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.

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.

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.”

With NaNoWriMo (that’s National Novel Writing Month) just a few weeks away, I thought it might be helpful to prepare a little overview of the Word Count tracking available in the Writer’s Database. If you haven’t already used that feature, or if you’re new to the site altogether, this time of year may offer additional reasons to give it a try.

So, here’s a video describing how to use WritersDB to graph your word count for NaNoWriMo. (Or, in fact, for any other writing that you do.)

My wife’s laptop fell on the floor a few days ago. After that, it wouldn’t start up. She had about 60,000 words of a novel-in-progress on that computer.

She came to me, looking scared, saying “it would be very bad” if that data couldn’t be recovered. She had assumed that I was making periodic backups of her hard drive, because I’m the computer person in the house . . . but once the thing hit the floor, she realized that that was an assumption rather than certain knowledge.

Her data is, in fact, fine. But this post isn’t about her. Are you backing up your writing somewhere?

Do it. Do it now. Tomorrow, do it again.

• Use an online backup service like Mozy.
• Use a simple external hard drive. (Get one bigger than you think you need today, because in 2 years it’ll be too small.)
• But do it. Back up your writing. NOW!

The most recently reviewed writers’ web sites I’ve noticed lately have been in the category of collaborative storytelling. You know: One writer starts a story, another picks up somewhere in the middle and keeps it going, and so on. Not necessarily a way to create publishable work, nor whole stories that you can call your own . . . but a fun way to stretch the writing muscles.

Links:
• Protagonize
• StoryMash

Any others to report? Any experience with these ones? I haven’t had time to check them out yet; I’m posting the links because the concept is interesting, and because it looks like a bit of a trend.

I’m pretty excited about the latest new feature here at the Writer’s Database, just introduced tonight. As vital as it is to keep track of which manuscripts you’ve sent out, to whom, and when . . . that isn’t the whole story for a writer.

How much you’ve been writing, and when, is nice to know, too.

For any title you’ve added to the Writer’s Database, you can now enter the total word count in that manuscript on any given date. The site will calculate how many of those words are new since the last time you wrote, and will serve up a wide variety of graphs for you upon request. (Note that this is a beta feature. It should be stable, but if you encounter any bugs, please do report them, so we can squash them.)

You can see how the total length of a manuscript has grown (or, if you’re in editing mode, shrunk) over time. You can see how many words you’ve written each day, week, or month—on any one title, or on all titles combined. You’ll know, in one easy-to-digest picture, when you’ve been productive and when you’ve been slacking.

The easy way to use this feature is to visit the site at the end of each writing session and type in the total word count for your manuscript right away. But if you need to wait until the end of the week (or longer period) and enter your best guesses at historical data, you can do that too. If you write a few more words—or edit a few—after submitting your word count, you can just enter a new word count for that same date; it will overwrite the previous entry for that date.

They say that what you measure tends to improve, and what you don’t measure tends to stagnate. Well, it just became easier to measure how consistently you write, and how much.

So write well, my friends, and write often.

One of the better inspirational posts I’ve seen on the writing mindset in a while:

A student asked, How often do you sing? [Pavarotti] answered with a single word: Always. When prompted he elaborated that he sings constantly—not always aloud—but even if only in his mind, he was almost constantly rehearsing.

When do you write?

Full article here: http://www.take2max.com/writing/2007/12/04/finding-the-time/

My Clarion buddy Trent Hergenrader makes an excellent point about the importance of being Earnest, where Earnest is a writer who keeps careful track of his submissions.

Out of 125 submissions, that’s my fifth instance of something getting lost in transit . . . It sucks, but it happens, even with electronic submissions.

Frankly, I don’t understand not carefully tracking submissions. It’s hard to remember what you sent where and when without at least a spreadsheet.

Yes, Trent’s post is a few months old. I’ve been meaning to link to it for a while now, but have delayed because I wanted to think of something to add. Tonight, I’ve belatedly come to the conclusion that nothing needs to be added.