For WritersFor Writers
Writing Tips
Accept that a first draft is just that - a draft. Priority number one should be to get it onto the page, after which you can concentrate on making it much, much better.
Take risks. Go deep. Look for the things that scare you most, that anger you most, that arouse you most. If your subject matter arouses strong emotion in you, it will surely evoke strong emotions in your reader.
"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words for the same reason that a machine should have no unnecessary parts." William Strunk Jr.
Always, always, always know what your character wants, even when he doesn't.
Don't announce character traits, but rather show them. Let your character's thoughts, tone, body language, deeds, etc., speak for him.
Develop good dialogue. Dialogue should be so unique to each character that you rarely need attributions. It should not be direct questions, followed by full and complete answers. (When was the last time you had a conversation like that, outside of a witness box?) Though we sometimes do answer direct questions with straight answers, we also tend sometimes to hedge, to answer questions with questions, to counter-attack, etc.
Pay close attention to the need for sacrifice. Your character must "earn" his reward, demonstrate growth over the course of your novel. By the end of the story, his emotional set point has to have changed appreciably. Ideally, your character should now be prepared to sacrifice something he would not have been capable of sacrificing at the outset.
Pay close attention to the need for reward, which goes hand-in-hand with sacrifice. In the final analysis, each character should get what they deserve, good or bad. (Carl Hiaasen, one of my personal writing Gods, does this better than anyone I know, with the bad guys reaping their due rewards in wonderfully grotesque, gruesome fashion.)
"You read all you can bear to read, learn what you can, realize it at the cellular level and work from instinct." John Long
Practice, practice, practice.
Read as much as you can, both within your genre and outside it, and never stop learning.
Study your market! Many writers would put this advice at the top of their lists, but I found I had to learn how to write a novel, period before I could hope to write to a particular market. That would have been too many balls for me to juggle at the outset.
Critiquing Etiquette
by Norah Wilson
One of the scariest things a fledgling writer can do is expose her work for critique, but expose it she must if she wants to master her craft. Even the not-so-novice writer can find it nerve-wracking, especially if she is pushing the boundaries in some fashion.
So how can we ensure that our fragile writers' egos emerge from the experience
unscathed?
Beats me! I always suffer at least some ego deflation when my mis-steps are
pointed out, no matter how gently it's done. But if the critique is sensitively
and constructively offered, with positive comments to counterbalance the negative
stuff, my downward emotional spiral lasts a mere few minutes, rather than days
or weeks. My comments, then, are aimed at making us better at giving and receiving
critique.
First, find yourself a critique partner. If this is your first foray into critiquing,
try to ensure you've chosen a partner whose world view resembles your own. While
soliciting opinions from less like-minded writers can be invaluable, it may
not be the best baptism for your heretofore sheltered work in progress. Find
out about your prospective partner's tastes. If she writes chaste romances and
you're targeting Big Blaze, maybe you're not the best fit. Likewise, if she
listens to classical music in her new climate-controlled SUV while Limp Bizkit
rattles the windows out of your ‘92 Cavalier, you might want to think twice.
It is also a good idea to try to find a partner whose level of development is
roughly equivalent to yours.
Okay, you've found yourself a partner(s). Now might be a good time to talk about
the ground rules. Here are some that I have found valuable.
Offer critique in a positive, constructive spirit.
If a piece needs a great deal of work, try not to overwhelm the writer. Since
we can't master all the elements at once, focus on one or two key things.
Don't forget to praise what the writer has done well. We gravitate to what needs
"fixing", but a steady diet of unrelieved criticism can be devastating,
no matter how constructive the observations. You don't need to write reams of
tributes. Just sprinkle in some smiley faces, or use wonderful words like "Great!",
"Yum!" or my favorite, "<Sigh>".
Couch your critique tactfully. Personally, I am more receptive to "This
might conjure some imagery that you may not have intended" than I am to
"Yuck!"
Offer suggestions, not pronouncements. Unless you want to come off as teachy/preachy,
"Have you thought about..." is probably a better approach than "Do
this, don't do that".
I find global impressions tremendously helpful. If you've done a line by line
critique, step back for a minute and view the whole picture in terms of pacing,
tone, etc., remembering to praise the elements the writer has handled well.
If you are of robust ego, you can ignore this point. However, if you're as neurotic
as I am, receiving critique can be harrowing. Depending on the intensity of
the critique, my reactions range from mildly defensive to devastated. My advice
is to accept these negative feelings and know that they will pass. Do not tell
the person who has just spent hours of her valuable time doing the most professional
job she can, how devastated you are. That will only serve to upset her. The
appropriate response is a heart-felt "Thank you." (Okay, maybe it's
not heart-felt today, but it will be tomorrow or the next day when you've bounced
back and realize some of their points are valid and can make your story stronger.)
Remember that the author is the final authority. If you're the critiquer, do
not be offended if she fails to accept all of your suggestions. It's her story,
after all. If you're the critiquee, accept the suggestions as such; do not feel
compelled to defend your decisions or to win the critiquer over to your point
of view.
Now that I've enumerated these "rules", I'm going to tell you that there's really only one rule – honor the creative force, in yourself and in your fellow-writers. If we nurture this creative energy, we can't go wrong.
Cultivating Experts
by Norah Wilson
No one needs to tell you – a writer – how important it is to do your research. Is your heroine a criminal defence lawyer? She'd better know the difference between an indictable offence and a summary offence and in which court each is likely to be tried. Is your hero a cop? He'd better know how to handle that Sig Saur 9mm. Is he a doctor? A security expert? An executive? Better do your research. That's not to say you have to master these respective trades; we're not writing police procedurals or medical thrillers here. But you do have to master some of the details, the language, the culture, to lend your story an air of authenticity.
How do you do this? Through reading, largely. Much of it can be researched on the Internet. There are also good reference resources out there. But one of the best (and often overlooked) ways to get a good grounding in a particular field is to talk with an expert.
For instance, I had a situation where I wanted my hero to have a life-threatening injury, one that could kill him quickly, but that could be alleviated with the right medical knowledge. I decided to give him pneumothorax (accumulation of air in the pleural cavity) with mediastinal shift (collapsed lung on one side forces the heart, trachea and great vessels to the unaffected side, with fatal results if a chest tube is not introduced). I read everything I could find on the subject, then wrote the scene.
Then I sent it to a writer-friendly physician who gently pointed out that my hero did indeed have a pneumothorax, but it was an open pneumo; my hero wasn't in immediate, critical danger until my well-meaning heroine intervened. By sealing the hero's knife wound, she turned his open pneumo into a tension pneumo, creating the life-threatening mediastinal shift. Thanks to this input, I was able to change the hero's injury to a closed pneumo (lung rupture from forceful impact rather than from a puncture, a scenario far more likely to produce a tension pneumothorax without the heroine's help!), and thereby avoided hideous embarrassment.
Another example? Without the help of a police officer on my last project (a cop story), I'd have had my hero pointing his 9mm at the villain without having chambered a round. Or removing the clip from his gun but leaving a live round in the chamber. Small details, but critical.
As you can see, there's just no substitute for conferring with an expert. And after you've picked his or her brain and written your scenes, see if you can get him/her to troubleshoot those scenes. Not only can they help you avoid mistakes like the ones I've described above, they can help you bring authenticity to your work by helping you nail the language. They can also tell you where you're being too show-offy with your new knowledge. And happily, as a complete and total bonus, this type of research will lend you credibility with an editor when you're explaining why you're uniquely qualified to write this particular story.
Don't know any cops (doctors/prosecutors/veterinarians)? No problem. Make a cold call.
You see, here's the thing – almost everyone is happy to share their expertise! It's true. This week, my local writers' group benefitted from a presentation by a local forensic anthropologist, as a result of a cold call I made. I don't know this woman from Adam (or should I say Eve?), but she agreed, enthusiastically and without fee, to my request to address our group.
Did the three hours I spent with Professor McLaughlin teach me enough to write a book from the POV of a forensic anthropologist? Nope. The field is too immense, too technical, too complex to absorb more than a broad-brush overview in the span of a few of hours. But just maybe I learned enough to fake my way through a scene where my detective (main character) consults with a forensic anthropologist (secondary character) on a case. And I established a personal contact with an expert to whom I can now turn for critical feedback if I should ever write such a scene. Or maybe I gleaned one little nugget of information that will stick in my mind like a grain of sand in an oyster's folds, destined in the fullness of time to become a story "pearl".
So, what do you want to know today? What kind of expert tops your list? Why not invite him/her to speak to your writer's group? The worst that can happen is they'll say no.
But I'm betting they won't.
Planning for Magic
by Norah Wilson
There are all kinds of writers in this world. At one end of the continuum are
the planners -- people who meticulously plot every scene before writing the
first word. At the other end are the "pantzers" -- people who prefer
to fly by the seat of their pants. I've known planners who use spreadsheet software
to map out their stories, and I've known pantzers who happily plunge in with
a "plan" that would fit on a postage stamp. Most of us fit somewhere
in between.
I will confess to starting out as a pantzer. In retrospect, I think my "just wing it" approach was a survival tactic. Had I burdened myself with the onus of knowing where my story was going, I probably wouldn't have started it, let alone finished it. Scene and sequel, show don't tell, start with a hook, keep the tension rising, use the hero's journey, GMC, BBM, POV.... SOS, already!
But once I'd mastered the basics and figured out story structure, I began to wonder if the planners didn't have an edge on us pantzers. They seemed able to target their markets more effectively than I could. With some ambivalence, I embarked on my first pre-plotted book (and I use that term loosely). I was afraid planning would take the joy and spontaneity out of writing, yet I was afraid I would miss the mark without a road map. To my delight, I discovered there was plenty of room between the mapped-out plot points for magic to happen.
What do I mean by magic? I mean that great idea that seems to leap out of nowhere, and yet is organic to the story you've created with your road map. For example, in my latest WIP, the hero (a regular-Joe cop) and the heroine (a rich, privileged lawyer) are thrown together when the hero plays bodyguard to protect the heroine from a stalker. Purely to underscore their differences, I made the hero a rabid baseball fan, and the heroine a fan of the arts. It was a bit of throwaway characterization. But later, when the H&H have to devise a plan to draw the stalker out, it struck me that the hero would naturally turn to baseball analogies to frame the problem and formulate a solution. And at the climax, when my heroine is held at knifepoint by the stalker, I was hit by another thunderbolt -- the hero would call upon their previous baseball-as-metaphor-for-life discussions to tip the heroine to what he's thinking, allowing them to act in unison to save her.
Did I plan for baseball to play a role in this story? Definitely not.
Did my pre-planning facilitate this little plot device? You bet! Not only does
pre-planning oblige you to get to know your characters intimately, it also frees
you to focus on the micro stuff during the actual writing, both of which lend
themselves to this kind of Ah-ha! moment.
Is this magic? Of the finest kind.
I know what you're thinking -- Can one plan so extensively that this creative breathing room is eliminated? Possibly. But you'd have to be a lot further to the right on the continuum between pantzer and planner than I am for that to be an issue! In fact, I've found that the "magic zone" persists even as the degree of pre-planning I do grows. For me, planning gives me the safety net of knowing the shape of my story will fit the market, while allowing ample room for spontaneity. The best of both worlds. For all you pantzers out there, why not give it a try?