Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

Must you begin your fiction-writing career by writing short stories so that you can “pay your dues?” Or is it OK to just start writing novels?

Neil posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Hi Randy: I want to write novels but I have read that you should start with short stories. I have read short stories but I have never been interested in writing them. Should I start with writing short stories for several years or should I start by writing novels which is my end-goal?

Randy sez: The short story is a somewhat different art form than the novel. If you want to write a novel, then write a novel.

Way back in the bad old days, there were a lot of markets for short stories, and if you wrote a short story, you had some prospect of getting it published. A lot of those markets have dried up for various reasons. You can still sell short stories, but your prospects of getting paid are lower than ever.

The advice that writing teachers gave writers in the bad old days was to start with short stories. Part of the theory here was to “fail quickly” although that particular buzzword didn’t hit the world until the 1980s, and the advice on writing stories goes back long before that.

Personally, even in the late 1980s when I started writing, I thought it was bad advice. I have written very few short stories in my life. I started right in learning the novel as an art form. After nine years of working on novels, I still hadn’t sold anything, but I was getting close.

One day I got an idea for a geeky short story, “Computers in Hell.” The question I asked myself was, “What kind of computers do they have in Hell?” I figured there had to be plenty of good puns that could be made out of “wicked fast” and “blazing speeds” and all that.

So I wrote the story and submitted it to a local computer magazine in San Diego that took one short story per week. What do you know! It got published and I earned $150 for it. So it turned out that my training as a novelist fitted me to earn a few bucks writing a short story.

Shortly after that, I sold my first nonfiction book and then soon after, my first novel, and I was off to the races. I’ve not looked back to short stories. Don’t see why I would want to.

If you wanted to write short stories, I’d say to go ahead and do it. If you wanted to write haiku, I’d tell you to do that too. Write what you want to write.

Neil, since you want to write novels, write novels. And have fun! If this fiction game isn’t fun, then it isn’t a game, and the pay’s just not good enough to do it as a job.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Blog of the Day: My freelance editor, Meredith Efken, answers a really interesting question today on her blog at the Fiction Fixit Shop: “Must every scene end with a disaster?” The short answer is of course, “Yes and no.” The long answer is . . . longer than that. Check out Meredith’s blog to see what she wrote and my comment.

Tosca Lee, one of my writing buddies, recently resold her first two novels to a new publisher. They’re currently running a promotion on Tosca’s first novel, Demon. For a limited time, you can download a free e-book version of Demon.

I met Tosca about three years ago at a writing conference. She was rooming with my freelance editor, Meredith Efken, and I got to know her a bit during the conference. At the end of the conference, while I was packing up my unsold books from the bookstore, Tosca gave me a copy of Demon.

Demon is about an editor who is accosted by a wannabe writer with a memoir that turns out to be his life story — as a demon. A real, human-tempting, lost-his-immortal-soul, straight-from-the-pits-of-hell demon. A minion of Satan. That kind of demon.

This is the kind of book that could be truly awful in the wrong hands. Or it could be fantastic in the right ones. So I read the first few pages on the plane with plenty of qualms. By the time the plane set down, the qualms had disappeared in a puff of sulfur and I was hooked.

Demon is one of those unforgettable, un-put-down-able books. I can’t guarantee you’ll love it. Different people like different kinds of books. All I can tell you is that I loved it. You can get a free copy right now, in either PDF format or ePub format.

PDF files are readable on any computer using Adobe’s free software. On a Mac, you can also read it using Preview, which is better than Adobe’s software.

ePub files are readable on most of the modern e-book readers EXCEPT the Kindle. (You can read a PDF file on your Kindle, so this isn’t that big of a problem.) Tosca emailed me about this promotion yesterday, so I grabbed both the PDF and the ePub version to see how they work.

They work just fine. To load an ePub file on an iPad, you open iTunes, click on the Books tab, and drag the ePub file into the container that holds your books. Then you plug in your iPad and the book transfers automatically. The book is a real pleasure to read on the iPad.

You might also enjoy Tosca’s second book, Havah, the story of the legendary mother of the human race. Right now, Tosca’s working on a novel titled Iscariot, and I’m pretty sure you can figure out what that’s about. You might think that Tosca is overly concerned with the Dark Side. I don’t agree, but if you don’t want to read about Evil and all that, then there are plenty of books about Amish people you can read. But I bet you’ll find plenty of that pesky Evil hiding under those bonnets.

As a footnote, I’ll add that Tosca is a two-time winner of the Mrs. Nebraska title and she was also first runner-up in the Mrs. United States contest. There are some people who think all beauty queens are brainless vaporware. My Loyal Blog Readers are far too intelligent to put people in a box like that. Tosca has a degree from Smith College and studied at Oxford and is smart enough to be one of my favorite Girl Geeks. So there.

Diana posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

How do you think of a good titles for your books?

Randy sez: You find good titles wherever you can get them. While driving. While taking a shower. While cleaning up the dog barf.

You really can’t force inspiration, so just relax and wait for it to strike. And if you have to spike Fido’s dog food with Instant Ralphie to speed up the process, then you are one sick writer, but go ahead and do it for the sake of your art.

Of course, thinking up a great title is no guarantee that it’ll get used. As we talked about not too long ago on this blog, a lot of publishers seem to believe that they have a perfect right to change your title. (Since they paid for the rights to publish the book, there’s a case to be made for this surly attitude. Since it’s your name on the cover, you have a right to object if they try to foist off a bozo title on you.)

I’d say to not worry too much about the title until you’ve finished the book. Start writing the novel. Keep an eye out for some word or phrase that keeps coming up over and over. Maybe it’s something one of the characters keeps saying. Maybe it’s part of the action. That word or phrase just might make a good title.

Or not. Like I said, you can’t force inspiration. Let’s be honest. A missing title is nothing to keep you up at night. If worst comes to worst, you can always try to sell it as “Untitled.” Editors might prefer that to something dreadful like, “Samantha Gets The Guy” or “Johnny Saves The World.”

Truth to tell, I’ve come across some incredibly bad titles when critiquing manuscripts at writing conferences. I’ve come across some incredibly good ones. I can’t remember any of them now. What I do remember are the manuscripts that were actually good. A number of those manuscripts have gone on to get published.

If a manuscript is good, any editor alive can come up with a passable title in ten minutes and most editors can even come up with a pretty good title in that length of time. (It takes a full committee — with Marketing, Sales, and Editorial all working really hard for hours — to come up with a total loser of a title.)

Trust me, your readers aren’t going to be running around telling their friends, “I just read the most incredible title!” Anyway, if that’s all they’ve got to say about your novel, then you should probably just slit that story’s throat right now and throw its ugly carcass out for the wolves to eat. No, you want your readers running around telling all their friends, “I just read the most incredible novel!”

Write an incredible novel. The title will pretty much take care of itself.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Blog of the Day: My friend Brandilyn Collins blogged today on “The Home Stretch in Writing” — namely, the last 30 days before the book is due. Since I have known writers who had not STARTED their book 30 days before it was due, this business of calling the last 30 days “the home stretch” seems a little bit of a stretch to me. In any event, you might find it interesting to see what a number of published authors have said about their experiences in that pesky home stretch.

What do you do when that pesky well of inspiration runs dry? How do you deal with the dreaded writer’s block?

Saira posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I’m confused, I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember and it was always my way to ‘get away from reality.’ I mean, I could really get inside my characters minds and just enjoy telling their story but now I’ve hit a giant brick wall… no ideas flow and if I get one I don’t like it, or I can’t go off of it. I don’t know how to get over this brick wall of writer’s block, it’s almost as if I’ve lost all desire to write… but I LOVE writing and I don’t want to give it up… how can I get past the brick wall and start the work on my novel? How do I reignite inspiration?
SairaCee.BlogSpot.com

Randy sez: A lot depends on what’s causing your writer’s block, Saira. I can think of a couple of reasons you might be blocked:

• You’ve written everything you had to say. When you run out, you run out. It’s that simple.
• You’re trying to create and edit at the same time. This is like driving while pressing both the gas and the brakes all the way to the floor.

If you’ve run out of things to say, don’t panic. You’ll get your inspiration back, but you need to take a break and do something else for a while. Read some good books. Watch some movies. Teach a kid to read. Play chess with your cat. Fly a kite. I don’t recommend trying to find your inspiration in a bottle. Your brain is a fantastic machine. When it’s out of gas, fill the tank, don’t throw in sugar.

If you’re trying to edit yourself while writing your first draft, then stop. Right now. When you’re being creative, create, don’t edit. Give yourself permission to break every rule in the book on your first draft. As the saying goes, get it written, then get it right. The surest way to freeze you up is to insist that every word you type be perfect. If you need some outside motivation, visit Dr. Wicked’s “Write Or Die” page. (I confess I’ve never taken the Dr. Wicked challenge, but a bunch of my writer friends swear by this.)

Truth to tell, I’ve almost never had writer’s block. That’s probably because I usually start writing when there is just barely enough time to get the book done before my deadline. That’s a powerful motivator.

When you know that you have to write 3000 words every day to hit your deadline, and you have three hours to write per day, then there just isn’t time to have writer’s block. You write your thousand words per hour and that’s that. If you get behind, you wake up one morning in a cold sweat wondering how in the name of Gandalf you’re going to hit your deadline. Then you realize that your back hurts from all the writing you’ve been doing, so you call in sick and tell them you can’t work today because your back is killing you. Then you sit home in your underwear all day and write like a maniac and put eight thousand words in the bank.

As Mark Twain said, when you know you’re going to be executed tomorrow, it concentrates your mind wonderfully. Ditto with a deadline, which is probably why they call it that.

If you don’t have a dragon-breathed editor breathing fire down your neck, you can get the same effect by finding yourself an accountability partner. My buddy John Olson sets a weekly goal and tells his friend Pete. If John doesn’t hit his weekly goal, then Pete gets $100. This works awfully well, especially if you can’t afford the hundred bucks. You might be up late on Saturday and email in your quota at 11:59 PM, but you will hit your target. And if you miss your quota once and have to shell out the $100, you’ll never do it again.

What do my Loyal Blog Readers do when writer’s block strikes? Leave a comment and share your secrets for beating the dreaded disease!

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Is it a rule that your fiction writing should always “show” and never “tell?” If so, then how do you get rid of the “telling” in favor of the “showing”? And if not, then how do you know when to use which?

Jay posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

How would you define the difference between ’showing’ and ‘telling’? I hear a lot from people talking about how you should never ‘tell’ the story, but always ’show’ it, but I also see a lot of different definitions of those two terms. What are your thoughts?

Randy sez: Drat, Jay has asked a question that needs about 10000 words to fully answer it, and I’ve only got a few hundred here. Well, I’ll do what I can, but in the end, I’m going to have to refer you to my book, WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES, for a lot of the details. (Of course, there are other books that deal with this topic, but tragically, none of those other books were written by me.)

The big problem here is that editors will often tell you “Show, Don’t Tell,” but they just plain don’t have time to show you what they mean. I believe that “showing” can be broken down into five different techniques. If you master these five, then you know everything there is to know about “showing.” If you use any other techniques than these, then you are “telling”:

• Action. Anything your characters do, shown in real-time. Example: Jake swung the bat into the kidnapper’s head.
• Dialogue. Anything your characters say, shown in quote marks. Example: “Take that, you scurvy dog!” Jake shouted.
• Interior Monologue. Anything your characters think, whether a verbatim record of the thought or a mere statement of it. Verbatim thoughts are often shown in italics, whereas indirect thoughts never are. Example: And if you ever touch my daughter again, you’re dead. What were these idiots thinking, to mess with the daughter of a Navy Seal?
• Interior Emotion. Anything your characters feel. This is best done by showing direct physiological reactions which can be directly interpreted as emotions. Example: Another rush of adrenaline boiled up in Jake’s stomach.
• Description. Anything your characters can see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Example: Two gunshots rang in quick succession. The bare light bulb in the basement exploded in a burst of darkness. Cold air rushed over Jake like a river. He smelled gunpowder, so strong he could taste it. The small red dot of a laser aiming device raced across the floor toward his feet.

If you restrict yourself to using only the five tools above, then you are “showing.” If you don’t, then you’re “telling.” Let’s look at how to “tell” the above snippet of a scene:

Jake whacked the kidnapper with a baseball bat and yelled at him, angrily wondering what kind of idiot he was. Somebody shot out the lights and then took aim at Jake.

Please note how much more efficient “telling” is than “showing.” Please note how much more vivid “showing” is than “telling.”

Now here’s an important point: You want to “show” the interesting parts of your story and “tell” the uninteresting parts.

Once in a while, I come across a manuscript that spends all kinds of time telling the character’s backstory and setting up a scene. Sometimes the writer will show in loving detail every single boring thing the character does on the way to the conflict. Then the conflict of the scene rushes past in a paragraph or two and then the writer spends the rest of the time winding the scene down in narrative summary.

Don’t do that. Spend your words on the high-conflict parts of your scene, showing it moment by moment, leaving out nothing. Then zip through the boring parts of the scene by telling.

There is a whole lot more to say about showing and telling, but it really doesn’t make sense for me to type all those thousands of words in again, when I already typed them into my book once.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

When you write young-adult fiction, do you have to “dumb it down” to the level of teens, or can you write as if they were adults?

Kathleen posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Randy — I’m writing YA and have begun to realize that I’m not really holding back when it comes to reading level or word choice. In other words, for me, it’s reading at the level of general commercial fiction. My protaganist is a very bright 14-year-old and I’m writing from his POV. Still, I keep reading that there are different conventions for YA and adult.

Randy sez: In recent years, there’ve been several major YA novel series that have been big hits with adults. Let’s look at each of them:

HARRY POTTER. The first book in this series is written at a bit lower level than any of the others. It’s shorter and tends to have a bit more juvenile humor. The next couple of books really stepped up the level until by book 4, the reading level was clearly for adults.

TWILIGHT and its sequels. Even the first book in this series was clearly written for older teens and so the word usage is at an adult level. Adults may gag at the massive amounts of teen-girl angst in the story, but they certainly won’t feel that the vocabulary is limited. And most adults can remember their own teen angst.

THE HUNGER GAMES and its sequels. This series has been first-rate from the get-go. The language and style work just fine for adults. (I’m hoping my copy of MOCKINGJAY arrives today!) The only reason this series was classified as YA is that the protagonist is 16 years old.

I’m not an expert on the conventions of YA, but it seems to me that the above examples prove that you can write a very successful YA series without limiting the language or treating your readers like dummies. I’m also reminded that Orson Scott Card’s books ENDER’S GAME and ENDER’S SHADOW featured preteen characters, but the books were targeted to adults. Card was criticized for making his characters “too smart.” Fans of the series know that a lot of kids that age really are that smart. Many fans of the series actually were that smart when they were kids.

So I’d say, go for it Kathleen. There’s no reason to dumb down the reading level on a YA book. Teens are not stupid and they don’t like being talked down to. Many 7th graders are completely able to handle adult-level books. Write a great story and you’ll have no shortage of fans.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

What if you want to write beautifully AND still tell a gripping story? Is there a middle road that lets you do both?

Shiv posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

When I had first landed on your site, it was a steep learning curve for me. I Quickly learnt the fundamentals of fiction writing like POV and I’ll always be thankful to you for that. Your e-zines helped me overcome the initial “trash writing” period every newbie goes through.

But then, after a few months, I moved on. And thats when my problem started.

Since schooldays I have always read and loved literary fiction. But now when I am writing my own novel, I can’t and don’t want to write purely literary novel. At the same time I also don’t want to write “literary junk” I know the story will remain the same in both the case. But in what style I present the story, also matters. Can you help people like me who want to adopt a “middle path” - not compromising too much with the aesthetics of language and style and yet writing a gripping and entertaining story that provides Powerful Emotional Experience?

Randy sez: There is no reason that literary fiction has to be boring. There is no reason commercial fiction has to be trashy.

For some reason, many writers assume that the world of fiction is one-dimensional. On the far left, you have beautifully written literary fiction that is boring as sand and sells like dogpoop. On the far right, you have the shlocky stuff that’s fun to read and sells like Cheezits.

This is nonsense. In mathematical terms, you have two independent dimensions here. The literary quality has nothing to do with the entertainment value.

It’s entirely possible to write a highly literate novel that’s also massively entertaining. Here are a few (a very few) of my favorites, and I have a ton of them.

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, by John LeCarre. This is, in the opinion of all right-thinking people, the very best spy novel ever written.

THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE, by Audrey Niffenegger. Literate and highly engaging. Read it.

THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME, by Mark Haddon. This is told entirely in the voice of a 15-year-old boy with Asperger’s syndrome. It’s a strong voice and a strong story.

GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING, by Tracy Chevalier. Beautifully written. A compelling story.

MY NAME IS ASHER LEV, by Chaim Potok. Ditto and ditto.

THE HUNGER GAMES, by Suzanne Collins. The third book in the series comes out TODAY! Amazon tells me my copy shipped out yesterday, so I should be getting it today or tomorrow. Some people will ask if this series qualifies as “literary fiction.” Heck if I know. Heck if I care. I teach the craft of fiction writing, and on my first reading of this book, I couldn’t find a single sentence to quibble with. (I found a very few very minor quibbles on later readings.) Draw your own conclusions.

THE CHURCH LADIES, by Lisa Samson. Lisa is a friend of mine and writes Christian fiction. THE CHURCH LADIES was a risk for her–after writing 8 novels, she decided to take a new direction and write something more literary. She succeeded. This book will surprise you, because the title so completely fools you into thinking it’ll be about dull, boring church ladies.

THE LOVELY BONES, by Alice Sebold. Literate. Gripping. What more do you want?

THE KITE RUNNER, by Khaled Hosseini. An incredible look inside Afghanistan culture.

OUTLANDER, by Diana Gabaldon. Is this a literary novel? No, but it’s highly literate. Is this a romance novel? Yes, but it’s a whole lot more.

OK, that’s ten novels that rate high on the lit scale and the excitement scale. I’ll bet my Loyal Blog Readers could come up with another hundred. How about it, folks? Wrack your brains and name your favorites. The only rule is they need to be great writing and great reading. Leave a comment here telling which ones you like. We’ll all benefit, and maybe we’ll all line up a few books that we never heard of before.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

How do you insert nonfiction explanations into your novel without sounding like a textbook? There are a few secrets to this, and I’ll reveal them today.

Mimi posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I am writing a novel and I have a question regarding plagiarism.

How do I go about presenting descriptions of non-fictional elements such as iconic locations (such as buildings and other landmarks), scientific studies and facts, etc., without making my novel look like a thesis?

How do I incorporate facts and figures in my novel without violating any copyright laws?

Randy sez: Let’s tackle these in reverse order.

How do you insert facts and figures into your novel without violating copyright laws? The most common way is to write it in your own words. That typically means you need to have several sources for your information (which isn’t always possible). But it always means that you need to understand it well enough to say it in your own voice.

Alternatively, you can quote short sections if you give credit. The key word here is short. Look up “fair use” on the internet to see how short is short. One common way to give quotes in a novel is in an “epigraph” at the beginning of a chapter or at the beginning of a new part of your section.

In most of my novels, I’ve worked in a few pithy quotes from authorities, giving full credit to the source. Normally, I have 3 or 4 major parts to a novel, and I insert these quotes on the page that begins each part.

Now how to insert all that information into your book without making it feel like an encyclopedia. The key thing here is to do two things:

• Make it short. Tell no more of those pesky facts and figures than you absolutely have to. You are a poor judge of what “absolutely have to” means. Ask your editor, your critique buddy, or your test readers just how many of your “indispensable” facts really are indispensable. You’ll be shocked at how little those philistines care about your research. For some reason, most people read a story for the story, not for the facts.
• Make it late. Avoid giving any facts and figures until your story is rolling — fast. Your reader will tolerate a history of the study of hummingbirds a whole lot better if the fate of the civilized world depends on that information. You can’t convince your reader of this until the story has built up enough momentum that even the dullest fool can see why those darned hummingbirds are so important.

In THE DA VINCI CODE, Dan Brown stops the story cold for three chapters right in the middle to give his view on Leonardo, the Holy Grail, Mary Magdalene, the Last Supper painting, Jesus, and numerous other things. You may think his ideas are weird or you may think they’re gospel. But you can’t deny that they matter to the story, and it’s really necessary to lay it all out somewhere. Brown was smart to wait until the story had built up a big head of steam before he trotted out his ideas. He also used the technique of telling his information in dialogue, using two character who knew all the facts, and one character who didn’t believe them and had to be persuaded. (In my view, she was too easily persuaded, but this is Brown’s novel, so he can write it any way he wants.)

Currently, Stieg Larson’s trilogy is riding high on the best-seller lists: THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is first, followed by THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE and then THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST. In these books you’ll find an enormous amount of nonfiction information on the structure of democracy in Sweden, on how to hack a computer, on Fermat’s Last Theorem, and on how the publishing industry works. Larson gets away with all these info dumps because he spins a fast, tight yarn (and because he’s created an incredibly compelling character, Lisbeth Salander, the “girl” who features in all the titles). Most of this information is presented as straight exposition, not in dialogue. This is the least compelling way to present information. Larson, who was a muck-raking journalist before he died, had the skill to tell his information in a reasonably interesting way.

You don’t have to use dialogue or exposition in your fiction (as Brown and Larson do). A third way is to salt in a fact here, a fact there, just at the point in the story where it’s needed. Suzanne Collins does this brilliantly in her trilogy beginning with THE HUNGER GAMES, followed by CATCHING FIRE, and ending with MOCKINGJAY (which comes out tomorrow! Are you all as eager as I am to read the final book in the trilogy?)

Collins inserts most of her exposition in bits and pieces throughout the story, inserting lone sentences with background information directly into her scenes. Generally, this is done as interior monologue, where the lead character Katniss is thinking about the information Collins wants to tell. Personally, I think this works pretty well. There are many writers who hate interior monologue. Done poorly, it can be awful. Done well (as Collins does it), it can be awesome.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

How do you avoid offending people who are going to read your novel and then say, “Good Lord, that character is me!” We’ll answer that thorny question today.

Sarah posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

How do you create characters that are enough different from real life that they don’t offend your friends - or your enemies?

I like to observe real people then twist their situations around into humorous fictional stories. (Like the clueless postal worker who faithfully follows every postal regulation–in the wrong order.)

My problem is, I do this even when I think I’m writing purely from my imagination. (Like the cow who burns a batch of cookies. That happened to me at age 11.)

I’m afraid that if I invent really uncouth or evil characters, people I honestly respect will think I’m making fun of them, or getting back at them, or trying to tarnish their reputations.

I would never exploit anyone in that way. Not on purpose.

So, how do you do it? How do you make realistic personalities that are *unreal* enough to be inoffensive?

Randy sez: There is one sure way to never offend anybody: Quit writing.

I don’t recommend that. If writing is in your blood, then you can’t do that, because nothing I say could possibly make you quit writing.

The flip side is that if writing is not in your blood, you’re eventually going to quit and nothing I say could possibly make you keep writing.

Listen, if you’re going to write fiction, then you’ll probably offend somebody somewhere along the line. That’s just the way it is. There are unreasonable people out there, and you can’t do a thing about them.

The only real choice you have is whether you’re going to write in a way that won’t make a reasonable person believe that you’ve based a character on them.

My rule of thumb is to take no more than a third of a character’s traits from any one real person. Often, I’ll just take one major trait from somebody I know. Then I’ll combine that with a number of other traits taken from other people or just made up.

There are a couple of legal issues that you should be aware of. Standard caveat: I’m not a lawyer, so nothing I say here should be construed as legal advice. My understanding is that you have two main things to worry about if you base a character wholly on a real person:

• Libel. If you publish something about a real living person, then it had better be true and you’d better be able to prove it’s true. The libel laws in the US are fairly lenient, but I’m told they’re much stricter in Europe. Libel laws don’t apply to dead people.
• Invasion of privacy. Even if you publish something true, you can still be sued for invasion of privacy if you reveal embarrassing information about a private citizen. (Public figures are fair game, here. If you want to reveal embarrassing true information about the President or anyone else who lives in the public eye, then you can.) Invasion of privacy does apply to dead people — their family can sue you for invading the family’s privacy.

The above apply even to fictional characters, if the character is clearly based on a real person. So it just makes sense to not base your characters on real people.

I’ve only ever had one person ask me if a character was based on him. My answer was no. I had taken one of his major traits and used it for that particular character, and I told him that. But I also said that I don’t ever base a character completely on any one person. I take a bit of this and a bit of that from different people, and a lot of it I just make up. And usually, each of my main characters gets at least one major trait from me. That ensures that I can write that character realistically from the inside.

In the past, I’ve had friends ask me to name a character after them. At a biotech company I used to work for, several of my friends kept asking me to do that. So I changed the names of certain minor characters in my novel DOUBLE VISION to be close to my friends’ names. But I didn’t base the characters on them in any way.

I’ve heard of novelists killing off characters who resembled people they didn’t like — an ex-spouse or the Other Woman or whatever. Personally, I’ve never done that, but I can see why a writer might enjoy that.

I don’t recommend basing a character entirely on some real person. When you do that, you’re just asking to offend them, and then you really don’t have any excuse. I’ve heard of a novelist basing a character on her own mother and being scared to death that her mother would be horribly offended. As it turned out, the mother read the novel and loved it and had some harsh words about that character, but she never dreamed that the character was based on her. So you might get off the hook, but I wouldn’t count on it. Mix and match traits from several real people, and you should be just fine.

What do my Loyal Blog Readers think? Have you ever based a character in your novel on a real person? Did you get away with it? What happened when the real person found out?

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Are you stuck in your fiction writing? Lots of novelists are. Today, I’ll help a 15-year-old writer get unstuck with a few words of advice.

Kevin posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Note: This is quite complex, for it expresses multiple questions that may be answered by simply giving details of my predicament.

I am but 15 years old and am highly interested in a writing career targeting young adults. I currently have two ideas for novels that I would like to write, one being a lengthy dark fantasy which requires little research, and another being a shorter dark historical that would require mountains of research that may actually rue the entire concept all together. I’ve invested much more time into the dark fantasy, for it was my original idea, and I plan to create it first.

Now, I am experiencing several problems. One is that I am not writing every day, and I understand that is something which I must work on myself, though not doing so during my schooling is acceptable due to the importance of education. I also fear that I may be trying to load in too much symbolism, but I sent to you earlier about that particular situation. The problem that I do wish to be addressed at this moment is the following:

Putting the daily planning that I forced upon myself by creating such a complex idea aside (though lately these thoughts have been slipping away for reasons I suspect to be related to the core problem I am about to express), I am finding myself stuck in the very same location of the writing that I started in, the first chapter. Constantly I watch my fingers creating and destroying wordings that are meant to tell the very same scene, and this is stopping me from going forward, and, excluding those ideas that burst into the brain only when a scene is being written, I already know exactly what shall occur all the way up to the fourth chapter, as well as many other key events and situations that I must find a location for only when more writing is done. This feeling of being trapped is highly aggravating, and I can foresee immense relief when I am finally satisfied with my first chapter. So, what is your advise? Should I continue this process of constantly rewriting though I am but a beginner, or should I move on to create a larger segment (or even an entire first draft) and then bring it to be critiqued by myself and my online critique buddies (I sadly believe that only one of them, the pessimist, is actually of use, though I am in the midst of finding another). It is quite understandable to me that, in its current phase, my writing should be fairly close to absolute garbage, for I have just begun attempting to write fiction, and this uncertainty of whether my writing is indeed publishable drives me to constantly rewrite that first chapter, especially since I have only one critique buddy that was born a pessimist and is actually insightful while the others are teenagers that I believe may be congratulating my work simply because they are my friends and don’t see the work as absolute garbage, or perhaps they can’t even tell when a work is absolute garbage (For example, I can assume that most of them read and loved Christopher Paolini’s books, though I have found online sources calling them filth).

I also saw your article on the two main schools of writing. One being writing is rewriting, and the other being writing is writing. Obviously, I am finding myself in the school of writing is writing, but I am worrying that such a choice is the downfall of the beginner who is never satisfied.

Randy sez: OK, there are a lot of implicit questions in there, so I’ll respond as best I can:

1) You’re comparing a dark fantasy that requires no research to a dark historical that would require mountains of research. It’s true that historicals require a lot research and fantasies don’t. But fantasies still require a lot of pre-work, because you have to do your world-building. Some prefer to do that up front. Others prefer to do it after the story is written. Doesn’t matter when you do it. Only matters THAT you do it. Sooner or later, you gotta build your Storyworld.

2) You’re a bit worried that you’re not writing every day. No worries there. That’s something you’ll work up to. You’re only 15 years old. That should give you a fair bit of time. It’s true that school does tend to get in the way. Be aware that you will never have more free time than you do now. Once you get to college, your free time will shrink. Once you get out of college, it’ll disappear almost completely. Once you get kids, you’ll find that you don’t have enough time to do it all. Just a word to the wise.

3) You’re stuck in the first chapter. OK, this is an order: Stop rewriting chapter 1 and go write chapter 2. Don’t rewrite chapter 2; move on and write chapter 3. If you keep endlessly reworking the first chapter, you are going to stagnate faster than last month’s milk with the dead fly floating in it. Write the whole book. If you get critiques of earlier chapters, don’t fix what’s broke in those chapters. Instead, apply what you learned from those critiques to whatever chapter you’re working on right now. Don’t stop and revise until you finish the first draft.

4) You’ve got a pessimistic critique buddy. Fire him. Now. That’s the last thing you need right now. Find somebody who is mostly positive. Find somebody who can tell you the ONE thing you need to work on. A negative-oriented critique buddy will drown you unless you’ve got an Xtremely optimistic nature yourself. (See the August 2010 issue of my e-zine for more on optimism versus pessimism and how to develop your optimism if you’re not naturally gifted that way.)

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Blog of the Day: I read a terrific guest post this morning by Marcus Sakey on Jane Friedman’s blog, There Are No Rules. The title of the post is “How to Ensure 75% of Agents Will Request Your Material.” The title says it all. Read it. This stuff is the real deal.