Category Archives: Writing

Don’t Kill The Messenger: 4 Tips To Avoid Soap-boxing

As I said on Monday in a lengthy introduction: it’s impossible for an author to remove themselves completely from their own work. No matter what you do, you’re going to bleed into it and people are going to be able to see what you think and feel about subjects through how you portray them in the things you’ve written.

Sometimes it can be incredibly subtle, left up for interpretation throughout the ages. But for others it can be painfully obvious. At this point we reach a stage where someone does what we call “soap boxing” or, worse, the dreaded Mary Sue insertion. As much as you want people to know you through your writing, you also want to let them have their own experience and come to their own conclusions. A good writer will have a message and a theme in their work, a great writer will guide the reader into discovering it for themselves.

So how does someone stay true to themselves without overwhelming the work and bogging it down with their own personality?

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The Real Reason Shia LaBeouf Needs To Go Away

As many of you have found out in recent weeks and months, Shia LaBeouf is a prolific plagiarizer. It’s not just that he has stolen whole works, but, in fact, even takes quotes as his own in the midst of interviews. Even his attempts to tweet apologies for his plagiarism are stolen material. In fact, as far as I’m aware, the only thing Shia LaBeouf has ever done that is 100% original to himself is say his name.

And while I’m willing to forgive that… he has to go. Continue reading The Real Reason Shia LaBeouf Needs To Go Away

4 Tips For the Unmotivated Writer

One of the most frustrating parts of writing is having a project in mind but being unable to move forward on it. We run into that metaphorical wall and shut down before we can complete our thoughts. Some people are good at just taking a couple steps back and then vaulting that wall while the rest of us look on in jealousy. But for others, it becomes incredibly hard to face the inner turmoil of self-doubt and just general lack of motivation.

So how do you break down that wall?

 

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5 Character Types People Frequently Screw Up

After a couple weeks attempting to convince people to edit and finding out through reduced traffic that no one really wants to do it (could have told myself that one), I have decided it’s time to branch out towards more general writing once more. Reading the work of several aspiring and new writers, I’ve found that one of the big problems with a lot of writing today is how often people strive to meet certain criteria without understanding the criteria.

It’s a problem that haunts many. So today I’m going to tackle a set of character archetypes that it seems almost everyone stumbles on once or twice and try to decipher just why they fail.

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The Three Laws of Rob-Edits

As of this writing, it’s been about a week and a half since the end of NaNoWriMo and a little over a week before the #Pitchmas event on Twitter. Your editing should be getting along if you listened to me at all last week. But there are some aspects of editing that always gall writers to no end, even after they get that feedback from their readers. How do you know when to keep a scene and when to throw it aside?

The general rule of thumb by the writing community is William Faulkner’s quote “In writing, you must kill all your darlings”. But William Faulkner’s line being applied to editing is the worst advice that I’ve ever seen and it still confounds me to this day that people keep using it in these conversations. That’s right – the emperor has no clothes, damn it.

The reason why people use this line is because they’re trying to tell you to not be so attached to your work that you ignore the flaws. You may have loved a scene that just doesn’t work anymore. But the advice itself is so vague that it’s basically saying, “delete all the scenes you find likeable and see what you get.”

That’s incredibly stupid.

So when thinking of an alternative to this piece of advice I started to consider just how you would go about determining what scenes to keep and what to throw out. It’s hard to really know for sure what you can and can’t keep because there’s so many factors to consider. But then, my nerd side spoke up and told me: “Hey, Asimov provided a solution to the conflicting functions problem years ago!”

That’s right, I’m going three laws on you guys even though you’re all fleshy humans (for now). In a hundred years, when this blog is found on some lost archive and is viewed again by my future counterparts, they’re likely to be robots anyway.

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5 Tips For Less Painful Editing

So, as of my writing this (December, though you may see this in the future, hi future!), the National Novel Writing Month just ended and you (the hypothetical you) have just spent the last month putting together the rough draft of your novel. Some of you might have done it for a laugh or just to prove to yourself that you could do it. But I know for a fact there’s a lot of you out there right now who intend to publish or try to publish what you’ve so painstakingly put together. In fact, I’ve heard from multiple sources that the first week in December is one of the busiest times of the year for agencies and publishers as they see a sudden influx of manuscripts.

This is a bad idea.

I understand, you’re incredibly enthusiastic about what you just put together. But, please, be aware that you wrote your piece in less time than it takes some casual readers to actually read the thing – you may want to edit first. And, actually, in the spirit of hyping internet trends that promote writing, remember that Pitchmas is coming.

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5 Writing Tips for Original Fantasy

So, continuing the trend and closing up the month (as next week it will be December), I am marking another week of NaNoWriMo with a little helpful advice to first time authors who may be taking the first step into the literary world this month. If you’re reading this on some other month, welcome, hope it’s helpful to you too in the far flung future. So far, if you’re late to the show, I’ve covered Mystery and Science-Fiction, two of the genres in my novel series Agent of Argyre. But today it’s time for the third major component to my stories: Fantasy!

But I’m sure at this point you realize how silly it is to give advice on how to create Fantasy stories. The beauty of Fantasy is that there are literally no rules to it. You can do anything you want to do in a Fantasy story so long as you have good storytelling and charming characters. This makes it one of the best genres for a lot of people who are just starting. Still, there is some room for me to be opinionated and throw unsolicited advice your way: How do you keep it fresh?

Fantasy has to be one of, if not the, oldest genres of fiction in human history. Even before the written word we were telling each other fanciful tales around the fire in the late evening hours. Folklore and mythology don’t just influence Fantasy – they were part of it. So it’s daunting for people to take that much history and be able to add their own mark to it. How do we do it?

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5 Writing Tips For Good Science Fiction

In the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I’ve begun sharing what I’ve learned while tackling my first two novels. And, while you may not be reading this back in November, I figure it’ll still be helpful whenever you are looking this way. Last week I addressed Mystery. But the fact is that Mystery isn’t the only genre present in those two novels. Anyone who has read my novels will know that they’re something of a genre mash-up. Though they’re primarily crime novels centering on murders and conspiracies, they’re also very focused on Fantasy and Science Fiction.

To me, the combination is natural. As Arthur C Clarke once said, any sufficiently advanced science will appear to be magic. So the reverse would be true as well, any magical thing could probably be explained via science. It’s because of this that I felt it was easy to take creatures such as werewolves and vampires and use the odd quirks of biology to explain some of their traits. In my eyes this makes them more fantastic because it makes it plausible that they could exist in the same world we do.

So when I once heard from agents and publishers that the weakest link of Science Fiction was the “science” part I started a series of posts devoted to the genre. But I’m not so blindly devoted to Sci-fi that I believe it can do no wrong. Science Fiction has produced some incredibly bad works for a variety of reasons. In the end, I think it has more to do with how writers approach the genre than it has to do with the genre itself. And so, in an effort to improve the future of Sci-Fi, I now lay down some helpful advice for those of you just starting to step into that world of endless possibilities.

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Five Tips For Writing A Solid Mystery

For a long time I was uncomfortable with the idea of trying to teach anyone about the art of writing. Anyone who reads blogs about writing is often a writer themselves, after all. So what exactly could I teach someone who should have as much or more experience than me?

As a result, I spend most of my time on this blog trying to entice people into the world I’ve created by doing tongue-in-cheek in-universe articles about creatures that wander my world. But today I realized, since this is National Novel Writing Month, a lot of people right here and now are writing their very first novel. Not only that, but I’ve realized after some experience tutoring in screenwriting that not everyone who has had formal education in writing comes away with the same information. There are some things that people miss until experience and experimentation point it out to them. So, given that I’ve written two novels, there just might be something I can show a new writer that they haven’t thought of yet.

So, in the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I present writing tips today for one of the genres I’ve tackled: Mysteries.

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Motivation To Publish A New Book

So as some of you know, hopefully all of you, I came out with my second book. A Patchwork Soul, the second part of the Altered World series, was, aptly, released today on Friday the 13th so I could try to press my luck again. I’m excited about it, and terrified, because I have hopes that releasing this book and more like it will eventually build towards my one true goal. For those of you out there who are also writers, you know a pretty common question that people ask that a lot of us don’t really have a confident answer for:

So, why do you do this again?

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