Five Easy Rules To Liking Things.

By Jay Stringer

It's been too long since my last confession. 

I've gone through a lot of changes in the last couple of years, some conscious, some less so. I made the decision to re-wire how I engage with media. And in this sense, I'm using the word 'media' to avoid using the word 'art.' 

I realised I was done with analysis culture. But what is analysis culture? To me, it started to feel like a nothing that was taking up everything. The idea of not just engaging with the art or entertainment itself, but also with a whole small industry of things that came with it. Podcasts and think-pieces digging down into each small aspect of the art, exposing 'flaws' discussing casting, talking about structure, critiquing the acting or writing. 

I was an early adopter of podcasts. Going through a marriage breakup back around 2005, I found myself with a lot of spare time, and I had an iPod with a whole category dedicated to 'podcasts' and....what the hell was that? Well, I also had the internet and plugged my iPod into charge when I got home from work each day, so I found out. And I was hooked. Every random taste or subculture I'd been on the fringes of when I was young -and each bringing with it some trek into the city, or obscure bar, or digging around on newsgroups- was starting to coalesce around these weird little radio shows. Except they weren't radio shows, because you couldn't find them on the dial. You had to know in advance what you wanted to listen to, and download them in preparation. And there didn't seem to be any rules. Some people talked for two hours, some people stuck to rigid 45-minute formats. I could hang out with my favourite comic book writers, obscure musicians, screenwriters, or believers in cryptids. And comedians. Oh god, the comedians. Stand-up was possibly my first entertainment love, and suddenly there was this whole world out there where I could listen to comedians talking to each other, breaking down their bits, using their secret language. It was like a drug. 

I was an early adopter of podcasts in crime fiction, too. Here at DSD we began hosting a semi-regular podcast that was supposed to be focused on crime fiction, but usually broke down into long conversations about Doctor Who or comic books. And in this genre we got in near the start. This was over a decade ago now, when there had been Clute & Edwards and Seth Hardwood and...that was about it. 

For a whole generation of people who embraced this era, it's never enough just to watch a forty-five minute episode of television, we need to download the podcast where other fans talk about it as they're experts of writing and producing television, and then rush to see what Alan Sepinwall thought about it. 24/7, 365, for years. Heads full of voices of people discussing a thing. 

You know what? I don't really know what it takes to make a forty-five minute episode of TV. I'm not a screenwriter. I'm not an actor. I'm not a director or producer. I'm not a Best Boy. As a Bike Courier I could probably make claim to using enough gaffer tape to be a Gaffer. So why did I keep filling my head with people who wanted to pretend they were? And not just them, why was I doing it too?

Why did I keep coming back to podcasting and discussing films that I couldn't make, or football matches that I couldn't play, or books I didn't write? How many times in the past forever had I sat breaking apart movies or tv shows or comic books and discussing what worked and what didn't as if taste could be an exact science? Surely I either liked the thing, or I didn't like it, and did I need to spend more time on it than that? 

Why did I want to get into discussions about how to write books, when that was time spent not writing books? And I knew I could write books because I was writing them.

I was a big fan of professional wrestling when I was younger. It's big modern mythology. It's working class opera. It's ballet with punches. It's roots go back to the carnival sub-culture, and it's a world with hidden rules and a secret language. For a kid like me? Catnip. Then I grew up and started to see all the things wrong in the WWE, the bad working practices, the racism, the sexism. Not only that, but my two favourite wrestlers in my late teens and early twenties were Eddy Guerrero and Chris Benoit and....well, time was not kind. So I walked away for a long time. Dipping in occasionally when someone I'd liked back in the day was doing something of note, but always coming away with a sour taste about that fucking company. Then AEW launched. A new company, with the financial backing to actually stick around and make a go of it. And they signed a bunch of wrestlers I'd never heard of, along with some I knew. They had big bold claims of being modern and progressive. And...well, look, in the weird carnival world of wrestling, no promotion will ever be fully progressive and they'll all make mistakes...but on the whole, they delivered. The shows were fun. The style was more high-flying and acrobatic than I was used to, and wrestling is clearly in a different place stylistically to what I grew up on, but I learned and adapted and had a blast. Each week now I look forward to tuning into the show and having fun. And in this past year, we've all needed some fun, right? 

But then the old habits kicked in. It wasn't enough just to tune in and have fun. I needed to listen to podcasts about each episode. And week after week, show after show, I'd come in hot after having FUN for two hours and then be pulled down by listening to men (always men) of my own age (roughly) who never wrestled, all talking about things AEW was doing 'wrong'. 

And finally it clicked. Why was I doing this to myself? Why was I filling my head with these voices? I have enough problem with controlling my own dark thoughts and anxious worries, why drown them out with other peoples? 

So I stopped. I deleted these podcasts. And others. Comedy, comic books, movies. Any that were about 'analysis' and not just about presenting some entertainment. Any that were backseat driving. Any that were about discussing doing a thing and not doing the thing. 

I trace a lot of this change back to doing stand-up. Most of the ways my writing (and my engagement with art, and my mental health) have changed in recent years go back to getting up on stage in Glasgow and telling jokes. Because, sure, I was a craft guy. I spent hours thinking about the jokes and how they worked. What they were about. What they meant. But the thing is...when you're up there on the mic, saying a thing and knowing that at the end of the sentence you're going to leave a silence that will be filled either with laughter or a much louder silence, all that matters is whether the crowd liked it or not. The work stood or fell in that moment. 

Paul Westerberg refused to have the lyrics printed in early Replacements albums because he wanted people to listen and react, because rock and roll was something that happened not something you read. And as a young fan that annoyed me because I loved lyrics, and I wanted to analyse things. But finally, way too late to make a difference, I get the point. 

See...the moment is what matters. Human beings live in emotion, moment to moment. Good art gets emotional reactions in the moment. Good "ring psychology" in wrestling is whatever gets the crowd on their feet. My job as a writer is to get people top feel. My job as a viewer of entertainment is to feel, or not feel. And there's not really any analysis culture I need beyond that. 

I liked it, or I didn't like it. I had fun, or I didn't. I'm a human being who formed an emotional reaction to a thing. Then I can move on to forming an emotional reaction with the next thing. 

Wait....I forgot to write the five easy rules, didn't I? Eh. There's only two. Enjoy it. Be in the moment. 

Short People

By Russel D McLean

I’ve just finished judging a short story competition in aid of the brilliant Million for a Morgue charity. I’m sure I’ve mentioned them before, but if I haven’t you should know that they are raising money for a great cause – to create a centre for forensic excellence in my adopted city of Dundee.*

It got me thinking about short stories. It’s no secret that I started out as a short story writer, and if you’ll forgive me a moment of indulgence, I’ll mention that I have a collection of some of those shorts out now in ebook form (go to my blog and check the sidebar if you’re interested - - I’m not doing the shill thing here – and let’s not forget there are two DSD short story collections out there, too) and that looking back on those stories I’m pretty impressed at my younger self’s ability to craft a good short.

Because it’s not an easy thing.

You’d think it would be. Unlike a novel, you don’t have to fill pages and pages. But in a sense that makes it more difficult. A novel gives you more leeway to breathe and relax. Which is great, but sometimes when you’re relaxed, you’re less likely to be focussed. With a short story, every word counts. Anything loose has to be cut.

And its tough to say in ten words what some novellists would say in around ten thousand. A picture may paint a thousand words, but in a short story you’ve only got those thousand to paint a hundred pictures and then add the dialogue as well.

To paraphrase Philip K Dick, you could open a novel at any page and chances are the characters aren’t doing anything interesting. But in a short story they have to be doing something. They don’t have the time not to.

And that’s tough to keep up.

That doesn’t mean short stories are all wham-bam tales of action. “Action” is an often misinterpreted word. Physical action and mental action can be equally thrilling as long as we are witnessing our characters doing something.

Some of the worst shorts I’ve ever read talk about things and never show them happening. They say, “There was this person, this was their life and this is what happened”. I’d rather fill in the gaps and be shown a moment, asked to make up my mind what happened around it.

In a short story, you learn about how to create shortcuts to character. You learn how to paint a picture, how to convey an emotion, in a few dynamic words. You learn about the value of implication over explication. You realise what your limitatations are as writer.

And you learn to overcome them.

Writing short stories is tough. I’ve seen established novelists who utterly fail when they try and write shorter fiction. Because it just isn’t easy. Because you can’t afford to waste time. Because you need to drive the heart of your story in only a few thousand words. You can’t mess about. You have to know what you’re writing about, what it is you have to say, what it is you want to convey. And you need to hit the reader slap-bang between the eyes with it.

The best short stories hit you hard and leave you reeling. They’re the literary equivalent of a sock in the jaw. You’re left reeling, but only later do you realise how much more there was to the experience than you realised, that it was a fuller and more intense experience than it seemed at the time. The best short stories linger.

The best short stories will leave their mark on you. Metaphorically speaking, of course.



*I’m not a native Dundonian, but I’ve been here over a decade now

Tones of Fun*

By Russel D McLean

I’m not sure how happy I am talking about this weeks subject.

Tone.

I really don’t know what to say about it. I don’t have much in the way of practical advice and in a sense, I think tone is often a matter of instinct and something you can only see as part of a far larger picture.

Tone is a funny thing. It’s one of those almost instinctual tools in a writer’s box. But despite it seemed like a vague, woolly-thinking kind of idea, its an essential thing to have.

Without having control of your tone, you’re screwed.

But what is tone?

And how can your control it?

Tone is what conveys the mood of your work. Tone is omnipresent in your writing. Tone comes from your word choice, your sentence structure, your point of view. It is the result of all those tiny little choices you make by writing.

Put one thing wrong and tone can go out of the window.

Tone is of course the great problem of the internet generation. We communicate by text almost all the time these days. I have friends whom I know more by their tone in emails than I do by their tone in conversations** And it’s amazing how many times tone can be misinterpreted. Sometimes you just accept that a person has a certain tone, but if you don’t know them then you cannot forgive them seeming rude because you don’t know that they aren’t. It’s the frightening thing about reading a text – all we have to go on are the words in front of us. And if they are mis-used, then often the tone can be misinterpreted and the intent of a communication ruined.

Tone is reliant on being in control of everything else you are doing in a piece of work. Tone comes at the end. tone is the result of all your hard work. My fellow DSDers have said that tone is attitude, that tone is atmosphere, that tone is voice and so much more. It is indeed all of these. And more.

If your tone is wrong, you fix it by working at the meta-level, by fixing some smaller, more intricate process such as your word choice, your structure, your point of view, whatever. All of these other things working in unison are what produce tone. Inconsistencies in tone come from elements of your work not working in harmony, like gears of the wrong size grinding together. On their own these elements may be brilliant, but together they produce something atonal and unsettling.

In the end, what I’m saying is that tone is not something you look at initially. Tone is something you allow to emerge from your work. Writing is like putting together a jigsaw in some ways. You are working with all these disparate and apparently unconnected pieces but when you find the right way to put them together, you can produce something quite unexpected and often entirely beautiful.

*You may groan, but I worked for ages to find a pun title for this entry…
**Not because we’re shut ins but often because we live in different countries. As Tony Hancock said when he took up the Ham Radio, “I’ve got friends all over the world. All over the world! None in this country, but all over the world…”

Tone Deaf

By Jay Stringer

After the news cycle we've had in the writing community of the past few weeks, writing about tone seems to fit. Tone and voice are two of the hardest things to quantify. You know it when you see it, but getting it right? Therein lies the trick.

Tone isn't something that you can get from cobbling together other people's words. It also changes with the times, so it's not really something you're going to be able to lift out of a 1950's novel and pull off perfectly as a modern book.

Tone and voice go hand in hand in my mind. The way a book sounds, its rhythm and vibe as the reader turns the pages and reads each sentence. A great voice is smooth like jazz, pushing the reader ahead more than even the action.

Now, let's go with the normal idea that "tone" in writing is about attitude. In a Parker novel, you're going to get some fisticuffs and some heist plans and guys with broken noses as dames with backstories.

"When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed."

That's the first line Richard Stark's THE OUTFIT, a serious, no nonsense, masterpiece of crime fiction. So the writing that follows the woman screaming in bed and the guy waking up and falling to the floor would be different than they would in many other novels. A woman screaming in bed? The guy asleep when she starts? You could go for the cheap, sexxxy slapstick pretty easily with that -- depending on the tone of your book.

Tone, as I mentioned, is all about attitude -- the writer's attitude to the book and to the audience. Heck, it's also about the audience's attitude to the story.

And, just like voice, just like attitude, it has to be your own. Sure when you first start writing, you're cribbing a lot of voice from your favourite writers. When you first start writings songs, really all you're doing is finding the simplest songs in the back catalogue of your idol, and reshuffling the deck a little.

I've written two full novels, and a couple of half finished ones, and I'm probably still trying to out walk the shadow that White Jazz cast on my impressionable little brain. It takes time.

But whereas voice is something that carries over from book to book, something that keeps drawing a reader to a particular writer, tone is specific to that story. One of the best examples of both tone and voice is When The Sacred Ginmill Closes by Lawrence Block. I swear, every time I pick that book up to idly scan the first page, I then go ahead and read the first dozen chapters. There's something specific in those first two chapters that draws you in. Two things, actually. Tone and Voice.

Those first two chapters are filled with things that we're told not to do as received wisdom. It's a murder mystery that doesn't drop a body straight away. The first chapter is filled with some fairly unsympathetic characters, and the narrator himself is a drunk, which makes us question how reliable he is. The second chapter is one long example of info dump. It's page after page of back story, set up and context. And yet, because Block is in total control of his words, it all works.

The information we're being given isn't all needed for the plot. A lot of it may have been cut by an editor working on a first time author. But it's setting the tone. It's an album track. In this instance, it's filling us with a doomed form of nostalgia, one that knows the past wasn't a better place, but makes us yearn for it anyway. It talks of people and relationships long gone, and failures long buried. And, on it's way, it sets up the whole book.

Tone and voice are the things that can hold together a story. See in Elmore Leonard's rules of writing? See hoe he keeps pointing out that the rules can be broken? It's having control over those two elements that lets you break the rules.

Now I wouldn't necessarily agree that tone needs to be consistent throughout the book. I'd say what it needs to be is effective. It needs to hold you. A great writer, once again, can break the rules and mess around with tone. It can be consistent as long as it matches the story at each emotional beat, and those inconsistencies can be used to pack a real punch, like the flip your stomach does as you go over the tip of a roller-coaster.

But if, like me, you're still finding your voice, and still learning to control tone, I'd say it's safer to make it consistent. Learn what you're doing before you start showing off. I don't really have practical tips on this one as I had in previous weeks, because it's something I'm still working on. But maybe try creating a soundtrack album to your story, thinking which songs would play in each chapter if this were a film, and then write with that soundtrack in mind.

Bit above all, always make it your own.

Setting Things Straight

By Jay Stringer

Setting is a loaded concept. Setting can be a place, it can be a time, it can be the thing that cement does after you've poured it over a dead body. It can be a character. We hear that one a lot, right? What I love about this novel is that the city becomes a character. Yet a place doesn't do things. A place doesn't drive the plot. It's the people in it that do that.

I usually flip things around when it comes to writing advice. I don't talk about setting all that much. I talk about context. An argument needs context, so does a joke, or a conversation. Context helps to define place,class, identity, ideology and actions. It defines whether our scared protagonist is pointing that gun in self defence or attack.

It's not just about where the story is set, but when, why and how. It's also one of the most important factors in reaching clarity, the real juice of story-telling. Where are we in the story, and where are we in the scene. That applies both physically and mentally. Think of it all as one and the same. Start to connect the two as you write.

In previous weeks we've talked about plot and character. We've discussed how to set up who your guy is, and what he wants. The final ingredient that turns those two things into a story is context. Out of this we get the obstacles, the difficulties, the motivations and the limitations.

A story set in Glasgow city centre at 2pm is going to be different to a story set in Glasgow city centre at 2am. The location is the same, but the setting is different. The context is different. At the risk of generalising, the internal monologue of a male character walking down that street might well be different to the internal monologue of a woman walking down that street. Both scared, but both having different fears. Again, the location is the same, and now the time is the same, but the context is still different.

People often say that Gotham is a distinctive character in Batman stories. But what the fictional city actually does is reveal character. Gotham is a reflection of the hero; it's providing a context to his story and obstacles for him to overcome.

Stories need tension to be interesting, and that can be either internal or external. But if you use your setting well, you can bridge the gap between the two. Gotham took away Batman's parents. Bruce Wayne is both Gotham's' most celebrated son, and most famous victim. All you do then is fill in the blanks to play to those two angles, so that the setting reveals the character.

Gotham may be fictional, but New York isn't. Matt Scudder walks the streets of Hells Kitchen in over fifteen mystery novels. Lawrence Block used a mixture of fictional and real locations; the bars and coffee shops were real, the murder locations tended to be fictional. But these stories were not documentaries, they were not journalism. The locations worked in relation to Scudder. They formed his world, they told us things about him. His sparse hotel room told us where he was both emotionally and physically. When he moved into a nicer apartment later on, that told us how he was changing, but the fact that he still kept the old hotel room as well told us something important. The passing of time in the city saw gentrification of his old stomping ground, but really that was telling us about Scudder, not the city.

"Realism," is a phrase that gets used often when describing crime genre, and again is often used to describe setting. But there is no such thing. Realism in fiction is an elaborate con job. We just give small details to trick the reader into a feeling of realism. (Pffft, if only there was a fancy French word for that.) And it's an easy con job, because the readers want us to pull it off, and their brains are programmed to help us, they will fill in the blanks if we give the right cues.

Okay, okay. You came here for tips and you got a lecture on context and some waffle about a comic book city. But where's the practical help, huh?

Okay, okay. Delegation, that is the key. Don't be afraid to delegate work to your reader.

Part of the trick to setting -to all writing- is leaving things out. It goes back to that con job, that trick. If you want a setting to really resonate with a reader and come to life in their heads, you need them to be doing a lot of the work, you need them to be making it into something that will stick. Don't over do the descriptions. Give the reader a few small details to latch onto. Something that's on the wall, or a smell, or a temperature. Give one or two small details that are specific to that location, something that will be unique about the setting just as if you're describing a facial feature of a character.

Then forget describing the patterns on the carpet or the colour of the curtains and get into your characters' head. How does that setting affect the character? What unique obstacles does it present? What are your characters emotions in this setting? From there -with one telling physical detail and then some character specific information- your readers can go about the hard work of actually constructing the location in their heads.

But always be mindful, what does this location reveal about my characters? If the answer is nothing then consider changing the location, or cutting the scene.

And, as with last week, don't sweat the big things. Build this story one scene at a time. One location at a time. You don't need to build Gotham, you just need to describe some of it's rooms and streets, and how they affect your characters. The reader will do the rest.

This guy's a character

By Jay Stringer

Character week, huh? I'll have me some of that.

When it comes to craft, many writers talk of character like some magic, alchemical thing. There's a point when this mysterious creature takes over in the writers head and leads the story. It sounds mystical and exciting, and I know I'm guilty of that kind of talk too. But sometimes I talk to people who are really intimidated by this. They'll sit and write, and wait for that moment when the character will appear fully formed in their head. When that moment doesn't come, they wonder if they're doing it wrong.

So let's take a step back and burst this myth. There's nothing magical about this process, and you're not doing it wrong. Well, you might be, I don't know. You might be doing it with crayon in the dark. Probably wrong. But then, you're also a visitor at DSD, which means you have taste, so that's another vote for not doing it wrong.

First things first, what is character? We all know this one, right? It's the person in your story. Well.....no. Well.....kinda. Well....yes. Well......shut up. Sure it's perfectly acceptable and standard these days to use the word in that sense, but it's something more.

If I type it into google I get this definition;

See, to my mind we're already making this easier here. Character isn't some magical person that will leap fully formed from your head and onto the page. Character is a trait, or a collection of traits, that are revealed about a person. They are shown in how your super spy reacts to adversity as he tries to defuse a nuclear bomb, or how your sexy forensic scientists deals with her crisis in faith (while defusing a nuclear bomb.)

Character isn't something that you need to have pinned down at the start of the story. It's something that is revealed at the story progresses. This is what story telling does. Plot reveals character. We know virtually nothing about Indiana Jones at the start of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, except that he needs to shave and he's wearing the fuck out of that leather jacket. But after 115 minutes of seeing him get beaten down, shot, bruised and bloodied, but still finding a way to climb back up, we know everything we need to about this guy's character.

So, don't sweat it. There is no secret formula that you're not aware of. There's no magic circle of writers who are forbidden from sharing their secrets (though that would explain the hooded man stood behind me as I type this, reaching for his swor......brb.)

Where was I?

Right, so. Plot and character go hand in hand. More than that, plot and character are the same thing, if you boil it down and do it right. There are beats in the plot that will face your spy/sexy scientist/monkey with a choice, and the way they react to that choice tells us a little more about who they are.

See those times when writers talk about the character taking over? That's what that is. It's that point when, partway through a first draft, we get a handle on how our spy/sexy scientist/monkey/superhero has been responding to choices, and we can take educated guesses on how they will respond to the ones that are yet to come. And then, being people who are revealing their character page by page, they go and surprise us. They make a different choice. The reader will be shocked, but that's nothing compared to how the writer feels.

Creating Characters (and see, now I'm playing fast and loose with the rules, because I've switched back to the other usage of the word) is pretty simple. In fact, my key to handling this bit is the same as my key to all writing -which probably blows my whole month's worth of useful comments right here- is ignore the big things. You build a plot one beat at a time. You build a character one piece at a time. You write the novel one page at a time. If you ever stop to think of the big things, you're just giving your brain an excuse to freeze up.

Think of your first chapter as an outline for a short story. For that, you only need a few aspects of character, and a few basic details of their identity. Start telling your story. At the end of the first chapter -the end of the short story- face your character with some choice that they were not expecting. Are they going to get in that car? Are they going to pick up the phone? Are they going to hide that dead body or call the cops? Do they like coffee with cream? From that reaction, you reveal your first layer of character, then you build from there.

Plot informs character and character informs plot. If I start a murder mystery with a guy who does the wrong thing when he finds a dead body, thats cool, but why does he do the wrong thing? I'm not a fan of "just because." I need a reason why my guy won't simply pick up the phone and call the cops, as most of us would. So then I realise, well, he's got a reason to run away from the cops. But what would that be? What reason would be so ingrained in a person that even knowing that they are innocent is still not enough for them to override their fear and call the cops? Well, hey, what if he was an ethnic minority. What if the reason it was ingrained in him was generations of alienation and rivalry? Bingo. And hey, this new found aspect of his character will have an impact on every decision he makes for the rest of the book. Bingo bingo. And now he has opinions, he has a voice, he has a family history and he's not afraid to tell me about them. And, hey, try making him a woman. Or a child. Or an alien.

As I said last week, I'm going to try and hold myself to giving some practical tips each week. last weeks list works for both plot and character, since they're the same thing. But here's a few simple things you can do, and it involves a little more work that last week.

-What single event or trait makes your character different to everyone else?

-What single thing does your character see in him/herself that others don't?

-What single thing does everyone else see in your character, that he/she doesn't?

-What is the most honest thing your character has ever done?

-What is the least honest thing your character has ever done?

-For each one, write a paragraph of dialogue, of your character answering the questions.

-Then think of the simplest way to show each one in a story.

Add what you've gotten this week to what you came up with last week, and if you've not gotten a story by now, you're really not trying.

Gunpowder, Treason And Plot.

By Jay Stringer

I've admitted this before, I think, but I wrote my first book by accident. I'd always intended to write a novel some day, but Hadn't intended to write one then. The way I stumbled onto the first full draft taught me what kind of writer I am.

I was a film student and a failed comedian. From telling jokes, writing scripts and editing short films, I'd picked up a grasp of structure. I was confident -too confident- that I knew how to tell a story. And I had a few bold and silly ideas about writing a crime film. What would it be like, I thought, to have a P.I. film set in Wolverhampton. Where the character was walking the mean streets of a post-industrial midlands town, rather than a black and white American soundstage. Where the script was full of fast, hardbitten dialogue, but it was spoken with my local dialect. Where there were slightly crooked cops, but they were crooked in the same way as any other civil servant, bored and looking to fiddle their expenses in some way, rather than gun toting mavericks.

So I thought, one day I'll write that script. I never did.

At some point I decided to see what that plot would be like as a short story. I started to write, and it was about a bartender who works as a PI in his spare time, who gets caught up in a murder mystery, in a town where murder mysteries are unusual. And I had fun with that for awhile, but I was running on empty. I hadn't had anything more than a jokey idea of inverting a few cliche's, and the story wasn't interesting me. But there was another guy at the bar, in that first scene. He had an interesting background, and didn't want to give much away about himself. He was slightly more criminal than he wanted to let on, and wasn't the most reliable of narrators. He interested me. So I kicked the bartender to the curb and let the new guy tell his story, and before I knew it, I had a messy, broody and wordy 80,000 word first draft. That first draft bore little relation to my original idea, and the final draft bore little relation to the first draft. But when I read through it, I can see the signs, I can see the books DNA.

I learned that, if I sit down with a plot in my head, I'll struggle to write. But if I can use an idea of a theme to discover a character, then that character will lead me to a plot.

I relearn this every time I sit down. Last year McFet and I were collaborating on a project. He'd created a bunch of characters and was writing the first part of a story, and I was writing the next part. In theory. I sat and thrashed out a plot. I had a scene by scene break down of what needed to happen -the only time I've tried that- so I knew what needed to happen, to whom, and in what order. If I had the story already, surely It would be a breeze?

Nope. Nothing happened for a long time. I probably drove McFet crazy with random emails about how much I didn't 'get' certain characters, and if he could tell me what music they liked, or what they talked like. I learned again that if I didn't know the characters, at least a little bit, I couldn't write. At some point the penny dropped. I don't remember what it was, it was probably a comment from McFet, I don't know. Something happened, and I knew the characters I was writing. And then the story happened. And the characters all did pretty much what I'd planned for them to do, and the story ended with the same final scene I'd intended, but I couldn't have done it without having the characters voices in my head.

What Dave said on Tuesday is true. Each time is different. I've written two crime novels, I'm halfway through an adventure story, and I'll be writing a third crime novel next year. Each one has been different. Each one is a wrestling match. So much of the work that many writers put into preparing the plot, such as the structure, the themes, the character arcs- these are all things I do in rewrites.

I find my plot by finding my characters. How to find a character? Well, that's for another time.

I want to give a few practical tips this month, so for the sake of plotting, let's just assume you've already got your character. Now get a pen and paper. Or a laptop, I'm not fussy.

-What does your character want, more than anything else in the world? Write that down

-What is the quickest way for that character to get to what they want? Write that down.

-What aspect of themselves is your character most ashamed of? Write that down.

-Who, or what, would be the biggest obstacle to your character getting what they want?

(you guessed it, right that down.)

So you have a list. It's not a big list, but you'll find you've already got more ideas spinning around in your head than when you were staring at a blank page. The next step is also pretty simple. Write a paragraph about each item on your list. By the time you've finished, you've got enough of a plot to get started writing your story.

Practice makes perfect? Maybe not.

by: Joelle Charbonneau

The more I write, the better I get at the craft of writing. That makes sense, right? Practice makes perfect. However, maybe it is just me, but I’ve also found that the more I write the harder it is for me to discern whether or not the story is any good.

I just completed my 9th manuscript. The first 4 will never see the light of day, which is a good thing. Some should never be read by anyone. Others are in genres I really have no interest in writing in again. They were great practice, but I don’t really want readers to flip through the pages. Four of the other books are either published or under contract. This most recent one is not. Is it good enough to be? I really don’t know.

When I started writing, I assumed that my ability to judge my skill level would improve. And on some level that is true. I am much better at judging the pacing of a scene, or crafting quick dialogue and choosing my words carefully to create the setting. But somewhere along the line I lost the ability to judge my own story. I can tell you if the individual pieces work, but no matter how much time passes, I can’t seem to make a judgment on whether the overall story comes together.

I felt this way when revising my 8th manuscript – MURDER FOR CHOIR – and was terrified when I sent it to my agent. I thought I had too much going on in the book and that she was going to tell me it sucked. Every day that passed between sending it to her and hearing the verdict made me chew my nails and even more certain that the book was terrible. Turns out she loved it. Several editors felt the same way.

Yay! The book sold fast.

Crap! I learned that I no longer have a clue if what I am writing is any good.

Now here I am revising my 9th book trying not to despair at my lack of ability to see the forest through the trees. Do I think the idea for the story is good? Yes. Am I doing it justice? The hell if I know.

So, I guess my question is this – do you ever have trouble gauging the quality of your own work? If so, can you tell me how you get through it because at the moment I can use all the help I can get.

Everyone shouldn't be published

by: Joelle Charbonneau

Why is it wrong to say that everyone shouldn’t be published? Yeah – that question is already sending some of you to your refrigerator to procure vegetable missiles. And while I might have to duck and cover, I will say that I don’t believe that everyone who writes and seeks publication should actually achieve it.

Should everyone be an accountant?

Does everyone have the ability to be a neurosurgeon or a rocket scientist?

Trust me when I say you don’t want me playing with sharp objects near your brain or doing whatever mathematical equations are necessary to launch people into space. Does that mean I suck at science or math? No. No it doesn’t. But it does mean that some people are better than me at it and I’m glad they’re the one in charge of keeping satellites in orbit.

Could I have applied myself and become a fabulous doctor or a ground breaking scientist? Yes – although all the studying in the world might not have helped me reach the fabulous or ground breaking parts. But yes – I could have spent years and years in school studying the principles and then years and years in internships and residencies and in a variety of jobs to learn the skills I needed to learn.

But I didn’t and so I will never crack open a skull (unless it is on the page) and I’ll never get high on rocket fuel fumes.

When I decided to sit down at my computer and type, I did so because I wanted to see if I could tell a story from beginning to end. And I did. Once I did that, I decided I wanted to learn better ways to write a story. I worked with other writers to learn about the craft of writing. I read lots of books in the genres I wanted to write in to see how the authors I liked best sculpted their words. And I worked hard to find my own voice….as crazy and wacky as it sometimes is. And even after years of work I knew that I might not ever be published because there are only so many books publishers will buy and mine might never be one that fits what they are looking for.

Would not being published mean I was a bad writer? No. Great writers go unpublished all the time. That’s just the way the business works. And I was okay with knowing that. In fact, just knowing that made me work harder to make my own writing stronger. I never wanted to publish the books myself (even though many do and they are very happy with that choice) because I wanted all or nothing. I wanted to get an agent, be edited by an editor and go through ever step that the authors I have loved for years went through. And if that had never happened I would have been at peace with it. I would never have thought less of myself for trying or curse the fates.

Publishing is what it is. A tough business.

And yet, for some reason saying the words “Everyone who writes shouldn’t be published” gets a lot of people pissed off and ready to do battle.

Being published takes hard work and even still you might come up short. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. The current trend to self-publish (and I’m talking full novels here not short story collections that are best sold directly to the author’s fan base by the author themselves) seems to perpetuate the thought process that all people who type on their computer should call themselves published authors. I can’t help thinking this is wrong. The new trend of writing a book and sticking it up on Amazon almost immediately after hitting "THE END" gives writers permission to skip steps in learning the craft and the business that would make them a better writer. They don’t have to go through the painstaking editing that might be required to get the book to the next level. They don’t have to worry about making sure every word is necessary. They don’t…

They just don’t.

Those steps are important. And I’m not saying that there aren’t books out there that have gone through these steps and for some reason or another didn’t get traditionally published. And I’m not saying that there aren’t reasons that one might want to self-publish a book. (Those short story collections are great reasons to venture into this arena.) But everyone who writes – traditionally published authors included – should never skip the steps that make their writing better. And if you are willing to skip those steps then you shouldn’t be published.

I’m not saying any of this to be mean or rain on anyone’s parade. In fact, I want to do just the opposite. I want every writer striving for traditional publication to keep working toward that goal. Keep writing, revising and submitting. Will you find an editor or agent if you do this? Not necessarily, but your chances are better. The more you do this, the more lottery tickets you buy in the publishing raffle. And one day, when you least expect it, your number might be called. And if not – then you will be proud of your efforts.