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And now for something completely different. I have a post from a friend and fellow author, Jon Richter. He has a new book coming out in a few days, follow the links and get your copy!

Hi everybody!  My name is Jon Richter, and I’m lucky enough to be a stablemate of Don’s at TCK Publishing, who recently published my first ever cyberpunk novel, London 2039: Auxiliary. I’ve also been known to dabble in crime thrillers and even short horror fiction, but whatever your preferred genre, there are a lot of tips and tricks that are common to any writing project.  I’ve really enjoyed Don’s recent series of writing tips, and thought that for my guest post I’d contribute some of my own!

Inspiration for Writing

Now that I’ve confessed to being something of a genre-hopper, I thought it might be interesting to reflect on some of my sources of inspiration.  I know a lot of writers, both successful and aspirational ones, who have found themselves in the grip of the dreaded ‘writer’s block’, unable to commit a single word to paper.  I’ve also had similar bouts, and although I think the notion of ‘writer’s block’ is misguided and can make a creative barren spell seem like a much bigger deal than it actually is, I do sympathise* with anyone struggling to get going with a writing project.  There are a number of things that can cause such stagnation, but I know that one major blocker can be the perceived lack of A BIG IDEA.  How are you supposed to write when you can’t think of anything good to write about?

Thankfully, there are a number of remedies for this.

Let It Flow

The first is to stop filtering yourself.  If I had a gun to your head (don’t worry, I promise we won’t need to go that far) I’m sure you could come up with ten ideas in the space of a minute, even if they were half-baked or borderline plagiarism.  This doesn’t mean they’re all good ideas, but my point is that you might be writing them off too quickly, even the ones that seem like thinly-veiled rip-offs.  There are a very large number of successful, and indeed some very good, books that are largely devoid of any original concepts.  Many writers choose to riff on traditional tropes or expand on another’s ideas, and that’s fine – and often an original spin will emerge during the writing process.

Get Your Fingers Working

This leads into my second point: I’m sure you’ve heard the old adage ‘writers write’, and there’s no idiom more annoying when you’re stuck in a rut, but it really is the best advice out there.  Stop waiting for inspiration, and just start writing anyway.  Write whatever comes into your head.  Even if it’s autobiographical.  Even if it’s just wallowing in self-pity.  Even if it feels like the worst piece of microfiction ever written.  You’ll find that your brain and your fingers start working together to open up some new synaptic pathways… see, there I go, utter bollocks, but at least I enjoyed writing it!  The point is that just the act of writing itself will generate inspiration.  And if it helps to imagine me with that .44 Magnum levelled* at your temple, go right ahead!  (I’m British, so the closest I’ll ever get to a Magnum is the ice cream variety.)

Quit Filtering Your Creativity

Similar to this is the idea of ‘brainstorming’.  Here, the goal isn’t to start an actual writing project, but instead to create a list of bullet point ideas, just a completely unfiltered mind dump of anything and everything you can think of.  Imagine that Magnum again (not the tasty chocolatey one) and imagine you’ve been told to scribble down twenty story titles, or plot ideas, or character sketches, or settings, in the next two minutes – then pick your favourite* one and start writing about it!

Riffing

Short stories are also a great solution.  Not every paragraph you write has to be the opening to a future Booker Prize winner; sometimes they can just be a throwaway piece of short fiction.  This can really take the pressure off, and you might find yourself really happy with some of the results.  This is how my first short story horror collection came about!  The point here is to take the pressure off yourself: you’re writing because you love writing, not because your work is going to be judged by some faceless scrutiny panel.

Writers Write… And They Read

Another tonic is to make sure you are consuming fresh fiction yourself.  Whether this is books, movies, TV shows or even video games (there are some great stories in the gaming world if you can avoid all the Candy Crush and Fortnite rubbish), you will find the ideas of other creators a goldmine of new inspiration… and remember, without exception, every one of them was in turn inspired by a piece of literature they themselves experienced.  There’s nothing at all to be ashamed of if you want to write something inspired by someone else’s work – after all, isn’t that how genres came to exist in the first place?

Make It A Habit

My final suggestion is to schedule your writing time, like an inescapable appointment with yourself.  This prospect may fill you with dread (it definitely does with me!) but the point here is to force yourself to avoid procrastination.  Do you constantly delay the start of your writing session because there’s laundry to do, clothes to iron, work to catch up on, a TV show you want to watch?  You can still do all of those things… just not right now, because this is your designated writing time.  I find that playing music while I write helps, because it gives me something to look forward to alongside the writing itself.  A two-hour writing window with a 1,500-word minimum target can sound daunting, but two hours of listening to your favourite* movie soundtracks while you have a bit of creative fun seems okay, doesn’t it?

I hope this has been useful, and has given you some useful suggestions for your next literary lull.  If you want to find out more about my weird dark fiction, take a look at www.jon-richter.com, or search for my new cyberpunk thriller London 2039: Auxiliary on Amazon, where it’s available in paperback or for your eReader device.  My enormous thanks go to Don for letting me invade his blog for the day, and I’d urge you to check out his gripping debut thriller The Guilty Die Twice too.  Whatever remains of your day, I hope it’s a good one!

JR

*Jon’s English, he lives in London, so we can excuse his spelling.

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If you get online, you’ll see this kind of advice: ‘you’re only a real writer if your write every day.’ Is this a real thing or bullshit gatekeeping? What do you think?

Only Write Every Day If You Want To

First off, why would you let some random schmoe decide you are or are not a writer based on habits he himself probably doesn’t have? Who the fuck is that guy? Nobody. Treat him like it.

I’m tired of unworthy gatekeepers. Gatekeepers in general, actually. Do you write? At all? Do you want to make a lifelong craft of it and get better with every day? Then you’re a writer, and screw anyone who says otherwise.

You do NOT have to write every day to call yourself a writer. If you’re a financially-independent hermit then, yes, I would expect a great deal of output from you. Thousands of words a day. But you live in the real world with the rest of us, and your families, and your 9-to-5 jobs, and your obligations to others that all of us have. So give yourself a break, and don’t pressure yourself to write every day.

And don’t listen to random schmoes on the the internet. In case you’re wondering, I’m no random schmoe, I’m a very definite schmoe.

Make A Schedule And Keep It

What does that mean, if it doesn’t mean every day? If you’ve set yourself a goal of writing, say, every other day, then honor your commitment to yourself and try very hard to keep that schedule. Every other day. Or every Saturday at 10 AM, or M-W-F at 8 PM. Whatever works for you.

But keep your schedule. It’s like going to the gym, people have different schedules than their neighbors because their lives are their own, but the people who are a success at working out make a point of adhering to their schedules. Life happens to everyone, and sometimes your schedule gets interrupted. But you can’t let life keep interrupting your schedule, or it’s not a schedule at all. Right? You can miss a day, but don’t make a habit of it.

In other words, don’t skip twice.

You want to write every day? Knock yourself out. But don’t say you’re going to write every day and then only get three days a week. That’s just lying to yourself and setting yourself up for disappointment and failure. Set a reasonable goal and stick to it. You can always increase your goal later.

Word Counts – It’s A Trap!

You’ll sometimes hear ‘you have to write at least 500 words a day, or you’re not a real writer.’ Says who? The writing police?

Daily word counts are a trap, don’t fall for them. If you’re not under contract, if you don’t have a deadline, then your output is a big ol’ bag of nobody else’s business. If you tell yourself you have to write 500 words a day, when you don’t make that goal – and you won’t – then you’re setting yourself up for disappointment again.

A better goal than word count would be a scene. That’s what works for me. I need to finish this scene right here. That’s it. It can take me half an hour, it can take me three hours, or two days. Whatever. But my goals tend to be story elements, blocks that constitute a beginning, middle, and end. Arbitrary word counts don’t do it for me. Concrete progress towards a finished product rocks my world.

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‘Show don’t tell.’ That’s pretty solid writing advice, right? I mean, it’s advice almost everyone has heard. But what does it mean?

Exposition Is Bad – Usually

When you hear ‘show don’t tell,’ what someone is trying to tell you is to avoid exposition. Rather than telling your reader very explicitly ‘Lex Luthor is a bad man,’ you need to reveal his character through his interactions with others. SHOW us that Lex Luthor is a bad guy; maybe he forecloses on an orphanage, or kicks a dog, or forecloses on a dog orphanage.

A character’s true nature comes across in their interactions with others. This is especially effective when you can employ dramatic irony (I did a post on dramatic tension already).

Make Your Prose Style Match Your Character

This is really a pro tip. If you can pull this off you’ll bring your reader that much further into the story without them knowing why or how.

When you make your prose match your character, you change your own writing style to suit the character who is the focus. (This assumes, of course, that you have more than one character as your focus). If you have a sharp, no-nonsense character, when they’re the focus your prose should be equally sharp and no-nonsense. Use shorter words, shorter sentences, less florid description

When your character is more sympathetic, however, more in touch with their feelings, your prose should match that outlook. More introspection, more value judgements, more doubt.

This is hard to do, especially when you’re trying to figure out your own writing style. But if you practice it, and do it well, it’s a seamless way to show, rather than tell.

Sometimes Exposition Can Be A Good Thing

I know, I know, I keep saying one thing, then saying its opposite. What a tool… But it’s true, sometimes exposition is the best way to show something rather than telling.

That is, if you have a character tell. In their own voice. Think of the reveal for almost every police procedural you’ve ever seen. One character usually does the explaining, laying out the connected details of the crime. Not only is this the payoff for the story you’ve built, it’s the ‘show don’t tell’ part of revealing the criminal’s true nature. It’s the one time exposition is better, so you can’t do it all the time. But it absolutely works.

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You’re a writer, and you love your characters. Right? All of them. Equally. They’re like your children. So you have to love them. Don’t you?

Of course not. They’re not your real children, they’re your mind-babies, and you’re allowed to hate them.

That may seem like blasphemy, and maybe it is a little, but you yourself don’t like everyone you meet every day. At least I don’t. I’m fairly indifferent to most people, but some people, a few of them, I actively dislike, even if I don’t know them. Maybe especially if I don’t know them.

So how do you translate that real-world distaste to your fictional characters? I’ll tell you in this internet-friendly numbered list.

1. Make the Character a Traitor

For me, disloyalty is the worst. If I can write a scene with a character who even hints around at being a traitor, I’m down on them the rest of the story. No matter what else happens. It’s an easy drive for me then, as the writer, to put that character through the wringer. They deserve it, after all.

But what if the character is a bad guy, and she’s being disloyal to other bad guys? Then that makes her very, very interesting. But it doesn’t make me like her any better.

2. Make the Character Rude to Helpless People

I particularly hate this trait in real people, in my imaginary people it drives me crazy. People who are rude to wait staff, for instance, or to service workers. Rudeness is pointless and lazy.

It’s so easy to take a moment for kindness, and when your characters just can’t be bothered, even when they’re in a position of clear superiority, that’s grounds for hating them.

3. Make the Character a Hypocrite

Ooh… this really chaps my ass in real life. Like the TV preacher who expects his congregation to tithe to him, but who doesn’t give a single dime of his own to charity. The moral-values politician who’s cheating on his wife. The cocaine-addicted prosecutor who locks minor drug offenders away for years. Those assholes.

As despicable as this trait is in your character, if it’s hidden from other characters (at least at first), it’s also dramatic irony. And readers love, love, love dramatic irony.

4. Make the Character Cruel

This is related to, but different from making a character rude. Rudeness is usually just careless, but cruelty is calculating. You have to put effort and creativity into being cruel. The guy who pretends he’s going to give a homeless guy a sandwich only to hand over an empty paper bag is one cruel bastard.

In real life, cruelty is a serious character flaw that often comes from deep-seated emotional pain. Your character should have a reason for being cruel, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to like her any better because of it.

5. Make the Character a Weasel

Everybody knows a weasel. This is the guy who doesn’t have a position of his own, he just gives a ‘yes, and’ to what someone else says. The guy who can’t stand up straight because he has no backbone. The guy who’s in it for one person alone: himself.

I have to confess, weasels are fun to write. I usually just have to think about what I would do in any particular situation, then write the opposite and amp it up times five. Doesn’t make me like the character, but it does hold my interest.

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This morning I agreed to take over a podcast for my publisher.

Yeah.  I’m going to be a podcaster.  About writing.  I know, it’s weird for me, too.

Way back in January I agreed to be part of an authors’ support group my publisher was putting together.  I’m not much of a joiner, but I realized that if I were uncomfortable with being part of a group like that, I really needed to ignore my anti-social tendencies and join up.  So I did.  And it’s become an invaluable part of my week.  God help me, I understand now that our authors’ group is a great idea.

Which is why, today, when several of us asked if we could use the group time to learn more about the craft of writing fiction, our publisher mentioned that would probably be a topic better left to a podcast they had going.  He also mentioned that they hadn’t done anything with it in a while, and maybe one of us would like to take it over?

That’s when I became Arnold Horshack.*  I volunteered like someone had offered me money to eat barbeque, the good kind, the Texas kind, not your Mephis or South Carolina stuff.  At the time, it seemed like a good idea.  A great idea, in fact.

Now?  I wonder what I have gotten myself into.  Here’s the portion of the podcast I’d be responsible for, according to my publisher: Finding new podcast guests, Inviting guests to be on the show, Scheduling interviews, Hosting the show and recording interviews and keeping a minimum 4-week backlog of pre-recorded shows, Contacting guests once the show goes live, Creating a show calendar/schedule – 1 per week, or more?

Yikes!  This is the real deal, I’m responsible for stuff now.  The actual work is something I can easily do, it’s just talking on the phone and writing stuff down.  I’m good at both those things.  And yet… there are five things I’m in a bit of a sweat over.

1. I’ll have to cut back on the milk.

I love milk.  And ice cream.  And cheese.  But all those things make you phlegmy, which cuts down on the resonance of your voice, and really does affect the quality of any recording you do.  Usually you have to cut back on dairy products two or three days before any performance, so this is something I’ll have to plan for.

2.  I have to earn my acting chops all over.

I used to be an actor, back when I lived in Pasadena, CA.  I made good money at it and everything, a for-real career.  But I haven’t acted professionally in eight years.  The techniques are still inside me, but it’s going to be a bit of a process to get comfortable again.  I’m pretty sure I’m gonna choke at least once.  Which, truth be told, is probably a good reason for people to tune in.

3.  I have to convey information accurately and in an entertaining manner.

This is where having been an actor comes in, I have techniques for being heard and understood.  I also did years of comedy improv, so I know how to listen (that’s the point of comedy improv, if you didn’t know, to improve your listening skills as an actor).  But being a good interviewer/ podcaster is not necessarily the same skill as being a good improviser or actor.  A podcast has to be informative AND entertaining, which means I need to step up my game.

4.  I’ll have to plan, and stick to the plan.

Normally this is not a big deal, I plan all day every day, both in my pay-the-rent work and my writing.  But when I’m performing, sometimes – I’ve been told – I go off-script from time to time.  I hope that’ll do me good when my guests give me some sort of left-field anecdote, but it could also do me poorly if I get bored and decide to entertain myself.  Stay tuned to see how this part goes.

5.  I’ll have to trust others want to do quality work too.

I like to work alone.  It’s one of the reasons I’m a writer, I get to control everything.  But with this podcast, since it’s my publisher’s, I have to give up total control.  I mentioned above the things I’d be responsible for, here are the things they’d be responsible for: Video / audio editing, Writing show notes, Creating images for blog posts, Creating and scheduling the blog posts. That’s a large part of the work, but it’s also where the character of the podcast gets created.  Working as an actor means working as part of an ensemble, so relinquishing total control is something I’ve done before.  Just not with stuff I do in my own office, at my own desk. We’ll see how it goes.

*  a VERY old reference to a VERY old and terrible TV comedy from the 70’s.  This was back when we had three commercial channels and PBS, we had to watch whatever was on at the time.

 

 

 

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I thought I’d discuss character motivation, because that’s such a frequently misunderstood concept.  Motivation is not the thing that gets your characters moving within your plot – that’s incentive – it’s the drive that gets your characters out of bed in the morning.  But it’s not usually passionate or all-consuming.  It’s boring and workaday, and your task as a writer is to instill a different motivation in your characters.

Previously, I’ve discussed Character – Position vs. Interest and Creating a Scene with the Ws.  A character’s motivation runs parallel to both these things.  You’ll see writing advice that tells you a character’s motivation is a conscious thing, like it’s something they think about every moment they’re awake.  Nobody thinks about motivation all the time, not even your noblest character.

Think about your own motivation, what makes you get up in the morning?  If you work for Corporate America, your motivation is probably very basic in Maslow’s hierarchy.  You need to make rent, buy food, and pay bills.  This isn’t a motivation you think about a lot, but it certainly comes up when the ‘downsizing’ emails start flying.  Unless you’re very lucky, in Corporate America your motivation almost never rises to self-actualization.  But what if you work for yourself?  Same thing, you’re working to pay the bills.  Maybe you’re working at something you love to do, maybe you’re just good at it, but your work probably doesn’t rise past ‘Safety’ in Maslow’s hierarchy.

The same is true of your characters.  They lead regular lives, for the most part.  Until your plot starts, when their motivation should change.  But even with a new, more urgent motivation, the old motivations are still there, and possibly even more powerful.

Let’s use Batman as an example.  He’s just a man, with a man’s courage, but he has an epic motivation: make Gotham the kind of city where no little kid ever has to see his parents gunned down.  He’s got a long row to hoe there, Gotham sucks.  But that’s why he does what he does, so no other eight-year-old has to endure what he did.

Is that his motivation all the time?  Yes.  And no.  If that were his sole motivation he’d probably end up a billionaire social worker, using his money to put orphans through college and rehabilitating crooks.  But he also has a secondary motivation, to stop crime that’s happening right now.  And revenge, there’s a strong streak of vengeance in his work.  And justice, of course, he wants justice too, after all the punching is finished.

That’s a conflicting mish-mash of motivations: societal change, crime fighting, vengeance, and justice.  And trying out cool toys, that’s a large part of what Batman does.

Do your characters have multiple, conflicting motivations?  Of course they do.  In my novel I have a character who is very motivated to fight the good fight for the little guy against the system.  It’s what drives his career, even if most of the time his work is pedestrian and low-paying.  But he’s also very strongly motivated to be right all the time, even to the point of cutting ties with his brother for ten years.  Those two motivations  wage war inside him although nothing changes until outside elements (the plot) force him to reevaluate those motivations for a third one: finding the truth, even if the truth shows him to be wrong.

Motivation is not all-or-nothing, not for real people and not for your characters.  Any all-consuming passion usually turns out to be cartoonish.  Your characters should have many things that motivate them, that also drive your plot forward.

 

 

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I thought I’d share some of what I know about storytelling, since I seem to be good enough at it to land a book deal.  At least one book deal, anyway.

I’ve had many people tell me they want to be authors, that they think they have a story to tell, but they don’t really know where to start.  I usually smile and nod and give them some sort of platitude like ‘start anywhere, you need to learn by doing.’   But that’s really just me being polite, most people who tell me something like that aren’t ready to write.  They might be ready to think about writing, but that’s not the same thing as writing, not by a longshot.

Everyone knows where to start a story.  At the beginning.  If you have trouble with that concept, sit down with a five-year-old and tell her a story.  She understands how it goes, and she’ll correct you when you get it wrong.  You start at the beginning, work your way through the middle, and finish up with the end.  Easy peasy.  Yet, somehow, when you’re an adult, you forget all the very, very basic storytelling structure you knew by heart when you were five.

So here it is, the breakdown of the story parts:

The Beginning – this is the bit where you introduce your characters, the world they live in, and the problems they’re likely to face.  ‘Once upon a time, a princess lived in a poor but happy kingdom, across the lake from a family of ogres.’

The End – this is the bit where you wrap up the tale you just told, giving everything a conclusion, though not necessarily a happy one.  ‘And the princess realized that, despite her best efforts, she had been as cruel and hateful as she supposed the ogres were.  She resolved to be better, and to listen first, instead of reacting.’

Everyone has the beginning of a story.  Literally, everyone.  Ask a random stranger on the street if they have a story they’d like to tell and you will get an answer every time, and that answer will be the set-up.  The beginning.  Many times, though not always, people also have an ending to their story, even if that ending is ‘it was all just a dream’ (my father pitched me a story with this ending once.  I’m not joking).

The Middle – this is your story.  All of it.  The ups, the downs, the betrayals, the sacrifices, the twists, the red herrings, the daring deeds, and the vile crimes.  How did the princess come to the realization that, perhaps, she wasn’t as pure and noble as she imagined?  That’s the story.  What did the ogres think of her and her actions?  That’s the story.

No one has a middle to their story.  Literally, no one.  Unless you’re a writer, because writers realize the meat of the story, the most delicious bits, come in the middle.  Everything you remember about a story happened in the middle.  In the Watergate story, the break-in has already happened, before the action begins and off-screen.  What people remember is the revelation of the break-in, and the slow unwinding of the truth, all the way back to the White House.  The story is the investigation, and how all the bits come together.  If you took that story linearly, it would be a boring procedural, maybe a court record.  The drama comes in gathering the pieces.  The middle.

Think of the three parts of a story this way, with font size indicating the importance of the part and effort you should put into writing it:

  • The Beginning

  • The Middle

  • The End

Remember that everyone has the beginning of a story, many people have an end, but a writer – a real writer – spends her time on the middle.

More in a later post.

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I have finished my round of Developmental Edits!!

Yay me!!

This is the first round of edits, from my editor to me and back again.  I’ll have more feedback in a later blog post, but I figured I’d let everyone know that I completed this major first milestone.  Only four or five more to go.

Also: my publisher has come up with a different title.  I have some opinions on that, too.  More to come.

It’s been two weeks of work, and I’m going to go outside now, to refamiliarize myself with fresh air and the sky.  More posts this weekend.

 

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I’m about 50 pages into the developmental edits, and I have a few thoughts.

  1. I’m far less prickly about this than I thought I’d be. Not that I’m entirely cool with it, that’s a little much to ask, but I’m not as precious with my writing as once was. There have been a few points so far where I was thinking ‘come on, now… really?’ but once I got over myself those edits made the narrative stronger.
  2. I’ve encountered a few dev edit comments, and they’ve been right on. That is, they’ve made the story tighter, made the words hang together better. I haven’t yet found a comment that I disagreed with. But I’m only 50 pages in.
  3. What copy editing has happened has been strictly according to established style manuals. I have to confess, some copy edits feel like flattening out my own style – I’m not a newspaper reporter – but I’m letting them go. They stick out to me like a neon sign, but more than likely no one else is going to notice them.
  4. From time to time, I’m being ‘handled.’ That is, my editor will leave me a compliment when he wants me to change a error he feels is sloppy and unprofessional. For instance: ‘Reword: kind of a cliché. Your writing is normally so good and so original – so I’d hate to have it marred by such a common turn of phrase.’ Translated from Touchy-Authorese this means ‘Seriously? Put some effort into it, don’t be a hack.’ All right, I get it.
  5. My years as an actor gave me a pretty thick skin for notes (thanks, June!), but that doesn’t mean I’m invulnerable. I’m learning to let it go, though, and trust that the guy who pays his mortgage by editing books knows what he’s doing. Kind of like they’re trusting me to know what I’m doing.

My main takeaway so far? This really is a team effort. I do need an editor, which means I’m going to have to accept that his goal is to make my book the best it can be. Even if that means losing most of my precious, precious ellipses…
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