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On the Willpower Engine: Key Self-Motivation Strategies for Writers

Jul. 9th, 2009 | 08:27 am

On The Willpower Engine, my blog about how self-motivation works, I've put up a new post called Key Self-Motivation Strategies for Writers, where I dig into some of the most effective ways a writer can keep motivated through a project. I'll be adding more writing-specific posts in the future, for instance, possibly one on troubleshooting writing motivation. Any suggestions for other motivation-related topics for writers?

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Humor That Stands the Test of Time

Jun. 28th, 2009 | 07:04 pm

There's a handy book called How to Write Funny, edited by John B. Kachuba (how could a man with a name like that not be interested in humor?), which I think was recommended to me by Eric James Stone (don't worry: he's not as reputable as he looks on his home page). What I've read of it so far is interesting and useful, but it was also a bit depressing at a certain point. In one of the pieces included, humorist James Finn Garner is quoted as saying "Anything written prior to 1960 meant to be humorous, no one reads anymore. Or am I wrong?" For a couple of days, I thought he wasn't wrong. Then a couple of exceptions occurred to me, big ones: Mark Twain on the one hand, and on the other, Shakespeare.

Knowing that there are exceptions, it makes me wonder what really makes humor stand the test of time. Maybe it's just the problem of any writing standing the test of time, amplified by the fact that so much humor is based on current ways of looking at things or current events. After all, it's not very much fiction that people are still willing to read 50 years after it's published (it's hard enough to write fiction that people will read 5 minutes after it's published).

I'd like to go ahead and make some insightful observations here about what kind of fiction stands the test of time, but honestly, so far I don't have any clear sense of it. Yet it is informative to think about these two exceptions, Twain and Shakespeare, especially since (apart from a hell of a way with words) I don't know that there's much that they have in common.

The first thing I take away is that most humor is forgettable--even very, very funny humor--and yet it is still invaluable. How wonderful is it when someone gets you to laugh? It's an obvious and magnificent gift. This tells me that regardless of whether my humor will be forgotten in a few decades or, hell, a few years, it's still worth writing strictly for the benefits it may bring today.

The second is that there are at least a few people (I'm sure there are examples other than Shakespeare and Twain) whose humor lasts. This tells me that it's worth me trying to make all of my writing--humor, serious fiction, non-fiction, and so on--meaningful enough and substantial enough to last. Whether or not it actually will last ... well, I can't count on that happening. But no one ever climbed a mountain by avoiding inclines. I think I'll try paying special attention to the inclines and try to steer my steps in that direction.

If you're interested in seeing examples of my humorous--or attemptedly humorous--writing, you could try my radio commentaries or perhaps this or this on The Daily Cabal.
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Improving your self-motivation

May. 1st, 2009 | 10:49 am

For some time now, I've been doing intensive study of self-motivation, bringing together information from a variety of schools of psychology (not to mention neuroscience and physiology) to gradually understand better how people get from wishing they did a certain thing to doing it. If you're interested in the subject, check out the new site where I'm blogging my findings: The Willpower Engine.

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Once it's written, how to go after getting it published

May. 1st, 2009 | 10:42 am

John Brown, one of the best people I've ever met at analyzing successful writing and writerly practice, has blogged a concise and right-on-target post called Finding Your Audience (and getting paid) that does a very good job of giving the basic information you need if you've just finished something and aren't sure what to do to try to get it published.

To what John has said, I'll add a couple of related ideas that can be very helpful in keeping your writing on track:

- If you keep trying to improve your writing, you'll continue to improve forever, so no project you do will ever be perfect. Decide when the story is close to the best you can make it. Then, in the words of Pat Lundrigen, "you must DECLARE VICTORY (yes, in all caps) and send it out."

- As soon as you send one thing out, start writing something else, something you care about. This will assist you in not going insane.

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AlphaSmart: Improved productivity through simplistic technology

Apr. 7th, 2009 | 06:41 pm

I'm writing this post on an AlphaSmart 2000. "A what?" you may reasonably ask. AlphaSmarts are one of the most useful writer's tools I've ever come across. Here's a picture.


You may well be asking yourself what possible benefit a decade-old plastic word processor with a four-line calculator-style display and for the love of Pete, not even a cut-and-paste feature could possibly have for a writer. My answer to that is: "bang! You're writing."

Computer word processing programs are wonderful: don't get me wrong on that count. But they come on computers, which means that they take several minutes to start up and then load the document in question (and longer if you have a slow-booting monstrosity like many of us have), and they are absolutely bristling with distractions: games, e-mail, the Web ... honestly, how often do you start up a computer and do nothing at all apart from writing? On an AlphaSmart, writing is all you can do. You pick up your AlphaSmart, and literally two seconds later, you're staring at a the blinking cursor, ready to type.

And you can write virtually anywhere on an AlphaSmart. I've owned mine for only a week, and already I've written in a cramped airplane seat with the person in front of me leaning all the way back, held in one hand while walking down the street, in a chair with the AlphaSmart sitting on my crossed legs, in bed, on a bannister beside a restaurant door as I thought of an idea on the way out ... well, I could go on, but suffice it to say that in cramped spaces, brief windows of time, locations with no flat surface, and many other situations that would not work with a laptop, an AlphaSmart will let you write. In fact, you can use an AlphaSmart pretty much anywhere you can use a pad of paper, with the improved writing speed and electronic availability of a digital file instead of a page full of ink for your trouble.

AlphaSmarts are also easier to carry around than laptops, weighing about as much as a hardcover novel and being only about 50% larger. They're rugged, they save your work automatically, they can be turned on or off at a moment's notice, they offer eight files to switch between at the touch of a button, they run hundreds of hours on a few AA batteries, they find and spell check, and they will dump information (albeit slowly) to either a PC or a Mac. Having an AlphaSmart means that within moments of thinking "Hey, I could do some writing right now," I can actually _be_ writing. Oh, and AlphaSmart 2000's go for less than $30 used on eBay.

They're not perfect for everything. For instance, only in a special circle of Hell would a person do substantial edits on an AlphaSmart, given the slow scrolling and lack of cut and paste features (although the newer AlphaSmarts have more features, like built in typing lessons, dictionary, and thesaurus as well as cut and paste--which still would not make it a joy to edit intensively on them). Yet this isn't a complaint: AlphaSmarts, as far as I'm concerned, are for cranking out words, not for editing or any other writing-related activity that doesn't involve clattering away on the desktop-style keyboard.

You don't necessarily have to buy one of the old AlphaSmart 2000s. The newer Neo has the niftier features I mentioned while still retaining all the benefits of the older AlphaSmarts, and the Dana is essentially a Palm Pilot in the form of a big keyboard and a wide screen. For what I do with them, though, an old AlphaSmart 2000 is perfect. Even pads of paper allow you to doodle: the AlphaSmart, in a way, is the ideal object on which to just plain write.

LITTLE TECHNICAL NOTES: To transfer files between an AlphaSmart and a Mac or PC, you need to buy a cable that plugs into the computer as though the AlphaSmart were a keyboard--and in fact, an AlphaSmart can be used as a keyboard if you like. Once connected, you send the file from the AlphaSmart and have to wait while it appears on the screen as though it were being typed by a supernaturally fast typist. You can buy a special cable depending on whether you use a PC or a Mac, or you can do what I did and get a Male PS2 to Male PS2 cable and connect that to a PS2 Female to USB converter (about $16 at RadioShack, and please note that the little green kind that look like they should do the job don't work for this purpose). This allows you to plug your AlphaSmart into either a Mac or a PC, as you like. Or, if you have an infrared-capable AlphaSmart and your computer has an infrared port (it looks like a little black plastic window), you can send information back and forth to the AlphaSmart by infrared, skipping the cable altogether.

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So my friends and I wrote these 500 stories, and ...

Feb. 12th, 2009 | 10:56 pm

I'm a member of the Daily Cabal. Here's a brief blurb about our Friday the 13th accomplishment:

Cabal of Science Fiction Writers Posts 500th Daily Story

Friday the 13th of February, 2009, a group of 13 science fiction and fantasy writers called The Daily Cabal posted its 500th story online. The Daily Cabal has posted a free, previously unpublished story of 400 words or less every weekday without interruption since it launched on March 26th, 2007.

Most Cabal stories are either science fiction or fantasy. Recent stories include "The Tungsten Lama’s Weekly Webinar," "Hollywood Goddess," "In the Elevator with Albert Einstein," and "Math for Witches."

The Cabal is the brainchild of writer Rudi Dornemann and writer and editor Jeremiah Tolbert. Its members are responsible for scores of professionally published stories in addition to books, articles, and poetry. All 500 Cabal stories published to date are available on the Cabal Web site at www.dailycabal.com , and the group can also be found on Facebook.


May I just say what a surreal thing it is to be part of a small group who have collectively written 500 stories (albeit very short ones)? That number makes my mind reel.

How many of the stories are mine? 81. I'm hoping I've learned some things, and I'll find out soon whether or not I did, since I plan to go on a story submission jag starting this weekend, making use of some of my massive inventory of work (which does not include the 81 Cabal stories, which I consider already published).

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Before I finally shut up about electronic readers ...

Feb. 10th, 2009 | 10:37 am

Interesting: the Kindle 2, just announced by Amazon, has a feature I didn't even think of: text-to-speech. Having heard a brief sample, it doesn't sound too bad for synthetic speech, and it would mean that any book I buy as an electronic book would automatically be a sort of poor man's audiobook as well, with the advantage over audiobooks that I could switch back and forth between reading and listening as I liked. It's still not nearly enough to make me think I can spare $359 for one, but it's enough that if I had money to burn, I'd certainly consider burning it on a Kindle 2.

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DRM That Actually Benefits Readers? It Could Happen

Feb. 9th, 2009 | 09:58 am

I've appreciated the varied and interesting replies to my last post about writing and Digital Rights Management ("DRM"), which have brought up some of the most difficult questions about this idea that I'm putting forward, that in order for writers to be able to get paid, DRM on eBooks (that is, built-in ways to prevent or at least hinder free copying) is necessary. The responses haven't had the effect so far of convincing me that DRM is a bad idea for eBooks, but it has made me think of what might be a workable solution.

First, let me say that I'm looking at all of this as both a writer and a reader. As a reader, I want to be able to buy a book once and read it forever; I don't want technical problems to threaten my library; and I don't want to have to jump through hoops just to read something I've already paid for. As a writer, one who has made a few decent sales (including one non-fiction book) and who hopes eventually to make a living from writing books--something that's currently very difficult, but not impossible--I want to be sure that there's a way for me to sell my books and that whatever structure is in place to get me paid, it works well enough that I can afford to devote a lot of time and energy to writing those books.

From a reader's perspective, traditional DRM doesn't seem important. The only major advantage for the reader is that maybe if writers are getting paid properly, there will be more good books out there--but from the reader's perspective, that probably doesn't seem very pressing. This post suggests an additional advantage DRM could offer readers.

Of course there are hardware manufacturers and publishers and especially electronic retailers involved here, too, but their concerns all have to do with getting the writer's work to the reader, so let's concentrate on just the readers and the writers for now.

In general, the biggest argument against DRM seems to be that it provides positive things for the seller but only negative things to the buyer. Here's a DRM proposal that actually helps the buyer, while taking away some of the biggest nuisances. I'm sure I'm not the first one to come up with it. It's account-based DRM.

What I mean by "account-based" is that when a person buys a book, that person gets a permanent license to read that book on any eReader device they own, from a smart phone to a dedicated eReader to, who knows, their wide-screen TV with a little black box attachment. Computers might or might not be included; that would be mainly a technical issue.

This "account-based" idea is different from what's usually talked about when people talk about eReader DRM, which is "device-based." That is, much of the thinking about DRM has been that when I buy a book, I get to read it on the particular device I bought it for and nowhere else.

With account-based DRM, each device would be registered to a particular person, and one person could have multiple devices. The books the person buys would be stored on the electronic merchant's servers, so that the devices don't have to keep the books in memory, and any book I've already bought can immediately be downloaded to any device I own, or all of the devices I own. Here are the advantages over device-based DRM:

- If my eReader gets lost, stolen, broken, or upgraded, I immediately have all of my books available on my replacement reader. This is an improvement on both physical books and on eBooks that are freely copiable once purchased: I always have a free backup available of my entire library, with no effort required on my part.
- If I like to read on multiple devices, there's no barrier: I can immediately download and read the same book on as many devices as I own
- There's no danger of me losing my library because of problems with my reader (although of course we have to be able to have confidence in the retailer)
- If I sell a device, resetting the account on the device means I'm not selling all my books, too. These devices would have to be built so that changing the account on the device would erase or lock all of the books that were bought on another account.

And of course DRM would only apply to books that aren't in the public domain: the complete works of Shakespeare and Charles Dickens and the biography of Ben Franklin and the Tao Te Ching (in older translations) could be made freely available to everyone at no charge.

There's also no reason account-based DRM can't exist alongside shareware-style books, books that can be downloaded for free and that readers can pay for if they want to contribute.

And not every book has to be handled by the same kind of DRM. For instance, one commenter pointed out that technical computer books are often most useful to read directly on a computer. If account-based DRM couldn't be reliably set up on computers, that might suggest that those kinds of books would need a different model; I'm sure there are other examples. Yet for the great majority of books, account-based DRM could work very well.

Obviously this approach isn't perfect: no approach to this very complicated and multi-sided problem is. Any kind of DRM can be hacked, for instance, but it's worth noting that people are much more likely to pass around things they can easily copy themselves than to retrieve hacked versions of things. We see this with software, where many consumers are willing to borrow a friend's installation CD but aren't willing to download hacked software from a pirate site (while other users will happily used hacked software).

And there's potential for readers getting around the DRM in other ways, for instance two friends always buying books in one's name and having both their eReaders registered to that person. Of course, if they ever terminate this arrangement, one of them loses every book they've bought. And so on. Yet compared to no DRM at all, the potential for abuse is very small.

There's even a further step that might not be workable, but that's very tantalizing: transferrable, account-based DRM. With such a system, every eReader would need to be able to check in regularly with the network, perhaps every time it opened a DRM-enabled book, or perhaps just every time they connected for another purpose, like to download a new book. In compensation for this pain in the neck, readers would be able to transfer ownership of eBooks, so that you could loan or give a friend a book you've read in exactly the same way you can with a physical book. If I'm giving you a book, the check-ins with the network are necessary to ensure that book is removed from my eReaders when it's transferred over to yours; otherwise I could just "give" the book away and yet keep it on my eReader, which is no DRM at all.

What might be ideal is to offer most books as either transferrable or not, and the buyer would get to choose which kind of DRM they preferred. If the book were not bought as transferrable, then the eReaders wouldn't have to get "permission" from the network to view the book, ever. If the buyer wanted to be able to transfer the book, then they could opt into the network check process and have the right to loan, give away, or perhaps even sell their used eBook.

All of this assumes a certain eBook retailing structure and certain kinds of hardware and software--all of which would be pretty easy to adopt, especially at this early stage. Account-based DRM offers much more flexibility than device-based DRM and offers more benefits to the reader than it does nuisances. And unlike no-DRM solutions, it provides a clear and workable path for writers to get paid along the lines of paper books, which means writers can afford to devote more time and energy to writing good books, which then benefits the readers.

In fact, a sound enough DRM system could ensure that writers get paid more for books while readers pay less--even while publishers and electronic retailers are getting their fair share. The real revolution in electronic books has less to do with convenience and markets than it does with simple economics. When the costs of printing, shipping, and returning paper books vanish, the economics of bookselling, which has been a tricky business for decades now, become much simpler, fairer, cheaper, and more lucrative to everyone involved. The only people who lose out are paper mills, printers, and logging companies, and honestly, there will always be buggy whip makers going out of business as new technologies move forward. But now I'm just preaching the glories of life in the information age, which is a topic most of us have settled our minds on long ago.

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DRM and the future of electronic books

Feb. 4th, 2009 | 05:49 pm

There's a lot to say about the future of books (and other kinds of writing) on electronic readers. John Siracusa gives a lot of useful background and insight in this article, including the interesting observation that the iPod is an electronic reader waiting to happen (the hardware and software are all ready; only the selling model and a decision from Apple to enter into the line of business are needed). The Kindle also seems to surviving, even though it's not exactly taking the world by storm.

But this post is about digital rights management (DRM) for books (not for short fiction, articles, etc.: that's another topic). As far as books is concerned, DRM controls this question: as electronic readers become more and more common, will people be able to share books with friends for free, or will each reader have to buy their own book?

The implications for writers and publishers (who have other things to worry about, such as whether someone else will swoop in and become the gatekeeper of book popularity as the business changes) are pretty huge. If books can be copied freely and immediately, will anyone even be able to make a living writing books? After all, it seems to be the case that any time anything valuable can be copied, regardless of legality, a large number of people do actually copy it.

"Oh pshaw," you may reasonably say. "Music has been digital for years now, and musicians are still able to make a living." Siracusa makes a partly music-based argument about DRM for electronic books, saying that it is inconvenient for legitimate consumers, that the content is easily pirated, and that anyway DRM has been proven to be untenable in the digital music market.

It's true that the digital music revolution is the closest thing we have to a preview of the digital book revolution, but there are some things that are fundamentally different between music and books, and it seems clear to me that these exact differences spell out why DRM doesn't work for music but is crucial for electronic books.

1. Musicians can make a living even if they give their recorded music away. Writers can't.
Yes, it appears that as digital music and unrestrained copying take over the market, musicians in many cases are no longer going to make as much money selling their recordings: it's just too darn easy to get a copy of the recording from a friend who already has it. Interestingly, this isn't all bad news: yes, it's decreased income from sale of recordings, but it's also increased exposure for the musicians involved, who can thereby draw larger audience to their performances. In other words, small- to medium-scale musical acts will make their money the way they always have, by performing.

Writers can't perform. All we have are the books. If those are free, we don't get paid. If we don't get paid, we have to take other jobs, which leaves us much less time to write, which not only limits the amount of work we can sell, but also how good we get. The way you get better at writing is by writing a lot and challenging yourself. Doing much less of that means less good writing gets out there.

Of course, writers would make something even if books could be freely copied. The problem is that writing is already an extremely difficult way to make a living, and cutting out a significant amount of a writer's income could easily make the difference between being able to write full-time or not.

By the way, I'm not addressing the question here of whether writers might somehow sell more books by making their work freely copiable. I'm very skeptical about the idea, but if it did somehow work that way, that would certainly be a meaningful argument against DRM for eBooks.

2. Music by its nature is always copiable--but books don't need to be.
Yes, we've always had the ability to copy books with photocopiers, and these days we can use scanners and OCR to "steal" books and recirculate them--but hardly anyone does, because it's a huge pain in the butt, whereas illegally copied music is everywhere. One reason for this is that all you have to do to copy music is to plug a recording device into the audio output--and virtually every audio device has some kind of output, if only for headphones.

Not so with books. The electronic readers don't have to output books anywhere, so they don't have to be copiable at all--not even with scanners, unless you can make a good scan of a long succession of Kindle screens.

The Achilles Heel of DRM for music has always been that there are very easy ways to get around it, and have been since the introduction of cassette tapes. Electronic books, if delivered to specific electronic readers, don't have to have this vulnerability: electronic readers do not need to output anything anywhere except to their own screen. DRM for electronic books could actually stick.

3. People want to listen to music on a variety of devices, but don't need to read from a variety of devices.
When I buy a CD, I will sometimes want to listen to it on my computer, sometimes in my car, sometimes on a boom box or stereo elsewhere in the house, and sometimes on a portable device, with headphones. Music needs to be copiable or portable so that I can listen to my music wherever I need to, whether that's on a set of headphones while riding the subway or over a set of huge speakers while throwing a party. True, iPod docking can get around this for some situations, but it's unlikely that listeners will be willing to adopt the iPod docking approach for every single music device they own.

With books, by contrast, we're used to them being discrete objects that we always read in one place. We don't have the changes in scale that we have with music: we don't need tiny type to read in the subway and huge type to read at parties. Reading things off the computer screen provides few advantages over reading something off an adequately-sized electronic reader while sitting at the computer. If I buy an electronic book, I'd be perfectly satisfied to be able to read it only from one device, because I would be very unlikely to use more than one electronic reader device (unless people take to using larger readers like the Kindle in the main and smaller readers like an iPhone while on the go, which is admittedly a possibility). Therefore there's no major, pressing reason for a license to read a book to be something portable that can be transferred from one device to another.

One potential wrinkle has to do with buying new electronic readers. What if I buy a Kindle tomorrow but want to trade it in for a new iReader in 2012? That's clearly a problem, but not an insurmountable one. It may just be that my older books will stay on my Kindle and my newer books will go on the iReader. There could be other solutions (for instance, a means to register the new device with the new seller and get a new download of already-purchased books after a verified erase of the books from the old device). This is a problem worth pausing over, but it's not the kind of thing that kills an industry.

To clarify a fine point, let me quote from Siracusa's article, in which he says "The consumer ... is the intended recipient of the 'message,' whether it be a song or a video or text. He must be given all the tools required to decrypt and consume the information!"

Siracusa here is thinking of the music model, where the consumer has multiple devices where the music will need to go. If we free ourselves from that model and think of an eBook sale as a license to read a book on one specific device, then we realize that it's not the consumer, but rather the consumer's eReader that needs the decryption tools.

I'm not implying that electronic books would be immune to piracy, but the simple fact is that most of us will not be hacking hardware to get free books.

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How do you practice writing when you hardly have time to write in the first place?

Jan. 2nd, 2009 | 11:08 am

Recent reading and discussion have brought me to the strong conviction that regular, deliberate writing practice is key to becoming a brilliant writer--even for those of us who have achieved at least a little success already. I'm sure I'll have a post (or half a dozen) on this subject soon, but for now if you don't mind taking that as given, there's another question that comes up very quickly for any committed writer: how can we get in regular practice writing when it's already hard to squeeze in time for actual writing projects?

One way to do this was brought up by John Brown, who shares my enthusiasm for analyzing what makes writing work: he recommended doing writing practice when not writing. For instance, I could be breaking down the structure of a book or movie in my head while driving or doing dishes.

In addition to this very good idea, I came up with three other possible approaches. Here they are.

USING EXERCISES TO BOOST PRODUCTION
First, I wonder if some exercises can't be used in two ways to boost production, namely

1) Helping break through temporary holdups, and
2) Revving the writerly engine.

By breaking through writerly holdups, I'm thinking of the kinds of writing problems that get me off track, prevent me from writing usable material going forward in a project, or stop me cold. Examples of this would be things like not being able to write particular love scene convincingly enough or feeling that a particular plot point isn't working.

My idea here--an untested one--is that it might temporarily be worthwhile to work on the kind of problem I'm having rather than the specific problem I'm having. For instance, if I'm having a problem figuring out how my protagonist gets from point A to point B, I might give myself an exercise of "Write 10 thumbnail sketches of chapters in which some character inadvertently gets himself or herself moved from one place to another."

Then I would scribble out a few sentences of an idea about the Pope stowing away in a bread truck to avoid a situation which would publicly humiliate some other person, a few more about a teacher accidentally going on the wrong field trip, a few more about a son getting a letter from his mother on her deathbed in a distant country when he hasn't seen her for 20 years, etc. By the time I'm done, maybe the problem will have jarred loose, or maybe I'll have accidentally come up with a solution to it, or maybe I'll just be in the best frame of mind to solve it. And even if not, at least it's making productive use of my writing time rather than encouraging me to think about how much I need to wash the dishes or check my e-mail.

In terms of revving up the writerly engine, I'm wondering if it might be helpful to get into the groove for the writing day by looking at the most difficult or most appealing or most unfamiliar writing problem you're seeing in front of you and designing an exercise for that. For instance, if I'm about to write a chapter in which a lot of characters are talking at once, I could design an exercise where I do five different dialogs, the first one with four people and adding one each time.

Alternatively, I could do an exercise that's specific to my project, for instance coming up with ten probing questions and "asking" my protagonist (as of that point in the story) about them.

If you try it, let me know how it goes for you! I expect to try it myself soon.

Ideally, it seems that repetitive practice, since it's easy to jump into, could be a good mechanism for claiming writing time that otherwise might be avoided or start slowly.

METACOGNITION WHILE WRITING
One completely different approach is to keep some of my attention on my own writing process (that is, to use "metacognition," which is to say thinking about my own thought processes). Are there difficult problems I'm avoiding? Where is my interest strongest? How am I making my decisions? I know it sounds very distracting and effortful, but Geoff Colvin talks about it in Talent is Overrated, and this self-examination while things are in progress turns out to be a widely-used technique among top performers across fields, probably because there are certain things we can't really practice outside of actually doing a project, and it's not deliberate practice unless we're thinking about what we're doing. On the other hand, I'm sure it won't appeal to everyone.

PRACTICING IN DAILY LIFE
Yet another approach is to try hard to make other activities into writing practice. For instance, I'm working much harder these days to write my forum posts as clearly and familiarly as I would want to write nonfiction books. Sometimes I succeed and sometimes not, but it's excellent practice for me, and if successful will improve both my non-fiction writing and my posting skills. The same thing could be done with imagery in conversation or with reconstructing dialog in e-mails. John mentioned a rich opportunity of this kind for parents: making up bedtime stories.

The biggest obstacle for me in this kind of practice is laziness: because I can write e-mails without paying much attention to expression or organization, I often do, and I think that this is a lost opportunity for my non-fiction writing, just as leaving out description and metaphor from e-mails and conversation are a lost opportunity for my fiction.

*

If none of these approaches prevents practice from consuming your writing production time, it might just be that writing practice is best for times when you can't bear to work on your big project, or need a change of pace, or don't have anything due.

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The coming transformation of the publishing industry

Dec. 17th, 2008 | 08:03 am

Predictions about how quickly new technologies will become popular--or whether they'll become popular at all--are notoriously unreliable, but seeing how electronic readers should within a few years be cheaper than $100 and as convenient and comfortable to read as regular books, it seems very likely that their convenience and the much cheaper price of electronic books compared to physical books will make electronic readers very widespread within 15 years--and maybe sooner.

After all, cell phone users went from 3% of U.S. households to about 60% in just ten years. Average consumers won't begin to become aware of electronic readers until they're already on a precipitous rise. Popular new technologies are typically adopted very quickly (see http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/2008/02/18/adoption-of-new-technology-since-1900/ ) once the right conditions are reached.

But I don't see any reason why electronic readers should put publishers out of business. Certainly they will with some publishers, whichever ones are bad at adapting to the new market conditions, but they may be the savior of others, when suddenly the huge expenses of returns, paper, printing, and transportation vanish. We might still be getting most of our books from Borders and Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and they might be published by the same publishers, but they would have an electronic delivery model (in addition to print runs, though much smaller than current ones, for more popular books).

Because publishers are not just distribution organizations: very importantly, they are the ones who pick the work worth reading (not to mention marketers with distribution connections). There is far more material out there written than anyone could ever possibly want to read, and finding the stuff that really appeals to a lot of people is exactly what publishers try to be good at. Doing that takes a lot of work in sifting through talent and manuscripts, and it takes understanding of the industry.

With that said, I think there will be many opportunities for new star players in publishing once electronic readers are adopted widely, even one-person publishing houses (run by individuals who are very talented at discovering top notch books through slush or other means). Marketing and connections are not essential in a business where word of mouth is king.

And since distribution will become less important, the emphasis will be more on finding the gems, which suggests that that process will become streamlined. It may be that in future writers will do as actors do, and post book proposals on Web sites where potential publishers can sift through a massive central store of work with powerful electronic tools. This may mean an end to the "push" model of sending books out to publishers and change to a "pull" model of publishers seeking out books from a small number of sites that feature these projects. It also may pose a serious threat to the agent's role in this work, although of course a good agent does much more than get your book in front of the right editor--and even with a "pull" model, there may still be effective "pushing" from agents.

As electronic publishing ascends, though, there will be many, many more things published, and people will increasingly rely on pundits, social networks, and proven sources to help them find what they want. Which is why we who are writing now are lucky: we have a last chance over the next few years to make names for ourselves so that by the time electronic readers predominate, we already have a following and rise above the vast, shallow ocean of available products through our following and proven accomplishments.

More good news: I think there's every reason to expect that electronic readers will result in an increase in reading. Currently radio, ipods, television, and some movies have a huge advantage over reading in that they can be obtained on demand: if I'm at home and want to get the latest Paul Simon "album," I can have it within minutes. There are thousands of movies on Netflix that I can be watching in hardly more time than it would take to insert a DVD, and if my cable were plugged in, I could watch TV at any moment with one button push. By contrast, if I want a book, I have to order it from Amazon or go to a physical bookstore, unless I have a Kindle or something similar. How much cooler would it be for writers if I were having a casual conversation with someone on the train at the beginning of a 30-minute commute when someone mentions James Maxey's latest book with enthusiasm, and I can immediately purchase the book electronically (for much less than a paper book would cost) and begin reading it?

That's the other thing: in addition to instant access to books, electronic readers will also give us hugely reduced prices (eventually), because there are no costs for paper costs, printing, transportation, returns, stocking, floor space, etc.

Of course, this is awful news for brick-and-mortar bookstores, but publishers have a great opportunity, and it's very good news for writers--provided piracy can be kept in check.

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Why Don't I Have a Plot, and Where Do I Get One?

Jun. 30th, 2008 | 09:42 pm

We don't necessarily need to include plots in our stories. Some literary fiction has no plot and does fine, for instance. Vignettes don't have plots. Stories can be a tour of a fascinating place, or can delve deeply into character without really following a plot.

Of course, if we're writing mainstream or genre fiction instead of literary fiction, we may find that no one will buy--and few people will read--a story that doesn't have a plot. So here I'll suggest a definition of what a plot actually is, and lay out what I've learned so far about putting one together. Many thanks to friends who recently posed this question in a clear enough way that I realized I needed to think it out.

Caption per Mary Robinette Kowal, while critiquing an otherwise excellent story; photo stolen from http://www.bestweekever.tv/

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Don't Worry: The Characters Don't Believe It Either

Mar. 30th, 2008 | 07:27 pm

John D. Brown, author of the forthcoming fantasy trilogy that begins with Servant of a Dark God (Tor Books, probably summer of 2009), maintainer of a blog of bizarre and enjoyable miscellania, and a writer who's very accomplished at finding powerful ideas for improving writing, pointed out a technique for believability in writing that I never thought of when writing my essay on believable fiction: having someone question the thing that's unbelievable. By having a character who questions something that readers might find it hard to believe, the reader's disbelief can often be forestalled. Maybe this is just the "for the love of criminy, man, the ghost was just right there in front of you!" effect, or maybe it's the reassurance that in the world of the story, most of the usual rules apply and people will notice when they don't. In any case, it works, and it adds to your writer's arsenal.

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How Writing Every Day Changes Everything

Mar. 28th, 2008 | 02:30 pm

It was about 10:30 or 11:00 PM on New Year's Eve, 2007, and I was at a party at the house of some friends, when the conversation shifted to New Year's resolutions. I mentioned that I never do them ... and then realized that this year I wanted to do one. With everything that had been going on in my life (and I'm a single parent with a full-time job who runs both a singing group and a large online writing group, so that is a lot), I hadn't been getting much writing done lately, despite my best intentions. So after thinking it through for a few minutes, I actually did make a resolution: I was going to write every day for 2008.

The rules were pretty lenient: there was no minimum length, and the writing could either be generating new material or making at least sentence-sized changes to existing material. However, all of the writing had to be for publication: no journal entries, blogs, etc. would count.

So I started. It was awkward at first. It would get to be time to go to bed, after a day full of things to do, and I'd realize that I hadn't written yet--so I'd sit down, chip away at making meaningful edits on some piece I wanted to get out the door for just 10 or 20 minutes, then turn the computer off and head to bed.

Within a couple of weeks, I had cleared out all of the projects that I felt were overdue and needed immediate attention and was able to get back on track with a novel I was working on.

This was more difficult. I wasn't entirely clear on where I was going with the novel, and because I was getting in my writing time late in the day, I really didn't feel like spending some time planning the story, then spending more time writing the story. So I tried just writing, an approach that has worked well for me some of the time before. Within a few weeks, it was clear I was driving myself through a trackless wilderness. Just Writing might work for me for some projects, but this one required a lot of thought and planning to come off well, and it wasn't working out. I began working on another project instead, one that I knew was more straightforward and would come out more easily.

But thinking back on that experience, I soon realized that I needed to change my resolution: my writing time could be for writing an actual piece, but it could also be for planning a piece, in writing (daydreaming and straight research wouldn't count).

Feeling I had gotten off track with the novel I had been "just writing," I set it aside and got to work on a new project, one that required a lot of brainstorming, imagination, ideas, and planning--and I've been working on it every day since. What I've found is that my brain has gotten fired up with the story, and since I don't take more than a day away from the old story forge at a time, the coals are still hot when I next get back to them, and just need me to blow across them a little for the flame to leap back up. This is <i>much</i> better than writing from a cold start: this is jumping into the saddle and having the horse break into a gallop.

Writing every day has become easier since I started, and I've found more opportunities to do it. So far, one quarter of the way through 2008, I've missed one day (when I was both sick and on vacation). As nice as perfection is, missing one day is fine for me. If I miss one day per quarter for the whole year, I'll consider that a massive victory.

And there have been more benefits, surprising ones. I find that before I go to sleep or when I'm driving, I'm working on the book in my mind: I've obtained a limited amount of that enviable obsession that produces idea after idea, insight after insight, into a project. I'm re-reading a favorite writing book at night now (Donald Maass' <i>Writing the Breakout Novel</i>, which I recommend highly), and as I go through it, I find myself easily able to see how Mr. Maass' insights can apply to my book, and what I need to do. The characters are getting richer and more human, the plot more surprising and satisfying, the milieu more real and engrossing.

So here's my advice to you: if you're serious about writing and you currently only write  every once in a while, perhaps because you really, honestly don't have the time (or just because you like to relax), try instead--just for a month or two--writing every day. Don't set high word count requirements, but follow your regime faithfully. What's interesting is that your work may change not just in the quantity of words you've generated, but in the way it feels to you to write it. After the first couple of months, writing for me began to feel effortless again, something I had only seen occasionally in the past and that I now suspect had more to do with having gotten into a habit of writing very regularly for a while than with some particular inspiration.

I'm not the first person to try this by any means. Some writers--even other when-I'm-not-at-my-day-job-or-with-my-family writers, like me--have made it a permanent part of their lives, as I may come to do as well. A whole group of us on Codex, my writing group, are doing this. Lots of other people are first. Lawrence Schoen (Codexian, fluent Klingon speaker, and author of a variety of clever short stories published in English and translated into a passel of other languages) started doing it back in 2006 or 2007.

And what about your writing? Would it help you?

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The Walton Mountain of Writing Advice

Mar. 19th, 2008 | 02:26 pm

My fellow Codexian David Walton has for some time maintained an extensive and beautifully-organized "Grand Index of SF Writing Advice." Don't let the title fool you: while there are plenty of articles listed there that deal specifically with fantasy and science fiction, most of the articles are hard-core, nuts-and-bolts, down-and-dirty, nitty-gritty, tried-and-true, generalized writing advice. (Sorry, I ran out of hyphenated descriptors there at the end: I had to stop at five.)

The articles David lists are from well-known genre fiction writers (Orson Scott Card, David Brin, Robert J. Sawyer, Mary Soon Lee, etc.), agents, editors, and a sprinkling of upstart neo-pros like myself and John Brown. They cover writing techniques, basic questions, the writing life, the business of writing, ideas, and a variety of other areas. Highly recommended stuff, especially if you're having a particular problem or question (can't come up with a good title, want to know how to write a query letter, etc.).

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Put that phone down! ... slowly ...

Mar. 18th, 2008 | 01:14 pm

Nathan Bransford, a literary agent for Curtis Brown, has an excellent advice blog for writers that gets updated just about every weekday. Today he mentioned that he gets about five calls a day from people wanting to know how to get an agent. This makes me painfully embarrassed on behalf of the callers, and pitying of the callees.

To put it in context: calling an agent to find out how to get an agent is similar to calling an attractive man/woman up out of the blue and asking them how to get a date (with them or someone similarly attractive). If you have any inclination to do it, please don't.

You probably don't, though. I have a good feeling about you.

If you'd like to know how to get an agent, he explains it all right here, with convenient links in the right margin explaining more of the details (like how to write a good query).

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Writer's Block: Nothing to Fear But Fear Itself

Mar. 4th, 2008 | 07:41 am

Orson Scott Card knows a lot of really useful things about writing, and he's both willing and able to write about and teach them, so I hope I'll be excused from occasionally echoing some of his writing opinions when I'm convinced he has a key insight.
 
OSC was the first person from whom I've heard the opinion that writer's block is a mainly imaginary affliction. This is a little bit shocking to assert, since after all, many respected writers have spoken of having writer's block, and interviewers for television and radio and magazines often ask about it as though it were some kind of disease with a natural pathology, like cleft palate or syphilis.
 
If it really existed, writer's block would be the inability to write. If we look at this idea for a moment, we begin to notice that it doesn't make much sense. Is a person with writer's block physically unable to put words on a page? If they are, it's not called "writer's block," but rather "paralysis" or "death" or "extreme drunkenness." So people with writer's block can clearly write. Presumably what a person's saying when she or he talks about having writer's block, then, is the inability to write anything good.
 
But how in the world can you determine whether or not you're able to write something good unless you write something in the first place? You can't. For all you know, you might get rolling and write the best thing you've ever come up with. In other words, writer's block can't really be defined as the inability to write anything good, either. It is possible to write and for it not to be good, of course, but that's not writer's block: that's just bad writing, which can be cured in a variety of ways, of which more in a moment.
 
So here's what I think we're talking about: writer's block isn't the inability to write, or the inability to write something good, but rather a code name for being afraid of not being able to write something good. But since people who don't write aren't really familiar with the process, it's much easier and more comfortable to say "I have writer's block" than to say "I wrote something terrific last year, and ever since, I've lived in terror that it was the only good thing I'll ever write and that if I keep writing, I'll be exposed as the hack I really am."
 
So the only real cure for writer's block is to write something. If it's bad, that's fine: we'll spin that by calling it (and here I'm borrowing one of OSC's phrases) an "exploratory draft." The virtue of writing that doesn't meet your standards is that it provides material for more writing that you might like very much. What if you rewrote it from scratch, but changed _____? Or maybe that just helps you see that the real story isn't the one you just tried to write, but something that comes before it, or after it, or instead of it.
 
Well, but what happens if you plow through your non-existent writer's block and start writing, but it really all does turn out to be garbage, and none of it is even useful as an exploratory draft? Well, then it's time to turn your attention to your craft. For a while, you may need to fall back on doing short exercises rather than full-blown pieces meant for publication. There are any number of excellent writing books out there (which would be a topic for another post, although OSC's Character and Viewpoint and, if applicable to you, Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy are exceptional), or you could work with a good writer's group or take a good workshop or what have you. The only caution here is to avoid books about writing by people who don't know what they're talking about, and classes taught by people whose fiction you don't enjoy.
 
The other thing someone might claim as a meaning for writer's block is that they have no ideas. Again, on even a brief examination this turns out to be silly, because we all have ideas. You can turn around and steal one from another story (Shakespeare did that brilliantly, time and time again) or use any of a number of means to come up with fresh ideas. You could look out the window and write about the first thing you saw. Would that make a good story? Maybe not, but there are means of coming up with ideas that will yield a good story, and I'll mention some of them in a moment. For best results, though, I strongly recommend aggressively thinking up or seeking out new ideas until you find one you're really excited about writing. Not "this might work" but rather "oh man, I have to write this one!"
 
OSC talks about working with ideas by looking at a situation or a possibility and thinking things like: What else might happen? What happens next? Why did this come about? What kind of problems could come up? I highly recommend applying these techniques to whatever ideas come to mind. In terms of coming up with those ideas in the first place, here are a few methods. What you're looking for in these ideas is some kind of stress or conflict or problem, because good stories are almost always about some kind of trouble.
 
  • Go somewhere where you'll hear people having conversations and listen until you hear one that interests you
  • Think about an event that interests you and imagine how it could have been different
  • Think over your own history or your family history.
  • Flip through an encyclopedia
  • Read a book about a factual subject that interests you
  • Combine aspects of two interesting people in your life
  • Take any situation and ask yourself what would be the worst thing that could happen 
  • Take a plot from a book or story or movie you've really liked and envision how it might play out in a very different setting, or with different characters. (Warning! Don't borrow feeling from books or movies: characters should feel and say things that you get from life, not things that you're used to hearing other people write about. Just ask yourself: Would a real person do that? Would someone really talk that way? We can make some allowance for artistic license, though.)
Of course, there's one more possible kind of writer's block: having trouble writing because you don't really like to write, and don't feel compelled to. Some writers talk about not enjoying the process of writing, but they're compelled to do it anyway. Either compulsion or enjoyment will work, but if you don't like to sit down and write and you don't feel driven to do it, then you can breathe a sigh of relief, knowing you don't have writer's block: that just means you're not really a writer.
 
As for the rest of us, let's get back to work!

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That Certain Something, Part II

Nov. 7th, 2007 | 06:44 am

In an earlier entry, I talked about characteristics that might make a story rise above other stories, that make it stand out. To sum up that entry: really effective writing doesn't just do the job well, it also offers experiences that the reader craves and doesn't get elsewhere.

That craving part is the key in this entry. A good story is compelling; we already know that. Once you start reading, you're so wrapped up in the characters or problems or experience that you don't want to stop. But recently I'm coming to think consciously also about a story being attractive.

Here's what I mean: what would you say to a really well-written story with sympathetic characters, about a plumber trying to get enough customers to stay in business? Let's pretend that this hypothetical story is well-written in every respect: the characters are interesting and believable, the plumber's plight in trying to earn enough money to keep his family from falling apart constitutes meaningful stakes, the description is sharp and evocative ... still not interested? Well, maybe you are (in which case, it's a bad example), but I'm not. This might be a story that, after you've read the first 1,000 words, you can't put down because you've gotten so involved with the characters, but where it might fail is in getting you to start reading it in the first place, and then once you've read it in having delivered such a singular experience that you recommend it to all your friends. Because even if the story keeps you interested, who wants to spend their time wallowing in a plumber's financial woes? (Someone, surely, but not many people.) 

So the thing that's lacking in that hypothetically brilliantly-written story is the element of the attractive. The story needs to offer something that readers know they want. 

It might be wish-fulfillment: a down-on-his-luck plumber comes up with a new kind of faucet that makes him a millionaire overnight.
It might be a certain emotional experience: A plumber who has become cold-hearted from years with a badly-suited wife begins to remember what made life worth living for him when he befriends a deaf teenager. 

Or it might be a mystery or a puzzle: A plumber whose business is on the verge of failing finds a human finger in a customer's drain pipe, and has to figure out who the murderer is and who the victim is before the murderer realizes what he knows.

It might even be an entertaining voice, or a setting that makes people happy, or any of a number of other things.

How is this different from what I was saying in my earlier entry? The earlier entry was about what makes your story not just good, but remarkable. This entry is about what makes your story not just remarkable, but attractive

So a lot of things that can make a story remarkable can serve as an attractive element, but not everything that's remarkable is necessarily attractive, and not everything that's attractive to you is necessarily attractive to a wide range of readers.

The test for an attractive element is to imagine a casual reader getting a friend interested in the story. If someone were enthusing about the story to a friend, what would they realistically have to enthuse about? This is similar to a logline, a one-line movie pitch, but it's not about summarizing the story; it's about summarizing what makes the story worth reading. Here are some examples: 

"I just read this story about this plumber, and the character kept saying these crazy things ... it made me laugh so hard I almost threw up."

or 

"I read this beautiful story ... it's really painful at the beginning, but by the end I felt so uplifted I was practically dancing." 

or 

"Hey, you have to read this story I read about this plumber who finds a finger in a drain, and there's this complete murderfest going on, and he has to be like, this detective to find out who's doing it before they kill him and chop him up and, like, shove him down a drain. It's really gross, but it also like, makes you completely tense and paranoid until you get to the end." 

Probably not all of these appeal to you, but I hope that even if the examples fall short, the point is making it across: if you can't realistically imagine someone getting another friend excited about the story with a simple explanation of what they liked, then maybe there is no attractive element to your story.

You might notice the similarity of these enthusiastic recommendations to cover blurbs, and this is not coincidence: cover blurbs are an attempt to simulate a recommendation from a friend by having a (one hopes) well-known and revered person enthusing about your story on the cover of the book. There are few things that can sell a book or get a reader to read a story as well as having someone whose taste you trust recommend it to you with a reason you find meaningful.

There are some attractive elements over which you have no control. For example, a really good picture of a vampire on the cover is enough to sell a book to some readers, but very often authors have no control over the presentation of the book. Having the following as an author is also sometimes enough in itself to sell a book (think Stephen King or John Grisham), but for your name to have that effect, you have to attract a lot of readers and please them in the first place.

The attractive element is particularly hard to find because if you get someone to actually read your story, they may find that they like it a lot, that it's really good. But since you're putting your story in their hand and they're reading it because you wrote it and gave it to them, they aren't like normal readers. Normal readers might give your book or story a second or two of consideration, and if they don't find something that they really want, they will generally just move on. If your story has an attractive element that appeals to them, and if they get some glimpse of that attractive element, there's a good chance you will have snared them and get them to read the story, which if it follows through on its promises and is compelling, might get them to start telling their friends.

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A Method for Collaboration

Oct. 5th, 2007 | 07:12 am

On Codex, we're having a Collaboration Contest, where writers team up in pairs to work on short stories. We've had a variety of contests, and they tend to teach us new things and force us to crank out sometimes very good writing.

I've been appealing to a friend offline to join me as a collaborator in this contest, and she mentioned that she hadn't done a collaboration before and was curious how it might work. I've collaborated in what for me has been a very satisfying way with fellow Writers of the Future winner Steve Bein, and have a method to suggest. What I'm about to describe is only one way to collaborate, and it assumes that the writers will be participating on an equal basis and are in the collaboration to learn and produce a really good story rather than for other ends. Here's my informal writeup of the method I proposed to my friend for the contest.
 
1. We fire e-mails back and forth, brainstorming ideas for the story

2. One of the ideas catches our interest and we start brainstorming other elements. Maybe the first idea we came up with was a character in a situation, so then we might brainstorm other characters, other events, etc.

3. Sooner or later we get to a point where one of us is itching to start the story. This might be very early on, when we barely have the basic idea for the story in our sights, or it might be much further on: we might even work out a complete outline for the story when we start writing.

4. Whoever is the one who got inspired to start writing first writes to a certain point--anything from a paragraph or two to half the story or even a bit more--and then passes it back to the other person to continue. We continue to discuss the story through e-mail or even by phone as we go.

5. We continue writing chunks of the story, not necessarily of the same size each time, alternating until it's finished. (The chunks don't even have to be written in order, although it's easier to do it that way.)

6. When we have a completed first draft, one of us does the first round of editing. If one person did more of the original writing, the other should be the one to do the first round of editing. During editing, we discuss any major changes before making them, but other than that we're ruthless and edit the stories almost as though they were our own. We don't hesitate to strike out a beautiful phrase or change a character or what have you even if the other person has done the original work. However, we do this using Word's "track changes" feature, which is very easy to use, so that if something needs to be restored it can be.

7. The person who didn't edit the first round edits it the second round, using the same approach.

8. If necessary, we continue alternating, editing the story all the way through and passing it back to the other person, until both people are happy with the story.
 
When it's time to market the story, one person is elected to be the marketer and keeps track of markets. Both people must agree for the story to go to a specific market. If the story is sold, the money is split 50/50 regardless of word count contributed. Any further direct use of the story (expansion into a novel, reprint sales, etc.) is done only with the agreement of both writers. Both writers are free to write derivative works from the piece (e.g., stories in the same world).
 
If the collaboration is a novel collaboration, a written collaboration agreement is written up and signed between the parties before work goes far on the book. I have one of these to view as a sample.

So that's one approach to collaboration. Another is that one person will come up with an outline or synopsis and the other will write the story; either or both could do the editing afterward. Another is that one person offers a story to the other that is "broken" and the other rewrites it into a strong, working story (thanks for that idea, Ruth Nestvold!). Another is that one person just begins writing, then passes the story to the other to continue in any way they please at a given point. Yet another is that the writers take responsibilities for certain elements, for instance each taking certain characters or certain kinds of scenes (fight scenes, dialog-heavy scenes, etc.). And there are other approaches.

One important element of a collaboration is mutual respect. Even if the collaboration is between a major, successful writer and an unknown, each has to respect the other's skills and intentions for the thing to work. Lack of respect or trust is likely to make a collaboration fail.

If you've tried collaboration, I'd be interested to hear about your experiences in comments, below.

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Six Superpowers of Description

Sep. 1st, 2007 | 08:25 pm

I was reading a manuscript--a very good one--from a friend recently, and it struck me that most of her descriptions were very straightforward. Common nouns are described with common adjectives, and similes and metaphor are not widely used. To some extent we can argue that this is stylistic, that "dark suit" or "white hair" are perfectly serviceable descriptions (which they are), and that nothing is needed. But this style got me thinking about description and the various jobs it can do, and I was surprised to come up with six. I'm sure there are more than six major things description can accomplish, but six will do for us, for now.
 
The reason this kind of insight might be useful is that as writers, we may be missing some wonderful opportunities when we use description for only one or two things. In other words, description has some skills that we can put to use, and if we're aware of those skills, our writer's toolbox gains some new implements.
 
It's true that we can describe things indirectly through action, as well, but for the purposes of this article I'll deal mainly with explicit description.
 
Superpower 1: Depiction
This is the obvious and arguably most important job description can accomplish. If we say only "Van came into the room and stepped up onto the couch," we barely can picture what's going on, and might be lacking key details that would matter to us. His standing on the couch will matter more if his boots are dirty, or if it's an old couch, or if he does it carefully versus roughly. "Van came into the dusty room and stood on the broken, dirt-colored couch" gives us a very different picture than "Van came into the parlor, which was as quiet and clean as a church before services, and stepped up onto the cream-colored fabric of the couch."
 
There's always the trap of getting bogged down in unnecessary details, or the worse trap of bloating your writing with too many adjectives, but that's a different issue and worth talking about separately. For the purposes of Superpower 1, it's enough to know that our writing becomes more specific and real if we're using description to depict.
 
Superpower 2: Evocation
Description can also transcend mere depiction and evoke a response from the reader that will take a long step forward in making the story feel more real and meaningful. Evocation is the art of describing or hinting things in such a way that the entire situation comes to life by comparison with a similar situation the reader has already encountered. Description can only show us specific, limited details of specific things. Evocation, by contrast, causes the reader to draw on her or his own experiences to fill in a huge number of details. It's much more difficult, but much more powerful when it works.
 
As an example, above we just talked about a dusty room. If we can instead talk about Van sweeping away cobwebs that cling invisibly to his sleeve, pushing a warped door open with a squawk and doused in a smell like a basement that has been given over entirely to spiders and centipedes, we may be able to evoke in the reader enough connections that the old parlor in the abandoned house will come alive with their own memories of basements or attics or neglected rooms.
 
Simile (a door as warped as a potato chip) and metaphor (a metropolis of spiders) can be powerful tools here when used well.
 
Superpower 3: Characterization
Description can give us an additional tool in characterization, not just in describing the outward character (which would already be covered in depiction and evocation), but in skewing the perception of what's around us through the eyes of the viewpoint character. If Van walks into a room in an abandoned house and we describe the room as "as dead and secret as Tutankhamen's tomb", this implies that Van either has a sense of adventure or expects to find something worth finding in the room. If we describe it as "like his grandmother's parlor might be if it were left to its own devices for twenty years", this can give us a completely different sense of the character. Using description this way can be useful to suggesting the character's immediate state of mind, the character's general proclivities, or both.
 
Superpower 4: Foreshadowing
Description also gives us an opportunity to steer our reader a little, to raise expectations or provide suspense or misdirect or hint at what interesting things are yet to come. While our job as writers is not to manipulate the reader, it is our job to provide an experience crafted to be interesting and compelling and to suggest certain directions, and description can help in this. If we talk about the room Van enters as "aching with a strained silence," this suggests to us that something will soon break that silence. If we say that the floor groans and a snapping noise comes from somewhere deeper in the room, we begin to worry about how sound the building is and whether it will collapse on Van.
 
Superpower 5: Flagging
Description can also be used as a flag to mark something as important. If Van walks into a store and asks a question of a "a cashier engrossed in a magazine," the lack of detail suggests that the cashier isn't important and will not be playing a large part in the story. If instead, though, we talk about a slim, spiky-haired girl hunched over a half-crumpled copy of the National Enquirer, readers are likely to pay a little more attention to her and be comfortable with her assuming a larger part in the story.
 
With that said, good description is sometimes useful to simply add color, entertainment, verisimilitude, tone, or other features to the story. The reader doesn't necessary expect that the cashier has to have an important part in the story if we single her out for a moment; it's just an additional option. If she later turns out to be important after not appearing for a long time, though, we will have made a much stronger impression and the reader will be much more likely to remember her and enjoy her reappearance if we've described her well initially.
 
Superpower 6: Style
Finally (at least as regards my list of description's powers), description can be used as a tool above and outside the story. This is a bit of a dangerous approach in some ways, since it means that the author is putting the experience of reading ahead of the experience of the story. Therefore, this can be an entirely bad choice, and by and large it should be done either for the whole story or not at all, since in a story that is otherwise delivered in as transparent a way as possible, a way that puts the reader there in the events, authorial intrusion yanks the reader out and damages that experience.
 
With that said, some writers (Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain leap to mind) make a carnival of description, using it as much to show off entertainingly as to push the story along. If we describe a character as looking like a "goat's butt, with his sad little tuft of forehead hair serving for a tail", that could potentially be amusing, and if description of that kind is delivered consistently, the reader could find it very satisfying. In the first paragraph of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams describes a house that "was about thirty years old, squattish, squarish, made of brick, and had four windows set in front of a size and proportion which more or less exactly failed to please the eye."
 
Stylistic description seems to be most useful for humor, but it can also be used for commentary, whether on specific situations or on the human condition. It can also be used in conjuction with the characterization power to make a highly enjoyable, sympathetic first person narrator.
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I'll leave it there for today. In closing, I'll repeat that I don't think these are necessarily the only powers description has to offer, and I'll add a caveat that not all six of these powers may be ones that you necessarily should use. Style is the clearest example of a descriptive power that may be best reserved for certain writers or certain types of writing, but it may not fit your style either, for instance, to foreshadow or characterize with description. With that said, I'd urge you to experiment with all six powers to see if any of them might suit you despite being underrepresented in your writing so far.

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