Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 136

Book Promotion

If you’re at all interested — and if you happen to self-publish, then I bet you are — here are recent results of various promotion services:

Tuyo free one day via Freebooksy, January: Slightly over 2000 downloads

Tuyo free one day via NewFreeKindleBooks, Awesome Gang, Book Angel, Ask David, and Armadillo books — all free services — February: 74 downloads total. So you see there is a HUGE difference between free promotion services and Freebooksy. Not a surprise. But, wow.

Tuyo free one day via Freebooksy, April 30: Slightly over 1000 downloads. So you can see that there is, or can be, a big drop off if you run the same type of promotion with the same service with just a three-month break. I did wonder.

Tuyo free one day via Booksends, May 1: about 500 downloads

Tuyo free one day via Book Runes, May 2, slightly over 800 downloads — a very good result for a not-very-expensive service.

Tuyo free one day via Book Rebel, May 3, 250 downloads

Tuyo free one day via Fussy Librarian, May 4, a very disappointing 100 downloads. Last year, they did much better than that for me.

These results were enough to bump Tuyo to the #1 spot in Epic Fantasy Ebooks, Fantasy Adventure Ebooks, and Military Fantasy Ebooks. Also #2 for Teen and YA Coming of Age Fantasy Ebooks, Sword and Sorcery Ebooks, and Action and Adventure Fantasy Ebooks.

Tuyo sat at the #1 or #2 spot for most of these categories for at least three days. It didn’t take long to drop! It’s lower again as of this morning. I’m not sure what effect going up the rankings has. There’s been a decent uptick in sales for Nikoles and Tarashana. I’m expecting to see a substantial increase in KU pages read that should hopefully last for some time — we’ll see how it goes!

Promotions for Black Dog last year and this year have ranged from nearly 4000 downloads from Freebooksy with, if I recall correcty, Fussy Librarian and EReaderNews stacked on top, to an absolutely pathetic 170 downloads via (the quite expensive) Books Butterfly this spring. I’ve used up my five free-book days for this enrollment period and won’t be able to set Black Dog free again and use a different promotion service for another several months. On the other hand, I might put that off till October anyway, do it right before releasing the 4th collection.

So … I get that results vary by author and by promotion. But thumbs up for Freebooksy, Booksends, and Book Runes and thumbs emphatically down for the amazingly overpriced Books Butterfly. For Fussy Librarian, Magic Eightball says: Cannot Predict Now.

Working with the free promotion services can add just a touch more oomph, but I’m frankly not sure it’s worth the trouble. I’m glad I ran those promotions separately so I can see how little they would add to the paid services.

I haven’t run a lot of 99c promotions on anything. I may try more later. I need to apply for a Bookbub ad — I want to do that with Tuyo shortly. It’s tough to get those ads, so I’ll probably plan to keep applying until I get one. It ought to help tremendously to have more than 80 reviews and an average rating of 4.7 stars. It will not help to have the book limited to Amazon. If I don’t get a Bookbub ad pretty promptly, I will probably take the whole series out of KU at the end of the current enrollment period, put the books out everywhere, and try again.

Other stuff I’ve learned about promotion, which you may know, but I sure didn’t, so in case you find it helpful:

a) For heaven’s sake, write short book descriptions that are 500 characters, 400 characters, and 250 characters long before you go to promotion service websites. Save those in a specific file. It’s absolutely a pain in the neck to have to write those on the fly. Having to do it twice because you didn’t save your descriptions the first time will make you feel particularly stupid.

Also copy little editorial quotes attributed to whomever, like SLAM THIS INTO MY EYEBALLS — bestselling fantasy author Rosamund Hodge (she really did say that about Tuyo, on her Goodreads review. Her review made me laugh.) Anyway, particularly if the book description is limited to very few characters, it may be better to throw in something like this plus, like, a five-word teaser for the book. Write that kind of description ahead of time too.

I’m still learning how to write good, extremely short book descriptions. There are lots of articles about how to do it best. The best advice so far: save every book description you use and add a note about how well it worked. I didn’t do that at first, and I wish I had.

b) Get all your urls for Twitter and Facebook and whatever and save those in the same file as all the versions of the book descriptions so you can cut and paste them quickly into the required fields as necessary.

c) Copy and paste all your books ASIN numbers into the same file so they’re handy when you want to drop them into the required field.

Doing those three things will make setting up promotions via promotion services far less annoying.

Yet more stuff I’ve learned:

a) You can choose just two categories for your book when you self-publish through KDP. But you can add eight more categories later. You go to the Amazon Author Central contact us page, here. Then you select “Amazon Book Page” and then “Update Amazon Categories.”

Of course you need to know what categories exist and exactly what string to use for each category. So —

b) Open up Amazon. Find any book sort of in the same basic subgenre as yours. Copy its ASIN or ISBN. Then open up BKLINK. Put the ASIN or ISBN into BKLINK. It will show you all that book’s categories, in strings like this:

Books » Books » Literature & Fiction » Action & Adventure Fiction » Fantasy Action & Adventure

or

Kindle Store » Kindle Store » Kindle eBooks » Literature & Fiction » Action & Adventure Fiction » Action & Adventure Romance Fiction

or whatever.

c) Copy whatever strings seem most appropriate into the Update Amazon Categories box at the KDP site, BUT, remove the repeated “Books” or “Kindle Store” at the front and turn all the double carots >> into singles >

Then the requested categories will be added to your title.

BUT

d) The ordinary Amazon page will never show you more than three categories for your book, which makes it look like those categories did not get added. They probably did, but maybe not, so to make sure, get your book’s ASIN and drop that into BKLINK, which will show you all your book’s current categories.

So, how about that? It was Anthea Sharp who told me how to do that, after Sharon Shinn suggested I ask her about book promotion. She was very helpful.

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A very good story you should all go read right now

Mary Aileen (@patchworkmouse) pointed to this story on Twitter, and I happened to see it, which is very nice because I’m not spending a lot of time on Twitter just at the moment.

I clicked through and read the story. So should you.

Oh, I just noticed now, after I read it, that it’s by Naomi Kritzer. No wonder it’s good.

Anyway:

The Thing About Ghost StoriesBY NAOMI KRITZER

The most interesting thing about ghost stories is that almost everyone has one.

The other really interesting thing, to me, is that they’re nearly all terrible stories if you try to take them as stories. A good story has a beginning, some buildup, and then a resolution or a twist or something at the end. Ghost stories go, “This creepy and inexplicable thing once happened to me. The obvious explanation is that I dreamed or imagined it; I am certain that I didn’t dream or imagine it.” Or in some cases, “I used to live in this house where creepy stuff happened all the time. Then we moved.” Every now and then you’ll hear a story with a ghost that has a beginning, middle, and end, but those are most often urban legends: “One day we were driving along and we picked up a hitchhiker.” (Beginning.) “As we drove, we had this creepy conversation with the hitchhiker.” (Middle.) “Then we reached our destination and the hitchhiker had vanished from the back seat.” (Twist!) That one’s not a real ghost story. It did not happen to your cousin, no matter what he says.

It feels like ghost stories should mean something, but it’s not at all clear what. I managed to get about a hundred pages out of the question, “What do these mean, anyway?” when I wrote my doctoral dissertation to get my PhD in Folklore, all without reaching an actual conclusion. My mother helpfully pointed that out when she read the manuscript.

“If I give them a real answer, they’ll just complain about it,” I said.

“So just tell me, Leah,” she said. “What do you think ghost stories mean?”

Click through to read the rest.

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Top Ten Examples of Common but Terrible Writing Advice

Following up the recent post on this topic, I thought I’d take a stab at a more thorough and better organized list of Common Bad Advice.

Previously, I criticized the linked post by saying that the items did not make a coherent list – four items involved advice about big or relatively big issues, while one item aimed at the nuts and bolts of the craft of writing. Here, I’m going to handle this division by splitting bad writing advice into two categories, which I could call Big and Little, or Broad and Detail, but I think I will call Erroneous Advice About Storytelling and Erroneous Advice About Writing Craft. The former will be easier because part of it can be pulled out of the previous post.

Erroneous Advice About Storytelling

1. Start in Media Res        

I am told that quite a lot of novice writers start too early, long before anything happens. No doubt that is true; I wouldn’t know, never having read through a slush pile. But starting too early isn’t actually the problem I’ve seen; nor is starting quietly intrinsically a bad thing to do.

When I’ve looked at workshop entries, the most common problem is not lack of action in the opening, but lack of context – an opening in a “white room” setting, where the protagonist is not placed in the world. I don’t mean that the setting is literally undescribed (though I have seen that). I mean that the reader is given no feel for who the protagonist is, no idea of what anything means in relation to the protagonist, no idea why anything is important to the protagonist or to anyone else – in other words, no hook for emotional engagement. It doesn’t matter if the opening scene is a battle where a hundred thousand people die and the fate of worlds trembles on the outcome. Explosions and fiery doom only matter to the reader if the reader is already engaged with one or more of the characters involved.

Look at the beginning of From All False Doctrine. Nothing is happening. Four young people meet on a beach and chat for a while, with clear hints of the romances to come. That’s it. That’s the whole opening chapter. This is the exact opposite of starting in media res. Yet it’s a charming, intriguing opening that immediately draws in the reader.

Not that one can’t start in the middle of a crisis. That’s fine too. Look at – I hesitate to illustrate things with my own books – but look at Tuyo. (Honestly, when I thought, Hmm, book that starts in a crisis situation, this is what leaped to mind.) This is a quiet crisis – no explosions – but it’s definitely a crisis. Let me think of something similar by someone else, another quiet crisis, okay, the first book of The Sharing Knife series, where right at the beginning, Fawn walks away from her family. She’s in the middle of a very personal crisis. Look at both these characters. They are both themselves from the first moment. Their crises are theirs, no one else’s. And they both are in their worlds. The reader has a sense of both the character and the world right away, not just a confused sense that there’s a crisis somehow for someone. Starting with a wide-angle shot of a battle isn’t the same. Whether you start in the middle of a crisis or not, I think you’re well-advised to start with the protagonist and put the protagonist in the world.

2. Show, Don’t Tell

The previous post hit this, and so did this linked post, so I will just say:

Telling (“He was furious”) is just fine if

(a) the narrator rather than the author is doing the telling;

(b) it’s a transition scene or any other type of scene where it’s best to move along briskly so you can get to the next scene that is actually important.

Showing (“He slammed his fist down on the table”) is preferred if

(a) the author wants to slow down the action

(b) the author wants the reader to engage emotionally in that scene

3. Think of the Worst Thing You Could Do to Your Protagonist and Do That

Elaine T nailed this in her comment on the previous post. I said something like, “Wow, do you get how awful a thing I could do to my protagonist? This is blazingly stupid advice.” Elaine pointed out that the right advice is more like, “Do the worst thing to the protagonist that he can respond to well and that will make him grow as a character.” That’s far, far better advice.

4. Write What You Know

Again, I hit this one in the previous post. Everyone already writes what they know. Writers are people who do things. They write about people who are doing things. It is impossible for a writer not to write what they know. If you don’t make the assumption that writers ARE writing what they know, regardless of whether they’re writing SFF or murder mysteries or whatever, then every single author would be limited to memoir.

This is true even for authors who are writing about nonhuman people, such as Martha Wells in the Raksura series and far more so for James Cambias in A Darkling Sea. The nonhuman characters are still people and they are still doing stuff for reasons that matter to people. If those people were not emotionally comprehensible to humans, then those stories would fail to engage the reader’s interest except at perhaps the most superficial, intellectual level. They don’t fail in that way because they are comprehensible, even if they are different.

It is of course desirable to know something about how nonhuman creatures behave if you’re writing characters like the above. The raksura have several behavioral traits similar to cats. They don’t behave exactly like cats, obviously, but their behavior is coherent and believable in the context of animal behavior. So is the behavior of the extremely different species presented in A Darkling Sea.

5. Kill Your Darlings

In the comments to the previous post, Irina pointed a huge, flaming arrow at the reason this is the worst possible writing advice, wrong on every level: this advice encourages the writer to believe that any scene they think is particularly good in their own writing is actually bad. People shouldn’t try to qualify and backtrack and justify this particular phrase. They should just quit saying this.

The correct advice is: If a scene is not beneficial to the story, if it detracts from the story in some way, then you should take it out even if you particularly love it.

The correct codicil is: maybe you can re-tool that scene and use it somewhere else. Or maybe you can revamp your story’s plot so that the scene you love is in fact beneficial and necessary. Either way, you should hang onto that scene.

The correct assumption is: your feeling about what is best in your own writing is something to trust and value. Your tastes may change and you may decide later you were wrong, but you are probably not that wrong. If you particularly love a scene, there is probably something there worth loving.

I’m going to add a personal note here. I wasn’t sure that readers would necessarily appreciate the Ryo-Tano plotline, which became so hugely important in Tarashana. The relationship between Ryo and Tano pulls attention away from Ryo’s relationship with Aras and it adds massively to the length. But, among other things, it also shifts Ryo from the position of a younger man with far less authority to a position as an older man with far more authority. That develops his character in ways I think are good.

But that’s not why I wrote those scenes. I wrote them because I loved them. Then I gave Tano a through-line that justified his presence in the story. The plotting came way, way after writing his first scenes.

So far every reader who has shared their reactions with me has really liked Tano and appreciated those scenes. Imagine if I’d decided nope, kill your darlings, and taken Tano out of the story completely. That would have been bad for me, unfortunate for the readers who love that plotline and character, and unnecessary. Tano’s presence was beneficial to Ryo’s character development. Also, it was not that hard to set up the broader plot in such a way as to justify Tano’s presence in the story.

Erroneous Advice About Writing Craft

1. Avoid Adverbs / Adjectives / “Be” Verbs / whatever

Honestly. Do not limit your use of the English language in unnecessary ways. Writing is hard enough without tying this sort of anvil around your neck. Go look at any writers widely considered to be good stylists; for example, Patricia McKillip, Nicola Griffith, and Guy Gavriel Kay. Open their books and look at their use of adverbs or whatever the heck you should supposedly avoid. Then forever dismiss proscriptive advice of this kind. Use adverbs or adjectives or “be” verbs in ways that seem good to you. Your judgment of how to use these parts of speech may change over time and that’s fine. You may decide to ax every instance of “very” from your own writing and that’s fine too. But don’t uncritically follow any proscriptive advice and definitely do not contort yourself trying to do so.

2. “Said” is Invisible

“Said” is not necessarily invisible, as I pointed out in this post here, where “said” becomes just about as obtrusive as fingernails on a blackboard.

I’ll pull out the specific snippet of dialogue I used in the linked post:

“I was promised a long story,” Duvall said, after they had gotten their food and drinks.
“I made no such promise,” Dahl said.
“The promise was implied,” Duvall protested. “And besides, I bought you a drink. I own you. Entertain me, Ensign Dahl.”
“All right, fine,” Dahl said. “I entered the Academy late because for three years I was a seminary student.”
“Okay, that’s moderately interesting,” Duvall said.
“On Forshan,” Dahl said.
“Okay, that’s intensely interesting,” Duvall said.

I listened to this book — Scalzi’s Redshirts, which I actually liked quite a bit — and in audio form, this repetition of said-said-said got increasingly painful. Then I got used to it, which took something of an effort of will, and as I say, I did enjoy the story. But, if you’re going to use “said” a lot, you would be wise to vary your sentence structure a lot more than this.

3. “Said” is Too Boring

However, avoiding “said” is even worse. There are a small handful of unobtrusive dialogue tags other than “said,” including answered, responded, muttered, whispered, snapped, and shouted. Overusing any of those makes them more obtrusive. Using anything else that I can think of is obtrusive except with great attention to context plus extreme moderation. That is why movement tags are so useful: they let you avoid any of the above.

But don’t go out of your way to avoid “said,” which is indeed reasonably unobtrusive as long as you vary your sentence structure.

4. Vary Your Word Choice

This is simultaneously both true enough to be justifiable advice and totally wrong. It’s true that you probably don’t want to keep repeating the same words over and over. If you said “discussed” already on one page, you probably don’t want to say “discuss” and “discussed” and “discussion” in the next couple of paragraphs.

That is unfortunately hard for me to avoid. I’ve thought about this, and it seems to me that my brain must get primed with a specific word the first time I use it and then pull variants of that word up again repeatedly for the next few minutes, whenever the context permits. That can happen with practically any word for me, as far as I can tell, and repetitions like this are amazingly hard to spot, though I think reading through the Death’s Lady trilogy in paper did help. We’ll see.

I’m also DYING to see how many typos you all catch NOW. Is my reading the books carefully in paper after already clearing out all the typos you all find enough? We shall soon see.

But! If you are writing about an elephant, say “elephant,” not “lumbering pachyderm.” (Especially since elephants rarely lumber. The feet of elephants are important sensory organs in several different ways, and elephants actually move with great precision and even grace.) Don’t say “elephantine beast.” Don’t say, “animal in the genus Loxodonta.” Just say “elephant,” even if that means you use the same word five times in two paragraphs. Do not, in other words, contort yourself trying to avoid the right word. If it’s the right word, then use it.

5. Once You’ve Got a Rough Draft, Cut Your Wordcount in Half

I guess this may count as something midway between craft-oriented detail advice and big advice about storytelling. But it’s pretty common advice, and it’s wrong.

That is, it’s at least somewhat right for some people. I almost always overwrite. I don’t know how often I’ve cut a hundred pages or more from some story or other, but a lot. I always cut, sometimes extensively. I cut two whole chapters from Tarashana. (Did you notice that we left the starlit lands and poof! emerged from the pass into the winter country? There used to be a chapter there. (It was unnecessary and also contained interactions that constituted too much of a spoiler for later events and for subsequent books. I cut that chapter almost as soon as I wrote it.)) I also cut at the paragraph and especially at the sentence level.

So, I cut almost all the time, and I cut a lot. (Never by half, though.)

But I know other writers who produce an amazingly stripped-down version of a story and then add even more words than I generally cut. They add description and transitions, say, having left all that out of the first draft. For example, David Drake said, during a panel at a convention, that he writes like this. Telling writers who obviously need to add a metric ton of words that they should cut is ridiculous. If they believe this advice, it’s harmful.

It’s important to really believe in your heart that everyone’s writing process is different. Once you believe that, you can stop taking prescriptive advice that is wrong for you, even if the so-called writing authority offering (or declaiming) that advice does so as though their advice constitutes a set of immutable laws of nature.

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Titles that are anti-appealing

So, I just got a list of books that are on sale, via BookBub, which I suppose happens every day, but I seldom pay that much attention.

Today I happened to have time, so I opened the mailing and glanced over the titles that are being offered for sale today.

This is one of them:

So, if you would like a copy of this collection of all Simak’s short fiction, today you are in luck! It’s 1.99 for the Kindle version on Amazon.

But what I mostly noticed was a visceral reaction to the title “I am Crying All Inside,” which can best be summed up as NO NO NO.

Wow, does that not sound a bit like anything I want to read. Only after that reaction did I realize that this is a collection.

Other stories included here:

— I Had No Head and My Eyes Were Floating Way Up in the Air

— Small Deer

— Gleaners

— Ogre

— Madness from Mars

— Gunsmoke Interlude

— The Call from Beyond

— All the Traps of Earth

Now, given those titles, which would YOU choose as the title for the whole collection? I think it’s a no-brainer. The most interesting title is the first in the list — I mean, your eyes are what? — but that isn’t the one that ought to be the title of the collection.

The one story title that is both evocative and non-horrific is The Call from Beyond. That’s the one I would have used.

Agree? Disagree?

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A small pet peeve

Okay, this is a detail.

But it seriously bugs me. And if anything, it’s getting more common, not less.

a) Protagonist meets another character and thinks, right off the bat, that she looks like she’s twenty-one or he is probably about fifty-two.

There is NO WAY to judge some stranger’s age that precisely and accurately when you first see someone. It is IMPOSSIBLE for anybody to know know exactly how old people are when they just look at them for the first time. The author is providing special magic knowledge to their protagonist.

This goes for weight as well. No one can look at someone and just know she weights 152 lbs. If someone out there can do it, I still don’t believe in this peculiar talent when I encounter it in fiction.

I honestly am pretty darn sure I have never, ever done this. My protagonists always think “maybe mid-forties” or something like that. Sometimes they’re wrong, too. For me, this is an obtrusive mistake, one I really dislike.

b) Protagonist meets another character for the first time and knows how to pronounce and spell their name, even though their name is obviously not easy for the protagonist to pronounce or spell.

This isn’t as bad. But there are times when the reader isn’t going to be able to overlook it. If Bob steps through a portal and meets D’sanethalthi, he ought to stumble over that. If he doesn’t, again, that’s because the author is giving Bob special knowledge he really shouldn’t have.

c) The most modern variant, which I’ve seen twice this year so far: Protagonist meets another character for the very first time and, without a word being spoken and without any introduction of any kind, automatically knows this singular person wants to be referred to as they/them.

Authors. Seriously. Cut it out.

New pronoun traditions are one thing. Providing magic knowledge to your characters is cheating. It also implies that something is wrong with real-world people if they cannot tell by magic telepathy that a particular person they meet wants to be referred to as they/them.

Stop doing that.

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Excitement! Anxiety!

Morgan is quite pregnant. She is carrying “at least five” puppies, says my reproductive veterinarian, who did not feel inclined to search around looking for further puppies after confirming five.

She is due on the 28th, which is a highly convenient time, as this is after finals week for the spring semester and a good week or more before the summer session begins.

I am not super, super stressed yet. But I will be in about another two weeks. I’m going to probably let her try to have these puppies the natural way, which is always significantly more terrifying than a c-section, believe me. You get one puppy that malpresents and you can lose them all. Not great for the mother, either. But with five or more, the size of each individual puppy is much more likely to be manageable, plus the puppies will for sure signal when it’s time to go. Just one or two puppies may not send a strong enough TIME IS UP signal to induce labor, which is bad enough; and of course they often get too big, which is worse.

But things can always go wrong, no matter how beautifully everything has gone up until the day. Plus Morgan’s great-grandmother is the one who kept losing puppies two days before the due date.

I’ll be doing progesterone tests at least weekly to help make sure Morgan is not heading into a miscarriage as she gets close to term.

Wow, this is so terrifying.

I won’t post about this again until I have living puppies. Please send good thoughts this way. Five healthy puppies would be so fantastic, I can’t even tell you! That many puppies would also help compensate for the large and unrelieved breeding expenses of the last few years, which would be a very nice thing indeed.

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Finished! For real this time

Okay, I have finished ALL the fiddlly page-by-page corrections and revisions for Death’s Lady Book 3: As Shadow, A Light.

WHEW. Glad that’s over. Also, nine days before I HAD to have the correct version loaded into KDP, so that’s fine.

If you’ve pre-ordered this series, thanks for the vote of confidence! Twice as many people have pre-ordered Book 1 as have preordered the full series, which of course makes perfect sense. Hopefully the teaser at the end of the first book will appeal to everyone who reads the prelude story. We shall see!

This is the exact time when I feel nervous. Everything is finished and it’s just a matter of counting down the days …

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Tuyo is free for the next five days

I realize most of you already have TUYO.

But for anyone who happens to drop by today and doesn’t, well, this is a good time to pick it up.

This is the first time I’ve had the chance to run a serious promotion for TUYO since TARASHANA came out, so I’m really (really) interested in how sales of TARASHANA will look over the next couple of weeks. And KU reads, too.

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Writing tips we love to hate

Via the Passive Voice blog, this post: Five Writing Tips We Love to Hate.

That’s a perennial post topic. Everyone has strong opinions about this, right? This post picked out some common writing tips that I do in fact hate. I grant, there’s one I feel iffy about.

It’s just five, so that’s easy to list:

1) Write every day

2) Show, don’t tell

3) Don’t use prologues

4) Avoid adverbs

5) Write what you know

You can click through to see what the linked post says about all these. It’s a brief post, but some of the comments about these items are good.

I think four of those belong together on one list — they are “big things” — whereas the fifth item is not like the others because it’s a “little thing.” That’s “avoid adverbs,” of course. That’s a detail of craft. I mean, I agree with this post — it’s unwise to contort yourself trying to avoid adverbs (or adjectives, or “to be” verbs, or whatever). The linked post says exactly what you’d expect, “Adverbs are fine but don’t overuse them” — which is all very well, but sooooo standard I am almost as bored by hearing that tip as by hearing proscriptive advice not to use adverbs.

The other four are bigger things.

I’m not sure anyone takes (1) Write every day all that seriously. I mean, perhaps, briefly. Then something unexpected interferes. The kids are all home with chicken pox or your mother suddenly needs to go to the hospital or you trip over nothing and break your very own wrist and poof! Suddenly it is clear that this advice is unrealistic.

I was never so deluded as to think that advice was practical.

Much more practical — the linked post doesn’t break this down — but here: top five ways to make this advice work:

Try to write every day when you are working hard to finish a project.Try to write every day when a deadline is bearing down on you.Make a habit of carving out a specific time to write every day and train your family to respect that time.Write just a thousand words a day (or whatever) for a month or so and see whether the new project looks like its going to go somewhere.Get up early and write every day before anything else is going on.

I often do write nearly every day. This year, that’ll probably be true all year, barring unforeseen complications. In past years, I have often taken weeks or months off and not even touched the laptop for that whole period. I don’t feel guilty about it, either.

(2) Show, don’t tell. That’s more interesting. The linked post provides brief comments and then another link to a post where this is laid out more clearly.

SHOWING is ACTIVE. TELLING is PASSIVE. That’s true. Sometimes telling is lazy writing. But sometimes it’s not. You can’t “show” everything. Painting a word picture in every paragraph turns your novel into a tome.

When is it okay to tell?

when you need faster pacingto show a minimal momentas a way to move your story forwardif you don’t want your book to finish at 350,000 words

When should you show?

when you want to evoke emotion in your readerduring a crucial moment or traumatic eventto point out a turning point in the storyif you want to show a change in relationships or circumstancesto highlight important information or a big decision

I think this is good advice. That whole post is good. Lots of brief, specific examples.

I will add, another unrelated reason you may move into telling rather than showing is: the story is first person and the narrator, not the author, is telling the reader what’s going on. With verve and style, or at least with the right kind of emotional context to appeal to the reader.

Oh, and there’s yet another time to tell rather than show: the story is third person omniscient and the omniscient narrator is telling the reader about the characters or situation. Let’s see. This may be most common in historicals, or maybe that’s just my feeling because that’s what I thought of first:

She was stronger alone; and her own good sense so well supported her, that her firmness was as unshaken, her appearance of cheerfulness as invariable, as, with regrets so poignant and so fresh, it was possible for them to be.

That’s from Sense and Sensibility.

You see the same type of thing in Georgette Heyer:

The Marquis believed himself to be hardened against flattery. He thought that he had experienced every variety, but he discovered that he was mistaken: the blatantly worshipful look in the eyes of a twelve-year-old, anxiously raised to his, was new to him, and it pierced his defences.

That’s from Frederica.

Anyway, telling is fine, showing is fine, you ought to use both depending on what that scene or paragraph or sentence is trying to do.

Moving on,

(5) Write what you know.

This has always struck me as peculiarly stupid advice.

I mean, you’re a person. You’ve lived around other people. You have some general notion of how people behave and why. Go write a novel about people doing things for whatever reasons and there you go, you’re writing what you know.

That’s why it’s possible to write fantasy novels. Obviously. No one is writing about dragons because they know so much about dragons. Fill in for every other genre.

Granted, I prefer when authors get stuff about horses right, stuff about wolves right, stuff about other animals right.

I don’t care that much if authors get stuff about swords wrong, but I hear a lot of readers care about that A LOT. Speaking of which, I’ve heard good things about this book. I haven’t looked at it (yet), but Eric Lowe writes great Quora answers about swords and swordfighting and so on.

Other things that do often matter to fantasy authors: a basic knowledge of history and how other people have lived in other cultures. A very basic awareness of geography and ecology, so that you don’t have people eating rice in a region climactically like Siberia or looking at a raven in a jungle setting. A basic awareness of the fantasy genre and what other people have been writing. But other than that, I think “write what you know” is advice that can be almost entirely disregarded. And has to be, if you plan to write anything other than contemporary fiction. Or, for that matter, memoir.

I saved (3) Don’t use Prologues for last because, well, sometimes it’s good advice? We’ve been here before, a dozen times probably, with all sorts of posts on what-kind-of-prologue-works and what-kinds-of-prologues-I-hate and more-about-prologues here and, yep, lots of posts about this already.

Basically, I’d say, if you can make a prologue work and your prologue doesn’t bore your reader to tears before they get to chapter one, then fine, use a prologue. If you can make your prologue essential, so that the reader both needs it for context AND is drawn into chapter one, then your prologue is excellent.

If your prologue is a history lesson about your world, I will probably not reach chapter one. But IF you can make your prologue really compelling even though it’s a history lesson, good for you, go right ahead.

I always have to pause and think, but I believe I’ve only written two prologues: One in the third Griffin Mage book and one in Winter of Ice and Iron. The opening bit of Timou’s first chapter in The City in the Lake serves as a prologue, in a way. But it’s not the first chapter in the book, so that is disguised. I’m talking about the bit where Timou appears as a baby and then grows up in about three pages so that her part of the story can start. I read one specific scene in The Sorceress and the Cygnet over and over while writing those pages in City, figuring out how to compress time. I don’t think I’ve ever tried to compress time that much again, but I do think it worked fine in City.

So, anyway, I can’t come down too hard on the Yay Prologues or Never Use Prologues side of this argument — even though in general, I don’t much like prologues.

For the fifth item on this list, the author should have come up with something big, not something detail-oriented. What should that have been? Writing advice that is common, that is wrong or at least should not be followed blindly, and that is big.

5) Think of the worst thing that could happen to your character and then do that.

I mean, it’s kind of good advice? I sort of did this, to a limited extent, in both Tuyo and Tarashana. And I will again in Tasmakat, by the way. But this certainly not advice to follow blindly. I mean, the worst thing, really? Because I could easily come up with much worse things than I actually put in the story.

I guess I’d say that this advice makes me wonder about the imagination of the person who suggests it. The worst thing I can come up with is way more terrible than anything I’d want to write — or read.

Also, sometimes you want to write or read a nice story about deepening friendships and then this advice is just totally off base. By the way, if anyone notices when the direct sequel to The Hands of the Emperor comes out, if you think of mentioning that here, that would be great. I do check periodically because I know Goddard said she was working on that, but I’ll likely miss it when it’s actually released.

So what’s another idea for bad writing advice?

Oh, I’ve got it:

5) Kill your darlings.

There. That’s the worst big advice ever given to writers. I mean, I get that it’s supposed to mean, “Take out nonessential stuff even if you personally really like it,” or a better translation would be, “If something is actually wrong for the story, take it out, even if you personally really like it.” But if that’s what you mean, SAY THAT. This “kill your darlings” phrase is thrown around like it makes sense as it stands, and it does not.

Agree, disagree, or offer a different suggestion for

5) Bad Writing Advice

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“Bloat” is not the right term

Here’s a post at CounterCraft: Novels and Novellas and Tomes

The novel is an extremely flexible form. It can come out in countless shapes, include infinite content, and end up almost any length. Let’s call the lower limit of a novel 40,000 words. Long novels like Infinite Jest and The Stand are more than 10 times that length …

Take high fantasy, a genre famous for its massive tomes ever since Tolkien. Even those tomes have grown longer as the decades have passed. The last individual volume of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series has close to the same wordcount (422k) as all three volumes of Lord of the Rings combined (480k)! There’s been similar bloat in children’s fantasy. The Narnia books were all 39k to 64k in length, novellas to short novel range. Compare that to the volumes of His Dark Materials (109-168k per volume) and Harry Potter (74k-257k). …

In general, popular genre fiction—thrillers, mysteries, etc.—and commercial fiction tends to be longer than so-called literary fiction these days, although all genres of novels became more bloated in the second half of the 20th century. Then again, pre-20th century novels were often quite long. Charles Dickens novels like Great Expectations (183k) and Bleak House (360k) or Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (126k) or Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (183k) and other novels of that era were frequently tomes by even today’s standards.

Okay, first, did anybody realize that any Narnia books were that short? Or that all of them were that short? I didn’t.

Second, I think it’s about time to quit defining 40,000 words as a novel. Good grief. If you’re under half the average length of a novel, let’s just re-define the categories and call that a novella. If it were up to me, hmm, I think I’d say that a novella is from 30,000 to, say, 50,000 words. Or even from 40,000 to 60,000. I know, I know, there would be lots of argument about that.

But I don’t actually care about how long novellas are at the moment. These are the phrases in the linked post that caught my eye: “similar bloat in children’s fantasy” and “all genres of novels became more bloated.”

My immediate response: It’s not bloat as long as the length works for the story. This is true no matter how long the finished work may be.

It is bloat if the story would clearly have been better if cut by 30,000 words or more. I grant that the last volume of the Harry Potter series did strike me as bloated; I thought in particular that the wandering-in-the-forest scenes could and should have been cut from a hundred pages (or whatever; they seemed absolutely interminable to me) to about three paragraphs.

Now, in contrast, let’s consider how far above its ideal length, say, Victoria Goddard’s The Hands of the Emperor might be. This is listed as 970 pp. I suspect that is Kindle-edition normalized pages. The hardcover is listed at just about 900 pages. Is it too long? How much too long? I would personally say that it could have been trimmed, but not that much; if certain aspects of the plot had been revised a trifle, it could have been trimmed farther, but would still have wound up very long. But it is not bloated. There were zero scenes I wanted to skim or skip.

I’m realizing now that this is how I define a book as bloated — not at all by length, but by whether I want to skim or skip over a significant part of the story. I mean, skim not because I don’t much care for a scene, but because I’m bored by a scene. Say, the first or second time I read it. Depending on the book, I may skip or skim a lot more when I’m re-reading a book for the ninth time. That’s different, obviously.

So, I define bloat mostly by whether I want to skim across boring transitional scenes, and also partly by whether I think the book would have been objectively improved by cutting a hundred pages or more.

Out of curiosity, did any of you find that you skimmed forward across scenes in Tarashana? I really am curious. One beta reader got the specific request: Please tell me if you find yourself skimming. She didn’t, but I wonder if anyone else did? The length of that story suits me personally, but as a rule, I prefer long novels both as a writer and as a reader. I realize not everyone feels the same way. It’s 210,000 words. I’m sure the author of the linked post would refer to it as bloated. But I did cut about 100 pages from the first finished rough draft. That’s where in my own opinion I got read of the parts that should have been cut.

I’ve also been thinking of the first book of the Tenai — Death’s Lady — trilogy as a novella. But it’s not, technically. It’s 63,000 words. That’s a little over 200 pages. Does that seem like a novella to you all? I can think of short, tight novels that are shorter than that. But this seems very short to call a novel.

The second book is 95,000 words. The third is 135,000 words. If you don’t think about length in words, then it’s easy to translate this into pages: as you go through the series, each book is just about 100 pages longer than the previous one. The whole thing put together is the longest single work I’ve ever written — 293,000 words; about 900 pages. Even if you cut off the semi-independent first book, the other two comprise a single story of 230,000 words. Again, bloated? Well, you can shortly be the judge, but obviously I don’t think so.

So — what defines “bloat” for you? Length as such? Unnecessary length? Saggy scenes that you skim over? Or something else?

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