Francis W. Porretto
An Indie Writer's Odyssey
Notes from the Independent Writer's Movement


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Copyright © 2012 by Francis W. Porretto

Cover art by Francis W. Porretto

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To Martin McPhillips
And To Mark Butterworth
And to independent artists everywhere

May God bless your courage
And smile upon all your undertakings




Foreword



There’s a new force abroad in the land: one that has the old powers terrified, cowering in their keeps with their guards clustered around them and their drawbridges up. That force is the independent artist: He who can:
Create his own original material;
Perform (or arrange for) editing, required artwork, and promotional blurbs;
Promote his creation by himself.

Chances are, you are such an artist. I am, too.
My art is fiction: the creation of stories intended to entertain and edify. I’ve been traveling this road for quite some time: more than thirty years. Only about two years ago, I marshaled the courage to cease importuning the barons of Pub World and take my stories’ fates wholly into my own hands.
I haven’t looked back since then.
The rewards have been considerable. Yes, money is a part of that, but far greater, in my case, at least, has been the sense of having joined an army mobilized for a good cause: the destruction of one of the longest-standing barriers between the artist and his customers.
The pre-existent power structure of publishing wasn’t exactly evil, but it did have some serious shortcomings. There was a certain lack of respect for the preferences of the reading public. There was a weakness in the available feedback mechanisms, when any such mechanisms existed and were attended to at all. There was also an emphasis on the exploitation of trends and fads, which necessarily shortchanges the writer whose work is genuinely trailblazing.
There was also a sense of constraint by “political correctness,” which synergized destructively with the other problems listed above.
The indie-writers movement has thrown a gauntlet at Pub World. Its moguls have been slow to respond, in consequence of which the major publishing houses now find themselves trailing the wave and paddling furiously in a possibly vain attempt to catch up with it.
There are several reasons to be excited, not the least of which is the proliferation of a lot of damned good fiction at bargain prices. The reader brave enough to test these waters can find quite a lot of good stuff...if he can steel himself to sort through the garbage that inevitably accompanies it.
The essays that follow were all written in calendar 2011, when independently produced, published, and distributed fiction lit its rocket boosters and really started to gain speed. Mainly, they were written to myself, as notes for the future that I could use as references for this adventure and bits of advice I could pass along to others working up the courage to try it. They’re not organized in any particular order, but they’re all quite brief, and I’ve tried to keep them light-hearted and entertaining.
If you’re a fellow indie, perhaps you’ll enjoy my little journal of thoughts on our common avocation. If you’re a customer, have a taste of the thoughts that percolate in an indie writer’s head when he’s not actually creating what he hopes you’ll throw him a few shekels for. If you’re neither...say, what brought you here, anyway?

Francis W. Porretto
Mount Sinai, New York
New Year's Day, 2012




The Thundering Herd



Blinding Flash Of The Obvious Warning! Once e-publishing became easy and inexpensive, it was foreordained that there would be a mad rush to exploit it—and that a very large fraction of those rushing to do so would spend their free time more profitably at origami or macrame.
In other words, most people who think they can write are mistaken.
(Hey, I said it was a blinding flash of the obvious, didn’t I?)
The distribution of writers attempting the e-publication channel goes something like this:
90% or more: Persons who cannot write and should not try.
~7%: Persons with a fair command of English, but who have no stories to tell that anyone else would want to read.
~2%: Persons with a fair command of English who have stories to tell, but whose styles and preconceptions are unsuited to telling them in a winning fashion.
~1%: Capable storytellers, including a significant number who could crack the “traditional” publishing channels (or who already have).

Let’s postulate that you’re one of the fortunate 1% -- that you have the writing talent, the stories to tell, and enough desire for a readership that you’re willing to put it all to work. Let’s postulate further that you decide on e-publication, since traditional publishing channels are notoriously slow to react and often seem arbitrary in their decisions. What would you guess your greatest frustration with the e-pub channel would be? 
Of course: Distinguishing yourself from the other 99%. 
There are methods for attempting to break out of the pack, but all of them are hit or miss. There are no guaranteed ways of getting John Q. Public to buy your wares. But even writers who’ve been smiled upon by Knopf, Penguin, or G. P. Putnam’s Sons can’t count on a profitable degree of popular acceptance. Most books from conventional publishing houses show a loss, even over the long term. It’s a tough business. 
What, then? Just cast your words upon the waters and pray? Well, I’m hardly one to knock prayer. But some e-pubbed writers have reaped great success. They should serve as an inspiration to the rest of us. Perhaps we should try emulating them. 
Trouble is, that’s pretty hard. First, most of us are extremely shy about what military SF writer Tom Kratman has called “pimping my own works.” Second, where does one go to deploy one’s soapbox, the nearest street corner? Third, the key characteristic of the successful marketer, no matter what he’s trying to market, is an absolute and unalterable conviction that he’ll win the day if only he can persevere—and for most of us, it takes only a handful of rejections to persuade us that we’ll never break through. 
I have no answers. I have an audience of about 75,000 readers, but that’s largely because for a long time I gave all my fiction away: retail price $0.00. Most people are willing to download a completely free eBook; after all, they reason, if it’s dreck they can always delete it. But even a price of $0.99, which is the practical minimum for eBook sales at this time, is enough to deter the reader if he knows nothing about you and your promotional blurbs fail to intrigue him. 
Maybe the most promising approach is to divide your fiction into “loss leaders” and “for profit” bins. Give the former away open-handedly; price the latter attractively. Some percentage of the readers who download a loss leader or two will come back for a “for profit” eBook...if you’re one of the 1%, and if you have the patience to hang around a year or two, or three or four, in hope of returns. 
It’s been said that eighty percent of success in life is “just showing up.” Maybe and maybe not, but a fair degree of success just might come from showing up and then hanging around despite all disappointments and discouragement. 
Just don’t spend the money until it’s in your bank account.





The Quickest Attention-Getter



Write some erotica.
There’s nothing that moves faster on the Web than erotica. Especially well-written erotica. And as a loss-leader, nothing beats free erotica.
Squeamish about it? I was. I’m a devout Catholic, and a bit reticent about matters sexual. But one cannot gainsay the evidence. As they say on C.S.I., people lie; evidence doesn’t. So one fine day not too long ago, I girded up my loins – get your mind out of the gutter – and set to the task.
Happily, it turned out that I was fair to middlin’ at it. More, I discovered that there’s a significant difference between erotica and pornography – and the typical reader greatly prefers the former.
To put it in the fewest possible words: Erotica is about desire; pornography is about plumbing. Ergo, it’s possible to write good, highly evocative erotica without being in-your-face about the sex.
When I put my erotica collection A Dash Of Spice: Erotica for Good People up at Smashwords and set the price to $0.00, it immediately leaped to the top category of downloads. Shortly after that, interest swelled in my contemporary supernatural fantasy novels and my short story collections.
Today, A Dash Of Spice is priced at $0.99, and it’s still selling, though not as briskly as when it was free. I’ve accompanied it with two other erotic fictions: Priestesses, a novel composed of linked, supernaturally themed erotic short stories; and Farm Girl, a free “couples erotica” novelette. They’re both moving quite well. Word gets around.
If you haven’t tried your hand at this form, consider it. It has unanticipated satisfactions, especially if you can...wait just a moment, please...sweetie, not now, I’m trying to write! Can’t you wait just a few...oooh...that’s nice...just let me lower these a few inches...ah, that’s it...riiiiight there...
Later, folks.




Giving Them What They Want



Well, of course you want to give your readers what they want! Why would they remain your readers if you didn’t?
Careful, friends. Here there be dragons. Sometimes, giving them what they want makes them ask for more.
Shadow Of A Sword is getting rave notices. I can’t be unhappy about that...or about the money...but among those notices are quite a number of requests for a fourth book in the Realm of Essences saga.
Truth be told, I can’t be unhappy about that, either—but I’ve already started work on a project completely disconnected from that canon! I know from experience that I can’t work on two stories simultaneously. Besides, I thought I tied off all the loose ends in Shadow. I have no idea where I could go from there.
The never-ending series, featuring a continuing set of protagonists (and sometimes antagonists too), is a relatively recent development in novel-length fiction. Maybe we could date it to John Galsworthy’s “Forsyte” novels. But surely any series can be overextended. Surely even the most attractive Marquee character will eventually become a caricature of himself. How is a writer supposed to know where to draw the line?
I know, I know: It should be my worst problem. But now I’m torn: should I pursue the attractive and evocative new idea to which I’ve already committed 10,000 words and a hell of a lot of emotion, or should I stick to the course of my established success?
I think that, in part, my readers’ desire for a fourth volume arises from one of my newer characters, a thoroughly unique politician who’s running for president. He’s unique because he’s honest, principled, candid, and detests other politicians. We haven’t seen many of that sort in recent decades—and just now, the hunger for such a figure is intense. Several of the exhortations toward a fourth book have mentioned him explicitly: my correspondents want to see him in the Oval Office, in action.
Well, frankly, so do I. But he’s a fictional character. I don’t know anyone remotely like him. And I don’t own some sort of super-synthesizer that would permit me to bring him to life.
This decision could take a while.




Oversights Large And...Well, Large



A smart writer never tries to function as his own editor. Any mistakes you made in the draft, you’re almost guaranteed to overlook as you “edit” your work. So beware the temptation to “save a few bucks” by eschewing a professional editing job.
But even a first-rate editor can’t compensate for certain errors. I just discovered one in Shadow Of A Sword that’s genuinely embarrassing: I omitted an entire scene.
Not so clever, eh? And I did proofread my first draft before I sent it to my worthy editrix Kelly. I simply missed it on the second pass. And Kelly, of course, couldn’t possibly have known that a big chunk of text she’d never seen was “supposed to be there.”
Well, fortunately I still have time to revise the paperback before it’s committed. As for the eBook version, that’s even easier. But it provides an interesting lesson to those of us who write important, high-impact scenes “out of sequence” and say to ourselves, “I’ll insert that after I’ve written the rest of that segment.”
Yet another demonstration that Post-It notes really are the invention of the century.




Heroism And Clarity



I mentioned in an earlier piece that among my goals with the Realm of Essences books was to redefine the hero and heroic fiction for the Twenty-First Century. In point of fact, that’s been on my agenda for quite some time.
Modern fiction is all too often anti-heroic by design. The protagonist is hardly indistinguishable from the common run of men. The story’s ethical orientation is muddled or entirely absent. Whether the protagonist wins, loses, or must continue on in a sequel often seems to be a matter of chance.
And so, it was to my great pleasure that a recent reader of Which Art In Hope said this about its protagonist:

The main character, Armand Morelon, is a true hero—how wonderful to find a hero in today’s fiction!
Of course, it’s always nice to know that you’re not entirely alone—that someone else, near or far, shares your convictions and preferences. But in this matter of heroism, there are substantial challenges to be overcome even once you’ve decided that your Good Guy is going to be really, truly Good and win the day (albeit at a cost): 
Does your hero start out as a noble soul, or does he develop into one? If the latter, how would his maturation, and the timing thereof, be best handled?
How much clarity of perception and judgment should you allow him? Remember, you’re the author; you know more than he does about what’s coming.
When the story’s final crisis is upon him and he must rise to the occasion, should he do so smoothly, or haltingly and with much regret? How should his moral framework be involved?

These questions must be fearlessly faced. Among other things, they compel you to ponder, well in advance, what you’ll make him pay for his moral convictions—and whether he’ll be immediately willing, or squirm to avoid the price. The degree of subtlety, insight, and love you bring to his travails will determine how your reader reacts to him. 
Heroism involves embracing a commitment to something larger than oneself. It stands to reason that a character can demonstrate heroism in only one way: by paying a hefty price, all he has to give and perhaps a bit more, to attain or defend that to which he’s committed. 
Heroism is rare. The average guy doesn’t readily commit to anything beyond himself and his family. Nor would he be all that quick to pay a large price to demonstrate or defend his convictions. Some smallish fraction of average guys will rise to a difficult occasion heroically despite never having displayed unusual character before, but fortunately for them and for us, such occasions are fairly rare. 
So plausibility enters the equation as well. Your hero-to-be, if he starts out as an average guy, mainly concerned with himself and his family, must develop in an expansive way. That is, he must become aware that there are larger priorities and values to be defended, and over time, realize that he is willing to defend them even at great cost. 
Musing over these requirements of heroic fiction, it becomes clearer to me why so few contemporary writers are willing to try it on. It’s tough. It requires you to design a character of substance, drag him through a maturation process that’s likely to be painful, and at the climax point, compel him to pay a very significant price for his convictions. As if that weren’t enough, you have to be clever about his victory: he can’t win easily or by obvious means. 
Subtlety and surprise can play a part by concealing the true crisis. If you can make the story’s big, showy conflicts ethically clear and easily navigated, while holding the hero’s real, ultimate difficulties off to the side, only tenuously connected to the main thread of action, you can provide your reader with an unusual kind and degree of pleasure. It takes a lot of forethought, and even more care and craftsmanship. 
Yet heroic fiction is making a major comeback. Granted, not all of it is first quality. Not all of it is plausible. But there are more writers attempting it than have done so for decades. And even their mediocre efforts are garnering significant popularity.




No Religious Test!



More and more, fiction writers are incorporating religious motifs into their stories. This gladdens me greatly, and not merely because I write Christian-flavored fantasy and science fiction.
There’s a lot of power in religious ideas. It derives from the premise inherently required to entertain them: the existence of a supernatural realm, whose denizens (possibly including the Big Guy Himself) sometimes take a hand in matters here among us mortals. All by itself, that premise compels us to ponder several other questions:
How various are those beings?
How powerful are they—and following from that, what capacity do we have to resist them?
What motivates them? All of them, or only some?
What developments might move them to become involved in human affairs? Once they do involve themselves with us, what might constrain them?
Is there only one supernatural realm, or could there be many—and if the latter, are they aware of one another? Is there a hierarchy among them? Do they cooperate, or compete, and how?

The flood of ideas available from contemplating any one of those questions is enough to keep a writer busy for a lifetime. 
BUT! There’s a great danger involved in fiction that incorporates religious ideas: the tendency toward preachiness. It’s a problem especially for the devout, as we put great value in our faiths and would like to share them with others, for our mutual benefit. Granted that to advance a wholly original idea about the supernatural—one that bears no relation to any recognized religion, such as Kurt Vonnegut’s Bokononism—is free of that danger. (Well, unless you go insane and start believing it yourself, anyway.) But for those of us who enjoy working “conventional,” Judeo-Christian motifs into our stories, great caution is required. 
Our principal responsibility is to entertain the reader: to make him feel that his investment of time and money in our story was worthwhile. Preachiness cross-cuts that goal rather badly. It’s a bit like dragging the poor sap into a revival tent by force and then demanding five dollars from him before we let him leave. 
That’s the heart of my complaint with most contemporary religious fiction. Let’s leave aside the mediocrity of the writing. I don’t like to be preached at, and neither do most fiction readers. If you want to make your Good Guy a devout Christian, or Jew, or whatever oddball faith you prefer, feel free to do so, but for the love of God, don’t have him declaiming to us about it after every decision. Even one such indulgence, if badly handled, can put a sour taste in a reader’s mouth. 
As usual, I’m mainly speaking to myself here. But I’d bet a pretty that plenty of other writers with religious inclinations could stand to hear it, too.




Paralysis By Analysis



Quite a number of writers claim that their worst problem is coming up with ideas. I’ve heard that so often, and from so many diverse sources, that it’s become hard to repress my natural response:
“Oh? Would you like to buy a couple of mine?”
Just now, I’m struggling to choose among four distinct, equally compelling ideas for a new novel. It’s frustrating me about as badly as I’ve ever been frustrated. I’m beginning to feel like the proverbial donkey that starved to death because he found himself equidistant from two piles of oats and had no way to choose between them.
I suppose I shouldn’t kick, given the idea-paucity problem other writers complain about so often. All the same, this is quite a challenge. I’m beginning to wonder if I should poll the readers personally known to me for a vote.
But it’s actually only a special case of a general problem: paralysis by analysis. When your deliberations deadlock as mine have, one of the hazards seldom spoken of is the rising fear that you’ll “make a mistake.” As silly as that can sound in this context, it has a power those who haven’t felt it might not appreciate.
At some point I’ll “break the tie” and choose one of these paths forward. But between now and then, the temptation is strong to think about...well, anything else, including the avenue of tossing off a few short stories just to keep my chops in working order.
I have no idea whether, or how, this sort of thing afflicts artists of other kinds, such as painters and composers. I hope it doesn’t; it’s both cruelly trying and devilishly ironic. But if it does, tell me, please, colleagues: How do you cope with it?




Drips And Drops



When you’re an unknown independent, not backed by any significant marketing force, you can’t afford to posture as if you’re the second coming of John Steinbeck. You have to be modest, no matter what opinion you hold about your skills as a storyteller. Nor can you demand a king’s ransom for your books.
Unfortunately, CreateSpace, Amazon’s print-on-demand subsidiary, sets minima for its productions that force trade-paperback prices on the physical editions of my books. At those prices, they don’t sell much. But it’s worth something to me to have physical copies on my shelves, so I try not to agonize over it.
However, I price my eBooks at $0.99 each. It’s the lowest price permitted by SmashWords, Amazon, and the other retailers who’ve graciously agreed to carry them.
They sell...a little. A good month brings me about $100.00 in sales. I’ll never get rich at that rate. Hell, It won’t even cover the payments on my mattress. But it’s assuredly better than nothing—and it provides the most valuable sort of feedback an indie writer can receive:
Some hundreds of persons have expressed, through their wallets, that my fiction is worth something.
Some of those purchasers might be willing to pay more per volume. There’s only one way to find out. I might try it, some day. But for the moment, the gratification of receiving even a pittance for my prose is quite sufficient. I do have a day job with which to pay for beans, bullets, and Band-Aids.
So the valuta comes in in a thin dribble, rather than as a magnificent cataract of baksheesh. And it does pay for my blood-pressure drugs, at least. And I find it to be a blessing like unto an eighth sacrament.
I’ll bet you would, too.




When Metaphors Attack!



I’m on record as saying that literary devices—similes, metaphors, and allusive images—are overused in today’s fiction. But ever since I wrote that essay, there’s been an itch at the back of my skull. The itching powder was planted by a commenter who supplied this James Gould Cozzens quote:

The general theory is the more similies, the better or more colorful the writing, while of course truth is the simile is a boob trap. What it amounts to is that the writer, unable to think clearly enough or write well enough to say what he means, gets around the impasse by cutely changing the subject.

This is not quite fair. It’s an overstatement that omits consideration of why similes and metaphors originated.
There are three situational justifications for similes and metaphors:
When an objective, “fact-oriented” description of events would be excessively long;
When such a description would be in bad taste;
When the device evokes an allusion of importance to the story.

Consider the following passage from On Broken Wings: 

Her new love stared sightlessly up at her. She crouched over him, felt for his pulse, found none, and began to scream. 
It was a scream of loss and pain, but it was more. Rage swelled within her, pure and lethal, until her universe could hold nothing else. 
It was the call of a predator who has summoned all his powers, and challenges his enemy to come forth from the forest to meet him in a final trial of strength and ferocity. It echoed from the buildings and gathered itself to pound against the dome of the sky. It foretold a great battle and a river of blood. It promised death and destruction in a universal tongue. No creature that heard that howl could do other than flee. 
She was still standing over Rolf and screaming when the police arrived and began to handcuff her.

The image of a great predator summoning his foe to battle was explicitly what I wanted from that passage. Battle is the reason for Christine’s existence; it’s what she was formed and trained for. The murder of her lover is the trigger that sends her forth, warpaint on and weapons in hand, to conclude the first phase of her life. 
Then there’s this passage from Which Art In Hope: 
From dinner onward, their evenings were a barely restrained revel, a celebration of excited anticipation expressed in giggles, absurd jokes, and looks and gestures of endearment that a complete stranger couldn’t miss. Each night the hearthroom rang with song, with clapping, with the inarticulate delight of voices raised in affectionate japes and ripostes. It went on until, drunk to bursting with family, the couple rose to take their leave and, against wails of protest from the others, retire to their bedroom. 
There, bathed in the light of a single candle, they explored the dominion of bliss. They gave their bodies to one another without reservation. Theirs was the fire of youth and the wholeness of love, wherein the oldest things are made new. Each caress, each tenderness, each whispered word became a new skein in the bond that knitted them together, a new stone fitted to their rising edifice of joy.

Good taste and explicit sexual depictions simply don’t go together. Sex is an important component of human life, to be celebrated and never condemned, but the mechanics of sex should remain private. All the same, I wanted the emotional fabric of the betrothed couple’s journey into physical mutuality to be palpable to the reader, so I dressed it in metaphors—hopefully, metaphors expressive enough to do the job. 
There’s always an element of uncertainty around the use of similes and metaphors. You can’t be sure that the reader’s reaction to the phrase will be the one you intend! It’s another reason to be cautious about them, use them sparingly, but it’s not a reason to rule them out of your toolbox. 
And now, as comic relief, some really bad similes and metaphors: 
The toddlers looked at each other as if they had just been told their mutual funds had taken a complete nosedive. 
She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef. 
She was a couch potato in the gravy boat of life, flopping dejectedly on the sofa. 
It will take a big tractor to plow the fertile fields of his mind. 
He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a Guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it. 
He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something. 
Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two other Sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master. 
His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free. 
She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again. 
The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t. 
McMurphy fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup. 
From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and “Jeopardy” comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30. 
Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze. 
Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center. 
Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever. 
He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree. 
The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease. 
Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph. 
The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can. 
John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met. 
The thunder was ominous sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play. 
The red brick wall was the color of a brick-red Crayola crayon.-Unknown 
He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River. 
Even in his last years, Grandpappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut. 
The door had been forced, as forced as the dialogue during the interview portion of “Jeopardy!” 
Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do. 
The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work. 
The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while. 
Her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can tell butter from I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. 
She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up. 
It came down the stairs looking very much like something no one had ever seen before. 
The knife was as sharp as the tone used by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) in her first several points of parliamentary procedure made to Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton. 
The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant. 
The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM. 
The dandelion swayed in the gentle breeze like an oscillating electric fan set on medium. 
He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up. 
Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser. 
She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs. 
Her voice had that tense, grating quality, like a first-generation thermal paper fax machine that needed a band tightened. 
It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

Now that’s talent!




The Hangers-On



Sometimes, you just have to let them have the stage. I’m talking about the characters that won’t go away: the ones you created for a Supporting Cast role, but who’ve kept growing beyond it, acquiring more definition and texture, until you feel you almost have to promote them to Marquee status.
Several characters have done that to me:
Louis Redmond of Chosen One and On Broken Wings
Father Raymond Altomare of On Broken Wings and Shadow Of A Sword
Charisse Morelon of Which Art In Hope
Althea Morelon of “The Last Ambassadors”
And just now, Todd Iverson of “Taillights,” “Making It Right,” and “Conspiracies.”

Iverson is currently attempting to force his way into my novel-in-progress, At The Gates Of The City. I have an eerie feeling he’s going to make it. 
I suspect this happens to quite a lot of writers. Sometimes the character doesn’t even have to have a presence in an existing story. Ursula Leguin felt compelled to create a story for her anarchist theorist Odo, who was merely a background referent in her award-winning novel The Dispossessed. And I’d bet a pretty penny that Jack Vance was endlessly tempted to put his background-referent character Baron Bodissey explicitly into a novel. 
A character that acquires greater stature than the writer originally gives him can be quite insistent about being allowed to use them. The reason is simple: good fiction is about vivid characters doing dramatic things. If you’ve got a vivid character in your sights, embedding him in a dramatic passage of events comes almost naturally. 
Back when I began the adventure of fiction writing, I was, as so many young writers are, convinced that the secret to telling a good story lay in the plot. Make it dramatic and swift! Make it striking, all its crises Earth-shaking in importance! Characters? Oh, I suppose I’ll need a few. But the plot’s the thing. 
Look how wrong you can be, eh? 
There’s a great deal of instruction available from one’s characters. Possibly from one’s Supporting Cast characters in particular. We don’t imagine them as movers and shakers, but what if they become such? What are they telling us about the events we’ve imagined and the course of action we want to portray? What are they telling us about the nature of Man and human motivation? Most especially, what are they telling us about the great motivators: love and hatred, loyalty, duty, the urge to excel and the desire to be free? 
I struggle to listen to my characters—to imagine them talking to me, as if they were as real as I. The Supporting Cast characters are often the ones with the most to say. Sometimes the conversations become quite animated, even audible, at which point my wife sometimes becomes concerned. (“Is something wrong, dear? Why are you muttering that way?”) But the gains are most definitely worth the costs. And every now and then, a new story or novel will emerge.




Stuck In This World



One of the problems I’m having with At The Gates Of The City, my novel-in-progress, is my penchant for supernatural motifs. The previous three Realm Of Essences novels—Chosen One, On Broken Wings, and Shadow Of A Sword, as if you were in the slightest danger of forgetting—were founded on an alternate Creation myth that involved an incorporeal race that had participated in the making of our universe. But the threads that bound those stories to that myth were severed in the third volume. It would be difficult to re-weave them for a fourth book.
Yet here I am, stuck with a super-powerful heroine and a readership that wants to see her in action again! Robert A. Heinlein summed up my problem in a single sentence: “For each fine cat, a fine rat.” I have to find an antagonist that will do justice to a struggle against Christine D’Alessandro. No pushovers!
But where would I find a sufficiently powerful opponent for my “killer beauty queen” in this world? 
Some writers use a powerful protagonist’s internal conflicts to neutralize his powers. That’s not my style; in any event, the approach strikes me as marginal, seldom legitimate. Consider that Christine has just participated in the defeat of a super-powerful entity from another plane of existence. How could she have plausible internal conflicts after that?
One possibility is to use numbers: “swarm the lion under with a multitude of ants.” It has possibilities, but conjuring the drama of a great conflict out of such an opposition will be much harder than evoking it from a one-on-one face-off with an antagonist of equal stature.
Another possibility is to revive the supernatural connection with a semi-plausible implication of “infection.” That is: Imply that someone who had been infested, or heavily influenced, by my departed super-villain has thereby acquired a share in his powers. That, too, has possibilities, but it would take rather careful development to make it sing.
Quite a three-pipe problem!




"Ur Doon It Rong!"



SF author Sarah Hoyt recently wrote of having embraced certain fashionable sins against the English language:

My friend Dave Freer, over at Mad Genius Club has a blog about Political Correctness in literature. I confess I have agreed with him ever since I was first trying to break into writing and found myself reading manuals on how to be politically correct in my writing.
I’ve learned to use the execrable he/she or worse, they instead of he in the type of sentence that now goes “one shouldn’t do that, lest they” simply because it’s not worth to endure screams of outrage over what’s at worse inelegant and agrammatical. And the type of person who thinks her worth lies in not being referred to under a generic “masculine” pronoun – as dictated by the rules of most indo european languages — inevitably also thinks screaming about it is an act of civic duty if not virtue.

I sympathize. My God, how I sympathize! But I won’t give in.
I’ve been upbraided in fora beyond counting for retaining the “he”-as-generic-singular-pronoun convention. Conversely, when I’ve suggested to other writers that the convention remains as it was, and that using it is greatly to be preferred to mangling one’s syntax or writing as if one were terminally confused about one’s subject, I’ve evoked the very screams of outrage of which Miss Hoyt speaks above. To borrow the timeless idiom of a good friend, the harridans in the audience have called me “everything but white.”
That’s what harridans do. Once I became accustomed to it, it ceased to affect me.
Also, there’s the little matter of racial sensitivities. Not too many people are aware that a century or so ago, the accepted term for persons of the Negro race was “black.” But over time, the race-hustlers deemed that term offensive. So the accepted term became “colored.” Over time the race-hustlers anathematized that term as well. So the accepted term became “Negro,” the technical racial classification. But over time that term was deemed beyond the pale. So now we’re down to “African-American”—but that won’t last; give ‘em time.
If you follow politics, you may be aware that Governor Rick Perry of Texas, who recently declared himself in the running for the Republican presidential nomination, brought the wrath of the Left down on his head for daring to use the phrase “black cloud” in referring to the economy. No surprises there; it’s part of the Left’s linguistic offensive to rule every possible idiom and figure of speech offensive.
The idea isn’t that anyone is genuinely offended by these idioms, or by the old “he”-for-generic-singular convention. It’s to make us censor ourselves: to compel us to prejudge every word that emerges from our mouths, pens, or keyboards according to whether it might offend someone. This, when American Negroes casually call one another nigger and a feminist playwright concludes her most popular play with a chant of “Cunt...cunt...cunt...”
As a technique for silencing, and ultimately subjugating, one’s opposition, this one has no superiors and few peers.
This mick-wop honky has had quite enough:
Idioms that use “black” or “dark” to indicate ominousness are just fine by me.
Persons who prefer lovers of their own sex are homosexuals, not “gay.”
Please, enough with the “undocumented worker” BS. They’re illegal aliens.
My fiction will depict villains who are Negroes, homosexuals, Hispanics, and Muslims as it suits me—and given the crime and terrorism statistics, it will frequently suit me.
And most emphatically, “he” is my standard generic-singular pronoun.
Don’t like it? Read someone else. 
I won’t give in.




Telegraphy



One of the forbidden sins of fiction is the ending the reader absolutely knows is coming, to the last detail. A writer can fall into this trap in many ways, but the most poignant of them is this: a focus on a completely personal conflict between the hero and villain, such that the climactic scene of the story simply must have the two of them face off in person.
Why is this the “most poignant” route toward a telegraphed ending?
The amount of work involved on the writer’s part;
The amount of work involved on the reader’s part;
The great need for fully developed, plausible contests between what is clearly good and what is clearly evil.

(Just in case it hasn’t been perfectly pellucid up to this point, I believe in absolute good and absolute evil. I strive to depict them in my stories. I lament the fact that there are so few decently written, plausible stories of that sort being told. It says a lot—none of it good—about the state of Western culture that prominent contemporary critics regard such oppositions as somehow puerile and risible. But then, they have no great love for plot, either.) 
One of the most impressive things about Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings saga is that, though a final contest between Sauron’s power and that of the Free West was inevitable, the actual climax came on Orodruin—and not through the will of Frodo, the tale’s nominal hero, but by an act of Gollum’s. Indeed, that climax was foreshadowed in the earliest segment of the first book, when Gandalf reproved Frodo for wishing Bilbo had “slain the vile creature [Gollum], when he had the chance,” yet it was all the more surprising and satisfying for that. 
There are ways to keep even the most “inevitable” ending from seeming utterly cliched. You don’t want your hero to win because he’s invincible, or because he’s noble and pure, or because he’s the hero! You want him to have to squeeze out every last iota of strength, cunning, insight, and endurance, and not...quite...have...enough. You want him to need a break, or some help. You want him to owe something to someone. 
Had Christine taken on Tiran mano a mano in the conclusion of Shadow Of A Sword, and triumphed by virtue of her superior physical prowess, it would have been both unsatisfying and implausible: the former, because it would be just too straightforward; the latter, because Tiran, an incorporeal entity of great spiritual and emotional power, is indefeasible through strength alone. In that regard, Ransom’s defeat of the Evil One in Perelandra by destroying the body it inhabits is something of a cop-out. Had the rest of the book been less evocative, and less gorgeously written, than it was, that ending might have spoiled both that novel and the whole Space Trilogy of which it was the centerpiece. 
It’s not easy to avoid a telegraphed ending. It’s more of a trial than most non-writers would imagine, because writers tend to “fall in love” with our heroes. All the same, there are few more efficient ways to spoil a story that’s otherwise worthy and well told.




Self-Abuse Vs. Other-Abuse



Relax, relax: this won’t be about...that.
SF writer Sarah Hoyt has a darkly amusing post up about the somewhat masochistic experience of being published by a conventional (i.e., paper) publisher. It resonates with the experiences of other conventionally published writers I know, and makes me...well, at least utterably glad to have been spared that fate.
The prestige value of being admitted within Pub World’s gates has declined somewhat since the advent of print-on-demand and e-publishing, but if one omits personal considerations, it remains the “preferred” way to reach bookstores’ shelves and, by implication, a readership. However, personal considerations ought not to be omitted...at least, not entirely. An old Dilbert strip, in which Dogbert has decided to become a publisher, is relevant:
Dogbert: I’ll buy your book, but you have to make some changes. Take out the murder, add some songs, and make the main character a large purple dinosaur.
Aspiring Author: But it’s a murder mystery!
Dogbert: Oh, like that’s so original.

Apparently, there’s a measure of truth in that depiction.
Miss Hoyt considers herself a “midlist writer,” and as I know nothing about how such determinations are made, I shall refrain from comment. (I like her stuff, but who the BLEEP! am I?) Her post about the treatment a middling writer—i.e., not Ian Fleming, not Stephen King, and most definitely not Tom Clancy in his glory days—can expect from publishers isn’t shocking, but it is depressing in the extreme. If that’s what I pursued for several years, I can only be grateful that I failed to “achieve” it.
But self-abuse—i.e., the route of self-publication—isn’t necessarily less wearing or demeaning, though it does have the advantage that the masochist is generally on good terms with his sadist. It’s an alternative, with its own trials, travails, and triumphs. The choice of either path—for those writers who have the choice—is mainly a matter of taste.
Stephen Green adds a few thoughts on the subject:

What the Internet has done to the news industry, ebooks are doing to publishing — which brings us to the winners in this brave new world.
Big publishers have squeezed the life (and incomes) out of mid-list writers. Between your Clancys and your prestige authors lies the put-upon midlister. He doesn’t sell millions of copies and get the big advances. He doesn’t have the proper degree from the proper university to express the proper opinions. He just tells good stories to an appreciative audience — if he can find a publisher willing to take a chance on an unknown commodity to earn an uncertain (but certainly slight) dividend. Giant publishers are, by nature, risk averse. And there’s nothing more risky than spending jillions of dollars to print thousands of copies of books by someone nobody has heard of.
But epublishing empowers the midlist writer to go crash the gates and at least be seen on the Kindle Store — which is a lot more than Random House is going to give them. And if one of Amazon’s editors takes a keen interest in something, they can publicize the book at very little risk to the bottom line. A few thousand (or even a few million) banner ads cost nothing compared to a whole bunch of remaindered dead-tree books.
There are thousands upon thousands of good storytellers who can’t get anyone at Knopf or anywhere else to give them the time of day. But for Amazon and Apple, more content is always better, because publishing is practically free.

Indeed. For a very long time, the established publisher was the only game in town. He had the printing presses. He had the cover artists. He had the marketing department and the expertise at publicity. A writer whose expertise is in writing, rather than in running a printing press, painting a cover, or marketing his wares pretty much had to go through a conventional publisher.
Yes, things are different now, thanks to eBooks, eReaders, and the Web. But most of us who write still need help getting our stuff out in readable form, and persuading others to risk their money on it.
Fortunately, where there’s a demand, there will soon be a supply. Just as there are independent writers who disdain to batter themselves bloody against the gates of Pub World’s fortresses, there are now independent cover artists and independent editors. Amazon has made publishing in paperback format rather straightforward. Smashwords has made e-publishing even easier.
The one area where most of us still need help — apart from the actual creation of readable fiction, that is — is marketing. I have no doubt that help will soon be on the way, though for a while the indie writer who makes use of it will be speculating on the efficacy of the marketer he signs up with. That will leave us with the sole (and difficult) problem of turning out good stories well told, such that readers who elect to stake a buck or two on them won’t wish they’d spent the money on something else.
The multiplication of alternative routes toward a readership, and the corresponding division of labor, will triumph. They always have before; why should storytelling for money be an exception? But that doesn’t mean conventional publication will fade away like Sauron after the destruction of the One Ring. Nor does it mean that self-published writers with grit and perseverance can expect some day to cavort in money playpens like Scrooge McDuck. But the bruises on our egos, like those on Philosophy In The Bedroom’s Eugenie, will be those we choose, rather than the inevitable price of playing the only game in town. And three silly similes is quite enough for one post on this subject, don’t you think?




Sadness



One of the things a writer, however great or small his readership, must learn to accept is that not everyone will love his stuff—and some of those who don’t will express themselves rather definitely on the subject.
The really sad part about this is that some fraction of those “anti-fans” will be vituperative about it. They’ll shower him with abuse, and he’ll have no recourse but to shrug it off. After all, there’s no law that compels criticism to be courteous...probably a good thing, too. But a fraction of that fraction will come back repeatedly to exercise their scatological talents at his expense, which can be a bit wearying.
See this brief essay and the comments to it for an illustration.
It’s in the nature of the beast, friends. If you put a public foot forward, you will get stepped on now and then. Sometimes an assailant will leer into your face as he grinds his heel into your instep. And most ironically, should you react, your assailant will do his level best to paint you as the bad guy.
There’s nothing to be done about it. Nothing at all...except pray for strength for forbearance for yourself, and for a gentling of the soul of your attacker. And in a truly supreme irony, to say openly that that’s what you’re going to do will sometimes draw the most vicious rejoinders of all.
This business takes a lot more than a way with words.




Block-Breaking



Just about every writer who writes about writing and the writer’s experience, regardless of what sort of advice he proffers, will eventually get around to the nasty old subject of writer’s block. What do you do when the words, or the ideas, or the setting, or the character definitions, or anything else in this Furshluginer avocation just won’t come?
I shan’t insult you with any variation of a head-on attack on the problem. There’ve been enough of those. Most of them will work for some writers; none will work for everyone. Besides, there’s a significant possibility that a head-on attack is the exactly wrong thing to try.
I step away from the keyboard. I’ll read something, or take a walk, or have a snack, or play with the dogs and cats. Maybe I’ll even go outside and do some yard work, much as I detest it. I simply refuse to treat my creative center as if it were an adversary to be cajoled or coerced into what my rational center would prefer.
Creative work is finicky. We should know that from the difficulty of describing what it is and how it develops. We don’t even know if it has a set of necessary preconditions. Doesn’t it make more sense to relax about it and let it happen on its own schedule?
That might not seem a satisfactory approach to someone facing a deadline, with money at stake should he miss it. But suppose the head-on approach, determined to batter your creative powers into submission to your will, is more likely than not to make matters worse?
Thoughts?




Last Sentences



Quite a lot has been written about the importance to a story of a striking opening, including a real gripper of a first sentence. Many writers, and writers-on-writing, have emphasized the importance of a strong opening. And indeed, many a fine novel gained its first readers with a striking first sentence:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
Call me Ishmael.
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
A Dream Of Freedom was a ship that had once been a world.

If upon reading the sentences above, you were immediately reminded of the masterpieces they open, you know what I mean. If not, you have some pleasurable reading awaiting you.
But there are traps here. One of Albert Camus’s more memorable creations, in The Plague, was his character Grand, whose obsession with writing a “perfect” first sentence was so complete that he never wrote anything else. It’s good to begin well, but it’s infinitely more important to begin.
It’s of another order of infinity, greater than the first, to end well. Have a few memories on me:

He loved Big Brother.
“It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.
“Think on it, Chani: that princess will have the name, yet she’ll live as less than a concubine—never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she’s bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine—history will call us wives.”
Beyond that, as has always lain beyond the knowledge of men, there is only hope.

This is about more than marketing. Yes, as the old saying goes, the first chapter sells the book, and the last chapter sells the next book. But beyond that, your conclusion is the very last thing your reader will carry away from your story. It should be the capstone of his experience, the fulfillment of his expectations. Literally every word you’ve written before that concluding sentence was a prologue to this one. Make it sing!
My readers write to me with fair frequency. They have much more to say about how my books end than how they begin. To my fellow writers: What about yours? To avid readers: What concluding sentences—or paragraphs; let’s not be too myopic—have struck you as brilliant conclusions to a story well told?




To The Curb With Your Blurb!



(Sigh. I would have liked to make the title “A Demo For Your Promo,” but that would be the wrong message for what follows.)
This one is aimed squarely at writers who distribute through SmashWords or a comparable site. I’ve discovered some good fiction there—and a lot of utter crap, of course—but I’ve also discovered that there are many whose storytelling gifts are greater than their ability to promote their work.
Now, I’m no promotional genius. I use this site, my other, op-ed oriented site, a little Twitter, and a lot of prayer, and just about nothing else. But I flatter myself that my max-400-character SmashWords blurbs are middling-decent hooks, if not a little better, for the reader interested in my admittedly weird sort of fiction. To save you the wear and tear on your mouse, here are a few:
For Which Art In Hope:
Hope, a world peopled by anarchists, is in ecological crisis. For 1200 years, a secret Cabal has elevated powerful psi talents to the Godhood of Hope—the management of Hope’s crust—at the eventual cost of their lives. Now only two remain: Armand Morelon and Victoria Peterson. But one is utterly unwilling and the other is murderously insane. And the survival of Mankind hangs in the balance.

For On Broken Wings:
You’re a young woman with no memory of your past. You’ve been made a sexual slave by a gang of vicious bikers. After ten years’ agony, you’ve freed yourself by committing murder and earning a faceful of scars. But the biker king is obsessed with you. Your sole chance of escaping him lies in trusting a mysterious young man you’ve just met. Do you choose the devil you know, or the devil you don’t?

For Shadow Of A Sword:
Christine D’Alessandro returns to Onteora County and is enmeshed in two deadly conflicts: one between security entrepreneur Kevin Conway and his competitor Ernest Lawrence; and one between presidential aspirant Stephen Sumner and President Walter Coleman. Behind them looms a third struggle, between two immortals, for the future of Mankind unto the limits of Time. Sequel to On Broken Wings.

The idea is to pique the reader’s interest without wearing out his patience over something he’s odds-on not to want to read anyway. Give him a glimpse of the central character(s), the (first) major conflict, and the stakes; you can’t reasonably expect to do more than that in 400 characters. Neither can you reasonably expect to write a blurb that will make everyone desperate to read your book; the statistics are heavily against such a turnout. Indeed, if as many as 10% of the readers who read your promo blurb go on to read the free sample of your novel—you did make the first 20% or 30% freely available, didn’t you? -- you’re doing really well.
Now have a look at some...lesser examples of the art:

“Hammer in the Head” is a very short fiction story dealing with a tragic accident, the hope, the healing and the coping and the love of grandmothers for grandmothers are are salvation. This very short story also deals with true forgiveness. Those readers fortuate enough to read this very short work will be reminded of simplicity, that simplicity works and that simplicity will get the job done!

The author has told us little about the meat of his story, and far too much about what he hopes the reader will get out of it. In addition, the spelling is poor and the grammar is questionable.

In this, her ninth novel, mortal threats force Diana Delaney to flee her Midwest home. She takes refuge with a favorite cousin in Greensboro, North Carolina, and meets Lance Cassidy, a handsome widower who is struggling with the loss of his wife while keeping her memory alive for their two young daughters.

Who cares if it’s the author’s ninth novel? Does it improve the listening experience for you to know, specifically, that the Symphony of Joy was Beethoven’s Ninth? Anyway, what’s the novel’s major conflict?
A novel of improbable proportions, ‘Dancing the River Lightly’ takes you on a nonstop ride through the magical world of the Pacific Northwest, where dreams unfold, friendships are forged, and lives are changed forever.

No characters! No conflict! No sense of the import of whatever action the book depicts! Just take the author’s word for it: it will change your life!
It’s possible that the fiction thus blurbed is highly worthwhile; I wouldn’t know, not having read it. But the reason I haven’t read even the free samples of those stories is that the promo blurbs are awful. Their authors have done a poor job of catching my interest.
Folks, if you want to be read, you have to work at this stuff. Grandmaster Siegbert Tarrasch once said, after obtaining a poor result in a tournament, “In these competitions, it is not enough to be a connoisieur of chess; one must also play well.” Similarly, it’s not quite enough to write a good story and make it available at modest cost; you must also entice readers into devoting some of their precious, ever-dwindling lifespan to reading it.
Physical books do that with dustjacket or back-cover blurbs. On-line books must make do with compressed on-line blurbs. Given the reluctance readers generally feel about spending money on an unknown’s ebook, the creation of such blurbs must be taken seriously—as seriously as the crafting of a resume for a much desired, highly paid job. In a way, it’s the same undertaking.
Verbum sat sapienti.




The Least Well Understood Trap



I’ve said on other occasions that good writing is rewriting. I meant it, and in the main, it’s true. However, as with all good ideas, it can be carried too far.
The ideal bit of writing, of any sort, would be one in which each word is:
Perfectly chosen for both its denotative and connotative aspects;
Perfectly placed within the piece,
Resonant to the reader’s “ear,” such that it helps to propel him irresistibly forward toward your conclusion.

But like all ideals, this is an asymptotically approachable goal. You can’t get there; you can only get closer. So the question of import becomes: How close do you insist on getting, and at what cost? 
Yes, good rewriting is rewriting, but then again, if you’re rewriting, you’re not creating anything new. 
I know a woman, a writer of demonstrated gifts, who’s rewritten her first novel at least seven times, from stem to stern. Why? Because she’s passionately attached to the ideas in that novel, but she’s had no luck at marketing it. However, if you were to read the book, you would probably conclude, as I have: 
That it’s well written by contemporary fictional standards;
That it’s exceedingly unlikely to find a market even so, being far too bluntly polemic about its theme.

The time that lady, for whom I have a great deal of respect and affection, has spent rewriting that doomed first novel could have been devoted to a new book—even a new book intended to advance the same thesis (hopefully, more subtly and winningly). At some point in that series of rewrites, she might have conceded that to herself, freed herself from that first book, and gone ahead with something else. Indeed, she did eventually do so, though the loss of the time and energy spent on the doomed novel cannot be recovered or recompensed. 
As with so many other things, writerly and otherwise, it’s important to know why you’re doing what you’re doing, and what the odds are that it will bring you what you seek. That applies to rewriting just as strongly as to anything else a writer does. In particular, if you write but can’t attract an audience: 
Are you eloquent, and nimble at managing your prose? Perhaps you should work on your storytelling skills: pacing, tone, the maintenance of tension, and expressing a clear, important theme.
Are you excellent at description but not terribly good at dialogue? Perhaps you should spend more time listening to how others speak, that you might become familiar with their argot, idioms, rhythms, and emphases.
Do plot ideas come to you easily, but you have difficulty portraying realistic characters? Why not spend some time musing over the people you know—both the attractive and unattractive ones—and jot down some notes about their signal qualities, from their principal drives to their “tics?”
Do you have all the tools—plot fertility, character development, a fluid style, and a fund of important themes—but can’t quite get them to jell into a story others will read? It’s likely that you haven’t read enough within your chosen genre. Perhaps you aren’t yet in tune with its requirements, or perhaps your themes and style are better suited to another one.

Don’t assume that all your rejected magnum opus needs is one more rewrite.




Fiction And "Bundling"



You know, for a Certified Galactic Intellect, I can be a bit...slow...
For a long time, short-form writers—we who turn out short stories, novelettes, and novellas along with our novel length works—had only two routes to a readership: publication by a periodical, or the issuance of a short-story collection long enough to be marketed as a book. (Of course, if your story became well known, it might be picked up by an anthologist for his collection of Famous Works Of Fantasy About Mackerel, but generally, it had to appear in a periodical first.) As publishers are notoriously indifferent to short-story collections—with good reason; they don’t sell well—that limited a short-form writer’s possibilities rather dramatically.
The key to the thing was the annoyingly obtrusive physical medium through which the story reached its readers: a paper volume, whether of book paper, pulp, or glossy stock. That was the one and only delivery system for fiction of any kind, up to fairly recently. It was believed, probably correctly, that to be marketable, a paper publication had to be substantial; it required a sufficient volume to make it a solid item, something that would weigh on the purchaser’s hands. So short fiction had to be “bundled,” either with other items of short fiction or with news, opinion, and advertising pieces, to become marketable. But that limitation is upon us no more. Therefore...why continue to act as if it were?
In publishing my short stuff as individual stories at my other Website, Eternity Road, I was making use of the flexibility inherent in the Internet delivery medium—and readers could dip into my offerings as they pleased. But for reasons I will never be able to explain, when I got involved with SmashWords, I fell into “bundling” behavior: I released collections, rather than individual stories from which readers could pick and choose.
Plainly, this is a mistake to be unmade.
Why? Because of “footprint.” An indie writer craves “footprint:” a large number of items with his name and reputation attached. The more individual works bearing his name are in the market, the greater the number of occasions of contact a reader will have with him. Collections reduce his footprint, and therefore his recognition and aggregate reputation, unnecessarily.
I’ve written a great many short stories and novelettes. Each of those items could have been a contribution to my footprint—my “brand,” if you prefer that term. Nor is there any compensating advantage to short-story collections to offset that lack of footprint, as readers today still shy away from collections...even when they’re free.
Sigh. One does live and learn. (What the hell good is a genius-level IQ if you can’t see something that’s literally flapping its hands in your face?)




Switchbacks And False Endings



Far too many writers in the action-oriented genres have fallen in love with the notion that the reader should be unable to tell when the story is over.
Does that seem extreme to you? Obviously, it doesn’t to me, or I wouldn’t have said it. To me it sometimes seems that every high-octane writer who’s emerged since Tom Clancy’s glory years has labored to embed as many reversals and fake-outs as possible in his narratives. The only clue the reader gets to the proximity of the real climax is the number of pages that remain unread—and that’s only if the book contains no appendices, glossaries, or family trees.
I don’t think this is a healthy trend. I think it shows a lack of imagination.
If writers are doing this to lengthen their books, on the supposition that long novels have a better shot at best-seller status than short ones, they’re trading away reader satisfaction in pursuit of a superstitious notion about potential stardom. If they’re doing it because it’s easier than character development and the construction of a truly worthwhile conflict, it indicates an off-axis form of laziness. If they’re emulating a writer they admire greatly...well, I can’t speak to that, except to say that I admire writers with a more straightforward, reader-respecting vision.
The false ending isn’t to be condemned outright. Occasionally surprising your reader with a climax-after-the-“climax” is good practice; it keeps him—and you—aware of the potential intricacies of all human interplay. But when a writer gets a reputation for incorporating false endings into every story he tells, it’s just as deadly to his image as any other kind of repetition would be. It’s seldom a good thing for your reader to think, “Oboyoboyoboy, I know what’s coming next,” even if you prove him wrong now and then.
An old favorite movie, Johnny Mnemonic, displayed a fine sense of directorial humor in evading a false ending. After the major contest is over and Johnny (Keanu Reeves) has escaped those who would kill him for the contents of his head (literally), we see him and his bodyguard (Dina Meyer) sharing a victory kiss...and the camera cuts away to the smoldering skeleton of a deadly, superpowerful cyborg, vanquished some minutes earlier, which appears to be rising for another round of action. However, an instant later, just after the tension has time to build, there’s another camera cut, Ice-T says “That’s just garbage. Get it out of here,” and the winch that had been lifting the skeleton for disposal is shown to the viewer.
Innovation and wit! How refreshing! Better than yet another interminable series of false endings, at any rate.




More On Erotica



Ever since I posted this article, I’ve been getting email questioning my stance on erotica. Not all of it is of the “How can a devout Catholic write erotic fiction?” variety, though there’s some of that (answer to come at the end of this article). Most of it, in fact, is about how to produce erotica that isn’t too obviously erotica—in other words, how to write about sex in such a fashion that your true aim (i.e., to write about sex) is concealed behind the story you tell.
And it is a very good question indeed. In fact, it goes to the heart of the storyteller’s art: what you must do to produce fiction worthy of anyone’s time. The answer is charmingly paradoxical: Don’t write about sex.
“I contradict myself? Very well: I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes.”—Walt Whitman.
Write about human yearnings: for love; for acceptance by a beloved other; for an end to solitude; for release from the constraints of your community; for the need to know that even in your most extreme aspects you’re not alone. Write about what happens to your protagonists when those yearnings incur sexual consequences. Be tasteful about those consequences; it’s very easy to be far too explicit about the sex act itself. At all costs stay close to your theme: the particular truth about Mankind you’ve chosen to express in your story.
One of my favorite stories is a good example of what I mean. As it opens, we learn that the unnamed protagonist has done something with erotic overtones, though those overtones are anything but explicit. The deed leads her to a sex act—masturbation—that couples in a fairly subtle way to what she really wants. That yearning, unexpressed throughout the previous narration, is the key to her situation and her behavior. Yes, it’s erotica in the technical sense...but thematically, it goes well beyond that.
Try it. The results could surprise you; you might well discover something about your own attitude toward sex that you hadn’t previously known.
Now, as for how a devout Catholic can write erotica, the answer, in a sentence, is as follows: The Church has gone well beyond its Christ-given authority—the old term is ultra vires—in its pronouncements on matters of sex. Read the Gospels, and find a single place where the Redeemer condemns sexual pleasure, or sex between two entirely unmarried, unbetrothed persons, as sinful. If you can, we should compare notes.




He Said, She Said...But How?



Adverbs! They’re everywhere. You simply can’t get away from them. Especially in writing dialogue tags.
Breathes there an aspiring writer who hasn’t been told, “Keep it to ‘he said’ or ‘she said!’” until he reflexively cringes at the suggestion?
But...why? Why are adverbs on dialogue tags a bad idea? Because of the dreaded “Tom Swifty?” Because of editorial preferences? Because it’s au courant to write like Hemingway? 
There are reasons. Those three are among the most compelling, though stark, no-modifiers Hemingwayesque prose has recently suffered a downturn in popularity. But there’s another reason that strikes this writer, at least, as of greater import.
The adverb attached to a dialogue tag can undermine your dialogue. Alternately, if your dialogue is already weak, the adverb might be there as a “crutch.”
Good dialogue, properly assisted by the surrounding narration, carries its own weight. It expresses the speaker’s emotional state clearly enough that an adverb is not required—and as Orwell himself has told us, “If you can cut a word out, always cut it out.” Consider the following passage as an example:

    Allan parked and locked his truck, immediately went around the house to the fields, and found Kate in the barn, laboring over their tractor, doing something incomprehensible to an assembly he couldn’t even name.
    “Nellie not well?”
    Kate looked up, startled. “Oh!” She set her tools down delicately, ran to him and wrapped her arms around him. “No, she’s okay. I was just resetting the valve gaps and the timing so we could run her on cheaper fuel. Costs about five horsepower, but for what I use her for, that’s okay.”
    “Why bother? We’re not hurting for money.”
    “So we should spend it unnecessarily? What kind of farm boy are you, sweetie?”
    He swallowed and dropped his eyes. “A sterile one.”
    He heard her breath catch, felt her arms tighten spasmically.
    “No doubt about it?”
    Allan shook his head. “None. No treatments for it, either.”
    She buried her face against his chest.
    She wanted babies so badly. What will this change? Will she stop wanting to be with me? Stop loving me?
    “It doesn’t matter.” The words were muffled against his chest.
    “Hm?”
    “It doesn’t matter!” She tilted her head back to look into his eyes. “We have the farm. We have what we grow. We have each other. That’s enough for me.” Her jaw tightened visibly. “Is it enough for you?”
    He stroked her back and shoulders. “Kate, you are the only thing in this world I really, truly need. I’d have loved to give you children. I wanted them just as much as you. But if you can bear this, as hard as I know it must be for you, then I can do it easily.” He ran his fingers through her hair and laid his palms along the sides of her face. “As long as I have you.”
    She stared hard into his eyes, and he grew briefly afraid.
    “Oh, you have me, all right,” she whispered. “It’s a good thing that’s okay by you, ‘cause I’m the one thing you can’t get rid of. You could burn the house down and salt the ground, and I’d stand by you. You could bring home a second wife, and I’d stand by you. This disappointment is nothing compared to how I love you.”
    She nudged him out of the barn, slid the door closed, and pulled him up the incline toward their house.
    “And I mean to make you feel it right now.”

[From Farm Girl]

I’m a dialogue specialist; at any rate, it’s the thing I do best. I try to structure conversations between my characters so that dialogue tags are as infrequent as possible. But would any adverbial attributions of emotion do anything to make the emotions behind the conversation above clearer or more intense?
In contrast, we have dialogue too feeble to stand on its own two legs. Consider the following trivial example:

“You can’t talk to me like that,” she said angrily.

“Angrily”? Really? Not lovingly or boredly or thoughtfully? What an incredible surprise.
The adverb in that example is not only an unnecessary word; it’s an insult to the reader’s intelligence. Why is it there? 
Because the writer knew his line of dialogue was cliched and weak, that’s why. Because he preferred to hack it with a tonal attribution rather than give his character and his story enough thought to come up with something strong enough to carry itself. In other words, because he’s a lazy bum.
Lazy bum writers don’t attract a lot of readers. The ones they do get are less than penetrating.
Of course, the classical Tom Swifty, such as those celebrated at the site linked above, is the intentional use of an adverb to create a humorous clash with the dialogue, as for example:

“My girl prefers lamb’s-wool sweaters,” Tom said sheepishly. 
“What our team needs is a man who can hit 60 homers a season,” Tom said ruthlessly. 
“I’ll have another martini,” Tom said drily.

The tonal attribution in the hands of the inept writer doesn’t entertain as those do. It merely makes the reader more conscious of the weakness of the attributed dialogue. Clumsy tonal attributions are probably the most common reason for an editor to reject a submitted story without reading it to the end.
The above is not an argument for absolutely avoiding all adverbial attributions in your dialogue tags. but surely it depicts the dangers involved. This is really a special case of a general rule: In good prose of any sort, every word carries its own weight; none of them are unnecessary. In other words, Don’t waste your readers’ time!




Pulling 'Em In



The indie author’s severest challenge remains what it’s always been: persuading readers to give him a try. Few of us, no matter our skills as storytellers, approach that task with anything but trepidation.
There are a few well-known techniques, and each of them works now and then: giving away bits of your work as “loss leaders;” obtaining recommendations from better-known writers; leaving your books around where others might notice them; using blogs and Twitter as vehicles for promotion; and so on. The efficacy of these approaches varies from writer to writer, and from book to book, and from season to season.
Recently, while looking for some indie SF to read, I stumbled over young-adult writer Jalex Hansen. Miss Hansen displays a charming quirkiness in her brief SmashWords bio:
Jalex Hansen was conceived during an interplanetary war when her mother, a high ranking officer, captured and interrogated her father, a triple agent for the opposing side. She is fluent in seven ancient fighting styles and has cured cancer on her home planet. Jalex has mastered time travel and occasionally watches through your window at night for data in her human sleep study. Sometimes she writes.

The first of her offerings, Lux 1.1: Seeds, is free to all comers, so I downloaded it and read it. Though it has a few low-level problems, it’s an impressive start to her Lux saga: impressive enough to impel me to purchase the next two segments at $0.99 US apiece.
Note the sequence:
An interesting “biography;”
A free introductory segment;
Each of the subsequent segments, issued at three-week intervals, at an extremely modest price.

Friends, as a reader-seduction technique, this one has considerable appeal. 
Just in case you’re unaware of it, the foremost storyteller of our time, the great Stephen King, issued The Green Mile, his “serial thriller” and one of his very best novels, in just about exactly the same fashion. It was a tremendous hit, and generated considerable excitement among readers precisely because of the method of issuance. 
Now you might say to yourself, “Okay, it worked for Stephen King, but I’m not Stephen King.” And unless King himself is one of the readers of this modest little blog, you would be indisputably correct, at least as regards technical matters of identity. But if you’re struggling for recognition in a sea of independent writers, this is an approach worthy of consideration. 
Of course, your book must be susceptible to serialization. Not all novel-length works can be segmented thus; I don’t think mine can, with the possible exception of Which Art In Hope. But if yours can, and if you’re willing to take a modest chance on your ability to hold a reader’s interest through three or five or seventeen time-sequenced segments of your saga, the idea is worth some thought. 
If serialization isn’t for you, then perhaps a loss-leader strategy would serve as a near equivalent: Pick something to give away—hopefully, one of your stronger stories—and include an “Other books by” page at the front or back. If Miss Hansen’s experience is any guide—her Lux series stands among the top-rated SF offerings for the Kindle on Amazon—the results might please you greatly.




"But What Does She Look Like?"



Some of the most important learning a writer does comes from reading his own work, long after he’s finished it.
I’ve always had an aversion to extensive descriptions. Most of them strike me as ballast: they weigh down a story without contributing to its plot, its characters, or the exposition of its theme. But here I speak of descriptions of the characters’ surroundings, which is usually called the setting. I have no particular aversion to descriptions of the characters themselves.
At least, I didn’t think I did.
But recently, I was minded by a reader’s comments to go back through the “Realm of Essences” novels (Chosen One, On Broken Wings, and Shadow Of A Sword) and in the process noticed how seldom I describe the physical appearance of a Marquee character.
It happens, now and then. But in the usual case, the Marquee character in a scene has the viewpoint, which makes it awkward to describe his face, physique, or clothing. And seldom, after that character has “made his bow,” do I bother to describe him through another character’s eyes.
Mind you, I’ve gotten no—zero—complaints about this. One reader did mention it, but in a neutral fashion. It has me wondering: Do my readers not need such descriptions? Have they arrived at their own conceptions of my characters’ appearances, such that no elaboration from me is required?
There may be some virtue in this. A writer wants his readers to identify with his protagonists; it intensifies the emotional journey they take through the novel. Part of the identification process probably involves some sort of appearance-transference. But an explicit description of a character’s appearance just might get in the way of the reader’s bonding, in that it would make it harder for him to see the character as himself.
Whatever the case, it was a discovery of some moment. It leaves me wondering whether I should leave well enough alone, or attempt to override my natural inclinations.
Thoughts?




"Tough Chick Lit"



Any number of writers—mostly women, of course—have established themselves among readers as purveyors of “chick lit:” romantically toned stories, with or without a sexual gloss, intended to appeal to the softer side of the fairer sex. The underlying theme—in the writer’s mind, not the reader’s—is that more women are interested in stories of love and romance than in adventures, speculations, mysteries, or other sorts. Though there are exceptions—I’m married to a murder-mystery addict who disdains “pink and purple books”—enough romance writers have prospered to lend some credence to the notion.
(Florence King, in her wonderful compendium STET, Damnit!, tells briefly of her foray into chick lit: her novel The Barbarian Princess, which apparently made her quite a lot of money but left her with several lifelong “tics” and an unshakable resolve never, ever, to do that again. It’s well worth your time—her tale of the novel’s creation, not the novel itself.)
But in recent decades, we’ve seen an explosion of stories about a different sort of heroine: the “tough chick,” capable of going mano a mano with any man and willing to do so for what she (at least) thinks a good cause. Indeed, “tough chicks” seem to dominate adventure and speculative writing today. Though “tough chick” adventures are more likely to issue from female than male writers, they’re more popular with male than female readers—and quite profitably popular at that, if the displays at Barnes & Noble are any indication. The temptation to dip a toe into those waters can overcome even the manliest man, as I should know.
The “tough chick” heroine needn’t be un-feminine. When she’s not duking it out with the forces of evil, she can display as much interest in traditionally feminine interests (e.g., clothing, shoes, makeup, romance, Real Housewives of New Jersey reruns) as any other gal. Her distinguishing characteristic is physical prowess; she doesn’t retreat from the action while the menfolk handle it. Indeed, it’s rather more likely that the menfolk will hide behind her.
But “tough chick lit” requires a lot of willing suspension of disbelief from the reader. It’s not that there are no women like that in real life, but that they’re very rare. Yes, we have female sports figures who approximate such characters when on the playing field, but transplanting them into tales of intrigue, combat, and bloodshed, and giving them the starring role, is a trial of the imagination. There aren’t a lot of Xena types in our normal experience.
All of this compels us to confront several questions:
Does a “tough chick” heroine properly belong only in the speculative genres, or can she “work” in more mainstream settings?
Can such a heroine be adequately humanized to appeal to readers of both sexes?
Does “tough chick lit” have a future as a genre of its own, or will it ultimately prove to be a fad, such as the current, never-ending fad for fiction about vampires?

Thoughts?




"Award-Winning"



Unless he has a large cadre of friends, family, and people who owe him money, an indie writer normally has to be his own promoter. For a one-man band who does his own publishing and marketing, that means grasping at any advantage he can find, however slight it might seem, and pushing it until all the nap has worn off.
One of the motifs I see frequently is that of the award-winning writer. A fair percentage of my fellow indie writers claim that status. Now, this isn’t inherently illegitimate, but in the usual case, it raises important questions that are seldom answered, to wit:
What was the award?
Who decides on who or what wins it?
For which of his works did the writer win it?
Does the award-winning item bear any relation to the one being promoted?

For example, if I chose to do so, I could claim to be an “award-winning writer.” I’ve won two short-story contests held by low-circulation magazines that cater to semi-pro writers. But I have more pride than to flaunt those “awards,” as they were as minor as minor can get and have no imaginable relation to the novels I’ve written. So this is the one and only mention of them I’ve ever made, and probably will ever make. 
It’s hard to determine what value any promotional motif might possess. Maybe “award-winning” is more potent than I realize; I can only say that it’s never had an effect on me...well, except for my immediate reaction of aversion to “literary works” awarded prizes by supercilious prize juries composed of previous “award-winning” writers. But then, most “literary” fiction strikes me as verbal masturbation, whose writer should have the decency to keep it to himself. 
I tend to select indie works to read by the same criteria I’ve always used in choosing reading material: 
Do I know anyone who knows of this writer? What was his opinion of the man’s work?
Has a writer whom I regard favorably endorsed this book?
What does the promotional precis—the equivalent of a dust-jacket or back-cover blurb—do for me?
Is there an online sample by which I can get a sense for the book’s pace, tone, and the skill level of its execution?
Can I afford the price requested and the reading time required?

Once in a great while, I’ll read a book because it’s won a particular award with which I’m familiar. The Hugos and Nebulas, awarded to works of science fiction, and the World Fantasy Award, which is bestowed on works of fantasy, will sometimes influence me positively. But in the main, the considerations bulleted above are the ones that will govern my decisions...and I have little doubt that most readers who aren’t writers use criteria very similar to them. 
In time, there will arise awards, and committees to administer them, relevant to the indie writer. Hopefully, some will be awarded by readers, and others by indie writers, the better to accommodate a spread of tastes. But it will take time. In the meantime, any of y’all who claim to be “award winners” should be a mite more specific about those awards—and don’t neglect to craft good promotional blurbs, offer substantial free samples, and maybe a few “loss leaders” to whet our appetites! 
Everything counts. Even for “award winners!”




"Best-Selling"



Continuing from the previous essay, we must debunk the promotional motif of the “best-selling” writer. Cruising SmashWords for reading material—hey, I can’t spend all my time writing these sententious pieces—I’ve noted about two dozen writers who’ve described themselves as “best-selling.” Inasmuch as I read four or five books per week and I’d never heard of any of them before, it occurred to me that others might find this appellation as mysterious as “award-winning,” and as worthy of explication.
Many, many periodicals maintain “best-seller lists.” Which organ you read will determine which of them you’re familiar with. New Yorkers tend to think of the New York Times and the list that appears in its Sunday Book Review section, and indeed, for a considerable spate of years I was unaware that other “best-seller lists” existed anywhere. But there are many; pick up the regional dailies from other cities and you’ll find one in each—and the books listed there aren’t guaranteed to match those listed in the Times.
It’s legitimate, albeit barely, to deem oneself a “best-selling writer” if one has ever-so-briefly occupied the #20 slot on the best-seller list of the Rat’s-Ass, Nebraska Rumor and Stink, circulation 23, motto: “Road Kill Pics Page One Above-The-Fold.” After all, the Rumor and Stink—a fine publication, really; their coverage of homosexual necrophiliac bestiality scandals is unequaled by any periodical outside Zimbabwe—has a perfect right to publish whatever sort of nonsense it deems “newsworthy,” guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution of these United States. But to grasp the full significance of being one of the R&S’s “best-selling writers” requires a bit more information:
How is the list composed? Does the publication solicit sales figures nationally, regionally, or only from very local sellers? Does it include books sold over the Internet, and books distributed in electronic form? Does it even bother with sales figures? “Best-selling” doesn’t have to mean “Most-selling.”
Does the list deliberately exclude certain categories of books? It’s been the case since Gutenberg that if all category restrictions are removed, the best-selling book is the Bible, and in places 2 though 10 are various cookbooks.
How often is the list updated? A list updated once per week will show results quite different from those of a list updated once per year—especially since most booksellers don’t keep sales figures around for that long.
Does the list have an agenda? That is, does it exist primarily to promote the works of certain writers, or of writers in the publication’s area of circulation? Does it exist to push works with a particular social, cultural, or political slant? Oftentimes these little qualifications won’t be mentioned even in the small print.

Being an honest man, I refrain from mentioning in my promotional forays that I was once mentioned in the “best-sellers” list of a very local paper. That paper was a shopping circular: a coupon-laden giveaway publication distributed for free at supermarkets and shopping centers in my area. It had a very specific agenda: to promote generally unknown and unheralded local writers to local readers. I wouldn’t want anyone to draw the wrong conclusion about the popularity of my writing—but that wrong conclusion is exactly what a lot of “best-selling writers” would like you to draw. 
For the reader, it remains the case that the genre in which the writer labors and a sample of his work are better guides to whether you’ll enjoy his stuff than any nonsense about awards or “best-selling” status. For the writer, here as in the business about awards, honesty is the best policy. Even the “award-winners” and “best-sellers” among us should display enough humility not to puff up their images beyond what’s genuinely relevant to the readership we all seek.




Cheaping It Out



If indie writers have a common, characteristic sin, it would be the tendency to eschew certain supports to professionalism and marketing because they’re “too expensive.” The supports most often sloughed in this fashion are high-quality cover artwork, professional editing, and a first-rate promotional blurb.
No, a cover designer’s services are not free. No, you can’t expect a sharp-eyed editor to labor over your manuscript for love alone. Yes, it takes time and hard thought to create an intriguing, winning promo blurb, assuming you can do it at all. But just how many books can you expect to sell without these things? What hooks will pull a prospective purchaser toward your tome, if you can’t catch his eye with your cover and his imagination with your blurb?
The typical purchaser spends no more than one minute on his decision to buy a particular book. Of those precious 60 seconds, the critical ones are the first 20, during which he’s reacting to your cover art and absorbing your blurb. You’ll only get his next 40 seconds if he regards the first 20 as well spent. His next 40 seconds will go to the first two pages of your book—and may God help you if he spots a badly misspelled word or an egregious grammatical error.
The conventional publishing houses, which I’ve collectively nicknamed Pub World, understand these things from long and bitter experience. A significant fraction of their operating expenses go to cover, editing, and blurb composition. That’s part of their rationale for glomming the lion’s share of the revenues from your book. (And that little Pub World practice was one of the reasons you decided to go independent, wasn’t it?)
There are freelance cover designers who’ll do a cover painting for you, usually from a synopsis of your book. Some, such as my preferred cover artist, are quite inexpensive; these tend to work from a large portfolio of stock images, adding custom touches with a program such as Adobe’s PhotoShop. Others, who start from a blank canvas and create a wholly original painting for each book, can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. Similarly, there are freelance editors, available through sites such as this one, that will do a creditable job on just about any sort of manuscript. Some of those editors are relatively economical, while others who have longer and more impressive resumes will cost you heavily. They’ll also do a blurb for you, sometimes for a few dollars more. But no matter where your cover art and blurb come from and no matter what they cost you, they are the critical front-line troops of your marketing campaign. They must not be stinted.
Therefore, when you decide to set out on the adventure of independent publishing, one of your mandatory first steps is deciding how much you’re willing to spend on such things and then setting that amount aside, in cash. Trust me: You don’t want to give birth to your novel, seriously out of breath and at the leading edge of post-partum depression, with that decision still unmade. Neither should you leave your choice of an editor to that point, but that’s a topic for another tirade.
What’s that you say? Good cover art and editing would run you $500 or $1000, and you just can’t afford to set that much aside? It would deplete your pile of fun-chips just too tragically for you to bear, leaving you at home on Friday night while all your rowdy friends are living it up? Okay, stipulate it. But can you afford the terrible letdown from publishing a book that garners no readership? The odds of that outcome are increased sharply by parsimony about the elements of book marketing that you, the author, are ill-equipped to execute unaided.
Independent marketing and publishing can be a terrific experience, a true thrill ride. However, by going indie, you’ve substituted your skills and resources for those of a professional publishing house. That includes some measure of capital investment. It’s not guaranteed that casting your bread upon the waters will gain you a sevenfold profit, but it’s damned close to guaranteed that if you venture nothing beyond your words, you’ll draw few readers and very little revenue.
Take it from a repentant sinner.




Grammar In Fiction



Since World War II at least, the notion that the prescriptive rules of grammar, including those of spelling and punctuation, apply with full force to fiction writing has been derided at best, completely ignored at worst. The rationale seems to be that one who is attempting to depict fictional places, people, and events need not consider himself bound by rules that pertain only to the “real world.” At any rate, that’s the substance of the argument I get when I gig a fellow indie writer for a grammatical sin.
I try not to be a martinet about it. There are clearly aspects of fictional prose, dialogue most prominent of all, where strict prescriptive grammar would make a story read poorly. It would strike a reader as absurd to confront modern American characters speaking as if they were grammarians from Tudor England. But that’s not the whole story.
First: I cannot imagine an exculpation for bad spelling. Spell the word properly; if you’re unsure of the proper spelling, look it up. Above all: Choose the right homonym. Your is not you’re, their is neither there nor they’re, and for God’s sake, learn the differences between its and it’s, and among to, too, and two! If your reader notes an error of this sort, it will diminish you seriously in his eyes, reducing the probability that he’ll buy another book from you.
Good punctuation is almost as important as good spelling. Consider the following sentence as a demonstration of why this is so:
Sentences of a complexity that would have choked William Faulkner, involute as the general theory of relativity and twice as opaque, festooned with terms of that obfuscatory anfractuosity that characterizes the inferior mind struggling to pass itself off as a temple of erudition, wrap themselves around the reader’s forebrain in braids of simulated profundity seldom properly equipped with the appropriate punctuation marks which after all are supports to both reading rhythm and comprehension and really shouldn’t be dispensed with no matter what the effect the writer is striving to create. 
Draw the moral. If you get my point, I need say no more; if you don’t, I can’t imagine how any further hectoring could make it clearer. For those who could use a refresher course in punctuation, Lynne Truss’s delightful Eats, Shoots, and Leaves is quite as entertaining as it is instructive.
As for the rules of grammar in sentence construction, I must admit that strict grammar is both a very large study and a trap for the fiction writer. There are some rules of strict grammar that idiomatic American English has discarded, such as the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition. There are others that were never valid in the first place, such as the “anti-Star Trek rule” against splitting an infinitive, and the related rule against splitting a compound verb. But there is a core of rules of good grammar that are both imperative for the fiction writer and easy to obey. These are best illustrated with fumblerules: individual sentences that illustrate the importance of the rule by violating it. My preferred set of ten follows:

1.Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read.
2.A writer mustn’t shift your point of view. 
3.No sentence fragments.
4.A pronoun should agree with their antecedent.
5.Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
6.And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.
7.Its very important that you use apostrophe’s right. 
8.Join clauses good, like a conjunction should.
9.Just between you and I case is important.
10.Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.

Locate the errors in each sentence and you’ll have the meat of the rule it expresses. 
There are other “low-level” guidelines to composing good prose, of course, but the subject here is grammar in fiction, so I shall restrain myself from going off on any tangents, which are lines that intersect a curve at only one point and were discovered by Euclid, who lived in the sixth century, which was an era dominated by the Goths, who lived in what we now know as Poland...well, anyway. Why should I stand here asking rhetorical questions? And don’t forget to kill all exclamation points!!! 
You get the idea.




Heard About But Never Seen



Fictional characters, like the characters in a play, divide into three categories:
Marquee: These characters are the ones “whom the story is about.” It’s their challenges and responses we’re mainly there to read about. Usually few in number.
Supporting Cast: Somewhat less important than the Marquee characters, their lives and deeds impinge significantly on one or more of the Marquee set, but they’re normally only tangentially involved in the main plot thread. More likely to die in the course of the story than a Marquee character.
Spear Shakers: Gotta have a body there, that’s all. No importance other than to fill a position that must be occupied by a human being. They usually have no lines and often are slaughtered in large numbers.

In the usual case, the reader doesn’t trouble himself about the Spear Shakers, and will seldom become much concerned with the Supporting Cast. But recently I’ve become aware of a hybrid between those two categories: the character of limited but non-zero significance that never “appears on-stage.” 
An excellent example of such a character appears in Martin McPhillips’s extraordinary thriller Corpse In Armor: 
    
No one understood the potential of that disaster [federal involvement in a NYC terrorism investigation] better than the [NYPD police] commissioner, who didn’t resent federal interference so much as he feared it. He saw their bull-in-china-shop ways as a danger to New York City. Everything he had done to strengthen NYPD’s anti-terrorism capability was done with an eye to keeping the Feds at a safe distance. He intended to leave that as part of his legacy. 
    The term Rob used to summarize the style of his boss was “no bullshit.” It would take fifty years, Rob said, before the story could be told of what the commissioner had done to protect the city from the next attack after 9/11. The insights, the strategies, and the tactical angles he developed were astonishing. He thought five or ten moves ahead, and always challenged conventional thinking.

The commissioner never appears in the immediate action of Corpse In Armor. He’s heard about, and fairly frequently at that, but never seen, yet his significance is considerable: a key element in the terror plot under way requires his death or incapacitation. For the first half of the book, he looms over the action in a uniquely silent manner. 
At one time, I would have said that to invent a character of any importance without allowing him to be glimpsed, at least, by the reader isn’t quite cricket. But it appears that I’ve stumbled into the phenomenon myself: 
    
Ernest wasn’t drunk. Not by his standards. He was just lubricated enough to be feeling good. When he set out to get drunk, he did a thorough job of it. Such occasions normally resulted in his waking up in one of his brother Raymond’s holding cells, after which Ray would give him a lecture about the importance of maintaining appearances and then send him home to Coretta. Ernest had learned how to shrug off the lectures long ago. He’d been ignoring Coretta for longer still. 
Ray had thought to keep him on good behavior with that nonsense about calling him every night between eight and midnight, then had called him at eight-thirty. He’d probably gone to bed straight after. At forty-six, Ray acted like a dried-out stump of a man. All that money, power and position, and he couldn’t bring himself to enjoy it. No boozing. No gambling. No whores. Spent every night at home with his wife! Worse, he tried to impose his ways on Ernest at every opportunity.

The unseen wives of Raymond and Ernest Lawrence, though of less importance to the plot of Shadow Of A Sword than McPhillips’s unseen NYPD police commissioner, do have an influence on the story, That influence is mainly on Raymond, who eventually takes action in a fashion that, shall we say, changes Ernest’s fortunes rather radically. 
I have no doubt that, were I to revisit any of the thousands of novels I’ve read, I’d find further examples of the “heard about but never seen” figure whose existence constrains or warps the actions of persons more visible to the reader. But are such characters “mistakes” in any sense, or are they an implicit acknowledgement that no story can hope to encompass the whole of the lives of its characters exhaustively and definitively? 
Let’s have some thoughts.




For Brave Indies Only



If you seek an original slant for your fiction, I have one for you, but beware: you must be unusually brave to adopt it. Indeed, you have to be unusual in several ways.
That shouldn’t be too hard a criterion to meet, should it? After all, going indie requires a fair amount of courage all by itself. No publisher; no marketing support; no squadrons of accountants and lawyers to steal from you, make your life a mess, and...hm, maybe we should let that subject pass. But still, an indie writer should be more courageous than the common herd, shouldn’t he?
Maybe. But the evidence isn’t accumulating very quickly. Of the fifty-plus indie novels I’ve read since I embarked on this adventure, I’ve encountered only one that was willing to deal with a genuinely controversial idea. All the same, here it is:
Write about the Undistributed Moral Middle.
It’s not terribly clear when I put it that concisely, is it? Well, Mondays are tough on all of us. But explication follows.
There’s a deep cleavage between moral judgment and legal judgment. However, most persons who hold specific moral views seem to think that what’s morally wrong ought to be legally punishable, as well. For example: a writer who writes about the drug plague will usually take a legal position that “matches” his moral position, to wit:
Drug abuse is morally wrong; therefore, recreational drugs should be illegal; or:
Taking drugs recreationally is morally indifferent; therefore, it should be legal.

But there are two more combinations possible—and they get very little attention from writers of fiction: 
Drug abuse is morally wrong; but it should nevertheless be legal; or:
Taking drugs recreationally is morally indifferent, but it should remain illegal.

(“And that completes our exploration of the 2 x 2 Cartesian product for today, class.”) 
You could get a lot of mileage out of a high-octane adventure featuring a hero who despises drug abuse and abusers, but finds himself compelled by his convictions about the proper reach of the law to defend them against the War on Drugs. Alternately, a hero who sees drug abusers as morally no worse than alcoholics, but prosecutes them relentlessly “for the good of society” could be a fascinating Marquee character in a legal drama. But these are not undertakings for the faint of heart—especially since too many readers assume that the author’s convictions must match those of his protagonist. 
What’s that? A drug-based conflict is too banal a plot element for you? Well, there are others. How about an anti-homosexuality preacher who becomes involved in protecting homosexuals from legal harassment and social opprobrium? How about an opponent of cross-racial adoptions who fights to protect a white couple that’s raising a black child? Or if you’re really brave, how about a pro-life activist who agrees to help protect an abortionist against physical assault, or a civil-rights campaigner who becomes emotionally involved with a devoted segregationist? 
You’ll need the ability to set aside your own strongly held moral convictions long enough to write sympathetically about someone with greatly different ones. You’ll also need cojones the size of basketballs. But then, fiction is not an avocation for the pusillanimous!




Niches And Style



If you’re a reader—and I devoutly hope that you are, or what business would you have writing? -- you’ve surely noticed the multiplication of genres and sub-genres these past few years. Examples: Once upon a time there was just “Horror.” Today we have several sub-genres of “Horror,” including such gems as “Traditional Vampire,” “Vampire Romance,” “Traditional Werewolf,” “Werewolf Romance,” and “Zombie.” (No, there’s no “Zombie Romance”...yet.) In “Fantasy,” we have “Medieval (High) Fantasy,” “Urban Fantasy,” “Horror Fantasy,” and “Paranormal.” (That last subdivides further into “Paranormal Thriller” and “Paranormal Romance.”) In “Erotica,” we have “Men’s Erotica,” “Women’s Erotica,” “Couples’ Erotica,” “BDSM Erotica,” “Homosexual Erotica” (2 kinds), “Historical Erotica,” and so on.
A genre is a marketing category—a niche. Everyone in this avocation is looking for a niche in which he can gain acceptance. But each niche comes with its own requirements.
Yes, of course: You must have an appropriate sort of story for your niche, populated by the appropriate sort of characters and set in the appropriate sort of setting. But beyond that, you must have some facility with the niche’s preferred style.
Some years ago, I wrote:

One of the oldest maxims of the fiction world is that one should write about what one knows. This applies broadly: to situations, to physical settings, to varieties of people and systems of belief, and so forth. It also applies to style. In fact, a strong corollary of that maxim is that, if a writer’s style seems inadequate to the material he wants to write about, he should probably be writing about something else. 
Do not attempt gothic fiction if you can’t bring yourself to deal in macabre metaphors about shadow-infested settings and intimations of doom looming in the gloom. 
Do not attempt “advanced” romance if you can’t deal with suggestive looks and fleeting but meaningful brushes of hands or feet, or write indirectly but evocatively about sexual desire. 
Do not attempt fantasy if the depiction of suffering, honor, or the clash of good and evil makes you cringe with embarrassment. 
Do not attempt science fiction if you’re a technophobe incapable of bringing a sense of wonder to the description of an imagined device. 
Do not attempt “high literature”—at all.

Style might not be “the man himself,” as the Comte de Buffon said, but it’s certainly relevant to what a writer ought to write—i.e., toward what niche(s) he ought to steer his efforts. 
A counterexample might help to clarify this. I have a certain weakness for thrillers of the sort written by Vince Flynn. (Mind you, I’m not proud of that; it’s just germane to the topic.) Yet Flynn is one of the worst writers currently being published. He’s grammatically inept. He almost never makes the appropriate choice between direct and indirect narration. He has no respect for viewpoint; he head-hops constantly, from paragraph to paragraph. His characters, apart from his beloved Mitch Rapp, are two-dimensional or worse. When he deigns to employ a device of any sort, it invariably proves to be the wrong sort for what he’s describing. I could go on, but I believe the point has been made. And this is a man being published by a major publishing house! How could it be? 
But I read his books. He’s a few dollars better off because of me, despite his abominable style. Because in the niche Vince Flynn has made his own, considerations of style are almost irrelevant. Moreover, his publisher knows it. 
This is demonstrably not the case in other genres. Most other genres do have a kind of style-requirement. Publishers who handle books in those genres are sensitive to such requirements, and will look askance at manuscripts that violate them. Vince Flynn could not succeed in fantasy or horror with the low-grade style he brings to his thrillers. 
If you’re a reader—reread the first sentence of this tirade—you already know this, even if you haven’t yet articulated the knowledge. Incorporating the implication into your own writing is important, perhaps even critical, to the marketability of your work...whether you’ve gone indie or are pursuing conventional publication. 
A few closing observations: 
The style that characterizes a “parent” genre is not guaranteed to predominate in its sub-genres. At any rate, it’s risky to assume the reverse.
The younger a genre is, the more fluid its stylistic demands will be. Inversely, a well-established genre is likely to be most inhospitable to those who deviate from its traditional style.
A genre that’s dominated by a particular writer will also be dominated by his style. Therefore, absorbing as much of that writer’s style as one can hold is probably the approach best suited to a writer who hopes to succeed in that genre.
Spelling and punctuation will always count.

Onward!




Niches Continued: The Crossover Morass



If there’s any single thing that most impedes the indie author when he goes a-marketing, it’s our pervasive tendency to cross-breed the established genres.
Mind you, this isn’t a slap at the considerable originality indies often display in their Burbanking of the categories. After all, some of the more recent sub-genres, such as Vampire Romance, are making their creators quite a lot of money. But it’s important to remember that for every writer who breaks through with such an innovation, there are probably 999 others who’ve been turned aside—and all of them for the same reason: an editor saying to himself, “can’t imagine how to market it.”
An adventurous, innovative writer must collide with an adventurous, innovative publisher’s editor to break through in this fashion. To put it most gently, the likelihood of such a collision is poor.
This is a big part of the reason so many of us go indie in the first place. Pub World is highly resistant to bold innovations, with good reason: Most of them are impossible to market successfully. The publishing industry is under terrible pressure, and can’t afford a lot of low-probability sorties. Even in the best of times, the marketing of fiction is very chancy, which is the main reason for editors’ famous maxim: “Give us the same, only different.”
If you’re determined to cross genres in your work, you have to have the resolve of George Washington and the patience of Job. There are some exceptions: for example, the Resident Evil series of books and movies, which combine Zombie Horror with near-future Science Fiction. But cross-breeds whose elements contrast more sharply than that will have a tougher time finding an audience.
This is a particular thorn in my flesh: I write mainly contemporary supernatural-fantasy fiction laced with Christian motifs and themes. Promoting such fiction, even among persons willing to read indie work, is unspeakably difficult. I’ve had more editors than I can remember tell me that they love what I’ve written but “can’t imagine how to market it.”
(So what am I working on now? Why, a near-future Science Fiction saga with magical, political, Christian, and philosophical elements! Always up for an impossible challenge, that’s me.) 
One of our needs is to find a way to introduce our more radical cross-breedings to an audience—an audience that might be no readier for them than is Pub World. Once again, everything counts and every little bit helps:
Clever blurbs,
Video trailers,
Loss-leaders and free excerpts,
Endorsements from better-known writers,
Glowing reviews.

But all of these things are already in play, at least among indies with a sense for the difficulties involved in marketing innovative work. What tactics are there that have yet to be pressed into service, and what would it cost to adopt them? 
I yield the floor to my indie-writer colleagues!




Indies And Print-On-Demand



For a long, long time, the writer who couldn’t persuade an established publishing house to accept his work faced a pitifully small set of options:
1.He could “file the book in the trunk.”
2.He could start his own publishing house.
3.He could purchase publication from a vanity press.

Option 1 is unappealing to a man proud of his work, but options 2 and 3 are quite expensive. So with the advent of print-on-demand publication, many indie writers flocked to houses that offered it as the preferred answer to their desire for some degree of circulation and readership. 
That wave has thinned considerably in recent years. Print-on-demand publication has steadily gotten better and more flexible, to be sure—the books can be made in ever more formats and sizes; their appearances have become ever more appealing; and their unit prices drop ever closer to the prices of conventionally printed books—but the advance of electronic publication has cut into POD’s desirability in a big way.The trends in progress suggest that POD books are likely to have essentially no influence on fiction indies in the foreseeable future, though they’ll remain important to technical and scholastic fields. 
Of course, POD publication will always retain some allure for an indie fiction writer. Who among us hasn’t yearned to see his name on the spine of a book? For that reason alone, services such as Amazon’s CreateSpace subsidiary will continue to do business for years to come...but the volume of sales an indie writer can expect for his POD books will remain small, probably two to three digits in the overwhelming majority of cases. 
That’s not to say e-pub has no problems of its own. We’re still in the early stages of the development and refinement of this channel of distribution. Format incompatibilities among the most popular eReaders continue to limit our opportunities. There are problems of copyright protection and theft prevention that will probably take years to solve. And of course, e-pub’s extremely low barrier to entry has attracted a huge number of “writers” into the field whose sole qualification for that title is the ownership of a word processing program. 
Still, it remains the case that e-pub is waxing and POD is waning. Newer technologies tend to do that to older ones. Given the still-surging popularity of eReaders, the smart money is on e-pub to become the dominant means of fiction circulation within the next decade, while paper books, including POD books, are relegated to small specialty markets. 
I know, I know: “a blinding flash of the obvious,” right? But the implications are clear: If you’re not yet on the e-pub train, get on it. Also, if you really, really need to see your name on the spine of a book, by all means go ahead and make it happen, but don’t imagine that thousands of others will experience the same desire, at least not at a magnitude sufficient to extend to the price of a POD volume. (I omit close relatives and debtors from that last.) 
Pub World’s major powers are jockeying for a place in the e-pub parade. They have worse problems from e-pub’s vulnerabilities than we indies do. Therefore, this is our chance to steal a march on them—perhaps the best chance we’ll ever have. Don’t let it slip away!




ZZZZZombies!



Fiction, like other forms of entertainment, is frequently afflicted by fads. Readers of contemporary fantasy are already aware of the fads for vampire and werewolf-oriented stories. Science fiction recently experienced a fad for stories about the extremely far future, and before that, what a friend called the “my artifact is bigger than your artifact” trend. And of course, “high” (medieval) fantasy often seems like one enormous, decades-long fad for quest adventures.
Many a writer will hop onto a fad in the hope of gathering a little of the gravy while it’s still flowing copiously. Being a devout capitalist (among other things), I cannot and shall not condemn such writers; they’re following the star most important to them. But the samenesses of faddish currents in fiction don’t speak well to the creativity of the participating writers.
Of course, a genre can experience two or more fads concurrently. Right now, contemporary (a.k.a. “urban”) fantasy is enduring trends for zombie-oriented stories, along with all the dreck about werewolves and vampires. Possibly it started with the “Resident Evil” series of video games, which were enormously popular and spawned an equally popular movie series starring the beautiful and talented Milla Jovovich. One way or another, we’re being overrun with zombie fiction. It’s become a campy motif: We have parodies such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the hilariously funny movie Zombieland, op-ed essays that use a plague of zombies as one pole of a sociopolitical comparison, and assorted bits of humor such as the bar that posted, as a reason to drink there, that it’s well prepared for the “Zombie Apocalypse.”
Okay, I get it. We all get it: Zombies are both scary and funny. But how many stories about zombies can the reading public absorb before the whole thing transitions from camp to kitsch? And that’s to say nothing of the deleterious effects on a writer’s creativity from writing repeatedly in that one groove?
Among the things a writer must do with a faddish motif is vary the terms enough to “make it his own.” Writers of zombie fiction have done a fairly good job at that. The first zombie fiction was based in the voudoun myths of the walking dead, created by black magic to function as slave labor. Today’s zombie stories are more frequently founded on a science-gone-bad motif: “Resident Evil’s” bioengineered T-virus, the conditioning-induced-but-still-infectious zombieism in the movie 28 Days Later, and so forth. But such inventions have a natural limit...and I think, as with the “vampires and werewolves as good guys” fad, we’ve reached the end of the line.
This is more a personal plea than advice to my fellow indies about how to maximize their market potential. I’ve grown weary from slapping the stacks in the Fantasy section, vainly searching for something in urban fantasy that isn’t about vampires, werewolves, or zombies. I read a great deal, and the few writers determined to stay out of those grooves don’t produce enough to keep me supplied. There are days I hunger so greatly for fresh, original contemporary fantasy that I almost feel I’m becoming a zombie myself.
Write something else. PLEASE!




Temptations



Every writer must learn to recognize the whisperings of the devil. They come in many venues, and even more forms. Resisting them is necessary, not to saving your soul, but to something almost as important: staying focused and productive. Today we will examine:

The Seductive “Finger Exercise.”

It’s not really fair, but a lot of novelists consider short stories to be exactly that: minor exercises of imagination and technique. And just about all of us will eventually face the associated temptation: to turn aside from the bogged-down novel in favor of a neat little idea that would make a sweet short story. “Where’s the harm?” we ask ourselves. “It’ll take a day, two at most, and it would be a shame to let it go to waste...especially as I’m getting nowhere with the Big Book just now.”
Resist!
First of all, short stories are not mere “finger exercises.” They’re actually harder to do well than novel-length stories. Every word of a short story must be the exactly right one in its place; every utterance from a character must be utterly perfect. You have no room for digressions, elaborate descriptions, or extensive characterizations, and your errors will stand out like a cow in a cathedral.
Second, when you yield to the urge to shove your main work onto the back burner, the temptations to do so again become more numerous and stronger. This is especially the case when you can say to yourself, “Hey, I’m writing, am I not? So where’s the harm?”
Third...ahhh, third. The kicker is always in third place, don’t y’know. It slipstreams in behind a couple of outriders, to allow them time to soften you up for the knockout punch.
Third, that attractive-looking short-story concept will mutate into a grand concept deserving of its own novel. You’ll go from having one unfinished novel on your workbench to two—each of which will beckon to you from the sidelines while you’re trying to work on the other one.
Why? Because you’re a novelist. It’s what you do, the form and length you prefer, in which your personal writerly chops are deployed to best advantage. Besides, who buys short stories? Where’s the profit in spending your time on them? And anyway, the idea is just too nifty to waste that way. Who knows when an idea this neat will come around again?
Beware, my friend. That’s Satan in his most dulcet tones.
File that nifty idea away somewhere safe. Make sure it’s properly synopsized and classified. Then get back to that damned frustrating book! As management guru Peter Drucker has said:
Concentration is the key to economic results...no other principle of effectiveness is violated as constantly today as the basic principle of concentration...Our motto seems to be, “Let’s do a little bit of everything.” [From Managing For Results]

Verbum sat sapienti.




The Undiscussed Promotional Powerhouse



There’s an attribute that helps to enhance all of an indie writer’s promotional efforts, regardless of their nature. However, it appears to be unknown, or at least unacknowledged, by the greater number of indies; at any rate, I have no other explanation for promo blurbs that begin: “A terrifying tale of fantastic adventures,” or “A profound exploration of the human heart,” or “Buy my superwonderful, badly underpriced book, you unappreciative, semi-literate clod!”
All right, yes, I made up that last one. But I think you get the idea.
No matter how proud he is of his achievement, or satisfied with its treatment of his cherished themes, the author of a book must not praise his own work. I can think of nothing that would more swiftly or firmly turn me away from a book than such self-adulation, and I doubt I’m unusual in that regard. Indeed, another promotional blurb I mentioned recently: 

A novel of improbable proportions, ‘Dancing the River Lightly’ takes you on a nonstop ride through the magical world of the Pacific Northwest, where dreams unfold, friendships are forged, and lives are changed forever.

...earned my ire for that reason as much as for any other.
No one reacts positively to vanity. No, not even persons who are themselves vain. Praising one’s own work is the quintessence of vanity in action. As we mathematical types like to say, quod erat demonstrandum.
Abraham Lincoln supposedly said: “You can catch more flies with a drop of honey than you can with a gallon of gall.” Had he lived a bit longer, he might have added: “No item of garb more becomes a man than a habit of modesty.” It’s so, at any rate.
We tend to transfer our opinions of men onto their works. A fellow who continuously preens himself for his craft is likely to have far more detractors than one who submits it humbly to its audience, without first festooning it with superlatives. This tends to be so even when the vainglorious craftsman is objectively the better of the two. The moral should be obvious...but as I keep reminding myself, the Latin roots of obvious mean overlooked.
Modesty in presentation, gratitude for appreciation, and graciousness in response to praise are tremendously powerful elements in a promotional campaign. Yes, the flyleaves of books by conventionally published writers are heavy with adulatory quotes...from other persons. Publishers would be daft to omit such praise; it indicates that those who’ve already read it—including persons who write similar sorts of stories—think well of it. If you recognize any of their names, your opinion of their books will likely transfer, at least conditionally, to the work they’ve complimented.
A struggling horror writer would sell his soul for a praiseful blurb from Stephen King. Similarly, a few admiring words from Alastair Reynolds would be of immense value to a writer of science fiction. A promotional blurb from J.R.R. Tolkien would be the Holy Grail for a writer of high fantasy...well, if Professor Tolkien were not already among the angels. But we cannot replicate the effect by presenting our evaluations of our own works to potential readers; that will merely elicit sneers and disdain.
Be modest. Let others praise your works. Be gracious about making use of such praise, rather than blatting it out in an I-deserve-it sort of tone. The rewards are quite definite. God Himself—Who, by the way, really loved Which Art In Hope, so don’t you think you should read it, you unlettered Philistine? -- has sent me here to tell you.




Approaches To Plotting



My esteemed co-contributor Mark Alger has written a brief piece about the two poles of plotting technique:

It’s a touchstone of the craft that there are generally two types of writers—as regards plot and how she is made in fiction. There are those who plan every detail meticulously to the last tit and jottle—hight Outliners—and there are those who just sort of wing it, or (as the saying goes) fly by the seat of their pants—called Pantsers.
And it occurred to me that I do a little of both. I wing it at first, then try to organize what I’ve got into an outline, then hare off in a new direction entirely once I think I’ve got it nailed down.

Mark’s approach strikes me as the most natural one, for several reasons.
First must come the germ of an idea: an inspiration, if you will. It must be substantial enough to strike the writer as an adequate reason to write at all. That is, it must illustrate some aspect of the nature of life in a time-bound, resource-finite universe each of us must share with many others like and yet unlike ourselves. Moreover, it must make it possible to entertain as well as edify, for entertainment is the reason the greater number of us read fiction. And of course, it must impress the writer as a suitable foundation on which to construct “my sort of story.”
Except in the case of the very shortest works, virtually no writer goes straight from inspiration to verbiage. We try to scope the thing out, at least in terms of the major events of the story and the interactions of the Marquee characters. The result might be a precis, or a synopsis, or merely a few words jotted onto a paper napkin, but whatever its form, it will attempt to capture the outline of the story’s action: its plot line.
Plot line is not plot. To go from plot line to plot, we must add causal relations: why this event was followed by that one. But a story must be about people; therefore, the causal relations that really matter will be about the reactions of the Marquee characters to one another and to the world around them. Since each of us reacts to events in a unique fashion, the writer’s next step is to envision the sort of characters his story idea will require to be acted out.
Characters good enough to be principals in a sound story will have a tendency to pull the writer away from his original conception. They do this through the force of their individual capacities and motivations, which are the core of their fictional identities. Thus, as soon as the writer begins imagining Marquee characters, he’ll start to revisit his original plot line, and the process of tailoring plot to character will begin.
This procedure may be repeated several times in the course of story construction. It extends easily into the actual writing of the story—especially in these days of electronic word processing, wherein no word, sentence, or paragraph is deemed finished, or permanently placed, until the writer declares himself satisfied and sends the story out to the world.
The modern tendency toward series built around an enduring Marquee character streamlines the process somewhat, but it does not and cannot make it formulaic. (Sorry, no matter how good Word’s macro capability gets, it will never write your book for you from a 200-word summary of plot line and theme.) Even dragging a complete cast of Marquee characters from book to book won’t remove the jags and switchbacks from this undertaking. Your principals must interact, not merely with one another, but with the world around them—and that world had better be changing from book to book, or why bother to keep writing? Also, it’s inevitable that good characters will continue to develop as you put them through adventure after adventure.
In my “day job” as an engineer and supervisor of others, I must often counsel my subordinates not to get “hung up” on planning documents, such as design specifications. One cannot know whether an abstract, uninstantiated design is actually buildable until one starts to build it. The disappointments that occur as one moves from stage to stage often outweigh the pleasures. Younger engineers, filled with the idealistic fire they brought from college course on engineering theory, can experience great anguish over such things...until they’ve got a decade or so of experience with the stubbornness of reality.
It’s the same with writing fiction, really. Sure, go ahead and write a 5000-word synopsis of your novel-to-be. Draw up character sketches of your Marquee characters, including extensive backstories that explain their more important limitations and quirks. But treat these things as a starting point, a backdrop against which to recognize necessary changes as they arrive. It’s the only way to keep your blood pressure down and your enjoyment factor up.




Danger!



Ours is a time fraught with hazards...and those hazards reach even those of us who merely write from our convictions:

The author of an online novel cited by four Georgia men who allegedly sought to kill U.S. law enforcement officials and federal judges said his work has been misinterpreted.
Mike Vanderboegh, of Pinson, Ala., said his novel, “Absolved,” which is set to be published in book form later this year, was “intended to communicate the fact that another Civil War is possible” in the United States.
“The federal government has been pushing the limits of liberty back in this country for many, many years, and my point was, at some undetermined moment in the future, someone is going to determine that they’re not going to be pushed around anymore,” Vanderboegh told FoxNews.com. “It is what it is … it’s a terrible description of what might happen if people continue to be victimized in this country.”
Federal authorities say members of the fringe militia group said they intended to model their actions on Vanderboegh’s work, although the author’s name is not listed in indictments charging the four men. The suspects, Frederick Thomas, 73, Dan Roberts, 67, Ray Adams, 65, and Samuel Crump, 68, all live in the north Georgia towns of Cleveland and Toccoa....
Vanderboegh said he has not been contacted by law enforcement authorities in connection to Tuesday’s arrests, and he characterized the matter as a “misinterpretation of a piece of fiction.”
Citing department policy, a Department of Justice source declined to indicate whether authorities had interviewed Vanderboegh or plan to do so.
“If we begin to treat fiction as grounds for legal action against the author because someone misinterprets it or uses a tactic from the book,” Vanderboegh said, “then the First Amendment no longer exists.”

So four elderly men took Vanderboegh’s book as a script for action, and as a result Vanderboegh might himself be under investigation. Bizarre! How long will it be before some bureaucrat gets the bright idea to blame John Ross for the assassination of a federal hireling, or Tom Clancy for September 11, 2001?
Vanderboegh is quite correct about the threat to freedom of expression. We allow the state to ban “incitement to riot” on the grounds that it’s easily distinguished from other sorts of speech and leads all too often to actual riots. We allow defamed persons to sue their defamers for libel or slander on the grounds that detectable financial harm done to a targeted individual with malice aforethought should be legally redressed. But the notion that a work of fiction, which probably says “Fiction” on the spine and “This is a work of fiction” on the flyleaf, might be held legally responsible for some lunatic’s destructive acts goes well beyond the bounds of rationality.
This is a subject anyone who ever sets words down on paper or in pixels should take maximally seriously. There is nothing, nothing more destructive of freedom than potential-consequence laws: laws that ban some wholly non-violent, non-destructive act because “it will lead to bad things.” When the subject is free expression—the notion that a speaker’s or writer’s words can and should be regulated by law because persons inclined toward violence, theft, or fraud might be moved to action by them—you’re staring down the barrel of totalitarianism on the march.
Lucky for you, Gentle Reader, that I have a lot on my agenda this morning. Else I could go from here into a tirade about the madness of “sexual harassment” charges based on “inappropriate comments.” Such notions are a major stepping-stone toward the infantilization of America. But all subjects to their proper times and places.




Characterization



If you’ve ever taught in a grammar school or a high school, no doubt you’ve known the despair that comes from the realization that little Johnny isn’t learning because he just isn’t listening. In the argot of our time, Johnny “has another agenda.” Whatever is on his mind, it’s not the carefully organized mass of fact and reasoning you’ve been so painfully ladling out.
Quite a few indie writers are weak on characterization. I can’t help but think they weren’t listening in tenth and eleventh grade English class, for characterization, despite the amount of effort it can demand, is one of the few aspects of fiction writing that’s truly teachable.
The key to characterization is the oldest and most resented of all writerly maxims:

SHOW, DON’T TELL!

As my good deed for today, I shall unpack that maxim for you all. Those of you who think you already grasp it: STAY IN YOUR !@#$%^&* SEATS! The probability that you really, truly do is vanishingly small, and anyway, who doesn’t benefit from a refresher course, now and then?

~

When is a writer “showing” and when is he “telling,” and why does it matter?
The easiest approach to “telling” is embedded in the phrase “tell a story.” Why, that’s what storytellers do, isn’t it? So what could be wrong with it?
Plenty, if you do it wrong.
If a story has a narrator, as most do—yes, that includes stories told in the first person—what the narrator says directly to the reader is “telling.” Some aspects of telling are quite all right:
Descriptions of setting;
Descriptions of the appearances of people and things;
Descriptions of things in motion and people in action.

Note the word “description” at the start of all those exemptions. Description is not characterization and must not be substituted for it. When the narrator tells the reader about a character—that is, when he narrates the character’s motivations, values, priorities, virtues, and vices directly to the reader, rather than demonstrating them through the events of the story—he’s doing it wrong. 
Take heart. Even the great geniuses of fiction get it wrong now and then: 
But though [Frodo’s] fear was so great that it seemed to be part of the very darkness that was round him, he found himself as he lay thinking about Bilbo Baggins and his stories, of their jogging along together in the lanes of the Shire and talking about roads and adventures. There is a seed of courage hidden (often deeply, it is true) in the heart of the fattest and most timid hobbit, waiting for some final and desperate danger to make it grow. Frodo was neither very fat nor very timid; indeed, though he did not know it, Bilbo (and Gandalf) had thought him the best hobbit in the Shire. He thought he had come to the end of his adventure, and a terrible end, but the thought hardened him. He found himself stiffening, as if for a final spring; he no longer felt limp like a helpless prey. [Emphasis added]

The emphasized sentence is a characterization blunder. J.R.R. Tolkien, one of the finest storytellers of all time, is telling you what to think of Frodo’s reserves of courage, rather than showing them in action. The irony of this is compounded by what follows: a textbook demonstration of Frodo’s courage in action, that makes it plain that the above error was unnecessary. 

~

There are three ways to show a character: 
What the character does;
What the character says;
What other characters say about him.

Those are in descending order of impact on the reader. Smith can say whatever he likes about what he would or will do in some situation. Similarly, other characters might well be mistaken about Smith in discussing him. What Smith does when he’s compelled to make a choice freighted with import is the best avenue by which to reveal him to the reader. 
Some examples:

“You asked Louis Redmond out?” The furrows on Katie Guynemer’s forehead threatened to crack her foundation makeup. 
Celeste Holmgren nodded. “For Friday evening.” 
“And he said yes?” 
Celeste looked from side to side, to see if anyone else in the cafeteria were listening. “Yes, he did.” After he got over being thunderstruck. “Why?” 
Katie shook her head in disbelief. Her long brown curls rippled like willow branches in a breeze. “Silly, the man is unapproachable. There are women here who are afraid even to speak to him...men, too.” 
[From Chosen One]

 [Christine] picked up her fork and was about to dig in when she noticed his gaze fixed upon her face. His eyes were liquid and luminous. 
“What’s the matter, Louis?” 
Again he produced the grin, accompanied by a tiny shrug. “Nothing. I was just enjoying the sight of you.” 
She smirked. “I’m just a carved-up former cycle slut who’s learned a lot about clothes and makeup.” 
His expression shattered like a mirror struck by a thrown rock. He reached for her hand and clutched it. 
“Don’t ever say that, Chris. There has never been a more beautiful creature on this earth than you, with or without the clothes and makeup. It’s a privilege just to be in the same room with you.” 
Something’s happening here. 
She tried to make light of it. 
“Come on, Louis. What I am is what you and Helen have made me, that’s all. All you see is your own achievements.” She made a show of looking herself over. “Not bad, I guess, but you could have done a lot better if you hadn’t insisted on starting from scrap.” 
He shot out of his chair and yanked her from her own. In an instant he had pressed her against the wall of the kitchen, his grip rough upon her shoulders, shaking her and shouting into her face. 
“How dare you say such a thing? The one thing you absolutely can’t do without is self-respect. What good will any of what we’ve taught you be if you don’t see yourself as worthy of it, damn you? Have we wasted our time after all?” 
[From On Broken Wings]

[Christine] was idle for the first time that evening when the commotion arose. 
“My, my. What a fine looking covey of quail. And they say there ain’t no wildlife left in New York.” 
The basso voice was loud enough to be heard in Westchester. It pulled Christine’s head around at once. A tall, broad figure swayed gently over a table of five women, all attractively dressed and made up. The intruder was dressed like a corporate executive, but carried himself like a thug. He was plainly deep in his cups. Christine edged closer. 
Is he wearing a gunbelt? 
One of the diners had risen. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.” 
The intruder flashed teeth like piano keys. “We can fix that any time you like.” He reached down and took a seated woman’s chin in his hand. “Sisters don’t come any hotter than you, sister. Maybe you’d like a little special attention tonight, ‘stead of just hanging with your girlfriends?” 
The first woman’s eyes went wide. “Sir, we’re trying to have a pleasant evening by ourselves, if you don’t mind.” 
Christine waved to the maitre d’hotel, but instead of coming toward them he began to talk animatedly to the barman. 
What’s wrong with the menfolk here? 
The boor put his hands on his hips and looked the diner up and down. “Pleasant’s my specialty, sugar. I was just gettin’ pleasant with this miss, but I can start with you if you like.” He swept his eyes back and forth across the table, grinning carnivorously. “Just how many of you wanna get pleasant tonight, and how pleasant do you wanna get?” 
The room had fallen silent. The other patrons were hypnotized by the scene. 
“Sir, this is insupportable. If you’d kindly allow us–” 
“Allow you anything you want, sweet thing, if you come along quietly and get cozy with me.” 
Christine strode forward. 
Christine– 
Shove it, Nag.
“Excuse me.” 
The enormous cad swiveled to face her, tottering only slightly. 
“You want to get in on this too, mama?” 
“It’s time to go home, Mr. Lawrence,” Christine said. These ladies are entitled to finish their dinners in peace.” 
The lout blinked. 
“Where’d you get my name, sugar?” 
She smiled. “It’s carved into the butt of that Browning you’re wearing. Nice gun. I prefer a Beretta, but then, my hand isn’t as large as yours. Now will you please make it easy on everyone and go home?” 
Lawrence’s mouth dropped open. 
“Be goin’ home when I’ve had my fill an’ not before.” He reached for Christine’s hair, apparently intending to yank her off balance and onto her knees. 
She caught Lawrence’s thumb and twisted. In an instant he was on his knees, howling in pain. 
“You’ve had your fill, Mr. Lawrence.” She kept her voice even and calm, and her gentle smile fixed in place. “You’ve had about a month’s fill, according to Tony at the bar. He said thanks for not tipping him, by the way. He’s glad he didn’t have to feel indebted to you.” 
Lawrence tried to rise and failed. She increased her pressure, and he hissed in renewed pain. 
“Grucci’s doesn’t like to have its patrons disturbed at their meals.” They’d gained the attention of everyone in the restaurant. “You’re creating a large disturbance. Some of us feel rather strongly about that. So I’m going to see you out.” She bared her teeth. “Right now.” 
She yanked him off his knees, twirled his arm around him, creating a half-Nelson from her previous hold, and propelled him toward the entrance. A channel opened before them. The maitre d’hotel opened the door, held it while she shoved her staggering captive through it, and quickly slammed it shut. 
She returned to the affected table, striving to carry herself as if nothing untoward had occurred. Five beautifully made-up faces stared up at her in astonishment. 
“Our deepest apologies, ladies. Grucci’s regrets the intrusion on your privacy and dining pleasure. A waiter will be here in a moment to take complimentary cocktail orders from all of you, as a token of our appreciation for your patience. Have a pleasant evening.” 
The woman the boor had first addressed whispered, “Thank you.” 
Christine smiled, turned, and glided away. 
[From Shadow Of A Sword]

As you can see from the above examples, using words, whether spoken by the character himself or by others about him, is easier and faster than using actions—but actions display character far more vividly, and far more reliably. 

~

Perhaps the best thing ever said on the subject of characterization is from Maya Angelou: “When a man shows you who he is, believe him.” Besides, haven’t we been told, when words and actions contradict one another, to disregard the words and put our credence in the actions? 
If you let your narrator tell the reader about your characters, you’re doing it wrong. Learn to show them instead.




The Action Fraction



As has often been said, there are two kinds of people: those who believe there are two kinds of people, and those who don’t.
All right, all right: there are really three kinds of people: those who can count and those who can’t. But more relevant to today’s point is that there are two kinds of readers: those who enjoy action fiction and those who don’t. If you write action fiction—loosely speaking, stories that include important segments that depict violence or extreme danger—the action-fiction reader is your audience...and your most important stumbling block.
Writers who denigrate action fiction imply that it’s simplistic of construction and therefore easy to write. They couldn’t be more wrong. The proof is in how many action writers do it badly and how few do it genuinely well.
One of the reasons Lee Child stands today at the pinnacle of thriller writers is that he handles the action segments of his novels exceptionally well. The late Robert B. Parker was equally skilled at depicting scenes of violence, especially those involving hand to hand combat. But for each such specialist, there are many writers in the various action-oriented genres who deal with it tentatively, even clumsily, and therefore cause the very reason an action-oriented reader bought their books to be a detriment to his enjoyment.
Whether he’s good or bad at it, the action-fiction writer probably has had very few personal experiences—if any—of the kind he’s attempting to describe. There are occasional exceptions, but there’s no correlation between such a history and the writer’s ability to convey the pace and tension of mortal combat to his readers. It seems to be a special skill, which might not be teachable or reducible to a set of key principles.
There are many approaches, no one of which seems to invalidate any of the others. All I can say about them is that some writers make them work while others fumble with them unconvincingly. Yet despite the difficulties, more writers head into the thickets of action fiction than address the more sedate provinces of the literary or psychological novel...probably because more readers buy and read action fiction than the more contemplative sorts.
Allow me to repeat an old joke: the [in]famous “tandem story” of Laurie and Carl.

Rebecca and Gary 
English 44A 
SMU 
Creative Writing 
Prof Miller 

In-class Assignment for Wednesday:

Today we will experiment with a new form called the tandem story. The process is simple. Each person will pair off with the person sitting to his or her immediate right. One of you will then write the first paragraph of a short story. The partner will read the first paragraph and then add another paragraph to the story. The first person will then add a third paragraph, and so on back and forth. Remember to reread what has been written each time in order to keep the story coherent. The story is over when both agree a conclusion has been reached. 


At first, Laurie couldn’t decide which kind of tea she wanted. The camomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked camomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So camomile was out of the question.
 
Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neuroses of an air-headed asthmatic bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. “A.S. Harris to Geostation 17,” he said into his transgalactic communicator. “Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far...” But before he could sign off a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship’s cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit.
 
He bumped his head and died almost immediately, but not before he felt one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who had ever had feelings for him. Soon afterwards, Earth stopped its pointless hostilities towards the peaceful farmers of Skylon 4. “Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing War and Space Travel.” Laurie read in her newspaper one morning. The news simultaneously excited her and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming of her youth—when the days had passed unhurriedly and carefree, with no newspapers to read, no television to distract her from her sense of innocent wonder at all the beautiful things around her. “Why must one lose one’s innocence to become a woman?” she pondered wistfully.
 
Little did she know, but she had less than 10 seconds to live. Thousands of miles above the city, the Anu’udrian mothership launched the first of its lithium fusion missiles. The dim-witted wimpy peaceniks who pushed the Unilateral Aerospace Disarmament Treaty through Congress had left Earth a defenseless target for the hostile alien empires who were determined to destroy the human race. Within two hours after the passage of the treaty the Anu’udrian ships were on course for Earth, carrying enough firepower to pulverize the entire planet. With no one to stop them they swiftly initiated their diabolical plan. The lithium fusion missile entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in his top-secret mobile submarine headquarters on the ocean floor off the coast of Guam, felt the inconceivably massive explosion which vaporized Laurie and 85 million other Americans. The President slammed his fist on the conference table. “We can’t allow this! I’m going to veto that treaty! Let’s blow ‘em out of the sky!”

This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic, semi-literate adolescent. 

Yeah? Well, you’re a self-centered tedious neurotic whose attempts at writing are the literary equivalent of Valium. 
You total $*&. 

Stupid %&#$!.

[Professor Miller: A+ I really liked this one!]


Plainly, Rebecca is uninterested in writing action fiction. She almost certainly doesn’t read it, wouldn’t enjoy it if it were pressed upon her, and would probably make a terrible hash out of it if she were to try to write it. Gary, in contrast, plainly prefers the drive and drama of combat to the introspective, contemplative sort of story Rebecca wants to write. He strives for a swift pace, events of terrible power and import, and the high emotions that attend such things. (Whether he displays any skill at the matter is open to discussion.)
I am of the opinion that writers, including writers of action fiction, treat this sheaf of skills and techniques too casually. It’s not enough to have opponents struggling to batter one another into submission. It’s not enougn for opposing groups to fire rivers of high-velocity lead at one another. It’s not enough to have bombs falling in bunches, wildfires consuming whole city blocks, women screaming and dogs barking at the tops of their lungs. More is required to lasso the reader’s emotions and get his pulse pounding to the beat of the punches, the hammering of the fusillades, and the staccato of the bombardments.
But it’s not always clear what that “something more” must be. At any rate, it varies from writer to writer, and from genre to genre. And the writer who masters its intricacies in his chosen venue will acquire a legion of devoted reading fans.




Too Pertinent?



Is there any temptation more powerful than the temptation to write fiction that recasts the political and / or international crises of the day? It would be so easy. The headlines practically plot your book for you. You can sculpt your characters around the public figures involved. And everyone who reads your book would know immediately “what you really mean.”
This is yet another “here there be dragons” idea, I think!
It should be obvious that a book that narrates crises greatly similar to those of the moment will be both polemic and time-bound. You can’t have your heroes address a political crisis without offering your preferred solutions, however indirectly. Worse, strong binding to the crises of an era inherently pins your book to that era. It becomes “historical fiction” within just a few years; those who lived through the period will dismiss it as such.
But it would be pertinent, wouldn’t it? People with an interest in contemporary politics, who are never few in number, would recognize the scenarios you sketch and become immediately immersed in your approach to them. It might even be a way to popularize your political opinions while making a few bucks.
That’s actually an additional strike against the notion. Fiction that strives to be contemporarily pertinent will strike many readers as pertinacious, especially if your opinions are already well known from some other venue. (No, the two words don’t mean the same thing; look ‘em up.) Besides, just how likely is it that your fictional heroes can plausibly solve the problems of the day when so many real-worlders have tried and failed, eh, genius?
This is much on my mind just now because I’ve been feeling the temptation myself. Shadow Of A Sword featured Stephen Graham Sumner, a candidate for the presidency whose candor and Constitutional fidelity made a huge positive impact on the electorate. Many readers of that novel have written to plead for a sequel about Sumner’s time in office. And I, being as susceptible to readers’ requests as any writer, had been toying with writing one.
Bad idea.
I can write individual stories about Sumner’s confrontation with individual opponents and crises. Indeed, I’ve already written a few; they can be found in my collection Caucuses, Cabals, Assignations, And Trysts. But to make the Sumner Administration the central aspect of a novel-length work would try both plausibility and reader patience; take my word for it.
Never fear; Stephen Sumner will return. But I’m not going to write a detailed political travelogue about his administration, or his stature as a world-historical figure.
Not yet, at any rate.




Naming Your Characters



Quite a number of the indie writers I know have expressed a substantial degree of frustration at choosing character names. When I first started writing fiction, I had some trouble with it, myself. It’s one of the few areas in fiction where there are few if any rules.
One of the very few rules that pertain to character names is that they should be as easy to remember as the characters are important. A Marquee character must not have a name that runs to six or seven syllables or looks like an explosion in an alphabet-block factory. A Supporting Cast character can be named more casually, but there’s still a need to take some care about legibility and pronunciation. A Spear Shaker need not be named at all, the poor soul.
Another rule is that a character’s name should not evoke some sort of cognitive dissonance. For example, it’s a very bad idea to give a character the name of a popular entertainer or political figure: the popular figure’s image and nature will eclipse your character in your readers’ minds. Similarly, it’s a bad idea to give a character a name that conjures up an image of that character at odds with what you want him to look like or be: an alley-dwelling junkie probably shouldn’t be named Whittington Choate Smythe-Carstairs. (This latter rule can be broken for comedic effect, as for example R. A. Lafferty did in his classic story “Nine Hundred Grandmothers.”)
Finally, if your character is supposed to be of a particular ethnicity, his name should reflect that ethnicity. An Argentinean should not be named Chantelle Myszciewicz; nor should a Polish immigrant be named Simba Ngoungau-tshombe. (No doubt, given the variety of Mankind, there are, or someday will be Argentineans named Myszciewicz and Poles named Ngoungau-tshombe, but fiction has its own demands.)
But beyond those mild thou-shalt-nots, the writer is free...which many writers would prefer not to be. Yet there’s no formula upon which you can rely to produce a set of plausible, adequately memorable names for your characters.
I’ve had some luck with character names. When I chose names for my Realm Of Essences series’s Marquee characters Louis Redmond and Christine D’Alessandro, I did so unconsciously; indeed, with more than a little irritation at the chore. It proved serendipitous: Louis Redmond is approximate medieval French for “Warrior-king of the world,” and D’Alessandro means, roughly, “of the excellences” in old Italian. I was able to exploit those happy coincidences in several ways.
If all else fails, you can sometimes let the character name himself. Give him a placeholder name—maybe something like “#47”—and just start writing about him. It’s a rare character of consequence who won’t eventually demand a “real” name, and provide you with all manner of usable suggestions for it. But by no means should you let mere namelessness prevent you from writing. I mean, look at what Bill Pronzini has achieved!




Symbolism



The use of objects and images partially disconnected from a story’s events to symbolize important concepts or emotions is a common practice in fiction. However, like the other “literary” devices and motifs, it can be abused or over-used. Indeed, some writers exploit it so relentlessly that it’s hard to follow the storyline buried beneath all those symbolic objects and images. Annie Proulx, Dom De Lillo, Paul Auster and Cormac McCarthy have been cited for this particular sin.
So the question arises: How much symbolism is too much? Behind that one lurks another: Why use symbols at all?
At its base, a symbol in fiction is a variety of metaphor. The writer intends the symbol to evoke a particular idea or mood through the symbol’s associations in the reader’s mind. Whether it “works” depends on the uniformity and reliability of those associations.
A bridge has been used frequently as a symbol for the human need for connection to others. It works pretty well because we understand the bridge’s function: making otherwise unavailable places available. But a bridge would be a poor symbol for lust, or for hunger; its function simply has nothing to do with those motivations.
An open fire has been used frequently as a symbol for romantic passion. This, too, works well; fire and passion both conduce to heat in the body. But no sensible writer would use a fire as a symbol for despair; it’s too dynamic in nature.
Corpses, both human and animal, have been used as symbols for futility, or for aridity of spirit. Here, it’s the lack of function that matters: there isn’t much good to be had from a corpse. But imagine trying to get a mood of optimism or dynamism out of a corpse; you’d be beaten before you could start.
From the above, it should be clear how symbols work and why they sometimes fail. And in those circumstances where the writer actively wishes not to speak explicitly of the idea or emotion he wants to conjure, inserting an appropriate symbol is often the right way to go. But what circumstances are those?
Probably the most important application of symbols is in those circumstances where the viewpoint character is in the grip of a powerful emotion, and the writer wants or needs to avoid expressing it in words. Consider the following passage, from this story:

I swung back the stable door and slipped inside. No one noticed. 
There were only the three: man, woman, and child. A single frail candle burned against the back wall of the stable, casting their silhouettes at me like inverted shadows. The woman had wrapped the baby in a loose cocoon of white muslin, leaving only its head exposed, and was laying it in the feed-trough that stood between the rows of stalls. She straightened, stepped back, and wordlessly collapsed into the man’s arms.
Around the little tableau, the horses were silent. 
I stepped forward, started to address the couple, and stopped. He cradled her in his lap, his arms tight about her, his face ablaze with uxorious devotion. Her eyes, large and luminous, were fixed upon her new child. 
It took all my strength to produce a voice. “Do you… require anything?” 
Her gaze remained locked upon her child. He assessed me with a glance and nodded with a certainty I could not help but envy. 
“Some water, perhaps.” 
I nodded and started for the inn, but something held me. I bent to the feed-trough, pulled the muslin back from the tiny face and looked into it, not knowing why or what I hoped to see. 
The baby’s eyes were open. 
The eyes of the newborn are never open.

There are two symbols of importance in that snippet: the silent horses, which lend the scene an air of portent; and the baby’s open eyes, connoting a supernatural degree of awareness in the newborn Child. They wouldn’t work for a reader who doesn’t know that horses are seldom still or silent in the presence of human activity, or for a reader who hasn’t recognized the Story being told. However, our cultural commonalities are strong enough that the typical reader will know those things—and the symbols made the explicit description of the viewpoint character’s emotions unnecessary.
Would that passage have been strengthened or weakened by inserting still more symbols? Obviously, I refrained from doing so. What would you have done—and if you’re partial to heavily symbolic storytelling, what symbols would you have used that I didn’t?
As with the other fictional devices, more symbols don’t always mean better storytelling. For that matter, they don’t always conduce to better symbolism. But you’d hardly know that from the practices prevalent among the “literary” writers of our day.




Overwriting



Night falls swiftly and silently in the Kern County corner of the Mojave Desert, the sky shimmering a pale orange as the sun sets toward the Pacific Ocean, glowing faintly to the south from Los Angeles light pollution, turning ink black to the east with only the faintest hint of Las Vegas burning like an ember in the distance.

Gentle Reader, words don’t exist that possess sufficient intensity or color to articulate the paroxysm of aesthetic ambivalence I experienced upon encountering the above, the first sentence from a recent indie science fiction novel of captivating premise: luminous, original, evocative, and inarguably deserving of a much, much better bit of prose for its introduction.
And now you’re invited to judge whose first sentence is more overwritten: the block-quoted one, or mine that immediately follows it.
Overwriting is a commonplace sin among “literary” writers. Of course, “literary” writers also disdain plot and plausibility, which is why so many readers disdain to read their effluvia. But the two syndromes go together, for obvious reasons: if you haven’t got storytelling skills, or worse, if you have no story to tell, you have to fill the space between the covers of your book somehow.
Yet many indies appear to think that overwriting is the key to fictional sophistication—that unless they pack several irrelevant, action-and-characterization-postponing images into a sentence, it’s unworthy to be called “writing.” This is, to put it gently, not the case.
Possibly the best writing advice I’ve ever received came in the form of a single brief sentence from a professional editor: “You want every word to carry weight.” George Orwell said this in a slightly more active style: “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.” Professor Will Strunk was even more severe: “Omit needless words! Forcible writing is concise.” Overwriting is the exact negation of this maxim of good prose.
Granted that concision can be overdone. We’re only allowed one Hemingway per century. Setting matters, and imagery is essential to establishing setting. But a sentence that contains two images invariably contains one too many. A paragraph that contains two imagistic sentences contains one such sentence too many. A scene that overloads on images—and you might be surprised, Gentle Reader, by how easy it is to overload a scene with images—will seldom contribute anything to the forward motion of the story.
If you disdain plot, as the “literary” writers do, that might seem quite all right to you. But without plot, you don’t have a story. Indeed, without a sufficient density of events and causal tissue to link them, you don’t have much of anything. But there’s actually worse: If you do have a story to tell, overwriting can prejudice a potential reader against it, as the block-quoted sentence at the start of this tirade prejudiced me.
Overwriting can be used to produce a comedic effect: 

Snow, tenderly caught by eddying breezes, swirled and spun into and out of bright, lustrous shapes that gleamed against the emerald-blazoned black drape of sky and sparkled there for moment, hanging, before settling gently to the soft, green-tufted plain with all the sickly sweetness of an over-written sentence.

...but how often is that what you really want to do?
If you make it a rule to favor the telling of the story over all else, overwriting will be easy to avoid:
Prefer action to description.
Prefer to characterize by depicting your characters in action, whenever possible.
Prefer to describe physical settings through the viewpoint character’s perception of them—and remember that that character will only take conscious note of those elements of his surroundings that are unusual or out of place.
Go sparely on images and other literary devices.

Above all, know when to end a sentence...or a tirade about overwriting.




The Large And The Small



The techno-thriller sub-genre of military adventure fiction owes Tom Clancy more than any other writer. Were it not for Clancy’s “Jack Ryan” series of novels, the techno-thriller might have continued to be neglected by the major publishers, and millions of male readers would have remained bereft of a reading experience they find uniquely satisfying.
It’s worth a few moments’ reflection on why Clancy attained mass popularity when several of his military-fiction colleagues, both before him and after him, failed to do so. It wasn’t all Clancy’s ability to provide fascinating descriptions of weapon systems or convincingly narrate military engagements. Indeed, that might have been the lesser part of his approach. Rather, Clancy proved adept at humanizing military adventure. He gave us characters, both of heroic and lesser stature, whom we could care about. Some we loved and rooted for; some we hated and hoped to see them fall. In all his successful books, Clancy’s ability to induce interest in his characters was at the heart of the achievement.
This is subtly different from routine characterization. The difference is especially vivid in the high-intensity world of armed combat. When the world around Smith is at war, Smith’s personal concerns would normally seem petty, dwarfed by the combat and its possible consequences. It takes quite a bit of thought and care to elevate an individual—at least, one whose personal heroics aren’t instrumental in winning a large battle—to a position of importance in such a tale.
More than that: If you can pull it off, you can provide the reader with one of the most intriguing and ultimately satisfying contrasts fiction can offer him.
Sometimes, in grooming your hero for his ultimate heroics, you can produce this sort of contrast “spread out over time.” In other words, you can show him grappling with difficult personal problems, or perhaps the small-scale problems of other people, before he gets busy with the solution of the story’s larger conflict. There’s a compelling logic in that: Before a man heads out to save the world, he ought to have practiced his moves a few times in less consequential situations.
Probably the hardest approach is the one Clancy took in Red Storm Rising, his World War III novel. In that novel, Clancy spends quite a bit of time following the trials of Air Force meteorologist Mike Edwards, whose assignment to Keflavik Airport on Iceland involves him in a harrowing trek across the island, in support of American attempts to retake the island and toward personal rescue. Edwards supports the recapture effort as an observer and reporter of intelligence, but he’s not critical to it in an objective sense. Even so, his adventure is both touching and arresting; it provides a human dimension to a military conflagration that has embraced the entire Northern Hemisphere.
Of course, compounding a coherent story that embraces both world-girdling events and human-scale dramas isn’t exactly easy. The reader who comes for the “big” action might regard the parts that focus on individuals as distractions, intermezzi at best, and skip over them. All the same, creating a story-canvas that depicts both the large and the small in distinct relief is among the most absorbing of fictional pursuits. When it works, it reminds us, reader and writer both, that even a hero has to eat, sleep, shower, and have the occasional argument with his Significant Other. When it doesn’t...well, perhaps we should leave that for another screed.




Style, Confidence, and Conviction



Quite a number of younger writers seem to “tiptoe” into the field. Perhaps out of a desire to maximize their chance of acceptance, they suppress their natural styles and strive to imitate the styles of well-known, established writers. Their products are seldom mistaken for the “real thing,” and even less frequently purchased by paying publications.
It’s a confidence problem, of course. The irony of it is that a lack of confidence practically guarantees defeat. You have to believe in your own chops. No singer or guitarist has ever won over an audience by being hesitant or apologetic about his talent. That would get him booed off the stage faster than any number of cracked high notes.
Sarah Hoyt has something to say about her own struggles in this direction:
See, I’d had people tell me before “voice, you iz doing it wrong” – yes, all my editors are Lolcats. (No. I don’t mean it. It’s a joke. For heaven’s sake, Toni W., don’t aim there. Don’t aim there. I type with those!) – but no one had explained what voice was. And books on how to find your voice were worse than useless. One of them advised removing all adjectives and adverbs and all “not strictly needed” description and stage setting. As far as that goes, it’s not a bad style necessarily, though a bit outdated and reading a little like a stage play.
Weber’s comment made it all clear. It’s the confidence of the voice and – if I may say so – the appropriateness to the story. (Something I only found later.)
The best way to put this in perspective is to think of someone telling a joke at a party. Even if they get the wording a little wrong, and it was three sheep and an Anglican Bishop instead of two goats and a Catholic Monk, it doesn’t matter, provided they do the right expressions, put in the right pacing, and make you SURE they know how they’re telling the story, and even that the story is funny. (Seriously. Some people just by the tone of voice and bullying through can make you laugh even if they forget the punchline.) OTOH is there anything more nerve wracking than the person who stands there and goes “and then he says, are you horny or… No, wait. It was he says the hornier you are. Then… No.” Or even someone who delivers the absolutely perfect line in an apologetic tone and cringes? (Unless that’s appropriate.)

For the uninitiate, what Miss Hoyt calls “voice” in the above is actually the writer’s natural style; the term “voice” is a relatively recent pseudo-sophisticated synonym for what would otherwise be a perfectly obvious aspect of the writing trade.
What, you didn’t know that you have a natural style? Of course you do! It’s the way you speak and write when you’re not being critiqued, or are unaware that you’re being critiqued. When you attempt to suppress your natural style in favor of some other mode of expression, you immediately become so self-critical that your storytelling gift—I assume you have one—is seriously hobbled, sometimes completely crippled. When you allow that style free rein, your writing is far smoother and less strenuous.
Your natural style is intimately connected to your linguistic development. It arises mainly from what you’ve read and sincerely loved, in the years before you took up writing yourself. The styles that characterize your fictional favorites will have seeped into your own style without having to be snatched and inserted there like a stolen transplant organ. Note that at that point in your life, you’re highly unlikely to be massively concerned about selling your own stuff.
Your confidence in your own style is thus likely to be founded on your belief in the worth of the books you’ve read and loved. Your favorite writers’ confidence will have been transferred, in part, to you. 
Confidence can be a magic elixir. It improves everything that’s not utterly hopeless. (You’ll know which stuff is “utterly hopeless” when it doesn’t improve.) But confidence touches upon matters beyond style.
Confidence without conviction is pointless.
Every salesman who achieves even the least success does so because he believes in his product, and conveys that to his customers. Fiction is no exception. But just as many young writers are timid about their natural styles, quite a lot of young writers are afraid to express any strong conviction in their stories. Thus, their stories have little or no theme to them. Even if the pacing and plotting keep the reader glued to the book to the very last page, his reaction when he finishes it is more likely than not to be “What was the point of that?”
Another term for writing with conviction is “writing from the heart.”
What’s really important to you? Faith? Romance? Family? Compassion? Freedom? Infuse whatever value it may be into your plots. Craft Marquee characters around that value, both for and against it. Let the triumph or defeat your protagonists suffer lead to the consequences you believe would flow from them. Leave your reader in no doubt where you stand.
If you haven’t read any of my tripe, my animating convictions are about the supreme importance of the Christian faith and individual freedom. I can’t write a coherent paragraph that isn’t imbued with one or both of those themes. But early in my writer’s odyssey, I tried. Oh, how I tried. And no matter how hard I labored over it, what I produced was unpalatable even to me.
Robert M. Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, wrote: “You say you want to paint a perfect painting? Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it.” That was a trifle facile, but it’s essentially about this very subject. The more confidence you have, both in yourself and in your convictions, the better storyteller you’ll be...and the more likely it is that those who read your work will cherish it, return to it, and press it upon their friends and loved ones.
What’s that? Will it make you rich? Gentle Reader, if I knew that, I wouldn’t still have a day job, now would I?




"Going Commercial"



She asks me why,
I’m just a hairy guy
I’m hairy noon and night,
Hair that’s a fright
I’m hairy high and low,
Don’t ask me why, I don’t know
It’s not for lack of bread,
Like the Grateful Dead...

(Opening lyrics to the song “Hair,” from the unlamented musical of the same name)

It’s tough to make writing fiction into your principal income. I know, I know: a number of writers have done it. And we have Dean Wesley Smith—who? -- telling us that more writers have managed to do it than we’ve been led to believe. All the same, there’s a hellish amount of work involved, and not all of it is congenial to someone who just likes to tell a good story.
There’s also a temptation lurking in the shadows: the lure of “what’s hot right now.”
For example, if we judge from the evidence available, there’s a lot of fiction about vampires being written—and bought—right now. The most famous excrescence of this abominably banal trend is Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series. The books have sold appallingly well, despite being unoriginal, poorly written, and repetitive in the extreme. Still, there’s no denying that Miss Meyer is making a chamber-pot-full of money. Given the breadth of the tie-ins being marketed alongside the books and the movies made from them, she’ll probably continue to rake it in for some time to come.
Now, not everyone who writes vampire fiction has been fueling his furnace with hundred-dollar bills. As the power law suggests, there are a few “top” earners in that subgenre of urban fiction, and one hell of a lot of hopefuls writing feverishly and praying to be “discovered” while pulling in painfully thin dribbles of valuta. Of that latter group, I’d bet that many of them have no personal desire to write vampire fiction, but that they were seduced into the vampire trend by the success of Miss Meyer, the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” phenomenon, or some other of the more visibly successful bloodsucker-suckers.
I contend that this is a danger to the writer with a significant storyteller’s gift.
Storytelling is the point of the enterprise...well, unless you’re a “literary” writer, but I severely doubt that there are many of those reading Musings. By corollary, he who decides to tell someone else’s story is betraying his own fund of stories—and you wouldn’t believe just how easy it is, once you’ve decided to “go for the bucks,” to slip into something akin to plagiarism.
Allow me to expand on that a wee bit further. Yes, it is possible to confine oneself to a subgenre such as vampire fiction or zombie fiction without becoming utterly derivative and unoriginal. Yes, it is possible to put your own preferred stories “on hold” while you pursue an income stream sufficient to keep the wolf away from the door. But it is dangerous—quite as dangerous as any other case of choosing a course of action not for its intrinsic satisfactions but in hope of a particular result.
Storytelling is not welding. It’s a personal gift to be shared with others. It should not be treated as a means to a “more important” end.
(To any welders in the audience that took umbrage at the previous paragraph’s implied denigration of the creativity and artistry inherent in their trade: You’re welcome. Now go sit on a railroad spike.)
Please, fellow storytellers and storytellers-in-embryo: Tell your own tales, and tell them from the heart: 
Do not treat your gift as something to be beaten into submission for the sake of money.
Do not allow the great success of other writers to prejudice you against your preferred genres and themes.
Do not permit your spouse, your friends, or any of the professional parasites of the writer’s trade to persuade you that “you could be big if you’d just write a nice romance / Western / bodice ripper / techno-thriller / vampire romance / mystery / police procedural / rutabaga adventure.”

Storytelling is inherently an act of love: love of theme, of plot, of character, and above all of your audience. If you must labor at something you don’t love to put beans in the pot, make it something other than what you do love. 
(NB: This article was not written because I’m sick to death of looking for fantasy to read that isn’t about vampires. Well, not exclusively.)




Genre, Category, And Formula



Martin McPhillips, author of the extraordinary thriller Corpse In Armor, is an unusual fellow in several respects: a scholar, a firm political conservative, a devout Catholic, a New Paltz resident, and an extremely affable and sociable guy. He’ll gladly share any of his opinions on any subject under the Sun with anyone who engages him...including his views about fiction:

...I don’t really even believe in the idea of genre (and I mean believe in it the way a kennel club believes that individual dogs must conform to the standards of their breed to attain recognition, and certainly must produce the papers of pedigree to even be considered). So genre, I speak for myself, ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.

Genre isn’t a new idea, of course. Upon entering their neighborhood bookstores, shoppers habitually head toward the sections that feature “their” genres, so most of us, whether rightly or not, do draw some meaning from the term. All the same, Martin has a point, especially in these days of rampant—one might even say promiscuous—cross-breeding among the “recognized” genres.
Genre is most important to publishers and marketers. To be able to say, “this book belongs in genre X” is to allocate it a place among “others of its kind.” If the classification is accurate, it helps a publisher to decide whether or not to buy a manuscript, helps the marketing department in deciding how to promote it, helps the retailer in placing it on the store’s shelves, and helps the reader to find it and relate it to what he prefers to read.
Book marketers also use another term, category, to create special divisions within a broadly recognized genre. For example, your local Barnes & Noble probably divides the Science Fiction / Fantasy shelves into two segments, one of which is marked “Series.” The Series category within SF / fantasy is used to classify novels that follow a specific instigating event, character, or item. For example, the many novels derivative of the “Star Wars” oeuvre are members of the Series category, as are novels that proceed from the conditions and assumptions of a television show, video game, or a for-grabs character. (A “for-grabs character” is one who’s serially licensed to writers who want to write about him. A good example is the long series of Rogue Angel novels about Annja Creed, a modern-day inheritor of Joan of Arc, to which many writers have contributed one or more volumes.)
Clearly, a category will have more confining requirements for its elements than works outside that category but within its enveloping genre. Some writers who are willing to ghostwrite when not engaged in their own adventures—the bills have to be paid, y’know—disdain category work as too stifling. Others do quite a lot of it, and reap substantial financial rewards over the years even if their names never appear upon a spine.
Still more confining is formula fiction. A writer who undertakes a formula novel starts from a plot line written by someone else—a plot line that pertains to every book written in that niche. The characters may change; the settings may change; the timelines may change. What doesn’t change is the fundamental plot. Such a book is often produced for a very brief marketing period; it might not spend more than a single month on bookstores’ shelves. Much paperback romance is considered formula fiction.
For discussion, Gentle Readers:
What’s your opinion of the prevailing system of genres under which books are sold in the English-speaking world?
Would you add any genres that you feel are real but not yet properly recognized?
Do you ever read category novels? If so, have you found any of which you’d think the writer, whether you know his real name or not, can be justly proud?
If you’re a writer, would you ever consider accepting a contract to produce category or formula fiction? What inducements would you require?




Dialogue And "Character Voice"



There’s that word again. Away with it! It summons up notions of volume, timbre, and pitch that have exactly no place in a discussion of dialogue. Nevertheless, it’s become prominent in discussions of dialogue, which many young writers regard as the toughest of the storyteller’s challenges.
Allow me an early tangent, if you will: Much of the frustration here is self-inflicted, but it’s powerfully reinforced by the prevalent trend toward trying to reduce the greater part of the storyteller’s art to technique. Granted that there are a few useful techniques—that is, patterns of story construction that can be followed in a formula-like fashion—in fiction writing; they’re not nearly as many as some writers-on-writing would have you believe. This is a particular irritant in this matter of “character voice.”
The underlying assumption in any discussion of “character voice” is that different characters should speak differently. That is: two characters should use different words, phrasings, and emphases to express themselves, even if the events they’re relating or the ideas they’re expressing are identical.
That sounds like a “but of course” notion, doesn’t it? Different characters, different “voices.” So why can’t I persuade myself that different real world people speak differently? Why do all the English-speakers around me—quite a diverse bunch, at that—seem to use essentially the same words, phrasings, and emphases?
I can’t be perfectly sure of this, but I rather suspect that the range of variations in modes of spoken expression is less than we’ve been led to believe. (Written expression is a completely different subject.) If that’s the case, then perhaps attempts to make different characters “sound” markedly different are misplaced. Perhaps our attention should be on other things.
I prefer to concentrate on my characters’ drives and values, which determine their responses to events. When I write their lines, I usually just “let it happen.” My premise is that a character is far more strongly colored by deeds than words. Therefore, if his deeds are consistent with his drives and values, the things he says about them, and about the actions of others, will tend to reflect his nature and motives adequately well no matter what words I put his mouth.
(There is an embellishment your can add to your dialogue, even while continuing to write naturally. If you equip a character with a verbal “tic,” which he can be counted upon to use in certain situations, it can help to distinguish his utterances from those of the characters around him. It can also become an irritation to those other characters—a plot element you can exploit for other purposes if you need it. For an example, in Greg Bear’s masterpiece Anvil of Stars, Hans Eagle habitually tags “Am I right?” onto the end of his statements. Note the way Martin, Ariel, and other characters react to that verbal tic.)
Here’s an example of what I consider natural dialogue that flows from the characters’ individual attributes and experiences, from one of my favorite stories: 

Marti laid five places at their table. Luisa brought the stew, a collation of pared roots in broth, and set the pot at the center of the table. Laella set a loaf of brown hardbread next to the pot and gestured to Gregor to sit.
“Marti, will you fetch Karine, or shall I?” she said.
“I’ll get her.” The small blonde woman scurried down the hallway.
A minute later Marti returned, urging pale, trembling Karine before her. In the firelight, the freshly scourged girl looked barely able to stand. Laella waited until they sat, reached for the ladle and offered it to Karine, who stared at it, uncomprehending.
“You must eat, dear. The cuts won’t heal otherwise.”
Karine took the ladle. They served themselves in turn. There was no conversation.
The fire had burned low when they were done. Luisa collected their bowls in silence. Marti attended to the leftover stew and tossed the end of the loaf to the dog, who settled by the hearth to gnaw it.
Karine sat slumped forward, eyes fixed on the table. Her color was returning, but she was clearly apprehensive about her place in Laella’s household. Gregor watched Laella discreetly, as if waiting for instructions. Laella caught Luisa’s and Marti’s eyes, and nodded.
With a murmur and a touch, Marti urged Karine to rise and come with her. Luisa excused herself and followed them, leaving Laella and Gregor alone at the table in the flickering firelight. His expression was solemn.
“You have a hard life,” he said.
“It’s not that hard. We’re used to being apart.”
“I see.”
“You’ve told us nothing about yourself. Where do you come from? Surely not the wastes?”
“No.” He shifted in his seat. “I’ve traveled a great deal.”
She examined him in the dim light. “You don’t look old enough to have traveled much.”
He smiled faintly. “Perhaps the marks are on the inside. Tell me of your baron.”
The swerve halted her. She considered. “He is a strong ruler, and brooks no disorder. His men are well disciplined and properly under his command. He takes a tithe, but he does not meddle with trade or trifle with the women. The people fear him, but in the main they don’t dislike him.”
“Not even you?” His eyes compelled her to candor.
Her mouth twitched. “Not most of the time.”
“Ah. There are worse rulers, then.”
“There are. We’ve known a few.”
They sat in agreeable silence.
His scars were few. The roughness of his face and hands was already fading. In their few hours’ acquaintance, he had displayed strength, insight, compassion and fiber. He said little, but omitted nothing needful.
She could not imagine what impelled him to wander the wastes, but neither could she imagine a community that would drive him from its bosom.
“Are you weary?” she said, her voice husky.
He nodded.
“Might I persuade you to stay with us a while, address some... other tasks? Or are you anxious to be off?”
Something moved behind his eyes. She waited an anxious interval before the corners of his mouth rose. “I am only just arrived. I need not hurry away. I will stay gladly, if I’m welcome.” He looked about for his pack. “Where shall I sleep?”
She rose. “Come with me.”
She led him down the hall, past Luisa’s and Marti’s rooms, their doors discreetly closed, and opened her own. She drew a slender candle from her dwindling cache of luxuries, lit it and set it by her pallet. He had halted at the threshold.
“Is something the matter?” she said.
His eyes were uncertain. “This is your room.”
She nodded. “And yours.” She gestured at the pallet. Luisa had set his pack next to it. “To share with me, if you will. For as long as you will.” She stared at the floor. “I am a virgin, Gregor, not another man’s cast-off.”
In the candlelight, his eyes looked as if they might fall from their sockets.
“Wouldn’t you rather remain a virgin, Laella?”
She barked a laugh. “Three years after bearing an unhallowed child?”
“The others—“
She flailed the air in sudden impatience. “What of them?”
He fell silent. After a moment, he approached her. As if of their own desire, her hands caught and drew him closer. He did not resist.
“You have a great strength in you,” he said.
“You have a great kindness in you,” she said. “Shall we share what we have?”
He bent and touched his lips to hers.

Traveling sorcerer Gregor and village-shunned Laella were so vivid to me that I didn’t hesitate over their words even once. My awareness of the kinds of persons they were dictated the way they would speak and respond to one another: Laella, the mistress of her household of outcasts, is inquisitive and cautious, while Gregor, who spends most of his time completely alone, who expects to depart fairly soon, and whose conscience bears the weight of a necessary but dreadful deed, is naturally laconic. Even as I put them through the formation of a love-bond, who they are and what they’ve been through conditioned how they would speak to one another. Yet the words they use are commonplace.
I suppose the ultimate mandate here is to know your characters, and immerse yourself in their experiences. This is obviously important when narrating from a particular character’s viewpoint. It’s just as valuable when writing their lines—and it will save you quite a bit of agony over how to “voice” them.




Marketing Or Discovery?



Mark Coker, founding genius of SmashWords, has written a provocative and quite important article on book selling tactics for indie writers:

Marketing isn’t as important as people think it is. I know this statement might strike some as sacrilegious.
Here’s the problem: Great marketing will raise awareness about your book and motivate readers to buy it. But great marketing is expensive and extremely difficult to pull off. We all know authors who invested thousands of dollars in marketing, never to earn the money back in book sales....
Marketing is merely a catalyst for sales. Like any true catalyst, catalysts help start the fire but they can’t sustain it. The word-of-mouth spawned by passionate readers is what propels books to go on to become best-sellers....
In this new age of the immortal book, marketing will take a back seat to discovery.

Please read the entire article, which is packed with both information and insight. Coker has penetrated to the significance of the essential difference between the era of eBooks and the paper-dominant milieu that preceded it: The eBook need never, ever go out of print.
Traditional marketing—an advertising-based promotional approach designed to get potential buyers thinking about whether they want to buy the book now or soon—is both expensive and time-limited in its efficacy. Such campaigns seldom last more than a month. Their effectiveness at increasing book sales is less than that of word-of-mouth and readers’ loyalty to their favored writers.
The strategy that would most benefit the indie writer is a “compounding” approach:
Get your book into a few readers’ hands, hopefully, including one or more reviewers.
Encourage those that like it to commend it to others.
Thank those readers who do so and ask them to pass your name around.
Use favorable reviews in your own promotional activities, however limited.

Such an approach won’t sell thousands of copies of a book within the first month of its availability. But to the extent that your happy readers recommend the book to others who share their tastes, it will “earn compound interest.” The longer you can keep it going, the greater your sales, aggregated over time, will be. 
Consider this: One of the best-selling novels of all time, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, is currently selling at a rate that exceeds any previous clip. No one is out there “marketing” the book; it’s simply being recommended by each favorable reader to one or more others who might enjoy it. In consequence, it’s out-selling many a newly-released “blockbuster novel.” (Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Rand’s ideas are highly applicable to the current national and world political mess.) 
If your books have enduring value—that is, if they’re capable of entertaining and edifying more than one time-limited batch of readers—a discovery-oriented promotional approach is the way to go. Indeed, it would be just as applicable to old-style paper books as to eBooks. However, for those of us who’ve gone indie, it could be the magic route to popularity, influence, and—who knows? -- a little money on the side. 
Give it some thought.




The YA Explosion



It seems there’s been a great increase in the number of writers and the amount of material—and some pretty good material, at that—aimed at the “young adult” segment of American readers. That’s not entirely surprising, given the immense successes scored in recent years by J.K. Rowling, Stephenie Meyer, and others who target that segment. But it’s slightly counter-intuitive on the basis of “prestige.”
Never imagine that writers aren’t motivated by prestige. We might harbor secret reservations about the objective skills of this or that popular writer—I’ve lost track of the number of writers who’ve oh-so-quietly told me how little they think of Tom Clancy or Stephen King—but that doesn’t alter their prestige factor. Any military-fiction writer would sell both his kidneys for an endorsement from Clancy; any horror writer would do the same for an endorsement from King. Moreover, the value of praise from a highly prominent and successful writer isn’t confined to its probable effect on your book sales.
That’s the counter-intuitive aspect of the YA explosion. The segment has low prestige. Very few writers who make it their focus become icons of the fiction world, no matter how many books they sell.
I’m not arguing against targeting the YA segment, mind you. I’m merely trying to understand the trend toward it.
Well, thirty years ago, before The Hunt For Red October, I probably would have said the same things about military-adventure fiction. Perhaps prestige isn’t all that important to an aspiring writer. All the same, most writers, regardless of the genre or segment they target as their “entry point,” seem to want recognition and adulation quite as much as money—and the non-material payoffs are a lot harder to get for work in the YA segment.
All the same, there really is some good stuff being put out for that age bracket—good enough that adults will find it quite as enjoyable as the teens toward whom it’s slanted. I’ve mentioned my admiration for Jalex Hansen before. Allow me to add two other names alongside hers: M.T. McGuire, whose delightful and uplifting fantasy Few Are Chosen about the improbable adventures of the Pan of Hamgee demands the sequel I was promised; and Jaron Lee Knuth, whose YA near-future science fiction adventure Level Zero I found original and exciting.
Gentle Reader, if you have kids in the YA age bracket—roughly 12 through 17 years old—you could do worse for stocking stuffers than those books. If you don’t have kids in that bracket, perhaps you might try them yourself. Along with a few of my titles, of course!




Humanizing The Alien



This one is for writers of science fiction, or of fantasies that include non-human characters.
Among my favorite maxims of fiction are Brunner’s Laws:
The raw material of fiction is people;
The essence of story is change.

Thus, a good story must involve changes in people, brought on by the events they precipitate and to which they must react. In other words, your Marquee characters must develop as characters, whether positively or negatively, over the course of your plot. But what if among your Marquee characters are people that aren’t...quite...”people?” 
I maundered over that one for quite some time in plotting out Shadow Of A Sword. Among the most important of that book’s characters were “Essences” about as far removed from Mankind as an intelligent creature could possibly get. But their importance to the story required that they, too, experience internal change. Figuring out how to handle that need was quite a struggle. 
The key to the puzzle was simple. Stumbling upon it brought about one of those “kick yourself” moments: the sort of experience that has you asking yourself, “How could I have overlooked that all this time?” But it was enormously enlightening all the same. 
To be a “people” of the sort consistent with fiction’s requirement for change, a character must possess the following characteristics: 
1.He must be bounded. That is, he must be conscious of his own identity, and therefore, that he “ends” at a definite point. He does not encompass the entire universe, even in his fancies.
2.He must be of limited power. That is, the satisfaction of his desires and needs must not be a trivial matter, at or beneath the level of a whim.
3.He must have unmet desires and / or needs. He must at some point become aware of those desires / needs, and must take an active role in the attempt to satisfy them.

That doesn’t make a sentient pentapodal lizardoid who metabolizes tungsten and can lift boulders with his eyelashes human, but it’s enough to make him “people.” He can be a Marquee character, as long as he wants or needs something he hasn’t yet acquired and must engage in some personal trial in order to get it. 
A number of great SF writers have avoided populating their works with aliens. Isaac Asimov was notable in this regard. The closest he came to alien characters were his famous robots, which tended to be even more human in their characters and personalities than many of his explicitly human characters. Robert A. Heinlein made extremely limited use of sentient aliens; as far as I can recall, he never made an alien into a Marquee character. There are others of similar proclivities. 
This makes the “Posleen” novels of Tom Kratman and the “Confederation of Valor” novels of Tanya Huff somewhat notable. These military-SF adventures frequently feature non-human Marquee characters: some good, some bad. Those characters are quite as intriguing, and their trials and travails quite as striking, as those of any human in those books. Clearly, those writers have penetrated to the Three Laws Of People enumerated above, whether consciously or otherwise; they show no hesitation in delving into the motivations and emotions of their alien protagonists and antagonists, and they handle the challenges smoothly. 
The moral of the story isn’t that “We’re all human;” clearly, some of us aren’t. Nor is it that “We’re all connected;” that, too, is a canard. Rather, it’s that sentience itself must come at a price: finitude of identity, limitations of capability, and needs and desires one cannot guarantee will always be met. A creature that satisfies those three criteria, regardless of how many limbs he has, what he eats and breathes, or how far out his eyestalks protrude, can be made engaging to the reader. Emotionally engaging; in fiction, everything else is just scaffolding.




Sequels And Their Travails



Some days, it seems that every experience in a writer’s life is bittersweet.
The great success of the Realm of Essences series:
1.Chosen One,
2.On Broken Wings,
3.and Shadow Of A Sword

...has brought with it a pressure I never would have expected: pressure for a fourth book in the series. No, in all honesty I didn’t expect it; I’m an unknown without marketing support and only the vaguest idea of how to go about promoting my books. But here we are: the first three books have sold, in aggregate, over 100,000 copies, and I’ve received several hundred emails pleading for new adventures in the Realm oeuvre. Those readers’ emphases fall on two characters in particular: presidential candidate Stephen Graham Sumner, and his superwoman guardian Christine Marie D’Alessandro. 
(Allow me to pass, tearfully but firmly, over the many requests for further stories about Louis Redmond. Sorry, folks: he’s dead, gone to his just reward, and will remain that way.) 
I’d love to oblige. I’m trying to oblige! But I have a problem: I tied off too many of the key themes and plot motifs of the series in Shadow, such that coming up with a plausible yet satisfying new plot is proving immensely difficult. 
To make me happy to write it—and energized about writing it—a plot has to have certain features: 
One or more serious, dramatic conflicts within and among the Marquee characters;
A plausible good-versus-evil climax;
Strong support for pro-freedom and pro-Christian themes.

All three of those requirements have proved elusive to this point, which has left me incapable of proceeding at a satisfying pace. But wait: there’s more! You see, the Realm sequel isn’t the only thing on my plate; I’ve also received quite a number of emails requesting a sequel to Which Art In Hope. The tone of those emails is just as ardent, and the difficulty of finding a solid, plausible plot suitable for a novel-length adventure is just as great. 
I can’t speak for other novelists, but for myself, this is an embarrassment of riches. Two equally appealing, equally desired things are causing me to ping-pong non-productively between them. I’d imagine that my frustration is as great as that of my readers, if not greater; they, at least, should be able to find other things to read. 
Still, as the saying goes, it should be my worst problem. Part of writerly discipline is the cultivated ability to concentrate: in particular, to concentrate on a single storyline for long enough to get it to the point of self-sustaining momentum. It might be a bit late in the game for me to learn how to do that, but you can’t schedule this stuff like a visit to the dentist. At least, I’ve never been able to do it. 
Historically—i.e., before the e-publishing revolution got fully into motion—it was very difficult to communicate with the author of a book. Publishers were scrupulous about protecting a writer’s privacy, for good and sufficient reasons. With ePub, all that has changed. It’s routine to include your email address on your “About the Author” page. Most indies are eager to receive reader feedback...well, nice reader feedback, at any rate. So when a writer strikes a chord with his readers, a deluge of emails “in return” is to be expected...and respected. They who’ve loved his books are telling him how to keep the romance hot. 
As I said at the outset: bittersweet. I have a day job, and a family, and a home to tend to, and animals to love and care for, and much else besides. But I’d be kidding you—and myself—to say that the desires of my readers are far less important than any of that. No one who could say such a thing would sink thousands of hours into the creation of fiction in the first place. 
I suppose this is how an indie writer moves through the stages of his career development. Sigh. Time to get out my “Oh, No! Not Another Learning Experience!” lapel button again.




Cats And Dogs



Way back in the Stone Age, when I submitted my novel On Broken Wings to my critique group, I braced for a barrage of harsh reactions of unimaginable kinds. I knew the book to be unusual in its themes and its construction, and I feared greatly that its deviations from what was then considered the norm in contemporary fantasy might prove unpalatable to my reviewers. It was a pleasant surprise that most of them liked the book. It was even more pleasant that several reviewers made genuinely valuable suggestions for improving it.
However, one bit of commentary has stuck with me particularly tightly. It was a general observation that had the ring of unassailable truth. That reviewer noted that by inserting a dog into the narrative, and by making that dog the object of my protagonist’s affections, I had humanized the protagonist far better than any other simple motif could have accomplished. Nothing, he said, more effectively brings out the humanity of a character than showing him caring for an animal, particularly a wounded animal.
This is actually a special case of a general principle, the one writers most detest and which they most need to remember: Show, Don’t Tell. If you want the reader to think a character affectionate, you must show him acting affectionately. If you want the reader to think a character compassionate, you must show him acting compassionately. These things require objects: foci for the emotion-based actions of the character being characterized.
Animals are particularly well suited for those roles. Our domesticated animals—dogs, cats, and to a lesser extent, pet birds—are good objects for the demonstration of tender emotions. (They’re also well suited for the demonstration of viciousness; see Stephen King’s novel The Dead Zone, specifically the early scene in which villain Greg Stillson kicks a dog to death for the unforgivable crime of slightly ripping his trousers.)
Boomer, the dog in On Broken Wings, had been seriously injured while defending his mistress, my protagonist Christine D’Alessandro. In the scene my reviewer praised, Christine, who has a more urgent and bloodier task to attend to, hands a large sum of money to her mentor Malcolm and tells him to take Boomer to the local veterinary hospital and to tell the vet to “do whatever they have to to save my dog’s life, and that I don’t expect change.” I’ve seen similar uses of this motif in the works of other writers—Robert B. Parker comes to mind—and it has never failed to tug at my heartstrings.
Am I a sentimental old fool? Of course; surely that’s well established by now. But I’d bet a pretty penny that such scenes would affect you the same way. Dogs and cats aren’t exact equivalents for human infants, but in their vulnerability and dependency they elicit the same sorts of emotions from humans, albeit slightly lessened in intensity. It’s a useful tool to keep in a fiction writer’s toolbox—but beware: there’s a fine line between simpatico and maudlin, and you don’t want to step over it!




Promoters And Promotions



Now the rovin’ gambler he was very bored
He was tryin’ to create our next world war
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor
He said “I never engaged in this kind of thing before,
“But yes I think it can be very easily done:
“We’ll just put some bleachers out in the sun
“And have it out on Highway 61.”

(Bob Dylan, of course.)

Anything can be promoted. Anything can be picked up, pumped full of glitz, and pressed on the public until Hell wouldn’t have it for the clamor. A quick look at the many odious books, fiction and “non-fiction,” that have been sold in mass quantities to a receptive, well-propagandized audience, should convince anyone.
So how should you promote your eBook?
(You knew we’d get to that question, didn’t you?)
At this time, promotional strategies and tactics are in a state of flux. Many of those au courant were borrowed from successfully promoted material products. Some of those seem utterly inapplicable to eBooks, both because of their immateriality and because the eBook marketplace is a unique thing. Others are quite new, and therefore essentially experimental.
A few of the most heavily promoted (!) promotional techniques seem a bit myopic. For example, the idea that using the “social networks”—Facebook and its close cousins—as one’s tool for pimping one’s eBook requires one to believe that those networks are packed chock full of readers. Well, they’re surely packed full, though of exactly what I’m reluctant to speculate. But the experiences indie authors have had with that approach haven’t been terribly encouraging.
The online retailers are trying their damnedest to help. Every online retailer prefers selling eBooks to selling paper books: infinite inventory, no shipping, no purchase order to a vendor, higher profit margins, and no refunds. Since those retailers are the current princes of promotion, their techniques are worthy of close study.
The most important of those techniques is association: “If you liked X, you might also like this.”
For decades, Pub World editors have pleaded with American writers to give them “the same, only different.” The marketing of fiction is among the most difficult, error-prone undertakings in the commercial world, because when it comes to the arts, no one can tell what will sell. We can only know what has sold well in the recent past. Therefore, the marketing department’s job is made far easier if it can describe a new book as “like the best of [popular writer X].”
The online retailers have noticed. The AI components of their engines strain to find associations between products, particularly best-sellers and newly released products. Indie authors may have far lesser resources, but we can emulate the core of the associational strategy in our more modest way, for example when plying our “word of mouth” efforts:

“My new book is moving pretty well. A couple of readers have written to me to tell me it resembles Stephen King in his early years.”

This is chancy. Resemblances of the useful sort will always be disputable—and you most assuredly do not want to get a contrary word-of-mouth chain started, talking about how you’re promoting your book dishonestly. So any associations you claim should be a product of your most honest, open-eyed assessment.
Of course, you can always try to get Amazon or Barnes & Noble to do it for you. They’ll try, principally through those AI association-finding engines. There’s no shame in “borrowing” their discoveries and using them yourself. And remember: as long as you don’t steal someone else’s original work and claim it’s your own, original creation:

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.—Author unknown

Verbum sat sapienti.




Villains



How long has it been, Gentle Reader, since you last confronted a genuine, purely black hearted villain in a work of fiction? For myself, it’s been a couple of years at least. They seem to be an endangered species.
Of course, that would be a good thing, in real life. But there’s a curious implausibility about completely evil characters. They never seem quite human, which makes them tough for a writer to flesh out. How many have there been, really, in all the great works of fiction you’ve read?
Consider this: In Greg Bear’s masterpiece Anvil of Stars, the villain, responsible for the destruction of the Earth and the deaths of nearly all of Mankind, proves to be a collection of species that’s apparently been doing such things for a long time. Why? We’re never told. As for the individual members of those species, Bear’s depiction of them certainly makes them seem a lot less than wholly evil. Sauron they’re not, except perhaps collectively.
Bear is a thoughtful writer. At one point he has one of his human characters tell the others that evil never presents itself to us in pure form: “No villain comes in black, screaming obscenities. All evil has children, homes, regard for self, fear of enemies.” And indeed, it is so. Even persons we’re inclined to judge absolutely evil are likely to have values of their own, and affectionate attachments quite like anyone else’s. As the saying goes, Hitler liked dogs.
This isn’t a brief for moral relativism; it’s a reminder that no individual is purely one, all-consuming characteristic or passion. To make a villain believable, it’s necessary to make his villainy an integral part of a human persona. When we confront various sorts of limited evil, we see this plainly. The bully is at heart a coward who’s straining to deny that bit of self-knowledge. The thief can usually produce several elaborate rationales according to which he must steal. And the murderer more often than not sees himself as an instrument of justice.
A recent movie, Shoot ‘Em Up, starring Clive Owen, Monica Bellucci, and Paul Giamatti, does handsome work in this regard. Giamatti’s character is a contract killer. Some people have decided that someone else has to die; he’s merely the instrument by which that decision is effectuated. He sees his work as nothing more than an obligation undertaken for money, and he’s determined to do it thoroughly and well. More, he has a wife to whom he’s devoted, and whom he makes repeated attempts to soothe about his absence on his latest “job.” There’s no question that for the good guy (Owen) to win, Giamatti’s character has to die. But the viewer can’t help feeling a twinge of pity for him when, as he lies on the floor gasping out his life, he receives a final phone call from his wife—to announce that she’s leaving him.
(The movie is also notable for its innovative use of carrots.)
So in crafting a believable villain, embedding his villainy in an otherwise human persona seems all but obligatory. The world simply isn’t filled with Hannibal Lecters or Idi Amins. Indeed, the most recent real-life personification of evil we’ve known, the late, unlamented Osama bin Laden, was apparently powered by the conviction that he was doing God’s will—a motivation that’s hardly unknown to history.
What fictional villains have you found especially believable and three-dimensional?




What You Can And What You Can't



In our attempts to create unusual, striking characters, we often find ourselves straining to imagine how someone more intelligent, or more compassionate, or more courageous would act in some context. There are obvious problems involved in the undertaking.
(In a recent movie, Heist, the protagonist, a well-traveled, highly successful professional thief played by Gene Hackman, is asked by a colleague to explain how he formulates his plans. Hackman’s response is both amusing and apt. “I imagine someone much smarter than I am, and I ask myself, ‘What would he do?’” Pretty good trick, if you can pull it off.)
Our qualities and capacities are what they are. We can’t change them quickly or easily; indeed, the extent to which we can change them with great effort over a protracted interval is open to question. So if we write our characters from “inside ourselves,” it’s inevitable that either they’ll share our qualities and capacities to a considerable degree, or they’ll be implausibly artificial.
That’s not to say that it’s impossible for a writer to write plausibly about characters far better and more able than he. But it does take extra effort, of two kinds:
Humility;
Consultation.

As Clint Eastwood said to Hal Holbrook in Magnum Force, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Fiction is difficult enough if you know yourself and are honest about your own abilities and character. It gets one hell of a lot harder if you deny yourself, preferring to live in a world of pretense. 
In reflecting on this for the first time in a long time, it occurs to me that it presents a good case for keeping your characters scaled to ordinary human scale. Heroes and heroics are all very well, but plausibility has its own demands. Some of us are a few percent brighter, or kinder, or braver than average; very few of us are orders of magnitude beyond the norm. 
This has been a particular problem for me, as some of my heroes are so brilliant, so variously gifted, and so courageous that I don’t belong in the same species with them. Yet they’re quite popular, and are generally taken as plausible. One in particular, Louis Redmond, has caused some readers to ask if I know someone like that personally, or if I’m writing about myself. Talk about an occasion for a swift, firm demurrer! 
All the same, a hero that really gets his hooks into the reader tends to be more than a few percent beyond the norms. He tends to be, in the classic phrase, larger than life. 
If you’re going to tread that road, it helps to have a few friends and acquaintances that “push the outside of the envelope” in those dimensions you want to inculcate in your hero. If you know someone who’s particularly brilliant, or courageous, or otherwise gifted, you can use him as a model for characters that exceed the average in his way. But it’s not wise to rely on a passive sort of modeling. As frequently, indirectly, and courteously as possible, you should ask him what he would do in situations of the sort with which you expect to confront your hero. 
(Pardon my cheek, Gentle Reader. It’s not quite fair of me to assume that you’re not a brute of fantastic strength and a cheetah’s speed, with a supergenius’s intellect, stainless ethics, and the courage of Theseus, Beowulf, and Audie Murphy rolled into one. But the odds tend to favor that assumption.) 
Yet paradoxes abound. I know of one writer, who specializes in adventure fiction featuring stronger-than-strong, harder-than-hard heroes and has grown quite popular in recent years, who’s afraid to leave his house. Another writer, whose protagonists are exemplars of compassion and good will, is among the most callous individuals I’ve ever met. And I have this habit of writing about polymathic geniuses, whereas I...oops, wait just a moment while I check...so sorry! Skip that last part, if you please! 
(tee hee)




Patterns



I recently had a brief, pleasant exchange with a fellow indie author—not quite as indie as I am; her novels are published by a recognized publishing house—in the course of which we agreed to sample one another’s works. I do this as often as possible, for two reasons. First, I think it important that indies support one another. Second, I read so compulsively and so rapidly that I’m almost never adequately supplied with fresh material. So far, the practice has served me well.
It’s also taught me a few things about the patterns a writer can embrace, usually without realizing it.
Patterns in one’s fiction are to be avoided. Their effect upon the reader, though often subliminal, is never good. He builds up a sense of “been here before” that, at the very least, will induce him to skip ever-larger segments of your prose. At the worst, he’ll spy your new title in his shopping, start to reach for it, pause, and say to himself, “No, I’ve grown bored with him. He’s too repetitive. I think I’ve seen everything he has to offer.”
I’ve developed that degree of distance from several writers; Orson Scott Card and Dean Koontz come to mind at once. If it can happen to them, Gentle Reader, it can happen to you.
Patterns in fiction are of several varieties. There are plot patterns: the writer tells essentially the same story over and over. There are characterization patterns: the names and faces of the writer’s Marquee characters may change, but their personalities, motivations, powers and limitations stay the same. There are style patterns: the over-frequent use of certain devices, words, phrases, or syntactic templates. No doubt there are others.
My new acquaintance’s books display an irritating syntactic pattern. Dozens of her sentences fit perfectly into the following template:

[Participial phrase implying concurrence], [the subject] [did something else].

There are several things wrong with this, but the one of principal import for this tirade is the pattern itself. Her readers will be affected by it even if they don’t register it consciously. It will have the same effect on them as a verbal “tic” in a friend’s speech would have: Whatever meaning it was once intended to convey will have bled out of it, and what remains will be pure noise.
If fiction has an overriding commandment, from which all the other rules and guidelines depend, it would be this:

Don’t waste your reader’s time!
Any scene, paragraph, sentence, word, or punctuation mark that doesn’t carry its own weight—i.e., that doesn’t somehow improve the reader’s experience, whether by building his excitement, bonding him to the hero(es), or intensifying his curiosity—must and should be cut. It doesn’t matter how proud of it you, the author, might be. You’re not there to display your writerly chops, nor is your reader there to applaud you for your devastatingly deft employment of metonymy, synecdoche, and litotes. You’re creating entertainment; make sure it will entertain!
Patterns are the death of entertainment. We don’t sit up at night watching the test patterns on the television, do we? Why bother, when there’s perfectly good wallpaper that would serve the same function without elevating the electric bill?
One of the greatest services a good editor can do for you is noting your patterns and chiding you for them. Indeed, that duty is an order of magnitude above correcting your spelling and punctuation errors. If you’re pursuing conventional publication, your odds of acceptance will be greatly increased by the avoidance of patterns, especially patterns of style. If you’re an indie, your readership could easily level off and start to dwindle once those you’ve originally seduced into buying your work become bored by your patterns.
Keep it fresh.




Critics



A “critic” is a man who creates nothing and thereby feels qualified to judge the work of creative men. There is logic in this; he is unbiased - he hates all creative people equally. - Robert A. Heinlein

The self-nominated critic can be a considerable pain in the ass: say, about like being raped by a herd of hippopotami. Moreover, the world is full of them:
There are critics who’ll deride your choice of genre, as if they’d been compelled at gunpoint to read something in which they had no interest.
There are critics who’ll lambaste you for your heroes, calling them “implausible” and “overdone,” whether for their qualities or for the motivations that send them into battle.
There are critics who’ll vilify you for your values, as expressed in the conflicts in which you enmesh your heroes and what they’re willing to do to uphold them.
There are critics who’ll demand that you abandon your natural style and ape some writer of whom they’re fond, regardless of whether your style is a good fit to your plots and themes.
There are critics who’ll say you use too many adverbs, or adjectives, or ablative absolutes, or semicolons, or images and devices—or, in each of the cases enumerated, too few.
There are critics who’ll give you hell for writing in a straight, story-respecting narrative style, because that’s just not “in” with the literati and the prize juries.
There are critics who’ll abrade you for allowing a character to express a complete thought, just because it requires more than one sentence to complete it.
There are critics who have no reasonable objections to your stuff, but who’ll drip contempt on it nevertheless, because it’s not what they want to see people reading.

Pardon my German, but fuck ‘em sideways with a rusty trombone. 
A man’s good will can easily be stretched to the breaking point by some kinds of critical attacks. A writer who’s strained to produce something worthy of others’ time, attention, and money can find himself wondering what’s wrong with that sort of critic. The effect is intensified when his book is eagerly snapped up by a clearly appreciative readership. 
Historically, the most popular writers in the English-speaking world have been the targets of the most vicious critical attacks. For example, John Galsworthy, author of the immortal Forsyte Chronicles, came in for denunciations that would have been more appropriate to a child-murderer—a great many of them from writers who never attained a tenth of his popular acceptance or admiration. Today, American writers who please tens of thousands are more stridently and viciously criticized than men who write the lowest varieties of pornography. Ironically, at least one widely read critical article has called thriller fiction, the most popular of today’s fictional genres, inherently pornographic: 

Eva Brann cares. 
Brann teaches at St. John’s College in Annapolis, where the curriculum is driven by the classics and professors are known as tutors. 
Years ago she read one of Stephen King’s books. She was greatly disappointed. “It was mere plot,” she says. “Everything was geared to stimulation by way of action.” 
Asked if she could recall the name of the King novel, she says, “It left no impression. It left no impression whatsoever.” That, she says, is a characteristic of popular fiction. 
“There’s a pornography of sex and a pornography of the nerves,” she continues. The No-Stylists, she says, are penning the latter type of porn. “Things happen—crude, wild, exciting things. They have no human depth. They’re just occurrences.”
 
I am compelled to ask: What is the point of a work of fiction? Is it to entertain, and perhaps to edify through its theme, or to impress the critics? 
Don’t know about you, Bubba, but I write to entertain—and the parties entertained had damned well better include yours truly. That’s not going to happen if my first concern is to please some gaggle of critics. 
Perhaps the most pungent dismissal of the critical world I’ve ever encountered came from the writer who is generally held responsible for making science fiction a genre worthy of the intelligent adult reader: 

What I write is intended to reach the customer - and affect him, if possible with pity and terror… or at least divert the tedium of his hours. I never hide from him in a private language, nor am I seeking praise from other writers for ‘technique’ or other balderdash. I want praise from the customer, given in cash because I’ve reached him—or I don’t want anything. Support for the arts—merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!—Robert A. Heinlein

Not coincidentally, throughout his active career, which spanned forty-five years, Heinlein was one of the most popular writers in the world. If that doesn’t immunize you to the barbs of the critics, what could?
About the Author

Francis W. Porretto is an engineer, fictioneer, and commentator. He operates the Eternity Road Website (http://eternityroad.info), a hotbed of pro-freedom, pro-American, pro-Christian sentiment, where he and his Esteemed Co-Conspirators hold forth on every topic under the Sun. You can email him at fwp@eternityroad.info. Thank you for taking an interest in his fiction.