Rick Hall's Blog, page 3

Creating An Author Website

Creating an Author Website

Create a promo site for under $100, with easy to use tools

 

When I first started writing, a lot of helpful people with more writing experience than me gave me a great deal of advice. Although I’ll be eternally grateful, I figured there was no way I could ever repay them. They did what they did without the expectation of any sort of return on investment.

But now that I’m at the stage where it’s time to start promoting my book, I’m in more familiar waters. One big task awaiting any indie author is that all-important promotional website creation process. And that’s where I can bring my background to bear by offering my many friends a return on their generous investment of time. I’ve been around the block a bit when it comes to creating websites.

I’m sure you might be asking yourself “Why shouldn’t I just use something like Wix or Squarespace? They’re free, I can get a site up and running in an hour, and it will look good.”

To be fair, you could do that, but then you’d be limited to the templates they choose to give you. They’re nearly impossible to customize, you don’t get much storage space or an email account, lots of them aren’t responsive, getting SEO working well is sometimes impossible, and you don’t get access to plugins.  With them, you wind up with something that’s basically an ornament. It looks pretty, but doesn’t do much. It makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something more than you actually have.

Look, crafting your own site from scratch is hard. There are a LOT of  moving parts and, to the initiated, even figuring out the list of things you have to learn can be pretty intimidating. You don’t know what to do, where to go to find reliable information, or how much to spend. But that’s where I can help. I can be your sherpa guide. It will be harder than Wix and Squarespace. I won’t deny that. But the end product will be a LOT more useful.

The following post is long and packed with stuff. For that, I apologize. It might take you ten minutes to read, and it will probably take you a couple of weeks to wade through all the necessary tutorials. But what I’m hoping the article will do for you is point you at all the right things, so you don’t waste time and money on unnecessary, overly technical mountains of information. My hope is that the resources I’m pointing out will transform that impassable technical mountain into a foothill.

Still, it will be a climb. So with the long winded intro over, let’s just strap on our climbing gear and get to work. In Stage One, we’ll go through the process of establishing a site and installing all of the necessary tools and plugins to create content. In Stage Two, we’ll get you underway with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the lifeblood of search engine exposure.

 

Stage One

The first thing you’ll need to do is get yourself a web host. This is the company with all the servers where your promotional site will reside. I know a lot of folks will tell you that free hosting services are awesome, but that’s just flat-out bad advice. You get what you pay for. And when you pay nothing, you get garbage.

Free hosting services suffer from a titanic amount of problems, from terrible performance to annoying advertisements, crashes, nonexistent customer support, and even data loss. Yeah, you can get content on them, but the problems you have to deal with are simply not worth it.

I’d even recommend against WordPress hosting. It’s not bad for a lot of things, but to make a really good site, you’ll want to take advantage of plugins, and if your host is WordPress, you can’t use them.

Here are a handful of reuptable web hosting companies that have the services you need, at reasonable prices.

Bluehost – Comes with free domain, 1-click WordPress Install, 24/7 support, and an introductory off that is less than $3 a month.

HostGator – All the same features as BlueHost, with a similar price, although you do have to pay an extra couple of dollars for a domain name

Justhost – The same as the above, with an even cheaper introductory price

X10Premium – Again, the same features, although it doesn’t have an introductory price, but if you sign up for 3 years, it works out to $3.95 a month, and you actually save money in the long term

There are a lot of decent hosting services out there, and it’s not hard to do research on them. The features you specifically want are: 1-click WordPress install, 24/7 Customer support, at least one free email account, CPanel access, and the ability to create FTP accounts. If the host you choose has those things, you’re good to go.

These hosts all have good C/S and tutorials for setting a site up, so you shouldn’t have much trouble there. You may have to talk to a customer support rep to attach your domain name to your site, but the process isn’t hard.

Make a point of writing down the username and password for your host account when you set it up.

Once you’ve got the site hosted and a domain attached, you’ll want to go through the WordPress install. I’m going to strongly recommend WordPress. (Note above that I didn’t like WordPress as a HOST, but the WordPress content management system is a must-have). With all of the above hosts, it takes literally 1 click to install WordPress.

Just go with the default settings. WordPress will ask you for a username and password. Again, write this down and keep it someplace safe.

Here is a very good tutorial that takes you through the entire process, step-by-step, including signing up for hosting with HostGator. So if you are the slightest bit nervous about any of this, Watch this video.

The video takes you through the process of choosing templates, page creation, the whole shebang. It’s very thorough.

From this point, you should be comfortable enough with WordPress that you can start personalizing. Now, the first thing I’m going to recommend is that you DON’T use a free template. I know it’s an attractive option, but they’re inevitably very specific, and you don’t get anywhere near as much control over the appearance as you want. I purchased a professional theme called Kleo. You can purchase the Kleo theme here for $59, and here’s a Kleo tutorial that shows you how to install it and get it running. I like Kleo because it has been around for several years. It is very stable, robust, has a lot of documentation, and a respectable community to answer questions.

Whether you go with Kleo or another theme, spend the money to get something professional. They’re not super expensive, and you’ll thank me later.

Now, from here, I added in something to make my life easier. Rather than jumping through crazy hoops to get all the best functionality, I grabbed an awesome WordPress plugin called Elementor. It’s totally free, and you can add it through the WordPress Add New Plugin section.

This plugin is really cool. It has its own visual editor, which allows you to add in fantastic functionality to your pages and posts, and it’s all drag and drop, visual editor stuff. No code. No CSS. Easy.

Additionally, there are a bunch of plugins that can extend Elementor’s functionality, some free, some premium. And, even more than Kleo, the Elementor plugin has a thriving community to help you solve problems.  And in keeping with my one-stop-shop attitude, here’s a tutorial video that will introduce you to the basics of Elementor.

So, I know I’ve given you a LOT of stuff to look at, and I hate to do it, but I’m going to recommend just one more thing you have to pay for. But it’s awesome.  If you’ve got any cash left over, buy yourself a copy of Smart Slider 3 Pro. It’s $25, and is totally worth the money. It has a ton of great templates for animated banners, testimonial sections, image rotators, post carousels, etc. And like all of the other tools I’m recommending, it has a big community and tons of tutorial videos all over Youtube. Here are a series of tutorial videos for Smart Slider 3 Pro that will get you started.

I’ve also got a couple of other stray plugins I’m using, like Expanding Archives by Nose Graze, RSS Icon Widget by Pixel Jar, Smush by WPMU Dev, Word Fence Security by Word Fence (the free version), and Yoast SEO by Team Yoast (again, the free version). You can see the collapsible archive working on the Shop Talk sidebar of my page. The RSS feed widget is right above it in the sidebar. Smush is a free image compression plugin that makes your site run faster, and I highly recommend it. All of these are free, and relatively easy to set up, but not strictly necessary, so I leave it up to you whether to use them or not.

Now, I know this all feels like a lot to absorb, and I won’t lie. It is. You should expect to spend a week or two acclimating yourself to all of this, but there are three advantages I’ve given you so far, and they’re both pretty big.

These tools are the exact tools I used to create this site, so you know they work together. And with these tools, you can do almost everything on my site (except the character generator page, which I wrote in Javascript). So far, I’ve recommended you spend $84 plus your hosting fee. It’s a modest investment that puts you in great position to add in all sorts of things beyond what you see here. And by the time you’ve waded through all of the tutorials, none of this should seem all that intimidating.
If you follow these recommendations, you don’t need to wade through an endless array of confusing options and choices, not know which are useful, and which are garbage. I’ve done all the legwork for you, and pointed you in the direction of all the relevant tutorials.
Best of all, with the above configuration, your site will automatically be responsive. What’s that? Responsive sites are the ones that magically look good on any device, whether it’s a laptop, a tablet, or a cell phone. If you originally ran across my site on your laptop, check it out on your smart phone. The elements I’m using will rearrange and resize themselves to suit the screen. That’s a BIG plus. The last thing you want is an unresponsive site. In today’s world, people look at sites all the time on their cell phones and tablet devices, and if the layout blows up in their face, you’ve lost a customer.

 

Stage Two

After having spent a week or two coming up with a decent site, you’ll want to populate it with content. Whether you post short fiction, blog posts, or promotional material for your book, you want to have a reason for people to poke around. To start with, you’ll want a critical mass of content. You don’t want drive-by web surfers. And once you’re up and running, you want to keep posting new content often. Give people a reason to come back often. It will build your audience, and that’s what you’re after.

Now, it will be important to collect email addresses at some point, and you’ll be using a tool like Mail Chimp, but that’s a big topic, so I’ll save that for a future post. It will take a while to start generating an audience, so there will be time to get into that later.

A more immediate issue will be registering your site with search engines, like Google and Bing. This will enable people to find you when they search the web, and if you don’t do it, you’re pretty much wasting your time making a site.

The absolute best tool for this is a WordPress plugin called Yoast. I mentioned it above, but this tool is an almost miraculous assistant in implementing Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you go to Add New Plugins in your WordPress editor, you can search for Yoast, and it should be at the top of the list. Install and activate this plugin. For now, you can go with the free version. You only need the advanced version if you want to get more sophisticated later.

This Yoast Tutorial will guide you through the entire process. It’s very thorough, and easy to follow. There’s only one part that might be hard for you. At one point in the video, the narrator instructs you to download the registration files for Google and Big, and put them on your site. He glosses over how to do it, and that will create problems if you don’t know how.

To execute this part of the tutorial, you’ll want to go back to your host, and log into the CPanel.  Each host might have a slightly different way of accessing it, but your host will have documentation that tells you how. Next, you’ll want to set up what is known as an FTP Account (FTP is short for File Transfer Protocol). This is basically a doorway directly onto the server, located wherever you have your website. It’s a way for you to manually upload files to your site. Again, you’ll need to consult the host’s documentation or talk to tech support. It’s not usually hard, and only takes a couple of minutes.

This process will require you to produce a login ID and Password for your FTP account. Again, write this down. You’ll need it.  When you create the FTP account, you’ll be supplied with some data like hostname, encryption type, and port numbers. Write all of this down too.

Now, you’ll need to get an FTP client. You can download Filezilla here. It’s very easy to use once you have it installed. If you need it, here’s a handy Filezilla tutorial.

With Filezilla installed, and able to connect to your site’s FTP account, you’ll be ready to upload the necessary file that the Yoast tutorial talks about.  It’s ironic that this small step that the narrator glosses over can big really important to those who aren’t familiar with web page construction. But the rest of is tutorial is so well done that we can forgive him this lapse.

After you’ve installed Yoast and registered with Google and Big, you’ll probably want to go back to some of the pages and posts you created earlier, and make a few modifications so that they’ll show up more easily in the search engines. The Yoast tutorial I’ve pointed you at will explain how you do it, and why it’s important.

By now, you’re in pretty good shape, so I’ll point you at a handful of really useful resources for dealing with SEO.

UberSuggest – This really cool, totally free resource is a really handy tool for identifying the effectiveness of your keywords. Once you’ve seen it in action, it will change the way you write blog posts. With it, you will be armed with potent words that you can sprinkle into your posts and pages, making them far more likely to come up in searche engines.

Neil Patel – This guy produces a ton of Youtube videos that deal with SEO, marketing, corporate culture, pricing, cryptocurrency, and a lot of other stuff. I’d recommend watching SEO Tricks and Tips, How to get more website traffic, and Best Blogging Tips for Beginners at a minimum.

Keywords Everywhere plugin for Chrome – This is a really cool Chrome plugin that shows up when you’re using google. Every time you do a google search, it gives you a lot of search phrase suggestions, and ranks each according to their popularity. With something like this, you can poke around in Google for half an hour, and have dozens of useful phrases that you can then start dropping into your blog posts, each of which makes it more likely to generate traffic and get you noticed.

Google Page Insights – This small-but-handy tool lets you see how well your page performs. Loading speed is important, and this site points you at any of the problem areas, along with suggestions how to resolve them.

Okay. I’ll stop bombarding you with resources for now. I hope I’ve provided you with all of the basics to get you off the ground and running for promotional website creation. It may take you some weeks to get all of this under your belt, but by the time you’re done, you should have a decent start, and hopefully you’ll be a lot less intimidated going forward.

The post Creating An Author Website appeared first on Rick Hall.

The Reflection

The Reflection

 

Two weeks into my junior year at Princeton, and my new roommate’s side of the room looked like an emo outlet store after a terrorist attack. I took it as a weird form of respect that the devastation lay strictly on her half, but that didn’t make it any less annoying. You could eat off my side of the floor. You couldn’t even see hers.

Her name was Dakota Lewis, and judging by her text books, I guessed she was a physics major. I wasn’t sure. On our first day, I introduced myself, and told her I was majoring in political science. You could almost see a tiny rain cloud form over her head.

She sniffed and said, “What would possess anyone to classify politics as a science?” and walked out of the room. In the fourteen days since, I’d gotten a total of maybe a dozen mumbled sentences out of her.

I could see right away she was going to be one of those difficult personality types. So be it. Mentally, I rolled up my sleeves and did that spit-in-the-hands thing baseball players do when they step up to the plate. I resolved to figure her out, if for no other reason than to get experience. After all, if politics were to be my future, it’s not like there would be a shortage of obnoxious people to deal with.

Dakota was the INTP personality type, according to what my psych professor had told us; smart, creative, colors outside the lines, doesn’t give a damn what anyone thinks of them. I recalled him once telling us “have patience with them. They’re the type that tells a joke, and the only ones to laugh are other INTPs. Everyone else thinks they’re an asshole.”

They’re not really all that bad, though. Albert Einstein was one. So was Thomas Jefferson. Then again, so was Dr. Frankenstein. That’s the disturbing image that concerned me as I watched her from the corner of my eye one evening.

Hunched over an aluminum work bench in the corner of our room, she was surrounded by an acrid smelling cloud of blue-gray smoke, soldering a wire into the guts of a plastic box. She wore nothing but a black sports bra – each breast dotted with tiny silver spikes – and a matching thong with a pink skull embroidered on the front. Who wears that to lounge around working on a science project at midnight? Actually, who wears that ever?

It probably had something to do with the fact she hadn’t gotten around to doing any laundry yet. Yeah, let’s go with that.

The way she left her clothes lying wherever she stepped out of them didn’t leave a whole lot of doubt about where laundry landed on her list of priorities. Somewhere between cleaning the port-o-potties at a monster truck rally and watching a CSPAN marathon.

I tugged a pair of her skinny jeans out from under an old pizza box and held them at arm’s length. A rusty brown stain covered one knee. I hoped to God it was tomato sauce.

“Soo… you want me to do a load of laundry for you, Dakota?”

She didn’t even look up. “Sure, Marci. Whatever.”

A snippy comeback would have been ideal just then, but I didn’t get the chance. The plastic box hummed to life, under-lighting her face with a fuchsia glow like a villain from some cheesy horror movie.

The effect creeped me out, and I almost said so as she snapped the cover onto the box. That’s when I saw the sticker on the side. One of those yellow and black circular symbols with the words ‘Danger: Radioactive’ under it.

“Oh please tell me that’s not what I think it is,” I blurted out. “The last thing I need is a roommate who’s building some kind of bomb.”

That netted me one of those eye-rolling, what-an-idiot looks. “It’s Potassium 40,” she said, speaking slowly and over-enunciating, “not plutonium. And besides, the alpha emitter is magnetically confined.”

Like that should mean something to me.

“Well is that a radiation warning sticker, or isn’t it?” I planted clenched fists on my hips and tried to look intimidating, hoping to mask the fact I was on the verge of wetting myself.

“Yeah.” She fiddled with some buttons on the box. “It’s radioactive. But barely enough to penetrate the skin. The warning sticker is mostly there to keep guys from holding it on their lap. They tend to do that with anything that’s warm and vibrates.”

Hardly reassuring. “So you swear it’s safe?”

She looked up long enough to nod in the direction of a pile of garbage next to her trash can. “The mold and bacteria in that box of Chinese takeout from last week is probably a lot more dangerous.”

It’s funny how a stray comment like that can transform your world. Until that moment, I’d always associated dirty clothes and garbage with mildly distasteful, general sloppiness. But that was before mold and bacteria entered the conversation. And radiation. Filth had suddenly mutated into dangerous new, flesh eating lifeforms.

I marched to my closet and retrieved a laundry basket, a bucket, some rubber gloves, a cleaning rag, and my emergency bottle of disinfectant. Screw the water. I poured the whole bottle into the bucket and went to work.

Dakota stopped fiddling with the thingamabob and propped her feet up on the work bench to watch me. She produced a fifth of Shipwreck Rum and some Diet Coke, and poured herself a drink. She was all black lipstick, black fingernails, black hair (well, okay, with a lavender streak which was oddly adorable), just staring at me with this little smile sketched across her face.

God, she’d somehow become even creepier.

I didn’t want to think about that or the mutant bacteria, so I started babbling. Anything to distract myself. I asked about the thingamabob.

“’Thingamabob’? Cute.” An eyebrow arched. The smile became a smirk. “It’s an environmental distortion machine.”

“What’s it do?”

“It lets me see ghosts.”

The cleaning rag made a little splash in the bucket and I had to snap my mouth shut before I got a mouthful of disinfectant. I just stared. She stared right back and smirked some more.

“Yes.” She sipped her rum and Coke.

“Yes, what?” I stammered.

“Yes, I believe in ghosts.” She licked her lips and looked thoughtful for a moment. “Probably not the way you think, though.”

I didn’t have a response to that. Clearly, she was getting a kick out of my inability to form a coherent thought.

With another sip, she settled back in her chair. It was one of those bizarre moments that will stay burned in my brain forever. Me, on my knees in toxic waste, while a Goth physics genius in bondage underwear sat bathed in ghoulish pink light, drinking rum and explaining the nature of ghosts to me.

Ok, it sounds a little melodramatic when you lay it out like that, but it’s not exactly your everyday college memory.

She took a deep breath. “I won’t bore you with the convoluted train of logic that led me to where I am today. Let’s just sum it up by saying I’ve decided that while I don’t believe in ghosts as ‘spirits’ per se, I do believe people who see them are seeing something. They’re not hysterical, or drunk, or crazy. They’re just interpreting what they see incorrectly. Try not to get lost in the explanation here. I’ll keep it simple.

“Time is a continuum. Every moment in time exists simultaneously. In a weird sort of way, there isn’t really a past or present or future. It’s all mashed together. We just perceive it to be running in a particular rate and direction. But perception is different from reality. Think of it this way: while people can only hear sounds at frequencies of up to twenty kilohertz, a bat can hear things at a hundred kilohertz, or maybe even two hundred. The bat science dudes aren’t totally sure. The point is, just because we can’t hear sounds pitched up that high, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. “

There was a faraway look in her eyes, almost reverence. It was as if this whole thing was something more like a religion than science. How long had she been obsessing about it anyway?

“Anyway, that got me thinking. What if time is the same way? What if we see our current position in time just because we’re built to see it that way? Maybe if we were built differently, or the environment was, we’d perceive time moving at a different rate or a different direction. Maybe we’d be able to see different points in time. And that’s what I think people are seeing when they see a ghost. It’s not a spirit. It’s someone from the past. Somehow, something in the environment lets them see a different point on the continuum.”

Oh, ok. Completely logical. Just a little rip in the space time continuum.

“So, I’ve spent the last three years building a machine which can artificially create that environmental change.” She tapped the pink, glowing box.

Oh marvelous. So it wasn’t bad enough that she thought the fabric of space was occasionally torn by accident. No, she had to go building a machine to tear open some extra holes on purpose. I didn’t know what to think. On the one hand, it was better than being ignored for the last two weeks. On the other, I was pretty sure she was bat-shit crazy.

“Umm… ok, then.”

I racked my brain trying to dredge up my sophomore psych class. Was it clozapine they gave to the total whack-jobs? I couldn’t recall, but it didn’t matter. I had no idea where I could lay my hands on some.

Of course, I couldn’t exactly say that to her. So instead, like an idiot, I said “I’ve got some Midol in my desk if you need any.”

She looked at me as if I was nuts. How’s that for irony?

Still, my skepticism must have shown through. She bounced up and dragged the chair from my desk over to the workbench, flashed me a smile, and patted the chair. I looked at her, then the glowing box, then back again.

“You know you want to find out,” she said with a wink.

And I guess I did.

Still, I slid the chair an extra couple of feet away from the machine before sitting down, just in case. It squatted there in the middle of the workbench, looking almost sullen. Just like Dakota.

I might have mistaken the thing for my younger brother’s videogame console if not for the fact it was glowing pink. Well, that and the black and yellow radiation sticker.

It was a foot tall and a foot deep, but only four inches wide, and had a lens-like thingie facing the center of the room. The top was dotted with a dozen black plastic buttons, a black plastic knob, and a digital screen.

While I was gawking, Dakota flipped open her laptop and fired up a video capture program. She adjusted the web cam so it faced the center of the room, pointed in the same general direction as the lens from the machine.

“Posterity,” she mumbled.

She didn’t lack confidence, that’s for sure.

Turning the black knob on the machine to one, she glanced at the laptop screen for a moment before redirecting her stare towards the center of the room. I don’t know what she expected to see, but to me it looked pretty much like a dark room with a pile of dirty clothes on the floor.

“I designed it to sort of bend space-time in a very small radius. About twenty feet,” she explained. “Let’s try ramping it up a notch at a time.”

She kept watching the middle of the room while I stared at the video feed on the laptop screen. Aside from a greasy fingerprint, it showed nothing. The fingerprint tempted me to fetch my bottle of Windex, but with an effort, I stayed put. I’d get it later.

Dakota reached over to bump the knob up to two and I think my heart stopped at the same time as the fingerprint smudge moved. It moved?

I wiped at it with the heel of my hand, but the smudge was tenacious.

From the corner of my eye, I noticed Dakota, head tilted, squinting at the center of the room where the laptop’s camera pointed. I turned that way, and there it was. The same greasy smudge hovering six feet off the floor. I swallowed hard. This was no fingerprint.

A strange sensation came over me. It was like looking at the room through a fisheye lens, all bulged out in the center and blurry around the edges. The effect made me feel a little sick, like I couldn’t keep my balance. After a few seconds, I just couldn’t stare at it any longer. I forced myself to watch the video feed on the laptop where the effect was less pronounced.

Dakota nudged it to three. The machine made a crackling noise, but it didn’t catch her attention.

The smudge seemed a little clearer. Sort of. You know how people are always seeing the face of Jesus in corn flakes and clouds and whatnot? I was having trouble deciding if this was something like that. The little blob of light kind of oozed back and forth, but it only vaguely looked like a face. Still, it was something.

My nose was still inches from the screen as she clicked it up another notch. This time, a distinct bubbling hiss came from inside the box, followed a couple of seconds later by a burning plastic stench. Still oblivious, Dakota clicked again. By the time it got to five, the blob had become clear. It was a face. Not just a face, but an entire body!

The hair on the back of my arms stood up, and I could have sworn I smelled… my grandfather’s cologne? One of those old fashioned, overpowering scents, it even held the burning plastic at bay. It emanated from the ghostly figure who stood before us.

He looked to be about my age, with a 1950’s buzz cut, thick horn-rim glasses, a white button down shirt, and a hideous argyle sweater vest. For some reason, the name Biff popped into my head. He looked like a Biff to me. Big, dumb, and just standing there slack jawed, staring off into space. You know. He was a guy.

I was so fascinated, it took a couple of minutes to realize he wasn’t quite staring ‘into space.’ He was actually staring slightly off center to my left, which is to say, he was staring at Dakota.

He could see us!

A cloud of smoke wafted upwards across my field of vision, dragging my eyes down to its source; a hole had melted through the radiation sticker. I froze. Some part of my brain screamed at me to douse the machine with Dakota’s rum and Coke. Another part worried about the mess it would make.

Dakota had risen to her feet beside me, studying Biff intently. She hadn’t been watching the little mechanical drama unfolding on the workbench.

“This is totally epic,” she muttered. “It’s big. Maybe Nobel Prize big.”

Her breathing was rapid and wheezy. Either she was hyperventilating or having an orgasm. The look in her eyes, dilated pupils, sort of half-closed eyelids, made me doubt she was hyperventilating.

Jesus, every time I thought she had the weird-o-meter pegged, I turned out to be wrong.

Suddenly Biff got a huge grin on his face. He opened his mouth, and I held my breath.

“Cripes! Did Jimmy send me a strip-o-gram for my birthday?”

Dakota looked confused for a beat. Then her eyes dropped to her own chest, to the bra and thong, and a lot of skin.

Although I’d have sworn it wasn’t possible, she turned a bright shade of red. In the time it took me to blink, she flipped a switch on the machine and the pink glow faded. Biff faded with it.

“Posterity is going to have to wait for you to do my laundry,” she grinned.

Pride oozed out of her. Chin tilted up, eyes sparkling the way my mom’s cat does when it drops a dead chipmunk in the middle of the kitchen floor.

I really hated to be a buzzkill.

“Dakota? Your machine’s on fire.”

The post The Reflection appeared first on Rick Hall.

Non Linear Writing

Non Linear Writing

Your own personal time travel method

 

About a decade ago when I first started writing fiction, my early work suffered from a staggering number of problems. If I represented each mistake as a single domino, I bet I could have filled a gymnasium with them, like one of those mesmerizing world record domino-toppling videos. Correcting my errors involved several years of herculean effort, but I’m happy to report that these days, I might only be able to fill my living room with dominoes.

In this post, I’d like to discuss the domino that I didn’t even realize existed until two or three years ago. I think in many ways, it turned out to be the master domino. The root cause of many of my flaws. The one that ruled them all.

I had been following a standard methodology that simply didn’t fit me. I was writing linearly.

Linear writing is such a standard that a lot of people don’t even recognize the term. They aren’t aware that it has an opposite: NON linear writing. They don’t know that it could be an answer, at least for some of them.

To understand it, let’s start by defining linear writing. It’s very simple. Linear writing is when you write each of the chapters in your first draft in the same order the reader will read them. It seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? I mean, after all, how can you possibly write chapter 47 before you write 46? Don’t you need to know what happened in chapter 46 first, so that you know where to pick up the action?

No. In fact, you don’t.

Non linear writing uses exactly that approach. It is a system where you write chapters in an order that is essentially random. Whatever scene you feel inspired to write about when you get up in the morning, you write.

Yes, yes. I know. That way lies madness.

Nah. Pour yourself a scotch and stop flipping the bird to me through your computer screen. You only need one thing to restore sanity to that madness. You need an outline.

Think about it. If you have a thumbnail sketch of each chapter in advance, then you already know the big events that are going to happen leading into the chapter. You already have an idea where the chapter has to end in order to flow into the following chapter. You already know the characters who will appear, what their motivations and emotions are, and what aspects of character arc you have to fulfil. You have everything you need to write any chapter at any time.

An outline is simply a matter of sketching out each scene with a few paragraphs of pertinent information.

There are lots of great books on the subject of outline creation. You can check out KM Weiland’s Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success for one good example. Books like this will give you lots of good ideas of the kinds of information a good outline requires. When done properly, an outline allows an author to focus on the writing craft, rather than getting bogged down in the strategic elements of plot and character development while they write.

Ironically, even the process of outlining can be an example of non linear writing. When I started my outline for Gnosis, I followed James Scott Bell’s advice in Write Your Novel From The Middle. I started with the pivotal mid-point scene first, then outlined the inciting incident, then the climax, worked my way through the major structural scenes, and finally filled in all the remaining gaps. All in outline form.

Then I started writing. In the past, I could write chapter 1, maybe 2, 3, and 4. But eventually, I’d hit a wall. For whatever reason, a chapter would stare at me and laugh. Nothing would come to mind. I’d struggle for days. Sometimes weeks. I’d delete attempt after attempt, each one causing me far too much stress.

Now, I look back on those days and laugh. Armed with my mighty outline, I wake up and ask myself “What do you feel like writing today, Rick? A chase scene? An epiphany scene? Dialogue?” I peruse my list of unwritten chapters, and let them speak to me. Inevitably, one will jump out and shriek in glee “Pick me! Pick me!”

And off I go.

In the back of my mind, I still know which chapters I dread. But with plenty of fun things to write first, the hard ones have time to bake in my brain. Sometimes a stray thought for a dread chapter will occur to me as I’m writing a fun one, and I jot it down in my notes while I forge ahead with the easier chapters.  Over time, I get enough notes that the hard chapter seems much less intimidating. When I finally get around to it, it’s almost never a dread chapter any more.

And this was the essential ingredient I’d been missing all along. The linear approach killed all of my motivation. It caused a civil war in my state of mind.

When you dread writing something, it’s almost a guarantee that it will take ten times as long, and in the end it will still suck. Then you lose momentum. Things go downhill fast. You resolve yourself to dealing with the dread chapter in revisions. You put it off, or sometimes you just chuck the entire manuscript onto the slush pile and start something new. I know. I’ve done that.

But using a non linear writing approach, I dialed back the difficulty level of the dread chapters, AND I kept up my all important forward momentum. I stopped tossing perfectly good work onto the back burner. Writing became fun again. And that made a world of difference.

But before you write the whole process off as just a self-induced motivational mind hack, note that there are some other tangible benefits to non-linear writing.

When you start your novel by writing the chapters in the middle, sometimes you realize that your character needs a particular personality trait, or a secret weapon to get through the scene. Maybe the character needs a morale boost. Something to get them over some difficult hurdle. But instead of magically introducing the needed trait on the spot, or going back and editing several chapters to insert it more organically, a non linear approach provides the opportunity to introduce the magic trait into a variety of preceding chapters that you haven’t even written yet. No editing. No deus ex machina. It’s like magic.
In a similar vein, non linear writing makes it MUCH easier to achieve foreshadowing. Following the same methodology as in the previous point, foreshadowing becomes a breeze, and cuts off the need to perform major heart surgery during revisions.
Non linear writing also provides a useful shortcut to achieving that old adage: start your story at the last possible instant. Sometimes when you start with chapter 1, you later discover that your opening is too slow. You’ve introduced unnecessary information, sometimes in the form of totally unnecessary backstory. Some authors even go to the extreme of writing the first few chapters knowing they’ll throw them out. They use this method as a way of figuring out when that last possible instant actually occurs. But if you’re writing out of order, you can avoid those first few chapters entirely. At least for a while. I’ve actually written all of act 2 before even starting on act 1. When I get around to the opening chapters, it’s much easier to understand what is necessary and what isn’t. The method eliminates the need for a lot of wasted effort.

At this stage, I should acknowledge a personal preference. I don’t feel totally bound by my outline. I treat it like a general road map, not the Bible. If, during the course of writing a chapter, I feel like a character’s personality dictates a zig when the outline called for a zag, I let the character zig. After I finish the chapter, I return to my outline, update it, and make the necessary changes to any subsequent (or previous) chapters that might be impacted. It’s not a lot of work. That’s the point of an outline. It’s low investment. You can write with no style and terrible grammar, and it doesn’t matter. Just change the necessary facts and move on.

That’s usually the big complaint about using outlines, by the way. Writers say they feel constrained, bound, by the outline. But if you do, you’re rather missing the point. It’s not there to shackle you. It’s there to liberate you. It’s MUCH easier to modify a collection of thoughts and ideas than to go back and rewrite whole chapters when you have to change a character or plot moment. THAT is shackling yourself. When you’ve invested a lot of time into writing an entire chapter, even in draft form, you’re giving it momentum. You’re increasing the resistance to change it. Outlines free you up from that.

Look, non linear writing isn’t for everyone. It requires a bit of a paradigm shift in your thinking, especially when you first try it. And it seems pretty scary, like you’re tightrope walking between skyscrapers without a safety harness.

But from my perspective, once I got the hang of it, the methodology offered so many benefits that I could never go back. It’s like travelling forward in time to read the ending of your novel, and then coming back to the present, armed with the exact roadmap of how to write it. Non-linear writing is my own personal DeLorean, complete with flux capacitor.

I’m never trading it in.

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