I love character quirks.

In one of my early stories one of the characters was a one legged prostitute named Reverend Moon (it’s still in the short story section of the site if you want to read it). I’ve levered in other strange tics, everything from an obsession with numbers to a predilection for Greek literature.

It’s taken me until my current project to realise I might have been overdoing it a little.

Bizarre quirks can work, but it’s like salt. A little improves a dish, a lot makes you gag. I’ve tired to infuse my current protagonist with some more ordinary quirks. He loves cheeseburgers, especially cold ones from Big Gary’s Chip Shop (named after a burger bar I used to go to long ago). He stashes grab bags around town, because he’s in a dangerous line of work and some times needs to get out of dodge quickly.

The first quirk, cheeseburgers, doesn’t need an in story explanation. Lots of  people like cheeseburgers. That the main character likes them cold is a little odd, but not odd enough to warrant any kind of explanation.

The second quirk, the grab bags full of clothes and the odd fake ID, needs a little more in the way of set up. Without knowing that my main character frequently finds himself in peril, readers could easily come to the conclusion that he’s paranoid. Which he is, but with good reason.

The lesson here, and I wish I’d learned it before now, is that big quirks and ticks need to have a context within the story, or it looks like you’ve put them in just for the sake of having them. Smaller, more human and every day things can be sprinkled in just for interests sake.

In other news I drew Riznphnx’s name out of the hat to win January’s prize for helping out Tee Morris and Sonic Boom. I’m keeping the competition going for another two months, so if you’ve already donated, you’re already in the next two draws. If you’ve donated, just tell me and I’ll add your name to the list.

If you haven’t donated, the ChipIn widget is just to the right of this post. It’s very easy to help out in the initial rush of a tragedy. It’s harder to keep helping as time passes. I haven’t always been good at it myself, but Tee has done so much for our community I’d like to see some more donations rolling in. As with last month, if you donate and tell me you go in the draw to win one of Tee’s books from Book Depository

Tags: advice, Community, Tee Morris, writing

Some of us hate outlining. I learned to do it after literally wasting an entire novel because I didn’t know where I was going with it, but until I finished my latest outline I was still vaguely uncomfortable with the process of laying out my story before I actually started writing.

There is an interim measure though.

Instead of an outline, write a 2 – 5 page short story. It doesn’t have to be of any quality, just imagine you had to compress your entire book down to 5 pages (at the most) and go nuts.

I need to stress that this short story really doesn’t need to be good. Throw in plot points and pure descriptions. Describe your epic multi chapter final battle sequence as ‘a little scrap’ and your love scenes as ‘got it on’. The important thing is that you know where you’re going if you get stuck.

The main objection most people have to outlining is that they feel restricted by them, that somehow the outline interferes with the creative process. If you feel like this then you certainly don’t have to use an outline, or the short story method. However if you’re like me, and never finish anything, having a plan really does help.

Tags: advice

I’ve been asking myself in the last few days if I should hire a writing coach. Not because I can’t write, but because I think I can probably write even better.

The other reason I’m thinking about it is that I think I’ve got a really good story cooking and I don’t want to waste it. I’m still on the fence, but I thought I’d do a pre New Years resolution post on what to look for in a coach.

1. Are they a published author/editor/agent or someone who is qualified to advise you?

A coach isn’t a beta reader, or a helpful friend, or even a fellow writer you found as part of a writing group. A writing coach is someone you are paying to help you achieve results. A writing coach has one goal. Help you get published.

Not help you get better, a writing teacher/beta reader can help with that. If you’re going to go so far as to hire a coach, then you need someone who has either been there themselves, or is so involved in the industry that they know what they’re doing.

2. Are they successful?

A lot of writers and the like make extra money by selling training services and seminars. That’s a great way for any writer to make ends meet, but you can and should expect your coach to have achieved some degree of success in writing fiction themselves. Obviously you want to do more than be an author who sold four books and bankrupted a small press. Of course not many best selling authors offer coaching (although some do), but you should check a teacher’s references and achievements.

3. Are they a good teacher?

This is one of the most important questions you can ask about a coach; can they teach? Not every great writer is a great teacher of writing. The same is true in sport. A lot of great athletes can’t teach others how to do what they do, they just do it. The best martial arts coach I ever had wasn’t the most successful fighter in the gym, he just knew exactly how to teach me what I needed to know. He could tell me, without judgement, when I was getting things wrong, and he told me without hyperbole when I was getting it right. He also cracked a lot of jokes, that’s not a necessity, but it does make any criticism easier to take.

A writing coach should be able to do all of these things for you. If your story is really, really bad, a coach is being paid to tell you why it’s bad and how to fix it. If they can’t do that, what are you paying them for?

Things to remember:

• A coach doesn’t necessarily look at your whole manuscript. They may just look at an outline and pitch for your story. Obviously it’s better if they can look at the whole thing, but it’s not vital.
• A coach can’t write your story for you. The normal rules about having an original, well written story still apply.
• Try and fix all typos and make your story as good as it can get before your coach sees it. The better your story is when they see it, the more they can help you.
• If your coach gives you advice, and you don’t take that advice, that’s your choice… but if you then subsequently fail to be published, it’s not your coach’s responsibility, it’s yours.
• If you take your coach’s advice, and you still don’t get published, it may not be your coach’s fault; however you should reassess their advice. If it was good advice, and your book still didn’t get picked up, then it may just be a matter of pitching more agents and publishers until you get a hit.

A good example:

Larry Brooks, over at www.storyfix.com meets all of my criteria (and more). I haven’t actually used the coaching service, but I know from reviewing his other work that he knows how to teach, has achieved a high degree of success writing fiction and is qualified to teach you how to write.

I know I pimp Larry’s stuff a lot, but that’s because he’s really good, and he’s the person I’ll probably go with if I get myself a coach. With that said there other coaches out there, do your research, talk to the coaches involved and make your decision from there.

Happy New Year everyone, thanks for visiting me and listening to me ramble. Here’s looking forward to an epic 2010.

Tags: advice, coaching, writing

This was going to be my first podcast for the site, now that I finally have the audio thing working, however I appear to have acquired Murphy’s Cold*.

I want to talk about writing your ending. This has been a problem for me for a long time. I can think of cool ways to dispatch the villain at any given second, but an actual well rounded ending…that was elusive.

So, on a whim, I looked back through my favourite novels had a look to see what my favourite writers were doing. From this extensive research (and sleep deprivation) I came up with the 60% rule.

The 60% Rule

I need to say that 60% is just an estimate**. You can use any proportion you like. The rule works something like this:

At the end of your book, your protagonist gets 60% of the things that they want.

A 60% victory could mean that they defeated the bad guy, but lost a friend in the process. Or, as happens in some of my stories, the love interest realises the protagonist is a vicious murderous bastard and moves away. This stops you from making endings that bring everything back to baseline or are too much of a victory for the hero.

You need to avoid there being to much going right at the end of any given book. The reason being that any totally happy ending finishes the series right then and there. There’s no more drama to be gotten from the ongoing situation that you imagine them to be in. However if the love interest is gone, or the best friend is dead, then it leaves the story some place else to go in the readers imagination. It also gives you scope for a second or even third book if you want one.

If you need a really happy ending, shoot for 70% of what the protagonist wants. This actually makes for a very happy ending. Just about everyone the protagonist knew is still alive, the bad guy is gone forever, just some serious real estate damage and a few minor characters lost.

If you consider any protagonist in a thriller/horror/fantasy type novel their list of needs goes something like this:

1. Survive

2. Make sure (x) character survives

3. Stop the bad guy

4. Stop anyone else from being killed

5. Make all this not be happening

6. Win the heart of the love interest

7. Get acknowledged for the good deeds

8. Don’t get injured

9. Make sure the bad guy is gone forever

10. Try to recover from the traumatic events.

Wiping out four of those goals is easy. Kill of a couple of major characters, give the protagonist an injury (a serious injury, no flesh wounds), make sure they’re blamed rather than praised for their killing spree and make sure there is no way the protagonist can go back to their old lives.

They still win, the book can still have satisfying closure, but you don’t get that “everything’s tied up with a nice bow” feeling at the end.

Winning has to cost the protagonist something, otherwise the win is meaningless.

* The cold you get when everything seems to be going well.

** Estimate = A number I made up

Tags: advice

I know writers who simply refuse to take criticism.

Any correction beyond basic grammar correction results in dummies being spat, toys thrown out of the cot and a general wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Normally I’d just write that kind of thing off as histrionics and figure these writers would grow out of it when they realised that getting published requires taking some criticism of your work to make it print worthy. However, I recently got barracked by one of these guys telling me that it violated their artistic integrity to take edits from anyone and they’d never do it.
I resisted the urge to leap through the internet and beat him to death with his own ego, but it was a close call.
My answer to the idea that criticism, from readers, agents and editors is somehow impinging on your artistic freedom is this:
Bollocks.
There are only two times when you can say no to critiques. The first is if you’re writing for your own entertainment and don’t care if you get published or not. If that’s the case then by all means, it’s your call. The other time you can refuse to take criticism is if you’re already a best selling author.
Of course if you’re a bestselling author, and you can’t take criticism, then you’re not going to be on the bestseller list for long (in fact, how did you get there at all?).
For the rest of us, no matter how much it sucks, we have to consider all criticism. You don’t have to take it as gospel, unless it’s from a publisher, but you must consider all suggestions made about your work. I know it hurts, especially when the person crushing your ego is right (this happens to me a lot), but your book will not get published if you can’t get over that.
It does get easier. When I first started writing I felt like every critique I received was an attack on me personally*. Now I can be more objective about the suggestions and take them as they are, suggestions as to how I can make my stuff better. If I couldn’t even consider their suggestions, I might as well burn my Work In Progress and take up crochet.
I know this post is s a rehash of one I did a while ago, but it seems like the message isn’t getting through.

* If, for any reason, someone attacks you personally instead of your writing then you can ignore that quite safely. There are plenty of people out there who just like hurting other people, you don’t need to give them any of your time.

Tags: advice, rants

I took a few days off writing.

I know this is one of the cardinal sins of NanoWrioMo, but it couldn’t be helped. It wasn’t personal tragedy, or even terrible work schedule that got me into trouble, it was lack of structure. As just about anyone who knows me can tell you, I’ve gotten pretty good at writing the first two to three chapters of any given book. I can also do you a decent short story.

Problems arise when it comes to the Big Swampy Middle*. As much as anything it’s that I have no idea where things are going, so I don’t know what to make my characters do. I’ve been doing seat of the pants writing for a while, and it’s not really working for me. My last effort, the Shadow Library, had a couple of really good chapters.

The rest was an abomination against all things.

It’s not the worst book I’ve ever read, but it was close. The problem was I had nothing to hang my story on, nowhere really to go. So I have recently been sent Larry Brooks guide to story structure and I’ve pent the last few days studying it properly. This will probably lead to me failing NanoWrioMo, but I don’t care because the plan is to get a better book out of it. There will be a review up of Larry Brook’s Story Structure – Demystified up in the next week or so, with a detailed look at how I applied it to the new project.

Which, you might have guessed, is called The Downside of Being Dead. I can’t tell you to much about it, except that I’m enjoying writing it, and that there are dead people walking around in it.

Right, I need to do some writing, because I’ve been a terrible slacker. If you need some better advice on writing than I’ve been able to give you in the last few weeks, I can’t recommend either Mur Lafferty or Carrie Heim Binas’s respective blogs enough. Listen to these ladies, your writing will be better for it. Mine is.

*With thanks to Jim Butcher for the term.

Tags: advice

I’m afraid last month, I was made of failure.

I got just over 28,000 words. If I hadn’t been aiming for 50,000 then I would have called that a good month, but I fell off the writing wagon. I spent exactly one minute on self pity, then I let that go, because despite the fact that I didn’t hit my goal I still got a lot out of that month.

What’s more, as a result November and NanoWriMo are going like you wouldn’t believe. I’ve averaged 2,022 words per day and I don’t think things would be going nearly as well. Of course not all of Novembers current happiness is down to my abject failure in October. I’ve also got a few other bloggers to thank for actually getting my act together.

First up, Carrie Heim Binas has an excellent writing advice blog. If you’re doing NanoWriMo, then you owe it to yourself to go and check out Heim Binas Fiction.

You probably all know Mur Lafferty of I Should Be Writing, but if you don’t and you need a kick in the pants to inspire you, an intelligent mind to advise you or some of the best interviews available online to keep you interested in writing then I Should Be Writing is the place to go.

Want to know just how good a podcasted novel can be, then go check out JC Hutchins’ website and join the clone army. His novel 7th Son: Descent has just gone into print, and it’s beyond good. If you go to the site, you can listen to the whole thing for free. While you’re there check out Project 777 for a good cause that gets you goodies while you’re at it.

I need to get back to work, but if you’re floundering on your novel, or you just want to see some damn good blogs, go check out the authors above, you won’t be sorry.

Tags: advice, fail, Idiot things I'm doing, nanowrimo, News, writing

JC Hutchins’ book 7th Son: Descent is out.

This makes me happy.

Not just because it’s good (it’s superb), not just because he’s got a damn snazzy website (although it is pretty damn snazzy), but because any new author trying to make it in the business should take a look at JC Hutchins’ way of doing things.

Hutchin’s has taken the “give it away free first” model and run with it. On his website you can literally try the novel before you buy it, listen to a prequel written just for 7th Son (which is awesome in its own right) and fill yourself up on all the juicy details your infovorous* minds can handle.

You can do all of that at his site jchutchins.net.

This means you (and by you I mean “me too”) can whip yourself up into a state of frenzy for the story before the book even reaches the shelves. 7th Son: Descent is so good that I think it would have done well even without all of the online attention that JC Hutchins’ media savvy/general awesomeness has generated, but combining its quality** with a genuinely inspired approach to new media and internet marketing will push this book through the roof. It’s not a novel for the faint of heart, but Hutchins’ writing grabs hold of your eyeballs from the very first sentence.

You can try this novel without spending any money. You can avail yourself of delicious details on JC Hutchins’s website, and you can check out Hutchins’ other (spooky) novel Personal Effects: Dark Art while you’re at it.

What are you still doing here?***

* I have Tycho Brahe of Penny Arcade Comics to thank for the word infovore, which I’ve twisted into infovorous. Making up words is fun, even if you’re not the first to think of it…

** Yes, no matter how great your marketing/website/interview style is your book still has to be good. JC Hutchins is a very very good writer and he’s platformed the rest of his stuff from that. Bear that in mind.

*** I would consider it a personal favor if you purchased 7th Son: Descent because novels like this should be encouraged and nothing encourages writers more than being paid for their good work.

Tags: 7th Son, advice, JC Hutchins, learn something, Required Reading

I’m running it close to the wire here. Four days to go and I’ve still got 10,000 words to hit my target of 50,000 in one month.

Even to reach this I’ve had to count everything I;ve written this month, including the words I’ve deleted.

It still counts.

Quick Tip:

Stuck for story idas? Look through the Google search terms people used to find your blog. My favorite so far is “freaky mace games.” If that was you, why?

You also inspired a short story, thanks.

But really, mace games?

Tags: advice, silly posts, updates