Making Your Characters Round

For a reader to invest upwards of 80,000 words or more into a character, there must be something worth following. Flat characters spell doom for a book. Even if your novel is a plot-driven mystery, the characters should be as developed as possible. Every character should have a backstory that gives nuance to her actions, or reasons for her choices. Supporting characters deserve the benefit of a personal history too, and for a writer just beginning the process of writing a manuscript, a set of character details can enhance the story even if the reader never necessarily finds out every tidbit that you used to build the character.

It's easy and often tempting to start with plot points, beats within a scene, or crafting dialogue and then dive into writing with a few sketchy character details (he's an innocent man unjustly accused running from the police, etc.) . But the characters' experiences shape their decisions, which translate into conflict. Their personal history affects how they speak, or whether they speak at all in any given situation. Here are some ideas on making your characters more round.

Start with some of the things a person may answer on a dating profile, or in a job interview, or even if they were writing an autobiography. Everyone had parents, foster parents, a father/mother figure, a teacher who influenced him. Who were they? Did they shape the character for better or for worse? Where did your character go to school? Or did she drop out? This affects self esteem and socio economic status, which drives the characters' choices, which in turn, will feed into the novel's conflict. And your book needs conflict. Lot of it.

What's your character's ethnic, racial and religious background? It's a great big world out there and your book should reflect it. What are their spiritual and political beliefs? Not having either is fine because that can also explain how people behave, how they react to the world, and how they treat others. It's easy to have a cookie cutter "stern librarian," or the familiar beleaguered police sergeant who keeps saying he's "too old for this," but dig deeper: Did the librarian have a childhood dream to become an actress that was squashed by an abusive parent? Does the sergeant have a sick spouse at home and is only on the job to keep his insurance benefits? Just picking a character's name, gender and occupation isn't enough. You should know why they have the job they have, who they love and who they lost, and how they view themselves in the world. Do they drink scotch or beer?

Does your character have a secret? Even if the "secret" is as benign as a corporate executive being a Star Trek cosplay nerd, this gives him depth and makes him realistic, and ultimately more interesting. If she has a body buried in the backyard, bonus!

What is your character's dream/goal? If he has an unfulfilled dream, and is stuck in a job he hates, that again gives him curves and edges. It's easy enough to describe a rather overweight person eating fast food.  But if you have that character looking at the food in disgust even as he eats it, alone, in his car in the parking lot of McDonalds, your reader knows this is a lonely, sad person who uses food for comfort. You, as the author, already know that his adult kids hate him, he hates his job, and he used to be a college athlete who has let himself go. You don't necessarily put all that into the narrative, but just knowing that will help you craft a few sentences that give him some texture, and that makes him come alive for the reader.

Some enterprising authors make a spread sheet with all of the characters that lists all their relevant information. You don't have to necessarily go that far, but remember that the plot still has to be carried by people, and the reader must want to read about these people dealing with that plot. Rounding out your characters will make the reader stick with your story because you've created people worth caring about.

Kim English - is the author of the Coriander Jones series and the award winning picture book 'A Home for Kayla.' Her latest picture book, 'Rolly and Mac' will be released in 2016. Her website is Kim-English.com. She is represented by Gina Panettieri.

When the "Show, Don't Tell" police come knocking

Every writer, at some point, has heard the phrase, "There is too much telling." Perhaps the critique came from a well-meaning critique partner, or even that rare agent who offered a personalized rejection. Unfortunately, that advice has become so common that it can be about as useless as the also-ubiquitous, "Passive voice is bad!" mantra.

So what exactly does it mean to show, not tell? And when is telling better than showing? Here are some tools I try to keep in mind when editing. To digress a moment, I don't recommend going through this process while you are churning out your first draft. It's called a crappy first draft for a reason.

When you see a long expanse of text with no dialogue, and no "short action" paragraphs to break up the action (like, "the cell door slammed shut"), ask yourself if the passage is lacking some description of a person's body language as well as other sensory elements, such as touch or smell that could convey the same information, or whether the same scene could be conveyed better with dialogue rather than description. If the passage if merely a character's backstory, does it read like an information dump or can you weave in some of the back story in later chapters if it doesn't have to be established up front?

By way of example, here is some "telling."

"Mary was very angry. Her husband was late for dinner again and despite several text messages and voice mails, he hadn't bothered to tell her if he was on his way home or not. To make matters worse, her teenage son had wolfed down a dinner she had carefully prepared from scratch. He had eaten quickly while standing up and then immediately dashed out, not even bothering to tell her where he was going. Mary wondered if she should just give up. She began googling divorce attorneys."

Here is how the same situation could be more "showy."

No new messages.
"Inconsiderate jerk," Mary muttered. She punched Joe's cell number with her thumb as she ladled the congealed remains of her signature lasagna into a plastic containers with the other hand. The remnants of fresh basil, oregano and garlic wafted through the air.

Straight to voice mail. Mary clicked End Call. She tossed her phone on the counter. The dog she hadn't wanted looked up at her hopefully with a leash in his mouth.

"Go walk yourself. I'm done being everyone's maid," she told him. "Jake, where are you going?

Her son barely looked up from his phone. He opened the side door. "Out."

"But you barely touched your din-"

The door slammed shut in his wake. Mary scraped the remaining food into the sink and put it down the disposal. She opened up her laptop, poured herself a glass of wine she'd been saving for a special occasion, and typed. A few minutes later, she clicked on Schedule a Free Consultation with one our Board Certified Divorce Attorneys.

In the first example, the writer is simply telling the reader what the reader needs to know about Mary. She feels unappreciated, put upon, and has simply had enough. The second example shows the reader things Mary does and says, and how she reacts to what other people do through action and dialogue. We don't need to be told how she feels because we can see it.

This is not to suggest that "telling" is always bad. Sometimes, telling is better than showing. Consider this "all tell" passage from Dress Her in Indigo by John D. MacDonald:

"T. Harlan Bowie had to be prybarred and torch-cut out of his squashed Buick, and there was so much blood the rescue people were in a big hurry. As it turned out, they would have done a lot better taking it slow and easy rather than turning him and twisting him and working him in muscular style out of the metal carapace. Nobody could prove anything afterward. The lacerations were superficial. But there was a fracture of the spine, and between the second and third lumbar vertebrae the unprotected cord had been pinched, ground, bruised, torn and all but severed. Nobody could ever say whether the accident had done it, or the rescue efforts."

You can't convince me that there is a better way to convey this information about poor Mr. Bowie than to just say it. There is no need to draw it out with "showing" techniques because the reader only needs to know Mr. Bowie's predicament in order to set the stage for actual plot, which doesn't really involve how he became physically disabled. Stephen King similarly introduces us to retired Detective Hodges in Mr. Mercedes by just telling us in straightforward, unembellished  fashion, about how he spends his days post retirement watching television and gaining weight.

So when to show and when to tell? That is often in the eye of the beholder. But say that Mary in our first example is a fleeting character in a slasher novel who gets killed off rather quickly at the beginning. Maybe a little "tell" works better because we don't really need to know the details of her lasagna and her kid. But if Mary is the main character in a chick lit novel, then yes, we need to be able to identify with the every day experiences of feeling overwhelmed and under taken for granted. In that case, the second example works better.

In your own writing, if you notice a lot of first-version Mary writing that goes on for pages and pages, this should be a red flag to ask yourself a few questions. Can I write this scene referencing facial expressions, glances, smells, or by use of dialogue?  Instead of  saying "Lady Macbeth was convinced blood was everywhere and on her hands and she couldn't get clean," show a character scrubbing an already immaculate surface until her knuckles bleed while someone pleads with her to stop.

The next step in editing is to identify  the filler words we all use  when we try to "show, don't tell."  My writing's  worst offenders are eye rolling and shrugging. But that topic has to wait until next month.

Happy show and tell until then.

Kim English - is the author of the Coriander Jones series and the award winning picture book 'A Home for Kayla.' Her latest picture book, 'Rolly and Mac' will be released in 2016. Her website is Kim-

Engineering a Fiction Series

My current WIP is an urban fantasy serial. I thought I'd take a break from the writing to give myself a refresher course on the business side of publishing. 

Pantsing a book--or even a series--is one thing, but authors must never pants their way through their careers. Better to lay good solid track down now before I get too deep! We all know that revisions can be a trainwreck. :) 

There is a certain appeal to the sound of the words "three book deal".

I remember the first time I read those words—my favorite author had just announced a deal to keep a beloved series going with a six figure payout. I was excited to learn there were more books coming…but those words curled themselves into a corner of my writer's brain and never left. Without realizing it, I'd set a goal.

I've long abandoned the idea of snagging a six figure payout for my work but the idea of a multi-book deal never went away. At the time I had been writing my first novel and knew that it wouldn't be a stand alone book in a stand alone world.


Choosing the Series Track

There seem to be two basic models for writing a series: there is the central idea/world with loosely-linked stand alones or there is the sequentially-linked stand alone format. When deciding to develop a series, we often choose one model or the other without ever thinking—but, once chosen, that model must be followed to the end.

I'm not sure editors want to hear the words "debut author" and "series" in the same query letter. There is a lot of risk in taking on the first of a series if the book can't stand alone. But isn't that why we pitch it as a series? You ask.

It is…but if you want to sell it as a series, you need to make sure that book will stand on its own legs. In fact, every book needs to do that—stand on its own. Very few readers like picking up a story in mid-thought and the dislike being left hanging even more.

I picture a series as I would a train—I'm the engineer and each of the boxcars is an installment. They are all linked together but they are each their own.


Continuity

A series isn't a three hundred thousand word novel that gets broken up into chunks. It's a collection of novels connected by themes and characters. A writer shouldn't assume that, in order to read the fourth installment of a talked-about series, a reader will run out and buy the first three books to study up in advance. No one likes extra homework.

That's why it's important to make each book stand on its own. But it’s a series! You insist. My characters have history! Yes, they do…which is why a writer must be sure the series has continuity.

When writing a new installment in a sequential-type series, you have an obligation to provide backstory. Please, do it with skill—no info dumps. Often, a few lines here and there serve as reminders of key elements to keep old readers in the loop and new readers in the know. Balance is key, however.

Continuity is also important in the loosely-linked format—you need to provide a balance of unique elements while still reminding the reader there are other stories to be explored in the series.

Once that balance is found, the stories of a series will display a certain continuity that readers crave in a series. You want those books to be like boxcars in a train: separate yet together. Continuity can be thought of as the hitches between the cars—it will help the reader view the series as a whole (good for consequential book sales) while letting them enjoy one book at a time.


Control

Perhaps you are the writer who is enjoying writing your story and is wondering if the story has series potential.

Maybe you are exploring future book plots, possible character interactions, subthemes and story lines. The key to writing a successful series, however, isn't how far you can blow that book out—it's how well you can control it.

Once again, I envision boxcars on a train (okay, I guess I have a thing for trains. Living where I do, it's hard not to.) In this case, each of the cars are relatively similar in size and shape. Sometimes the train has a tanker or a coal bin punctuating the link up—and the change is refreshing, in a way.

I am not thinking circus train, where one car is a box full of sad clowns and the next is a cage with giraffes hanging out the top. If your series begins to look like that, it means you let an element grow out of control—either a story line got away from you or a character is growing too fast to be contained by the story. Either element will run you into trouble and cause your series to falter…just like that circus train whose engineer doesn't know there's a low bridge around the next bend.

How do you control your stories from ruining your series? You need to always be looking ahead. Keep your characters in check. Know where story lines are going so they don't diverge so hard they split the series or converge too soon in premature collisions. Keeping tight control on the series will help you prevent crashes.


Cancellation

Another reason you may not want to consider—but absolutely must—is cancellation.

There are many reasons why a series gets cancelled and not all of them have to do with the series or even the writing. Sometimes publishing houses change direction. Editors leave. Philosophies change. Sometimes the money dries up and the house closes their doors.

If that were to happen, where do you want to be in your series?

That's why each book must be a stand alone—if there isn't a book to follow, do you want your readers satisfied or ripping their hair out in frustration? You can always pick up a well-written series someplace else…but if you alienate your readers by leaving them stranded, they won't forgive you so easily.


Does Your Story Have Series Potential?

Little did I know, back when writing my stand alone book, I was, in fact, laying the groundwork for a potentially successfully series. My publisher has since contacted the second book and is wondering when the third will show up in her inbox. I still have the responsibility to make sure each of the other books stand on their own feet.

While any story has the ability to spin off, series need better planning. However, with a little foresight, you can evaluate your work and make the important decision of turning your stand alone into a series.

You simply must make wise engineering decision to keep your work on track.

Ash Krafton is a speculative fiction writer who, despite having a Time Turner under her couch and three different sonic screwdrivers in her purse, still encounters difficulty with time management. She's the author of the urban fantasy trilogy The Books of the Demimonde as well as WORDS THAT BIND. She also writes for YA and NA audiences under the pen name AJ Krafton. THE HEARTBEAT THIEF, her Victorian dark fantasy inspired by Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”, is now available.

Plotting vs Pantsing: A Daoist Writer Contemplates the End

"In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it." — Rose Tremain

I’m a Potterhead. Over the years, I’ve collected all sorts of Pottery (see what I did there?) from wands to Gryffindor scarves to fond memories of the first time I had a Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Bean*.

Tutti-fruitti. Mmmm. Delish.

However, my most cherished piece of HP memorabilia isn’t sitting on my desk or living in a photo album. It’s an idea. A piece of writer’s nerdistry. I remember reading an article wherein Rowling said that she’d written the last chapter as part of her earliest work on the series.

She knew how the story would end all along—and wrote her stories so that they would all work toward that ending.

The Yin
As I myself evolved from a reader into a writer, I often thought about that. Her technique made complete sense.

I was fascinated by the absolute loveliness of the series. Everything just seemed to fall in place like a wonderfully intricate mosaic. It made the reader in me very, very happy. Stories like that are fulfilling. I’m glad she knew the ending because it made for an amazing journey.

I added Rowling’s idea to my writer’s “toolbox”. Knowing the end helps ensure the story gets told in a fulfilling way. It enables a writer to include all those elements that come together to form the final picture.

I began writing on Team Pantser. Rowling’s “advice” served me very well. My first books were definitely not plotted out. I knew where I wanted each one to end up and happily pantsed my way through the book until I got there. And somehow, the stories worked. They had those delicious elements and clues and resonances interspersed along the way that culminated in fulfilling endings.

So why the Rose Tremain quote? you ask. It would seem to be the exact opposite of the philosophy I’d developed for my writing. But that’s the thing about writing: we grow with every story we write. Our craft develops. We learn. We change.

The Yang
As I continued to evolve as a writer, I had a feeling that I couldn’t write by the seat of my pants forever. I’d learned too much about story arcs and acts and structure to ignore the pros of plotting a book.

My first romance novel was also my first plotting project—and that’s because romance readers have very high expectations. If I didn’t plot the romance story line, it would have been in serious danger of flopping. A relationship story requires a pattern of ups and downs in order to invest the reader in the outcome.

And outcome is key. A romance novel has one major requirement: a happy ending. Knowing that the story would end up in a happy place allowed me to write that story to get there. I didn’t know it would end up with the ending it got. I just knew love would find its way.

And the times, they were a-changing. I was approaching a new place in my writing, someplace strange. A place where planning became essential to my writing process. I had begun to play for the other team. The Plotters.

I began studying Save the Cat. I scrutinized beat sheets. I even found these nifty references here and here that help me make sure I hit my beats on time by plotting out not only the beats but also the appropriate word counts associated with them. Never in my wildest pantser dreams could I have imagined the joy of the science of plotting, the mathematical precision of putting delicious story elements in their proper order.

The Conflict
But there is a word I associate with concepts such as mathematic and scientific. Clinical. Furthermore, there are other words I associate with clinical. Cold. Precise. Spiritless.

Last October, I got out my beat sheets and plotted a story, planning on banging it out the next month for NaNoWriMo. The beats were primo. The plot was *mwah* magnifique! The story was intricate and fulfilling and waiting to be written. All I had to do was connect the dots.

That’s when something terrible happened. I tried to connect the dots. Tried to write the story in between those defined points I’d so carefully plotted.

I didn’t feel like writing it.

I didn’t feel.

The plotting was perfect but in plotting, the process became clinical. Cold. Spiritless. I couldn’t figure it out at first. Thinking it was just a little bit of exhaustion from my day job, I back-burnered the project. I pantsed a different story and had a blast doing it. After some space, I went back and looked at that NaNo project and realized what went wrong.

I knew too much about what was going to happen. Knowing exactly the who’s, the how’s, and the when’s took all the joy of discovery out of the writing. It made writing the story (and I shudder to write this) work.

And I never want writing to feel like work. My day job feels like work. Work equals (shudder) work.

Writing is the part of my week that restores me, rejuvenates me, uses the muscles I don’t get to use at the day job. It is what balances me and keeps me sane.

The Daoist Writer
I have come to think of this in Daoist terms. Writing and day job are yin and yang. They are push and pull. They are two very different halves that make me whole.

Balance in technique also keeps me whole. And that’s where Rose Tremain restored my sanity.

Her quote originally made me wonder if my Rowlingesque mindset was the wrong thing for me as a writer. I needed to look at my craft, my books, and my techniques. Here's what I discovered.

• Knowing the ending and pantsing my way there worked for some of my books.
• Plotting and beat-sheeting a book before writing worked for some of my books.
• Pantsing instead of plotting would not have worked as well for my first romance.
• Plotting and beat-sheeting a story before writing any of it—before I got to know the characters and their world—made the passion of writing the story fizzle out, leaving a cold, clinical task.

And so the ultimate Daoism emerged:
• There was no single perfect way, no one true path to writing my stories.

The Balance
Rose Tremain’s advice wasn’t saying that Rowling’s way was wrong. It was simply another truth. That was the balance I needed. Tremain’s words became the yang to Rowling’s yin.

So, that it? you ask. Here I thought you’d clear it up, once and for all, what we should be—plotters or pantsers?

And the answer is: don’t ask me. Ask your story.

Your story may spring fully formed and armored from your forehead, like a Greek goddess. Your story may require a structure to serve the genre, such as mystery or romance. Your story may pop into your head, ending first, a final moment that is the essence you want to share. Or your story may be whispered to you by your muse, scene by random scene, in drops of inspiration.

If you are the type of writer who has a consistent writing process, your stories may be conceived in one particular fashion and your technique is the same from book to book.

I can’t write with a one-size-fits-all approach. My stories are too varied. Maybe if I were to stick to one style, one genre I could use one technique. But that’s not me. My day job is very strict in the sense that there is only one right way to do what I do, with piles of company policies to ensure it gets done that one right way and boatloads of state and federal regulations to ensure I don’t decide to start freewheeling it. My writing is definitely the yang to my day job’s yin.

I am a Daoist. I strive to keep my life in balance, and each part of my life in balance with itself.

Writing is no different. My state of enlightenment enables me to realize that I am not meant to be pure plotter or pure pantser. I strive for simplicity, naturalness, and spontaneity while giving a story the structure it requires for reading fulfilment. My stories are best served by a balance of the two approaches and, when I write using the best of each of those two techniques, I achieve my goals and create stories that I really, truly love.

And that’s good karma for me.

What team do you back—the Pantsers or the Plotters? Or are you a free agent like myself? 


*Not to be confused with the first time my husband had a BBEFB. He found the bag of jelly beans next to the computer one night and, bathed in only the light of the monitor glow, did not realize he was about to eat a vomit-flavored one. Much racket ensued. Geez, can that man hold a grudge.

Ash Krafton is a speculative fiction writer who, despite having a Time Turner under her couch and three different sonic screwdrivers in her purse, still encounters difficulty with time management. She's the author of the urban fantasy trilogy The Books of the Demimonde as well as WORDS THAT BIND. She also writes for YA and NA audiences under the pen name AJ Krafton. THE HEARTBEAT THIEF, her Victorian dark fantasy inspired by Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”, is now available.

Editing the Muse #writetip

As a writer of all lengths of fiction, I always seem to have a work in progress. My muse, who apparently has some sort of attention deficit, like to bounce between novels and short stories and back again. Sometimes, I actually finish things. More often than not, I’m editing.

I’ve learned a lot about editing and revising over the years, through books and online classes and (my favorite) reading books by authors whose style I adore. I’m heading back to my WIP for a long, hard look and I’m considering doing some editing. For those of you who are also currently wallowing in edits, I thought I’d share some thoughts on the process.

I have a huge list of bookmarked articles on the subject... and these are the ones I always re-read when I need to refocus.

Fellow writer and former Query Tracker blogger Elana Johnson recently posted an article on “good vs. done.” It’s a rallying cheer we all need to remind us of our talent and our self-worth (as well as an opportunity to visit her fun vocabulary. I love to listen to her write.)

Sometimes, an editor or feedback group will recommend edits or revisions. It’s easy for us to think it’s because what we wrote is, as Elana puts it, sucktacular. But it’s not. Changes make something that’s already good even better.(And anyways, if it was truly sucktacular, they would have told us to shred it and start over.)

So, once we’re firmly reminded that we’ve already written something worth keeping, it’s time to edit it. Dustin Wax writes that there is no good writing, just good re-writing. Having edited my first novel over the space of three years, I have to agree with him. I find this to be a splendid philosophy for anyone facing the daunting task of staring down a first draft.

Before you start, it’s important to ask yourself what, exactly, you need to do. Are you making surface edits or major revisions?  I came across Dennis G. Jerz’s article “Revision vs. Edition" and found a great quick-reference list.

While polishing a short story can be done in a manageable amount of time, editing a large volume—say, a four-hundred page novel—can be downright overwhelming. One trick many authors--and editors--use is to break the process into steps. You can find an example of a breakdown here.

It also helps to make a list of changes you want to make throughout the piece. Just tackle them one at a time and you make big progress with every small step. Take it chapter by chapter, task by task, and remember: keep going. It’s worth the work.

And then, once you think you have that WIP right where you want it, read Nathan Bransford’s advice to see how close to “done” you’ve gotten. If necessary, lather, rinse, and repeat.

But if it’s done, then it’s all good.

Right? *evil smiley because we all know done is never, ever, really, truly, done*

Ash Krafton is a speculative fiction writer who, despite having a Time Turner under her couch and three different sonic screwdrivers in her purse, still encounters difficulty with time management. She's the author of the urban fantasy trilogy The Books of the Demimonde as well as WORDS THAT BIND. She also writes for YA and NA audiences under the pen name AJ Krafton. THE HEARTBEAT THIEF, her Victorian dark fantasy inspired by Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”, is now available.

When the Publishing Business Just Isn't Into You

A few years back, a hugely successful book spoke the blunt truth that sometimes the object of your affection just isn't that into you and there's nothing you can do about it. It's a simple, yet profound notion that neither of you has a fatal flaw and the universe hasn't conspired to keep you apart. As the saying goes, it's not personal.  Every writer meets that moment when the question must be asked: Is it time to move on?

Before you decide to shelve your manuscript though, ask yourself some tough questions.

Did I query the manuscript too soon? Every manuscript deserves a break before a final edit and polish. That nay be a month, or a week, but if you haven't let your book simmer for awhile, you'll regret it later when you see a dozen ways those first five pages could have packed a better punch. This is easier to fix if you query in small batches. Yes, you've blown the opportunity with those agents that already rejected you, but there are plenty of agents out there.

And speaking of agents, did you research the agents before you queried them? Did you look at their favorite books, their current clients and their stated areas of interest? Was your query concise, professional and did it plainly lay out the protagonist and the stakes in your story? Did you do something gimmicky like writing the query in the character's voice or leading off with a hypothetical question? (If so, please proceed to "Query Help" on QT the forum right now)

Is your manuscript in a genre that's currently saturated? It really stinks if no one will touch your dystopian YA right now, but market trends have ebb and flow and you can't control it. Write something else. There will always be a place in bookstores for vampires and romance and sci-fi and a year from now, maybe you'll get a warmer reception.

Are you a tad bit whiny/needy/bitter on social media?  Being a part of a supportive community doesn't necessarily mean you have to share every indignity you've suffered while dealing with rejection. Many agents do check you out on line before making an offer of representation or a request.Make your on line presence an asset.

This is the hardest one: Is your writing just not up to par? Have you tried to objectively compare your writing to other published works in the same genre? Try reading passages out loud, which is a huge help in identifying awkward sentences.  Has your manuscript undergone scrutiny by beta readers (not blood relatives) critique partners, or published authors? Have you done a full content edit, looking for clichés, crutch words, tropes and pacing issues? It's never easy to admit that something you've created may not see the light of day in traditional publishing, and yes, great books do get rejected, but sometimes the common denominator is simply that this manuscript isn't the right one.

Every writer gets rejected. Every. Single One. Good queries and bad queries likely get the same form rejection. Before you give up your dream, try as best as you can to objectively assess the reason for your failures. Most of the time, you can fix what is wrong. Writing improves with practice. Queries can be polished. About the only thing you can't control is market trends and the wildly subjective tastes of people in the industry. Press on and never let the fear of failure stop you from pursuing your dream.

Kim English - A native Floridian, Kim is the author of Coriander Jones Saves the World and the upcoming Coriander Jones On Assignment at Sabal Palm Academy. She lives in southwest Florida with her family and an ever increasing number of rescue pets. You can learn more about Kim and her books at CorianderJones.com

Unleashing Your Creativity: Five Ways To Switch Off That Internal Editor

A writer has two main signals in the brain: create and edit.

The creator, well, creates. Stories grow and bloom and take on life. The editor and her red pen prunes and cuts and shapes. But there's a reason why I'm a writer, not a farmer, so let's lose the gardening analogy and think of this another way: think green light and red light.

Green light, go—the words flow. Red light—stop. Stop and fix, stop and think, stop and just plain stop.

And stopping isn't going to help you get your first draft done.

First drafts need to be green light, all the way. Any time your word flow hesitates, it's an opportunity for the editor to take over. You'll re-read those last lines and tweak them. You'll pause, mentally discarding phrase after phrase because they're just not good enough. The writing stops. The cursor blinks, wondering if you got up and left. Red light.

But you don't have to live at the mercy of a red light. The writer controls the signal. Like every other element of writing, it's a piece of craft to be learned.

Pro-level Green Light
One way to bask in the glow of the green light is to attain a level of competency that lets you self-edit on the fly.  In this article, Sean D'Souza discusses how writing competency leads to writing fluency, where editing happens so quickly we don't even know we're doing it. The red light is only the briefest of flickers in a stream of green.

How does a writer become competent? You write. And you write. You make the mistakes that come with learning a craft. You learn from those mistakes and you get better. Each mistake and its subsequent lesson is one step closer to competency.

But learning a craft takes a long time. In the meantime, we still set word count goals and deadlines, long before we attain this nirvana called fluency. How do we keep ourselves writing forward instead of deleting backwards...or stalling because you can't get past a sentence just because you can't get it down right?

Do everything you can to keep the red light from coming on.

I have a few tricks I use during first draft writing and each one contributes to green light streaming in its own way.

1).  Go Analog
Notepads don't have delete keys. Plain and simple.

Writing longhand gives me a change to simply write. My handwriting is smooth enough that it all blends in my periphery--I tend not to look back over the last lines as I write. If I do need to change something, I strike it through. Unlike deleting, the original word is there so I don't obsess that I made a mistake by erasing one.

Plus, I love the flow of ink. I'm a very visible-art kind of person so writing with an ink pen is akin to painting words. Best of all, I get to choose the ink color that inspires me. When I was younger, my pen of choice was a purple Pilot ballpoint. Today, I'm partial to blue ink. So much of what I read is in black and white so the mere sight of blue taps into my creative side.

Blue is also my ideal color for meditation. Calming, serene blue. Did you know that writing is, in itself, a form of meditation? Google it sometime—when you're not supposed to be writing, of course. Which leads me to another red light reducer:

2).  Remove distractions
Distractions create pauses. If you are not actively submerging in the creative flow, typing out words, focused on the story, then your brain will flip the switch to editor mode.

I have a lot of cool junk on my desk. There's a lovely collection of ravens and skulls (thanks to my endless devotion to Edgar Allan Poe) and a bunch of Dr. Who and Sherlock and Supernatural collectables (because I will go down with that 'ship) and a bunch of other nifty writer things. In fact, my desk is the reason why I don't write at my desk. Ever. Too much to play with... and if I'm playing, I'm not writing.

If I look up from the page, I might toy with a sonic screwdriver. My brain might then toy with something I'd already written. The red light comes on and the editor comes out. And that's not what I want when I'm trying to get that first draft written.

Take the time to make a list of your worst distractions. Internet. The telephone. Your hair, if you're a twister-tugger-fidgeter like me. Identify those distractions and do what you can to limit them. The less you look up from the page, the less likely you are to staunch that green light flow.

3).  Plan Ahead by Plotting
Some writers love the freedom of watching a story bloom and unfold right before their eyes, with each sentence taking them further along a path toward a new undiscovered word. That's a beautiful thing, that quicksilver taste of creativity—and it's the reason many of us enjoy writing as much as we do.

But how many of us actually sit down in from of a blank screen without at least thinking where the book is going to go? Precious few, I'd wager. At the very least, we have an idea. A hook. An anecdote. Something.

But if that something isn't big enough for a pantser to go on, it's easy to bang heads with writer's block. (Pantser? Writer's block? If that's the main problem for you, read this.)

So, plan ahead. One easy way to do that is to create your plot outline.


Seems like contrary advice coming from a pantser like me but just hear me out. If you know where the story is going, you can write more freely than if you have to come up with each and every element as you go. A little planning goes a long way in illuminating the path ahead so you don't go bumbling in the dark.

4).  Allow Necessary Roughness
A first draft is often called the rough draft. However, writers forget that they are allowed to be rough when writing them. Sometimes, we set unrealistic expectations for ourselves and our writing and feel pressured to make the first draft the only draft.

When I was in college, my freshman lit professor told me she loved my first drafts. I wasn't a budding writer or an English major. I had no thoughts about writing novels. I was a first year pharmacy student who felt more at home in the humanities department and I simply loved my reading and writing assignments. Lit classes were a brief escape from chem labs and white coats.

These days, I still haven't escaped the white coats, but I do still try to put out competent first drafts. It's a weird way to pay homage to my old mentors back in Philly—the pharmacist who writes as if her freshman lit teacher was watching. But these days, there is a big difference.

I'm not going for a grade. I've given myself a lot of breathing room. I allow myself to write imperfectly. I permit roughness in my drafts.

For instance: I use brackets (like this article describes.)  If an element makes me stumble, I close it off, skip over it, and keep going.

Skipping the unwritable parts keep the green light going. You can go back and write those spots later, after you've had time to work them out. (That's what second drafts are for, right?)

In fact, I love skipping things. In my current WIP, one chapter has only three words: SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS. The next chapter picks up the narrative once more, with actual scenes and sequences. I'm able to pull this off because of the previous tip about plotting. I know where the story is going so it doesn't matter if I have trouble somewhere.

I just gun the gas and speed past it, blasting through that potential red light. Skipping stuff can be such a rush.

5).  Avoid Criticism
It's not enough to allow myself to write roughly in a first draft. I know what I'm writing is not the final product. I know it's going to get better, and deeper, and less riddled with thinly-developed ideas.

But would someone else know that?

Beta readers and critique partners are a writer's best friends. Seriously. We all need a set of impartial eyes on our stories to see the flaws we can't. But a first draft is no place for that kind of critique.

Not only is the story not yet at a place to be properly critiqued—neither are we. A first draft is a place of discovery and experimentation, a place where creativity needs to flow unimpeded. Criticism, at this point, slams the writing light to full red. It forces us to rethink our work, to go back and change. It intentionally switches us to editor mode.

It also does something to our confidence. Even when the critique is gentle and constructive, it makes us doubt ourselves and where we thought our story was going. You might think a critique is necessary at the beginning, that it will save us unnecessary work down the road. I think that's premature. I think that there's a bigger risk of squelching a good idea before it has a chance to be fully developed. That's the worst kind of editing—it's censoring.

That's why I keep my first drafts to myself. I might give a sneak peek of a scene to one of my inner-sanctum betas, just for a taste of what I'm writing. But I never give enough to inspire criticism and I never hand a red pen over with it.

Green Light... Go!
The next time you find yourself stuck in first draft traffic, don't despair. The writer in you has the power to switch that signal and turn that red light green again. You don't need a miracle. You just need to learn how to take back that control.

The switch is all yours. Learn to use it to your advantage.

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Five Ways To Switch Off Your Internal Editor

Red light, green light: Editing vs. Writing

Improve your creative flow with these 5 tips

Ash Krafton is a speculative fiction writer who, despite having a Time Turner under her couch and three different sonic screwdrivers in her purse, still encounters difficulty with time management. She's the author of the urban fantasy trilogy The Books of the Demimonde as well as WORDS THAT BIND. She also writes for YA and NA audiences under the pen name AJ Krafton. THE HEARTBEAT THIEF, her Victorian dark fantasy inspired by Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”, is now available.

The Importance of Being Edited

It's never fun to read a critical review, but even worse than a reader who simply didn't like your book is the critique that says something like "And on top of it the typos and punctuation errors on almost every page really made me cringe." How can this be when we pour hours and hours revising and editing, running spell check and combing through our manuscript searching for mistakes?

 I liken it to housekeeping. Ever walk into someone's house and think, "Oh, my, how many dog/cats do they have?" Walk into your own house, though, and you are far more likely to overlook the dishes in the sink or the Eau de Fluffy because, hey, it's your house and you clean on Sundays and it's only Friday, right? Same with your manuscript, which you know by heart. You know you meant "you're" not "your." But without a fresh set of eyes, one that doesn't already know every plot twist, you will miss things and people will notice. This is where an editor comes in handy. Even if you don't plan to self publish, an editor can be an invaluable tool along with your critique partner and beta readers, in getting your manuscript in the best shape possible.

 Let's define some terms. I conferred with fellow Floridian and freelance editor Becky Stephens to help understand the different types of editing services a writer may use. (Disclosure: portions of the information provided by Becky appeared on my blog earlier this month in an interview format, so I am using quotation marks to ensure her comments are properly attributed) "Although the terms can vary from publisher to publisher and editor to editor, generally speaking, the 'copyedit' editor ensures that the prose is smooth and the style consistent. She provides line edits with the focus on spelling, grammar, punctuation, verb tense, word repetition and usage, and all the minute things."

 But, you say, in the word processing age, won't the almighty spell check will catch all my mistakes? "No. The word processor’s spellcheck is never enough. It can't differentiate between “your” and “you’re” or to spot “in” when “it” was correct, for example." This is where your beta readers comes in handy. And speaking of beta readers, if you use them in lieu of a professional edit, ask yourself what you expect from them. "Do they read simply for overall plot? Will they spot an inconsistency, such as a character walking barefoot on a cold floor, but suddenly is wearing shoes two pages later? Will your betas notice the missing or incorrect punctuation before the closing quotation mark in front of a dialogue tag? If you aren’t 100% sure they will spot these types of things, consider bringing an editor on board."

Back to defining terms. "A 'content edit' (also known as a developmental or substantive edit) starts with the editor helping an author develop ideas. In the case where a manuscript is already completed, a substantive edit is a significant restructuring of a manuscript. The content editor helps an author organize, sharpen, and tighten a manuscript so that the characters and dialogue are believable, the plot is coherent, and the setting appropriate."

So, the big question. How much is this going to set me back? According to Becky, the rates vary considerably from modest to budget busting. Do your homework. The ranges of common editorial rates set by the Editorial Freelancers Association will give you guidance on what to expect.

Once you decide you want to hire an editor, how do you find the one that's right for you? Ask yourself these questions: "Are you looking for someone who follows all the rules laid out in the Chicago Manual of Style, an editor who is willing to bend–or even break–the rules, or someone somewhere in between? What you want is an editor who meshes with your style and genre(s). Don’t hire the first editor that pops up on a Google search. Talk to other authors. Ask your author friends and their friends for references. Find a Facebook group or Goodreads group where you can inquire about editors. Authors who are happy with their editors are willing to brag about them. It’s up to you to do your research. Once you find a few potential editors, get in touch. Ask about her portfolio, what genres she is most passionate about, whether she specializes in content or copy editing, and about her other clients. Due diligence on your part is critical."

I was curious what are the most common mistakes/problem areas that editors see. The winner is: Incorrect dialogue tags and punctuation. Becky provided these examples:

“Maggie, darling. You’re here!” Jonathan cried out. In this case, because the dialogue tag says he cried out, the exclamation point is overkill. A comma is all that is needed.

“Jonathan,” Maggie breathed. In the example above, an incorrect dialogue tag is used. Breathed is a body function, not a dialogue tag. Maggie probably whispered his name.

I admit it. I've had characters "shrug" words. I've used all caps in dialogue. Everyone occasionally messes up putting a comma instead of a period. But with the assistance of an eagle-eyed editor, the world never has to know we didn't get it right the first time.

 

Kim English - A native Floridian, Kim is the author of Coriander Jones Saves the World and the upcoming Coriander Jones On Assignment at Sabal Palm Academy. She lives in southwest Florida with her family and an ever increasing number of rescue pets. You can learn more about Kim and her books at CorianderJones.com

Best Writing Advice: Sometimes, You Just Gotta Throw Darts

I once had a good friend named Carolyn.

We met through QueryTracker, talking informally through the forum. Turned out, she worked closely with the site's captain and moderated the QT blog. One day, she invited me to write with them.

It was a huge opportunity. I thought, what a great gig. This could really pan out for me. What I didn't know was I'd be getting a dear friend and mentor in the bargain.

Carolyn was bright—no, brilliant—and funny and innovative and she had a charm about her that was far too humble to accurately portray her innumerable talents. One of those talents was giving advice. And over the years I'd turned to her quite often for guidance.

Once, I was lamenting being stuck for a topic for my upcoming spot on the blog. After a lot of sympathizing/grumbling on both our ends (because writer's block doesn't discriminate), she shared a few of her tactics for treating Topic Absentia. Then she added:

"I've also been known to flip through writers' books and just put my finger on a page and write about whatever I end up with."

As offhand a comment as that seemed at the time, it stayed with me. Frankly, it was good advice. For one thing, this nifty little trick actually worked. I've got a pretty sizeable writer's library, so every time I've resorted to this, it worked like a charm. It was an innovative way to harness the elusive muse and her inspiration.

Apart from the simplicity of the advice, there was a deeper takeaway message.

And, like just about everything else Carolyn said, it was light-hearted and poignant and brilliant, all at the same time.

Sometimes, you just gotta throw darts.

Ready, Aim...
Picking a random topic out of a writer's book is like throwing a dart. Close your eyes and pick one.

It's a stress-free way to make a decision and it pretty much takes you off the hook for it. Fate determined the choice. Now, all you had to do is make something of it.

These days, I find myself with more options than opportunities to see every single one of them through. Sometimes, it's just too hard to choose…and we waste valuable time waffling. If you've ever faced a deadline, you know how desperate lost time can feel. And what if we pick the wrong option? In a profession where doubt can do serious damage, anything that makes a decision a lot less guilt-ridden is a commodity.

In moments like these, you need to close your eyes, center your spirit, and lift a dart.

That sounds scary, I know. (And it would qualify for Jane's advice to do one scary thing every day.)

But it doesn't have to terrify you. You already know that, no matter where the dart lands, it's going to be a choice that you had already considered. It was on the table. It was something you wanted to do. And, if any one of those choices is a scary thing in and of itself, tell yourself this: you control that fear, because you had already been willing to face it.

Knowing that you have a table full of things you'd like to do doesn't mean it's easy to choose one from amongst them. Maybe you want to do all of them with equal intensity. Maybe they've divided themselves into categories like Easy, Necessary, Impressive (or Fun, Feels Like Work, Would Look Awesome in A Bio). But if you didn't think they should be done, they wouldn't be on the table in the first place. There are no bad choices.

So, feel the dart in your fingers. Weigh it. Envision its flight path. Imagine the satisfying thunk it will make when it hits home. Let fate make a decision, for once, and revel in that tiny fleeting moment of blameless freedom.

...Fire.
Then open your eyes, see what life has next in store for you, and smile because your aim is true.

You made sure of that before you even picked up that dart.

Ash Krafton is a speculative fiction writer who, despite having a Time Turner under her couch and three different sonic screwdrivers in her purse, still encounters difficulty with time management. She's the author of the urban fantasy trilogy The Books of the Demimonde as well as WORDS THAT BIND. She also writes for YA and NA audiences under the pen name AJ Krafton. THE HEARTBEAT THIEF, her Victorian dark fantasy inspired by Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”, is now available.

Best Writing Advice: There's No Such Thing As Talent

A writer's main activity is procrastinating. Sometimes it's useful procrastinating, like time spent letting a manuscript marinate before starting to edit. Sometimes it's the procrastinating that happens when you have a deadline (self-imposed or otherwise) that you really don't feel like keeping. I'm excellent at both.

Self-portrait in charcoal,
September 2008

Recently, I've gotten back into art as a form of procrastination. I enjoyed it when I was younger, though I was never particularly good and, like with writing, my teachers taught me how without the subject ever penetrating deep enough to matter. Thanks to a poor teacher in college, I barely passed my required art class. She noticed that I wasn't doing the techniques correctly but couldn't be bothered to teach me the right way. Didn't stop her from grading me down, though.



Thankfully, you don't have to be very good at whatever you do to procrastinate for it to be a worthwhile pursuit. So I looked up tutorials and got to work. It turns out, the writing advice I once received from a critique partner applies to art as well, and it's the most important advice I've ever received, inside or out of writing:

Flower in oil pastel,
circa spring 2009

There's no such thing as talent.

Sometimes things come easier for one person than another, but in every project you take on, something will come easier for someone else. And there is nothing that cannot be taught. A tall person might have the advantage in basketball, but tell that to 5'3" Tyrone "Muggsy" Bogues, who played for the NBA from 1987 until 2002.

If something about your writing isn't working, practice. Find a critique partner (or several, or an editor) and learn what your weaknesses are. Work on them. Practice creating plots that are organic. Practice writing dialogue. Practice weaknesses in short stories until you master them, then move on to novels. Don't be afraid of writing something that is horrid and unsalvageable. Just learn from it and improve the next time.

Portrait of my daughter in colored pencil,
July 2015

The only thing that separates "experts" from "n00bs" is the number of hours put in. Sometimes those hours are spent learning. Concert pianists practice their scales and arpeggios daily. Sometimes those hours are spent on actual projects. When I paint my nails, I run the polish over my finger and move onto the next. When I get my nails done professionally, they mess up as much as I do. They just go back and remove their mistakes. They use more layers of polish to keep it on longer. When a child colors a pictures, they grab blue for the sky, green for the grass, and peach or brown for the person. When a professional artist colors a picture, they grab five different blues, three grays, a white, and a few purples for the sky alone.

The change in perspective is everything: lacking in talent means you're setting the blame externally. Lacking in practice, however, is something you can fix.

Don't use a "lack of talent" as an excuse for not reaching your goals. Call it a "lack of practice" and then get practicing.

Flowers in oil pastel
June 2015

Rochelle Deans sometimes feels like the only writer on the planet who rushes through the writing so she can start editing. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and young daughter. Her bad habits include mispronouncing words, correcting grammar, and spending far too much time on the Internet.

No Such Thing as "Right Now" (Things I've Learned Along the Way)

I work full-time as a retail pharmacist. Over the years, I have developed a sort of mantra that I use to remind customers and coworkers that sometimes waiting is necessary. When there are more customers than staff, odds are someone will have to stand in a line. Sometimes, the lines are grumbly and complainy but I value safety over speed--and I'll find myself gently resetting their expectations.

Usually, I turn to the phrase "You can get it right or you can get it now. But you can't get both."

Rushing through a task increased the risk of producing faulty work. In my career, that could be dangerous. That's why I work at one speed—the RIGHT speed.

I owe it to the health and safety of my patients.

Eventually, I realized that this philosophy also pertained to my writing career. When it came to writing and producing stories, I needed to combine the correct combination of craft and time to ensure that the story is the best it could possibly be before releasing it.

After all, I owe it to the satisfaction of my readers.

You can get it RIGHT

By exercising your writer's brain, you improve your craft. By improving your craft, you write better stories. Those are the stories you want to give your readers: the stories that are crafted so well that it leaves a reader gasping. Stories that leave you gasping, knowing you could not have done it any better.

But stories like that do not spring forth fully-armored from the foreheads of most mortal writers. We deliver our book babies the regular way—slowly, over time. The idea gestates and builds mass and definition. We nurture the characters and allow them to grow and develop and mature. We ponder their stories and we use all our craft to create a miniature, perfect world.

And a story is not done until it's done, rightly so.

You can get it NOW

We all know there are extremely prolific authors out there who seem to churn out titles. Their names seem always to be in the spotlight, along with the words "new release".  It's ingrained into our writer's mentality that the first rule of success is: write a book, release it, write another. Making it big with a breakout debut is less likely than getting struck by lightning while winning the lottery. One of my favorite author mentors once said, in part, that you need 4 to 6 books before you can begin to reach critical mass.

A quick look at Amazon reveals that not every book is a 100k word magnum opus. Short works and serials are tempting outlets for authors looking to build their lists quickly. Readers are happiest when the stories they love keep coming.

And it's no hard thing to get your 4 to 6 books these days. If you have the time to type and the vision to get your stories straight, you can bang those books out.

But you can't get it RIGHT NOW

Most writers can't sit down and crank out perfection in a single draft--not even shorter stories. Plain and simple: good things take time.

Those prolific authors that turn out title after amazing title are professionals. Yes, many of us are tempted to try and keep up with them. Sure, it's possible for less-experienced writers to rapidly turn out titles—but often it's done for the sake of expediency or impatience. And those are terrible reasons for a writer to publish anything.

Many times, the proofing process is skipped—the editing stages, the critique stages, the sit-and-think stages. If an author plots and outlines a story and possesses a knack for clean, tight first drafts, this might not be a problem—but those people are the exceptional few.

The danger is today's ease in publishing: anyone can hit the PUBLISH button at any moment, and living in a world of demand and impatience and instant gratification, there's a misleading belief that there's no time like the present.

Did you ever stop to consider that the prolific authors may have spent a ton of time getting their stories perfected, waiting until they had a sizable product list before releasing them in more-or-less rapid succession?

And even that bit of advice from my mentor author—you need 4 to 6 books before you reach critical mass—wasn't entirely complete. She said it takes 4 to 6 books...and then 4 to 6 months before you can start to see a shift toward critical mass. It takes time.

An impatient author can easily skip that last part. Don't you do that.

Do the RIGHT thing. You owe it to your readers.

Getting Unstuck: The Krafton Method

For the last few weeks, we’ve been talking about “getting unstuck”.

For a writer, getting stuck is an occupational hazard. Our ideas get sluggish and the writing gets stagnant before dragging to a gummed-up halt. Sometimes, being stuck seems like the natural state of things, with merciful moments of productivity and creative flow.

Truthfully, I haven’t had to struggle against writer’s block very much. I’ve found myself in an awkward spot a few times, but it wasn’t because I had no idea what to write—it was because I had too many choices.

I guess it’s just the way I’ve trained the writer part of my brain. It’s always switched on, always whirring, always thinking. (Over time, I've learned that 90 percent of writing is thinking.)

And when I do type up to a spot where my fingers hover over the keyboard and I read and re-read the last line over and over, I don’t wait until I start to wonder where the flow went. I don’t give myself a chance to grow stagnant, or frustrated, or blocked.

I’m a writer. I write through it.

Sometimes that means opening a new document and starting something new.

This has been a very successful practice for me. When I started to pursue a writing career, I had a three-book project in mind. I put most of my effort into writing and editing and shopping the Demimonde trilogy.

But, like everyone else, I didn’t sit down and type out three books without missing a beat. There were plenty of pauses, lots of moments when I needed to sit back, reflect on the projects, think about what would work best.

It’s what I did with those pauses that helped me to remain prolific and productive. I wrote.
I wrote poetry and short stories and I shopped those, too. I wrote down ideas that popped into my head while I was driving. I wrote out quick plot summaries for those new ideas. I wrote pages of scenes and conversations and scenarios. Sometimes, I just wrote character sketches and peered into their imaginary hearts while they weren’t looking.

I wrote anything I could get my brain on and filled flash drives with it all.

And sometimes, one of those files would get reopened, again and again, because there was a potential world to explore and I couldn’t keep away. Eventually it would get to the point where I couldn’t wait to finish one book because there was another I was chomping at the bit to get to.

I guess that’s how my bibliography grew, despite my having a full-time job outside the author’s office—a novella, a few short work and poetry anthologies, tons of individual clips from magazines and journals, and four published novels. Five, actually, because the latest one (a Victorian dark fantasy called THE HEARTBEAT THIEF) just came out today.

And do you know how THE HEARTBEAT THIEF came to be? The same way so much of my other work did: I took a break from writing one book and flipped to a new page.

The first lines I wrote were a conversation between a young woman and a mysterious entity in a funeral parlor on the topic of how to live forever. It was a little creepy, I admit, but it was nothing like what I had been writing at the time. It proved to be the mental palate cleanser I needed and soon I was back to work on my original project.

The biggest cause of writer’s block is mental congestion. Sometimes, a writer gets so wrapped up in a project that it gets hard to think straight. By flipping to a new page, I shift gears and look out a different window. I fluff up the pillow and change the station. The congestion clears right up, allowing the creativity to flow at its natural pace again. Writing through the block is therapeutic, see?

My family asks me when I’ll ever take a break from writing because I always seem to be doing it. They don’t seem to understand that I’ve trained a long time to be able to exercise my craft with this kind of endurance.

Yes, it takes practice. You become a writer twenty-four hours a day when you learn that 90% of writing is mental. You train your writer’s brain to be constantly vigilant, always observant, and you coach yourself to take advantage of down-time by making notes and writing small, unrelated pieces. Keeping your brain aerated and stimulated keeps the ideas from growing stagnant and settling to the bottom.

Ready to get unstuck and stay that way?

Here’s a few tips from the Krafton Method:

• Keep a notebook or digital recorder handy. (Here’s a previous QT article on why you should always have a writer’s notebook handy.) I’ve emailed myself when I didn’t have access to anything else. Sometimes, it’s just a description or a single line. It’s a seed for something bigger to grow.
• Be observant. Notice everything. Take pictures if the words don’t come right away. They’ll follow, trust me. “You see, but you do not observe,” Sherlock Holmes once said. Observing involves taking what you see, ingesting it, and using it to think about something else. Another favorite Holmes quote: "You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles." No better way to describe my own method. I observe the trifles, write them down, and revisit them when I feel the threat of writing sluggishness.
• Opposites are attractive: when you feel your writing is getting sluggish, flip to a new page and write a paragraph about something that is the exact opposite of what you’re currently writing. Change the scenery by writing the antithesis to the emotion, the setting, the occupation of your character. Create something new and cleanse your mental palate.
• Write a poem. It doesn’t have to be good. The majority of poetry is terrible stuff. But poetry is blessedly free of expectation and demand. It’s pure expression and creative simplicity, even when written in its most complex forms. I like traditional forms such as villanelle and sestinas, because these forms have a sort of mathematical equation that goes into the writing. Math, to me, is the exact opposite of novel writing, and really helps to reset the prose side of my brain, thereby relieving mental congestion.
• Move your butt. Go someplace else to write. New surrounding are both stimulating and relaxing and give your words room to breathe.

You don’t have to suffer from writer’s block or mental congestion. You just have to learn how to keep the words flowing. Using these tips will help you train yourself to be a writer 100% of the time.

 

Have a tip of your own to share? Leave us a comment and help us all become a more productive writer.

Ash’s new book THE HEARTBEAT THIEF is a Poe-esque tale of endless devotion—full of dark fantasy, Victorian dresses, and, of course, Death.

Special release day sale price of 99 cents for two days only.

Download your copy today…steals like this don’t last forever.

The Rule of Three

Certain motifs and patterns appear consistently in storytelling, whether it be fairy tales or literary fiction. The repetition of "threes" is particularly useful in writing humorous scenes and dialogue. Consider the following first draft:

"Kim scowled as she filled out the patient intake form, distracted by the screams of a diaper-clad toddler who managed to void his bladder while assaulting the receptionist."

Applying the rule of three, compare it to this version:

"Kim tried to ignore the screams of a diaper-clad toddler, who flung a sippy cup at the receptionist, screeched in delight at hitting his target, and celebrated the occasion by urinating in a potted fern."

(The above event may or may not describe a recent visit to a walk-in clinic.)

Now consider the use of threes in dialogue. Here is version one:

"Your repeated insults of my home town are off-putting," Bobby said.

"Listen, the other day I bought a hot dog off a guy in a landfill," Jess replied.


Cute, but add in a third line to add some extra zest to the debate:

"It is a salvage yard, not a landfill," Bobby replied, "And they are all beef kosher."


Experts say the human brain is hard-wired to perceive storytelling a specific manner, hence the centuries-old adherence to a three act structure with specific plot points. Three indicates a completeness, whether narrative or dialogue. So if you are conveying that your friend has a slightly creepy crush on your mom, see how it flows if you tighten the description to just three sentences:

"Most of the interaction between Steve and my mom happens in the kitchen. Mom flits around in her gym spandex, microwaving Hot Pockets while Steve pretends he actually wants a snack.  I avoid the scene by stashing twinkies under my bed for an after school pick-me-up."

Let's say you and Steve have a confrontation about his disturbing fondness for your mom:

"Man,  Debbie says you never have anything nice to say," Steve said.

"Stop coming over all the time," I shouted, "She's forty years old for god's sake! It's creepy"

"Debbie says forty is the new thirty."


Give it a whirl. Who is to argue with the likes of Aristotle that the magic number is three?

Finding the Humor: Jokes in the Midst of Tragedy

One of the worst things to believe about writing tragedies is that every scene must be tragic. Filling a serious book with heavy scenes and bleak dialogue will not get you very far. You want to be taken seriously as a writer of Important Things, and so you take yourself and your story seriously, too.

This can be a huge detriment to the quality of your story. When you're working with heavy themes, the most important thing to remember is that to your characters, there is no overarching theme. There are the present circumstances and what they're doing about them, nothing else.

The point is this: sometimes you need humor where humor doesn't seem to belong. You need it in stories about fighting other children to the death on national television. You need it in stories about cancer. And most likely, you need it in your own story, too.

Most people, and therefore most characters, have a go-to type of humor, be it so-unfunny-they're-funny (a la Ross Geller), sarcastic, hyperbolic, or a number of other things. Tragedy, especially tragedy that hasn't happened yet, doesn't change that.

If you have a character who seeks refuge through humor, it doesn't matter whether he's about to lose his eyesight to cancer and the girlfriend he loves just broke up with him and all his other friends are terminal, too. He's going to continue to seek refuge through humor.

Even if your story ends in a way that makes Romeo and Juliet seem happy, just because your book is sad, doesn't mean it has to read like it's sad. Your characters don't know the fate that awaits them. Give them some hope. Let them make inopportune jokes and feel terrible about it afterwards. Let them have a moment of refuge in the midst of their lives falling apart when they have semi-normal banter with a stranger on a bus.

Trust me, your readers will want a break from the heart-wrenching, anyway. There's nothing like the cognitive dissonance of wiping sad tears from your eyes while laughing at something funny that someone just said. You feel terrible for laughing when the situation is so bleak, and yet you can't help it; it's funny. That sort of cognitive dissonance permeates real life, and it will bring that realism into the world of your story.

Writer Productivity Tip: Healthy Competition

This is a continuation on our series on tips to make the writing process and your writing career more organized, less stressful, and more effective. 

There is a small chance that I might be a little bit competitive.

My husband and I keep a cribbage board on our coffee table so we can continue our complicated, in-depth tournament whenever we have a spare half an hour. I may or may not have resorted to yelling at my sister over a game of Sorry or Apples to Apples. For me, it's just not a cozy family gathering until there are winners and losers and I am collecting my bountiful spoil.

Okay, okay, so I have to plead guilty.

There are a lot of ways in which being a writer and a competitive person is terrible combination. Obviously, there isn't a lot of good that can be done by stalking your critique partners' book reviews, or obsessing over the Amazon rankings of authors in your genre. However, there is still a place for healthy competition in a writer's life. For me, competition comes in three forms: against myself, against a clock, and against a situation I can't control.

To compete against myself, I keep a writing journal. Before I begin the day's work, I write down what I want to accomplish, what I've been struggling with, and how I think I'll fix certain problems. At the end of the day, I write down what I actually accomplished. End-of-day Me has to report to beginning-of-day Me and be held accountable for her actions. On good days, this means I write "I wanted to write 750 words today and get to the end of the scene with the Cheetos. I got to the end of the Cheetos scene at 600 words, but I kept writing and got 1,000 words today!" I like writing that a lot more than I like writing "I got distracted watching Property Brothers and, um, I thought about my plot a lot... does that count?"

When I am writing a first draft, I write best in short bursts. Give me a half an hour timer or an active sprinting hashtag on Twitter and I can churn out 1,000 words in half an hour. Just don't ask me to do it again for a while. It isn't a pace I can keep up, but slow and steady doesn't work for me during rough drafts. Fast and sporadic keeps me excited about the story, and my fast writing pace helps keep the plot moving forward as well.

My last method of competition is sort of a mix of the other two and is driven out of necessity. My husband and I will agree to watch an episode of Friends after he finishes the dishes. I'll put my daughter down for her nap on a Saturday afternoon. I have a limited, but uncertain, amount of time to finish what I need to write. This sense of urgency, combined with the uncertainty of not knowing when the dishes will be done or when my daughter will wake up, keeps me on task and focused.

For me, immersion in my world and characters doesn't come until I'm editing on paper. I need to get the story out before I concentrate on setting and whether my voice is consistent (confession: it probably isn't).

Do you work better with no distractions for hours and complete immersion, or in short bursts, working quickly? Does it vary depending on what part of the writing process you're in?