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[Guest Post] A Keyboard is Mightier…

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Back in the old days, you were a tough guy if you knew how to hold a sword. This illusion of sword being the best tool for world conquest only started to shatter when tough guys started to notice that their ladies were fawning over the pale, fragile and sickly type of people who were more likely to pick up a quill and scribble down some sweet little nothings. The proverb of pen and sword was most likely invented by those fawning ladies when they were trying to comfort the poets who had gotten beaten down by jealous boyfriends.

Not many tough guys know how to wield a sword nowadays – and, sadly, many of them don’t know how to wield a pen either. Keyboard comes to our rescue, but even when it has made writing a whole lot easier, it hasn’t made it more popular. I wonder why that is? Haven’t people yet realized that writing is the optimal tool for life, made of win?

Maybe not. I mean, that’s why I’m here, writing for you about writing. Maybe some of these things come off as a surprise, but I hope that you take them to your heart and start wondering if you could pick up that keyboard for something else than good old game of Frets On Fire.

Out of all the forms of art, writing is the one that can has the greatest effect. I’m not going to mention how writing as an art form is the best way to reach out to people, their minds and their hearts – that should be an obvious fact. Instead I’m going to talk about how writing doesn’t only have an effect on the world around you. It can have a great effect on you.

From a biologist’s point of view, writing when you are stressed is most useful. Writing consecutively for 20 minutes exchanges all hormones in your brains, including the ones that stress you out and make you feel like a puddle of vomit on the floor. Later you can read the piece of text you wrote – no matter how long or how short – as an expressionistic form of art.

From a psychologist’s point of view, writing is a way to organize your thoughts. You ever have one of those moments when all your thoughts are racing back and forth and you can’t make out what exactly is going on in your mind? Writing thoughts down, one by one, especially if you include the emotions related to each one, gives you a peace of mind. Even if you don’t know how to write a whole essay about your feelings, it’s scientifically proven that simply making lists about your thoughts has proven useful.

From a social scientist’s point of view, writing is a way of expressing yourself to the politicians. Even when it might sound utopistic, politicians work for you and your life. If they don’t know what you want, they’re going to do what they want. If you’re unhappy for that and you never spoke out, you can only blame yourself.

And, finally, from an author’s point of view: writing is a way to solve your inner conflicts. Try writing yourself in a story. Let the main character solve the problems you have. You might be surprised – maybe the similar methods could work in your own life. And since they originate from your own imagination, maybe that’s exactly what you want to do.

All you need to have is some faith in your own imagination and the fact that there is a difference you can make in yourself. Just write it out.

Serafima is a 21-year-old theater instructor, musician and performing artist. She is currently graduating from a double degree, and her thoughts of life, politics, music, art and internet can be read on her blog in Finnish and English.

[Guest Post] Frankenstein and the Private Eye

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My eleventh grade English class read Frankenstein, and it started a debate with my teacher.  There is a scene in the book where the monster meets a blind girl.  The girl, not able to see the monster’s deformities, befriends him, and for the first time, someone treats him with compassion.  My teacher told us that this was Mary Shelly’s commentary on mankind’s tendency to judge based on appearance.  I questioned her.

Wasn’t it possible, I wondered, that Mary Shelly simply wanted to create believable characters that the reader could care about?  Didn’t showing a range of emotion in the monster make him more relatable and help draw the reader into the story?  Aren’t the best stories really about characters and how they deal with their situation?

I probably didn’t put it quite in those words, but that was the gist of my argument.  The teacher agreed to open the floor for discussion (which made me feel pretty good for a short, introverted geek with oversized glasses and a mullet).

I’ve been thinking about that discussion recently because I finished a book where I felt the author could’ve benefited from what had been said.  In this book, a female investigator is coerced into helping a drug lord determine who killed his beloved wife.  Our heroine’s policeman boyfriend follows her to South America, is shot and then nursed back to health in the drug lord’s compound.  While her boyfriend is near death in the next room, the investigator considers accepting the drug lord’s sexual advances (he’s just sooo powerful, and that’s hot!).

And… I lost interest.  I no longer cared what happened to the characters.  They’d stopped being real.  Would this investigator really develop those feelings?  Not the way she’d been previously portrayed.  How much did the drug lord really care about his dead wife?  Very little, apparently, so why was he going through all this trouble?

Love triangles and plot twists are fine, and I would’ve had no issue with these characters’ thoughts and actions if they’d somehow been established as people who would entertain such thoughts and perform such actions.  But the opposite was the case, and as a reader, I simply stopped caring.

If a character’s actions exist only to propel the plot, then you’ve done a disservice to the character and your readers.  While writing Good Deeds, I realized that one of my characters had acted against the personality I’d given him.  He’d left someone behind in the midst of horrific creatures only because I felt it made for better suspense and conflict.

But it didn’t ring true, and I knew it, so I scrapped about 30 pages and changed the action to match the character.  That change took the story in a different direction than I’d planned.  The result, I think, is a better story and actually has more suspense than the original writing.

Not only should actions follow a character’s mold, but descriptions and internal monologues should also ring true.  For example, let’s say you’re writing a scene where your protagonist (we’ll call him Jim) is wandering through a crumbling urban landscape, a once thriving city that has seen better days.  If Jim is an architect, you might describe the chipped stonework and compare early 1900’s warm craftsmanship to the 2000’s cold steel and glass.  Or, if Jim is a hypochondriac with OCD, he’ll only notice the filth in the wet gutters and the mixing scents of asphalt grease and rotting garbage in the alleyways.

And if Jim is a gang leader… well, you get the idea.  Either way, you’ve described a city in despair, but you’ve also made your character more real and relatable for the reader.  The reader will become emotionally invested in Jim, care more about what happens to Jim, and find Jim’s story more engaging.

So, please, take a lesson from Mary Shelly.  Create a confused monster instead of an apathetic private eye.  Jim—and your readers—will  thank you for it.

D. Miles Martin is a former English teacher and author of the dark novel Good Deeds (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords) and the novella The Evolution of Mortality (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords).  Hell Bent, the first in a new series of horror-mysteries, is scheduled for release in the spring of 2012.  You can find D. Miles Martin on his website, Facebook, and Twitter.

Site Updates for December 2011

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You may have noticed a few new changes around the site – or, if you’re new, maybe you’re just getting used to it.  I’ll give you a rundown  of what I’m doing differently these days.

  • New Theme: I change themes once in a while, and I felt it was time to move to a new one.  I like this pink floral layout very much.
  • Added Guest Post page – since I’ve started writing and accepting guest posts, I figured it might be nice to have a place to organize all of them!  Check out links to old guest posts on other pages and find out how you can guest post here, as well.
  • The widgets in the sidebar are gradually changing…
  • More links added to the Links section!  Like my page on Facebook, add me to your circles in Google+, follow me on Twitter and Goodreads, and much more!  As time goes on, I’ll be adding more of my friends and guest bloggers.

That’s in for now – more to come as school gradually finishes.

[Guest Post] Hit Fast Forward

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It’s now December 1st and you’ve got a spanking new 50,000 word novel (or at least a substantial part of a novel).  What are you doing to do?

If the novel’s not complete, finish it.  You’ve got momentum coming out of NaNo, really good writing habits, and the ideas are still sunshiny fresh.  Besides, your friends haven’t seen you for a whole month.  They won’t miss you if you’re absent for several more days.

Then when the novel’s done, toss it into the bottom of your literal or figurative drawer and ignore it for at least a month.  Call your parents, remind your friends you’re still alive, apologize to your significant other for ignoring him/her/it for so long, and wrangle up a date for the Christmas party.

And then what?  What can you really do with that tangle of words conjured up in a single heady, highly-caffeinated month?

First, read it (and yes, it’s perfectly normal to cringe.)  In spite of all the tricks you used to inflate the word count, do you see in it the glimmer of a great story?  Do you want to go further with it?

Of course you do!

Last year, I took part in NaNoWriMo for the first time.  My 70,000-word partially complete NaNo novel hit 120,000 words by the time the first draft was done.  Seven major revisions later, it has 91,000 words.  The novel recently placed second in the Royal Palm Literary Awards for Science Fiction (unpublished), and the full manuscript is currently sitting on the desks of several literary agents, where I’m hopeful it will go further.

The key to getting your NaNo out of that bottom drawer is to edit, edit, edit.  Compared to writing, editing is slow and laborious.  The rewards aren’t immediately obvious; instead of seeing that word count climb, you’re likely to see it fall.  But it’s the only way that NaNo novel is going to go anywhere.

Join a critique group and find the guts to read your novel in front of other people.  (I’ll confess, I’m still trying to work up the nerve for this one.)  Beg your friends to read your novel.  Score double points if that friend is also a writer – they provide better feedback.  Take part in NaNoEdMo and commit to 50 hours of editing.  Invest in yourself.  ‘Writing the breakout novel’, by Maass, provides fantastic tips on creating a story that’s worth telling.   ‘Self-editing for fiction writers: How to edit yourself into print’ by Brown and King teaches you how to identify and correct stylistic problems.

Don’t be afraid to substantially edit your novel.  It’s not a baby (really, truly). Think of it as a bonsai.  Regular pruning is absolutely required for growth.  My writer friend told me that the last third of my novel sucked (yes, that is a technical term).  So, I ripped out about 40,000 words, and eventually replaced it with something much better.

Are you done editing?

Do it again.

Do it until it’s the absolute best you are sure you can do on your own.  And then, if you’re not the archetypal poor college student and can find $1,000 – $3,000 to spare, seek out a good professional editor (the key word here is ‘good’, not just ‘professional’), and get them to look over your work.  (Full disclosure: I didn’t even consider going down this path until after my novel won the award.  I figured a winner was probably worth a larger financial investment.)

Finding an agent and getting published is a whole other story, and it’s a path I’m just embarking on.  But you’ll never get there unless you edit that NaNo novel.  Good luck, happy writing and merry editing!

Jade Kerrion is a Science Fiction author.  GENESIS, the first book in her DOUBLE HELIX series, placed second in the Royal Palm Literary Awards, Science Fiction (unpublished) category.  Find her online at JadeKerrion.com.

[Guest Post] A NaNo Strategy to Help You Win NaNoWriMo

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Hi Feliza, thanks for having me! Now that NaNoWriMo is over for another year, it’s time to start planning for next year. (Tongue in cheek.)

I first heard about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) through Chris Baty’s book No Plot, No Problem and I was hooked. I did my first NaNoWriMo in 2007 – and won. I did it again in 2008 – and I won. 2009 & 2010? Won/Won. My strategy, if you will, for winning NaNoWriMo every year (knock on wood) is that I stick with the same series. No matter what I write throughout the rest of the year, come November, I’m writing the next Westin book in the Masked Rider series.

This technique helps so much, I keep believing I’ll meet the 50,000 word goal in November each year and am waiting for the inevitable downfall of someone who gets a little too cocky! But I work hard and I plan a bit and focus my energies.

I’ve built the world my characters live in and I know how everyone fits in. I know how my characters think, what they believe and why they act the way they do. I also have a clear idea of the theme of the book and its unique flow. Year after 50,000-word year I know all of this going in.

If you adopt this strategy, or already use it to your advantage, then you know how much deeper you get to work. If it sounds like it’s boring, trust me, it’s not. Since the groundwork is laid out, you get to delve into other areas; dialogue, background, character motives, red herrings and so on. You can make non-regulars fully fleshed out. Instead of being stuck developing and learning about your main characters, you can do that work with the one-offs. It’s especially useful with mysteries – I get to have a whole new set of suspects with each book and I round them out with great care.

(It worked so well for me that I fully fleshed out my characters’ unknown grandparents and came up with the Ella Westin Mysteries, which I started publishing in January. I just got Masked Rider: Origins back from my editor and am hoping to have it done and published this upcoming January!)

Another fun thing you can do with a series is introduce a character briefly in one book and have him be a suspect in a later one. Sharp-eyed readers get a kick out of it and those that don’t see it will still enjoy the depth and richness you provide.

Thorough work shows.

It’s win-win-win: author, reader, NaNoWriMo’er.

I know there are a load of NaNo-strategies out there, and I’d love to hear yours and I thank you for reading mine.

Thank you, Feliza, for inviting me to your blog and being such a wonderful host.

Jennifer Oberth is the author of the Ella Westin Mysteries and has published Married To Murder (Smashwords, Amazon, Barnes & Noble) & Honeymoon Homicide (Smashwords, Amazon, Barnes & Noble). You can reach her at NaNoWriMo, her blog, Twitter, and her Facebook Page.

*Editor’s Note: As of the date of this posting, Jennifer has become a NaNoWriMo Winner for 2011! Congrats, Jennifer!