Category Archives: The Writing Process

Wow, another week has gone by already and we’re now 25% of the way through the year (you really wanted to know that, didn’t you?). So once again, here are some of our favourite recent reads.

Looking forward to a writerly get-together? Kait Nolan discusses the etiquette of talking to writers.

Over at Romance University, Laura Griffin discusses chapter hooks.

Nathan Bransford talks about the war on ebook pricing.

And while we’re talking ebooks, David Gaughran goes through the basics of self publishing.

Wondering how the length of your current WIP matches up against expectations? Aaron Stanton discusses average book length for various genres.

At Writer Unboxed, Anna Elliott talks about the necessity of trusting your own instincts.

For a laugh: Word count envy

For fun: How fast do you read?

For inspiration: how will we obtain additional resources once we exhaust the earth’s supplies?

And just because it’s cool: over at The Accidental Author, our very own Joshua Essoe talks about working as an editor.

Revision Show and Tell: What Tricks Do You Live By?

March 12, 2012

Leigh Galbreath

Authorial Trust Craft & Skills First Drafts Ideas & Plotting Leigh Galbreath Reader Investment & Empathy Rewriting 6 Comments

I confess. I don’t like first drafts. Working out the story, initially, is always the hardest part, for me. When it works out, it’s great, but most the time, it’s a slog that requires hard work and persistence that’s sometimes really hard to stomach.

To me, the best part is the rewriting–taking what was meandering and barely readable and turning it into something entertaining that other people might actually want to read.

Of course, when that’s done, the story is down, all the plot and character issues are worked out, and the book is revised, and re-revised, it’s time for some polish. As Kylie mentioned in her post on Editing, just re-reading the manuscript isn’t enough. To really polish our works of art, we often need help. Everyone’s got their little tricks for everything from pacing problems and varying sentence structure to catching typos. Clancy told us about using “The Writing Code,” and that got me to thinking. What other tricks are helpful for catching those little things that keep our stories from really shining?

I’ve collected some over the years. Here are a few of my favorites.

Reading the story aloud

Probably the best way to catch problems with rhythm and flow. If you stumble over anything, it probably needs to be revised.

Using Word’s Find/Replace feature

This is helpful to locate those words I use too often, fixing spacing problems, finding to-be verbs so I can change them to active voice, or any other problem I know normally crops into my stories without my noticing.

Reading the manuscript in different mediums

It’s amazing the things you find when you turn a Word document into a PDF or print it out.

Reading the manuscript backwards

This is a handy trick to find typos because you can’t get lost in the story.

Creating a scene cheat sheet

You can use a simple note card, an Excel list, the keyword feature in Scrivener, or whatever works for you. This is basically just a list of what plots are being serviced in each scene, so you can tell which scenes are pulling their weight are which aren’t.

So, it’s Show and Tell time. What tricks work best for you?

And the winner is …..

February 24, 2012

Ace Jordyn

Ace Jordyn Contests Craft & Skills Critiques Publishing Rewriting Submissions The Writing Process 2 Comments

And the winner is ….

Not you!

What happened? You’ve worked on your craft for tens of thousands, hundreds of hundred thousand words. You’ve gone to workshops, read every blog, every book on craft you can find. By now you know what the pros say and you can teach the writing courses just as well. And yet, the podium still eludes you.

Then there’s Writer X gracing the podium. Her writing isn’t as crisp. Her wrinkles of profound thought aren’t as deep. And she’s much newer at the game. So why was her work chosen over yours?

As co-editor of the Shanghai Steam Anthology, I’ve had to read well crafted and poorly crafted stories. Some writers had great ideas but needed to hone their writing skills. Others wrote prose well enough but the story lacked tension, the story arc was incomplete, the dialogue didn’t work, it lacked theme/focus or the historical homework wasn’t done.

Then there were the stories which survived the first round of cuts. Those which had that extra something. Some would need some revision, others editing while the best ones required no work.

What!!!!!! you exclaim. Some needing revision are in the final round? What about the ones with the well crafted prose that you denied? Why weren’t they chosen for editorial revision?

The answer is simple – besides being decently written, these stories are memorable. Despite their flaws, I was engaged to the end. Every story in the last round evokes an emotional response whether it’s of laughter, amusement, bitter sweetness, feeling defeated, cheering a hero, being horrified, melancholy, elation, and so on. It may be quietly engaging as in a romantic tragedy or a simple rendering of a thought provoking moment.

The emotional response I’m describing is not about liking or disliking a character. It’s about the story itself. Am I left feeling optimistic, laughing, amused by the clever turn of events or am I saddened, horrified, forced to reflect on the human condition? And does that story stay with me long after I’ve read it? Does it have emotional resonance?

The story, like every character in it, has its own voice – its own drama, its own growth, its own ability to draw readers in and not let them go. That voice carries the story’s emotional resonance which is framed by the promise made at its beginning and is concluded or addressed by the end.

We understand that the story arc is an important backbone for a story with a beginning, middle and end which includes challenges, climax and denouement. Characters cleverly doing their thing without purpose or meaning is not enough. How do you want the reader to understand the world you’ve created when the story is done? How do you want him to feel? Happy? Sad? Thoughtful? Hopeful? Depressed? Scared to death? Satisfied for running a marathon? Cheering that the good guy beat the bad guy?

Once you understand what emotions you want the reader to experience, your writing voice will be clear and the story’s emotional resonance will reflect that. Emotionally, the reader is compelled to read the story through to its bitter, joyful, triumphant, tragic or thoughtful end. You don’t want them feeling emotionally flat and wondering so what?

Good writing counts for a lot in submissions for contests, anthologies or publishing. But no matter how well crafted the words are, how strong the plot and characters appear to be, without emotional resonance the story isn’t memorable. It’s the little aha! I get it! or what a ride! feeling a reader experiences that makes it memorable. That aha! may be a good chortle, a reflective moment, celebration of the protagonist’s victory or grumping at a character’s stubbornness. Whatever the aha! is, every reader craves it and every story needs it to be memorable.

Now when you revise and edit your work or when others critique it for you, ask them: How does the story make you feel?, Does it stay with you after you’ve finished it?, If you had strong feelings about the story, tell me why. If not, what does it need/why does it feel flat to you? These are hard questions to ask and answer but knowing this will take your story to the next level and make it resonate with readers.

There’s No Place Like Home

February 10, 2012

David Carrico

The Writing Life The Writing Process 3 Comments

Creative people-for example, musicians, actors, artists, and yes, writers-are often considered a bit odd or ‘funny’ by the rest of humanity. That’s okay, because the truth is we are different. The drive to create a work that perhaps has no permanent utility yet still stands outside the creator can sometimes cause the creator to do things that are perhaps a bit daft, as our British friends might put it.

This can even be seen in the things we do to put ourselves in a space where we can create. For example, I once read of a well-known cartoonist who literally could not work if he did not have one foot in a pan of hot water and the other foot in a pan of cold water. (Unfortunately, the book in which I read that account seems to have not survived my most recent relocation, so I can’t give you a cite.)

At a slightly more mundane level, I can tell you of at least two or three pretty well-known science fiction authors who write best with metal-death music pouring from their stereo speakers at high decibel levels. I know of at least two very successful authors whose work regimen is to write from about 10 p.m. to about 6 a.m, sleep in the early part of the day, then spend the afternoon and early evening with the spouse and kids before sitting down at the keyboard again at 10 p.m. And there are always stories about someone’s writing for the day getting totally derailed because his/her coffee/tea/drink of choice was just not available and it blew his/her routine off the tracks.

So writers are often considered to be a species of odd ducks, and sometimes for valid reasons.

I never considered myself to be an odd duck, but the one thing I secretly took pride in was I could pretty much write anywhere. Airport, coffee bar, hotels, airplanes; if I could get my laptop there and open, I could put words down regardless of the distractions around me. The day job had me doing the road warrior gig several times over the years, so I had plenty of experience in working in places that were not home. In fact, my personal best getting-lots-of-words-down-in-a-short-time record happened in a hotel room in Grimsby, England-6000 + words in five hours. Truth. Cross my heart.

So for a long time, I kind of felt like I was invulnerable as a writer.

Then came March of 2009. Remember? The housing bubble had burst, all the mortgage rocks had been flipped over and we were gagging at the putrefaction we found underneath, and the economy was on a greased slide to nowhere and it was getting there fast.

Skipping a lot of the details, the bottom line is that the day job laid off about 400 people, and one of them was me. I found out in March 2009 I was going to be laid off, and at that moment my fiction writing dried up. Withered. Croaked. I wasn’t actually laid off until December 31, 2009, but I knew it was coming. And yeah, at first I was in shock, and angry, and all the typical emotions, but this wasn’t the first time I’d been out on the street, so my head straightened out pretty quickly-except for the creative voice. I could write text for work without any problems at all. I was serving as a Bible study teacher, and I could write study materials without a glitch. Words just flowed. But try to write fiction? Wasn’t happening.

Fast forward. I spent January through October 2010 in school picking up some education credits to help the job search. Writing for the classes, no problem. Fiction? Uh-uh. Oh, maybe a paragraph here and there, but nothing good, and no comfort at it. I put that down to just the uncertainty of my situation

In November 2010 I got a new job with a great company. Only problem with it was I had to move about 160 miles to take it. And selling a house in 2010 wasn’t much easier than selling a house in 2009 would have been. So it was back to the road warrior gig: leave town on Sunday afternoon with a car full of clean clothes and food, come home on Friday night with a car full of dirty laundry, spend the week in a small hole-in-the-wall apartment. (Not unlike being in college.)

I figured that with the new job, the uncertainty would be gone. I had lots of experience at living in road warrior mode, and lots of experience at really producing words while doing it. I thought, “Great! Five nights a week in the apartment with nothing else to do. I’ll get tons of writing done.”

Yeah, that’s how it should have been. But the next ten months proved to be one of the most frustrating times of my life as a writer. I was used to writing up to 2500-3000 words in an evening. A night in which I only put down 1000 words was substandard for me. Yet during those ten months, I would sit down night after night, spend two to three hours at the keyboard, and if I was very lucky I’d have 150 words. A lot of nights I only had 50. More nights than I care to think about I had 20, or 10, or none. Truth. And if I did get some words down, the next night I’d probably delete most of them as dreck. But I kept trying.

It drove me batty. I knew I could do better than that; a lot better. But no matter what I tried, nothing primed the pump; nothing got the words flowing again. You could have used me for a picture of frustration in the dictionary. I was dying of thirst in a writing desert. Still, I kept trying.

Fast forward again to August, 2011. We sold our old house in the city we moved from and bought our new house in the city we moved to. We moved in September.

After the move, I kept trying to write. And to my surprise (and joy), slowly, bit by bit, it became easier to write. The words starting to flow again-a trickle at first, but soon in a stream. The volume of words produced each day started to grow. At the beginning of December, 2011, I was consistently producing an average of 1000 words every time I sat down, which, while it’s not where I was pre-2009, was so much better than what I’d done in the last 2 ½ years I was ecstatic. And then around December 15, it was like the muse opened the flood gate. I wrote 40,000 words in a little over two weeks. Joy, relief, happiness; oh, yeah, did I feel that.

So what made the difference? What opened the door to my creative voice again? I think it’s having a home. When I was laid off, I knew that I would most likely have to move to get a good job. I think that something about not having a home even in prospect just really shriveled my creativity, and it wasn’t until I got the new home and actually settled into it that it started to revive. Makes sense to me. So perhaps I am an odd duck after all.

What’s your bedrock? What’s the one thing in your life that if it was removed, you wouldn’t be able to write?

I hope none of you ever land in that writing desert. But if you do, the best advice I can give you is keep writing. Persevere, even if you only get 30 or 50 words done in a day. From my experience, when you get out of the desert you’ll still have the patterns and habits of writing, which means you’ll get back in the flow that much quicker.

Meanwhile, enjoy paddling around with the rest of us odd ducks. Quack, quack.