Category Archives: The Writing Life

When I was younger and less experienced, the joy of writing came from
building worlds and characters, then diving headlong into the story.
Full steam ahead and damn the consequences! Don’t get me wrong, I would
have a general idea of the plot in advance, but I was in no way married
to it. Or engaged. We were kind of dating, but really we were just
friends. As writing strategies went, it was loads of fun. Not terribly
effective, but fun.

As a not-so-surprising consequence, my writing suffered from all the
same problems that discovery writers typically face. Drafting took
forever as I would too often follow random bursts of “inspiration” down
a dead end path. I wasted scores of hours hunting down the perfect
moment for the finer corrections needed to justify and foreshadow an
ever evolving plot line. That’s not even touching the large scale
structural edits my meandering style necessitated. When combined with my
writer’s ADD, I’ve left many partially complete and messy manuscripts in
my wake. Looking back, I may choose to salvage a few of those worlds,
but probably scrap the prose and start again. It’d be easier than going
back and editing the mess into something publishable.

Discovery writing worked fine when I was a hobbyist. I was having fun,
and that was all that mattered. However, as I started considering a
writing career seriously, I recognized that I needed to change my ways
if I had any hope of making a living at writing. Most publishers and
readers don’t have the patience to wait years between manuscripts. I
needed to become more efficient at taking a novel from concept to a
completed work. Additionally, I needed to become more consistent with
the quality of my early drafts and more intricate with my plots. All of
which is really hard to do on the fly. As much as I hated to admit it, I
needed to outline.

It took a while to convince myself that outlining wouldn’t ruin all the
fun, but once I had, I began searching the Internet and my local
bookstores for advice. Published authors who had something to say about
outlining seemed to focus on story structure rather than the actual,
mechanical process of representing my thoughts and plans on paper. When
I reached out to my friends in the writing community, most everyone
seemed baffled by my questions. What do you mean you don’t know how to
outline? You just do it, right? Eventually I grew so embarrassed and
self-conscious that I stopped asking and started experimenting.

It took a while and many failed attempts, but eventually I ended up
settling on a graphical approach. Being an engineer by training and
trade, I was used to analyzing graphs and charts quickly. By plotting
story intensity versus time in story, I literally drew the shape of my
novel and labeled the scenes, reversals, twists, and foreshadowing. In
so doing, I was able to easily see the points where the action would
become overwhelming, or the narrative too slow to drive reader interest.
With a little tinkering and a comprehensive symbolic guide, I soon was
able to simply and clearly express complex thoughts and relationships of
tension and structure.

It worked well, but the results felt… mechanical. My plots were
technically sound, but I was missing something crucial to the very
nature of story. I understood the lack on an instinctive level, but
couldn’t put words to the feeling. It wasn’t until I sat down and read
through David Farland’s Million Dollar Outlines that I figured out what
I was missing.

While my discovery written works were erratic and often flawed, they did
have one very important thing going for them. They were passionate,
driven by emotion. When I tried to refine my structure, I was treating
my work like a science, not an art.

Farland’s book taught me that readers are fundamentally seeking an
emotional experience. They want to feel the heart pounding thrill of
overthrowing an empire or the sweet poignancy of a passionate first
kiss. Reading is an emotional exercise, a place in which they can
practice facing the world while still safe from the consequences of
defying totalitarian governments or risking one’s heart with potential
rejection. If your work doesn’t grab your readers’ heart strings and
pull, they won’t feel the satisfaction of a story well told. No matter
how technically sound your work is, Farland argued, you can’t forget the
importance of a balanced and powerful emotional journey.

So, I sat down and created a color code for all the emotional beats I
could think of, eventually refining the list down to ten key emotions. I
then began coloring in the symbols I had been using for my graphs. My
plot’s problem points began to pop out to me almost immediately.

I was planning a science fiction spy thriller, so I needed both drama
and action/adventure beats to support the story. However, I had decided
early on to focus on the adventure plot in order to help me maintain the
thriller pacing. And yet, I had planned to start with a drama beat.
Well, that wouldn’t do, so I rearranged the early plot structure to pull
the adventure and wonder forward while pushing the drama and mystery
back a bit deeper. Furthermore, there were several places where the
story descended into drama for a time, without a drop of action to be
found. I needed those sections to support later events, but was able to
add a few carefully chosen explosions and fight scenes to carry the
tension and pacing.

Perhaps the biggest problem yet, the climax was the wrong sort of
emotional payoff for the story as planned. Not completely broken, but
half wrong. What I really had was two plot lines that I was trying to
shoehorn into a single climax. By splitting them up and resolving the
subservient plot line with an appropriately emotionally satisfying
climax in the big middle, I was able to do both stories the justice they
deserved. I sat back and examined my plans. The plot wasn’t perfect, but
it was much better. Balanced. Good enough for me to start writing and
iron out some of the details in-situ.

I don’t think I’ll ever be the sort of writer who creates a 200 page
outline. That style is too rigid for my tastes. Even though I’ve been
spending a lot more time preplanning recently, I still do have faith in
the emotionally driven mad-man who loves to dive into the trenches and
set things on fire. I just have a more logical and deliberate part of me
in charge of keeping the other guy from wandering off after a shiny new
idea. In the end, I believe both aspects will be essential to my
writing. The trick will just be finding the optimal balance between the
two. David Farland’s Million Dollar Outlines was what I needed for the
technical side of my brain to understand what my passionate self knew
all too well. You can’t just outline the plot, you must also work out
how you intend to grab your readers by the heart strings and pull.

All The Good Things That You Do Not Want

December 23, 2015

fictorians

As authors, it isn’t enough to have goals and know what you want – you also have to know what you don’t want.

We spend so much time working towards our goals that it seems contrarian to not embrace every opportunity that comes along, but in fact, to truly create and build up the kind of career you want most, that’s exactly what you have to do. The problem isn’t that we aren’t offered opportunities; the problem is that we are so hungry for acceptance, so desperate for validation of what we work so hard to create, that we overlook the potential drawbacks of saying yes to the opportunities we’re presented with.

This, exactly this, is what allows vanity presses to thrive, and scam artists pseudo-publishers, who promise everything from editorial guidance to production to promotion to distribution, to prosper. Education is key in avoiding being stuck in those kinds of mires, which is one reason I am a teacher for and advocate of the annual Superstars Writing Seminars – because learning the business of being an author is just as vitally important as being an author itself, and the need for that knowledge is ongoing.

New authors are extremely vulnerable when it comes to publishing scams – but those can, with a little knowledge, be easily avoided. No one wants to be scammed, so those aren’t exactly missed opportunities. The ones that are more difficult to avoid, even for experienced authors, are the ones that look exactly like what we wanted, and may in fact be very close – but which turn out to be Potential Disasters In The Making.

Several years ago, I had an opportunity to sell a comic book project to a flashy, upstart publisher that had been having a lot of success in the comic book Direct Market. A lot of my peers were doing books with them, and we were in active talks to develop my project – until I read the contract. They asked not just for a stake in ownership of the properties they developed (which was balanced by a hefty page rate up front, something not guaranteed by publishers like Image where they don’t have an ownership stake, but you pay all the development costs yourself), they asked for 51%. Just enough to be the majority owner of the Intellectual Property. And over that 1%, I declined.

I took a lot of grief from friends over what they saw as a stupid decision – right up until that company decided to shut down, and sell all of its properties to a Big Corporation Publisher. All my friends lost their books, because that 1% meant they never owned them from the moment they said yes and cashed the check. In some cases, they had to watch as other writers and artists were brought in by the Big Corporate Publisher to work on books they had created, while they weren’t even considered.

Saying yes to that 1% might have given me a short-term boost, as it did with my friends – but I’d have lost control and ownership of something I had created, and that option was never, ever going to be appealing to me.

In traditional book publishing (as opposed to comics), ownership is not a question, unless you are being asked to do work-for-hire, or ghostwrite a project, but the same problems can arise depending on the terms of the contracts being signed. Even dealing with that issue that is mostly a matter of knowledge though, and willingness to stick to what you want, so it’s something that can be worked through (or not) and signed (or not). The opportunities that are the hardest to turn down are the ones that almost give you everything you think you want – except for that one little thing. But trust me: like the 1% difference in that comics contract, that one little thing is what will define our work and our careers, and sometimes irrevocably change the direction they take.

I spent a good part of this year negotiating a publishing deal for my inspirational nonfiction trilogy The Meditations, with a publisher that is well known and respected for publishing such books. The publisher liked me. The editorial staff liked me. They liked the books a lot, and really liked the fact that I was already being paid as a speaker, doing my presentation Drawing out the Dragons. It all seemed like an ideal match and a perfect opportunity: they would publish the books, and I would join other speakers on their established lecture circuit. It was giftwrapped and ready to go…except for that one little thing.

They wanted exclusivity, not of those books, but of my efforts as an author and speaker. In doing their due diligence, it seemed to them that I had plans to continue working as a YA Fantasy author, and comics creator, and an illustrator, and they felt that was not the best use of my abilities – not if I wanted the deal to move forward. They saw me as a potential full-time Life Coach, and someone who could ask – and get – ten or twenty times the amounts I was being paid in speaking fees if I was only just willing to edit the books to point in that direction, and more fully dedicate my efforts to that end as a part of their stable of author/speaker/Life Coaches.

I had to decide what I wanted, because that proposal seemed to me to be 99% of what I had asked for – a nice book deal, an international platform, and the potential for a lot of money – but the 1% difference, which wasn’t going to be contractual, just, ah, strongly encouraged, made my heart sink.

I knew what I wanted my career and life and work to be, and it was all of the things I do: writing fantasy, drawing comics, and yes, writing inspirational books and giving lectures. But the combination, the whole, is what makes me happy, and hopefully, inspires those around me. To exclude any of those parts would lessen who I am, lessen my happiness, and lessen the quality of the work that I do. And so I said no, and let that opportunity pass.

Those books have their own purpose, and will find their audience. I’m not worried about missing that deal, or about my career, because it’s the choices we make and the actions we take that define us, and there are always going to be more opportunities to choose, as long as we haven’t given away too much of our power by saying yes to too many of the wrong things, simply because we were afraid to say no.

So, if you didn’t get that publishing deal, or agent, or contract, have a drink and celebrate – it might be the best thing that could have happened to you. Then keep going, keep writing, keep choosing. That’s how it works.

James A. Owen is the author of the Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica series, the creator of the critically acclaimed Starchild graphic novel series, and the author of the Mythworld series of novels. He is also founder and executive director of Coppervale International, a comic book company that also publishes magazines and develops and produces television and film projects. He lives in Arizona. Visit him at HereThereBeDragons.net

I Finally Finished a Novel

December 22, 2015

Jace Killan

Finish It! First Drafts Goals Jace Killan Self-Awareness Superstars Writing Seminars Writers/Illustrators of the Future 1 Comment

Nearly three years ago, I attended Superstars Writing Seminar in Colorado Springs. I had been writing for about a year and was excited to learn how to become a published author.

It soon became apparent that I was ahead of my time in attending. Not that it didn’t totally propel my development as a writer, but one fact kept slapping me in the face—I had never finished a book. I had started several, they had great ideas, great premises; yet I hadn’t finished any of them. I would write a few chapters, get stuck, and abandon the piece indefinitely.

Several in the group claimed to have written terrible novels of which they were too ashamed to let see the light of day. But they had finished them all the same. I envied them.

I left Superstars with the resolve that I needed to finish something, anything, regardless of skill or quality.

Well, three years later, I’ve thrown out hundreds of thousands of words. I almost finished a novel about a year ago and almost completed it, solely out of principle, to be able to claim that I had finished a novel. But after taking a writing seminar from David Farland, I knew it was garbage. I abandoned the 90% finished work for a new project.

This year I did a lot of things and learned a lot of things that have helped my writing. Each of these has a synergistic effect on my writing. First, I took another class from David Farland (this time online). I set monthly goals. Some of these goals required me to submit my short stories for publication. I hired an editor to perfect a couple short stories, and learned from this experience a great deal about self-editing. The culmination of these led to the completion of a novel. I completed a novel.

In February, I’m returning to Superstars, this time having completed a novel. Also, from my goals and endeavors, I am now a published writer. I had no less than three of my short pieces published (one in a paying market). I received my first rejection letter from Writers of the Future. And this year was my first to participate in NaNoWriMo. I wrote about 42,000 words (8k shy of winning).

These are exciting accomplishments, but the grandest of all, the one that will make me a successful writer one day, is the accomplishment of not giving up. I’m still writing.

I’m planning on taking another David Farland class or two, attending Superstars, winning NaNoWriMo, and writing throughout the year, finishing at least one other novel. I’ll submit each quarter to Writers of the Future. And I’m looking for an agent for my finished novel (despite being my first, it’s actually pretty good).

I live in Arizona with my family, wife and five kids and a little dog. I write fiction, thrillers and soft sci-fi with a little short horror on the side. I’ve got an MBA and work in finance for a biotechnology firm.

I volunteer with the Boy Scouts, play and write music, and enjoy everything outdoors. I’m also a novice photographer.

You can visit my author website at www.jacekillan.com, and you can read some of my works by visiting my Wattpad page.

For Me

December 18, 2015

fictorians

Amanda Faith Classes & Seminars World-building 1 Comment

For me, writing comes naturally. Writing well takes work.

I decided this year was the year to take a step back and evaluate how well I write. Although reading is a great way to learn about writing, an online class is definitely a more effective way to strengthen your skills.

Time was a consideration for me when deciding to take on “one more thing.” I tend to lead a busy life. I work two jobs as a teacher: one at high school, the other is at college. I am currently enrolled in courses for an additional add-on to my certification. I am going back to school again for yet another degree in January (I already have four). Taking on a writing class was definitely something to really think about since I knew I needed to do it now rather than later.

Honestly, I didn’t take a lot of time. I wanted, no – more like craved – to learn more and become a better writer. Ok. Ready, set, go! I jumped.

I signed up for a few classes with various instructors. All were good classes. I have to say that David Farland’s classes and online lectures were the strongest ones I have taken to date. Listening to his sage advice and techniques had me taking copious notes and reviewing previous things I have written. It has also given me a stronger foundation for future works.

Dave is patient man. Any question I emailed him he has graciously been kind and helpful. No question is “stupid.” The feedback I received from the assignments had corrections and suggestions. Some lessons have more corrections than others, which is ok. I wanted to learn. If I knew it all, I wouldn’t have signed up.

One of the assignments had me build a world. An actual world. With land and water. With habitable areas. With people and animal potential.

I had to read the assignment again. I was terrified. *deep breath* Ok. I can do this.

I watched the videos a couple of times. I took notes. Then, I started plotting and planning.

I figured the best way was to start large and work my way in. I made a world, then focused in on the major areas. From there, I created cities that were important to the story.

At first, I was stressed. I wanted it to be great. With Dave’s advice, I did it over a few weeks, one step at a time. As my fictional world developed, so did my creative world. The more I added, the more it became real to me. I have even, with the help of my chemistry friend, developed the crystal that is a major prop in the story.

I submitted the assignment. And waited.

My results came back. Dave made comments on everything I had submitted. Although I still have all of the comments, the one that still sticks out for me was, “This is something doable.”

My face hurt from smiling. I did it. I was proud of myself.

Dave has truly inspired me. I have never created anything this complex. World building is new to me, and I now realize how much work goes into it. There is as much, if not more, work as actually writing the story. I find I keep going back and adding more, creating more detail for myself so as I create the story, that information will filter through. I want to transport the reader to a new world and experience a new adventure.

Yes, I am published. My paranormal mystery, Strength of Spirit, won an award in 2014. I have had short stories, journal articles, and poetry published. I have been published academically, too.

I am a seeker of words, a bibliophile by choice. However, I pray I never become so complacent with my work that I don’t desire to learn more.

About the Author: Amanda Faith

Award-winning author Amanda Faith may have been raised in Dayton, but her heart and home is in the South. With a lifelong love of teaching and writing, she had plenty of encouragement from teachers and friends along the way. Loving a good puzzle has always been a fascination, and writing gives her the outlet to put all the pieces together.

Being adventurous and loving to try new things, it wasn’t long before her characters found themselves in unusual situations. She loves to put people from two different worlds into new situations and to see how they interact, taking them on journeys they would never have normally experienced.

Teaching high school English by day, college English by night, writing, and doing paranormal investigations doesn’t slow her down from having a great time with a plethora of hobbies. Her published credits include short stories, poetry, several journal articles, her doctoral dissertation, and her award-winning book Strength of Spirit. She is a staff writer for The Daily Dragon at Dragon Con and an intern for Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta at WordFire Press. She has a Bachelor of Arts in English, a Masters in Education-English, and a Doctorate in Education-Teacher Leadership. Check out her website at www.amandafaith.net.