Advice for newbie writers

The other day I received a ping on Facebook chat from one of my FB friends who wanted to ask me about how to go about getting published.

It is a common starting point question for those who have begun the process of writing a book. What do I do after I finish writing?

Well, before you finish your first draft, I recommend that you begin thinking of yourself as a writer.  Start using that term when you refer to yourself.  It is a psychological shift, but one you need to make in order to take yourself seriously as a writer.

You also need to work on your craft.  That means you must write all the time.  You must also read all the time.

Discover what you enjoy reading, and then write the kind of book that you would like to read.

Analyze your favorite books.  Tear them apart.  Dissect them.  Take copious notes. Discover the plot points, the subplots, the plot twists.  Think about the characterizations and settings.  Could the story be set in another place and time?  If so, how would it have changed the story?

Here are a few books on craft that will be thought provoking and help improve your storytelling ability:

Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass
Fire in Fiction by Donald Maass
Make a Scene by Jordan Rosenfeld

Here is another book that I adore for understanding drama:

Audition:  Everything an Actor Needs to Know to Get the Part by Michael Shurtleff

Beyond working on your craft, you also need to start educating yourself about the business of publishing.  I recommend that you subscribe to two different daily electronic newsletters.

Publishers Lunch and Publishers Weekly Daily

You should also read industry blogs.  If you do not have a reader to help manage blog subscriptions, please remedy that today.  I use Google Reader and I have far too many blogs to comfortably follow, but I do scan them.  If you don't have a Google account, please get one.  It's free and easy to obtain.

Here is one agent's blog that I think is helpful:  Kristen Nelson.

Start there, check out her blogroll.  Try a few others, subscribe to ones you like.  Scour more blogrolls. Rinse, repeat.

You must also find a support network.  Try and find a writers club near you.  Check your Sunday newspaper to see if there are any listings for meetings in their author signings area.  Look in the advertisements in your papers for meetings.  Perhaps you have a writers club that meets that you've never heard of before.

Then again, maybe you'll have to dig a little deeper to find a writing community in your area.

You can also try and utilize a cyber community of writers.  Absolute Writer Water Cooler is a great place to start.

Getting feedback from fellow writers is essential.  Finding a good fit critique group is important in improving your writing skills.  It is helpful to not only hearing from others about what works and what doesn't work in your drafts, but by reviewing others' work you begin to develop stronger editing muscles by identifying strengths and flaws in someone else's writing.

I feel it is more important to find someone you have good chemistry with in your critique group than it is to find a group of same genre writers.

Now onto a word of caution: there are many who will try and take advantage of writers.  Please do not click on any links for "Publish your novel here" that you might see.  It is doubtful that you will be happy with the result.

You should check out a website called Preditors and Editors and familiarize yourself with the various scams that are done to unsuspecting writers.

A companion blog that is entitled:  Writer Beware Blogs!

Another tip is to find a good adhesive to secure your backside to your desk chair or as some of my friends call it:  Butt Glue.

Any other suggestions from my writing friends for those just starting out?



http://lcmccabe.blogspot.com/2012/05/advice-for-newbie-writers.html

Critique Groups and Self-Editing

Becky Levine and Linda C. McCabe

It has been over a month since I last posted.

I have not been hospitalized, abducted by space aliens or any such dramatic excuses. Nor is it due to me running out of blog topics. Nope, I have just been busy writing. And editing. Again.

The biggest part of writing is the re-writing process.

One of the most difficult aspects of re-writing is recognizing what works, what isn't working and what needs to be changed.

My writing club held a series of editing workshops this year and we were fortunate enough to have a roster of wonderful speakers. One of which was my friend Becky Levine who spoke on a topic near and dear to her heart: critique groups.

She was able to use her workshop as a "testing ground" for her forthcoming book by Writers Digest books on the very subject of critique groups and how to critique other people's writing.

How to offer constructive criticism that will help others to know what works and how things can be improved. It is in the process of using your analytical eye on another person's work that you can then recognize things in your own writing that had heretofore been invisible.

Because the writer is always too close to their own work to really see it objectively.

Becky has been a member of various critique groups for about twenty years and she stresses that the purpose is to help writers improve their work, but never to get them to write a different book. It is the individual's work and the writer determines what advice is taken and what is rejected.

Her preferred critique group structure is one where pages for review are submitted a few days before the meeting. This allows for thoughtful consideration of the work rather than immediate response to the text.

Becky gave handouts which included a form for a written critique. She includes questions for the reviewer to answer such as:

Character: can you identify the hero (main character) in this scene? Has the author written a hero that a reader can sympathize or identify with? Does the hero's personality show complex, even conflicting, traits? What would you do to strengthen this character as the hero?

She also includes spaces to discuss Plot, Description (settings and people), Dialogue, Point of View & Voice, as well as Scene Structure.

Becky insists that when writing a critique that you always start with something good. We are dealing with people's creative sides and their egos, so find an area to praise. Becky did not allow for the possibility that there would be nothing worth praising. She adopted her "stern mother voice" if someone wanted to skip that part and directed them to find something to admire.

After starting with praise, then move to areas where you see weaknesses. Identify areas where you were bored, confused, or taken "out of the story." If you had a negative response to the text and try to identify why it did not work for you. Offer suggestions such as "what would happen if...." or "Have you tried..." Then end on another note of encouragement.

Face to face interactions are important, but it is the written critiques which can sometimes provide the most lasting help. They might be filed away for months at a time and then the tangible bits of advice are used later during revisions.

In regard to the in person critique group meetings, Becky suggests that only one person speak at a time with the writer being critiqued remaining silent. That is unless there is some confusion and questions for clarification. However, one should remember that most readers will never have the writer there in person to answer a question so if there is confusion in the text, it may need to be addressed in the revision process. (Unless that is a deliberate aspect of the story such as a clue or red herring designed to make the reader guess the solution.)

If while another person is giving their critique you think of something you wish to add, jot that down in a note rather than interrupt. You will have your turn to speak.

Overall, Becky did a wonderful job presenting how best to conduct yourself in a critique group and it reinforced many of my thoughts on the subject. I look forward to buying a copy of her book The Critiquer’s Survival Guide, due out in Fall 2009.

I had meant to do this write up about Becky's workshop shortly after it happened, except I ran out of time. I was busily preparing myself for a week-long plot intensive workshop sponsored by Free Expressions. It was the Breakout Novel Intensive known by its participants as BONI.

The classes were taught by literary agent Donald Maass, author of Writing the Breakout Novel and its companion Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook.

Donald Maass

Mornings were filled with lectures, but they were more like motivational seminars fused with writing challenges. Donald Maass is an excellent public speaker who has great passion for the subject of writing and drama as well as a quick wit.

During his talks we were barraged with questions about our characters, plot points and challenged to make things worse.

One of the first exercises was to consider the main character or hero of the story, identify defining characteristics about them and then consider what the opposite qualities would be. Then find a way to show both the ideal and its opposite in the first five pages.

Here is the notes he wrote on the easel for that day:



I realized while listening to that lecture that I had those elements built into my first chapter, but they had not been brought out sufficiently. In challenging myself to find a way for my hero to show a negative quality, in this case to be disrespectful, I had to make him hurl an insult.

A nasty insult to a superior officer.

That afternoon I worked on implementing the homework assignment. My first attempts were a bit lame, but it was a break through for me to allow my hero to do something against his nature so soon in the story.

I was excited to print out my new revision to show to the critique group that night. We were assigned groups according to our genres and I was fortunate to be a part of an incredibly lively (and bawdy) group of writers.

One of the reasons I signed up for the BONI workshop was to discover what was wrong with my first few chapters. I had good luck in getting agents interested in seeing my work, so I knew that my premise and pitch were working. However, none had ever asked to see more pages.

I had received some feedback that the beginning seem "too distant." I had been polishing the chapter for so long that I could not understand what was being asked of me to change.

I brought those comments to the fresh eyes of my BONI critique group members and it was as if I had given a sock to bloodhounds in a fox hunt. One person mentioned that when I used the term "ominous" that they wanted more. Another thought I should cut it, but then I began challenging myself to give more personal stakes for my hero in that first scene.

It was as fireworks were going off in my brain. Later that night I stayed up late re-writing the first chapter and including the new insights. I fell in love with the story again.

I also want to personally thank one of my critique group members who helped me tremendously in how to increase the insult to the ego of my antagonist. By changing the dialogue slightly, without changing any plot events, he showed me how to increase the size of my hero's cojones.

And, the insult that I am now using to end my chapter wound up flowing from my lips as the group brainstormed. Thank you, Lucien.

Lucien Nanton

The afternoons were designed for you to have time to work on your writing as well as the time set aside for one on one consultations with faculty members who read portions of your work and synopsis.

Here is one more snapshot of a morning workshop's notes which is in honor of my friend Terri Thayer. During the discussion, there was mention of some designer quilts going for as much as $100,000 to collectors. Donald Maass showing his quick wit decided to change gears and switch topics from scenes to quilts.

Not really, but it was funny and led to several rounds of puns tossed out by people throughout the room.




I have found after going to my writers club meetings that I feel energized. As if simply being around other creative people releases endorphins into my bloodstream.

Interacting with the other BONI students was fantastic. Many were veterans of other Maass workshops, but all were serious writers committed to bettering their craft. So even when I wasn't at class or in a consultation, I was networking with other writers.

The week spent at BONI took my natural post-meeting high and amplified it tenfold. I felt as if I was on mental steroids.

Seriously. I had trouble sleeping, because my mind was so fired up. I rested, but could not really get into deep sleep because of the intense mental stimulation wouldn't allow me to shut my mind off.

It took me several days at home before I was able to revert to my normal sleeping patterns.

One of the last bits of advice Donald Maass gave to us was to take 20-30 pages of our manuscript and throw them off a staircase so that the pages are in disarray. Then take another 20-30 pages and repeat the process. Do this until the entire manuscript is out of sequence. Then edit page by page for microtension.

Ye Olde Grading by Gravity trick.

The rationale was to force yourself to look at each page in isolation to identify weaknesses and avoid getting "caught up" in your own narrative by doing it in sequence.

I have begun that process and am about a quarter of the way through this round of edits, but have not yet entered any into my computer. Because I am fearful of potentially introducing continuity errors by editing out of sequence.

So I shall wait until I have finished this round of edits and then enter them sequentially. I am finding areas in my manuscript that were a bit heavy on exposition that can be tightened and/or changed to dialogue.

But I now have a new focus and energy toward making this manuscript as strong as I can make it.

Write on!

On Criticism

I've been trying to think of what to write for my next post, and had felt particularly uninspired. I felt it best to be silent than to waste time by putting something frivolous on the blog.

Then I read an entry on one of the agent blogs that I follow. Jessica Faust wrote about giving honest critiques to writers at a recent conference.

BookEnds, LLC — A Literary Agency: Critiques

It was a negative experience for both parties involved. She was trying to convey her professional opinion to a writer who voluntarily chose to submit their work for critique.

Unfortunately the writer did not like hearing Jessica's criticism, and became hostile.

That is not the professional front that you should put forward with anyone in the publishing industry.

I understand the human reaction from both the writer's point of view as well as the person presenting the criticism. I've been on both sides of that equation. Well, except that I've never been an agent with fifteen years experience.

On the receiving end of criticism.

I remember vividly when I was a freshman in college and sat next to my professor's desk while he reviewed my paper. I stared at his red marker hovering over my words scratching them out repeatedly as he diagrammed all the failings he saw. Try as I might, I could not stop the tears from flowing at the sight of my paper being defaced in such a manner. After he finished his critique, he handed me the paper covered in crimson marks and declared that "he liked it." I was given an "A" on the paper, but was numbed by the ordeal. I staggered back to my chair with no idea what he said to me. I felt like a patient given a terminal diagnosis and couldn't focus on anything said past hearing the words "brain tumor." Even though I did well, I felt humiliated, and this was an Honors level class.

I tried reassuring myself that I couldn't have gotten into the class if I hadn't shown some talent. I could help others restructure and improve their papers, but his class made me feel inadequate when it came to my own.

The professor was an old man with a gray pallor who stood in front of the class hunched over like a vulture. He played with the keys on his belt while he lectured and I can't remember a single thing I learned from him. The only things I took away from his class were my fear of his red pen and the conviction that he was a human bird of prey.

Since I was a science major, I couldn't allow myself to become distracted from my core studies by obsessing over general education courses. The reason why this bothered me so much is that writing comes from your soul and your intellect. Writing is a permanent reminder of what your thoughts and how you articulate an argument or simply tell a story. It is not the same thing as learning to plug numbers into a mathematical equation and turn a crank to get a result. Writing is a reflection of the author, and when professors responded negatively to the product of my intellect, I decided to withdraw from submitting future work to their scrutiny. I took a test and "comped" out of my third term requirement for English. Those negative experiences in college class stifled my muse for close to five years of my life. I can't let that happen to me again.

I have developed a thicker skin since then, but I still understand how callous and careless criticism can wound rather than help.

Now, years later I seek out critique of my work in the hopes that errors that I cannot see will be spotted by a fresh pair of eyes. I also need perspective to know if I am achieving the emotional reactions from my readers that I am striving for in certain scenes. I want to know if the dialogue rings true, and if my pacing is too fast or too slow.

It is nice to receive accolades, but if there is something structurally wrong with my story, I need to hear it while I can still do something about it.

I've belonged to a critique group for several years now and it has for the most part worked well. However, you should never just take someone's opinion as a mandate to change things. You should always take people's suggestions as just that: suggestions.

A few months ago after a critique group meeting I found myself in a terrible funk. It was because one of the members gave me criticism that I not only found unhelpful, but damaging to my psyche. I started doubting my own ability to construct a sentence.

I was suffering from what my engineering friends would say is "analysis paralysis."

I felt as if everything I wrote or attempted to write was dreck. Now, I knew it wasn't true, but this was the level of the funk I found myself.

Anne Lamott in her book Bird by Bird refers to it as listening to KFKD radio. (Think of KF**KD).

As I read Anne Lamott's book looking for inspiration, I realized that she has some massively long sentences. Her style runs counter to Strunk and White's Elements of Style by a mile. One sentence was 94 words long. That can't possibly be thought of as concise. Yet, herbook is one of the most frequently cited favorite reference books by writers, even though she eschews concision in her writing. Why? Because she's funny.

A sentence is supposed to convey a thought, and sometimes thoughts are complex which then will need time and space to be developed adequately. Writers are also advised to have a variety in their sentence structure. Too many short sentences in a row are read as staccato and can be jarring to readers. Does this mean that from now on I will be emulating Lamott's use of humongously long sentences? No, but I'm not going to hang my head in shame if I write a sentence having more than X number of words.

One of my friends told me that he tries not to have sentences longer than 14 words. He literally counts the number of words in each sentence. I am not about to follow that practice. Instead, I shall gauge the effectiveness of my sentences by whether or not the meaning is lost by its end. If the logic train derails in the deep woods, the sentence needs revising. I shall also take into consideration the overall flow of the piece. If the narrative becomes snagged then I'll revise, but not because it went past an arbitrary word limit.

Giving out solicited criticism

I have offered my feedback to other writers and have thankfully not gotten such a visceral response as Jessica Faust received.

My critique group is structured so that we send our writing samples to the other members ahead of time. It allows us to print out and read the submission and make line edits. It also allows for us to have a broader view of the piece rather than a few sample pages being read aloud.

One of my strengths is in spotting continuity errors. That generally comes about when a writer has made some changes in a story, but forgot to incorporate those changes throughout the text or when the writer hasn't thought through all the implications of a plot choice. I questioned the age difference between two characters once because I didn't think that things added up correctly and my friend admitted that he had changed the little sister's age, but forgot to update it throughout his novel.

I've also given critiques to members of my writers club when they ask for my opinion on their writing. Recently I read the first attempt at short story writing by someone who has only written technical papers. He had become inspired by interacting with fiction writers and wanted to try his hand at it.

I had started reading his story and made some line edits before coming to the realization that structurally the whole thing simply didn't work. There was no conflict and therefore no drama. He had two talking heads in a room that were discussing a political issue. Neither character was defined, it was simply a way to have dialogue exchanged which allowed political beliefs to be espoused.

Nothing happened in the scene. It was only an excuse to dress up a position paper as fiction and use quotation marks in the hopes of informing people through entertaining them. It failed because it did not entertain.

I've written political essays in the past, so I know full well the urge to put forth my positions on issues that I am passionate. However, I also know and love drama. If you wish to mix drama and politics, the dramatic needs of the story must always come first.

I wound up explaining those differences to him and suggested he read Audition by Michael Shurtleff which I find indispensable when thinking of dramatic conflict. I also made a few suggestions of how could put his characters in peril. Then, he could slowly draw out the information in a police interrogation, should one of those characters choose to use methods other than peaceful, civil disobedience to further his political goals. By the end of our discussion, he thanked me for my time and my insight. I didn't give him any of my line edits, because I knew that very little of what he originally wrote would survive any second drafts he made on that story.

Sometimes it is the global problems in a piece of writing that is the biggest obstacle that must be dealt with before you get down to the sentence structure level of spelling, punctuation, grammar, pacing, and concision.

Offering Criticism to people you don't know

I became friends with John Granger because of my responding to his open invitation in his first book on the Harry Potter series, The Hidden Key to Harry Potter. He had included his email address in the back of the book and I wrote to him via email.

It wasn't a gushy note that laid the praise on thick. Nope. I wrote him a detailed message where I started out introducing myself and told him what I liked about his book, and then I mentioned errors that I spotted including page numbers for his reference. Some were spelling mistakes, whilst others were factual errors. I then shared my thoughts where I differed with him on areas of interpretation or speculation which could not be classified as errors but instead were differences of opinion. I backed up those reasons with citations from canon, but I was not dogmatic about it. I realize that my opinions on these matters might be proven in the future to be totally wrong. Therefore, I did not try to persuade him to the absolute correctness my theories, but rather to introduce him to other schools of thought on the matters under discussion.

I was trying to be as diplomatic as possible, because I felt that it was the polite thing to do. He appreciated how I comported myself and we have since then have corresponded via email for close to four years. There are many areas of speculation that we disagree on, but we are never disagreeable about it.

Not everyone who has read his books or online essays seems to share that same sense of propriety.

Prior to the Sonorus event, I met up with John and Mary Granger and had lunch with them. John bemoaned the fact that not everyone in the HP online fandom followed what he called the "Linda McCabe school of diplomacy" by contacting someone directly before critiquing their work in public.

That discussion came up due to several online fansites I read recently with topic threads discussing the concept of literary alchemy in the HP series. There were some people who had done a lot of researching and theorizing on the issue, and had been inspired to begin their inquiry into the subject by John Granger's work. However, the difference is that they never tried to engage him in a discussion and see if their underlying assumptions had any validity to them.

Some who posted mentioned his work in unflattering terms and dogmatically stated that he was incorrect in his interpretations, and that they knew how these things worked.

I've read enough on the subject to realize that alchemy is a complex subject that cannot be fully understood in an afternoon's worth of reading or even a month or year. It can and has been the lifelong pursuit of many people over the centuries. Alchemical symbolism is deliberately complicated and understanding it is not like simple mathematics where you place numbers in an equation and churn out a result. Nope, it is more like higher mathematics where there may not yet be a solution to given problem, but the trick is to try and focus your intellect on how to approach solving the problem.

Which means that when you are trying to predict future plot lines using the various characters in a series following a literary alchemy framework isn't as easy as it looks, and there are many, many ambiguities which can be resolved in multiple if not an infinite number of possibilities.

Only J.K. Rowling will truly know what influences she drew upon when she made her detailed plot of the series. Only JKR knows what details in her story such as the mention of the herb dittany is there for symbolic meaning or simply there to dress up the narrative.

She is like a magpie with mythology and takes things from a myriad of sources and then twists them to fit her own plot needs. She is not bound by any rules that force her to follow any predetermined formula. In fact, having unforeseen plot twists is exactly what her fans have come to expect from her. Expect the unexpected.

John decided against posting a rebuttal post in that forum to defend his scholarship in this area for he felt that the standards of polite discourse had not been followed. If they had tried to engage with him from the beginning in a discussion about Harry Potter and literary alchemy, he would have responded. Instead, they simply attacked him in a public forum and put forth their own interpretation as if it was the only credible possible explanation.

I enjoy having layered symbolic meaning to stories. It adds a richness and depth to its meaning. However, there can be more than one meaning derived from symbolism and it is wise to remember that.

Later, while reading my literary blog subscriptions, I came across a link to an article written about how best to approach people you don't know by email. There are a lot of good points in the article and I would hope that these precepts would soon become a standard part of netiquette.