The Writer’s DB Blog

If you’ve been reading about the writing process for any length of time, you’ve come across each of these tips as a standalone article, probably many times. Here they are, condensed into more quickly digestible chunks, all in one place—with my own take on which ones make sense and which ones will steer you wrong.

This post won’t stop people from rehashing the same 10 pieces of common writing advice many more times, on many more blogs, in the future. But maybe it will make those posts easier for you to skim, in your pursuit of the good stuff.

1. Editors are busy.
At any given time, an editor has at least 200 manuscripts to read. Most of those manuscripts aren’t going to be bought. The job requires that the manuscripts destined for the “No” pile be identified and discarded as efficiently as possible. So yes, editors are actively looking for a reason to reject your manuscript. Poor grammar or spelling, clunky dialogue, and overly familiar plots all qualify as reasons. Make your writing very, very good before you send it out for publication.

2. Focus on technique, not all the incidental stuff.
If you’re relatively new to the writing game, the most important thing you can spend your time learning is how to write a great story. Not how to network with editors and agents, not which software or which brand of pen to use, and especially not how to protect your copyright. (A copyright notice on a manuscript submission is the mark of a rank amateur—an almost infallible sign that the manuscript isn’t going to be any good. Get over the paranoia. Nobody wants to steal your work.) After your fiction becomes staggeringly brilliant, some of that other stuff will matter. Until then, it doesn’t.

3. Writing is rewriting.
This one is endlessly debatable. The advice goes: Just get a complete first draft finished; push straight ahead until you’re done. Don’t look back, don’t polish yet. Just to figure out the structure, the skeleton of your story. Then go back and revise as many times as necessary to put some meat on those bones. Layer in the personal details that bring your characters to life, the witticisms or metaphors that make your writing special, the foreshadowing of plot points you didn’t know were coming on the first pass.

Personally, I think different methods work for different writers—and if you’re one of those who work best by writing a rich, detailed first draft, then by all means, do your thing. But this advice is put forth so often that the list would be incomplete without it.

4. Bickering isn’t conflict.
Conflict, the driving force behind a good plot, is about characters struggling against obstacles to achieve a goal—obtain something, escape something, change something. Characters who are just bickering about how much they dislike one another, or complaining about their unsatisfying lives, are not engaging in conflict—or anyway, not the sort of conflict that propels good fiction forward.

5. Ignorance isn’t suspense.
Suspense is created when the reader knows that something bad is happening or about to happen, understands pretty clearly what that bad thing is, and worries that the characters won’t be able to stop it. Suspense is not created by keeping the reader ignorant of what the protagonist already knows. “My heroine has decided to ask her husband for a divorce, but the reader doesn’t know what she’s going to do” . . . is not suspense. On the other hand, “My heroine has decided to ask her husband for a divorce, but the reader knows that the husband recently stopped taking his anti-psychotic meds and bought a gun” works a little better. The reader can see what’s coming, and it ain’t pretty.

6. Show, don’t tell.
The more advanced version of this advice is: “Know when to show and when to tell.” There are times when a quick line or two of telling is more appropriate than a chapter’s worth of showing. Years passed. Johnny dated dozens more women after Catherine, but never really felt a connection with any of them. But a beginning writer usually errs on the side of too much telling. Julia was a chronically depressed, mean-spirited person. She could turn the most festive of parties into an ordeal. It was impossible to have a good time while she was around. Yeah, that’s bad writing. Show me an actual party with Julia in attendance, with character interactions, body language, and plenty of dialogue. It’s more work that way, turning the generic into specifics, but nobody ever said this was going to be easy.

7. Read, read, read.
It’s just slightly amazing that some people think they can write stories without reading stories. If you have a gunshot wound, you don’t want the surgeon who’s just returned to the profession today after three years’ vacation. You want the guy who has operated on five gunshot victims per day for those last three years. If you haven’t been reading stories, then you haven’t been conditioning your brain to do what you’re asking it to do. (Besides, reading is fun!)

8. Insert butt in chair.
Don’t wait for the mood to strike; don’t wait for inspiration. Set aside time every day when you aren’t going to be doing anything except writing. During that time, put words on paper, or onto your screen. Even if the words are crap, at least you’re there, writing. Mark off the days on a calendar if you must, so you’ll see how well you’re sticking to the regimen. Eventually, you’ll finish something this way. You won’t finish many stories if you never get around to working on them.

9. Write what you know.
Ugh. And double-ugh.

Sorry for that gut reaction, but this advice is so easily misinterpreted that even the people giving it often don’t understand it properly. Of course, I approach this question from the perspective of a science fiction & fantasy writer. Most of the writers who’ve written about traveling through deep space at 90% of the speed of light, or about sorcerers battling dragons, aren’t doing it from personal experience—and yet, some of those stories are very well written, and great fun to read.

So, what are the real, useful takeaways from this overused expression?

First: If you’re writing about a real place, research what the place looks like, the customs, the laws, the climate. If you’re writing about a real-world activity (police procedures, prostitution, computer programming), again, you’ll want to know how it’s really done. Then if you deviate from the truth, you’ll be doing it consciously to make a better story, as opposed to getting it wrong out of ignorance.

Second: Write about emotions you can really understand. Maybe you’ve never won a gold medal in the Olympics. Fine. If your character wins one, search your memory for experiences that might have made you feel the same way. Or, for example: there’s not much else that feels like parenthood. So if you’re not a parent and you want to write a character who is, be careful. Take extra pains to get those emotional details right.

10. Kill your darlings.
In case you haven’t heard this line before, it simply means: Delete the clever lines, the parts of your own work that you like the best. No one else will like them as well as you do.

I hate, hate, hate this advice. It fundamentally assumes that the writer to whom it’s being given has bad judgment. What if you don’t? I have read my friends’ stories and pointed out passages that I especially enjoyed reading—and sometimes discovered that one of those passages was the writer’s “darling.” Other writers have called out my darlings approvingly and drawn smiley faces on the manuscripts. Yes, be willing to remove your favorite bits—ruthlessly—if they don’t serve the story. But don’t deprive us of all the good stuff, just because of institutionally reinforced self-doubt.

This is just a quick notice that as of last night (October 30), the WritersDB site has moved to a new server at a new hosting provider. You shouldn’t notice any changes—so if you do notice anything out of the ordinary, please let me know.

As always, write well!

When you’re about to send out a manuscript, chances are you want to send it to a market that isn’t already holding on to one of your submissions. (Or at least, that’s probably how the editor prefers it.)

So here’s a small new feature under the “Search Markets” link in the Writer’s Database. It’s a checkbox labeled “No submissions pending @ market.” Check that box, and your search will be narrowed down to markets where you don’t currently have a submission pending. You can find the next market for your manuscript that much faster.

Received a feature request this morning for a feature that already exists on the site. That’s usually a good indicator that I should create a quick tutorial, in case there’s anyone else who hasn’t discovered that the feature exists, but would use it if they knew about it.

In this case, the inquiry was:

I think your service is popular among some people doing genre submissions who send material to a list of magazines, sending it to the next one immediately upon rejection.

The ideal thing would be

Where hasn’t this MS been?

To find out which of your markets haven’t seen a particular manuscript yet, it takes three quick steps:

1. Click “Search Markets” in the left sidebar.
2. Select your manuscript from the “Untested for manuscript:” menu.
3. Click the “Search My Markets” button at the bottom of the search form.

Optionally, you can specify additional parameters in your search. For example, find only markets tagged “horror” and “tier1″ that haven’t seen the manuscript yet. Or only markets that accept electronic submissions greater than 10,000 words long. Or only contests whose deadlines are less than a month away.

Posted a couple of new writing-related links to the WritersDB twitter account, but I thought I’d mention them here as well:

• ficly.com
  Collaborative storytelling site with a 1024-character limit per contribution. (In other words, you write a maximum of 1,024 letters, numbers, punctuation, and spaces before the next writer takes over the story where you left off.)
• WritingFix.com
  This site is rich in writing prompts, among other things. I particularly like the “Serendipitous characters” and “Serendipitous plots” in the “right-brained” section of the site.

For a couple of years now, ever since version 2.0 of this site launched, it has been possible to discover new markets for your writing by browsing the shared market listings of other users. However, you’ve had to do it manually—by clicking on the “Browse Shared Markets” command in the left sidebar every so often to see what’s new.

Now, there’s an easier way. When new market listings are added to the site by your fellow users, you can get them in your RSS feed reader, your customized homepage (such as iGoogle, Netvibes, My Yahoo!, Pageflakes, etc.), or even your e-mail inbox. Here’s how:

In the title bar of the “Browse New Markets” page, you’ll find a little orange icon representing the newsfeed. Click on it, and you’ll be presented with the opportunity to subscribe to the feed.

As you can see, the newsfeed gives you a wide array of subscription options. Regardless of which one you choose, my hope is that this will help you to find a few publishers who love your writing.

Others may have their own priorities, but for my money, “not ugly anymore” is the best feature of the new & improved Amazon Kindle. I’m actually pretty tempted by this thing now.

Amazon Kindle, 2nd generation

You can store your own documents in it via USB, without the silly 10-cent fee per document. So I can carry my own works-in-progress around with me—and add notes to them as I’m re-reading them!

Considering how much reading I do in the car, while waiting for appointments or waiting for my daughter to wake up from her naps, portability is an especially valuable quality in my reading material.

Besides, in case my work on the Writer’s Database wasn’t enough of a giveaway, I love technology. Not as much as I love reading and writing, but nearly. Shiny new toy!

Are any of my loyal readers getting one? Tell me! Maybe the peer pressure/validation will help me to overcome that last bit of buyer’s resistance.

Not using an RSS feed reader to keep up with your favorite web sites? Don’t even know what RSS is?

First of all, you should learn. As I tell everyone, sooner or later, RSS is great. It’s like having the web content you care about come to you the way e-mail does, so you don’t have to go out to dozens of different sites and fetch it.

Besides that, more and more WritersDB content is going to be available in RSS format as time goes on—especially shared market listings from other users. Once you’re in the habit of using RSS anyway, this is a tremendous convenience.

But in case you don’t feel like learning about RSS yet, it is now possible to subscribe to the Writer’s DB blog by e-mail. There you go.

Writing is a solitary activity; it’s useful to have the support of friends. People who will read your latest work and offer commentary. People who, if they hear you haven’t been writing, won’t let you get away with it. People who write themselves, and whose presence in your life helps to foster an environment of creativity.

Some of you reading this probably have accounts on Facebook. They have over 140 million active users, so I feel safe making that guess. The purpose of Facebook is to bring your friends closer, to help make them more a part of your life. That purpose should apply in the context of writing, as well as any other context.

So, I’ve taken advantage of their newly released “Facebook Connect” technology, which allows other web sites to integrate with Facebook. It is now possible, when you take certain actions on the Writer’s Database, to publish the news of those actions to your Facebook news feed, where your friends can see it.

I’ve started with four specific actions:

• When you send out a submission.
• When you receive a reply from a market. (Let your friends celebrate or commiserate, as appropriate.)
• When you update the word count for a manuscript in progress.
• When you add a new market to the Writer’s Database. (Your friends might want to submit there, too.)

When you perform one of these actions, you’ll be given the opportunity to publish the news to your Facebook newsfeed, and you’ll be given the choice of a one-line format or various longer versions, which include different levels of detail. For example, when you submit a manuscript for publication, you can choose to include just the title, the title plus the name of the market, or neither.

Please note: This is beta functionality. I’ve tested it with my own account, but that’s all. And Facebook’s own release of FB Connect happened in a bit of a hurry. If it doesn’t work as expected, please let me know, and please be patient.

The Clarion Writer’s Workshop was the best thing I ever did. One of the many reasons is that it was the most intimately I’ve ever been connected to a community of talented writer-friends. These new WritersDB features are not as good as Clarion—I guarantee it. But I hope they’ll help.

In the 2006 film “The Prestige,” Michael Caine plays an engineer who designs and builds magic tricks for stage magicians to perform. The film begins with Caine’s character explaining the three-part structure supposedly common to all great magic tricks:

1. The Pledge. The magician shows you something familiar. A coin. A man.
2. The Turn. The magician makes the familiar thing behave in an unfamiliar way. The coin vanishes. The man is sawed in half.

   But, he explains, the trick isn’t satisfying yet. Making a coin disappear isn’t enough. You need . . .

3. The Prestige. The coin is restored. You put the man back together.

Let’s think about that structure as it applies to stories—in particular, horror stories. Often, a horror story features an evil thing, either clearly identified (a murderous wooden doll) or mysterious (muddy footprints appearing overnight in the hallway outside your bedroom), stalking and trying to kill an innocent. At the end of the story, the evil thing kills the innocent, or the innocent destroys the evil thing.

The story has to end in one of those two ways. What else can it do? So when it does happen, it’s awfully easy for the reader’s reaction to be: “SO WHAT? Is that all?” In many horror stories, yes, that’s all. And that’s supposed to be enough.

The cry of “So what?” from your reader may be a signal that she’s still waiting for the prestige.

• The protagonist kills the monster . . . which is exactly what the monster needed, to become truly powerful.
• She exorcises the terrifying ghost . . . who has been working so hard to protect her, without her knowledge.

Done well, that reversal, that ultimate defeat right at the moment when the protagonist “wins,” can be more deeply horrifying than any of the struggle that precedes it. See Richard Matheson’s classic short story “Prey” for a fine example.

Am I saying that every horror story needs a twist ending? Certainly not. For one thing, they would rapidly cease to be effective. For another, this is a solution to a specific problem. Not every story has a plot with only two possible outcomes, both easily foreseeable. But if your story falls into that category, and if you were thinking of ending it when the protagonist gets sawed in half, think just a little longer. Consider whether there’s any way to deliver a “prestige.”