Category Archives: Writing Tools

A discussion of the various software that authors employ to write, plot, backup, and ultimately use to write a novel.

That Moment it went from Hobby to Career

First Drafts Goals Jace Killan Motivation Rewriting Self-Awareness Starting a Career The Writing Life Writing Tools 1 Comment

researchWhen I picked my topic for this month (titled above) I didn’t realize the title of my first Fictorian post this year, “Keeping the Day Job.” The two titles definitely describe where I was and am in my writing and I’m happy to see the progress made this past year due in part to my keeping goals.

I wrote everyday. There might have been a month or two that I didn’t hit 20,000 words, but there were others that I surpassed that. I did not submit something each month, but I submitted 12 pieces for publishing during the year. I finished a novel, my first, The Broken Amulet, and am in the stage of cleaning it up and editing. I went to Phoenix and Salt Lake City Comicons. And I attended David Farland’s writing workshop.

It was there that writing changed for me from a hobby to a career. In that workshop I was able to see how I could actually make money at doing what I enjoy. I’ve started working on a new book. David Farland helped me see how to craft, research, and frame the story and I’m confident that I will have it in the hands of an excited publisher by the end of 2015.

There was a moment in the workshop that I realized that I could be a successful author if I continued to learn and grow and develop as a writer. There wasn’t a month last year that I wasn’t a better writer than the month before.

So I’ve set some new goals and have developed a bit of work ethic. Here are some things that I am doing different now.

  • I set up an author email, jacebkillan@gmail.com that I use to keep all my writing stuff in one place. As I have ideas for short stories or plot twists in my novels I email those to myself with a descriptive subject line so that I can find them later, but I don’t spend too much time thinking on new things and forsaking my current work in progress.
  • I set up an author profile at Wattpad. At some point I will share a short story or two. It seems to be a great tool for aspiring and published writers.
  • I write at least a couple blog posts each month. This gives me a break from my work in progress and allows me to process things on my mind. It also helps in developing a readership.
  • I started outlining my novels. This was a hard thing for me as I’m a prancer or discovery writer, but Farland’s workshop helped me get some direction without losing interest in a story once it’s laid out. Another great tool is Farland’s Million Dollar Outlines.
  • With a good outline, I’m able to research with direction. I’ve spent the last month scouring old books, the internet, and museums for research on my work in progress. The picture above is of my readings this past weekend. In my hobby days of writing I would have taken the lazy, less expensive, less timely road of just making it up. Actually, I wrote a chapter of my current work in progress before Farland’s class.

The scene takes place in Milan, Italy in 1774, where the protagonist is enjoying chicken parmesan after having travelled a great distance from Nice, France. After Farland’s class I learned through research that Milan, Italy didn’t exist in 1774 but belonged to the House of Savoy in a country known as Sardinia. And tomato sauce wasn’t really used in Italian cuisine until later. And Nice wasn’t yet a part of France either, but also belonged to Sardinia and it wasn’t until a few years later during the Napoleonic era that Nice was annexed. So I rewrote the chapter and it no longer reeks of novice.

  • I started using Scrivener to keep track of my research and keep my thoughts and outline organized.
  • Every movie, television show, book that I experience is now analyzed for its story telling features.

To wrap up, my goals for this next year are as follows

  1. Finish my work in progress
  2. Find an agent
  3. Submit at least once to Writers of the Future
  4. Finish editing The Broken Amulet
  5. Outline another novel
  6. Attend two cons
  7. Attend two writing workshops
  8. Register for Superstars in 2016

I’m confident that I will become a published writer and professional author because I continue to improve, I continue to learn, and I continue to write.

 

 

 

Goal Setting and the Metrics of Success and Failure

Goals Motivation Quincy Allen Self-Awareness Starting a Career The Writing Life Writing Tools No Comments

This month on the Fictorians, many of us are following up on posts we made back in January and July. We’ve given a great deal of thought over the past twelve months to setting goals, meeting them, and coping with the inevitable shortcomings and failures that are common with people managing their own destinies.

Like most careers, becoming a self-sustaining writer is not unlike climbing a mountain—but one that has no summit. It’s more a matter of reaching one plateau after another in a line of them that extends to the end of our days.

I use that analogy deliberately because of something I noticed recently on Amazon.com. Amazon—that mega, web-enabled shopping cart of doom—has become a mainstay for traditional, hybrid, and indie-pub authors alike. We ply our wares there, and many of us track the status of our success or lack thereof in a little place called Author Central. If you have books or stories of any kind, regardless of publisher, that are available on Amazon, then I would recommend you go through the exercise of setting up your Author Central Account and tying in all your available works back to that account.

Once you have this mechanism in place, you can track where you sit in the Amazon author rankings. I must add here that it may be a bit daunting at first. To give you an example, my data goes all the way back to September 28th, 2012. My rank started at 386,929. Between then and November 2nd of this year, I saw a low of 629,888 and a high of 35,451. It’s a jagged graph that seems to plot, at least partially, when the novel came out or was revamped in a new edition. It also seems to reflect when the anthologies I was in came out.

Then something happened. On the 2nd of November there was a sharp spike in my ranking. It jumped to 4,500 and then slid back down slightly to hover for the past month around 20k. That is the plateau I was talking about. The beauty of it is that I can track that spike to three separate releases that all occurred at roughly the same time. Essentially, One Horn to Rule Them All, Fantastic Holidays: The Gift of Stories, and The Best of Penny Dread Tales all hit the streets or had media spikes almost simultaneously, and this gave me a bit more “street cred” in Amazon’s ranking algorithms.

I mention this all because while goals are an important aspect of being a writer, tracking metrics on your successes and failures is the first step in truly managing your writing career. We all need to have an understanding of what a success is—beyond just finishing a story or getting it accepted somewhere. There is a bigger end-game that many of us work towards: namely, making our writing career a viable means of self-employment. You can’t steer your course unless you know where you are succeeding and failing. Author Central is just one mechanism to do this. Maybe what you are looking for are positive book reviews, or sales data, or invitations to conventions. The metric you use isn’t nearly as important as having the knowledge of where you are in your career path.

Be aware of these things. Set your goals, implement the tools to track your success, and consider each “failure” as a stepping-stone to the next success. I quote Thomas A. Edison who said, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” While it wouldn’t surprise me that Edison stole that quote from Tesla, the import of what he said is paramount to us. Failures are inevitable. We need to know each one intimately, so continue to have them, and use them as a foothold to the next success. And have a means of knowing when you’ve reached your goals. It’s always more than just finishing a story. In fact, finishing the story is just where the work begins.

Keep writing.

 

Q.

A Crash Course on the Best and Worst Elements of Writing

Ace Jordyn Character Craft & Skills Reading Reviews The Writing Process Writing Tools No Comments

What an enlightening month November has been! If you ever wanted a crash course in what makes writing the best or the worst, this was it.

There is so much to learn about writing craft and storytelling from the masters yet we can learn equally from writing that doesn’t engage us. Deciding on the ‘best’ means we need to understand why we like what we do and what constitutes the best for each of us (Kristin Luna). It also means not disregarding other forms of fiction because the best stories use elements of both literary and commercial fiction and knowing how each works makes us better skilled writers (Susan Forest).

Elements in the best writing includes:
precision of word choice, great imagery and detail plus an author who gets right into his character’s heads (Clancy); a grasp on multi-sensory prose which like a dream, makes the fantastical normal and lifts the reader to a place of wonder (Brenda Sawatsky); cliffhangers and when multiple story lines crash together in a maelstrom of calamity at the end of a book (Evan); well executed diverse fiction that helps the reader understand the world we live in and cultivates respect (Kim May); story matters and being a good storyteller with proper pacing and resolutions is key, but before telling the story, think about how much you can tell us by each word, each sentence, and the beauty you strive for in bringing them together (Colette); it’s not just about the protagonist against the antagonist but about how every character interacts with every other character (Jace Sanders); heroes aren’t heroes all the time. They are just humans with something about them that is extraordinary, and the more flawed a character is, the more human they seem (Leigh Galbreath); the best writing has characters who strive for themselves along with sentences that soar on their own (James Van Pelt); successful prologues convey information without being an info dump and they promise a story/writing style upon which they deliver (Ace Jordyn); a consistent background which functions almost as another character, widening the options for the protagonist’s conflict along with psychological realism where characters behave consistently (Al Onia); the key to the ‘best’ has less to do with perfect prose, and more to do with story impact when what we’re writing matters, emotions rise up, and the reader can feel it (Adria Laycraft).

What constitutes the worst writing includes:
meandering prose that loses the reader and is boring and there’s no beginning, middle or end and no characters to invest in (Clancy); it’s a bad idea to mislead readers about what kind of story you are telling readers for pick up books because they’re hoping for a certain type of experience. (Mary); when writers grab hold of a culture’s cool elements—Samurai swords, martial arts, ninjas—and throw the rest out the window because the history, philosophy, sociology, and traditions are so intertwined and influential on the cool elements that you can’t separate the two and do it justice. (Kim May); it’s not possible to root for a guy who seems like a walking pity party or if the main character lacks any sense of wonder (James Van Pelt); prologues don’t work if they create expectations that the book doesn’t meet either in story content or style, if they’re an info dump or if they are used to foreshadow or tease (Ace Jordyn); when writers betray the promises set in the beginning of the book and shatter the reader’s bond with the story (Frank).

So how can we judge how we each measure up at being the best? We can compare our work to those we admire and like to read or, as Nathan Barra observed, we can learn by comparing our earlier works to our current ones and being motivated by that.

In case you want to follow up on any of the excellent points I’ve summarized, here is a list of November’s blogs. Just click on the title and the link will get you there.

Happy reading and writing!

Lee Child vs the Boring Clancy
Not What I Signed Up For Mary
The Dreamer Brenda Sawatzky
In Loving Appreciation of the Story Swirl Evan Braun
The Emperor and the Impostor Kim May
Kneeling in the Silver Light Mary
The Importance of Word Choice Colette
Learning from the Masters Jace Sanders
A Tale of Two Readers; or, Everybody Wins Kristin Luna
The Not So likeable Hero Leigh Galbreath
Pluck, Pity Parties and Prose – What I Like Best and What Doesn’t Work James Van Pelt
SSWS Writing Scholarship: Should YOU Apply?  Colette
Clive Cussler, Guy Gavriel Kay and DJ McIntosh are Masters at … Ace Jordyn
Writing What I Like to Read Al Onia
Writing Stories that Matter Adria Laycraft
Looking for Progress in a Mirror Nathan Barra
Don’t Break Your Promises Frank
Using the Tools of Both Literary and Commercial Fiction Susan Forest

 

 

 

 

Using the Tools of Both Literary and Commercial Fiction

Craft & Skills Guest Posts The Writing Life Writing Tools 1 Comment

A guest post by Susan Forest.

Have you noticed that readers and writers different genres of fiction can sometimes have very different approaches to story? At times readers and writers of literary fiction, and readers and writers of commercial fiction can seem to exist in very separate worlds, each knowing little about the other. As a writer who approaches my work from a commercial sensibility, I have been wrestling with this dichotomy, and over the past few years have come up with a framework that helps me with this struggle.

Two of my biggest inspirations in this struggle are Nancy Kress and Donald Maass. Nancy points out that work in any genre can be written in a more literary style or a more commercial style–or anywhere in between. For instance, although one tends to think of the genre of science fiction as primarily commercial, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake has a literary sensibility. In his 2012 book, Writing 21st Century Fiction, Donald Maass points out that the most successful books have elements typical of both commercial and literary fiction.

Neither style is better: it is the reader’s expectation that determines whether a book will be successful in its market. If a book is written from a more commercial sensibility, a reader who prefers a literary style may find the book confusing, exhausting and too focussed on external conflicts; If a book is written from a more literary sensibility, and reader who prefers a commercial style may find the book boring and too focussed on internal conflicts. Knowing some of the hallmarks of each style can help a writer to select those techniques that suit his or her purposes.

Commercial fiction, at least in the current market, often is centred on the character’s voice; in literary fiction, there is more room for the author’s voice to be heard. Commercial fiction is often fast-paced: the page-turning novel. Literary fiction may take more time to linger in beautiful imagery, to set place and era, or to develop background.

Commercial stories rely on characters who are active agents: who are impelled to take action to resolve their problems, and who are often sympathetic to the reader–or at least have human qualities that allow the reader to understand him or her, and therefore develop the desire to follow him or her. Literary characters may have more freedom to be reactive to their environments, or to have very complex and not always appealing qualities.

The point of view in a commercial story is frequently either first or third person, limited, with changes of point of view occurring only at scene or chapter breaks; readers of literary fiction are often more tolerant toward the omniscient narrator, and even to “hopping” from head to head within a scene.

Commercial fiction is usually written in scenic form, much like a movie unfolding in real time with scene breaks that indicate jump-shifts in time and/or place. There is more room in literary fiction for narration.

Commercial stories often begin in media res: in the action of the story; whereas, literary stories might take the time to set the scene before launching into the story problem.

Readers of commercial fiction may expect certain conventions to be followed in a story, such as the try/fail cycle. A murder mystery without a murder, a romance without a love story, or a fantasy without magic would be a disappointment. Literary fiction can tolerate more experimental structures that do not rely as heavily on conventions.

On the whole, stories written for a commercial audience typically resolve the conflict at the end: the hero may win or lose, but the resolution of the story’s problem is clear. In literary fiction, resolution may not be the point: an opportunity for the reader to grapple with big questions and allow big ideas to resonate in his or her psyche might be the goal instead. An example is Hemingway’s short story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” Here, a young waiter becomes impatient waiting for an old man to finish his wine and leave, because the waiter wants to go home and make love to his wife. The middle-aged waiter cautions the younger waiter to be patient. Eventually, the old man finishes his wine and leaves; the young waiter goes home and makes love to his wife; and the middle-aged waiter goes to a bar and thinks about life. The end. This ending clearly lacks resolution, but resolution was never the point. As Nancy Kress so eloquently said: the story is about death, and even Hemingway, with his ego, could not resolve, or have the final word, on death. Neither approach–resolution or resonance–is right or wrong, but the author’s choice depends on the reader’s expectations.

Naturally, there is no such thing as a “purely” literary story that has no action, resolution, driven characters, and so on; or a “purely” commercial story that has no internal conflict, authorial voice, unexpected twists, etc. All stories fall somewhere on the continuum between these extremes. Donald Maass would suggest that the best stories use elements of both. Understanding these elements and consciously choosing to include–or not–specific commercial and literary techniques in one’s story is part of the professional writer’s bag of tools.

Susan3Three-time Prix Aurora Award finalist, Susan Forest is a writer of science fiction, fantasy and horror, and a fiction editor for Edge Press. Her stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, OnSPEC Magazine, and The Urban Green Man, among others, and her collection of short fiction, Immunity to Strange Tales. Susan edits for Edge Press, teaches creative writing at the Alexandra Centre, and has appeared at numerous local and international writing conventions. Check her website at: www.speculative-fiction.ca.