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— Mark Paxson

Below is the video for our latest video chat, in which we begin to respond to the questions/suggested topics from our post at the beginning of the year. Thank you to those who offered suggestions. We really appreciate it.

The last question we address in this chat is a question related to the “rules” of marketing. I wanted to take a moment to provide a fuller answer than I did in the chat.

As I say in the video, I’m not sure what the “rules” of marketing are for writers. So, I struggle with that from the outset, but as I think about it more, I can come up with a few.

Establish a social media presence. I know of a writer who got a publishing contract with a small publisher. They published two of his books — cozy mysteries. But then passed on anything else from him because he didn’t have a sufficient social media presence for them.

This need for a social media presence is something that has been in the background ever since I started my publishing journey. You gotta have a blog! So, I got a blog. And then you have to have Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And now, you better be on TikTok. Or the world is going to pass you by.

I’m on all of those things. Except TikTok. I just refuse to go there. But, social media has been both a blessing and a curse for me. The biggest problem is that I likely don’t use them the way I should to fully promote my written works. I don’t tweet regularly about my books. I tweet when there is something new to say about what I’m doing. Same with my blog.

Plus, my blog and my tweets are all over the place. They are not focused on my creative endeavors. I write and tweet about politics and food and photography and music and life in general. Which, to be honest, I think is a better way to develop an audience than the artificiality of never-ending marketing and promotion. I am who I am, both in real life and on social media. But the world doesn’t seem to work that way.

I’ve never established a huge following on social media. I’ve never approached viral status. And I’m okay with that. I’d rather develop a following naturally, through interaction with followers, than because of one single post or tweet that thousands see and decide to follow me … and then never interact with me again.

I gnash my teeth at times over the limits of what social media has offered me. But … here is the blessing social media has provided. Without it, my readership would be even smaller than it is now. Through social media, I have met and befriended so many other writers and readers and many of them buy my books when I publish something new. More than anybody else in my life, they are the ones who feed me and encourage me and support me in these endeavors.

Overall, at least for me, as frustrating as social media can be, I’d consider establishing a social media presence to be an overall positive. But I encourage you to make your presence what you want it to be. Be you and let your following grow organically. I think it’s far more rewarding than to develop a following that you never interact with. This, of course, gets to what your objectives may be — maximize sales or establish connections.

I’m not sure what other rules there are to publishing. We could discuss the querying process, the publishing process, and various promotional ideas. One of the things I’ve discovered with my last novel is that the on-line promo sites simply aren’t as effective and beneficial as they where when I started this journey ten years ago. It’s a fundamental reality of this business that there are ever more writers publishing ever more books, which makes it ever harder for writers to get noticed and to get readers to purchase their books.

One of the things I see is that you need to have a newsletter and an email list. And I just think … why? This is the type of thing that would just end up sitting in my email in-box, never being read, drowned by all of the other emails I get. 99% of which are spam and junk. I just don’t see how newsletters help. Somebody who has one and who has found success with it, please share that experience in the comments.

Whatever the rules of publishing were ten years ago, they’ve changed now because of how swamped the marketplace is. In some respects, I think the rules of marketing now are … do what you can. Try to find some niches where you can find readers and pursue them. But don’t expect much, because you are just one small fish in a very large sea. Set your objectives and dreams accordingly. Unless, of course, you are one of those rare writers who actually enjoys the promotion side of things. And good luck!

We have been known to offer unsolicited advice on this site. In this case, it’s advice on writing fiction for fame and fortune.

Don’t.

Yah, I realize that you’re not going to take this advice. Didn’t expect you to. I mention it only so that you don’t blame me if fame and fortune eludes you. The credit if you do make money writing fiction is entirely yours.

Still, there are thousands of authors making a significant amount of money from writing fiction, so it’s not an impossible dream. The thing is that there are tens of thousands who aren’t, not to mention thousands who are spending a significant amount of money in indie publishing chasing that dream and not making the money back. The odds of finding fame and fortune in writing fiction have never been good, and they’re no better today, no matter what path you take.

There may’ve been a time, early in the ebook revolution, when a writer had a better chance of making significant money in indie publishing than in traditional publishing, but those days are long gone. Self publishing has its own gatekeepers now – Amazon’s algorithms that reward the best sellers with visibility, and the best selling authors who protect their turf by spending thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars, promoting their books to potential readers on Amazon and Facebook. You have to be able and willing to pay to play in indie publishing these days for even the chance to make money writing.

The long and short of writing is that you have two equally daunting paths to fame and fortune. This suggests that the path you choose might be best chosen by determining the type of writer you are. Are you a novelist, or a pulpster?

Indie publishing is the pulp market of the 21^st century. To be financially successful in indie publishing, you need to be a pulp writer. You need to be a very prolific writer, someone with more story ideas than you’ve time to write them down. And you need to be able to turn those story ideas into stories at 2,000 words, or more, a day, in order to produce three or more novels a year. You will also need to be an entrepreneur. You’ll need to spend money to hire cover artists and editors before your book ever has a chance to earn any of it back. You’ll need to learn the arcane art of efficiently promoting your books and be willing to spend folding money to do so. If you’re good enough, you can find fortune in indie publishing, though probably not fame.

If you’re not a pulp writer and/or an entrepreneur, if you need a year or more to write a novel, then you might be wise to pursue a career in traditional publishing – along with ten thousand other aspiring authors. Traditional publishing has its own arcane knowledge that you’ll need to master – how to do an elevator pitch, write a query letter, and compose a concise synopsis. You need to research agents, and maybe enter pitch contests and the like. Plus, it may well take several novels, hundreds of rejections or no replies, and a decade or more of your life in querying hell to sell a novel, if you’re lucky. On the upside, you don’t have to spend money on postage these days to send out your letters and manuscripts, though you can spend money on coaches and seminars, if you choose to. Both fame and fortune await your success. And there’s always indie publishing if all else fails.

Writing fiction has never been a smart way of making money, though that hasn’t stopped writers from trying their hand at it. And it probably won’t stop you either. But I believe that odds of financial success are pretty even between traditional and indie publishing these days, so that you can confidently pursue the publishing path you’re most comfortable with without looking back over your shoulder at the path not taken.

— Mark Paxson

At the beginning of the year, Audrey posted an invitation for you to suggest issues or questions for us to address. A lot of what that produced will be covered in future video chats, but I wanted to take a stab at one of them.

Anonymole ask the following questions:

• What’s your thoughts on writers writing only what they feel compelled to write, ignoring the market or even the concepts of demand? In other words, how much do you think writers should pay attention to their niche, if they even have one?

My answer to each of these questions will begin with the same thing. It depends. Unfortunately, that’s kind of a reality for me and it goes back to something we’ve covered a number of times in our video chats.

It depends on what your objective is.

Personally, I write stories I want to write, without regard to what the market is doing, or what readers are screaming for. At the same time, I write stories that I hope can find an audience. I have no interest in wallowing in my own internal craziness, producing something that would only mean something to me. So, I write stories I want to write with the hope readers will want to read them. 😉

But … if you’re writing because you want to get a publishing contract and get your name on the best-seller lists, then just writing what you want likely isn’t going to get there. You have to bend your art to what the market is looking for. And in the world of writing and publishing, that means what the gatekeepers (publishers and agents) think the market is looking for.

Who am I kidding? I want those things too — the contract and the best-seller. Unfortunately for those goals, I want even more to write the stories I want to write. Sometimes that means a story that might fit in with what the market is looking for, but if it does, it’s wholly incidental.

The story I’m working on, which will likely end up being about 40,000 words — too short to call a novel — could fit into the market. Although I may be a little late to this particular genre. Do you remember Gone Girl, how successful it was, and how it was followed by a number of other books with “girl” in the title? Well, my WIP is what I refer to as a domestic thriller that could very easily be titled … The Girl in the Basement. But, I want to resist that as much as I possibly can. We’ll see.

• Create a “known universe” (including an inviolate canon) or create a series — preference?

Again, it depends on your objective and the type of stories you want to write. The vast majority of what I write occurs in the known universe that we live in. Normal people dealing with situations of our modern existence. Occasionally, I dip into story types that allow for more creativity in what the universe is. I have a series of dystopian or post-apocalyptic stories that have been percolating for a few years.

But, I think the thing I don’t do is build worlds or develop new canons to occupy these stories. Instead, the stories are driven by the characters, who are all ultimately very human and like you and me, and what they’re going through to get through their lives. The world around them and its canons are not the story, they only provide the context in which the story occurs and I don’t do much with the world or its canons.

• Mundane world vs improbable world vs impossible world? Where do your stories take place? What do you think sells better or is more appealing as a burgeoning author? (i.e. The Notebook vs Hunger Games vs Harry Potter).

I think the examples in the parenthetical answer the question. Any and all of those can be successful. My stories all occur in the mundane world. I’ve struggled with efforts to write improbably or impossible fiction. Others who write on this blog have written stories that fit in those categories, however.

But … what sells? Who the hell knows. The gatekeepers decide that and what they look for are books that look like other books, with an occasional new idea popping up. Like Potter, which spawned hundreds or thousands of copycats. Like the Hunger Games, which spawned hundreds or thousands of copycats. But, have those two types of stories kind of run their course? Now, we’re on to something else aren’t we?

I think that’s the key, if your objective is to get published and grab an audience, it’s important to find the wave before it crests and ride it with your own take on what is popular. Or, best of all worlds, be the writer who writes something new that begins the wave — but it is much harder to sell that book to the gatekeepers.

Have you ever gone back and reread your earliest published stories – not with the intention of revising them, but simply as a reader? If you have, I’d be curious to compare notes with you, since I’ve done just that. I enjoy rereading my favorite books, so rereading my own books wasn’t something unusual for me, though it did take a little courage.

If you did go back and reread them, what would you hope to find? On one hand, we’d like to find that our newest stories are better written than our earliest ones. That we have, indeed, learned something in the intervening years and tens of thousands of words we’ve written. But how much better? A lot? Or a little? If our newer stories seem too much better, what does that say about our first works? Would they be embarrassing? Of course, if we’re writing marvelous books these days, our early books could still be wonderful and we could still say that we’ve made significant progress. We’d have our cake and eat it too. But if our current work is not quite marvelous, how much “progress” would we be comfortable with, without being embarrassed to be found dead in a ditch with our first works? I suppose that the best case scenario is that we’d find that our first books are good and our most recent books are better. Kinda splitting the difference.

Well, as I mentioned at the start, I, with some trepidation, decided to go back and reread some of my early books. What I found, somewhat to my surprise, was that they were still good. Darn good, in fact, defying my expectations. Oh, I found a few typos, (imagine that!) and a few sentences that I’d like to rewrite, but on the whole, despite my efforts to write crisper, shorter sentences, these first books read remarkably well. Viewed one way, this result can be seen as rather alarming – suggesting little or no progress in a decade and several million words typed. But on reflection, I found several explanations for this phenomenon.

The first one is that my earliest self-published works are not my first written works. Prior to writing my self-published books, I’d written a fantasy novel, a SF novella, and a short story all of which I shopped around in the late 1970’s without success. After that, I’d spent a year planning another novel, wrote a YA novel, and puttered around on other stories for several decades. Thus, I already had my earliest works tucked away in the drawer, just like they say you should, before embarking on writing the books I eventually self-published.

Secondly, setting out to write seriously at age 60, after half a century of reading books, I feel that I had absorbed the art of storytelling, at least for the type of stories I wanted to write. I could write them more or less “by ear.” I knew what I wanted to write and wrote those stories, just as I’m doing now.

The third factor is that, as I’ve mentioned in other essays, I wrote these stories to my specifications, just to please myself. They’re custom-designed to please me, so it’s not surprising that I, at least, still find them very enjoyable.

The last, and perhaps the most telling factor, is that I am writing within the narrow limits of my talent. I write episodic novels. I don’t have amazing, mind-blowing science fiction concepts to explore. I have nothing profound to say about anything. And my range of narrators and characters is very limited. My characters are like old time movie actors, where you can still see the “movie star” in whatever character he or she plays in my stories. This is just as true of the stories I wrote ten years ago, as it is for my most recent stories. They haven’t changed significantly because they remain the type of stories I can write. My talent won’t take me any further. Nor, to be honest, have I any motivation to push beyond these stories, since I write what I like to read. Oh, I’d like to write them better – shorter sentences, fewer “and”(s) – that sort of stuff. But I have no ambition beyond that. I’m comfortable with my limits. I must have been standing behind the door when ambition was being handed out.

So while my exploration of my early works resulted in spending some enjoyable evenings rereading some of my favorite books, your experience may differ. You are likely more ambitious than me, and may’ve written increasingly challenging stories over the years. Or perhaps stories in different genres that might make going back to your earliest books more of a leap. Without a doubt, you were younger when you started writing and have matured along with your writing, which may also color your perception of your early work as well. And yet, skill in writing is not always the final arbitrator of enjoyment. Enthusiasm and originality may compensate for less polished prose. I would hope that when all is said and done, you too would find pleasure in your early works, should you decide to revisit them. And that with all the work and worry that went into them now years behind you, you can approach them simply as a reader and fully enjoy the worlds and characters that you, somehow, created.

In any event, I am certain we would all be curious to hear about your experiences in rereading your early work, or what you would expect to find if you did so.

One of the readers of this blog wondered how much time and detail one should put into description in a fantasy or science fiction story. I am sure every writer would answer that question differently, and there is no one way, or right way, to do it. However, because I’m a firm believer that you should write the books that you’d enjoy reading yourself, I’d suggest that you look to see how the authors of your favorite books use description in their stories. Thus, if you study how your favorite authors tell their stories, noting both the parts you like and those that you don’t, you may get an insight on how you might want to do it in your stories. In my case I didn’t so much study the books I read and liked, as I sort of absorbed what I liked in them over the decades of reading.

For a more concrete answer I’d propose that one of the most important elements in world building is the voice of the narrator. The voice of the narration sets the whole tone and mood of the setting and story. The point of view of the narrator(s), the choice of words, the length and type of sentences, and the “attitude” of the narrator(s) paint the world you’re creating in broad strokes. And it is the narrator(s), be it third person, or first, who determines what gets described and how.

In my case, I write first person narratives, and I must admit that the narrators of all my stories sound very similar because they share, in part, my attitude and outlook on life. This is one of the limitations of my talent. I can’t get into some other mind, nor do I care to. That said, they’re certainly not me – you’d never catch me doing anything my characters do – but I’m certain that my attitude towards life colors the worlds I create. This is both a limit to the imaginary worlds I create, and a strength, in that it defines the “brand” of my stories.

As for actual world-building, well, I write science fiction and fantasy stories, so world building is important. However, I have one small handicap in that regard; I don’t have a visual mind. I can’t see the worlds I create, at least not clearly. They’re an impression of a place rather than a vision of it. Perhaps, if you can picture your imaginary worlds in great detail, you would not only be able to describe them in great detail, but want to do so as well. In my case, my primary purpose in descriptions is to either create a mood, or describe a stage setting in order to accommodate the action that I have in mind. I might begin with an idea of the mood I want, and a vague, impressionist picture in my mind of the setting, and then begin to flesh out the details, all the concrete, mundane items that I would expect to find in the setting and work these little things into the narration to imply the broader world beyond the immediate setting. Some of these things I’ll invent and describe, others I borrow from the familiar world, and thus they’ll be familiar to the reader without much or any description.

I’ll conclude with a concrete example of how I use description. I’m certainly not saying that this is how it should be done. It’s just my approach to building an imaginary world.

I have a couple stories set on tropical islands. In one story my narrator is returning to his island home after seven years abroad. He has to walk up a hill from the harbor to report his arrival. The office that he needs to report to is high above the harbor because there are many volcanic islands in the sea and tsunamis are common. The fact that the office is set high on a hill to avoid being carried away by a tsunami is a little element of world building. The path up to the office is made of crushed seashells which crunch beneath his footfalls is another little detail focusing on the island and the sea — and sounds. As are the seagulls weaving overhead, calling to each other. He stops to catch his breath halfway up, because he is not yet used to the moist heat of the islands. It’s getting near dusk, so the sun is low in the sky and its golden light gilds the masts and sails of the ships in the harbor, all of which is designed to create a mellow atmosphere. He looks around. All is familiar, but after his long absence, he’s looking at it with different eyes, which allows me to have him recall the past and note the differences, giving me an excuse to toss in more description than if he had seen it just yesterday. Basically, I use little details that the narrator can reasonably take note of, and find a reason to comment on without getting too much out of the head of the in-story narrator. Still, there are times when I will need to cheat a little and describe or explain things that everyone in the imaginary world would otherwise know, but the reader won’t. Hopefully I’ll find a place and an excuse to do this — and do it entertainingly — so that it doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb.

I know that we have many accomplished authors looking in on this blog. I, and I suspect many other readers, would be interested to learn how all of you approach world building. We would welcome your ideas and suggestions.

Lots of interesting questions are being asked on our “Ask Us Anything” post that can be found here: https://writerssupportingwriters.com/2022/01/01/ask-us-anything/

Send us more!

I’ll attempt to tackle the question about how to get your ebook published on Amazon’s Kindle – very briefly.

Step one: write your book.

Step two: edit and then proofread your book. And then either hire a professional proofreader, or get as many readers as possible to proofread your book. I have five or six people reading my book, and everyone finds different errors and typos, so that the more eyes on the page, the cleaner the copy will be.

Step three: prepare your manuscript for conversion into an ebook. What you are doing in this step is setting up your text so that when it is converted into an ebook it flows smoothly without blank pages or oddities in the text, that may cause Amazon or other ebook publishers to bounce it back to you with error messages.

There are software apps that you buy that will do this for you. One is an Apple computer only program called Vellum. It costs $265. Some authors teach themselves how to program in HTML and then use the free program Calibre to make their own epub. You can also let Calibre convert your word processor program into any of the ebook formats, but unless you know what you are doing and what all the terms mean, you are probably best to leave this process to Amazon, or Smashwords. For Google Play Store you do have to create your own epub, and I do so with Calibre’s default settings, except that I use version 2 instead of version 1, the default setting, since version 1 returns an error for me.

All that said, I would recommend just letting Amazon or Smashwords create their ebook document from your word document. They know best what they want. However, to create the best looking ebook, and avoid errors, you do need to set up your word document correctly. For example, you may have your word processing document set up to include page numbers. You don’t want page numbers in a document that will be converted to an ebook, since the number of pages changes depending on size of text that the reader of an ebook selects. In addition, there are a number of other things that should be set up for ebooks as well. All of which can be found in the free ebook by Mark Coker; the Smashwords Style Guide which you can download here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/52 While this was written for people planning to upload and publish their books on Smashwords, I have used its procedures without any problem with Amazon Kindle as well.

Mark Coker takes you in a numbered, step by step process through creating a document that will make certain that your book is acceptable to the Smashword’s process of turning it into an ebook. It is not a daunting process. If you are only producing a non-illustrated work of fiction, half of the book will not apply in your case, so don’t let the page count scare you. I use this process for all my books.

They style book sets out guidelines for things like how many blank lines you should have between chapters, the size and style of your text and chapter heading, how to format the pages of your manuscript, and how to eliminate invisible characters that may affect how the text appears once it is converted into an ebook. It tells you how to set up a table of contents, however, this is optional and I just let the publisher’s process create one for me automatically.

The book is written for people using MS Word. I write my books in LibreOffice, but I have found that while the terms and options may look a little different, the programs have basically the same functions and it’s easy translate the directions. Coker also suggests that you might want to make sure your text doesn’t have any unnecessary invisible characters that word processors use in the text to indicate things like a paragraph break, and such. It is possible that some of these unseen characters (unless you toggle them to be visible) might’ve crept in during the writing process and might affect the results of the conversion. This involves copy and pasting your story into a simple text editing app, and then back to your word processing app, the details of which are in the book.

Once I’m done with all this, I use the option in LibreOffice to save the manuscript as a Word 97 document, and then upload it to both Amazon and Smashwords, changing only the “edition name” to match the ebook store I’m uploading to. If you work in MS Word, you’re set to upload your book.

On Amazon that there are several options for what you can upload and publish. I believe that they even have a dedicated ebook maker that you can upload your document into and tinker with online. But, of course, you can just upload the manuscript in the current version of MS Word as well. I use the old version of Word, the “.doc” version, since it works, and why fix something that works?

Step four: uploading your nice clean ebook ready manuscript to Amazon and/or Smashwords. Besides your manuscript, you’ll need a separate JPEG image of your cover in the suggested size. Both places will ask for the manuscript and cover to be uploaded separately. You will also need a blurb, and you’ll have to decide what categories that you want your book to appear in, plus come up with some keywords that will lead people searching those keywords to your book. On both platforms the process is pretty straight forward. With Amazon you’ll have a choice to publish only with Amazon, which gives you some special deals, and automatically lists your book in their Kindle Unlimited program where readers can borrow your book with Amazon paying you for the pages readers read. If you want to release your book on other platforms, this option is not open to you, so be sure to read the instructions carefully.

Step five: select your price and push the publishing button.

Step six: start counting your money. You’re going to need a lot of it to promote your book, but that’s another story.

— Mark Paxson

We talk a lot here about the “rules of writing.” In our video chats, in posts. It seems to be a significant issue within some portion of the writing community. The fodder for much of this comes from Twitter and its very active #writingcommunity.

Every day it seems there are tweets from writers of various levels of experience asking questions about the “rules.” Some of it is just for sake of conversation. Some is just to see what kind of response will be generated. And some of it degenerates into “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not” kinds of responses.

I’m all for good dialogue and interaction on these types of topics. I think we need more of it, which is one of the reasons we talk about these kinds of things around here. (Hint: we’d like more voices on these topics. Hint: we’d like hear from you. Yes, you. Don’t look over. your shoulder as if I’m talking to somebody else. We want to hear from you about writing, your creative process, and all that goes with it.)

Where I want to jump off the cliff is when the dialogue degenerates into those “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not” moments. As I’ve said repeatedly, the only rule in writing is one — write a good story.

But I get that some people need more guidance than that. And that’s what they should look for guidance, not rules.

I recently saw the new Dune movie. It inspired me to read the book again, and once I read the first book, I decided to keep going and see how far I could get into the six books Frank Herbert wrote about the world of Dune. Years ago, I got through the first three books. This time, I’ve made it into the fourth book, unsure if I’ll make it to five and six.

But as I read it today, there are some lines that are very relevant to this discussion about rules and writing. Leto II, the God Emperor of Dune, is talking with one of his underlings, trying to get him to see a point Leto II is making. I’m not going to provide any more context than that to avoid any more spoilers for anybody who might be reading through these books. But, the conversation has nothing to do with writing or with what most people would consider a creative endeavor.

Here is the first statement Leto II makes that struck a chord with me:

There is no such thing as rule-governed creativity.

And the next line:

Rules change with each surprise.

And the final line about Leto II’s one and only rule:

Short-term decisions tend to fail in the long-term.

It’s fascinating to me that these statements are embedded in a conversation that had nothing to do with a traditionally considered creative endeavor. It’s almost as though Herbert was stepping outside of the story and speaking directly to his fans and critics, both of which there were many, and telling them to pipe down. Using his story and this little space in it to essentially say — this is a creative piece and even I don’t necessarily know what is coming next (i.e., things change with each surprise) and considering the lengthy arc of the entire Dune story, one shouldn’t look at only short clips of it, but consider the entire work.

But, that’s not really my point here. My point is that those statements are exactly what I think about the “rules of writing.” Creativity simply cannot be bound by rules. If it is, then it is no longer creation. It is simply following a formula that somebody else established for their own purposes. When creating, you are the god of your universe and you get to establish the parameters within which you are going to create. There is nothing wrong with seeking guidance and input from other writers, or from readers, or from whoever. But always consider it as such — guidance. If it doesn’t fit your creation, toss it aside.

I really like the second statement. Rules change with each surprise. Maybe this doesn’t happen to plotters who have their story outlined, laid out, and fully formed before they start to write. But I know that there are all sorts of surprises that come with each story I write. I have a general idea and I start writing. Sometimes I know the ending, but not much of what happens between the beginning and end. Sometimes I don’t even know the ending. I just have an idea and I want to see what happens.

So, there are surprises along the way and I have to be open to them. And some of those surprises can cause the apple cart to tip over. So, not only do I have to be open to the possibility of surprises, I also have to be open to the possibility that a surprise will completely shift my thinking about the story — meaning the parameters (notice, I try very hard not to say rules) I lay out at the beginning for how I want to tell the story might change as those surprises reveal themselves.

The novel I’m currently working on is a surprise unto itself. A story that started as a short based on one of the writing prompts I posted here a couple of months ago. It has blossomed into 30,000 words at this point and I’m realizing I need to change some foundational things about the story.

It started in first person and when it was just a short story motivated by that prompt, that was fine. But when I got to 29,000 words, I realized that I needed to get deeper into some aspects of the story, reveal more about some of the other characters, and that was going to be difficult do if I kept it in first person. So, I’ve spent the last week or two converting the existing portion from first person to third person. I’m about two-thirds of the way through and now I’m concerned that some good elements that existed in the first person version will be lost as I shift to third person. And I’m toying with going back to first person to keep those elements.

I’m torn between the two versions and one of the reasons why is that there are a multitude of ways to tell a single story. And part of the challenge is to find the right way. The surprises that come along during the creation are one of the things that can make that challenge even greater. If you set in stone the “rules” for your story at the outset and close yourself off to the changes surprises can produce, you may just miss out on the best version of your story.

Which essentially leads into the third statement. Short-term decisions tend to fail in the long-term. I think that’s basically what I just said, just using different words.

Listen to Leto II and his wise words. Creation means bending and breaking the rules. It means keeping your mind open to the surprises that come along the way. Whether writing or painting or sculpting or composing a song. There are all sorts of side paths that can be taken. Colors that weren’t expected. Notes that ring truer than imagined. Those surprises, those side paths are what make these things a creation. Your creation. Don’t let a “rule” stop you from discovering them.

— Mark Paxson

Happy Holidays to all out there who stop by for a visit here and there. I want to thank Berthold, Richard, Audrey, Lucinda, and Chuck for joining me on this little adventure we’ve embarked upon with this website. I haven’t dedicated the time to this blog that I wanted to and it has grown much slower than I hoped. But I’m hopeful that we can keep working on this space and create a bigger conversation among writers.

For all you writers out there, I hope that 2022 brings you words flowing easily, ideas a-poppin’, the publishing path of your dreams, a cure for the block if you have it, more eyeballs on your words than you ever imagined possible, and success and happiness in your creative endeavors throughout the year and beyond.

Happy Holidays everyone!