Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 8

The Love and Hate of Research

White kitten with black and orange spots on an open book. Little playful kitten on a wooden background. Image © serkucher at Deposit Photos

I’ve been doing long-term thinking about a book on research for fiction writers. While I can address some techniques about how to do it that don’t include the standard tips, I want to do more. It’s a topic where a lot of writers make assumptions, ranging from “This is the only way to do it,” to “I luv research. You’ll luv it too.”

I enjoy it now, though I’m not one to dive into dusty books for a year. I have two strengths with very short attention spans (heck, one’s a two-year-old and the other’s a Border Collie. For anyone familiar with the Clifton Strengths, it’s Ideation and Adaptability).

Previously, I loathed research. I’d listen to the writers on message boards bragging about how they researched the weather on a particular day in history so that the one percent of the readers who knew that obscure their fact wouldn’t call them out.

It turned research from a supporting player in a story and the characterization into….homework.

Most writers fall back on their school experience to do research. Perhaps it’s an advantage, perhaps it’s a disadvantage, but I don’t have a B.A., a B.S., or any of the usual acronym suspects. I struggled with figuring out my major and ended up never settling on it. I wrote term papers but never did a thesis.

So when I look at most of the recommendations about research, I scratch my head and think, “But I’m not writing a term paper. It’s a novel.”

The methods people talked about just didn’t fit.

Yet, everyone is so sure of the prescribed way that it makes us question if we know what we’re doing.

So much so that writers regularly popped up on message boards and asked, “Do I need to add footnotes in my novel?”

Yikes.

Similarly, pantsers are directed to outline so they can do the research before writing the novel. Somehow, all roads lead back outlining, doesn’t it?

That leads to another question that shows up, and one I asked: Do you need to do research?

Of course, me loathing everything I heard—the absolutes, the mind-numbing inane details, the lecturing about using three-ring binders, gleeful bragging about how many years the writer researched…yeah, it was easy for me to say “No.”

Even though that wasn’t true.

Writers get so focused on the “correct” way to do things that they shut other writers out who can’t do it like that. Or maybe don’t need that same level.

One of the striking things is that the reason for the lectures on the “correct” way is fear. Once you look for it, you can see it between the lines: “The reader will call you out on this.”

Like the reader is a teacher grading us.

Maybe yes, maybe no. Depends.

Yes, you want to be reasonably right. Especially with anything everyone knows. I ran into a younger writer who described a hospital emergency room as a doctor’s office. Getting something wrong like that is instantly going to make the reader put down the story.

Do you need to be insanely right? For that one percent of readers? Nope. The rest of the readers won’t care, and there are better things to do (like writing) than spending hours or days on an obscure fact. This is also the kind of thing that can turn into years of research, as well as procrastination.

The depends is anything that will help your creativity, be something fun, and help you develop characters further. That includes setting (betcha didn’t know that. Describing setting is a piece of characterization).

So, some examples of this:

Try a new food at a restaurant so you can have your character eat it. Much fun was made of escargot during the 1980s when hapless characters on TV ordered it at a French restaurant and discovered it was snails.Walking barefoot on a sandy shore so you can write about your character doing the same thing. I grew up visiting Southern California beaches but had forgotten about what that was like until I did it on a strip of beach on the Anna River in Virginia.Attending a two-hour walk so you can describe bird songs. It snowed when I attended a winter wonderland bird walk. And I can now add a titmouse’s “cheerily, cheerily,” to my setting repertoire.Taking an online webinar on any topic that interests you.Visit a historical site and take the tour. You can get a lot of information from the tour guide. Historical sites work well for fantasy novels and seeing how people might have lived. But sometimes you’ll pick up a detail you can use in a science fiction story.Explore a museum. But look up the museum online first to make sure there’s an exhibit you’ll have fun seeing.Nature tri-folds. You can get these online or from nature centers and park gift shops. Much easier to use them for birds, animals, trees, and plants than searching online. If you hit online, you’ll spend a lot of time digging through the rare birds, not the common ones.Day trips. Pretty much anywhere. I drove to Fredericksburg and rode in a carriage around the town. I’m debating flying in a biplane (it’s about $100 for five minutes).TV Documentaries: Channels like Smithsonian and Science can lead you down interesting paths. This morning, I watched one show about a cat mummy that didn’t have a cat inside. They speculated that there might be a price tier for mummy offerings to gods.

None of this involves three-ring binders or diving into dusty tomes for years at a time.

Research is what you make of it. What’s your pet peeve about what other writers have told you about research? Hit reply and tell me.

Fun Links for the Input in All of Us

Spring is just starting to pick up for us, alternating (as usual) between warm and freezing. The cherry blossoms and dogwoods are starting to bloom. I shot the above action picture on a nice day in Old Town, Alexandria. It actually took about 50 pictures to get it. That dog was fast, and he was happy to chase frisbees forever.

I have links this week because everything is picking up at work and I’ve been struggling to keep myself from getting too overwhelmed. Onward with the links:

Since I talked about manual typewriters several weeks ago, I thought it appropriate to link to The History of Typewriters | Back Then History.

The term UFO originally came from the military and was adapted into general use! ‘UFO’: A Military Term Abducted by Fans of Aliens – WSJ

Superhero territory! Ant-Man is the strongest Avenger by far, scientist confirms | BBC Science Focus Magazine

3 Things You Must Do To Face Fear & Intimidation In A Fight Jeet Kune Do. This was research for Superhero Vs. Superhero.

Finding sand dollars: When I wasseashells growing up, I often visited Atascadero Beach (now renamed Morro Strand Beach) in Morro Bay, California to search for seashells. Black mussels and limpets were always plentiful. Then, I could also find big clamshells and sea glass. And sometimes sand dollars. I had no idea they weren’t shells, but skeletons.

Dropping Clues and Hiding Secrets Like J. K. Rowling, Part 5: Discrediting the Witness — The Writing Kylie One of the most annoying things for me is to read a mystery and the writer doesn’t lay in the groundwork for the killer. Maybe he gets one minor scene to “hide” him, and I get to the end and wham! He’s suddenly revealed. I’m annoyed because the author provided no information. This article is part of a series to promote a book, but the skill area is something I’ve spotted in the Harry Potter series.

A writer asked me what program I used to create my covers. It’s Adobe Photoshop Elements. It has many of the basic features of the big sister, but not the subscription price tag. I also met a writer at Superstars who uses it to create covers for Chris Mandeville. This was created with the program and about 15 images.

Looking for some unusual learning resources? This Atlas Obscura Online Courses – Virtual Workshops, Seminars, Lectures features some unusual classes, currently including how to pick a lock, how we dream, and history of tarot reading. Most are multiweek and around $200.00

If you like photos of actors, I’ve been posting pictures I took of them on Pinterest. Already up: David Hedison, Anne Lockhart, William Schallert, Richard Hatch, Linda Thorson, Grace Lee Whitney, Paul Carr, Kent McCord, Eddie Albert, Yvonne Craig, and John Saxon.

These are coming eventually: Melissa Gilbert, Mindy Cohn, John Crawford (and cat), Victor Lundin, Paul Mantee, Charles Dierkop, Billy Mumy, June Lockhart, Mark Goddard, Michael Ansara, Erin Murphy, Andrew Prine, Bernard Fox, Sandra Gould, Gil Gerard, and Juliet Mills. I’ll take special requests.

Free Books: Wrapping this up with free books for March. Free Fantasy and Sci-Fi March (bookfunnel.com) This is all speculative fiction giveaway, so you’ll find your next adventure here!

The Fixation on Plot

The clever cat is reading fairy tales for kittens. Kittens listen to him carefully.

Cat with Book © Iridi | Deposit Photos

Artificial Intelligence has begun to migrate into fiction. Neil Clarke shut down submissions to Clarkesworld this week because AI stories flooded his submission system. Probably from writers hoping for a quick buck without a lot of effort.

This is particularly problematic for science fiction and fantasy magazines. Over the years, magazine reading has dropped—I’ve seen it recently as magazines drop off the stands. A food magazine I always picked up because it had well-researched articles and more unusual recipes decided to go online exclusively. Once they did that, the well-researched articles disappeared, I subscribed for a year, but it wasn’t hard to tell that they weren’t going to survive. Late last year, they announced they were folding.

Fiction’s had it worse. The pulps are gone. Some magazines pay professional rates. Except for two in mystery, the rest are science fiction and fantasy. So they are targets for people hoping to score with AI-generated fiction.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch hit on this new development:

That’s how I’ve been thinking about the AI writing algorithms. I’ve also been shaking my head at the dumbass writers who continually say they like the AI writing tool to help them plot. Those writers simply do not understand how fiction writing works. Plot comes from depth, by going deep into characters as individuals (real living people…who just happen to be fictional). If you approach plot as an exercise, something separate from the story creation done by your own fingers at your own computer, then you haven’t learned your craft yet, and no AI writing tool is going to help you.

Dean Wesley Smith talks about the Stages of a Fiction Writer. At the first and second levels, the writers fixate on plot as being The Most Important Thing.

They also don’t understand what it is.

We see it show up in conversations like:

Are you character-focused or plot-focused?Are you a pantser or a plotter? (I always find this question insulting. The question implies that a pantser doesn’t have plot).

Let’s get the definition of plot out of the way first.

Plot is the events of the story. If you wrote a mystery novel, the plot would include:

The first murder.Detective finds Clue XA second victim is murdered.

Moreover, not a single genre has plot as the top requirement for readers. Most genres are setting or character. Literary is the exception with style, and it’s not too popular.

I suppose plot rises to importance with the Stage 1 and 2 writers because it can be associated with a shiny idea. We want that shiny idea to turn into a best seller. Many writers fantasize about it like winning the lottery. Their book hits the best seller list and they can quit their day job and lounge by the pool all day.

This gets into another area, more common at every level of writing.

Ideas that are too easy to come up with.

It’s when you hear a theme for an anthology and it’s the first idea that pops into your head. The same idea as everyone else, and the same idea as Hollywood, which relies heavily on cliches. If I said there was an anthology call for a murder in a restaurant, what did you immediately picture? Probably a restaurant critic murdered for a bad review.

Now apply this thinking to a Stage 1 and Stage 2 writer using an AI. They fixate on plot, use an idea anyone can come up with and plug it into the AI. The AI doesn’t create a story. It pulls from hundreds or thousands of stories it has access to and mashes these elements together.

This results probably in a lot of gibberish, but also like the old Xerox where you make a copy of a copy of a copy. I used to work in a copy shop. This was in the days of paper and a man would bring in a Hollywood script to copy, presumably to submit to an agent.

He must have lost the original at some point.  This was several copies deep of it. Some of the pages had been copied at an angle so the text ran off. All the pages were covered with spots from the copying process.

If the AI scans Stage 1 and Stage 2 writers, this is what the program will produce.

But expect to impact how we submit to magazines and anthology calls.

Impact on us?

Magazines and anthology calls with probably start with short submission windows. Neil Clarke reports those as not being as affected by the AI submissions. These are challenging because you have to be ready for the window and get the story in fast. I also doubt if it will remain unaffected.Writers will need to certify that they wrote the story, not AI. I’m expecting to see this show up as a more immediate solution. And the publishers will get burned by writers who lie about this.Some publishers may decide to shut down. All these magazines already receive far too many submissions. With an increase of AI submissions—and trying to catch stories created by one—that may be more work than a publisher wants to do.Possibly a requirement to submit queries for short stories. The AI stories wouldn’t even get in the box with that circumstance. But it’d also lose some legitimate writers who struggle with queries.Invitation-only anthology calls and magazine submissions. This would do for writing what technology is doing to industry—removing the ability to learn skills at the entry-level. Contrary to general belief, you don’t learn writing skills by aspiring to lower-paying levels. Rather, all you do is set your standards lower.An alternative to the idea above is to request a submission ID and once you received it, you could submit a story. This would discourage a lot of writers because it’s so many extra steps.

Rather than helping, this will hurt us. We’re already seeing organizations like CNET try to phase out writers. It wouldn’t be surprising to see one of the publishers try dump writers in favor or AI stories. More likely this will show up in Hollywood first because they’ve never wanted to pay the writers. And there are a lot of lower level magazines that consider publishing a story for no pay a gift.

Is there are fix? It’s a good question and is going to take some time to shake out. What do you think the publishers are going to do in reaction?

What is Writer’s Block?

Image © racorn | Deposit Photos. Distraught writer or businesswoman with her head lying on her desk in a pile of crumpled paper as she suffers from writer’s block or a total inability to come up with a solution to a problem.

I feel like I’m still recovering after Superstars Writing Conference. It’s a lot of input, and from writers who have done it long enough to know what they’re talking about. But the biggest draw is the sense of tribe, which I’ve never seen anywhere else. Next year, they’re capping the number of attendees–the last two years, the conference has really grown. I thought that was a good idea because too big and the feeling of tribe disappears.

This week, I’m tackling a topic that commonly gets two extremes: Memes of pain and suffering and dismissal that it exists.

Writer’s block.

Hollywood’s behind a lot of the bad image of writer’s block. It amazes me that the stories depicting it are written by, well, writers, who should know better.

The image is this:

A writer, like Magee from NCIS, is trying to write a novel. He uses an old manual Royal Typewriter (which never made sense to me for the character. A tech nerd like that? He’d use the latest technology, not an antique that you can’t get even the ribbons for anymore).

So Magee, or any other fictional film writer, sits at his antique typewriter and cranks the paper into the roller. He types one or two words.

Stops. Looks at what he’s written.

Frowns.

Rips the paper out. Crumples the paper into a ball and hurls it into a trashcan. The trashcan is already full of crumpled paper balls, and there’s more on the carpet.

Then he repeats everything, including the same words he typed in.

Since Hollywood is such a visual medium and looking at a writer writing is well, rather dull, the above image makes it more exciting. The manual typewriter makes noise, from the clack of the keys, to the crank of the carriage return handle, and even the crumpling up of paper. And a trashcan full of crumpled paper? It makes the audience chuckle.

But the images sticks with us as writer’s block. Somehow, it turns into a failed writer who can’t get off page one and finish a book. While there are plenty of people who never finish books, it shows up in a variety of ways:

They always say they want to write a book but never have time to do it. Writing isn’t that important to them; it’s more about the image.They write about three chapters and then lose interest in the story. Critical voice wanders in for this one. Again, not writer’s block. In a past writing group, a man would bring his three chapters in. We’d critique, and be pretty encouraging about seeing more. But if anyone said even the slightest negative comment, like adding more description, he’d toss the three chapters and go on to another story. He was constantly looking for a story that wouldn’t waste his time and wasted plenty of time doing it! Kris Rusch recently talked about people like this: Business Musings: How Writers Fail Part 11: They Want To – Kristine Kathryn Rusch (kriswrites.com)The writer gets about halfway, where the story hits the middle. You’ve been in the story for a long time and it stops looking shiny and exciting. New idea for a book comes along, and you abandon the existing one for the now shiny idea. Again, not writer’s block.

The actual Magee image of writer’s block doesn’t exist.

But it’s a fanciful notion because it makes us smile. It also lends itself to some writers imperiously declaring, “There’s no such thing as writer’s block” or “I don’t believe in writer’s block.”

And, effectively dismissing a writer who is legitimately stuck.

There are lots of ways you can be stuck in a writing project. It can include fear (again, read Kris’s blog above on that) and critical voice issues. But I’m going to hit on one that no one talks about.

Writing advice.

Just go anywhere and you will tons of writing advice, even from pros. Last year, when I attended Superstars, I sat in on a class on pacing from Jonathan Maberry. He’s a best-selling writer. He also outlines and encouraged the writers attending to outline.

Whereas, Dean Wesley Smith offered his Writing into the Dark class at this year’s Superstars, encouraging writers to not outline.

This is not a soapbox example; I picked it because it’s one every writer has heard of and had experience with. I don’t care if you need to outline or if you’re more like me, where you can’t know anything at all, or if you’re somewhere in the middle. Doesn’t matter. How you get there is your business.

Unless you get stuck.

Being stuck is a common form of writer’s block. Figuring out why can be challenging. Because of the image Hollywood gives us and writers telling us “I don’t believe in writer’s block,” we think there’s something wrong with us.

For me, I thought it was my process. At one point, it was messy and chaotic, and frankly, frustrating. I got stuck, daily, sometimes hourly, and assumed it was a problem in a story.

It was the writing advice. Particularly the pantsing vs. outlining.

If you search for “Pantsing,” you’ll find hundreds of blogs on “pantsing vs. outlining.” They’re always written by an outliner, and probably not one who’s finished a book. They scratch their head in puzzlement over the pantsing, then explain how it works, having never done it themselves. It’s clear they disapprove of the method and then launch into explaining how they outline.

If you’re on message boards, other writers will lecture you to do an outline. It’s wrapped up in a lot of workshops, largely because the teacher is an outliner and doesn’t know how to teach the craft to the pantsers.

This is neither good nor bad. It’s something that simply is.

Where the problem comes in, and why we get stuck, is that we don’t always know what we need to write.

We also think “It works for me, so it’ll work for everyone else”—without understanding the mechanics of why it works for you.

This thinking is common in everything. Over on Asian Efficiency, the men discuss a cluttering trend emerging. Their discussion concludes they find an uncluttered environment works better because it is calming for them. Whereas, being a high-input person, I collect things. Collecting means some form of clutter, because, realistically, it will not look like an Instagram photo of the perfect room.

It’s very stressful for me to be completely decluttered. It’s more calming to have some clutter. (They reason that once you declutter, you’ll see the truth of it. That’s a lot like what outliners tell pantsers).

Everyone is different in how they approach writing.

Take outlining. One person might need to do a deep, 100-page outline. Another writer might do a broad sweep on one page. Still another needs the visual of a storyboard.

Even pantsing isn’t uniform across the board. Some need to know the ending. Others need a few plot points along the way. Some, like me, can’t know anything about the story at all.

These are all different ways we process how to write. But they’re often presented as the “wrong” way to write, depending on who you talk to.

I’ve tried outlining. I succumbed to the pressures of the message boards and dived in. But part of my processing is that I have to puzzle out the story. If I do that in an outline, I’ll never write the story. And I’ve been told by outliners, “No, that’s not true. It doesn’t work that.”

For them. Not for me.

One piece of my process is that I need to think about the next scene or two (especially if they connect). The thinking can be in my head or on the screen (I’ve been using Plottr’s notes feature for that). I may or may not use what I come up with. It’s just the path to get to the written word.

When I tried the “prescribed” way of Writing in the Dark, which was to just start writing, I got stuck. A lot. Writer’s block.

I wrote a short story a week for an entire year. The first six stories worked great because I took some shortcuts to get me over the hump of getting started: I used existing ideas that had been bubbling around in my head or redrafted an existing story. I’m pretty sure the first story I wrote had quite a bit of thinking time on it.

Getting stuck started on the seventh story. No more shortcuts. It was a new story every week. For every story, I redrafted that first scene over and over until something clicked. In hindsight, I was using redrafting to think my way into the story. I always felt like I needed two weeks to write the stories, and if I’d said this, I would have been sneered at by other writers for taking too long.

If you are getting stuck a lot, put your critical voice to work to find the thing that is causing it. Doesn’t have to be a big thing, like creating an outline when you want to just start the story. It can be something small and simple that’s going against how you need to work.

If you’ve discovered anything that everyone recommends that doesn’t work for you, hit reply and post your story about the discovery here.

5 eclectic links to the fun, strange, and beautiful

This week, I’m in Colorado Springs for the Superstars Writing Conference. I’ll be taking an editing workshop from Dean Wesley Smith, so we’ll see how that goes.

So I’m embracing my input strength and passing along some links I’ve collected.

Why did this non-existent town show up on maps of New York? (gizmodo.com) A mapping company put a fake town on a map to prove copyright, and someone spotted it on the map and moved in.

Fairies are a huge staple of fantasy fiction. Fairy forts have trapped many an unwary fictional traveler. But thousands of the real thing dot Ireland. Read about their history: What is a Fairy Fort? – Atlas Obscura

Artificial Intelligence is asked to depict salmon swimming upstream. This shows how much of what we think is assumed in context. They asked an AI engine to recreate “a salmon swimming down a river”, and here’s what it guessed it would look like. (real story) : Damnthatsinteresting (reddit.com)

Cat Calendar: If you didn’t see this online, a man from the Army Corps of Engineers (hoo-ah!) made a cat calendar. Some people are criticizing the Photoshop quality, but it’s pretty obvious he had a lot of fun creating it. The calendar is free. When you download it, make sure you scroll to the page after December. The Army Corps of Engineers Made a Glorious 2023 Cat Calendar (gizmodo.com).

And since I’m going to Colorado, this perfectly timed article shows some of the wonderful scenic views from the state. I’ll be visiting the first one on the list, Garden of the Gods, with Kevin J, Anderson. It is an amazing site to see in person. But I will take pictures! Colorado Winter Wonderland – Atlas Obscura

Finally, I’m participating in Imagination Unleashed: Fantasy & Science Fiction with Imagination (bookfunnel.com), a book giveaway. There are 115 books to pick from, so drop in and see if there’s something you like.

Thinking About Story at Pohick Bay

One of my challenges in embracing my Intellection strength is in allowing myself time to think as part of the writing process. I need it. I can see where I’ve had sticking points in the story, tossing scenes to restart again and get myself grounded.

But another part of me (probably critical voice, being the sneaky devil it is) says, “But you’re not writing.” (Can you hear it whining? I swear…)

Except that I am.

We’ve become fixated as a culture on numbers because they’re a concrete way to measure success. There’s an app to count everything.

But it’s also easy to check the box on doing the thing without doing it well. One of the appalling things for me is that to get to a 30K novella, I have to write another 80-100K of words that I toss out. Not revision, but trying out different approaches, getting stuck, backtracking, and restarting.

So thinking is in.

So much so that I’m turning down an opportunity to hear Michael La Ronn talk about writing a million words a year with a day job. It’s just not where I’m at now.

For my thinking time, I wanted to get out in nature to do this. Partially because I’m working to exercise the bottom of my feet. Feet are made to walk on the ground, not concrete, and on things like tree branches, roots, rocks, and bumps.

That’s hard to find in my area without traveling somewhere. The concrete is everywhere! In many places, no road verge exists at all (a verge is that strip of grass between the sidewalk in the curbs, though the name varies, depending on the state).

The weather was pretty good…clear and sunny. Not too cold, and no wind to bring the chill in.

I hopped on I95 and head south. I’d stop at the first park to have signage on the road. That became Pohick Bay regional park.

The name comes from an American Indian tribe in the area. The bay feeds into Gunston Cove, which connects to the Potomac River (granted, any body of water in our area does this, eventually).

It has about four nature trails through a wooded and hilly area. Some pretty beaches along the bay, too. I also found a lot of apple snail shells washed up on the sand.

Very peaceful and quiet walking. Just the sounds of the water lapping at the shore, a bird that sounded a lot like the screech of Tribbles, and the occasional power motor of a boat. Won’t be like that in another month or two!

The Fallacy of the Best Seller

I’m putting on my input and futuristic hat, and this post is going to make people mad.

The collapse of the traditional book industry for fiction is coming.

It’s probably in the next 10-20 years, though with change moving faster and faster, it could come sooner. There are some other events coming into play like Ai writing that may change the dynamics, depending on how fast they move and how the publishers react (or don’t).

It’ll feel abrupt, but the seeds have been there for decades.

It started in the 1980s. Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes about the events that occurred during that time in Lessons from Writing the Fey. It’s a horrifying read. I was trying to finish my first novel then. If I’d gotten caught up in the craziness, it might have hit me at the wrong time and broken my writing.

Grocery stores were a major source of book sales, picked by the regional managers based on their location. Like mysteries sell well in Washington, DC, and there are states where Westerns sell well. This formed the mid-list and allowed writers to produce books that readers enjoyed and develop skills to be a better writer. Those new skills turned them into best-selling writers when one book took off nationwide.

But a major grocery chain decided it was more cost-effective to buy the books at the corporate level. We saw this thinking in a lot of places during that time. Television studios decided to focus on a very narrow demographic and canceled TV shows doing well because they didn’t fit that demographic. Movie industries started doing sequels because that was a built-in audience (Star Wars probably helped that along with the blockbuster movies. I’m sure the studios envisioned every sequel being a blockbuster).

The result gutted the mid-list. Publishers expected writers to be a bestseller with their first novel, mirroring what was happening in Hollywood. Anyone get hooked on a TV show only to have it canceled three episodes later? Yeah.

So a lot of writers wrote a few books, got dropped by the publisher, and disappeared.

And the publishing industry stopped making writers who built up skills to be a bestseller.

The first change I noticed was V. C. Andrews. I read Flowers in the Attic when it hit the bestseller list. It was like watching a car accident in slow motion. Horrifying and mesmerizing. But when I picked up later copies of the series, they weren’t the same.

The author passed away. Her estate hired a ghostwriter.

After that, it was Vince Flynn, who I met at the first ThrillerFest. Other writers have continued his Mitch Rapp series. He still gets top billing in a book published last year, like a best seller, but another writer wrote the book.

Clive Cussler also stepped back and spawned several series with his name on them and a different author writing them. His son Dirk Cussler has taken up the torch for the flagship series, Dirk Pitt, after his father’s death. All the series are still publishing, with Clive Cussler’s name prominent, books by someone else.

I was a fan of Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt books. When he switched to the ghost writers, I tuned in for a few books. They were okay. But with his name on the cover, I expected Clive Cussler, and I didn’t get books that felt like him. It was more than a formula to check off. There was a personality I’d come to expect from his books that wasn’t in those.

These types of books are spawning everywhere. Lee Child is the latest. Vince Flynn ventured into it (and thankfully didn’t stay long). They’re like making a copy of a copy. After a while, the good gets diluted from what originally made the story marketable.

These best sellers built their skills in the early 1980s. Most of the writers you see on the fiction best seller shelves are those writers.

Not new writers.

Oh, sometimes a new writer might surface as a bestseller. But if the second book doesn’t do well, the writer disappears.

Those bestsellers who built their skills in the 1980s are in their sixties and seventies. As they retire or pass away, there’s no one to replace them.

All these various mergers, including the one that got derailed by the courts, are a sign of the problem. Businesses run into trouble, so they buy other businesses that look successful. It sustains them for a while, but eventually bad business practices will catch up. Sears and K-Mart are an example of this. Sears used to be a Fortune 500 company.

The publishing industry is remarkably short-sighted, and I think glaciers move faster. They may already be too far past the tipping point because no one bothered to ask, “What if we run out of best sellers?”

Unpacking the Writing

These last few weeks, I’ve been slowly unpacking the new things I’m learning from Writer Faster-Better. We’re just hitting the section on the writing itself. Not craft, but how the personality types need to do different things to write.

One of the things that came out of the class is how some of my strengths got push back at some point and I backed off them. Other strengths tried to compensate and overbalanced (Adaptability and Achiever).

The first one Input (#3 for me). With this strength, I’m a collector of information and am, combined with Intellection (#1) good at details. But I always thought I was poor at details.

But a common issue for Input is that we like information and can provide too much to someone who doesn’t care. It seems likely that at some point I did that and was told not to do it.

Another contributing issue is school. First up, I know there are good teachers out there. Unfortunately, I had very few of those. Most fixated on test scores. To get test scores, they created the Scantron tests. You got a choice of four items to choose which one was right. Often the questions weren’t for interesting facts but ones that bored me. Who cares if the S.S. Valencia was wrecked on January 22, 1906? Does the exact date matter?

Worse, though, I could never guess what the teachers were going to test on, so I always did poorly.

School tests also created havoc for my #1 Intellection. They don’t encourage people who need to think for a bit about the questions. And everything these days is rush, rush, make a decision now or it’s going to go away.  Probably one of the worst decisions I made was enlisting in the National Guard instead of doing my time with the ready reserve. I was pressured by the NCO that the “deal” (I would get $17,000 for doing it) would go away. Adaptability jumped in and said, “Sure,” and made the wrong decision.

So I’m thinking about changes to how I do things when I write.

Input

I’ve struggled with notes, partially because most of the discussion on notes is on organizing them in such a way as to make connections and generate ideas.

Zettelkasten, which was a system the creator understood but was too complex in a lot of wrong ways. Index cards would have driven me mad, as did that numbering system (and I did try it). People have said things like “If the notes are good, the article writes itself.” (Well, no. the writer does that).PARA.  This looked promising but didn’t fit me at all. Though Tiago Forte wants to be the guru for all note-taking, it’s more of a one-shot pony. The audience is entrepreneurs and seems to have more to do with work (the day job) than pure collecting and creativity.  The idea part is particularly for entrepreneurs’ work, not for someone like me. They pay me to do tasks, not come up with ideas.

And all discussions of note-taking seem to be offshoots of taking them for school.

I’m collecting random facts in a notebook—a Mead Composition Book, hard-back (Target seems to be the only one selling them). Doesn’t make me feel like I’m in school like the other ones, and big enough for me to play around in.

Punch List (or whatever I decide to call it)

Another new thing I’m starting, also in a notebook in a punch list. I’m using a Decomposition Book from Target, mainly because it had a cheetah on the cover (Erahas, my half-man/half-cheetah god). In project management, it’s a list of minor tasks that need to be completed by the end of the project.

For me, let’s suppose I’m writing along. I realize that I need to add some additional setting detail in Chapter 1 to make Chapter 4 work.

In typical Writing in the Dark fashion, you would hop back, add the detail, then resume writing. Dean says it’s not a good idea to put a placeholder in because that detail might inspire your creative side.

The WITD practice: Hop over to a different computer (and I do have two), do the research, and hop back to continue writing.

I get that this works for Dean. It’s his process.

For me? It’s an interruption. I’ve always wanted to do placeholders for small details and circle back around later. Batch do the quick look-ups instead of interrupting myself (and this may be a key difference: I get interrupted all day by other people in my day job. Why would I want to interrupt myself?).

Okay, yeah, I’m questioning everything.

If I followed the WITD standard, I would have interrupted myself for two things I ended up deciding not to use. I just needed to think about them first to see if I wanted to use them (which I didn’t realize until I did it).

Key in my punch list is that they get done quickly, like after I finish what I’m writing or the next day.

So the class is upending some things that I was doing that didn’t fit me. We’ll see what else we uncover….

Rewiring the Writing

This week, I’m in the first week of Write Better-Faster 101, which is a deep dive into how strengths play into writing. Which, curiously, can include what goes in the writing.

Mostly, it’s been identifying where your problems are… just thinking about them. Mine, hands down, is getting a book to novel length. In the days when I wanted to traditional publish, this seemed like a goalpost out of reach. I didn’t understand how other writers could come up with a book that blew past 100K when I was just hitting 20K.

I debated at one point if I should just go to short stories because I couldn’t write novels. But it felt like the wrong reason to do that. If I wrote short stories, it should be because I enjoyed writing short stories, not because I couldn’t write long enough books. The same thing applies to novellas.

So we’ll see where that one takes me.

Superhero Vs. Superhero

This is slow going, but not a slog. I’m having to stop and think about issues that I think I would have skipped before when I was doing the “Just sit down and write. It’s that simple” method. By issues, I mean if the character does X, what happens? But what if she does Y instead?

These don’t always occur to me at the first blush of the blank page. I suppose that’s like marinating a piece of chicken. Sometimes, I’ve had to walk around and think a bit before writing (hard now. It’s gotten cold again). But sometimes, as in the case above, I need to think a bit with my fingers. You know, put something down, even if it comes out later, because I’m not sure of what I want to do. But it’s different from typing a thousand words and then dumping a thousand words. It’s more like a few hundred words.

Guess I’m rewiring the writing!

Reading, reading, and more reading

The Fantasy and Science Fiction Book Fest is still running. Nearly 200 books to choose from!

I want to add to my TB pile!

New Year, New Writing

I usually have a theme of sorts for the new year. The one that’s emerged was working with the Clifton Strengths, rather than focusing on writing craft.

I’ve felt a little overwhelmed and maybe a bit burned out on the writing craft side–to where it has diminishing returns.

And the Clifton Strengths seems to scratch an itch I didn’t know I had. I spent the last two weeks over the holiday walking (where possible, given Arctic temperatures) or driving and thinking about the story. Sometimes it was while I played Solitaire.

It’s not thinking about the entire story (I guarantee someone will say, “Ah ha! You’re outlining!” Nope. I don’t know what happens later in the book or at the end). I just ran through different options for the next scene until I felt settled enough on what I wanted to do to write it.

Once I finished the scene, I cycled through it, quite a few times. Because there was more thinking involved, mostly through adding depth details.

But when I started the next scene, I ended up back for another round of thinking about the first one because the character needed more of a reaction in the first scene, and then this was the closure of that reaction. That’s something I don’t think I would have picked up as easily without thinking about it.

And that second scene turned out a lot longer because of my thinking about it, which was a surprise.

I also made a discovery about the time for writing. Because of my day job, I’ve done writing in the time available–6:00-8:00 p.m. It’s never felt like it was a really good time for me–just what was available.

With taking the time to think first, it’s evolving that days where I have all day to wander in and out. Of course, critical voice is “You’re not writing every day” and “you’re not get X words a day.”

But the opening foundation is much more solid starting out.

Free Fantasy and Science Fiction Book Fest

We’re now officially in the bleakness of winter in Washington, DC. Usually, it’s so cold that I want to hibernate with a book. Of course, the temperature is in the low sixties after being minus-five last week. But still, any excuse to get more books…

I want more books!

This giveaway has an astounding 193 books! Mostly urban fantasy, a little science fiction. There’s a book I’m eying called Flesh Eating Cheerleaders. The title just says that I have to investigate. Please check out the above link and see if you find some books you’d like to read.