Category Archives: writing

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Playing God: Apocalyptic Storytelling
EE Knight, Daniel H. Wilson, Victoria Blake
OryCon 33
  • Panel
    • Daniel – background in robotics. Wrote How to Survive a Robot Uprising. Then Robopocalyse.
    • Victoria – publisher of Underland Press. Science fiction, fantasy, and horror. We haven’t yet published a straight apocalypse novel.
    • EE Knight – vampire series, post apocalypse. dragons series. last book of dragon series is apocalyptic.
  • Apocalypse
    • definition: revelation
  • Favorite scenarios
    • Daniel: as a society, we’re totally enmeshed in technology. if you take the technology away, or if you turn the technology against us, that’s really fun. it tears the world around. it explores how we depend on it, and what we get out of it.
    • Victoria: apocalypse stories have to choose where they are situated: a year after the event, 50 years after the event. that choice interests me. 
    • One generations luxuries become another generations necessities. and then the next generation they become unneeded again. e.g. a post apocalyptic society wouldn’t say we need electricity for lights, they would just go to bed when it gets dark.
    • apocalypse is just a 5 minute event, and then it’s over.
  • anything done to death?
    • No… it just need to be done well.
    • zombie apocalypse done to death…and yet, still love to read them.
  • Daniel
    • when I read it, I want to know who the bad guys are.
    • apocalypse scenarios show us what people are made of. people stand up. heros are forged.
    • but when you get into things like people roasting babies on spits… that’s too contrived and too pointless. 
    • i want redemption. the apocalypse is about starting over clean. are we inherently good or bad? do we hunt and kill each other or work together
  • When you blow up whole worlds… movies like that thing. but you need to show the few people, which is what people care about.
    • You can focus too much on one person, or zoom out too far.
  • Zone One: 
    • literary apocalypse novel
    • no plot
    • three days
    • the end happens at the end.
  • The interesting part is seeing how people survive the scenarios.
  • The little details are what make stuff. 
  • Knight: I really like On The Beach. I do like the scenarios where everyone dies.
    • It’s a resonate book about a whole society where everyone knows when they are going to die.
  • Justin Kronan’s The Passage
    • the book is divided into thirds.
    • first third is the moment of the apocalypse
    • second third shoots forward in time dozens of years: rebuilding
    • third third
  • Q: Is it still an apocalypse novel if the apocalypse occurred 50 or 100 or 200 years ago?
    • Seems like yes.
    • Q: So what are the defining points of an apocalypse story?
    • Daniel: You need to establish the context. You have to have the world. You don’t know to do that if its Poland in WW2, because we know it. But if it’s a different world, you have to establish it. Then once you build it, you rip it apart. 
    • Knight: It’s the story of who lives and who dies. People have to make a choice of whether to live or die. 
  • It’s almost like running a simulation: let’s run five people through the simulation and see who lives and who dies.
  • There’s lots of real stories about apocalypses: every culture that died as a result of English colonization had an apocalypse. Maybe when you are living in the time, you don’t need to write about it.
  • Books discussed
  • If you want to research this stuff, you can live in places that give that feel. Go to South Africa.
  • Most Indian Reservations are post-apocalyptic societies.
  • Daniel: Used Native American background. Loved having cowboys and robots.
  • Q: Does a slow motion apocalypse qualifies? e.g. water wars, rising water levels. Is that an apocalypse, or just science fiction?
    • thermodynamics says everything is in growth or decline.
  • Seems like two types of stories:
    • the actual apocalypse: surviving
    • the post-apocalypse: rebuilding
  • In Orwell’s 1984, you have a protagonist trying to figure out what it was like before.
  • If you have an apocalypse scenario, what is the long story arc? To get across the street? To get to the hospital? Then what? There’s less to explore.
  • Apocalypse novels are exploration of current society’s fears: environment, radiation, government, cold war, robots.
  • Mockingbird – about robots that feed humans birth control drugs.
  • Kurt Vonnegut has a short story in which all people carry these little radios that tell them what to do all the time.
  • Ray Bradbury’s 
  • When you take away all the people, you take away all the meaning.
  • The Sparrow – unintended consequences of an anthropological mission.
  • Robopocalypse: 
    • We barely give each other any rights. We’re highly unlikely to give robots any rights. We’ve never had to deal with another sentient species, let alone a superior sentience.
  • Q: To Victoria Blake: What are you looking for in an apocalypse novel in as a publisher?
    • Blake: It just has to be done well.
  • Q: What’s going to be the next big apocalypse theme?
    • Technology
    • Robots
    • Home mortgages
    • Society collapsing under its own weight
      • The domino effect, the effect of only 3 days of food in new york city.
    • Drought

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Gender and Writing
Rhiannon Held, Cat Power, and Peter Smalley.
  • How does gender affect your writing?
    • Held: I have two main characters, one of them is male. My male readers tell me where I’ve gone wrong.
      • Women tend to talk more about people. Men tend to talk more about things.
      • But when you’re talking about defusing a bomb. It’s problems solving.
    • Smalley: My male and female characters tend to have different approaches to problem solving. More direct for the male, and more radiative for women.
    • Powers: I write more female characters than male, but don’t feel uncomfortable writing men – I grew up with brothers, had male friends, live with a man.
  • Powers: I get frustrated by writers who take 20th century gender relations and say it will be the same in the 25th century. Probably not.
    • Held: I don’t feel like it is central to the stories I write, so I don’t focus on it. With the exception of a werewolf.
    • Smalley: It’s an opportunity to bring out the similarities and differences in characters. I had two brothers in one story: I want to make one be a more manly man, and the other a thinking man. But it’s not enough to define them as a stereotype. You have to define it and move past it.
  • Held: Frustrated by the trend to make women kick-ass, sort of the Buffy effect. They can kick evil in the the butt. But how about something else – smarts, treachery, deception. 
  • Q: Do any of you feel like you should challenge the readers concepts of gender relationships or definition, and yet still give them a character they can relate to.
    • Smalley: 
      • I don’t feel like it is my job to challenge readers. It’s my job to tell a good story. I can challenge myself to do. I don’t want to preach. I want to learn about myself. I want to learn about my readers.
      • But saying all that, it’s not interesting to reader to pander to them. 
      • If I challenge the reader, it’s not to preach or simply to challenge, but to tell a more interesting story.
    • Held:
      • Therapeutic metaphor: I want to tell something so rich and complex that the reader can pull out of it what they need to take away what they need. I can’t control what they take.
      • Good vs. bad Jane Austin adaptations: Sometimes there can be a character defiance. They are defined in terms of defying things. But I want to read about characters doing things, living their life.
    • Powers: No one wants to read a book with an agenda. And challenging readers sounds like that. But I do want to challenge other writers. Much of what I write is in reaction to other stories.
      • To write a story about gender just to do it is bad craft. If it is part of the story, then good.
  • Held: It can be more feminine to have more allies. It’s not just how to solve the problem, but who will help you solve the problem.
  • Powers: Recently read an Asimov story about miners on the moon. All the action of the story is around who should go out in these little mining pods. At the end of the day, the miners go home to their wives who live in little picket fences. They never even think about what if the women went out.
    • What blinders do we have on that we aren’t aware of?
  • How does gender affect reception of a work?
    • For epic fantasy, the best sellers are still all men. One woman author was planning to use a pen name with initials so it would appear more masculine.
    • The exception is in urban fantasy, where the authors tend to be woman. 
    • So there still is some effect…
  • Nowhere do we have perfect equity between men and woman, but as we begin to approach that in society, we’ll see more of what nature vs. nurture brings to it.
  • Books
    • Writing the Other
    • How to Suppress Women’s Writer

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My notes from a panel discussion on internal character change and external change in novels at OryCon 33.

Internal and External Change
Mary Roseblum/Mary Freeman, Dianna Rodgers, Ken Scholes, Mark J. Ferrari, Andrew S. Fuller
OryCon 33
  • Introduction
    • Ken Scholes, writer of short stories and novels. Has a five book series with Tor, three books are out. Writing since high school, with a long break. 10th OryCon.
      • I want my character to change or be changed. Sometimes the change happens in the reader: a revelation about the character can create a change in perspective in the reader. Result of Kate Whilhelm workshop. She has a book on writing.
    • Dianna Rodgers
      • All people, characters or not, are struggling with the question of to change or not to change. Most of the time there is a contract with the reader, expecting some kind of change. But sometimes you can also bring people right up to the brink of change, and then have them decide not to.
    • Mark Ferrari, illustrator. Recently discovered that while a picture may be worth a thousand words, a thousand words pays more and is easier to produce. Recently published first book. Many time OryCon attendee.  
      • If you read a whole story, and nobody learned anything or had anything happen to them, it’s not even a story.
    • Andrew Fuller, writes primarily short fiction.  
      • There has to be conflict, of course. The times I enjoy writing is when it feels like I am just reading it and discovering as I go. That happens in the time of change.
    • Mary Rosenblum, primarily a character writer.
      • In character driven work, you are looking for depth of character, and that only comes from both internal and external change.
      • But in some genre of stories: military SF, action SF, detective story you can be carried along just on the external action. They still lack depth, but the action carries them along.
  • In Star Trek episodes, the world remains the same, the characters remain the same from episode to episode, but within an episode characters learn something, and action happens.
    • But characters still develop over time. Spock becomes more human, develops a friendship with Kirk. In Voyager, Paris changes from very angry to more comfortable in his skin.
  • Why is internal change so important?
    • It’s an important of the human experience.
    • Many people have difficulty changing themselves. So it can be a sense of success and satisfaction to feel the character change. 
    • All people want to change something about themselves or the people around them or the world.
  • If your character doesn’t seem to learn things, to change, they aren’t going to seem human.
  • It matters HOW they change.
    • You want to keep people guessing about who will prevail. But there is a presumption that the protagonist will prevail. The ultimate outcome is kind of presumed. 
    • So the real tension and excitement comes from HOW they will succeed, how they will prevail, how they will acquire what they need. 
  • All of this assumes that if characters are going to improve, then they can’t be perfect to begin. They must be flawed.
    • George R.R. Martin’s game of thrones series is filled with wonderfully flawed characters.
  • So much of fiction is based on change
    • the external circumstances force internal change
  • You can’t just say “It’s been done” because something has the same plot. The story depends on the characters followed and the changes they go through. 
    • H.G.Wells war of the worlds was totally different than the later treatment in which the focus is on a dad and his relationship with his children, and how he rises of being a shitty dad. Totally different story, same plot of aliens invade, kick our ass, and die of the common cold.
  • There is a danger in people who are beginning to write in that they try to artificially add the change. It becomes just tacked on. It’s a trap. There author feels it needs to be there, and so they add it, but it is not intrinsic.
    • Things are going well when your characters have enough integrity and depth that they ignore your outline, and make their own decisions.
  • Process – How much of the internal change is in your head when you start?
    • Andrew Fuller – For short fiction, I don’t have an outline. So I just write, and I like to be surprised.
    • Mark Ferrari – I want to know 3 things before I start writing. How the story begins. How the story ends. What’s the story about? Not what happens, but what it’s about: anger? loss? etc.
      • So I pretty much discover everything about my characters on the way.
      • I make some outlines as I go just I don’t forget things.
      • But from one sentence to the next, I don’t know what my characters are going to say.
      • But if whatever is happening – if it doesn’t have to do with what the story is about, then then it has to get scraped out.
      • Great story about his work as an artist: He loved drawing the details. And he’d finished these highly detailed drawing, but you couldn’t get a sense of the theme of the piece. So he’d have to erase the details or color over them so that they would fall into the background, and the primary stuff would come to the surface.
        • [Will: this reminds me of photographs: you want a shallow field of focus to make some stuff fuzzy and some stuff sharp, and that makes an interesting photo.]
  • Q: How do you write the revelatory moments?
    • Ken: it’s a revelation i felt personally, so I can describe because I can feel it.
    • Dianna: it has to be consistent with the internal motivation. It somethings is internal dialogue. Sometimes it’s external. it depends.
    • Mary: It’s the plot, forcing the character to the point where they can’t ignore, they have to deal with it.
    • Mark: the stories I write are all about that moment. i punish my characters until they break. if they can recover from that, the story goes on. if they can’t, then that’s the revelatory moment. there’s no where else to go.

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My notes from a panel on the use of description in writing. At OryCon 33.

Description
Victoria Blake: Publisher Underland Press
Alma Alexander: Writer, described as a lush writer.
David W. Goldman: short fiction, science fiction for ~6 years.
Devon Monk: urban fantasy, and several others
Bill Johnson: Playright, screenplays
  • People don’t self describe. Beginning writers tend to have characters look into mirrors  and describe themselves. But people don’t do that.
    • Unless your character has some flaw they are very self-conscious about
  • Blake: some writers describe themselves at lyrical writers. But it can be pretty but meaningless. Lyrical can be lazy writing: lots of words that aren’t edited.
  • Monk: description has to be tied to the emotional reaction of the character. A character who has lost a child and describes a pair of baby shoes, that means something.
  • Typically these days, most people are writing with a close point of view. Anything you describe is from that characters point of view. What they see and don’t see. It does more than just describe, it tells us what the character observes.
  • Adverbs: good or bad?
    • Johnson:
      • Nouns: good
      • Verbs: good, be more specific.
      • Adjectives: a few
      • Adverbs: none
      • “Suddenly he bolted from the room.” You don’t need suddenly if you have bolted. We know that means suddenly.
    • Monk: Suddenly you can describe what you need in the structure of your writing. Short sentences go faster. Long sentences slow things down, but the reader only remembers the end of it, so the important part needs to go there.
      • Short snappy descriptions will get you a lot further than long ones.
    • Blake
      • em dash – one of my favorite tools. because it’s not a comma, so you can do interesting things with it. “John — young, drunk and stupid — jumped out the window.”
  • Blake: the view paragraph.
    • The character goes up to the top of a building, plane, or something: and they take in the view. In one to three paragraphs, we get the whole world.
    • This is good — a useful tool to give the world succinctly.
  • Alexander: China Melville is a masterful description – not by long lengths of details – but with using the right words. 
  • Monk: a great practice is to look at the world around you, the common things around you, and describe them in a unique way to you. Then think about how your characters would describe them. You want practice doing this sort of stuff.
  • description tends to fall into one of two cases:
    • expositional vs in-scene
    • exposition is not in the flow of the story, and it requires a different structure.
    • You kill your action scene if get into exposition in the middle. Just work the description into the action scene.
  • Q: What about when we have an action scene, and then in the middle of it we have a “16 hours earlier…”
    • You can do it to have fun with your reader [good]
    • Or you can do it because you are a beginning writer who wrote a really boring beginning to your story, and instead of fixing it, you try to throw something in at the beginning. [bad]
  • Q: I was in a workshop and someone said “You don’t have enough description” and someone else said “You have too much”
    • Blake: That’s workshop speak for “Somethings wrong but I don’t know what”
    • Goldman: You need to get to symptoms first, not diagnosis: I’m bored is a symptom. Too much description is a diagnosis.
    • Monk: Everyone wants different things.
  • Blake: The only way writers can learn is to study language. Learn about adverbs. Learn about long sentences vs short ones. Exposition vs not. Write a one page report on it to make it really concrete.
  • Q: Talk about using dialogue as a way to convey description
    • “Come back to bed, I’m cold.”
    • The only way to get your dialogue going is to read it out loud.
    • In first person, it’s especially helpful to use the opposing characters to bring out description that wouldn’t come out otherwise.
  • Adverbs:
    • A verb + an adverb ==> usually there’s a better verb to use. 
  • Said / Asked
    • At one time, don’t use it at all. Books were full of growls and chortled.
    • Nowadays, they say only use said and asked. Just do it and move on. They are invisible to the reader.
  • But the important thing is to write. Don’t let this hold you back from writing. Just get the first draft done, put it away, and then go back and revise.
  • Q: The use of description as it is different for each genre
    • Goldman: I’m writing with a tight point of view. So it’s about what the character is experiencing at this point in time.

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These are notes from Ken Scholes’s presentation at OryCon 33 on Evolution of a Writer Career.

Ken Scholes
Evolution of a Writing Career
OryCon 33
  • Evolution of a career
    • Wrote as a teenager, got a dozen rejection letters.
    • World Fantasy Con – the big business con: agents and editors
    • Took three years of serious, solid writing and seventy rejections before selling his first short story
      • Having written 10-15 in high school and 15-20 in later life
      • Probably published ~50 stories by now
    • Took Swenson’s writing class in 98, learned about Tale Bones.
    • Sold first story in 1999 — to Tale Bones. 
    • Second one in 2000. 
    • In 2001, sold another story. Met Jay Lake. Became good friends.
    • Norwest Con
    • 2002: sold 4th story – his 2nd story for the 2nd time.
    • Didn’t sell another story until 2004.
    • Then in 2004, something happened. Sold a bunch of stories
    • In 2005, won third prize for one of his short stories
    • L. Ron Hubard Writers of the Future
    • In 2005, decided he would not longer treat writing as a hobby. started tracking receipts. took a different job that took less of his brain, left him more for writing. took writing more seriously.
    • In 2006: people taunting him to write a novel. Jay Lake said “if you have a first draft by World Fantasy Con, I’ll introduce you to everyone I know.”
    • Jay Lake introduced him to his agent.
    • In October 2007, Tor said “We want all five books”.
    • In 2009, Lamentation came out, started selling well. earned out by third book.
    • In 2011, have novels out in many countries. Doing quite well.
    • Still has a day job.
    • His career is making years in the making. What seems like a lot of success in 2009-2011 is really the result of 14 years of serious writing plus lots of history before that.
    • Make friends in the industry. Spent time in the industry.
  • Questions and Answers
    • Q: How to transition from writing short story to novels
      • Same tools you use to build, but the process is different (e.g. like building a shed vs a house).
      • Don’t write a novel. Instead, practice writing a novel. See where the practice takes you.
      • Or… don’t spend time thinking about it. Just do it as quickly as possible.
      • The biggest part is: don’t quit. Even if it feels like the shittiest book ever, don’t give up. He thought Lamentation was the worst book he ever read: flat characters, action happens off-screen, etc.
      • Most of the time we quit too fast.
    • Q: How do you decide what Con to go to?
      • My first was World Fantasy Con. Then OryCon. Then Norwest Con.
      • World Fantasty Con is really business driven. The agents and publishers all go.
      • Depending on where you are in your career, go for what you need. To learn craft, etc.
      • But go to make friends. Those friends will be really helpful throughout your career. Build relationships.
      • Now that he’s progressed in his career, he goes to the bigger cons to do business and network.  WorldCon, WorldFantasyCon.
      • It’s easier to sit down and talk to people, even big people at the smaller, local conferences. 
      • Send thank you notes and follow ups to everyone you meet.
        • “Greet meeting you at…”
      • Find out the publishers and editors that you love, and where they go.
    • Q: Agent recently said “not enough creative and unique manuscripts being sent”. Any thoughts?
      • It takes about a million bad words before your own voice really emerges.
    • Q: How do you assure you’ll get pay
      • You can report it through SFWA
      • If it’s a short story, the publication credit may matter more. Don’t worry too much about it.
      • Even the pro markets are very slow in payment: He has books out around the world, three novels, since 2009, and he still needs a day job and struggles to pay the bills.
    • Q: For short stories: How do you end it, and when is soon enough?
      • What’s the promise at the beginning of the story?
      • You start with a person that feels believable. They are in a setting. They are given a problem, always on the first page in a short story.
      • When they have solved the problem, and received whatever it is they get for solving the problem, that’s the ending.
    • Q: Finding agents
      • Willamette Writers
      • Suri
      • Cascade Writers 
      • you can meet editors more easily than agents
    • Q: How do you balance research, deliberate practice, and action creation of new content?
      • Follow my muse.
      • Sometimes the research leads to a story.
      • Sometimes I just fly by the seat of my pants.
      • I’d rather have my muse push me in the direction of production. 
    • Q: How do you figure out where your prospective readers are online?
      • Absolute Write
      • I tend to build my community at convention.
      • Mary Rosenblum’s panel on social media on Saturday.
      • Use Facebook because it’s easy.
    • Q: How do you know when your novel is ready to submit?
      • Get it as good as done you can get for that moment, then it’s ready.
      • Don’t spend your life revising one book.
      • As soon as some people who are not your immediate family say it’s good, then it’s ready.
      • You need to have some writers who can give you critical feedback. You also need to have some people who are just readers, not writers, who can simply say “good” or not.
      • You have to have a next thing to get excited about it. 
      • You will not grow by simply rehashing old stuff. You have to write new stuff.
      • If an editor says “do this”, then do it, because they’ll pay you.
    • Q: What if the most effective marketing program for selling your book?
      • Knowing what you want, where you want to go. Ken knew he wanted to go with Tor.
      • Go to cons.
      • And keep writing new stuff. Don’t fret about the stuff that’s out there. If you keep writing new stuff, it’ll build over time.
    • Q: Motivation
      • I write so I can know who I am.
      • I write so I can share a story with people that they might enjoy reading.
      • I write because I have daycare bills. If I finish this book, I can get a check.
      • Now Ken’s career is at a tipping point: Wouldn’t it be great if Ken didn’t have to have two jobs? 
    • Q: How do you convey non-human characters to readers without losing characteristic of non-human? (e.g. dragons)
      • You don’t want to have something so far from human that they aren’t enjoyable. People want to read for both the unique stuff as well as human qualities.
      • MSU: the great university of writers. Make Stuff Up.
    • Q: How do you effectively edit a novel?
      • I write good clean first drafts. The story is intact. It’s just spelling and word choice.
      • That’s the product of practice: lots and lots of words written, lots of short stories. In short stories you learn to make each word do three or four things.
      • Don’t spend years and years making it right.
      • Crank out a book a year.
      • If you want to make a living doing this, you can’t do a book every five or six years. You have to write faster than that.
      • Don’t take more than one or two or three passes through a novel before putting it out to market.
      • Effectively == quickly.
      • Figure out the strengths of the people who are reading it. Are they plot people or character people or what? If they are a character person and they complain about the plot, then don’t worry about it. If they complain about character, then listen carefully.
    • Q: Does speaking in front of an audience help you write?
      • I was a quiet introvert in high school.
      • I expanded – to choir, to music, to being a preacher.
      • If you are able to hold your own at a party, teach classes, give presentations, it gives you more opportunities.
      • But in the end, a writing conference is going to take a great writer who is a mediocre speaker than a great speaker who is a bad writer. So focus on writing.
    • Not willing to self-publish. Willing to do small presses for short story. Short stories are a reasonably small investment of time. For novels, it is a big investment of time. I wrote enough in the short story world that my first novel was good enough to be marketed.
    • Start at the top, and work your way down.
    • There are people who would have been with big publishers, and they settled for small publishers.
    • For people who have some readership, then self-publishing may work.
    • For small publishers, they don’t have the money to distribute you effectively.
      • Then you become a person who has to self-promote. Then you don’t have the energy to write.
    • Go through all the pro markets first.
    • Q: Mind hacks to keep writing
      • Music
      • Access to water and food so I don’t have to leave
      • Audience: the progress bar in scrivener
    •  Q: Does writing short stories help you improve as a writer faster than writing novels?
      • Yes.
      • Q: So if you are not inclined to write short stories, should you do it?
        • No.
        • But, what would it cost you to try? If you are used to writing 100,000 word novels, what would it take you to write five 5k-10k short stories? Try it.

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      Gene Kim and I were discussing how to reach an audience of readers, and he referred me to 1,000 True Fans:

      A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

      The premise is that with 1,000 True Fans, it’s enough to support a writer or artist. If they each spend $100 per year, buying everything you produce, then that’s $100,000, which is enough to provide a living.

      One thousand is a feasible number. You could count to 1,000. If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years. True Fanship is doable. Pleasing a True Fan is pleasurable, and invigorating. It rewards the artist to remain true, to focus on the unique aspects of their work, the qualities that True Fans appreciate. 

      The key challenge is that you have to maintain direct contact with your 1,000 True Fans. They are giving you their support directly. Maybe they come to your house concerts, or they are buying your DVDs from your website, or they order your prints from Pictopia. As much as possible you retain the full amount of their support. You also benefit from the direct feedback and love.

      One of the key principles is that creators don’t need to strive for a best seller or #1 hit, nor do they need to settle for languishing somewhere in the long tail. 1,000 True Fans will sustain a happy medium:

      Young artists starting out in this digitally mediated world have another path other than stardom, a path made possible by the very technology that creates the long tail. Instead of trying to reach the narrow and unlikely peaks of platinum hits, bestseller blockbusters, and celebrity status, they can aim for direct connection with 1,000 True Fans. It’s a much saner destination to hope for. You make a living instead of a fortune. You are surrounded not by fad and fashionable infatuation, but by True Fans. And you are much more likely to actually arrive there.

      Check out the full original article.

      Will

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      Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Rules for Writing Fiction:

      1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
      2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
      3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
      4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
      5. Start as close to the end as possible.
      6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
      7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
      8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

      The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.

      From Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction

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      Sometimes people wonder how much they need to write each day in order to finish a book each year.

      Assume:

      * You write six days a week for 50 weeks a year. (300 days.)
      * You spend half of your time writing, and half of your time editing (150 writing days).
      * You have a target of 90,000 words  – the publishing minimum for scifi/fantasy, but this is really genre specific.

      That yields 600 words per day needed.

      But of course, there are days you are busy, unmotivated, sick, underproduce, etc. So 1,000 words per day may be a better target.

      Some writers believe that they need to overproduce, and then cut it down to size. This situation is not a great place to be. If you need to cut, then you are basically doing wasted work. Better to find a way to not write things you’re not going to use.

      If you use an outline, even if that outline changes, you will reduce the amount of wasted work you do, simply because you start out with an idea of where you’re going.

      Similarly, if you ask yourself, as you are writing, what purpose is served by the scene you’re writing, then you’ll naturally start to focus on the things that have high value, and start to drop out the things that don’t have value.

      Writing novels is like permaculture. Every scene and every character should serve multiple purposes and work hard to bring the book together.

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      Someone on reddit thought that they’d start a blog as a way to build the motivation to write their novel. 

      I think it’s unlikely that anyone will find motivation by starting a blog. The more likely case is that they’ll be distracted.


      It’s always going to be easier to write a blog post than to write or edit a chapter of a book. The blog post is shorter, simpler, and self-contained. If someone is having problems with motivation to begin with, they’ll naturally gravitate toward the easier thing – writing a blog post instead of writing their book.

      Then at the end of the week they’ll have a bunch of blog posts and no progress on the book.
      Here are some of my ideas for motivating progress on writing. 
      • Give yourself a reward to get started. For example, if you’ve been wanting a new (monitor, computer, car, clothes, etc), make a commitment that you’ll get it when you’re done with your fifth chapter.
      • Make a personal commitment to work on your book for exactly one hour each day, six days a week for one month. Anyone can do anything for a month, right? This can include outlining, note taking, and actual writing.
      • Find a friend or family member who will hold you accountable, and check in with them weekly. Set realistic goals: “I will finish a first draft of a chapter each week.” Then schedule a meeting with them every week at a set time to discuss your progress. You’ll find yourself working toward the deadline.
      • Don’t set out to write a book, if that seems daunting to you. Instead, set out to write 1,000 words instead. Keep writing in chunks. In a month, when you have a bunch of chunks, organized them into a book.
      • If writing at all seems daunting, start with writing a one page synopsis. What is the book about? See if you are clear on the story. If so, then take your synopsis and expand it into a chapter by chapter breakdown of what happens. Spend 3 to 6 sentences on each chapter. Are you clear on what happens in each chapter? If so, then move on to writing the chapters according to the outline. 
        • The outline can change! It is not fixed. As we say here at work, the plan is the plan until it’s not the plan anymore. If your characters do unexpected things – hurray. When you finish the chapter, go revise the outline based on what really happened.
      • If your problem is distractions, then try changing the setting. I find it easier to write in a coffee shop than at home. If I am at the coffee shop, I try to imagine that everyone will laugh at me if they see me doing email or surfing the web.
      • Another other trick for distractions is to remind yourself that the only person you are cheating is yourself. If you are distracted at work, it’s your employers loss. If you are distracted when writing, it is your loss. You can spend an hour writing, or you can while it away and end up with nothing. Your choice, your outcome. Reminding yourself of this can often give you the drive to get it done.
      Good luck!

      If you try any of the these techniques, and they work (or don’t), post a comment below. I’d love to hear from you.

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      This has been a busy couple of weeks for writing. Here’s just a partial list of what I did:

      Last week I finished laying out Avogadro Corp for printing on Lulu. I’m not self-publishing, but I did want a few nicely printed copies for people I need feedback from. This turned out to be a great exercise. In the process of running the manuscript though the spell checker and grammer checker “one last time” I discovered about more than a hundred errors that had made it past ten rounds of editing by me as well as one round of copyediting. This really does speak to three things:

      • Changing formats, even if it is just from one page size to another page size does open you up to seeing the work in a new way, and spotting issues you didn’t notice before.
      • The spell-checker and grammer checker in your word processor does have value, even if it is insufficient.
      • There really is a tremendous need to hiring a professional copy editor and a proofreader.
      Then this week I received back the three printed copies, and immediately noticed a half dozen additional errors and formatting issues. The lesson learned here is to order just one copy after making changes.
      I also received a list of thirty literary agents from Writer’s Relief. I sent off email queries for Avogadro Corp to fourteen of them. I was surprised that as many as sixteen preferred hardcopy queries. I took my existing query letter, turned it into a mail merge document, and put the other sixteen into a spreadsheet. Now I need to print sixteen (16!!) copies of my manuscript.
      I learned that on average, it takes about a hundred submissions to get one acceptance. I think this is based on agents accepting about one percent of what they receive, so it doesn’t really account for the quality of the work, but it does give you the idea that a great deal of submissions are necessary. Fortunately, agent submissions are usually done in parallel (as opposed to publisher submissions which are non-simultaneous.)
      Printing the manuscript for those hardcopy submissions is sure to drive me insane. Here’s why: I used Apple Pages for my first novel. It’s a word processor similar to, but nicer than Microsoft Word. Like Word it has styles for fonts. But what both Word and Pages fail to have is the equivalent of .css files. For the web, you could have one content pages (.html), and you could style it as many different ways as you want by simply switching the .css file it refers to.
      The problem is that there are many unique styles I need to get my manuscript into:
      1. For on screen use while I am writing and editing it.
      2. For printing it on 8.5×11 paper to read it myself or give it to my critique group.
      3. For my copy editor for her to mark it up and give me feedback. (typically it’s double-spaced with wider margins.)
      4. For printing in a book (typically everything changes: margins, fonts, font sizes, insets, page handling, page size, etc, etc.)
      5. For submissions – and this can be any of many subtly different formats.
      In my experience, it takes anywhere from two to four hours to change from one of these output formats to another. It’s detail oriented and error prone. 
      Since my last manipulation of the book was to print it on Lulu, and since I made a number of corrections to it for Lulu, I will now need to restyle for submitting to agents. 
      Sigh. I just want to be able to define all the style information in a table, and then auto-apply a given style.
      I also worked on integrating the feedback from my copyeditor for AIpocalypse, my second manuscript. We’ve done three chapters out of sixteen. It feels as though I have about half the amount of red marks as for my first novel, so perhaps my writing has improved somewhat. She’s headed back to college for the Fall semester, so progress there may be dropping off.
      That’s probably a good thing, as I start a new writing workshop on Tuesday. To prepare for that I wrote a one page synopsis of my third novel. I’m four chapters into that work. While I have a general outline of where I’m going, there was a lot of hand waving to write the synopsis: “Group A and group B will then meet up in San Diego in some way as yet unknown.”
      I’m somewhat nervous about this third book. I’m much more ambitious in what I’m tackling: my protagonist is a woman, the motivations of the characters are far more complex, and the characters themselves go through more development, I have several major subplots, and I’m describing a far different society than the one we live in. It’ll either be great, or a crashing failure. I’m voting for great.
      I know that my writing instructor will make it a requirement of the workshop that everyone writes daily. I’m close to this now, but not quite there. My plan is to get up at 5am three mornings a week, use my usual Saturday morning writing time, and then also write two evenings a week. (I did the early morning thing many years ago when I was in grad school with a newborn, and found that while it worked, I also was severely burnt out after a few months of it. So I’ll use it, but limit it to a few days a week. Hopefully that will avoid the burnout.)