This isn’t the norm, in fact I’ve been told over and over that using pop culture and technological references in my work will mean it dates quickly and will be irrelevant to future audiences.

Sadly this is one of those things that has a very changeable answer depending on who you’re asking. A University Professor I had a while back was absolutely against any sort of pop culture reference* in fiction, where as if you ask John Locke (he of How I Sole A Million E-Books fame) pop culture references rule.

I think if you want to put them in, put them in. Unless you’re writing pure fantasy or sci-fi there’s almost nothing you can put in your work that won’t date it. Language changes, so does technology, and no matter how you put together a story it’s going to seem very different to an audience fifty years from now than it does to your audience today.

So if pop culture references are something you want to include in your work, then I say that’s all the justification you need.

What do you think, pop culture references OK or would writers be better to leave them out?

Let me know in the comments.

* and pants that actually fit him. It was his silent war against the student’s collective psyches.

However my wife was a little upset about it and it took some convincing to persuade her that even a bad review is far better than no reviews at all and that if I am going to get a bad review then that’s the kind I want*.

Once I explained she was much happier about everything, but it didn’t change the fact that her first instinct was to stand up for me**.

I see a lot of responses to reviews online that seem to have come from people close to the author, trying to defend the writer from whatever the reviewer has said. This is totally understandable, especially if the reviewer is vitriolic towards the author.

But it doesn’t really help.

If you’re a writer and you’re being smart about it, you’ve conditioned yourself to take reviews in your stride no matter what they say. If you’re being really smart about it you look at the reviews you get and try and take pointers about what you can improve next time you write. Your friends and family don’t necessarily know this, so I think it’s worth telling them that no matter what a reviewer says, it’s okay, and they don’t have to leap to your aid.

It’s nice that they want to help, but let them know that their writing an objective, well crafted review of their own will help infinitely more than anything they can say about a review that’s already been and gone.

* i.e Helpful, well written and objective.

** This too is a good thing. If she’d just pointed at me and said “you got what you deserved!” I might not be feeling quite so upbeat.

I may also complain of lack of sleep and bleeding from the eyes.

Today I wanted to share with you the Santa Claus method of dealing with being overwhelmed with stuff to do. It’s so easy to get pushed into a space where you feel like you have no time to write, yet at the same time spend several hours watching TV.

So, the Santa Method as you may have guessed, is this:

1. Make a dang list of things you need to do.

2. Check the list.

3. Check it again.

It sounds like a very boring way of handling your life, but if you’re anything like me** then it will literally save you hours of time each week I would have otherwise spent contemplating my navel while waiting for the next thought to arrive or screaming bloody murder at the universe because I can’t find my car keys***.

How do you keep your day straight? Any planning tips for the chaotically inclined among us? Let me know in the comments.

* I have it on good authority that if I don’t I’m going to get my face murdered.

** i.e. Disorganised.

*** Last time I lost them I challenged Twitter to a game of “let’s find Andrew’s keys”. They found them in three minutes and thirty seconds.

Speaking of which:

After watching it something occurred to me. In the name of plot convenience main characters often end up doing really questionable things. Protagonists doing questionable things can be a great plot device if you do it deliberately, but if the only reason your protagonist does something out of character is because the plot needs it.

This was going to be a list, but there’s one thing that really stands out for me:

Spying.

In This Means War the two main male characters are spies that get into a contest of sorts to win the heart of Reese Witherspoon’s character. In order to do this they break several hundred laws to put her under surveillance…

Cameras and microphones in her house, trackers on her car, the works.

Creeeeepy….

This comes up a lot in written fiction a lot, especially in private eye and spy stories. Imagine you’re interested in someone, things are going well…and then you find out they have been watching you through hidden cameras in your house.

I don’t know about you but the Police would be getting a call if it happened to me…

Is this something you use in your writing? How do you make it so readers don’t feel slightly unclean?* What other things do main characters do on a regular basis that make you feel uncomfortable? Let me know in the comments.

* Or do you want them to feel unclean?**

** It comes off in the shower.

So here are the ten that seem to be asked of everyone along with the answers I’m mostly unqualified to give. Mostly.

1. Where do you get your ideas?

Every writer gets asked this and every writer has their own variation on the answer. Once you take away all the joke answers about captive Germans, eldritch horrors and jars of peanut butter* there are usually only two concrete answers:

Either the idea springs fully formed into our heads at three o’clock in the morning and keeps us awake or it’s the combination of two or more other ideas. Most authors aren’t short on ideas at all, in fact every author I’ve ever met feels like they have too many. There are more stories available to us in the world than we’ll ever be able to write and that leaves most of us jittery and somewhat paranoid.

The combining two ideas thing is really common in movies. Think about the last film you saw; chances are there are elements of two other movies in there at the very least. Speed is a good example of writer sitting on a bus thinking about Die Hard and then suddenly having a brain wave.

2. How do you find time to write?

I have to plan for it. If I don’t plan time to write then I spend my writing time crashed out on the sofa watching Doctor Who and eating chips**.

I also have to accept the life sometimes gets in the way and that it isn’t a tragedy if I miss a day as long as I’m otherwise consistently writing. A lot of people seem to get the idea that if they miss even one day of writing then they have failed as a writer and a human being and no longer deserve to be a writer.

Sometimes shit happens. Pick yourself up and move on.

If you are truly too busy to write (I can only assume you never watch TV or play on the computer) then you may have to try delegating some of the things you do to someone else.

The times I’ve felt too busy to write I’ve often had plenty of time spare, but I felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of different projects I had going. Instead of trying to do things one step at a time, I instead did nothing.

Don’t get me wrong, you need time to just do nothing, but plan for it. Rather than just collapsing on the sofa after work, plan to spend an hour doing nothing and an hour writing. Both will be time well spent.

3. How Do You Name Your Characters?

Naming characters can be tough. Some people agonise for weeks over what to name a protagonist or even a minor character. What I do is start writing out names, twenty or so, on a sheet of paper and then pick the one that’s closest to what I want.

With that said, all of my characters have relatively prosaic names. If I need something more exotic I look up the naming conventions in the country the character comes from and try and name them something that would be relatively common there but unusual in the west.

Always check the names you use to see if they’ve been used by other writers, especially those in your field.

4. Why Do You get Your Ideas?

I got punched in the head a lot as a child. And as an adult.

5. How Do You Deal With Rejection?

Initially I dealt with rejection (whether a bad review, an actual rejection from an agent or a thumbs down from a beta reader) badly and would generally spend some time sulking my way through a tub of ice cream.

Now days I check to see what I got wrong. It’s very rare a rejection comes through for no reason at all and usually it’s something I’ve screwed up. If it’s not something I’ve gotten wrong then I just say ‘meh’ and get on with whatever I was doing. Sometimes it still feels bad but rejection of all kinds is part of being a writer.

I still eat the ice cream though.

6. How Long Should My Book Be?

If it’s your first book then it should be between 80,000 and 100,000 words at a rough estimate.

Now that I’ve given you a number I should say that length doesn’t matter as much now as it once did, especially if you self publish. For self publishing I think that 90 thousand words makes for a good fast paced novel, but if you really feel that the shortest you can make your story is 150 thousand then there is nothing stopping you.

In traditional publishing agents and publishers are unlikely to accept a book that long from a first timer (although it has happened) and you may be better off aiming for something shorter.

7. Do I Have To Write Short Stories?

Short answer: nope.

Longer answer: You don’t have to, but it can still be a good thing for both your writing itself and your career. Short fiction teaches you to be economical with your words. It can also force you into thinking in terms of entire story instead of just in scenes.

You can also sell collections of short fiction on Kindle even if you’re not having a lot of luck with the dwindling number of short fiction markets out there. Ultimately whether or not you write short fiction depends entirely on you. If you want to then there are real benefits to be gained. If you just want to focus on novels that’s fine too.

8. Should I Self Publish?

Maybe.

Are you prepared to write, re write, edit and line edit your work like you are going to be trying to get an agent? Are you then prepared to pay for professional editing, cover design and ebook creation?

Have you done at least one month’s worth of research looking at both traditional publishing and self publishing? Can you ignore the chest thumpers on both sides of the argument?

If you can say yes to ALL of these things (excepting paying for the things you can honestly do to a high professional level yourself) then yes, self publishing is a real option for you.

9. Is Traditional Publishing Dead?

I don’t think it’s dead, but traditional publishing is going through an upheaval it hasn’t seen since the advent of the printing press. It’s impossible to say exactly how the Big Six publishers will come through this period of change.

That said, I doubt we’re going to see the end of the Big Six (although they might end up as the Big Four). They will have to make enormous changes to the way they run their businesses in order to stay viable. They will have to be able offer something that self publishing authors can’t and until they can show that difference to the world (and drastically alter their e-book pricing model) then they will keep losing business to Amazon.

10. Do I Still Need an Agent?

No, you don’t need one, but you might still want one. Agents can open doors that even the best self published author can’t, and they can deal with contractual issues that would be difficult for any writer to navigate alone.

Agents can also wrangle foreign rights for your work, again something that’s not going to be easy for any writer to do alone. Yes you can get a lawyer to do these things for you but often agents will have contacts in the industry that will help they negotiate better deals for you.

In the future agents may end up being micro publishers in their own right, acting as much as a stamp of quality for an author as a negotiating force.

Do you have any questions for me? Or are there any questions you get asked all the time I haven’t covered here?

Let me know in the comments.

* You were kidding about that…right?

** I have become the anthropomorphic personification of the I Should Be Writing theme song.

I try to write every day but it doesn’t always work out the way I’d planned. More often than not I find myself binge writing on weekends when I can carve out two hour blocks of time.

One of the most common questions people ask writers is “where do you find the time to write?” and the only answer is “I make time”.

It’s more daunting than it sounds, but if you really, truly want to be a writer you will find a way to squeeze writing time out of your day. It might mean giving up your daily mayonnaise bath*, but you’ll do it.

I get that sometimes life gets in the way, and if you haven’t been finding time up until now don’t beat yourself up about it, guilt won’t help. Instead have a look at your day and see if you can find even fifteen minutes to half an hour to write.

In some ways writing is a lot like going to the gym: once you start, it’s a lot easier to keep going.

How do you do it? Do you have any suggestions for time starved writers? Let me know in the comments.

 * That’s right, we know all about that.

My own first aid experience is limited, but even I know that the last thing you do to someone with a puncture wound is rip it out. Chances are it’s the only thing stopping them from bleeding out. There are a few exceptions, but a stomach wound isn’t one of them.

So in that vein, here are the ten things I think most genre fiction writers need at least a passing knowledge of. I say genre fiction because some of these might not come up in contemporary literary fiction (although it couldn’t hurt):

1. First Aid

You don’t need to turn yourself into a walking medical encyclopaedia (unless you’re writing medical thrillers) but you do need to know how the trauma your protagonist is going through is going to affect them physically.

For example: a lot of contemporary fiction has the protagonist getting knocked out, a lot, and yet suffering no ill effects from the repeated blows to the head. A basic knowledge of first aid would have told the writers that even one blow hard enough to knock you cold is enough to cause permanent damage. At the very least the protagonist should have been feeling unwell for some time after being belted over the head.

2. Hand to Hand Combat

You don’t have to join the UFC to get a decent knowledge of how to fight, but some basic knowledge of how to hit and also how it feels to be hit is a must for writers who want to include fight scenes in the work.

Of course you can suspend the rules of reality in your fiction, but to make a good fight scene you need to know what rules you’re breaking and why.

For example: The character Sara has to fight Ned, the local thug. Ned outweighs Sara by almost one hundred pounds, is a foot taller and smells terrible. For Sara to simply beat him down with no explanation will pull most readers out of the story while they try to figure it out.  

If instead you’ve set Sara up as having extensive martial arts training and then show her hip tossing Ned onto the ground and then lapel choking him unconscious then that fits far better with both the story and what most of your readers will be thinking.

3. About Guns

This is my particular blind spot. I’ve done a little shooting but nothing serious and so I know very little about firearms (especially pistols) except from what I’ve read and seen. It’s probably in my best interests to learn more about fire arms and to go shooting so I a have a better idea of the feel of a gun. It also means that I won’t show my protagonist shooting two pistols at once with any accuracy* or go on about the smell of cordite after firing a pistol**.

4. Forensics (but not from CSI)

Forensics as presented by CSI is on par with the “sacrifice a chicken and hope” method of crime solving. It’s a magical, speedy and perfectly accurate method conducted in epic montages.

Sadly real forensic evidence is (comparatively) slow to process and doesn’t always produce a concrete answer. Real CSI’s can and do produce amazing results as part of their processing of crime scenes, but they aren’t psychic.

Something else to bear in mind is that forensic investigators don’t do the pursuit and arrest of suspects themselves. There are uniformed police, SWAT teams and the like for that kind of thing. Why would a police department risk their CSI’s in combat?

Finally in CSI: Miami, it is shown that people like David Caruso, whereas in real life, no one likes David Caruso***.

5. Police Interrogations

I should say that my information on this comes from just the one ex-police officer and the rules and methods for different police units will differ.

With that said, there is almost never a good cop/bad cop dynamic in play during interrogations. Instead what most suspects come up against is good cop/nice cop. Officers will simply speak quietly and gently to a suspect, relentlessly asking the same questions over and over, all the time stressing co operation as the suspect’s best option.

The reason they do it that way (as opposed to beating people with phone books) is the soft and gentle approach is far more effective. It’s so effective in fact that people who are innocent sometimes end up confessing.

So bear this in mind when you’re writing interrogations. If in your story the cops are going to break the rules there would need to be an amazingly good reason to do so, especially as being nice (for a given value of nice) works better than any other method.

6. Psychology

Basic psychology, especially as it relates to how people normally process trauma, is something every writer should look into researching. I don’t think you have to go as far as studying it at university but it is well worth checking out your local library and even seeing if you can have a chat with a lecturer at the local university about how people cope with severe trauma.

Severe violence, relationship trauma and massive life changes will affect your character and the way they see the world. Depending on their circumstances just having them harden up might not ring true for your story.

This goes double if your character is frequently faced with violence. Police officers and the military are offered counselling and special training to deal with the things they have to face and even then a lot of these very tough people end up breaking down because of the things they’ve seen.

7. Knives

I know I know I’ve talked about this before, but it’s a pet peeve of mine. In fiction knives are so often treated as the one weapon the hero doesn’t really have to worry about, they just disarm the bad guy and carries on with their day.

Real life doesn’t work like that. In reality at close range a knife is just as much trouble as a gun. If the person wielding the blade knows what they’re doing then your hero is going to have to be freakishly skilled, lucky or powerful to survive.  Preferably all three if they want a good chance of enjoying their own intestines.

I would recommend attending a seminar on knife fighting/ knife defence to see just how badly a knife can harm someone. If you don’t leave the seminar feeling harrowed then you went to the wrong one.

Knives are scary, and someone who knows how to make one work for them is doubly so.

* I’ve never actually tried this but I have it on good authority that to hit someone while firing two pistols at once you’d have to have both guns shoved up their nose.

** Cordite isn’t used as part of modern pistol cartridges and as far as I know hasn’t been used for small arms since World War 2. Although legacy rounds like WW2 era .303 cartridges might still use cordite as their propellant.

*** Yeeeeeah….

The reason? I’d only written about characters that directly affected the story. Occasionally I tossed in a background character or two, but for the most part my world was barren of people just going about their day.

This isn’t such a problem if your book takes place in a rural area, or if it genuinely is supposed to be an empty world story, but if your story is set in a city then there will almost always be someone around somewhere. Whether it’s a group of determined party people or a hobo painting his toenails in a doorway**, there are few places you can go in a big city where there is absolutely no one around.

If you’ve ever worked security or done anything with the Police you’ll also know that the people who live on the street are often extremely adept at staying out of sight when they want to, so even streets that seem empty can have several pairs of eyes watching it.

Have a look at some amateur photos taken in cities, there will almost always be someone in shot somewhere. These photos can be really useful for writing scenes where you need to make passing mentions to people in the background. You can also use indoor photos to help with your descriptions of bars, stores and other places.

The other thing to bear in mind with this is you can use to add some tension to your story, if there are always people around then a suddenly empty public area is an incredibly threatening place to be.

It wasn’t until I went back and looked at some of my old writing that I realised that I had this problem and it was something I needed to fix. Of course you don’t need to bash your readers over the head with it, but a passing mention of the other people in the same world as your characters can help flesh out a scene.

Do you use references to help you write details into your scenes, or do you have any tips on how to avoid empty world syndrome?

 Let me know in the comments.

 * Hmm, there’s a story there somewhere…

** I have actually seen this. You see some weird stuff walking home after work at 4am.

But it can go so very, very wrong. here are a few things to think about before you decide to give your characters power…

1. How much realism are you going for?

This is a decision you’re going to have to make early. It may seem a ridiculous thing to be asking, who needs realism in a story where people can belt each other with cars?

Sometimes it’s fun to just cut loose with the super powers and not worry about the rest, but stories that have at least a touch of realism to them can help readers achieve a better suspension of disbelief.

Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files uses this to great effect. No matter how fantastic harry Dresden’s powers get, he needs to draw them from somewhere. Whether the energy comes from will and emotion or from stealing the heat energy from a lake. This gives the series (which could have gotten totally out of control with power creep*) a grounding point for the super powers on display. Harry can still blow stuff up with his mind, but he can’t do it lightly or on a whim.

2. Secondary powers

If you’re going for an even vaguely realistic world then you will need to bear in mind that a lot of super powers come with some serious drawbacks unless you character has some extra abilities just so they can use their main powers without killing themselves.

A good example is super strength:

Let’s say your character wants to pick up a full sized car and hurl it at the bad guys. If he is super strong, but not also super tough he’s going to rip the muscles clean off his bones by putting that much force through them. This actually happens to power lifters in real life. They are technically strong enough to make the lift, but either their muscles snap or they tear the muscle away from the bone.

Even assuming their muscles and bones are strong enough to support the weight of the car, they’ll also need some way of bracing themselves in order to avoid Newton’s third law. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Strength is not mass, and if your character attempts to throw something with greater mass without some way of anchoring themselves they will instead hurl themselves backwards.

 It sounds stupid until you try it**. Go and find a handy wall and put your hands against it. Jump up into the air and (gently), push. You’ll push yourself backwards by a foot or so. All a super powered character is doing is acting on a greater scale.

3. Who’s watching?

Unless you’re writing a world where super powers/magic are used openly, it’s important to bear in mind who’s watching your characters throwing around the mojo.

Heck even if you’re in a world where magic is an accepted fact nothing makes a character cautious about who they show their abilities to like hearing a mob screaming “burn the witch!”.

The prevalence of cell phone cameras and YouTube will also mean that any physics defying feats they perform will probably end up on the internet. While you can rely on the net to claim anything and everything as fake, if the government in your story is keeping an eye on anything spooky being uploaded your characters could easily find themselves in a government lab being dissected***.

At the very least a individual with powers that gets themselves noticed is going to attract a lot of attention, and whether that attention ends up getting them killed or merely a legion of inconvenient fans it’s probably going to be a bad thing.

4. Power Creep

I’ve already mentioned power creep, but I though it deserved its own mention. When you give a character, particularly a hero, extra normal abilities then as writers we usually try to match them with a force greater than their own.

This isn’t a problem over the course of one book. The hero pulls out all the stops to win the day, the uber powerful bad thing is dispatched and everyone is happy. More or less.

The problems crop up in book two when the now tougher, more experienced and probably more powerful protagonist needs a new threat to challenge them.

By about book seven the hero is looking down on the gods and wondering about whether or not creating a universe is a normal personal goal to have.

The best way around this is to plan ahead of time. There will be power increases experienced by your characters; however you can balance them with adversaries that are dangerous even if they aren’t as powerful in a straight up fight as your hero.

For example: a character that can wield magic is a terrifying opponent for any bad guy (or good guy for that matter). Still, a patient, skilled vanilla mortal with a sniper rifle or a lunatic prepared to plant a bomb can present a very real challenge to even the most powerful character.

5. Where is the power coming from?

Most people get this one right, at least eventually. Whether your character was empowered by gamma radiation, an ancient demon or a friendly spider most stories will take a look at exactly where all this power is coming from.

It can make a very good story hook, especially for more powerful protagonists, to have their source of power either be openly hostile or at the very least want all that power back.

Another possibility is to make the power source something that’s slowly corrupting the protagonist, forcing them to examine exactly what they’re doing with the power and why.

Speaking of which…

6. All power costs something

All power has its price. Whether we’re talking the metaphorical cost of being distanced from normal humanity or a very real tangible cost that the hero has to pay whenever he uses his abilities, all real power costs.

A real life example is martial arts. To be a really good fighter you need to invest thousands of hours in training. Time you spend away from your family, your friends and your other hobbies that don’t involve being punched in the face.

All that training will give you real, physical power…but you will pay for it.

In a story a good example is a character drawing on energy to cast a spell. That energy has to come from somewhere. If they draw it from themselves one of the costs they could be paying is that it ages them very quickly or perhaps it weakens them physically as they become magically stronger.

However to me direct physical costs aren’t as interesting as the dehumanising effect power seems to have. Once you’re strong enough to wipe a SWAT team out without breaking a sweat it’s going to be very tempting to use that power whenever you’re challenged. This can easily turn a good person into a bad one.

The old quote still holds true, both in fiction and in real life:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” – John Emerich Acton, first Baron Acton (1834–1902).

If your characters can use their abilities without any cost to themselves then it’s far too easy for them to use that power badly. It also reads really badly, often coming across as wish fulfilment on the part of the writer.

 What Do You Think?

What should writers think about before giving their characters power? Anything I’ve missed? Let me know in the comments.

*  The tendency  for extra normal powers to slowly increase over the course of a series as the writers throw more and more powerful stuff at the hero in order to present a threat to the increasingly godlike protagonist.

Also see item 4.

** Disclaimer: Don’t be a moron about this. If you conceivably injure yourself by trying this out, don’t do it.

*** FOR SCIENCE!

Old Ones

[Repeat x2]

My Old Ones bring all the cults to the yard

And their knives

Are better than yours,

Damn right they’re better than yours,

I can gut you,

Then I’ll eat your heart.

I know they want it

The things that stalk me,

What the cults go crazy for.

They lose their minds,

The stars are right

I think its time

[Chorus x2]

Ia ia-ia ia ia,

Cut them up

Ia ia-ia ia ia,

The gods are waiting

My Old Ones bring all the cults to the yard

And their knives

Are better than yours,

Damn right they’re better than yours,

I can gut you,

Then I’ll eat your heart.

I can see you’re dying

You want me to teach thee

The spells that freak these gods

That live undergound

Just know if you call it up

You got to put it down

[Chorus x2]

Ia ia-ia ia ia,

Cut them up

Ia ia-ia ia ia,

The gods are waiting,

My Old Ones bring all the cults to the yard

And their knives

Are better than yours,

Damn right they’re better than yours,

I can gut you,

Then I’ll eat your heart.

Oh, once they’re invited in

The gods will always stay

You must maintain the charms,

Same time maintain the blood-flow

Just get the virgin heart

And the veils shall part

Their high priest’s a squid

Who lives in your head

[Chorus x2]

Ia ia-ia ia ia,

Cut them up

Ia ia-ia ia ia,

The gods are waiting

My Old Ones bring all the cults to the yard

And their knives

Are better than yours,

Damn right they’re better than yours,

I can gut you,

Then I’ll eat your heart.