Tips For New Writers BEFORE You Begin A Project!

Decide How You Are Going To Punctuate!

Let’s say that somewhere in chapter thirty you find yourself needing to write down the contents of a street sign. How would you do it?

Maybe:

“He thought he was on Parker street, but when he reached the street sign it read ‘Pine Rd’.”

Or:

“He thought he was on Parker street, but when he reached the street sign it read Pine Rd.”

This may seem like an immaterial distinction to most beginning writers – neither way really matters after all. What does matter, however, is consistency. If half of your book puts signs in quotations and the other half puts them in italics, that can be very negative for you as an author. You won’t come across as having planned very well, readers are less likely to give you the benefit of the doubt if any questions arise in their mind, and/or you’ll have to do a lot of editing in the future to make up for your lack of planning!

Also, be sure to plan your personalized punctuation. There will be instances where you might prefer stylistic choices that are outside of the norm. A personal example from my own work comes from the big debate in the editing community right now about the use of “all right” vs. “alright”. The general consensus now is to use “all right” in any and all cases. I personally, don’t agree with this. What if somebody cut their arm and a character asked, “Are you feeling all right?” In my mind, this seems like a flawed question. How could somebody be all right, as in completely right, if their arm is bleeding? Knowing personal preferences like these beforehand is important. Before you begin a project you should do yourself a favor and ask yourself the tough questions:

• Do you want to use quotations?
• Will you indent your paragraphs, as is common, or try to save printing space as in the up and coming style?
• Will you put dialogue on separate lines?
• What tense will you be using?

Remember, consistency is key!

Start With Something Other Than A Novel!

It takes time to develop your own unique style. If you start with a novel, you will be discovering it as you go along. This is a problem, not just because of the consistency issues listed above, but because without being extremely familiar with your preferred way of doing things, you might not be able to elegantly convey the messages that you want to convey. I recommend writing several short stories before you begin a novel. Ideally, use your stories as training tools to practice your craft, decide your favorite tenses and discover/fix your personal disadvantages. This is the best time to test the boundaries of what you are capable of in your writing! Another way to test your writing ability beforehand is to write a screenplay. A screenplay, because it is a bigger project, is a great test to give oneself as a starting writer. It will give you as a writer a chance to see what it’s like to work on a larger project, and will force you to plan your work in a very similar way. Whatever you do, beginning a novel can be a daunting task! If you do it without the proper preparation, you might find yourself unable to finish or left holding a 30,000 word book!

Know Your General Point Before Word One!

It’s okay if you prefer to write without knowing your destination. While I personally thrive with 10+ pages of planning, not everybody does. What is not okay is meandering. In my work with new fiction I’ve come across stories about characters who have no life goals, who wonder aimlessly from place to place, simply because their authors didn’t know what to do with them. Just having a message or, at least, a basic character arc in mind, can help drive your plot forward. By a message, I don’t necessarily mean a moral.

Let’s say you decide to write your book about a poker player in the 70’s – a real Doyle Brunson type, not unaccustomed to having his winnings taken from him at gun point in back-alleys. Your message can be something simple like “Poker players lead rough lives.” This allows you, the author, to know the confines of the story. If your character is a gambler on page one, he needs to be a gambler on page one-hundred and one. This message also prevents you from clearing all his problems away too early.

What happens if you don’t have a message or through-line. Let’s imagine a story about a chronic gambler whose life is really hard until, about half way through the novel, he meets a woman who helps him get over his addiction. Throughout the rest of the book, the ex-player helps other people get over their addictions… what’s the message here? That a good relationship can cure addiction? Not really. If it were, what was the point of the second half of the book? That curing gambling is a good thing? If that's it, it's a really weak message! Do you see how it falls flat? The book has become a series of events devoid of meaning. There must always be something that connects the events in a meaningful way! Think about a good book that may, on the surface, be all over the place. A good example is Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. Billy Pilgrim jumps through from scene to scene throughout the book. The events don’t unfold chronologically. Yet, somehow it works. What holds the book together? It’s the message about the Dresden Bombing, and about war in general: when someone witnesses a great tragedy, sometimes they need an escape in order to keep their sanity.

Before you begin a novel, at least have a general idea of what you’re trying to say! Here’s the sad truth: You will create messages whether you want to or not! The most powerful ones, however, are intentional.

Create A Schedule!

Start small. 300 words a day is more than doable as an initial goal. Depending on how early you have to wake up, consider doing it first thing in the morning before you start your daily ritual. If you can only set aside an hour a day, you might be surprised at how much you’ll actually get done during that time. Not everybody has time to write 2000 words a day like Stephen King, but a schedule will force you to be honest with yourself about what kind of time you DO have to write. The most common reason I hear for not setting aside specific time to work on your book is “I don’t even have time to make a schedule!” Okay. If that’s really, honestly true, you certainly don’t have enough time to write a novel.

Familiarize Yourself With Similar Material!

If you’re planning on writing a book about aliens invading the US, you should read and watch any similar material you can get your hands on. The point is not to steal their work, but to see if their stories can fuel your own creative efforts. In these cases, don’t read/watch for pleasure. Instead, think about plot holes, what made the dialogue good or bad and the work’s strengths and weaknesses. Let your mind run away with possibilities. Ideally, you’ll find yourself thinking, “That’s good, but what if I did this…” Even if you don’t immediately find anything useful, seeing how other authors wrapped up dilemmas you might face may subconsciously help you with your future problems. Before I start a project, I won’t touch a book that I don’t believe will be useful, either because it’s written in a similar style to my future novel, or because it contains a certain element that I want to incorporate in my own work. Not only is this process immensely helpful, but it allows you to make sure that what you’re writing hasn’t been written before!

Note: Lots of people prefer to write by the seat of their pants. They believe that, because they have no idea how their project is going to turn out, that they can’t do any research beforehand. I completely disagree with this philosophy. If all you know is that you want to write something about a guy who lives in Tennessee, then you know enough to start!

Writing Prompt

Write 500-700 words on the general point of a novel you are planning on writing. I won't edit it, but I'll give you advice on whether the idea has what it takes, what works to look at, and how to maximize your ideas effectiveness!

All About Flashbacks

We all know that in the last fifty years or so, flashbacks have run rampant. Sometimes they are used well, but most of the time they break the flow of a story. Books like How to Write a Damn Good Novel by James N. Fray recommend using flashbacks “only when you have to,” but they rarely go into specifics on why flashbacks can be so irritating for readers. On that note, this article has a dual purpose. The first is to explain the problems inherent in using flashbacks, and the second is to give you a few ways to minimize them in your writing. Let’s begin.

The problem with flashbacks isn’t as clear cut as some writers may believe. I personally avoid them entirely in my writing, but it’s not the concept of the flashback so much as the way they are often executed that causes the trouble. Here are a few EXTREMELY common tendencies that, if you are going to come across as a professional, need to be avoided entirely.

1) Having Your Character Enter Flashbacks Too Often

This is just unrealistic. While the best plots are character based and not action based, there should always be some kind of action in the lives of your characters – they are better, smarter or just different than the average people (or else why are we reading about them?!) So, in the hectic life of these other-beings, how do they have time to allow the smell of a flower to transport them back to a time when they were bouncing on their father’s knee? If it happens once, okay, fine… but I have read and edited books where it happens hundreds of times! This brings us directly into the next point.

2) Unrealistic Memory Sequences

“Being punched in the face brought me back to the time when…” Sound ridiculous? This kind of stuff happens all the time. Author’s first novels especially are filled with people running away from serial killers who, simply because of the color of the street, are transported to a business meeting they had two years ago. THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN. Your writing should mimic reality, and in reality, when you are fighting for your life, you simply don’t care about anything except the knife in your assailant’s hand and whether or not you are going to die.

3) Breaking Action Scenes

Flashbacks at their best, serve to show back-story. When you are in the middle of an action sequence, whether it be physical action or emotional action, that’s the only story you should be focusing on. Simply put, your reader doesn’t care why your character is in that position – at least not until much later. What they want is to see how it turns out. They want you to make them feel something: fear, shock, anger, sadness… When you set up a sequence with resonance, and then pull away to explain why your character is there, it’s the equivalent of handing and ice cream cone to a child and then quickly taking it away and saying, “Don’t worry. You’ll get this back later.” As you can probably imagine, it doesn’t create any positive emotions.

But what about movies? Lots of movies begin with a crazy action sequence. A man in a cashier’s uniform is driving a car. Suddenly, a black van cuts him off and he slams on the breaks! Five or Six men jump out and grab him, abducting him in front of 100+ eyewitnesses. The police try to pursue, but the van does some kind of daring maneuver and they’ve abducted the man. THEN, we begin the movie with a close-up of our seemingly-average-Joe cashier as he helps somebody buy a pair of pants at the local clothing store. All in all, this is a fairly strong sequence, but the action scene itself is still ruined. Think about it. Either a) We find out that Joe is actually an ex-marine who was placed on a secret mission to kill a foreign political leader (Not Kim Jong-un guys, nobody freak out.) In this scenario, the sequence was all smoke. We used a reverse flashback to give a scene that wouldn’t have been shocking the element of surprise and by the time we get to its actual place in film, that game has been played already; or b) It would have been surprising, but instead of having a shocking turn of events, the viewers of this imaginary movie are now actively trying to find out why Joe was in this situation. Either way, by the time we get to that sequence, it’s been played out. Flashbacks destroy the tension of action sequences. That’s just the way it is.

4) Using Flashbacks Too Early

I recently read For Whom The Bell Tolls by Earnest Hemmingway, and while it was a wonderfully written novel in many ways, the opening felt very weak. In the very first chapter, about three pages in, we flashback a week earlier to the events that brought our main character, Robert Jordan, to the heart of the Spanish Civil War. Most readers, myself included, probably wouldn’t have learned the character’s first name three pages in, so the question is: Why should we care? Flashbacks exist to bring out character traits and show vital information that may have been left out along the way. In essence, a flashback serves to answer questions. Why is a character acting a certain way? Where did Ned get that bazooka from? If you start flashing back in your first two or three chapters, there simply aren’t enough questions that readers need answered. What’s more, if there are, you are almost always answering them too quickly! You want your readers dying to know something before you reveal it to them. If you answer their questions before they’ve even thought of them, you aren’t leaving very many places of tension!

5) Throwing Flashbacks at Your Character

In many first time novels, flashbacks can come across like a character obstacle. Oftentimes, this is not what the writer intended. A common fallacy concerning flashbacks is that characters have to be in the experience themselves. Back to the first example, if the smell of a flower transports your character back in time, and he is living the memory over again, this can make your character appear to have mental problems! It is as if they are incapable of living in the present moment. If you are going to use flashbacks, it’s best to use them casually. Here is an example.

“The last time John ate an orange he was back in Napa with his family. He wasn’t yet eight years old and his sister…”

In this example, even though the action has shifted to the past, the reader isn’t jarred by the sudden explosion of prose born from something as simple as an orange.

So how do you avoid flashbacks?

1) Work the Back-Story in Using Dialogue

It might be harder, but it’s far more elegant. Of course, I’m not suggesting you do exposition:

“Ted, how’d you get that scar?”

“This? Well, I got this when I was fighting in Vietnam. Yes, I may look like a normal guy, but I have some hidden demons...”

If this is the best you can do, I recommend sticking with flashbacks! That said, if you just keep your character’s past in mind, you’ll be surprised how many times it comes out in your writing. Maybe one of his military buddies visits the town? Maybe his alcoholic grandfather gives him a tough time about how he only served 15 years in the army when his other sons are both Generals by now. There are many ways to bring out these kinds of revelations without resorting to flashbacks, and your readers will be thankful for it!

2) Work the Back-Story in Using Description

If your novel is written in the First Person, this is incredibly easy. First person is already in the head of the character, so it actually takes less effort to do it this way than to use a flashback!

“The store clerk looked at me with more spite that a Viet-cong soldier. If I’d had my M16 with me, there’d have been clean up on three isles.”

In third person, it’s a lot easier to use action.

3) Action

Let’s imagine a mugger jumps our Vet in the street. This is a great opportunity for dramatic, exceedingly interesting character development. What if, when the mugger attacks, he immediately disarms him, takes him to the ground and snaps his arm in three places? Maybe we didn’t specifically say that this guy has military training, but I guarantee you that your readers will realize that there’s something out of the norm going on!

4) Simply Don’t Explain!

Your readers don’t need to know everything. If there are things they don’t know about your character, FANTASTIC! Think about your best friend. You probably know him or her very well. Do you know everything about them? Of course not! People are complex. Why would you want your characters to be any different? I personally love it when authors entice their readers and then don’t ever go back to fill in the blanks.

“You know, this reminds me of that one time at Lake Powell…”

“Yeah, I know what you mean…”

Then go off and talk about something else entirely! Wonderful. Never force your dialogue to reveal things to the readers. If both Jack and Peggy know exactly what happened at Lake Powell, don’t explain it. This is a fantastic trick to add realism, but keep in mind it should only be used for fairly minor plot points such as the one above. If you spend half a novel talking about something, you’ve effectively made a promise to wrap it up. If after that, it just kind of drops off and we never hear about it again, you’ve broken the trust of your readers.

Writing Prompt

Whatever your choices regarding flashbacks, you might as well learn to write them correctly! Write 200 words on a character in a normal setting, then ELEGANTLY flashback for another 500-800 words. As always, if send it to me via the contact tab, I'll edit it for free!

Thoughts On The First Person Present POV

In my previous blog post, I mentioned that writing from a First Person Perspective can be a problematic writing style. This isn’t a popular statement. The First Person POV has gained quite a bit of attention in the last twenty years, a lot of it centered around the popularity of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games. I myself have read many wonderful novels written using this style, but in general, I think it should be avoided. Like all of the problematic styles I listed in my previous post however, there are advantages and disadvantages. In this case there are several more disadvantages than advantages for new and experienced writers alike, but I’ll do my best to create an objective list to ruffle as few feathers as possible.

Advantages:

1) Easier to be Inside the Head of a Character. The Hunger Games is a great example of this. If someone were to try and put all of Katniss's thoughts into something written from a past perspective, it would probably be rather annoying to read. In present however, there is an easy chronological order. Take for instance, the scene on the platform, just as she is brought up through the tube at the beginning of the games – we as the readers are fully conscious that every thought she has takes place as the seconds are counting down, and it only intensifies the action. In present, especially first person present, thoughts feel more like active story points.

2) Intense Action During the Action Scenes. When stuff is really happening, present is just a joy to write in! Sentences like “He stands over me, hands at my throat, keeping the air from passing into my lungs” are crisp, powerful and just delightful. “He stood over John with his hands at his throat, keeping the air from passing into his lungs” simply doesn’t have the same fire. There is another layer of separation. We’re seeing John and his attacker through another screen.

3) Characters Are Easier to Relate to. This might not always be the case, but I’ve personally found good present tense work to be easy to relate to. Your heart thumps along with the character because the prose takes you step by step through action.

Disadvantages:

1) Naturally Leans Toward Shorter Chapter Length and Lots of Line Spaces. Chapter breaks and line spaces are some of the only ways to veer away from things like meals and going to sleep – things that will be mind-numbingly dull in any POV. In present, it’s tough to say things like “The next day, I’m sitting with my friend Bob planning how we’re going to win the archery competition” or whatever, because if it truly is present, you have to remain in the present moment, and “The next day” implies a broader perspective than a character might have if he/she is looking on events for the first time. So instead, you do a line space and say “My friend Bob and I talk about various ways to win the competition. It’s only a day away now, and we’re running out of ideas.” Note how I wove in the time that has passed in a way that might follow the actual flow of the conversation. This brings us to the next disadvantage.

2) Constricting. Okay, going back to our previous example. Say you wound up trying to solve “the next day” problem by doing a line space before the previous action, but instead of what I said, you wind up saying something like, “Now I’m with my friend Bob, planning how we’re going to win the archery competition.” Do you see how the “Now” is a little tough to justify if someone were really living moments event by event, because it’s always in the now, so having to specify it implies a kind of time skip. Counteracting issues like these may become second nature after a while, but writing a novel is hard enough as it is, and you really don’t need to be adding more things to do! Which brings us to the next disadvantage.

3) Tough First Drafts. When you’re forced to keep certain things in mind to write in the present tense, the entire school of writing in which one writes a shoddy first draft and then comes back and edits it to perfection is lost. You HAVE to make sure your story makes sense in present or else the editing will be so intense you may never want to write again. I’m serious. This said, I tend to do very tight first drafts myself so it wouldn’t bother me as much as some. Which one are you? Do you like to freewrite and then edit later? If so, maybe a first person past is what you’re looking for?

4) Significantly Less Narrational Leeway. This one is important. Let’s create a hypothetical example to show the real issue here. Let’s just say that your character owns a pot that she’s had for fifteen years. She uses the pot nearly every day for making soup for lunch. In this particular story, it is of vital importance to describe the appearance of this pot, as it has a family crest carved into the bottom, which (as your hero will find out later) gives the object the ability to grant three wishes… Okay, this example is absurd, but hear me out. How, if she has used this pot every single day, can you get off describing it in first person present? “I take out my pot, the one with the family crest scratched into the bottom, and start cooking…” But isn’t that forced narration? Present is the same as being in the mind of the person, and why would the person, who has no reason to describe the pot, describe it? To try and make this work in this story, you would be forced to have her drop the pot to reveal its backside, have somebody else mention it at some point in the story and have her reply “Oh, that? I thought that was just a family crest!” or something tacky and obvious to get it out. It makes you either A) spend a LONG time making the current story work, or B) change the story somewhat. While option B isn’t necessarily a problem, you might be surprised by how many times you will find yourself changing story elements in FP-present. There’s a trick that I do where, no matter how hard it is to write, the way I imagine it is the way it needs to be written in the story. That way, it holds my real feelings and people are less prone to discover writing tactics. This directly conflicts with the idea of changing something because it might work better with the flow of a novel! On a less dramatic note, FP-Present also limits the amount of time you can spend on the descriptions that actually do work.

I’m reminded of a story I heard not too long ago. In it, people enter a woman’s house, and as they enter, what they are seeing (beautiful lamps and decadent upholstery) is described. How would this description vary in FP-Present? The author couldn’t say anything about the way the furniture was arranged or on the intricate patterns of the lamps. There is no “stop button” between action points where description can fit. It must be bare-bones. Eg. “I look around the room and see lamps on an oak dresser – exceedingly expensive lamps – and think ‘Wow… this woman is a snob!’” I picked one thing to focus on, added one thought, and it’s time to move on. Why? Because time flows when characters observe and think. Sadly, those are the only times in present where any description can come out.

5) Almost Impossible to Switch Between Characters/How Can Your Main Character Ever Get Knocked Unconscious? … How can he or she die? If the narrative follows your character, you run into a few issues. If you switch characters and continue to write in the present, you will confuse your readers to no end. As much of a literary nerd as I am, I cannot think of a single book that switches characters in present! There are lots that switch in first person, As I lay Dying being one of them, but not in FP-Present. Another issue is that, if something happens to your character (a car accident, a brutal mugging et cetera…), the second he/she gets knocked out, you are practically forced, unless you open up your bag of tricks, to end a chapter or do a line space. On top of that, the reader knows also that the next sentences after your character loses consciousness will be your character waking up, and it’s always boring to know what’s going to happen. What’s more, if your character dies, that’s the end of the book. There can be no pondering sentences about the meaning of his/her lives. A quick comment, maybe, is all you get.

Here's an example:

“The faces around me begin to swirl together, smeared like with the sun like a kindergartener’s finger painting. ‘Is this it?’ I ask them, but they are a blob now, a single orange blob, a color swatch that has taken the place of my friends. Yes. This is it, I think… I’ve always hated the color orange…”

Powerful? Yes. But you might find that, by the time you reach this point, you still have more to say. You want to tie in that idea you had about how, when her brother died at a young age, she had always wondered what it was like to die. You’ll find in this case, if you try to add even a sentence about herself wondering if this is what her brother felt when she dies, it’s simply too late.

6) Agents and Publishers Hate the Present Tense. There are several Agents that won’t accept work written in the present tense. Why? Because it’s harder to write a masterful work in the present tense, and most writers aren’t good enough to make it work. That said, most will accept it, but when it comes to finding representation, especially if you’re not yet an established writer, you want as few things as possible counting against you as possible.

Writing Prompt

Throw caution to the wind and write a 500-1000 word story in First Person Present! Send your completed assignment to my email through the contact tab on the website and I'll edit it for free!