Joshua Silverman's Blog, page 9

The Best Advice I Got as a Writer

If you’re a struggling writer you’re probably going to go through some similar things that I went through. But to improve in any new skill you have to practice it until you’re sick to get it right – and we’re all still trying to get it right. I don’t believe there is a “perfect” writer. So I did the only thing I knew how to improve my writing. I went to Google.

Out of all my research I began noticing a theme in the advice I was receiving. Two comments, in particular, were repeated often.

The problem is, although I’ve read the “what” you should do a thousand times, nobody ever tells you how to implement the advice. But I will tell you how.

READ A LOT. When I first read this deceptively simple piece of advice my first thought was “no shit.” My second thought was “I already read a lot, that’s why I like writing.” Most writers do read a lot. Why is this advice deceptively simple yet amazing at the same time? Because nobody tells you how to read! Go ahead, read that last sentence back to yourself. You know how to read right? I mean, you’re a writer for God’s sake! I thought I did, but I didn’t.

What does an author mean when they tell other aspiring authors to “read a lot?” I’ll tell you what they mean. They mean read analytically. When you and I read a book we want to get lost in the story. We’re not thinking about plot holes, how descriptive the author is, his/her overuse of adverbs, or sentence structure. We’re caught up in the drama like any other reader.

But is that type of reading going to make me a better writer? Sadly, no, it won’t. Reading for fun won’t help you worth a damn. That’s right, you heard it here. Reading a lot for the sake of reading a lot will not help you. Sucks, I know.

But you have to read right? Yes, you have to read. But this is what I want you to do. I want you to get a fiction book you liked (NOT A BOOK YOU LOVE). Once you get it find a section that either impacted you emotionally or has some kind of action in it. I want you to read that section twice so you’re in the moment. Now ask yourself, why are you feeling the way you do? What words is the author using to evoke an emotional response? If it’s an action scene and you’re on the edge of your seat, ask yourself the same questions. Why are you so tense? Why are you anxious for your favorite character?

There are a finite amount of words in the English language. The difference between a bad, good, or great writer is the order in which they use those same words. But that’s the great thing is that a bad writer has the same words that are available to them as a great writer.

So the question you face is what words and in what order does the author of the book you picked make an impact on you and why. Once you figure that out, you need to replicate how the author achieved that success so you can elicit a similar response from your readers. Note that I’m not saying plagiarize or copy. I’m saying use their style at first until you develop your own (and you will).

Fair warning here: this process is a lot of work but worth it.

Write a lot. This is another common piece of advice. This requires you to go through the six stages of writing – or something similar to it. But the only way you can improve is with practice. You will be emulating your favorite author at first, but that’s okay. In time, you’ll develop your own style.

In all honesty, if I had known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have written the Emerald Tablet first. I would’ve practiced honing my craft on a few short stories or novellas before embarking on my big idea. Now, if some author had told me to hold off on the novel of my dreams and write something else to get the bugs out, I probably would’ve flipped him/her the bird. But I’m a stubborn guy and like to do things the hard way.

I encourage you to write at least 100,000 words before you start the book of your dreams. Does that sound like a lot to you? Don’t worry, it is. The writing will be smoother by the 100,000th word than the first. Don’t worry, you can thank me later.The Emerald Tablet

The Best Advice I Got as a Writer

If you’re a struggling writer you’re probably going to go through some similar things that I went through. But to improve in any new skill you have to practice it until you’re sick to get it right – and we’re all still trying to get it right. I don’t believe there is a “perfect” writer. So I did the only thing I knew how to improve my writing. I went to Google.

Out of all my research I began noticing a theme in the advice I was receiving. Two comments, in particular, were repeated often.

The problem is, although I’ve read the “what” you should do a thousand times, nobody ever tells you how to implement the advice. But I will tell you how.

READ A LOT. When I first read this deceptively simple piece of advice my first thought was “no shit.” My second thought was “I already read a lot, that’s why I like writing.” Most writers do read a lot. Why is this advice deceptively simple yet amazing at the same time? Because nobody tells you how to read! Go ahead, read that last sentence back to yourself. You know how to read right? I mean, you’re a writer for God’s sake! I thought I did, but I didn’t.

What does an author mean when they tell other aspiring authors to “read a lot?” I’ll tell you what they mean. They mean read analytically. When you and I read a book we want to get lost in the story. We’re not thinking about plot holes, how descriptive the author is, his/her overuse of adverbs, or sentence structure. We’re caught up in the drama like any other reader.

But is that type of reading going to make me a better writer? Sadly, no, it won’t. Reading for fun won’t help you worth a damn. That’s right, you heard it here. Reading a lot for the sake of reading a lot will not help you. Sucks, I know.

But you have to read right? Yes, you have to read. But this is what I want you to do. I want you to get a fiction book you liked (NOT A BOOK YOU LOVE). Once you get it find a section that either impacted you emotionally or has some kind of action in it. I want you to read that section twice so you’re in the moment. Now ask yourself, why are you feeling the way you do? What words is the author using to evoke an emotional response? If it’s an action scene and you’re on the edge of your seat, ask yourself the same questions. Why are you so tense? Why are you anxious for your favorite character?

There are a finite amount of words in the English language. The difference between a bad, good, or great writer is the order in which they use those same words. But that’s the great thing is that a bad writer has the same words that are available to them as a great writer.

So the question you face is what words and in what order does the author of the book you picked make an impact on you and why. Once you figure that out, you need to replicate how the author achieved that success so you can elicit a similar response from your readers. Note that I’m not saying plagiarize or copy. I’m saying use their style at first until you develop your own (and you will).

Fair warning here: this process is a lot of work but worth it.

Write a lot. This is another common piece of advice. This requires you to go through the six stages of writing – or something similar to it. But the only way you can improve is with practice. You will be emulating your favorite author at first, but that’s okay. In time, you’ll develop your own style.

In all honesty, if I had known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have written the Emerald Tablet first. I would’ve practiced honing my craft on a few short stories or novellas before embarking on my big idea. Now, if some author had told me to hold off on the novel of my dreams and write something else to get the bugs out, I probably would’ve flipped him/her the bird. But I’m a stubborn guy and like to do things the hard way.

I encourage you to write at least 100,000 words before you start the book of your dreams. Does that sound like a lot to you? Don’t worry, it is. The writing will be smoother by the 100,000th word than the first. Don’t worry, you can thank me later.

My 6 stages of writing (so far)

When I first started writing I had no idea what I was doing. I am still a newbie author, but have learned so much in the past year that I am not the same writer I was when I first set out on this journey. I was overzealous, completely unprepared for the raw amount of man- hours writing a novel takes, and totally in over my head.

I had this great idea for a book. I wrote a synopsis of the story, which took up about 5 paragraphs. But when it came to writing more than the outline, I was stumped. Staring at the blank page can be beyond intimidating.

What follows is the story of my evolution as a writer. It’s not the “right” way to write. It’s not the “wrong” way to write. I’m not an English teacher (and don’t want to be). I just hope you can learn something from my mistakes. Some of these stages will demand further explanation, and I will provide it in subsequent blog posts. This post will be a little longer than my average posts because I use examples (about 1,000 words).

Stage One – A Complex Outline

My solution for tackling the blank page was this: I would write a complex outline. Get basic the action done then fill in the details later:

Mary wakes up. She puts on clothes, goes outside, and cuts the lawn.

This turned out to be a huge mistake. After about two chapters of this crap I gave up, realizing I would end up writing the book about 5 times. So stage one was over real fast. First, it reads like an outline – very factual and completely boring in every possible way. If you’re where I was, I beg you not to do this. Just skip this stage completely. You won’t think you can. You might resist this advice at first, fearing that you might be paralyzed by the challenge, but you’d be surprised.

Stage Two – The Bland Details

Okay, so we know that a complex outline doesn’t work. What next? Start filling in the details. Easier said than done, right? I didn’t have a picture in my head at that early stage in my evolution. I didn’t know what my world looked like (and wouldn’t for some time). But I started writing anyway:

Mary wakes up tired. She struggles to get out of bed while she walks to her boring dresser and pulls out her overalls. Her movements are slow as if she was born tired. Mary puts on her work books and walks out her front door. She gets her lawnmower, pulls the string, and the engine turns on. She cuts the grass of her front yard.

Certainly better than stage one. Now we have a better idea of what’s going on, a little more detail. But we’re not there yet. We need more. As many of my test readers said: “I still don’t have a picture in my mind.”

Stage Three – Write a Picture

How do you write a picture if you don’t have one to work off of? My answer is fake it till you make it. Yes, you read me correctly. Fake it. My book was set in a futuristic world, so I started Googling concept or futuristic architecture, and I scrolled through thousands of pictures. I found ones I liked, ones I didn’t, and made a hodge-podge collage of those images at first (until my own vision took over).

Mary pulls off the cotton bed sheets that are stuck to her body from a night of sweating. The straw inside her mattress plucked at her all night, making for an uncomfortable evening. She gets up and trudges over to her dresser. Each step is painful. Her feet have been conditioned to withstand the divots, splinters, and spikes in the wooden floorboards. She lights a candle on her mantle, illuminating a framed picture of her mother.

Stage Four – Using the 5 Senses

If you didn’t know this already and are trying to be an author writing about humans, or most animals for that matter, we have five senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. Use all of them. It not only gives your characters depth, it completes the picture. For example, I will add sound and smell to the paragraph above:

Mary pulls off the cotton bed sheets that are stuck to her body from a night of sweating. The straw inside her mattress plucked at her all night, making for an uncomfortable evening. She gets up and trudges over to her dresser. Each step is painful. Her feet have been conditioned to waistband the divots, splinters, and spikes in the wooden floorboards. She lights a candle on her mantle, illuminating a framed picture of her mother. The room fills with the familiar smell of burning wax as she pulls open a drawer. A rooster calls out the arrival of the sun, calling Mary to her morning duties.

Stage Five – Adding Backstory

Every fiction book has backstory. I can’t recall one off the top of my head that doesn’t. No character is just “born” in your world (unless you’re actually writing about a child). Things happened to them in the past that made the character who he/she is in your book. Backstory gives your character depth, emotions, and history. It makes them relatable. I will spend a whole post on backstory, but here’s an easy example of how you can weave it into your story without being obtrusive:

Mary pulls off the cotton bed sheets that are stuck to her body from a night of sweating. The straw inside her mattress plucked at her all night, making for an uncomfortable evening. She gets up and trudges over to her dresser. Each step is painful. Her feet have been conditioned to waistband the divots, splinters, and spikes in the wooden floorboards. She lights a candle on her mantle, illuminating a framed picture of her mother. She doesn’t like to look at the picture, but she does out of habit, every morning. It wasn’t long ago that her mother was doing the household chores….blah blah blah you get the idea. The room fills with the familiar smell of burning wax as she pulls open a drawer. A rooster calls out the arrival of the sun, calling Mary to her morning duties. The first chore on her list is mowing the lawn.

Stage Six – Embellishing.

Take all that we did and make it better by a hundred fold by adding more details. You don’t have to go overboard in this (like say one author I read who spent 3 pages talking about a character scooping mash potatoes onto his plate – 3 pages for mash potatoes!)

The room is cold and dark. The wooden floorboards and lack of insulation suck the early morning heat out of the room. Her candle burned out long ago, the smell of wax still hangs in the air. Yet the warm cotton blanket surrounds her, enveloping Mary in a cocoon of protection from the duties of the coming day.

Straw bites into her back with sharp jabs of pointed barbs like wires. She twists, trying to find a comfortable position. The sheets swish under her movements.

The red orange glow of the morning sun creeps through her window, coupled with the rooster’s natural alarm, it announces the waiting day.

So there you go. Those were the six stages of writing that I passed through on my way to a completed novel. You can see how the writing improves with each stage. This can only be accomplished by actually sitting down and doing the writing. It takes lots and lots of practice. It took me almost 200,000 words before I figured this stuff out. I hope it won’t take you as long if you can learn anything from this post.

The dreaded (but fun)

I have to admit, when my publisher said I should start a blog to help promote my book and get my name out there I was not enthused. I mean, what did I have to tell people anyway? Do they even care? Probably most of you don’t. But as one of my favorite bands, Homegrown, said in some lyrics: “It’s okay, I’ll do it anyway!”

I’ve never thought of myself as a blogger; hell it’s a struggle to think that I’m a published author. I’m still coming to grips with that.

I thought a long time about what I should write. I didn’t want to make this thing boring or a personal journal. Let’s not mince words here; none of you really care if I got my hair cut today or went to the grocery store. What you may be interested in, however, is my journey on being a writer. So, that is what I decided I will blog about. Some posts will be about my book, some will be about the business of writing and tips and tricks I’m learning, some posts may even be about other books I’ve read. But it will chronicle this journey.

So, to start, I will just tell you briefly how I got to where I am. When I was sixteen and in high school (Esperanza High School in Anaheim, CA), my English class introduced us to poetry. I hadn’t been interested in literature until that point. No offense to George Eliot, but Silas Marner was about the most boring thing I’ve ever read. The only two books worth a lick of interest in high school were Lord of the Flies and Fahrenheit 451. Those books had style and an interesting, action oriented plot. But Great Expectations, The Great Gatsby, Cry the Beloved Country. Sorry to all the English teachers out there, but those reading choices deterred me from writing. They were so boring.

But poetry got my attention for some reason. So I started writing that when I was 16. I was introduced to the guitar by my next door neighbor, who went to a private Catholic high school. I was lucky that my aunt had left her old crappy classical guitar with my dad, who had put it in the garage and let it sit in dust for years. That is, until I pulled it out and restrung the poor bastard. Matt, my neighbor, taught me how to read guitar tablature. And from that moment, we would rock out in his garage, he with his electric Fender Stratocaster and me with my dusty classical. We had big dreams of being rock stars and some days, I still have those dreams. But mostly, they died when we had to graduate college and “get a real job.” So long Mark Hoppus, I wasn’t going on tour with you (all newbie guitarists learned “Dammit” as one of our first songs in the last 90′s).

But my poetry led me to writing song lyrics for our terrible compositions. Always something about some girl– I don’t remember most of what I wrote then and if I have any sense, I’ll burn the lyrics if I find them.

Then I went to college and took a creative writing class. I wrote a series of short stories inspired by that class. They were terrible. I was reading the Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice so my stories were all about Vampires.

Then writing faded away as other interests caught my attention. In August, 2006 my wife (then girlfriend) and I moved to Phoenix, Arizona. I took a job as a file clerk in a law office. Then, I moved up to a paralegal position. If you don’t know what paralegal’s do every day, they write, read, edit, and they sort lots and lots of paper. So, I got pretty good at writing, reading, and sorting – but not the kind of writing, reading, and sorting I’d need for creative fiction. But it didn’t matter. The things I learned as a paralegal for the last six years set me up to write The Emerald Tablet.

In July, 2011 I started writing the first book of a seven book series entitled, The Legends of Amun Ra. Now that I look back on that, I was fucking nuts to choose to do a 7 book series as my first published world. But, I’ll try as best as I can, to show you how I am progressing not just in the business of writing and selling books, but being a better writer in general.