Rule R: writing Rules are not set in stone

Linda’s Rules of Writing

You have until sundown to stop breaking the rules.

We’re onto the letter R in Linda’s Rules of Writing for the A to Z Challenge.  What better letter for the Rulz themselves?

You’ve probably seen it.  A writer posts for critique or asks a question like “Can I use a dream sequence?” or “Can I have a flashback?”

The other writers trot out their imaginary rule book and say, “No.  You can’t do that.  It’s against the rules.”

Like there’s a rules police who will come after you to run you out of town for doing something against the rules.

Seriously, if the writing is done well, that’s all that should count.

Right now, I’m breaking the rule of following a 3-Act Structure.  Instead, I am ignoring it and doing something else that works for me.  What “rules” have you broken and why did you break them?

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Check out my short story “Six Bullets,” which is in the Forward Motion Anthology A Princess, A Boatman, and A Lizard. Six Bullets is about a princess who enlists in the military and has to battle her way upriver. It breaks one of the traditional “rules” you hear about — opens with a character waking up. I didn’t even think about that when I wrote it because being in the military means that your sleep is going to get interrupted for guard duty, gunfire, or inspection.

Caption: A to Z Challenge

 

Rule N: Never look desperate when it comes to writing

Linda’s Rules of Writing

Begging is cute on a dog, most of the time anyway, but smacks of desperation from a writer.

We’re onto the letter N in Linda’s Rules of Writing of the A to Z Challenge, and it’s never to look desperate.  Sort of like Gibb’s rule to never apologize.

This one was inspired by a review request I got.  The writer was emailing me blindly because I had a blog.  He didn’t notice I didn’t do book reviews, nor did he notice what I read, nor did he notice how to spell my name correctly.  Honestly, Linda Adams — is that hard to spell?!

Desperation comes in many forms.  It’s the writer begging for reviews like above.  It’s the writer spamming strangers on Twitter. It’s the writer slipping a manuscript under a bathroom stall to the agent inside.  It’s the writer willing to lie to an agent to get what is needed.

It’s tough getting published, and there’s a lot of competition.  Only about 5 percent get an agent’s interest and 1 percent of that gets to a publisher.  It is enough to make people desperate to be seen.  But if the story doesn’t work, fancy tricks aren’t going to sell it.  Desperation just plain looks bad.

What’s your gripe about desperate writers?

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Rule F: writing has to come First

Linda’s Rules of Writing

Sometimes social media feels like a tug of war with other priorities.  But I made my priorities by writing 75% of these posts over several months.

We’re onto the letter F in Linda’s Rules of Writing of the A to Z Challenge, and on making sure writing gets done First.

There are so many things now that are in a tug of war for our attention: Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Pintrest, you name it.  Writers have been told they need to build their audience, even before they’ve finished the first book.

I took the We Are Not Alone blog course with Kristen Lamb.  One of the striking things was that all these writers got online and started blogging three times a week.  I immediately stopped the recommendation to find link lists and videos because, frankly, it took too much time, and I wanted to hold onto my writing time.  It’s hard enough working around the job.

About 6 months later, I started seeing my fellow WANAs posting that they had to take time off blogging so they could get back to writing.

Writing the book has to come first.  Without the book, all the social media in the world isn’t going to matter.

How have you taken back your time from social media?

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Writerly Adventuring

I wrote on this same topic for Vision: A Resource for Writers.  Check out my article Balancing Writing and Blogging in issue 69.

 

Rule E: publication is Earned, not rewarded

Linda’s Rules of Writing

A soldier earns medals by doing things that most people don’t want to do.

We’re onto the letter E in Linda’s Rules of Writing of the A to Z Challenge, where being published is something that is Earned.

When the military is mentioned in the media, the medals are often referred to as being “won,” which makes them sound like a prize.  Soldiers earn them through the things they do.

Publication is like that.

When print on demand first took off, writers flocked to it and believed that it was their way to get what they thought was publishing “success.”  Invariably, many ended up paying to get a physical copy of a bad book and selling to only family members.

I always thought POD gave the writers an excuse not to get better.  (They didn’t like me much when I mentioned this.).

But I kept seeing an attitude come from them, that they’d invested all this time writing this book and now they should be rewarded for the effort.  That attitude is still out there, and usually the writers with it have the most myopic view when it comes their own stories.  It’s suddenly about finding the right person to get the foot in the door, not how good the story is.

Publication is earned through hard work, and sometimes a lot of it.  Even today, with the more options for writers that include self-publishing, the readers’ interest still has to be earned.  No one gives bonus points for effort.

What kinds of things have you changed in your writing to make it better?

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Caption: A to Z Challenge

 

Rule B: take regular Breaks from writing fiction

Linda’s Rules of Writing

A grass umbrella on a beach: Sometimes sitting and doing nothing is a great break!

We’re onto the letter B in Linda’s Rules of Writing, and on the importance of taking Breaks.

If you wander the web, you’ll find plenty of advice that says “Write every day.”  There’s truth in that advice, because it’s really easy to find something else more important and not get around to writing.

But writing every day can drain the muse.  So it’s important for the creativity to be recharged.  When I was trying out all different forms of writing, including screenwriting, I managed to burn myself out from too much writing.  That’s apparently common for writers in Hollywood because they do a tremendous amount of writing.  Now I take one day a week off to do something else, or nothing at all.

Since I’m in Washington, DC, I have plenty of museums to visit, like the awesome sculpture garden for the National Art Gallery.  The National Zoo also recently opened their new Elephant Trails.

What kinds of fun things do you like to do on writing breaks?

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Caption: A to Z Challenge

 

When You Hate to Research

That’s me, by the way.  I don’t really enjoy research and am never going to get lost in it and forget to write a novel.  In fact, what Advanced Fiction Writing says is absolutely true:

If you hate research, then [you] are probably not doing enough of it and your fiction writing is going to suffer in various ways.

* Sigh * Yup, it’s true.  It also doesn’t help when I see another writer produce a huge list of questions about details to research and all I want to do is hide because I’ve instantly gotten overwhelmed.  Don’t mistake this — I like some of the information I find because it does inspire creativity, like researching Chinaman’s Hat in Hawaii:

Screen reader: Palm trees and grass frame an island shaped like a hat the Chinese immigrants used to wear.

Butt the process of research is at the opposite end of creativity.  I’d almost rather do proofreading.

Almost.  Proofreading is pretty boring!

So it starts with making the research as efficient as possible.

I have to know exactly what I need.  What I’ve been doing is identifying details in scenes that I need to research.  Like if the scene is set outside, “What are common trees in Hawaii?”

Screen reader: Shot of a monkeypod tree in Hawaii, which resembles an umbrella.

Then all I have to do is bring the list of questions with me and hunt down the information with a fast scan through.  I also have to make sure I take good notes so I don’t have to repeat the research. Been there, didn’t want to do it, but got stuck doing it anyway.  I’ve always had a problem with being able to take useful notes, so I’ve been experimenting with visual note taking.

The time to do the research is also a consideration.  I ran across a reference in a book where a non-fiction writer would do footnotes when he wasn’t feeling particularly inspired.  So I try to do the research when I know I’m probably not going to be writing.  That way, it doesn’t feel like it’s cutting into the writing time.

Do you hate to research?  What do you do to make the process of it less painful?

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How do you take these three diverse subject — a princess, a boatman, and a lizard — and make them into a story?  My short story “Six Bullets” turns the princess into a soldier who has to fight an army of warriors of a river.  Check out the Forward Motion anthology, A Princess, a Boatman, and a Lizard.

 

Not Shooting Yourself in the Foot With Your Online Image

I have a confession: I’ve been going to science fiction conventions since 1976.  My goal for many of those cons were to see actors.  Some of them were nice people and others I wouldn’t want to know.  One I became friends with.  He was always a gentleman and very aware of his image he presented to the world.  At one con, he did an interview for a horror magazine.  So when it first came out at Borders, a friend and I snatched up copies right away.   I called my friend, a little worried because the interview was laced with f-bombs.  We’d both read all his interviews in the past, more than 20 years worth, and he’d always kept it very clean.  We debated about it and wondered if the writer had added the words for that magazine.

Nope.  The actor had gotten to drinking during the interview and said the words himself.  When he saw the interview, he was livid because he’d gotten the writer to promise not to use the profanity.  But the true problem was that he’d said them in the interview in the first place.

There’s been a lot of that online lately from writers.  It’s like people have forgotten … Read the rest on Unleaded: Fuel for Writers.

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My short story “A Soldier’s Magic” appears in the anthology The Darkness Within, available from Indigo Mosaic Publishing.  It features two women soldiers who have to make a tough decision to save a lot of people.

 

The Frugal Novel Researcher

Maybe a few too many books?

How many research horror stories do you have?  I’ve bought books that I’ve never used, made copies of magazines for scenes that ended up being jettisoned from the story, and had to research topics multiple times because of my bad note taking abilities.  Yet, as the sequestration looms on Washington, DC, I may be furloughed.  The writing isn’t stop, but I’m going to have to find ways to cut costs out of things like research.

That means, among other things, not buying books.

Must.  Resist. The. Bookstore.

And it’s easy to buy books.  It doesn’t look like a lot of money.  Until I realize I’ve bought five books on a topic and have spent $100.  Start adding up what you’ve purchased and see what it comes out to.

I think one of the reasons I spent so much on the sources was because I’m a terrible note taker.  I’m visual spatial, so I don’t connect well to the typical note taking methods, nor was I taught how to do it.  I’ve had to start out saving money by learning how to do this part better with visual note taking (which is also a lot of fun!).

But the internet, while free, isn’t always a good source.  Ever gone online for a quick 5-minute search and 1 hour later got back to writing?  Sometimes it’s easy to get distracted, and specific information can be hard to find.

So the local library has been my first resource for research.  It’s pretty close, so if I needed to save on gas, I could walk there (you are tracking your gas mileage when you do research, right?).  I’ve been using a combination of the library’s online catalog and WorldCat, which is a great tool for telling me what library the books are located at.  Sometimes I’ve had to go to other libraries, like the University of Maryland.  But that has additional mileage costs and parking, so I have to make sure that my visits there are a good use of my time (back to taking good notes).

Inter Library Loan has also been a great tool.  It does cost about $3.00 a book, so I still have to look at what I’m spending.  I once made the mistake of getting a book through ILL, and the book turned out to be available in its entirety on Google Books (having been published around 1900).  Worse, it wasn’t helpful.  So, before I order an ILL book, I look around to see if there are other resources I might be able to use.  The result is that I’ve only ordered two books recently because they’re topics I know I’m going to need to spend more than a few hours with the book.

Copies are also one of those things that add up.  I used to copy pages from magazines when I found an article I needed, and for the same reasons as buying books: note taking issues.  Often what would happen is that I’d make the copies, and then the scene that had needed the research would get deleted.  :>

What are your research horror stories?  What to do you do to save money on research?

Links on research for fiction writers

Guns, Drugs, and Elvis: Research tips for novels from Kenyon College

10 Research Tips for Fiction Writers:  Practical tips based on experience from Sheryl Clark.

Researching Details in Fiction: Worth a look alone for the list of links.

 

Doing What You Like — Writing. But It’s Not As Easy As It Looks

It’s Tuesday, and we’ve just had the usual rounds of complaints about Mondays.  A lot of people don’t like their job, so they fantasize about doing something else. @NKEllison sent this tweet:

Lots of tweets and FB updates about hating Mondays and working. Change what you do to something you enjoy and it won’t feel like work!

That’s not always possible, especially for a fiction writer, where the competition is beyond fierce, and the learning curve is a chasm.  Yet, most people don’t have an understanding of how difficult it is — even other types of writers.  It’s not uncommon to have someone think the process for writing and publishing a novel looks like … Read the rest on Unleaded: Fuel for Writers.

 

I Don’t Need No Stinking Rulz

One of the things I’ve discovered about writers on the internet is that they love citing rules to other writers.

Got a prologue?  Get rid of it.  There’s a rule against it.

Dream sequence?  Nope.  There’s a rule against that, too.

These rules emerged from guidelines identifying things beginning writers misused, overused, or did badly.  But they turned into “Don’t do it at all,” as opposed to “Learn how to do it well.”

When we try to break the rules and do it well, we’re often told, “You have to know the rules to break the rules.”  What does that mean?  How do we know at the point where we know the rules and can break them?  If we ask other writers, they fall back on”You have to know the rules to break the rules.”

I learned how to write by reading novels.  Sometimes I see a writing element an author used, and I want to try it out myself.  Little did I realize that if a published author does something that breaks the rules, I’m not allowed to experiment with it.  Other writers descend and tell us a published writer can get away with breaking a rule, but we can’t.  So we’re supposed to read published books and learn from them, but we can only things that follow the rules?

I don’t know.  Maybe it’s a way of trying to control something when so much of the control is out of the writer’s hands.  I sent two short articles to the Washington Post Magazine.  Once I clicked submit, it went into a black hole.  I don’t know if the editor will read it, like it, or even respond.

What do you think is behind this obsession with rules?  Tell me about a time when you broke the “writing rulez” and why you did it?