2014! Welcome to the world of tomorrow! Just with no flying cars. Or jetpacks.
And far less moonbases than Space: 1999, Inherit the Stars, or 2001:
A Space Odyssey led us to expect.
Wow. We’re only two days in and 2014 is kind of a
letdown so far.
Anyway, as
I often do at the start of the year, I’d like to take a minute or three
to talk about this page and the kind of stuff I babble on about. And touch on a few of the things I don’t.
And to do
this, I’m going to dip my toe into a potentially controversial subject. So hopefully I won’t offend anyone too much
Maybe it’s
just the circles I travel in, but I tend to see a lot of “after the fact”
material. It’s on pages I get links to
or I get spammed with messages about it.
People with blogs about how to self-publish and why traditional
publishers are dinosaurs. About how to
get past those evil “gatekeepers” and why they’re pointless. Which ebook platform is best. How to format for said platform. Where to find a good agent. Where to find a good artist for my
cover. How to network. Good places for self-promotion. How much I should self-promote. How much I should pay for that promotion.
The reason
I call this “after the fact” material is because it skips a major step. Every one of those issues is about getting my
book in front of readers. None of it
addresses the important question...
Should
my book be in front of readers?
Is my book
ready to be published, by me or anyone else?
Does it deserve to make it past those gatekeepers? Do I have something worth promoting?
And that’s
what I don’t see a lot of out there—help to get past that first step. Because the best chef in the world can’t do anything with no tools and an empty kitchen. If I don’t have a full, polished manuscript,
all those other tips are kind of useless.
This is
why, in my opinion, self-publishing still has—and probably always will have—a
stigma hanging over it. There are some
absolutely phenomenal self published books out there, and some authors who are
making great money as self-publishers.
But the ugly truth is that, statistically, most self-published material
is bad. Now that it’s so easy and cheap
to self-publish, I’d even say that these days the vast majority of self-published
stuff is awful. There’s a lot more good
stuff than a decade ago, absolutely, but by the same token there’s tons and tons more bad stuff.
So, that’s
what I want to do here. I try to help
with that first step. Every week I toss out some advice, tips, and observations
on how to improve a manuscript and turn it into something people want to buy
and read. Things I was told or stumbled
across (or learned the hard way) in the thirty or so years that I’ve been
stringing words together.
Now, the
two main things you’ll find here is advice on writing and rules
on writing. Yes, there are rules. No, I don’t care what he said. No, I don’t care what she said either. There are rules that have to be followed. Bear with me.
Advice
is optional. When to write. Where to write. What to write. How to develop characters. How to edit.
How many drafts I need to go through. What
kind of structure a particular story should have.
What point of view to use. I’d say the ranty blog is about 60-65% advice.
This is the
kind of stuff that’s going to be individual to each writer. I like to write in the afternoon, but you
might be more productive in the morning, and she’s more productive after
midnight. I tend to plan a rough outline
in my head, but you might need three really detailed pages before you begin,
and he might be fine with a dozen notecards taped to the wall. I might need music to write but you need
absolute silence and she can’t write unless she’s outside and wearing a Ren
Faire outfit. The thing about advice is
that it’s rarely wrong, it just might not be advice that works for me or
you. That’s one of the main tenets here,
my golden rule.
It drives
me nuts when I come across someone insisting advice must be strictly followed. I think a lot of would-be writers get messed
up by this, and these are the folks who end up staring at a blank page every
morning in a silent room, wondering why they can’t write the opening of the
goth-witch-lit novel they have no interest in but were told is going to be the
new big thing. They often get stuck
wearing an itchy corset, too.
Y’see,
Timmy, rules are the real non-optional stuff. Spelling. Grammar.
Structure (you have to have some kind of it). Likable characters (not necessarily good characters, but someone my readers won’t mind following) with believable arcs. Flow.
Coherency. This page is maybe
35-40% rules, at any given time.
Most of us
had at least five or six teachers during our lives who tried to teach us the
rules of writing—the basic mechanics of how words go together to express ideas. If I want to make a living at this, I need to
know those mechanics. If I don’t know
how to spell, if I don’t understand structure, if commas and apostrophes are
baffling to me, if I can’t sense how my readers will react to something... well,
it’s going to be very hard for me to have any success as a writer.
The
flipside of what I mentioned above, it’s also very damaging when some folks try
to insist that rules are just loose guidelines, that it doesn’t matter if I
follow them or not. I think a lot of
that comes out of folks who see the rules broken by an experienced professional
and assume they can be ignored from the start. They point to the exception and use that as their reason to not learn the rules. This kind of deliberate ignorance leads to poor writing and bad habits, and it means a lot of
potentially good writers never improve.
Y’see,
Timmy, if I don’t understand the rules, I’m not going to know how to break
them. A good writer can break some of
the rules, but it’s like playing Jenga.
I can’t pull out all the blocks holding up the stack, and if I’m going
to pull out this one I need to make sure that one is
rock-solid. If I don’t understand the
basic rules of how the tower stands, I’m going to bring it crashing down on my
second turn. Maybe even my first.
Actually,
that’s an even better analogy. Breaking
rules is like demolishing buildings. It
looks simple, but the folks who do it actually need to know more than the
people who built it. They need to
understand which walls are load bearing and which beams are supporting, but
they also need to know how the material’s going to break or crumble or shatter
and how much explosive is needed for each result without there being so much
that the building collapses out rather than in.
Because it
might look really cool and fun when the building collapses out across the city,
but it doesn’t get a lot of repeat customers.
What else,
what else, what else...
Do I repeat
myself here? Well... yeah. Especially if you’ve been following along for
two or three years. I try to come up
with new ways to approach the same problem.
Sometimes I’ll hear something new and clever that I’ll try to share, or
maybe even expand on. At the end of the
day, though, this page is more like a mid-level class on writing. You can take the same class twice and get
more out of it, but by the third of fourth time there’s a serious case of diminishing returns. I’m not
saying any of you long-time followers should leave, but don’t be too surprised
if I end up talking about dialogue or character voices or something like that.
Speaking of
which, next time I wanted to talk about dialogue and character voices.
Until then,
go write.
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