7 surefire writing tips for April

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I thought I’d kick off the month with a quick list of writing tips that are sure to create a bestseller.

1. Don’t write every day. Writing is like lifting weights. Your mental muscles need to rest every other day, or you might strain something and damage it permanently.

2. Don’t read other people’s work. When you create something, it needs to come from you alone. You can’t write something pure and honestly yours if you have other people’s words swimming around in your head.

3. The more words, the better. A short novel is the sign of an amateur writer. Anything less than 100,000 words is a disgrace.

4. The first chapter should be mostly backstory. Your readers need to get to know your characters before they can get into the real action. Flashbacks are really useful for this, and you can use as many as you want.

5. Don’t nitpick. 99% of the time, the first version you write will be the best version. Don’t second-guess yourself. Anyone who criticizes your grammar or sentence structure just obviously doesn’t understand art.

6. Use a cool font. Times New Roman is kind of boring. Comic Sans is much more fun looking, and it will add whimsy to your writing.

7. Take up smoking. That way your hands will have something to do when you’re not typing.

BONUS TIP: Once you get published, make sure that on the front cover, your name is bigger than the title of the book. Branding yourself as an author is way more important than promoting the story itself.

Lemony Snicket: four victories and one epic fail

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A Series of Unfortunate Events. Even the title is enough to spark interest for its sheer cleverness. First, because of the play on the word “series,” and second, because “unfortunate events” is simultaneously charming and intriguing – a word which here means “makes you long to pick it up and peruse its pages.”

And Lemony Snicket’s thirteen-volume series does not disappoint. Except in one important respect.

Mr. Snicket, as stated, does not lack charm. His whimsical wit is reminiscent of Lewis Carroll and Douglas Adams, but with melancholy overtones. A chapter titled “Déjà vu” opens with a description of the stated phenomenon. We read to the end of the page, turn that page – and find ourselves reading the same page again. And this is only one in a long list of amusing devices.

Mr. Snicket uses reverse psychology to make his writing irresistible. He opens Chapter One of Book the First with:

“If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle.”

Mr. Snicket does not forget that his narrator is also a character. From starting each volume with a mysterious dedication to “Beatrice,” to slipping in snippets of his own sad story at intervals, to confiding in his audience that he often visits bookstores so he can find copies of his books and put them on the highest shelves where they won’t be found, Mr. Snicket carefully paints a picture of his baffling, utterly depressed self.

Mr. Snicket keeps us interested by feeding us tidbits of information that we know are important. We begin to desperately wonder what happened  to Beatrice, whether or not the Baudelaire parents are actually dead, and what in the world is in the sugar bowl. We devour each chapter, bookmarking every few pages – everywhere we see a clue. As we near The End, the mysteries are piling up, we are holding our breaths, we—

And this is where Mr. Snicket fails us.

Granted, he warned us there would be no happy ending. Granted, he did everything he could to persuade us not to read on. But we still expected different. We expected the ending to be happy after all because no matter how vehemently the author denied it in every printed line, we could read the truth printed on the white spaces in between. Or so we thought. But even if we took his words at face value, we at least expected answers. Every problem promises a solution, remember? Every mystery promises an explanation.

But all we are left with at the end are broken promises and a sugar bowl that will remain eternally shut.

And hours of amusement. Yes, even though I am grievously disappointed in the ending, I would still highly recommend the series. Such is the dark art of Lemony Snicket.

Inspiration Monday V

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The brilliance continued last week, as for the first time every prompt was used! Seriously, check them out!

Mike and Mike again

Sonia M.

Jinx

Indigo Spider

Rebekah

Find an Outlet

Rashmi Kamath

Char submits by email

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The Rules

There are none. Read the prompts, get inspired, write something. No word count minimum or maximum. You don’t have to include the exact prompt in your piece, and you can interpret the prompt(s) any way you like.

OR

No really; I need rules!

Okay; write 200-500 words on the prompt of your choice. You may either use the prompt as the title of your piece or work it into the body of your piece. You must complete it before 6 pm CST on the Monday following this post.

The Prompts:

Don’t believe everything you think*
All my life, I’ve wanted to go to Earth*
The dark is afraid of me**
I’ve never seen the sky that way before
I don’t believe it was suicide

 

If you want to share your Inspiration Monday piece, post it on your blog and link back to today’s post; I’ll include a link to your piece in the next Inspiration Monday post. If you don’t have a blog, leave your piece in the comments or email me at: stephanie (at) balcomagency (dot) com

Happy writing!

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*Today’s first and second prompts brought to you by a bumper sticker and Robert A. Heinlein’s Podkayne of Mars, respectively.

**EDIT: I neglected to mention that our third prompt also comes from a bumper sticker.

Ghostwriting: lame or legit?

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A ghostwriter is a professional writer hired by someone to write a book that will feature the employer’s byline (for instance, Bob Jones would hire John Smith, a ghostwriter, to write a book. John would do most of the work, but the published book would say “by Bob Jones”).

Basically, a legal form of plagiarism. The way I see it, there are two types of ghostwriting – one is permissible, and one is not.

Celebrities
Society has an obsession with actors, musicians, politicians, etc., and they all have stories to tell. Very few of them have the skills to write those stories, but they all seem to be coming out with books anyway. This is thanks to ghostwriters, and it is a sensible way to fill a need. I object, however, to calling the celebrity an “author” and allowing the byline to include their name only. It should be classified as a co-authorship, and the ghostwriter’s name should appear beside the celebrity’s on the cover.

Famous authors
Sometimes an author of series fiction gets tired of writing one series, but the publisher thinks there is still money to be had. So they outsource future books to a ghostwriter, providing a basic plot structure the ghostwriter should follow (hence “formula fiction”). While the celebrity situation is acceptable, for an author to do this is disgusting. It goes against everything I believe in. The author is cheating his readers by paying others to do what he should do himself. He can’t put his soul into it because he is not writing it, and the ghostwriter cannot put his soul into it, because he is writing under someone else’s name. Inevitably, then, the book will have no soul. It will be a thin, runny, concoction of words without real feeling. It’s just empty entertainment.

This is no insult to the ghostwriter’s skills. As a copywriter, I have experience writing things for other people, and skill has nothing to do with soul. I work hard to make it good, but it is still not mine – it is the client’s. It will look and sound how the client wants it to, and do what the client wants it to. This is expected from advertising copy. But in novel form, it is the cheap fiction we read as children, the Nancy Drews* and the Babysitter’s Clubs, which we remember with vague fondness, but wouldn’t pick up again – whereas other children’s fiction, the Narnias and Borrowers and Winnie the Poohs, we gladly pick up again, because their authors actually wrote them, instead of farming the work out to be stamped with cookie-cutters.

What’s your take? Is ghostwriting a despicable cheat, or a legitimate business arrangement?

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*Nancy Drew wasn’t technically ghostwritten; it was written by a group of writers sharing a collective pen name. It is still, however, formula fiction.

Writer’s block

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I started writing a post about writer’s block, but it wasn’t working. I know that sounds like a gag opening, but I’m serious.

It was going to list the types of writer’s block and some tips for conquering it. I wrote the whole post but all I was saying was “keep working” or “take a break.” So instead I’m just going to talk about my personal experience with writer’s block, and how I deal with it.

Since most of my writing occurs in a work environment, so does most of my writer’s block, usually when I’m trying to write a headline for an ad or billboard. I call this “hitting my head against the keyboard.” I feel guilty, because I’m being paid – by the hour, from the client’s perspective – to come up with something clever, and here I’ve spent two, three, four hours staring at a blank screen with nothing good to show for it. I begin to panic, thinking I’ll have to stay at work until seven or eight, so I can still put in eight hours without counting the three I wasted. But how far have I gotten? I open an email to my boss and paste in my work from the last few hours. For some reason, it’s easier to think away from the Word doc I’ve been working on. I weed out the worst lines first. There might be two or three half-decent lines left, which I scrunch together and stare at. If I had just a couple more good lines, that would be a decent list of options. I take a few more minutes to think about it. I type whatever comes into my head. Then, most of the time, something good comes to me. It may be the best line of the lot – or not. Either way, I now have a decent list to send to my boss to pick favorites, tweak, or make suggestions.

It’s like playing the kid’s hiding game, Hot and Cold; to find out where the thing is, you have to move. You can’t be afraid of moving in the wrong direction, because even going from chilly to freezing helps you figure out where it is.

You have to write something to know what you are not writing to know what you are writing.

First, you just dump something out. Read it – no, that’s not it. Dump again. You kind of like that part. But the rest is rubbish. Dump again, building around the good part. No, never mind; you were really aiming for something else. Dump again. Eventually, you’ll eke out something decent. You’ll spend the next week editing, and a few months later, you will completely rewrite it again and that will be The One. With a few minor tweaks, of course.

It’s all part of the process.