Author Mike Duran gives some tips on how to manage your writing while holding your “day job.”
Writing
New Writer Myths and Staking Your Name
Here are Eight Myths new writers should consider. While you’re at it, why don’t you have your own website yet? One with your name, that is.
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Details, Details
I previously wrote on the importance of finding the right balance of details in a novel:
It’s true that too little detail is boring. Just as certain is that not allowing a story to breathe, to capture the reader and bring them in, is just as boring. It doesn’t take a lot of detail to paint a picture in the mind. A perception. A feeling. An immersive book doesn’t have to be 200,000 words long. Fewer and purposefully chosen words can ignite the reader’s imagination, draw them inside and propel them forward.
Novelist and professor James Hynes, in his course Writing Great Fiction, also implores writers to get your details right:
…evocative writing provides significant detail, but it doesn’t overwhelm the reader. The point is to draw something out of your readers, which you can’t do if you pour too much in. This is a tricky balance to get right, and beginning writers often have the most difficulty with it. Just as one common error among young writers is not providing enough detail, another…is to overcompensate by telling to much. Often, inexperienced writers will go on for several paragraphs about the appearance of a character or place when a few well-chosen sentences or words would have done just as well.
Finding the right balance of detail can allow your readers disappear into your book, or make your book disappear.
Ending Badly
Russian playwright Anton Chekhov famously wrote:
Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.
What he was referring to is that when writing, you better give payoff for whatever you set up in your story. Surprisingly, the failure to do this most often manifests itself in the endings of books or films. Years ago, I was reading a particular bestselling thriller that everyone was reading. It contained action and conspiracy and adventure, but then came the ending. “Is this it?” I asked myself. “People really think this is great?”
The author had all this build-up and expectations, so high that the ending was overshadowed. Perhaps he was hoping the rest of the story would compensate? Sales of the book seemed to vindicate the book, but when have we become so easily entertained that we overlook a poor ending?
Part of it may come from motion pictures. Blockbuster films jam the film with so many expensive set pieces and action sequences, the traditional slow burn to a climax is often nonexistent. When the big showdown does unfold, it isn’t so spectacular. It’s as if the film makers spent all their money already or didn’t bother thinking the end through as well as the previous acts. This doesn’t stop many of these films from being successful, but it can make others that do have a real climax a refreshing change.
Just as beginings are critical, don’t let your endings flounder. Don’t hope that the preceding chapters will make people overlook bad final pages. Maybe they will, but is that the standard you want to follow?
A great ending can also be a great beginning, but make sure the reader wants to read what you write next.
Heroes and Legends
Famed J.R.R. Tolkien biographer, Professor Thomas A. Shippey, in his course Heroes and Legends, writes on the “universal human art form” of storytelling:
…Over the millennia of human history, millions of tales, novels, romances and epics have been written, published, and many more must have been told in the far longer millennia of prehistory. The vast majority vanished without a trace once their immediate purpose had been served – forgotten, discarded, out of print.
A small number survive and become classics. Of that small number, an even smaller number does more than survive: They inspire imitations, sequels, remakes and responses. It is the heroes and heroines – and sometimes the villains – of these super-survivors who have created and continue to create our imaginative world. “Don’t the great tales never end?” asks the hobbit Sam Gamgee…Sam has good reason to see that the answer is: No, they don’t.
…Most of all, the “great tales” offer an insight into the human heart, in all its variety and complexity, that nothing else can provide.
Categories: Books, Fiction, Writing
Tags: J.R.R. Tolkien, storytelling, Thomas A. Shippey
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Selling Your Book
Brian Godawa continues his instructional series with How to Market Your Self-Published Novel. Don’t let the title mislead you, however. Regardless of how you publish your novel, much of the marketing is up to the author. Until you earn the auto-selling reputation of a Tom Clancy or J.R.R. Tolkien, an author’s effort at marketing their book is critical. Many new authors are surprised at this, expecting book ads and radio spots, but such things have become the exception rather than the rule. The quantity of books being published also makes it impossible for every new book to receive the red carpet treatment. So once that book is done, your work isn’t.
Self-Publishing vs. Legacy Publishing
Author Brian Godawa discusses the pros and cons of self-publishing:
Categories: Books, Writing
Tags: Brian Godawa, indie authors, indie publishing, self-publishing
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Writing Better
Someone said (or wrote) that you should stop reading about writing and just start writing. True, but here’s some articles with some great tips anyway: 8 Pieces of Advice for Writers from novelist Nadine Brandes; “Call me Ishmael” is already taken, so read 7 Ways to Create a Killer Opening; and make sure your characters are driving your story scene by scene.
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Epic Sci-Fi…From 1933
It seems that many authors think that their sci-fi or fantasy books must run 200,000 words to qualify as a world-building epic. As we discussed before, that isn’t always the case. There are many lengthy books that are must reads, but many others that fail to let their stories breath and trust their readers’ imaginations.
Older sci-fi tended to be much shorter, such as Otis Adelbert Kline’s The Swordsman of Mars and The Outlaws of Mars. A contemporary of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Kline wrote in the same vein of swashbuckling adventures.
Does the short nature of these books mean they lack detail? No, you quickly find yourself on the red world, immersed in another culture. for a short while you are there on a world that never was. I have often argued that just enough detail can go along away to implanting images in the reader’s mind. Describing every last button and rock along the trail just slows down the journey.
A writer must learn when to detail and when not to. Where to pause and give more, and where to forge ahead and trust the reader. Surely reader preferences may come into play, but most want to be pulled in and stranded in a fantastic adventure.
The Red Planet is a good of a place as any to start.
Categories: Books, Fiction, Writing
Tags: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Mars, Otis Adelbert Kline, sci-fi, science fiction
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Darrick Dean 