It’s been a hell of a long time since I did one of my writing tip round-ups… but I’ve been collecting links ever since. There are nearly fifty links in the following post, and I culled it down from close to a hundred so we just got the best and most pertinent. So read on - for here be wisdom.

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We’ll kick off with some tips from rising star and all-round top chap Gareth L Powell. Gareth has some advice on how to start writing a story, and here’s another five useful writing tips

1. Never tell anyone the plot of your story until you’ve finished writing it. Once you’ve told your story, even in outline, some part of you relaxes.

Next, Luc Reid explains the nuts and bolts of plot - if you’ve ever been a little fuzzy on where plot begins and structure or character or worldbuilding ends (yeah, me too), this is an essential read.

“… I’ll suggest a definition of what a plot actually is, and lay out what I’ve learned so far about putting one together. Many thanks to friends who recently posed this question in a clear enough way that I realized I needed to think it out.”

io9 took a brief break from blithering on about Battlestar bloody Galactica and provided a rather useful post titled “How To Bring The Weird In Your Near-Future Stories”:

So how can we, as writers and storytellers, create a believable medium-near-future world?

How, indeed. Go find out.

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No writing tips round-up would be complete without a healthy dose of Jim Van Pelt, so here’s some highlights:

• Listen to Your Language: “The poet Lew Welch, whose thoughts about writing have influenced me, said, “The basic tool is speech.” What he meant is that what we write down on the page is a representation of ourselves speaking. But, as he also said, “If you want to write you have to want to build things out of language and in order to do that you have to know, really know in your ear and in your tongue and, later, on the page, that language is speech. But the hard thing is that writing is not talking, so what you have to learn to do is to write as if you were talking, and to do it knowing perfectly well you are not talking, you are writing.”"
• Who Critiques Your Stuff?: “Imagine this situation: your teacher asked you to bring rough drafts to class for peer editing. You break up into small groups to share your manuscripts. The teacher may have given you pretty specific instructions for what to look for, or you may have been told, “Read your peer’s paper and tell them what you think.”"
• Writing Rules: “Part I, and I think this is the hardest part, is figuring out what is in your head. What do you want to say? Fortunately, I think writing helps you to figure out what is in your head. Somebody said once, “How do I know what I think until I read what I’ve written.” There’s some truth in that.”
• Procrastination: “Yesterday I put up a shelf in my eleven-year old’s room, which would be a pretty good thing to have done if I hadn’t have bought the shelf and hardware to do it six months ago. I’m a horrible procrastinator. There’s almost no job that has to be done right now that I can’t figure a reason to put it off until later, and that includes writing.”
• How to Finish a Novel in Nine Months: the Teacher Edition
• Why Writing is Good for Us: “Tonight was my last night for the college creative writing class. I end by giving them the “everything I wish other writing teachers had told me but didn’t” lecture.”

And here are some of his “The Day Job” columns for The Fix Online:

• Making a Writing Group Work: “For most writers, part of their writing process involves seeking feedback. At first that might mean giving the manuscript to a friend or spouse, and sometimes that works out, but you’re darned lucky if someone that close to you can also give you an informed and honest opinion about your work.”
• The Day Job: Quitting It: “Just like short stories, though, a novelist has to continue to produce novels to continue to produce income. An out of print book generates no income. I know at least three novelists who are doing kick-butt successes in the novel world right now, but none of them feel they have the income to depend on the books for their living.“
• Carpe Penicullus: “Time’s winged chariot pauses for no one, and for writers whose passion almost always takes multiple hours, days, months, or years for the completion of a single project, the clattering of those distant hooves must sound distinctly loud, if we remember to listen to them.”

Uncle Jim is the bomb, kids. Pay attention.

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SFX (perhaps inspired by io9’s example) also took a break from wanking on about BSG and Doctor Who to do some interviews with some of the Gollancz UK publishing team, which means you can get advice on writing (and submitting) from Gillian Redfearn and Simon Spanton acting in concert, and from the formidable Jo Fletcher, who - ninja-like, perhaps - operates alone.

The SFX peeps also had a chat with genial rogue Paul Cornell to get the perspective from the other side of the editorial desk:

“Don’t tell them everything the character knows. Why is this odd scene happening? You can hold motivations back for as long as you like. Presenting something that’s anti-intuitive and then explaining it through the substance of the story always works. Like with Orwell’s ‘clock that was striking thirteen’ in 1984: it says wrongness.”

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Another font of writing about writing is the redoubtable Jeff VanderMeer. Sometimes controversial, sometimes (to me at least) impenetrable, he’s quite the philosopher of writing-as-process and writing-as-life:

So mastery actually equals uncertainty. The more mastery you achieve, the less confident you become, although I don’t really mean “confidence” and “uncertainty” in the strict dictionary definitions of the words. This is a good kind of uncertainty, and a bad kind of confidence. Because you are uncertain, despite having mastery, you know that your writing is still alive, that you are not simply doomed to repeat the same path you chose so many times before. Because you feel once again as if you are writing your first book, you know that writing is still meaningful to you.

Whatever you do from now on, don’t feel that it has to always be successful. To be successful, to be as good as you can possibly be in whatever field you choose, you need to have permission to fail. You have to feel like you can bungee jump out to the edge of success and into that space where the ropes might break. If you don’t, you won’t take risks, you won’t get out there, to that area with a night sky full of unfamiliar stars where “success” might become either something extraordinary or utter failure. Because utter failure and extraordinary accomplishment are conjoined twins much of the time.

Or, put another way, the space between a “publishable” story or novel and a “good” story or novel can be a chasm.

I should give myself permission to fail, I think. It would make the, er, failing a little easier.

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Nick Mamatas is the one person you don’t ask for advice on writing unless you’re prepared for the shocking warts-and-all underbelly of the writer’s lifestyle and mindset, stripped of glamour and cool before being laid out bloody like the flayed flesh of your naive dreams:

You have to stop caring whether you live or die.

This is not just apathy about life, but a more active denial of the social world. You have to get comfortable with the idea of walking around without skin, with not caring at all whether or not your parents ever speak to you again, with not stopping after your lovers all leave in teary huff after teary huff, whether your book sells two thousand copies or two million, whether or not everyone knows exactly what imagery you masturbate to. This doesn’t mean merely being confessional, but simply ready. If your imagination — your imagination — suggests that the best solution to some problem you have is the insertion of your right arm into a wood chipper, you must eliminate the social, personal, and autonomic buffers that would keep you from doing just that.

Eeep.

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I’m always relieved to find that my dread and hatred of the mechanics of writing - the “actually sitting down and hitting the keys” part - is not something exclusive to me. S C Butler, for example, knows the pain:

You might ask, why do I write at all? The answer? Because the only thing I hate more than writing is not writing.

Nor am I the only person who beats himself up over getting nothing done (because I’ve been, I dunno, procrastinating and doing a gargantuan links post or somesuch). Howard Andrew Jones of Black Gate Books:

It is much easier for me to do this thing called NOT writing than it is to actually write. I imagine it’s easier for all writers to NOT write, except that when we’re NOT writing the NOT part eats away at us. Me, when I’m NOT, I feel more and more like a failure, or simply a wuss. Yet if I sit down and write 500 words I’m not satisfied. I say to myself, well, if I’d actually had two or three hours to write, I could have written a few thousand words, why didn’t I get it together? Wuss.

Hell, even seasoned pros like Elizabeth Moon find themselves saying “It’s not supposed to be this hard, is it?”

Sometimes the story comes roaring out like a flash flood down the creek. Unstoppable, full of energy, exhilarating (even a bit scary, and definitely LOUD.) When a story does this, it’s great fun to write, shooting the rapids and yelling in triumph at the end.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

And that’s the thing you have to fight against, says Justine Larbalestier:

Writing through a crap day is the very hardest part of being a writer. Then getting up the next morning and doing it again. And the next. And repeat until the bloody book is finally finished.

Then again, she points out that not everyone sees writing the same way:

A year earlier I was bitching to this same writer that I had no idea how my book ended. I had nine tenths of the book, but no ending, and I had no idea what to do.

They thought I was insane: “How could you get that far into a book and NOT KNOW THE ENDING?!”

Um. Cause that’s how I write books.

While you’re there, you might want to ask Justine how she finished her first novel.

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M John Harrison’s writing advice is multilayered, much like his stories: the advice itself is telling you something, but the way it is written is telling you something yet more. If you can decode it, of course.

Some kind of directness of image which would obviate all that narrative guff. You can find it in Surrealism, traditional ghost stories, 15th Century engravings of witches’ cats, in unwriterly reports of hallucinations, madness, alien abductions.

I feel exactly like Mrs Keilar, one of my alter egos in Nova Swing: “This morning,” she said quietly, “I sat here for an hour without moving. I ache. I’m waiting for something to happen, and I don’t even know what part of my life it will approach from.” Always write what you know. The book will tell you what that is. Eventually.

You have to look at the major transitions of your life with a metaphor that makes aesthetic and emotional sense.

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Here’s a few thoughts from Paul McAuley:

Ian Fleming claimed to write the James Bond novels at the rate of 2000 words per day. 1000 in the morning, followed by lunch and a swim; 1000 in the afternoon, and then cocktails and the company of beautiful women. It took him six weeks of this regime to finish a novel. Nice work if you can get it.

SF and fantasy novels not only have to provide an ending for their characters; they also have to give an idea of how the world in which they are set has been changed, and whether it will carry on changing, and in which direction.

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Here’s a mass of wisdom from Elizabeth Moon:

• Word games… the constraints that your chosen form puts on word choice.
• Characters I & Characters II: “It’s a principle of logic that statements in the indicative cannot (logically) lead to conclusions in the subjunctive or imperative. That is, factual statements do not lead *logically* to “should” statements….something we observe when we look at current events. Without the intervention of a value system, the existence of a problem does not induce action to correct it. For the fiction writer, this means that dumping a problem on your character’s foot will not ensure any particular action. Your character won’t act unless he or she is motivated to act, and motivation requires more than “just the facts, ma’am.”"
• Story

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The rate at which Jay Lake sells stories, you figure the guy’s gotta know what he’s doing. I expect he’d claim otherwise if pressed, but that’s modesty in action, methinks. Observe:

• On “the plot diamond“: “The second act is where you (mostly) stop throwing open new doors and begin to concentrate on what all those choices mean to the characters and their story. This is the waist of the diamond. The famous “muddle in the middle” comes from this shift in both momentum and direction, when the author has to figure out what the heck it all means and drive the story in some direction or another.“
• On reading as a writer: “… it’s dangerous not to read. And unpublished work just isn’t the same. The qualitative experience is different, first off - I’m almost always reading with a pencil in my hand (or the Word comments feature turned on). Which is to say, I’m reading critically, and not staying inside the flow of the story much, if at all. The expectations are different, too. A sheaf of printouts, or .doc file, are simply not the same physical or mental experience as a book.”
• On description and setting: “I go back and forth on description in my own work. Generally, if I want to I can spray on the adjectives like an air compressor with a busted shut-off valve. Sometimes that works.”

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Here’s some advice on character-building from David Louis Edelman:

… think of the art of characterization as something akin to the art of additive sculpture. When you build a character, you’re not describing an existing personality so much as building one from the ground up. (Additive sculpture, my Art History major wife informs me, is the type where you pile up stuff to build your object, whereas subtractive sculpture is where you start with an existing hunk of something and chisel away the stuff you don’t need.) Just like with sculpture, when building characters you’ll often throw in materials that you’ve got lying around the shop. And just like with sculpture, your characters don’t have anything that you don’t explicitly put there yourself.

And more elsewhere:

Almost all good stories need conflict - and not the epic battle-style of conflict. The conflicts that bring characters alive are the smaller conflicts that occur between two people, a small group and the internal conflicts we deal with on a daily basis.

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Via Making Light, some advice from playwright and screenwriter Todd Alcott on writing dialog:

To every extent possible, characters should not tell each other how they feel. Any time a character tells another character how he or she feels, the audience is going to wonder “what the heck is he or she getting at?” Any time a character says “Here’s the truth of a matter:” what should follow the colon is anything other than the truth of the matter. Think of it: any time someone comes to you in your daily goings-about and says “Let me tell you something about myself” or “I have some feelings I want to share with you” or “The fact of the matter is…” you want to turn around and run in the opposite direction. Because the only reason someone would come up to you and offer you some kind of truth is because they want something from you.

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Let’s not neglect the non-fiction fields, either: here’s 15 Tips on How to Generate Ideas and Write with Ease:

I find that some Zen meditation techniques enhance my writing. Most of the problems that arise in the writing process happen when our mind is at war with itself. At those times our creative energy is scattered, instead of being focused in one steady beam.

Plus 3 Things You Need to Know about Using Dialogue in Non-fiction:

Dialogue works as a hook because it makes a story out of mere information. Open a daily paper at random and observe how journalists use this technique.

And advice that applies equally to both sides of the fence, coming in this instance from a copywriter: How to Lose 30 Pounds of Word Flab Overnight

I always recommend lean copy. And it’s twice as important online. Whipping copy into shape is an important skill for any writer, because all of us start with flabby first drafts.

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But what to do with that story when it’s finished, hmm? Well, first you check it thoroughly:

One of the best one-sentence pieces of advice about writing professionalism I got from Octavia Butler. She said that you shouldn’t ever send something out that had mistakes in it that you knew of. You were ultimately responsible and a professional didn’t send out something with errors.

Then you can send it out to adorn a slush-pile - but take a tip from Gareth D Jones and try some out-of-the-ordinary targets:

The moral to this tale is: don’t limit your markets.

Indeed - and don’t be so proud as to refuse to edit your piece if the changes mean the editor will take it.

It was funny though, that the publisher actually called me with the acceptance, because she had important news. It went a little like this…

Eventually, though, you may have to accept that no one wants to give your tale a home. Tobias Buckell talks about trunking stories:

I’ve written over 130 short stories and published just over 30 of them, and about 95 of those are now trunked (and for those following along ‘trunked’ means ‘no longer submitting the short story you’ve written to any markets.’)

And we’ll give fellow fictioneer Neil Beynon the last word as regards how you should react to those rejection slips:

… I could wax lyrical about how it’s unprofessional, how it shows a lack of realism around the way both small press and main stream publishing works - I could even tout that really irritating argument that every successful author has been rejected at least once. All this is true. But I fear it misses the heart of the matter.

That being it’s just plain rude to gob off about being rejected.

Amen.

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Now, I should be writing something that isn’t a big links-list…

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.

No substantial blogging from me tonight, I’m afraid; deadlines beckon, and I must heed their imperative call.

So, here’s some stuff for you to read in the meantime:

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Jeremiah Tolbert has been looking at genre fiction magazine business models, and has come to a conclusion that I’m inclined to agree with:

“I am not sure that the [paid] subscription model is working very well anymore.” [my insertion]

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Meanwhile, E. E. Knight takes the highlighter pens to a classic Rudyard Kipling story to examine the use of action verbs in defining character. Great analytical technique, one that I plan to steal.

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And finally there’s a feminist science fiction blog-carnival at ‘Words from the Center, Words from the Edge’ - which I haven’t read yet, but will find the time for over the weekend, circumstance willing. Then again, there looks to be over twenty posts on sf literature alone, plus more on comics, TV and film … I may have to cherry-pick. If you pop over and spot any winners, please let me know.

And now, back to reviewing CD singles by obscure bands that neither you or I have ever heard of …

Despite the name, science fiction isn’t (or at least shouldn’t be) all about science and technology.

Sure, you need some of that stuff in there - in varying degrees, from each writer according to his or her individual preference. But first and foremost, the second part of the name is the important bit: science fiction. It’s just stories, first and foremost. And because of the way human psychology works, good stories - the ones that engage the most readers the most effectively - are about people.

Well, maybe it’s better to say characters, because in science fiction some of the ‘people’ aren’t necessarily human people, but the point still stands - and it is made successfully by Ian Hocking’s essay for Concatenation’s twentieth anniversary issue:

“When the story is put on hold for attention-stretching paragraphs, even pages, you place your fiction into the category that justifies the response of those who hate science fiction: ‘I’m not interested in all that space stuff’. You shouldn’t have to be interested in the space stuff to an enjoy an SF story any more than you need to have an intrinsic interest in African territorial jurisdiction to enjoy Casablanca, Russian history to enjoy Dr Zhivago, or time paradoxes to enjoy The Terminator…”

Reading that reminded me of one of Jeremiah Tolbert’s recent posts (that I was sure I had linked before, but can’t seem to find in the archives). He’s talking about reaching the same character-over-gimmicks realisation Hocking discusses above, and mentions that Ted Chiang’s anthology of short fiction was the catalyst for this epiphany:

“What I thought I had realized was a pattern in his collection. Each story seemed to be an idea story, only he had two ideas that he had connected at an interesting intersection. But what he was doing that I had not yet learned how to do was taking a character’s life and figuring out where that idea intersection impacted them most.”

Wise words, I think. As Tolbert’s parting shot mentions, this probably isn’t news to many readers here at VCTB. But to someone struggling to learn the basics of the craft, it’s a crucial revelation, and it’s certainly changed the way I think about writing fiction.

Lots of good free advice for fictionistas in the RSS feeds today; the greatest chunk of which comes from Jim van Pelt’s Livejournal, a resource which I only discovered recently, but am already very found of.

Mr. van Pelt first looks at character creation, and the methods of showing rather than telling the reader what a character is like:

“For me, actions trump both appearance and speech.  The soldier who talks about how he will run when faced with the enemy, but throws himself on the grenade at a key moment reveals more about himself through his actions than his words.”

He then shares an exercise that he gives to his students, which sounds like the sort of thing I’d have really enjoyed, had my teachers in English ever set such tasks - go into another classroom and take observational notes about the teacher!

Next, he looks at situations where the canonical rules of writing can be broken, on the proviso that the writer knows what they are doing. For example:

“Don’t shift point of view.   In general, this is good advice.  A writer who slips around willy nilly with point of view just confuses the heck out of the reader.  I responded to a story the other day that dipped into the cat’s point of view for a sentence, and then, catastrophically, into a house plant on the fireplace mantle for another sentence.  The better advice, at least to stronger writers, is Control point of view.  If you know what you are doing, a story that shifts point of view can be the only way to tell the story, if it works.”

Following on neatly from that is Carol Berg’s response to a reader enquiry about shifting POVs at the DeepGenre blog:

“There is certainly nothing technically wrong with multiple first-person narrators. It is no more “incorrect” than using multiple third-person points of view or present tense or omniscient POVs or whatever else. For those of us who love first person done well, multiple narrators can alleviate the biggest downside of writing first-person narrative, which is getting only one character’s view of the action.”

Ms. Berg goes on to list a number of techniques she uses to make sure her first person viewpoints work: making it clear to the reader ‘whose head they are inside’; minimising the use of ‘I’; and avoiding navel-gazing episodes, to name but a few.

Lastly comes a slew of advice on techniques for writing descriptively - thanks to the way Livejournal works, I can’t put a name to their supplier, but their LJ user handle is bg_editor - which were posted in response to the van Pelt material above:

“I look on description as my camera. If I am analogous to the director of the film my readers watch, then description controls many of the aspects of that story experienced by the reader. That camera is critical for conveying pacing, setting, character, and plot.

Description does not sit statically—it has a purpose. Like makeup, it is applied sparingly to highlight or emphasize what we wish to show, to draw attention away from what we do not. It cues the reader as to what is critical to the story and ensures that a tale maintains momentum.”

Lots of quoted examples from well-known writers in there, too; an excellent chunk of advice.

The only problem I have is that, the more writing advice I read, the more intimidated about sitting down and attempting to actually accomplish any writing I become. That golden first rule (writers must, y’know, write) has always been my biggest stumbling block.

Your cognitive dissonance for the day comes from Jeremiah Tolbert, as he explains why Fiddler on the Roof can be considered as a work of science fiction. For the first time in my life, I’m actually contemplating watching a musical of my own volition.

Gareth L. Powell is offering you the chance to win a signed original manuscript of an as-yet-unwritten story - all you have to do is pick the name and nationality of the heroine. It had better be a name that fits a tough determined lady, knowing Gareth’s stories …