OK, so I’ve been pretty bloody busy since well before the new year began, and I’ve fallen massively behind with my compiling of writing advice links.

Or rather, I haven’t. I’ve been steadily compiling them in Google Notebook (which is a great tool, especially when used with the Firefox plugin), but the emphasis is on the “piling” … there’s about twenty of the buggers sat in there, taunting me from their position of safety-in-numbers, saying “hah - no time to post us, no time to write, you suck!”

Well, I’m not having that. So let’s offload - call ‘em out by author and/or website, sergeant!

Jim “Justice” Van Pelt

[ Long-time readers will know well my admiration and respect for Uncle Jim; no one tops him for quality friendly writing advice. Most of these are from his LJ feed, but the top one is from the column he does for The Fix.]

• “Sometimes the best bump I can give my writing is to get out of the house. A retreat is great, of course, but packing up my laptop and heading to the bagel shop or library is effective too.”
• “Is there such a thing as a “great” title, or do titles begin to look great because they’re married to “great” stories?  After a while, we can’t imagine the story being titled anything else.  Which comes first?”
• “While we walked, I was reminded again of the challenge and importance of writing with the landscape where a story takes place in mind.”
• “Writing the conclusion to a story can be hard!  First off, the whole story has been leading to this last page, so the sense of responsibility to the story and to the reader is huge.”
• “At any rate, I have a bunch of mini-units to talk about aspects of short story writing.  One that we covered last night was mood or atmosphere.”
• “I become insanely sensitive to repetitiveness in my sentence patterns, and I’m convinced that every reader will see it too.  I sometimes stare at my prose in despair. So, I go to the literature I love best to wash out my ears and to let me hear the rhythms again.”
• “My stance on all writing rules, from the nuts and bolts of grammar to the other much discussed rules of fiction writing (like staying attached to only one point of view, or “show, don’t tell, which I discussed earlier in Every “Rule” Has Exceptions), is that the only rule that matters to the writer is “Does it work?”"
• “Fortunately, your body which needs the oxygen doesn’t know if the breath that produced it was made while not thinking, or if it was the result of conscious effort. Your readers won’t be able to tell the difference. You can write crap consciously or unconsciously, just as you can write effective stuff both ways.”

Luc Reid

• “Don’t Worry: The Characters Don’t Believe It Either”
• “So here’s my advice to you: if you’re serious about writing and you currently only write  every once in a while, perhaps because you really, honestly don’t have the time (or just because you like to relax), try instead–just for a month or two–writing every day.”
• “Writer’s Block: Nothing to Fear But Fear Itself”

Jay Lake

• “Having just hammered 30,000 words out of the manuscript, I can say yet again that killing your darlings is hard sport.”
• “Developmental Anatomy of a Book“

Jeff VanderMeer

• Evil Monkey’s Guide to Creative Writing: Tips for Beginners - “(1) An early sense of entitlement is deadly to development. Don’t posture and preen well before you have any right to do so. (In fact, don’t ever.) Them that do rarely develop as writers, although some of them may become widely published over time. They just never recognize they suck.”

Paolo Bacigalupi

• “After today, what I really think is that I’m a dogged writer. If I polish the turd long enough, eventually something shines. It’s really my specialty. Going after a story again and again until finally I figure out how to spin crap into gold.”
• How to write a short story - by throwing away a short story - “I wrote a novelette last week. The interesting thing about it was that I literally had no idea what I was doing.”

Neil Beynon

• “As has been alluded to a few times recently, I have been experiencing more than my fair share of writer’s block, that all pervading paralysing fear that the ideas will dry up and not a single interesting sentence will be transmitted to the page.”

Write To Done blog

[ Some of these are more focused on non-fiction, but still useful. ]

• “How to Disagree“
• “How to Write Conversationally“
• “Research Sources for Writers: A Guide to Backing up Your Words“
• “Clean Up Your Narration: Four Tips For Fiction Writers“
• “31 Ways to Find Inspiration for Your Writing“
• “Short Stories: The Art of the Start” - “While revision is important for the entire short story — you should rip it apart and massage it and mold it until you have it right — I recommend paying special attention to the first paragraph or three.”

io9

[ OMG!!!1-post-not-about-Heroes-or-Torchwood shocker! ]

• Steal This Pitch: 8 Unstoppable Rules For Writing Killer Short Stories - “Short fiction is the “garage band” of science fiction, claims Tor Books editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden, so it’s time to step on that fuzzbox and thrash as hard as you can without knocking over your mom’s weed-trimmer.”

PickTheBrain.com:

• George Orwell’s Five Rules For Effective Writing - “If you want to be understood, if you want your ideas to spread, using effective language must be your top priority. In the modern world of business and politics this is hardly ever the case.”

WordWise:

• Verb Your Enthusiasm - “… a brain-imaging study conducted at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England, showed that the brain’s motor cortex responds to merely reading action words like active verbs. Verbs, in other words, stimulate readers, kickstart their imagination, draw them in, compel them to think.”

Yes, some of these are hideously old. Doesn’t mean they’re any less useful, though.

Now, I’m off down the road to talk to an H P Lovecraft-inspired band called The Sword. Enjoy!

… because, as I’m sure many of my readers know, only one thing procrastinates better than a writer, and that’s an ill writer with twenty mission-critical deadlines breathing down his neck.

Posting this will, believe it or not, be therapeutic - and it will help me toward clearing the RSS backlog, which is surely trying to tell me something:

Enough banter - bring on the freakin’ links, I hear you cry! Well, alright.

First of all, if you’re going to write fiction, length is an issue (yes, ladies - even for you). Jay Lake has the low-down on story length, so you can tell your novelette from your novella, and so forth.

***

John “Electric Velocipede” Klima has been involved in some lengthy discussions about the genre short fiction market, and has summarised the initial debate and posted his further thoughts on the matter.

Not so much about the mechanics of writing, but useful for thinking about the markets realistically. The take-away? Don’t get into writing short fiction unless it’s something you love to do, because it’ll never make you a living.

***

If, like me, you find it hard to find the time and focus to write regularly (hah!), perhaps the advice of the Write To Done blog will be of use to you - “write just one thing today, and write it well“.

***

Stuck mid-story in need of a character name? Happens to me all the time - but hopefully this crafty hack from Gareth L Powell will not only cure my fiction of Enid Blyton-style names but give me a reason to love my spam folder.

***

La Gringa supplies a list of attention-getting tricks that will not get an agent to be more sympathetic to your query letter:

• Using the phrase “This is not representative of my best work” in the query letter will probably not help your cause.
• A Xerox of your photo from your high school yearbook will not help sell your book. It will, however, live on in infamy on the intern’s refrigerator door, where a steady collection of lunatic query letters has been growing since December.

Bam!

***

Last but not least, the indispensably avuncular Jim Van Pelt has a round-up of pithy quotes and aphorisms about writing accrued from books, real-life meetings and elsewhere.

Sensible useful advice, delivered straight and friendly. This is the van Pelt way. Nuff reshpeck, innit?

OK, mania and panic beckons seductively from the to-do list. As the old joke goes, “tea-break’s over, back on your heads!”

Hey, look - writing advice from people who know what they’re on about! I need all I can get, that’s for sure - if you do too, read on.

Two top-tens from Jim Van Pelt

A double-whammy of top-ten lists from Jim Van Pelt. First of all, the Top Ten Rookie Writer’s mistakes (a rough draft). I’m terrible for this one:

"3 - Point of view character is passive or pluckless."

Then he revisits the list idea, after realising that there are at least ten top rookie writer mistakes that are behavioural as opposed to literary. This time he nails me with the first point:

"1 - Starting projects but not finishing them."

Ah. Right. Yeah, but, y’know, I’ve been busy, and … [exit, stage left, muttering]

Sharp thoughts from Uncle Nick*

The ever-succinct Nick Mamatas also has two posts of note. Firstly, two bad tendencies he notices in the slushpile:

"1. Being boring, on purpose. It really doesn’t work. One should not attempt to reflect the boredom everyday life by boring the reader with, say, a 700 word description of the process of consuming cereal…especially not within a 1400 word story. Bite. Chew. Swallow."

I’ll admit my writing’s often boring, but I’ve never tried to make it that way.

And secondly, reflecting on a story he had accepted by Nature magazine, a reversal of an established aphorism:

"You know that old saying "Murder your darlings"? One time, try the opposite: keep the darling, murder everything else, and write a new story around that jewel."

I think the important thing to note is his use of the words "one time". I know my poetry has benefited immensely from me learning to cut out the bits I think are really awesome. That’s because my assessment of them is usually very wrong.

Paolo Bacigalupi has a sex change

After someone made some trenchant observations about his characterisations of women, Paolo Bacigalupi decided to word-replace a character from a novel-in-progress from being a guy to being a girl, and discovered something interesting in the process:

"As I read the part of the story where my newly minted female character first appears on stage, I was struck with an almost overwhelming urge to describe her physically. Nowhere in the previous version of the story did I physically describe her male incarnation - no height, no weight, no haircut, no musculature, no eyes, no lips, no nothing — and yet now that her sex had changed, I felt intensely compelled to add markers of physical description. The role of this newly minted female character was to be the same as the earlier male’s role, her function in the story and the scene exactly the same (in the scene where she first shows up, she’s counting money - pretty gender neutral behavior) and yet now I had this intense urge to describe her black bobbed hair. Interesting, no?"

An insight into the actions we undertake when writing without being consciously aware of them.

The endings justify the meanings

Last but by no means least: David Louis Edelman, wearing his DeepGenre hat, discusses endings - more specifically the why and how thereof as opposed to the what - using the Batman Begins movie as a template:

"… we don’t tell stories from a naturalistic perspective. We might try to simulate nature’s point of view or use it as a tool in our own story-telling, but by and large we construct an artificial framework on which to hang our stories. We have a point of view. The protagonist’s experiences are filtered through a set of moral questions or psychological dilemmas. We focus on Batman’s efforts to stop the Joker from poisoning Gotham’s water supply rather than the audit of his 2003 taxes because it’s a convenient metaphor. Can Batman overcome his feelings of despair and hopelessness to face a challenge? Will Batman press ahead against overwhelming odds when it’s very likely he’s going to fail anyway? Does Batman believe that he’s fulfilling his mission to act as an instrument of justice? And so on.

When does the story end? It ends when the moral or ethical or psychological question is answered, whether in the affirmative or in the negative or some combination of both. Bruce Wayne finds the strength to put on the mask one more time. Bruce Wayne chooses to follow his convictions, even though they clash with society’s. Bruce Wayne perseveres when a lesser man would have given up. Whether he actually succeeds in capturing the Joker or not is of secondary concern."

Plenty of food for thought there. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to try and avoid breaking Jim Van Pelt’s first rule …

[* I have no idea whether Nick Mamatas would object to me finding his brutally honest writing advice to be avuncular ... but having seen how he tears a new one for people who piss him off, I'm sure I'll find out eventually. It's meant with the greatest of respect, Mr M.]

What with one thing and another, it’s been a donkey’s age since I last did a writing advice round-up. I had a few morsels lying about in the old RSS reader, so I thought I’d take a moment to pitch them out.

Twenty mistakes to avoid

This is the first of two posts from E. E. Knight, a man who manages to educate and entertain at the same time. It’s a list of twenty fiction-writing blunders made by beginning (and not-so-beginning) writers. My personal favourite:

11 - So that’s why you wrote this: I’ve read stories where the most precise language and evocative imagery is saved for the all-important pudenda-shaving scene as the heroine gets ready to go to the library. I’m not knocking your kink, I’m just wondering why so much word-weight is put into a personal hygiene choice in a story about tracking down Shoggoths.

Zing!

Showing not telling - avoiding infodump

Back-story is probably more essential in genre fiction than any other form … but that doesn’t make it any more palatable when served in huge expository lumps. So here’s a snippet of E. E. Knight’s comprehensively lengthy advice on sneaking the back-story under the radar:

You’re doing a disservice to your readers when you present them with the information they need to know to understand your world (or the backgrounds for your characters, or whatever) in a couple of ways when you do this, though. For one thing, it’s absolutely static and therefore boring. For another, the authorial hand is visible, cold on the reader’s throat like a doctor checking your glands.

Indeed. Concludes with plenty of examples, also. If you’re a beginning writer, and you’re not subscribed to his RSS feed, you’re missing out.

Collaboration 101

Another writer whose advice I increasingly find indispensable (and another one by whose actual fiction, to my shame, I’ve never read*) is Luc Reid. While not so much of a didactic piece as Knight’s material above, this post lays out a procedural framework for collaborating on short stories:

6. When we have a completed first draft, one of us does the first round of editing. If one person did more of the original writing, the other should be the one to do the first round of editing. During editing, we discuss any major changes before making them, but other than that we’re ruthless and edit the stories almost as though they were our own. We don’t hesitate to strike out a beautiful phrase or change a character or what have you even if the other person has done the original work. However, we do this using Word’s “track changes” feature, which is very easy to use, so that if something needs to be restored it can be.

Hmmm. I’m thinking you’ll have to be pretty good friends with anyone you do that sort of work with! Good food for thought, though.

Clomping foot redux

It’s a mark of his great talent (and the great esteem in which he is held) that M. John Harrison can set the genre blogosphere alight with a few short paragraphs about the sort of fantasy he is tired of seeing:

Go away & write me a fantasy like that. Wait twenty years before you start. Write it out of some emotion of yours you never understood, or some decision you made you’re not sure if you regret; but never once name that emotion or let me see the decision. I want what’s underneath. Make it short. Remember the world never had a plot, & that there’s no difference between a “myth” & commuting to work, they’re just two really excellent ways of narrating the life out of life.

Tear this one up, & start again with that very good sentence from p50, “I didn’t know what was happening.”

Much like the original “clomping foot” post, I think people will be talking about this one for some time to come.

In fact, it reminds me of some of the things the Mundanistas have been saying, though there are fundamental differences. But that’s a post for another day …

[*Actually, that's not strictly true - I have read some of Luc Reid's super-short pieces over at The Daily Cabal, which is kind of like Friday Flash Fiction every single day, and another fine addition to your web-based diet.]

The old feed reader is full of useful advice for writers once again, so time to share them with the people.

Jeff Vandermeer’s Evil Monkey delivers the second short sharp installment of his Guide to Creative Writing:

“Alas, market predictions aren’t like assholes, because everyone has two or three, and they usually serve little purpose.”

Luc Reid tries to nail down what it is that makes certain stories rise from “good, but not quite what we’re looking for” to “sold”:

“So what makes a story rise above its fellows, inspire love, stand out? The intuitive response would be that it does the things we talked about better. The characters are stronger, the plot is more compelling, the description is more vivid. But usually standing out is going to mean something else, and it’s going to differ from writer to writer and sometimes from story to story. The stories that rise above are not just more competent than the stories that don’t, although more competent is always better.”

Moving beyond the writing itself and into the territory of promotional work, Charlie Stross explains the dos and don’ts of public readings with his usual dry humour:

“The water jug isn’t an optional extra. I usually take the precaution of bringing along a drink of some sort, simply because my throat dries out after ten or fifteen minutes of speaking and if I’m scheduled late in a day of readings, the folks providing supporting facilities such as jugs of water tend to be getting a bit erratic themselves.”

And finally, David Louis Edelman has some advice on how to self-promote with ethical integrity:

“3. Avoid glaring sins of omission. This is a difficult guideline to follow, because it’s very subjective. Don’t use ellipses to claim that your book is “an absolutely terrific… thriller” when the actual review states that your book is “an absolutely terrific example of what not to do when writing a thriller.” Don’t try to sell to a group of Vietnam vets by claiming that your book has a Vietnam vet in it, while conveniently forgetting to mention that said character gets run over by a truck on page 4.”

Ah! The intarwebs: helping aspiring writers (to avoid writing by supplying them enough advice from genuine writers that they can convince themselves reading it is a more valuable way to spend their time than actually writing) since 1997!

[Cross-posted to Futurismic]

There seem to be a lot of posts containing advice for writers in my RSS reader at the moment, so I thought it would be nice to share them with everyone. Let’s see …

First up we have Jeff Vandermeer reposting the start of his “Evil Monkey Guide to Creative Writing” at his recently-relocated blog.

My Futurismic co-blogger and rising science fiction novelist Tobias Buckell has links to some extensive notes on plotting that were taken at the Taos Toolbox writer’s workshop.

Finally, Jetse de Vries is e-submissions fiction editor for Interzone, but he’s a writer in his own right, too. He shares with us the lessons he’s learned from reading the slush pile, and discusses the value of “trunking” stories that you just can’t seem to sell.

[Cross-posted to Futurismic]

OK, so here’s one of those memes that doesn’t involve you answering the sort of personal questions that the population of MySpace seem to find so incredibly important, and it promises to send some links back to you if you complete it.

These things remind me of chain-letters, to be honest, only without the veiled threat of gypsy magic or voodoo curses. But I’m going to do it anyway, because I was tagged by Chip, and he’s been a loyal reader here for ages - despite the fact that I have no idea what it is that he finds worth reading amongst the waffle and sf-nal pontification. Selah. So …

-Start Copy-

It’s very simple. When this is passed on to you, copy the whole thing, skim the list and put a * star beside those that you like. (Check out especially the * starred ones.)

Add the next number (1. 2. 3. 4. 5., etc.) and write your own blogging tip for other bloggers. Try to make your tip general.

After that, tag 10 other people. Link love some friends!

Just think– if 10 people start this, the 10 people pass it onto another 10 people, you have 100 links already!

1. Look, read, and learn. ***
-http://www.neonscent.com

2. Be, EXCELLENT to each other. ***
-http://www.bushmackel.com

3. Don’t let money change ya! ***
-http://www.therandomforest.info

4. Always reply to your comments. **
-http://chattiekat.com

5. Link liberally — it keeps you and your friends afloat in the Sea of Technorati. *
-http://chipsquips.com

6. Don’t give up - persistence is fertile.
-http://www.velcro-city.co.uk

-End Copy-

OK, so the challenge for me is picking out ten people who I think care enough about blogging as an end in itself to take part in this … so, let’s try Gareth Powell, the SF Signal crew, Tobias Buckell, Jeremy Tolbert, Jason Stoddard, Paul Gilster, Sven Johnson, Jonathan McCalmont, Niall Harrison and Jamais Cascio.

I’ve made a quite deliberate effort to keep that list down to people who I read regularly, and who don’t blog for a living, but who do it because it’s a way of enabling their main job, or engaging with a community around a creative career.

Tally ho!

If you write short fiction with an eye to getting published, you’re probably hungry for advice on how to make your manuscript survive the slush-pile process.

So give thanks to Doug Cohen, fiction editor for Realms of Fantasy Magazine, for sharing this insightful essay where he looks at the openings of genuine slush-pile survivor stories, and analyzes what it was about them that saved them from the default rejection note.

Of course, not all parts of the writing process are quite so easily explained - witness Jim van Pelt talking about where story ideas come from. [Cross-posted to Futurismic]

Words that have been used to death

The consistently useful WordWise blog has a list of words that have been overused by marketers and other writers to the point where they have lost all their original power.

As blog posts go, it’s a seamlessly integrated synergistic paradigm-shifting solution, leveraging a win-win proactive strategy for facilitating robust communications. Or rather, it’ll help you not sound like a hackneyed personal development coach every time you sit down at the keyboard.

Words that get interchanged incorrectly

Word Wise also has another post that lists words frequently yet improperly used in place of one another; ‘reluctant’ and ‘reticent’, for example.

I’m always secretly rather pleased that I usually know the right use for each word when I read a post like this, but every now and again I’ll discover an error I’ve been making for years. Which is one of the reasons I’m so fond of the online Chambers Dictionary reference page, which I can search from the Firefox search box … it’s saved me from more than one potentially embarrassing mistake in the past.

Writing characters of colour without being racist

While aimed at the fanfic community, this post offers great advice for anyone who wants to write about characters of a different ethnicity to their own, without falling into the trap of crass stereotyping. It’s also delivered with just the right mix of seriousness and humour:

You are probably wondering, “Good grief, this is a lot of work, and if I screw up, all I can do is lie down and get kicked in the head. Why on Earth should I write CoCs? I can just avoid the mess by only writing about white people!”

That thing where you are considering only writing about people of the same race as you is an exercise of white privilege. It is something that you are able to do because you are white.

I’ve not written enough fiction to have fallen into the trap of stereotyping coloured characters, or the even more insidious trap of never writing them at all for exactly that reason - all my characters so far have been equally cardboard, whatever their ethnicity. But having read the above post, I’m a little more confident about making the effort in future.

I’ve been a bit lax on posting up useful bits of fiction writing advice - largely due to being busy as all hell trying to scrape up some paid work writing non-fiction, as it happens - but a couple of doozies were sat in the feed reader that I thought were worth sharing.

First off, Luc Reid (who certainly seems to know his writerly onions) has a post on writing believeable fiction:

“Of course, if the reader just wants a good story and isn’t in a critical mood, you can get a lot more by that reader with less work. Unfortunately, this is in the individual reader’s hands rather than the writer’s, so it’s best to write for the skeptical and unwilling reader, since the willing reader won’t be overly bothered by the detail.

However, there is one element of willingness over which you have control, which is how compelling your story is. If you introduce your pond scum creature in the midst of a tense scene in which it immediately becomes clear that the pond scum creature may be able to give your main character the name of his birth mother, the reader may care so much about the story that they will accept whatever they need to in order to continue seeing it unfold.”

That advice has to be useful to anyone writing any sort of genre fiction.

Elsewhere, the Slushmaster approaches a thorny issue in a humourous way, by making a metaphor between the writing life and Darwinian ’survival of the fittest*’:

“Let’s use cavemen to illustrate some points, because cavemen are funny.  “Man next door has fire.  Me no need fire.  Me know what me doing.”  Translation: “I don’t need to read the submission guidelines.  I know what I’m doing.”  These are the writers who fail to put their stories in the proper fonts, fail to enclose their SAE, or stamps, or IRCs, send fantasy stories to science fiction markets, send poetry to markets that publish strictly fiction, etc.  If there are better methods of hunting/gathering you can easily learn, use them.”

Zing!

[* Yeah, I know, 'Darwinism' and 'survival of the fittest' aren't really the same thing ... but we both got the point he was making, right?]