What I’m looking for from SFWA

ByJohn Brown

SFWA has asked M.C.A. Hogarth to head up the new self-publishing committee. Hogarth posted about this and asks:

So here’s my question for those of you who self-publish, either entirely or as a hybrid author: what services would you look for in a professional organization? What would make you say, “Wow, that’s worth $90 a year, sign me up?”

I applaud SFWA’s move. And the many good things SFWA has done in the past. However, as an indie and SFWA member, here’s what would interest me: Business.

That’s with a big B.

That means . . .

Distribution into brick and mortar venues. So indie authors can get on the Ingram’s catalog. Big whoop. The retailer still has to order. If SFWA was able to facilitate the sales function in some way, that alone would be worth it.

One idea is a SFWA catalog of vetted work. I don’t know how you’d vet. Maybe some certain sales and revenue level. And revenue would have to be part of it. Brick and Mortar isn’t going to be interested in stocking the person who “sold” 50,000 units but only made $300 because 99% of them were free downloads.

You might also consider the back lists of authors with work that was once published that has been brought back indie style. So a catalog of that includes new stuff and a section for the back list. Quality and popular indie work.

BTW, this catalog would ALSO go to libraries.

Education in cover design AND art direction. Maybe adding this to an awards category chosen NOT by the general membership but art pros.

The Nebulas recognize author’s who sell. But what about recognizing those who are author-publishers, what about recognizing and celebrating quality and achievement in the key elements of publishing?

Education in Marketing that has actually been tested and shows positive ROI. Not a bunch of articles about bookmarks and conventions. Real ROI.

Interior formatting. Principles. Awards.

News. What’s new on the indie front. New markets etc.

Selling foreign rights as an indie with and without an agent.

What about an award like RWA’s Golden Heart, but for indie books? Or make indies more inclusive in the Nebulas.

A vendor forum where folks who provide services to indie authors (editors, artists, etc) can be listed and rated, GoodReads style, but only by SFWA members.

And two things I have submitted to SFWA before as a trad pub author.

Education and discussion of contracts and contract terms. What’s current. What’s alarming. I get more off of Kris Rusch’s blog than the professional organization I belong to. I should be giving my $90 bucks to Kris. What the heck?

Education and discussion of current contract rates. Same as above. For a professional organization to not have data on current rates for novels is a real head-scratcher.

How is it that Tobias Buckell can run a survey, but it never occurs to SFWA to survey and publish annual numbers?

How is it that Brenda Hiatt, the romance writer who does an annual “Show Me The Money” and “Indie Earnings” report, provides more info on Tor advances than SFWA? Romance writers are better organized than any writing group on the planet, but do they need to spank us in our own house?

These last two are no-brainers.

This is a trade organization. These types of things would be a HUGE help.

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  • Is trying to improve your style a bad thing?

    ByJohn Brown
    By Stan Eales
    Ink and Quill by Stan Eales

    Another great podcast by the Writing Excuses team, this time on style and voice: http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/10/06/writing-excuses-episode-35-voice-tone-and-style/

    Quesion: is it dangerous as a writer to try to improve your style?

    A lot of respected authors say it’s foolishness to focus on style. Because story is what people want. Story is the thing. Put all the lipstick you want on a pig, it’s never going to be anything but a pig.

    I agree with them. Why fiddle with the words when the content oinks? If you have to focus on something, focus on delivering killer stories.

    However, story content is not everything. There is a feeling that comes with how the story is written. You can serve prime rib on fine china in a $100 / plate restaurant, or you can serve it in a cardboard box out on the back lawn by the shed. Same beef, but not quite the same experience.

    Orson Card is one of those who cautions against thinking about trying to improve your style. I want you to read this.  

    Question 5:

    I would like to use the discussion in Lesson One as a springboard to my own inquiry. I understand that obsessively analyzing the style in which one writes can lead to bigger problems. However, my problem is not with an overall stylistic deficiency, but a very specific one. Through dialogue, the voices of the characters speak with one another. Are there any techniques you can offer which make the process of composing dialogue any easier? (I don’t expect a wonder formula, just some methods which would help me organize my thoughts a little better.)

    — Submitted by Jennifer Dittrich

    OSC Replies:

    Composing Dialogue

    The secret is not to think about dialogue as a separate task. You aren’t writing dialogue, you’re writing an encounter between characters. Part of the encounter is what they say, but part of it is how they react to each other, what they want from each other, what has happened between them in the past, who else is watching and the impression they want to make, and so on. When the characters speak, therefore, they aren’t “speaking dialogue,” they’re using words to do something to the other person — sometimes to try to get the other person to understand some information, but more often to get the other person to do something or feel something or reveal something. That’s what you concentrate on, and then come up with words you might use to accomplish that character’s purpose. Sometimes you’ll try many different opening lines as a conversation begins, and see where they go; sometimes you’ll erase long passages because they don’t feel right to you. But the solution to dialogue problems is rarely to “write better dialogue.” It’s almost always to clarify or change what the character wants or feels or thinks.

    Most often, bad dialogue is bad because it’s “clunky.” The usual cause is that you’re trying to “write well,” and your idea of writing well comes from the horrible essays you were forced to write in high school and college. Forget all that! But don’t forget it just when you’re writing dialogue — that’s bad writing even in the essays and papers produced by those very same teachers! Good writing sounds like a person talking. Your narrative sections should be written in fluid language that can easily be read aloud. In other words, your narrative should sound like dialogue spoken by a good storyteller!

    So if you worry about your writing style, especially your dialogue writing, chances are that the problem you have is that you are worrying about your writing style instead of worrying about what happens and why in the story! Bad style is almost invariably the result of trying for “good style,” because “good style” is invariably defined by writing teachers and the students who believe them as “writing like someone else who writes better than you.” But you can’t write like them, because you’re not them and their voice isn’t your voice. You can only write well when you write the way you talk, only more clearly and precisely. If you are laboriously constructing your sentences, searching in the thesaurus for “just the right word,” you are almost certainly writing unreadably; and, while you might only notice it in your dialogue, chances are you are writing badly all the time.

    How do you cure this destructive habit? Let me give you a parallel example. When I was a child, I had a lyric boy-soprano voice, complete with vibrato. I sang high and sweetly, and that ability to sing was an important part of who I was. But when my voice changed, the “high” was gone and so was the sweet. Grimly determined to get my voice back, I forced a vibrato using very bad technique — a strained, rapid diaphragmatic vibrato rather than one that arises from a relaxed throat. It made my voice sound eccentric and unpleasant — and the tightness that resulted severely limited my range. I went through my college career with that voice, even though I knew it didn’t sound all that good, because I didn’t know how to do it better.

    Then I went to Brazil as a missionary. Nobody there knew me as a performer. No one cared how I sang. I stripped away the old pretense and sang “straight,” with clear tone, no vibrato at all. I learned to relax my throat. I sounded like nothing; and then, to my surprise, a genuine, relaxed vibrato began to enter my voice on sustained notes. And my singing range increased, both higher and lower. When I came home, my singing voice was a far more versatile and powerful instrument than it had ever been before. During my forced-vibrato years, I couldn’t “do voices” — I could only sing the one way. Now I could take my relaxed voice and shape it to sound like an old man singing, or a child, or an untrained singer, or an operatic buffoon. I could sing conversationally; I could sing formally. I had my voice at last.

    But I had to stop trying to force my voice and just relax, concentrating on the song and not the singer. Before I could sing well, I had to stop trying to sing well and concentrate on singing clearly, singing to the audience.

    And if you don’t understand how this applies to writing style, I’m not a good enough writer to explain it to you any better.

    You can read it on his site here: http://www.hatrack.com/writingclass/lessons/1998-08-14-5.shtml

    Lots of great insights there. How many ways can you say, “Please, focus on the content of the story!”

    But did you notice this line: ” Your narrative sections should be written in fluid language that can easily be read aloud. In other words, your narrative should sound like dialogue spoken by a good storyteller! ”

    And this one: “You can only write well when you write the way you talk, only more clearly and precisely.”

    Card is talking about improving your style to make it more clear and fluid and authentic to you. Even while warning this questioner as strongly as possible to avoid trying to improve your style, Card prescribes improving your style.

    So style matters, even to Card. It just doesn’t matter nearly as much, in most cases, as content does. And I agree with him on his priorities.

    However, I still think Card is throwing the baby out with the bath water. Maybe because he’s seen too many wretched stories that had great style. Nevertheless, there IS a way that each of us talks. We talk that way out of habit, but also because we like some of those turns of phrases. Because certain sounds, words, and rhythms appeal to us at some level. Because they feel right.

    So what if you’re reading TC Boyle and love the rhythm of his prose? What if you figure out some of what drives that rhythm? What if you begin to use it in your writing? Is that bad?

    Or what if you notice how David Farland always puts movement into descriptive passages? Or that you use “really” and “very” really a lot in very many places? What if you like how Dean Koontz stops to paint his characters? His use of metaphor to evoke an image of a person? What if you notice how some of Card’s prose works poetically?

    What if your editor notices something you do that jars him so much it sets his teeth to rattling, and when he points it out you agree?

    What if you pick up new stylistic elements and options and try them? Are you then going to write excrement?

    No. You’re not. Because it’s natural to pick up words, phrases, manners of speaking. It’s natural to try them on. In fact, trying to AVOID this is what’s unnatural.

    I used to work with a guy named Rick Jendro. He looks like a young Sylvester Stallone. One thing I loved about him was that he is a wonderful water cooler story teller. Rick used his hands and voice and face when telling his water cooler stories. He wasn’t Acting with a capital A, but he was acting. He was evoking the story. He reminded me of another friend, Jeff Cuthbert, who did the same thing.

    I loved listening to both of them. LOVED IT. Partly because of this acting they did.

    So I noticed what Rick was doing and Jeff had been doing. The next time I told a story I let myself be a bit more free with my hand motions and actions. I didn’t study movements or anything like that. Didn’t rehearse. I found they just came when I reminded myself to let them come. I tell a better story today than I did before because of this.

    Was I wrong to delight in what they did and try it? I don’t think so. There’s nothing wrong with imitation. Good gravy, that’s how we learned language in the first place.

    My advice, lowly writer that I am, is to read and imitate. Notice things. Notice every thing that sings. Every thing that clunks. From character to plot to punctuation to paragraphing to dialogue to whatever. Then try things on. Try on structures and plot twists and dilemmas. Try on paragraphing and poetical devices like simile and metaphor. Try on everything that strikes your fancy. Get a whole closet of outfits that feel wonderful on your bones.

    And when you write, just write. Don’t worry about the style because all these new outfits you’ve got: the ones that feel most natural for the task at hand will present themselves to you when the time is right. I promise.

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  • Indie Thoughts: How To Sell Loads of Books

    ByJohn Brown

    From Russell Blake.

    This does not represent the only way to do things, but it’s my way, and is the synthesis of everything I’ve learned over the last 23 months of self-publishing:

    1) Pick one genre that’s popular and with which you are extremely familiar, and then write in that genre. Stick to it. Don’t hop around. It confuses your potential readers and muddies who you are in their minds, and will hurt your sales. If you want to write different genres, use a pseudonym, and if you like, let your readers know that moniker is you. But stick to one name, one genre, because you’re building your brand, and brand building is a function of clarity – clearly communicating what you do, and what your product is.

    2) Write a series. Why? Because readers like series, and you want to give readers what they like. Or you won’t sell as much. You can try stand-alone – I have – but my series outsell my stand-alone books 4 to 1. Once you have at least three books in the series, make the first one free. Earn your income from the rest, but give readers a whole novel to decide whether they like you or not.

    3) Write a lot. By that I mean try to write at least 3 novels a year. Don’t bother with short stories or novellas (40K or under) if you’re writing fiction – erotica, romance and non-fiction reportedly to do better with short form, but I don’t know from personal experience. Write 60-90K installments in your series, and release them AT MINIMUM every four months. Every three months would be better. Every two, better still. Momentum breeds success, and readers have short memories. The current market is a hungry animal, and you need to feed it, or risk being forgotten by the time your next one releases. Sorry. It’s the truth. And don’t start whining about how X famous author only puts out one book every Y years. If you’re Dan Brown and you sell tens of millions of novels each whack, then do whatever the hell you like. If you aren’t, listen up, or chock your strategy up to, “Become the next Dan Brown” and stop reading this drivel.

    . . . .

    5) Allocate time every day to write, and be disciplined. I suggest minimum one hour per day, or 1000 words. I actually ignore that and shoot for 5000-7000 a day when writing a novel, but that’s just my approach, and it’s not for everyone. My point is that you must be disciplined about your writing and develop that muscle. If you don’t make it a habit, you won’t write enough to put out one novel every four months, and you’ll already be way behind the curve.

    6) Allocate time every day to market. I recommend a 75%/25% writing to marketing mix. So spend an hour writing every day, and fifteen-twenty minutes marketing (social media, blogging, interviews, message boards like this). Two hours writing, half hour to forty minutes marketing. And so on.

    . . . .

    13) Price competitively and intelligently. Look at your genre. Where are most books priced? Are you undervaluing/underpricing your work? Price to sell, but don’t go cheap, no matter what Locke or Hocking did years ago. Use low prices occasionally to move product, as promotional pricing. But price your product consistently with the rest of your peers. Over time, you can increase prices, if your product warrants it and your readership is willing to pay it. My advice here is don’t price too low, or too high.

    . . . .

    19) Have realistic goals. Look at what the average person does in their first year, and their second. That’s average. It ain’t pretty. If you want to be different than average in a good way, you need to do something better/different, and you need to make your own luck. Don’t get bummed because you haven’t been an overnight sensation. I sold $300 of novels in November, 2011, after six months of 15 hour days and seven releases. In December, 2011, I released five novels I’d been working on for months, to create a massive Xmas surge. I leaped to $1450. With a dozen books out. That’s not exactly a ton for the big Xmas season. But I continued writing as though my work was in hot demand. And I kept investing in my product, losing money, until it turned the corner and I started making decent money in Jan of 2012.

    20) Book selling is a retail business, and retail businesses are promotions intense. You’re only going to be as good as your last, and next, promotion. Promotions are a necessary fact of life in retail. You have to generate noise – the product won’t do it by itself. There are millions of books out there. Yours are just more books. Figure out how to get some visibility. I won’t advise you on how – there are plenty of ‘experts’ that will charge you $5 for a book on what worked two years ago. Simply put, it’s constantly changing, so you need to experiment and push the envelope, share information with others and stay ahead of the curve. But if you aren’t promoting, you’re stalling. In business you’re either shrinking, or growing. If you aren’t promoting, chances are you aren’t growing.

    There are 28 tips in all at “How to Sell Loads of Books.”

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  • Indie Thoughts: Russell Blake’s Indie Author Myths

    ByJohn Brown

    This is from Russell Blake, a pseudonym for Craig Osso, a 52-year-old retired home developer who has sold close to 450,000 copies of the 25 books he published in the last 30 months. The man has made over a million bucks at this.

    1) Books Sell Themselves. No, sweetie, they don’t, at all, and never did. That’s why trad pubs spend massively on promotions. Because they know that visibility sells books, not invisible cosmic forces or author brilliance. It’s a highly competitive market with millions of choices, and it’s a retail market, and in retail, visibility is key. Which means constant promotion. Which most authors hate. But it’s reality, so get used to the idea. A companion to this aphorism is the next one…

    2) Just write the next one. Sure, if you want to have two undiscovered gems instead of one. Look, writing the next one’s important, but not if it’s used to justify not promoting the last one, which is often the case. You have to both market the last one AND write the next one. Sorry. You do.

    3) It’s all about luck. Well, perhaps some of it is. Maybe even much of it is. But so’s everything. You drive to the market, and 30 seconds after you pass the intersection some dumbass crashes into the car behind you. Luck. A hundred people start restaurants in town and two do well while the rest fail. Luck. A mugger attacks you after a movie. Luck. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. The book biz is no more or less random and chaotic than life, and yet some folks seem to consistently do better than others. I believe you need to work very hard, prepare, and be persistent, thereby creating some of your own luck. As an example, it’s possible you always wear your seat belt and the other driver didn’t today. In that case, bad luck becomes disastrous due to a simple lack of preparation. Or in the case of the restaurants, perhaps the ones that prospered had owners that worked 18 hour days and were talented chefs, and further, were savvy and inventive about getting people to try their cuisine. Preparation, persistence, hard work combine in that case to drag Lady Luck in their direction. With the mugger, maybe you have pepper spray or spent years on martial arts or have a concealed carry. Your preparation is the mugger’s bad luck.

    Luck may be a factor, but in my experience it’s only one factor, and that perspective of it all being all about luck breeds apathy.

    4) Do everything right and you’ll make it. Huh. If that were so, every book put out by big pubs would do well. The vast majority don’t. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to do everything right, unless you want to worsen your already slim odds rather than improving them.

    . . . .

    10) Your muse cannot be forced to dance. Of course it can. If you were a writer on 24 or CSI or SNL you’d be expected to perform every week or you’d be out of a job. Most who work hard enough to get those gigs don’t want to lose ‘em, so they perform. Whether they feel like it or not. Whether they’re particularly inspired or not. The notion that you need to wait for your muse to decide to infuse you with story is fine if your books sell 10 million and you can afford to wait 4 or 5 years between each one. If that’s not you, you need to develop two things: a work ethic, and a system to inspire yourself.

    One technique I use is to ask myself how I can make this book, or this chapter, the best I’ve ever written. You get completely different answers depending upon what questions you ask yourself. “How can I consistently write 5K a day and enjoy it?” will get you a different answer than “How am I ever going to do this?” If you’re stuck, ask better questions.

    . . . .

    12) I’m too busy to read. Who’s got the time? This one kills me. How in the hell do you expect to be a good writer if you don’t read a lot of good books? Intuition? Divine guidance? Magic?

    . . . .

    1[6]) Write a good book and you will make decent money. Or write a lot of good books and you will make decent money. Would that it were so. Reality is that the overwhelming majority of good books, which is to say competently written-and-edited tomes, fail to sell much.

    . . . .

    My message is simple: working very hard and very smart can improve your terrible odds, but that’s all it can do. It’s not a magic pill, nor a recipe for success.

    . . . .

    I can tell you how to operate your writing and publishing company intelligently, but you need to recognize that most well-run publishing companies fail. Just as most well-run any-kind-of-companies fail. Most start-ups don’t last. They go belly up. Even those with the smartest people and shiniest wow products. That’s just how it works. Don’t start a company if you’re uncomfortable with that idea.

    . . . .

    I’m a big proponent of choosing a genre that can support you, which means one that’s popular, and sticking to it (with the caveat that if it doesn’t meet your expectations after a massive, concentrated effort, pay attention to the result you’re getting, and switch to something with better odds). I’m also big on publishing regularly, meaning every three or four months (more often if possible) if you intend to make this your living. I’m huge on pro editing and covers and proofreading. I consider your cover and your blurb essential to success. But those are the basics. Important basics, but still, building blocks.

    They will narrow your long odds because most authors simply don’t do what they should to make themselves successful. Understanding that is an advantage. It means you already know more than 90% of those who will publish on Amazon this year. If you do everything right, that will make you the 10% that has a chance.

    But still, it’s not a lock. By any stretch of the imagination. Get clear on that. In all businesses, this included, you can do everything absolutely, spectacularly right, and go nowhere. Because God hates you. Or because the world’s unfair. Or because you’re not good enough. Or were born under a dark star. Or didn’t get breast fed enough as a child. Pick your reason. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you recognize that in ALL industries, most businesses do not succeed.

    . . . .

    I wish I could tell you how to avoid being that person. I wish there were a formula. What I’ve come up with I share openly: Pick a genre you love and that’s large enough to support you, stick to it, write a lot of seriously good books, focus on improving your grasp of craft each time you sit down to write, make each book your best ever (meaning respect your reader above all else), package and quality control your books like the pros do, market intelligently, and spend massive amounts of time and energy working smarter than everyone else. And above all, be extremely realistic about everything. Some might say, cynical. I’d say pragmatic.

    . . . .

    Can you do this part time and make it? Sure you can. So can someone who starts any business part time. Just recognize that your odds of making it are lower than if you did it full time. Duh. Put in 80 hours a week, you might get better results than 10. Big surprise. Can you put in 10 or 20 and still do well? Sure. Again, anything’s possible. But you have to be unable to grasp basic business concepts if you think your odds will be the same. If they were, nobody would put in the 80. They’d all put in the 10, because their odds are identical.

    . . . .

    What’s my point? That self-publishing is both exciting in its possibilities and daunting in its requirements. And that very few businesses succeed, whether it’s a new shoe shop, or a convenience store, or a restaurant, or a software start-up…or a publishing company. But it’s more possible now to succeed than at any point in the past. I’m living proof.

     

    Link to the rest at Russell Blake’s Author Myths-1, Author Myths-2, and Author Myths -3.

    Blake has some of the most sensible advice I’ve read. If you want more, search for him over on KindleBoards.

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  • “Vivid and Clear” video, bootleg style

    ByJohn Brown

    Michael Barker generously offered his time to mash up the audio and PowerPoint for my LTUE presentation “Vivid and Clear.” He didn’t have tons of tools so ended up playing the audio on his computer, clicking through the presentation as it played, and recording the event with his iPad as a movie. So the result isn’t Hollywood. But it’s not bad for a bootleg (grin).

    You can find it in seven-part Vivid and Clear (almost…) series on YouTube. Enjoy! And here’s the Vivid and Clear v2.

    He’s now working on Story Turns. Stay tuned for more.

    BTW, a big thanks goes to Aaron Allred who recorded the audio.

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  • Generating Story 14: Freewriting from Inquiry to Outline to Scene to Draft with Author Maya Lassiter

    ByJohn Brown

    Maya Lassiter is an unschooling mom, a yogini, a goat keeper, a yurt dweller, and a pantsy fantasy writer. Or should I say very likely soon to be less pantsy and more of a juggernaut? We shall see.  The initial results of her attempt to go from writing by the seat-of-your-pants to doing more pre-draft development seems to be paying off big time in less stress and higher word counts in each writing session.  I asked Maya to share her method with us. Here’s what she had to say.

    Maya

    At one hundred pages in on my eighth novel, I ran aground and could not seem to move forward an inch.  This was totally normal.  As a pantser, I pretty much always ran aground at some point, usually many times per novel, and then had to go back and rewrite, revise, redraft, finding the point I had gone off the rails and fixing things until finally I could get the train drafting moving once again.  Of course, even after all that, I would still go back to the beginning again, once I had hit then end, for revisions were where I found the book out of the mass of stuff I had gotten down by the seat of my writerly pants.  It was usually for four or five more drafts.  Grueling, exhausting work. 

    This time, however, staring at the choked up, broken manuscript before me, I had had enough.  I decided I wanted to be one of those people who planned their book: to heck with this pantsing crap. I wanted to write a draft that hung together the first time through.  I wanted this whole novel writing thing to be easier.

    In deciding this, however, I realized I had no idea how to proceed.  It’s one thing to say, “I want an entirely new way to do this,” and quite another to actually know what that new way is.  So, I did what any avid reader does when trying to figure anything out: I went to the library.  I checked out a giant stack of books–anything about writing fiction, or writers talking about their work, or editors talking about their writers.  I read it all. 

    In the process, I might have figured out how those outliners do it.

    Pantsing, for me anyway, involves figuring everything out in the draft.  Following your nose, your characters, your muse, your whim, and learning about your story as you go, often right along with your protagonist.  I had previously given up on outlining (multiple times) because, how can you outline what you don’t know, and how can you know if you haven’t written it yet?

    I found one solution to this in Alan Watts’s The 90 Day Novel.  In a word, free-writing.  In fact, 30 days of his 90 are spent just making stuff up, fooling around, free-writing without intending to keep a word of it, all using Watt’s copious question prompts about your story, your protagonist, or your antagonist, whenever you need to, to prime the pump.

    So I tried it.  And after 30 days, I knew a ton about my story I hadn’t already figured out—even though I had already written 100 pages of a draft.  (A draft that was riddled with problems, and now I could see what the pieces were.)  Basically, inquiring into the story and characters, and fooling around in longhand to find answers, brought many insights, including flashes of scenes, scraps of dialogue, the voices of the characters coming to life, new ideas….

    At some point I started listing these flashes out.  That is, any time I actually saw a scene-let from my novel spring to life in my head, I wrote it down.  I got an out-of-order laundry list this way of bits and pieces of the book-to-be, and I kept adding to it as the 30 days progressed.  Until one day I realized that two or three of those scene-lets could come together and become a true scene.  And that this bit ought to go in front of that bit–the beginnings of a plot!  Basically, the list started organizing itself as I figured out more about the story through those free-writes.  Magic.

    Watts also makes use of a three-act structure and slotting my proto-scenes and full scenes (as I found them) into his structure helped me see where there were holes…which brought more questions and more inquiry, which brought more free-writing, free-wheeling, answers.  I think any structure could work for this step: a romance structure, a puzzle structure, a plot-coupon epic, a coming of age story, whatever you know and love and want to use. 

    So, the laundry list, the scene list sequence, and then playing with that scene list within a structure template, these were the three steps that took me from a mass of free-written, stream of consciousness stuff, to a pretty clear idea of the arc of the story, beginning, middle, and end.  With lots of information along the way.

    At this point, I was at the end of Watts’s 30 days, the point at which he starts to draft in earnest….but I still wanted more than a laundry list of scenes, even an organized one.  I wanted a tighter sense of the thing.  I wanted less WORK and flailing about as I wrote.  So I took a page from Holly Lisle’s technique–a very similar one, I have learned, to a technique in Victoria Schmidt’s book, Book in a Month, that she supposedly got from Nora Roberts, and on it goes.  What you do is you take an index card for each scene and write a single sentence on it that sums up that scene.  The sentence includes five parts: [A protagonist with a need][in conflict with][an antagonist with a need][in an interesting setting][with a twist].  If you’ve got all five of those parts for each and every scene, you’re going to have tight scenes that move the story along, with no dangling bits or wandering (re: getting lost). 

    I took the “twist” part of that formula and read it to be similar to a central idea in Robert McKee’s book, Story, something he calls the Turn.  Basically, your character walks into a scene expecting X and the general energy charge of the scene is either postive + ish, or negative – ish.  Then something happens, or something is revealed, that changes all that, turns those expectations upside down.  That’s the Turn.  Whatever the charge was to begin with, it is now very different, either much further than it was (really + or really -) or the opposite charge altogether.  If a scene doesn’t have a Turn, it isn’t a scene.  If the charge doesn’t change, you get a monotony in your manuscript.

    All right.  I took my scene list and converted it into Sentence-per-Scenes on index cards, making sure each sentence had all 5 components, more or less, especially including the Turn.  Surprise, there were 28 scenes in this novel.  How about that?

    If I wrote 28 cards-worth of material, I’d have a complete novel draft.  It seems so doable, when it’s put like that.

    But I wasn’t done yet.  I remembered a blog post I had read a while back about increase productivity–and remember, this whole experiment was to see if I could make novel writing an easier, more streamlined process.  Maybe I would fail, maybe writing novels for me was always going to be guts and angst, but I wanted to see what was possible.  I mean, why not, right?  So I went and found that post, a post on Rachel Aaron’s blog, called How I Went from Writing 2000 Words a Day to 10000 Words a Day.  (http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.ca/2011/06/how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-day.html  )  One of her primary tricks was to figure out what you were going to write for five or ten minutes–just fool around long hand on a page or two, before you start drafting until the scene is clear in your mind before you start drafting.  It was sort of like Alan Watts’s 30 days of free-writing, in miniature. 

    I also remembered another writer, Laurel Amberdine, talking about her trick of priming the pump for a scene with a sort of cheat sheet she had invented, a list of things she wanted to be sure to hit in each scene–not as a checklist, but as more writing prompts to help her find the details of the scene before drafting.  I went looking for that in our writer’s group threads, merged it with John Brown’s take on that same list, and then added on some questions from McKee’s Story, and I came up with my own prompt-sheet, designed for 10-15 minutes of pre-writing before starting each of my 28 scene cards.  Here it is:

    One Sentence Description:

    Problem:  What does the main character want in this scene?

    What persons or forces stand in the way?  What do they want?

    Value:  What is the value at stake?

    Describe the charge, positive or negative, for the main character as the scene opens.
    Described the value charge as the scene closes.

    Turning Point:  When does a gap open between expectation and result?  Describe it.

    Beat Pattern:  Comment on any of the action/reaction exchanges that may occur.

    WHERE ARE WE?
    – Fun, cool, weird, odd, particular details, surprises for reader
    – Time, weather, etc.
    – Background or world building details?

    WHO IS HERE?
    – What’s the situation for each character?
    – Who is driving this scene?
    – What is his/her concrete objective?
    – What does each of the others want (motive)?
    – Fun & cool stuff?  Surprises for reader?

    WHAT STORY LINES WILL HAVE BEATS HERE?
    – Progress or trouble?
    – Points of conflict?
    – Obstacles?
    -TURN

    Opening/transition:
    Current Situation:
    Setting, and significant details:
    Next big crisis:
    Turn:
    Background/worldbuilding details:
    Desired effect in reader:
    Events:
    Emotions:
    Character’s unique reactions:
    Ending hook:

    Print one of these out, read my scene card, and start fooling around with the prompts.  By the time the page was filled up, the scene was clear in my mind, often with dialogue written, emotional beats I wanted to hit, and most importantly, the Point of it all, that Turn.  Not to mention foreshadowing, setting goodies, backstory bits I needed to get in, all of it on a single, handy page.

    Of course, at this point I had about a half-dozen different writer’s processes rolled together into a giant mash-up that was sure to do me in with sheer weight and complexity.  But so what–this was in the name of Science!  Throw everything against the wall and see what sticks!

    With card #1, built off the bones of my 30 days of free-writing, and my filled up, front and back, worksheet (took about fifteen minutes), I banged out the first scene chapter, 6000 words, in about 3 hours.  That’s double my usual top speed of 1000 words an hour, but who’s counting?  The main thing: it was perfectly painless.

    My scene card #2 was written similarly in record time, the words flowing easily, no staring into space or getting lost, just smooth, lovely writing.

    Plus, I wasn’t at all having the feared, “why write it if you know what’s going to happen?” thing that so many pantsers cite as their reason for not outlining.  On the contrary, I was very excited about each scene because I knew just what was so cool about it, where the juice was coming and why, and I was psyched to get in there and make it as awesome as I knew it could be. 

    In other words, I could focus on the HOW because the WHAT had already been determined.

    I won’t know, of course, until I finish card #28 whether the process will really work. And I REALLY won’t know until I do a revision pass on the complete draft to see if what I’ve got is any good.  So think of this post as a progress report from the trenches.  I’m up to scene card 6 so far, 16,000 words in, and its still going well, easy writing sessions at double my usual speed and no flailing. 

    Too soon to tell, but tentative conclusion…maybe a pantser really can become a plotter?

    John Sez

    Isn’t that absolutely fantastic?

    By simply taking some time to freewrite, which is just another term for sketching, she has been able (so far) to take out a ton of pain AND increase her word count. And increase it dramatically. So let’s see again how she does it.

    Step 1: Sketch the story using questions as prompts

    1. Sketched using inquiry and freewriting a la Alan Watt’s The 90-Day Novel. Among many other things, that pre-draft development generated a number of scenes and scene snippets. (Hum, “inquiry” and “freewriting”; why, they’re just another form of creative Q&A. That dang creative Q&A is popping up everywhere!)
    2. Kept a list of the scenes she saw.
    3. Sequenced the list in a this-before-that order.

    Step 2: Create a working outline

    1. Maya compared what she had to a structure pattern that and tried to fill in any gaps using more inquiry and freewrite.
    2. (I’m a big believer in patterns, not formulas.)

    Step 3: Sketch the scenes

    1. Next, she sketched out each scene on her list using her own version of the Holly Lisle/Victoria Schmidt/Nora Roberts technique. 
    2. Her sketches had 5 parts: [A protagonist with a need][in conflict with][an antagonist with a need][in an interesting setting][with a twist]

    Step 4: Draft

    1. She was now ready to begin drafting, but does one more sketch before she writes each scene.  She uses her own version of the Amberdine “Template,” which I call the “Scene Primer” and Maya calls a “prompt-sheet,” which helps her (a la Rachel Aaron) to envision the scene more clearly.  So does this for about 15 minutes at the beginning of her drafting session.  
    2. She starts to draft, full of excitement, and feeling free to focus on the how instead of so much on the what.

    Note all of the sketching. Note the creative Q&A. Note the developing in iterations. Did you also see her comments on the helpfulness of using a plot pattern?

    I remember when I first started doing this and feeling the same way–I can focus on the how! It’s so liberating! The writing became more of a pleasure. And I never stopped inventing. Because even though I’ve sketched a lot out, things change when you do the next take. It always does.

    I cannot wait to see how this experiment of hers turns out. I think she’ll run into a few snags but find it’s a much more productive method. We shall see.

    We shall also see if I can’t improve my productivity and pleasure because while this is generally how I work, I haven’t used the Lisle card prompts. Nor have I read Watt’s book. Which means it looks like I’m going to be performing an expirement of my own. And it couldn’t come at a better time. I’ll be done with BAD PENNY here in just a few weeks. And it will be time to start another novel. I can’t wait to try these new tools.

    For more in this series, see How to Get and Develop Story Ideas

    P.S. Look at the cover of Maya’s latest novel. I think it’s gorgeous.

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  • Washington Irving, Family, & Writing

    ByJohn Brown

    How do writers juggle writing and family?

    One of my heroes is Mary Higgins Clark who, as a single mom, started a career. She got up very early, wrote for 1-2 hours in the morning, and became a mega-seller.

    I have four girls. And a full-time job. When the first two were little my wife was working and I was Mr. Mom going to school. Then we switched.

    Here’s my experience. While I love writing, my stories do not run to me and give me wonderful strangling hugs after school like my youngest. While I laugh at the humor I come up with in my stories and enjoy it, it cannot replace the uncontrollable giggling I experience when I go on dates with my second. While writing lifts me, it does not fill my office with notes and wallpapers of love like my oldest. And writing never drags me out to play ghosts in the graveyard or hide and seek–daughter #3. Nor will my stories and novels be there for me when I’m old.

    While writing is incredibly fulfilling, my wife, kids, and other relationships are a joy it cannot replace.

    What all this means is that I try to recognize that I can’t let family and writing compete. They can’t be equal priorities. Family comes first. But this doesn’t mean I don’t write. I block out times to write. These are my writing times. I get up early to make time for this. I don’t watch a lot of TV. I don’t read a million blogs, nor, alas, can I read fiction at the level I used to. I make time. But I also make blocks when I just forget writing (even though it can be hard).

    Specifically, here’s my average work week.

    5:00 AM rise, wake and get centered for the day
    6:00 AM work (“work” is my day job and writing)
    6:30 AM family and breakfast
    7:30 AM go to work (at home). Try to get in 7-8 hours at day job and 2 hours writing. When I did commute I wrote for 1 hour during lunch and 1 hour in the morning before I went to work. Then I’d take a 2 hour block on Thursdays.
    5:30 PM family etc.
    9:30 PM bed

    On Saturdays I get a few more hours writing. Sunday I forget everything but family.

    With the new book contract I have to become a bit more creative. But if it ever comes down to sacrifice the last 2 years of my oldest being at home and writing, well, the books will go.

    When my writing plans meet reality, I try to adjust and find other slots for writing. It wasn’t easy in the beginning, but it’s become much easier. And I don’t worry about what I might have accomplished in writing if I’d just had the extra time. Such what-if’s, I’ve found, are almost always poisonous. And who the heck cares? Because while I want to write wonderful stories, I think the greatest loss I think I might experience at the end of my life (believing in an after life or not) is looking back and seeing that I traded the opportunity for wonderful relationships for a rapidly mouldering spot on the shelves.

    Washington Irving wrote a funny and wonderful piece on this mouldering in his “The Mutability of Literature” in THE SKETCHBOOK OF GEOFFERY CRAYON. I recommend every writer read this to put life and writing into perspective.

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5 Comments

  1. If SFWA was able to facilitate the sales function in some way, that alone would be worth it.

    They need peer-review! Your $90 membership allows you to submit to a peer-review panel of 3 members. Works receive the stamp or don’t. This could help sell work in or out of stores.

    SFWA could make a blog specifically for those works which passed the peer-review process, and appearing on that blog would be a stamp of quality. If SFWA did it, it would have more weight than if a nobody reviewer took up that role.

    Stamp of quality–that makes me think. They need a little stamp that you can put on your cover (digital or physical).

    I guess this opens up a huge can of worms regarding taste, but it seems like they could mitigate some of that with a careful rubric.

  2. That would indeed be a can of worms 🙂 On the other hand, sales numbers and revenue are pretty inambiguous; furthermore, they are appealing to businesses wanting to make better bets on what to stock on their shelves.

    On the other hand, if they did do a Golden Heart like award for indie published books, that would highlight work that peers thought merited attention. Do it annually. Or regionally.

    But a catalog of proven sellers and award-winners should tempt the retailers. And if they show a profit, then the retailers will gladly come back for more.

    Brick and mortar relies on a publisher name, their marketing plans for the book, the author reputation, and pre-release reviews (PW, Booklist, etc.) With BookScan they are able to add more accurate author sales history.

    I’m okay if making an offer to them requires me to first sell to a certain level. Right now, you can sell tens of thousands of copies as an indie and still run into a wall with brick and mortar because it’s just not feasible to get your work in front of those who purchase.

    The beauty of indie is that I can get the book out there and let it find an audience without prejudice and pre-formed ideas about what sells. When the sales begin to prove out, what I need is help getting the value proposition that book presents in front of those in other distribution venues.

  3. Something tells me this will get boiled down to bi-monthly emails about how to be a REAL published author. Sorry, but I don’t have much faith in SFWA.

  4. SFWA would also be a good place to begin book content rating, as you have discussed in a previous post. I think that the rating movement will have to be started in the indie market.

  5. Someone should come up with a standard that others can adopt. Kind of like XML Dita or other standards in the software business. Like games. There are a great number of indie authors who would rate their books. I wonder . . . this is something to look into. All it takes is a few authors adopting a standard. Hum.

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