Artist

Introduction and Caveat

Hello, and welcome to my page about writing. If you have arrived at this page free of skepticism and are assuming that everything I say will be gospel, I would pose that you are missing key critical thinking skills that you will need to write for most genres and age groups. You should be asking yourself, "Who is this guy and what qualifies him to give anyone advice on writing?" If that question or some variation of it was in your mind when you arrived, bravo!

I will answer that question in brief. I began constructing stories from the time I could lift pencil to paper and put together a string of words. At the time of this writing, I have spent nearly a quarter century making my living writing non-fiction in the IT industry. This includes articles, white papers, manuals, help documentation, specifications, and a full gamut of project documentation. I also have eight fantasy books published through a small publishing house. While not one of the "Big 5," this is an actual, real publisher, not a vanity press and not self-publishing. What's more, I have read thousands of books by highly skilled authors. That is, I believe, more important than years of academic study on the subject.

It should be understood that different writers have different processes that work best for them. My purpose here is not to cite any rules that you must follow. I often have strong opinions on various aspects of writing. I have certainty on these things because through decades of trial and error I have found what works best for me. I continue to hone my skills through practical application of my process, as we all must do in whatever process we use. If something I say sounds interesting or workable to you, try it. If it helps, great. If not, find something that does.

While I do have extensive experience writing non-fiction, this page is dedicated to fiction.

I will preface everything with this idea: The main goal of the writer is to have emotional impact on the reader. If we cannot agree on that simple idea, there's probably not much point in your continuing to read this page.

I also have the view that if one is going to put in effort to do anything, they should at least attempt to do it in a professional manner. If you aren't going to try to do it well, why bother doing it at all?

The goal of this page is not to spew out highly complicated concepts or to make myself seem learned. My purpose is to take things that are often over-complicated or over-thought and simplify them so that you can have a foundation or basic point of reference from which to grow and hone your writing skills.

What is a story?

This is probably the best place to start. What are the bare minimum ingredients to a story?

Characters: This is arguably the most basic aspect of a story. The story is happening to someone. The reader will be rooting for or against a character or characters. The characters may or may not be human but they will have identifiable traits, good and bad, that the reader can recognize and they can compare and/or contrast those traits to their own life experience. The more those traits align with what they have seen and experienced, the more "real" the characters will seem to them. When the character acts or reacts in ways that are inconsistent with what the reader would normally expect, we need to provide a reason for this difference or we will lose our audience.

Writing believable characters requires knowing how a lot of different types of people react in various situations. By this, I do not mean you study psychology or psychiatry to see what they say on the subject. I mean you have to study people. When you are out in the world, observe people interacting with each other and just with the environment. Experiment by talking to people you don't know. Many writers might be challenged by this, claiming to be shy or an introvert. I fell into that category myself once upon a time and, despite countless claims I've heard that "people can't change," I am that no longer. I'm not saying you have to change - I'm saying you're going to have to make a decision about what is more important to you, writing believable characters or going outside your comfort zone. Nobody ever said this was going to be easy.

You can supplement this by watching movies and shows where the characters are really engaging. You can also read well-written books and stories where the characters are really well-developed. However, nothing replaces experience with and observation of real people.

Conflict: The reader can't root for a character if there is no conflict. Conflict doesn't nessarily mean a fight or violence; it simply means there are goals within the story that do not align. A good story will have many conflicts that run the gamut between small and large. Joe wants to have pizza for dinner and his date wants sushi. That's not earth-shattering, but it's a conflict. Overcoming that may be simple or the argument may be the last straw that destroys the relationship. The stakes of the conflict in the story can be earth-shattering or they can be very personal.

Is that it? That's really the bare minimum. There are a myriad of other components that can be included in any story.

What about plot? Every story has a plot if it has characters working to resolve a conflict. The plot is what they do and how they overcome difficulties along the way. Plots can be anywhere from simple to highly complex. This will vary by genre and target audience. The plot is, essentially, the story.

Rules and Tricks for Writing

As soon as you start looking into writing -- joining various writing groups on FB or other social media, or taking classes, or any other vaunted source of "helpful" information -- you start hearing about things such as arcs and beats or any number of other rules, some of which I will address directly on this page. For the most part, I ignore these things. At least, I ignore them as a goal or as something I attempt to apply or follow.

There are a number of things that happen naturally when writing a story that academics can discover through careful analysis and they can then express those as "rules," but those stories weren't written with any intent to follow those rules. They were written with the intent to tell the story well.

Here is an analogy to explain what I mean by this. When you speak you manipulate your lips, tongue, cheeks, but you aren't usually thinking about that when you're speaking (unless you're trying to overcome a speech impediment.) When you learn to speak as a child you aren't thinking of these things; you simply learn to speak through listening to others, experimentation, and trial and error. If, in that process of learning, someone was enforcing that you must manipulate your mouth in a certain way for each sound this would likely have slowed down your learning process as well as slowing your speech. Sounding natural also would have likely been a challenge.

If you are having trouble with a certain aspect of writing, my first piece of advice would be to read well-written examples of that aspect and pay attention to what the author is doing. Unfortunately, that isn't a quick and dirty resolution to your problem. In this day of instant information and instant gratification, people are looking for shortcuts. I'm not here to give you shortcuts. Another, perhaps faster, option would be to find a book about writing that aspect by an author you admire whose work you have already read. When you read what they have to say on the subject, you will recall the stories you have read and connect that to what they are saying. Then try to do what they are suggesting. And of course, throughout the process, keep writing and experimenting.

Research for your Story

The old maxim is to write what you know. I would pose this from the other side: Don't write what you don't know.

I have read too many books where the author referred to something that they clearly did not know about. When that happens, it throws me out of the story to some degree; sometimes a little and sometimes a lot. Examples:

• A pre-technology country has an extensive underground mine that is a secret, and they simply dump the displaced earth in a nearby ravine, and the people doing the mining are not miners.
  No. An extensive underground mine would collapse without experts giving direction. An extensive mine would quickly fill any ravine, the ore from the mine would be processed somewhere, a lot of timber would be needed for support, the supply lines to the mines and the production lines from the mines would not long be kept secret. There are a number of ways that these problem could be solved, but ignoring them is a mistake. Perhaps the mine is secret because it is disguised as producing something much less valuable. Maybe they hired expert mine engineers from outside.
• Military science fiction where a lieutenant salutes and calls a sergeant, "sir." Nope. That's backwards.
• A character looks at a wrecked motorcycle and the first adjective that comes to their mind is, "dented." Not bent, twisted, ground, or scraped. The only thing that would be dented is the gas tank, and that would be much less obvious than all the surrounding damage. The author was clearly thinking of a car, not a motorcycle. Having been in more than one motorcycle accident, I can tell you there is a difference.

The above are easy examples and some of them might seem small or insignificant. I want to emphasize that I didn't notice them because I was being critical while reading, I read for pleasure with the goal of immersing myself in the story, I noticed them because they were just wrong. It would not have taken much research on the part of the author to discover for themselves that it was wrong. And that is just being lazy.

If your character is a sailor and there is any sailing or discussion of sailing in your story, put in some research on the subject.

If your characters are going to be riding horses to get anywhere, research how far you can expect a horse to travel in a day carrying a rider as well as other things relating to horses and travel by horse.

Did you know that in the USA, in some states the National Guard is called the State Guard? I didn't know that until I looked into it. But many people in the referenced state would have instantly recognized I was full of it had I used the wrong term. Which one is applicable to your story?

Military structure and procedure differs not just between branches of the military, but also between countries.

If you have some kind of floating city in the sky, they have to get resources from someplace. Grain for bread will not be local, there will be supply lines and trade agreements and who knows what else. For more information on this line of thinking, refer to the section on Worldbuilding below.

The bottom line is that you must research. I have heard, "I don't have time to do a bunch of research." You don't have to get a doctorate on every subject. With the internet, you can learn a lot very quickly. Look at a few images or wrecked motorcycles and you'll find your descriptions are much better than they would otherwise have been.

Do not discount the importance of research for your writing.

Worldbuilding

Worldbuilding is something that mainly comes into play for fantasy, science fiction, paranormal, or alternate reality stories.

Worldbuilding is the author working out how his world, or his version of the world, works. I see worldbuilding as a category of research. Research is finding out how something works so you can correctly use it or describe it in your story. This holds true for your world, even if you are the one creating it.

I have sometimes seen people refer to worldbuilding as something written in the story itself. This is incorrect. Separate from your story, you create your world with whatever level of detail you will need to support the story - that is world BUILDING. Within the story, relating the world to your reader is world DESCRIBING. This is also known as setting the scene. It is important to remember that as the author, you will need far more information about your world than the reader ever will. Much of the work you do in worldbuilding is strictly for your own reference to ensure that your characters and setting are all operating consistently within the same overall context.

Does your world have to follow the same rules as the real world? No, it does not. However, until you let them know otherwise, your reader will assume things work the same way; you will need to let them know specifically that the particular aspect is different and it needs to make sense.

It can be easy to go down the rabbit-hole and be forever worldbuilding and never actually get into writing your story. You have to watch out for that. Focus on those things that will actually have an impact on the story and the characters.

Showing and Telling

"Show don't tell" is one of the most common (and in my opinion, useless and pedantic) pieces of advice bandied about by writers and academics alike.

Background: The concept originates from a quote by Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) the Russian playwright and short story author. The line was: "Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."

"Ah ha!" say many. "So simple, beautiful, and profound! This is the secret! The Holy Grail of writing!"

Really? But what, exactly, does it mean? Isn't all writing telling, since it uses words and not images?

To decipher it's purpose we should identify the audience to whom Chekhov was directing this comment. Victorian narratives of the time had veered to long-winded explanations and mental wanderings that rendered the stories dull and boring; they were, perhaps, an intellectual exercise but carried little that could evoke emotional impact. It was those authors to whom he spoke. If you also write in that outdated style, you should also take it as directed to you.

Still, the question persists. What does it mean in practical terms? In addition to that, why would I say it is useless advice?

• Seasoned writers know it means and how to apply it. They have no need to hear this.
• New writers don't understand it and will always need a broken down explanation of how to use the idea. Quoting "show don't tell" to them is wasting time. Move on to the actual details.

In truth, Chekhov did quite a bit of showing in his writing. Any effective piece of writing will have a balance of summarizing information and providing evocative detail. How you do this depends on factors such as the pacing of the story and the scene, and where you want to direct your readers' attention. For example, you can describe the rising bubbles and the steam, or you can say "the water came to a boil in the pot." Which one enhances the story? Sometimes one and sometimes the other - not every piece of associated information belongs in the story and it takes judgement to know what to include and what not to include.. There is no "one size fits all" answer. That's where you experience as a reader and as a writer will help you. That is the long and short of show don't tell and there is nothing mystical about it at all.

Planning and Plotting

How much planning is needed for your story?

There are many schools of thought on this subject. For some authors, planners, they need to plan out every chapter in fine detail in order to write. Others do no planning at all - I term this style of author as a discovery writer.

At this stage in my writing, I do very little planning and I find out what happens next along with the characters. My planning is focused on worldbuilding and identifying my characters. Give me a genre, a setting, and a character or two and I'll figure out a story and a conflict from there. The more planning I do, the more predictable my story becomes and the less authenticity my characters behave; it's too contrived. I am not saying that the work of planners is predicable with poor characterization, I am saying I function better by focusing on the characters than adhering to a preconceived plot. My characters grow and change in unpredictable ways at unpredictable times and I can do this more organically if I have fewer arbitrary restrictions. I will also say that the closer you get to the ending of a story the more you will need to know about that ending.

Whether you work best as a planner or as a discovery writer is something you will have to discover for yourself. Also, this may change over time.

Dialog

This is something that a lot of writers struggle with: how to write believable, natural dialog. The best way to know how to write good dialog is to observe and participate in a LOT of conversations with many different types of people. You can't write believable dialog if you don't know how people talk with each other.

I use an approach I call method writing. I adapted this from method acting wherein the actor essentially becomes the character. My characters are basically a patchwork of things I have seen in real people but put together in a way to create someone new. I step into that character's shoes to react and speak as they would react and speak. Then I jump into the other character's shoes and do the same from that perspective. In this way, the dialog is not contrived and comes across as more genuine.

Voice

This is something that a lot of new writers tend to associate as being some aspect of themselves. "It's my voice. It's me."

No.

Voice is a tool, not a personality trait of the author.

A competent writer can choose the appropriate voice to use for any given project. Of course, you've probably heard the expression: If the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. If you find yourself using the same voice in every project it's time to start experimenting with other voices. You can write in a dozen genres to vastly different audiences and you should be using the voice that will best communicate the story and create emotional impact in your target audience.

Alpha and Beta Readers

It is very important to know your genre and your audience. Alpha and beta readers are key to ensuring you understand and are connecting with your audience and I have a page dedicated to just this subject: Alpha and Beta Readers.

Writer's Block

Writer's block can be attributed to a number of things. However, the most common reason for writer's block is that in the process of trying to write, the author puts on the editor hat instead of the writer hat; they discard a line as not good enough before it even gets to the page. If you run into this, stop worrying about how good it sounds and just get it down - you can always come back later and clean it up.

For myself, when I am stymied in forward progress it is usually because there is something I don't know enough about to be able to proceed. I need context. I can't take my characters into a new city if I know nothing about that city. I don't always know right away what it is that I'm missing, and that can be frustrating. I look at where my characters are and where they are about to go or who they are about to interact with and figure out what it is in that equation I don't understand. Once that is solved, I can move forward again.

Workshops

Yes, writing workshops can be very helpful. But check the creds of a workshop before jumping in. Do those giving the workshops actually have production history to indicate they know what they are talking about?

The Writers of the Future Contest offers a free, online, intermediate writing workshop. I've done it and found it to be extremely helpful. You an check it out here: Writers of the Future Online Workshop