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“Fiction writing is an odd combination of comfort and discomfort.”  --Reed Farrel Coleman

Writer Advice

Jan 2012- Mar 2012

 

Journaling for Caregivers

by Reed Farrel Coleman, Author of Hurt Machine

For the past five years, I’ve taught a summer class in writing—How To Write Genre Fiction or How To Write A Novel—at Hofstra University on Long Island. It’s a three-credit class open to regular students, graduate students, and continuing education students as well. Furthermore, it’s an accelerated class in that I must teach a full term’s worth of material in two consecutive weeks—four hours a day, ten days in a row. In order to accomplish this I had to learn how to reduce lessons down to their most impactful, economical forms.

Then, two years ago, Larry Light, the current Executive Vice President of Mystery Writers of America—a position I once held—came to me and asked me to lead an effort to develop an idea called MWA University. This was to be a program where Mystery Writers of America would offer six hours of college level writing instruction on a single day as a member benefit. Six hours sounds like a lot of time, but in reality it is very little to teach the basics of fiction writing. Again, I was forced to concentrate my lesson plans even further. Here are just some of the bits of writing advice I give to my students that I have developed along the way.

Narrative: New writers are often flummoxed by this concept. Here's an exercise: Download the late Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle" or "Taxi" or "W-O-L-D". In these songs, all about five minutes in length, Chapin perfectly exemplifies a complete narrative. There is a beginning, middle, and end with deep characterization, and emotional story arcs. If he can tell stories this complete in five minutes, imagine what you can do in three hundred pages.

First or Third Person: First person allows for an intimacy between the narrator (usually the protagonist) of the story and the reader that is unachievable through third person. However, first person can be very limiting because all the information to the reader must be delivered through the narrator/protagonist's experiences. The reader can never know what is going on in another character's life when that character is not with the protagonist. It also means the protagonist must be constantly "on screen". Third person allows for broader experience in that the reader can have a greater sense of the complete picture. It may even allow the reader to know what is going on in the lives and minds of several characters even within a single scene. The price a writer pays for writing in third is lack of intimacy and potential confusion.

To Outline or Not To Outline: Fiction writing is an odd combination of comfort and discomfort. I, for one, never outline because it robs the spontaneity of the writing experience. I feel once I've done an outline, I've already written the book and I have no desire to write it twice with no surprises. On the other hand, many successful authors do rigorous outlining. They feel they cannot enjoy the writing process if they haven't gotten the heavy lifting of plot out of the way. Just as with routine, experiment. Find out what works best for you and stick with it.

Rule of Three: A difficult issue for new writers to make sense of is how to handle critiques and criticism. On the one hand, you can't change a manuscript to suit every individual bit of criticism you receive. On the other, as I mentioned earlier, you can't remain stubbornly wedded to your manuscript as if it was biblical scripture. When seeking feedback or when you begin the search for an agent or publisher, follow the rule of three. If three people mention one specific weakness in your manuscript -- The protagonist wasn't likeable. The plot was confusing. Your antagonist was one dimensional. -- you might want to pay attention.

© 2011 Reed Farrel Coleman, author of Hurt Machine

Author Bio
Reed Farrel Coleman, author of Hurt Machine, is the former executive vice president of Mystery Writers of America. He has published twelve novels -- two under his pen name Tony Spinsosa -- in three series, and one stand-alone with award-winning Irish author Ken Bruen. His books have been translated into seven languages.

Reed is a three-time winner of the Shamus Award for Best Detective Novel of the Year. He has also received the Macavity, Barry, and Anthony Awards, and has been twice nominated for the Edgar® Award. He was the editor of the anthology Hard Boiled Brooklyn, and his short fiction and essays have appeared in Wall Street Noir, The Darker Mask, These Guns For Hire, Brooklyn Noir 3, Damn Near Dead, and other publications.

Reed is an adjunct professor at Hofstra University, teaching writing classes in mystery fiction and the novel. He lives with his family on Long Island.

For more information please visit http://www.reedcoleman.com/, and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter.

National Novel Writing Month's Secret Weapon

 

I think it really comes down to that 30-day deadline. Month-long deadlines, whatever the goal, are very powerful beasts. There's a reason why so many self-help books are built around a 30-day schedule—it's really the biggest chunk of time that I think human brains can effectively plan around. To me, the power of a 30-day deadline for novelists comes down to three factors:

1) A month gives you enough time to get a draft done, but not so much time that you start procrastinating. Procrastination will kill creative projects the same way rust eventually locks up gears on an abandoned bicycle. Isaac Newton was absolutely right when he said that objects at rest will stay at rest. Which is why people who give themselves a month to write a novel draft are—strangely enough—more likely to finish it than people who give themselves a year. The thirty-day deadline gets those gears moving immediately, and forces you to come up with a realistic schedule that breaks the daunting task of writing a first draft into a series of manageable, daily writing goals.

2) A month-long deadline forces you to abandon perfection and shoot for completion. This is exactly where you want to be on a first draft. Because if you give yourself enough time to analyze every word you write, nothing is going to be good enough. You'll spend so much time beating yourself up about the quality of your sentences that you'll never around to getting a story down on paper. When it comes to first drafts, the best thing you can do is turn off your inner editor and just commit to getting a beginning, a middle, and an end down on paper. Was that page the worst thing you've ever written? Good! Now go write another lousy page. Then another. And another. Hundreds of thousands of writers have edited a bad first draft into a great novel. But no one has ever edited a blank page into anything but a blank page.

3) A month-long deadline brings out the cheerleaders. Imagine a marathon without supporters or spectators. Just solitary runners moving silently through empty city streets. If they drop out of the race, no one notices. If they cross the finish line, no one cares. This, essentially, is the state in which we write our books. Most people don't know our writing project exists, and those who do tend to stop asking about it after a couple months. The manuscript becomes something we grapple with alone, usually at the times of day when we're most exhausted. Is it any wonder so many book projects get abandoned?

When you're writing a book on a month-long deadline, people get excited. They want to help. There's something about the folly of the endeavor that brings out cheerleaders, and you'll find everyone from your local barista to your normally grumpy boss eagerly wanting updates on your progress. Significant others also have an easier time embracing the month-long novel, and will swap childcare or chore duties for one month so you have more time to write. That encouragement (and increased writing time) is priceless, but the real gift you get from your cheerleaders is commitment. I guarantee that there will come a point in the month when your manuscript looks like a total disaster and all you want to do is quit. The only thing keeping you going will be the fact that you don't want to disappoint all those people who believe in you. So you grudgingly keep at it, logging your daily word count while cursing the whole concept. And a few thousand words later, you stumble on some great twist or character and you're in love with our book again, and you're so thankful you didn't give up.

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Chris Baty is the Founder of NaNoWriMo, and the author of No Plot? No Problem! A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days.

 

Here Are 15 Excellent Tips for Writing a Book

• Use Scrivener to write your book. Awesome organizing tool as well as word processor. -- Mark Frauenfelder (The Mad Professor)
  

• "The first tip is that readers expect books to be exhaustive on their subjects. That doesn’t mean they want the books to be long — it means that they expect that you will cover all the basic ground that needs to be covered to understand the subject, even if they know some of it already. This piece of advice may or may not be relevant to your subject. In my case, with a very idiosyncratic book on viral culture, it led to people asking me at readings why I hadn’t included an analysis of X or Y viral phenomenon in my book. “Because you already know about it,” the magazine guy in me always wanted to respond. But in the book world, people want to see you mention the stuff they already know, at least in passing (or to knock it down)– otherwise, how can it claim to be a book on the subject? It’s worth taking that point of view seriously." -- Bill Wasick (And Then There's This)
  

• "I tried, not always successfully, to start each day with some discrete goal I wanted to accomplish: write 200 words, or get through a certain amount of research, or conduct two interviews, or whatever. If I set out to spend a day “writing,” that would be so overwhelming I’d end up just farting around online all day instead of starting the climb the mountain." -- Seth Mnookin (The Panic Virus)

• "Planning. Planning. Planning. It’s a campaign. I used some project management tools in the end to put some order into the vastness. That’s the thing about the bigger scale. It requires more management to support the creativity. Cultivate a good relationship with your editor from the beginning. He/she is going to be your task master at some point. That’s going to go so much better if he/she is also your friend, colleague, supporter, and fan. The campaign of writing a book can get so lonely sometimes, you need a good attaboy just to remind yourself of why you’re doing it and that you’re not the crazy loser who needs to get out more." -- Barry Boyce (The Mindfulness Revolution)
  

• "When I’m writing a book I only read other books that somehow inform my book. If it doesn’t serve my process — no matter how much I want to read it — I don’t. I suspect there are a lot of people who will give the opposite opinion (take a break from reading about your subject matter, etc.), but I’m not one of them. This is your time to be completely and justifiably obsessed. So go ahead — bask in the madness." -- Peter Conners (Growing Up Dead)
  

• "Do as much research as possible away from the Internet — with living people, in real places." -- Carl Zimmer (The Tangled Bank)
  

• "Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly." -- Josh Shenk (Lincoln's Melancholy)

• "Write when the book sucks and it isn’t going anywhere. Just keep writing. It doesn’t suck. Your conscious is having a panic attack because it doesn’t believe your subconscious knows what it’s doing." -- Cory Doctorow (Makers)
  

• "I do not write from the beginning to the end. I write in the order that particular parts take form in my mind and I enjoy mulling them over… I mull and mull and imagine I am explaining them to someone and then I write them down. I have the order in mind, so I write whatever part is bubbling energetically in my mind, print it out (always) and begin a stack on THE BOOK on a corner of my desk into which I can add pieces (in their proper order) as they get written and so I have a visible proof at all times that something is happening." -- Sylvia Boorstein (It's Easier Than You Think)
  

• "Develop a very serious plan for dealing with internet distractions. I use an app called Self-Control on my Mac." -- Ben Casnocha (My Start-Up Life)
  

• "Get feedback — oodles of it. Along the way, show pieces of your book to lots of people — different types of people. Ply them with wine and beg them for candor. Find out what’s missing, what’s being misinterpreted, what isn’t convincing, what’s falling flat. This doesn’t mean you take every suggestion or write the book by committee. But this process will allow to marry your necessarily-precious vision with how people will actually react. I find that invaluable." -- David Shenk (The Forgetting)
  

• "I find it helpful sometimes — and still to my surprise — trying to explain to someone what it is I’m trying to write about, usually someone bright but in a different intellectual zone, and not a writer. Or, likewise, in a letter or email to such a person." -- August Kleinzahler ( Cutty, One Rock)

• "The process of lining the book up, giving it a bedside manner, asking 'Is this what it is about? But what is it really about' was a plunge. I had to explain the work to myself in more and more elementary language. I came to enjoy doing this. It helped when I realized that the discovery process was part of the writing and I didn’t have to be through it already." -- John Tarrant (Life Inside the Dark)
  

• "Advice from a Newsweek editor I worked with in the ’80s, Nancy Cooper. Roughly my age, but so much smarter and more worldly and sophisticated. I was worried about writing the opening story of the nation section. And she sent me a note that read: ”You just start working and you keep working til it’s done. That’s all there is to it; no mystery.” -- John Schwartz (Tall)

This article originally appeared on The Atlantic Wire, http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2011/06/so-youre-writing-book-heres-15-tips/38428/.

Checking for Plot Holes

by Joseph Bates

Author of The Nighttime Novelist: Finish Your Novel in Your Spare Time

There’s a famous story that illustrates how even masterful storytellers can end up with glaring holes in their plots. It concerns Raymond Chandler’s classic detective novel The Big Sleep in which the killing of a chauffeur helps launch a series of complex mysteries involving drugs, pornography, blackmail, and murder that Chandler’s hero, Phillip Marlowe, must solve. When the novel was later made into an equally classic film starring Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe -- with a screenplay by William Faulkner -- the crew realized during production that there was one last question to resolve: Who killed the chauffeur? As the story goes, director Howard Hawks first called Faulkner wanting to know, who had no idea, so Hawks wired Chandler, the source, and asked him who killed the chauffeur. Chandler’s response, as he later recalled, was to-the-point: "Dammit, I didn’t know either."

To make sure your plot is as solid as it can be -- before some legendary film director discovers a plot hole while trying to adapt your work -- consider the following questions and see that you have them answered in your novel.

• Have all subplots and supporting character arcs been concluded? You might want to go back through the novel and mark those moments with subplot and supporting cast that seem to demand revisiting later . . . and make sure you did revisit and conclude them in some satisfying way.

• Do you find any of your characters indulging in excessive monologue toward the finale? Late-novel monologues often indicate that certain information should have been introduced earlier but wasn’t -- and now your character is trying to catch the reader up on that omitted information in one big breath. These one-breath wonders suggest a hole in the plot that the character is now trying to plug, poorly. Be aware of any such information dumps you come across, and consider how you might plug the hole yourself earlier in the text.

• Do the events in your novel follow the rules of the story as you’ve set them out? We already discussed rule breaking in terms of the "twist" ending, but the same applies to every turn your story takes. If your protagonist is launched on his adventure when he saves a young woman from drowning, but then at Plot Point 1 he lets the antagonist get away because he’s not a very strong swimmer, that’s obviously a problem, and everything that comes after that point will be looked on with suspicion by the reader (if he's still reading at all).

• Do the events in your novel follow, and account for, the rules of logic? If it's revealed at the end of your novel that your time-traveling hero has fallen in love with his own grandmother and is now his own grandfather, your reader will likely either scratch his head or kick your novel across the room, depending on what kind of day he's having. It's absolutely true that, as an author, you control the powers of time and space in your book -- see the section on pacing on page 147 -- but even so you're still bound by the general rules of logic; what you do has to make sense. Thus anything that doesn't seem possible, or at least believable, is a problem you'll need to fix.

Sometimes we get so caught up in the momentum of our story, in the fun of telling it, that we forget to properly account for, explain, or excise inconsistencies along the way; even Raymond Chandler can let a dead chauffeur slip past him. But the smallest plot hole might still be big enough for your reader to fall straight through, so be mindful that your plot be as solid as it can be. And if there's anything in the story you can't reconcile, you may want to consider what the offending element is doing there in the first place.

The above is an excerpt from the book The Nighttime Novelist: Finish Your Novel in Your Spare Time by Joseph Bates. The above excerpt is a digitally scanned reproduction of text from print. Although this excerpt has been proofread, occasional errors may appear due to the scanning process. Please refer to the finished book for accuracy.
Copyright © 2010 Joseph Bates, author of The Nighttime Novelist: Finish Your Novel in Your Spare Time.
Author Bio
Joseph Bates's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The South Carolina Review, Identity Theory, Lunch Hour Stories, The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, and Novel & Short Story Writer's Market. He holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature and fiction writing from the University of Cincinnati and teaches in the creative writing program at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
For more information please visit www.nighttimenovelist.com and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter.

Tough Lessons From a Debut Novelist: Motivation to Write and Other Tips

“The Book Group”… From Question to Setting to Story

You look good. Did you lose weight?

Or maybe…

Did you lose weight? You look good.

We’ve said it. We’ve heard it. We’ve thought it. But is weight loss, moderate weight loss that is, always a good thing? I wanted to turn that question upside down, look beyond the obvious answer, and challenge some common assumptions. Thus, “The Book Group” was born. Or rather, the ending of “The Book Group” was born. My job would be to write toward it.

My first task was to envision a setting. I imagined a group of women with a connection but not a close friendship, who met regularly but not daily, and who shared interests but not secrets, in other words, a book group. (And yes, it is easier to write what you know). Perhaps the most important part of building the setting was the selection and creation of the small details that would bring the reader into the scene. The limited word count of this particular contest forced me to restrict those details to only those that I thought would anchor the reader as efficiently as possible…homemade brownies, a fistful of spoons, a pile of coats on the couch. I thought that in the end this process of paring my writing down to its essentials did make for a stronger story.

The casual, chatty dialogue also became an integral part of the setting as well as a way to move the story forward. I did, however, struggle with the number of characters in this piece. I thought that a book group with fewer than six members might have seemed unrealistic. Yet the flash fiction format didn’t allow for any real character development beyond that of Lisa. Still, I was convinced that this particular story could best be told in a flash. My solution was to allow each of the individual characters to remain sketchily drawn. In a sense, the entire book group (minus Lisa) became a single character whose purpose was to form a believable backdrop against which Lisa’s experience, feelings, and secret could emerge.

I hoped that Lisa’s growing sense of discomfort with the conversation would provide the subtle clues and create the tension that would make the disturbing end unexpected, yet emotionally true, and that the story would “continue beyond the page.” (Jayne Anne Phillips said that, but I wish I did)!

And then, I left the reader…to question, to think, and to feel.

A former college administrator, Francine Garson has published a short memoir on worklifegroup.com.  Her fiction has received recognition from several contests, including Writer Advice's Fifth Annual Flash Prose Contest. Read her story here.

Francine lives in New Jersey with an even-tempered husband and a moody cat. Her almost grown children occasionally return home for food and clean laundry. 

Universal Call: How to Create a Winning Anthology

A Chemist Gets Creative

 

But one change was not required; I was use to writing in the active voice. Most scientific style guides now recommend it, but in the old days the passive voice was preferred, being considered impersonal and objective. A famous exception was the opening line of Watson and Crick’s 1953 blockbuster paper: “We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.).”

Speaking of DNA, when I was but a zygote, perhaps my double helix specified a writer. Or maybe it was nurture, not nature; my mother was a writer. Fact is, I paid scant attention to literature in my youth, more interested in the Gilbert chemistry set in our damp basement. I made lots of nasty smoke heating stuff with my alcohol burner.

Even in adulthood my fiction reading was limited, but nonetheless of consequence. In Tim O'Brien's award-winning book Going After Cacciato, two stories are intertwined, reality and fantasy. O'Brien blurs the distinction between them. I was fascinated when, at one point in the narrative, I realized that what I was reading was a hallucination. This is the book that inspired Highway to the Valley.

A surprising—and greatly valued—result of winning the contest was receiving written comments from the four judges. All offered kudos, but they also criticized: shifting of past and present tense, parts that were too melodramatic, lack of clarity of what the narrator is suppose to be telling. One judge referred to my “braided narrative,” which it is. But I had not thought consciously about this term and enjoyed googling it and reading about the many examples of this structure. Getting feedback from people who have thoughtfully and critically read my work is golden.

For me such feedback comes most often from small writing groups to which I belong. But aside from this pleasant face-to-face activity, it feels good just to write and be connected with a community of writers through time. July was the 50th anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Though I am in awe of this masterpiece and am remote from her because of the chasm separating our talents, I nonetheless feel a tenuous kinship.

Stephen Bakalyar’s story is archived at (Highway to the Valley) and you’ll find his biography there.

You Gotta Have Friends

That’s shortsighted. Professional groups and conferences are two of the best places for an author to meet other authors, and in this topsy turvy publishing environment, friends are critical to your success. While we can sustain relationships through social media, face-to-face interaction still trumps cyber-connections. There’s something honest and real about meeting a person in the flesh. No matter how good your computer interface is, it can never replace the bond that comes from sharing a cup of coffee or feeling a kindly pat on your shoulder.

Friends—people you can rely on and who, in turn, rely on you—are indispensible to any author’s success.

Here are just a few reasons why:

1. They keep you going. Several years ago, a friend posted on her personal blog that she considered herself a failure because her first series couldn’t get any traction. I fired off an email to her. I’d always considered her a success, and I encouraged her to hang in there. Today she’s a New York Times bestselling author. I think of our exchange often; it’s a constant reminder to me to never give up.

2. They brainstorm with you. Last summer my good pal Shirley Damsgaard and I spent hours and hours working on new proposals. As a result, Shirley put the finishing touches on a query for Die Standing, which will be published by Avon. I know I benefited from our discussions as well. Only another author can understand how fragile the process of sifting through ideas can be!

3. They make you look smart. My agent called with an opportunity for me. She didn’t have long to chat. She expected me to take the information and run. But I still had a few questions. I called a friend who’d recently tackled a similar assignment, and she kindly answered my questions. As a result, I looked good because I could take the ball and run with it.

4. Friends tell you the inside scoop. How does co-op work? What is sell-through? What’s the best way to get on a panel? Where can you get bookmarks printed? There’s a shadowy world, a place where questions and insecurity hold hands. Your friends will lead you through the darkness. They’ll shine a light of understanding so you don’t trip, fall, and lose your way.

It can be tough to tear yourself away from your comfy office, to change out of sweatpants and into presentable clothes. It can be hard to brave the elements, to take time out of your day to sit in traffic, or to justify the cost of a cup of Starbucks when you could brewed java at home. But over the long haul, the investment you “spend” in making friends will come back to you many times over. You just can’t put a value on friends, as a commodity they’re precious--especially if you’re in this business for the long haul.

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Joanna Campbell Slan is the author of eleven non-fiction books as well as the Agatha Award nominee for Best First Novel—Paper, Scissors, Death, which was the first book in the Kiki Lowenstein Mystery Series. The third book in the series—Photo, Snap, Shot—will be released in May 2010 by Midnight Ink. Visit Joanna at www.JoannaSlan.com or at the blog she shares with five other mystery authors http://KillerHobbies.blogspot.com

Writing "The Trip to Goodbye"

always found that nature has a restorative and consoling effect on me, and many of my best writing ideas come to me when I'm out in the country. As I thought about the trip and how I was feeling, the image of Christopher sitting in the truck, which I describe in the discovery scene of the story, suddenly appeared in my mind. I found it provocative and compelling. A trip to goodbye, I thought, seeing him there behind the wheel, the truck loaded with gear. Once I had that in my head, I knew that I had the beginning of a good story.

A few months passed before I sat down to write the story. I wasn't sure which direction to take, so I concentrated on getting to the place inside of me where the idea began, and to connect with the strong emotions surrounding it. The first scene that I developed was the ending. It came to me right away—the story would end in silence, the truck's motor choking to a stop, the quiet evening closing in around them. I then began working out the rest of the story. I was having difficulty developing a typical storyline, so I wrote a series of scenes with the intention of connecting them later. As the writing progressed, I realized that it would be more effective to leave them separated, the threads of the story unfolding side-by-side. I set the main series of scenes, those that follow the actions of the main character, in normal font, and the parallel, complimentary scenes in italics. This structure allowed me to convey the parallel nature of the events in a natural way, play the scenes off one another within the context of the main character's journey, and then bring everything together in the scene at the river, setting off the ending to great effect.

After I completed a rough draft, I made several editing passes through the story, revising it into a first draft. I then passed it to my editor, and she and I repeated this process until we both felt that the story was finished and ready to submit to prospective publishers. I like this method because it allows me to open up and write freely at the time I'm developing a story, and then focus on perfecting the prose and other elements during the editing phase, finalizing it in collaboration with my editor.

There are many paths to a great story. I hope that my description of how this little story came about will be helpful to you in some way. Whatever the case, I believe that a writer must find the story that is relevant to him, and then write it from his heart, for that is where all great stories come from, in the end.

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Douglas Crago writes short stories, poetry and music. To read his award winning story, "The Trip to Goodbye," click http://www.writermag.com/The%20Magazine/Online%20Extras/2010/01/2009%20Short-Story%20Contest%20First%20Place.aspx.

Every Day Should Count

What is it like to be writing and publishing after age 85? I hope the story of how this happened will give encouragement to writers of any age.

After collecting a pile of rejections, I decided to self-publish Without Warning as a Christmas present for family and friends. The praise was so genuine that I took a deep breath and entered the St. Martin’s Press Malice Domestic contest for first unpublished mysteries. Months went by. One morning I opened my email, and there was a message from renowned editor Ruth Cavin. The book was too international for the contest, but would I accept a contract for two books? After nearly thirty non-published years, I levitated out of my chair. Suddenly I was a pro again, no longer the wannabe with nose pressed against the glass. I could write Author on forms. Ma’s “hobby” commanded respect. Without Warning was published in 2007, Overkill in 2009.

Why such a publishing gap? I was a late starter. For years, I darted around like a hummingbird, tasting different genres. In my forties, I became a freelance reporter for local papers. Great training, but then came the nagging question: Instead of 300 words, why not 300 pages? The first book was trash. The second, a historical/suspense novel, The Ancestors Cry Out, was published by Doubleday and Ballantine in 1979. In hindsight, it might have been more productive to stick with that genre. Instead, I spent years of research on a heavy historical. And when that didn’t sell, I decided to try mysteries.

Easier said than done. There are rules. Mystery readers expect sly red herrings. Judiciously scattered clues. Surprise endings. For me, there is something satisfying about a genre that deals with the great absolutes: Death, retribution, punishment. The villain is always caught.

Motivation? I have an on-going compulsion to try to give readers total immersion into another world—in these chaotic times, I believe that the need for escape reads is greater than ever. My characters tend to be strong people who are working their way through disasters with a certain amount of sophistication, all set in interesting backgrounds. By now I’ve come to know my protagonist Emma Streat as well, maybe better, than my own daughters. I really love her, which is just as well as I’m about to be spending a lot of time with her as she survives a complicated love life and more looming disasters.

What about process? My plots aren’t set in concrete, but I like to sit in bed eating breakfast and planning the next few pages. Once in a while there’s a logjam. At that point I write What If at the top of a blank page, followed by the situation, followed by possible solutions. It usually works.

There’s no getting around the fact that it takes time to evolve a voice. I’ve learned, the hard way, to keep in mind that as writers we are entering a relationship with our readers. Clarity is key. For mysteries, I’ve whittled my style down to a minimum of adjectives and adverbs. I use a lot of short sentences and action verbs—all aimed at compelling the reader to turn the page.

It’s fair to say that writing at any age requires a major dedication of time. To be young means there’s the luxury of experimenting. When the numbers are heading towards ninety, there can be a slowing down, as well as an awareness that every day should count; slip on the ice and in a nanosecond life changes.

On the other hand, science has given the “wrinklies” some useful tools: the computer, affordable self-publishing, internet access to information and promotion. Above all, it’s a great blessing to wake up in the morning with the urge to create—and it can happen just sitting at a table.

Twelve Rules of Screenwriting

5) Begin each scene just before it starts to get interesting and cut away before it starts to bore.

6) Never reveal or even imply what is going to happen next. Keep the reader off balance. If a man asks a woman to dinner, don’t show her saying yes; just cut to the date.

7) Narration should be a last resort. If you must use it, make sure that the narrator never tells us anything that we already know or can see with our eyes.

8) Human beings in conversation rarely call each other by their names, so why should characters? Cut every name, unless absolutely necessary. They are dialogue killers.

9) Make scene descriptions terse, visual, and filmable. This is your chance to write good prose. Refrain from smart aleck asides. Never do anything to interrupt the dream.

10) Never suggest specific songs for specific moments. It’s amateurish. It’s not your job.

11) Structure is everything. Structure is logic.

12) Write and write until you discover your own rules.
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Allison Burnett is a screenwriter and novelist living in Los Angeles. His novel Undiscovered Gyrl was published by Vintage in fall of 2009. Read about him at allisonburnett.com.

I often hear publishers say that there are "very few brands in book publishing." But to thrive in today's competitive, niche markets, perhaps brands are exactly what we need. What readers choose to read is personal and an extension of who they are. Shouldn't their book choices be supported by a publisher, a brand that is invested in their interests? 

Many small publishing companies have done an enviable job of branding themselves and building reader communities around their books. Take O'Reilly, TOR and Hay House. You may not read their books, but you know what they publish. Their communities trust them. People who share their point-of-view flock to their lists. These companies publish for a niche community, and are trusted members of their community. They provide extra resources, and often their authors are members of the community itself. TOR has even launched a bookstore to meet their readers' needs. These publishers show passion for their books and an understanding of their readers, and as such their readers reward them with loyalty. 

Publishing books for the community

Besides reader loyalty, publishing for micro communities may have other long-term benefits as well. For example, the focus would help publishers save money on marketing. Marketing through online communities is less expensive and much more powerful than trying to reach the general public and hoping to find the right match. The publisher's Web site wouldn't have to cater to a wide variety of people. It would be designed to serve the needs of a small group. Instead of expensive advertising, they could announce the book to the community that has already bought into their brand. Publishers and authors could enlist the support of the community to spread the word (which will always be the most efficient method for marketing books.) The logo on the book spine would mean the readers have a promise that the book is worth reading. The readers would know that the publisher looked at over a thousand manuscripts all on the same topic and is offering them the very best. 

So are large, general publishers at a disadvantage with today's search-empowered, community oriented readers? I think so. General trade publishing is for everyone, yet there is no "everyone" out there.  Readers are part of micro communities. They want good books, and they need publishers who will support their interests and passions. 

The bottom line is that publishers and authors need to evolve their marketing and publishing strategies to accommodate for a new kind of reader. A reader whose expectations demand more interaction and community. A reader whose loyalty you can have once you have earned it. A reader who wants more than a 6-week marketing campaign so you can sell a book. This new reader requires an investment of months and years. 

Is that too much to expect? Perhaps. But this is your new reader, and she will stay with you if you stay with her. 

Stay tuned for Web marketing tips in future weeks, or follow FSB on Twitter to see our results in real time: http://twitter.com/FSBAssociates
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Fauzia Burke is the Founder and President of FSB Associates, a Web publicity firm specializing in creating online awareness for books and authors. For more information, please visit www.FSBAssociates.com.

1. Wait for the fog to rise. And for the first few months, I was right. Even if I’d had the desire to write, I don’t think it would have been particularly good. My brain felt foggy; I was exhausted, brain-dead, and far too enraptured with my baby to sit at my computer for very long.

Stuck? Need new insights on your manuscript? Take The Next Step Towards Publication, taught by Writer Advice’s Managing Editor, B. Lynn Goodwin, begins January 9th. You can meet her in person at the Story Circle Network Conference in Austin, TX in mid-April.

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Journaling: Gateway to Self Discovery is available by special arrangement. Contact
Lgood67334@comcast.net 
for information.