I recently finished reading Donald Maass’ Writing the Breakout Novel.

Maass is an author and literary agent and the book has lots of practical and useful advice on how to make your book more readable.

The book concentrates on the key parts of successful books: premise, stakes, setting, characters, viewpoint and themes.

Salon recently published an article on a reader’s advice to writers.  This was a response to the recent Guardian article on writers giving writing advice.  The Salon article contained some similar ideas to those in Maass’ book, such as making your characters want something.

http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/02/23/readers_advice_to_writers/

A few commenters on the web site criticised this advice, accusing the article of just promoting formula fiction.

Similar accusations have been labelled at Maass’ book.

But this is missing the point.  Even if you’re writing the most literary of books, it helps to make your characters and settting more interesting.

Maass doesn’t advocate writing cliched books.  He argues against the idea that anything that is widely commercial successful is badly written.  While some recent bestsellers might not have the most engaging of characters, at the very least they’re able to maintain the tension and conflict enough to keep a lot of people interested.

The book was published in 2001 and while the overwhelming majority of advice is still relevant for writers, it’s interesting to note where the book has dated. When talking about how to make thrillers exciting and convincing Maass writes:

Easiest of all to make convincing are military foes, geological disasters, bad medicine, serial killers and courtroom justice. These threats are better understood, more widely documented and are more commonly experience [sic] by the public. You or I could fall victim to any one of them. In contrast, we are not terribly likely to be hurt by drug cartels, Middle Eastern terrorists or militia-type isolationists. As sources of potential disaster, they do not inspire visceral fear.

The book also has a couple of amusing typos:

Janellen and Bowie’s love transcends pubic pressures, a strength that Lara and Key must learn.

One of the suggestions for trying to find the focus of your book is to imagine that for one reason or another you can only write 10 pages on your novel.  What part of your novel would you choose to write about?  Then condense these 10 pages down to a single page and Maass suggests you might have a better idea of your novel’s key themes.

British writer Paul McAuley wrote an interesting article about the depiction of science in science fiction.

He makes the point that it’s in the nature of fiction to tend towards depicting sudden revelations rather than gradual processes:

You know the kind of thing: lone geniuses who go against the grain of current thinking; oddballs who stumble upon a new paradigm, like a metal-detecting hobbyist lucking out on a hoard of Roman gold; science advanced by epiphanies that explode with the frequency of flashguns at a film premiere (and in films, often require really fast typing to defuse some last-minute knucklebiting threat involving overflux in the intertubes that would otherwise create deadly feedback in everyone’s hypothalami).

But most science is mostly a cooperative, slow, patient accretive process… And an awful lot of science isn’t about the sudden apprehension of a universal truth, but the gainsaying of alternate explanations for an observed phenomenon or fact…

Of course, this kind of science isn’t much use in the construction of stories in which heroes slice through the Gordian knot of some world-threatening problem, or make some world-changing discovery. But it’s the kind of science that serious SF should at least acknowledge – just as any kind of serious fiction should acknowledge the complexity of the happening world, and the knotty and often ambiguous moral choices real people have to make.

 

Discover magazine recently published a list of examples of bad science from movies.  The entry onTransformers includes this:

A fundamental rule in the universe is that mass cannot be destroyed, so making something smaller doesn’t mean it will be lighter in weight! Any Transformer keeping its mass will therefore become very dense: A 100-foot-tall robot compacting down to a 10-foot car would plunge right through the road and into Earth’s crust.

That would be amusing to watch but would make endless sequels unlikely.

Some beginning writers who are only familiar with science fiction through the movies and TV shows don’t realise that written SF has much higher standards when it comes to scientific accuracy and consistency.

For example, the popular Battlestar Galactica show (the remake) has some interesting ideas about consciousness and downloading.  (Many of these ideas aren’t  new compared to books like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Neuromancer).  But other aspects of its science are a confusing and inconsistent mess.  Take the use of nuclear weapons.  Sometimes ships can use nuclear weapons and instantly blow up anything they want.  At other times, it can take ages for a fleet of ships to even damage other ships.

One of the show’s main characters is a TV Scientist^TM – not a real scientist.  He’s conveniently an expert in whatever scientific field is biology, computer programming, networks, chemistry, astronomy, astrophysics is required for the purposes of the plot.  It takes a lifetime to specialise in any of these fields.  If you write a SF short story or novel, your depiction of scientists had better be more accurate than this.

Some famous SF novels that include interesting depictions of scientists at work include Timescapeand Spin.

Even in written SF your science doesn’t have to be 100% accurate (it’s debatable whether things like time travel and hyperspace travel are scientifically possible), but you should at the very least avoid obvious errors of terminology.

One of the most famous bad science clunkers comes from Star Wars where Han Solo talks about making the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs.  A parsec is a measure of distance, not time.

Other terms that I’ve seen misused a lot recently are uploading and downloading.  Some people simply substitute download for copy, but that’s not right.

For example:

• I downloaded the data onto the Internet.
• I uploaded the data onto the Internet.

WikiAnswers has a nice summary of the difference:

It’s all a matter of perspective. If you are loading something to the computer in front of you from another computer it’s called “downloading” If you’re loading something FROM the computer in front of you to another computer, it’s generally called “uploading”.

Another perspective is the SIZE and function of the computer. If you’re loading something from a server or large computer to your computer, it’s downloading. If you’re loading something TO a server or larger computer it’s called uploading.

These days it’s much easier to do research on the Internet.  A good overall guide for helping to make your science more accurate is The Writer’s Guide to Creating a Science Fiction Universe by George Ochoa and Jeffrey Osier.

Even if your main interest is in writing novels and/or short stories, you should still consider writing some non-fiction pieces.

Why?

If you’re a beginning writer, getting a non-fiction piece professionally published is usually a lot easier than getting paid for fiction.  Essays and articles are also a great way to draw attention to your novel.  Let’s say you’ve just had a vampire novel published.  If you had an article published about the differences between vampires from different cultures, you could include in your bio information that you’d written a vampire novel.

So how do you work out what to write about?

One way to start is to work out what your favorite magazines and web sites are.  What kind of articles could you write for them?

You can also work out what broad areas you’re interested in.  For example I’m interested in: science fiction, books, movies, travel, photography and computer games.

That gives you a broad area to work in, but you need to give your article a specific focus or slant.  What I Think About Movies isn’t the kind of article you’re going to sell (unless you’re already famous).  It needs to be more specific.  Why China’s Reclaiming of Hong Kong Led to a Decline in the Hong Kong Film Industry.

This is particulary true for travel writing.  Some editors will tell you that a destination is not an idea.  Travel magazines have already published articles on just about any place you could care to think of.  Instead of My Trip to Paris, you could try selling The Ten Best Museums to Visit in Paris. Many editors are particularly partial to Top Ten kind of articles.  (The Ten Hottest Clubs to Meet Vampires?)  Not everyone likes top ten articles though.  Clarkesworld’s non-fiction guidelines explicity state their dislike of “articles that purport to provide 10 rules for success/failure in a particular endeavor.”

Does your job give you any special qualifications that you could write about?  A friend of mine is a psychologist and counsels adolescents.  I used to work for the computer games industry.  We co-wrote an article providing an overview of some of the studies that had been conducted examining the effects on children of playing violent computer games.  We sold it to an Australian parenting magazine and got paid 50c a word.  That’s 10 times the rate I’ve been paid for fiction sales.

Maybe you can’t think of any areas that you feel qualified to write about.  What personal experiences have you had that others might be interested in?  I attended Clarion South (a science fiction writing workshop) earlier this year.  I sold an article about my experience as a student to The Internet Review of Science Fiction.

Even if you don’t think you’re an expert on a topic, the Internet makes doing research so much easier than what it was 15 or 20 years ago.

So what are some ways of generating ideas for articles?

Reading articles can give you ideas for your own articles.  You read an article about how vampires represent the lust women have for gay men and think that’s nonsense.  You write an article about how vampires really represent our fear of dentists.

What topics are popular right now? This can include the bleeding obvious (e.g. vampires).   The trick is to give a different perspective or compare it with something else.  How are Asian vampires different from Western vampires? (Chinese vampires like to hop!)

Another easy way is repackaging a topic for another market.  I read an interview with an Australian potter in an Australian local newspaper. I don’t know anything about pottery, but it mentioned that the potter’s tea bowls had been graded by Japanese tea masters. I interviewed him by email and sold anarticle to a Japanese magazine that was interested in what foreigners thought of Japanese culture.

You can also write about different works (movies, books, etc) that have a similar broad theme.  I sold an article to Salon.com a few years ago that looked at books that had been linked to controversial murder cases. I got the idea when I read a book about the Aum Supreme Truth cult in Japan and how they had been influenced by ideas from Asimov’s Foundation series.

Another way is to look at upcoming events.  The World Expo will be in Shanghai next year so people are going to interested in articles about Shanghai.  Upcoming anniversaries are another source of ideas.  It was the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall recently and there a lot of articles about the Berlin Wall in the media.  It would be a good chance to try and interest editors in your exclusive scoop of how vampires secretly brought about the fall of Communism.

Writing Reviews

Most of the more prestigious publications already have their own reviewers.  But writing reviews for smaller web sites can be a good way to get your first publication.  Maybe you won’t get paid, but sometimes you’ll be able to get some free books out of the deal.  Just remember that writing a summary of the plot doesn’t equate to writing an interesting review.

Science Fiction Markets

A number of online sf magazines  are interested in non-fiction submissions.

Clarkesworld

Fantasy Magazine

Strange Horizons

Non-Paying SF Markets

Specusphere

Revolution SF

SF Crows Nest

Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife is now on sale.

I’ve read lots of books about writing and this is one of the best I’ve read.

It has great tips and advice for the personal and professional sides of a writer’s life.

What I Learned From Clarion South

AKA: Jedi Writing Tricks – These aren’t the characters you’re looking for.

A Post-Clarion Summation By Aidan Doyle

******************************

Six of the best weeks of my life are now but a memory.
I knew I was in for a fun time, when within the first two weeks, the four people in my apartment had written stories covering the cardinal points of speculative fiction – zombies, pirates, ninjas and vampires.

* THINGS I LEARNED FROM CLARION SOUTH

Even ghosts and ninjas aren’t allowed to infodump.

Life in a post-apocalyptic village with no family and hallucinogenic teenagers is not always easy.

Constructing something from your dead girlfriend is not healthy.

If you’re in hell, word choices may not matter.

Sometimes you have to consider the savagely sleep deprived demographic of your audience.

Feigning eccentricities to avoid responsibility is not acceptable.

The value of focusing your monster.

One helmet doth not steampunk make.

Anything that licks the pope is not kosher.

Everything you need to know about writing can be found in Throw Momma From the Train.

People outside Clarion may have a different image in mind when they talk about “puppet governments”.

Convulsive beauty does not always involve jumping out from behind bushes.

Not everyone is thrilled about the idea of creating a monkpunk genre.

If you want to make a story scarier you should add more “n”s.

If you are horribly wounded, don’t explain everything.

If you hang a cow from the roof, it pulls the roof down.

Some people just read to have their happy buttons pushed.

If you’re going to submit a story written in Chinese characters, you should at least try to double-space it.

You should write your story’s emotional scenes in Assembler, not C++.

“Chaotic stupid” is a common character alignment for movie villains.

Running away to join the circus can be detrimental to your writing career.

Having a screen door on a spaceship may cause readers to doubt your world-building skills.

It’s difficult to learn astrophysics in one day.

Malaria can cure syphilis.

In the worlds before Monkey, primal chaos reigned.

You should always wash your fiction unless you want to be subjected to a Jungian analysis.

If you overload your prose, sometimes the sentence ship will sink.

Literary excellence can be achieved through superior horsepower.

Critiques delivered by sock puppet have added authority.

Sean is strong with the force, but “Evil” Sean has not yet turned to the dark side.

Margo likes it when you do nasty things to children.

Jack disapproves of the rectal insertion of incendiary particles.

If Trent ever gets his hands on a zombie girlfriend, he will do many Bad Things.

Jeff is very appreciative when he receives squid in the mail.

Mark likes his scavs lecherous.

Liz is an expert at throwing axes horizontally.

Lisa is not ideal babysitter material.

Brendan has developed a set of tools for not killing people.

Angie is a story slut.

Steve M has few reservations when it comes to using the bathroom facilities.

You should be very wary if Steve T invites you to go and see a Spiderman movie.

Steph has the most powerful heart of all.

Su Lynn is capable of delivering some of the most insightful critiques while looking extremely flustered.

Ben is a founding member of the Cogito Ergo Zombie telemarketing group.

Alex is fond of yum cha fairy orgies.

Angela has cornered the market on prime real estate in Wrongtown.

Tracy is going to be the mayor of New Wrongtown.

Amanda is overly fond of chopping, cutting, macerating and dissecting things.

Suzanne has arranged a deal with Taiwanese exporters to supply her with all the fairy wings she needs.

Mac likes stabbing people in the humpy.

If Brendan asks if he can have your fingernails, you should be very afraid.

You could be in for a surprise if you get stuck in an elevator with Lisa.

Even though I was on my best behaviour, people still thought I was an evil monkey trickster god.

* OTHER TOPICS OF DISCUSSION

Satan’s socialist aspirations, desert orcas, the Buddhist principles espoused by Groundhog Day, Schrodinger’s comma, sabretooth mermaids, zombie telepaths, The Zombie of the Opera, the miracle of zombie holidays, living with strange bearded men, the value of dead seahorses, monkey Hemingway, kung fu butterflies, frozen god sperm, unicorn glue factories, how to name superheroes, time-travelling zombie Nazi unicorns, how to dilute napalm, elf porn, departments of defenestration, Myers-Briggs personality tests, post-infinity stress disorder, SteamAss, how many monkeys it takes to write a horror story, Dungeons & Dragons character alignments & Wrongtown.

* NEW GENRES I ENCOUNTERED

hard fantasy, fantasy opera, monkpunk, piratepunk, officepunk, numberpunk, uberpunk, goldpunk, tranniepunk

* RULES FOR WRITING SHORT STORIES

Short stories are about interesting characters in difficult situations.

Unless absolutely necessary, don’t change POV.

Start scenes as late as you can, and finish them as early as possible.

Most readers will respond better to a memorable character than a cool idea.

Avoid flashbacks unless absolutely necessary.

Show don’t tell (most of the time).

Be specific, rather than general.

Circular endings are a good way to end your story (where the ending inverts or echoes the opening).

You should know a lot more about your characters and setting than makes it onto the page.

Make sure you choose the right viewpoint character.  Are they active?  Do they act rather than just react?

Dream logic isn’t the same as story logic.  Stories have to make sense.

What is the point of change in your story?  Have you started your story there?

What is going to happen in the story after the ending?

If you are doing historical research, ensure you read primary sources (this may involve learning more than three extra languages).

Ensure your magic system is so detailed and baroque that even Jack is impressed.

Check with Su Lynn to see if anyone else has written a story with the same idea.

* RULES FOR REVISING YOUR STORY

Find the focus of your story.  What is it about?

What is the purpose of each scene in your story?

What is the purpose of each character in your story?  How are they connected to other characters?

Remove elements that don’t enhance the focus of your story.

Add subtext that enhances the focus of the story.

“Argument” openings (that explain what your story is about) can usually be cut.

“Could, that, somehow, something, realise, suddenly” are your enemies and should be mercilessly purged.

Eliminate passive voice where possible.

Remove repetitive prose.

Remove repetitive prose.

Add 15% more time cops.

Add 20% more monkeys.