Everything that doesn't fit into the other F.A.Q.s
Question
On Writing
Answer
How do you get published?
Two secrets:
Write the story.
Submit the story.
All
the rest is where it gets complicated. I never particularly cared for
English teachers, either, but if you haven't picked up a modicum of
grammar and spelling at this point, you're going to have a hard time
getting published. Don't think that you can get away with writing "any
old way" when you write on-line, either. I'm willing to pony up serious
cred to the first person who shows they've sent me a letter like the
below, much less L33tsqek (which I've gotten) who gets published by an
actual for-pay house. You may feel free to take that as a massive
fucking whap from a clue-bat. A friendly one, but massive.
How you write, any time, is how you're going to write stories. If you
don't care about sentence structure, grammar, flow, spelling, when you
write things like, oh, an email, you're not going to get them right in
a book, either. So make it a habit to try to write as well as you
possibly CAN no matter what the medium. Train yourself to get rid of
your bad habits, first. You might find your writing improving when you
write fiction as well.
Think of it this way: It's like
muscle memory. Muscle memory is why special operations guys train and
train and train with their weapons. They want to know that when they
draw, they draw smoothly and accurately, when they point they point at
the target. So they practice and practice and practice. But if they
practice wrong , when it comes time to go mano y mano, they lose.
Writing
is the same damned thing. If you train to miss you're going to miss. If
you train to write poorly, you're going to write poorly. Period fucking
dot.
That's my first and major lesson. If you look at what
you wrote and what I wrote, you'll see the difference. For one thing,
there are paragraphs.
You read alot and that's good. But
you have to take what you've read, how authors write (their style) and
draw on that to learn to write. The best example I can point to is
actually WEB Griffin, who in the beginning I copied slavishly. Clear,
simple prose, fairly effortlessly patterned, good character
description, excellent dialogue.
Take a short story idea,
this can be as simple as retelling something interesting that happened
to you in third person, and try to write it as if you were an author
you read. Copy a style first, your own will naturally change that and
then you'll slowly transform into who "you" are stylistically. But
copy, first.
"The mocha latte dripped. It dripped from
condensation. The mocha was cold. The air in the room was a rich wet
velvet furnace. Drips like tears of the Madonna rolled down its clear
glass surface."
(Me preparing to drink a Starbucks mocha as written by Hemingway.) :-)
Dialogue
and characterization. Characters are what people are going to identify
with. If you don't have good characters, you're going to have one hell
of a time. There's a simple trick to good characters, though: Pay
Attention To People.
For Dialogue, listen to how people
REALLY talk. Then write it close, but not exactly. Some people you know
talk in staccato, I'm sure. Others just sort of loaf along. Grab that
and use it.
Beverly's voice was like the flurry of a
hummingbird wing, constant, rhythmic and mildly annoying especially
when you thought it was an overlarge bee.
"Rachel stopped
by today," she spat out, so fast it made me wonder why she didn't get
tongue burn. "She was looking for you. She wondered where you were.
Where were you?"
"Out," I muttered, slumping through the reception area.
"Have
you broken up with her?" the receptionist continued, blurting the words
so fast I couldn't even make it through the safety of the security
gate. "Is there a security problem? Should I have her escorted out next
time? She seems very dangerous."
"If I'd broken up with
her, she wouldn't have been here," I muttered, swiping my card. "You'd
have gotten a two kilogram C-4 care package instead."
Notice
that the staccato secretary speaks in short, declarative sentences.
They're actually probably too long. The point-of-view (POV) character
is more long winded and uses words that are less definitive.
Characterization:
Notice people's mannerisms as well. People may have a hard time
remembering characters, separating them out, but if you include
mannerisms they get almost subconscious clues who is talking.
"Mike pulled off his helmet then pulled the dip out from between his upper lip and gum..."
"Roger
reached into a pouch and slowly removed a long leather thong. He pulled
his hair back and tied it in place, carefully ensuring he got every
hair in place by pulling it back one strand at a time..."
Don't
be afraid to do something like take a notepad to the mall and wander
around looking for good characters. I got the "pulling his hair back
one strand at a time" from a guy installing a stereo in my car.
Readers
also want to know where they are. There are these characters and even
if they can separate them out, they want to know where they are. So add
sensory data to every page. Smell, sound, touch, taste, sight. I
generally tend to cluster that towards the beginning of a scene. Get
the reader grounded in a reality then take them into unreality.
There
are about a billion different levels and parts to a story. The prose is
the bricks and mortar. You have to have good materials to make a good
house. Then there's the flow. Beyond simple sentence structure (prose)
there is how something flows. Are the walls straight? Does this hallway
lead anywhere or does it end in a blank wall? Paragraphs let people
separate disjoining ideas.
"When the alarm went off, John
knew it was going to be a fucked up day. He could feel it in the
overheated air of the apartment. He could smell it wafting from the
overloaded cat boxes. He could taste it in the cat fur stuck to his
tongue. Bad. Bad. Bad on toast with a shit cracker..."
Then
on to another thought, drawing from that one but not continuing it. If
you look at the sentences, you'll see that they're long at first then
shorter and shorter. This is flow. People think of one thing then
narrow down. Your job is to take that method of thought and use
telepathy, via the written word, to get it in their heads.
The
second part of flow is transitions. Repeat after me. Transitions. Good
transitions are what make for a "page turner." You want to avoid
breaking the reader's trance, so that they send you emails complaining
about being up all night reading when they were supposed to be at work.
A wonderful example of a transition is in Tom Clancy's Red
Storm Rising. An American unit and a Russian unit are about to face off
in battle. The weather is wet and rainy with low clouds.
The
Russian: "I hate this weather. The American aircraft can drop out of
the clouds without warning, ravage our formation and then escape..."
About two thousand words of them preparing for battle then kicking off
then...
The American: "I hate this weather. Our planes can't see shit until they break out of the clouds..." :-)
And never end a chapter at a good stopping point. :-)
Then
there's plot. Stephen King was apparently bitten by a plot as a child
and thus refuses to admit that plot and story are the same thing. If
you're writing story based...stories, then they have a beginning a
middle and an end. In general, at the beginning the main character is
in status quo, then you take them down as low as you can get them then
you bring them back up to victory.
There are two forms of
victory, though, physical and moral. If you're writing a series, I
generally end with one or the other until the last book that "caps"
either the series or a portion of the series. Thus in We Few, the end
of the "coming of age" part of the Prince Roger series, Roger finally
sustained a fairly clear physical and moral victory. Mike O'Neal has
yet to. Mike Harmon has a physical victory in Unto the Breach but
sustains a huge moral loss. It's also possible (I'll do it later in the
Mike O'Neal books) to sustain a physical loss and a moral victory.
So,
story is the design of the house. High, low, High. Start off with the
character fairly high, drag them low then bring them back up to victory
of one sort or another.
Flow is how the prose works. Set up a rhythm and only vary it when you want to emphasize something.
Ensure smooth transitions between POVs and chapters.
Work on characterizations. Listen to people. Record experiences. Live life. Remember.
Then
there's the simple aspects of prose. That's just pure ass training. But
train right. If you ever send out another letter like the one below,
forget ever being a published author. You're refusing to train and you
don't get to Carnegie Hall without practice practice practice.
(Unless you're doing stream of consciousness, but that's out of my area of expertise.)
Last lesson, padwan:
"Good
writers create. Great writers steal." All truly good writing comes from
life. Go live it. Hemingway didn't sit on the internet all day and
night.
Take care,
John
PS: When you get to the point of thinking about submitting a book, get the Writer's Market. You can find it in most libraries.
Question
In response to a question from the bar: Books similar to John's
Answer
Well,
I tend to write what I'd like to read so I'll make some suggestions
from what I've read. Bridge of Birds. If you pick up only one book,
find this one! Just thinking about it brings tears to my eyes.
Lois
Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series. Again, if you are looking for really
good writing, these are it. It is collected in omnibus additions. If
you only read one short story, read "The Borders of Infinity."
Most
of David Weber, especially Path of the Fury, Mutineer's Moon,
Armageddon Inheritance, Insurrection, Crusade and the first four books
of the Honor Harrington Series. The latter books don't stand on their
own well without reading the earlier ones.
The early
Bolos stories. Just pick up the anthology "Bolo!" and go from there.
The anthologies and stories have high and low points, but I can
definitely recommend the anthology "Honor of the Regiment."
WEB
Griffin's Brotherhood of War series. Roger was consciously modeled on
Lowell with a few of his rough points either enhanced (shortness with
idiots) or detracted (womanizing.)
Early Tom Clancy. Hunt For Red October, Patriot Games, Red Storm Rising and Without Remorse. The later ones devolve extremely.
Robert
Heinlein. I would say "everything" but he has distinct forms and
periods. So I'll list only those I enjoyed (uncomprehensively.) Citizen
of the Galaxy, Moon is a Harsh Mistress, STARSHIP TROOPERS (I agree,
ignore the movie/s), the short stories collections Green Hills of Earth
and Methuselah's Children, Orphans of the Sky, Time Enough For Love. He
has a vast number of other books, all of them excellent, but his
"earlier" works I find most appealing.
John Steakley's
Armor. This is more along the lines of Gust Front, sort of. Fairly
nihilistic for much of the book but the ending makes it all worthwhile.
I disagree with Forever War. Far too nihilistic. Nihilism
is one of the things I consciously avoid in my novels. For the same
reason, based upon what you liked and didn't,
I'm not
recommending most Drake, although I quite like Dave's stuff. If you
want to give it a whirl, I'd suggest starting with the short story
series Hammer's Slammers and then The Sharp End. Take it from there.
For
the There Will Be Dragons stories, I have no suggestions. They're just
too different from most of the stuff out there. They're a bit of high
fantasy, a bit of high tech and the characters act too "mundane" to
make the connection to most fantasy. However, if you want to give
fantasy a buzz, The Earth Masters trilogy by Patricia McKillip,
Riddlemaster of Hed, Heir of Sea and Fire and Harpist in the Wind.
Absolutely the best fantasy trilogy ever written. Try _only_ the first
three books of the Wheel of Time series. The rest are dreck.
The
Belgariad. Mercedes Lackey's "Last Herald Mage" trilogy. The Winds of
Change books are good as well and the Dianne Tregard series. You can
take or leave the rest of Mercedes' ouevre. David Weber's Bazel series.
David Drake's Isles series is very very good. I won't recommend Lord of
the Rings. Why? Because when people try to read it after their reading
muscles have been formed it tends to come across as too florid. Ditto
on the Lensman series by Doc Smith and various other "Golden Age"
writing. The prose tends to throw people off. That should more than
cover things for a while. Much of this can be found in the library or
used bookstores to cut down on the costs.
Question
From the bar: David B asks where to get a
small book of Kipling's Barracks Room Ballads that could go into a sea bag or a duffel.
Answer
Rudyard Kipling: Complete Verse. Trade Paper. Published by Anchor, in 1989. 864 pages. 038526089X
There's also The Portable Kipling.
The Portable Kipling is not the choices I'd make. Complete Verse is too
large. What is needed is a combination of Barrack Room Ballads and a
few others.