How to use this Page

I had a dear friend who had a gift for telling stories about her day. She’d launch into one, and suddenly everyone around her would hush up and lean in, knowing that whatever followed would be pure entertainment. A story of encountering a deer on the highway would involve interludes from the deer’s point of view. Strangers who factored into her tales would get nicknames and imagined backstories of their own. She could make even the most mundane parts of her day—and everyone else’s—seem interesting. She didn’t aspire to be a writer, but she was a born storyteller.

Why All Nonfiction Should Be Creative Nonfiction

The term creative nonfiction often brings to mind essays that read like poems, memoirs that read like novels, a lyrical way of interpreting the world around us. But the truth is that writing nonfiction—from blog posts to routine news reports to business guides—can (and should) be creative work. And the more creativity you bring to any piece, the better it’s likely to be received, whether your target reader is a friend, a website visitor, an editor or agent, or the public at large.

The March/April 2015 Writer’s Digest goes on sale today—and this issue delves into the creative sides of many types of nonfiction.

• Learn seven ways to take a creative approach to any nonfiction book—whether you wish to write a self-help title, a historical retelling, a how-to guide, or something else entirely.

• Get tips for finding the right voice for your essays, memoirs and other true-to-life works—and see how it’s that voice above all else that can make or break your writing.

• Delve into our introduction to the nonfiction children’s market—where writers can earn a steady income by opening kids’ eyes to the world around them.

• And find out what today’s literary agents and publishers are looking for in the increasingly popular narrative nonfiction genre—where books ranging from Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks to Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist to Susan Cain’s Quiet have been reinvigorating the bestseller lists.

Why Readers Love True Stories

“Narrative nonfiction has become more in-demand because it provides additional value; it’s entertaining and educational,” explains agent Laurie Abkemeier in our narrative nonfiction roundtable. “There are many forms of entertainment vying for our attention, and the ones that give us the highest return for our time and money investment are the ones that we gravitate toward.”

So give your readers that amazing return. The articles packed into this informative, diverse and boundary-pushing issue will show you how. Download the complete issue right now, order a print copy, or find it on your favorite newsstand through mid-April.

Jessica Strawser
Editor, Writer’s Digest Magazine
Follow me on Twitter @jessicastrawser

BY ELLEN MEISTER

When my adult writing students confess their struggles with self-doubt, they usually look panicked. I can’t possibly be a real writer, their eyes seem to say. I’m just never sure what I’m doing is right.

That’s when I explain that self-doubt is the fuel that drives us forward. Show me a writer with unshakable confidence, I tell them, and I’ll show you a lousy writer.

No one proves this more than Dorothy Parker. Though arguably the greatest literary wit of the twentieth century, she battled those demons of doubt every day.

In 1956, when interviewed by Paris Review and asked about the period in which she wrote poems, Parker replied, “My verses. I cannot say poems. Like everybody was then, I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers. My verses are no damn good. Let’s face it, honey, my verse is terribly dated—as anything once fashionable is dreadful now. I gave it up, knowing it wasn’t getting any better, but nobody seemed to notice my magnificent gesture.”

No damn good? I beg to differ. Dorothy Parker’s poetry still resonates with freshness and wit. Even her darkest verses, such as Resumé, have legions of modern fans.

But her self-deprecation didn’t stop there. In a 1945 telegram to her publisher at Viking she wrote: ALL I HAVE IS A PILE OF PAPER COVERED WITH WRONG WORDS. CAN ONLY KEEP AT IT AND HOPE TO HEAVEN TO GET IT DONE. DONT KNOW WHY IT IS SO TERRIBLY DIFFICULT OR I SO TERRIBLY INCOMPETENT.

The telegram referred to an introduction she had agreed to write for a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work. And it followed on the heels of an even more painful period of inertia, as she had been unable to fulfill her contract to write a novel. This was a lifelong thorn in her heart. Parker wanted desperately to write a novel, but couldn’t seem to get out of her own way. Her perfectionism may have been the culprit, as she was a relentless self-editor. In that same Paris Review interview she explained that it took her six months to write a short story, saying, “I can’t write five words but that I change seven.”

Clearly, she found the process more filled with despair than joy. It’s no wonder then, that she offered up the following advice: “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

If that gives you pause, consider an even more famous quote from Parker: “I hate writing, I love having written.” Even if your feelings aren’t quite that extreme, the message is clear—the doubt isn’t going anywhere, so you may as well put away the panic and get to work.

Ellen Meister is a novelist, essayist, public speaker and creative writing instructor at Hofstra University (Hempstead, NY). She runs a popular Dorothy Parker page on Facebook that has almost150,000 followers.

Her fifth novel, Dorothy Parker Drank Here, is in stores now. To connect with Ellen, visit ellenmeister.com, and for daily quotes from Dorothy Parker, follow her Facebook page.

The following is a guest post from one of WD’s bloggers from our NaNoWriMo project, EJ Runyon. In this post, EJ describes the importance of moving past using writing exercises and learning how to turn the exercises into usable content for your work-in-progress. Using an exercise should only be the first of several steps in beginning your writing process, particularly as a beginner.

*     *     *     *     *

Novice writers spend a lot of time reading blogs and other websites that offer exercises, story starters and prompts to try out writing skills.

Write a list your antagonist will use shopping.
What would an apple say if it could plead for its life?

And we all dig in and write out small drabbles. It’s a start. Especially for new writers wanting to flex writing muscles.

But if you exercise, then nothing more, will you ever discover where those exercises might take you?

Let’s take the steps of expanding those exercises by questioning them. The goal is reviewing with an eye for “exercises into scenes”:  looking at your work and taking the next step; reworking exercises into actual storytelling.

Let’s say you were given a word or two for starting the beginning of a sentence,

“First thing in the morning…”

Your task is to write anything for 5 minutes. So you look at your paper, or the keyboard and you begin writing:

First thing in the morning all I have to do is get up and write my page. I tell myself this every morning yet I can’t seem to follow through. I reassure myself I will tomorrow. Am I lacking the will or am I unable to do it at all? Instead of doing what I need to do, want to do, I end up wandering into the kitchen, getting coffee; then I’m off through my day.

Cool.

After a while you have disk files or notebooks full of these exercises. But you don’t have many finished stories or novels written. How much time do you think the average beginner spends working with writing exercises? How much time creating short stories or novels?  Where is the disconnect? What does it take to move to the next step? To begin looking at your own work? It takes questioning. Not much else.

Ask yourself questions like these:

• Does the exercise paragraph mean anything?
• Can you use this for a character study?
• Can you use this as a piece of dialogue? 
• Can it be expanded into a scene or a hunk of narrative? 

Your answer might be, “I’d say, the way it reads now, a lot more work’s needed.”

Unhappily, if you work the way some novices do, the way I started out working, you’re constantly exercising, but anxious about the rest. You’re glad for the immediate gratification, and attention, in feedback of the polite, “That’s good work.” But you’re afraid to try writing something really whole that begins, has a middle, and ends.

You’re afraid of something that requires a quantity of re-writing, editing and revising. That is, you, functioning as a writer by looking, questioning and working with those drabbles.

Let’s take a look at that sample paragraph. And ask it some questions.

After you’ve exercised, start by asking the questions above. Take notes. Call these notes of yours pre-work, if you want. You can then turn questioned exercises into a new start of a scene or story.

*     *     *     *     *

Looking for some exercises to practice EJ’s techniques?
Try James Scott Bell’s The Art of War for Writers, which
features strategies, tactics and exercises for fiction writers!

*     *     *     *     *

Not every exercise will blossom into a viable story, but then, if you’re given an exercise you can always make sure it will: Focusing on what you want the exercise to become.  Make the exercise work for your writing, not the other way around.

Let’s use the sample paragraph to work though what we have on our page. After the sample you can move on to your own exercises. Getting them to work for you. Here’s what to ask:

Does the paragraph mean anything?
No, not much now, at least not the way I left it. Nothing I can see.

Can you use this for a character study?
I can probably write a girl who is bored with her job, but can’t let herself take up writing for a living.  Or a guy who got a new journal from his girlfriend for his birthday—maybe she’s a real artsy type—he’s trying to score some points with her.

Can you mold it into a piece of dialogue?
It might work for internal dialogue, how she talks, putting herself down. To her mom? Or hey—about what she says to a shrink, or a best friend? Yeah.

Can it be expanded into a scene or a hunk of narrative?
The wandering into the kitchen, getting coffee is a good part. Maybe more with descriptions? How the kitchen looks, things like that. 

Maybe the guy can be talking to his girl over coffee on the weekend, when they’re together and she gets on his case ‘cause the journal she gave him is still empty.

Do you see where looking at your work can take you? Exercising is only the first step.

Posing these types of questions and answering them is step two.

And acting on those answers is step three—that’s the getting down to writing that counts the most.

About EJ Runyon: I’m a lucky soul. I’m living my dream. I began my transformation in 1992. Started writing NaNoWriMo in 2001, and in 2006 I sold my house to go back to school, for degrees in English/Creative Writing and Online Teaching & Learning.

Now it’s writing and coaching daily. It’s my new life and I love it.

NaNoWriMo sent me on the path to reach writer’s nirvana. In 2012, six short stories pulled from various NaNo novels became part of “Claiming One,” a story collection from Inspired Quill (UK). Then, in 2013, my 2008 NaNo became Tell Me (How to Write) A Story, a writer’s guide. This year, 2003 NaNo’s became my debut Literary/LGBTQ novel, A House of Light & Stone.

I’m a Scrivener pantser all the way, and even created a jumpstart template for coaching clients. It’s been everything wonderful I’d possibly dream. 2016 & 2017 will see another how-to and a second novel. I alternate literary fiction with how-to guides.

How can you tell if a piece of writing is strong? Whether you’re editing for a publishing company, working as a freelancer, or self-editing, correctly assessing the quality of the work is imperative. In this excerpt from The Editor’s Companion, Steve Dunham discusses four marks of good writing and how you can recognize them in every piece you review.

1. Good Content

Communication, even in writing, requires two people. Every time a writer begins putting words together for publication, one fact should always be foremost: The writing is (at least partly) for the benefit of someone else. Even if a writer begins without a specific audience clearly in mind, the goal of communication remains. The writing must achieve a link between author and reader.

The editor, too, must always remember the reader. Both writer and reader may benefit from written communication, but editing is done primarily to benefit the reader, to smooth the process of communication.

The content of any piece of writing ultimately must be of personal interest to the reader. From news headlines to novels, from apartment leases to the Bible, every piece of writing attracts readers by providing something that concerns individual people.

An editor faces the task of taking a piece of writing and heightening its relevance to those individuals who constitute the publisher’s readers or market.

2. Focus

Each sentence, says editor Margaret Palm, should convey one idea. So should each paragraph and each chapter, with the ideas becoming more general as the writer progresses up the scale. This sort of cohesion does not limit the number of ideas a writer is able to communicate; rather, it organizes them. Focusing on one idea at a time makes for clear, direct communication. It does not leave the reader guessing where the writing is headed. It does not distract the reader with digression. Instead it takes a general idea as the subject of a chapter, develops an aspect of that idea in each paragraph, and provides details in every sentence. Focused writing, like a focused photograph, presents information clearly.

The classic style of newswriting, with the “most important” facts at the top, followed by less and less important facts in descending order is called the inverted pyramid. Inverted pyramid leads begin with who, what, when, where, why, and how, all in a few sentences.

Those five Ws of journalism also provide a guide for both writers and editors of nonfiction. In a news story, the writer must tell the reader who, what, when, where, and why—preferably in the first paragraph. Although not all nonfiction needs to be as compact as news writing, the editor must be sure that the basic facts are communicated.

Even in fiction, the five Ws need to be addressed somewhere in the story, although depending on the genre—mystery, for example—key parts of the story may be withheld until the end.

3. Precise Language¹

The writer’s biggest job is that of combining words—and often numbers and graphics—to share ideas. Organizing the material and choosing precisely the right words require more effort than just writing down what is in the writer’s head. The knowledgeable writer possesses information or ideas that the reader does not. To make that information accessible, the writer must use words that the reader understands (or explain any that the reader does not). The writer must choose which information to include and must decide what is superfluous or would burden the reader. Appendices, footnotes, and bibliographies are all communication tools. So are abbreviations. They help the reader understand what the writer has to say.

The editor’s job is to help the writer communicate with the reader, and just about all of us—including editors—need some help with our writing. Sometimes we have a little trouble saying what we mean. Editors do make sure the commas are in the right place. (It does make a difference: My favorite comma error was in an ad in the church bulletin for a supper hosted by the youth group; it read, “Don’t cook Mom!”) Editors also do a lot more, ensuring good content, focus, precise language, and good grammar.

Editors are on guard for much more than missing commas, however. Writers might, for example, get a little repetitive: “The analysis phase of the project consisted of analysis,” stated one report I read. A job ad required “program related experience in related areas”—one of those “necessary conditions that must be met.”

“Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a word!” as Lewis Carroll wrote in Through the Looking-Glass.

The reader’s time is worth something, too. Let’s not waste it by stating the obvious. If our work is read voluntarily, we will lose readers if we waste their time. Often, though, we may be editing a piece of writing that people are obligated to read, and we owe it to them to communicate simply and clearly.

In The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells, the Monkey-man— a monkey that Doctor Moreau had been trying to turn into a human—“was for ever jabbering … the most arrant nonsense” and “had a fantastic trick of coining new words. He had an idea … that to gabble about names that meant nothing was the proper use of speech. He called it ‘Big Thinks’ … He thought nothing of what was plain and comprehensible.”

Writers can commit Big Thinks by using imprecise language or misusing words entirely. Some writers may impress themselves by using big words they don’t understand. Utilize may sound more impressive than use (but has a specific meaning of its own: to find a use for). Comprise is not the same as compose (it means “be made up of,” as in “New York City comprises five boroughs”); a nation-state isn’t merely a sovereign country (it’s the country of a single nationality); coalesce isn’t transitive (things coalesce, people don’t coalesce things). Emulate means “do at least as well as,” but imitate, the word that is more likely appropriate, doesn’t sound nearly as impressive. Respective is often used where it is not needed, as in “The adjutant generals report to their respective governors”—well, of course they report to their own governors. Writing to impress oneself or others is what editor Dave Fessenden called “the curse of Babel.” He pointed out that people built the Tower of Babel to make a name for themselves and ended up with their language confounded—a result still obtained by vain and pompous writers, he said.

Editors must be alert to misused words. Words Into Type has an excellent twenty-three-page list of “Words Likely to Be Misused or Confused”; The Elements of Style has a similar list, and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary has usage notes for many entries.

In his book Doublespeak,² William Lutz described another way of misusing big words: “gobbledygook or bureaucratese … a matter of piling on words, of overwhelming the audience” or “inflated language that is designed to make the ordinary seem extraordinary.” That language is meant to impress, and specifically to deceive, the reader.

Aside from writers who deceive themselves, readers are usually the victims of misused words. As William Safire wrote in his book In Love with Norma Loquendi,³ “Meanings can be assigned to words to suit the speaker, corrupting communication and derailing intelligent discourse.”

For example, one job description stated, “Demonstrates technical achievement at the highest Government and corporate levels.” In plain English, what does that mean? It sounds as if the job applicant must have been president, chief justice, or speaker of the house. Such overblown prose corrupts communication and derails intelligent discourse, to borrow Safire’s wording.

When writing and editing, let our first concern be the reader. Let’s not try to impress anyone, least of all ourselves. Instead of engaging in Big Thinks, let’s pursue the goal of “plain and comprehensible” communication.

4. Good Grammar⁴

“I don’t care about grammar,” a writer told me when he brought his article in for editing.

In fact it seemed that the writer, like many others, didn’t care about a lot of things.

“This merger does not seems to posse any intimate security risks to the United States” was one statement in the article. I called out the posse of language deputies; we changed posse to pose and fixed dozens more errors, grammar and otherwise. We had to query the author to find out what intimate was supposed to be (he’d meant to use immediate).

Unfortunately this writer was not alone. Not in making mistakes—we all make those—but in not caring. George Orwell cited two common faults in English writing: “staleness of imagery” and “lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.”⁵

If a writer doesn’t care about grammar, the writer at least should care about the reader. If you have something worth saying, then care about communicating it.

The editor, who is assisting communication between writer and reader, must scrutinize every piece of writing that is intended for publication and, to the greatest extent possible, make the text conform to the marks of good writing.

Author Stephen Coonts, in a July 2001 interview with Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute,⁶ discussed the editing of his books (the Naval Institute Press published his first novel, Flight of the Intruder).

Proceedings: How were you treated, editorially, at the Naval Institute Press, compared to your subsequent publishers?

Coonts: The Naval Institute is unique, because it probably publishes more first-time writers—not so much first-time novelists, but first-time writers—than any other publishing house I know. So for me it was a great place to learn how to write by working with the editors and to learn how to get a manuscript up to what is called “commercial quality.”

Subsequently, I went to Doubleday, where they have a line editor who looks at the manuscript and puts in some commas and takes some out. How you wrote it is the way it’s going to be in the book. It’s tough for most beginning writers to get their prose ready to be published. It was a really great educational experience at the Naval Institute. I worked with a great editor, and I learned a lot.

Proceedings: So you’d say you were edited more at the Naval Institute Press?

Coonts: Yes. They edited the living hell out of the book. I think they overedited some of the passages. In some cases they improved it; in some cases they made it worse. Looking back, I don’t think they had much faith that I knew what the story I was telling was all about. On the other hand, the folks I worked with knew their English, and what a sentence was, and how the prose had to come together. On balance, it was a great learning experience for me.

As Coonts pointed out, editors make mistakes, too. Sometimes we attempt to improve clarity and end up muddying the water instead. Worse, we sometimes accidentally change the correct meaning to something incorrect. “One of my greatest dreads as a copy editor is that I will change something to make it wrong,” wrote copy editor Laura Moyer in her Red Pen blog.⁷ “Changing things on the proof is risky, as it raises the possibility of introducing an error while attempting to correct an existing one,” she wrote in another blog entry.⁸ Editing for focus, precision, and grammar are essential and less hazardous than editing for content, which requires some knowledge of the subject matter.

Furthermore, overconfidence can lead to wrongly second-guessing an author’s meaning. An editing error in Under Two Flags: The American Navy in the Civil War by William M. Fowler, Jr.,⁹ led to a cure that was worse than whatever the supposed illness was: “Galena was far smaller than New Ironsides, 738 tons versus 3,486; her topsail schooner rig and exaggerated tumble made her home immediately recognizable.” When I read that, I suspected that it should have read, “… her exaggerated tumblehome made her immediately recognizable”—tumblehome being the inward curving of a ship’s sides as they rise (some ships, anyway). Galena indeed was immediately recognizable because of her exaggerated tumblehome (see the photo). Evidently the nautical term tumblehome was unknown to the editor, who rearranged the sentence into immediately recognizable words (the author confirmed that this was an editing error but added, “Alas, I read proofs”).

An extreme example of second-guessing the meaning was a reference to a story in the Atlanta Constitution headlined “Mock Bioterror Attack Spooks Some in Denver.” Someone citing it decided it was a mistake and, in a footnote, changed it to read, “Mock Bioterror Attack Some Spooks in Denver.”

Both the word tumblehome and the Atlanta Constitution headline were verifiable with a little research. Second-guessing the meaning (rather than looking it up to verify it) is one hazard for editors.

Arthur Plotnik, author of The Elements of Editing, noted another: Editors “must stop short of a self-styled purism and allow for some variety of expression.”¹⁰ All editing requires care to ensure that the writing communicates better than it did in its original form.

Plotnik posed ten questions for editors to critically examine their own work:¹¹ Has the editor

1. “weighed every phrase and sentence … to determine whether the author’s meaning” was preserved?
2. “measured every revision … against the advantages of the author’s original”?
3. “pondered the effectiveness of every phrase”?
4. “studied every possible area of numerical, factual, or judgmental error”?
5. searched “for typos and transpositions, especially in” parts that were “retyped or reorganized,” and “edited and proofread” the portions altered by the editor?
6. “groveled in the details of the footnotes, tables, and appendices”?
7. “cast a legal eye upon every quoted phrase, defamatory comment, trade name, allegation, and attribution”?
8. “stepped back to consider the impact of the whole as well as the parts”?
9. “provided all the editorial embellishments to the text—title, subtitle, subhead, author notes, sidebars …”?
10. “cleared every significant revision and addition with the author?”—if that “is the policy of the publication.”

As Plotnik’s list indicates, editors must be certain that they are actually improving the author’s writing. Overconfidence comes all too easily, and we need to handle the author’s creation with care.

This article was excerpted from The Editor’s Companion by Steve Dunham. Filled with advice and techniques for honing your editing skills, this book provides the tools you need to pursue high quality in editing, writing and publishing—every piece, every time.

Footnotes

1. Portions of this section appeared in Precision for Writers and Editors, September 1999; “Writing for Everybody,” Precision for Writers and Editors, spring 2001; “Better Writing: Stating the Obvious,” Transmissions, June–July 2001; and “Big Thinks” and “Word Abuse,” Precision for Writers and Editors, Autumn 2001; all copyright Analytic Services Inc. and are used with permission.
2. William Lutz, Doublespeak (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
3. William Safire, In Love with Norma Loquendi (New York: Random House, 1994).
4. Portions of this section appeared in Precision for Writers and Editors, September 1999, copyright Analytic Services Inc., and are used with permission.
5. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language.”
6. Fred L. Schultz, “Interview: Stephen Coonts,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, vol. 127, no. 7, July 2001, p. 68.
7. Laura Moyer, “Rock. Copy Editor. Hard Place,” Red Pen blog, Fredericksburg, Va., Free Lance–Star, June 7, 2011.
8. Laura Moyer, “Lie/Lay. I Had to Tackle This Sometime,” Red Pen blog, Fredericksburg, Va., Free Lance–Star, Aug. 2, 2011.
9. William M. Fowler, Jr., Under Two Flags: The American Navy in the Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).
10. Arthur Plotnik, The Elements of Editing, p. 3.
11. Arthur Plotnik, The Elements of Editing, pp. 35–36.

This is a recurring column called “7 Things I’ve Learned So Far,” where writers at any stage of their careers can talk about writing advice and instruction — by sharing seven things they’ve learned along their writing journeys that they wish they knew at the beginning. This is installment is from Eric Smith, author of The Geek’s Guide to Dating and the young adult novel, Inked.

1. Editing? Cut the Parts You Find Yourself Skipping. When I’m finished writing something, and it doesn’t matter what it is, a chapter in a book, a new essay, a blog post, whatever… I like reading and re-reading it, often times, reading out loud. And almost always the same thing happens. I find myself skipping over parts because I’m a.) way too excited to get to the next paragraph or b.) find that I’m tired of that particular section.

Usually, that means it’s time to make some cuts.

If you can’t even get excited about a bit of writing you’re working on, if you’re tired of that passage already… there’s a solid chance your reader will be too. You should be excited about everything you’re hammering down on the page. Leave no room for skipping. Unless, of course, it’s a victory skip in your backyard. Then, by all means, go forth and frolic. You earned it.

2. It’s Okay to Take a Break. When I wrapped up the rough manuscript of Inked, I immediately dove into working on a sequel idea while researching agents. Immediately. I got lucky, signed with a fantastic agent (hi Dawn!), and shortly after, the opportunity to work on The Geek’s Guide to Dating came up at my publisher. I worked on that book, and when that was done, went back to the sequel concept, worked on some essays, and started adfjdfgdfgsdfkl CRASH.
Burned. The. Hell. Out.

With one manuscript being shopped around and another on its way to publication, I took a breath. I went on a vacation. Not any place special. A little place called Tamriel. Lush wilderness, rushing streams, and tons of dragons. Oh, Tamriel is a place in a video game called Skyrim. I was on my couch. It was great.

Listen: It’s okay to take a break. Whether you’ve got something on submission, a book on its way to publication, or you’re just working on a bunch of fun ideas and drafts. Don’t burn yourself out. You’re no good for anyone like that. Plus, you need your energy for all that dragon slaying, Dovohkiin.

3. Save Your Darlings. I say this a lot, but when you’re busy editing and cutting, whether you’re making cuts on your own, with your peers, with your editor… save those darlings. Avoid that “kill your darlings” cliché, and open up a Word .doc, and stash those little gems off to the side.
Look, you might never use them. They might be the bits you cut out because they were boring you (remember #1?). Those couple of pages you sliced out of that manuscript, you probably cut them out for a good reason. Your agent, your editor, your writer friends… they’re a smart bunch, otherwise you wouldn’t be working with them, right? But down the line, when you’re working on a new story or idea, click on over. See what’s in the scraps. You might find something that sparks an idea, which you might have otherwise deleted.

And if not, whatever. How much space does a Word document take up? Like, a gig? Maybe? Who cares how many gigs? You have lots of gigs.

4. If You Must Read the Reviews, Learn From Them. I have a sign on my desk at work and at home that says “Don’t Read the Comments” in big bold letters. I bought it on Etsy in a fancy frame, because in my mind, an artisanal frame made out of reclaimed wood would make it work.

I never listen to it. No one does.

Look, if you’re going to read the reviews (you’re gonna), don’t lash out, don’t get upset, don’t get angry. Instead, see what you can learn from them. I love book bloggers. Love them. I follow tons of them on Twitter, read a lot of their blogs, and go out of my way to say hi to my favorites at conventions at BEA.

Because they are book lovers. They are my people.

And yes, when they write about my books, I read their reviews, the good and the bad. Why? Because these are the smartest consumers of books out there, and you can actually read what they think about your book! Your book! And if they care enough about your book to talk about it, that’s freaking awesome.

Reading reviews isn’t for everyone. Even I’m aware that I shouldn’t do it. I KNOW I shouldn’t do it. But I do. And when I do, I see what there is to learn. And I’m grateful that someone took the time to actually read my wild button mashing in the first place.

5. Find Your Soundtrack. I have a lot of friends who go running and hit the gym, and when they are busy doing this thing called exercising, they often rock out to music that gets them in the mood. Pumps them up. Gets them excited for the work they are about to do. Because hey, working out? That’s work. And so is writing. It’s just a different kind of work, with an equal amount of tears.

Writing at home? Find your soundtrack. For me, it depends on the kind of work I’m doing. Fussing over a Young Adult novel idea? I turn on the music of my youth, lots of pop-punk, power chords, and acoustic guitars, music by New Found Glory, Fall Out Boy, Punchline, Something Corporate, Saves the Day. An essay? Something that’ll calm me down. The Fray, Dashboard Confessional, Sherwood, Gin Blossoms.

Please note, I listen to my pop punk and emo on a regular basis too. Sing it, Motion City Soundtrack!

6. Find Your Peers Online As Well As Off. Thanks to the magic of Twitter, I’ve met more authors I admire and adore than… well I’m not quite sure how to finish that sentence. I’ve met so many. And the great thing about the online literary community (or “bookernet”), is that everyone supports one another. Be genuine, be kind, be excited. Find the authors who write books you deeply care for, find the writers you yourself admire. Connect with them on Twitter. Celebrate their success. You’ll learn so much from them. I absolutely have, and wish I’d been more active in seeking out writerly peers earlier on.

7. Surround Yourself With Supportive Friends. Team! Team, team, team, team, team. I even love saying the word, “team.” Having an awesome team backing you up is so very important, and I’m not just talking about professionally. Close friends that can network you, will blast your message out there… those friends are awesome, don’t get me wrong. But friends that will give that crappy rough manuscript a looks over, who will join you for coffee and listen to you ramble about an idea you haven’t quite thought out yet, friends that will look over your under-construction author website full of Geocities era animated .gifs… those are the supportive friends you need around you at all times.

Real friends. The friends that will give you a kick in the pants when you’re down and troll you a little bit when you’re doing too well. Who will keep you level. Surround yourself with those kind of friends, and it’ll certainly help your writing career.

Good luck!

Eric Smith is the author of The Geek’s Guide to Dating (December 2013), which was an Amazon Best Book of the Year in Humor and has sold into five languages. His debut young adult novel, Inked, comes out January 2015 with Bloomsbury’s digital imprint, Bloomsbury Spark. He is represented by Dawn Frederick of Red Sofa Literary. He can be found blogging for BookRiot and The Huffington Post, and when he isn’t busy writing, he can be found tweeting and marketing at Quirk Books. Visit Eric’s website to learn more, and follow him on Twitter (@ericsmithrocks).

The following is an excerpt from Word Painting Revised Edition by Rebecca McClanahan, available now!

The characters in our stories, songs, poems, and essays embody our writing. They are our words made flesh. Sometimes they even speak for us, carrying much of the burden of plot, theme, mood, idea, and emotion. But they do not exist until we describe them on the page. Until we anchor them with words, they drift, bodiless and ethereal. They weigh nothing; they have no voice. Once we’ve written the first words—“Belinda Beatrice,” perhaps, or “the dark-eyed salesman in the back of the room,” or simply “the girl”—our characters begin to take form. Soon they’ll be more than mere names. They’ll put on jeans or rubber hip boots, light thin cigarettes or thick cigars; they’ll stutter or shout, buy a townhouse on the Upper East Side or a studio in the Village; they’ll marry for life or survive a series of happy affairs; they’ll beat their children or embrace them. What they become, on the page, is up to us.

Here are 11 secrets to keep in mind as you breathe life into your characters through description.

1. Description that relies solely on physical attributes too often turns into what Janet Burroway calls the “all-points bulletin.”

It reads something like this: “My father is a tall, middle-aged man of average build. He has green eyes and brown hair and usually wears khakis and oxford shirts.”

This description is so mundane, it barely qualifies as an “all-points bulletin.” Can you imagine the police searching for this suspect? No identifying marks, no scars or tattoos, nothing to distinguish him. He appears as a cardboard cutout rather than as a living, breathing character. Yes, the details are accurate, but they don’t call forth vivid images. We can barely make out this character’s form; how can we be expected to remember him?

When we describe a character, factual information alone is not sufficient, no matter how accurate it might be. The details must appeal to our senses. Phrases that merely label (like tall, middle-aged, and average) bring no clear image to our minds. Since most people form their first impression of someone through visual clues, it makes sense to describe our characters using visual images. Green eyes is a beginning, but it doesn’t go far enough. Are they pale green or dark green? Even a simple adjective can strengthen a detail. If the adjective also suggests a metaphor—forest green, pea green, or emerald green—the reader not only begins to make associations (positive or negative) but also visualizes in her mind’s eye the vehicle of the metaphor—forest trees, peas, or glittering gems.

2. The problem with intensifying an image only by adjectives is that adjectives encourage cliché.

It’s hard to think of adjective descriptors that haven’t been overused: bulging or ropy muscles, clean-cut good looks, frizzy hair. If you use an adjective to describe a physical attribute, make sure that the phrase is not only accurate and sensory but also fresh. In her short story “Flowering Judas,” Katherine Anne Porter describes Braggioni’s singing voice as a “furry, mournful voice” that takes the high notes “in a prolonged painful squeal.” Often the easiest way to avoid an adjective-based cliché is to free the phrase entirely from its adjective modifier. For example, rather than describing her eyes merely as “hazel,” Emily Dickinson remarked that they were “the color of the sherry the guests leave in the glasses.”

3. Strengthen physical descriptions by making details more specific.

In my earlier “all-points bulletin” example, the description of the father’s hair might be improved with a detail such as “a military buzz-cut, prickly to the touch” or “the aging hippie’s last chance—a long ponytail striated with gray.” Either of these descriptions would paint a stronger picture than the bland phrase brown hair. In the same way, his oxford shirt could become “a white oxford button-down that he’d steam-pleated just minutes before” or “the same style of baby blue oxford he’d worn since prep school, rolled carelessly at the elbows.” These descriptions not only bring forth images, they also suggest the background and the personality of the father.

4. Select physical details carefully, choosing only those that create the strongest, most revealing impression.

One well-chosen physical trait, item of clothing, or idiosyncratic mannerism can reveal character more effectively than a dozen random images. This applies to characters in nonfiction as well as fiction. When I write about my grandmother, I usually focus on her strong, jutting chin—not only because it was her most dominant feature but also because it suggests her stubbornness and determination. When I write about Uncle Leland, I describe the wandering eye that gave him a perpetually distracted look, as if only his body was present. His spirit, it seemed, had already left on some journey he’d glimpsed peripherally, a place the rest of us were unable to see. As you describe real-life characters, zero in on distinguishing characteristics that reveal personality: gnarled, arthritic hands always busy at some task; a habit of covering her mouth each time a giggle rises up; a lopsided swagger as he makes his way to the horse barn; the scent of coconut suntan oil, cigarettes, and leather each time she sashays past your chair.

5. A character’s immediate surroundings can provide the backdrop for the sensory and significant details that shape the description of the character himself.

If your character doesn’t yet have a job, a hobby, a place to live, or a place to wander, you might need to supply these things. Once your character is situated comfortably, he may relax enough to reveal his secrets. On the other hand, you might purposely make your character uncomfortable—that is, put him in an environment where he definitely doesn’t fit, just to see how he’ll respond. Let’s say you’ve written several descriptions of an elderly woman working in the kitchen, yet she hasn’t begun to ripen into the three-dimensional character you know she could become. Try putting her at a gay bar on a Saturday night, or in a tattoo parlor, or (if you’re up for a little time travel) at Appomattox, serving her famous buttermilk biscuits to Grant and Lee.

6. In describing a character’s surroundings, you don’t have to limit yourself to a character’s present life.

Early environments shape fictional characters as well as flesh-and-blood people. In Flaubert’s description of Emma Bovary’s adolescent years in the convent, he foreshadows the woman she will become, a woman who moves through life in a romantic malaise, dreaming of faraway lands and loves. We learn about Madame Bovary through concrete, sensory descriptions of the place that formed her. In addition, Flaubert describes the book that held her attention during mass and the images that she particularly loved—a sick lamb, a pierced heart.

Living among those white-faced women with their rosaries and copper crosses, never getting away from the stuffy schoolroom atmosphere, she gradually succumbed to the mystic languor exhaled by the perfumes of the altar, the coolness of the holy-water fonts and the radiance of the tapers. Instead of following the Mass, she used to gaze at the azure-bordered religious drawings in her book. She loved the sick lamb, the Sacred Heart pierced with sharp arrows, and poor Jesus falling beneath His cross.

7. Characters reveal their inner lives—their preoccupations, values, lifestyles, likes and dislikes, fears and aspirations—by the objects that fill their hands, houses, offices, cars, suitcases, grocery carts, and dreams.

In the opening scenes of the film The Big Chill, we’re introduced to the main characters by watching them unpack the bags they’ve brought for a weekend trip to a mutual friend’s funeral. One character has packed enough pills to stock a drugstore; another has packed a calculator; still another, several packages of condoms. Before a word is spoken—even before we know anyone’s name—we catch glimpses of the characters’ lives through the objects that define them.

What items would your character pack for a weekend away? What would she use for luggage? A leather valise with a gold monogram on the handle? An old accordion case with decals from every theme park she’s visited? A duffel bag? Make a list of everything your character would pack: a “Save the Whales” T-shirt; a white cotton nursing bra, size 36D; a breast pump; a Mickey Mouse alarm clock; a photograph of her husband rocking a child to sleep; a can of Mace; three Hershey bars.

8. Description doesn’t have to be direct to be effective.

Techniques abound for describing a character indirectly, for instance, through the objects that fill her world. Create a grocery list for your character—or two or three, depending on who’s coming for dinner. Show us the character’s credit card bill or the itemized deductions on her income tax forms. Let your character host a garage sale and watch her squirm while neighbors and strangers rifle through her stuff. Which items is she practically giving away? What has she overpriced, secretly hoping no one will buy it? Write your character’s Last Will and Testament. Which niece gets the Steinway? Who gets the lake cottage—the stepson or the daughter? If your main characters are divorcing, how will they divide their assets? Which one will fight hardest to keep the dog?

9. To make characters believable to readers, set them in motion.

The earlier “all-points bulletin” description of the father failed not only because the details were mundane and the prose stilted; it also suffered from lack of movement. To enlarge the description, imagine that same father in a particular setting—not just in the house but also sitting in the brown recliner. Then, because setting implies time as well as place, choose a particular time in which to place him. The time may be bound by the clock (six o’clock, sunrise, early afternoon) or bound only by the father’s personal history (after the divorce, the day he lost his job, two weeks before his sixtieth birthday).

Then set the father in motion. Again, be as specific as possible. “Reading the newspaper” is a start, but it does little more than label a generic activity. In order for readers to enter the fictional dream, the activity must be shown. Often this means breaking a large, generic activity into smaller, more particular parts: “scowling at the Dow Jones averages,” perhaps, or “skimming the used-car ads” or “wiping his ink-stained fingers on the monogrammed handkerchief.” Besides providing visual images for the reader, specific and representative actions also suggest the personality of the character, his habits and desires, and even the emotional life hidden beneath the physical details.

10. Verbs are the foot soldiers of action-based description.

However, we don’t need to confine our use of verbs to the actions a character performs. Well-placed verbs can sharpen almost any physical description of a character. In the following passage from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping, verbs enliven the description even when the grandmother isn’t in motion.

… in the last years she continued to settle and began to shrink. Her mouth bowed forward and her brow sloped back, and her skull shone pink and speckled within a mere haze of hair, which hovered about her head like the remembered shape of an altered thing. She looked as if the nimbus of humanity were fading away and she were turning monkey. Tendrils grew from her eyebrows and coarse white hairs sprouted on her lip and chin. When she put on an old dress the bosom hung empty and the hem swept the floor. Old hats fell down over her eyes. Sometimes she put her hand over her mouth and laughed, her eyes closed and her shoulder shaking.

Notice the strong verbs Robinson uses throughout the description. The mouth “bowed” forward; the brow “sloped” back; the hair “hovered,” then “sprouted”; the hem “swept” the floor; hats “fell” down over her eyes. Even when the grandmother’s body is at rest, the description pulses with activity. And when the grandmother finally does move—putting a hand over her mouth, closing her eyes, laughing until her shoulders shake—we visualize her in our mind’s eye because the actions are concrete and specific. They are what the playwright David Mamet calls “actable actions.” Opening a window is an actable action, as is slamming a door. “Coming to terms with himself” or “understanding that he’s been wrong all along” are not actable actions. This distinction between nonactable and actable actions echoes our earlier distinction between showing and telling. For the most part, a character’s movements must be rendered concretely—that is, shown—before the reader can participate in the fictional dream.

Actable actions are important elements in many fiction and nonfiction scenes that include dialogue. In some cases, actions, along with environmental clues, are even more important to character development than the words the characters speak. Writers of effective dialogue include pauses, voice inflections, repetitions, gestures, and other details to suggest the psychological and emotional subtext of a scene. Journalists and other nonfiction writers do the same. Let’s say you’ve just interviewed your cousin about his military service during the Vietnam War. You have a transcript of the interview, based on audio or video recordings, but you also took notes about what else was going on in that room. As you write, include nonverbal clues as well as your cousin’s actual words. When you asked him about his tour of duty, did he look out the window, light another cigarette, and change the subject? Was it a stormy afternoon? What song was playing on the radio? If his ancient dog was asleep on your cousin’s lap, did he stroke the dog as he spoke? When the phone rang, did your cousin ignore it or jump up to answer it, looking relieved for the interruption? Including details such as these will deepen your character description.

11. We don’t always have to use concrete, sensory details to describe our characters, and we aren’t limited to describing actable actions.

The novels of Milan Kundera use little outward description of characters or their actions. Kundera is more concerned with a character’s interior landscape, with what he calls a character’s “existential problem,” than with sensory description of person or action. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tomas’s body is not described at all, since the idea of body does not constitute Tomas’s internal dilemma. Teresa’s body is described in physical, concrete terms (though not with the degree of detail most novelists would employ) only because her body represents one of her existential preoccupations. For Kundera, a novel is more a meditation on ideas and the private world of the mind than a realistic depiction of characters. Reading Kundera, I always feel that I’m living inside the characters rather than watching them move, bodily, through the world.

With writers like Kundera, we learn about characters through the themes and obsessions of their inner lives, their “existential problems” as depicted primarily through dreams, visions, memories, and thoughts. Other writers probe characters’ inner lives through what characters see through their eyes. A writer who describes what a character sees also reveals, in part, a character’s inner drama. In The Madness of a Seduced Woman, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer describes a farm through the eyes of the novel’s main character, Agnes, who has just fallen in love and is anticipating her first sexual encounter, which she simultaneously longs for and fears.

… and I saw how the smooth, white curve of the snow as it lay on the ground was like the curve of a woman’s body, and I saw how the farm was like the body of a woman which lay down under the sun and under the freezing snow and perpetually and relentlessly produced uncountable swarms of living things, all born with mouths open and cries rising from them into the air, long-boned muzzles opening … as if they would swallow the world whole …

Later in the book, when Agnes’s sexual relationship has led to pregnancy, then to a life-threatening abortion, she describes the farm in quite different terms.

It was August, high summer, but there was something definite and curiously insubstantial in the air. … In the fields near me, the cattle were untroubled, their jaws grinding the last of the grass, their large, fat tongues drinking the clear brook water. But there was something in the air, a sad note the weather played upon the instrument of the bone-stretched skin. … In October, the leaves would be off the trees; the fallen leaves would be beaten flat by heavy rains and the first fall of snow. The bony ledges of the earth would begin to show, the earth’s skeleton shedding its unnecessary flesh.

By describing the farm through Agnes’s eyes, Schaeffer not only shows us Agnes’s inner landscape—her ongoing obsession with sex and pregnancy—but also demonstrates a turning point in Agnes’s view of sexuality. In the first passage, which depicts a farm in winter, Agnes sees images of beginnings and births. The earth is curved and full like a woman’s fleshy body. In the second scene, described as occurring in “high summer,” images of death prevail. Agnes’s mind jumps ahead to autumn, to dying leaves and heavy rains, a time when the earth, no longer curved in a womanly shape, is little more than a skeleton, having shed the flesh it no longer needs.

Now more than ever before, there are so many things we can do to promote our books, articles, stories, essays, services, and other creative works and skills—regardless of whether we’re self-published, traditionally published, or even not-yet-published. Bookstore and library events remain staples, of course, as do reviews, mentions and bylines in prominent media. But add to the mix blog tours, home pages, social networking sites, free promos, cheap promos, paid placements, Web ads, print ads, Goodreads giveaways, email lists, indie author coalitions, and the myriad services claiming to increase “discoverability,” and one thing becomes clear:

You can’t do them all.

And even if you could, who would want to? Just reading that list is enough to make even a savvy marketer’s head spin.

What you need is a strategy—one that’s developed through a solid understanding of what makes the best sense for you and your work, while allowing flexibility to bend with the changing winds.

I don’t need to tell you that self-promotion and platform building are important. In a reader survey we conducted in 2014, 61 percent of respondents listed “to learn how to promote myself and my work” as one of the primary reasons they read Writer’s Digest magazine, and 45 percent of readers requested even more coverage of the topic.

The February 2015 Writer’s Digest delivers. It’s our best and most up-to-date resource on how to promote your work—and it’s hot off the press and on newsstands now. Here’s an exclusive sneak peek at what’s inside.

Keys to a Successful Promotional Strategy

In creating this issue, first, we identified two key areas worth focusing on: your author website (essential for scribes of all stripes, from freelancer to novelist, from beginner to multi-published author) and Goodreads (a must for book authors in particular). We enlisted experts to deconstruct what you need to know to make the most of each medium. Digital media pro Jane Friedman’s “Your Author Website 101” and bestselling hybrid author Michael J. Sullivan’s “Get in Good With Goodreads” are comprehensive guides ripe for earmarking, highlighting, and referencing again and again. Whether you’re just starting to investigate how to promote a book or you are looking to create a Web presence that will be the foundation of your career, these articles are a great place to start.

Then, we put a call out to the writing community asking for “Success Stories in Self-Promotion”—and we got them, in droves. Learn through the real-life trial and error of writers whose promotional efforts ultimately yielded impressive sales, further opportunities, and, in some cases, even agents and book deals.

Best of all, as those authors share their secrets and tips, you’ll notice one key takeaway that comes up again and again:

If they can do it, so can you.

Doing What Works for You

That underscores the point that in working to improve both our craft and our career, it can help for us writers to stick together—to use one another as the valuable resources we are. The February issue also features a WD Interview with Garth Stein, best known for his runaway bestseller The Art of Racing in the Rain and his latest novel, A Sudden Light. Stein had more great insights than we had space to print, so in our online exclusive outtakes from the interview, he talks about how he came to co-found the literacy outreach group Seattle7Writers, and why every writer should have a writing friend.

The February 2015 Writer’s Digest is already getting some great buzz on Twitter, Facebook and blogs from other writers who likely share in the same platform and promotional challenges that you do. If you’re looking for fresh tips on how to promote your work—plus the usual doses of writing inspiration and craft advice we put into every issue of WD—you won’t want to miss it!

Happy Writing,
Jessica Strawser
Editor, Writer’s Digest Magazine
Follow me on Twitter @jessicastrawser.

The following is a guest post from one of WD’s bloggers from our NaNoWriMo project, EJ Runyon. In this post, EJ talks about the important steps that need to be taken between first draft and revision, and the difficulty of working with a piece or a story that you can become too close to. Sometimes it’s better to step outside of your writing and world, and spend some time with the story in your mind rather than on a Microsoft Word page.

*     *     *     *     *

The first short story I wrote, that I hoped might be published, got worked on quite a bit.

I edited it many times. Well, what I thought was editing at the time: small tweaks of lines, and wording. Shifting bits around from one section to another.

Then, it dawned on me that I’d written too much. I think I must have cut at least 500, maybe 700 words from the whole story then. Not a full scene or two, but bits out of nearly every scene. It was then that I really felt I might get to be a real author. When I re-read and found myself cutting bits for each paragraph.

That culling was followed by reading the story out loud at my Saturday workshop.

As a writing coach I sometimes wonder how many beginner writers are in workshops. It’s a totally different dynamic than posting your work to your blog and waiting for some comments to pop up about it. Especially if what you say is, “Hey, come see what I’ve posted.” But that’s not quite the same as having folks help make a piece stronger.

At those workshops, folks mostly told me, “Good writing, but that ending…”

So, back I went and thought a lot. What was wrong with it was, as one guy put it, “You’ve got the first two scenes of a three scene piece of work.” And once that was pointed out, I knew there was more to do. But what?

But I didn’t sit right down and begin at working a re-write, scribbled pencil notes in my notebook, fingers on keys. Coming up with more to tack on to the end of my piece.

All I did was think on things. I ran “What if?” scenarios in my mind. Over and over again. Mind work. Away from any writing implements. I wanted this to be me, steeped into the solution, before I tried writing it out.

So I read. It was like I was searching for an answer, and knew I didn’t have it yet, in me, or I would have seen, myself, that the piece needed that third scene.

So I went looking elsewhere, beyond my pages for the solution. And then it hit me.

I remembered a device from a short story I’d read in some English class, a way of framing the story. Reading that story I’d thought it was unique. That I’d not seen it coming at all. At the end of reading that story, I’d thought—”Wow. This guy is good.”

So I tried something like it myself. I wrote my third scene. And re-wrote the opening.

I followed that with editing it all many more times. More small tweaks of lines, and wording. Shifting bits around from one section to another.

Asking myself, “Had I’d written too much?”

And culling. Again.

That, of course, was followed by reading it at workshop the following Saturday.

The two leaders of the group were nodding, and they smiled when I got to the end. One leaned forward, one sat back. One said, “Good. Good work. It’s Raymond Carver-like.”

And I beamed.

The other added a deadpanned, “I hate Raymond Carver.” And we all laughed.

That was the first short story I ever submitted. And it got accepted for publication at the first place it was sent. Was it because I was a writer who read? Or because I was a writer who worked the story until it was worth publishing? Or because of those workshops?

Or maybe I got published on my first try because I thought about why and how to do something better with my story?

Because of all of that.

About EJ Runyon: I’m a lucky soul. I’m living my dream. I began my transformation in 1992. Started writing NaNoWriMo in 2001, and in 2006 I sold my house to go back to school, for degrees in English/Creative Writing and Online Teaching & Learning.

Now it’s writing and coaching daily. It’s my new life and I love it.

NaNoWriMo sent me on the path to reach writer’s nirvana. In 2012, six short stories pulled from various NaNo novels became part of “Claiming One,” a story collection from Inspired Quill (UK). Then, in 2013, my 2008 NaNo became Tell Me (How to Write) A Story, a writer’s guide. This year, 2003 NaNo’s became my debut Literary/LGBTQ novel, A House of Light & Stone.

I’m a Scrivener pantser all the way, and even created a jumpstart template for coaching clients. It’s been everything wonderful I’d possibly dream. 2016 & 2017 will see another how-to and a second novel. I alternate literary fiction with how-to guides.

Two Cups of Tea by peppermint quartz on DeviantArt, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, http://fav.me/d4ahdt1

Happy New Year!

Happy … and yet.

Everywhere you look, it’s all about pushing ourselves, isn’t it? First came November’s NaNoWriMo, with all the tips for writing more, more, more, writing faster, faster, faster. Then came the holidays, with 12 days left to shop/plan/wrap/bake/revise that manuscript from last month, 11, 10, 9 … And now it’s on to who can make the biggest commitment to his or her writing in the coming year.

I should start by saying that I am a huge believer in having a writing discipline. When I’m in the midst of a writing project, I feel I have to work on it most days—often at odd hours, and for longer than I’d intended (much to the frustration of the non-writers around me)—to keep the momentum going.

And yet, it’s not always human to expect ourselves to maintain that intensity and speed and productivity indefinitely. So with all that said, I’ll also say this:

If it starts to become a drag, you’re doing it wrong.

Best in Class Writing Advice

For a long time, I’ve been wanting to start a series of blog posts here celebrating the best-in-class writing advice that we at Writer’s Digest have collected over the years. I’ve had the privilege of discussing the craft of writing with so many authors who I deeply admire for our WD Interview cover stories. You’d think all those conversations might run together in my mind after a while, but in fact the opposite happens: The best advice rises to the top.

I’d like to kick off 2015—and this Best in Class writing advice series—by spotlighting wise words from two famed writers who offer unique twists on the age-old writer’s advice that we must Write Every Day. Both of these interviews were “click” moments for my own writing discipline, and they just might be for yours, too.

You Don’t Have to Write Every Day, but You Should Do This

• The first is from my October 2010 WD Interview with literary legend (perhaps best known for The Color Purple) and activist Alice Walker:

 “… Part of writing is not so much that you’re going to actually write something every day, but what you should have, or need to have, is the possibility, which means the space and the time set aside—as if you were going to have someone come to tea. If you are expecting someone to come to tea but you’re not going to be there, they may not come, and if I were them, I wouldn’t come. So, it’s about receptivity and being home when your guest is expected, or even when you hope that they will come.”

• The second is from my October 2012 WD Interview with Patricia Cornwell, a very different sort of writer, who almost single-handedly launched the forensic thriller genre with her iconic series character Dr. Kay Scarpetta:

“Treat your writing like a relationship and not a job. Because if it’s a relationship, even if you only have one hour in a day, you might just sit down and open up your last chapter because it’s like visiting your friend. What do you do when you miss somebody? You pick up the phone. You keep that connection established. If you do that with your writing, then you tend to stay in that moment, and you don’t forget what you’re doing. Usually the last thing I do before I go to bed is sit at my computer and just take a look at the last thing I was writing. It’s almost like I tuck my characters in at night. I may not do much, but I’m reminding myself: This is the world I’m living in right now, and I’ll go to sleep and I’ll see you in the morning.”

What they’re both saying, and what I myself believe to be true, is this: You don’t always have to force yourself to write every day, but you do need to make the time and space to spend with your writing as regularly as you can. If you do, it will come when it’s ready.

To my mind, that’s a lot less intimidating than writing every day. It’s a lot more zen, organic, intuitive, enjoyable—and effective, too.

How to Really Start the New Year Right

One of my favorite articles in our January 2015 Writer’s Digest—a comprehensive novel writing guide boldly proclaiming on its cover that “This Is the Year You Write That Novel!”—is an in-depth look from therapist-turned-writer Tracey Barnes Priestley on the real reasons so many writers give up on their writing resolutions, and how we can get out of our own ways and make real progress in the weeks and months ahead. That article, “Why So Many Writers Give Up Mid-Novel—and How Not to Be One of Them,” and the January issue as a whole, is a warm, encouraging companion for the writing year ahead. It’s on newsstands for only one more week, so I encourage you to get your copy while you can! Of course, it will also remain available for instant download in The Writer’s Digest Shop.

What’s your philosophy on your writing routine in this new year? What’s your own preferred approach to writing (or making room for writing) every day? Let’s continue the discussion in the comments thread below!

Wishing you and your writing a great year ahead.

Jessica Strawser
Editor, Writer’s Digest Magazine
Follow me on Twitter @jessicastrawser.

Thinking of starting a blog in 2015 to build your writer platform and gain a readership for your work? All the best journeys start with a bit of planning. Even if you’re not one for planning and would rather dive in right away, bear with me! In this exclusive excerpt from Blogging for Writers, Robin Houghton asks six crucial questions about your blogging goals, audience, and plan. Be honest with the answers as you write them down—they’ll serve as good reminders and motivators later on. When you’re finished, you’ll have the beginnings of a blogging roadmap that will assist you throughout 2015 and beyond.

1. Why do you want a blog?

What appeals to you about blogging? Is it something you can see yourself getting into, enjoying, and looking forward to doing? What do you want to get out of it? Promotion? Community? Sales?

It’s important to have goals for your blog, and those goals should be linked to your goals as a writer. All the same, the more open you are to seeing the fun in blogging, the more likely you are to stick with it and have it work for you.

2. Who do you want to read it? 

An interesting question, and linked closely to your blogging goals. It’s no good saying, “I want the whole world to read it!” Of course there are ways to go viral or hijack an audience, but the most successful bloggers are in it for the long term and are interested in becoming notable rather than notorious.

So, who is your audience? Your readers and fans (actual or potential)? Your peers? Industry influencers? Prospective publishers, agents, editors, gatekeepers? Perhaps, if you write for children, it’s the parents of your readers. Perhaps you write for two different markets with very different readers. The reason for this question is to get you thinking about what your blog will be about, what it will look like, the tone of voice you will adopt, and so on.

3. What are you prepared to put into it? 

Sorry to sound harsh, but the vast majority of blogs are abandoned within the first year. Don’t let that be yours! You can blog for free, but there will be costs associated with it—some financial, but mostly in terms of your time and effort.

Do your research—check out other writers’ blogs, especially (but not exclusively) those in your genre or niche. Look at the top industry blogs and websites—the annual Writer’s Digest 101 Best Websites for Writers is a great place to start. Not only will you draw inspiration from them, but by subscribing to other blogs you’re starting the process of connecting with the blogosphere. It’s never too soon to start commenting, sharing, and engaging with other bloggers. When your blog is up and running, it’s just as important to keep engaging with others as well as nurturing your own blog community.

4. What’s your blogging persona?

A blog is unmediated—it’s you talking directly to people—so it’s worth thinking about your “persona,” or the face you present to your blog readers and anyone else who may come across your blog. Here are some considerations:

• Professional vs. Personal: Let’s say you are approaching blogging primarily as a business tool—for example, your goals might be to network with influential industry people, demonstrate your authority/ability/talent, or promote yourself to an audience of readers or potential readers. In this situation, you are presenting yourself and your work as a brand, and your blog will reflect that, both in how it looks and in the nature of its content. But this is a blog, not your author publicity page. Take advantage of that and inject your personality into it, too.
• Transparency and Consistency: Will you talk about both your successes and your failures? Not everyone wants to lay themselves bare by mentioning rejections, spats, loss of motivation, or other negative aspects of their writing life. Others revel in it and find visitor numbers and comments increase when their blog posts are at their most raw and honest.

5. What will you name your blog? 

What will your blog be called? An obvious choice might be your name, writer name, or something that incorporates your name, such as “Seth’s Blog” or “Neil Gaiman’s Journal.”

You might prefer your blog’s name to say something about the content, or its purpose, so that it’s separate from your name. This could work well if it’s not your only blog, or if you’ve already got a website with your name associated with it and the blog is in addition to that, or if you are planning to have regular guest bloggers or contributors.

Your blog’s given name or title doesn’t necessarily have to be its domain name (the address that appears in the browser bar). You may choose to register your writer name as your domain name, then call your blog something different. As a rule, you should try to register both your writer name and your blog name (if different) as domain names, even if you’re not sure you will use them right away.

6. What blogging platform will you use? 

A blog platform refers to the software that powers a blog. You could think of it as the underlying construction, like a house—is it timber-framed or brick-built? Once the house is built, you may not be able to tell. Most blog platforms do pretty much the same job. But it’s worth understanding the key differences—the choices you make at this stage will affect what you can do with your blog further down the line, so it’s worth taking the time.

The most popular blogging platforms are WordPress and Blogger, and Blogging for Writers goes into both of these in depth. Do your research and make a decision based on your needs, comfort level, and personal preferences.

Blogging for Writers by Robin Houghton is available here.

Rachel Randall is the managing editor for Writer’s Digest Books.

Ignatius J. Reilly

We talk a lot about the importance of writing characters that readers like or can relate to—and by “we” I mean anyone who feels strongly about books, regardless of profession. It’s nice to know when the good guy is good and when the bad guy is bad. That’s what you expect from a story. You want a hero, right?

Nope. Not this reader.

I love unlikable characters. It’s fair to say that if there’s a no-good, dirty, rotten scoundrel in the lead, I am 100 percent on board. But it seems incongruous, doesn’t it, that a character who is wholly unappealing—repulsive, even—should be something readers might seek out. And one step further, it seems counterintuitive to recommend that you write characters that readers will rightfully dislike. And here, I think, is where unlikable and uninteresting are confused.

Be they bad apples or good eggs, a character needs to exhibit enough agency to earn a reader’s attention—regardless of whether that attention is positive or negative. And herein lies the key: You can make your protagonist as low-down and dirty or as mindful and generous as you please, but she has to be the engineer of her own conflict to earn readers’ interest. A character—good or bad—must be an active participant in her own story. And if you want a character with a built-in conflict machine, you should go low-down and dirty.

Some characters are difficult to connect to simply because they do little to engage a reader. A character who lets the world act upon her and doesn’t influence a change in her situation could be unlikable or lovable, but either way she’s uninteresting. She’s too passive to warrant concern. You can’t care about this character, and as a result you can’t care about her story. You’ll lay the book aside and tell your reader-friends that the character is unlikable. But a more accurate sentiment might be that the character isn’t interesting or compelling—all things that even a good-girl character needs to be if she wants readers to care about her enough to finish the story.

But the opposite—a character who sets himself up for conflict and consequences through the dastardliness of his doing—is surely unlikable, yes, but also magnetic. You want to watch him ruin his life. He repulses you in the same way a car accident is simultaneously disturbing and hard to look away from. This character is a train wreck, and it is glorious to behold. Every time he does something unwholesome, immoral, felonious or just, like, super-rude, he creates a conflict. The anticipation and delivery of that consequence is deeply satisfying for a reader, and by their very nature, not-nice characters create these conflicts almost constantly.  In the words of Oscar Wilde, “The suspense is terrible; I hope it will last.”

One of the most important steps to writing a book is crafting characters that pull readers into the story. From concept and naming to choosing point of view and writing convincing dialogue, it takes skill to write characters that come to life on the page. Creating Characters collects the best instruction on how to write a novel with compelling and significant characters. The featured essays and articles compiled by Writer’s Digest editors will help you make the right choices when building characters for your stories.

Think about this: You have an idea for a novel. You’ve been working on it for quite a while now, but something isn’t clicking. Your protagonist is a woman who’s down on her luck. She is now in a bind and needs some help. She’s lost everything: her boyfriend, her house, her job. Even her cat disappeared. Man, what a mess.

In Scenario A, your protagonist asks her parents for money, but they can’t give her that. So Instead, they let her stay in their home until she can get back on her feet. Maybe she doesn’t love living with her mother. Maybe she never finds a job. Maybe she’s camping out in the basement for so long that her parents leave and tell her to keep the house. Win-win, and your character is still a nice girl. That was easy, right? Yep, and honestly, pretty boring.

In Scenario B, no one can (or will) help her out. Your protagonist is living in her car and yet no one is there to lend a hand. Why not?, you’re asking. Good question. If she’s a good person and her circumstances truly are outside of her control, then surely someone can give this nice lady a hand. But lets pretend she’s not a nice lady. Maybe she kicks puppies on her lunch break. Cheats on her taxes. Kidnaps kids for ransom. Kills her boss in a fit of rage and frames her coworker (the nice guy, of course). What if we find out, for example, that her house and boyfriend and even her cat are gone because she’s a manipulative sociopath who tied the guy to the bed and then burned the place down so he couldn’t leave her? That is much more interesting than a girl who needs to sofa-surf at Mom’s until that next job interview.

The character from Scenario A may well be the sweetest, kindest woman who ever existed in print. In fact, I’d put money on it. Poor girl just had a bad week. But the protagonist from Scenario B is going to be infamous, and even if we hate her (and we will, that murderous wretch), we’ll still think about her after the book is back on the shelf. (Both Senarios were made up on the fly as I typed this; if they resemble actual works of fiction, my apologies. If not, those ideas are free to use.)

Let’s look at some fictional characters who are generally considered unlikable.

Rabbit Angstrom, the protagonist of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run and its sequels, is a (slightly) less sadistic character who manages to ruin the lives of every woman he meets. And as often as he isn’t doing the hard work of being gainfully employed or staying faithful to his wife, Rabbit is no slouch when it comes to creating an avalanche of consequences for himself. He’s an aimless, unkind, jealous cheat, and watching him scramble to avoid the falling walls of his life is as entertaining as a story gets.

Lolita‘s Humbert Humbert is a monster by every definition, a “detestable, abominable, criminal fraud” according to his wife (and Dolores’ mother), and a “vain and cruel wretch” in Nabokov’s own words. The reader understands that he’s both human and inhumane, and because he chooses to give in to his baser instincts, he earns both the consequences of such and the dislike of readers.

Frank and April Wheeler, the lead characters in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road are unbearable, conniving snobs. Their shortcomings and pettiness and self-righteousness and backstabbing create every major plot point in the story. Yates’ debut novel remains among my favorite because I’d never want to know them, but it’s not very difficult to imagine the Wheelers living next door, driving each other insane.

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl features two of the most despicable characters to ever grace the page. I stayed awake reading through the night to find out who I was supposed to be rooting for, and in the end I hated Nick and Amy Dunne equally and fully and I loved every word of it. Unlikable? Absolutely. Uninteresting? Not for a second. The novel could accurately be retitled Two Cats, One Bag.

The compelling unlikable character exists in every medium. Books, film, TV, plays, you name it. Add Joffrey Lannister (Game of Thrones), Javert (Les Miserables), Yvonne “Vee” Parker (Orange Is the New Black), Alonso Harris (Denzel Washington’s character in Training Day), Ignatius J. Reilly (A Confederacy of Dunces), the Narrator in Fight Club (or more broadly, possibly every character in every Palahniuk novel), Holden Caulfield, Jack Torrance … there’s no end to this list.

But in every case, the unlikable character who earns our attention is generating problems that require resolution—problems that carry the plot forward in a logical, organic way. The unlikable character is a one-man plot-building machine, and I wholeheartedly encourage you all to try it at least once.

Adrienne Crezo is the managing editor of Writer’s Digest magazine and a freelance writer and editor. Follow her on Twitter @a_crezo.

There’s something about the holiday season that puts people in a generous mood. From random anonymous acts of kindness to time-honored remembrances, it truly is the giving season. Heck, even the Grinch’s heart grew three sizes during the holidays. So what can writers do to pay it forward within the literary community? Here are a few ideas:

• Gift your readers. Above all these people are the people that should all be on your “nice” list! There are plenty of ways you can make your readers feel more connected to you and your books. Run contests, offer giveaways, reveal new cover art and excerpts. Show them you appreciate their loyalty during this time of year and you’ll enjoy the benefits during every season.
• Give back to fledgling authors. Share freely of the secrets of your success. Host workshops so other writers can benefit from your expertise. Perhaps you’d like to make this gift more personal; focus all your efforts on one or two struggling writers and act as a mentor. Be realistic but encouraging. Your feedback and valued opinions will be appreciated. Volunteer to assist at a writer’s conference or at your local writing group.
• Support your local libraries and bookstores. Think where we would be as a society without them! Offer to do writing workshops at your local library or contact the Friends of the Library and let them know you’re available for book and author events. Likewise for the bookstores in your locale. Show your support by frequenting events there, buying books, and mentioning signed copies of your titles are available there to readers along with a link on your website.
• Help your author brethren. Every author can use a boost by commenting on their blogs, sharing their posts, retweeting their messages, and signal boosting their new releases. Spread the word about their work to your own readers. You can even consider doing a book review as a gift!
• Use your books to support your favorite charities or the community. One of our publishing partners, Publerati (publerati.com), donates percentages of its proceeds to Worldreader Organization. One of our authors, Aaron Zerah, (www.atozspirit.com) has provided free books to Worldreader and also offers free children’s books on his website.
• Last but not least: Give away your book in the local community. Here’s just a quick list where you can donate your book:  Women’s shelters, VA hospitals, homeless shelters, children’s hospitals, retirement homes, prisons, church libraries, rehab centers, doctor’s offices, community centers and senior centers.

In the spirit of giving, Blue Ash Publishing is offering a free guide for authors who need a boost in promoting their books. Spreading The Word, written by Sage Cohen, offers effective and sustainable promotion ideas including:

• Establishing and nurturing a vibrant social network for communicating and collaborating with people in your field
• Reaching out regularly to the audiences who will benefit from what you are offering
• Creating a daily rhythm for moving toward big-picture goals

This free Blue Ash Publishing guide is available for download by clicking HERE.

  Thinking about self-publishing? Blue Ash Publishing (a division of Writer’s Digest)
can provide all the tools and know-how you need to properly write, publish and
sell your book. Whether it’s digital publishing or print, Blue Ash has you
covered—and it’s completely customizable.
Click here for more details.

Do you ever write something and immediately find yourself wanting to edit it (or worse—delete it)? Or are you struggling to really develop an idea? It’s tough not to immediately begin the rewriting process or automatically start second guessing yourself. Sometimes, as writers, we can get lost in continually improving a piece, trying to give it that little extra bit of pizzazz.

In the following excerpt of Elizabeth Sims’ “How to Develop Any Idea Into a Great Story,” originally in the November/December 2012 issue of Writer’s Digest, you’ll learn four solid techniques for heightening the tension in your story and taking it to the next step. Whether it’s increasing the drama through detailed and well-developed secondary and tertiary characters or adding extra emotion, you’re sure to find a tip that will add a new layer to your story.

Are you writing or putting the finishing touches on a short story? Consider entering it into Writer’s Digest’s Short Short Story Competition, where the winner will receive $3,000 in cash and a trip to the Writer’s Digest Conference! This year, all entrants will also receive a special pass to attend a live webinar conducted by award-winning author Jacob Appel. Hurry, though: The deadline is December 15!

Brief Encounter is a British film adapted from Nöel Coward’s play Still Life. It’s the story of two quiet people who meet and fall in love in spite of being married to others, but then, conscience-stricken, break off the relationship before it really gets going. The small, exquisite tragedy resonated with the genteel, romantic codes of conduct valued in prewar England.

But then along comes Tennessee Williams with his play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a love story that has similar themes at its core but rips us away from any semblance of civilization. Williams sure could amp drama! For one thing, he knew that a story about noble ideas wouldn’t cut it anymore. Setting his play in the emotionally brutal mélange of the postwar American South, he slashed into the secret marrow of his protagonists and antagonists alike, exposing the weaknesses and delusions that bind people together on the surface while tearing them apart below decks.

Take the essence of your story, and amp it:

• Add characters and pile on the emotion. Playwrights used to limit the number of characters in their stories, not wanting to overcrowd the stage. But when Williams crams six or eight people into the scene at once and sets them all at one another’s throats, we get a chance to feel their emotional claustrophobia and unwanted interdependence. Amp up your action by adding cunning, vindictiveness, jealousy, fear of exposure, stupidity, even death.
• Make even minor characters fierce and elemental. Consider Mae and Gooper’s five children in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, who lesser authors would describe (boringly) as “brats” and leave offstage. Before you even see them, you witness their havoc (ruining Maggie’s dress) and listen to Maggie call them “no-neck monsters.” You don’t even have to meet them to fear them. Then Williams gives them stage time, every second of which makes you squirm with discomfort.
• Expose internal bleeding. The deepest, most painful wounds are the invisible ones humans inflict on one another and ourselves in a hundred ways: betrayal, selfishness, abandoment. Strive to write characters who feel vulnerable to pain, whose secrets are so close to the surface that they can’t afford to be polite. Put in a truth teller and watch the inner flesh rip and sizzle.
• Create blood ties. Kinship is story gold. Take your pick of, and take your time with, its darker aspects: scapegoating, favoritism, jealousy. A blood link can instantly heighten any conflict. Why? Because kinship is the one thing in life you can’t change or walk away from. Make your characters learn this the hard way.

Interested in learning more about short stories, or where to submit them to? Check out the 2015 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market, which offers hundreds of listings for book publishers, literary agents, fiction publications, contests, and more. Plus, you’ll find dozens of informative articles on how award-winning authors published their first work, how to market your work, build a loyal fan base, and more. Take the guessing work out of the business side of writing and find out exactly where you need to send your manuscript!

Cris Freese is the associate editor of Writer’s Digest Books.

BY ANDREW MARANISS

People assume that when your father is a Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author, he must have helped you a lot with your first book.

For a while, I thought he might, too.

I’d email first drafts of my chapters for “Strong Inside” to my mom and dad, and I soon discovered why the messages I’d get back only contained suggestions from my mother: my father understood from the very beginning that I’d feel a whole lot better about my book if I knew I did it without major input from him.

Which isn’t to say that he had no influence. His fingerprints are all over it, but more in the sense of lifelong lessons on reporting and writing: avoid clichés and unnecessary words; find the universal in the particular; do the reporting.

Growing up, the people who came to visit our house for dinner or picnics were mostly journalists—I’d sit around on the periphery of the conversations and listen to the joy everyone took in describing great lead paragraphs, or scooping the competition. (I also remember the time Bob Woodward brought my sister and I some 45-RPM records, including “Safety Dance,” and the time Sarah and I tried to trick John Feinstein into eating a dog biscuit). Growing up in the home of a Washington Post journalist meant reading a great newspaper every morning—and reading great writing is the best way to learn to write. (Another childhood memory: Each morning, I’d spread the Post out on the dining room table, read the sports section first, and our family sheepdog, Maggie, would hop up on the table, park her body on top of the rest of the paper, and then lap up the milk from my cereal bowl when I was nearly done. Wow.)

Feeling as through your creativity well is running a little dry? With The Write-Brain Workbook and Take 10 for Writers, you’ll get the words flowing again in no time! Over 1,000 combined exercises help you get into the habit of writing—and enjoy it! You’ll learn how to celebrate your own writing accomplishments; discover your own unique writing process; build momentum in your writing and overcome writer’s block. Regardless of genre, you’ll unleash your own writing passion with this Creative Writing Collection.

My father did not become a published author until after I graduated from college, but one of the lessons I’ve picked up from him in this later stage of his writing career is the concept of “go there.” For him, that meant traveling to Vietnam for one book, moving to Green Bay, Wisconsin, for the winter for another, and flying to Kenya, Indonesia, Hawaii and Kansas for his bio of Barack Obama.

In my case, going there meant two things: seeing my adopted hometown of Nashville through the eyes of my subject, Perry Wallace, and trying to travel back in time to the 1960s in as many ways as possible. On the time-travel side, I set my satellite radio to the 1960s channel and spent my 45-minute commutes to my “day job” listening to the songs Wallace and his contemporaries would have heard while he was making history as the first African American basketball player in the Southeastern Conference. I watched movies from the period, and read books about the Sixties that had nothing to do with Wallace’s story but shed light on the culture of the times in interesting ways (in addition to my dad’s many books that are set in the decade, one of my favorites was Mark Harris’ book, Pictures at a Revolution, on the five  movies nominated for Oscars in 1967).

It was seeing Nashville through Perry Wallace’s eyes that produced the most valuable anecdotes for the book. I’ll forever remember the afternoon we spent driving around the town he left 44 years ago. He showed me the houses he grew up in, the parks he played in, the schools he attended. Driving past one house, he saw an old friend sitting on the front porch and jumped out of the car to say hello. Driving past a street corner in a now-fashionable part of town, he explained that in 1955, standing on that same corner, he had been stunned by a carload of white teenagers who pointed a gun out their window at him, pointing it, pointing it, pointing it, as the car slowly made its way around the corner. And as we drove past a baseball field, he asked me to stop the car. We got out, and he pointed to a thicket of rocks and trees behind the outfield fence. “See that rock?” he asked. “That’s where I sat and meditated over my decision whether to go to Vanderbilt.”

Suddenly I was standing next to Perry Wallace in the present, but also sitting next to him on that rock in 1966.

“Go there” indeed. Thank you, Dad.

Andrew Maraniss is the author of the new biography, Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South. His father, David Maraniss, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist for Washington Post and the author of 10 books.

Follow Andrew Maraniss on Twitter @trublu24 and at his website, andrewmaraniss.com.

Sometimes, as a writer, it’s difficult to think about large, overarching goals when you’re working on a project or planning to start on something new. Thinking, “I’m going to write a novel and have it completed by XX date,” is ambitious. And maybe it’s too much of a reach.

Instead, develop a plan. Write in chunks. Write sections of your novel or story that you find more interesting than others. Challenge yourself, but make your goals and expectations reasonable and attainable, because it will make the payoff satisfying.

Below is an excerpt from our go-to guide, Crafting Novels & Short Stories: The Complete Guide to Writing Great Fiction. The selected portion will help you develop a plan to start writing immediately and turn writing into a habit, rather than a chore or an exercise. The entire book will assist you with whatever you’re currently writing: flash fiction, a short story, a novel, or an epic trilogy. It features advice and instruction from best-selling authors and writing experts like Nancy Kress, Elizabeth Sims, Hallie Ephron, N.M. Kelby, Heather Sellers, and Donald Maass, plus a foreword by James Scott Bell.

Are you writing or putting the finishing touches on a short story? Consider entering it into Writer’s Digest’s Short Short Story Competition, where the winner will receive $3,000 in cash and a trip to the Writer’s Digest Conference! This year, all entrants will also receive a special pass to attend a live webinar conducted by award-winning author Jacob Appel. Hurry, though: The deadline is December 15!

“So, what do you do?” asks the fellow dad at the soccer match, glancing over at you while he keeps an eye on his daughter, the star forward.

“I’m a writer,” you announce proudly.

“That’s fascinating! Anything I would recognize?” he asks, while you both cheer a save by your team’s goalie.

“Not yet,” you admit. “I haven’t had much luck yet in getting published.” There is a pause while he makes a sympathetic-sounding cluck. “Actually, I haven’t been writing much lately at all,” you continue. “Being home with the kids takes so much of my energy that by the time they’re in bed at the end of the day all I want to do is watch television. Plus, writing is so discouraging when you can’t get someone to even look at your work.”

There is a beat while he processes this. “But, you’re a writer, right? How can you be a writer without actually writing?”

This scene may cause you to chuckle with recognition or possibly to hang your head in shame. Real writers write. Successful writers find the time every day to hone their craft and meet their writing obligations—whether those obligations are external (from editors) or internal (from an incontestable desire to write). What usually separates good writers from bad ones (and often, published writers from unpublished ones) is a strong work habit. That’s it. That’s the big secret. Real writers work hard. In fact, most work ridiculously hard.

Professional writers know there’s nothing like a looming deadline to make them focus on their work. In fact, the real problem for beginning writers is usually not scrambling to meet a deadline, but simply organizing their time efficiently enough to find time to write at a productive pace. All writers feel this way from time to time. As other commitments encroach on our days, writing is often pushed aside like an unpleasant chore.

Accomplishing your writing goals requires making a writing plan, which is a time schedule that lists what you need to do and when.

Choose to Write

Everybody on the planet has the same amount of time every day. How we choose to use that time makes some of us writers and others of us short-order cooks. If you are a short-order cook who wants to write, however, you should probably take a bit of time to think about how you use your time.

Sandra Felton, who has written more than a dozen books on how to get organized, including Neat Mom, Messie Kids, and The New Messies Manual, points to prioritizing and dedication as helpful organizational tools for writers. “I think the whole answer is focus,” she says. “I think what focus means is you have to decide what you want to do and lob off other stuff that you also want to do. Because you want to write more.”

Note that the choice is not between writing and doing something else that you don’t want to do. The choice is among a nearly overwhelming array of things that seem appealing: checking in with your friends on Facebook, reading for pleasure, or having people over for dinner. Then there’s going to movies and the theater and the opera and family get-togethers and on trips and watching way too much television. Sometimes people would even rather do laundry and dishes than write. (All writers have days like that, but if that’s your constant M.O., you may wish to rethink a literary vocation.) Faced with so many options, people tend to choose too many and feel like they’re short of time.

Some people actually can use stray snippets of free time to write, penning novels on the back of envelopes while waiting in the checkout line at the grocery store. If they have ten minutes between helping a child with homework and driving her to flute lessons, they use those ten precious minutes to write or polish a small chunk of prose. Such people are the envy of the rest of us. For the rest of us, writing for publication requires larger pieces of time to research, ponder, draft, rewrite, and polish.

Make Writing a Habit

Finding writing time requires a modicum of organization, but using it productively demands dedication. The theme of virtually every article about getting organized to write is straightforward: Just do it. Wanting to write and writing itself are cousins, not identical twins. Psychological research indicates that writing every day, whether your muse is whispering in your ear or has deserted you, produces not only more writing but also more ideas for future writing.

The writing habit, like the exercise habit, is its own reward. When you don’t do it, you feel as if you’re cheating yourself. Real writers don’t sit around and wait for inspiration to strike before they put fingers to keyboard; they put fingers to keyboard and know that somewhere during those hours they will discover small nuggets of inspiration. The fingers-to-keyboard, butt-in-the-chair pose is like exercise for the writer. In a way, this is just like real runners who pound the pavement or the treadmill in all weather, whether they are busy with work or on vacation. Like physical exercise, writing is often not enjoyable while you’re doing it, though occasionally an endorphin or two will spark and the serotonin does its thing. Most of the time, though, writing is just a matter of discipline, plain and simple. Discipline comes more easily to some people than to others, but it is certainly a skill that can be cultivated.

“The only thing I can tell you I do that’s inviolate is when I have to write, I get up in the morning and literally go straight to the typewriter,” says Stephanie Culp, who has written books on organization and time management. “Any little distraction that takes me away from my desk kills it. When I’m writing something large, it takes about three fitful days, and then I’m in the rhythm of it, and I write it. I can still write a book in three weeks.”

Here are some tips for getting into a writing habit.

• Start by setting aside an hour or a half hour every day to write.
• Or make a goal to write a set number of words each day.
• Try to write at the same time every day so it will feel peculiar to do something else at that time.
• Write even if you feel uninspired, even if you don’t feel ready to write. If you want to be a writer, you must write.

Your Writing Plan

Often, getting started on a writing project is the hardest part. Most writing jobs, however, can be viewed as a sequence of doable tasks that follow the same general path from beginning to end. If you accomplish each task in order, you can follow the plan to a finished piece. The more you write, the more you will be able to anticipate how much time a particular project will take you.

The planning guidelines below help you break your book project into smaller tasks. Start with individual chapters, and break down the chapters into component parts. Schedule your writing project into your day at specific times, and, with a little luck but more hard work, you’ll finish your pieces on time.

If you’re a person who resents and resists scheduling, remember that creating a writing plan is intended to help you, not restrict you. The goal is to relieve some stress, organize your life, and make your writing process more efficient. Meeting even mini deadlines can lift your spirits and bolster your confidence. Simply crossing items off to-do lists feels so good that the act in itself becomes a reward and keeps you writing.

Take a look at the following guidelines, which will help you better organize your writing time and, in turn, finish your projects.

1. Set reasonable, measurable goals. Even if you’re not writing to someone else’s external deadline, give yourself your own deadline and treat it seriously. Because you understand the power of the written word, write down a specific goal, with a due date: “Finish chapter by [whatever date].” Some people even establish a punishment and/or reward if they meet or don’t meet their self-imposed deadlines: “If I complete chapter five by Friday, I can go to see a movie; if I don’t finish on time, I will force myself to scrub the toilets as penance.” Well, you don’t have to clean the toilets, but a little self-flagellation is probably good for you.
2. Divide and conquer. View your writing project not as an overwhelming monolith, but a compilation of many smaller items. The reason hard jobs get bypassed is that they often seem too daunting if they’re written as one entry on your list of goals. For example, “Write a book in the next year” can be overwhelming. The scope of the project is so big, and the deadline so far away, that achieving the goal seems impossible. Instead, focus on smaller tasks to do today, tomorrow, this week, and this month to help you reach that goal. You’re likelier to accomplish smaller tasks in the near future than a vague goal in the abstract faraway. The tasks help you reach that distant goal step-by-step.
3. Create a plan of ordered tasks. Writing down tasks in the order in which they should be done keeps you focused, as well as frees your mind to concentrate on the important things—rather than wasting mental energy trying to remember all the niggling details that must be done each day. Break the task down into manageable steps.
4. Select dates and stick to them. “Someday, I’m going to write a book.” How many times have we all thought this? Turn your lofty dream into an actual accomplishment by adopting a workable schedule. For example, choose a date on your calendar for beginning your writing project. Make it today. You’ll be surprised by how much more quickly you’ll work with deadlines, especially if they come with positive and negative consequences. For example, if you miss your deadline at a major magazine, you may never be hired again and may in fact not see your piece in print, which are both negative consequences. But if you make your deadline, determine that you will give yourself a real day off, a massage, an entire chocolate cake, or what have you. Enlist other people to hold you accountable.
5. Work backward. The most important step in planning the time for your writing project is this one: On your calendar, mark the story’s final due date. (If you don’t have a deadline from a publisher, give yourself a reasonable one.) Then figure out when each of the specific items, in reverse order, must be completed if you are to meet that deadline. Allow a little wiggle room in your calendar for the delays that inevitably happen: an interviewee gets the flu and has to postpone by a few days, the computer crashes, etc.

Next to each item on your list, write the time you think it will take to accomplish it and the deadline for completing it. People commonly put far too many items on their to-do list and, as a result, feel defeated when they have to copy uncompleted items from day to day. As William James once wrote, “Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.” So jot down what you can reasonably expect to accomplish in a day. Some people have success using online organizational websites to help them stay on track. For example, on www.Toodledo.com, users can create goals for themselves, color code them, assign themselves deadlines, prioritize the tasks in a “hotlist,” and keep track of the time spent on each project. There are other similar sites as well, including many that are compatible with PDAs and smart phones. (Of course, the old-fashioned system of a pen and a sticky note works fine, too.)

‘Tis the season … of short stories! Contests and journals are currently calling for submissions; to be selected, your story must stand out. By building strongly defined characters, a rich backstory, and the perfect pace and momentum, you can ensure your work makes the cut. Write & Sell Superior Short Stories is a kit that guides you through every phase of writing your short story, from gathering ideas to publishing your completed work. With creative writing prompts, advice from writing experts, and step-by-step guides to constructing scenes, choosing the right narrative and more, this kit will help you compose short stories that readers love and publishers can’t resist. Includes: Crafting Novels & Short Stories, Where Do You Get Your Ideas?, Writing with Emotion, Tension and Conflict, 2015 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market, and much more!

Cris Freese is the associate editor of Writer’s Digest Books.

With the buzz of National Novel Writing Month over, it’s now a time for reflection and introspection. Take a step back from your work before examining it. Did you meet your goal? Did your writing meet your standards?

Will it ultimately meet your standards? Will you make something of what you’ve written this NaNoWriMo? Share your experiences with us in the comments! And thanks for tagging along with us on this writing adventure.

Below, our experts share their reflections on their NaNoWriMo experiences, looking to the future of their writing and what they’ve learned, while offering advice to those who also won this year, did not participate, gave up, or are thinking of participating in the future.

Did you miss any of our other posts in our NaNoWriMo blogging series? Be sure to check the others out:

• Meet Our NaNoWriMo Experts
• Starting NaNoWriMo: Finding the Motivation to Write
• Don’t Let NaNoWriMo Get the Best of You: Find Your Happy Place
• Writer’s Block: Avoiding the Struggles of NaNoWriMo
• Adapt Your Writing: How NaNoWriMo Changes Your Daily Writing Routine
• Halfway There: Finishing NaNoWriMo Strong
• The NaNoWriMo Progress Report: How Are You Feeling?
• One More Week: Staying Motivated at the End of NaNoWriMo
• Lessons Learned: Takeaways From NaNoWriMo

Natania Barron: So here’s the thing. If you’re being technical, Jonathan and I didn’t win NaNoWriMo. Neither of us hit 50,000 words.

But I’m not upset in the least.

Why? Because NaNoWriMo isn’t just about “winning” really. Sure, you get a nice little badge and you can share an icon on your blog and social media. But at the end of the day sometimes (and this has happened to me) what you end up with is more work than what you started with.

From the outset, Jonathan and I wanted to use NaNoWriMo as a tool. Not an event. The focus, for us, was kindling a fire, carving out some time in our equally hectic lives to do a project that neither of us could manage alone. Did we do that? Hell yes we did. To the tune of around 70,000 words, we’re more than halfway through the book, and getting into the nitty gritty now. The deep collaboration. We had no way of knowing, starting out, where that would take us, where we’d end up. But once I hit about 35,000 words on my part of the story it became clear that we had to work more closely—and more slowly—to get the rest of the book right.

The most amazing part of the whole process has been sharing a brain. Well, not exactly. A space. That’s why we called our blog Two Brain Space—instead of going it alone, Jonathan and I have been able to bandy about when we’re stuck for ideas. And going back and reading what he’s written always inspires me to tweak and improve, and sometimes figure out entire sections of the book. It’s a thrilling, wonderful process to share an imagined world with someone who isn’t you. Like playing pretend all over again. But, in our case, with more spiders.

Defining your own success is a totally hackneyed concept, sure. But if you lost NaNoWriMo this year, don’t despair. You’ve started something amazing. Something no one else could do the way you’ve done it. You’re not a loser.

Stephen King’s On Writing was a big influence on my process early on as a writer. And he’s the one that’s forever lodged the concept of excavation to me—that we’re not so much writing books as we are excavating them, like archaeologists. Not every writer has the same experience or the same tools. And NaNoWriMo is just one of those tools. What matters is that you become familiar with the habit of writing. That even when November is over, you’re finding those whispers at the back of your mind telling you to dig a little more. You’re out there finding new tools to help you dig out that dragon skeleton. Or maybe it’s a cavern to another world. Or an old spaceship. But you’re the only one that can do it, the only one that can find it.

So NaNo losers, let’s celebrate! So long as you’ve honed your skills and fine-tuned your approach, you’ve won.

Rachael Herron: It was a quiet win this year. I was at work on a break, four-thirty in the morning. I slid over the finish line with six words to spare, and when I went home later that morning, I got in bed and slept the sleep of the just. I’ve still got another 50k to go to see the end of this first draft, so I’m doing a repeat NaNoWriMo in December. I’ve learned the Reverse NaNo is for me—a week or two of hard work followed by smug backsliding. What’s not to love about that kind of system? Add some holiday chocolate, and Bob’s your wordy uncle. 

Regina Kammer: You know what? My story is a mess. There are inconsistencies, plot holes, and I have no idea where my hero’s sister went after page 3, but she suddenly became an important plot device at the end of the novel.

If I handed the manuscript to an editor right now, it would come back to me slashed with red and flagged with comments like “what does that even mean?”

Well, I know what I meant to write, my characters know what they meant to say, but you know what? No one else knows any of this right now.

That is the beauty of NaNoWriMo. You’re writing for the sake of writing, forming all those ideas and images into words. They may be the most clunky words ever, but they are words. And words can be reformed into better words. That process is called editing.

To quote Chuck Wendig: “Writing is when we make the words, editing is when we make them not shitty.”

To quote Nora Roberts: “You can’t edit a blank page.”

November is not National Novel Editing Month. Nope. (Apparently that is officially in March.) November is writing quantity month. 50,000 words of quantity.

What did I get out of writing quantity not quality? I got a few plot twists and details that I had not considered when I started working on the outline. I also cut some fat out of my story. I had a whole plot line involving the hero’s sister that just didn’t add anything to the story, and, I discovered while frantically typing, I wasn’t interested in that plot line anyway. However, as noted in the first paragraph of this essay, the sister still needs to play some part. I’m just not quite sure what that part is.

If you’ve ever wanted to write a novel, NaNoWriMo is the way to do it. The great thing is that 1,667 words a day is a big chunk of words and yet, at the same time, a manageable chunk of words. I actually pace myself accordingly (although I tend to write in scenes rather than word chunks). I’m not a fast writer, I’m not the best writer (initially; I pretty much rock after edits), so if I can do this, so can you.

 The November/December 2014 issue of Writer’s Digest
is loaded with advice, tips, and strategies
to help you survive—and thrive—during NaNoWriMo.

Kathy Kitts: This is my twelfth win in a row, but even if I hadn’t won this year, NaNoWriMo provides a confidence that extends beyond writing. No matter the type of challenge I may face, I can succeed by applying the rules of NaNo: set a goal, tell others, get a support group, and plug away each day. The recipe for success might not be easy, but it sure is nice to know what it is.

Kristen Rudd: I’ve got the post-NaNoWriMo blues. While I’m super happy that I’ve got 50,000 words on my project to work with now, I’m restless and don’t know what to do with my time. Really? No write-ins to attend? No word counts to procrastinate over? No forums to check? What happens now?

This is a common refrain. What happens now is that I must keep going, despite the mush-like state my brain is currently in. I must keep writing and not lose my momentum. A lot of people take a break this first week of December—they step back from what they’ve done with the promise to edit or finish it after the holidays. Maybe they didn’t win and think their novel’s not worth continuing. I have done all of this, too.

This is a mistake. Editing, sure—step away, but start something else immediately. But if you’re not finished, you cannot stop now because the next thing you know, the holidays will come and go, and you will have lost that habit. I don’t want to lose the habit. It’s easy to let life get in the way of developing your craft. So I will press on and keep writing.

EJ Runyon: They tell you: “Write. Don’t stop. Don’t over think it. Just write. Get it down. All of it. Don’t go back to bits for polishing. Get to the end as you now know it to be. That’s the goal – the end.”

But once the month is over—start talking to yourself about what to do with your NaNo effort:

Tell yourself,
Finish it.
Let it sit.
Re-read it. Make notes. Don’t dive into edits yet.
Re-read your notes.
Re-write it.
Proofread it yourself.
Don’t rush.
Don’t know how to proof your own work? Learn.
Show it to other writers, not to readers yet.
Take on what critiques matter, leave those that don’t sound right to you.
Re-write it off the notes you will take on.
Finish all the re-writes.
Let it sit.
Proofread it yourself. Then send it off to a story or content editor.
Work the story edits you two agree on.
Proofread it yourself.
Don’t rush.
Send it to a professional proofreader. Not your cousin, sister, or friend unless they do that for a living.
Re-read it. You reading your own galleys is an author’s job. Don’t skip this bit.

After all that, then say, “NOW is the time to work on the blurb, synopsis and cover art.”

Jessica Schley: The big thing I always have to hold in my mind after a NaNo is that what I’ve produced is probably a zero draft. I wish I could remember who first coined that term, but it’s pretty easily googleable and in common parlance in the writing world now. My NaNo novels often need a complete re-write by the end—if for no other reason than that it seems my method of winning NaNo is to crank out thousands of words over Thanksgiving. So, you know, I need to go back and say, use contractions! There’s a tendency to feel like, “Wow, I have a mess here.” And truth is, you probably do. But within that mess is an awesome story that maybe needs some of the excess marble chipped away so that it can become a clearer sculpture. So if you’re feeling like your novel is maybe not what you wanted, put it away for a little while (I’ll be doing that—I’m revising two other pieces right now and those get top billing!) and come back to it with fresh eyes sometime in 2015. Chances are, you’ll see the book inside it that just needs a little coaxing to come out. Congratulations on making it through November, no matter what your word count is. 

Brian Schwarz: NaNo is a trip.

It seems like I develop some kind of amnesia when thinking of NaNo, because each year that I choose to participate I try to forget the previous years (or I look back on them and think about the great moments).

The honest truth about NaNoWriMo is that it is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Each year I think I won’t make it. Each year I give myself a list of excuses a mile long. Each year I fight to play catch-up, get caught up at some point, and spend the rest of the month behind because I got too comfortable.

My wife has a good piece of advice that she preaches to me. She tells it to me over and over again:

“You get out what you put in,” she says.

Now for those of you who are considering doing NaNo for the first time next year, or for those of you who did it and failed, or even those who succeeded, I want you to ponder these words.

You get out what you put in.

To me, NaNo isn’t “a trip” because you write a lot of words, or because you spend a lot of time on a computer, or because its wrought with all sorts of roller coaster up and downs. NaNo is crazy because it makes you realize exactly how much time in a month you really have.

This month, I wrote 53,000 words. I did this by sacrificing all manner of things. Some of these I cannot continue to sacrifice, such as time with my wife or generic sleep. But some of these I can absolutely continue to give up.

Whether you wrote 50 words or 50,000 words, you learned this lesson too. You learned that you get out what you put in. Because being a writer is as simple as sacrificing time that could be used for other things, and using it instead to write.

So quit reading this and go write something. Or better yet, make a commitment to revise what you wrote and start that instead.

*     *     *     *     *

Print Your Book!
Need more book writing inspiration for NaNoWriMo? Blue Ash Publishing, the book publishing arm of Writer’s Digest, is running a limited time offer for all NaNoWriMo authors. Get $100 off 100 or more custom printed books by using the coupon code NANO100 at checkout. Get your own book in print today! But hurry—this offer ends 12/31/14.

Cris Freese is the associate editor of Writer’s Digest Books.

BY LIZ CRAIN

GIVEAWAY: Liz is excited to give away a free copy of the second edition of her just released book, Food Lover’s Guide to Portland, to a random commenter. Comment within 2 weeks; winners must live in the US to receive the book by mail. You can win a blog contest even if you’ve won before.

The summers that I was 6 and 7 years old in early ’80s, I went to a day camp in the woods maybe 30 minutes or so from the suburbs of Cincinnati where I grew up. There were a lot of memorable things about that camp, as there tend to be, but without a doubt the most memorable was Mr. Brady—the camp nature guide whose office was the old barn across the way from the open-air dining hall—and his resident alligators. The seven or eight alligators ranging in age from a couple years to several years lived in a large, maybe 10-foot diameter, round metal trough topped with a piece of plywood.

One day, every summer, Mr. Brady would take the youngest, or maybe just the most docile, alligator out of the trough, put it in the bed of his old beat-up blue pick-up truck and drive it down the hill behind the barn to the creek, where 15 or so of us would be waiting with our counselor. What happened next is not a dream. I am still friends with one of the campers and can verify that Mr. Brady—longish white beard, rubber pants and suspenders, boots—would then spend the next 40 minutes or so of our nature session wrestling with the alligator in the murky creek. Our task: watch. And in the process scream, laugh and hug each other tightly.

I’m sure there were some teachable moments that I’m missing that occurred during the alligator wrestling. There might have been words about habitat and behavior in the wild and maybe even a little bit about how humans are not typically a part of the alligator diet. Of course, all I remember, and all I am sure that most campers remember, is an old man wrestling an alligator in the creek. By choice. He seemed to have no fear, and he seemed to genuinely love doing it.

Although I have changed the names and some identifying details of the alligators what follows is my own story of wrestling with alligators, except that the alligators are humans and the wrestling is being done with writing.

When I first started freelance food writing shortly after moving to Portland, Oregon, in my mid-20s, I said yes to just about anything work-wise that came my way, including waiting tables, nannying and working in a Montessori after-school program. I also covered a lot of writing territory. I wrote a corporate fitness manual without ever having worked in an office, smoking cigarettes and drinking most nights of the week and never setting foot in a gym. Clearly I was an expert. I also wrote website copy for a few hotel and hospitality companies, health and fitness articles for a smaller circulation magazine in Arizona and movie reviews for an online art and culture startup in New York.

Do you want to make money with your writing? Do you dream of having your byline in magazine columns? Then the Freelance Bundle is for you. This kit offers two ebooks by our some of our most popular authors: I.J Schecter and Naveed Saleh. Then, use your Writer’s Market subscription and get the contact information you need to send your work to the right people.

I tried my hand at a lot of different types of writing and, in doing so, did the opposite of what most writing manuals tell you to do—write what you know. Instead, apropos of an ambitious 20-something-year-old, I wrote more often what I did not know.

I always brought my limited life experience and subjectivity to the page, of course, and I researched and dug as deep as my usually too-fast-approaching deadline would allow, but let’s just say I was in all of these writing endeavors far from an expert. And that lack of expertise led directly to lack of confidence. That first year of freelancing I spent a lot of time researching and educating myself, but my primary motivator was a little off. I wanted to know the right things that, in my 20-something year old mind, translated to all of the things that would make me not sound stupid.

Nobody likes a snoop and that’s exactly what I was that first year of freelancing. My regular gig was ghostwriting food and drink pieces for AOL Online. For that, I’d visit restaurants, bars, clubs and markets in and around Portland and then write short profiles of each. I took copious amounts of notes about menus, inventory, décor and service in my tiny black refillable notebook, and if I ever caught whiff that someone was on to me I’d commit the remaining visit to memory as best I could sacrificing any more documentation to save face.

I would only ask one or two questions per visit, and then only if I thought I could get away with it without revealing anything personal. I’d avoid eye contact. My heart would race and my palms would sweat as I took ridiculous notes under the table about things such as the microgreens topping my scallops (“What are the little purpley-green spade-like micros? Mustard?”). If you kicked all that fear-built subterfuge down, I wasn’t being Ruth Reichl-like, in disguise in order to maintain journalistic integrity. I just didn’t want to have a real conversation with anyone that might reveal all that I did not know. Instead, I would go home after dinner and suffer through mind-numbing Google searches of  microgreens until I settled on the variety that looked the most similar before ultimately deciding not to use it in the profile anyway. No time wasted at all!

On those rare occasions when I did find myself face-to-face and engaged with folks who I was interviewing or meeting with for some sort of professional reason, I showcased what I knew as best I could and tried to hide what I didn’t know. In other words, I was a bit like 20-year-old Ira Glass in his early interviews with members of the cast of MASH, which he talks about on the “Cringe” episode of This American Life. The worst is when Glass asks Harry Morgan, who played Colonel Potter, a series of needling questions about why he’s never been the lead on any show. So painful.

This sort of bravado is inherently juvenile, but we’ve all done it. Here’s how I got rid of being scared of not knowing: I stopped using my tiny black notebook to take notes in in public and I got a big notebook. I stopped sneaking away to the bathroom to take notes—I’m sure that a few waiters had me pegged as incontinent—and started writing them openly. I stopped muzzling my curiosity and ended more sentences with question marks. I had more and more face-to-face interviews that I needed to conduct for seasonal food stories with weekly deadlines that I was writing—more projects in general. I no longer had time to digest the latest study just enough so that I’d sound smart, to make obscure references that were only tenuously related to the subject at hand (references I’d secretly hope no one would actually try to turn into a real conversation). All of these things that we do from time to time to puff our feathers when we feel intimidated or unconfident, and as a result, hide our truer selves.

After a year of freelancing, I was too busy with assignments to keep up appearances anymore. The real, vulnerable, curious and often ignorant me stepped out into plain view. It turns out that first year of freelancing I’d wasted a whole lot of time getting in my own way. I simply got out of my way and the decade since I’ve been more than willing to often be the fool or even, from time to time, when it seems helpful to the interview and subject at hand, play the fool.

In general, people love to be asked questions—personally and professionally. Ask away. Be brazenly curious. Be proud of not knowing. The less you know means the more you have to learn and that’s a big part of what’s most fulfilling, fun and interesting about writing—the learning. Don’t be a bore and always try to prove yourself and outwit others. No one is impressed and it’s tiresome. Show how ignorant you are—we all are!—and you’ll have a lot more fun and be a much better writer as a result. The best writers are the most curious risk-takers who want to burn and learn and live
life to the fullest. Stop being scared and be one of them. In other words, wrestle those alligators in the creek. By choice. See, I knew I could bring it back to the alligators.

*No alligators were harmed in the writing of this essay.

Liz Crain is a fiction writer as well as the author of Food Lover’s Guide to Portland and Toro Bravo: Stories. Recipes. No Bull. A longtime writer on Pacific Northwest food and drink, her writing has appeared in Cooking Light, Budget Travel, VIA Magazine, The Sun Magazine, The Progressive, The Guardian and The Oregonian. She is also editor and publicity director at Hawthorne Books as well as co-organizer of the annual Portland Fermentation Festival.

You can find more from Liz Crain on Twitter (@foodloverPDX) and her website, lizcrain.com.

Light-bulb moments. Aha moments. Flashes of recognition. Revelations. Call them whatever you like. I like to think of them as clicks.

In the writing life, the best kind of click is that moment something makes you realize exactly what’s been missing from the not-quite-right scene you’ve been working on. Or the instant you put two plot points together and suddenly have a clear view of what’s really beneath your character’s behavior. Or the random tip on plot structure that magically conjures for you a map of how everything in your messy draft might fit together after all.

Clicks. They’re satisfying, exciting, inspiring, invigorating. And they’re the stuff writers live for.

The January 2015 Writer’s Digest—devoted to all things novel writing—releases today, and I’m so excited to finally be able to offer you a preview of what’s inside. We’ve done our best to fill this issue with the types of craft advice and writing techniques that help things click into place. Because whether your own moments of realization are quiet head nods or loud exclamations of triumph, as subtle as the click of a key in a lock or dramatic as a stack of papers launched into the air, we know it’s the bits of advice that resonate that can make all the difference for your novel-in-progress.

First, award-winning novelist David Corbett shares what made his own characters finally click on the page—and how you can paint more effective pictures of the players in your own stories, too. Then, longtime contributor Elizabeth Sims details techniques for mastering one of the most notoriously difficult elements of fiction: dialogue. Bestselling novelist Steven James shows you precisely how to manage the flow of tension and conflict in your story—through multiple plot points, climaxes, subplots and more. Therapist-turned-writer Tracey Barnes Priestley delves into the real reasons “Why So Many Writers Give Up Mid-Novel—and How Not to Be One of Them.” And four bestselling series writers take you behind the scenes with their iconic characters to show you what it is that gives a novel that special something that makes readers want another installment, and another, and another.

We all know that writing a novel isn’t easy. But in those moments that something clicks, suddenly anything seems possible. Here’s to many ahas on the pages—and in the new year—ahead.

Get your copy of our “This Is the Year You Write That Novel!” issue on your favorite newsstand starting today, or download the January 2015 Writer’s Digest and start reading right now.

Happy Writing,
Jessica Strawser
Editor, Writer’s Digest Magazine
Follow me on Twitter @jessicastrawser.

*     *     *     *     *

Say goodbye to writing and rewriting with no results. Starting—and finishing—your novel has never been easier! First Draft in 30 Days provides you with a sure-fire system to reduce time-intensive rewrites and avoid writing detours. Award-winning author Karen S. Wiesner’s 30-day method shows you how to create an outline so detailed and complete that it actually doubles as your first draft. Flexible and customizable, this revolutionary system can be modified to fit any writer’s approach and style. Plus, comprehensive and interactive worksheets make the process seem less like work and more like a game.

Cris Freese is the associate editor of Writer’s Digest Books.

BY MIKE MEGINNIS

This is a recurring column called “7 Things I’ve Learned So Far,” where writers at any stage of their careers can talk about writing advice and instruction — by sharing seven things they’ve learned along their writing journeys that they wish they knew at the beginning. This is installment is from Mike Meginnis, author of Fat Man and Little Boy.

1. Write for your own pleasure. My goal is always to write sentences, paragraphs, scenes, and chapters that satisfy and surprise me. Trying to guess what other people want will lead you into dead ends quickly — there are so many people, they all want different things, and you can’t know who will be your audience, or if you’re even going to have one. All you can know for sure is whether you’re having fun. And if you’re not, your readers—whoever they turn out to be—will feel it.

Besides, the rewards of writing fiction are often small and few enough that if the writing itself isn’t a pleasure then there really is no reason to continue.

2. Write “love it or hate it” stories. No one buys a book because there’s nothing wrong with it. You don’t build a lasting audience by winning the mild approval of a broad swath of people. You win readers by deeply pleasing one person, then a second, then a third. The people who truly love one thing you write will always remember that experience, and the people who hate something you write will remember that too. The people with feelings between love and hate are the ones who will forget, who will never buy a second book with your name on the spine.

3. Worry about sentences first and last. Some things make good sentences in your voice and style; others don’t. I have a lot of great ideas that I will never write because I can’t make them conform to the sentences that I write best. There’s a story that takes place entirely inside computer hard drives that I would absolutely love to tell, but that sort of abstract, high-concept setting just doesn’t work in the simple, declarative sentences I do best. (Believe me, I’ve tried.)

Once you’ve found a way to write your story in your best sentences, trust that: in my experience, if you attend to the sentences, the macro-level issues (structure, character, tone) will attend to themselves. If a section isn’t working for what you suspect are macro reasons, fix the sentences until that section works.

4. Make arbitrary rules to simplify your process. The thing about writing is there are far too many options, many of which are equivalent or very nearly so. I will sometimes spend fifteen minutes typing the word “that” in the middle of a sentence and then removing it. Arbitrary rules can help you to move past these traps. My rule used to be that I would not use “that” if I could help it. In every book, I make rules about page-lengths for chapters—the chapters in this book will be eight pages long, four, or sixteen. In this book, the chapters will be ten pages long, twenty, or five. I avoid three-syllable words where two- or four-syllable words will suffice. None of these are good or bad rules, and none of them should necessarily be yours. You should make up your own. All that matters is that they make decisions easier.

These rules change all the time, of course: now I use “that” wherever I can tolerate its presence. If a rule leads you to make a mistake, you can always fix it later.

5. Get to the good stuff as soon as you possibly can, if not sooner. Inexperienced writers often begin stories with their main character waking up to the sound of an alarm clock. The character showers, brushes his or her teeth, and dresses. Maybe there’s a breakfast scene. Writers do this because we can’t find the story’s actual beginning, or worse, because we think we have to work up to the good stuff. We think it needs context, that the reader needs to be prepared to understand and appreciate it in the right way. Most of the time, we’re wrong; we should be jumping right in. To help myself do this, every time I have a good idea for any part of a story, I try to write it right away, even if it probably won’t happen for hundreds of pages. This helps me to remember to get to my best material as soon as I possibly can.

6. Embarrass yourself as much as you can. When you feel strange about what you’re writing, when you worry what your family will think, when you begin to be just slightly concerned about your future prospects for employment in light of what you’ve written, that’s how you know you’re onto something good. Nothing is less interesting than a story designed to imply that the author is a cool, smart, moral person with good ideas and opinions.

7. Don’t try to make something smart, subtle, wise, or beautiful. These qualities will emerge on their own in ways you could never predict or contrive. Your job has nothing to do with the mind or the soul. Your responsibility is the body. What does the body want? What do your characters want? What do you want for them? Are they hungry? Are you? If you are hungry, then maybe so are they. Maybe you should feed them. Or maybe they will have to wait.

If someone were to ambush you and shout, “SAY SOMETHING PROFOUND!” you would sputter and fail. When you try to say something dumb, you’ll usually fail at that too—you’ll say something smart or strange or beautiful instead.

Mike Meginnis is the author of the novel Fat Man and Little Boy (Fall 2014, Black Balloon Publishing). The Brooklyn Book Festival called Mike one of “the year’s most impressive debut novelists” and The Japan Times said Fat Man and Little Boy “straddles a hybrid genre of historical magical realism.” Mike has published stories in Best American Short Stories 2012, The Collagist, PANK, and many others. You can find him on Twitter @mikemeginnis.

Joe Hill via Wikimedia Commons

BY DREW TURNEY

Author Joe Hill worked as a writer for nearly a decade before revealing his relationship to legendary horror author Stephen King. (For the uninitiated, Hill is King’s son.) Hill has stated that he wanted to prove himself on his own terms, and so chose to work under a semi-pseudonym. His three novels—Heart-Shaped Box, Horns and NOS4A2 (pronounced Nosferatu)—are all bestsellers, and his collection of short fiction, 20th Century Ghosts, won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection in 2005. And now his novel Horns is a movie starring Daniel Radcliffe, and his latest release is his bestselling book yet.

Here, Hill talks about his family, his writing, and what it’s like to step back and let someone make a film from your book.

Are you ready to write an engrossing thriller that readers can’t put down? In this series, bestselling authors share their firsthand experience and techniques both in writing thrillers and in getting their careers established. Get the inside scoop on the changing publishing industry, explore strategies for portraying point of view and pacing your story appropriately, examine the ins and outs of writing villainous characters, authenticating your story with psychological details and using forensic evidence. With help from these experienced authors, you’ll be ready to create edge-of-your-seat suspense and complete a thriller novel that agents can’t resist.

DT: How involved were you with writing the screenplay for Horns?
JH: I spent about three years writing Horns, and after that length of time I was ready to be done with it. Mandalay optioned it and wanted to make a film, and they asked if I had any interest in writing the script. I said ‘Not really,’ so they passed it onto Keith Bunin, who did a wonderful, wonderful job.

In terms of my contributions, we had a lot of great conversations when Keith was working on the script including Keith and I, Cathy Schulman who is a producer at Mandalay, and Adam Stone who’s also a producer on the film. And eventually Alexandre Aja when he came onboard.

We had lively arguments and broke the story down a dozen times and built it back up. It was a lot of fun. When Alex actually began filming, I viewed my role as to not get under foot and not to create trouble so I showed up on set for a couple of days to goof off and watch what people were doing and then I made myself scarce again. I came back in on the end to talk about editing, as they put the film together and I had some suggestions and some ideas. But at the end of the day, I felt like the film could only work if it was Alexandra Aja’s version of the story.

I told my version; it was time for him to tell his. I hoped that he would be true to the spirit of the characters and he was. Daniel Radcliffe and Juno Temple made sure of that. But beyond that I wanted Alex to feel free to have fun and to make a movie that lived on the screen, not something that was trying so hard to be faithful it just kind of plods along. I think he found a nice balance.

You know the thing about the film and about Alexandre Aja, he has a very light touch. And I know that’s a strange thing to say about the guy who directed The Hills Have Eyes, but he does have a very light touch. The film has this kind of lush romanticism to it. You know, I think that Alex has a romantic heart, and that’s sort of wonderful. It comes through in the film even in the most painful scenes.

DT: Do you have the distance yourself from it to some extent because it’s someone else’s baby?
JH: Yes, this is why I didn’t write the screenplay, too. I have written screenplays and I have fun doing that but I’ve never tried to adapt my own work. I don’t think I’d be a good collaborator if I were the screenwriter of something I spent three or four or five years writing as a novel because after I’ve spent three or four years meditating on a set of characters and on the situation, I’ve really got to have it my way. I just don’t think I could be flexible. I don’t think I could adapt.

I can do that if that’s my starting point. I wrote a pilot for a TV show called “Dark Side,” which is a reboot of an 80s TV show, “Tales from the Dark Side.” My version’s pretty different. But I had no trouble taking notes and collaborating and working with the network on that. It was fun and exciting. And I liked the challenge—if something’s not working, coming up with a fresh set of ideas. But there my starting point was the screenplay; however, with Horns I [had] just spent so much time with those characters and situations. Best to stay out of the way in a situation like that.

DT: Is it tricky to keep that distance?
JH: Yeah, it is. I always feel uncomfortable saying this. I was in so much pain when I wrote it. And you always find people like that annoying, right? Because it’s like they sound so self-important, so full of themselves and so full of their own sense of drama, you just want to smack them up the side of the head. But I kind of understand. I was in a really bad place mentally when I wrote Horns.

It’s a really unhappy and paranoid book by a really unhappy and paranoid man. That’s not to say I’m not very proud of the book—I think it’s a lot of fun, I think readers enjoy it. But I have a hard time revisiting it. And so for me, it’s actually easier to enjoy it as a film than it is to enjoy it as a book. I just don’t like thinking about where I was mentally when I wrote the story. … But it all turned out okay at the end.

My first novel was Heart-Shaped Box and it was a tremendous success. And I know it’s a cliché, but fell into that second-book trap and at one point I had 400 pages of a novel called The Surrealist Glass and every scene was terrible. Everything about it was bad. I was 50 pages from the ending and I threw the whole thing away. I just couldn’t stand it and I remember thinking, Forget it, I’m done. If there’s never another book, there’s never another book. I don’t want to be a guy who wrote a crappy book just to have a follow up. I’d rather just be a one-book writer. 

And so I stopped the writing for a little while. And then at some point after I stopped writing, the mental fist came unclenched. I started thinking about what I needed to make a story work. I decided that what I needed was the devil. Stories always come to life when the devil walks on stage, a character to tempt people into sin and to reveal secrets and that was sort of the starting point of Horns.

DT: Were you afraid that the rich inner lives of your characters wouldn’t translate to the screen?
JH: Well, it is hard, but that’s the challenge—that’s an actor’s challenge. One of the things I’ve said over and over again is that, in the course of the story, Perrish (the hero) covers this enormous emotional terrain. He experiences grief and loss and rage and madness and delirious joy. He goes from innocence to experience, and a lot of that is internal. Daniel Radcliffe was able to bring all those emotions to the screen and make it look easy, make it look effortless. I always think that whenever you see an artist do something that’s difficult and make it look easy, you’re seeing someone who’s worked incredibly hard. I do think that Dan is a really remarkable young actor, and with every role he shows more range and an almost athletic range of skills. We were just so lucky that he wanted to play the part.

DT: So do you have any plans or action on movies of any of your other books?
JH: Some good things have happened with a short story called “Best New Horror.” Some interesting things have happened with my novel NOS4A2 that I’m not allowed to talk about yet, but they’re sort of trucking along in an interesting way. Universal is waist-deep in the preliminary work on adapting Locke & Key as a film trilogy. My understanding is they have a pretty big chunk of the script that they’re all really happy with. My tendency is not to say too much about any possible film or TV stuff until the cameras are actually rolling because until then I don’t really believe in it.

DT: Have you ever thought about acting?
JH: Well, I’m a former child actor. I was in Creepshow. I was the little kid with the voodoo doll. My feeling is that that particular performance was gold, and so perfect that there’s really no reason to return.

I explored everything there is to explore in the field of acting with that film and there’s no reason to tarnish the greatness of that initial performance with another role. I view myself as very much like Daniel Day-Lewis, you know—years and years between parts. Daniel Day-Lewis and I are almost exactly the same guy.

DT: You definitely showed some incredible range in that role.
JH: I think so. It was right there. Way better, way better than those, way better than those second-rate child actors who worked on Harry Potter. Oh my God, blew that right out of the water!

DT: That Daniel Day-Lewis guy, what’s he got on you really?
JH: Nothing. He’s got longer hair.

DT: You and your father seem happy for the worlds of your books to cross paths a little. So it seems that you don’t want to be too disconnected from his work.
Well, not so much anymore. When I was a younger guy, I was really insecure. I was afraid if I wrote as Joseph King that publishers would publish a lousy work because they saw a chance to make a quick buck in the last name. I was afraid of that. So I decided to write as Joe Hill. I was able to keep it a secret for about a decade.

In the course of that time, I made my mistakes in private—which is where you’re supposed to make them. I worked my craft and learned the things I needed to learn and, eventually, when I did sell my first book of stories, I sold it to a small press in England. I felt like it sold for the right reasons because the publisher didn’t know anything about my dad. He didn’t know anything about my family. He just really liked those stories. Each of the short stories sold individually for the same reason, in little magazines where the editor said ‘This is great, we really like this story. We’d be happy to publish it.’

I desperately needed that encouragement. I needed to feel like I was succeeding on my own merits, not because my dad was someone famous. I’m a little bit more secure now, and in many ways NOS4R2 has a lot of joking references to Stephen King novels in it. In some ways, NOS4R2 is a book about Stephen King novels. It is a kind of response to my dad’s book It, which I loved as a kid. If you scratch the surface, it’s possible to see that NOS4R2 and It share the same underlying structure.

A brain isn’t very big. It’s just a few pounds of gray matter stuck in a very small living space. You’ve only got so much space to move around in, and so you are stuck writing about the facts of your own life. You may be inventing fiction, but you’re stuck using your own childhood and your own experiences and your own emotional responses to things. So it’s really impossible to have a lifelong career as a novelist and not write stuff that is occasionally reflective on my parents.

Drew Turney is a filmgoer, movie industry watcher, technology expert and books and publishing reporter with more than ten years experience. He writes about everything from the latest mobile phones to special effects to book reviews to author profiles, and everything in between. Find more at drewturney.com and filmism.net.

National Novel Writing Month isn’t just a test of your writing prowess. In many ways, it’s more of a test of your determination, will power, and ability to hold yourself accountable. Are you going to stick to your 50,000 word goal? What are your daily goals? How do you handle potentially falling behind?

Most importantly, NaNoWriMo will teach you how to adapt as a writer. For the most part, your daily (weekly?) routines of writing will get thrown out the window during this month. You’ll have to learn how to accept bad writing and edit later. For some (myself included), that’s tough to do. The thought that there could potentially be bad writing in what I’m working on is cringe-worthy.

Learn to accept it. Write through the bad parts until you get to the good stuff. You can worry about the edits on December 1. Put the critic away until then. If need be, when it’s all done, check out Writer’s Digest’s Critique Services. But, for now, it’s only about the writing.

How have you modified your writing habits to make it through NaNoWriMo? Are you finding that it works for you? Please share in the comments, because you never know if your methods can help out another struggling writer!

Have you missed any of the other posts in our NaNoWriMo blogging series? Be sure to check the others out:

• Meet Our NaNoWriMo Experts
• Starting NaNoWriMo: Finding the Motivation to Write
• Don’t Let NaNoWriMo Get the Best of You: Find Your Happy Place
• Writer’s Block: Avoiding the Struggles of NaNoWriMo

Question: How does NaNoWriMo affect your writing, versus your normal writing pattern? (Besides the obvious word count in a day… For example: Do you find yourself editing less as you write? Are you skimping out on detail and just writing the bare bones?) Do you think this process works for you? 

Natania Barron: I’ve always written at something of a fever pace. When an idea for a novel really crystallizes in my head, it takes over a huge part of my brain power. What’s been hard over the last few years with kids and a full time job is that I just don’t have the brain space I used to. NaNoWriMo makes me schedule the time in. It’s a lot less just waiting for the Muse (Muses are crap anyway) and a lot more just making it happen.

Having Jonathan be part of this whole process helps light a fire under me more than ever before. That sense of accountability. Much of the spine of this novel is Jonathan’s idea, but I like to think that the flourishes are mine. The whole beast of the matter is very much a collaboration, and I’ve got to hold my part of the bargain up. Life is insanely chaotic at the moment, but there’s something rather precious in behind beholden (in a good way) to a friend and collaborator. I’m finding I’m really looking forward to my NaNo time.

Getting in the writing habit is hard. And NaNoWriMo is really hard, whether you’re a novice or an expert. I hate NaNo naysayers who criticize people for doing it, and just making a “part of a novel” instead of a whole novel. That’s certainly not the point of NaNo. Writing is the hardest part. Getting it done. Even if no one ever sees the story, it’s still the hardest part. And it helps develop those habitual practices, even when you’ve done it before. Because it’s easy to lose it. And more than anything I’m appreciating being wrapped up in the process and learning ways to more easily integrate it into my very busy life.

Rachael Herron: NaNoWriMo does affect my day-to-day writing in that I let it get really rough in November, and it ain’t pretty. In my normal writing, I try to be somewhat conscious of the fact that someday people will read my sentences. I owe a book to my editor—I probably shouldn’t just flat-out make up words like scirvel and whishumptic. During NaNo, I allow myself to forget that. I’m back to just writing as fast and as badly as I possibly can, and it’s SO liberating. When I write fast, I do throw out a lot later. That said, I manage to save a lot more than I ever think I will. 

Nikki Hyson: I can’t honestly say my writing pattern is any different in “NaNo mode” or out of it. I’ve always had the notion, in the back of my mind, that no one was ever going to read my first draft anyway. So, if I wanted to skip a difficult part, or hash out some detail later, it didn’t matter. NaNoWriMo has, however, affected my writing in one very profound way. If I start it in November, I finish it. I have a knee-high pile of notebooks under my desk—all projects that were gasp worthy and I couldn’t wait to start. None of them finished. That isn’t to say that I never finished a novel before NaNoWriMo, but my batting average has improved since November of ’10. I’ve also created more novels from NaNoWriMo that I wanted to take “to the next level.” Before NaNo, the novels I finished went into a box, never to be heard from again. My first NaNo novel I spent a year reworking, editing, and polishing before I put it in the box. My second NaNo Novel went into the box on December 1st, only to be remembered as a win. My third NaNo novel I just finished up the editing, revision, polishing, and final line edit. That was 2 years in the making, and I’m now querying agents. So how has NaNo changed me? I know I can do what I set in my heart to do. 

Regina Kammer: While I’m doing NaNoWriMo 2014, I’m also under deadline for a short story so I’m feeling the effects of NaNoWriMo instantaneously. I have no word count goal for the short, just the goal of producing a good story. It’s freeing just writing what pops in my head without a whole lot of planning, which is the effect of NaNoWriMo’s pantser philosophy. At the same time it’s freeing just writing and not concerning myself with how many words I need to pump out that day. So I get the best of both worlds: squelching the inner-editor while writing as much as I need.

On the other side of this, my usual writing strategy is to be a bit of a plotter and think in terms of scenes (or actions if a short story is one big scene). So during NaNoWriMo, I find it helpful to think in terms of scenes instead of words. Focusing on getting the plot or characters from point A to point B rather than dwelling on the daily word count, is very motivating and actually produces all the words I need—and then some—each day!

 The November/December 2014 issue of Writer’s Digest
is the go-to resource to help you reach your goal of
50,000 words during the month of November.

Kathy Kitts: I can write a novel in 30-days or one short story in six weeks. Why? Inner critic. NaNoWriMo helps me to banish him.

Without the critic, I write more freely and with less censorship. This allows me to describe things more fully and not worry whether a particular detail is necessary. I don’t know whether having the MC wear a blue sweater is important until later. If the sweater is unimportant, then I cut it during revision. But if the murderer was seen in a blue sweater, then maybe not!

In contrast, when I write a short piece, I have the entire arc plotted out. I start crafting immediately because I know where the story’s going. However, in a novel, characters quite often take on lives of their own and to fight that is counterproductive. I am forced to be looser and am less likely to worry about crafting the perfect sentence. After all, why perfect something only to delete it later?

Kristen Rudd: This is totally embarrassing, but I haven’t been a consistent writer year-round. Especially the past year or so. As my kids have gotten older, their extracurricular activity level has ramped up. I had to drop out of my writing group, and then I had to drop out of my critique group. Without those sources of positive peer pressure, my writing tapered off to nothing. I haven’t even been reading as much, and I’m a pretty avid reader.

I’ve been away from stories and telling stories, and boy, is it showing in my output. I’ve never been so thankful for sucking, because NaNo’s getting me to do it again. Writing, I mean. Not sucking. (Well, maybe sucking. I guess that’s for others to decide.)

I think of NaNoWriMo like a great reset for people like me—people who aren’t published, people for whom it may be a little while before they’re ready to be published, or people who may not ever publish. If you’re not consistent, NaNo is a good way to get consistent. Don’t have a normal writing pattern? NaNo will give you one.

Since this story in particular is one I’ve been working on, off and on, for a few years, I have found that I’m approaching it very differently than normal. I will usually go back over a passage the next day and add detail that’s missing or flesh it out more, which is also great for word count, and I’m not doing that this year. I’m just moving on, trying to get to as many scenes as possible in order to finish the draft and tell the whole story. It’s a little uncomfortable, but clearly, I need to be kicked out of my comfort zone a little. It’s also making my inner outliner ridiculously cranky.

Is it working? I don’t know yet. I hope so.

EJ Runyon: Because I’ve done this since 2001, I’ve kind of brought my normal writing patterns into my NaNo stuff. When I write, in or out of my NaNo months, I always write out a first draft without a lot of editing. I always bring things to the page “in scene,” my pattern is to not plot so much that I’m in a straightjacket, but instead I pants more, and that lets me follow my characters so their choices are what’s creating those plot points. And that frees me a bit.

I really think writing ‘in scene’ (Scrivener helps tons in this) allows me to write even more than you’d expect. Each scene comes from answering a “What if…?” question. Not editing during a first draft isn’t about needed to edit. It might be possible you overwrite—which is so the opposite of skimping or bare bones.

[This process has] worked really well for me. I’ve written a creative writing website, and an entire writing guide on the ways I write. And I teach from that book too. As a process, it’s let me write a novel each November, and start one or two during camp months. This year it’s another writer’s guide. It all comes down to riding the revved up speed when you have it, forgiving yourself when things slow down, and revving back up instead of giving up when you think it’s over. It’s never over.

Jessica Schley: I definitely edit less, but I’ve learned over the years that I can’t utterly not edit. If I feel a sentence is cruddy, I will get blocked on the next section. One thing I do is that I don’t delete (obviously!). If I feel I need to rewrite a scene, I rewrite it—and both go toward my word count. One trap I fall into in NaNo is writing exposition instead of really writing the scene—the latter produces words faster than really getting in-scene with your character. I’ve learned, though, that when I feel myself doing that, it’s time to look for the five senses—what’s my character feeling, seeing, hearing, smelling? That gets me right back on the mat with them. I try to produce something that’s not too too different than what I’d produce if I weren’t doing NaNo—if my NaNo novel is too big of a mess, I won’t want to revise it! So it’s got to be reasonably close to what I’d otherwise come up with. 

Brian Schwarz: My writing pattern is totally different during Nano than any other time. Normally I like to write a page or two a day and go back to review it, change it, polish it, and then move forward. During NaNo, none of that is possible. I spend most of my days spilling my depleted plot line onto the page, writing every scene I can conjure and then what connects them, while I stare at an ocean of self-loathing and terrible writing mixed in with a few gems. I tend to go through heavy rhythms of describing scenery, internal monologue, shallow and deep dialogue, and mostly just a skeleton of what is supposed to happen eventually. Honestly Nano for me is less about writing a finished novel and more about writing enough words that I can revise and fix and figure out later. That’s my method.

*     *     *     *     *

Find the focus, energy, and drive you need to start—and finish—your book in a month. Write-A-Thon gives you the tools, advice, and inspiration you need to succeed before, during, and after your writing race. With solid instruction, positive psychology, and inspiration from marathon runners, you’ll get the momentum to take each step from here to the finish line. You’ll learn how to: train your attitude, writing, and life—and plan your novel or nonfiction book; maintain your pace; and find the best ways to recover and move forward once the writing marathon is finished and you have a completed manuscript in hand!

Cris Freese is the associate editor of Writer’s Digest Books.

Have you ever been curious about what it takes to get your novel or series turned into a movie or film franchise? In today’s guest post, Robert Blake Whitehill, author of the Ben Blackshaw series, sheds some light on his experiences in getting his novels optioned.

—

As an award-winning screenwriter, I always hoped my Ben Blackshaw series of novels, including DEADRISE, NITRO EXPRESS, and TAP RACK BANG, might be considered for adaptation into feature films. You might have similar ambitions for your own novel or series. Ambition is the seed of accomplishment, but getting ahead of yourself, imagining the smell of the popcorn at the premiere—or worse, memorizing witty remarks and the list of all the Little People you’d like to thank after due homage is paid to the Academy—is only fun for a minute. There are other matters to attend to first.

One’s core responsibility, duty, and calling as a novelist are to offer great writing to your audience. Readers, at home or in Hollywood, must really enjoy the work. They invest seven to twelve hours of their lives in a book of average length. Thirty to fifty thousand of every reader’s heartbeats become yours. You had best not waste their time with offal.

That means writing and rewriting, and includes working with the best editors you can find. I had the privilege of working with Richard Marek, who discovered and shaped Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne series into the blockbuster franchise we all know today.

Once your book is proven to resonate loud, hard, and strong with readers, with solid sales and resounding reviews, it is possible that Hollywood might call, but perhaps not right away.

Case in point: The Princess Bride novel was published thirteen years before production of the film began. Studios balked during that period even though The Princess Bride’s author was also an Academy Award-winning screenwriter with a terrific adapted script under his arm. For a while, Hollywood thought The Princess Bride simply could not be made. Rob Reiner and Norman Lear thought differently and never wavered.

Basics of the Business

For those with dreams of seeing their books up on the silver screen, a call from Hollywood out of the blue is rare. It is far more likely that an author and his or her team will need to help studio development executives or independent film makers discover the property.

I must first admit that all the films I personally picked up at Centerseat when I was Vice President of Independent Film Acquisitions were finished works, and absolutely none had been adapted from any kind of narrative prose or poetry. We know this is not always the case. Yet, from Gone with the Wind to Moby-Dick to The Guns of Navarone to The Princess Bride, books are adapted into film with unvaried frequency, though with varied success.

Agents can help with this strange form of business-to-business marketing. Many agencies represent screenwriters as well as authors, and packaging a book from its stable of authors with their credited screenwriters nets the agency more in commissions.

You can also zero-in on film makers with a track record of crafting movies that are like your book. The Hollywood Creative Directory lists more than 11,000 potential partners, and it only takes one to start the gears of the film industry grinding for you.

My hard-working public relations team at Shelton Interactive has really helped The Ben Blackshaw Series find its audience among readers. They introduced me to some notable film makers, who were willing to read DEADRISE when it first came out. I got some great advice from these Hollywood moguls about possible ideas for the scope of the series. Though an option did not result at this point, you will soon see I was wiser and better armed when I took the series, with its additional titles and awards, out again later. Quick piece of advice: Never look at money paid to great partners as a fee. It’s always tuition.

Rob Reiner and Norman Lear are household names and perhaps seem daunting to approach. Must you reach that deeply into the A-List to get an option on your book’s film rights? Perhaps not. Do not dismiss less-experienced producers who are passionate about your work. Passion, and even zeal, in combination with canny movie-making chops will carry a project through to a premiere despite the great odds arrayed against the novelist. Remember, the sad truth is that saying no is always the safest tack for a film maker. Saying yes involves the risk of one’s industry reputation, not to mention the potential loss of vast resources. A film needs thousands of yeses along the way. Great work paired with a passionate champion will keep the yeses coming. This approach certainly worked for me, as you will see here.

Larger studios have economies of scale working in their favor, and also in your favor as a writer. They can amortize the risk of one poorly performing movie across a broader slate including other films which might become moderate or breakout successes. If you write a series, you can offer (and a studio can afford) multiple titles at an attractive discount, which could be viewed by studios and savvy independents as a smaller slate-within-a-slate, also known as a franchise. With book adaptations, you must help any potential partner envision a film before there is even a screenplay.

From Book Series to Film Franchise

As my dear friend, creative consultant, and networking guru Joanne Zippel asserts, writers can mine interested readers with film-making connections from among their own contacts. The way she puts it, “Most people have better networks than they realize.  You start by looking beyond the obvious—doing the right research to connect the dots between your work and the people most likely to share your creative aesthetic.”

On Joanne’s advice, I began reaching out to every film industry professional I knew. If they agreed to read something, I hit them right away with copies of The Ben Blackshaw Series books. I was extremely fortunate—the process did not take long. Through LinkedIn, I quickly reconnected with a classmate from Haverford College named Stephanie Bell. Like me, she had graduated with plans of acting. Today, she is a producing partner at HatLine Productions.

Thank goodness Stephanie Bell runs a lean shop. She and her producing partners, Michael Lipoma, and Tamra Teig, tend to check out their carefully vetted list of submissions to HatLine personally, without first getting recommendations through coverage from a development staff of readers.

Stephanie writes, “I’ve always been an avid reader (hence my BA in English Lit) and when I had the opportunity to read Robert’s first novel, DEADRISE, he was fortunate to have caught me at a place when I had time to read it (which these days is not a lot!). I was happy to do so, not only because he is a fellow Haverfordian, but because I knew his background and skills, and because he was generous to me when I reached out for help; I wanted to reciprocate.”

So encouraging of novelists, Stephanie goes on to say, “There is an incredible wealth of both fiction and nonfiction literature available today by both publishing houses and independently published authors, which makes the job for a producer much easier but also harder! I am always looking for fascinating stories, and the ability to connect to authors so quickly is fantastic. What is exciting to me is that there are so many amazing stories waiting to be discovered and brought to life on the big screen.”

Stephanie’s response to DEADRISE could not have made me happier. She writes, “I couldn’t put DEADRISE down, and the minute I finished, I called Robert and said, ‘I want to make this movie with you.’”

On Stephanie’s immediate recommendation, fellow HatLine producer Michael Lipoma said he would read the second title in The Ben Blackshaw Series, NITRO EXPRESS.  Thank goodness, he agreed with Stephanie’s assessment of the works, saying, “NITRO EXPRESS is visceral and visual, and we at HatLine Productions couldn’t be more delighted to help Ben Blackshaw assume his rightful place alongside Jason Bourne and James Bond!”

Bond? Bourne? Wow! You can imagine this was incredibly exciting for me to hear. The crucial yeses were starting to become real for Ben Blackshaw.

That is when Stephanie asked to see the third book in The Ben Blackshaw Series, TAP RACK BANG. I was a moron. I hesitated. At the time, TAP RACK BANG was still in manuscript form. It was as yet unpublished, so no one else had read this book, meaning there were still no rave reviews to bolster the decision-making process at HatLine Productions. Taking a leap of faith, I sent the manuscript and found that Stephanie did not need reviews. As I said, she makes her own decisions based on her personal assessments.

She has written, “In TAP RACK BANG, Whitehill weaves together intricate story lines that will leave you reeling; another brilliant Ben Blackshaw adventure!”

Right after reading TAP RACK BANG, she picked up the phone again, and said, “I want to make the entire series with you—will you have me?!” As she puts it, “The friendship and partnership were born!”

After that call, negotiations began, and yes, today we are in business together.  My friends at HatLine share my vision for The Ben Blackshaw Series. In our business and creative meetings I relish how we always speak with one another from a position of utmost respect.

One of the many happy terms of my agreement with HatLine includes that I will adapt the novels into screenplays myself. That prospect is wonderful! The road ahead will be long, but all the principals involved are marathon runners, not sprinters, and we will see it through. Then, you bet we will make decisions about popcorn at the premiere. We will have earned that much.

For anyone with further questions about this process, or anything else to do with writing, you’re welcome to email me at [email protected]. I will respond.

You can learn more about Ben Blackshaw, the Chesapeake Bay region, and me at www.robertblakewhitehill.com.

Do good work. Market it hard. Mine your contacts. Manage your expectations. Keep writing.