What Not to Write

I've been thinking about beefing up my online presence as I prepare for the Thomas & Mercer releases of The Righteous. I don't always feel comfortable actively promoting my work, but neither do I want to appear indifferent or even hostile to my readers. I love to connect with people who have read my books. I'm just not comfortable with grabbing passersby and pressing flyers into their hands.

Nathan Lowell recently posted about the failure of many writers to effectively promote themselves via social media. The problem, he notes, is that people are trying to sell their work rather than just connecting. Nathan wrote:

If you’re genuine and responsive, if you’re interesting and engaging, then people will find you. When they find you, they’ll click your links and explore your world. Engage them and encourage them to become part of your world. They’ll support your work, if they find it interesting. They’ll tell other people and promote your work in ways that you cannot.

I'm no expert on social media, but I immediately saw the connection between how Nathan advises that one connect with readers and the decisions that I make about what kinds of books to write. I went through a period where I struggled to know whether I should write fantasy, science fiction, thrillers, horror, and how to write books that could attract first an agent and then a publisher. As an unpublished writer, publication was an all-consuming interest. I would talk about it with writing friends, listen to panels on how to get published, read books about getting published, and lie awake at night wondering why I had not yet, in fact, been published. I spent more time worrying about how to get published than, you know, writing. When I did write, I focused on short stories (the quickest, best path to publication), and on whatever seemed most commercial at the time.

All of this changed about ten years ago when I realized something. The stuff I wrote chasing publication was crap. The stuff I wrote because it spoke to me wasn't half bad. These less commercial stories were the ones that actually sold. The reason is obvious. It doesn't matter how commercial the genre, if my heart wasn't in it, the story wouldn't be good enough to sell.

I decided two things. First, I would write novels. I don't read short stories, I read novels. My pacing, my writer's temperament leans toward novel-length fiction. Second, I wouldn't worry about what was selling at any given moment, I would write the kind of books that I like to read.

It was about this time that I started writing stories worth reading.

Respect Your Characters

I made a decision when I started writing The Righteous that I would take my religious characters seriously. That meant they weren't deluded fools or brainwashed or any of the other tropes that you frequently see in writing about religion (as opposed to religious writing, which has its own issues). That meant that even my evil characters must have clear justification, that they had to frame their actions in terms of their religious background. These people did not consider themselves mustache-twirling (beard-twisting?) villains, they were serving God's purpose. Never mind that other characters thought they were serving God's purpose or looked at these people as clear villains. In their own mind, they were the heroes of the story.

This last line bears repeating. Every person considers himself the hero of the story. There's a great line in Shakespeare in Love where Shakespeare has turned the nasty financial backer into a true patron by giving him a minor part in the play. Someone asks this guy what Romeo and Juliet is about and he says, "There's this apothecary..."

Remember, too, that no person is merely part of a group. She isn't Chinese, or a paraplegic, or a doctor, or, in my Righteous series, a polygamist. These things may shape her view of the world, but she is smart or stupid, kind or cruel, thoughtful or careless, or anything else largely independent of her surroundings. In fact, I sometimes find it interesting to write characters in direct opposition to what they should be. A thoughtful, but patriotic German living under the Nazi regime is much more interesting than yet another cruel Gestapo agent. Now pit him against a cruel Gestapo agent, but work like hell to justify that agent's behavior. What is the story our antagonist tells himself? How does he frame the narrative to make him the hero of the story? There are numerous ways, all of them more interesting than the guy who says "Ve have vays of making you talk..."

If you take every character seriously, you can write about all sorts of people without making them sound either like stereotypes or--almost as bad--politically correct reversals of stereotype. I love writing from the POV of people very different than myself. My four favorite characters are the aforementioned patriotic German (The Red Rooster), the favorite son of a cult leader and his bright, believing younger sister (The Righteous), and a guy whose only means of communicating with the outside world is a single, blinking eye (The Devil's Deep). Of these four, Jacob from The Righteous resembles me quite a bit, assuming I were smarter, better looking, and more charismatic, but the other three are very different from me.

I guess you could say that I ignore the advice to write what you know, but that's another post entirely.

The Brainstorming Phase

In my earlier days as a writer, I used to just sit down and start writing once I had an opening, a bit of an idea, or felt it was time start writing a new story. This led to a lot of crappy fiction with a snippet or two of something usable thrown into the mix. Over time I've come up with a method that leads to much stronger stories while still preserving the fun part of writing, which is the discovery process.

I'll start with an idea, which may be nothing more than "time to write a new book" or it might be well developed, such an idea with established characters and the ideas of a plot that is the next book in a series. I'll open up a new document and start brainstorming. All sorts of stuff will go into this file: fragments of dialog, my goals for the book, character sketches, questions that are unresolved. Over the course of a few weeks, this document will grow into 30-40 pages. Ninety percent of this will be dead ends or otherwise unusable, but over time, an actual plot will start to come through. I'll have major turning points, mysteries, revelations, set pieces to work toward, some scenes. Before I'm ready, I like to have an understanding of the major characters, the opening few chapters plotted out, at least one major set piece where things will blow up in the middle, and a rough idea of the ending.

At that point, it's a question of setting a date to begin the actual writing. I'll go back to the brainstorming document as I work and I detect major plot holes. And I don't feel obliged to stick to the quasi-outline, but use it more as a rough guide. Sometimes (usually?), the plot takes major detours. I do find, however, that having this document to refer to keeps me from wandering down blind alleys that can waste weeks of time.

Time Management for the Writer

Thomas Edison: "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration."

Or, to put in modern terms, one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent not wasting time on the internet. Once I've overcome the inertia of between-project laziness, the trick to productivity is to find a way to avoid all the other distractions at hand. It isn't easy. Emails come in randomly and regularly. There is always someone wrong on some forum and spoiling for a good argument. Facebook is eager to tell me what my friends are having for breakfast, and my blog feed is stuffed with interesting observations. Heck, chances are there are writers reading this very post who should be doing something more productive with their time than listening to me babble on.

Yet in spite of all of these distractions, I can sometimes manage incredible bursts of sustained effort. I wrote The Wicked in a three month period from mid-February to mid-May. I started the first draft of The Devil's Peak on June 1, and released it on August 1. Here are some techniques I use:

1. Write every day. The hardest part of starting a new project is the first day, with the second day being only slightly easier. If I take a single day off it feels almost like starting over again. I try to write through illness, holidays, vacations, etc.
2. Start as soon as I'm done with breakfast and finish by noon. I found a number of years ago that if I had a whole day to write one hour's worth of work, I was less likely to finish that hour than if I had an hour to do an hour of work. Time pressures, like the guillotine, tend to focus the attention nicely.
3. Don't wait for inspiration. Inspiration comes as soon as my fingers start typing, or within a few minutes. I swear this is true.
4. Cut myself off from the internet while I'm working. This is difficult, nearly impossible some days. A moment of difficulty or distraction and I've got my browser open. I may intend to check "just one thing," but it never works out that way. I have used Freedom, which is a program that cuts you off from the internet for a specific period of time, and an egg timer.

One big problem with writing productivity is that nobody cares if you write. Even if you have a contract and a deadline, each individual day or week or even month has no milestones, no boss looking over your shoulder, no accountability. People who can work with the boss's whip at their back, doing drudgery work, often cannot motivate themselves to do work that they love and do for nothing more than the glory of the human spirit.

The key to productivity is to trick the mind into thinking there is a man with a green eyeshade and bifocals comparing your time card to your output.