Your single biggest challenge writing novels - John D. Brown

On Writing

LDStorymakers Presentation
ByJohn Brown May 12, 2017May 12, 2017

I’m at LDStorymakers this weekend. Had a wonderful time yesterday facilitating idea generation for the magic systems of eight writers who all had some really cool stuff. Today I will be giving my presentation on banishing writer’s doubt, fear, and block using cognitive therapy.

For those who want the slides, here they are.

Banish writers fear doubt and block with cognitive therapy (PDF)

Enjoy!

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On Writing

How author Rachel Aaron wrote a novel in 12 days
ByJohn Brown February 8, 2012February 8, 2012

Well, not quite. It was 15.

First read her essay “How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day”. Now read about her 12 day triumph in “12 Days of Glory”.

Amen on the pre-writing! I’d be lost without it. LOST. Sketching out scenes beforehand makes them SO MUCH EASIER to write. I can focus on the delivery, characters, dialogue, etc. instead of the events. It frees my creativity to focus on other things. Sketching out a novel beforehand does the same for the whole book. I have a simple sketch of the scene I’m going to write today. There’s no dithering about what to write. I KNOW what I need to write. So I do another more detailed sketch, the pre-writing for the scene before I jump into the day’s work. When I get the scene in my mind, the draft comes so much more quickly.

Amen on time! I’ve found my mind is like a furnace: it takes time to get hot, and if I only dedicatetake small chunks of time, I’m forever warming it up. When I get 3-4 hours a day, I far more productive on a per hour basis than when I only get one.

Amen on enthusiasm! There’s nothing worse than trying to write something that bores me. I can’t do it. And her little method for reviewing scenes is very similar to what I do.

Great posts, Rachel! Now I just need to get back into my dedicated time groove.

Read More How author Rachel Aaron wrote a novel in 12 days
On Writing

Meyer on the Brain
ByJohn Brown May 6, 2008December 1, 2008

Watch an interesting Borders interview with Meyer about Host and Twilight. The thing I keep seeing in her interviews is that this woman follows her passion. She follows the story that wows her. It’s nice, of course, that millions of fans want to share that wow with her. But I don’t know that a writer can be successful doing anything else.

Here’s Orson Card’s blurb about Meyer in Time’s list of the 100 Most Influential People

Nobody was looking for Twilight. A Mormon housewife writes a young-adult novel about a love affair between a teenage girl and a vampire?

Is this Anne Rice lite? Not in the eyes of the teenagers—and their mothers—who have embraced the book.

But Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight does raise some questions, and I’ve asked them. “You really want your teenage daughter to live inside the story of a girl who lies to her parents, invites a boy to sleep in her bed and trusts him not to take advantage of her?”

These women look at me as if I’m insane. “But she can trust him. He really loves her. He’s…perfect.”

In an era when much of the romance genre has been given over to soft porn, and dark fantasy is peopled with one-dimensional characters bent on grim violence, many readers have become hungry for pure romantic fantasy—lots of sexual tension, but as decorous as Jane Austen.

Meyer, 34, did not calculatedly reach for that audience. Instead, she wrote the story she believed in and cared about. She writes with luminous clarity, never standing between the reader and the dream they share. She’s the real thing. Still, who’d have thought it? Today Mr. Darcy is a vampire.

Card is author of Ender’s Game, Empire and Women of Genesis

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On Writing

The Secret to Getting Great Story Ideas
ByJohn Brown September 7, 2015

Last week I spent a lovely day with the League of Utah Writers at their annual writing conference. I presented “The Secret to Getting Great Story Ideas” which was about how to stop generating great story ideas by accident and start generating them on purpose, whenever you need them. I promised the folks I’d post my PowerPoint and notes. You’ll find them below.

The Secret To Getting Great Story Ideas 2015 LUW – Presenter Notes

The Secret To Getting Story Ideas 2015 LUW – Slides

For those wanting more details, you’ll find the same idea in my series on getting ideas. Here’s the first post: “Can You Create a Redneck Crapper”.

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On Writing

In writing, profanity is a tool, but not the only tool
ByJohn Brown August 25, 2009August 25, 2009

In this week’s Writing Excuses comments, a poster named Sam asked:

How do you, as writers, get past your own inhibitions concerning the use of profanity in order to write a character who does use it?

Why get past them?

Any given audience has values (as do you as a writer). Stomp on the values too much and you will make the readers so uncomfortable or angry that their discomfort will outweigh the draw of the story. They will put you down and never read you again. For one audience it’s gore. Another it’s explicit sex or vulgarity. For another it’s the bashing of a political stance or a particular demographic.

If you or your audience is uncomfortable with profanity then say “he swore” OR find another way to convey the information the profanity does.

Writing works by evoking types in the reader’s mind (as well as type resistors for surprise, curiosity, humor, etc.). Trigger a type and all the data associated with that type comes with it. Profanity is one way to trigger a type (or work against type) in the reader’s mind. But there are many other ways to evoke that same type, many ways to produce the same effect. Language, especially profanity, is a powerful and efficient method, but it’s not the only one.

You want a mean cruel man? You can have him call his wife a “cu**” all the time. OR you can just show him doing something cruel to her or slapping her, e.g. he grabs her by the neck and makes her look at the food on his plate up close like some pet owners do to dogs when they crap where they shouldn’t–”Does that look like beef stroganoff to you? Stupid whore.”

Look at Prison Break. Teddy needed to be scary. Profanity could have helped trigger his character. After all, cons use a lot of profanity. But Prison Break was prime time so the writers used other things to evoke the types they needed. Teddy worked for the purposes of that story. All of the cons did. They were believable. And all that without a deluge of profanity.

Stay away from replacement profanity that evokes a different type. For example, if you had Teddy using “darn it” all the time, unless it was part of some particular character attribute, it would have not been believable because it evokes the wrong type, e.g. Ned Flanders.

So if you don’t want to use profanity, don’t. Think about your objective and find another type trigger.

Read More In writing, profanity is a tool, but not the only tool
Blather

Is Sad Puppies the right strategy?
ByJohn Brown February 7, 2015February 22, 2015

There are a number of great science fiction and fantasy authors who feel that the Hugo awards have become irrelevant because the folks voting–only those who are members of Worldcon–do not represent science fiction and fantasy fandom.

Brad Torgersen describes it with this Venn diagram.

But this is not only about the fact that the voting block is not a statistically valid sample of fandom. It’s also a campaign against what Larry, Brad, and many others see as a politically correct shibboleth in parts of the publishing community that they feel short shrifts authors who do not toe the liberal political line.

Two years ago, Larry Correia decided to give this issue a lot of attention. He did this by asking his fans to purchase a Worldcon membership and then consider a list of authors he thought were very good but didn’t necessarily reflect the prevailing values of the traditional Worldcon audience. Last year he repeated the effort and created a shirt-storm (I like that image so much better than the one that includes flying poops). This year, Brad is carrying the banner. Read Larry’s post Sad Puppies 3: The Slatening? to see this year’s slate of alternative folks and a summary of why these guys are doing this.

I’m friends with Larry and Brad. And I do not like the Should Police coming out and telling me I should or must include more X in my stories and less of Y, whatever that X and Y may be.

But, I’m wondering if storming the Hugos is the right way to do this.

Yes, the Hugo award has a lot of brand equity. But must the Hugo represent fandom?

Is Sad Puppies attempting to storm the castle and force upon Worldcon something Worldcon members don’t care for?

Let’s go back to the original issue that Sad Puppies is trying to shine a light on.

Reader Kim wants more of X and less of Y in his or her books.

But instead of saying, “Geez, where in the crap do I find books with more of X and less of Y?”

Instead of trying to get with a bunch of folks and saying to suppliers, “Hey if someone would write more of X and less of Y, we’d buy it! Look at this market that’s dying for product!”

Instead of developing the More X and Less Y website dedicated to helping readers who like that find their books.

Instead of that, Kim says, “Gosh darn it! All books should have more X and less of Y. And if they don’t, they’re, they’re, they’re bad, and bad for you, and probably make kids smoke! And we should make all stories conform.”

And the mandated “should” is where things get all tangled up. That should is what Sad Puppies is speaking out against.

So instead of trying to stomp out differing opinions or requiring all authors to write stories with some allotted amount of XY content, would it not be more productive to simply work with our wonderful free market to try to create a new silk road (or pave the existing one fit only for camels) that connects readers who like XY stories with authors who are happy to write them?

I think it would.

At the same time, this same argument could be applied to the Hugos. Instead of trying to force Worldcon members to change their ways, why not let them like the stories they like, but create a fresh new award that seeks a broader base? It would require work to build its brand equity, but maybe that’s a more effective long-term strategy.

It’s kind of like the New York Times best seller list. There are many problems with that list, including, but not limited to, the fact that it can be gamed. But instead of trying to change it, USA Today came up with something much better. Yes, “NY Times Best Seller!” still has huge brand equity. But USA Today is gaining on it. And as the market learns more and more about the difference between the lists, USA Today’s will only grow in luster.

I suppose it’s true that you sometimes do indeed need to storm the castle. And maybe this one needed some barbarians to show up and sack it. But I wonder if it’s time to pivot. I’m wondering if in this case the best long-term strategy wouldn’t be to simply build an armored division of M1-Abrams with air and sea support and make the castle irrelevant. Maybe this is something to think about for next year.

Read More Is Sad Puppies the right strategy?

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