When it doesn't come easily...

Sometimes I sit down to write and everything flows like I'm just the medium for some muse or spirit who has things to say...other times, getting the words out feels like I'm trying to walk while dragging a load of logs behind me.  I've realized that when that happens, it's because of two main things:

1.)  I'm letting myself be too distracted by other things - social media, news, life's dramas.  I fix this by disconnecting myself from the Internet and taking my Alpha Smart to some quiet place where I'm not temped to see what reply I've gotten to my latest FB posting about the Gaza Strip, for example.  Or, if it's something going on live - I compartmentalize.  I take note of it and file it away to be dealt with when my word count is near where it should be.  (Of course, emergencies have to be dealt with on the spot but, thankfully, those are few and far between.)

2.)  The other main problem is when I haven't done sufficient research into the background of the work at hand so I'm having problems envisioning the setting or my characters or reasonable plot developments.  This is easily fixed by taking a day or two to immerse myself more deeply in the life of the characters - if the setting is somewhere other than where I live, for example, I may spend some time on Google Maps and Street View trying to see what my characters would see.  I check out Wikipedia - not just the country itself or the city, but the things that have happened there recently, the foods, the language, the music, the flora and fauna.  I watch YouTube videos.  Usually, I emerge from this once again brimming with excitement and the will to write.

Other things I think would also help are taking a writing class, joining a writer's group, and reading or re-reading a book like Stephen King's On Writing.  I was once a member of Romance Writers of America and I've kept a lot of the great motivational articles from writing workshops I attended online so I return to that folder every now and then and find them hugely helpful.

What do you do to get your mojo going?

How to Help a Starving Author 3: Authors Helping Authors

Remember my How to Help a Starving Author posts? The first was the DOs, and the second the DON'Ts, and they were aimed at readers and fans who wanted to support their favourite authors so they could continue enjoying their books. Today's post is aimed at authors. In the current independent-spirited publishing climate, authors need each other like never before. Without authors spreading the word about other authors' books, there is little chance of the books being noticed, sold and read. 

So what can an author do to help fellow authors? The answer is: A lot:

1. Befriend each other on Facebook.

2. Like each other's Facebook pages.

3. Follow each other on Twitter.

4. Like each other's author pages on Amazon. (Garner enough 'likes' and the Amazon algorithm kicks in to improve visibility of the books.)

5. Like each other's books on Amazon. (Ditto the algorithm stuff.)

6. Download members' free books during promotions. (You don't need to own an e-reader; Kindle apps, for instance, are free for most devices. Download an app here.)

7. Tag each other's books on Amazon. If the books already have tags just clicking the boxes will do.

8. Host each other on author blogs.

9. Comment on each other's posts, not forgetting posts in blog tours.

10. Write reviews. The bottom line is that reviews are more effective than anything else when it comes to selling books. Take the time to write reviews, keeping the following in mind:

• Never review a book you haven't read.
• Always give an honest review. 
• Avoid spoilers! Giving away the plot spoils the reading experience for others.
• Don't insult the intelligence of shoppers. Most experienced shoppers can tell when reviews are less than authentic. I can. We have learned to read the signs, like the reams of 5 star reviews from people named 'A Customer' and reviewers who have reviewed nothing else on the site. 

These are the basics; there is much more that authors can do collectively: readings, book signings, advertising, printing of promotional items. There is strength in numbers; the reach of a group is often far greater than the sum of the reach of individuals operating on their own. Cross promotion works. We have seen it happen time after time where authors get together and do all of the above and their books break out of the ranks to become bestsellers. Buzz creates buzz, and buzz sells books. Much of the buzz behind the breakout books these days is created by... other authors.

Do you have a cross-promoting success story? Please share it in the comments.

—Liane Spicer

Lessons on Writing from the World's Champion Speaker

Ryan Avery, the 2012 International Public Speaking Champion, has a lot to say about being a professional writer. I know, I heard him say it two weeks ago in Hickory, NC. The fact he didn't say a single word about writing is beside the point.

I'm willing to bet some of you had no idea there was an International Public Speaking Champion. The championship is sponsored by Toastmasters International. Every year up to thirty thousand people in 116 countries enter local Toastmaster competitions with at least some idea of making it to the international bout. Contenders are winnowed out through a series of local, division, district, regional, and national contests until there are only ten. These finalists go head to head at Toastmasters International's annual convention, which in 2012 was held during the second full week of August in Orlando, Florida.

At twenty-five Avery is the youngest person ever to win an International Championship. Not that he's all talk. At twenty-five he is also the Oregon state director of Special Olympics, has degrees in anthropology and journalism, and is beginning graduate work in strategic communication. (I suspect becoming International Public Speaking Champion of 2012 is just one cobblestone in the road he's building.)

This is a YouTube video Ryan Avery made when he set his sights on winning the international championship. Before he'd won his first local competition. Watching it is interesting, but you can learn a lot that's relevant to writing just by looking at the still.
First thing you notice is that the video exists. Avery made a firm public commitment to his objective. He told everyone he knew - and a lot more people he didn't know - exactly what he was doing. He didn't bore them with excerpts from, iterations of, or musings about his speech. He just made sure he was accountable to as many people as possible.
The second thing you'll notice is that his wife let him nail six whiteboards to their living room wall. This tells us his personal support team of one believed in his sincerity and determination; whether she thought he could actually pull it off is something she kept to herself.

Writing, serious writing, requires self-discipline and constancy – it's too easy to goof off or get distracted or do any of a hundred things besides work. Other people in our lives, those close to us, usually don't take our writing seriously until they've spent some weeks or months watching us take it seriously. Avery's wife took his objective seriously because she'd already seen him demonstrate the requisite commitment in earning his two degrees and working with Special Olympics.

Avery's objective is posted in the center of the whiteboards and over the next several weeks he filled the areas around his goal with things and ideas relevant to that objective. He studied videos of past finalists and read transcripts of their speeches. He studied the structure of the speeches and looked at the subject matter. He learned male contestants wore dark suits. More importantly, he learned that winning speeches had 600-650 words, were delivered in just under seven minutes, and shared a three-step structure; averaging fifteen to twenty 'laugh points' – moments of humor – each.

In other words, Avery discovered all he could about his target market, figured out their needs and preferences, and determined what he'd have to do to deliver a product they'd buy. Which is what a professional writer should be doing as a matter of course. Don't send a story to Analog or Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine if you don't read either; submitting a story to a market you haven't researched is a waste of your time and theirs. If you have researched a market you want to break into, say the New Yorker, and discovered you don't write the sort of story they buy, you need to decide whether you want to write their way or set them aside and look for another market.
That last bit was the problem Avery faced. He freely admits he is not good with humor, at least not the kind used in the winning speeches. But changing markets wasn't an option; he would have to learn how to be funny.

Until you start looking for them, you don't realize how many Toastmasters clubs there are in the world, most towns of any size will have at least one and cities usually have several. Avery has a pretty good idea how many are in Oregon. He traveled the state, visiting as many as four Toastmasters clubs a week, trying out variations of his speech in front of as many strangers as he could find. His videoed each outing and asked his listeners to be brutally honest, and listened to what they had to say (he reports many said he'd never be funny). He didn't take everything his many audiences said as gospel – a lot of them contradicted each other – but he paid attention and made what adjustments he felt were valid.
Writers often undervalue practice; we want everything we write to sell, to reach as many readers as possible. We like to pretend we don't know we need to write new things, work to develop new skills, even if no one else will ever see our efforts. We need to pay attention to what trusted readers, colleagues, and especially editors say about our work. Don't rewrite – unless an editor makes it a condition of sale – but take note of things to think about and watch for in future projects.

I do want you to take seven minutes and look at the YouTube of Ryan Avery's winning speech. Note the structure of the story. Note how he uses all senses – even the taste of Cheetos – to give each scene impact. See how he employed imagery his audience – at a convention in central Florida during the hottest days of sumer – could identify with, sweating in a hot suit and the jarring sound of a hotel alarm clock. Also note that he recognized the tradition – not requirement – of wearing dark suit was a convention that didn't serve the story or his objective; he wore a green suit in order to stand out.

But also note something else, something that's apparent only in two moments toward the end. He told those of us listening to him in Hickory that the hardest line for him to deliver was "when her curls turn grey." He cried when he wrote it and he almost cries every time he says it. That's the first thing. The second is the last line. Whenever he speaks his wife always sits so they can see each other; he always makes eye contact and he always says the last line directly to her. We were in a small room in Hickory, and I could see both of them legitimately mist up at his last words. Because despite all his artifice, despite all his carefully calculated pauses and inflections, despite the comic mannerisms he forced himself to master, despite his green suit, what drives Ryan Avery's speech – what gives his words their power – is his heart.

Do I really need to explain what that has to do with good writing?

Writer’s Block? I Don’t Have…Oh, Shiny!

Last year when I began my monthly turn here at Novel Spaces, one of the things I mentioned in my “all about me” blog posting was that I don’t believe in writer’s block or the notion of waiting for The Muse to strike. To me, these terms always sounded like a fancy way of saying, “I really, really don’t want to write today.”

Now, bear in mind that this is just my way of not letting myself off the hook when it comes to this kind of thing. Of course writing can be hard, and some days it seems like the words just don’t want to come out and play. However, in my experience, what a lot of people try chalking up to “writer’s block” instead can be explained by a simpler yet less exotic-sounding term: distraction. Oh, yes, distraction is as much the enemy of writing as it is any other endeavor, perhaps more so because you’re usually working alone, with no one to spot you. Therefore, distraction, once it seizes hold of you, often is able to maintain its grip because—more often than not—there’s nobody around to call you on your shenanigans. Having regular deadlines is a nice way to battle this demon, but there are those times when even that doesn’t seem to wield a big enough stick.

Distractions are everywhere, aren’t they? Facebook and Twitter, video games, DVDs or Netflix, that Finding Bigfoot marathon on the Animal Planet: Traps, folks! Every single one, and those are just off the top of my head. I’m as susceptible as anyone to such frivolous time sucks, and my home office is an arsenal of bad influences. I write a lot of media tie-in fiction and magazine and web content, so a television in the office is a necessary tool. It’s also a siren, luring me in with promises of a favorite movie or TV series season set from my rather sizable collection. I don’t have a game system in my office, but I do have a fully functional Star Trek arcade game in one corner. Hey, I use it to…uh…research, you know…space combat tactics. Yeah, that’s it.

As for the actual writing, there are times when I experience difficulty with thinking too much about what I’ve already written, and not about what I’m supposed to be writing at the moment. Even though I often preach “Write now, edit later” as a quick, sensible writing tip, it’s another easy trap, and I’m pretty sure every writer at every level has fallen into it at some point. On other occasions, I stall because I realize I haven’t given sufficient thought to the scene I want to write, where I want the character and plot to go from this point, and so on. Or, maybe my original idea for the scene just stinks. I’m not one of those writers who can just sit and figure out those sorts of things, so I go and do something for a little while that doesn’t require a lot of thinking—exercising, cutting the grass, washing the car. More often than not, my little writer brain unknots the problem while I’m engaged in that other activity, and then I run back inside and jot down some notes so that I’m primed the next time I sit down to start banging keys.

Another trick I use is to set aside the project du jour and start a bout of “writing freeplay,” where I just get stuff out of my head and onto the page. Sometimes I don’t even bother with the laptop and go with pen and paper, or one of those composition books like we used to have in school. I have a handful of those things, their pages filled with all sorts of random, nonsensical scribblings I used as a warm-up, and this sort of exercise often helps get my brain into gear for the day’s “real” writing. Maybe it’s notes for another project, or some dialogue snippet, or backstory for a character that might not even make it into the story I’m writing, but at least I’m working the muscles. It’s a quick little self-therapy session that helps me back on task.

What gets in the way of your writing? How do you fight distraction? Do you have your own little tricks or rituals you call upon to get you back on track?

Guest author John Brantingham: What Writing Sonnets Taught Me about Writing Mysteries

John Brantingham

When some mystery writers find out that I was a poet before I wrote mysteries, they expect me to be a little snobby. I’m not sure why. None of my poet friends are ever surprised to find out that I love mysteries. Most of them do too.

Besides, I love to write sonnets.

The major misunderstanding of the sonnet is that it is a restrictive form of poetry with rules meant to inhibit the writer. Anyone who has worked with the form for any length of time has found the rules liberating. These are not rules that weigh the poet down but tools that help the writer find meaning. Because certain things must happen at certain moments in the sonnet, the poem writes itself.

What I love about the form of the sonnet is that it gives me the poem and the ideas. As long as I allow the tools of rhyme and meter to carry me along, I will always get a poem that is satisfying to me and the readers.

In fact, often the worst thing that I can do is to get in the way of those elements. It’s better to start without a clear idea of what I’m going to say in a sonnet and let the form write the poem. All I need is a word or two or a beginning idea and the form of the poem will help me find greater meaning. Wordsworth knew that. Shakespeare did too.

And Shakespeare would have loved to write a mystery novel.

The genre has built-in tools that help writers create meaning. When I write a mystery, I always come to that wonderful moment when the story takes over. I -- like the reader -- wonder what’s going to happen next.

That’s the form taking over as it does in the sonnet. If the form doesn’t take over, if I am forcing things to happen, then I know something is wrong. Perhaps, the characters have not been well drawn. Perhaps, there is not enough action to propel the story. Perhaps, the antagonist has no real complexity.

What the sonnet taught me to do was to lighten up and not be so controlling. It taught me to surrender to the process. If you like, it taught me to surrender to the muse. That’s served me well in writing mysteries.

I put the murder in chapter one and let the form pull me to the end.

Anyone who writes sonnets well appreciates mystery novels and appreciates mystery novelists. Sonneteers and mystery writers have the same love of form and have the same dedication to craft.

So here’s a question for everyone. Whoever answers first will win a copy of my poetry collection, East of Los Angeles. What important event happens in the last two lines of a Shakespearean sonnet? It not much different than what happens at the end of many mystery novels.

—John Brantingham


John Brantingham's work has appeared on Garrison Keillor's daily show Writer's Almanac, and he has had more than 100 poems and stories published in the United States and England in magazines such as The Journal, Confrontation, Mobius, and Tears in the Fences. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for a poem in his chapbook Putting in a Window, which was published by Finishing Line Press, and his second chapbook, Heroes for Today, was published by Pudding House Press. He is a full-time professor at Mt. San Antonio College in Southern California and one of two fiction editors of The Chiron Review, a nationally distributed literary magazine.

John's website: http://johnbrantingham.webs.com/index.html
His blog: http://johnbrantingham.blogspot.com/

What Do You Bring To the Table?

Independent presses have a lot to offer today's aspiring authors. The slush pile is smaller and the chance for an unknown, untried author to get a contract is greater. Unlike large publishing houses, there's still very personal interaction between editors and writers. Unlike self-pubbed books, the publishing house takes care of cover art, lay-out, printing and distribution. Authors are nurtured and a bond builds between the author and publisher.

What most authors fail to realize is that they are expected to don the hat of promoter once the ink has dried on the paper. The job's not finished when THE END is typed on the last page of the novel. In fact, the hard work has just begun.

Anyone aspiring to a career in publishing cannot be blind to all the posts and forums talking about book marketing. It's the #1 topic discussed today. Yet, when the long-awaited novel is finally on the shelf, there it sits. Why? Because authors are unprepared or unwilling to dirty their hands in selling the book to the public. Isn't that someone else's responsibility?

Depending upon the contract, the average amount a publishing house gets is less than $2 profit per book sold. It takes the sale of approximately 200 books before a small outfit sees any profit on a title. That covers production cost, plus Amazon gets their cut and the author gets royalties. Industry stats say the average book will sell about 500 copies. Nobody is out to get rich, but in order to keep producing more books, money has to come from somewhere.

Independent houses exist only when authors and publishers work side by side to do book promotion. I would be more inclined to recommend to my publisher a well-written book backed by an enthusiastic marketer over a great novel written by a prima donna who has no interest or intention to sell.

Holidays and Heresies

As I discard the last of the Halloween candy (I thought of donating it, but who needs donated candy?), I found myself thinking about holidays and ancient heresies.  Though we live in a modern world, we keep old pagan notions closer at hand that most of us are aware of.  

Halloween was not always Halloween.  The Christian holiday of All Hallows Eve began as the Celtic festival of Samhain.  Throughout Ireland and Scotland, bonfires were lit to mark the moment when the membrane between the world of the living and the world of the dead was at its thinnest, and the souls of all those who died during the year could pass through.  

When the coming of Christianity, the good Celts were not keen to give up their traditions, so the holiday was reassigned, made a Christian holiday.  But it’s still Samhain deep down.

The Spring festivals honoring the fertility goddess Eostre were similarly re-imagined. The Saxons would invoke Eostre using the egg as a symbol of birth and renewal.  Often depicted with a rabbit at her side, Eostre moved into Britannia with the Anglo-Saxon invasion, finding a fertile new home.  

But converting pagans is never light work, and the cults of Eostre were not going to give up their long-held traditions and beliefs.  The Christians had little choice but to allow the worship to continue, so they created Easter, modifying the name only slightly, and reassigning it a Christian meaning.

Perhaps the toughest pagan holiday to dislodge was Saturnalia, the wine-fueled orgiastic festival that gave praise to Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture.  The Christians were just going to have to find something else to do with December 25.

Not to be forgotten, Saturn still lives on in our western concept of time - we honor him at the end of each week with his own day - Saturday.  

Lest the gods of the Vikings feel left out, the most powerful among them, Odin, gets his due every Odin’sday or Wednesday as we pronounce it.  Odin’s wife, the goddess Frigg, gets her due on Friggjardar, or Friday.

So as the grocery stores stuff away their Halloween wares, briefly replacing them with Thanksgiving themes, before the arrival of Santa Claus (a pagan Icelandic figure who rode an eight-legged horse named Sleipnir, for whom children left food by the chimney), I’ll be thinking of what to get my wife for Christmas.  

I still have time.  Besides, it’s only Thursday (Thors-day, named for the Norse god of thunder, the mighty Thor.)

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