The notion of the lonely writer, shrouded in solitary genius, is a myth easily debunked by nearly any writer making money today. In reality, a writer treasures the feedback provided by editors and test audiences, and of course, the all important writer’s group.

While an editor can help professionally, writer’s groups are a great way to get feedback on a work in progress from similarly talented individuals, and naturally, a great place to meet friends with similar interests. Trading favors, reviewing others’ work in exchange for some reviews of your own, is a great symbiotic relationship many writers could not live without. The challenge, however, is finding a group that really works for you, and it is possible to make many missteps along the way.

Finding that perfect group is worth the challenge, but where to begin? The first step is to find some candidates. Fellow group members can be recruited from real life acquaintances, but if you do not know enough interested writers, you could always go online. Sites like Craigslist can be used to find and setup a meeting between interested people in your area, or, if you are not successful there, you could also consider expanding your search and hosting a virtual writer’s group where writing and feedback are exchanged completely online.

Once the candidates are selected, the next important thing to consider is scheduling. Each member of the group will invariably have their own conflicts that will have to be scheduled around, be they work or family commitments. A day and time should be selected that works best for everyone in the group. The next question is a matter of frequency: how often should you meet? It is easy to start off overly ambitious, wanting to meet each week or even several times a week, but this could be a mistake. Meet too often, and you risk burning out and making the group more of a burden on everyone than it needs to be, but this all depends on the determination of all the group members. The rule of thumb here is that everyone needs enough time to read their assignments, be they sample chapters, shorter or longer excerpts, and develop commentary and feedback. I would not recommend meeting more than once a week, and feel that meeting every other week has worked well for several of my writers’ groups in the past. How long will each meeting last? Keeping the group small, especially in the beginning, can help keep the meetings manageable. Remember: you need enough time to address each person’s work, plus a little time to catch up and socialize as your group grows close.

Finding fellow members and a consistent schedule that works for everyone is the hard part. What’s left is to iron out some of the nuances. Where will your group meet? Is someone willing to host the group in their home each time? Perhaps a rotating set of homes? If that is not especially convenient, you could always meet in a coffee shop, or a library if they have a conference type room available for use. Will snacks or drinks be served? Be careful on this point. I belonged to a writer’s group that was essentially BYOB; everyone would bring a bottle of wine, a six pack, what have you, to enjoy during the discussions. It really did sound like a good idea to us at the time, but it made us the complete opposite of productive. By the end of the hours long meeting, we were all pretty tipsy and sloppy with our critiques. Drink with extreme caution!

While it can be a lot of work to find interested members and a consistent schedule that works for everyone, once the group is up and running each member will have an irreplaceable addition to their repertoire: a source of free editing and feedback, and maybe even a new friend of two.

‘Tis But A Scratch!

August 1, 2011

Jason Michelsen

tis but a scratch — Cartoon Credit: Joe Sutliff, after Monty Python and the Holy Grail

As speculative fiction writers, we often find ourselves doing a lot of research. Much of that research goes into worldbuilding, pulling from this or that culture, borrowing this or that religious ritual. Every nation in my own world has roots in more than one ancient culture from our past, just enough familiarity to give the reader a solid frame of reference. And while everyone pretty much knows where to go to do that particular kind of research, I’ve come across a couple books recently that have helped me tremendously with the authenticity of other areas of my writing.

I write Epic/Heroic Fantasy of an adult nature. It’s violent. It’s bloody. People get hurt, injured, maimed, disfigured, etc. Unfortunately – or fortunately, depending on how you look at it – I don’t get to observe people who have been injured on a daily basis. Aside from TV and pictures, I’ve only seen one dead body outside of a funeral home in my entire life, but I want my books to feel real. I want the injuries that occur to feel real, the consequences to feel real.

Recently, a friend of mine gave me a copy of Body Trauma: A Writer’s Guide to Wounds and Injuries by David W. Page, M.D. While the book does spend a good amount of time dealing with injuries caused by modern weapons, much of the information can be applied to ancient warfare. The chapter on abdominal trauma alone is worth the price of the book. I mean seriously, how many people will I run through with swords in my writing career? Probably one or two. There’s a chapter dealing with injuries to just about every body part with special chapters dealing with impalement, amputation, bug bites, frostbite and much much more. It’s a must have for any writer planning on hurting one of his characters.

Another book I’ve turned to on a number of occasions is Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor. I originally bought it as a research book for a huge siege set piece I have planned for a future book, but I’ve used it two other times to come up with devious methods of attack. It has information on everything from ancient flamethrowers to poison gases to incendiary bombs. Nothing pleasant, but all pleasantly helpful to anyone writing violent fiction.

And on a less “violent” note, I thought I’d bring up a book that some might never think to read if they’re interested in writing speculative fiction. Robert McKee is a name widely known in Hollywood, but maybe not so much in the SFF community. He’s a screenwriter of some renown, and his book Story is one that anyone interested in telling stories should read. While it claims to be a book on screenwriting – and was indeed the required text for one of my classes in film school – it is so much more. McKee breaks storytelling down into the most basic elements, providing examples and showing how and why some elements work and others do not. I try to read Story at least once every 2-3 years. Not only is it educational, it is inspirational.

I hope these book recommendations prove helpful to someone out there. If anyone has any other books of this nature that they use regularly, feel free to post them in the comments section. I for one am always looking to expand my research library.

Taking Advice

July 29, 2011

Brandon M Lindsay

Brandon M. Lindsay Craft & Skills Publishing The Writing Life 4 Comments

Everybody has an opinion. Oftentimes, a person’s opinions and ideas about a given subject will contradict those of other people. Writing is no exception.

Take any topic within writing, ask a bunch of writers what they think about it, and the answers you’ll receive will be all over the board. It doesn’t matter if the topic is agents, dialogue tags, or the best hours of the day to write–opinions on such things will vary widely. But does this mean there is no one right answer to the question you’re asking?

At first, it might be easy to think so. After all, what these authors are doing obviously works well for them. But there’s the rub: what they’re doing works well in their situation.

Now, I’m not advocating the position that there are no universal truths in the world or in writing, which I would argue is a philosophically invalid and practically worthless position. What I am advocating is the notion that these universal truths only apply within a given context.

For example, let’s say you’re trying to design a book cover for your Tolkienesque epic fantasy novel. You might think, “Well, book covers that have tramp-stamped female characters on motorcycles holding shotguns are selling like mad. I’ll think I’ll jump on that bandwagon.” Doing so would absolutely ruin your book and everyone who read it would hate it. Why? Because books with that kind of cover only sell well in the context of urban fantasy novels, not epic fantasy novels.

The reason context is so important is because our careers, our writing styles, and our stories, could potentially manifest themselves in a vast number of ways, some of which could be very unlike others who have written in our respective genre. While a particular method for getting published or selling books might have worked for one person, that same method applied by someone with very different personal qualities or writing strengths could crash and burn.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have anything to learn from those who have come before us. It does mean that we have to know ourselves, our situations, and our writing, and that we have to know how to apply the things we’ve learned in a way that benefits us. While our writing and our careers may look nothing like someone like Stephen King’s, there is still much we can learn from him (if you haven’t already, read his book On Writing).

So if I were to give you one piece of writing advice that is universal, it would be this: do what is appropriate for your story, and do what is appropriate for your career.

Gatekeepers: Do We Need Them?

July 27, 2011

Evan Braun

Evan Braun The Writing Life 19 Comments

I recently came across an online discussion between a couple of friends of mine and an established science fiction writer. The conversation lasted several days and became a little heated at times-at least, so it appeared to me. What were they talking about? Okay, seriously, I’ll give you exactly one guess.

You don’t need one, you say? Not surprising, seeing as the publishing world seems entirely preoccupied these days with one subject and one subject only.

Indeed, the discussion revolved around the debate between self-publishing and traditional publishing. Let me state clearly that I am not trying to present a comprehensive argument on that subject through this blog post. I would prefer to focus in on one aspect of this debate, which is gatekeepers, and whether or not we have a need for them.

What do I mean by gatekeepers? Let me explain. In the traditional publishing model, writers send their work to agents and publishers, who in turn evaluate the suitability of said manuscripts and judge whether or not they are viable for publication. This, in essence, is gatekeeping. Not everyone can get their books published, because there is a system in place to filter out the books that are worthwhile from the mountains of books which are not. In the publishing world, this mountain of dreck is known as “slush.”

But all of that seems to be changing, and self-publishers are increasingly of the opinion that gatekeepers of any stripe are obsolete. In the modern world of ebooks, in which the Amazon juggernaut will allow anyone to publish anything, regardless of quality or questions of legality (a post for another day, to be sure), there is no one manning the gate. In this cutthroat world, the burden of literary filtration is more and more being placed on the backs of readers.

This is, of course, both a blessing and a curse. The reading market now has more freedom to choose-and more freedom must be a good thing, no? Some readers are well-suited for this brand of freedom, though I would suggest they are a minority. Instead of going to the bookstore and choosing one of the several dozen titles on the bookrack in front of them, readers now must select from literally thousands of books, and they must be increasingly wary and educated about how they go about this process of selection.

There are great resources available to help readers make informed, wise decisions-again, a blog post for another time. But my question is this: should this responsibility fall to the reader at all, and does the average reader want it?

I, for one, would like someone to man the gate. My opinion is influenced by the fact that I am currently in the middle of filtering my way through a massive slushpile of my own. Part of my job this summer is to go through the ten huge boxes of books piled up in my living room, distilling them into a shortlist of ten viable manuscripts (pictured above). It’s hard work, and doing it right requires weeks of intense labor and concentration.

Do I think the average reader values the notion of having someone take on the slushpile for them? Yes. Yes, I do, though I don’t know what form such gatekeeping may take in the future.

Discuss amongst yourselves.