Biff Mitchell's Blog: Writing Hurts Like Hell - Posts Tagged "creative-writing"

So you’ve finished the first draft for your novel. You’ve worked evening after evening (assuming, like most writers, you have a day job as opposed to being a poverty-ridden Bohemian living on friends’ couches and writing on soiled paper with a stubby pencil) for a year, or two years, or more. Your friends have stopped inviting you to parties because they know you’re going to say something absurd like, “Sorry, gotta write.” Your significant other has long been someone else’s other and you can’t even remember their name. At work, people talk about television shows that you’ve never heard of, excluding you from the circle of those in the know. You’ve become a coffee-addicted outsider.

But that’s alright; you have the first draft for a novel and now you can have a life again. For a while.

What you have now is several hundred pages of really bad writing. That is, if you’ve been doing the right thing…writing as quickly as possible (saving revisions and rewriting till the first draft is finished) so that you don’t lose the story and your enthusiasm for it. Now it’s time to let go for a few months. Just put the manuscript aside and forget about it. This is going to be difficult. I mean, the sooner you send it off to a publisher, the sooner you’ll see it on the best-seller lists, sell the movie rights and move into that 50 bedroom mansion in Tuscany you’ve always wanted, right?

Right. So, you don’t have to read the posting any further. Just call someone at Random House and tell them you’ve finished your novel and you’re ready to talk advances,

On the other hand, you might want to improve your chances of an agent talking to someone at Random House (they don’t talk to writers, just agents). Before you send off that novel (to an agent if you’re aiming for the Big Six publishers, or an editor if you’re scaling down to indie publishers), you need to look at it objectively. You need to rise above the mire of details and “known truths” in which you’ve been immersed for so long that you’re the last person on earth who can really judge the quality of what you’ve written.

In short, your first draft is something you shouldn’t even let your friends (if you still have any) see. You’re going to have spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, incoherent descriptions, inconsistent information, poorly constructed sentences, indecipherable paragraphs, boringly long dialog that goes nowhere, adverbs and adjectives that are the exact opposite of what they supposedly describe. What you have is what you’re supposed to have…dough, ready for the oven. But you need to get away from it for a while before you’re ready to see it for what it is: just…dough.

Besides, you need a break from the writing regimen, some time to read a book or two, call the former significant other and wish him or her all the best in their new relationship, or just say, “I wrote a novel. What’ve you done lately?” You need time to drink beer, catch up on television, spend some time in the shower, do that laundry you’ve been putting off since last Spring.

I generally take three to six months. I try not to think about the manuscript calling out from my computer and Google Mail (Yep, Google Mail. Each night, after I’ve finished writing, I mail the manuscript to myself. This gives me a daily update stored outside my computer…a handy thing for someone whose computers crash as often as mine do…and also gives you proof of copyright, dated on a daily basis by a third party.) If I come up with ideas that I’d like to incorporate, or suddenly realize that I wrote something the wrong way, or re-consider the role of a character, I make notes in a document called “Revisions,” but I don’t touch the manuscript. Instead, I drink beer (or wine), play some pool http://www.doolys.ca/, go canoeing with Nanook of the Nashwaak, relax. Sometimes, just to keep the flow of words in my life going, I work on a short story or two, but not intensively…more like some gentle stretching or a leisurely run.

It seems strange at first…suddenly having time to do things, fun things, things without schedule. But I get used to it. And then, of course, by the time I get used to it, it’s time to dig back in and start the real work of writing: re-writing.

I tell my students in my Writing Hurts Like Hell workshop that no novel is ever written; novels are re-written. And then re-written again. And again. Until they’re finished. This process could take a few weeks. It could take a few months. It could take a year or more. I know writers who came close to having nervous breakdowns during the re-writing process (and a couple who nearly lost it after their books were accepted for publication and they had to do yet another re-write under the yoke of merciless editors). No book is finished until it’s on a bookstore shelf or posted on Amazon or another online bookseller.

For the most part, writing the first draft isn’t all that stressful. In fact, it should be relaxing. Your mind should be open to new directions, tapped into the subconscious and excited about the work. Getting to your place of writing (coffee shops for me) should be something to which you look forward, eager to push the story just a little further towards the end, eager to see how that argument between Tina and Turner is going to transpire before Tina stabs Turner, eager to find out exactly how Ray gets out of the burning factory (where you left him tied up in chains in the basement yesterday). Each time you sit down to write, you have a rough idea where you’re going next, but it’s when you do the actual writing that you find out how to get there. It should be relaxing, exploratory, fun.

Not so with re-writing. The fun part is over. The work part begins: thinking with your left brain, making hard decisions, deciding what stays and what goes, what makes sense and what doesn’t. It’s like going to classes and taking notes…and then writing the exam. This is where everything you do counts because it’s time to commit. You can change your mind off the cuff while you’re writing because you’re still in the process of creation, of filling the unknown void with the suddenly known. But in re-writing, you have to take the already known and make it convincing, accurate, readable, satisfying and publishable.

Yes, publishable. When you’re writing the first draft, you’re writing for yourself. It’s your story and you’re telling it. In the re-writing, you’re writing for an editor who’s going to look at it through the eyes of people who are going to buy (or not buy) your story. Loose, open-ended writing has no place in re-writing. Everything now comes under scrutiny, judgement, evaluation, second thoughts, the guillotine of the Delete button.

It’s a big, long process and it can be done the right way or the wrong way. The worst way is to just start at page one and make micro changes to spelling and sentence structure and all the other little revisions to make the writing perfect page after page.

Here’s my process:

Step 1 (Relax): Drink beer and party my ass off for three to six months.

Step 2 (Refresher): Read through the whole manuscript, but don’t make any changes, just make notes in the margins (if you’re reading a printed copy) or notes in the text, highlighted in yellow (if you’re using a computer) or use Word’s track changes feature. This isn’t the time to get caught up in details. You’re looking at the big picture. How does the story flow? Does it slow down where it should speed up or vise versa? Are all the characters really essential? Is this scene essential to the story, or does it just confuse things or draw the story out in a boring manner? Big things.

You’re going to notice things like spelling errors, clumsy sentences, paragraphs that should be cut in half or reversed, repetition, inaccuracies…and on into the wee hours of the night. But you have to resist making changes. The idea is to read at close to the same pace as you would a published novel. You’ve been away from it for several months and now it’s time to get back into it with fresh eyes and a bit more objectivity. Maybe that paragraph about the cat in the graveyard isn’t quite as mesmerizing as you thought it was while you were writing it. Cooling your creative heels for a while takes some of the fog off your eyes.

Step 3 (Second Draft): So…ready to make changes to spelling and grammar? Good. But not yet. This is where you make the big changes. Remember in Step 2 where we mentioned non-essential scenes? This is where you look at the note for Scene 3, Chapter 4 that says: Is this really necessary? Consider dropping this. Can you imagine how heart-wrenching this would be if you’d spent, say, an entire evening or two re-writing this scene to make it perfect and then realize that it just slows the story down and doesn’t do anything to advance the plot? Now’s the time to drop it, before you’ve wasted any more energy and time on it.

In my last novel, The Reality Wars, Notice how I put in a plug for my book? We’ll get into this when I do a posting sometime in the future about how to market your book after you find a publisher.) I had over 180,000 words in the first draft. In the second draft, I cut over 35,000, mostly because I dropped two characters who didn’t do anything to advance the plot and may even have caused some reader confusion. This meant tracking down every passage where they were mentioned and any passages that may have been affected by them, and deleting or re-writing those passages so that the characters were gone, but everything still made sense.

In this draft, you’ll also be looking for things like scene juxtaposition. You may have a scene in which Jake is wondering why his father killed himself, but it comes before the scene in which his father actually commits suicide, and the reader’s wondering what the hell’s going on. It’s not hard to make mistakes like this in the first draft because you’re focussing so much on the just getting the story out of your head.

You might find inconsistencies, like Cassie wearing a blue coat while she’s talking to her mother, but you come back to this scene later and she’s suddenly wearing a red coat. Or Dave might have blue eyes in Chapter 1, but have green eyes in Chapter 3. These things happen. There may be inconsistencies in timelines.

I posted a novella at the Zoetrope Writer’s Community several years ago. (It was a community of fiction writers who read and critiqued each other’s work. I think it’s defunct now, and replaced by the Zoetrope Virtual Studio, devoted to filmmakers.) The story took place over a period of several thousand years. One of the community members sent me a two page list of timelines that were skewed, inaccurate and otherwise just plain wrong. I spent a week implementing his changes. But this is the kind of thing that happens in the first draft.

Another thing to look for is modulation…the rhythm of your story. This is something you might have in mind when you’re writing your first draft. You might have short scenes for fast action and long scenes for slow action, but you’re unlikely to have a sense of how those really work until you’ve finished your novel. When you read over the first draft, you might find that you have one slow scene in a section of the story that just doesn’t’ fit; it slows things down where the action should be continuous. This is the time to decide whether the scene gets dropped or relocated.

Mood and atmosphere can be so easily buggered up in the first draft. For instance, you have a section in an old house where people are disappearing and the remaining people who were stupid enough to go into the house with the curse on it in the first place are seriously creeped out. But you get into the thoughts of one of the characters as she thinks about the pool party she attended few days earlier and this scene goes on for a page or two…and totally breaks the mood of fear and eeriness you’ve been building for the last fifty pages. If you’ve been away from the manuscript for a few months, this disruption of mood with blare out. Now’s the time to delete or relocate.

Look for things like conversations that drag on and on and on…and go nowhere. I’ve noticed this in a lot of novice writers. They get some pretty cool dialog going and the accents are perfect, the tones are right on, the language flows beautifully and the diction fits the character to a tee. But the conversation goes on for three pages and does nothing to advance the plot or reveal parts of the characters that haven’t already been revealed. This is what I call elevator talk, and it should be enthusiastically slashed and burned. Ask yourself: Would the whole meaning and usefulness of this conversation be improved if it were just a page or less? Put all your conversations under the microscope.

Related to superfluous dialog is superfluous description. A writer friend of mine, Beth Powning, spent years and much traveling researching her novel, The Sea Captain’s Wife. Her descriptions of clothing in the 19th Century were accurate and absorbing. However, she had to cut over a hundred pages of description from the first draft. This especially happens when you’ve done a lot research and you want to use as much of it as possible. You might over-describe a house, someone’s facial features, a setting, a legal procedure or a character’s feelings about someone they love or hate. Modern audiences seem to respond to writing that goes light on description and lets the reader fill in most of the details. Ask yourself, “Does this two page description of the meadow behind the house really need the part about the robin feeding worms to her young in the nest clinging to the large branch with veins like those of a champion weight lifter after a three hour workout in a hot gym with…?”

Probably not. Minimalist is the way to go, unless details in the description advance the plot or will be needed as clues to solve a crime if you’re writing a mystery.

Step 4 (Third Draft): OK…you’ve re-structured, ruthlessly deleted superfluous material, relocated scenes, corrected inconsistencies and done some re-writing. Now you have things pretty much the way they’re going to stay for the duration. You have a stable script and unless you get a mind-altering brainstorm that causes your head to melt, what you have is ready for the small stuff, the micro editing.

This is the fine tuning part, where you correct spelling and grammar. (Although you might have already corrected the spelling in the previous draft since it’s not really that big a deal when you have things like spell check.)

This is where you look at each sentence, paragraph and page and make some really serious decisions. That sentence you thought was so beautifully worded in the first draft and maybe even through the following drafts is suddenly under a microscope with a scalpel attached to the lens. Here’s an example:

Ted thought that he was the only one in the group of young men, who were all members of the same soccer team, who had any really realistic ideas about where their little enterprise was going and what they should be doing, as a team, to make some lasting changes at the outset of their venture, rather than wait until their mistakes were so entrenched as to be impossible, or unnecessarily difficult, to change way down the road.

According to the MS word count, that’s 78 words. That’s a lot of words for one sentence, especially when this is part of a scene that’s packed with fast action and intense thrills (You did get that, didn’t you?). But, when I wrote this, I was almost in tears at the majesty of the diction, the depth of thought, the magical flow of images spilling across the screen, and I’m sure that you share these feelings. But…maybe we can improve on this perfection. How about this?

Ted felt alienated from the others by his insistence on proceeding cautiously with their venture so that mistakes made now wouldn’t be compounded in the future.

Twenty-six words. And it says pretty much the same thing, except it gives a more precise insight into how Ted feels: alienated. And this sentence could have been re-written thousands of ways…all of them better.

Most of your re-writing won’t be this drastic though. Mostly it’ll be dropping a word or two. For instance, the “pretty much” in the last paragraph could be dropped and have no effect on the meaning of the sentence. I`m leaving it in because it`s the way I talk. Editors, though, want `tight` writing. They want the writing pared down to the essentials. Anything that doesn`t reveal character, advance the plot or compel the reader to keep reading gets tossed.

Before you begin this step, may I suggest that you read The Elements of Style from cover to cover. You only have to do this for your first novel. After that, use the online version for specific edits and things you might have forgotten.

Step 5 (More Relaxation): After that last draft, you can relax for a few weeks. But that’s all. Any more than three weeks and you will disintegrate. You need this time to get away from the details. I mean, you did some pretty close editing. So now…drink some more beer. Call friends who may have forgotten your name. Call the ex. Tell her or him that you’re OK with their choices, like, if you’d rather have hamburger than steak…I’m OK with that. This is the time to have some fun.

But just for a few weeks.

Step 6 (Fifth Draft): This one’s not so bad. You just read through the entire manuscript and make notes where you might have missed something. When you’ve finished reading, make the changes in the notes. By this time, it shouldn’t be a lot. If it is, you might want to considerea career in busking. The good thing now is that you’re ready to share your manuscript.

Stop 7 (Feedback): If you have any friends left (or relations who still speak to you), give them a copy of the manuscript and ask them what they think about it. You’ll likely get just two or three who’ll give you feedback, but that’s OK. They’re the ones you want the feedback from. Their feedback will likely lead to a few more changes.

Sometimes, getting feedback on just a few things is helpful across the whole book. When I was doing the editorial changes for my third novel, The War Bug, the editor told me to delete every instance of “And then.”. It wasn’t until then that I realized how much I used it and how distracting and unnecessary it was

Step 8 (One Last Read Through): By now, probably the last thing you want to do is read this manuscript that’s sucked the life out of you for so long, but you should., because now you’re going to send your manuscript (well, the first thirty or so pages) to a publisher or agent, or maybe you’re going to self-publish.

I always do one last read-through…just for peace of mind. And generally, I’ll find some stupid little error here, another there, spelling mistakes, places where I’ve accidentally deleted half a sentence. It happens.

After that last read, you’re ready for the riches, adulation, fame and glory that I know you’re going to receive because, after all this, you deserve it. And please don’t forget us little people.

Ross Howard was a psychic. A real-life, bonafide, honest-to-goodness psychic. And he’d been a psychic for, oh, let’s see now...six hours. Ever since he’d been banged on the head by a hammer that morning on his way to work. He wasn’t sure how that had happened; probably just a random head banging but, when it was over, Ross was a psychic.

He could read minds. Predict the future. Lift heavy objects through the power of thought. He hadn’t tried the last one yet, but he could predict the future and he’d predicted that he would soon be lifting heavy objects just by thinking it.

In the meantime, he was having one hell of a time reading peoples’ minds, delving into their most inner secrets, peeking into the stuff of their lives, prying away the illusory boards shuttering the windows into their pasts.

Only problem was...people kept lying to him. In their thoughts. And he had ample proof of this. For instance, he read the thoughts of a woman in the coffee shop line-up just a few hours ago. She was thinking about buying a regular coffee with lite cream but, when she opened her mouth to order, she said, “I’ll have a double caramel latte.”

Liar.

And he could have sworn he’d seen the hint of a malicious smile as she placed her order.

An hour before that, a man driving an SUV in front of Ross was thinking about turning right but almost as soon as Ross read the man’s thoughts he suddenly turned left without any warning and cut across traffic at a busy intersection, almost crashing into a Ford pickup, a convertible Punch Buggy and a woman on a mountain bike.

Crazy liar.

And had Ross seen the man laughing into his rear view mirror?

So he figured he’d try a little reverse psychology. A woman sitting at a restaurant counter bounced her choice between the lemon meringue and apple pie before deciding on the lemon meringue. But Ross knew she was lying and knew that she would pick the apple. When the waitress came over to her, she said, “Could I have a slice of that lemon meringue pie, please.”

These people couldn’t even tell the truth when they were lying. And again, he could have sworn he’d seen a nasty grin on the woman’s face as she ordered her lemon meringue pie.

It was mid-afternoon in suburbia and the sun was shining, not a cloud in the sky, but there was just the slightest of breezes to keep everything warm but comfortable. It was a beautiful day to be a psychic...if he could just figure a way to get people to think the truth. The woman at the restaurant kept with her decision to the lemon meringue pie, but she’d led him to believe that she would get the apple pie by deciding not to get the apple pie.

Had she done that deliberately, just to mess with his head? Or...were mysterious forces at work? With the gift of his new powers, maybe he’d opened some sort of portal into states of being beyond the ordinary. Had he disturbed things that were better left alone? He thought about this for a few minutes and decided it was time to lift heavy objects with his mind.

He focused on a garbage truck parked by the side of the road about thirty feet away. He thought deeply. Very deeply. He visualized the truck lifting gently upwards from the pavement. He closed his eyes and imagined all weight and substance drifting out of the truck so that it would rise, rise, rise from the pavement. He opened his eyes and the truck was still grounded. So he commanded out loud that the truck rise. He lifted his hands, palms upwards, as though he were lifting the truck with his arms, and said, “I command you to rise! I command you to rise!” The truck stubbornly stayed where it was.

Ross decided that he’d probably seen a little further into the future than he’d guessed when he predicted he could lift heavy objects with his mind.

Back to mind reading.

He saw the mini mall a few blocks ahead with the bright blue sign announcing his favorite cyberbar, The Lively Laptop Cyberbar and Grill. Beer and a laptop. That’s what he needed. He passed a yard surrounded by a metal fence and looked into the future, predicting that a dog would bark at him. As the walked by the fence, sure enough, a vicious Dachshund barked indolently at him as it lay on its side in the cool grass. His ability to look into the future was starting to develop.

He walked through the tinted glass doors of The Lively Laptop Cyberbar and Grill into a large LED lighted room with a bar running the length of one wall, booths attached to the other wall, and coffee tables surrounded by easy chairs filling the floors. The glow of monitor screens lit the faces of about a dozen people hunched fervently over laptops. No one was talking. He’d never paid much attention to the other customers in the past, but today he would be paying much attention.

Time to read some minds and find out who was downloading porno. He bought a Corona from a young woman wearing thick glasses who dragged herself reluctantly from her laptop behind the bar. He read her mind. She was irritated with him. She frowned when she passed the beer over the counter to him. Ah, he thought, someone’s finally thinking the truth. He paid for his beer and walked slowly, so as not to attract attention, to one of the tables against the wall. He opened a dated laptop sitting in the center of the table and pressed the ON button. While the laptop booted up, he looked around the room. Who’s mind would he read?

His eyes settled on a middle aged man in a two piece suit with his tie and shirt collar loosened around his neck. He focused on the man’s head, looking deep into his brain, opening his own mind to whatever thoughts would flow from the man’s cranium. Almost immediately, he knew the man’s name—Bob. Bob something. He knew the man was writing an email to a business associate. He knew that man was writing, “I’m sure Hanson will go along with the plan, but we’ll have to watch Mercer carefully.”

Good.

That was a successful mind read. He thought about approaching the man and asking his name and what he was doing, but the thought crossed his mind that the man might suspect that his mind had just been read. That was something he’d have to think about. Secrecy. If other people found out about his powers he could find himself in a bit of a pickle. How would they react to his ability to peer into their deepest secrets? Would there be those who would want to hire him for his psychic talents? Would there be those who would fear his talents and want him dead? Would they see him as a precursor to a new race of superior human beings and fear for the extinction of the human race as it is? Would he be seen as a threat to national security? Would they send teams of men in black suits and black SUVs in the wee hours of the night to wisk him off to some secret laboratory where he would spend the rest of his life under observation, poked with cold steel instruments, interrogated endlessly, hooked to wires and electrodes, subjected to psychological testing at all hours of the day and night?

No...he would have keep his new powers secret. At least, for the time being. In the meantime, he would work on them, develop them, get a grip on his full potential. And right now, he would read someone else’s mind. Let’s see. The woman in the corner with the glasses that seemed to cover most of her oval face. Her eyes were the size of silver dollars as they stared into the laptop monitor, her face illuminated eerily, like a phantom object shining out of the darkness of the corner. He stared intently at her high forehead, stared into her forehead where the gray matter was, where her thoughts were. Her name was Sara. She was thinking, “...mmm, ffttt. Mmmm...rrrrgggg; mmm...fftt...”

No way could that be a lie. So her name had to be Sara. His powers were in top form. He was reading minds like a pro. He was on the cusp of great things. No one could stop him now. If they came for him in the wee hours of the night, he would know. He would know before they knew. He would lift them into the skies with his ability to lift heavy objects just by thinking about it and let them hover over their fate until they screamed for their mommies.

He took a long celebratory drink of beer, then watched as his laptop screen finally displayed Firefox. He cursored to the Google search box and entered: mind reading for beginners. 556,000,000 results. He decided to do some research later. In the meantime, he would just learn by doing. He turned the laptop off and chugged the rest of his beer.

Outside, the sky was beginning to cloud over. Ross predicted rain.

He spotted a small plane in the sky and decided to try his hand at long distance mind reading. He projected his thought reading power into the sky and centered on the plane, penetrating the fuselage, directly into the mind of the pilot, whose name was Bob. Bob was thinking about his approach to the airport, which seemed strange. Ross thought that the airport was in the opposite direction. But he wasn’t sure. So he wouldn’t accuse Bob of lying. As he thought this, he noticed that the plane dipped its wing. Wasn’t that how pilots saluted and acknowledged someone on the ground? Well, he wished Bob a happy landing.

Yes, his powers were getting stronger by the moment. He was reading people’s minds like reading comic books. He was the master of transparency. He started thinking about how best to use his powers and the answer came into his mind immediately: time to get rich.

He headed straight for the Tenth Street Casino. It was time for some poker, and it didn’t matter how straight faced the other players were. But he would let them win some small amounts, at first. Let them get over confident, ready for some big bets. He would know exactly when to lose and win. He would play them from within their own minds.

An hour later, he walked out of the Tenth Street Casino broke, his wallet cleaned out, his savings cleaned out, his wrist minus a watch.

Liars !

He couldn’t believe it. It was as though they all knew that their minds were being read and deliberately did the opposite of what they were thinking. Even when they were about to do the opposite of what they were thinking, they suddenly did the opposite of that.

Cheating liars!

He was stunned. Heading towards him down the sidewalk was a woman pushing a stroller with something bundled up so tightly it was impossible to tell if it was a baby or a dog. He read the woman’s mind as she was about to pass him. It was a baby boy. His name was Bob. Finally, another successful mind reading.

The woman stopped and looked at him quizzically. Uh-oh. Was his secret out? Did she, through some form of mother’s intuition, sense that he’d been reading her mind? Would they be coming for him in the wee hours of the night?

“Traci,” said the woman.

Ross stared at her. What the hell was she talking about?

“My baby is a girl. Her name is Traci, not Bob. And that’s a nasty bump you have on your head.”

(Note: This is one of the many fine stories in the Twisted Tails VIII anthology from Double Dragon Publishing.)

I used to write commercials for a radio station; you know…those thirty second blasts of sound that keep you awake in rush hour traffic. The key element in a radio commercial is the first line.

If it fails, everything fails. Think about it, the listener is driving through rush hour traffic (that’s the most expensive air time for a radio station), possibly texting a friend, yelling at the kids for throwing pop tarts out the window, giving the guy in the left lane the finger for whatever reason (plenty of those in Freddie Beach with its internationally acclaimed record for having the worst drivers in the world) and looking for the next off ramp. The trick is to cut through this moving circus and get the driver to listen to the radio, and the only way to do this is to start the commercial with something personally meaningful to the driver.

Let’s say the driver has been thinking about buying a new car and the ad for a car dealership starts with, “Get your ass into AJ Auto for the best deals and service in town!” I’m not sure if this is going to compete well against a pop tart flying out the window. Change that to, “Looking for a new car?” and you’re a lot more likely to get the driver’s attention, right off the bat, so that they hear the entire commercial, including the name and location of the dealer.

This is the way the title of a book works…if you’re really interested in selling the book. There has to be a personal connection between the title and the reader. “Murder! Murder! Murder!” would probably attract someone looking for a murder mystery with a lot of murder in it. “Baseball Was My Waterloo” might attract a sports fan. “Strange Love in Hong Kong” might attract a romance fan with a thirst for weirdness. In fact, just about any title you can think of will attract some specific audience. Go ahead, think of a title for a story and ask yourself who might be attracted to it. There will always be someone.

So your title is important, almost as important as the cover art. (I dare you to challenge me on this one. I’ve walked down supermarket aisles, past stacks of books and it’s always the cover art that screams out the loudest.) The only exception I can think of is when the title is part of the art. Or there’s no art…just a white page with the title. Or the author is so beloved that the very presence of his or her name within thirty feet draws the attention of ardent fans. OK…so there could probably be a thousand or more exceptions…but I’m telling you right now…your title is important.

Case in point: beautiful cover art that draws a crowd from to the airport’s bookstore shelves…a hundred copies of the book casting a spell-binding aura over the crowd. When they get up close and just beginning to reach for a copy, they read, “Why I Like Cats.”

Big waste of cover art.

Better idea to get the reader to open the book, “Why I Don’t Kill Cats.”

“So what does this have to do with roses?” said the fox.

“That was just the title,” replied Biff. “Something to get your attention. And it worked. You’ve read this far.”

So just how do you come up with a title, provided you haven’t already? If you don’t have one, then anything will do to begin with. This is called a working title. I can be anything you want it to be because it’s not going to be the final title. Here’s how it works.

The Working Title

The working title is what you call your novel while you’re writing it, just so that you have a name for it. This may (and likely will) change by the time you’re completed the novel, and this can be for any number of reasons. You might decide that you don’t really like it; you might decide that it’s not catchy enough; you might decide that you like something else better; you might decide that it doesn’t fit the evolving mood and tone of the novel; your publisher might change it.

Worse…the novel might change to the degree that the title no longer makes any sense. This happened to me with my fifth novel. It was to be the sequel to a previous book, so I was pretty damn sure how it was going to go even before I began story boarding. It was going to be 2000 years in the future. (kept) I was going to use several of the characters from the first novel. (kept) I was going to have an online triathlon. (kept, with modifications) I was going to bring Linus Torvalds, the inventor of Linux, back from cryostasis into a world where he would be the last programmer in the universe. My working title was The Last Programmer. As the story board progressed (almost from the beginning), this idea dropped away and Torvalds was left in cryostasis. (Sorry, 'bout that Tor.) The novel’s final title was The Reality Wars. I put the focus on the cyber triathlon.

But it’s still good to have a working title. It can give you a point of focus as you write. It gives you a better reference point than just “My Book” or “That Thing I’m Working On.”

The Final Title

This may end up being your working title, unchanged, un-dropped and still relevant. It can happen. However, if you haven’t already changed the title while still in the planning, first draft or re-writing stages and you still aren’t happy with it as the title that will appear on the published cover then you have some serious work to do.

Start by asking yourself, “What is this book about?” The title should reflect something about the book: the theme(s), the mood, the context (historical, international), the genre, or the basic storyline.

Write down everything that comes into your mind. You might even want to use some of this to do some clustering exercises. Carry this around with you. Look at it from time to time. Keep adding to it. Sleep on it. Talk about it. Think about it. Sooner or later, it’ll come to you.

When it does, ask yourself:

• Does it appeal to the target audience?
• Does it address the content?
• Is it understandable (not too long or convoluted)?
• Has it already been used? (Google the title.)
• How will it fit into a series? (if you plan a sequel or two)
• Is it sellable?
• Is the title descriptive?
• Does it conjure an image?
• Does it fire up the reader’s imagination?
• How will it fit with cover art?
• Does it need cover art to pull it off?
• How do YOU really feel about it?

Ask your friends and family what they think. Do some brainstorming with them. You’ll come up with something.

I was sitting in a coffee shop one night working furiously on a short story for one of the Twisted Tails anthologies (The editor, J, had mentioned that, if I didn’t have the story to him pronto, bad things would start happening to me.) when I felt someone nudge my shoulder. I quickly grabbed my Saint Christopher’s cross to ward off evil editors before turning to see who it was. It wasn’t J.

It was a pimply faced middle aged wide eyed short paunchy balding man wearing the ugliest sweater I’ve ever seen. I won’t spoil your appetite by describing the sweater. He asked if I were Biff Mitchell. I said no, but he just ignored me and waved two crumpled sheets of paper in my face.

“I need you to tell me what’s wrong with this.” He sounded pissed off and disappointed at the same time. I thought for a moment on whether or not I should take the paper out of his hand and shove it up his nose, but I don’t do things like that anymore, so I took the sheets and looked at them.

“There’s something wrong, but I don’t know what it is.” His eyes looked like they were almost ready to burst into tears. “Ashley, my sister, read it and laughed.” I think he called her a bitch, but I’m not going to use that kind of language here. I told him to calm down and I started reading. He moved to the empty chair on the other side of the table as though he was going to sit, but I told not to sit down, that it would ruin my focus. I read the first page.

Surprisingly, the writing wasn’t bad. In fact, it was good enough that I continued reading into the second page. And that’s when I almost started to laugh.

He described the cockpit of a Formula 1 racing car going full out as smooth as a bar of soap sliding across ice. Now, I’m not going to get into a critique of the imagery, but I will take issue with the description itself. I’ve never driven a Formula 1 racer myself, but I once saw a video clip of the inside of one going full out…and it was anything but smooth. In fact, it was bumpy as hell and it seemed to me to be a miracle that any car could hold together under that kind of stress.

His sister obviously saw the same video clip. In his case, a simple search through YouTube might have given him a little more insight, but, obviously, he just used his imagination and figured that a car built for those speeds would probably drive smoothly at those speeds. His research obviously sucked.

Good research is a key ingredient in a well-written novel. Lack of it shows, not just in terms of inaccuracies, but in terms of convincing descriptions of settings, procedures, operations, cultures and everyday rituals…just to name a few aspects of fictional world-building.

I mentioned this to the man in the ugly sweater and he grabbed the pages away from me, stared at me with wide swollen eyes, stood up, broke into tears and ran out of the coffee shop. He could have avoided that whole scene with just a little bit of reality.

I’ve heard a lot about this thing called the writer’s voice…as though it’s some magical sound thingy that slides through the night and whispers breezes of joy into the ears of the reader...or rips through the fabric of the reader’s comfort zone and leaves a path of raised eyebrows and bumpy skin.

I’ve heard about this thing called the writer’s voice that readers and editors and critics wrap tightly around a pedestal and raise it into the sky with each successive publication of “THIS NEW VOICE!”

And therein lies the secret of becoming a successful writer: finding that distinctive voice that will distinguish you from the rest of the pack and vault you into riches and fame or critically correct obscurity. And your writing doesn’t even have to be good. It can be crap. But if it’s distinctive crap, it’ll sell…once the voice is out there, recognized, familiar and well-marketed.

But voice isn't a style. Styles can be copied. It’s more like a personal resonance, a sense of the rhythm and flow of the way words would be used if they were read out load on a street corner, rise above the traffic and human bustle and still be heard. It’s the rhythm and flow of a human presence as distinctive as fingerprints and DNA…a rich flow of visual diction as well-composed as a great painting or photograph. It’s the rendering of thought through words so that it can’t be mistaken for any other voice.

The man who punctuates every sentence and thought with “fuck” is just as distinctive and memorable as a great orator. Once you hear it, you’ll never forget it no matter how much you’d like to…and you’ll always recognize it.

“So, Biff,” said the fox, “where do you find this thing called voice?”

“You don’t find it,” I said. “It finds you.”

“And just how might it find you?” said the fox, a little too arrogantly for my liking.

“Well,” I said, “one way is through mindless writing.”

“You’re joking, right?” said the fox.

“Let me explain…”

I teach a writing workshop call Writing Hurts Like Hell (and it does). In the first class I introduce my students to a this thing called mindless writing that I borrowed from Dorothea Brandt, who introduced it in her 1934 book On Becoming a Writer. It’s a little book, but it’s big on wisdom and great advice for anyone with aspirations of becoming a writer.

Here’s the gist of it: pick a word, a topic, a thought, a dream, a memory, a sentence, an object within view, a feeling, a concern, a theme, a conversation you overheard, a scent, a worry…anything that pops into your head.

Pick a length of time you intend to write. Start with five minutes. Being the cruel malicious bastard I am, I make my students start with fifteen minutes. Some of them run screaming from the class and drink too much for the rest of their lives. Now, start writing (preferably by hand with a pencil, pen or stick and sand…this has actually been proven to engage the mind more than a keyboard) about your chosen whatever.

Here’s the catch…you can’t stop writing until you’ve reached the time you set for yourself. If you stop to correct something, rewrite it or change it in any that will make it different from what you wrote…God will kill you. You have to keep writing even if you run out of things to say about your chosen whatever. You might have to change to another whatever or just repeat the last sentence you wrote until something new comes along. When this happens to my students, they write something like, “I hate this bastard, Biff. I hate him. I hate him. I hate him!” Surprisingly, this can occasionally lead to some genuinely insightful mindless writing.

But it’s worth the pain.

Mindless writing helps bring out the individual voice without judgement, editing or criticism. That voice that’s always inside you trying to get out, but pushed back inside with left brain thoughts like, “This is too flowery.” “This is too plain.” “This sucks.” We tend to write the way others expect us to write so we write for them, not for ourselves. We write in such a way as to gain the approval of those for whom we write, even if they’re imaginary spectres looking over our shoulders, and if we imagine they don’t approve of what we’re written, we scratch it out, delete it…deny it.

The last place you’ll find your own personal voice is in the approval of others. It just won’t happen.

Do this every morning. That’s the best time. It’ll give the right side of your head a boost that’ll charge your mundane day with creativity. But more importantly, the more you do it, the easier it will become. It will gain coherency, structure and uniqueness. Your voice will find you. It’s in there…you just have to give it a pathway out.

“So,” said the fox, “any other ways to find your voice?”

“Yep,” I said. “Get into arguments with yourself.”

“But…”

It’s a little like mindless writing except it has a definite structure: a dialogue. You write something down, complete with quotation marks and then disagree with what you said, complete with quotation marks. Then defend your statement. And go back and forth like this for a page or two or more if you're really into it. You’d be surprised at how many times you’ll lose an argument with yourself.

The key to letting your voice find you with this way is to believe everything you say, on both sides of the argument. You'll develop an objectivity that rises above criticism because your the one criticizing on both sides of the fence. You'll rise above the na sayers because you will be them...along with the yea sayers. Think of it as a battle between your right brain and your left brain taking place in the stadium of your left brain.

Always good to hedge your bets.

Argue hard and furiously. And, unlike total all-out extreme mindless writing, you can stop and think about your arguments and counter arguments.

So how does your voice find you in this medley of dissention? Well, nothing brings out the inner self as convincingly as a good heated argument. Argue with yourself when you're feeling kind of groovy. Argue with yourself when you're angry at something. Argue with yourself when you have nothing else to do. Have a drunken argument with yourself. Yell at yourself. Yell back. Sometimes, do some name-calling. You'd be surprised at what you may call yourself that might give pause for thought.

One little hint...keep it in writing. Don't get into a shoving match or a fist fight. That's called "hearing voices in the head." That's not what you want.

Keep this up and after a while, you'll find one side winning more and more frequently. That's your voice. You'll know when you hear it because it will have found you.

This is one I don't teach in my workshop because if I give away all my secrets, they won't need me anymore and they'll kill me. This is how Kung Fu masters die.

One last way to let your voice find you...blog. But write in a word processing program first...or pen, pencil, stick in sand. That way you'll be writing for yourself. Then decide what you want to share and what you want to keep for yourself...and revise accordingly. Not giving a flying bat's ass what anyone thinks about me...I never delete anything. I wrote it for myself...it's my fucking voice and I argued and wrote mindlessly for millennia to get it, so put up or shut up.

Don't mean to insult either of you, but that's how I feel. You should feel the same way too.

We live in a violent world. It’s a part of life. Animals die violently in nature to feed other animals. We walk across a beautiful bed of grass―and squash the life out of ants and other insects that were busily going about their lives thinking, “I’m so happy to be doing this.” And then … crush. They’re gone. We may not have intended violence, but tell that to the bugs.

Violence, like the characters in your stories, is more complex than it may appear on the surface.

You have to ask yourself: Why did that person commit that act of violence?

No human is a single person. We’re all each of the people we’ve always been, when we were children, when we were teenagers, when we young adults, when we were middle aged, and when we’re old. We carry around with us all those people we’ve ever been―all the fears, all the joy, the anger and the love. Most of us deal with these things over time and manage to bring all those people into a balance that allows us to function. Some of us never quite find that balance and this can cause us to act in ways that surprise us. We might suddenly snap at someone for no reason, or we might overreact to some little thing that goes wrong. We have no idea where this comes from. It could be from problems in our everyday lives, or it could be from some long unresolved hurt in our childhood, still festering and calling out for help in our adult lives.

It’s this richness of experience and the emotional impact it has on us for our entire lives that makes every person complex and multi-dimensional. No one person is completely bad and no one person is completely good. If you have a character in your story who is completely evil with no redeeming characteristics, then you have a piece of cardboard. Even a psychotic personality may have a deep fondness for chocolate ice cream. Adolf Hitler played a game with his general staff. When one of them saw a man with a beard, they yelled, “Beard!” The one who saw the most number of beards won. This man who caused the death of millions of men, women and children had a sense of play.

An experiment performed in a US school in which students were to re-enact the rise of Nazism as part of a history project got so far out of hand in just a few weeks that most of the students had to undergo extensive counseling. In a matter of days, normal children were converted to fascism.

We’re all a mixture of many personalities, but we all have two sides―a dark side and a light side. Most of us manage to stay within the bounds of the light side, but the dark is always there. As writers, we have to accept both sides. We may not agree with some of the things that our characters do, and we might not like them if we were to meet them on the street or at a party, but we have to accept them for both their good and their bad.

It starts by loving our characters, unequivocally. If we love them enough to create them in the first place, then we have the responsibility of loving them enough to go the whole course and give them life. We show the good in bad people and the bad in good people. We keep it balanced.

If you have a violent character, don’t let the violence just hang there. Show where it comes from. You have the breadth of story-telling in a novel to do that. Sometimes, just the mention of a scar that the character rubs after committing an act of violence may suggest something deeper and give some understanding or meaning to the violence or the character. Sometimes, you can do this through back-stories that track back to an incident in the character’s life that feeds violent behavior throughout their lives.

Violence: Physical and Emotional

Violence is not always physical. Emotional violence can be just as destructive and sometimes even more so than physical violence.

I was in the checkout at the Superstore one day when I heard a man call his wife a fucking bitch a few aisles down. They had three children with them. He told her how useless she was and called her a fucking bitch several times. Everyone could see that she was humiliated and close to tears. It wasn’t a big jump to assume that this is what she lived with every day.

The man in the supermarket might just as well have punched his wife in the face. Our bodies heal quickly from physical violence but emotional violence lingers inside us and punches us in the face moment-by-moment, day after day. It eats at our souls and strips us of our pride and self-worth.

Whenever you can, try to show both sides of the act of violence, including the victim―if only through the expression in the victim’s eyes. As for the man in the store, I’m guessing that someone in his past probably called him every name in the book.

Ask Yourself: Which is worse, physical or emotional violence?

Violence Pointers

Never throw gratuitous violence into your stories. Violence is a part of life and therefore has meaning in life. It comes from your characters; treat it with all the respect you give to the people you’re creating. Make your violence appropriate.

Don’t overdo it. You don’t have to describe every physical blow or every hurtful word. Focus more on the effect it has on your characters.

Make your violence reveal character, not obscure it.

Try This

You’re a child in a playground. The school bully comes after you, insults you and slaps you in the face. If you do anything to defend or protect yourself, the bully will beat the living daylights out of you. Write about your thoughts as this is happening, right from the moment you see the bully heading toward you, through the taunting (“Hey, ya four-eyed runt,” etc.), and finally to being slapped in the face.

OR

Write about a man or a woman punching another man or a woman in the face, over and over. Get inside the person doing the punching. Write only about what's going on inside the head of the person doing the punching. You can state it explicitly or you can hint at it … but try to show where the anger and violence are coming from.

OR

Try both.

All humor arises out of the basic absurdity of life. Let’s look at life. We’re born. We flourish. Or … we don’t flourish. Then we die. It’s an absurd concept. We’re given this beautiful gift called life, and then it’s taken away from us. For no reason. Even if we’re really good and never kill a fly. Eventually, we die. It all ends.

It’s absurd.

How do we deal with it? Some people turn to religion and see it as just the first step toward a better life. Some people get drunk and speed up the process. Some people smoke and really speed up the process. Some people try not to think about it. Some people take a philosophical view and say, “It forces me to value every moment of my life … because the moments will end.”

Some people recognize the absurdity of the whole thing and laugh at it. That’s us. We’re the ones who laugh at it. And we’re the ones who want to make others laugh at it.

What Is Humor?

“Humor is the product of a surprise ending applied to a normal situation, and the more unusual the surprise ending, the more intense will be the humor.” Jim Foreman in “How to Write Humor”

“You take a woman walking down the sidewalk . Show the audience a banana peel in front of her. Everyone knows that she is going step on the banana peel and do a pratfall. At the last instant, she sees the banana peel, steps over it and falls into an open manhole that neither she nor the audience knew was there.” Charlie Chaplin

My Definition of Humor

Humor is that which lifts the spirit. If you can make someone let go of the basic absurdity of life, make him or her forget about bills, work, the dishes piling in the sink, a pulled muscle―all the basic heaviness of living life day-by-day― then you’ve created humor.

You don’t have to make them laugh until they puke. All you have to do is lift their spirits. Make them laugh to themselves, make them smile, make them forget about the mundane for an instant―give them a bit of breathing space.

In a nutshell: Humor is anything that lifts the spirit in such a way as to say, “Yeah, it’s all so very serious…but not right now.”

NOTE: Comedy is a whole different animal. In comedy, you need to make a live audience laugh and keep them laughing.

Seeing Humor All Around Us

The potential for humor is all around us. It lies just under the surface of everything we see in the way we see it. One of the best ways to explore this is to go through pictures and look for alternate realities to what you see.

The trick is to let your imagination run wild and not be constricted by what you see. Very little in life is what it appears to be. You can see a photo of two people embracing for a picture and they look like the happiest couple on earth. But she might be thinking, “Right after this, I’m going to tell him about John.” He might be thinking, “Right after this, I’m going to tell her about Marsha.” The situation under the surface of appearance is humorous and ironic.

Writing Captions

A great way to develop a sense of drawing the humor out of everyday things is to write humorous captions for pictures you find in magazines, newspapers, and advertisements. If you really want to get into it…go to the family photo albums.

You could even write an entire scenario based on a photograph, taking the people in the image an absurd world of your making.

Try This

Go through a magazine or newspaper and cut out pictures of people interacting with each other. Create thought or dialogue balloons with words that show the exact opposite of what's going one. For instance, a picture of four executives standing for a formal portraits and three of them are thinking, "Who farted?" And one of them is thinking, "Smile folks, smile for the camera."

Exaggeration and the Absurd

Exaggeration and the absurd are the most common forms of humor and are sometimes impossible to tell apart. You take something mundane like a sign on the road with a picture of a deer. The deer almost looks like it’s dancing. Up the road, you see an actual deer―and it’s dancing. Not only that, it’s wearing a ballet dress and tights. Further up the road, you see several deer dancing. Some are doing ballet, some are doing the tango. Still further along, you see dozens of deer dancing, then hundreds―ballet, rumba, flamenco, tango, twist, 2-stop. They’re in the woods, on the roadside and on the road. You have to stop your car and watch while they dance. After a while, they dance away into the woods and everything is quiet. As you start to drive forward, you see a sign that shows a moose. It looks like the moose has a grenade launcher.

The whole point with exaggeration and the absurd is to let yourself go―no restraints. Forget about what’s possible and what’s not possible. Make it possible, without any explanation. People will suspend their credibility gaps for a laugh. Don’t say, “This is stupid. I’m not doing it.” Instead, do it because it’s stupid. While you’re in the first draft writing phase of exaggeration, nobody will see how stupid you are. You can edit later to hide the true nature of your stupidity. Remember, nobody has ever gone to jail, lost their job, lost their marriage, or been laughed at for something they’ve written. Unless they were caught.

Try This

Write down a word or sentence and then start exaggerating it, going from mundane to increasingly absurd things. Keep in mind the deer sign on the road and the steady progression of impossible things, each more absurd than the previous.

It Builds Over Time

Do these exercises whenever you get a chance. The more you do them over time, the better you’ll get. And then, when you’re writing, you’ll be more likely to identify places in your stories where humor is appropriate and you’ll be ready to write that humor.


Try This

Do the same as in the exercise above. Start with the sentence: She had big blue eyes.

Sex can be the most magical thing in the world and it can be the ugliest, but it’s the most intimate form of communication between two people, whether the communication is about love or about terror.

It can say wonderful things about your characters and it can say terrible things about them.

Sex should never be gratuitous in your stories―it should be used to reveal character in the people who populate your literary landscape.

Sex Should Reveal Character

The way we have sex reveals how we feel about life, about other people and about ourselves, and the way your characters have sex will depend on how well you know them. If your characters are real, when you put them in the sack with another human being, they’ll have sex the way they would in real life.

Get into the minds of your characters while they’re having sex. Exploring the interplay of thought between two people in the throes of ecstasy (or boredom) can be a brilliant source of humor, drama, or irony.

For instance, the interplay between a woman and man on a one-night stand―and they both know it. He’s saying “I love you” to a woman he met an hour ago. During hurried and awkward sex, he’s thinking: “Let’s get this over with so I can put another notch on my conquest meter.” She’s thinking: “Let’s get this over because I haven’t been laid in a month and I need this, but I also have to get up for work tomorrow.”

If your character is violent and self-absorbed make sex with that person something painful and unfulfilling for the partner (unless, of course, the partner is someone who gets off on violent and self-absorbed lovers).

One of the best examples of this is the movie American Psycho. In one scene, the lead character (a self-centered sociopath) is having sex with two women. His room is lined with mirrors and he’s watching himself during the entire sex act. He’s basically using the women to masturbate on fantasies of himself. One of the women has to be hospitalized. It wasn’t a joyful thing for her. This scene says more about the lead character’s complete lack of feeling for other human beings than the scenes in which he brutally kills them.

At the other side of the spectrum, don’t have a prudish character suddenly having torrid sex unless you’re going for humor, or you’ve set the character up for this with the occasional erotic daydream or a quick flash in the character’s eye when a member of the opposite sex walks in, and the flash reveals something stirring inside, like a repressed sexual dynamo waiting to be loosened.

I remember watching pornographic movies with the guys in college. For the most part everyone laughed. Your sex scenes should make people think or understand, not laugh (unless you’re writing comedy). If the sex in your stories isn’t saying something about your characters, then it’s gratuitous, and possibly pornographic, or maybe it’s just boring.

The key to writing about sex is to not force it. Let it flow through you from the characters you’ve created. And don’t be afraid to experiment. If something seems a little over the top or perverse, but that’s the direction your writing is taking, go with it. You can always edit or toss it later. On the other hand, you may have found that you’ve written something beautiful, even if perversely beautiful.

Try This

Write a two-paragraph description of two people having sex. Use only their thoughts, no physical description (i.e. the bed, the room, etc.) unless it’s coming from the thoughts of the character. Write quickly and just let the words flow.

How Much Sex Should Your Character’s Have?

How much sex is right? That’s completely up to you and your characters. They might be able to get through a 400 page novel without once having sex, or as in Susan DiPlacido’s steamy chic lit novel, 24/7, they might not be able to get through four pages without sex.

If you find yourself putting a lot of sex into your first draft, keep it there for the time being. You can edit out the gratuitous stuff later, asking yourself, does this make sense? Is this real? Is this what these people would do?

Again, let the sex come from the characters you’ve created. If you’ve done your work on them before you started writing, then trust them to have the kind of sex they want to have. Don’t try to manipulate them. Write mindlessly, following the feelings your characters invoke in you. The sex they have may change them. Let them change.

In this light, if you’re writing erotic fiction, make sure your characters are erotic. Build them around their sexuality. Give background to their sexuality. Give the reader flashbacks to their first sexual acts. Give the reader their daydreams and fantasies and then make those daydreams and fantasies come true.

But also give them lives outside their sex lives. Make them real people in every facet of their lives and then put real people into the sack with them.

Do this, and two or three chapters into your book, your characters will let you know how much sex they should have.

How Do You Balance Sex Between Pornography and Eroticism?

Sex scenes don’t have to be graphic with descriptions of wildly flailing bodies and graphic close-ups of genitalia. If the sex is violent, you might describe bruises and grunts and facial expressions more than sexual contact. If the sex is humorous, you might focus most of your description on props like clothing, condoms and a leaky waterbed. You might even describe anything but the people. The entire scene can unfold as the description of a flower blooming, incorporating the sensual movement of petals as they tighten and then unwind and finally burst into color.

You might describe everything that’s going on in the character’s life, incorporated right into the sex act. The best example I’ve ever seen of this is Molly’s sex scene in James Joyce’s Ulysses, and it hardly says anything about body-to-body contact.

However, if you’re writing erotica, you’ll want your sex scenes to be more explicit. But erotica is not pornography, and two bodies just pounding away at each other without any kind of build-up or reason isn’t going to create great eroticism. You need to arouse your reader. You need to give your reader a little literary foreplay, getting into the minds of your characters and exploring their wants and expectations.

Pornography turns people into sex machines, indulging in sex for no other reason than to go through the motions. In fact, pornography dehumanizes people to the point where they become little more than plastic sex dolls. It’s demeaning to both parties.

Erotica gets into the minds and bodies of your characters and makes your readers feel what they’re feeling. It’s a beautiful exploration, and if you can incorporate the rich experience of your character’s life into the act of sex like Joyce does, then you’ll be giving your readers a glimpse into your characters’ souls.

Romance, is generally much less explicit, with the focus on love or a relationship built on much more than sex.

Try This

Write one paragraph of pornography. Then turn it into one paragraph of erotica. Then turn your paragraph of erotica into an act of love. Let yourself go on this exercise. You can destroy it as soon as you've written it so that no one else will see what you've written, but you should go beyond yourself in this exercise so that you understand the differences between the various approaches to writing sex.

I’ve known people who would never dream of saying “damn” and then lose it completely and say “fuck” over and over. Sometimes, a deep breath just doesn’t do the trick. I’ve known people who just barely communicated because the amount of foul language coming out of their mouths almost obscured what they were saying.

But whether they never swear, or can’t stop swearing, you need to convey the sense of language your characters use and it has to be realistic.

Nothing describes your characters as accurately as the language they use. A large burly man dressed in rags is walking toward you on the sidewalk. Ten feet away, his eyes meet yours and hold there. You think, oh no, and get ready to say, “Sorry, I don't have any change.” When he's just a few feet away, he smiles and says, “Beautiful day.”

The words we use and how we use them say more about us than the clothes we wear and, often, how our faces and bodies look. Language is how we express our thoughts and feelings. It defines us more than anything else about us.

For example, a friend of mine ran an English immersion class for French high school students (many years ago). When he first ran it, there were situations where students had nervous breakdowns, made suicide attempts or dropped out of the program because they couldn’t handle the stress. The problem was that they were cut off from using their language. They defined themselves and their reality so deeply through their language that, when they weren’t allowed to speak it, their personalities began to dissolve.

If you put all the love, commitment and work into creating real characters in your stories―characters who are believable and surprising―then you have to go the whole distance and let them talk the way they will.

In children's books, family books, and religious books, the language is going to be toned down, not because teenagers, seven year olds and priests don't swear, but because your characters are created for a very specific audience and they represent the ideal type of person in your reading audience. This is the way you've created them. They'll take the road less foul-mouthed. On the other hand, you might want to change the rules and give the audience something new. Make sure you have a thick hide and a day job before attempting this outside the home.

I know very few people who don't swear at one time or another. We use strong language when we're mad, when we're disappointed, when we're reaching orgasm, when we're trying to insult someone, when we crush our thumbs with a hammer, when we're surprised, when we're frightened, when we're…

It goes on. And many of these times are appropriate for strong language. The same holds true in your stories. You use language that's appropriate for the situation and for your character in that situation. One woman might say, "Damn!" when she burns herself on the barbeque. Another might say, "Fuck!"

Don’t Under-do It

Don't have a big burly biker saying "Oh fudge!" when he comes back to his Harley and sees that somebody's taken a knife to his custom paint job.

Don't censor your characters’ language with F***! and c--- and &!!&%%$#!@**! You can use this kind notation to write non-fiction, but don't use it in your fiction. Real people don't speak in stars, dashes and ampersands. If you use this kind of technique, you take your readers out of the fictional world that you've made so real for them with your blood-and-soul characters and force them to focus on the fact that all they're doing is reading a make-believe story.

Let your characters talk the way they will talk without censoring them and your readers will stay in the world you’ve created.

Sometimes beginning writers are shy about using the word fuck. Don't be. It's old hat these days. Used appropriately, it neither startles nor offends. Used appropriately, it can deliberately startle or offend. It's that versatile. Use it for effect, and use it to define your characters. Does your character say “I fucked so and so …” or “I slept with so and so …” Both statements say the same thing, but they suggest different attitudes toward sex.

In Heavy Load (a laundromance), the lead female character, Hillary, is a young intelligent woman who has been betrayed by her boyfriend. Her language throughout the book is mild with the occasional “damn"…never anything stronger. But when her boyfriend uses inside information from her to steal her job and then calls her up to try and make her think everything’s alright between them she says, “Fuck off, Tim.” And hangs up on him. You don’t expect this kind of language from her, so when you hear it, it emphasizes that something is really out of whack.

The word cunt― considered almost mandatory in some British movies and books―is still pretty much verboten in most mainstream North American writing, which is exactly why it can be a powerful character definer when it’s used appropriately. Want to learn more about this word? Watch the Vagina Monologues with Eve Ensler.

But Don't Overdo It

I used to work as a bartender. One night a customer came to my bar and started talking to me about the rough time he and his brother had experienced earlier in the day moving a large couch down a narrow stairway. I’ll quote just a small part: “The fucking thing was fucking too fucking big for the fucking stairway and we fucking had to fucking take the fucking legs off …” This is exactly the way he talked for 10 minutes. Would I use this in story about him, exactly as is? Probably not, and not because I’d be concerned about my gentle readers’ ears, or consider it too gross. This is exactly how he talked. But I’d still delete a few of the “fuckings” and then read it out loud until I was satisfied I’d captured his tone. This kind of extreme overuse of a word is just as distracting as taking twenty pages to describe a setting for a scene that lasts for one page. The verbal expletive barrage focuses the readers attention on just one thing, the word, and looses a lot of the meaning of the conversation and the delineation of character in the process. This is where the writer as editor comes in and recreates reality in his or her likeness and strips away the extraneous detail that distracts from the story the same way F*** and Sh--! would.

Write Mindlessly and Go Right Over the Top in Your First Draft

When it comes to language, don’t let an image of your future readers, an image of your parents, children or a favorite teacher looking over your back, or your own sense of what’s right or wrong for yourself stop you from letting your characters use the kind of language that’s appropriate for them. A man saying to his wife, “You fucking bitch” draws a truer picture of a disturbed personality than the passive description: “And then, in front of everyone, Jack verbally abused Sally.”

Write without editing and write fast and furiously, putting in every foul expletive that you think might surge through the dialogue and the narration. Come back to it later and edit out the stuff that you feel is too far over the top, distracting, inappropriate for your reading audience, or just not right for that particular character.

If you’ve done your work in creating your characters, let them talk the way they will.

Try This

As a person, you may not like certain language and you may never use it. As a writer, you do what your characters demand. This exercise is designed to break the ice between you and how your characters need to express themselves.

Write the word (or phrase) that you think is the most repellent word you can think of twenty times. Then write just once, the word you think is the exact opposite. When you're finished, read the word aloud all twenty times. And read the final word.