Borrowing From Mythology
Posted on | January 28, 2012 | No Comments
One of the defining aspects of humanity is that we like telling stories. We tell stories to entertain each other, to teach each other and to scare each other. We’ve been doing it since Thag The Caveman told Zog The Caveman a story about the mystical god of giving Thag all the meat.
Fortunately the stories we told each other to try and explain the world got a little bit more complex than that and gave rise to a truly astonishing variety of stories, myths and legends that weave in and out of human history.
These old tales can add a spin to your story that something that’s been made up out of whole cloth* just won’t have. Not that the things you invent in your own head are necessarily less, but they won’t have the same sense to them that an element of real mythology will have.
For example; have a look at the first of the Repairman Jack novels by F Paul Wilson. Titled The Tomb the protagonist Jack** fetches up against a family of monsters called Rakosh. These are based (loosely) on the Rakshasa of Hindu folklore. Wilson could easily have called the monstrous flesh eaters something else, however by rooting them in existing mythology it provided a reference point for the magic in the books.
You by no means have to borrow from mythology, and it’s probably not appropriate for your legally accurate courtroom drama (although I personally would love to see a courtroom drama with slavering monstrosities), but if you do need a god or a monster then you can do far worse than looking to humanity’s collective myths for inspiration.
I say inspiration because as much as you’re looking to add the myths to your story, most of them will be improved (at least in regards to your particular story) by you altering them slightly to fit in with the way your narrative works.
Regardless of what you take from mythology and how you alter it for your own purposes, it will benefit you to do the research and have a good understanding of what it is you’re borrowing from. That way if you make a major change, you can at the very least hang a lampshade on it.
Tell me, do you take from mythology in your writing? If so what do you look for?
* One! One cliché! Muhahaha!
** Jack. Just Jack.
Do You Need An Agent in 2012?
Posted on | January 26, 2012 | 3 Comments
This is becoming a tough question to answer. If Doctor Who showed up in the TARDIS and whisked you and I back even three years I’d have said yes, you absolutely need an agent if you want a career as a writer. These days there are definite ways to make it without one.
Perhaps a better question would be “do I want an agent?” because with the rise of self publishing as a viable method of making a living it’s now coming down to personal choice as to whether a new writer goes for legacy publishing or self publishing. If you still want in to legacy publishing you will almost certainly need an agent to help you get there.
Literary agents get a bad rap from some people in the industry, especially those heavily invested in self publishing, but there is a lot an agent can do for you and I don’t think it’s wise to ignore the idea of getting an agent without knowing what they can do for you. They do charge a commission of 15%* and this commission based payment ensures an agent will always be working to get the best deal for you.
Obviously if you want to see your book printed by the big six publishers an agent is going to be invaluable in getting an editors attention and helping you navigate the contract processes and negotiations.
However that’s not all a literary agent can do for you. Every agent (at least, every good agent) will have a series of contacts in the industry that they can use to your advantage. You may need a specialist to help you with foreign sales of your work and chances are your agent will know one.
An agent can also act as a career coach, and help you with the decision making process when it comes to planning your next career move. An agent will probably tell you your planned 700 page epic about navel lint is a project best left to later in your career.
They will also keep an eye on what trends are developing in the things editors are looking for and may be able to help guide a project as you’re writing it.
If you’re self published an agent may be in your future despite what you might think at first. Let’s say your self published novel does really well and sells several thousand copies (I’ve heard the number was 2000 copies but that may well be higher now) you may want to approach a publisher to see if they’d like to take you on now that you have a proven sales record. An agent can help you negotiate the best possible deal for you, and statistically speaking deals negotiated by agents more than cover the amount paid to the agent.
Also, as above, if a foreign publisher decides they like the look of your self published book and asks to publish a local copy, you’d be foolish to try and negotiate a deal involving foreign law and publishers without the help of an expert. It’s up to you if that expert is an agent or a lawyer, but agents who specialise in foreign sales will have significantly more contacts in the local industry.
Do you have to have an agent? No, there is good money to be made going it alone. That said there is a lot an agent can do for you no matter which path you decide to follow so I would recommend keeping them in mind no matter how you tackle your career.
* You should never have to pay an agent up front. Agents work on commission only, if they ask for your money up front they’re not an agent you should be dealing with.
10 Hand to Hand Combat Myths That Writers Need To Stop Using
Posted on | January 25, 2012 | 1 Comment
I like writing about fighting, it’s one of the few things I know a bit about. The one downside of knowing a bit about fighting is that when a writer who doesn’t tries to sound knowledgeable but doesn’t do their research the mistakes really stand out in the fight scenes.
Here are ten of the most common myths I’ve seen used by writers in fight scenes:
1. You Can’t Kill Someone by Shoving Their Nose Back Into Their Brain
This one’s been around for a long, long time. Since Imperial China in fact. The idea is simple enough: a powerful blow with the heel of the hand to the base of the nose drives a splinter of bone into the brain of the victim…and they die.
Except that they don’t. You might break the cartilage in their nose, and it certainly hurts (I’ve broken my nose so many times I can just crunch it back into place*) but you can’t shove a bone back into someone’s brain because there are no bones there.
Yes, I know it happened in The Last Boy Scout. That movie is full of lies.
It is possible (theoretically) to kill someone by striking just above the bridge of the nose, but the amount of force required is astronomical. You could have a super powered character killing this way, but even for them it would be far easier to just break someone’s neck. For a normal person to manage it without a sledgehammer is unlikely at best.
The other reason this is so unlikely is that people just don’t hold still in a brawl, the precision required for this sort of blow is beyond anyone except professional fighters and true martial arts masters.
2. Getting Knocked Out Is No Big Deal
We get this in fiction a lot. Batman spends so much time unconscious you have to wonder if he just likes taking naps on the job.
Sadly the reality is that being knocked out, whether by a blow to the head or being drugged can easily kill you. In fact it’s far easier to accidentally kill someone while trying to knock them out than it is to keep them reliably unconscious for more than a minute or so.
Secondly, concussions are cumulative. Have a look at boxers as they age. The ones whose style involves getting smacked in the head a lot often develop degenerative brain conditions such as Parkinson’s Disease and Pugilistic Dementia. Our brains are sensitive instruments and they only shut down when they have absolutely no other choice.
I’ve been knocked cold twice. Each time when I came to I immediately felt intensely ill and it took me several minutes before I even knew where I was. If it had happened in a street fight I would not have been leaping to the attack at that point unless you count vomiting on someone’s shoes.
3. Pressure Points Work In Real Fights
Nope. Sorry but this just isn’t true. Yes there are pain compliance points on the body that can cause you a lot of grief if someone puts pressure on them. The problem is that you have to hold very still in order for these to be effective.
The second problem is adrenaline. If you try a pressure point attack on someone in a fight, they might not even feel it because the adrenaline will dull any pain they should be feeling. Adrenaline will also affect you ability to apply anything that requires fine motor movement as that part of your brain that handles fine motor movement goes into shutdown the moment you get scared or excited.
There are however structural weak points on the body, and attacks on these do work in real fights. A hard punch to the point of the jaw will knock most people out. A kick to the liver hurts so much it will incapacitate the receiver for several minutes (if you don’t believe me find a local Thai boxing gym and take a kick to the liver from one their fighters). Joint locks like kneebars, kimuras** and choke holds all attack parts of the body with structural weaknesses. These really do work but take some skill to apply.
4. A Kick To The Groin is Game Over
While a hard blow to the groin does tend to end fights if it lands cleanly, it’s not the combative panacea it’s made to be. First of all, most people really do not want to be kicked in the groin and they will go to quite extreme measures to protect that area of themselves.
Secondly even after a very hard shot, most men get between three and five seconds before the pain sets in so badly they’re incapacitated. Pretty much every athlete that plays contact sports will know this and can keep working until the pain sets in. Guys who don’t know about the three seconds they have often go down the moment they get hit because even the initial pain is frightening.
There are also some guys who for whatever reason are predicting they are going to take a shot to the groin at some point, and they buy a groin guard. Great if they’re a good person doing good things, not so great if they’re bad guys who’ve thought ahead.
5. A Kick To The Groin Is Just Painful
Actually a hard kick in the nuts can seriously injure a full grown man. It’s played for humour in fiction but what’s almost never shown is just how bad a groin shot can be.
While it’s true that a kick to the groin isn’t necessarily the end of the fight (see above) if a man does take a kick from a strong, trained opponent then the sheer shock of the pain caused is enough to send that man into shock. While it’s rarely fatal it can cause the testicles rupture, at which point they have to be removed.
If your characters get struck in the groin, make sure there are consequences. It can’t just be shrugged off in a few moments, if it’s a hard hit it will be some time before they can do anything except pray for death.
6. Grappling Beats Everything
Er…this one’s harder. It’s not true but there’s an element of truth to the idea that grappling trumps all other fighting styles. It comes partly from the first UFC competitions where a slight Brazilian man name Royce Gracie ran rough shod over his much larger opponents using his families grappling art Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
As a grappler (mostly) I can say that if you’re an experienced grappler fighting someone who doesn’t know how to fight on the ground, or stop you from taking them to the down, then it’s going to be very hard for them to beat you even if they’re larger than you.
However, this assumes that they’re unarmed, alone and don’t know enough stand up grappling (wrestling, judo etc) to keep the fight standing so they can knock you out. It also assumes you’re standing on a surface that’s safe to roll around on.
In my experience grappling is awesome, and a lot of fun, but it needs to be supplemented with other styles.
7. Grappling Is Useless In Real Fights
Despite what I’ve said above, don’t discount grappling as an option for your characters.
The myth says that a good street fighter will either knock a grappler out before the grappler can take them down or use dirty tricks to hurt the grappler before they can be choked unconscious or have a bone broken.
I can say from my own personal experiences that this just isn’t true. Before I studied grappling I tried my hand against a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu fighter who consistently beat me to the punch (and kick) before I could hit him. I was hardly a hard hitter at that point but I was very quick and I still couldn’t hit him before he took me down.
Once I was on the ground I never had a chance to use any dirty tricks because he held me in positions that gave me no chance at all to fight back. If I’d tried to eye gouge or bite him I would have been handing him my arms or throat to attack before I could have hurt him. Plus of course there would have been no reason he couldn’t have gouged me back if he’d wanted to.
8. You Can Punch People In The Head With Impunity
If your hero punches an opponent in the head without either some from of hand protection or a serious amount of training and conditioning, then chances are they’ll break their hand.
Your hand is full of small bones and the human skull is basically one huge bone (more so for some than others). Punches generate a lot of force if thrown correctly and if you hit one of the harder parts of the head (like the forehead) it’s easy to fracture those little bones. In fact it’s so common it’s known as a boxer’s or brawler’s fracture.
If you hit someone in the mouth then you easily get a bit of tooth lodged in your hand. This not only hurts (trust me) it can get infected really easily because human mouths are basically nightclubs for various kinds of disgusting bacterium.
This can add some nice detail to the aftermath of your fight scenes and even if you ignore the injuries you can at least add realism by hanging a lampshade on it.
9. Complex, Esoteric Martial Arts Are Better
All things told one of the best martial arts out there is boxing. Boxers are fit, conditioned to fight, used to getting punched and hit harder than you would believe possible.
I’ve done a lot of different martial arts over the last twenty years (God I feel old) and I can say that the only ones that have helped out at all when I’ve been fighting have been boxing, Muay Thai (Thai Boxing) and the BJJ/wrestling hybrid I’ve been taught.
Everything else failed me when it counted and I took a beating.
It’s not true for everyone; there will be Kung fu masters who are badass and masters of even more esoteric styles that can really fight…but there also plenty of football players that can really fight despite never being taught how to throw a punch.
Simple, repetitive moves are easy to remember even when you’re under stress. That punch you’ve thrown forty thousand times in training will be the one that comes out when you get mugged.
10. Martial Arts Guarantee A Win
I wish this was true but it just isn’t. All martial arts can do is improve your odds of defeating someone you didn’t have a chance against before. A bigger person can still knock you out with one hefty punch. Someone who’s armed can cut you to ribbons or shoot you dead before you can fire a kick off.
Even if you’re better than they are, anyone can be surprised. I’ve been punched in the back of the head by people I never even knew were standing there.
If you need to humble your hero this can be used to great effect in your story. Have them surprised by a weaker opponent, or simply overwhelm them with numbers. No one martial art can guarantee you’ll come away from a confrontation unscathed.
Not even the ones made by Smith and Wesson.
You Tell Me
What martial myths have you seen? Do you disagree with me on any of these (history would suggest I’m wrong about at least one of them)? Let me know in the comments.
* Sadly a lot of my broken noses have been user failure rather than enemy action. I’m amazed I can keep breathing without injuring myself.
** A kind of bent arm shoulder lock
Twelve People You Should Be Following on Twitter
Posted on | January 24, 2012 | No Comments
Hi everyone, I’m absolutely crazy busy today sorting out wedding stuff and (theoretically) writing. So instead of telling you my completely unfounded theories on writing, I thought I’d tell you who I look up to in the writing world and how to find them on Twitter. This is by no means a complete list and I’m sure I’ve left off people who should be on here. If that person is you, my apologies.
If you’d like to find me on Twitter I’m @ajackwriting. Yes, that’s a sonic screwdriver.
@elizabethscraig Elizabeth tweets writing links all day every day, grabbing the best advice articles from around the web and sharing them. If you follow her stream I guarantee you’ll learn something useful.
@chuckwendig Chuck Wendig is some kind of beard powered force of nature. I’ve already pimped his website www.terribleminds.com and his many, many books on writing. It’s also worth following Chuck on Twitter if only for the fact that he’s a really funny dude and his tweets are entertaining.
@fantasyfaction If you write genre fiction you can’t go past Fantasy Faction either as a website or a Twitter stream. Useful advice, top notch reviews and interesting links. Well worth a follow.
@mightymur Mur Lafferty, creator of I Should Be Writing and possibly the saviour of the universe, or at least the destroyer of Matt Wallace which amounts to more or less the same thing. Speaking of which…
@mattfnwallace Matt’s tweet stream is practically an Eldritch Abomination in and of itself. If swearing, violence or pure unbiased hatred of all life bothers you then this might not be the stream for you…on the other hand if you can cope with all that then Matt is an entertaining tweeter.
@scalzi John Scalzi, author, president of SFWA and human blog hybrid. Tweets useful advice, links to important blogs and updates.
@lilithsaintcrow Lilith Saintcrow is both absolutely hilarious and an excellent writer. She tweets pretty much constantly and it’s all good stuff.
@sfwa Science Fiction Writers Of America links, warning and news pertinent to genre writers.
@howardtayler Creator/cartoonist of Schlock Mercenary and one of the best writers anywhere for anything (although I doubt he’d believe me if I told him that). Living proof that excellent storytelling isn’t confined to novel format.
@cstross Charles Stross author of The Laundry series of supernatural thrillers (and lots of sci fi). Follow him for the same reason I do. He has a ridiculously enormou9s brain and you hope to absorb some of his intelligence through osmosis.
@rsullivan9597 Robin Sullivan heads up Ridan Publishing and has great advice coming out of her ears. In the same mention I also recommend following Michael J Sullivan at @author_sullivan
@kristadb1 Prolific writer of doom and dispenser of both excellent advice and excellent snark.
@Julie_Butcher because she’s awesome. That is all.
@skyladawn Skyla Dawn Cameron Author, blogger and acquiring editor. Also the person who can help stop you from making a complete dick of yourself if you follow her advice.
@dinajames Author of the superb All Wounds (as original a take on Urban Fantasy I’ve seen in a long time) and general dispenser of evil. Knows a lot about guns and helps me out by telling me things about weaponry I have no idea about.
Who would you recommend I follow on Twitter? Who do you keep in your Twitter feed (as opposed to your basement)?
Let me know in the comments
Andrew Update 2012
Posted on | January 23, 2012 | No Comments
As some of you know I had a bit of crapsack 2011…but I have to say that 2012 has started off extremely well.
I am yet to be eaten by a bear. Some consider this inevitable and I am glad to have been able to prove them wrong again. That said, no promises for February.
Frankly, I understand if you want to side with the bear on this one.
Writing is going reasonably well, I’m completely re-cutting and redrafting my novel Unquiet Nights to deal with its pacing issues. They weren’t bad, but they did slow things down in critical places. I hope (and I have hoped in vain before) that I’ll be finished by March, but we’ll see.
I plan on entering the Fantasy Faction short story contest and I think you should too. It’s got very favorable terms and there’s no entry charge. However, and this is perhaps the most important thing, you get to keep the rights to your story.
That is awesome.
I’m trying to blog every weekday. While I don’t want to promise I will always be able to do that, it’s been good for me to put my thoughts on writing down each day. The site is getting correspondingly more hits and I’m glad to be talking to so many people.
On the health front I’ve lost twelve kilos since November and I intend to keep going. It’s nice to feel like myself again.
By the way, I’m getting married in two weeks! That’s right on February 4th my long-suffering fiancée and I are getting hitched. She’s been an incredible supporter of my writing and she’s been an invaluable editor of my stuff. That I can even write a coherent sentence is often down to her.
Things are good.
Is Now The Best Time Ever To Be A Writer?
Posted on | January 20, 2012 | No Comments
Depending on who you ask, we’re either living in a writerly utopia where we dance hand in hand with Amazon over fields sown with royalty cheques or we’re witnessing the end of publishing and fleeing Amazon as it realises its destiny as an eldritch abomination that wants all the good books to be sold for seven cents.
I can’t tell you what the real answer is; I can only give you my perspective. That won’t stop me from talking about it like it’s the truth from here on out of course…
Now is a great time to be a writer, maybe it really is the best time to be a writer…as long as you can hustle.
Now, more than ever, writers have a better chance to control their futures thanks to the internet. This applies to traditionally published writers just as much as it does to self published authors. Even five years ago, all writers were dependant on the publishing system for success.
You needed to have a marketing team on your side to get word of your book out into the world and if for any reason you didn’t have that kind of powerhouse behind you then your chances of success dropped dramatically. A great book could still shine, but it was markedly harder.
These days though, success is far more dependant on the author’s efforts than the publishers. Again a great book can win out no matter what, and authors heavily backed by invested publishers will still do well…but for the starting author the playing field is more level than it’s ever been.
The level field is partly due to self publishing itself, partly due to the marketing power of the net and partly down to the fading stigma of self publishing.
It used to be that self publishing a book was an admission of failure on par with wearing a barrel to your bankruptcy hearing. These days it’s a valid way into serious sales numbers and even publishing contracts with major publishers.
There is a downside to all this:
It’s now totally up to you, and that means you either have to learn how to do everything or pay people who already know what they’re doing. Whether you pay up front or you end up signing a contract and you end up paying for it via a publisher doesn’t really matter.
You still have to write a book that stands head and shoulders above everyone else’s and there is still an element of luck that’s part of publishing no matter how you do it.
The way I see it though, if the only downside to the new world of publishing is that my success is now even more tied to the amount of work I put in then I say now is a great time to be a writer.
Is it the best time ever? I don’t know. Maybe next year will be the best ever, but 2012 is the best I’ve ever seen.
What do you think?
Are we living the dream as authors or is this the kindlepocalypse?
5 Ways Bad Reviews Can Help You
Posted on | January 19, 2012 | 3 Comments
If you’ve ever had your work out in the public domain, you’ve almost certainly garnered yourself a bad review or two. These can range from professional reviews that question valid problems with your work to ranting, frothing diatribes that question everything from your parentage to your humanity.
And it sucks. A bad review can make you feel like hiding in a corner and never writing anything but awkward poetry about marmosets that you won’t show anyone just in case they review it.
Maybe that’s just me.
However a bad review, no matter how painful, can actually help you far more than it hurts you. The next time you get a one or two star review, bear these points in mind:
1. Perfect scores generate suspicion
If I see a book with five perfect glowing reviews on Amazon, I do wonder if those five reviews have come from the authors five closest friends. Now, to be fair, this is going to happen if it’s your first work. People that love you want to give you good reviews and they’ll tend to give you five stars whether you deserve it or not for fear of hurting your feelings.
However a single negative review shows that someone you didn’t know has gotten a hold of your work, and even if they didn’t like it, it affected them enough to leave feedback.
When you first start out, quantity of reviews matters far more than quality (within the boundaries of reason). Having fifty 3 star reviews will benefit you far more than having three five star reviews.
2. They can make a valid point
Those friends that left you the five star reviews may well be being perfectly honest; maybe you really did deserve five stars (it could happen), however they may also be being influenced by how they feel about you and that’s making your story seem better than it is.
A bad review from a stranger can shed light on your story that no amount of well meaning reviews from friends can. If you can separate yourself from the sting of criticism, there may well be some very good advice about the way that you write that can carry over into whatever you write next.
3. It let’s you know your work is getting read
As Mur Lafferty once said: “Anyone can get five star reviews, but once someone hates you, you know you’ve made it.”
It can be hard to tell who is picking up your work, and why, but if you get a terrible review you know that your book has gotten the attention of someone outside your immediate social circle…even though they didn’t like it that much.
4. It can help you toughen up
No matter how vitriolic the review, no matter how unlikely it is that the reviewer has actually read your work, I can guarantee that worse is coming. The more popular your stuff becomes the more likely it is to attract a breed of reviewer that lives to give one star reviews.
These particular beasts don’t actually seem to read a lot, and you can spot them on Amazon and Goodreads by the fact that all of there five hundred plus reviews are one star and full of hate. You don’t have to pay too much attention to these ones.
But there is worse coming, as I said, and getting these nasty little reviews will help prepare you for the rare review where you’ve offended someone so much they threaten you.
These threats are almost always meaningless (if someone bothers to email you, or indicates they know where you are then it’s more serious and time to call the police) but it still hurts to know that your lovingly crafted story makes someone want to punch you in the reproductive organs.
5. It means your cover is working
Assuming that the person doing the review has actually read your book, then they bought it on the strength of your idea and your cover art. This is an amazingly positive sign, as a bad review can just mean that the book didn’t suit the reviewer, however the concept and the cover art was enough to get them to try it out in the first place.
One caveat…
If you are getting ONLY bad reviews, then something is wrong and it might be time to pull your book (assuming you self published. If you’re traditionally published and you get only bad reviews you have my sympathy) and see if what’s angering your reviewers is something that can be fixed.
There is a tale about the three horses and a donkey. I don’t know where this one came from so if anyone would like to let me know in the comments I’d be grateful.
The story says that if you purchase a horse and on the way home someone tells you that you actually bought a donkey, you can ignore them.
If, on the way home, two people stop you and tell you that you have indeed somehow purchased a donkey then you should probably check the horse and listen for suspicious braying noises.
If a third person says you bought a donkey, you bought a donkey.
So, applying that to writing, if you end up with three reviews criticising one particular aspect of your story, then at the very least it’s worth checking to see if those reviewers are right.
12 Basic Writing Mistakes I’ve Made and How To Avoid Them
Posted on | January 18, 2012 | 2 Comments
1. Trying to write two books at once
This pretty much never works. Very rarely you will hear about a professional author writing two books at once, but in my experience what they’re actually doing is writing one book while editing the other.
A big part of why this is a problem is that it seems to work, at least at first, especially if you’re good at story planning. However it always ends up going pear shaped because the human mind gets details wrong. Small bits of each book will creep into the other and it can become very hard to catch the problem until it’s irreversible.
It’s also just plain hard. Writing even one book is a task that can consume your life, and especially if you’re new, you need to be concentrating on making sure your first book sucks to the smallest degree possible.
You can very easily burn yourself out trying this, I certainly did and ended up not writing for two months. Learn from my stupid. Learn from it!
2. Trying to be totally original
This is a noble goal but the chances of you pulling it off without churning out an unreadable pile of dung is pretty much nil. There are reason certain story structures, tropes and characters recur in fiction; they work.
A second thing to bear in mind is that even the most out there ideas have been tried at one point or another, sometimes it goes well, sometimes it doesn’t but if you really think that no one’s tried an unlikable protagonist before then I have bad news for you.
What you can do is take a new spin on an old story. Rather than writing something purely for the sake of making it different, write it because it fits the story and your own unique way of telling it. A good example is the Dresden Files novels by Jim Butcher. The Dresden books are almost an encyclopaedia of tropes, references and allusions. What makes them work is Butcher’s story telling and the original way he’s telling stories that have been around for years.
3. Trying to write to the market
Yeah I tried to write a sexy vampire story. This is not my bailiwick and it was awful. The reason it was so bad is not because sexy vampire stories inherently suck (there are some genuinely good ones) but because I tried to write it because it was popular and not because it was the story I wanted to tell.
I keep a copy to remind myself of how badly this can go wrong.
That’s not to say you can’t write something that’s currently super popular. If you want to write a sexy vampire novel then that’s what you should write. Where you run into difficulty is in forcing yourself to write something you have no emotional investment in.
As with everything, there are exceptions to this but they’re normally provided by professional writers with a faster time to market than beginners. Pro writers can take better advantage of the reading market’s passing fancies but even then no matter how callous they claim to be I suspect that these writers still enjoyed what they wrote even if it wasn’t their normal fare.
4. Not planning
I’m not saying you have to write an outline (hint: write an outline) but not planning your writing in some way, even if it’s just setting aside time to write, is a recipe for disaster.
You also need to plan how you’re going produce, distribute and market your work. You need to know how all of this works before you need to use it or it’s going to be a very steep learning curve when your book is done.
5. All planning and no writing
Yeah, this again. You can spend your life developing the perfect book marketing plan and never write a word of your novel.
If you don’t write your book it will never sell. If you don’t write, you aren’t a writer.
It’s harsh, but it’s true.
6. Not checking Writer Beware/Preditors and Editors
This is a mistake I only made once, and I managed to catch myself before anything really bad happened, but it was a close enough call that it’s ingrained this lesson into my brain.
If someone, anyone approaches with an offer or a request for your writing these two sites should be your first port of call. Most scams you will spot a mile away, but there are a few around that are extremely sophisticated and can easily suck you in if you don’t check on them.
The sites you need are: Writer Beware run by SFWA and Preditors and Editors. Check them if you have any doubts about anyone or anything you are dealing with in relation to your writing.
The law of the universe now states that I will fall victim to a writing scam that ends with me selling both my kidneys to a street vendor in Venezuela.
7. Getting into arguments online
Fortunately the fights I’ve had online have had nothing to do with writing, but in the end like all online arguments they were fruitless, pointless and just wasted time I should have been writing.
Just remember this XKCD comic every time you’re tempted.
8. Thinking I knew everything
This is just embarrassing but when I first started writing I thought I knew enough that I didn’t have anything more to learn and I could just go for it on any idea I came up with.
Yes, I was complete tool.
I may still be, but at least I’m open minded enough to know I know very little. Most of what I know has come from learning from my mistakes, and the rest of what I know has come from listening to people smarter than me.
Who you need to listen to is going to vary depending on who you are and what you write but I think you can’t go wrong with starting out listening to these three groups:
Mur Lafferty at I Should Be Writing. You should listen to Mur because she is smart, funny, an excellent writer and one of the few people prepared to tackle the emotional side of being a writer.
Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowhal and Howard Taylor at Writing Excuses. Four of the most entertaining writers in the world (for my money anyway) talk about everything from character development to world building to making sure you bathe before conventions. Always smart, always useful and always awesome.
Robin Sullivan of Ridan Publishing. There’s a reason Ridan gets a free ad on this site and will do for the foreseeable future and that reason is that over the course of two interviews* Robin taught me more about the way self publishing, indie publishing and traditional publishing works. Her blog is an absolute must for anyone getting into writing fiction.
Start with these three and it will be hard to go wrong. Not impossible, I’m living evidence that no advice is idiot proof, but I guarantee their advice is excellent.
9. Thinking I Could Do Everything Myself
Theoretically you can do almost everything yourself, but there is one glaring exception. You must, must get someone else to edit your work. I’m not talking about grammar and spelling (although it’s not a bad plan to get that checked too), I’m talking about getting someone who knows their onions to check over the story itself.
I recommend hiring a professional editor to do this, even though it costs, partly because they will be better at it than almost anyone who will do it for free and because they can tell you straight up if something’s not working without caring if your feelings are hurt.
Friends and beta readers will try but it’s very hard to tell someone that their story needs a total re write without hurting them.
10. Not Reading Out Loud When I’m Editing
Want to save yourself a ton of grief? Read your work out loud when you’re doing an edit. You will catch so, so much more in the way of odd phrasing and bad dialogue if you do it that way.
Scenes that seemed so perfect in your head will reveal their problems to you when your ears actually hear what you’ve written.
I think the reason this works is that it forces you to read what you have actually written instead of what you think you’ve written. We all read in chunks of words, and our brains have a bad habit of filling in gaps to make things sound better than they actually are.
11. Editing As I Go
I still do this; in fact I’m so bad at it that all I can say is “Go! Save yourselves!” and encourage you to leave me to die in a pile of premature edits.
Changing things as you go means it will be very hard for you to finish anything. Yes some people can do it, but I’m not one of them and I’m willing to bet you aren’t either. The people who can do it are full time authors who can afford to pull things to bits constantly and then rebuild as they write.
It’s very hard to know the shape of your story until it’s actually done. I know it’s a pain to know that a small change you’ll make at the start will necessitate changing things later in the book, but far better that than you never finish at all.
12. Leaping Into Things Too Quickly
A friend of mine asked me about my current book the other day and she asked if I was going to send it to a professional editor.
The answer was yes, but not yet.
The reason is that it’s just not that good yet. I could send it to the editor, pay several hundred dollars (that’s a minimum) and learn a great deal, but I’m not going to get the most out of my money and their time unless the book is as good as it can be first.
These days, especially with self publishing, it’s so easy to be impatient. To be afraid that if you’re not putting out a book a month you’re going to fall behind all the other authors who are churning out page turners seemingly every seventeen minutes.
As much as we all want to be successful right now so we can hurry up and order our Ferrari you will be far better served by waiting a little and putting out something of high quality.
More and more book reviewers are going to be the arbiters of quality when it comes to books both self published and traditionally published. It will pay for your book to stand head and shoulders above the rest when it comes time for the book bloggers to see your work.
* You can see them here and here.
12 Twitter Tips for Writers
Posted on | January 17, 2012 | 4 Comments
Twitter is one of those good idea/bad idea things. On the one hand it’s an amazingly powerful tool for setting up a platform and communicating with your readers. On the other it’s a time sink equal to any other on the internet and it’s quite possible to spend a day doing almost nothing but tweet.
Twitter has worked for me, moreso than anything else I’ve tried it’s allowed me to reach an audience far outside of what I normally would have been able to reach.
I can’t recommend Twitter enough, but if you’re new to twitter, there are some rules to keep it from becoming more of a liability than a boon.
1. Tweet. Interact.
Twitter isn’t much use if you just lurk around in the background, reading tweets as they fly by. It’s fun, don’t get me wrong, but for Twitter to positively impact your writing career you need to get involved. It’s also a lot more fun to actually be having conversations with the myriad of people you can find on Twitter.
It’s that personal interaction with people that is going to make twitter worthwhile. It doesn’t matter what the ineraction is as long as it’s friendly. Talk. Participate. I’s worh it, I promise.
2. Don’t just tweet about your products
It’s tempting to relentlessly pimp your stuff, I know. Believe me I know. Especially where there is a direct correlation between your fiction sales and your ability to eat that month.
But on Twitter you just can’t do it. There is no faster way to get ignored or even blocked than to do nothing but tweet “BUY MY CRAP” over and over again.
You actually need to make a connection with other people in order to get them to pay any attention to you when it comes to sale time. A number I’ve heard is that you can afford to make somewhere between and 1 and 3% of your Tweets self promotion. If you can, err to the lower end of that scale.
3. Positive balance man
A very easy mistake to make is to follow thousands of people in order to build up your Twitter following. This sort of works because most people and especially companies, will follow you back. You can build a twenty thousand person following in a week or two just by following everyone Twitter recommends to you.
And it will be both meaningless and next to useless.
Something everyone, consciously or not, look at when they are deciding to see if you are worth interacting with is your twitter balance. In short this means the balance between the number of people you follow vs the number of people who follow you.
If you look at my twitter account @ajackwriting you will see that I follow 561 people, and that roughly 731 people follow me. I’m in positive balance because the number of people following number is higher than the number of people I’m following.
This is so important, because being in negative balance will warn everyone that the only reason you’re on Twitter is to market your stuff and that you don’t really care about interacting with other Twitter users.
4. Fewer ham sandwiches
Blame my Uncle for the title. It was his way of referring to the very human habit of jumping on Twitter to tell the world about your latest ham sandwich.
I’m not saying you can’t say silly things on Twitter, hell that’s half of my day sometimes, but you do need to think of the way it looks to people who are following you. If the only thing followers ever see from you is tweets describing your boil in excruciating detail you might find yourself with far fewer followers than you’d hoped*.
You need to tweet about interesting things, share other peoples links and generally try to be as interesting as possible.
5. #hashtags
If you’re new to Twitter then you may be wondering what the strange people are doing putting what seem like random words at the end of their tweets with hashtags (#) at the start.
A hashtag is a way to get a tweet out into a kind of Twitter community group. These groups spring up all the time, and they’re a great way to get your work out there. If you are talking about writing, whether you want to brag about writing two thousand words in an hour or you’re posting a link to a great writing article you found online** it ensures anyone keeping an eye on that hashtag will see it.
Personally I’ve found the best hashtags to follow are #amwriting and #pubwrite. You can learn a lot just by clicking the links that come through.
6. Don’t forget you have a book to write
This advice is for me as much as it’s for anyone else. It’s so easy to just stay on Twitter, reading links and talking to other authors and feel like you’re writing. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to build a plat form on Twitter but in the end, if you don’t write a book (or a story, or whatever sort of fiction or non fiction you write) you’re ultimately wasting time.
7. One liners
This hasgtag gets a special mention: #wiplines. For some reason once I started posting on liners from whatever I happened to working on my number of followers and their interaction with me skyrocketed.
If you’re going to put some of your one liners onto Twitter, bear in mind that they have to be one of three things (assuming you write genre fiction): sexy, funny or creepy.
Personally I get better responses from the funny lines than I do from anything else. Some people have success just posting what amounts to the most awesome/action packed/sexy one liners they can manage, but for me you can’t go past making people laugh.
Possibly they are laughing at me rather than with me.
Tempting as it is, try not to give away plot details in your one liners. Instead go for the feel of your novel and try to get across why it would be fun for people to read.
8. You are your brand
While some get away with being utterly impersonal on Twitter they tend to be those who are offering things other than themselves as a brand. When you’re an author, you are your own brand, which means that the people who interact with you want to know about who you are and what you think.
Yes you need to maintain an air of professionalism, and no matter how tempting it’s never a good plan to cut loose with abuse on someone else, however you also need to give your followers a sense of who you are and what you’re about.
If you love steampunk…talk about it. Post up pictures of awesome steampunk stuff you’ve come across online or in real life.
Try to stay away from political or religious arguments if you can, simply because you will never, ever convince anyone online that your point of view is correct and you can make enemies needlessly.
If you want to debate about sports…or really anything else then go for it, just make sure you remain polite and logical even in the face of John Gabriel’s GIF Theory (sort of NSFW).
9. Networking
I’ve had a bit of a rant in the past about networking. The short version of it is this: make friends rather than contacts. If you set out just to network for your own selfish reasons you will get exactly nowhere. There are just too many social media douchebags*** out there already doing the same thing.
Instead, do favours for people and have no expectation of being repaid. Help promote books that you love and writers you respect. Sometimes people will return the favour, sometimes they won’t, either way keep doing nice things for people and eventually people will do nice things for you.
10. Never respond to critiques on Twitter
If someone bashes your book on Twitter, just stay quiet. It doesn’t matter how awful he review, how monstrous the reviewer or how great the book you don’t get to respond.
By barking back on Twitter you will do yourself ten times the damage a bad review can. Not responding to bad reviews (or any review for that matter) is good advice for any platform, but it goes double for Twitter.
One stroppy tweet from you can blacken your name around the world faster than you can imagine.
If you find yourself about to attack a reviewer on twitter, contact someone you love and have them punch you until you no longer feel the urge.
11. Tweets never die
As above, things you say on Twitter theoretically last forever. A tweet expressing your hatred for pants you made two years ago can come back and haunt your current pro pants campaign.
Don’t feel like you have to sensor yourself too much, but bear in mind how you’d like to appear to the world and consider how the tweets you’re putting out there match up with the image you want to display.
Chuck Wendig of Terribleminds.com is a good example of this. Despite being a foul mouthed beardy lunatic, Chuck manages to come across as intelligent and professional despite managing to take curse words to all new places. It fits the brand he’s set up for himself and it matches his image.
12. Have fun
This is often the last piece of advice I have about anything to do with writing. People will be able to tell if you are simply enduring Twitter for the sake of sales, and those sales will be few and far between. There is a wealth of people on Twitter who know more than you do, plumb them for information.
There are also a huge number of potential friends on there too, be friendly.
Enjoy using Twitter as the unique tool it is, because if you have fun with it the marketing and promotion side of things will be a side benefit that will all but take care of itself.
What are your twitter tips? Have I missed anything?
* Or possibly more. People are sickos.
** I don’t necessarily mean mine of course. <cough>
*** I can’t find who coined this term, if anyone knows let me know and I’ll credit it
Writing Full Time: Ten Things to Think About Before You Go Pro
Posted on | January 16, 2012 | No Comments
Almost every writer I know wants to be a full timer, I certainly do. It’s a very understandable dream, who wouldn’t love to stay home and do what we love to make a living?
There are a few things you need to bear in mind as you work your way towards massive word counts and naked workdays. Since I’m very much a part timer this article is based on the things I’ve learned myself and on interviews with full time writers.
1. Overheads
You need to know how much you need to survive, and then you need to build a serious cushion into that number. It’s easy to forget little things that a normal job can get you when you’re sprinting towards your dream. Things like insurance, taxes and business costs not only cost chunks of your income when you’re out on your own, they also suck up a huge amount of time.
Time you should be writing.
The flip side of this is that if you can reduce you overheads significantly then making a full time income as a writer is far less daunting. It is much harder to make fifty grand a year than it is to make thirty and if you can be comfortable at thirty grand a year there’s no reason you can’t go full time.
2. Get an accountant
Get one before you have to deal with a full time income. Your tax department is going to start getting really interested in you as soon as you start pulling anything more than beer money and they are not a group of people you want to nark off.
An accountant can save you both time and money. My accountant has saved me so much that she’s more than paid for her services many times over.
They can also help you claim money back on your taxes for anything you spend on your writing business.
3. Realize this is going to be a job
Writing every day for a living sounds like a dream, and it is in a lot of ways, but when you’re your own boss it can be easy to cut yourself too much slack and before you know it you haven’t written anything in six months and your landlord isn’t interested in how high you have managed to level your Skyrim character.
As soon as you don’t have the safety net of a day job, you are literally going to have to be your own pedantic HR manager. You will have to plan your leave in advance, and you will have to have some mechanism in place for making sure you have your butt in the chair and your hands on the keyboard…AND you’re writing what you’re meant to be writing.
4. Realise what you’re giving up
It’s hard to know just how awesome a steady paycheque is if that’s all you’ve ever known. As soon as you start making money as a writer it’s going to seem like Christmas, but psychologically speaking while you’ve still got a steady job, you still have your safety net.
As soon as the net is gone you’re going to start sweating like there’s a polar bear in your kitchen.
The company you work for now will also be doing a lot of other things you may not think about much. As I said above they will be organising and paying your insurance, taxes and they may also be making contributions to your retirement fund.
You must take all of these things into account when you’re working on your business plan (also known as the “I don’t want to have to sell my body to science plan”).
5. Bear in mind what you’re gaining
You will get freedom…of a sort.
Freedom to walk around in your undies. Free to attend work without shaving, grooming or bathing* , free to take time off whenever you want, for whatever reason you want.
Freedom to starve.
It literally becomes all up to you at this point. No matter how badly you get screwed by publishers, readers or employers the final responsibility for your success or failure rests with you. People who don’t quit, keep improving and keep an open mind tend to carve out a space for themselves. It might not be a huge piece of the pie, but some pie is better than no pie at all.
6. Things will happen that are impossible to predict
At some point in your career as a writer, you can just about guarantee that something big and terrible will happen. There will be hugely expensive medical bill or if you’re traditionally published you may not get your contract renewed. If you self publish maybe it will be that you’ll sell well for six months and then suddenly not at all. Perhaps Amazon will reveal itself to be the digitized incarnation of Cthulhu and start eating people**.
On the flip side there will be odd pieces of luck too. You might get a great review from an influential reviewer, or hit the top one hundred books on Amazon (these days even being in the 1000 can do amazing things for your sales).
While these events can be influenced they are extremely hard to predict with any precision.
This isn’t quite black swan theory (which I have harped on about a lot – if you want to read up on here’s a link) but it’s close. The best thing you can do is try to prepare for these events ahead of time.
You need to be saving some of the money that comes in from your writing, having it socked away just in a case a rainy day turns into a biblical flood.
You also need to have some kind of a plan in place just in case you strike it lucky. We all know stories of people who have gone totally off the rails because they didn’t know how to handle success. Most writers are unlikely to fall into this trap, but you can make sure that you are in the best possible position to take advantage of your good fortune when it turns up.
Talk to that accountant I said you should get, see what they think you should be planning for. Speak to a business planner and see about making your own business plan.
7. You must have a plan
Owning your own business is a lot like writing a novel. You can do it with or without an extensive plan and your relatives will probably think you’re insane for attempting it.
The difference is that you can write a novel without a plan.
You can’t run a business that way.
If you are truly looking to go pro with your writing you have to plan for it. Ask yourself how you would go about running another business, maybe selling socks, and list the answers. Then formulate your plan from there.
I don’t have the space here to go into the specifics of writing a business plan, however it is well worth doing your own research or speaking to someone who knows how to write one up.
8. How does your family feel?
If you’re single then leaping feet first into being an unemployed nutcase fulltime writer is probably something you can recover from if it all goes dreadfully wrong. You may have to disappear of course, but single people can do that.
A family though, might find your shift to being a full time writer disconcerting. Regardless of whether you’ve given up a full time job to write, or you need to delegate more responsibility for the care of the children and the house so you can write, it’s a big change and one you need to talk over with everyone in your family old enough to speak.
9. Consider part time first
This is what I do. I write freelance and fiction, and I work part time at a day job. Until I’m earning more from the writing, this gives me the best of both worlds, and while I would love to write full time, it hasn’t been hard to get a lot done in the time I do have.
Of course this has its own disadvantages; the biggest being you still have to dedicate brain space to your day job. No matter if you’re flipping burgers or defusing bombs, you still have to think about transport, food and timing.
10. Get all the help you can
I don’t know why but writers seem to be allergic to asking for help. Maybe it’s pride, possibly it’s some kind of unknown immune deficiency created by overexposure to prose.
Either way, most of us ask for help only when we’re already on fire.
There are a lot of different kinds of help available. You can join writers groups, both online and off. You can apply for arts grants (this depends a lot on where you live and what genre you write in).
You can also pay for help in the form of professional editors, marketing ninjas and cover designers. If you are going pro you can’t afford to be without professional services to cover you for the things you don’t know how to do. At the bare minimum you need to run your work through an editor; however I highly recommend you use a professional cover designer unless you’ve been trained how to design book covers and you know Photoshop backwards.
If you haven’t already sign up to Twitter and talk to some of the writers on there. There’s a lot of good advice to be had for free.
Just don’t spend all your time there; you still have to write the books.
* Not that I’m recommending this. If you do decide to become a kind of remotely employed ambulatory pile of filth, try to stay away from open flames.
** This may affect your sales numbers.
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