Tag Archives: Writing

A Publishing Update

— Mark Paxson

Months ago, I posted that I was going to try the traditional publishing route with my latest novel. That effort didn’t last very long. Queries sent, queries rejected. Or just not responded to at all.

So, I decided to go the indie publishing route again. Only, I was going to put a little money into the effort for the first time, beyond some editing costs. I paid for a Kirkus Review of my novel.

The Kirkus reviewer provided a decent review, with some quotes that could be used for marketing purposes, but … the reviewer referred to the novel as a novella and the summary of the story line only included content from the first third of the novel. Which makes me wonder if the reviewer bothered to read the whole thing.

I asked them to fix the reference to it being a novella. It took more than a week to get that done. As the review was finalized, I pushed publish on the e-book version of the novel, while I finished up the formatting for the paperbook.

Let’s just say that the formatting experience became a gift from hell. Or something like that. There are certain things about Word that simply are not intuitive and never will be. Every time I work on formatting something for publication, I have to learn it all over again. It took me days and days and days to get it done.

One of the things I did with this book was to pay for a professional cover. It looks incredible and I never want to DIY on covers again. But that was another $300 down the drain.

Once I pushed publish on the paperback, I ordered author copies from Amazon. Twenty copies to hand out to people as I wish. Unlike when you buy a book from Amazon and it takes two days, sometimes a few more, for delivery, author copies take about two weeks. And for some reason, Amazon split my order of twenty copies into two separate orders. One order was … nineteen books, while the other was for one book. That one book showed up about a week later, and I waited and waited for the other nineteen books. They never showed up. Yesterday, I ordered twenty copies again. Let’s see what happens.

Meanwhile, I’ve entered the book in a couple of book contests, primarily ones focused on independently published books. I await the results. That was another couple hundred bucks invested.

And I’ve tried some promotional websites. EReaderNewsToday, which was so good for me with my first novel eight years ago, has been a difficult nut to crack this time. I submitted the book for their consideration a few weeks ago. Their website said that they were pretty booked and to make sure to submit for a date more than 30 days out. But the submission form required a date within 30 days. So, I requested a date within 30 days, and the book was rejected because they didn’t have enough room.

I re-submitted the book to EReaderNewsToday with a proposed date that was more than 30 days out. They rejected the book because they didn’t have room. Sheesh. Before I started writing this post, I tried for a third time — which is always the charm, right?

I also tried another promo site — GoodKindles. For the small fee of $45, they featured my book. Which means it was the lead book of the day in their emails and tweets to their subscriber list. My book ran on August 2 on their site and in their subscription communications. It produced a grand total of … zero sales.

A couple of days ago, I set up an Amazon ad campaign. I committed $150 to the campaign, which only costs me something if somebody clicks on the ad. What I set up was a campaign for Kindle screens. When you turn on you Kindle or it goes to the lock screen, ads show up, typically for books, but occasionally for other things. The campaign started today. As I write this post, 48 people have seen it, one of them has clicked on it, and none of them have bought the book. But at the moment, I’m only out .32 for that one click!!

This is all a long way of saying that nothing is working and I’m close to being at a complete loss for what to do next. I try to remember Berthold’s words on this topic in previous exchanges. To write for the pleasure of it and for the interaction with whatever readers I have. Between the Kirkus Review, the cover, and the promo efforts I’ve tried, I’m in for more than $1,000 now on this book and it’s actually sold worse than my last book. Even though I think it has more popular appeal that that last book.

What do you do when you get frustrated with results like this? Or do you not get frustrated? This goes back to a concept we’ve discussed frequently around here. It comes down to objective. While I don’t expect to ever write and sell a bestseller, I’d at least like to write books that reach an audience beyond my family, friends, and social media buddies. I’ve yet to figure out how to do that. I’d like to at least make some money at this and not just break even, or in this case, lose money.

It’s a mystery. How to do this in the indie publishing world is becoming almost as opaque as the traditional publishing world. Part of the problem is that there are so many of us. Literally, everybody is publishing a book now. Okay, not literally — almost everybody. It’s hard to find a spot in a limited world when it appears that there is an unlimited number of books out there competing for that spot.

I’m frustrated at the moment, but I’m also oddly motivated. I want to get to my next half completed novel and push it out there and see if that’s the one that can be a breakthrough. And, if not that one, the next one. I haven’t given up. Yet.

Typos: How May Are Too Many

— A Guest Post by Chuck Litka

As a reader and/or a writer, how many typos are too many? One, you say? We’re talking about self-published books here. Still one? We are talking in this world, not heaven, right? Okay, having no typos is an ideal to aim for, but realistically, how many are acceptable? Still none? Be that way.

Putting an actual number to the acceptable number of typos (more than none) is hard. The real world measure is likely the ratio of typos to the quality of writing, i.e. is the writing and story compelling enough to overlook the errors, or not? Still, let’s see if we can try to put a number in that ratio.

I’m going to compare software code to writing. A line of software code does about the same thing as a word or punctuation mark in writing – it conveys a bit of information. And software has errors – bugs. A line of code usually has more letters – things that can go wrong – then a word, but we’ll make adjustments for that as we go.

It is estimated that a shipping software program might have an error rate of 3 to 5 errors per 100 lines of code. This is eventually reduced to somewhere around 1 error per a 100, to 1 error per 1,000 lines with bug fixes after shipping. For writing we’ll consider misspellings, wrong words, missing words, double words, missing or wrong punctuation, and missing or double spaces as typos. In writing 1 typo per 1,000 words, or about 1 every 3 to 4 printed pages is pretty high. If we cut that rate in half, to 1 typo in 2,000 words, we’d get 5 typos in 10,000 words or 50 typos in a 100K word novel, roughly 1 typo in every 5 to 6 pages, on average. I think that we’re now nearing the ballpark, if perhaps still a little high. However, if we cut that rate in half again, to 1 typo in 4,000 words we’d have only 25 typos in a 100K word novel, which I think is an acceptable error rate.

While 15 to 25 typos in a typical self-published novel might still sound like a lot, a significant number of them will never be seen by most readers, just as bugs in software do not affect most users. I send my manuscripts out to 5 or 6 beta readers after we do our in-house proofreading who report the typos they find back to me. Some find more than others, but time after time their lists of typos have remarkably little overlap between them. Different readers find, and miss, different typos. Hopefully between them they find most of my typos, but individually, most of them find less than half of the actual typos present. And these are readers looking for typos. This suggests to me that most readers will notice significantly less than the total number of typos in a story. There are, of course, natural born proofreaders who see every typo. And some of them get annoyed when they bump up against them – and mention it in a review. However, these readers are edge case readers, and I’m not sure whose problem it is.

In software, it is possible to achieve a zero rate of errors, and it’s necessary when human life is at stake – think of self-driving cars. To do so, however, is very expensive and time consuming. The same can be said for eliminating all typos in a manuscript. Traditional publishing has a series of procedures with multiple editors going over every aspect of the work to eliminate all sorts of problems. But this is an expensive and time consuming operation, and it is reflected in the cost of traditionally published books. Self-publishing authors do not have the resources to conduct multiple edits by different professionals. And even self-publishers who spend the money to do it “right” and hire professional proofreaders still aren’t guaranteed a zero error copy. I’ve seen a review that mentioned the “typical self-published” typos for a book that I know had been professional proofread. Still, there may be self-published books with zero typos. Indeed, I find them all the time, but then, I’m blind to typos.

Being blind to typos, I likely underestimate how annoying typos are to most readers. And as someone who has never mastered spelling the idiotic language of English, I’ve long since realized that for a person to know that a word is misspelled, they must know the correctly spelled word – which means that the misspelled word actually worked – it did the job of the correct word. The reader simply had to spend a fraction of a second to translate it. However, I understand that for some readers typos derailed and bump them out of the story. Ideally, all authors would like to prevent this from happening. Our name is on the cover of the book, and its imperfections are our imperfections. However, given how expensive it is to even get close to zero typos, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect a traditional publishing level of copy in a much less expensive self-published book. As I see it, when it comes to books, one can either be persnickety or cheap, but not both. Self-published books are cheap. Very persnickety readers might be more comfortable with the more expensive traditionally published books.

So to sum it all up, I feel that if a writer has a process in place that reduces the rate of wrong words and punctuation down to 1 in 4,000 words or fewer, they’re as close to perfection as any reader of self-published books can reasonably expect. And that’s a hill I’m prepared to die on. But what about you, dear reader? What do you think is an acceptable rate of typos, either as a writer and/or as a reader? Am I being too cavalier about typos? Am I being too dismissive of the adverse effect of typos on readers? What is your standard?

Would You Recognize Your Characters…

— Chuck Litka

…if you ran into them on the street? How clearly do you picture the characters you create for your stories? Do you know exactly what they look like, and how they dress? And do you consider their appearance essential to your stories? I’m curious, because I have only the vaguest idea of what my characters look like. I leave it to my readers to create their own mental picture of the characters, since I don’t have one.

One of my reasons for this, is that I don’t have a visual memory. I can’t even conjure up a mental image of my wife of forty-some years in my mind. Nor of anything else, for that matter. At best I have a vague impression in my mind, the details of which fall apart if I try to focus on the image. The condition even has a name, aphanfasia.

However, I really can’t blame aphanfasia for the lack of description of my characters. If I cared to, I could create a deck of character cards listing their distinctive characteristics. I could scour the web for photographs of people to use as models for my characters. I could keep these cards and photos on hand to consult whenever I wanted to describe how a character looked. But… well, the key words are “if I cared to.” Having lived my life without the details of how people look cluttering my mind, I don’t feel a need to include many details on how my characters look or dress in my stories.

What I do, is select a few general characteristics for each character. I may assign them an eye or a hair color. Maybe they’re slim, lanky, or stout. Maybe they wear glasses or sport a beard. I think I described the major character of my last two books as having a “pretty face.” Rather than relying on visual descriptions of the character, I try to create my characters in the reader’s mind using their dialog and how they act.

And then there’s clothing, another aspect of a character’s appearance that I also skimp on. On describing the clothing, not the clothing itself. Again, I usually mention only a few characteristic features. I picture my spacemen wearing nautical clothes straight out of the clipper ship era, so they have caps (for no particular reason). I have a ship captain who wears a yellow sweater with his black uniform and a sentient robot butler that sports a yellow paisley tie with his formal black suit – as a mark of individuality.

No doubt this light handed approach to character descriptions would not work in some genres and some stories. There are genres where readers expect detailed descriptions of how the characters look, and how they dress – scene by scene. In these cases, omitting detailed descriptions of characters and dress would not meet readers’ expectations. Plus, in many types of stories, clothes can be used to define, or at least hint at, some of the character’s deeper characteristics, as well as their role in society and the story. And as such, describing what they wear may be essential to the story.

However, in my case, I believe that I can rely on my readers to fill in the blanks. And by being unspecific, I’m giving them agency to visualize my characters as they would have them look. Writing for a world audience, being unspecific is likely a plus.

But enough about my approach. How do you approach describing your characters? Do you love to create fully realized mental pictures characters? How do you create them? Do you imagine them first in your mind as a picture, and then describe them in words? Or do they take form as you write more and more about them? I know of one writer who uses a program called “Daz Studio” to create 3D images of her characters – mostly for her own amusement. Still, it is a way to bring imagined people closer to life.  

And finally, how important is the appearances of your characters in your stories and in the stories that you read? Share your opinions and your process.

Writing Simply/Writing Like You Talk

— Mark Paxson

A few days ago, Berthold published a post over on his blog, How Simply Should You Write? The post was in response to some essays by Paul Graham, who has written quite a few essays on a range of topics.

In a nutshell, Graham thinks that one whould write simply and also write the way one talks. Each of those concepts pretty much speak for themselves. Write simply means, well, to write simple. Keep it simple, stupid, in other words. Short simple sentences are better than long, convoluted ones. Be clear, don’t be muddled. Go for understandable words and constructs and don’t try to impress with big words or bigger sentences. From Graham’s perspective, complex writing is more difficult to read, it hides ideas rather than reveals them, and to him at least, complex writing is clumsy writing.

Writing the way one talks is a companion concept. He uses an example: “The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: ‘After Altmira, all is decadence.'” Graham suggests that nobody would talk like this. He can’t imagine anybody calling somebody else mercurial in the course of conversation. His essay on this topic bleeds into the write simply concept, He basically says that his objective is to write in language he would use in conversation. He wants it to be simple and to sound in written form comparable to spoken language. To Graham, spoken language is easier and less complex than written language.

Meanwhile, Berthold disagrees. He points to a couple of examples from George Orwell and Oscar Wilde as evidence that great writers throughout time did not write simply or write the way people talk. He also makes a point that Graham assumes too much about how other people may talk. Maybe Graham wouldn’t describe Picasso as “the mercurial Spaniard,” but Berthold certainly would!!!

Which gets back to the point I always make when somebody tries to suggest there is a “rule” to writing. It depends. It depends on you as the writer. It depends on you as the reader. It depends on all the other readers who might be reading your work.

It also depends on something else, particularly if we’re talking about fiction. How does the narrator talk and think? How do the characters engaged in dialogue talk and act? For instance, one of the things I started a few years ago is a series of short stories, that may become a novel, based on some characters who work for a traveling carnival/circus. The characters in this piece simply don’t talk the way I do. They have a different rhythm, a different language, slang that I’ve never heard off. It would make no sense then for me to write it the way I talk. No, instead, I have to completely strip away the idea of how I talk and, as I’m writing that story, talk in a way that is alien to me. In some respects, it’s kind of like method acting. If I’m ever to complete that story, I’ll have to immerse myself into the rhthym and flow, the accent and the slang, of a group of traveling carnies.

That said … I do think there’s value in what Graham says and with Berthold’s caveats in mind. I think the most important thing we can do as writers is to not make reading a challenge. Zoe Keithley, a wonderful woman who led some writing exercises I attended for several years, always said, don’t make it too hard on the reader. If a story is too difficult to read, the writer is going to lose a lot of readers. So, I agree in general with the concept of writing simply.

But there are degrees to simplicity. Nobody wants to read stories written in the Dick and Jane style, unless they’re teachers of reading in the early grades. Graham has a couple of good suggestions. Write a draft, just let it go and write (something I still haven’t figured out how to do). And then, go back and see how it sounds. Read it out loud. See if you can follow it. Does it sound normal? Or are there places where it’s obvious you’re trying to force something? Okay that last one is really my idea and I think that’s where I realize I’m getting too complicated in my writing. When I go back, and say “huh, that doesn’t sound right. What was I … oh wait, I could cut out half of this sentence, rearrange this, and then … much better.”

In conclusion, I want to go back to that “mercurial Spaniard” criticism. That stuck in Berthold’s craw and it is, in some respects, contrary to so much of what we are told as writers. Don’t use cliches, be unique, make things interesting. And I agree with those things. Maybe one wouldn’t refer to Picasso as a mercurial Spaniard in conversation (although Berthold disagrees), when reading a story … that’s part of the pleasure in reading. Seeing things, words and phrases, that you generally don’t see or hear in normal conversation. It’s what keeps fiction fresh and worth coming back to. How does this writer make another marriage gone wrong sound fresh and worth reading? How does that writer make another murder mystery unique and worth turning the pages? Through different words, different takes, different ways of presenting the pieces of the story.

So, yeah, keep it simple, stupid … but, don’t kill the uniqueness of your story by over-simplifying it. Yes, write the way you talk …. no wait, rewind … write the way your narrators and your characters talk. Push the edges and stretch your imagination. Don’t write the way you talk, write the way the people you have created would talk. And maybe, just maybe, one of them would refer to Picasso as that “mercurial Spaniard.”

A Video Chat — A Conversation with Richard Pastore

— Mark Paxson

We had a wonderful conversation with Richard Pastore, author of The Devil and The Wolf and an upcoming novel he promises to be something different. That’s the thing about indie publishing — a lot of what we read in the indie publishing world is just different than what we see in the traditionally published world. The Devil and The Wolf is a great example of this phenomenon.

Take a look and a listen. If you’re interested in participating in a similar chat, feel free to let us know in comments, or by email at writinghelp2021@gmail.com. We are very interested in getting more authors, more voices, more thoughts and ideas incorporated into what we do here. (In the meantime, after watching this video, I’m going to focus on blinking less.)

Until next time … keep writing, keep creating, keep dreaming.

Is Blind Support A Good Thing?

— Mark Paxson

When I first started blogging and publishing, there were a lot more writers out there in blog land. I got into what I felt was a pretty good community of writers looking to grow and learn, and also to support each other.

One of the tools I learned of back then was a blog tour. Basically, a bunch of bloggers sign up to promote somebody else’s book on their bl0g when it is published. I looked at that and thought, “Why would I promote a book I hadn’t read yet? Give me a chance to read it first and then I’ll decide.” But, for awhile, blog tours were a thing.

There is something similar now going on over on Twitter. #pitmad is a quarterly “event” where writers develop pitches for their manuscripts and tweet them out. Then others retweet those pitches as a show of support. There apparently is some kind of value to retweets. There are a bunch of agents and other writers who “run” this event. The next PitMad is scheduled for tomorrow.

The problem is that in the days leading up to tomorrow, I’m seeing all sorts of writers tweet that they will trade retweets with other writers or that they’ll retweet pretty much anybody’s tweet pitch. Which all leaves me completely unimpressed with the whole concept.

I absolutely totally, 110% believe that writers should support other writers. As Berthold wrote about last month, there are many views of how writers interact with each other, but at the end of the day we should all be in this together. II prefer to reside in a supportive community instead of a competitive community. As a result, I don’t want to bash the general idea behind PitMad.

The concept is a good one. Writers post their pitches and get feedback. It helps them hone their pitches and there are some who have got agents out of their PitMad participation.

However, the idea of blind support just puts me off the whole thing. It turns into a popularity contest instead of a value and quality contest. Support is good, but blind support just doesn’t seem to be very meaningful.

This is one of the things we indie writers should be careful about. I get that the point behind PitMad isn’t necessarily to support indie writers, but instead to support people in their efforts to get noticed by agents and publishers. I think it is relevant to what we do, however.

There is enough of a scarlet letter reputation for indie writers already. We are viewed as the trash heap of the published world by all too many people. So many of us can barely find any readers even when we give our books away. And all too frequently, we hear of readers who have no interest in indie books because of their poor quality.

What does it say about indie writers then that they are willing to endorse books they’ve never read or pitches they’ve never seen? I really think that we owe it to ourselves and to other indie writers to care about quality and to know what we are supporting in the industry before we put out an endorsement. There are enough good quality indie stories out there that we shouldn’t need to show our value in the community by supporting anything and everything that gets thrown out there.

Blind support, while it may feel good and may produce some blind support in exchange, doesn’t really produce any long-lasting value. At least that’s what I think. At some point, it becomes apparent that the support isn’t based on anything real. Here’s the real consequence. If you tell me a book is great on your blog, or on Twitter, and then I go read it and see that it is riddled with typos and barely edited, there’s a very good chance that I won’t pay attention to your recommendations anymore. There’s something else I won’t pay attention to — anything you produce.

Over the last few months I’ve thought of developing a pitch and participating in PitMad at some point. This week’s multitude of “comment here and I’ll retweet your pitch” and “retweet me and I’ll retweet you” tweets has turned me off of the whole thing.

What do you think? Ever participated in PitMad or a blog tour or anything else like that? Every endorsed a book you hadn’t read? (I’m open to the possibility. I’m interested in the why.)

Using the World of Englishes in Our Writing

A Guest Post by Chuck Litka

Like most self-published authors, I publish one English edition for the world. This means that some readers will find words spelled differently, or, dare I say, “wrong.” Or “wrong”. Since, in British English, the period goes outside of the quotation mark. Some readers will also have to translate, if they can, the different English terms for the same item, i.e. cookies vs biscuits, hood vs bonnet. And of course, every region of English speakers and readers have their own phrases and speech patterns, who may find my English off kilter and perhaps, hard to follow. While I don’t see this as a major problem, publishing one version worldwide does has its little issues.

However, if you look at it a little cross-eyed, you can find a silver lining in these little issues. If you’re always going to be wrong somewhere in the world, why not take advantage of that fact? Why not adopt parts of the different Englishes and use them to your advantage? For instance, in British English, unlike American English, you don’t use periods behind Mr or Mrs or any such title. Since that period tells the reader nothing they don’t already know, why waste a keystroke to clutter up your sentence with a useless period in the middle of it? It’s merely a regional convention, and you’re publishing for the world. I’ve eliminated those useless periods.

Adopting different spellings is a lot more risky, since there are readers out there laying in wait to pounce on any preconceived misspellings, especially if you try to mix and match conventions. However, I use the British “grey” rather than the American “gray” because “grey” brings to my mind a sharp, clear color, be it dove grey or battleship grey. Whereas “gray” brings to mind the murky, muddy color of the clay I used to play with as a child. However, beyond that, well, I was (rightly) dinged for my typos, wrong words, and misspellings in my early editions, so I don’t care to venture too much deeper into that potentially dark valley. However, I could see using the British spelling of words for a British character, while using American English for an American character just to add color to the characters. In my stories with British narrators, I turned on the British English spellchecker and used the British spellings, plus as many British terms as I could, though I likely fell woefully short in the latter, given my rather distant view of that variety of English.

And, as I mentioned, there are all those different terms in American and British English for common things. These can be more easily mixed in than the different spellings. I usually use “lift” instead of “elevator” and “flat” instead of “apartment” simply because I like them better, for whatever reason. On the flip side, there are words that mean two different things, for instance, “jumper” which is a sweater in British English, and a dress of sorts in American English, which you might not want to substitute. Still, if we are writing for the world, why not write for the world and use all the English we have at our disposal?

The British convention that I adopted right from the beginning is the single quotation mark – ‘’ – for dialogue, rather than the American double quotation mark – “” – for three reasons.

First, it works just fine. It’s largely invisible. No reader has ever complained about my use of the single quotation marks. And you know they would, if it bugged them.

Secondly, I think that it makes sentences look more streamlined – more elegant. That is just my opinion, of course, but I like how it does the job in a nice, understated way.

And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it saves me time, effort, and perhaps some pain as well. I don’t have to stretch and hunt for the shift key for every quotation mark and use two keystrokes for it.  

I like to do things efficiently, and hitting one key instead of two for every quote makes my writing just a little more efficient. Of course, I still have to hit the shift key for the capital letter that follows the first quotation mark, but I’m pressing it down for a beat less, and the quotation mark at the end is a pure win. All these tiny movements in typing, repeated millions of times, add up. While I’ve avoided carpal tunnel syndrome so far, I still find that by the end of a final draft of a story, I can feel a bit of soreness in my left pinky finger, my shift key finger, despite using the single quotation mark.

It is said that the English language is the richest language in the world. As writers of English for the world, why not embrace the full scope of English and explore how we can enrich our English from this treasure trove. And, perhaps, save a few keystrokes along the way.

What do you think? What English conventions do you use in your writing? Have I missed some neat English tricks for efficiency and elegance? Or, on the other hand, do you see problems that I don’t in mixing and matching Englishes?


I am an amataur author. I write just for the fun of creating. I’ve enjoyed writing all my life, eventually taking the plunge into self-publishing in 2015. While most of my novels are old fashioned romances — adventures in exotic imaginary worlds, I have written something of a romance, and have just completed something of an old fashioned whodunit. I’m looking to write a Gothic style story next. 

A Video Chat — What We Like About Writing

Audrey, Berthold, and Mark take on a topic. To get away from the rules of writing and what can sometimes be too much focus on the negatives about writing, we decided to talk about what we like about writing. We spent a few minutes on that topic. The conversation eventually morphed into a conversation about how we write, primarily Audrey’s method. Take a look and let us know what you like about writing.

Side note: we found a theme song for our videos. Father John Misty’s I’m Writing a Novel. We used the opening lines of the song at the beginning of this video, but for some reason it didn’t take. So, here are the opening lines:

I ran down the road, pants down to my knees
Screaming “please come help me, that Canadian shaman gave a little too much to me!”
And I’m writing a novel because it’s never been done before

Another View on Writing

I’ve tried to get Trent Lewin to join this blog. There’s even a page all ready for him should he decide to leap in. Trent writes some of the most inventive fiction I’ve found in my time blogging and reading other writers, and he is currently traveling the publishing route for a novel he recently completed. I know he has thoughts and advice for other writers.

For instance, here’s what he posted earlier today. It’s a bit of a twist on our regular conversation around here about the “rules of writing.” Trent doesn’t talk directly about the rules. Instead, he talks in his brilliantly snarky way about misperceptions people have of writers. More specifically, great writers.

I want to take a moment to respond here to his identified misconceptions about writers.

  1. Writing What You Know. We’ve talked about this in our video chats and it appears Trent agrees. I can’t say strongly enough how frustrated I get when I hear somebody say that writers need to write what they know. Trent even uses one of the examples I’ve used — JRR Tolkien. That’s kind of an unfair example though. The whole point of fantasy is to make up worlds and characters. But … isn’t that what all fiction is, whether set in Middle Earth or Detroit. It’s made up, it’s fictional, it is the product of the writer’s imagination. Limiting writers to “what they know” would be monumentally boring, unimaginative and not worth the effort.
  2. Saving Ideas for the Mega-Hits. As Trent suggests, writers don’t coast here and there, and only pull the big guns out for the big story. At least not “great writers.” No, (and before I say this, understand I don’t think I’m a great writer) we try to hit it out of the park every single time we put words together. We want each story to be better than the last in a constant search for perfection. It’s why writing can be so difficult, so emotionally draining. We want each piece to stand on its own and reach to the heavens and, more importantly, reach you and make you feel something. Whether it is to laugh or to cry, to feel anger or joy.
  3. Writers and Social Media. It’s the trade-off between the writing life and the promotional efforts to find readers. Trent is right. Great writers write, they care about the craft far more than they do about what’s happening on Twitter. Sadly, as I continue to struggle with my writer’s block, I spend way too much time on social media. 😉
  4. Great writers don’t outline. Trent suggests this is a misconception about writers. And again, I’m not claiming that I’m a great writer, but I don’t outline, except for vaguely in my head. I think it’s entirely possible to be a great writer without outlining. In fact, I’m going to push back on this a bit — part of the creative process is in the discovery. An outline, particularly one that is too detailed or too rigid, can stifle creativity and cause a writer to miss the hidden gems that show up along the way.
  5. Writers Write Every Day. Again, Trent says this is a misconception. I agree. But it’s interesting how many established, published authors insist that writing every day is a must. As Trent says, most writers simply cannot do that. There is far too much life going on to be able to sit down and write daily. There was a time when I wrote almost every day. Back when I first started and I was incredibly productive. No matter what was going on, I found some space in each day to write and I was happy with that. A little progress here and there was a good thing. Now, not so much. Too many distractions (see social media), too many frustrations, and likely unrealistic expectations.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

6. Writers All Have Degrees From Prestigious Writing Programs. If this were true, I should put my pad and paper (laptop) away and never started. Not only do I not have any such degree, I never took any English classes after high school. I hated the topic so much and hated writing so much back then that I didn’t take any English classes in college. Not a one. The last thing I wanted to do was have to read great literature and then disect the why and wherefore of the author’s product. The last thing I wanted to do was write. And the other thing about this misconception is this — there are many ways to write a story, many styles, genres, and story types. The sneaky feeling I have when I read things that cater to the MFA world is that people who go through those programs are forced into a particular style of writing. I subscribed to Glimmer Train for a few years at one point and eventually gave it up because I was tired of reading stories written in the same wandering, rambling, deep thought vein. So, no, writers don’t need those degrees. In fact, for purposes of creativity and different ways of storytelling, I think it’s better if they don’t.

7. Great Writers Don’t Rewrite Numerous Times. This is a misconception I struggle with. Yes, great writers likely rewrite numerous times and maybe that’s why I’ll never be a great writer (and I’m okay with that, by the way). I edit as I write for the most part and once I type The End, I’m more or less done with the story. I do some tinkering and typo fixes and make sure there aren’t any glaring holes or omissions or consistenty issues, but for the most part … I never rewrite a story once I type those last words.

8. Great writers regurgitate because every story has been told. This is one that drives me crazy. The “every story has been told” criticism. I remember when I completed my first novel hearing from a beta reader that they didn’t know if the book was marketable because it’s a story that has been told over and over again, and what about my version was special. This kind of thing pretty much drives me crazy. It ties in with some of these other issues. If every story has been told, why are we bothering with any of this. Wouldn’t every writer just put their pen down and go swimming or mountain-climbing? No, because every story hasn’t been told. I guarantee that nobody told Henry Thornton’s story before I wrote The Irrepairable Past, and I guarantee nobody has written the story of Lily, Sophie, and Peter until I wrote The Dime.

9. Adapting a Commercial Style. I absolutely agree with Trent on this one. Writers should write what they want to write, in the voice they want to write in, telling the stories they want to tell. And if they do that, their love of the craft and the story will shine through and bring attention to them. Many “great writers” were horribly unpopular in their day, only to be seen as the visionaries they are now. Write what you love, not necessarily what you know, but what you love.

10. Successful Writers Didn’t Get Rejected. Yes they did. The vast, vast majority of them did. It’s an inherent part of any creative endeavor. Rejection is just as much a part of writing as the words are. It’s unfortunate, but a reality.

So … what do you think? Do you have any other favorite misconceptions about writing? Do you disagree with Trent? Agree? Share your thoughts in comments.

Let’s Talk Description

Something I’ve worried about a lot with my writing is that I don’t include enough description. Of people. Of settings. Of all sorts of things. I recently re-read my first novel to get some ideas for some follow-up short stories and was surprised at how much description was in the book.

These days it seems like I don’t include much. I just want to tell the story. Leave the details to the imagination of the reader.

What got me thinking about writing a post about this was a realization I had for my recently completed novel. There are three main characters. The narrative is in first person and switches back and forth between those three characters — Lily, Sophie, and Pete. My realization? That I don’t think anywhere in the 80,000 words of this story do I describe what they look like.

Oh, there are little tidbits here and there. We know Sophie is in a wheel chair because she was paralized in an accident when she was five. But beyond that? I really don’t know. I don’t share the details of how they look Hair color. Body type. The size of their noses. Or the color of their eyes. They just are. Three people occupying space in this story that takes them through three years of their lives.

When it comes to setting, I think I use more description, but still it remains pretty minimal. Fireflies dancing in the yard. Ambulance lights flashing in the night. The rocky shore of the Great Sacandaga. Things like that. But the thing is, generally that minimal description fits within the flow of the story. Or at least I hope it does.

There are a couple of reasons I use minimal description. I go back to the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference I attended a few years ago (where the first two chapters of this novel were what I submitted for critique in the group sessions I participated in). One of the writers in that group kept criticizing other people’s works because they didn’t explain this, or describe that, or reveal something else. Each time she offered that criticism, I wanted to stand up and say, “that is what your imagination is for.” I don’t think good writing involves revealing every last detail or every single element of the characters and their story. A good story includes some mystery, some gaps that the reader fills in with his or her imagination.

In writing, I’m also informed by my own reading habits. I tend to skim over description. Particularly when it goes on for lines and lines and lines. That kind of description, to me, pulls the reader out of the story. When I read books that include that kind of description, I may skip chunks of the text until I see something that suggests the story is picking up again.

As I mention above, I think it important that writers try to include description within the flow of the story. Instead of stopping the story to tell us every last detail of how somebody looks or what is in a room, ask yourself, “what is the narrator seeing? what is the narrator feeling?” Answer those questions with something that fits within the flow of the story. The articles listed below have some good examples of both doing this and not doing it.

A few months ago, I participate in a writing prompt exercise with a group of other writers. One of the other writers wrote a scene with some of her characters walking along a forest and meadow near the ocean. She dropped in small descriptors within the flow of the story based on what the characters were seeing, what they were going through as they walked, rather than setting off the description of the area in a paragraph that broke up the flow of the scene. I think that’s how to go about description.

And don’t be afraid, never be afraid, of leaving things to the reader’s imagination. Yes, somebody will complain that there isn’t enough description. But if you include more, somebody else will complain that there is too much description. As with most of these concepts and “rules,” it really depends on the writer and the reader. Each of us is different. But be aware of the issue and try to find the sweet spot.

Now, I need to go back to that “completed” novel and ponder whether I included enough description. I think I did — it’s the story that is far more important than the description.

What do you think? Description? Yay or nay?

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A couple of other views on the topic:

https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/common-writing-mistakes-much-description/

https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/common-writing-mistakes-much-description/

https://www.scribophile.com/blog/too-much-description-or-too-little