Darrell Pitt's Blog, page 3

Characters Need an Obsession

How do you drive a narrative forward?
The answer is easy. You don't. Your characters do. 
A writer once said his role is to torture his characters. This is essentially true in many cases. A character sitting in a room eating chocolates and watching television is not a very interesting character.
Make the roof fall in and everything changes. 
For the better.
Characters in fiction need to be obsessed. This is not the same as someone sitting in the corner and giggling to themselves in a maniacal fashion. Characters need to have an overriding goal and the closer to home the goal, the more it will mean to the character. 
If you've ever watched 24, you know what I mean. The adventures of Jack Bauer are now part of television folklore, but he spent seven seasons saving the world from one crises or another. Sometimes it was nuclear weapons. Other times the weapons were biological. 
But when did viewers feel the most tension?
It was when the crisis lay closer to home. It may have been his wife who was threatened or his daughter or Chloe O'Brien, but that's when the viewers really sat on the edge of their seat. 
Jack Bauer was an obsessed character. Most characters need to be.
Does that mean every character needs to be an action hero? Absolutely not. Would you say that Scarlet O'Hara in Gone With The Wind is obsessed? Certainly. She is consumed with her love for Rhett Butler. What about Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird? He's obsessed as well. In his case it's justice. And what about The da Vinci Code? Robert Langdon is obsessed too, but he's an obsessive seeker of the truth. 
And while your protagonist is obsessively trying to achieve their goal, the writer is repeatedly throwing obstacles in their way, making life difficult for them and generally making it impossible to achieve their obsession. 
Until the end when everything is resolved. Then the character can put their fictional feet up on their fictional table and enjoy a glass of ice cold fictional beer. 
Of course, that happens after the reader had finished the book.
That's all for today.
Keep writing!
http://www.facebook.com/darrell.pitt

20 Cliches to Avoid In Your Writing

What is a cliché? It's an overdone phrase that has been done to death (notice the cliché). It's the job of writers to avoid them like the plague (which is another cliché). At the same time, ideas can be clichéd as well which makes us ask the question:
If they're so overdone, why do people use them?
And the answer is: Because they work. 
In fact, old ideas are being rehashed all the time. The difference between good and the bad writers is that good writers rehash old ideas and make them look fresh again. 
Here's twenty phrases that have done the rounds (another cliché) a thousand times too often:
jack of all trades in hot water get your feet wet afraid of his own shadow no love lost like clockwork clear as mud babe in the woods devil is in the detail high as a kite on a roll ear to the ground few and far between scared stiff par for the course man of few words go with the flow white as a sheet red as a beetroot worst nightmare
In terms of clichéd ideas, there are plenty of them. They range from the mentor whose job it is to train the apprentice to the road trip where a group of people are drawn together by adversity. These stories have appeared again and again throughout literature. 
No doubt you could turn on the television over the next few minutes and identify half a dozen ideas that have been repeatedly done. 
If you're going to use a clichéd idea, at least make it appear new.
If you're going to use a clichéd phrase – don't. 
There's no room for them in writing.
That's all for today.
Keep writing!
Darrellhttp://www.facebook.com/darrell.pitt

Anna Campbell – Want to be a Successful Author? Here's how…

Anna Campbell is a wonderful example of someone who wanted to make it as a writer and put in the hard yards to achieve their goal. After writing her first novel, it took her twenty-seven years to achieve publishing success with her book Claiming the Courtesan. She attributes much of her success to being a member of the Romance Writers of Australia.
Today she talks to us about how she became a writer and the importance of belonging to a supportive writing organisation that helps you achieve your writing goals.
Darrell - Can you describe a typical day of writing?
Anna - Hi Darrell! Thanks for talking to me today. One of the things I like about writing is that there really isn't a typical day. I generally divide my day between promotion and writing with writing taking a larger and larger slice closer to deadline.
Darrell - You had several years of writing before finally breaking into the big time with Claiming the Courtesan. Did you feel your standard of writing move from amateur to professional when you wrote this book or was it simply a long, slow process of improvement in the previous years?
Anna - I actually finished my first historical romance after high school and it was twenty-seven years after that that I sold Claiming the Courtesan to Avon in New York. I think I always had a pretty good grip on the mechanics of writing although all those years in the unpublished wilderness meant I had a wonderful opportunity to develop my voice. The thing that made a difference between Claiming the Courtesan and my previous manuscripts is that I'd finally learned to write emotion.
Darrell - What research do you do to write historical romance novels?
Anna - After writing six Regency-set romances (and an unpublished manuscript under the bed), I've got a fairly good general knowledge of the Regency now. But there's usually something specific I have to research in depth for each story. For Untouched, it was the treatment of mental illness in the early 19th century and for Captive of Sin, it was the East India Company. I've also been lucky enough to visit the UK, where the books are set, on a regular basis – wandering around stately homes or green countryside definitely counts as research!
Darrell - You've spoken before about the importance of being a member of Romance Writers of Australia. In what way has this helped you as a writer?
Anna - In so many ways! If you're interested in writing romance, I'd definitely recommend joining RWAustralia (http://www.romanceaustralia.com/). They run contests, crit groups, several email loops and a monthly newsletter. Each year, they also have a wonderful conference where you can meet romance writers from all over the world. I've also made some wonderful friends through RWA – nobody understands the ups and downs of a writer's life like another writer. 
Darrell - What methods of marketing have worked the most for you in promoting your books?
Anna - I think the best advertising for your books is to write another good book. I enjoy the social media sites, especially Facebook (my fan page is http://www.facebook.com/AnnaCampbellFans and I'd love to see you there). I have a pretty comprehensive website (www.annacampbell.info) that I update monthly – a good website is the absolute minimum promotional requirement from an author these days. I do talks and workshops and I give away a lot of books. I think you develop a fan base reader by reader.
Darrell - How do you think writing will change now that ebooks are on the market?
Anna - That's the million dollar question, isn't it? I think it's too early to say exactly what effect digital books will have on the market as a whole. A good story will still be a good story but I think one benefit of the e-book explosion will be that there will be a greater variety of stories for readers to enjoy.
Darrell - What advice would you have for someone trying to succeed as a writer?
Anna - Write, write and write some more. There's a lot of noise out there at the moment and it's easy to get distracted, but if you want to succeed as a writer, you need to do the hard work of getting the words on the page.
And an enormous thanks to Anna. What great advice. So many writers have said the best way to promote their books is by simply writing good books. It makes sense, doesn't it?
That's all for today.
Keep writing!
Darrell
http://www.facebook.com/darrell.pitt

Michael Prescott – Four Bestselling Ebooks on Amazon Kindle At Once

Most authors would be over the moon if they had one bestselling book on Amazon Kindle Bestseller List. Michael Prescott currently has four. Here are his current rankings (although this is constantly in a state of flux, so can quickly change): 
Shiver - #23 in Paid Kindle, #16 in Literature & Fiction, #3 in Suspense
Mortal Pursuit - #29 in Paid Kindle, #2 in Action & Adventure, #2 in Police Procedurals
Stealing Faces - #38 in Paid Kindle, #27 in Literature & Fiction, #6 in Suspense
Riptide - #95 in Paid Kindle, #3 in Psychological Thrillers, #4 in Police Procedurals
This is obviously pretty amazing. Today Michael speaks to us about his writing and the best ways other writers can market themselves to get their books into the bestseller lists too.

Darrell - Can you describe a typical day of writing?
Michael - In my thirty or so years as a professional writer I've tried various approaches. When I was writing horror novels in the 1980s, I forced myself to do four double-spaced pages a day. Usually I wrote at a specific time and treated it like a job. I had to work fast because I wasn't being paid much! Later I became more relaxed in my approach and gave up on the idea of a daily schedule or a targeted number of pages. However, I always had a sense of the deadline and how many pages I needed to complete each month.
Everything changed a few years ago when the mass-market paperback end of the business started falling apart. Like many midlist writers, I was shown the door. I thought I could find a new home at another publishing house, but with the industry in transition there were no takers. At that point I switched my focus and started making money in ways unrelated to publishing. However, I still wanted to self-publish a thriller called Riptide, which I'd shopped around unsuccessfully to print publishers. It was basically a vanity project. I was mainly interested in bringing it out as a print-on-demand edition, using CreateSpace. Doing it as an ebook was an afterthought. I figured as long as I had the book proofread and formatted, I might as well put it out as a Kindle edition too. As it turned out, the print on-demand version has sold relatively few copies, while the Kindle edition is doing much better. Eventually I decided to do ebook versions of some of my out-of-print titles, since the rights had reverted to me. When the ebooks starting to sell, I realized -- somewhat to my surprise -- that this was actually a viable market.
Now I'm doing some original writing for the first time in a while. But it's different from my earlier stuff. What I'm working on is a short comedy novel specifically for the ebook market. There's no deadline, so I write when the spirit moves me.
I guess the short answer is, there's no typical day of writing for me. Sometimes I get inspired and write a whole lot of pages, and other days I focus on other things. And this was true even for much of the time when writing was my only job.
Darrell - You started out writing a number of scripts for movies, but switched to novels. Do you think of yourself as a 'visual' writer?
Michael - To be honest, I probably wasn't visual enough to be a good screenwriter! Only one of my scripts actually got made into a movie, and it was awful.
The main difference between screenwriting and novel-writing is that in a screenplay everything has to be condensed. Plot developments and character motivations have to be reduced to a few lines of dialogue or a little bit of action or a single meaningful image. In a novel, on the other hand, you can explain things at length. You can get inside the character's head and show exactly what he's thinking and feeling. For me, it's much easier and comes much more naturally.
I don't think my style of writing is particularly visual. I think it's more oriented toward dialogue and interior monologue. In fact, sometimes the first draft of one of my scenes consists only of dialogue. I fill in the action and descriptive details later.
Darrell - You mentioned on your website that you had problems getting your book "Final Sins" published. How did this come about?
Michael - It was actually Riptide, not Final Sins. Final Sins was the last book I did for a print publisher, and it concluded a loose trilogy that began with Dangerous Games and Mortal Faults. All three books featured a pair of heroines, Abby Sinclair and Tess McCallum, who had an interesting dynamic. But because mass-market paperbacks were on the decline, sales for each book were lower than for the previous one. After I finished Final Sins, I couldn't find anyone to publish either Riptide or another book I wrote on spec, which I'll bring out as an ebook eventually. Nobody was buying fiction unless they thought it was going to be another Da Vinci Code.
Frankly, I think The Da Vinci Code ended up doing more harm than good to the book industry. It's an entertaining book, but its success was, to some extent, a fluke. It's not the kind of thing you can repeat at will. Even Dan Brown couldn't repeat it. And yet publishers became obsessed with finding the "next" Da Vinci Code. In the process, they lost sight of the less splashy books that had been making money for years. They weren't interested in "small" stories anymore. Everything had to be high-concept, over-the-top, international in scope. But not every writer can do that kind of thing, and not every reader wants to read it. So they ended up losing a lot of perfectly good writers and alienating a lot of formerly dependable readers, all in the quest for another mega-hit.
Darrell - You currently have four books in the Kindle top 100 "paid" bestsellers. How did you achieve this amazing feat?
Michael - I'm not entirely sure! But the basic strategy is one I learned from a good friend of mine, J. Carson Black, who used it to get several of her books into the top 100. And I think both of us are indebted to Joe Konrath, whose blog about ebooks has provided a lot of inspiration and solid, practical advice.
For me the strategy has two key points: First, price your book at $.99. There's a whole subculture of ebook readers who look for these bargain books. Second, promote your book using Amazon's discussion boards, which can be accessed toward the bottom of any Kindle book's sales page. Include a link to your sales page in any comment you post. Visit, say, five boards at a time and post your sales pitch. Do this only on boards that specifically request sales pitches and book recommendations. Don't do more than about five at a time, because some people subscribe to multiple threads and get irritated reading the same ad over and over. Wait a few days or a week, then visit five new boards and repeat the procedure. Keep track of which boards you visited so you don't place duplicate ads on the same thread. It doesn't take much self-promotion to start getting some sales. As the book moves up in the rankings, sales may snowball.
I've also made my books available in Nook editions, but those aren't selling well. Barnes & Noble does not have the same resources available for indie authors to make themselves known.
Darrell - What do you think is the best way for writers to market themselves?
Michael - The best way is to use the Amazon discussion boards, as mentioned above. But it's also good to have your own Facebook page -- not just a personal page, but an author page devoted exclusively to publicizing your books. You should also have your own website with links to your sales pages. If you have a mailing list of readers, send them a note when you put out a new title. Many people use Twitter, but I don't. I'm too damn old to tweet.
Darrell - How do you feel about self publishing for writers? Do you think this is where the future lies?
Michael - I think the days of the big publishing houses, which take 90% of the book's earnings and allow the author a royalty of 10% or less, are coming to an end. I'm not saying they will all go out of business, but I think they'll be less important in the future. As it becomes increasingly clear that authors can find a large audience through ebooks and keep 35% or 70% of the income, while writing only the books they want to write, it will be tough for the big houses to stay competitive. Even now, they're pricing their ebooks too high and taking too long to bring out digital editions. They don't seem able to adapt nimbly to changing conditions, and I think this is going to be a fatal flaw for some of them.
I'm sure big bestselling authors will continue to have nationally distributed print editions of their books, and there will also be a market for children's books, graphic novels, art books, and other books that are given as gifts or intended for collection or display. It's not the end of print, but it is the end of print's monopoly, and that's a good thing.
And an enormous thank you to Michael. Obviously these are changing times for the entire publishing industry and the authors who keep up with the changes will be catching the biggest waves.
That's all for today!
Keep writing!
Darrell.http://www.facebook.com/darrell.pitt

Dakota Banks – First Published Book returns as a Successful Ebook

Growing up in a funeral home could cause issues for some people. For Dakota Bank it helped her to become a writer. She has written eight books with another one coming out shortly. As well as her current successful Mortal Path series, she also writes books under her real name of Shirley Kennett and these are starting to reappear as successful ebooks.   Today she talks to us about how she became a writer and the many interests (including Star Trek) that have led to her success. 
Darrell - How did you become a writer?

Dakota - I wrote my first short story when I was eight years old and had it published in the school newspaper. My parents were thrilled and I figured I just had to wait for the money to roll in. I kept writing stories but didn't get any of them commercially published, though I accumulated some nice rejection letters. I still have them. In college I discovered a competing love (besides my husband): computers. I began a career as a programmer, then a manager, then a consultant. Several times I tried writing, but nothing came of it. Finally I decided that it was now or never, and I sat down and wrote a novel about eco-terrorism. I got an agent who loved the book, but it didn't sell (then). I decided I'd better put some planning into my next effort, so I developed a series about a woman who was an expert in virtual reality crime scene simulations. A week after I finished it, I had a two book contract and I was on my way! Since then I've published eight books with a ninth coming next April.

One of those books was the first one I'd ever written, the one that was a flop the first time out. I looked it over with more experienced eyes, revised it, and it came out as my fifth book, BURNING ROSE, published under my real name of Shirley Kennett. Since then the rights have reverted to me, and I self-published it as an ebook. It's available free for a limited time ( www.shirleykennett.com). It's been an amazing ride for that first manuscript! My initial experience with self-publishing ebooks has had a steep learning curve, because I wanted to do every step myself, including cover design. Previous ebooks I've had have been issued by my publisher, so I didn't have any chance to learn. I plan to work on five more books in my backlist over the summer, so within a few months I should have six Shirley Kennett self-pubbed ebooks out there. I hope they'll be popular, but one thing for sure: it's been rewarding to give an older book a second life.

Darrell - Can you describe a typical day of writing?

Dakota - I wake up around noon or 1pm and spend some time in the afternoon on the business of writing: promotion, research, the work I do for organizations I belong to, correspondence, website maintenance, and things like creating a cover and learning how to publish an ebook. I take a break for dinner and spend some time with my husband, then--I take a nap. What!! I only woke up a few hours ago. It's my pattern of working. I sleep for a couple of hours, then get up and start my writing "day" at about 10-11 pm. I write through the night, when the house is quiet, with a single desk lamp on in my office creating a little cone of light. My two cats keep me company and think it's wonderful that someone keeps the same hours they do. Sometime between 5-7am, I'll fizzle out and crawl into bed. Rinse, repeat, seven days a week. I am a full-time writer, which is a good thing because I don't know when I'd have time for another job. I don't recommend this crazy schedule to anyone, but it works for me.
Also, the way I write doesn't fit the method used by the majority of authors. Most will finish a first draft in a fairly short time, then revise the entire thing one, two, or more times. When I start a writing session, I don't move forward into the book, I go back in the manuscript to cover the previous session's output and edit it. When I finish editing and hit new territory for the next scene or chapter, I'm warmed up, fully into the story, and ideas are flowing. By the time I put THE END on the last page of the manuscript, it really is done (except for a check of spelling, grammar, and punctuation). All I can say about this is it suits me. As a writer, you need to find the time, setting, and method of proceeding that works best for you. Don't be afraid to go with your instincts. There's no wrong way to tackle writing.

Darrell - You grew up in a funeral home. What are your memories of that interesting environment?

Dakota - It was an imposing three story home built in the 1870s. In the front yard was a wall made of granite blocks, the last layer having rounded tops. When the sun was out, the blocks would heat up and become comforting to the touch. They looked like loaves of bread baking in the sun. The wall defined the edge of a driveway that went to the rear of the house, where there was a large garage. The hearse and attendant vehicles parked there. It used to be a carriage house for horse-drawn carriages. The city property wasn't big enough for a separate stable, so the horses were kept in the carriage house, too. I could still see the place where the hay bin was, and on the wall there were hooks to hold the tack. When I lived there, the hooks were used to hold mundane things like rakes and shovels. I loved to go to the carriage house, push open the big, sliding wooden doors to let the sunshine in, and read in the hay bin. Heady stuff for a girl reading The Black Stallion series, and if I had to point to an experience that channelled me into writing, this would be it.

As for the rest of it, things were more sinister. You asked, though, so here it is. The house had a large front porch that had been enclosed and turned into a sunporch, an elaborate front door, and an expansive foyer with a huge mirror that was original. In my imagination, the mirror had captured and held the images of the large numbers of grieving people who had passed through that front door, along with the huge range of emotions they were feeling. Genuine loss, confusion, anger, greed, and the occasional murderous instinct. I'm sure my parents wondered why I spent time on a bench in the foyer, carefully positioned so I couldn't see myself in the mirror. I was cooking up stories about the past.

Our family lived on the first floor, in an apartment carved out of the parlors where visitations for the dead were held plus the dressing room (where the deceased were dressed for their final appearance), the sales room (the basic pine box versus the fancier version with a lining), and the private room where the family could retreat if the commotion in the parlor was too much to take. My bedroom was one of the parlors, with a high ceiling, a fancy chandelier converted from gas, and a chair rail so that extra chairs could be lined up around the edges of the room if there was a crowd. The upper floors, where the funeral home's owners and staff originally lived, had been converted into rooms for rent by the week. My parents ran a rooming house. The staircase to the upper floors was impressive. I used to imagine ghosts sweeping down the stairs, although it didn't make sense that they'd be coming from UPstairs. It was just a perfect setting, and setting and atmosphere were important to the stories!

Then there was the basement.

The basement had been the embalming area. There were two embalming platforms (no waiting) in the centre of a large space, each having an E-Z clean porcelain top, chipped and worn from use. The reason they were not long since removed is that they were made of some kind of slick stone and anchored right into the floor. Like the pool table that gets left in the basement because it's so much trouble to move, these remained in place over the years. There was a short flight of stairs up to a door that led to the outside, to the area in front of the carriage house. Bodies arrived that way. There were shallow trenches in the floor that ran to a drain in one corner of the room: gutters that carried away blood and contaminated water from cleaning and embalming the bodies. I was told that the drain fed the mixture out into the street, where it mixed with mud and horse droppings and apparently no one noticed. I kind of doubt this, even for the time, but I don't know. There were bins and cubbyholes made of concrete around the edges of the space, including some that giant ancient spiders were thought to reside in. One of our cats had kittens in a supposed spider cubbyhole, and mom and little ones did fine, proving that whatever had lived there had moved on. I used to go into the basement at night with a flashlight or candle and let my imagination roam. I have a brother who is six years older than I am, and he delighted in telling gruesome stories in the basement to his spellbound little sister that almost always ended in the light going out at an intense point of the story. I knew that light was going out. I expected it. I still screamed. What fun!

Darrell - You're a Star Trek fan among other things. What is there about Star Trek (and science fiction) that attracts you?

Dakota - I love the idea of space exploration. I think that if we can manage not to kill ourselves or our planet, that someday we'll be travelling among the stars, meeting other intelligent life that shares our peaceful, pioneering spirit, and learning from each other. Okay, barf. I know that sounds sickeningly idealistic. If you don't buy that one, how about this: I love action, adventure, edgy characters, exotic locations (!), geeky stuff, and gadgets. I long for a transporter. I want to be able to murmur, "Earl Gray, hot," roll out of bed, and have my tea ready without lifting a finger other than to pick up the teacup. I want to face giant lizard things in hand-to-hand combat. I think I was born a few hundred years too soon. Or possibly 65 million years too late.

Darrell - Where did the idea come from for your Mortal Path books and will the next book complete the trilogy?

Dakota - I have a serious interest in archaeology, though not formal training. During the Iraq invasion in 2003, the Iraqi National Museum was temporarily left unguarded, and looters got in who stole and vandalized some of the world's greatest treasures. Iraq is located on the ancient site of Sumeria, the Cradle of Civilization between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The artifacts, some as old as 7,000 years, are part of the heritage of all of us. It seemed ironic that some vase or statue could survive that long and come to an inglorious end, smashed by people behaving badly. It got me thinking about what else might have survived from that time period. I knew that Sumerian mythology was interesting, so I delved into it looking for ideas I could extrapolate. I came up with Sumerian demons left behind on Earth long after the Sumerian gods had abandoned the planet to their creations, humans. These demons, seven of them, are the cause of major troubles on Earth, such as war, diseases, and plots involving a lot of death and destruction. These negative elements have been a brake on human development and kept us from realizing our full potential. The demons are confined to the Underworld and don't interact directly with humans. So they need servants, recruited among about-be-die or recently dead humans, to be their assassins and evil-mongers. The Mortal Path series focuses on one such recruited human, a woman named Maliha who decides after a few hundred years that she doesn't want to be a demon's assassin anymore. It's not easy to undo selling your soul! The third book, Deliverance, will be out in March 2012, and is not the end of the series. The scope of the story has grown, since Maliha seeks not only personal redemption but the elimination of all the demons from the Earth, plunging humanity into ... paradise? I'm aiming for a total of six books in this series. The author is supposed to know the final destination of the series, but the issues here are so large that even I don't know how it's going to turn out yet--or who's going to be around to see that end.

Darrell - What advice would you have for someone trying to succeed as a writer?

Dakota - The best piece of advice I have gotten is the use of the synopsis. This technique literally saved my writing life. When I wrote my first book, I started right in without planning. That book expressed my basic writing talent, but I hadn't studied my craft enough to know how to organize a book. I thought it would all work itself out as I went along. The result was a rambling, hard to follow mish-mash (as I can see from hindsight). For my next book and every one after that, I've started by writing a synopsis of the story with a beginning, middle, and end, characters that both fit and create the situation, and pacing that provides the correct balance of action and breathers. All of these elements are laid bare when you boil your story down to ten pages or less. I'm not talking about a chapter outline that defines what goes in each chapter or even how many chapters there are. Just get down the high points of the story so that it makes sense and the synopsis is an exciting read in itself. This is the brainstorming portion of your writing. You still have intense creative work left to do to transform that shell of a story into an engaging novel. But--you have an overall guide to follow instead of picking your way through the jungle of the middle of the book. The synopsis is a tool, not something set in stone. If you think of a better way to handle the story, try it out in the synopsis first. It's better to change a few pages to see if the new idea works out in short form rather than put it in your manuscript and discover that 100 pages later, you've put yourself in a blind corner. Writing a synopsis is a crucial skill, because you're going to need one as a marketing device when you try to get your book published. An agent might ask for three chapters and a synopsis. Why not get double use out of that synopsis by writing it ahead of time instead of hurriedly trying to scratch one out for an agent request? And best of all, you'll soon be getting contracts based on your synopses instead of having to write the whole books first!
And a big thanks to Dakoka. What great advice about using a synopsis! Also, what an amazing life! You would think growing up in a funeral home would make you dead boring…get it…dead…anyway, that's all for today. 
Live long and prosper!
Uh, or as I always say here on my site…
Keep Writing!
Darrell. http://www.facebook.com/darrell.pitt