Hieronymus Hawkes's Blog, page 5

So…What Do You Write (Cue Existential Crisis)

#writingcommunity #booksky #amwriting #writing

You’re at an event, surrounded by writers or well-read folks. Maybe it’s a book signing, a panel, a casual gathering. You’re feeling pretty good about being part of this community, until someone asks the question:

“Do you have a book out?”

That’s the common question.

You smile. “Yes, I have one published book.”

And then they hit with the follow-up…the one you dread:

“What genre do you write?”

That’s when it happens. The inner cringe. The throat-tightening pause.

I quickly answer, “Science fiction.”

Cue the wave of embarrassment.

Now, if I am at a convention filled with other SF & F people? No problem. I light up. I belong. But out in the wider world—where people aren’t gathered because of their shared love of warp drives, galactic empires, or fairies and dragons—it’s different. That’s when it creeps in. That all too familiar feeling.

I’ve loved science fiction since I was 11 years old, when Star Wars hit the big screen and everything changed. I devoured fanzines, watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Battlestar Galactica, and Alien. Awe inspiring stuff to a preteen boy with a head full of stars. I’ve been a lifelong fan of science fiction and fantasy ever since. I have great respect for the genre. I even got my MFA from a program that focused on Popular Fiction.

So why the guilt? Why the embarrassment?

We all kind of know why.

Despite billion-dollar movies and cultural phenomenons like Harry Potter, genre fiction still doesn’t get the respect it deserves from certain corners of the literary world. It’s still considered “lesser” by some—especially the crowd that leans literary. They prefer their fiction grounded, quiet, introspective. Realistic. And if you show up talking about space vampires, they assume you’re not a “serious writer.”

Never mind you’re writing about grief, or identity, or humanity, or power, or love. If your characters are on a spaceship instead of in a Brooklyn brownstone, well…good luck getting invited to the serious table.

My first book was a techno-thriller—grounded in near future science, with just enough speculative edge to keep it interesting. It wasn’t quite as embarrassing. But now? Now I am writing a space opera with a 700-year-old vampire as the protagonist. And every time I say it out loud, I can feel it, the voice in my head whispering, They’re judging you.

This isn’t real literature.

You’re not a real writer.

This is silly, pulpy genre stuff.

But here’s the truth. My book deals with identity, memory, redemption, power and betrayal. It’s about what it means to be human—and to lose that humanity. It’s not a comedy, although hopefully there is some humor in it. And I am rewriting it again, digging deeper, trying to get it right.

So where does this shame come from?

One word: (ok, it’s really 2 words) Imposter syndrome, raising its ugly head once again.

I heard Harlan Coben this morning talking about his 37th novel, and imposter syndrome. He said he wakes every morning afraid he’s not a real writer. Maybe that was hyperbole, but maybe not.

Maybe we never really get over it.

I do love science fiction. I love the imagination, the freedom, the challenge of exploring real human issues through a speculative lens. I love building worlds that reflect our own in strange, distorted, sometimes illuminating ways.

And I want to be proud of what I’m doing. Even though, some days, I’m not.

But it won’t stop me.

I’ll keep writing, because that’s what real writers do.

The Birth of a Story

I’d made the decision to write a novel.

I had no idea where to start. I hadn’t written anything for ten years, and nothing approaching even novelette length, let alone a novel length story. So, I came to the first conundrum that most new writers come to. What do I write about?

“Where do you get ideas?” is a very common question for writers. I did have other hobbies besides playing games. I liked to read. Mostly science fiction, but other things as well, like urban fantasy or historical drama. I also enjoyed poker. I learned to play back when I was a lieutenant in the Air Force, and it stayed with me.

I was noodling with ideas, and I kept coming back to having a story with a poker game, but the kicker was it had to be at a space station. So, I had to figure out a reason the players were on a space station. I came up with the idea that they were sitting on standby as part of a scout unit. But why did they need to be on alert? I landed on stargate protection. They were there to keep an eye on things, protect from pirates and other bad actors. Stargates have been done quite a bit. Eve Online came out in 2003, and I had played that game. It’s truly visually stunning. Not to mention the tv series Stargate. So, the idea for stargates was pretty well established.

So that was one scene in the story. Something to build around.Subscribed

I needed characters to populate the story. Somebody had to own the stargates or operate them. I figured my protagonist would be playing poker and was a member of the scouts, but I needed a bad guy. Well, I had gathered a lot of materials for the game Vampire: The Masquerade, and even though I never actually played it, I did read a lot of the companion books associated with the game. It was exceptionally well done. Vampires had been popular on and off for decades. I started working on this book in February or March of 2008, later that year, Twilight would be published, which only confirmed that using a vampire was a good choice at the time.

Combining two things I really love, space opera and vampires, now that sounded like fun.

I thought the bad guy might be a vampire, and he owned the stargates. I made them a result of a meteor strike that carried an alien phage. Not traditional vampires, something new, or newish. Somehow living a long time had allowed my vampire to invest well and eventually his company invented stargate travel. Once I hit on this idea, I started fleshing out his character and started to really like him. I liked him so much I flipped the story around and made him the protagonist and started noodling with plot ideas, until I came up with something that made sense. By April 20th, 2008, I was writing the first chapter of a poorly designed story. Hey, it was my first story, of course it was bad.

And it wasn’t really designed. I really had no idea what I was doing, but I was writing, seat of the pants, letting the characters take me where they wanted to go. I was having fun, and I had plenty of confidence, but it wasn’t until I showed these first bits to some friends of mine that I realized how bad it was.

After a few attempts I started over, renamed the story and changed from first person point of view to third person point of view, and I renamed most of the characters and refined the plot a little and tried again. By this point I had added in a second point of view character, a fiery female pilot that works for the enemy company. Like most new writers I rewrote the beginning a thousand times. But then I settled down and moved the ball forward. Once I got about three-quarters of where I thought the story was going, I sat down and outlined to the ending. I distinctly remember writing the last few days on my iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard. As I closed in on the end, I wrote ten thousand words over two days while sitting alert, waiting to fly support missions for Operation Odyssey Dawn in 2011.

I got a little more feedback and realized that I needed a little more education. I didn’t even know what a speech tag was. I started looking for low residence MFA programs. I didn’t do it to get credibility in the community or to get bona fides to teach. I did it because I didn’t have the tools to write. I found the MFA in Writing Popular Fiction program at Seton Hill University. I loved every second of it. At that first residency I found my tribe. It was such a rush to be around people that loved to write. It was a new experience for me at the time. It made a huge difference in my writing. But that was only the first step to improving.

That’s how I started writing. That novel went into the trunk for a few years. I still have those very first pages. Perhaps at some point I will share them.

A few years back I pulled it out and rewrote it again. I had it edited and wrote the sequel. But now I am going back, after getting more insight from my new editor, to fix some major plot problems and to try to master Deep Point of View. I have hopes of creating an even better story than the original. Some days I question if I have any idea what I am doing, that perhaps I wasn’t meant to be a writer. Other days it’s okay. You read a piece that you wrote and it’s pretty good. It validates you.

Imposter syndrome is real.

The only way to fail at this, or anything worth pursuing, is to stop trying.

Saving My Progress: How I Traded XP for Word Count

How I became a writer

Until the age of forty-four I spent most of my free time playing games. Mostly video games.

I’d been obsessed with computers ever since the TRS-80 came out in 1977. A friend of mine had one shortly after they were released, and eventually I found a used one for myself and took it to college. It ran on level I Basic. It used cassettes to run programs, and it had some interesting text only games.

My college roommate bought an Apple IIe, a major upgrade. We played some early computer games on that with actual graphics, even though they were crude by today’s standards. I remember playing a lot of Lode Runner, came ut in 1983 and there was no save game function. We would race back after class to get on the computer and play until we died, then it was someone else’s turn. That got rough when we got into the hundreds. When someone reached a new level they would call out and we would all gather around and watch until it was our turn to try. I bought SunDog: Frozen Legacy, published in March of 1984 and it was hailed as the most impressive and absorbing game to come out. It set a new standard for complexity and ease of play, setting the stage for more to come.

A few years later, after I finished flight school and having gone without a computer for more than a year, I bought a Tandy TX1000 in 1988. It had the first hard drive for a personal computer, a whopping 20 megabytes. I had a 1200 baud modem, baud is bits per second, and a dot matrix printer to go along with it and it cost me more than two thousand dollars back then. The games got better, and the computers got faster and more powerful.

In the mid 90s, I was fairly savvy at building my own computer rig and tried to keep up with the changes in language and the new Windows program. I gave up around 1999. I was too busy with three kids at that point and working a lot, and the programming was changing so fast.

But there was a game on America Online, by this time we had doubled our speed to 2400 baud dial up, that was the first multi-player game. It maxxed out at 100 players. Neverwinter Nights was a version of the AD&D gold box PC games. It was 2D, the graphics were very simple, and the gameplay was limited, but we supplemented the gameplay with writing about our characters on a forum for our player guild. That was my first foray into writing creatively.

From there I played Meridian 59, Ultima Online, Everquest 1 and 2 and World of Warcraft. There were others of course; but those were the Massive Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games that took up the bulk of my time.

I was an instructor pilot in the Air Force and Air Force Reserves, and I basically spent my time playing video games when I wasn’t working or doing something with my wife or kids. The kids grew up on my knee, watching me play games. My eldest son got a degree in game design, and both my boys are following in my footsteps, as they spend the majority of their free time playing video games, much to my chagrin.

All of that to say I reached my mid-forties and felt like I had nothing to show for my efforts. Did I have fun playing all those games? Yes, but ultimately playing games no longer satisfied me. I wanted to have something tangible for the time I spent. I wanted something more.

I had never been a car guy. I didn’t know how to play any instruments. I thought about woodworking, my stepdad has an incredible woodshop, with a lathe and a planer, a table saw, and a jigsaw, all the tools needed to make anything. But I had very few useful woodworking tools and no space for a shop.

I made the pivot to writing. I had no idea how to start or what to write but I was going to do it. I was going to write a novel.

Failure is the best teacher – learning to take critique

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

-Winston Churchill

When you first start out as a writer you become a dichotomy of wants. You want people to love what you are doing, but you also want to keep it to yourself because, why would you want to expose yourself that way?

When you finally reach a place where you are ready to have someone else look at your writing, you secretly hope that there will be nothing that needs improvement. They will fall in love with your words and prepare to throw a parade when you finish your masterpiece.

In reality, I imagine there are extraordinarily few, if any, writers that can achieve that out of the gate. Most of us have some learning to do and may not even have a clue that we do. The first step is letting it go. Because we are so close to the writing we will often be blind to the problems it has.

Those first critiques are hard to take. Let’s not kid ourselves, they’re all hard to take on some level. But, at first, I think we are all a little resistant to want to hear anything negative or have the desire to change the perfect words we’ve written. We want to argue with whoever the critiquer is about why they are wrong.

I’ve seen it in many critique groups when a new person joins the circle. They aren’t ready to learn anything yet. Their dreams haven’t been trampled enough yet.

I kid, but it’s kind of true. We all go through a period of writing horribly and not being able to see what is wrong. That is the essence of why we get critiqued in the first place. Deep down we know, in those parts of ourselves that we rarely acknowledge, that something is off.

I’m not sure why it takes so long to start listening to that voice, but I can guarantee you, that voice is always right. We will see something weak in a passage we’ve written, but in that moment can’t see how to improve it, so we let it go to see if the reader will notice.

They always notice. Always.

We need to learn to trust that voice and save everyone from enduring your experiment and just cut it. This is also a learned skill.

There are multiple avenues to get critiques. A quick google search turned this up:

49 Places to Find a Critique Circle to Improve Your Writing

When I was desperate to find a crit group 15 years ago, I found a great resource online, since I had nobody physically close enough to meet in person. Critters Workshop. You earn credit by critiquing others. There a lot more these days of you do a simple search.

You might have a group of writer friends that you can share with in person. There are people that might serve as Alpha or Beta readers for your work.

Critiques are going to vary greatly. We did small group critiques for my MFA program, and even there you get a wide variety of responses.

There are several schools of thought on how a critique group should work. We used the Modified Milford method of critiquing, which meant you as the author had to sit quietly while everyone in the group got a chance to critique you, live and in front of everyone else. At the end the author got to ask questions. We received written copies of the crits afterward as well, which I found useful and often more valuable than the verbal critique.

Milford has been the standard technique for a long time, but new methods are popping up now that are less oppressive and more collaborative. On the Clarion West website they breakdown the workshop methods very nicely.

You are going to find that crit styles vary as much as people do. Some are performative, some are just extremely nitpicky. Some are on the mark and useful. You need to consider the background and experience level of the critiquer as well. Some may be published authors, some may be experienced writers who have done the critique sessions many times, and some may be new to the process.

Ideally the feedback should be constructive. Kindness goes a long way.

So, what do you do with the criticism?

Approach the critique with an open mind, but with a dollop of skepticism. They are not going to have equal value to you. Some will be completely worthless. Some will be fantastic. Some people may offer you a solution to what they perceive as the problem with a particular passage. This is generally frowned upon and usually won’t fit with your vision anyway. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem with what they are pointing to.

Here’s the thing. All critiques are just other people’s opinions. Keep that in mind. You don’t have to do anything with them. Your work belongs to you, and you have complete freedom to do what you like.

However, if multiple people are pointing to the same part of your story, then there is probably something there that needs to be fixed. What that will look like is up to you.

Keep in mind also that you volunteered for the critique. I don’t think people are signing up just to be mean to other writers; usually they have good motives. Some people are just better at it than others.

Workshops and critique groups are just the beginning of this torturous journey.

Next level is when you send it to a professional editor or an agent. The editor will definitely give you a lot of feedback, you paid them after all. The agent may or may not. If it’s not for them, they will likely say that it wasn’t a good fit. Or you might hear nothing. If it is for them, they may try to edit it. If it is bought by a publisher, they will have a professional editor go over it and then you will have a choice, make the changes they want or fight for what you want. You may lose the deal if you choose poorly.

My experience with editors has been positive. The ones I have used are very detail oriented or have great vision and they can see things you can’t. Again, the ball is back in your court to make changes or not. Somewhere along the way you will learn to let go of your ego and learn from the critiques you get. That is the entire point after all.

At the end of the day, learning to take critique is about growth. It’s about shifting from defensiveness to curiosity, from resistance to resilience. I’d like to think that the best writers—no matter how experienced—never stop learning. Each critique, whether from a peer, an editor, or a reader, is another opportunity to sharpen your craft, to see your work through fresh eyes, and to build a story that truly resonates.

Yes, it can be tough. Yes, it can bruise the ego. Writing isn’t about proving you’re already great, it’s about improving your skill with every draft. But the real skill isn’t just in writing, it’s in rewriting, refining, and embracing the process. The sooner you let go of perfection and lean into feedback, the stronger your work will become.

So, take what helps, discard what doesn’t, and keep writing. The only failure is refusing to learn.

Deep POV – More feels, less filters

This week I had an epiphany. I got something from my new editor that I wasn’t expecting. I think we all hope our readers are going to read our work and be awed by how amazing it is. We want to hear from our editor that there is nothing wrong and it’s ready for the world. That rarely happens, if ever. But if we are being honest that is not why we hired the editor. We want to hear the hard truth.

It’s appalling how hard it is to educate yourself in the craft of writing beyond the basics. Did you know in Europe you can get a PhD in Writing? Not in the United States. I may be oversimplifying this, but teachers will show you a few tricks of the craft and give a some examples and set you on your way. They tell you to write a million words and it will all become clear.

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I’m being a little facetious, but it’s not far from the truth.

I remember getting the first critique back from my first MFA mentor. He told me I needed to go deeper. “Read Coma,” he said. He actually meant was: “Read the opening chapter. See what it means to have a deeper point of view.”

But that wasn’t what I heard (because that wasn’t what he said.) I read the entire novel in a couple of days. I didn’t understand what he really meant, and I learned nothing from that exercise. I understood at a very rudimentary level that he wanted me to get in closer to the main character’s perspective.

My next mentor, who was amazing, cut filter words from my text. Words like, thought, felt, saw, heard. I understood that. I learned to use body cues to show emotion. I learned a lot of other things as well that had nothing to do with point of view.

I wrote a lot of words. My writing incrementally improved. But my understanding of Deep POV did not.

Then a friend of mine who went through the same MFA program, but had better mentors (we did share one,) decided to try out the editor gig. He has a pedigree. He taught writing at the collegiate level for several years and had gleaned a lot more about the process than I had. Writing was still a hobby for me. It was a job for him.

If you want to get good at something there is no better way than teaching. It worked the same for me teaching systems for the KC-135.

I put my manuscript in his hands to read, simply as background for the second book in the series, but he put on his editing hat as he was reading and next thing you know I got a 122 page document on the problems with my story.

My next blog is going to be about taking critique…

Jacob Baugher knows the keys to Deep POV. He talked about genre and plot, and yes, those need addressing, but the big lightbulb moment for me was when he started talking about Deep POV. I ordered a few more instructional books based on his recommendations.

It just so happened that same day I got an email from writersinthestormblog.com, talking about, you guessed it, Deep POV.

Serendipity.

The writer of that piece is Lisa Hall-Wilson and she talks almost exclusively about Deep POV on her blog. She talked about how hard it was to find ways to educate yourself beyond the basics and spent years learning Deep POV. She has written a book about it, which I now have, and teaches a master class on how to do it.

For at least a decade, Deep POV was one of the techniques I’d aspired to learn. Although I didn’t know that’s what people were calling it.

My favorite books are those that make you forget you are reading. It feels like you are experiencing the story along with the main character. Matthew Woodring Stover is one of the novelists I can point to that has Deep POV down. He has written eleven novels and several screenplays, including my favorite Star Wars book, Shatterpoint. But even though I could point to stories that I love, I still wasn’t recognizing what they were doing that I wasn’t.

Not until Jacob talked about it in the pages he sent me. The light bulb went on.

I have started on Lisa Hall-Wilson’s book, Method Acting for Writers: Learn Deep Point of View Using Emotional Layers.

She claims that the skill isn’t hard to learn, but it is not an intuitive way of thinking. My hope is that by the end of my rewrite it will become more intuitive.

So, what is Deep POV exactly?

It’s an immersive technique that eliminates any distance between the reader and the character. It’s writing in a way that puts you in the head of the point of view character (POVC) and keeps you there.

Which means cutting out telling about what is going on or explaining how the character feels about something.

You need to show it in a visceral way.

This is “Show, don’t tell” on steroids.

You have to dig into the underlying emotional state of the POVC and get to the root of WHY they feel that way. It will require you as the writer to deeply understand your POVC.

You will need to remove the author’s voice as much as possible, meaning no narrator other than the POVC. Everything must come from the character’s perceptions and worldview. The fundamental key is understanding what is motivating the character at a deep-seated level, rooted in the events that have formed the character’s world view, for better or worse. The reactions in a given scene may be the result of a multiplicity of emotions and understanding that is key to being able to write Deep POV well.

Now, not every story needs to be in Deep POV. And not even an entire book necessarily, but I do think it will take your writing to the next level if you can master it. I hope to.

Special thanks to Jacob Baugher for setting me on this path. I hope together we can achieve something elevated. I cannot say enough great things about his approach. I highly recommend him if you are looking for an editor.

#WritingCommunity

If Nothing’s at Stake, Why Are We Reading?

I’m in the process of querying for an agent again. Most agents these days are using QueryTracker, and on the latest sub one of the agents asked something specific that I had not seen in more than a hundred subs over the course of years of doing this in multiple iterations. It was straightforward and surprising that I didn’t have a ready answer.

Typically, most agents ask for a query letter, with a 1or 2 page synopsis, single spaced, and anywhere from 5 to 50 pages of your manuscript, or maybe the first 3 chapters. Lately I’ve seen requests for comparable books, target audience, and the dreaded one sentence pitch. I saw one that offered a small reprieve in the form of the one paragraph pitch. Some will give you very specific guidance on what they want to see in each section, which is always helpful, and you ignore this guidance at your own peril. So here was the question:Subscribed

What’s at stake for your main character?

Should I have had a ready answer for this question? Short answer is yes.

But here’s the thing. It never crossed my mind. Never. Not once in writing this book and the next and halfway through the third in this trilogy.

The development of this story took a lot of turns to get even started. I pantsed the beginning of this story a long time ago. The protagonist kind of emerged fully formed, like Swamp Thing oozing up out the bog. He did grow organically after his emergence into what I needed him to be.

I did some soul searching for the right answer to this simple question and not only did I find an answer, but it added some clarity that will shape some rewrites that I plan anyway. I should be getting documents back from my editor at any moment. (this is the second professional editor to have a go at it, kind of accidently, but you really can’t get enough eyes on your manuscript.)

But was that the best way to go about it?

It was certainly one way, and a very long way to do it.

So, what would be better?

I don’t know how you develop your stories, whether you start with an idea then develop characters to populate it, or whether you start with some interesting characters and give them a problem to solve. Whichever way you do it you will need characters to drive the plot train.

There are a lot of worksheet ideas to build your characters, if you need that, but at the end of the day you will need to give them something they want. And maybe there is something that they need, and maybe those are not the same things. Those will drive the character, but they won’t necessarily answer the question of what is at stake for that character.

Figure that out at the beginning.

Do it for the protagonist and the antagonist. A strong antagonist can really take your story to the next level.

Knowing what is at stake for both characters will add a lot of gut level drive that will make it easier to plot the story. It will add clarity.

One of these days I will take my own advice and save myself a lot of editing.

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Tell Us About the Writing

In preparation to start this journey I did some thinking about what I want to do with this space. I’m involved in a writing group which I helped foster initially when my wife and I owned a tea shop. We met every Thursday afternoon, and the group fluctuated in size, and people dropped in and out, but what I found was it turned into more of a salon, where we talked about all sorts of things, some very esoteric and some quite deep, loosely related to writing.

After the shop closed, we moved the spot to a new location where one of our members had a membership at a coworking studio. The group now is pretty stable, and we stilltalk about writing, and life, more than actually write, but I wouldn’t trade that time and friendship for anything. They are spectacular people, who all have incredible life experiences, and they are all exceedingly well-educated, not that it’s a prerequisite to being interesting, and bonus, they are all kind. But I wish I had kept notes on what we talked about over the course of two years, because it often reminded me that I had something valuable to offer. All that education and life experience had coalesced into something useful. People sought out my advice on various topics and when I started thinking about what to write about here, I desperately wished I had those nonexistent notes. So many good things to share, but alas, they are gone into the ephemera. My memory is like a large colander, and things drop through the holes regularly. Note taking is a survival mechanism at this point.

When I thought about what to write, it made me laugh to think, “Tell us about the writing.” Which is of course ridiculous. Can I talk about it with some sense of knowledge? Yes. But I could also talk about flying airplanes the same way. What do you want to know? That would be my first question. Are you stuck on something specific?

So, we will start off with the first thing you need to know about the rules for writing.

There are no rules.

There are guidelines.

Suggestions.

Expectations. Especially in genre.

Will you ever know all there is to writing? Probably not. I learn new tricks and techniques all the time. A lot of the tools become more natural over time, as with anything, “the more you do it the better you get. tm” There is a common thought in the writing community that there is something magical that happens at the million-word mark. I will say that I felt like I had some better idea of what I was doing at that point. But it is just a reframing of “the more you do it the better you get. tm”

If you write, you are a writer. That’s the second not rule.

There are lots of these non rules. But generally speaking, it’s a good idea to follow convention, unless of course you are deliberately trying to break convention. That falls under “you need to know the rules to break the rules. tm” Even though they’re not really rules.

Let’s see if I can list a bunch (some of these are almost cliché):

Show don’t tell

Write what you know

Use proper grammar

Stay in the same tense (I don’t count dialogue here)

Start in the middle “in media res”

Get in late as possible and out early as possible

Infodumps should be kept to a minimum

Use active voice

Minimize the use of strange language (I would add names to this also)

Describe only what the POV character would notice

If you get all the plot arcs to be answered as close as possible to each other and near the climax it is much more effective

It’s more important to tell a good story than to write well (I guess that’s not even a rule really)

Actually, I have a better idea. Let’s look at some famous writer’s rules for writing:

Elmore Leonard, a master of crime fiction, laid out these rules to keep writing tight and engaging:

Never open a book with weather.Avoid prologues.Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.Never use an adverb to modify “said.”Keep exclamation points under control.Never use “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”Use regional dialect sparingly.Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

George Orwell’s rules focus on clarity and precision:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.Never use a long word where a short one will do.If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.Never use the passive voice when you can use the active.Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Kurt Vonnegut’s advice applies broadly to storytelling:

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that they will not feel the time was wasted.Give the reader at least one character they can root for.Every character should want something, even if it’s only a glass of water.Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.Start as close to the end as possible.Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your characters, make awful things happen to them.Write to please just one person.Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible.

Strunk & White’s “The Elements of Style“

This book outlines key principles of effective writing:

Omit needless words.Use active voice.Use parallel construction.(this means use proper grammar)Avoid fancy words.Place emphatic words at the end of sentences.

The Elements of Style was one of the first books I was told to get when I started on this craft. There are lots of great craft books out there, and I try to read one a couple of times a year. Although, if you look my stack of craft books you would call me out. I said try.

Basically, it really does help to know a lot of these concepts in order to subvert them. Or maybe just follow them? Just know that your reader will be the ultimate judge of your prose. It doesn’t matter what any “expert” says.

Ok, well that’s a lot of words. I hate long posts, don’t you?

The True Joy in Life

“This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”

― George Bernard Shaw

You should be following Mary Spender

She’s been doing the Youtube thing for several years as a singer songwriter and talented musician. Her following has been growing and she really is very earnest and I want her to be successful. This latest video really spoke to me as a writer. How do you face the bank page?

My New Writing Nook