Category Archives: Ideas & Plotting

The Importance of Author Mentors

Contracts Critiques Editing Ideas & Plotting Interacting With Professionals Networking Outlines Petra Klarbrunn Professional Behavior Starting a Career 2 Comments

A guest post by Petra Klarbrunn.

Most beginning authors I know think that a mentor is someone who will look over your latest screed and give you feedback and editing suggestions. While it is something that a mentor may do for you, that’s actually the job of an editor and/or critique group.

So what does an author mentor provide? I’m glad you asked.

  1. Questions at all stages. As mentioned, you might be lucky enough to have a mentor who has enough time to read over your epic novel. The majority of mentors are working professionals, so they’re busy working on their own epic space opera trilogy. They don’t have time to line edit your work. They do make time to answer specific questions for you. Say you’re having a problem with your opening hook. You can ask your mentor to look at a couple of paragraphs and get feedback from someone who knows how to write opening lines that propel the reader forward. Even better, they can provide a couple of different takes and have them go over why one is better than the other.
  1. Contracts. Mentors can give you some feedback on contracts, explaining what the egregious portions are and what they actually mean. They may suggest contract modifications or recommend that you take the contract to a specialist lawyer, especially if the contract is from one of the Big 5 publishers.
  1. Plotting. Some mentors can go over your plot outline and make suggestions. One of my mentors found a serious flaw in a novella that would have had me spinning my wheels for weeks until I discovered it. Don’t send a forty-page plot outline to your mentor. Send a bullet-point list so they can see how you build up towards the third act.
  1. Networking. Often overlooked, having someone who can provide introductions within your genre can give you a leg-up on your peers. One of the complaints about writing is “it’s about who you know that counts.” While exceptional writing can do your introductions for you, getting introduced to a busy editor at a convention or via email can at least give your work a better chance at getting looked over by a publisher. Introductions can also provide opportunities to get into anthologies or to work on collaborations.
  1. Blurbs. Receiving a blurb from a bestselling author or a celebrity can push your work to the top of the shopping cart. Stephen King gave a relatively unknown author named Jack Ketchum a glowing blurb and recommendation. Now Mr. Ketchum is a bestselling author and screenwriter.
  1. Giving back. Most mentors say that the main reason they choose to be a mentor is to give back to the community. Because most authors are genuinely nice individuals, they want others to succeed. Sometimes mentors didn’t have anyone they could ask questions of, and they want to help new authors with the craft. And who knows? Perhaps one day they will ask their mentee for a blurb or two.

Petra Klarbrunn Bio: Petra battles with her four cats daily for the use of her laptop. She writes in the romance, erotica, bizarro, horror, and academic fields using multiple pseudonyms. Her diet consists mainly of tofu and espresso.

Help! I’ve Written Myself Into a Corner and I Can’t Get Out!

Craft & Skills First Drafts Ideas & Plotting Kim May The Writing Process No Comments

It doesn’t matter if you’re an outliner or a seat-of-the-pants writer. We’ve all done it. We’ve had an awesome idea that will make the story so amazing! But when we follow that awesome idea to its end we realize that it changes everything. All the neat plot twists you originally planned to write won’t work anymore and you have no idea how to get your characters out of their new predicament. You’ve backed yourself into a corner and there’s no sign of salvation.

Well, not quite.

The way I see it there’s two ways to get out of this mess. The first is to become a rabid badger. I know. It’s not very attractive and there’s that whole rabies thing but it does have a tendency to scare away the plot bunnies. It doesn’t make it any easier to solve the plot problems you still have but it sure is entertaining to watch. The other option is to light the bat-signal and ask your non-rabid badgers-in-arms for help.

Remember when I said “we’ve all done it”? Few people understand this kind of hopelessness and desperation better than fellow writers and few can help you get out of it better than fellow writers. Ask a non writer for help and they’ll say “you’re not trying hard enough” or worse. Only writers will give you a sympathetic nod before dispensing with advice. Better yet, ask writer friend that knows you and your process. Their advice is more likely to be exactly what you need. If you’re not close enough to any local writers or aren’t part of a writing community (local or online) you can still avoid the rabid transformation. There’s sites like this one, online writing communities that are always looking for new members, and wonderful podcasts like Writing Excuses that you can turn to for advice. If a favorite author is coming through your neck of the woods on tour you can ask them for help too. All the pros I know are more than happy to answer writing questions.

When these things happen it can be hard to hard to reach out for help but don’t let that stop you from doing it. The only shame in being stuck is if you allow yourself to remain stuck. No writer is going to think you’re an amateur or stupid for asking. Actually the opposite. This is how we learn, this is how cool stories are finished, and this is how we grow closer as a community.

This Ain’t No Fortess of Solitude

Craft & Skills First Drafts Ideas & Plotting Leigh Galbreath Life Philosophies Making Progress as a Writer Rewriting Setting and Milieu The Writing Life No Comments

We talk about writing being a solitary art. We go on and on about sitting alone in a room, writing stories that only we can hear in our heads with characters we create in worlds we manufacture, an internal creation that, in it’s inception, is as separate and isolated as the writer putting down the words.

Only, it’s not, strictly speaking, true, is it? I mean, yes, the story in our heads part is real, and often we are alone when we’re thinking about said story or writing said story, but when you think about, none of us really write in a vacuum.

Let me suggest that, rather than saying that a story is an internal creation, it is actually a creation of internalized experience. Experience, of course, based on the community in which we live, work, and play. And community is essential for good fiction.

Lets start at the beginning, the inception stage when everything is amorphous and at most we have bits and pieces of plot or setting or character. But these bits and pieces didn’t come out of the aether. It might feel like divine inspiration, but it’s not really. Its our lives, our friends, something we saw on TV or read in a book. Its all the people, places and things that our minds (whether consciously or not) squirrel away for whatever reason. It percolates in our heads until something cool comes out and we think, “Gee, that could make a groovy story.”

And the more experience, the wider our personal community we take in, the more inspired that grove can be, the more diverse and deep, in sum, the more realistic the story can become. Without taking part in the world, without that community, I dare say, story cannot exist. Inspiration would fall flat on it’s innocuous face.

Now, that’s just no fun.

I personally have trouble with this part. I spend too much time in my head and not enough taking in the world around me, but when I do pay attention, I’ve found some the best characters always have a basis in people I know. The same goes for places and even plots. Even though I’ve never been to another planet, I can still describe what it feels like to get sand in my shoes on that planet because I’ve been to a beach on this one. An analogue can alway be found in our personal experiences within our community for the details that place the reader there with a character.

But it’s not just the initial inspiration that comes from our community. One of the nicest things about having a large group of acquaintances, picked up from going to seminars and classes or starting up a conversation in the check-out lane at Wal-Mart, is that not only can you gain inspiration, but also gain sources for fact and reality-checking. Don’t know how to fly a plane? Ask a pilot. Network enough, and you’re sure to find one, or someone who knows one. Need to make sure you’re plots on the right track? Pick a friend who reads or join a writer’s group, if you’re so inclined.

My point is that you do not, in fact, live in a fortress of solitude. It’s not difficult to bring community into our writing lives. It’s already there. We just have to take the time to pay attention to it. Actually, it’s kinda hard to truly be alone in our writing (that is assuming you’ve not locked yourself in a bunker without the internet or television or anything, but let’s face it, if you had, you wouldn’t be reading this, so you wouldn’t notice to argue with me, now would you?).

Your community is right there, now go use it!

And while your at it, use our community to give you some seriously nifty books. Scoot that cursor right on over to the right and sign up for this week’s give away. And come back on Monday, and do it again for even more nifty books!

Mining the Pain

Conflict Craft & Skills Ideas & Plotting Life Philosophies Reader Investment & Empathy The Writing Life Writing Tools 1 Comment

Pain is a part of life. Suffering is the human condition. It rains down on us and we wallow in it. It eats at our guts and we keep feeding it until there’s nothing left but a shell.

If there is anything that every single member of the human race holds in common, it is one thing.

Love.

All of us have loved. Most of us have lost. Lovers, children, parents, friends, pets. Betrayals, unravelings, deaths, or simply unrequited yearnings. All love comes together, and then it must, inevitably, come apart. Someone said that all love stories ultimately end in tragedy.

Rather than philosophize all the live-long day, I should point out that this is going somewhere.

Artists are uniquely suited among us to use that pain to illuminate the human condition. Music and poetry and prose comes along at just the right moment, lances that boil of loss that’s festering in one’s soul and lets healing begin.

On the way to the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2009, I was driving through the forests of upstate New York toward New Hampshire, with a background noise of hurt emanating from how a woman I really loved was breaking my heart. And then some song I had picked up on a free Starbucks iTunes card cycled through my iPod for the first time and blasted a hole in my heart ten-miles wide, splattering bits of my soul all over the inside of the car. The song was “Sometime around Midnight” by Airborne Toxic Event, and it evoked a tidal wave of sad, sick, helpless desperation that I swam in for the next several hours. I listened to it over and over, memorizing every word. That song, in that moment, was about me.

So I arrived at Odyssey, started getting to know my amazing classmates and teacher, and settled in. The first week brought in the award-winning horror writer Jack Ketchum as a guest instructor. During his lecture, he said something I will never forget:

“In your writing, examine love always, and binding.”

And then Ketchum went on to explain that stories are almost always about love coming together, coming apart, or strengthening, renewing, reaffirming the bonds between characters. There are, of course, exceptions, but anytime you’re dealing with human beings in conflict, the crux of the story is almost always one of love’s multitude of forms. Even war stories are often the about the camaraderie among soldiers.

His lecture crystallized for me what I had been writing about for years. And throughout the rest of the workshop, I applied this newfound insight in every story I wrote.

And all that pain I had experienced in the car, I poured into the stories. They were raw, dripping with emotion. But they were real.

Today, in the midst of writing this, I was procrastinating over on Facebook, and another quote popped up on a friend’s feed:

“Great writing is not perfect; it’s real. It bleeds and leaves a trace.” – Jordan Rosenfeld, A Writer’s Guide to Persistence

The writing I produced in the midst of that pain back then is still some of my favorite, because it all came straight from the depths. It was far from perfect, but it certainly left a mark on me.

Writers of all stripes are uniquely suited to distill our pain into art. But what makes it “art,” rather than commonplace catharsis? Does anybody really want to read your therapy? Unlikely. It’s not the fact that you’ve had the courage (or neediness?) to put your pain on the page and show it to people. It needs to offer the reader something of value: a unique insight or perspective. What do you want the give the reader as they walk away?

Growth is a good place to start. People lose patience quickly with those who wallow in their pain for interminable periods and never learn from it, never get past it, or repeat the same mistakes over and over, and so will readers. What did you learn from your pain? Will your characters learn it too? What does your story have to say about love and binding? This discussion is leading us straight into the idea of “theme.”

You may not know what your story is about until you type THE END, but you should be able to look at it with an objective eye and identify its theme. The hard part here is being able to look past whatever emotions you mined to build the story to look at it objectively. All that raw emotion feels absolutely, 100% true and real to you, but not necessarily to the reader. You still must have the ability to lead them into it.

Just like nothing should get in the way of love, the writer should allow nothing to get in the way of writing about it, especially not worries about who will read it. You may have loved and lost, but maybe you can get a good story or two out of the experience.

About the Author: Travis Heermann

Heermann-6Spirit_cover_smallTravis Heermann’s latest novel Spirit of the Ronin, was published in June, 2015.

Freelance writer, novelist, award-winning screenwriter, editor, poker player, poet, biker, roustabout, he is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and the author of Death Wind, The Ronin Trilogy, The Wild Boys, and Rogues of the Black Fury, plus short fiction pieces in anthologies and magazines such as Perihelion SF, Fiction River, Historical Lovecraft, and Cemetery Dance’s Shivers VII. As a freelance writer, he has produced a metric ton of role-playing game work both in print and online, including content for the Firefly Roleplaying Game, Legend of Five Rings, d20 System, and EVE Online.

In August, 2015, he’s moving to New Zealand with a couple of lovely ladies and a burning desire to claim Hobbiton as his own.

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