Category Archives: The Writing Life

The Value of Mentorship

Evan Braun Publishing The Writing Life 1 Comment

As a writer, it has always been a struggle to get readers. I suspect this as close to a universal experience among writers as exists. My early novels went largely unread, but I harvested as much encouragement as I could from the crop of readers available-parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles. That feedback kept me going.

It’s somewhat ingrained in us to value the opinions of those closest to us, which is exactly as it should be. But if we’re on a professional trajectory, a point must eventually come when parents, brothers and sisters, and aunts and uncles can no longer advise us in the way we need. In short, we grow up.

The longer I write and the better I get, the easier it is to find readers. Slogging through one of my books is no longer quite the imposition it used to be back when I was writing grade-school Star Trek tin-in fiction. My approach to plot and characterization has grown more sophisticated, and as a result my mother’s opinion has become steadily less critical to my process.

Let me take a rabbit trail for a moment. Until the last few decades or so, in western society, a person developed into a professional in their chosen vocation through mentorship and apprenticeship. It seems to me that we are so independently-minded today that we’ve progressively moved away from that. Which is a shame, because it’s critically important to take advice and guidance from those who have already accomplished that which we are trying to do. It doesn’t make much sense to glean career advice as a writer from a doctor or mechanic. While I’m sure there will always be some professional carryover, it’s apples and oranges.

The American dream-or at least as I understand it, as an acknowledged Canadian-is for every individual to become a self-made man (or woman). The emphasis being on the word self. But wouldn’t it be much better to have a mentor? Wouldn’t it to be much better to have some help along the way from someone who has already walked this difficult and barely navigable path? Wouldn’t it be better to follow in someone else’s footsteps?

As a writer, I value the opinions of my peers. But I value the opinion of my betters all the more. So if you’re trying to make it as a published author, you would be well-advised to hang out with published authors. Over the last few years, I’ve come across a lot of successful authors who are more than willing to pay it forward by lending a helping hand to those who are a few steps behind them on the publishing track.

Take advantage of such opportunities when they present themselves. And when they aren’t just falling into your lap, seek them out.

Book Trailers

Frank Morin Publishing The Writing Life 4 Comments

I recently attended the LTUE (Life, The Universe, and Everything) conference in Orem, Utah at the UVU campus.  I sat in on the book trailers class more out of curiosity than any real expectation to learn anything useful.  After all, I had never heard of book trailers.

This turned out to be an extremely insightful session.

Book trailers are a growing phenomenon.  Just like movie trailers, some authors and publishers are now developing book trailers.  This was news to me.  I had never considered making a trailer for a book.  But as was stated in the panel, today’s world is a video-centric world so a book trailer could draw a very wide audience.

What a brilliant idea.

Who doesn’t love a good movie trailer?  When done right, they can drive moviegoers into a frenzy to see the movie.  Book trailers can do the same thing.

Then again, a bad book trailer can be the stake through the heart of your book.

My first thought was, “Book trailers?  That’s great for publishers with a marketing department and deep pockets to pay for expensive graphics design or live actors.”

But, book trailers can be more affordable than you may think.  The panel at LTUE gave us some useful tips.

First, for the do-it-yourselfers, there are some great sites to download photos, music, and even video clips royalty-free for very reasonable prices, like iStockPhoto.  With a little work, you may be able to piece together an excellent trailer with very little cost.  Please remember, no matter where you find your material, make sure you have permission to use it.  One author mentioned that they produced a book trailer independently.  When they signed with a publisher, they were forced to take the trailer down because they could not guarantee that all of the images they used were royalty free or used with permission.

A couple of points were stressed repeatedly:

  1. Find the right music.  Great music can make your trailer.  Bad music will kill it.  Again, there are lots of resources online for royalty-free music.  Or, if you know a musician, they might just let you use their music for free as a way to increase their own presence on the web.
  2. Don’t underestimate the importance of asking.  If you want a piece of music, or a photo, or even live actors, ask them.  Many people will give permission for their work to be used, or will offer to help free of charge because they see your trailer as a way to highlight their talents.

Another idea is to check with local colleges, or with any college students you might know, particularly those involved in film production or any related field, including acting or modeling.  You may be able to get high-quality assistance from students looking for a good project.  Again, they want their names out on the net, and this provides a way.

One example of a good book trailer is the one for Dan Wells’ new book, Partials.  You can view the trailer here.  It had only been out a month when I watched it, and the YouTube link had already received almost 3000 hits, plus all the hits on the official web page.

I also found this one for Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters,  that was very well done.

Other links of interest:

On Darcy Pattison’s web page, she lists a Book Trailer Manual for sale as well as many links to other resources on book trailers.

Book-Trailers.net shows some existing book trailers

BlazingTrailers also has existing trailers to watch.

From the little research I’ve done to date into book trailers, I don’t find a ton of trailers yet.  I find that encouraging because a good trailer might just get a lot of attention.  The sobering flip-side is that of those trailers I’ve watched so far, many of them weren’t very good.

So if you’re going to do a trailer, make a good one or don’t bother releasing it.  You don’t want to hurt your sales.  If you can develop a really good trailer, it might play a major role in your marketing plan, especially if you e-publish your own novels.

This is an idea too powerful to ignore.  I know I’m going to look into it this year.

Does anyone know of any good trailers to recommend?  Do you know any authors who have successfully developed trailers?  Are you planning to release your own trailers with your books?

In Translation

Craft & Skills Leigh Galbreath Rewriting The Writing Life 3 Comments

A while ago, I got into a conversation with a friend of mine about whether or not he should use a commonly used term as a name for a certain magical phenomenon in his fantasy novel or if he should call it by a word he made up just for that book. It’s not a new conversation, especially for fantasy and science fiction writers. I’ve had that conversation a few times and I still find the argument a little odd. I mean, why use a made word when someone’s already come up with a word that works just fine?

His argument was that since his POV characters live on a different world, they don’t actually speak or think in English (the language the novel is written in), and so the made up word would be more correct.

It got me thinking. If that one word has to be in another language because the character doesn’t know English, why is the rest of the novel not written in this other language? Why bother with English at all?

The best example of this is when I heard people complain that a TV show set in ancient Rome used modern curse words. The complaint was that those words hadn’t existed in Rome at that time, so they shouldn’t be used in the show. To which I often responded that, if you really want to get technical, they were all speaking Latin, and Latin doesn’t use articles (such as the or a). Therefore, if we’re getting rid of words that didn’t exist at the time, we’d have to chuck those a well. Now do you really want to watch a show or read a book that doesn’t ever use the word the?

Me neither.

The way I’ve come to think of it is like this — every work of fiction where the characters are based in a time or place other than where the writer lives is a translation. It’s sort of taken for granted that those characters wouldn’t really know the writer’s native language, but since none of us are J.R. Tolkien, we take the other language (whether real or imagined) and turn it into English for the benefit of our readers. Our goal is to make the story easily comprehensible to anyone who picks the book up. And when you’re translating text, you don’t just leave the odd word untranslated to prove that the point of view was originally in a different language.

I mean, why force your reader to slog through dialect and odd terms when they don’t have to? Sure, a few bits of dialect can give the text a little color and texture. You may even run into the occasional term that just won’t translate.

But if you decide you just have to have that made up term, it will require context and explanation for the reader to understand what you’re talking about. When you’ve already got enough to explain with world-building and character development and plot points, this seems like effort you could put to better use. Why make things harder for yourself by having to explain one term in a believable fashion, without slowing down the story, when you could easily have just used a common word that people will understand in an instant?

Not that there aren’t writers out there who are gifted at slipping in the odd dialect and crazy, made-up word that just zings. If you’re one of those people…well, I’m insanely jealous. You are a rare breed. But as for the rest of us, it’s better to err on the side of the easily understandable.

So, I ask you, when you find yourself wanting to use that cleverly created magical lexicon you’ve come up with, or just feel the need to toss in a made-up term, to make sure you really need it. Ask yourself why a normal, everyday word can’t do the job, and make sure you really want to put in the time and effort it will take to make the reader understand what you’re talking about (and no, creating a dictionary at the back of the book ala Frank Herbert doesn’t count).

Please, be kind to your readers. Don’t make them work any harder than they have to. Treat the text like you would a translation and make it easy to understand so they can focus on what’s really important-your fantastic masterpiece of a story.

When to tell, not show

Mary Pletsch The Writing Life Writing Tools 1 Comment

When to “tell, not show”

Most writers know the maxim “Show, don’t tell.”  And, like many such catchphrases, there’s a good reason for it.  Narration informing a reader that two characters are best of friends isn’t going to be as effective as a scene that illustrates their friendship.   Multiple pages of description can be dull to read if the description has nothing to do with the ongoing action.  Few people enjoy being preached at by the author through the medium of the book.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m the only writer who’s been bitten by this rule.

The fact is that I’ve discovered there are some times when telling is more appropriate than showing.  There are some times when too much show makes for long, rambling, wordy novels that range far away from the main plot.  These are times when entire chapters are devoted to showing a single thought, idea, or plot point that could be conveyed in a paragraph, or sentence, of tell.  The main storyline gets lost amongst all the digressions that show, show, show everything.

I think of my first serious novel attempt, where I made certain to show the reader who my characters were and what events had shaped them as people.  80,000 words in, I was ready to start Chapter One.  That’s when I stopped working on the book.  Not just because I’d planed a 120K novel, not a 200K one, but because the 80K words had little to do with the story I actually wanted to tell.  They were just the foundation.

I once read a novel draft in which the writer was preoccupied with character location; any characters separated from the main group got individual scenes showing where they were.  Sometimes this information was relevant (under attack by an enemy) ; too often it was not (shopping for groceries, going to the coffee shop).   This novel has since been edited with some tells-if the writer was certain that readers would wonder why a character wasn’t with the group, another character  saying “Joe’s at the grocery store” took the place of a wholly unnecessary scene.

Another pitfall of showing is too many flashback scenes.  Flashbacks need to be handled carefully so the story doesn’t come across as fragmented.   I don’t want to pepper my novel with flashback scenes of my character at age eight…at sixteen…at twenty-one…at twenty-five…particularly not when a paragraph of tell can take the place of an entire flashback scene’s worth of show.   Unless the flashback scene is necessary to the story,  I want to look for other ways to convey what happened in my character’s past that shaped them into the person they are at the time of the story.

Show, don’t tell is a good maxim for writers who want to develop their characters, draw readers into their world, and allow their readers to draw their own conclusions from their characters’ actions.  But for those of us writers who tend towards the wordy, the overwrought, and the irrelevant, a plot can be tightened up considerably by some judicious usage of tell.