are soon enlisted by the magickind government to help identify the person killing students at Dusty’s high school, Arkwell Academy, a secret school for magickind. Now Dusty and Eli must follow the clues both within Eli’s dreams and out of them to stop the killer before more people turn up dead. And before the killer learns what they’re up to and marks them as the next target.

Complete at 76,400 words, The Nightmare Affair is a YA contemporary fantasy, which I like to think of as Veronica Mars meets Hex Hall. Per your submission guidelines, I have included the first 10 pages below.

My short stories have appeared in various semi-pro magazines, including Happy, and I have received an honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2008. I have a Master of Arts in English Literature with an emphasis in Creative Writing. On a personal note, I follow both your blog and twitter account and thoroughly enjoy both. I think your First Page Shooter endeavor is invaluable.

I look forward to hearing from you soon. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Mindee Arnett

Address

Address

Phone

Email

I hope this letter is self-explanatory, but as always, feel free to ask me questions. Also, here’s a list of some things I think considered important in my agent submission process which you might find useful too:

• Know and understand the individual guidelines for EVERY agent you query.
• Unless those guidelines say otherwise, put the pitch paragraphs first in the query. Agents are short on time. Don’t make them wade through the BS unless they specifically want to.
• Send yourself test emails to make sure the formatting comes through properly. Be sure to view them on your iPhone or other device as this is how a lot of agents view them.
• Add a personal note so long as it’s honest and relevant.
• Follow the agents (twitter, blog, etc) you want to work with, and be sure to mention it. (Not long after Suzie had full manuscript of TNA, she started following me on Twitter, and WOW, was that a GREAT feeling.)
• Keep the pitch short and precise. Trust me, there’s a whole lot more to The Nightmare Affair than what’s suggested in this pitch. But I resisted the temptation to try and tell the whole story in two paragraphs. Just razzle-dazzle with as little as possible (i.e. the heart of the conflict and who it’s happening to).
• Query in small increments. I sent out only 5 queries at 1 time. If everyone gets rejected, take another look at the query.

(BONUS: Wanna see what happens after you sign with an agent and the book goes on submission? You can read the pitch here.)


Good luck and don’t give up!

First Draft Pep Talk

So I officially started on the first draft of my next work in progress. What does officially mean, you ask? It means three things:

1. I’ve decided on which project to focus on (having wavered between 3-4 valid ideas).
2. I filled in a couple of note cards with events I *think* will happen.
3. I opened my pocket-sized notebook where I record my daily word counts, turned to a brand new page and wrote the tentative title to this WIP at the top along with the word count total goal and my completion date goal.

Now, as I get ready to plunge in, meeting those daily word count goals, I’ve decided to give myself a little pep talk of ideas that I’ll want to keep in mind as go along.

1. Don’t get too upset whenever you fail to meet one day’s word count goal. Especially in the beginning. No matter what, the start of a story always takes more time than the end. There’s a reason for this. The start of the story involves the heaviest amount of world-building / character building. Think about it. I’ll probably spend a good hour or so a day, just figuring out the first and last names of important characters and places. But toward the end — not so much.
2. Remember that if I’m not having fun with a particular scene that I’m writing then nobody else will either (hint: skip those).
3. Ask and know the answer to questions right from the start. Why does this character care about that? Why does this character behave in this way?
4. Don’t forget the description (one of my chronic failings whenever drafting).
5. Write every day. Don’t slack. Don’t get distracted. Use the time you have now. There’s nothing better.
6. Don’t come to the page lightly, which is one of my all-time favorite quotes from Uncle Stevie, and the one I struggle with the most when drafting. Don’t just write words because it’s easy to write them and because you’re trying to meet some word count goal. Don’t just slip along, mindlessly, uncaringly. Take this writing business seriously.
7. Have fun. Do it because you love it. Because it fulfills. There’s no other reason to do it. None at all.

Furry Friday - Write Every Stride

Almost everybody involved in the horse world has heard the term “ride every stride.” It’s a fundamental principle when it comes to riding, especially when we’re talking about competition. The expression means pretty much what it says — you’ve got focus on each and every stride the horse takes. Make each one count. Pay attention. Don’t just sit back and coast and let the horse go on autopilot. It’s important especially if when you’re facing obstacles as challenging as this:

Same is true for writing. We’ve got to write every word. Make every word count. Every scene must matter. Pay attention to what you’re writing, or reading when it comes to revising. Don’t let a single word pass by your notice. If you make each writing stride count, you’re more likely to get past the big hurdles of finding an agent, pitching a book, publishing it, and staying published. It’s all the steps you take before that get you there.

Happy Writing (and riding, too)!

Everything I Know About Writing Books I Learned From the Movies

Just kidding. Like probably all writers, most of what I’ve learned has been from the old “read a lot, write a lot” routine, with a fair bit of trial and error thrown in.

But not all of my writing lessons have come from the written word.  I think you can learn something from any form of storytelling, good and bad. Sometimes even a single line or two can be profound, no more so in my experience then in a short scene in Wonder Boys. This is one of the rare films I like even more than the book, for all kinds of reason (not the least being that Alan Tudyk has a small role in it). The scene in question, between a college writing student and her professor, goes like this:

Hannah Green: “Grady, you know how in class you’re always telling us that writers make choices?”

Grady Tripp: “Yeah.”

Hannah Green: “And even though your book is really beautiful […] it sort of reads in places like you didn’t make any choices.”

Took me a long time to understand the full impact of this small, seemingly insignificant little exchange. Writers make choices? Well duh. That’s all writers do, right? We name our characters, decide what they look like, move them around on the page like dolls in a toy house. Simple, really, don’t you think?

Nope, not by a long shot. Those things aren’t the choices that Hannah is talking about. She’s talking about the big stuff, the deep stuff, like deciding what makes a character tic, why the villain comes onto the scene with a gun on page 23. Transcribing these events, the conflicts, the arguments, the declarations of love is easy. Understanding them isn’t.

So what’s the trick to making choices you ask? Simple. You’ve got to ask questions. That’s the difference between writing on the surface and digging deep. When we drift along, letting the story unfold as it wants without pause or consideration, it’s like riding down a river in a raft with no oar. When we do things that way it’s too easy to get stuck, to move too slow, or even worse, to go over the edge into some unnecessary and unbelievable plot development.

So ask questions and make choices. Those are the oars writers steer by.