Phil Elmore's Blog, page 3

Do You Hate Your Readers Like I Hate Writing about Writing?

You are an author with a small but perceptible reader base. One of your readers posts a political opinion with which you disagree. Do you A) ignore it; B) post your opposing opinion; or C) tell the reader you hope his children are raped to death by wild dogs? If you said C, congratulations: You’re a psychopath. And yet in all the bickering I’ve seen writers and authors do on Facebook, I can honestly say that I have seen someone who believed Option C was actually a viable and worthy response.

One of the things I hate is writing about writing. I do it because this is what you’re supposed to do to promote your work (and as someone with some experience in the field I do feel good about passing on what I’ve learned to this point). Always, in the back of mind, is the understanding that when I am writing about writing, I am not actually getting any paid work done. A working writer lives and dies by how much he can accomplish. To pay the bills off the sweat of your brain, you have to work; you have to work hard; you have to work hard and fast. Those are the realities of making a living this way. Writing about writing may feel good, but it’s ultimately an indulgence, even if it’s done for promotional purposes.

I get kind of sick when I see writers (and yes, I’m aware that I sometimes use that term when technically what I mean is authors — people who write fiction — rather than people who write to spec for pay) who maintain elaborate blogs about writing, success in the writing field, “how to fail” while making it as an indie author, and so on. If you’re not already making enough money off your writing for it to be a significant part of your life, you have no business telling the world all about the craft of writing. In other words, if you’re not already achieving at least a limited amount of success, your deep and weighty opinions about the profession… aren’t. You’re wasting precious productive time indulging yourself in writing about writing.

There’s a worse offense, though, than indulging yourself in this way. That is hating your readers. People like the author I mentioned — the guy who, yes, told a Facebook friend, reader, and fan that he wanted the man’s family raped to death by dogs — aren’t even that successful as authors. They’ve stepped onto the lowest rung of recognition (the one I’m sitting on) and there are a few people who know what they write and who like it. So what do they do? They treat these people like crap. They act like they expect total fealty from people they hardly know. “Oh, you liked one of my books but not the sequel? Then screw you, buddy. I hope a pack of kangaroos steals your grandmother’s car and leaves her for dead.”

These same entitled, ungrateful authors will post lengthy diatribes about the many ways their fans and readers displease them. Their fans are posting memes they don’t like on Facebook; their fans aren’t reviewing their books enough; their fans are daring to pose questions that the author thinks are tiresome. One of the more offensive articles I’ve seen floating around the Internet is something like, “Ten Things Never to say to a Writer.” The questions all seem to revolve around the author’s sense of self-importance. And that’s why some authors believe, even at the lowest levels of success, that they can treat their fans like garbage, take them for granted, or scold them for having opinions of their own. Most authors are self-absorbed children.

We should all be so lucky as to have people asking us repetitive, annoying questions about our work. It means not only that people care about what we do, but that they care enough to hear what we think about it. If you ever have a few hours to kill, just ask an author about the craft of writing. He’ll go on and on for hours. I should know; it’s my favorite thing in the world. Never ask me to talk about my work if you have a plane to catch later this week.

The fact is that what writers and authors do simply isn’t that big a deal. The most self-indulgent authors seem to think of themselves as national treasures. They’re not. They’re bass players in Han Dold City. Nobody ever says to himself, “Where am I going to find a writer?” You can’t throw a cat into traffic and not hit a car driven by one. Now, yes, it’s hard to find a good writer, someone who consistently hits deadlines and produces quality work across a broad swath of subject matter categories. That’s something that I can do, but even I’m going to miss deadlines, and I’m good at this. Still, there is a ton of competition for what I do, much of it at cutthroat rates from third-world countries like India.

There’s an even greater surplus of fiction authors. Everybody and his uncle is writing the Great American Novel, or wants to, and now that anybody can publish to Amazon, there’s nothing stopping any amateur from declaring himself a published author. I’d rather it be that way than the old model, where your choices were the big publishers or a vanity press… but the point stands. Authors, even successful authors, aren’t that big a deal. Many of them aren’t even good people. (A surprising number are fairly awful.) Even the best of these can’t afford to mistreat readers and fans, though. Those readers are the whole reason you’ve experienced any success at all. They are your success personified and you must respect them.

Respect takes many forms. It starts with refusing to indulge yourself too often… or take yourself too seriously. It hinges on the respect you show the people who make possible what you are trying to do. Your readers are not your followers. They are your supporters, and there’s a significant difference.

Are You Competing with Your Fellow Writers or Authors?

Let me start by saying that I make a distinction between writers — people who make a living by writing for clients — and authors, people who write stories. If you work a job that is not writing in order to support yourself and your family, then you may still be an author (amateur or otherwise), but you are not a writer. To me, the term writer connotes a commitment to the profession that ties it to your continued sustenance. In other words, working writers survive by putting words on paper (or screens).  Authors write stories. Some of them are very successful. Some of them are also writers. Many of them are amateurs.

I am both an author and a working writer. This does not make me special; as an author, my work is not well known. There are many writers like me. I write everything: website copy, marketing material, ghost-written fiction, self-help guides, instructional manuals, etc. Sometimes, my talents as an author and my talents as a writer overlap, such as when I ghost-write adventure fiction. I wrote over twenty novels for Gold Eagle/Worldwide Library/Harlequin Enterprises in their Mack Bolan/Stony Man/The Executioner series, for example.

Writers definitely compete with each other. If you and I both bid for an editing job on a freelancer website like Upwork, only one of us can get the job. That’s the purest form of competition there is. Simply put, yes, you are competing with other writers if you also make a living from writing. But that does not automatically make all other writers your enemies. I have a couple of friends who are writers who are also allies — people who send work my way when they have too much, or when a client makes them aware of an assignment that is not a good fit for my friends, but might be a good fit for me. Even writers with identical skill sets sometimes job out work to each other, because schedules can get tight.

Interestingly, despite all the competition for work in this field, it’s remarkably hard to find a good writer. I know, because at various times I’ve tried to find one to whom I could sub-let some of my workload. I know some great writers, but they charge more than I do; to make a profit on farming out some of my assignments I would need to find someone reliable who works more cheaply than me. That is a tall order, and to date I’ve not yet found it. Periodically I try again.

That brings me to authors. I’ve not always been good about making the distinction between writers and authors, using the terms interchangeably when I should not have. But I’ve said before that most writers — most authors — hate each other. We’re all jealous of each other’s success, and deep down, we’re all convinced that if one guy gets a lucrative contract, he’s just somehow subtracted from the finite total of contracts available to the rest of the writing world. Thus, we believe that one author’s success comes at another author’s expense, even indirectly. It makes us weird with each other.

The thing to remember is that unlike when you are a working writer, you are not in direct competition with your fellow authors. There is no barrier to you being published. If your work is good, you can publish it yourself. You may never reach many people, but you’ll reach some, and if what you do is great, word will get around. The fact that a horrible “social justice” whiner of an author got a million-dollar contract with a major publisher doesn’t stop you from publishing your book, no matter how much you dislike that other guy. And it’s not as if the audience is finite, either. Ask a reader if he’d rather have two great books to read, or only one; rare is the individual who does not want more options.

None of this becomes a problem, in fact, until you become the sort of author who obsesses over his “competition.” I know of at least a couple “independent” authors who go out of their way to attack their peers. They believe the heat and light of flaming another author means higher hit counts on their blogs and thus greater attention for their work. Ultimately, though, these antics don’t serve you. They make you look immature and, worse, they make you look horribly insecure. Sadly, personal dislikes and politics do enter into these conflicts, as the recent “Sad Puppies” row over the Hugo Awards demonstrated. There are definitely authors in the market who believe other authors don’t deserve to be known, to be bought, or to be read. People who think this way are usually pretty awful people. They may or may not also be mediocre writers.

The lesson is this: If you are an author, focus on the quality of your work. No amount of attacking other authors will improve your writing. If you are a writer, focus on the service you provide for your clients. You are in competition with your fellow writers, yes, but that doesn’t mean you can’t also work with them. In all cases, try not to make enemies you don’t need to make. Most authors aren’t exactly dangerous people, but a few of them are individuals you don’t want to run into at a convention after you’ve spent several blog posts running them down. They might just come take the matter up with you directly.

Every Client is Temporary

There are writers, and there are working writers. A working writer is someone who makes his living writing to specification, on contract, by assignment, and so forth. In other words, he or she writes for clients. Most working writers would gladly trade the day-to-day grind of word counts, painful edits, vague outlines, and rougher-than-rough preliminary input for the cushy life of an author. An author is somebody who writes stories. A writer is somebody who types out everything else, from blog posts to web copy to white papers to… other author’s works. A working writer is a ghost-writer, but he’s also a gunslinger, the kind of guy you bring in to write something you can’t or don’t want to write yourself. A working writer cannot live without clients, because it is his clients that pay his way. But every working writer must reconcile himself to one inevitable fact about those who pay his bills: every client is temporary.

My father ran his own technical writing business for twenty years. I remember vividly when he retired as the assistant plant manager at a factory, where he had worked his way up to management from engineering. He received the lion’s share of his “profit sharing” for his time at the company, taking a percentage loss by leaving early. With that money, he founded his company, buying a Tandy 1000SX (that’s an ancient home computer, if you’re under 30), a monochrome monitor, and a dot-matrix printer. In the early days of his company, he had many smaller clients. By the time I was in college and working for him as a draftsman and writer during the summers, he still had a few smaller jobs — but most of his work came from the same massive company, which was funneling him the lion’s share of his income. Times were good and his company prospered. At the height of his success, he was employing myself, my uncle, and various other family members in a rotating third employee slot.

You can see the inevitable problem, of course: Eventually, his major client started to have financial trouble. Management changes prompted different policies concerning how outsourced documentation was to be handled. The money dried up, and with it, the business. Suddenly, a thriving company found itself foundering for lack of work — purely because, for years, there had been no reason to find any. Work that is knocking at your door is always much more profitable than work you have to go find, if only because of the time factor. A freelancer, a working writer, lives and dies by cash flow. The more time it takes to develop a client and secure payment, the more bills go unpaid in the meantime.

In the course of your career as a working writer, clients will come and go. Each one of them lives out a client life cycle and, while some progress through the steps faster than others (and some skip most of the steps because they do not offer repeat business), I’m convinced that life cycle is unavoidable. That is to say that no matter who the client is, no matter how much business they give you, no matter how much money you make from them, eventually, the money’s going to stop.

The typical client life-cycle plays out like this:

Development
Working Together
Repeat Business
Friends or Coworkers
Waning Phase
Parting Ways

In the development phase. This is when you first start talking to the client: They found you through your website, they were referred to you by someone else, they hooked up with you on a freelance site like elance or Upwork, or whatever. This is when the client explains what he or she wants (or you pitch the client what you are offering). The two of you dance a little bit, both of you trying to get the other to offer a price first. Eventually, you agree on that price. Maybe you a sign a contract; maybe you let e-mail and PayPal serve as your contract.

The next step in the client life-cycle is the working together phase. You deliver on the job, and if the client isn’t happy or thinks he or she can do better, the cycle probably stops right there (although it’s not necessarily unrecoverable). In most cases, you deliver as promised and the client, satisfied, pays you. This may be the last you ever hear from that individual, but in some cases, the relationship moves on to the repeat business phase. The client gives you job after job, coming to rely on you for certain needs. For most freelancers and working writers, this is the best-case scenario. You’re regularly making money, the work is coming to you (so you don’t have to burn time and effort finding it), and you and the client have gotten to know each other well enough that you can skip some formalities.  For many writers, this is the most profitable phase of the client life-cycle.

The step that follows is rarer, but still common enough: It’s the friends or coworkers stage. This is when you’ve worked with a given client long enough that you’ve come to consider them friend and peer, rather than simply an employer. You will find yourself doing favors for the client at this phase and, if the relationship is a legitimate one, they’ll return the favors. They might refer other business to you; they might advance you money when they know you’re in a bind; you find yourself discussing your personal lives. The “coworkers” component of this phase occurs when a client hires you on full-time or part-time, becoming a regular and predictable contributor to your wages.

When you’ve come to anticipate your income being a certain amount, it is difficult to adjust to losing it. The waning phase of the client life-cycle is a reminder that you can’t afford to become complacent where business development is concerned. In many cases, the waning phase occurs because the client is running out of money. When his or her business does not prosper, there is less money to hire you. There are other reasons business might dry up from a client, though. He or she may grow dissatisfied with your service (even if this is unreasonable), he or she may become entitled and expect more from you than you are willing to provide, the client’s business needs might evolve, or there could be any of countless other factors at play. In most cases, it isn’t personal; in some cases, it might be. Regardless, the money is drying up, and you have to understand that this will eventually happen with every client — no matter how long you’ve worked with that person or business.

The final stage of the client life-cycle is parting ways. You and the client agree that you will not be working together anymore. Some clients skip right to this step after a single job, because they don’t come back to you for more. Others come to this point after years of repeat business. You must do your best, at this stage, to end things on at least a neutral note. Your goal is to wrap things up with the client so you can stop spending time on his or her projects, while making sure that you and the client both understand your work together has ended.

Do not burn bridges if you can help it, and let the client know that you would be receptive to new work in the future if the two of you can come to an agreement. I usually say, simply, “I’ll be here the next time you need me,” and leave it at that. You never know when a client you thought was gone for good might start a new venture, or experience renewed success, and suddenly rediscover a need for your talents.

The time to develop new business is not the parting ways phase, when you’re scrambling to plug a gap in your cash flow. You should be developing new clients all the time, but especially when a client enters the waning phase, it’s time to find income to replace what you’re losing (and what you’ve still got left to lose). A working writer’s day-to-day life is a constant hustle for work followed by long hours of typing out assignments. It’s not glamorous. It’s not even fun, some days. But it is a living, and an honest one, which you can make off the sweat of your brain.

Here’s to the Next 527,040 Minutes

As 2015 comes to a close, I have to say that I’ve learned a lot this year. It wasn’t my best year, but it wasn’t my worst. I had a little fun, I spent a lot of time working (and trying to catch up), and I face the new year with a mixture of anticipation and concern: Anticipation, because a new year always brings with it new opportunities, and concern, because I feel I am on the cusp of a variety of important career changes, developments, and challenges.

If I could describe one thing that characterizes my thoughts on 2015, it is a lack of tolerance. I am, despite my ardent beliefs to the contrary in years past, a very patient person. I possess a grasp of diplomacy and I am a communicator by trade. When I am offensive or inflammatory, this is done deliberately, to achieve certain very specific professional goals. I am not an intolerant person and, despite my approval or disapproval of anyone’s choices, lifestyle, opinions, or beliefs, I am actually reasonably accommodating to and accepting of anyone who knows me. I say this simply as a statement of fact. I think most people who interact with me on a regular basis understand this to be true.

As 2016 dawns, however, I find myself increasingly intolerant of the weaknesses of others. If you take offense easily, if every statement I utter and with which you disagree is somehow a personal affront, if you are a delicate and special snowflake who requires special treatment with the most delicate of velvet gloves lest your pretty little feelings be hurt, please don’t waste my time by telling me how angry you are with me. Simply go your own way. You will be doing so without rancor or prejudice on my part; I bear you no ill will. I simply have run out of patience for drying your tears and telling you that everything is going to be okay.

I watched a lot of my closest friends go through serious challenges this past year. I think in every case we all grew stronger for it, and I’m learning, as I get older, that life isn’t more or less difficult as you age — it’s simply that you’ve seen more of it, you relate to more of it, and you feel greater empathy for those going through difficulties that you, yourself, have faced. If there is another lesson I’ve learned in the last year, it is that the people you think you know are never quite who they seem. Even those in whom you have believed for years can fail, can betray, can turn at the most disruptive possible moment. This is a terrible shame, but I accept that, too. It simply means that those left standing — after the traitors and failures have cleared the room — are that much more valuable to one’s life.

I wish for you a successful and fulfilling 2016. This is, in some ways, an entirely arbitrary division. Nothing about you or me will be different at one second past midnight tonight. We will not have learned anything in that second that we did not learn in the last twelve months, and even that period of time is delineated for convenience rather than meaning. Still, insofar as the calendar means anything, it is a way of cataloging, taking stock, and documenting the days and minutes of your life. These are precious, and I hope you have many more of them. I hope each and every one of the

of 2016 is good to you, and I’m grateful for your friendship — however lasting or fleeting it may turn out to be.

Kind regards,

Phil Elmore

31 December 2015

Machina Obscurum: A Collection of Small Shadows

I’m published again, this time in J. Edward Neill’s Machina Obscurum. This is a full-length (about 70,000 words) collection of short works, of which my flash fiction, “Ice Cream,” is one.

I wrote “Ice Cream” specifically to see if I could get it included and was pleased when the answer was yes. I don’t know J. Edward Neill personally, but his professionalism and attitude really impresses me. I’m looking forward to curling up with a cup of coffee over the holidays to enjoy reading this from cover to cover.

When Politics Get Personal

Writers are an expressive lot, and like any group of human beings, they have politics. I am always a little surprised when an action writer is anything other than a conservative or libertarian, to be honest, but I recently found out one of the long-time writers of a series to which we’ve both contributed is such an ardent left-winger that he’s actually said Republicans should die. There are plenty of authors whose left-of-center politics are well known, such as John Scalzi or George R.R. Martin. The recent flap over the Hugo Awards and the “Sad Puppies” campaign highlighted some of the more right-of-center authors out there.

I don’t think any author whose politics lean left has ever worried that he might miss out on an opportunity, a review, or a fair shake because of those politics, but I know there are conservative and libertarian authors who have. That’s just the nature of the industry. If your politics are “wrong,” there are outlets, big outlets, that won’t want to touch you. You can either downplay your politics or you can be out and proud, but if you choose the latter, you have to live with the consequences.

Most of the time, though, where you’re going to encounter politics with fellow authors (or with family, or with anyone else) is on social media. Recently, on Facebook, an author whose work I love told me that he wanted pit bulls to rip my testicles off (among other exhortations). This was after he told a reader — a fan of his — that he wanted that fan’s children raped. All of this came about because the author in question disagreed with a political opinion of mine. It also wasn’t the first time I had expressed an opinion only to have him call me out personally, to accompanying profanity so complex and richly textured that only an author of great experience could have thought it up.

I try to be very patient with people, although I’m not always successful. In the case of this fellow, I’ve admired his work for years. He is an immensely talented guy. Unfortunately, he doesn’t handle political disagreement well. He got angry and attacked me personally. When I told him that doing so would be deleterious to our friendship, he told me to go to hell (again, among other exhortations). He had made his position clear: We could not be “Facebook friends.”

What’s sad about these types of interactions is not merely that they are unnecessary. If you disagree with someone’s opinion politically, you can choose to ignore it or you can disagree politely. If the two of you go on disagreeing politely, you might just have an interesting conversation. Most of the time on social media, though, people get angry and their disagreements turn into spats. When we don’t respect each other’s boundaries, those spats become feuds and those feuds become bitter resentments.

How does this affect you as a writer? Well, it’s a fact that you’re better off not discussing politics. You enjoy the most advantages, for your career and for your professional life, if people focus on your work and not on you as a person. If you are already associated with your politics to a high degree, acknowledge at the outset that it is inescapable. Don’t emphasize it on your website or in your blog. If you must talk politics on social media, have a long fuse and be patient with people. Give them plenty of chances to back away from affronts and to reconsider their positions.

If you respect yourself, however, you must also terminate social media connections with people who disrespect you personally and repeatedly. People will take as much power in a relationship as you give them. If you teach them that they can abuse you personally and repeatedly, that is what will occur. When I find that a social network connection is untenable, I delete it, with no grudges held and no hard feelings.

If the author in question comes up in the future, I will continue to recommend his work. If I have the opportunity to work with him in the future on a project that is not political, I will not let his anger toward me interfere. What I won’t do, however, is permit repeated and personal disrespect — and neither should you. If you’re going to be a writer and you’re going to use social media, you have to set and enforce boundaries. Expecting civility and respect, requiring people to treat you as you treat them, is not at all unreasonable. It is a good standard to set and meet… and it requires diligent enforcement.

To sum up, avoid politics if you can. It only detracts from your non-political writing. If you must discuss politics, do it on social media, not your professional blog or website. If you come into conflict with other writers or with readers who disagree, be patient and kind while giving them every chance to back away from disrespect. As a last resort, terminate the connection without prejudice. Set this as your goal and shoot for it. You may not always meet it, but you should aspire to do so.

Your Opening Is Weak

“Always grab the reader by the throat in the first paragraph,” said Paul O’Neill, “send your thumbs into his windpipe in the second, and hold him against the wall until the tagline.” It’s some of the best advice you’ll get when it comes to opening a novel. If your opening lines don’t grab the reader by the throat, they need work. Your book needs a hook, and that hook has to dig in from the first words.

There are two basic ways to open your novel. You can write a provocative prologue in which we don’t see your protagonist, or we can meet your protagonist right away. If we meed him right away, I have a rule to offer you. I say “offer” because it’s really more of a guideline than a rule. It doesn’t hold true in action series work, for example, because it would get ridiculous quickly, and there are some stories where it just doesn’t fit. If it does fit, though, consider this:

When we meet your protagonist, we should meet him at the worst moment on the worst day of his life.

Use this as an exercise to punch up the opening of your novel. For example, consider the following opening:

Bastille smashed through a trio of coeds on his way to the fence, putting them on the paving. He was going to hear about that. He was sure to have bloodied at least one of them. They wailed after him. He was here to protect their lives, not their dignity, but he was still going to hear about it.

Huffing, face burning, a stitch growing in his side, he reached the south fence. His thumb found the safety on the rifle while he was still running. That was a violation of University procedure. Getting caught moving with a weapon off safe would get him disciplined.

The armor-piercing rounds in the carbine’s magazine would get him fired.

That is an actual opening from a first draft I wrote for a novel. I showed it to one of my mentors, someone who frequently provides me with great feedback and criticism on my writing, and he told me it wasn’t good enough. It was, in fact, pretty weak. Several edits later, here’s what that opening looks like:

The students had been jammed together in the auditorium when the first of the creatures hit the perimeter fence. A severed head landed on the stage. Then the screaming started.  There had been no way to evacuate them all.

He stepped in a puddle of blood. Someone was screaming. To his left, a body burned.

He touched his left ear. “Ethan,” he said. “Ethan, come in. Ethan!”

Still nothing. Ethan had been assigned to this section of the quad. Maybe he had gone to ground with a group of students. Maybe he had barricaded himself somewhere. Maybe Ethan’s carbine was the last line of defense.

Don’t be dead, Ethan.

Bastille closed his eyes. His lungs ached. This was his fault.

Now compare the two. The language is much tighter and reads more quickly, which is what you want in a fast-paced opening for a thriller, action novel, or horror piece like this. There’s also a much more immediate building of tension. In the first opening, you get the same information, more or less, about a vague threat the protagonist, Bastille, is fighting.

In the second opening, you get slapped in the face with just how awful that threat is, not to mention a healthy does of internal conflict because our hero is blaming himself for some aspect of it. There’s additional tension from the fact that our hero is now looking for someone specific whom he fears may be dead. Overall, it’s a much stronger opening that better thrusts the reader into the action.

There’s another trick for punching up your openings that you should consider, and that is chopping out your opening paragraphs. Many authors try to set the scene to the detriment of the actual throat-grabbing O’Neill was talking about. I do it myself, and even knowing that I do it, I can’t predict what needs to be eliminated until I actually write it. For example, here is the original, first-draft opening of my novella, Augment: Human Services:

Techno-lounge music thumped and bumped and unced from inside the nightclub, synchronized to exterior displays to create a harmonic strobe. The lights would give any human being a headache after a few minutes’ exposure.  Chalmers, accustomed to these petty provocations, averted his eyes through long habit.  As he strapped on the forearm bracers of his armor, he glanced to Nile, who was staring out the window on the passenger side.  Drops of water dotted the plastic, the shadows they cast drawing phantom pocks on the younger man’s face.

“You’re going to get a migraine,” Chalmers warned.  “Don’t look at it.”

Nile jerked his head back as if he’d been caught gazing into an acetylene torch.  He squeezed his eyes shut and put his hands on the dashboard.

“Relax,” Chalmers said.  He began tightening the straps of his chest plate.  The spinal guard, overlapping steel plates running down the center of his back, clanked as he shook himself.  Nile opened one eye experimentally, then both, as Chalmers press-checked the gas-operated automatic before shoving it into the high-ride holster over his appendix.  He grunted as the grips of the gun dug into his gut.

It’s not bad, and it sets the mood I wanted, but the first paragraph isn’t a very good hook. On review, the opening should start with Chalmers’ warning to Nile. Here is how the opening appears in the final draft:

“You’re going to get a migraine,” Chalmers warned. “Don’t look at it.”

Techno-lounge music thumped and bumped and unced from inside the nightclub, synchronized to exterior displays to create a harmonic strobe. The lights would give any human being a headache after a few minutes’ exposure. Chalmers, accustomed to these provocations, averted his eyes through long habit. As he strapped on the forearm bracers of his armor, he glanced at Nile, who had been staring out the window on the passenger side. Drops of water dotted the plastic, the shadows they cast drawing phantom pocks on the younger man’s face.

Nile jerked his head back as if he’d been caught eyeballing an acetylene torch. He squeezed his eyes shut and put his hands on the dashboard.

“Relax,” Chalmers said. He began tightening the straps of his chest plate. The spinal guard, overlapping steel plates running down the center of his back, clanked as he shook himself. Nile opened one eye experimentally, then both, as Chalmers press-checked the gas-operated pistol before shoving it into the high-ride holster over his appendix. Chalmers grunted as the grips of the gun dug into his gut.

It’s a subtle change, but it makes all the difference in the world. Eliminating the first paragraph (and in this case simply moving it to after the first line of dialogue) more immediately puts the reader into the story while also raising tension. What is who looking at? Why would it give them a migraine? The reader is hooked and wants more information.

The otherwise minor shift also puts the focus on Chalmers, the protagonist, from the outset, rather than focusing on the setting and then shifting to Chalmers. Again, this is a subtle change, but the novel benefits greatly from it. There are also a few tweaks to the prose that emphasize Chalmers’ tough-guy attitude. “Gazing” is too soft for a tough guy like Chalmers; if he were assessing his passenger’s behavior, he’d think the word “eyeballing” before he’d think “gazing.”

(Not coincidentally, the chapter goes on to describe Chalmers’ being framed for murder on a day that is, unquestionably, the worst day of his life.)

When writing an opening, always look for what will grab the reader most powerfully. Then look at what you can trim, move, or completely delete to clear the way for that hook. You’ll find that almost every first chapter you write is bogged down with extra fat that can be sliced away to reveal a first-class hook. Nothing you write will ever see more sets of eyes than the first paragraph. If you want the reader to continue past that, you’ve got to make a compelling first impression.

 

You’re Not A Big Enough Thief: Writing Characters and Dialogue

Characters are something I’ve always done well or, if not well, then easily. What I mean is that some authors spend a lot of time agonizing over both characters and character names.  If you have trouble with either, there’s a simple answer to the question, “Why do I struggle so much writing characters?” That answer is, “You’re not a big enough thief.”

Names are the easiest part. You don’t have to be JK Rowling, who is known for her incredibly evocative names. You just need names that sound decent and, hopefully, which embody some aspect of the character as you picture them. Just pick names from lists of baby names online. If your character has an ethnic background or a specific nationality, there are endless numbers of lists online for names and surnames for every nationality you can imagine. Choose a first name from column A and a last name from Column B if the name feels like a good fit for your character. You don’t have to manufacture it yourself. You can just steal a first name and a last name from lists already compiled for you. I do this all the time for surnames of specific nationalities. For example, if I need an Iraqi last name, I look up lists of Persian surnames and Persian baby names and pick two that go together and sound good to my ear.

As for the characters themselves, you can steal those too. You are surrounded by realistic, vivid characters. You have access to an endless supply of them. That supply starts with your family, your friends, your acquaintances, and your coworkers. People will sometimes ask me if they can be a character in one of my books, and I always tell them, “Don’t worry. Everybody who knows me ends up in a book eventually.” There are two reasons for using people you know as characters in books: It makes it easier for you to write and it makes it easier for you to keep track of your cast.

When I’m writing multiple characters, I tend to pick people I know or, more often, certain aspects of people I know. Often I will take the defining traits of a friend or acquaintance and exaggerate them to suit my purposes. A villain can be based on anyone you know, from a hated coworker or boss to your best friend. The key is to view everyone in your books as actors and then visualize what that friend would say or do in a given situation (taking into account the aspects of their personality that you may have amplified to make the character more useful to your story).

If you don’t have a friend or enemy you want to use, you can use actual actors. I tend to picture all of my narratives visually. That means I’ll pick famous actors whom I think would be perfect for the “role” of the character I’m writing. Then I picture that actor and how I think he or she would behave in a given scenario. For example, take James Marsters. He was great as “Spike” on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and he’s turned up in a few other films I’ve seen since then. If I model a character on him, he’ll have Spike’s English accent and his generally cynical, anti-social demeanor, but he won’t be a truly evil character in most incarnations. I can picture how my almost-Spike character would behave and, more importantly, I can picture how he would speak. That means that when the character engages in dialogue with other characters, I can predict what he would and would not say (and how he might or might not say it).

There’s no shortage of characters to model from your own life, or from television and movies. Just steal what you need and make it your own. Don’t create any obvious cookie-cutter simulations of more famous characters (you don’t want to write a spy novel about an English super-spy named Jules Blonde, for example, unless he’s a deliberate parody), but do feel free to steal liberally from the catalog of people, personalities, and actors that you know, then picture them as the cast of your novel.

When creating a character, always have in mind the backstory for that character, even if this backstory is never discussed. The character’s history informs his decisions and his dialogue now, and the better you know it (and thus the character), the easier it is to predict what the character does and says. Where this development pays off is in dialogue. New writers often find it hard to write realistic dialogue — speech that does not found stilted, awkward, or contrived. But if you know your character very well, all you have to do is present him or her with a situation. The dialogue will flow from your conception of that character almost as if you aren’t writing it so much as transcribing it.

As for where that backstory comes from, I steal those too. I make up elaborate histories for my characters from bits and pieces of movies, anecdotes people have shared with me, news and current events, and anything else I can think of. I always try to be respectful of my friends and family (I don’t share sensitive personal stories, for example) and I am careful not to violate anyone else’s intellectual property (I change many details to this end), but basically every backstory is just pieces of countless other people’s backstories.

One of my favorite parts of writing any Mack Bolan or Executioner novel was always the chapters that I devoted to my villains. The lead characters of these action novel franchises were not dynamic characters. They were fixed points, meaning they were the same at the beginning and the end of the story, by contract and by design. Where I was allowed to have fun was with my villains. I delighted in fully developing these antagonists by giving them elaborate backstories that they would ponder at least once in the book. This gave the reader more insight into why the villain was being villainous (he did not just “wake up one morning hating the world,” the motivation for the psychotic villains in the Sylvester Stallone action film Cobra) and also made their ultimate defeat more interesting and satisfying. It helped me immensely to develop the backstories for these villains because I could then move forward more confidently in writing their actions and speech.

The late author Joel Rosenberg once described the interaction of two of his characters who were reciting verses from a song or a poem (I forget which). In his afterword, he said something to the effect of, “I wanted them to recite the whole thing, but I couldn’t quite get them to do it.” This is the great example of the phenomenon I am describing. He knew his characters well enough that their dialogue flowed from that knowledge and was informed by it. Forcing the character to say or do something they otherwise wouldn’t just produces bad writing.

Your readers notice if your characters are A) not fully formed and developed; B) speaking in ways not consistent with a developed character; and C) people you don’t care about. By this I mean that your indifference to a “filler” character will show in your writing about him, her, or it. There are no throwaway characters. You should understand each of the people in your novel and craft them accordingly, because only then can you write both great characters and great dialogue for them.

Word Count and Writers’ Conceit

If you know a writer who proudly tells you all about the massive word count of his latest creation, you are talking to an amateur.

Words, in and of themselves, are not valuable. They only matter when A) you are being paid by the word; or B) your contract stipulates a minimum word count, a maximum word count, or both. Most of the time, a working writer spends his days struggling to meet word count, but there are times when you realize you’ve got to cut to stay under the maximum. On the whole, it’s better to be over than under. A book that is bloated can always be edited, but a even a great editor cannot manufacture five or ten thousand words that you failed to supply.

Have you ever read A Tale of Two Cities? The book is sold in an edited version for consumption by high school students. That’s because the book was initially published as a serial over 31 parts. It’s incredibly verbose because Dickens was earning money on each installment. (It’s a popular myth that he was paid by the word, but the story sure reads like he was.) It’s a great book, but without doubt it includes a great deal of prose that lends nothing to the story. You may own a leather-bound first edition that is absolutely beautiful to look at, but all those gilded affectations don’t make the novel any better.

Writing simply to hear yourself talk isn’t a virtue. I once had the misfortune of editing the work of a would-be fantasy author whose novel plumbed new depths of terrible writing. This book quite literally reset my bar much lower for what I thought the worst writing possible could be, and I’ve read — and edited — some real stinkers. The same author was very proud of the 1.5 million words over multiple novels that he had squeezed out over the last several years. How anyone could write that much and not actually get better was less terrifying than the thought that he had improved over that time. Regardless, said author would tell anyone who’d listen just how many words he had typed, believing this to mean he must be good at writing.

This is one of the reasons editors are so important. Left to our own devices, authors tend to be self-indulgent and pretentious. It takes the lens of an outside eye to filter out our worse conceits, and bloated word count is one of these. Here are my basic guidelines for word count:

1,000 words to 1,500 words: flash fiction
2,000 words to 7,000 words: short story
10,000 words to 18,000 words, give or take: really, really long short story
20,000 words to 40,000 words: novella
50,000 words to 60,000 words: a full-length novel, but a relatively quick read
85,000 words to 95,000 words: The maximum length you should tolerate for a full-length novel
100,000 words and over: You had better be George R.R. Martin.

These are just general guidelines. It’s not like you haven’t written something approaching a novella at 17,000 words; it’s just that there are some overlaps in the categories. When I write a novella for Amazon publication, I try to come in at a minimum of 20,000 words, just to make the product worthwhile. To me, a novel isn’t “full length” until it hits at least 50,000 words. All of my Executioner novels for Harlequin were in the 55,000 to 58,000 word range, while the longer “Stony Man” and “Super Bolan” titles were more like 85,000 to 88,000 when I turned them in.

You should never let a book grow to over 100,000 words, in my opinion. Unless you’re scripting an epic fantasy novel, a 100,000 word novel is just an indulgence that will likely be ponderous and boring. If a story can’t be contained within less than 100,000 words, you’ve got too much plot or you should be working on a trilogy.  More than likely, though, it isn’t that you have more plot points than the word count will bear; it’s that your prose is bloated and boring. That means you’re going to lose the reader’s interest.

Never, ever proclaim the word count of your latest project as if that means something in and of itself. Blogging updates like, “Dear Diary, today I passed 103,000 words in my self-published Amazon Kindle fantasy book that nobody will read” just underscores that you don’t know what you’re doing. If anything, you should be making apologies for a book that gets away from you like that.

There’s a reason writers like Hemingway, Robert E. Howard, and Moorcock are known for the sparseness of their prose (in comparison to writers like H.P. Lovecraft, who once wrote a sentence so long nobody has yet finished reading it). They were great writers because they said a lot with very few words. That’s the ideal for which you should be shooting. Yes, H.P. Lovecraft was also a great writer, but as difficult as it is to be brief and great, it’s even harder to be verbose and great.

Remember that writing, good writing, isn’t only about you. It’s also about the audience. Who are they? Who do you want them to be? And what does the audience want? The shift to e-readers means that, at least if you’re publishing for electronic format, you need to keep word counts lower. If you must write your magnum opus, bear in mind that you are cutting your potential audience before you even get started. To write for the people who read your work is not somehow compromising your vision for your book — but it may mean you don’t get to be as self-indulgent while you type.

Your Special Little Friend, Profanity

How often should you swear? How often should your characters swear? Even among earnest authors telling serious stories, this can be perplexing. If you never use profanity, you may find yourself engaged in “Breakfast Club” editing, replacing terms that make much more sense with nonsense words. (The TV edit of Breakfast Club famously replaced profanity with ridiculous dubs like “Flip you!” and so on — things that no human being would ever say in a moment of anger.) But if you do use profanity, you run the risk of offending or alienating part of your audience. So what do you do?

Some of this is genre specific, although I’ve been surprised a time or two. For example, the Young Adult (YA) market is one in which I would have thought cleanliness was prized, yet not long ago I did a voice over for a successful YA novel that included what I would consider quiet a bit of profanity. I remember swearing a blue streak in Junior High when my parents weren’t around, so it’s not the case that kids preteens and teens don’t know the lingo. Still, it surprised me that swearing was acceptable to that particular market, perhaps on a case by case basis.

I’ve had readers thank me for writing “clean” stories that I did not intend to sanitize, specifically a couple of my Executioner novels for Gold Eagle/Harlequin. These are books where profanity is generally accepted as part of the genre. I didn’t set out not to do it; it just never came up. The audience for action novels, though, is generally pretty tolerant of profanity, at least overall. Assuming you haven’t been given a directive to keep a manuscript clean, or the genre doesn’t demand it, you still have a choice to make: Do you swear, or don’t you?

Recent serious problems with his past aside, Bill Cosby once exemplified the “clean” comedian. I can think of hearing him swear only once, and that was during his famous Bill Cosby: Himself special. Reacting to people who claimed they used drugs to enhance or intensify their personalities, he quipped, “Yes… but what if you’re an asshole?” It was hilarious specifically because Cosby didn’t usually curse.

I tend to think curse words are our special little friends, who should be brought out for emphasis only. Most of the time, you should hold them in reserve. If you overuse them, they lose their punch. If you use them sparingly, they can punctuate a dramatic or comedic moment in a way that is very powerful. When writing an action story, for example, my baseline is one “major” swear word, up to and including an f-bomb, per novel or novella. This allows me to use it for punch or emphasis for major scenes or moments. I’ve made exceptions and there are times when realistic dialogue demands some profanity — but these moments are fewer and farther between than you might think.

Unfortunately, there is a trend in mainstream online outlets to use profanity even in headlines, often when cursing out conservatives or other public figures who are considered fair game by the more popular infotainment sites. Here I’m thinking of sites like Buzzfeed and the Daily Dot, but there are other online news portals that have begun resorting to profanity in what used to be a professional setting. I dislike this practice intensely. I think that, rather than making the author or the outlet look hip, raw, and cutting-edge, it just makes everyone involved look amateurish and sleazy.

In parallel to that, I’m aware that some authors use profanity to appear edgy. Producing a vulgar manuscript, a book that is full of profanity in every sentence, isn’t good or bad. Neither is employing low-brow bathroom humor. If you can do it well, nothing succeeds so much as success. The problem is that I’ve rarely seen this done well. More often than not, an author who does this is just overcompensating for a lack of skill or finesse. It’s a gimmick, and if you have to rely on gimmicks, you’re not producing quality work. You don’t look edgy or down-to-earth when you do it; you just look childish. Giving your book a subtitle like, “Shit’s about to get real,” will ultimately hurt you more than it will help you– mostly because it makes you look stupid.

Refusing to use profanity as a crutch forces you to focus on language, on dialogue. Ultimately, this will produce better writing, which is the true reward for your time and effort. You don’t need gimmicks and you don’t need to risk alienating potential readers. Let your work speak for itself on its quality, not for its parental rating.