Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 4

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Fiction Writing

white dog touches a carrot with its nose to a snowman in a Santa hat and a striped scarf. Winter season in a snowy forest. Friendship, humor, Christmas holidays

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Earlier this week when Kristine Kathrine Rusch offered the end-of-year challenge—try to out-write her word count for $600 in class credits or still get $300 in class credits for completing—I thought about doing it. Briefly. My Adaptability strength does much better with outside deadlines than ones I set.

But…

I’d have to do a daily word count. For two weeks, I might have managed it. But I was more than likely to mess it up, since the strength to do that kind of tracking is in my bottom 20 of the Clifton Strengths. Plus, well, Adaptablity.

Also, the cost. I wasn’t sure of the value of spending for something like this (though I was curious to know what Kris would send out). Though I want to take one of the advanced classes, I wasn’t so sure about giving them the $300 until July (it’s the Advanced Information Flow class, a topic I’m having trouble finding much about). So I briefly considered, for a few hours, then decided it wasn’t worth the money.

But, really, everything these days needs supervision. You cannot go on autopilot with decisions because the world is competing to do everything for us. Even marketing tries to take away the decision with fancy words and shiny images.

That’s not a good thing.

This last week, I tried a free trial for a new writing tool called Draftsmith. It’s similar to ProWritingAid and was created by PerfectIt. The latter is a copyediting tool I use for the finishing stages of a final proofreading. If you pay for a copy editor, they probably use this tool as part of their process. Michael La Ronne also provided input for Draftsmith.

One of the reasons he did was because Grammarly and PWA have too many false audits, especially for fiction writing.

And it’s actually gotten a lot worse since ChatGPT exploded on the market. The book Unsupervised is a scary read about what exactly AI is doing.

When I first started using PWA, I was doing a refresh of most of my published books and short stories. It was amazing to find many typos (mostly missing articles) that a copy edit I’d paid for had missed entirely. I don’t think she did a bad job; missing articles are very hard to find. Even with multiple eyeballs on a novel, as Nora Roberts describes, I still find some typos in the books.

So that makes PWA a useful tool. It also showed me that I was using a sentence construction too much: “He was” and other variations. The tool identified this as passive voice, which I disagreed with. The subject was in the right place. I think it identified the use of “was” as passive voice. This is one of those writing areas where you have to supervise to see if it’s actually passive voice. Most of us aren’t writing sentences like “Mistakes were made,” which is classic passive voice. Though I knew a writer who had a big problem with that because his job required passive voice, a habit he struggled to break in fiction writing.

PWA made me reset how I wrote so I don’t use the “He was” structure as much. After that, I pretty much ignored those flags. And the tool flags “pretty much” as excessive words that can be removed. But I’m the writer and I wanted to use them.

Draftsmith is in the very early stages, and I do mean early. There are lots of problems with it. Among other things, it couldn’t figure out the names I used and kept wanting me to change them, sometimes not even consistently to the same thing. If I backed up and tried again, I often got different variations (and spellings!) to correct the name. They couldn’t be saved in a dictionary.

I also had some sentences it seemed totally confused by, since it gave me back another sentence that was completely different. And everything is British spelling that cannot be changed. The tool doesn’t give you a highlighted correction, so it’s hard to see if you should fix it. So not ready for prime time.

PWA, on the other hand, has gotten a lot more aggressive. I spent the better part of an hour reporting flags as incorrect because of this. The tool flags word choices and says, “Improve your vocabulary” and suggests a word. I have a number of problems and concerns with this:

If the tool is suggesting the word, it’s probably not going to improve your vocabulary. All you’re doing is selecting a word.
Just because a word is listed in the Thesaurus as an alternative doesn’t mean they are interchangeable. They are merely similar and have different definitions. You should always look up the definitions when using alternatives to make sure it means what you want it to.
I’m writing fiction! My word choices are because that’s what the character would say or is part of my voice. “Improving my vocabulary” would ruin the characterization and my voice.
The tool tries to control how I write. If I hit “ignore,” it circles back and prompts me for the same correction again. If I hit Disable Rule, nothing happens. The same flag shows up over and over, each one flagged twice. (Grammarly wants me to change “over and over” on the quest for conciseness. “Over and over” says frustration; repeatedly does not).

The concern, and it’s a doozy: some writers, particularly beginners, would use these tools without supervision.

That is, they would agree to everything. There are writers who do that already with critiques, so it’s not a big stretch. Heck, early on, I assumed everyone else was right and changed what I wrote based on other people’s comments without deciding myself.

Why is this such a problem? It’s guts the voice and the character from the story.

Take this sentence (from Superhero Vs. Superhero):

A late afternoon thunderstorm snarled at downtown Metro City.

Grammarly tells me that removing the “at” will make the sentence clearer.  

A late afternoon thunderstorm snarled downtown Metro City.

That changes the meaning of the sentence! It goes from a nasty storm to a storm that causes a traffic jam.

Or try this one:

“It’s freaking huge!” she said.

First flag: Tool tells me to remove “freaking” because it’s unnecessary and this will tighten up the sentence. If I accept it, the sentence becomes: “It’s huge!” she said.

Second flag: The tool tells me to expand my vocabulary, suggesting I use enormous instead. For the purposes of this, I looked both words up on Merriam Webster.

Huge: “very large or extensive: such as great in scale or degree.”

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Enormous: “marked by extraordinarily great size, number, or degree.”

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Those do not mean the same thing!

But, following in the thread, I’ll change it: “It’s enormous!” she said.

And now the characterization and my voice has gone as flat soda without carbonation.

The bigger problem with this is that we had control of our knowledge over to a program. And guess what? The technology is controlled by a small group of people who want to make money and have power.

This is what we’re handing our writing off to?

Story Resolution/Wrap-Up (Part 6)

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This is one of the skills that can be confusing when you’re looking for information. It doesn’t have a consistent name. Algis Budrys may have coined the term validation, which is the term Dean Wesley Smith uses in various workshops and lectures. Deborah Chester calls it “poetic justice.” Reedsy uses denouement, though many of the definitions refer only to a mystery. Others use the term “resolution.” Still others refer to the ending as the climax. No wonder it’s confusing!

I’m going with yet another term, book wrap-up. Yeah, adding another one, but I don’t think the other options are very clear that they have anything to do with the ending. Resolution is often associated with the climax, and unfortunately, beginners are infamous for using words interchangeably without learning what they mean (revision/editing I’m talking about you!).

What it isn’t: It’s not the climax. If you’re having trouble with endings, you’re probably ending on the climax. The climax is the resolution of the story problem, but not the book wrap-up.

What the wrap-up is: It’s that little piece at the very end that tells the reader the story is done. You wrap up any loose ends, reassure the reader that the characters are going to be okay, and give them a sense of closure.

Many of the explanations of how to end a story are pretty poor. They talk at such a high level that it’s hard to know what you need to do. Nearly all of them miss the part about giving the reader story closure.

The wrap-up is hard to write, particularly if you’re a pantser or operating on a tight deadline. I often got to the end of the story and was so eager to finish that I botched the wrap-up. If you mess it up, you leave the reader unsatisfied. TV and film can also have problems like that, particularly because of the time constraints. All my examples are from TV shows you should be able to find on one of the free stations or being rerun locally. No need to spend money buying or renting a movie.

Where it didn’t work:

Adam-12, “The Search”: Malloy’s police car crashes off the road in Griffth Park. He’s badly injured, with a broken leg and is bleeding internally. Of course, it’s night, the radio doesn’t work, and no one knows where he is. Climax: Reed insists Malloy’s still in the park and eventually finds the wrecked police car. He races down the slope and finds Malloy bleeding and broken. Malloy sighs with relief and says, “Partner,” and that’s it. No wrap-up. What would the wrap-up have been? Showing Malloy in a short scene in the hospital recovering from his injuries so we know he’s okay. Reed could bring flowers.

Stingray (the Stephen J. Cannell version), “Playback”: This was an excellent series that always closed the loop on the resolution except for one episode. The episode revolves around a murder in a biosphere. I’m guessing it was a script written to fit the deadline, and it simply didn’t come together. Ray emerges from the biosphere after they’ve answered what happened, gives a flippant remark, and the episode just, well, stops. This was more disappointing than the Adam-12 example because it felt unfinished. What would the wrap-up have been? Ray meeting with the woman who hired him. He tells her husband’s name is cleared, which the episode needed. Then he gets in his black Stingray and the car vanishes (which it does in other episodes).

Where it worked:

Emergency, “Virus”: This episode is a fan favorite. Johnny Gage and Dr. Brackett both catch the Coki fever virus that the doctors can’t treat and is lethal. One person has already died. Climax: Johnny and Brackett are fading fast. No one can find anything that will help. The initial victim suddenly remembers that her choreographer also had a mild form of the virus. Phone call, plane flight, code three to the hospital, blood transfusion. Jump to maybe the next day, and Johnny looks much better. He’s been telling stories to the nurses when Roy comes in. Dr. Brackett, his roommate, complains about “Romeo.” But we clearly see that everyone is okay and will be back another day.

NCIS: Any episode. This is show nailed it nearly every time. Just watch that last little bit at the end wrapping things up.

Die Hard: This is the movie most like a novel. If you watch the beginning where the wife is talking on the phone and then watch the last scene, you’ll see that it’s been bookended. One sentence in the beginning tells you how the movie will end.

To do a wrap-up in your stories:

Make sure you’ve dealt with most of the plot threads before you get to it.

After the climax, do a scene break. There should be a time jump of some kind, even if it’s only a few minutes. But it can be a few hours or the next day. And wind it down.

Wait a few days (if possible), then return to the wrap-up and cycle through it again. Once you reach the end of the story, it’s easy to rush through, so another pass is essential to make sure it wraps the story up properly.

Resources:

The best explanation of this skill is Dean Wesley Smith’s lecture on Writing Endings. He also has a more in-depth course with the same name that analyzes endings. His Novel Structure workshop also covers it, though you will need to buy a copy of Die Hard.

Elements of a Short Story by C.A. Nicholason. This is an article about the various structure parts of a short story, including plot, theme, and setting. As I noted elsewhere, it’s opinion. Caveat: The author of the article says not to do much description. I think he means don’t get overblown with it, but that’s easy to misinterpret.

Story Climax by Jim Butcher. Scroll down to near the bottom of the post for a discussion on what he calls the resolution.

Fiction Formula Plotting by Deborah Chester. She studied under Jack Bickham and taught Jim Butcher.

What is a Story’s Denouement?

Telling Time in Fiction (Part 5)

Hungry dog with sad eyes is waiting for feeding. Cute labrador retriever is holding dog bowl in mouth at cozy home..

Image (C) Chalabala | Deposit Photos. Dogs definitely understand time when it comes to dinner.

Time in fiction is a skill mostly not taught. It seems simple because we all know time, right? Yet, it’s easy to forget that your characters should have weekdays and weekends, or even seasonal events. It’s easy to forget to add a specific time marker in every scene. The problem may even be magnified by the description drips and drabs teaching because time is often part of description.

If the time is messed up in a book, the reader will pick up on something wrong. They may not understand what it is, or they could suddenly be knocked out of the book when they realize what happened. I read a book where the characters were stranded in the middle of nowhere and had to walk to help. When they arrived, the writer told us two days had passed, which threw me out of the story. The writer hadn’t anchored time enough, and I imagined it a lot longer than that. In another book, the writer jammed an impossible number of events into a twenty-four-hour period. She’d clearly lost control of the time in the story.

Start practicing the skill first by putting a time marker at the top of each scene. This includes the month, date, day of the week, and time. It doesn’t have to be precise, like 7:34 a.m. Story Grid discusses this, as well as how long the scene lasts.

What this simple step will do is help identify errors in time logic in your story. While I was working on a series of scenes in Superhero Vs. Superhero, I discovered I had a time logic problem. The character has arrived to eat dinner with the aliens. That’s a time marker. She ends up using her superhero suit and has an hour of suit time, another time marker. But a scene later in the sequence was impacted by that hour, and it was clear to me it didn’t feel like an hour had passed. In this case, removing one scene revealed the problem; I added another scene that used the hour and cleaned up the continuity issues,

Even if you plan to have the time marker in the final draft of the story, make sure you’re firmly anchoring the time in the words of the scene as well. Some readers will pay attention to the time marker and some won’t. Either way, it won’t hurt to anchor it further.

Why you should think about doing time:

Figuring out what time of the year can be a big influence on elements in your story. If it’s July in Washington, DC, the weather is very different than January. If it’s winter, the days are much shorter, so it might be night at 4:30 p.m. In July, there might be sudden thunderstorms; in January, it’s a blizzard. All setting, of course.

Time shows up as an integral part of the pacing of the story. You can use it to build suspense, like the ticking time bomb.

For more reading on the topic:

Story Grid, by Shawn Coyne. This is the only resource I found that discusses the duration of scenes.

Making Time With the Viewpoint Character, The Editor’s Blog. This was the most detailed, showing different ways you could use time.

Managing Day and Time. Also from The Editor’s Blog. There’s a surprising number of ways to do time without actually stating the time. But you’ll need description to do it.

Any discussion on pacing. Jonathan Maberry’s done classes on pacing, discussing compressing the timeline for the story to speed up the pacing.

Dean Wesley Smith also talks briefly about time in Point of View and Novel Structure workshops; probably also his Writing Endings (I haven’t taken that one). One eye opening discovery, since Superhero Vs. Superhero is that first person needs a small time jump at the beginning of scenes. Who knew?

Writing Magazines

Cute gray kitten sleeping on carpet at home

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Writing magazines like The Writer and Writer’s Digest were always a staple of writing when I was growing up. My great uncle, who wrote children’s fiction in the pulp era, kept copies of The Writer on his coffee table. Much better than the traditional coffee table books.

Writer’s Digest was always solidly for beginners. Even back through the pulp era, their issues targeted the beginners and promoted vanity presses. The Writer always was a level up.

But with the internet, the landscape’s changed. It used to be that I could go into Barnes and Noble and they would have an entire bookcase of books on writing craft. Granted, most of them were for beginners.. Today, when I went inside, it was two shelves. Mostly old books like Stephen King’s On Writing, Strunk and White (new edition, illustrated), and Donald Maass’ book on emotions. Even StoryFix’s Story Engineering has disappeared from the shelves, and that was popular for a long time.

Mostly, the problem is that beginners can easily find the same content online. Every developmental editor sets up shop, does a blog on writing tips, and draws them right in. Notables are K.M. Weiland and StoryFix. Anne Allen and Janice Hardy also blog this way, but don’t do the developmental editing side.

The Writer is currently on hiatus until 2024. The company appears to be discontinuing print editions and going to streaming (includes three other magazines). That’s sent alarms blaring for me.

Several years back, I regularly picked up Paleo Magazine at the grocery story. It was a beautiful magazine with full color photos, gluten free recipes–and better still, they always had breakfast recipes. That’s often tough to find. Breakfast is the neglected stepchild. They also had the usual nutrition articles, decent and well-researched. Those articles were more thoughtful in their approach; they didn’t use the “This is the superfood that will add years to your life” or “Lose 10 pounds for the summer body” marketing.

One day, they announced they were going online. The reason was the environment. The editor said in good conscience he couldn’t continue using paper. Reading between the lines, paper costs were going up and they probably weren’t selling well because the articles didn’t hit the diet emotional points. Online meant the entire library of recipes could be accessed.

Cost was also pretty cheap compared to the magazine. I think I paid $15 for the year. No new recipes came out in that year. They did produce more articles, but it felt like not much effort was put into them. Also, we got more new articles at the beginning but as the year wore on, the magazine stopped publishing them.

At the end of the year, I ended my subscription because I was pretty sure the magazine was headed out the door. They folded a year after that. Very likely, at the price the magazine cost (would be 14.99 today), the only way they could have kept an audience was to focus on the diet culture. I respect the decision not to, and it was one of the reasons I bought the magazine. But in a brutally competitive world of sound bytes, it got lost in the chaos.

The Writer may suffer a similar fate in the next 2-3 years. For many years, it knew it’s audience. I’ve been scanning through the older issues. It catered to all writers, and changed when the world changed. Early issues included how to write for radio, then that evolved away. There were also articles on writing for the theater. But mainly, it was on the craft of fiction.

However, they could also be slow to change. The photo covers that adorn today’s issues were slow to come in. They still used the digest style covers long into the 1980s. All those years, even into recent times, they’ve tried to be a little bit of something for everyone. The problem though is that magazine page count went down, so it often felt a little superficial. Just didn’t allow for the depth writing needs. The earlier issues had dense articles…lots of words to read, filling a whole page. The newer ones had pretty graphics taking up a lot of space. I know that’s the audience, but combined with the loss of pages, it leaves little room for depth.

So they’ve been falling behind, unable to compete with the developmental editors giving away tips for free. Beginning writers are notoriously strange with money when it comes to writing. They throw three grand or more at a developmental editor for the “promise” of publication. throw money at Amazon ads, and balk at a writing course that costs $300 that would actually improve their chances of publication. They’ll take one that’s $75 and be happy to get an agent tell them they use too many commas in their query (yes, that happened).

A bizarre world we live in….

Writing Fiction in the New World (Part 4)

puppy looks in autumn leaves.

Image (C) gurinaleksandr / Deposit Photos

We are in the final week of the 2023 Writing Story Bundle. If you haven’t picked up your set, you have only six days left.

Onward to the topic!

The challenge of having only a beginner culture is that it’s pretty hard to even figure what other skills to learn at a more advanced level. If you wanted to write a prologue, how would you find out when no one teaches it? Add to this yet another problem. While there is advanced writing teaching some things, it’s their opinion. They may leave something out that they don’t agree with, or never use, and it’s something you would find helpful.

So here’s a list of skill areas to tackle (bearing in mind that I may have missed some myself)

Description

Hands down, description will be the foundation skill for nearly everything else. If you find it a challenge for any of these, it’s your description skills behind it:

Characterization

Setting/Worldbuilding (which is also characterization)

Five senses

Emotions

Pacing

Character actions

Hiding information

…And the list can go on.

If you’ve spent a lot of time in the writing culture of drips and drabs, it’ll be hard unlearning that. I had to tell myself every time I opened a scene to start with the setting. What did it look like? What did it smell like? What did it sound like? After all, your character exists in this place in the story. The reader should never feel like you could replace Washington DC with Los Angeles or Atlanta and not tell the difference.

Start by hitting the setting and the five senses at the start of every scene. What you need varies, depending on how you talk to, and even in what order. Dean Wesley Smith, in his depth class, says the five senses every five hundred words. To me, that’s very hard including taste like that. While technically you can add taste from smell, pretty much your characters have to eat (though you can use dialogue for this and have the characters talk about food or being hungry).

Edward Amejko, The Writer July 1949, recommends using touch, sight, and hearing at the very least. He also notes that the reader will experience emotions through the senses.

Dorothy McCann, The Writer, February 1952 also notes that some sounds carry their own story. Probably the best example of that is your character is in bed late at night and is woken up by a gunshot. The reader instantly knows “trouble” and maybe “danger” for the character. Use the tools liberally.

The late Dave Farland also recommends that you add a sense of light to every scene. This doesn’t have to be a physical description of light. You can mention the sun being low in the sky, a nearly full moon with a chip out of the side. Characters can give the time, say “Good morning,” complain about getting up early, complain about missing dinner, eat dinner (and you get the five senses in!). Try studying James Rollins for this.

David Farland also notes that you must be specific about the weather in the scene. If it’s raining in your setting (or snowing or wind gusting), describe what kind of rain. Just saying “It was raining” is a fake detail. It doesn’t give the reader any kind of visual image of the rain. Here, if it’s too vague, they won’t remember it until it suddenly becomes important and then kicks them out of the story. So, is the rain spitting, a piss trickle, or dumping so much rain that the streets are flooding (a common occurrence where I live)?

This means, of course, you have to also decide on the time of year. A surprising number of writers ignore the seasons entirely. Thinking about how it affects your story adds more to the plot and the characterization. If it’s almost Thanksgiving and the main character doesn’t get the annual invite to the turkey dinner, what’s going on? Description feeds into everything!

Practice adding it to your scene as much as possible. You’ll probably add too much and slow the story down, interfering with the pacing. If that happens, take a sentence out. Tighten a few others up.

To study, start with The Writer Magazine online archives. Search for the five senses, since you will find that with description. You can also try searching for description and setting as well. The writers say the same things, but in different ways.

After that, take Dean Wesley Smith’s Depth class. This will probably be the single hardest class you’ve ever taken. However, once you’ve practiced the skills you learn, if you submit short stories to professional rate magazines, you’ll see personal rejections and eventually some acceptances. You’re also likely to overbalance and put too much in. It will be helpful to practice all the skills above before you take the class.

Then take Drake University’s Show Don’t Tell Basics. This will sound like a beginner course, and it’s anything but. Where Dean Wesley Smith gives top-level concepts, Drake University gives specific details and examples. Depth is such a big topic that input from other sources will only help with your understanding.

Other things to try:

Build your observation skills. Walk around the neighborhood and study what you see. Try to use as many of the senses as you can.

Sit at a restaurant table outside and watch the people walk by. How do they dress? Do they wear jewelry? What does their hair look like? What does their voice sound like? (David Farland says description of voices is often neglected). If you’re sitting near two or more people, eavesdrop discretely (this is a tip also from David Farland).

Take a moment to study the meal’s composition and smell it. What does it taste like? What’s the texture?

There are lots of opportunities to do this. Better still, it will also stir your creativity. I wrote several stories based on lawn ornaments I observed. If you have trouble figuring out what to do, try Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing. He sends out a weekly newsletter with a noticing task to try.

Do a metaphor review. Metaphors are a huge part of our language. When you’re reading a non-fiction book, write down all the metaphors you find. Or do it with a week’s worth of newspapers (paper copies are best). This came from Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind. When I tried this, I was amazed at the results. Metaphors sometimes get a bad rap because writers can try too hard and end up with purple prose. When you do a review like this, you see how rich with metaphors our language is. It isn’t just comparison phrases, but specific words we use daily.

Boost your vocabulary. I’m not talking about doing it the traditional way, like receiving a word a day. Those are usually not words you’d want to use in fiction. Instead, take a moment to look a word up to see what it means, then hit the thesaurus. And I know there are some writers who discourage using the thesaurus because supposedly everything comes from your subconscious. However, our brains are always going to hit the more generic words.

I’ve been amazed to discover that some words don’t mean what I’m thinking they do. Let’s suppose you’re writing about the Christmas rush on the street downtown. Your default word is “crowd.” But look it up and discover it isn’t the right word and that there’s a better, more specific word that suits your setting.

Read poetry. This comes from David Farland. If you like poetry, it’s a great way to study description. Poets have to hit the point concisely, and off with non-traditional descriptions.

Find and Replace. Use this word processing tool to find certain types of words and then think about how to replace them with description. For example, the infamous “look.” Writers are often horrified when they discover their characters are always looking at each other. Other potential words are glanced (which means something different than looked. Vocabulary!), shrugged, and nodded. This problem goes away with boosting the description skills.

This single skill is what separates the writer from artificial intelligence. An AI tool can put together a description, but it’ll be like the exercises the beginners do—disconnected from the character. The writer puts the character’s opinions and judgments in, giving characters heart. No machine can do that.

Description is a huge skill, and you may spend some time getting comfortable with it. Each level uncovers more nuanced skills, like discovering how to get emotion into the story. Enjoy the process!

—

More topics on this to come! This should be a lot of fun, since there are some topics no one talks about at all at the beginner level.

Writing Fiction in the New World (Part 3b)

Small white kitten laying in an orange pumpkin shaped basket surrounded by gourds pumpkins and squash with fall leaves and orange background. Fun fall harvest theme.

Image (C) Sheilaf2002 / Deposit Photos

Debunking still more writing advice!

Keep your description minimal

This counts as the one I hate the most because it held me back for a long time. And it’s advice that will not die. As you will see in the later debunking, it also conflicts with other advice.

There’s no particular catchphrase. I’ve seen authors advise minimalist description, “drips and drabs,” and “Let the reader imagine it.”

First, let’s deal with letting the reader imagine it. This is always applied to character descriptions. The writers seem to think that the reader will picture themselves as the main character. There are two problems with this thinking.

It’s a copout. You’re essentially saying, “It’s my story, but what the character looks like isn’t my problem. I can’t be bothered.” You’re handing control of your characters over to the reader.In Characters Make Your Story by Maren Elwood, she says that if you’re vague about your character descriptions, the reader will refuse to picture the character.

For me as a reader, if the writer doesn’t provide description details, the character stays vague. Sometimes it works if other character elements are solid, like Michael Connelly’s Bosch. But if the characterization isn’t solid, I stop reading or don’t get the second book.

But where does the problem with the description start? Why are writers and experts so insistent that you shouldn’t do much of it?

Because writers do it badly. And the reason for that is how it’s instructed, so it feeds on itself.

I took an online class on writing descriptions. The instructor approached it by assigning exercises to describe settings like a restaurant. We were supposed to use the five senses also.

It might not be obvious, but something is missing: Character.

Good description is filtered through the character’s point of view (and that’s hitting characterization, point of view, setting, and pacicng, just to name a few). Their commentary on what the experience is part of the characterization and can be entertaining.

Which is better?

1, The dining room was made up of booths with vinyl seating. Dirty dishes were left on many of the tables from the breakfast rush. The room smelled like coffee, maple syrup, and bacon.

2. He exhaled at the sudden warmth as he entered the restaurant. Not a dive, but maybe a step above. The vinyl seating had a shabbiness no amount of cleaning could fix. The staff hadn’t yet recovered from breakfast to clear the tables. Still, he decided, that smell of maple and bacon wasn’t half-bad. It’d do. Coffee might be lethal though.

Showing description from the character’s perspective is key to not writing boring descriptions. One of the things I discovered was to hit three items, then come back and hit a few more. Sometimes I had to take a sentence out to adjust the pacing flow. No one teaches this, certainly not with drips and drabs!

“Said is dead.”

This refers to the dialogue tag said. It shows up because writers overuse said. The result tends to veer in one of two directions:

Ridiculous dialogue tags that draw attention to themselves. Writers will even collect these on long lists. Yikes!Writers try using actions to show who’s talking instead. This is actually a good decision, but the actions often tend to come off as superficial. More about that momentarily.

Dialogue does need an attribute to the reader who’s talking. There are opinions on whether to use said or not, and both are right. Dean Wesley Smith declares it’s invisible (not entirely true; if you use it after each line of dialogue, it’ll stand out). The late Dave Farland stated it was outdated.

That takes us back to actions using the narrative. Writers have trouble finding attributes that add to the story because they don’t know how to write description. If you establish a setting, your characters can use that as they talk. Think about Law and Order. The show’s writers recognized they had a problem when Lennie and Curtis interviewed a witness: It was too easy for the scene to turn into a bunch of talking heads. So the witness is a driver unloading boxes from his truck as he answers questions. Lennie might look in one of the boxes and make a typical Lennie comment.

Use the description to establish your setting. Then you can use the setting to help with identifying your speakers. You can still use said, asked, etc, but you won’t need to as much.

Eliminate all adverbs

This one is a favorite of the top ten lists. I think it showed up on every single one. It was a common complaint from agents, and may have been popularized by Stephen King. But it’s been around a long time according to Merriam-Webster.

This is typical of the writing that lands it on the top ten lists:

He shook his fist angrily.He ran quickly.

Some writers may also go overboard, using a bland, factual description and adding adverbs to spice it up.

All of this stems from the same problem: the advice to keep description to a minimum. Pretty hard to show a character reacting angrily if you parsing out the description in drips and drabs. The result is that the writer has to rely on adverbs to show what’s going on.

Use more description through the character’s POV and you’ll have no problems with adverbs.

And this sounds like a broken record repeating the same thing again, well…it’s going to get repeated again. The minimalist description approach results in a LOT of related rules because it undercuts so much.

Show Don’t Tell

This one lands on the list because minimalist description causes writers to have problems with show don’t tell. This advice actually refers to a fairly advanced writing skill. Someone, on the quest of being helpful for beginners, boiled it down so simply that it makes the skill hard to even understand. Especially with all the conflicting advice about description.

Dean Wesley Smith calls it depth, though you will find it in many articles in The Writer Magazine during the 1940s and 1950s. Edith Warton writes about it in 1928. This skill shows the reader the setting through the five senses and the opinions/judgments of the characters. You cannot do this with drips and drabs of description.

For example, the typical tell version of showing a character is angry: He waved his fist angrily.

The Depth way: For a moment, he couldn’t think, he couldn’t react. Then fire roared through him, scraping him raw.

If you’re having trouble showing emotions, do more description.

Description was the hardest thing for me to learn. I’d heard the drips and drabs everywhere and dutifully did it, getting boring writing. I feared doing too much because we’re taught at the beginner level to fear it. When I discovered I needed more, I had to keep reminding myself to add more description. It also horrified me because everyone advocates a minimalist approach and this was a lot!

The problem with the sound-byte writing advice is that it only teaches not to do something, not how to do it correctly.

Writing Fiction in the New World (page 3A)

Photo (C) oov / DepositPhotos

This one you should find fun. I’m debunking the bad writing advice. It’s so big that it’s more than one part! Feel free to comment with your hate writing advice.

Debunking Bad Writing Advice

One of the horrifying realities I discovered in my journey was how much junk advice I’d picked up along the way. Sure, I knew some of it wasn’t true, but it shocked me that the repetition of it had filtered into my writing despite that. To work on more advanced skills, I had to identify all these and mentally make an effort to unlearn them. That was a painful process!

Unlearning is big talk in business these days. A company might have old processes that are no longer valid, so the employee has to reset mentally to stop using the old processes and start using the new ones. Writing fiction is worse because the information is not outdated; it’s inaccurate and always was. Yet, much of it also seems to make sense as something you should, especially if a big writer like Stephen King says to do it.

So I’m going to hit the most common writing advice everyone’s seen. If I can find an origin to it, I’ll provide that; and also what it really means; why it’s being interpreted the way it is. I think knowledge of these is helpful to resetting yourself mentally.

Onward to the fun stuff!

Start with the action

Opening a story is hard, and not at all intuitive, especially at the beginner and beginner-advanced level. This advice originated with boring openings. The character wakes up and gets out of bed. She wanders into the bedroom, and brushes her teeth. Maybe she looks at herself and does the mirror description, admiring her supple body (who does that anyway?). She wanders out into the kitchen and begins making breakfast…and yawn.

Action’s supposed to mean “start with the story,” and yet, it’s not clear how you get to that. Given most writing advice relies on movie examples, writers think they have to start with actual action scenes. You know, a body on page one, an explosion going off, of, as I did in my first novel, a sentence designed for shock value. Movies start with physical action to hook the men in the audience. On the writing side, it’s far less effective because the reader is being thrown into an action scene where they need to care about the characters…but that foundation hasn’t been established.

This advice shows why trying to present writing fiction entirely from a beginner approach doesn’t work well. You can’t break opening a story down into tiny, actionable steps anyone would understand because each story and writer approach is unique. It is likely that “start with the action” showed up because writers were trying to push past the beginning advice, and the “expert” didn’t have a better answer for them.

If you were writing a romance book, the opening would be very different from opening a thriller. These two genres are opposites. Thriller would start much faster paced, for example. Or anything in speculative fiction would require world building. Yet, you also have to provide a hint of the story to come in the opening and control the pacing so it doesn’t drag. This is not a skill that can be broken down into basic beginner step!

When I did the Great Challenge, a short story a week for an entire year, the hardest part for every story was that opening. I spent 80% of my time working on how to get into the story in that first scene, because if that didn’t work, the rest of the story didn’t work. There was no formula, either; each story was unique in what it needed. Even genre influenced how I opened it. And I still can’t give concrete advice I know people look for because it’s different every single time.

Kill your darlings

This advice has been attributed to many writers, including Oscar Wilde and William Faulker. Stephen King’s also repeated it. Slate found the earliest instance of it is from around 1913 by Arthur Quiller-Couch. What it actually refers to is a writer who becomes too writerly in their prose. It probably applies more to literary writers rather than genre, since literary’s genre requirements encourage that (style choices are a reader requirement). Pretty much, it’s flowery, ornate words that you put in…well, just because.

But our world loves a soundbite. Most writers assume this advice now means if it doesn’t move the plot forward, get rid of it. This turns it into incredibly bad advice because you might take out things your story needs. For example, I love reading the character interactions in the J.D. Robb In Depth series. But by the KYD standard, those would be edited out in favor of the plot. And it would suck the heart right out of the story,

If you aren’t doing ornate writing that might be labeled as purple prose, you can leave this one in the last century.

Don’t use Prologues

Agents put this one on the top ten because writers didn’t know how to write a prologue. The writers struggled to figure out how to open the story and get backstory in. Invariably, the prologue became a scene of the character’s life before the story to show the backstory—not very interesting,

Of course, no one said to learn how to do a prologue correctly. Mostly, these days, there is little on how to write one correctly at all.

The prologue is a scene with the event that triggers the rest of the book. This is most likely to be the victim getting murdered (though Clive Cussler had amazing historical scenes that did the same thing). The scenes have a different feel to them. They summarize rather than go deep. Beginners will be quick to accuse them of “telling,” though telling has its place. Here, it pulls back enough, so it’s obvious to the reader this isn’t a character who’s going to be around long. Dean Wesley Smith and J.D. Robb are both examples of this.

More to come!

Writing Fiction in the New World (Part 2)

I just returned from 20Books in Las Vegas, the last one. It will be Author Nation in 2024. Lots good stuff, and I got to meet blog reader/writer Peggy and her husband Thomas, and her two dogs, Archie and Smoke (if I’ve gotten any of those wrong, my brain is addled from the time difference). More on the conference later.

The writing StoryBundle is still available for another 18 days, so grab your books!

The topic:

Finding Experts in Fiction Writing

Expert is a term that is rapidly losing its meaning and importance. It used to mean you had a special skill or knowledge in a particular field. You might be considered an authority, like Dr. Thomas Holtz, a Vertebrate Paleontologist at the University of Maryland. He’s given panels at Balticon about dinosaurs and consulted on Jurassic Park. (He’s an entertaining speaker and shares his joy of learning, so if you see his name on a panel, attend.)

Now, like the Sling commercial, people can read a book on a topic and declare themselves as an expert. Being an expert seems to be how well you can market to the audience on the topic, not on how much knowledge you have.

In the book The Wellness Trap, the author discusses how anyone can create a blog about wellness and write a book on it. Some are doctors in the medical field, some have a nutritional background, and others declare, “This worked for me.”

Their marketing always appeals on an emotional level. You’re doing your best for your health. You’re taking control. And always with the suggestion to buy wellness products from them or recommended by them.

There isn’t any screening or qualification for them to do this. There have been frauds who say they cured their cancer and never had it.

Think about it: Some of these “experts” get exposed for being a fraud. With writing “experts,” they get praise if they say the right things to their audience. They just have to hit the right emotional buttons to pull in the beginners.

There’s always a new beginner wanting to write a novel. These writers will have a mingle of hope and fear and excitement. I’m going to be published! I can hold my book in my hand! Some may think, This book will be a best seller. I can quit the day job. Please note there isn’t anything in that about writing more books or having a career in writing fiction.

The first book is always a really big deal for a new writer (and sadly, some of the long-term writers put this down). We all have the excitement of starting a book for the first time and fantasizing about what will happen when we finish it. That first book is an adventure, a fun one.

But all those emotions make the writers vulnerable to marketing by people claiming to be experts. They ask, Don’t you want to have the best for your book?

The audience wasn’t even aware that such a question that makes you feel guilty for answering it in the negative is another emotional marketing pull. I attended a con panel on editing, and the panelists spent the entire session circling back to that question. Most of the panel consisted of developmental editors. They were selling their services to a rapt audience!

The first step to finding better experts is to recognize the ones who are marketing to beginners. This can be hard to do; some of them are skilled. An easy first screening test is to see if they are on the Writers Digest 100. That’s voted on by the readers of Writers Digest, and their targeted audience is the new writers. You won’t ever see a writer marketing to intermediate writers on the list.

Look also at what they’ve published. It’s always more profitable to sell to beginners, so these “experts” will often have very few novels published. Or they’ll have some fiction and a lot of non-fiction craft books.

One writer zoomed onto a writing message board to sell his craft book. The book presented a new “system” for writers. It wasn’t anything new; he’d just relabeled the beginner basics with a business buzzword. Seven years before, he’d published two novels. With such a big gap in time, it suggested that the books hadn’t been successful. Of course, it’s hard to tell why there was such a gap; could have been an illness or another life event. But at the publication of the third book, he was selling developmental editing services associated with his system.

It isn’t even enough to see if they’ve written a lot of books. Read them and judge their skills for yourself. Another writer had indie-published seven books in a series. She also was a developmental editor and offered a course on how to write genre. She billed the series as a “Science Fiction Mystery like J.D. Robb.” As I read the two genres and that author, I read the first book. She didn’t have enough world-building for science fiction readers and too much science fiction for mystery readers. Nor did she have enough mystery for the mystery readers. Instead, a romantic subplot dominated the story. Yet, she was teaching other writers how to write genre.

Another writer blogging about writing—no craft books or courses—had about ten books traditionally published. Since the series was set in a place I had visited twice a year growing up, I purchased one book. I hated the main character (that was definitely my personal taste; I think it was the selling point for the book). But this author advised doing description in “drips and drabs” and to not describe anything with physical details. That’s the way she writes. It made the book feel shallow. I was disappointed that she never described this place beyond mentioning the name. If she were to teach a class on description, I would never spend money on it.

But what is qualification then? First. not even a best-selling with 20 years of experience and over 100 books may be able to teach. Not everyone who is successful can teach how they write. There are also some writers who have a successful but not spectacular career and are amazing teachers of writing.

To start, screen out anyone selling developmental editing services. Contrary to popular belief, professional writers don’t need developmental editors; this is an area for beginning writers. Any advice they provide will likely to be sell you on buying their services.

Also dismiss anyone giving broad advice, like a two-hour course on “How to Write a Novel.” There’s just no way to even properly address the topic, so this is usually something on outlining. You will see some courses by best-selling writers; you might consider those at a future point understanding that you might not get your money’s worth out of it. Anything broad is for beginners.

Writers with actual expertise will have favorite specific topics, or even hobby horse topics. Anyone who follows Dean Wesley Smith knows he fits into both of those!

These writers will also be opinionated, and make people angry. Anyone marketing to beginners can’t afford to be anything but encouraging, and generic. Because these writers are opinionated, the beginners will also talk about them in a negative way. When I was on writing message boards, the writers all reacted to Dean Wesley Smith talking about not outlining. There was an air of superiority as they dismissed what he proposed as unworkable.

You probably won’t find these writers by searching the internet, unless you know what you’re looking for. You might hear about them from other writers. Professional conferences will be a great place to find a variety of people. By professional, I mean ones that include business as topics for panels. What you hear takes a very different path because the writers are focused on making money. Those will also be more pricey than most conferences (because beginners don’t want to spend money on learning).

Listen to the panels. Make your own judgments about the content. Remember that everything that they say is their opinion, and you are free to say, “That doesn’t work for me.”

A real expert isn’t worried about disagreement. A marketer expert is always afraid of it.

—

A few expert resources for the blog readers:

Deborah Chester: She was taught by Jack Bickham and was Jim Butcher’s teacher at the Oklahoma University. She may have retired; she used to have a blog with a lot of good information, but it’s been taken down. However, she has a few books on writing published that you can check out.

Thrillerfest is another excellent conference at the professional level. It’s in New York, and it’s very expensive to attend. When I went to one, just about everything cost extra, But I attended sessions by Vince Flynn and James Rollins. Amazing experience.

Finding Experts in Fiction Writing

I just returned from 20Books in Las Vegas, the last one. It will be Author Nation in 2024. Lots good stuff, and I got to meet blog reader/writer Peggy and her husband Thomas, and her two dogs, Archie and Smoke (if I’ve gotten any of those wrong, my brain is addled from the time difference). More on the conference later.

The writing StoryBundle is still available for another 18 days, so grab your books!

The topic:

Expert is a term that is rapidly losing its meaning and importance. It used to mean you had a special skill or knowledge in a particular field. You might be considered an authority, like Dr. Thomas Holtz, a Vertebrate Paleontologist at the University of Maryland. He’s given panels at Balticon about dinosaurs and consulted on Jurassic Park. (He’s an entertaining speaker and shares his joy of learning, so if you see his name on a panel, attend.)

Now, like the Sling commercial, people can read a book on a topic and declare themselves as an expert. Being an expert seems to be how well you can market to the audience on the topic, not on how much knowledge you have.

In the book The Wellness Trap, the author discusses how anyone can create a blog about wellness and write a book on it. Some are doctors in the medical field, some have a nutritional background, and others declare, “This worked for me.”

Their marketing always appeals on an emotional level. You’re doing your best for your health. You’re taking control. And always with the suggestion to buy wellness products from them or recommended by them.

There isn’t any screening or qualification for them to do this. There have been frauds who say they cured their cancer and never had it.

Think about it: Some of these “experts” get exposed for being a fraud. With writing “experts,” they get praise if they say the right things to their audience. They just have to hit the right emotional buttons to pull in the beginners.

There’s always a new beginner wanting to write a novel. These writers will have a mingle of hope and fear and excitement. I’m going to be published! I can hold my book in my hand! Some may think, This book will be a best seller. I can quit the day job. Please note there isn’t anything in that about writing more books or having a career in writing fiction.

The first book is always a really big deal for a new writer (and sadly, some of the long-term writers put this down). We all have the excitement of starting a book for the first time and fantasizing about what will happen when we finish it. That first book is an adventure, a fun one.

But all those emotions make the writers vulnerable to marketing by people claiming to be experts. They ask, Don’t you want to have the best for your book?

The audience wasn’t even aware that such a question that makes you feel guilty for answering it in the negative is another emotional marketing pull. I attended a con panel on editing, and the panelists spent the entire session circling back to that question. Most of the panel consisted of developmental editors. They were selling their services to a rapt audience!

The first step to finding better experts is to recognize the ones who are marketing to beginners. This can be hard to do; some of them are skilled. An easy first screening test is to see if they are on the Writers Digest 100. That’s voted on by the readers of Writers Digest, and their targeted audience is the new writers. You won’t ever see a writer marketing to intermediate writers on the list.

Look also at what they’ve published. It’s always more profitable to sell to beginners, so these “experts” will often have very few novels published. Or they’ll have some fiction and a lot of non-fiction craft books.

One writer zoomed onto a writing message board to sell his craft book. The book presented a new “system” for writers. It wasn’t anything new; he’d just relabeled the beginner basics with a business buzzword. Seven years before, he’d published two novels. With such a big gap in time, it suggested that the books hadn’t been successful. Of course, it’s hard to tell why there was such a gap; could have been an illness or another life event. But at the publication of the third book, he was selling developmental editing services associated with his system.

It isn’t even enough to see if they’ve written a lot of books. Read them and judge their skills for yourself. Another writer had indie-published seven books in a series. She also was a developmental editor and offered a course on how to write genre. She billed the series as a “Science Fiction Mystery like J.D. Robb.” As I read the two genres and that author, I read the first book. She didn’t have enough world-building for science fiction readers and too much science fiction for mystery readers. Nor did she have enough mystery for the mystery readers. Instead, a romantic subplot dominated the story. Yet, she was teaching other writers how to write genre.

Another writer blogging about writing—no craft books or courses—had about ten books traditionally published. Since the series was set in a place I had visited twice a year growing up, I purchased one book. I hated the main character (that was definitely my personal taste; I think it was the selling point for the book). But this author advised doing description in “drips and drabs” and to not describe anything with physical details. That’s the way she writes. It made the book feel shallow. I was disappointed that she never described this place beyond mentioning the name. If she were to teach a class on description, I would never spend money on it.

But what is qualification then? First. not even a best-selling with 20 years of experience and over 100 books may be able to teach. Not everyone who is successful can teach how they write. There are also some writers who have a successful but not spectacular career and are amazing teachers of writing.

To start, screen out anyone selling developmental editing services. Contrary to popular belief, professional writers don’t need developmental editors; this is an area for beginning writers. Any advice they provide will likely to be sell you on buying their services.

Also dismiss anyone giving broad advice, like a two-hour course on “How to Write a Novel.” There’s just no way to even properly address the topic, so this is usually something on outlining. You will see some courses by best-selling writers; you might consider those at a future point understanding that you might not get your money’s worth out of it. Anything broad is for beginners.

Writers with actual expertise will have favorite specific topics, or even hobby horse topics. Anyone who follows Dean Wesley Smith knows he fits into both of those!

These writers will also be opinionated, and make people angry. Anyone marketing to beginners can’t afford to be anything but encouraging, and generic. Because these writers are opinionated, the beginners will also talk about them in a negative way. When I was on writing message boards, the writers all reacted to Dean Wesley Smith talking about not outlining. There was an air of superiority as they dismissed what he proposed as unworkable.

You probably won’t find these writers by searching the internet, unless you know what you’re looking for. You might hear about them from other writers. Professional conferences will be a great place to find a variety of people. By professional, I mean ones that include business as topics for panels. What you hear takes a very different path because the writers are focused on making money. Those will also be more pricey than most conferences (because beginners don’t want to spend money on learning).

Listen to the panels. Make your own judgments about the content. Remember that everything that they say is their opinion, and you are free to say, “That doesn’t work for me.”

A real expert isn’t worried about disagreement. A marketer expert is always afraid of it.

—

A few expert resources for the blog readers:

Deborah Chester: She was taught by Jack Bickham and was Jim Butcher’s teacher at the Oklahoma University. She may have retired; she used to have a blog with a lot of good information, but it’s been taken down. However, she has a few books on writing published that you can check out.

Thrillerfest is another excellent conference at the professional level. It’s in New York, and it’s very expensive to attend. When I went to one, just about everything cost extra, But I attended sessions by Vince Flynn and James Rollins. Amazing experience.

Writing Fiction in the New World (Part I)

Happy Halloween! Cute kitten sitting in jack o lantern candy bucket on background of pumpkin with bats. Kitten posing at holiday decorations, celebrating halloween at home. Photo (C) Sonyachny | Deposit Photos

This post is the start of a new book, of which I haven’t settled on a title yet. It’s inspired by the simple fact I wanted to do another writing book that would scratch my intellection side and maybe get into Story Bundle again next year. You can still pick up 2023 Novel Writing Tools Bundle that I’m in with lots of amazing authors.

Onward with the first chapter…

This book is for the writer who wants to learn how to be better but is frustrated by the lack of information on how to progress past form rejections. It is not a step-by-step instruction on how to write a novel. It is a book that will tell you how to find information to push your skills and what kind of information to look for, as well as traps to avoid. That’s sadly lacking in modern-day fiction writing advice.

With so much information available to us, it’s surprising how narrow the information on writing fiction has gotten. Writers submit to agents and wonder why they receive maddening form rejections that don’t explain anything.

If you’re learning to write in this new world, you start out with five strikes against you.

Beginner Culture

This is a huge problem with today’s craft advice, whether it’s a book on how to write a novel, classes, or bloggers. In the late 1980s, as the writers from the pulp era passed away, the industry flipped to selling only to beginners.

And not just beginners, but the ones who say, “I want to write a novel someday.” These craft books were written to appeal emotionally to this audience. They held hands, suggested it was easy to learn to write, and implied that all the writer needed to do was follow their advice to be published. The writers of these books knew that most of these hopefuls would probably never finish a book.

In actuality, these resources do not provide any skills that would help you get published.

Imitation Culture

Any time someone develops a new concept, everyone else jumps on board to come up with their own spin. You can see this in the time management book industry. Open any new book and the writer will explain all the things you need to do—and present nothing new.

Sometime in the 1980s, there was likely one professional writer who wrote a book on his process of writing. The process included outlining, along with the typical advice for the beginner culture. Until that point, most advice did not mention outlining! (This is based on reading many issues of The Writer Magazine from the 1940s through the 1960s, as well as craft books published before the mid-1980s).

Every non-fiction writer created a variation of that book, having never written fiction. Copies of a copy. Today, we have spotty, muddy, crooked copies of those copies.

Expert Culture

This is something that emerged when the internet was new. Marketing novel is hard. Reading fiction is a want, not a need like other topics. When fiction writers asked non-fiction writers how to market, they were told the befuddling advice, “Be an expert.”

Every time I was told that, I scratched my head. What did it mean? The answer was often something like, “If you’re writing a wine mystery, write about wine.” What if you write in multi-genres? What if you write fantasy? What if common sense intrudes and tells you this will be a waste of time? By this standard, I should have blogged about Hawaii as an expert for my alternate world fantasy. But I would have gotten tourists, not future readers.

The result? Many writers blog on how to write, regardless of experience level. You can see this most prominently in blog posts on pantsing. Just search for pantsing versus outlining. A new writer will try to explain the difference between these two writing processes. They’re puzzled by pantsing, struggling to understand why anyone would do something they believe doesn’t work. They’ll regurgitate what they read on another blog about pantsing (the spotty copy again). Then they explain their writing process. All of this possibly without ever having finished a book.

Anyone can declare expertise. It doesn’t mean they are experts.

Tip Culture

The tip culture for writing started in writing magazines, well before the internet. Writers flocked to the magazines, looking for answers on form rejections from agents. This was an impatient audience; they wanted to know how to fix the problem without doing a lot of work.

Agents were interviewed for the top ten lists of things that would cause them to reject a manuscript. There were a bunch of common skills that writers did badly that wound up on this list, like flashbacks, dream sequences, and prologues. Instead of advising writers to learn to do them correctly, these important resources advised “Don’t.” The result is that these advanced skill areas are being lost. Most of these skills are barely discussed today.

Tips really took off with the internet. It’s hard to read on the screen, so we’re all advised to do a lot of bullet points, leave lots of white space, and keep posts under a thousand words. Tips fit well into those guidelines.

While this works well for simple things, it’s terrible for anything where a deep dive is required. All but the very basic level of writing requires a deep dive.

Rule Culture

Rules are a safety net that comes out of our days in school. If we followed the teacher’s rules, we passed the class. Many people come into writing looking for someone to explain the rules. They figure if they follow the rules, an agent will buy the book and fulfill their dreams. In many respects, it’s another form of hand-holding.

Rules can also be a way of keeping a writer who wants to advance in their place. On the message boards, I regularly heard, “You have to know the rules to break the rules,” but they never explained what rules they meant so it could be randomly applied. As a pantser, I kept running into the “rule” that you must outline.

Yet, writing fiction doesn’t have any rules. There are aspects of writing that you should probably do to keep from being rejected. Or if you’re being experimental and trying something like a prologue, you should know that the risk is that might be rejected if you don’t do it well. But the rules police aren’t going to scream, “You used a prologue! You have sinned!”

I didn’t read any of the above in a book, or on a blog. It’s from experience. I grew up wanting to write. The craft books available to me were a handful of ones from pulp writers that are long out of print now. By the time I started writing for publication, the industry had shifted to marketing to beginners. Unless you had a professional writing mentor, you wouldn’t have been able to see the problem.

Still, having read those older books, I felt a vague sense of dissatisfaction.

But all these books were about writing, so I soaked them up. One day, I ran across one that had clearly bogus information. I checked the author bio and discovered he hadn’t written any fiction. I started screening for authors with a fiction background. I was surprised how many books weren’t written by anyone with that experience.

I submitted short stories and received many form rejections. I’d get an occasional personal rejection, often by a first reader who seemed more frustrated by the slush pile then offering anything useful.

When the internet took off, I thought it was a great place to connect with other writers. Advice was everywhere. I soaked it all up. One of the things I picked up from the early books, though I didn’t know it, was that describing the setting is important. Yet, description landed on those top ten lists because writers wrote description badly. Thus, it was deemed to do as little as possible. “Drips and drabs” is common advice. So I advised writers to do more than say a character walked into a bar but didn’t do it myself.

I frequented the writing message boards, reading advice, giving it. As a pantser, I found it was best to keep my mouth shut on how I wrote. Though, eventually, all the commentary against pantsers made me question how I wrote and I would eventually try outlining. It was a complete disaster and went against how I naturally wrote. Yet, the other writers merely told me that I must not be doing it correctly.

Once a well-published writer started a series of online courses, I jumped in feet first and walked away from the writing message boards. To give you an idea of how narrow the beginner culture focused, the message boards routinely dissed this writer as not knowing what he was talking about. Because he didn’t follow the beginner advice rules.

Yet, no one noticed that he was published and they weren’t.

I realized that everything I had been reading until then barely scratched the surface. Worse, I’d subconsciously picked up on bad advice that I knew was wrong and it had corrupted my writing. I had to go through a painful process of unlearning everything.

But once I’d learned more from this writer, I ran into different problems. What he teaches is his opinion. That’s okay. All writing advice is opinion. But I didn’t always agree with his opinion. I also discovered later there were some skills that dropped off his radar because they weren’t for him, but they were of interest to me. I was hungry for diverse opinions.

Except that there were very few talking about advanced skills. He was the only one teaching classes; the others did it once a year at conferences.

So how in the heck do you navigate this complicated mess? How do you find new skills to learn when they’re being lost?