Rules and Triggers

— Mark Paxson

Audrey Driscoll writes some great stuff about writing. Her latest is about rules and an experiment she ran. Go read her post to see what it was.

One of the things that bothers me about all of these social media “conversations” about the rules of writing is that I wonder if anybody actually reads a story with the “rules” in mind. I don’t. Of course, that may be because I don’t believe in the “rules,” but still I read a story for the enjoyment of it, for the escape it provides. While I’m reading something, I’m not paying attention to sentence structure or word choice or the use of adverbs. I’m just reading the story.

Isn’t that what a writer’s objective should be? Isn’t that also a reader’s objective? To fall into the story and stay there until the end. I don’t know of any rule I’ve heard of that would necessarily help me with that as a reader.

Yes, there are certain things that can cause me to lose interest in a story. I think my two biggest pet peeves are (a) too much description; and (b) too many characters introduced too quickly. Either of those two things can pull me out of a story pretty quickly. The first because I get bored by description and the second because it just gets too confusing too quickly. But for the rest of it … I want to read the story the way the writer wanted to tell it.

Meanwhile, a while back I saw list of Kurt Vonnegut’s rules of writing:

  1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. (My note: the old, avoid cliches nonsense.)
  2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

After I saw this list, I came across a completely different list that purported to be Vonnegut’s rules for writing. So, who knows? Maybe this is all BS and Vonnegut never said any of these.

Here’ is my question … do any of you think about things like this while you’re writing? I’ll be honest. I almost never do. Yes, occasionally, I decide something is too cliched, but frequently decide not to change it because if something is commonplace than it can connect to a reader more easily. Not everything in every story has to be creative and uniquely yours.

And yes, particularly when I’m editing something, I may look for words that can be cut out to make my sentences less wordy.

But I just don’t see how I could ever keep all of these things, rules, in my mind while I’m writing or even while I’m editing. The whole process would take even longer than it already does if I had to think about all of these things.

At the end of the day, what I do is … just write. I’m curious though to hear what the process looks like for people who are more concerned with these types of issues.

Which leads me to another rule, but one for publishing rather than writing. Trigger warnings. I feel like we’ve discussed this before here, but I saw this post on the topic and found it as spot on as possible on this topic.

I worked on putting together an anthology recently. One of the writers wanted a trigger warning for her story because it involved a suicide. The only problem is that the suicide was essentially the end of story reveal. I talked her out of it for that reason and suggested that, if the anthology got published, we could have a generic trigger warning for the entire anthology. Due to the theme for the collection, most stories, if not all, were going to be a bit dark.

Other writers involved in the project were dead set against any kind trigger warning. I side with them. Part of reading is the discovery and it is fiction, so none of it is real. I don’t want to discount the very real trauma people experience and can experience in reading a story, but I’m with the author of that blog post. The genre of a story, the blurb of the story, and other aspects of the book will give, or should give, enough of a clue about the content for most readers, and as writers our job isn’t to hold a reader’s hand as they read. It is to tell them a story, that at times can be unsettling.

An Interview with Hozier

— Mark Paxson

People who follow me in other parts of the internet likely know that I am a huge fan of Hozier, an Irish musician whose very first single was Take Me To Church. The song was a huge hit becoming one of the first songs to hit one billion streams on Spotify. He followed I up with one of my favorite albums — Wasteland, Baby.

I’ve rarely heard him talk about his art, but listening to his music, I can tell he takes this stuff seriously. He touches on a lot of themes in his music and sings with an appealing passion. I saw him live in September 2019 at the Memorial Auditorium in Sacramento. The auditorium is a historic place that only seats a few thousand people. Hozier is now performing in much larger arenas.

Anyway, that’s the back story to why I’m sharing this video. A friend shared this with me a few days ago and I listened to it while I weeded the front yard yesterday. There are a lot of things in here that I think creative people deal with, but that a lot of us don’t necessarily talk about.

I share it here … just because. I found it interesting and refreshing to hear that a man who has achieved such monumental success in such a short time struggles with many of the same things I do.

Audiobooks on Amazon

Did any, or all, of you fellow authors with books on Amazon receive an invite to try out Amazon’s new beta program of converting your ebooks to audiobooks to be sold on Audible using their virtual voice narration?

I did and I was wondering if anyone else received the invite and if you have, have you tried this service. I gave it a try, so if you have the opportunity and are interested in my experience, let me know, and I’ll describe my experience.

Proofreading with Google Docs and Grammarly

I’m a sloppy writer. I simply transcribe the voice in my head, paying minimal attention to the words I’m typing. Being a lifelong touch typist, I can clip along, stopping only to correct all those red underlined misspellings. Moreover, I tend to read what I expect to read, so between these two characteristics, I can read my manuscript three to six times and still miss many double words, many missing little words, and never see the difference between where and were, or its and it’s. I need a copy editor. I need my wife. And my beta readers. And Google Docs and now, Grammarly.

I write in LibreOffice, which has a rudimentary grammar checking function – one that begins and ends at telling me when to use “a” and “an.” Several years ago, I discovered that Google Docs has a much better one, so I uploaded and ran all my books through Google Docs to clean them up a bit. For my newest novel, I decided to add the free version of Grammarly to my proofreading arsenal. So how does this system work? Can you rely on Google Docs or Grammarly, or both to do your proofreading for you?

Google Docs does a good job of finding double words, some wrong words, and most missing words. But not all, as I discovered when I uploaded the Google corrected copy to Grammarly. It is good for detecting the proper tense, but it doesn’t pay much attention to punctuation or spacing.

For Grammarly, I used the free web version to proofread my latest book after running it through Google Docs. I uploaded it chapter by chapter to be edited. Before Grammarly edits your work, you’re given several options to choose from to set the level and aim of Grammarly’s editing process. I chose “Expert” “Informal” and “Tell a story” as my guidelines. So how did Grammarly do?

First off, Grammarly loves compound words. Google Doc never mentioned them. Before, I never knew when to compound adjectives, so that I almost never did. But after Grammarly, I’m going to compound every damn pair, as it seems that anything and everything goes. I’m exaggerating, but it was a lesson in the use of compound words. Besides telling me to use all those hyphens, I’d say 75% of the suggested edits involved adding or subtracting commas. I made the lazy editorial decision just to go along with Grammarly on commas, it should know, right? Before, I put them in places that I knew they belonged and when the voice in my head paused, and where I think the auto-narrator of my books should pause as well. However, Grammarly not only put in more of them, but I think it eliminated commas that my wife thinks should’ve been there. Though to be fair, while I believe that I would’ve also put in the missing ones – they were places that I would’ve put them – I can’t swear that I did actually have them there before Grammarly removed them. Grammarly also found more missing words, and corrected the wrong words, i.e. where instead of were, et al that Google Doc missed. So it was a plus, overall.

Grammarly also offered several suggestions for phases that it thought were too wordy. I ignored those suggestions. Given free reign, I’ve a feeling that Grammarly would strip creative writers of their authorial voice. Thus, my readers will read a few extra words, like it or lump it. It also would occasionally tease its premium service, telling me of two hundred ways it could make my chapter less wordy and confusing, if I paid them. The whole experience, however, was easy. You just click a button to make the suggested changes you approve of, so that it didn’t take me more than two hours to go through a 105K novel. However, you can, and should be fussier than I was. Lesson learned.

I was confident that when I handed this Google Doc & Grammarly proofread ms over to my wife, it would be a clean copy. It wasn’t. There was that question of missing commas, which can easily be addressed in the future, but both services also didn’t catch a few missing word – those little “to”s and “the”s – and neither made any objections to the semicolons I used, which my wife, a stickler for semicolons, objected to.

Note; for example, I’m editing this in Google Docs, and it underlined in red “semi-colon” just now, and suggested “semicolon,” but it didn’t object to the “semi-colon” when it appeared in the line above. These are the inconsistencies that make the Google Doc less than perfect for proofreading.)

Anyway, the semicolon issue can be fixed by going back to always using em-dashes for everything, like I have in the past.

So, looking at the big picture, when I started writing, my wife would find half a dozen or more typos and errors on every page. I’ve gotten more mindful over the last decade, so that now, together with Doc and Grammarly, there can be two, three, four pages without a single error, and most of those errors involve commas this time around. Which is to say, I’ve seen a significant improvement in the process. And knowing all the errors I corrected in Google Docs and Grammarly, I have to give a lot of that credit to Docs and Grammarly.

So, is it worthwhile to upload your ms to Google Docs, or upload it to Grammarly, or use both, seeing that neither are perfect?

The first thing to remember is that both services are free. You can’t beat the price, especially if you’re considering hiring a proofreader or editor. You have no way of knowing if that professional editor is simply using Grammarly Pro to do their work for them. I don’t think human proofreaders guaranteed their work to be error free or your money back. Given this, it would seem to me to be time well spent doing your own proofreading with the help of these two free programs. And if you want more of an editor than a simple proofreader, it might be well worth spending a little money on a month of Grammarly premium to see all those hundreds of suggestions it has to improve your writing instead of big bucks on a professional editor. All in all, I think that the free version is good enough for most of us, especially if you’re better at proofreading than I. It could simply serve as a quick quality check, and perhaps a tutorial on the use of commas and compound words.

Bottom line; you get more than what you pay for. They’re not quite good enough to produce a perfectly clean copy all by themselves, but they certainly can save a lot of time in the proofreading process.

A Thing I’m Trying

— Mark Paxson

I’ve been pondering writing a post about a negative experience I had with an agent on Twitter, but decided to let it go and write about something more positive. A few weeks ago, Maddie Cochere wrote about her “habit tracker.”

The idea intrigued me and seemed to along with my theme for 2024 — Turning Bad Habits Into Good Habits. I spend a lot of time doing not much of anything, looking at my phone more than I should, and just not getting enough things done. Not just the things I have to do, but the things I want to do, that I claim that I enjoy doing. Like writing.

After reading Maddie’s post, I decided I would try something similar to see if it could help me turn bad habits into good habits. As usual with these things, I’m taking a little bit of a different spproach. Some of the good habits aren’t necessarily daily in nature. For instance, one of them is just a reduction in screen time on my phone (which my phone only tells me about once a week). And another is to get outside for a bike ride. Again, not something I can do every day, but that I want to get to once or twice a week once the winter weather is over.

I’m also not committing do do the “daily” activities every single day, or a certain number of days a week. Instead, I have five “daily” things on my habit tracker. I plan on adding more, modifying what I already have, and trying to keep the list fresh.

For purposes of this blog, one of the habits on the tracker is to write at least one hour. If I do, I get to check the box. And this is where the reward comes in. Much like children in kindergarten who have a sticker chart, or a card system where the color of the card in their slot indicates what kind of day they had, there is an intrinsic reward in being able to check the box (or get the sticker or the green card).

After a few months of struggling with getting started on my current WIP, I started this habit tracker about three weeks ago. In that time, I’ve added 5,000 words to that WIP. That may not sound huge to you, but for me … I had written less than 2,000 in the previous few months, so those 5,000 words are huge.

As stated above, my goal isn’t to write every single day because I know that’s not possible. But instead, of the five things I have on the tracker, I want to be able to check three of them off each day. I don’t manage that every day, but the tracker helps me keep these habits in mind and motivates me to do them in the quiet moments when I would normally just stare at my phone. In the three weeks I’ve been doing this, my phone screen time has gone down by 5%, 10%, and 8%. I’ve been exercising more, napping less, and writing more.

So … if you find yourself stuck in a rut and want to turn things around, give kindergarten a try and reward yourself when you so good.

What’s Your Favorite

— Mark Paxson

Last year, I started going to craft fairs to sell my books and photography. I also did one book fair. So far, I’ve done three events with plans for more this year. All told, I’ve probably sold around 25 books via those three events.

But they have exposed me to a brand new question. I offer six books. A couple of novels, two novellas, and two short story collections. The question is … which one is your favorite?

I’m about to write a blog post for my personal blog where I attempt to answer that question in detail. (I won’t do so here because when we started this blog, one of my conditions was that this is not a place for any of us to promote our own works. We may mention them at times when discussing various aspects of our writing life, but I feel like a post where I talk about why I like or don’t like my books would cross the line.)

It’s like being asked which of your children is your favorite. The honest answer is that none of your children are. That you love each of them and likely for different reasons for each child. And, if you’re really honest, there are also times when you can’t stand each of your children, likely also for different reasons for each.

I’m curious though, for those of you with multiple books or stories published, if any of you deal with this question and how you answer it.

Your Recipe for Writing

I’ve identified five ingredients that go into creative writing; talent, education, examples, practice, and life experiences. I wonder if and how everyone’s recipe for writing is different. So I am wondering, what’s your recipe for writing?

A talent for writing is an ability you’re born with enabling you to put words, sentences, paragraphs and stories together in a coherent manner. It’s the wellspring of inspiration, as well as the steel spring that drives you to write. Many people have stories in their head, but it takes a special talent to bring those stories out, find the words to fit them, and then, set them down – all the way to the end – without it being a class assignment.

Education can be a university MFA degree, college or night school courses taken, seminars attended in person or online, and/or reading and studying how-to-do books or articles on writing. Education offers a tool set of established conventions and techniques that can enhance, expand, and shape one’s intrinsic talent to write.

Examples are what I call the books, movies, and TV shows we’ve read, viewed and enjoyed which have informally informed our concepts of what storytelling is all about. These are sources of education and inspiration that we unconsciously absorb and inform the way we write. While we may absorb certain aspects of styles and subjects, they are not read as text books, though I suppose one can study them as such.

Practice is simply what we’ve learned about writing from writing, writing, writing, and writing over the hours, years, or decades we’ve done it.

Life experiences are what we bring to our writing from what we’ve experienced in living our real lives. It may also include the experiences of others that we have observed in our life. I’ve also placed mundane real world considerations, like having the place, the time, and the energy to write, as well as the tools to write, under this heading.

If you can think of any other ingredients that contribute to your ability to write, please feel free to include them. The question I have for you, dear readers, is what’s your recipe? Can you estimate the share of each of these ingredients in your writing? I expect that it varies from writer to writer and I’m certain other writers would be interested to see the different approach we take to do the one thing we all do.

To get the ball rolling, I’d say that, for me, I believe that talent accounts for 50% of my writing. I’m a big believer in talent. I had the desire to be a writer from the time I started reading. When I started college, I signed up as a journalism major. I wanted to learn to write, not read old books. But I realized that I was too shy to interview people, and decided that if I had the talent, I could write, and if I didn’t, education would not make up for the lack of it. So I switched majors and took my chances. I feel the same way today, some 50 plus years later. Talent is king.

For me, education only accounts for 5%. I took an agriculture journalism course in college, and later, a written communications class in night school when I was thinking of getting a certificate in technical writing. Neither of them had any influence on my writing. The 5% comes from just one class, the most useful class I ever took; my high school typing class. Learning to touch type on manual typewriters has been something I’ve used all my life. Of course you can write novels by hand, or by hunting and pecking, but being able to touch type makes getting ideas into words almost seamless. It’s only 5%, but It’s an important 5%.

Examples accounts for maybe 20% of my writing. I’ve read several thousand novels over the last 60 years and while they have certainly influenced my writing style, I don’t consciously try to imitate any particular writer or style. However, I do think they form the basis of what I think a story should be. Plus, some books, TV shows, and genre fiction have inspired me to write my own versions of their themes.

Practice probably accounts for 15% of my writing. I find it hard to tease this factor out from talent, as it is a direct expression of one’s talent. On one hand that number seems low, but on the other hand, for better or worse, I don’t see a lot of evolution in my writing over the years. Little things have gotten better; but I think I’ve always had a certain voice, and that goes back to my first adult work, some 40 years ago.

Lastly, there’s life experiences. I’m left with 10% to allocate to my life experiences. I don’t think I’m skimping too much in this category. Thankfully, I’ve lived a nice uneventful life, so my real life plays no part in my writing. The 10% in this category comes from the tools and time of life that I now enjoy; which is to say the time retirement has given me to write, and the computer – with spell checking, – that I use to write, as well as the internet, ebooks, and the self publishing opportunities that living in the 21st century has provided. All these things have made writing so much easier. I’ve written a novel and a long novella on a manual typewriter, and when I was working, so I know it is possible to do without all these modern inventions, but they never got published, and it is unlikely that I would have written what I have published, without computers, ebooks, and the prospect of self publishing my work, making effort worthwhile.

So my recipe is 50% talent, 5% education, 20% influences, 15% practice, and 10% life, which should add up to 100% if I got my math right. Now, what is your recipe?

Apple Audiobooks; Not for the Fainthearted

From Debra Purdy Kong’s blog via her comments on Audrey Driscoll’s blog, I recently learned that Apple is offering to convert the ebooks into auto-narrated audiobooks – for free. Audiobooks are popular and the price was right, so I investigated the prospect. I found that I did not have to get my books into the Apple Store on my own, rather the conversion is done in partnership with Draft2Digital. I already had my books on D2D, but I was only distributing them to the two European stores, using Smashwords for Apple and all the rest. I would have to switch to D2D to be able to take advantage of the offer. Which I did, and adding all the other stores while dropping Smashwords for distribution, while I was at it.

So here’s the deal. To create an Apple audiobook, you simply select your book on D2D, and click on the audiobook tab next to the description of your book. Here you are offered two options; one to to work Finaway Voice, and the other to have them auto-narrated by Apple. Clicking on the Apple narration takes you to a very (i.e. too) simple interface to create your audiobook.

First, you will need a square cover for your book, which you can either provide a (3000×3000 pixels) one, or let D2D make one from your ebook cover. I had made square covers for my Google audiobooks, but I had to up size them to the 3000×3000 size required by Apple.

Next you have a choice of two voice tones for narrators; a soprano voice, i.e. a female voice, or a baritone, i.e. male voice. And that, my friends, is the only choice you have. Apple actually has 6 AI narrators; one in each sex for fiction and romances, a slightly different one for science fiction and fantasy, and a very serious one for non-fiction. However, the narrator comes with the genre of your book, you don’t get to choose more than the genre.

After you select the sex of your narrator, and the genre of your book, you get to choose your price, and then agree that, among other things, that you will not be able to make changes in the audiobook without paying for them, and that you need to keep the book listed for at least 6 months. And that the conversion process may take up to 2 months .Agree and you’re done. If there is anything more to do after the audiobook is generated, nothing was mentioned.

Debra Purdy Kong decided not to go with the auto-narrated books for reasons you can read in her post. I decided to take advantage of the offer, not without some misgiving. The primary reason for signing on is that my auto-narrated Google books now account for 1/3 of my sales – over 12,000 copies since May of 2022 – and their ratings match their ebook ratings, so that it seems my auto-narrated customers are happy with Google’s results. I would think Apple wouldn’t do auto-narration half-assed, despite the total lack of control the author has over the final result, so I expect them to be as good as AI narrators get. Secondly, I sell the audiobooks for free, so I don’t have to weigh value/quality with price. If people want to look a gift horse in the mouth and complain, fine, but I won’t lose any sleep over it. Thirdly, all my books are first person narratives, so a single narrator is the natural way to read my stories. I’m not an audiobook fan, and from what I’ve sampled, I’ve found that narrators using different voices for different characters sound hokey. No doubt that’s just me. I know some audiobook fans buy books just to hear their favorite narrators. And finally, while my books on Google far outsell Apple, being able to offer my audiobooks right in the Apple Store for an attractive price, may prove to be popular. Time will tell.

I will admit that the total lack of control over the final product is a bit worrisome. I outlined my experience with Google’s audiobook procedure in this post. Suffice to say that you have not only far more options for voices – 12 different English voices for each sex; including American, British, Australian, and Indian accents – but the book is ready in hours, so that you can listen to it, or individual words, to hear how the AI pronounced them – and, if necessary, change how they are pronounced – before you publish the audiobook. For a writer of science fiction who makes up a lot of words for names and places, the ability to hear how they sound is kind of important. This lack of oversight and control makes the whole Apple audiobook venture not for the faint of heart. Or for the persnickety and /or control focused author. But nothing ventured, nothing gained, and trying new ventures is how I promote my books. I’ll report back in a few months to let you know how I fared.