Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 29
July 5, 2020
Is Learning Fiction Craft Being Dumbed Down?
I’ve been away working on a superhero novel over the last month, with a working title of Superhero Diaries. It’s intended as part of a series. It’s got aliens giving away superhero suits, much like Greatest American Hero, except none of that 1980s “My world was destroyed. We’re benevolent aliens helping you prevent yours from being destroyed the same way.”
No, these aliens have their own agenda and it benefits them more than the humans. Of course, they’re not telling anyone that.
But it’s forced me to dig a lot deeper into craft skills that have been hard to find.
I grew up as a writer reading craft books in the late 1980s and 1990s, when I could buy them. Before then, I was limited by what my library had (not much).
Now we can go online and get craft tips anywhere. But it’s very superficial. A lot of it treats fiction writing like a checklist:
Eliminate adverbs. Check.Don’t use flashbacks. Check.No dream sequences. Check.
One time I asked how to do a dream sequence well on a message board. I’d read several best selling books with dreams in them and it looked like I might have one in what I was working.
The reaction of the writers? Stern lecturing not to do it. Fear, too, especially once I said I was going to do it. They started backing away like “I don’t know this crazy person.” They weren’t even willing to see how they might do it well.
I did do the dream sequence. It’s in Rogue God.
I have a flashback. It’s in the Superhero Diaries.
How did we veer away from experimenting with craft?
I think technology was at fault.
Before the 1990s, writing novels was done on a typewriter. It’s a lot of work just typing. If you make a lot of typos like me, it’s even more work. Pulp writers of the 1940s and 1950s learned how to do one draft because there wasn’t any profit in retyping to revise.
Computers made fiction writing accessible to anyone who could afford the technology. You could write without all the work of a typewriter and revise it as much as you wanted. It even had the marvelous invention of a spell checker.
Heck, yes, I jumped on board and got a computer.
But now all these craft books had to cater to the audience starting their first novel.
Agents were flooded with submissions, most of them bad.
In marched the lists. They were everywhere. All the writing magazines had them, in every issue for a while. They were lists of what the agent didn’t want to see:
No flashbacks.No dream sequences.No adverbs.
No this, no that. The internet came and they were all over the place for a while. I tried to find one of those lists online now and they’re gone…but some form of them is the foundation for most craft books today.
The lists consistent of craft techniques that beginners were doing wrong. The agents didn’t have time to coach the writers (no should they), so they put it in list format.
Everyone started repeating the list as a rule that said “Do Not” rather than a craft skill to be learned.
And most of those items on the list have disappeared as skills from books.
Can you find a book that has a chapter on how to do flashbacks?
Disappearing Skills as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
When I was on the writing message boards, I always felt like I had to hold myself back. If there was a writer who saw a craft technique in novel and wanted to try it, they were told “big name writer can get away with with it. You can’t. Don’t even try.”
More of that fear.
And personal preferences showed up preferences showed up as a reason to eliminate their skills.
Description is one of those skills that takes a hit here.
Ever hear, “Description is boring! Do as little as possible!”?
Some people don’t like a lot of description, possibly because they ran into a writer or a type of book that didn’t suit their taste. Their answer is that the description is the problem, not the individual reader’s taste.
I’ve seen writers say that the best way to do description is things like:
Don’t describe your character. Leave it up to the reader’s imagination. Do description in dribs and drabs, like “She tossed her brown hair,” or “The bar was dim.”Do as little description as possible. Audiences don’t want to read it.
Yet, by doing all these, this cuts the knees out of characterization. These “tips” make writing superficial. And I’ve been guilty of doing this myself.
These skills also hard to learn to do well, another reason they’ve been eliminated from the craft lexicon.
Time Traveling for Writing Craft
These skills have not entirely disappeared though. I’ve been finding them in books written in the typewriter age. They were not for holding someone’s hand through a first novel. They were for someone who wants to write and improve:
Writing and Selling Your Novel by Jack Bickman – his first chapter is on treating writing like profession. Have you heard of the hidden story? I hadn’t, and it’s in this book. Creating Characters: How to Build Story People by Dwight V. Swain. He hits tags and traits for characters, a concept I was having trouble grasping.Guide to Fiction Writing by Phyllis A Whitney. She discusses time, a topic I was struggling to find anything on. She also has an extensive section on building a story bible.Spider, Spin Me a Web: Handbook for Fiction writers by Lawrence Block. He covers flashbacks.
Buy used. It’s a lot less expensive.
Learning should make you work a bit and be a little uncomfortable.
May 31, 2020
5 Tips if You Hate Researching Your Novel
When I first started getting out in the world of writing, I ran into a lot of writers who treated research as if they were being graded. I was told things like:
You have to research everything before you write the novel. It doesn’t matter if you only use 10 percent of it.You have to research every single detail to please the 1 percent of the readers who would know that detail.
These seem terribly inefficient for the Minimalist Writer. These also made me despise research. Fortunately, it’s not the only approach. Read on if you hate research.
1. RESEARCH FOR A NOVEL IS NOT THE SAME AS A TERM PAPER
I think writers fall into this trap because their experience base is what they did in school. College papers have very different requirements than fiction. A teacher is going to mark you down if you get an obscure fact on the subject wrong. A reader might not even know.
Will some readers spot a mistake? Sure. But do you really want to be researching what the weather was like on a specific day in 1947?
Also, sometimes the facts don’t always cooperate with what the story wants.
2. START WITH YOUR EXPERTISE
Everyone likes to read about something, whether it’s World War II, art, or medieval knights. It might not feel like it, but you have a lot of knowledge you can use for a story without doing as much research. How about that?!
I grew up reading about Hollywood of the 1940s and 1950s. I know how makeup was applied in Planet of the Apes (and the name of the person who did it). I know how some special effects are done. I’ve even written about 50 scripts for TV and film.
That’s how Golden Lies became a story. If you start with something you already enjoy reading about, you might only need to do spot research.
Of course, if you do have to look something up, don’t fall in the rabbit hole!
3. DON’T LET THE IDEA DICTATE THE RESEARCH
Some writers get an idea and it’s immediately locked in stone that this THE direction the story must go. So a mystery set in a hospital requires a non-medical writer to understand how a hospital works and even how to perform surgery. One writers actually watched an operation for research. That’s hardcore.
But if you treat the idea as only the starting place for the story, think on how to adjust the direction to be better suited to what you already know. Instead of taking that mystery set in a hospital, maybe it’s a family member of the victim.
In Crying Planet, I used my military background combined with a trip on a cruise to create life on board a spaceship.
4. LITTLE THINGS MAKE A DIFFERENCE
One of the biggest lessons I got on research is from the TV series NCIS. The show is shot in Los Angeles but it’s set in Washington, DC, where I live.
One day a co-worker and I were talking about the show. We both laughed because the show gets the distances wrong. There is absolutely no way that the team could go from DC to Norfolk in 30 minutes. Not even with Ziva driving. (It’s a four-hour drive if the traffic isn’t fussy.)
Then it hit me that if I didn’t live in DC, I probably won’t know those details are wrong. They have enough details on that show that are right. They use the names of real places like Annandale and Norfolk. Our transit system is referred to by its correct name, Metro, and they did get some footage of the inside, rather than using the Los Angeles subway. Every location they mention is in the right place.
Whereas on the TV show Covert Affairs, the subway was just called the subway. Langley was in downtown DC (it’s in Virginia, near McLean). Bones was also set in Washington DC, but palm trees were visible in the shots of the Jeffersonian. We have no palm trees here.
5. BE CURIOUS
Part of having all this knowledge available for your creativity to latch onto is going out and absorbing it all. Just go to places, see things, and absorb. You don’t even need to take notes.
I went down to the Alexandria Waterfront yesterday to go to the farmer’s market. After I picked up my vegetables, I walked down to the waterfront. I’ve been in dire need of new input for weeks, so I was on the hunting for historical signage.
Along King Street, I found street signs with a map on one side and historical fact on the other. Did you know:
That ferries were powered by horses? The horses were aboard the ferry and they walked in a circle, powering the ferry.We have a street called Rolling Road. Since most streets are named after people, I thought that was the case here. No…the origin is something quite different. Merchants rolled hogshead barrels down the road to the waterfront.
It’s not important to store this someplace where it will turn into a black hole and be forgotten. I think the act of recording means that it’s been stored away and can be forgotten. Whereas taking it in leaves it ready for your subconscious to use it in a story.
Research for fiction doesn’t have to be like a term paper. What’s the worst piece of research advice you’ve been told?
May 24, 2020
Social Media Reset
When it comes to social media, I’ve started embracing digital minimalism and doing a reset.
Coronavirus pushed me into it, especially with all the hysteria and fear playing out across it—and I was making an effort to not look.
When I first tested the waters of indie publishing, everyone was jumping on the social media bandwagon. But it was different then. Social media was a conversation, and you could get noticed as a fiction writer if you could plug into a marketing image.
That’s changed. The companies want us on their sites using social media as much as possible. I watched a Live Event of Cal Newport, who had been sounding the alarm since 2017 about what was happening to us with social media. In the time I took the original workshop, social media went from being a conversation with people to looking for likes to our posts.
It’s all designed to draw us in and keep us there so the companies make money.
So I’ve been reviewing and deleting (where possible) many of my social media accounts. The number of social media that I landed on is shocking! I didn’t realize how much had crept up on me. Many of the accounts were one-time use only:
VimeoQuoraTriberrLinked inInstagram (a 14 day wait, while they continue to send me emails)PinterestRedditYouTube (Google made this one hard. I had to put my password in three times, and then my email address before it would let me remove this)MediumFacebook writer’s page (yup, I had one that I never launched)
I also dumped my cache and all my saved passwords and form information. Google does not like this. Any time I log into email, it takes FOUR steps to log in. The nuisance of the extra work is designed to force me to save my password—you know, grease the wheel to make it easier for me to stay on the sites.
Cal Newport’s been running a series on Digital Miniminalism on his blog. You can also read my post for the miniminalist writer. Meanwhile, I’m continuing to delete social media accounts…
May 21, 2020
Cover Refresh: A Quartet of Clowns
When I first created the cover on the left, I fell into the trap of looking for a very specific picture. Of course, I couldn’t find it. Or anything else that made me happy, so I ended up with a setting cover. It’s time for an update!
The story took its inspiration from how the distorted shapes a clown wears (such as the feet) can frighten people or make them laugh. A perfect opportunity for a fantasy story with a monster!
I originally wanted to put a circus tent on the cover. But no cover-worthy circus tent images were to be had. Sure, I could have slapped a photo of a modern tent on it, but that wouldn’t have given me the fantasy feel the cover needed.
I found the one on the right by searching for “woman in the woods.”
First up was opening and resaving my template. The program is Adobe Photoshop Elements, which is like an average user version of Photoshop. I’m not sure what the price is now, but I spent about $120 when I got this version a few years ago.
The blue lines are the guides. The outer ones are to make sure I don’t get too close to the edge.
The interior lines are for the one-third points. The one-third points help the cover look balanced. Most images will come already balanced. At one point, I was in a FB group where cover artists showed samples of their work. I was shocked at how many just simply centered a character and ignored this basic rule.
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Next up I dragged the image I selected onto the template. On the left, you can see the layers. Layers are how you get a magazine cover where the character’s head is in front of the title graphics and yet you can still tell what the title is.
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I used the sampling tool to get a color from the lantern and use it on my name. My name also gets moved to the top, flush with the top line, and between the two border lines.
Also that I shifted the image over so the lantern is hitting one of the one-third guides. Her hand is also pointing down at the corner (so the reader will “turn” the page).
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Time for the story title. I usually change the color for that text, but there weren’t any other contrasting colors I could draw on.
I wanted to make sure the reader could see most of the woman and the lantern, so I put the titles flush left.
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And it’s done. These usually take about half an hour to do. You can find the story at the usual suspects.
A Quartet of Clowns received an honorable mention from Writers of the Future.
May 19, 2020
Minimalist’s Guide to Keeping Track of All Them Stories
When I first started indie publishing, I just threw stories up on the publishing sites and didn’t think twice about the future. Now that I’ve been doing cover and interior refreshes, I wished I’d left better information for Future Self.
A list of my story inventory has become essential. Not only for figuring out what still needs to be refreshed, but also what else I can publish. It even affects the order I put everything up on the website.
But the reason I haven’t done it before was simply that I didn’t sit down and think about what I needed. I have several unfinished attempts at the inventory, but I just put down what I thought I needed. They were often more complicated then I needed.
Just like with tracking short stories, it’s important to focus on only what’s needed.
WHAT INFORMATION IS NEEDED?
So it’s a step back to the basic question. What do I need?
Let’s see:
Story TitleType of short story (i.e., novel, short story)Genre (i.e., fantasy, science fiction)Published. This is the original published year. That’s useful for future refreshes.Refreshed. So I know if it’s been refreshed and when I did it last. I hope Future Self is happy, since there will be even more books by then!Aggregator. Important for the refreshes, since some books went out via Smashwords and others on Draft to Digital. That way, Future Self doesn’t have to think too hard.Price. This was a late addition. Some of my early stories were published on Smashwords and had to be added later to Draft to Digital. So I had to hunt down the price, which was a nuisance.Notes. Something always needs notes!
WHAT TOOL TO USE?
An Excel spreadsheet works pretty well for this, especially if you use drop-down lists for repeating information. Given my ability to make typos, a drop-down makes this task a lot easier.
NERD ALERT: If you manually enter a field like the genre, you might end up with science fiction, sf, and sci-fi all in the same row. Future Self is terrible at remembering that you were supposed to type in science fiction. Or, if it was me, I might type “science ficiton.” A pre-loaded drop-down list makes all your information consistent.
How to create a drop-down list
This is what the drop-down information looks like:
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HOW TO UPDATE THE SPREADSHEET
Adding 75 items to this list promised to be very tedious. Writing Nerd can feel her eyes glaze over. Tedious means it won’t get done again.
So I started with opening the folder in File Explorer and typing just the titles on the spreadsheet.
The next step was off to Amazon because of how the stories are displayed. I ran through their list and added the publication dates. From there, I could use filters to display only a specific year and complete the rest of the information in smaller bites.
How to create a filter in Excel
This is what I came up with:
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I used Cell Styles (on the Home tab) to highlight the rows that I need to do refreshes for. I suppose I could filter it down to the blanks on the Refresh column, but I also like seeing what I’ve completed.
One of the best things about an inventory list like this is that you have a list of all your stories right at your fingertips.
May 17, 2020
What the heck are story ideas?
I suppose this will be a minimalist approach to ideas. But it’s important to understand an idea at the most minimalist level. We all tend to jump in ideas and launch excitedly into a story without actually understanding that step of the process.
For fiction writing, I got prompts or “what do I do with it?” If I left fiction off my search, I got a lot of discussion on them from the business side. But those are not the same thing.
WHAT ISN’T A STORY IDEA
To define what the idea is, we have to start with what it isn’t.
The business side sometimes gets mixed in here. Ideas there can turn into inventions. People new to fiction fear that if they don’t copyright the idea before they even write it, someone else will steal it. Usually, it’s the most horribly cliched storyline that Hollywood’s done a dozen times.
Psst. If Hollywood’s done a story, you’ve shot way past cliché, said she who wrote an amnesia story. Yeah, well…
An idea is NOT the entire story, or the plot.
SO WHAT IS A STORY IDEA THEN?
I had a hard time coming up with ideas because I thought I had to come up with the entire story. That also meant the story had to be good on my first inking of creativity.
A lot of pressure.
I worked with another writer at one point and we got into a huge fight over ideas. Everything I came up with—which was going for a full-blown story—he dismissed because he didn’t like the idea. The result was that nothing got written because we were busy looking at the tree that we missed the forest.
An idea, simply, is a tiny pot of inspiration to get you started into the story. To get your creativity to the starting point.
Each story is going to have hundreds, or even thousands, of ideas. Each scene starts with another idea. Isn’t that pretty cool?
It’s a lot easier than coming up with a full-blown story at the starting line.
HOW DO YOU EVALUATE YOUR STORY IDEA?
I used to get these ideas that were so shiny and exciting that I had to start the story right now! Even writing them down in a pocket notebook wasn’t enough. I had to start writing! Because if I didn’t…well, I didn’t know what would happen.
And then…the story would fizzle out. Maybe a page or two later. I had a lot of those stubs of stories.
Moreover, I couldn’t even come back to them. Disconnected from the shiny object I used to create them, I didn’t know how to connect my creativity back to them.
Years later, I found one of those old pocket notebooks. I could see why those ideas had tickled my creativity and I could also see why they hadn’t turned into stories.
Not all ideas are equal. Some are just your creativity working on the problem. It’s just a stop on the journey to what it’s working on.
So the best way to evaluate the idea is to write it down. If you’re already coming up with more detail, write that down, too. Then let it sit for a few days. One of two things will happen:
It’ll nag at you over the next few days, working at it like a dog chews on a bone. Then demand to be written.
Or you’ll forget about it. One day you’ll run across and wonder what you were thinking.
Next up: Coming up with ideas!
May 14, 2020
Video Review of X Marks the Spot
Books ‘N Stuff With Chas did a book review of X Marks the Spot. Tune in for a fun review.
May 12, 2020
Minimalist Guide to Tracking Story Submissions
In any movie, the superhero jumps in to solve the problem. There’s no time for bureaucracy because the villain is up to no good now.
What does this have to do with tracking story submissions?
[image error]A charming photo from Demkat on IstockPhoto.
We tend to overcomplicate tasks. The more steps it takes, the more time it takes, and the more time it takes from the writing.
WHY NOT TRACK IT IN MORE DETAIL?
You’ll always have more rejections than acceptances. Most of them will probably be form rejections.
So how does knowing that it was a form rejection help? It doesn’t.
But it does remind you that your story was rejected.
Every time you add a new submission, the reminder is there. Every time you update an entry, the reminder is there.
How is this helpful?!
SO WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW?
A minimalist approach starts by asking what we need to know:
The story we submittedThe magazine/anthology/contest we submitted it toWhen we submitted itMaybe when a response is expected (useful for contests where they might not send a response)
We also have to ask the other important question:
What would I rather be doing? Updating a spreadsheet or an online site or writing a story?
Every little bit of time to doing a lot of extra steps takes a chink out of the writing time. It does add up!
THE MINIMALISM APPROACH
What then is an option to track the submissions? You have an existing tool in your toolkit:
The calendar.
You want one of those month wall calendars, like this one (I’m not getting any benefit from providing this link. I just find it helpful to see specifics).
But don’t waste a day block filling in the submission. Just grab a Post-It. Put in the story name and the magazine you submitted it to. Slap it on the top of the calendar and done.
Once a response comes back, toss the Post-It. This does not have to be any more complicated than that.
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May 10, 2020
Disappearing Days in Fiction
Lately, it seems that when I read fiction, the days of the week seem to disappear. The character might have other time markers like dinner, but the days of the week are absent.
That might be a result of our crazy lives. Technology has caused work and home to blur. But human beings are hard-wired for time. We work Monday through Friday. We get up at a specific time. I know what day NCIS comes on (there are priorities, after all).
But if time isn’t there, it can confuse readers. The last thing you want is a reader paging back, trying to figure out why the time feels so off.
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It’s always time for a walk! Great photo by Eva Blanco on IStockPhoto
GOALPOSTS OF TIME
Having days of the week is a very simple way to add internal structure to the story. But it also serves many other purposes:
How the timing of events can impact the charactersAdds a sense of motion to the story (in addition to the five senses, humans also have a sense of time)Adds to the aboutness of the world, whether it’s futuristic or modern day.
Time is always important. It also doesn’t take much to add it.
HOW TO ADD TIME
At the beginning of each scene, stop and think about what day of the week it is. Think about the kinds of events that would happen on specific days or how your characters react to those days. It’s an opportunity for more story, too!
Add something to the scene to anchor it on that day. It could be an event like church on Sunday, or a tie-in to a secondary storyline like a Friday night date.
Finally, keep track of what day it is. If you use a reverse outline, you can toss it in there. Scrivener’s index cards will work great.
[image error]Sample of my reverse outline
Share how you keep track of time in your story!
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May 7, 2020
Cover Refresh: Writer’s Guide to Military Culture
So much of what we all see on TV and in movies about the military is often wrong. Soldiers don’t act like soldiers. I was horrified watching Robotech post-military because the main character is very disrespectful to his superiors.
This book came from an online class I did at Forward Motion. Recycling at its best!
It has a facelift to both the title and the cover. It never had a subtitle and all non-fiction does. So it’s becoming: Writer’s Guide 2: Military Culture.
Original is the left cover. New cover is on the right.
Writing is an incredibly hard topic to illustrate. For years longer than they should have, The Writer Magazine used the fifties-style digest cover. At the same time, Writer’s Digest had some pretty goofy covers like giant pencils. They’ve both since gone to author photos instead.
At the time of the original cover, I was simply looking for something that said military and wasn’t too specific. So I picked a silhouette.
The new cover was the result of a search for another image to use for the Pantser’s book (now going to be called Writer’s Guide 1: Writing for Pantsers). Cats really are interlocked with writers!
This cover took more work to build than my typical ones. I created two rectangles, one for the border, and one for the interior of the border. The reason for the border was because I needed one. Otherwise, the white part of the book would disappear on a page like this.
As it turned out, I like the way the border works.
Rethinking the titles also made me consider doing another writing book: Writer’s Guide 3: Time in Fiction. What do you think?
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