Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

We have been critiquing first paragraphs of novels that my loyal blog readers have submitted over the last couple of weeks. Are you getting tired of this, or shall we continue a bit longer? If you want to switch, what topic is burning in you right now? What shall we talk about next?

I am coming up on a major deadline and have had to skip blogging the last couple of days, but hope to get time to blog tonight.

Hi All:

Just a quick house-keeping note on my blogging schedule. I normally post blogs just before midnight so they’ll show up the next day. In the past, I’ve blogged Sunday night through Thursday night so the blogs appear Monday through Friday.

For the future, I’m going to shift this just slightly. I prefer to blog Monday night through Friday night, so the blogs will appear Tuesday through Saturday.

I’ll post a real blog entry tonight and pick up where we left off our discussion from last week.

See ya then!

A quick note to say that I’ve been working all day on my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine and it is sent out now. If those pesky spam filters are preventing you from getting it, all issues are archived here.

We’ll return tomorrow with some closing thoughts from Jeff Gerke on marketing.

It’s almost midnight on Sunday and I’m ready to get rolling for this week! I spent most of Friday doing last-minute work to get ready for a conference. I spent all day Saturday at the conference.

The big question of the day: What shall we talk about next? Last week, many of you submitted questions for things to talk about. Some of those were easy to answer. Others are going to take some substantial time.

Let’s vote. Which of the following topics most interests you? Leave a comment here and I’ll look for a pattern:

1. How do you design a novel?
2. How do you construct a character?
3. How do you research a given place or time?
4. How do you write a proposal?
5. How do you find an agent?
6. How do you settle a disagreement with your editor?
7. How do you develop your voice?
8. How do you choose what facet of writing to work on next?
9. How do you promote your novel?
10. How do balance the rules versus creativity?
11. How do you increase your daily word count?
12. How do you use your writing time efficiently?
13. How do you cut a book that’s too long?
14. How do you develop your own personal style?
15. How do create mystery without confusing your reader?
16. How do you choose a writing conference?
17. How do you behave at a writing conference?
18. How do you keep track of all the story details?
19. How do you teach a theme without being didactic?
20. How do you develop story ideas before you’re ready to Snowflake it?
21. How do find the ending?
22. How do you layer in elements in your novel?
23. How do you strengthen a weak plot?
24. How do you find high concept stories?
25. How do you turn a concept into a plot?
26. How do you edit yourself effectively?
27. How do you find a great title?
28. How do you balance plot and character?
29. How do you make a strong villain without cloning Darth Vader?
30. How do you find the right beginning?
31. How do you write an action scene?

I’m reading the list of questions you all posted in the comments today. Wow, these are great! It’s going to take months to work through all these, but that’s OK, right?

I’m cataloging your questions now. If you’ve got more, keep them coming. I’ll try to put some order on these and create a new page that’ll archive the answers.

The best form for a question is: “How do I __________________?” The blank should be something fairly specific but not too specific.

It’s been a long day, and it’s almost midnight, and I’m frazzed, so I’m going to bed now. Tomorrow, I’ll pick a question and we’ll start working on it.

In the coming weeks, I’m going to start a new page on this web site that catalogs what I’ll call “Best Practices” in fiction writing. More on that in a minute. First, I want to answer one comment from my last blog entry:

Sarah wrote:

Randy- I must admit, I thought the treleseminars would be more about the anxiety of speaking, esp. since you talked so much about overcoming your own panic. I looked up toastmasters in my area and there are abut 50 groups- I guess I’ll just have to take the plunge. I’m fine in a group if I’m part of the group and not “apart” from the group- so maybe I can learn to feel like I’m just one of the group even if I’m standing up front…if that makes sense!

Randy sez: No, the info page spells out exactly what we’ll talk about. It will NOT be possible to talk about speaking anxiety, since this is a psychological issue with many different causes. Neither Mary nor I are qualified to talk about that. Toastmasters is excellent for dealing with the normal levels of fear of public speaking that most people have. Those folks who suffer from genuine anxiety disorders or panic disorder will need help from a qualified counselor or psychiatrist to solve their problems. (I had both a counselor and a psychiatrist to help me deal with mine and I’m glad I did, because they were both extremely helpful.)

If you haven’t signed up for the teleseminars on public speaking that I’ll be doing with Mary Byers, don’t fergit! They start Monday, October 15. For all the info, click here.

Now back to “Best Practices:”

I’ve done quite a bit of software engineering in my short life (I spent quite a few years as a computational physicist, and to this day I still do a bit of consulting in scientific software). Software people talk about “best practices” in software analysis, design, and implementation. A “best practice” is a technique that is known to produce superior results to solve a particular problem. It sometimes happens that there is more than one “best practice” for a given type of problem, and in that case, you get to choose among them. But you definitely want to stay away from “worst practices”.

There are many different kinds of problems we face in writing fiction:
* How do you design a novel?
* How do you construct a character?
* How do you research a given place or time?
* How do you write a proposal?
* How do you find an agent?
* How do you settle a disagreement with your editor?
* How do you develop your voice?
* How do you choose what facet of writing to work on next?
* How do you promote your novel?

What I would like to find out from you, my loyal blog readers, is what problems you face. Post a comment here with one or more questions of the type I gave above. (No need to repeat those above. I’ve got them on my list.)

What I’ll do is collate all your questions and start finding the “best practice” answer to each one of them. I’ll discuss them here on my blog and then I’ll add an entry on my “Best Practices” page on my web site. In time, we’ll have a resource that answers a ton of questions.

Sound good? Start your comments!

Several of you have noticed that the FeedBlitz emails are no longer being sent out when I post to this blog. I suspect that the new FeedBurner plugin that I installed the other day is causing problems, so I’ve disabled that. If you’ve subscribed via FeedBurner, it should still work. But what I’ve turned off is a WordPress plugin that sends ALL feeds (including FeedBlitz) through FeedBurner.

If we all get a FeedBlitz email for this blog post, then the problem is solved. If not, I’ll look into it more.

Just a quick housekeeping note to those of you who like to read your blogs using RSS feeds: I’ve now got hooked up with FeedBurner. I hope I did it correctly. If not, I’m sure all 7 billion of you will tell me and I’ll get it squared away. The link is in the sidebar at right. Have at it!

Thanks to all of you who made comments to yesterday’s post on dealing with email. Let me note that I already have my email organized in folders. Hundreds of ‘em. And I use filters. Hundreds of ‘em. Anyone I write to regularly has their own folder. Every conference I teach at has its own folder. All my email newsletters are subscribed to in digest form and they get filtered into a catchall folder for newsletters which I read at my leisure. Whenever someone buys something on my site, my system sends me several emails to let me know that each step in the process went through. All those get automatically filtered into their appropriate folders and they open up automatically for me to oversee. But a lot of email still comes into the general in-box, much of it from perfect strangers.

My policy is to answer all first-timer email that isn’t spam. So anyone who writes to me should get an answer at least once. However, a guy’s gotta have boundaries, and my boundaries are set so that if people respond to my response, I don’t feel obligated to continue the conversation. After all, I hear from hundreds of friends and thousands of strangers every year.

I do feel bad, though, when I run through the old email files and see requests for me to come speak at a conference and I never responded. Or requests from a friend to do a critique and I never answered. Those sorts of things happened last year a couple of times when I was in the middle of moving out of the old house or when I was moving into the new one. They just fell through the cracks, and because my in-box had a couple thousand emails in it, I didn’t notice them. So my new procedure is designed to prevent that in the future.

That’s all for today! Tomorrow, I think maybe we’ll switch gears and talk some about the M-word: “marketing”. If you’re a writer, you need to market yourself, and the sooner you start, the better. So I’ll want to talk about how you can do that. See ya then!

Just a quick note on housekeeping issues:

1) Some of you have asked why your comments didn’t appear right away but got shelved for moderation. Answer: I have my spam filters turned on quite tight for this blog. Anyone who posts a comment for the first time automatically gets moderated. After that, they can post comments unmoderated. Also, any post that contains a link will automatically be moderated, since all spam contains links. My spam filters have identified 126 comments as spam. Of those, 125 were real spam, some disgustingly filthy. 1 was a legitimate comment, which I allowed to post.

2) Thanks for all your suggestions on forum software! I appreciate your suggestions. I’ve got several candidates and will be narrowing it down as I study them carefully. I want to choose a good solution.

3) Those of you who have blogs, let me know if you’d like to be on my blogroll. If you have no blog but have a web site, I can put you on my Writers list. I’m thinking that I’ll limit most people to be either on my Writers list or on my blogroll, just so neither one gets overfull. So I’ll be trimming the duplicates out shortly. Don’t take offense–I just don’t think duplicates serve any useful purpose. I will allow duplicates for those of you who run editing services, for which I have a separate category.

4) Thanks to the many of you who’ve linked to me on your own blogs. My technorati rating is steadily improving. If you’ve linked to me and I haven’t yet reciprocated, just send me an email. I may simply not have noticed. It’s been busy lately.