a. Tips: Do you have any tips for beginning writers?
i. It’s a long road. Just know that going in, and keep plugging away. I’ve heard from a Tor editor that books that come in on their slush piles take 3.5 years to get looked at. Not trying to discourage you, just telling you how it is. If you love this enough, you’ll just suck it up and take the waiting and write lots of books while you do wait.
I know a guy who hated even the thought of writing until he was 40, and since then he’s worked for Hollywood and written TV shows, movies, and novels. What matters, though, is that you read. You have to read a ton of books in order to soak up how writers do what they do, and how to do it well. If you’re not a reader, you’ll never make it as a writer. There’s just too much to learn. It’s sort of like thinking, “I like running. I should go to the Olympics.”
ii. Write regularly even when you don’t feel like writing, even if it’s just a little bit every day. Don’t spend too much time re-reading what you wrote before, because if you’re like most people, you’ll think, this stinks, and you’ll get frustrated and you’ll quit. Or, you’ll spend years polishing that first chapter. Here’s the funny thing: sometimes, you won’t really know what the book is about until you actually get done with the first draft. But you can’t polish what isn’t here yet. So you have to write that crappy first draft, even if it is crappy. And trust me, it probably will be crappy. Try not to think about this for the next year as you write your first draft. We all go through it, there just aren’t that many Mozarts in writing. Decide up front, if this is what you really want to do, and if you have, or can learn to have, a thick skin, and a high tolerance for frustration, because to put it bluntly, there is a lot of that. And then, just start writing. Write to the most fascinating dilemmas and the hardest points and the things you’re most passionate about and the things you’re most terrified of. Keep going to those places, and keep making it worse. If you do that, who knows, maybe that first draft will practically write itself.
b. Outlining: Do you write organically, or do you outline? And which do you suggest doing?
i. Some people like to figure out everything their character is going to do for the whole book. Other people just write from day to day, not knowing what’s going to happen next. Most people are a mix of both. And great writers fall all over the spectrum.
Here’s the thing I do. Wherever your hero is at, make things worse. Make the dangers greater, make there be all sorts of different kind of dangers–that is, threaten not just his life, but also his marriage, his status, his dog, his comic book collection. And then make the dangers real–make him actually lose the dog, or the marriage, or the best friend, just so people know that all the threats are real. Then make all those things that are threatened be even more valuable to him. This comic book collection he’s going to lose isn’t just comic books to him, it’s his last recollection of his father who died tragically when he was young. Etcetera. If you keep making things worse, and make them matter more and more, the journey from point A to point B will be just as rewarding for you as it is for your readers. And if it’s ever not fun, that’s YOUR fault. Ask yourself, how could this be more fun? And then do it. Surprise yourself, and you will surprise your readers too.
You might find the book goes in a different direction than you thought it would. That’s fine. After you get to the end, you’ll start all the hard work of fixing everything. But first, get to the end. Just get there.
i. How do you get your ideas down on paper?
The first thing is to write the book. The first thing is always the book. You have to write a really great book. How you do that, honestly, is a mystery. I think you just need to write a story that fascinates you. If you get bored as you’re writing it, then you’re the writer, make it interesting.
ii. How do you get started writing?/How do you stop Writer’s Block?
I think Writer’s Block hits when you have either a lack of confidence in yourself, or in the story. Inspiration is a beautiful thing, and it’s awesome when you sit down to write and everything comes easily. I know, I’ve had those days where I’ve written seven thousand words (say 30 pages), but writing is work. If it were easy, more people would do it well. When you’re stuck with a scene, write down something. Sometimes it’s just that first sentence–and it may be agony. There a dozen decisions you make by writing that first sentence. Get it out there. Yes, it may be wrong. But by making the decisions, you’ll quickly figure out which ones are right, and which ones are wrong. If you can’t even begin to start the scene, then write down some notes: Joe and Cynthia fight about her signing up for the army without telling him… and what? Something needs to happen. And she decides to break it off with him? Write that thought down. Then write down, No, that pushes things forward too fast for what I’m trying to do there. How about Joe gives Cynthia an ultimatum to go back down to the recruiting office and unenlist, or he’ll never speak to her again?… Could work… Oh, and she bumps into his friend Blake, who tries to cool things down between them. She’s never noticed Blake is so cool.
See? Now, even though you aren’t getting the scene on paper, you’re making the decisions that will help you get the scene on paper. You’re doing the work.
d. Editing: (Mary asked for “ANY and ALL editing advice you might have.”)
As it so happens, as I write this, I’m deep into the process of editing, so this has been on my brain a lot. Like every part of writing, some parts of this will come naturally to you, and other parts will be naturally more difficult.
First, if you want to be a pro, act like a pro. If your friends can’t be honest with you because you fall to pieces when they don’t love everything about your book, they’ll lie to you. Yes, we’re artists; we want everyone to love everything we’ve ever done and tell us we’re brilliant. If anyone ever tells you they love everything you’ve ever done, they’re either lying or a moron.
If you’ve written the first draft, you’ve done something that thousands of people who say they want to be writers will never do. Congratulations. Crack a Sprite, pat yourself on the back, howl at the moon twice, and go to bed late, dreaming improbable dreams.
Done? Good, now get your butt out of bed. It’s time to work.
Before, you had nothing. Nothing is hard to shape. Now you have marble, Michelangelo. Thing about marble? It’s tough. Bring your hammers and chisels.
Re-read your book. All of it. Make notes as you go about what doesn’t work. It may help to print it up. You may not remember all the stuff that was good, or bad. After you’ve got that list, prioritize. What are the biggest problems? Do you have a chronological difficulty? Tackle that sucker first, because it’s going to change some other things. Figure out what is most logical to fix first.
When you see all the problems laid out in front of you in an honest fashion, you may despair. There’s so much! It’s horrible! You’ll never fix all this! Okay, give yourself five minutes to wallow in that beautiful little puddle of self-pity. Done? Good. Pros panic, too. Then we get back to work.
If you give up now, all the work you’ve done before this point is for nothing. Don’t.
Have some faith in yourself. This is one incredible, wild, unjustifiable, irrational place in your art to let your ego run wild–you broke it, you CAN fix it.
I like to make my problems discrete, so I can tackle them one at a time. It gives me a sense of accomplishment. So, “FIX Greedy’s dialogue. He doesn’t sound like a Smurf…ever!”
I’ll take this, and I’ll go through the entire manuscript, looking only at Greedy’s dialogue, fixing every instance. Finished it? Okay, maybe it took two days, or ten. Fine, check it off. Move on to the next.
Be fearless as you take apart your manuscript. Change that twelve-year old girl to a seventeen-year-old boy. Juggle that timeline. Make Jill be in love with Timmy instead of Tommy–EVEN IF IT BREAKS THINGS. If you know that the way you have it now doesn’t work, change it. Your manuscript is a moving target. This is hard. But if you’re not willing to make the big changes, your manuscript will not be as good as it can be. And why? Because you’re a coward. Because you’re afraid of hard work. Grow up. Writing IS hard work, and those who pretend otherwise are lying to you so you’ll believe they’re a genius. Even Shakespeare wrote and rewrote Hamlet for years and years and years. Your vampire romance could probably use a bit of polishing too.
If you give up now, all you’ve done until now is for nothing. And you know what? Established writers can sell a mediocre novel now and again. (Though they shouldn’t!) You, however, can’t. There is too much competition for less than your best work to get published. Sorry.
Read your book again if you’ve made a ton of changes. Do the same thing again, writing down what doesn’t work, and maybe what does if your ego needs it. Now read Donald Maass’s books that I’ve talked about a million times, and see if they don’t give you lots of ideas for how you can do better. Does that female character seem cliché? Is there no good reason for that guy to love that girl? Is your villain really believable? Does some point in the novel drag? Are you consistently over-explaining? Be honest.
When you think it basically makes sense and is pointing the direction you want it to point, then send it to your beta readers. (If you have any. I didn’t, but I’m a bit of a lone wolf.)
The most important things your betas can tell you is: (and I’m stealing this from another writer who helped me, Dennis Foley) if they were ever bored, and when in the manuscript they became aware that they were reading a book again. (Which can happen from confusion, or odd sentence structure, or dialogue that doesn’t fit the voice or anything.) Non-writers are sometimes better at this. You want people to flag where things don’t work–not fix them for you or overanalyze.
Then go back and fix. Oh, you’re not done crying yet? Go over in the corner and mope quietly for two days. (It takes me two days to get over a really bruising critique. Yes, still.) But hey, QUIETLY. Make your friends pay for their honesty, and they’ll stop being honest.
Done yet? Oh good. Guess what?
Oh, look at you, already going back to work! Good job. You’re learning, aren’t you?
Once you have the big stuff fixed, the character motivations making sense, the exposition folded in smoothly, the plots giving awesome resolution, the subplots making sense and affecting the main plot, THEN start worrying about the spelling and grammar and the smaller stuff.
Go through the entire novel, fixing everything you see that’s still wrong.
Now go through it again. What? You still see more stuff wrong? Sentences that seem awkward? Congratulations, you’re human. Fix it. Are you sick of reading your own novel yet? Yeah, that’s part of the deal.
Most authors are perfectionists. Some pretend that they only send their books out when they are perfect–and then you read their book, and you have to ask, “Really? You thought THIS was perfect?”
A more honest approach is to analyze when you’re reaching a point of seriously diminishing returns. Generally, you’re close when you notice you’re changing sentences BACK to the way they were written before the LAST time you came through and changed them–and it doesn’t really matter one way or the other. (If you have chapters that still refuse to work after you’ve tried and tried and tried, it’s time for outside advice.)
Then you can send it off. Guess what? Your editor or agent may see a LOT of stuff that you need to fix. Take your hurt feelings… oh, you know the drill now? Done moping already? Back to work already? Fixing it already?
Heck, you may be cut out for this work after all.
Two years from now, when your book hits the shelves, guess what? You’re going to see flaws in the first paragraph of your own book when you read it. It’s normal. It’s a sign you’re growing as a writer. Don’t sweat it. Your next book is going to be better. And look, you’ve already forgotten how painful the whole thing was.
You adorable, snuggly little sucker.
e. Originality (DW asks, “Sometimes I find that my story idea seemed too similar with some other story that I’ve probably read or watch years ago and loved. I think you’ve mentioned this in your tips, in trying to think about other branches for the story that are different from others. Problem is I can’t get any ideas that won’t stray far from the message I’m trying to put across…”)
I was actually just talking about this today on Twitter. Without getting too specific, because I don’t want to give spoilers of my own book, I have a magical thing in The Blinding Knife that I wanted to name something that gave a sense of foreboding or dread. It’s a magical, made-up thing, and I obviously could have gone with a completely made-up name, but I find in fantasy we already make up so many names that in this case I wanted something a little closer to English. One of the easiest places to go for something like that is to archaic words. So I called the magic thing some made-up name that I didn’t like just to get through the book, and then when I started my edits, I found the perfect name: the bane. Now bane has been used in other fantasy novels and in games, but as far as I was concerned, it hadn’t been overused, it had a nice feel to it, and it did what I needed it to do, especially for something that does not appear that many times in my novel. Good enough, right?
Then I was playing the fantastic game Batman: Arkham City and among the many villains, Batman interacts with a character named Bane. Ah, that’s interesting, I thought. Sort of funny that I just thought of that a few weeks ago. But I was still quite happy with keeping bane because here was a Batman villain I’d never even heard of, so I figured this went nicely into the second-tier uses of the word bane. Again, obviously the Batman creators were looking for the same thing I was looking for: something kind of creepy, and dark, and arcane, but that still communicated something.
And then I read that Bane will be the primary villain in the next Batman movie. So now, shortly before my novel comes out, the huge cultural juggernaut called a Hollywood Blockbuster Movie will roll through town, obliterating everything in its path. My bane has nothing to do with the Batman Bane or the movie Batman Bane. It doesn’t look similar, it doesn’t act similarly, it’s really nothing alike. However, the conversation plays all too easily in my mind:
“This book has magic and stuff, and there’s these cool things in it called the bane.”
“Oh, he totally stole that from Batman.” Gah!
And this has happened to me before. When I started with the idea for The Black Prism, part of what I wanted to do was come up with a fresh, cool new magic system. I knew I could do that. But part of the challenge of coming up with an intricate magic system is making it, on surface, very easy to understand. When one person says to another, standing in the bookstore, “So you say this has a cool magic system. What’s it like?” it’s nice if you can give people something simple to grasp. So the answer to that question is, “Oh, it’s a color-based magic system.” As I thought about the idea, I liked it a lot. We all understand colors, and we have strong associations with them. Plus, I hadn’t seen a color magic system in fantasy in a long time. (Not saying that there weren’t some, but I hadn’t seen them.) So I wrote the book. It was turning out beautifully. I was maybe 2/3 of the way done with The Black Prism – and then Brandon Sanderson’s Warbreaker comes out.
Warbreaker, in case you didn’t know, has a cool magic system. It’s based on color.
Sometimes, I wish Brandon Sanderson weren’t such a nice guy. Because then I would hate him.
So what’s the lesson? The truth is, originality in the Romantic conception of something that has never been done before is probably a bankrupt concept. People are people. We go to stories for certain things. We feel satisfied when justice is served – except those of us who are more satisfied by a gritty portrayal of the world that shows that justice isn’t served. We like it when the guy gets the girl in the end. Except those of us who are sick of those saccharine portrayals and want to read a book where the girl slaps that smiling dude’s pompous face! We like characters who grow and change from the beginning of the novel until the end – except those who stay the same and force the world to change around them. The truth is, every trope is a trope for a reason, and every trope inverted is simply another trope.
Now, Hollywood likes to say that there’s only 30 storylines (or whatever). And most Hollywood movies play out as if they believe this. I don’t believe that originality is impossible, ergo steal everything you can. I think we can tell old stories in new and surprising ways, and I think that’s a human imperative. Clearly there are more and less original ideas. If you start writing your teenage vampire novel now, that vein has probably been picked pretty clean. But clearly there’s something about the vampire story that resonates. And in another 50 years, it will probably have another resurgence.
My advice, if you’re really worried about writing something original, is a bit counterintuitive. I’d say don’t go out and read every fantasy novel you can get your hands on that has something remotely similar to your idea. That way madness lies. Plus, the subconscious is a slippery thing. Sometimes ideas that you swear are yours are really ideas that have infiltrated from elsewhere. This is where Google is your friend.
Instead, as I’ve recommended before, I’d say follow your passions. For me, this means, that I don’t look at the way slavery works in other fantasy novels and try to do something different. From my classical studies, I remember feeling that slavery in fantasy is understandably heavily influenced by the way slavery worked in the American South. But in antiquity, slavery was often not race-based. If your Greek village lost a border skirmish with the Greek village next door, you could be a slave. And so any person you saw on the street might be a slave. And this caused a lot of anxiety among the privileged class. So instead of trying to be different from everyone else, instead I went and studied slavery in Greece and Rome. It turns out its an incredibly slippery topic, because it’s really hard to tell who’s telling the truth, and obviously the slaves never got to tell their side of things.
After I’d done this research, and had already incorporated it into my worldbuilding, I read George R. R. Martin’s latest book – and I swear he’s read some of the same books that I did in between his last book and this one. The lesson isn’t that I’m always the last to the party, believe me, there are a few books out there with covers depicting hooded assassin-y figures who would attest to that! The point is that I can worry a lot that somebody out there is going to accuse me of stealing an idea, even though I didn’t, or I can write the book I’m passionate about. I can write it as honestly and as well as I understand. So some things that I’m passionate about that I incorporate into my work: science, and the history of science, history, leadership, cultures, and religions. I’m really curious about how people understand their world, both physically and metaphysically, and how that changes them, if it does at all. Rather than trying to see what my contemporaries have done with the things I’m passionate about, I go to the sources themselves. And believe me, I think that reading Winston Churchill on military leadership is probably better than reading [insert generic fantasy author here]. Because other fantasy authors probably agree with me, we may well end up drawing water from the same cultural wells. So there may be similarities. Brandon Sanderson probably had the same thought process as I did when he came up with Warbreaker – he just writes faster than I do. But Warbreaker and The Black Prism are completely different books.
If you use your life and your passions and your courage, and if you put in the practice, the hundreds of thousands of words (maybe a million words) to become truly comfortable in your own skin as a storyteller, then when somebody reads your novel, there will be no doubt in their mind that it’s your novel: “Yeah, it’s got vampires, but they don’t sparkle. And they’re all from some eastern European country. It’s sort of got this steampunk thing. Except, I don’t think there’s any cool gadgets. But it’s really good! It’s by this guy named Bram Stoker.”*
*Yes, I’m aware this is not a perfect analogy. I thought it was funnier than putting in some other contemporary who’s written a vampire novel that’s diametrically opposed to the most famous vampire novels of our time.
**If you have further questions that you want me to address on these topics, please leave them in the comments on the main page. (If you really wanted to make my life easy, you could leave them below the post where I announced this writing advice page, but I’ll see them regardless.)**
