It’s All Saints Day and this was the best day to be a Catholic school kid, because it’s a holy day of obligation, so I for one enjoyed the day off from classes, especially as it meant some quality time with my candy bowl. It seems fitting, then, that I began my month-long quest with a snack-sized Almond Joy and Nestle Crunch bar. Instead of going for the standard 50,000-word mark this year, I’m shooting for 60,000 words. Fingers crossed! Read More…
There are some basic rules new writers hear again and again—skip the passive voice, show, don’t tell, and never start a story in a dream or morning routine. Then there’s the never start a story with a piece of dialogue, and the cast out ye adverbs admonition. If these no-nos are the signifiers of poor writing, then surely agents and editors are on the lookout for them and once spotted, our work is targeted to the real or virtual trash bin. And Microsoft can call its icon a “recycling bin” all it wants, but nothing ecologically positive happens with it, so they should stop confusing the next generations about what recycling means. Read More…
Everyone loves a good character. The converse is also true. Weak, two-dimensional characters kill a story because what hooks most of us is our interest in the personalities depicted by the writer. After all, we’re writing, usually, about conflict between people, and most stories end by showing how someone changed from the start of the tale. Thus readers are looking for people who feel real, with whom we can identify or about whom we can feel superior, especially in the case of comedy. Read More…
I’m a regular reader of the various “How I found my agent” stories that pop up all over the Web at a slow simmering rate. Part of it is because I enjoy a good pick me up tale in the midst of all the mass-murder, spree-killing, pandemic-virus, certain-doom narratives that flood the information superhighway every day. But I’ll come to Jesus and add that I’m also looking for patterns, as anecdotal as the occasional agent article is. Is there something successful authors are doing that I should adopt as a practice? Is there any kind of aspect to their attitudes, their community base, their writing environment that I can leverage? Read More…
Last week, Jane Friedman, an alum of Writer’s Digest and an advocate for writers working to get published, posted an article over at WD in which she steered very new writers away from hiring professional Web designers when those writers are just starting out on the Web. I can appreciate advice like figuring out what one wants from a Web presence before dropping money on some pricey design that may turn out to be a poor fit for one’s needs. But to me, this just means that writers should spend some time assessing those needs before they do anything else, even before they select a theme on WordPress, for example. Read More…
A good friend asked me this morning where I find my ideas, and the first image that popped into my head was an Easter egg hunt. On the heels of this sweet memory appeared a roundhouse punch, something delivered in a grimy tavern. And so I had my answer. Sometimes I find my ideas, and sometimes they find me. Read More…
A joke I’ve told over the years is that I have a 1950s education because I went to Catholic school in the 70s and they were twenty years behind. But it remains true that I learned penmanship using the Palmer method and I was forced to diagram my sentences as a means of mastering grammar and syntax. I’m sure I would have learned the difference between a complex and a compound sentence without diagramming, but hey, I had the additional instruction in seeing how words make patterns, and looking back, I appreciate the sisters’ determination even if it meant a lot of embarrassment in front of a chalkboard.
Before everyone rolls their eyes and runs off lest I carry on about sentence diagramming, know that it isn’t the focus of this post. Yippee! Actually, I want to talk about flow diagrams for novel writing. Read More…
I haven’t spent quality time in a writing workshop in years, and I was disappointed to find that the LGBT writing group in Seattle doesn’t really have a workshop per se. After college and graduate school studying American literature I don’t really have any more pep for talking about books, especially if I have to pay $100 a month to do it.
I went online to find some critique groups and I came up with three: two for speculative fiction and one for long format work. After underestimating Emerald City traffic congestion, I turned around and came back home from my first foray, now much better educated about where exactly Bellingham is, and which is the best on ramp to I-5 from my house. I will always marvel at how places so close together can take so long to reach in something as technologically advanced as a car. Read More…
I went back to Whidbey Island yesterday to hear Corbin Lewars give a presentation: How to Persevere with Your Writing. One could argue that driving four hours round-trip was in and of itself “perseverance,” so why even drive out there? But then if one didn’t go, then they wouldn’t exactly be persevering and well, I think I just found a paradox. Or an alignment of truth. Whatever. I only passed that logic class in college because the TA took a shine to me, I’m sure, because there is no way that 50 points on each exam equals a C. Read More…
A couple of weeks ago, Johanna Harness on her blog talked about literary rejection as not unlike the experience of learning to walk. We humans, we learn to stand, then take small steps while holding onto something sturdier than ourselves, and we fall down, a whole hell of a lot. Somehow when we’re toddlers, without all of this cumbersome self-reflection and analysis, we don’t really mind the hiccups that are part and parcel with the learning process. But sheesh, get a couple of “I’m just not the right agent” letters, decades later, and it can be an unraveling worse than seeing your favorite baby blanket in tatters.
Something happened in the meanwhile, Johanna posits, that changed how we feel regarding the negative side of the learning process. And it behooves people trying to write for a living to retain the totality of experiences related to getting work published. Read More…
Trans/plant/portation 