Category Archives: The Writing Life

Sometimes You Have to Let Go

Editing Kevin Ikenberry Making Progress as a Writer Publishing No Comments

Sleeper ProtocolIn October 2014, I signed a contract with Red Adept Publishing for my debut novel, Sleeper Protocol. From February of this year until September, the publisher’s amazing editing team worked with me through six content edit passes and four copy-editing passes. I could say, without lying, that I learned to love the editing process because of the awesome team I had in place. But what I learned this year to improve my craft was that sometimes you have to let go.

You see, Sleeper Protocol went through it’s early stages several years ago as a short story and then novella entitled “Walkabout.” Every time I worked on the basic idea, there was so much more to tell. I fell deeper and deeper in love with the story as I wrote. Strong feelings during the writing process are good because they take us deeper into the scenes, the motivations, and the surroundings of our story. When I made a sweeping change to the story and “appointed” a new antagonist, the book took off. When I submitted the manuscript to Red Adept, I was understandably nervous but I believed that the book’s title, first line, and entire plot would get the publishers attention.

I was right – but one out of three ain’t bad.

In one of the very first conversations I had with my publisher, the working title of Walkabout had to go. There were too many other books out there with the same title or a variation thereof and finding it could present a problem to prospective readers. To my surprise, this wasn’t that difficult to swallow, except that I spent about two weeks trying to use Walkabout in every possible title combination. Nothing worked. I decided to put off searching for a title until the content edits were completed. I spent weeks brainstorming a new title only to find that my publisher and I both came up with the same possible title, and Sleeper Protocol was officially born.

During the editing process, though, I learned the biggest lesson of all. We’re told to put everything we have into the hook. The right voice, descriptions, and purposeful prose will bring the reader in, right? I created what I thought was a great first line only to have my editor immediately tell me it had to go. There was a POV inconsistency in it and it led the reader in the wrong direction – but in my mind it was perfect!

And there was no point arguing about it. My content editor was exactly right. We made the change and re-tooled the first few lines and made the opening stronger. When the very first line gets the ire of your editor, it’s easy to think that the rest of process will be horrible. To the contrary, it gave me a tremendous boost of confidence that she loved the book enough to say “Hey Kevin, let’s do this differently.”

The lesson: don’t hold on too tight. Yes, the story is your baby and you’re understandably anxious about the whole process, but when your team says “consider this” you have to listen. I am glad that I learned to do just that, and I think that the novel is so much stronger than when I submitted it eighteen months ago. Hopefully, you’ll help be the judge of that.

Sleeper Protocol releases in ebook formats on January 5, 2016 with print versions to follow.  You can find more information on my website www.kevinikenberry.com. Happy New Year, and I wish that 2016 be a great year for your writing!

About the Author: Kevin Ikenberry

Kevin IkenberryKevin ikenberry’s head has been in the clouds since he was old enough to read. Ask him and he’ll tell you that he still wants to be an astronaut. Kevin has a diverse background in space science education and works with space every day.

Kevin’s science fiction and horror short fiction has appeared internationally, most recently in the anthologies Extreme Planets and Pernicious Invaders. His debut novel, Sleeper Protocol, is due in January 2016 from Red Adept Publishing.

Kevin is a member of Fiction Foundry, Pikes Peak Writers, and is an alumna of the Superstars Writing Seminar.

He can be found online at www.kevinikenberry.com.

On Being a GPS Writer

The Writing Life No Comments

GPS Author2015 marked my eleventh year as a professional writer.  2004 was when I first began getting paid for my writing.  But like all writers I know, I’m continuing to grow in both my command of my craft and in my understanding of it.  And this year I gained an understanding of how my writing process works that I hadn’t had before.

True confession time:  I’m a seat of the pants writer/pantser/ organic writer.  One of those writers who doesn’t draw up a written outline for writing anything, even lengthy novels.

I find that a lot of readers don’t understand what the seat of the pants approach is all about.  Since it’s usually contrasted with the outlining approach, many just assume that the seat of the pants approach means just throwing words together almost at random, much as a painter might throw splatters of paint at a canvas, in the hopes that he or she will end up with a story instead of a mess.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The fact is, seat of the pants writers do outline.  They just outline in a very different method than organized outliners do.  And I knew this.  I just couldn’t articulate it very well.  Then I listened to a two-part interview with authors Lois McMaster Bujold, Wen Spencer, and Brendan DuBois on the Baen Free Radio Hour podcast (September 11 and September 15 2015 episodes) on the subject of creativity.  Listening to those fine authors discuss the subject caused my understanding of my own creative process to come into focus, and it definitely helped me shape what follows.

Keeping in mind that there is no one right way to write—they’re all good as long as they produce good stories and novels—I’m going to give you a look at how I approach working a writing project.

Just about all writers I know will admit to having some sort of internal guide for how they approach the craft.  Depending on who you talk to, it might be referred to as “the muse”, or “the back of the brain”, or “the writer sense”, or “the unconscious mind”, or “the writer perception”.  I’m sure there are other labels out there, but those are the ones I’ve heard the most.  Personally, since I tend to personify things, I refer to it as “the muse”.  (Don’t ask me what I call my laptop sometimes.)  I’ll carry that phrase forward now.

The first thing that the muse brings to me is the main character, or sometimes the main character set.  I’m not going to call my writing “character driven”, but every story I’ve written, no matter the length, began with the characters arriving in my mind.  Then I spend some time, anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of weeks musing on the characters.  (Pun intentional.)  This is who the story is about.

The next thing the muse delivers is the situation/problem/conflict that is going to be the driving force behind the story.  And I spend some time meditating on that, on the ins and outs of the issues, and how they will impact the characters and the story.  The situation also usually defines where the story is going to start.  This is what the story is about.

Mind you, this kind of thinking is not done in dedicated blocks of time, but rather is tucked away in the back of the mind to kind of roll around while I’m at the day job or doing family stuff.  Every once in a while a thought will rise to the top and I’ll go, “Okay, that’s cool,” and add it to the mental file I’m building about the work.

The last major piece that the muse delivers is the ending.  This is critical to me in how I work:  I can’t start writing until I know how the story will end.  This is where the story is going to go.

If the story is a shorter work, that’s all I need to get started.  If it’s headed for novella or novel length, I may have identified a milestone or two that I want to include in the path of the story.  But characters, situation, and ending—the who, what, and where—always delivered in that sequence—are the pieces I personally have to have in order to begin writing.

So far, the process probably isn’t very different from how outlining writers work.  Things diverge now, though.

Let’s use the metaphor of driving from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Miami, Florida.

The outlining writer will plot a course from Cincinnati, identifying the exact roads to be taken, the places to change from one road to another, where to stop for the night, and perhaps even where to stop for meals.  And the story that will be written from that outline will flow in exactly that manner.

I, on the other hand, being the enterprising seat of the pants writer, simply begin writing.  I don’t have an outline on paper, but I do have the bones of an outline in my mind—beginning, milestones, and ending—and a destination fixed in place.  At this point, my muse begins operating like a good GPS.  She (I told you I personify things) points me in the direction of the goal and kicks me into gear and I head off down the highway toward Miami.  But somewhere along the way, I decide to take an exit and go see what’s happening over near some little village.  And my muse, like any good GPS, recalculates while I’m checking out what I wanted to see, and rather than try to take me back the way I came, tells me the new direction I need to go to get back on track and get to Miami.  And no matter how many diversions I make, how many bakeries and amusement parks and historical sites I go see, nothing gets outside the reach of my muse/GPS, and she will infallibly deliver me to Miami and the conclusion of my project.

So the outlining writer and I, we both arrive at Miami; he by way of his carefully plotted out roadmap/outline, and I by way of my muse/GPS.  Yes, the roads thus traveled are different, and the sights seen and described are very different, but in both projects we arrived at the end.

As a seat of the pants writer, it’s not true that I don’t have an outline.  I do have an outline; it’s just the barest hint of an outline residing between my ears, but when matched up with my-muse-the-writerly-GPS, it gets me to the end of the story.

So I think I’m going to quit calling myself a seat of the pants writer, and instead start calling myself a GPS writer.  What do you think?

David CarricoDavid Carrico Bio:
David Carrico has been an avid science-fiction and fantasy reader since January 1963, when he encountered a copy of Andre Norton’s novel Catseye.  He started writing (mumbledy) years ago, but has been selling professionally since 2004.  Most of his work is alternate history.  His first book, an e-book entitled 1635: Music and Murder, was published by Baen Books in September, 2013.  It’s a collection of two different groups of stories which collectively provide the backstory for his second book, 1636: The Devil’s Opera, a novel published by Baen Books in October, 2013, in both paper and e-book formats.  Both books are laid in Eric Flint’s Ring of Fire alternate history universe, and the novel was co-written with Eric.
David is married, has three kids, five grandkids, two great-grandkids, and usually has at least a couple of Basset hounds lazing around the house somewhere.

Writing While You Condition and Rinse

Dave Heyman The Writing Life No Comments

ShowerAs I am still in the early phases of my writing career, I approached this year with goals that were as much about education as production. I did have specific writing milestones I wanted to achieve, but I also wanted to devote a decent percentage of my time and resources on learning as much as I could about the craft. I attended classes, took workshops (both online and off) and made as many contacts in the industry as I could. Like most new writers, I was looking for advice from every corner I could find.

The most valuable thing I learned this year though was how to tailor all the advice and counsel into a form that worked inside my own life and methods. Different strokes, as they say. For me, the most important lesson was how to integrate the most common advice of all: write every day.

“Write every day” or some version of this is by far the most frequent recommendation I’ve seen, the one piece of counsel most writers seem to agree on. This was something I was aware of in 2014, and by the start of this year I was in already in the habit of sitting down at the keyboard at the same time every night and working through my two hours of blocked out time. Some nights I wrote little, sometimes I wrote a lot. For a while I became very focused on word counts, during the Spring I decided this was less useful than I had hoped.

As the year progressed, I started to look at this time differently – it stopped being writing time and started being typing time. When I entered my two-hour block with a solid idea of what I was there to do, the words would flow quickly and freely. When I tried to use the same time to work out my story’s problems and issues, all the while with hands on the keys and eyes on the screen, I could feel the momentum grind to a halt.

To work on the mechanics of my stories I needed not only a different environment but a different time. That time might come in smaller, harder to predict chunks, but it was there. In the car, at the grocery store or in the shower. I could spend that time thinking about my stories, and that was writing too.I discovered that, for me, writing was not only something I could do at other times of the day, often times it worked better.

To give a specific example, I’d like to dive briefly into a more detailed lesson I learned this year. This came courtesy of an online workshop taught by Dean Wesley Smith. (I found these workshops to be excellent – here’s a link.  The relevant item to my story was the lesson that your character needs to have an opinion about the setting; omitting this will deny both the ability to resonate with the reader. As Dean often says in his lessons, I filed that “in the back of my writer brain” and moved on with my writing.

Fast forward to several months later. I was working on a new short story that I was quite passionate about. I had an interesting setting, a solid premise and what I felt was a really compelling main character. Unfortunately, when I ran the story by my writing group I got very consistent feedback: the readers could not connect with my main character. She was coming off as cold and distant, removed from the story somehow. I racked my brain trying to reason out why that was and eventually that voice from the back of my writer brain reminded me of Dean’s lesson. Taking a second pass at the story, I added her opinions about the setting and got the feedback I was looking for.

The important piece I want to stress here is not really how I solved this particular problem, but where. I didn’t solve that in front of my monitor, hands on the keys. I solved it in the shower, because when I take a shower, I always take it as a writer.

As I said above, I realized earlier this year that I have all my best ideas and breakthroughs when I am isolated. Taking a long walk by myself, driving to the store, or taking a shower. Thus I decided that when I am in those isolated situations, I will always think about my writing. This has allowed me to be mentally present when I am with my family or working my day job, while still getting maximum usage out of my typing time.

One of the most common statements I hear from folks in my position is “It’s hard to find time to write” and I almost agree. Balancing a job, a family, healthy living; all the demands of real life can be quite challenging. Sometimes you can only find a few minutes a day to type, but it can be easier to find time to write if you remove the requirement of a keyboard from the definition.

Just make sure you have a good hot water heater for those long showers.

About the Author: David Heyman

David HeymanDave writes both novels and short stories in the various genres of speculative fiction. His other passions include his family, his job, gaming and reading about mountaineering. Sleep is added to the mix when needed. You can visit him at daveheyman.com

Happy Holidays!

Guy Anthony De Marco The Writing Life No Comments

‘Twas ten seconds before Christmas, and all through the house,
Not a creature was stirring, except for an author still working on a story.
Deadlines, deadlines…

Since today is actually Christmas, at least in my time zone, I’d like to wish you and yours a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. If you’re not one who follows this holiday, than I wish you a Happy Kwanzaa, a Happy Chanukkah, or even a Blessed Solstice. The point is, I hope you’re going to be interacting with someone in close physical proximity instead of using your keyboard or smartphone. This year, that won’t be me. It’s a quiet yet oddly warm evening out here in flyover country. This is the second Christmas in a row that I’ll be celebrating alone. Last year, I volunteered to move two of my kids across the country, since my publishing company owns a large box truck. I ended up stranded in a snowstorm when the windshield wipers and the cabin heater broke. At least this year I’m at my writing cabin, and it’s warm. I’d better knock on some wood before I toss it in the fireplace.

Writing can be quite a lonely profession. We all get caught up in whatever writing project or looming deadline that is fast approaching, and we forget that it’s the season to pay attention to those around you. You see a lot of writing advice talking about focusing on writing. There’s a corollary to that thought. Don’t forget to live. Don’t forget to interact. Don’t forget to appreciate those you care about, because one day you might find yourself stranded in a blizzard or alone in a quiet house. Neglecting the truly important things around you just to get the final polish on a short story isn’t worth it. Spend some time with those you love, or even those you tolerate. Sometimes the story is polished enough and you can shove it out the door so you can go play catch with your kid or make your significant other a candlelit dinner.

After all, all work and no play makes Jack go a little crazy in the Overlook Hotel.

Happy Holidays from everyone here at The Fictorians.