Category Archives: The Writing Life

Posts about writing for fun and profit.

On Bad Fiction

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Practice before you publish.

I read some very bad fiction today. It reminded me why so many writers can’t seem to get published.

They suck.

The story was a short mystery in a magazine I downloaded into my iPad from MagCloud. I blogged about the free content there just the other day. Now I feel as if I should add a disclaimer to that post: Some content may not be worth the time it takes to download.

The thing you need to know about MagCloud is that it’s a tool sometimes used by self-publishers to get their content published. In this case, someone had put together an anthology of short fiction in a “Special Short Story Edition” of their magazine. The magazine itself is poorly designed, featuring dense lines of tiny print and low resolution images — yes, I do mean pixelated images; you know resolution has to be very low if a photo doesn’t look good on an iPad. The images have nothing to do with the stories. Not at all. Well, I should amend that description. Not all of the stories were dense lines of small type. Some were rather spacious. There was really no consistency in the magazine’s layout. It was the most amateurish thing I’ve seen since the days of typewriters and wax pasteups.

I don’t know where the editor got the stories he put in the magazine. Maybe he created a contest. Maybe these people actually paid an entry fee to “win” a place in the 60-page PDF that would cost a whopping $13.95 plus shipping to get in print. But that’s beside the point.

The point is that I read one short story and it was bad. Very bad.

There are three points that made the story bad and they repeated themselves throughout the story: author voice, missing information, and factual inaccuracies. Let’s take a look at each.

Author Voice

I am a huge believer that the author’s voice should not distract the reader from the story. The author is narrating — telling the reader what’s going on. She’s setting a scene, describing action, reporting dialog. As you read the author’s words, you should be able to step into the page (so to speak) and see and hear what’s going on.

Good writers can do this. Great writers can do this even when editorializing along the way.

But bad writers absolutely suck at doing this. They’re so hung up on writing the descriptions, using the right words, reporting the things they think will bring the scene alive. They so obviously write with a thesaurus nearby.

Take this opening passage:

Detective Emma Knightwood sighed heavily as she stared at the body lying only inches in front of her sensible brown shoes. Emma was a petite woman of fifty-four, with salt and pepper black hair and green eyes. Although it was nearly midnight, her ivory silk blouse with the elaborate lace bow looked as fresh as when she’d put it on that morning and she never would have admitted that she was perspiring beneath her brown tweed suit. Emma was as frugal and exacting as a miser slowly counting his piles of gold and her support hose had been carefully darned several times over, rather than being replaced with a new pair.

This is the opening paragraph of the story. The paragraph that’s supposed to be “the hook.” I’m not hooked. I’m turned off by a cheap spinster detective wearing brown and darned support hose.

But here are some specific problems:

  • The first sentence mentions that Emma was looking at the body that lay at her feet, but the remaining lines of the paragraph don’t mention the body again at all.
  • Is her hair salt and pepper or black?
  • How is it that her silk blouse can look fresh at midnight if she put it on that morning and she’s sweating?
  • Why wouldn’t she admit she’s sweating? Is that a character trait?
  • What’s with the miser counting gold? That run-on sentence takes the reader away from the character and the story before bringing the reader back to the character.
  • This is the opening paragraph of the story. Do we really need to know all these details about this main character now? Or ever? Nothing else that comes later in the story refers to any of this.

Here’s a bit more, with dialog. It comes after a few paragraphs about the victim, the fact that there have been multiple murders lately, and an introduction to Emma’s partner, Detective Stanton Reynolds. Reynolds has just asked Emma what she thinks.

Emma straightened and pushed her wire rimmed glasses up her small nose. “I don’t know. Read me the summary of the victims again.”

“Okay,” Stanton replied, flipping through the pages in his small blue book. “The first victim was Ophelia Danworthy, age sixty-eight, married with four children, retired. The second and third victims, Candace Winters and Henry Simpson, worked together in the same jewelry story and were killed while attempting to make the store’s nightly deposit at a bank. Ms. Winters was single, unmarried and Mr. Simpson was a bachelor, nearing retirement.”

“No signs or a robbery attempt on the store employees?” Emma queried.

“None. The bag of money and deposits was found with the bodies. Victim number four was Sophie French, age thrity-four, a successful businesswoman, unmarried and no children.”

“And now Rachel Zerinsky,” Detective Knightwood sadly mused aloud.

This, like most of the rest of the story, is screaming at me in the author’s amateurish voice, preventing me from getting into the story, forcing me to nitpick every sentence.

  • Emma’s nose is small here, but it’s also slender a few paragraphs later when she does the glasses poke again.
  • Ophelia Danworthy? Rachel Zerinsky? Oddball names for no reason can be distracting, too.
  • Ophelia was 68 and she had four “children”? I hope they were grown children.
  • Emma’s “query” about signs of robbery is so obviously contrived as a way to pass information to the reader using dialog. Emma would have to be a pretty crappy detective to forget that the jewelry store employees were not robbed when a “bag of money” was found with them.
  • “Queried” and “sadly mused aloud” are two examples of overstated dialog attribution. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, Google “dialog attribution” and see what comes up. Although I don’t completely subscribe to the “he said,” “she said” school of dialog attribution, I agree that using an excess of odd attributions — especially combined with adverbs — is extremely distracting. (Stephen King’s On Writing goes into this in a good amount of detail.)

The author attempts a lot of character development through dialog and by telling the reader about the characters. In doing so, she inserts so much of her voice that the reader can’t get into the story. She needs to learn more about what some people call the first rule of writing: Show, don’t tell. According to Wikipedia,

Show, don’t tell is an admonition to fiction writers to write in a manner that allows the reader to experience the story through a character’s action, words, thoughts, senses, and feelings rather than through the narrator’s exposition, summarization, and description. The advice is not to be heavy-handed, but to allow issues to emerge from the text instead, applies to non-fiction writing too.

Heavy-handed is the phrase I’d use for this author’s work.

Missing Information

One of the rules of mystery writing is called “fair play.” Fair play means that the reader gets all the clues the detective has. This is so the reader can solve the mystery or at least understand how the detective solved the mystery.

This author fails at fair play.

  • In the beginning of the story, she mentions “strange clues” left behind at the scene of each crime but never details what these clues are.
  • Later, when a diamond is found at the murder scene, she talks with her partner about the “stones found at the scene of the crime.” Are those the strange clues?
  • The analysis of the clues are far beyond the capabilities of an average person.
  • The murderer is identified during a dialog that presents new information unavailable to the reader. A name is thrown out as they race to the next victim’s apartment and, sure enough, he’s the killer.

To make matters worse, there are no real red herrings — clues that lead to false conclusions. There’s no challenge to the story, nothing to make it interesting.

Factual Inaccuracies

This story has more than its share of factual inaccuracies.

  • The murder victim described at the beginning of the story was supposedly bruised from being beaten with a strand of pearls after death. Although the story does not mention how long the victim had been dead, bruises for injuries inflicted before death can appear as red or blue flesh for the first five or so days after death. Bruises for injuries inflicted after death do not appear in color. This is likely due to the lack of blood flow after death. This document explains. (It took 10 minutes for me to confirm this using Google.)
  • Another police officer calls out to the detectives: “Mr Reynolds? Miss Knightwood?” If they are detectives — as they were both introduced to the reader earlier in the story — they would be addressed by fellow police officers as “Detective Reynolds” and “Detective Knightwood.” Even television can teach you that.
  • A diamond in the story is referred to as huge. Emma says, “It must be at least three carats, maybe more.” Sorry, Emma. Three carats is not “huge.” I wear a full carat on my finger and it’s smaller than the size of a pea. Two carats would be a fat pea. Three would still be smaller than a chick pea (aka garbanzo bean). Now if you were talking ten carats — well that would start getting closer to huge — for a diamond, anyway.
  • When a set of clues resolves into a series of numbers — 878910 — the detectives automatically assume they’re “latitude or longitude in hours, degrees and minutes.” Whoa. First of all, no latitude or longitude in the U.S. starts with 8 or 87. While it’s true that the coordinates could refer to a place in another country, that’s a pretty far leap for the detectives — especially ones who refer to coordinates in terms of hours. Latitude and longitude is measured in degrees, minutes, and seconds. There are no hours.
  • Here’s where the author’s spelling checker failed her: “Devon held Miss Barron in front of him like a shield, pressing the point of a long butcher knife over her juggler vein as his brown eyes shifted from one officer to the other.” [Emphasis added.] I think she means jugular vein. Oops. At least I got a good laugh.
  • Back to the diamond. Emma taunts the murderer by insulting the way he cut the diamond. (He’s supposedly an expert diamond cutter.) She says, in part: “Some of the facets are incorrect and you’ll have to admit, your cut is a little shallow, as well.” Huh? Putting that aside, she goes on to say, “You can always break it and try again.” Break a diamond to recut it? What the hell is she talking about? She then tosses the diamond into the air and the murderer lunges for it — apparently to prevent it from breaking. The diamond bounces on the “hardwood floor” and is unharmed. What else would we expect? A diamond is one of the hardest substances known to man. It isn’t going to break by being dropped on a hardwood floor. An expert diamond cutter would certainly know that, so why is it that he “lunged sideways to catch the diamond before it hit the floor”? Could it be that the author hasn’t got a clue about diamonds?

Bad is Bad

I could continue tearing this story apart, but I think I’ve done enough to make my point. This author:

  • Does not have good writing skills.
  • Is not true to her genre.
  • Does not know how to do research (or is too lazy to do it).

The resulting story is amateurish, almost to the point of being funny. In all honestly, the only pleasure I got from it was tearing it apart as a lesson to myself and anyone who might be interested in writing quality fiction. It’s a perfect example of how not to write a story.

I know I’ve quoted a lot of text from the story, but I’ve done so under the guidelines of fair use, presenting the material in an editorial manner. I have not mentioned the name of the author or the publication so as not to embarrass either one. If the author or publisher read this and want to be mentioned by name, please let me know and I’ll do so. Just don’t expect me to modify this post beyond that. There are lessons to be learned here.

Now excuse me while I purge this crap from my iPad.

How Twitter Can Help You Become a More Concise Writer

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140 characters or less.

One of my biggest problems as a writer is that I tend to be overly wordy. If a story can be told in 500 words, I’ll take 1000. If a how-to piece for a magazine article needs to be 1500, I’ll write 2200.

A Real Writer's KeyboardI was lucky. When I first got started as a writer, only the magazine publishers cared about word count. I’d spend a day writing a piece and then spend half the following day cutting it down to the necessary size. I still wound up submitting 10% to 20% more words than they wanted. The book publishers didn’t seem to care how many words I wrote.

Times change. When my primary book publisher started restricting page count, I knew I had a problem. It bugged me, mostly because they were willing to cut out entire chapters of a book revision just to keep the page count under some magic number spit out by a spreadsheet. Content didn’t seem to matter as much as maximizing that bottom line. The tail had begun to wag the dog.

Most of my magazine work, on the other hand, went digital. Since there is no paper and a page can be any length, they don’t care how many words I submit for a piece. Of course, payment by the word went away, too. Instead, I’m paid by the article. As long as what I submit is complete, they’re happy.

The Ultimate Limitation

Of course, my history with publishing isn’t the point. The point is, a writer needs to be able to deliver a message in the desired word count.

Twitter logoAnd that’s where Twitter comes in. With only 140 characters, it’s often tough to communicate a complex message. While many people resort to cryptic txt world abbreviations, I prefer not to. Instead, I prefer whole words and even whole sentences.

Still other people will use several consecutive tweets to tell a story. This is generally not a good idea — more than two Tweets in a row that tell a long story is generally considered bad Twitter etiquette. Besides, where’s the challenge in that?

A better idea — one that offers good practice for a writer — is to embrace the 140-character limitation. Deliver complete, grammatically correct — or nearly grammatically correct, as I’ll discuss in a moment — thoughts as whole sentences.

And this is what I attempt to do on Twitter.

Tighten It Up

Here’s how I embrace Twitter’s limitation and use it as a tool to practice tightening up my prose:

  1. In Twitter client* software — compose the tweet to say what you need to say.
  2. Check the character count. If you’re under, tweet it as is. You’re done. Skip the remaining steps.
  3. If you’re over the character count, start paring down the text. Here are the things I do in the order I usually do them:
    • Reread the tweet. Do you really need to say all of that?
    • Look at the long words. Can any be replaced with shorter words that mean nearly the same thing?
    • Kill the adverbs. This is basic writing advice that has nothing to do with Twitter.
    • Look at the adjectives. Do you really need them?
    • Drop periods after obvious abbreviations, such as Mr or Dr.
    • Kill the articles. This is where grammar begins to suffer. I have a personal rule: if I kill one article in a tweet, I kill them all, just for consistency.
  4. As soon as the character count gets below 140 characters, re-read the tweet. If it’s what you want to say, tweet it. You’re done. Skip the remaining step.
  5. If your tweet doesn’t relay your message, start over from scratch.

This exercise can be fun if you go at it the right way. Although it might seem tough the first few times you do it, it does get easier and easier. I’ve gotten to the point where I sometimes cut so much out that I can add another short sentence. Not bad.

Are you a writer or just a tweeter? If you’re a writer, rise to the 140-character challenge of Twitter without leaning on txt abbreviation crutches.

*This is nearly impossible to do on a cell phone using txting, so don’t even try.

Photo Flying, Job Shuffling, Helicopter Rides, Travel, and More

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Yes, I’m still alive and kicking.

In case regular readers are wondering whether I’ve fallen off the face of the earth, the answer is no, I haven’t.

My life has been non-stop craziness since the third week in September and I’ve simply been too busy to blog. That’s not to say I don’t have anything to blog about — I do! I just can’t find a 2-hour block of time to get some good content out of my head and into this blog. This status report will have to do for now.

Aerial Photo Flights at Lake Powell

The thing that started all this craziness was the aerial photo gig I had at Lake Powell. I was there for two weeks, but the last five days were the busiest. I did 14 individual aerial photo flights, each lasting between one and two hours.

I didn’t think it could ever happen, but by the end of the third day, I was actually getting tired of flying over that beautiful lake. It wasn’t until the last two photo shoots that I started really enjoying it again. I flew with a local photographer, Gary Ladd, who directed me to show him the lake and surrounding area in ways I’d never seen it. He brought the magic back. You can see some photos taken during the two flights by Rebecca Wilks, my client for those flights, at Skyline Images. I’m hoping Rebecca lets me share some of her work on the Flying M Air Web site.

That whole gig ended with a 2.2 hour flight from Lake Powell to Deer Valley. The first half of the flight was very pleasant, including the stop for breakfast at Marble Canyon Lodge. But once we got down off the Colorado Plateau southwest of Sedona, the heat and turbulence made the flight very unpleasant. My passenger, Rebecca, was likely on the verge of being ill for some of that time; I was certainly not feeling very good either. Landing at DVT was my return home after being away since May 15, ending four whole months on the road.

Two New Jobs

Back in July and August, when I had no writing work lined up, I started putting irons on the fire. The economy might be scary for people with jobs, but it’s terrifying for freelancers when there’s nothing on the calendar. I started discussions with two different publishers, feeling I had about a 50-50 chance of getting either job.

The good news: I got them both.

The bad news: They had the same deadline.

I worked my butt off for my first full week home, trying hard to deliver content for both of them. I realized that they’d either think I was lazy or incompetent. This was not a good thing, since one of the contracts was a brand new relationship with a publisher I hope to do more work for.

I confessed to both of my editors. I was surprised — and very happy — about how understanding they were.

Now I’m at Lynda.com‘s offices in Ventura, finishing up one of those projects. On Sunday, when I return, I’ll be back at my desk, cranking out new chapters for the other project, a brand new book. I expect to be working on it daily for the next three weeks.

Helicopter Rides

I do helicopter rides every year at the Congress Days event in Congress, AZ. It’s a very small event, but it gathers quite a local crowd. I make the rides cheap enough for anyone to afford them. This year, they were $25 per person, down from $30 per person last year.

This year, the rides gig fell on October 2, which was this past Saturday. Despite my crazy busy schedule, I showed up as planned and did a bunch of rides in 95°F weather. This particular event is extremely blog-worthy due to the challenging flying conditions and I definitely will be blogging about it when I get some time. I just need to assemble some more visual aids. It’s a good lesson in high density altitude flying.

Phoenix to Santa Barbara by Way of Bakersfield

My flight to Santa Barbara (to go to Ventura this week) was a bit of an adventure. The marine layer was in at midday and the glide slope at Santa Barbara was broken. On the attempted landing, the pilot was able to get down to 500 feet (the decision height) and not see the runway. I got a glimpse of the ground through the clouds before he hit the throttles and we ascended back through the clouds.

There was no second try. He flew us to Bakersfield where we were let off the plane in a terminal with a closed Subway restaurant. When the United Airlines flight to Santa Barbara also landed there, they hired a bus to take us to Santa Barbara.

I hate buses.

When a fellow passenger rented a mini-van for a one-way drive to Santa Barbara, I was one of five other people who joined her. The $130 rental plus $20 fuel purchase came out to $25/person and I’m certain that we beat the bus by at least two hours.

So instead of arriving at my hotel by 2 PM, I rolled up after 7 PM after an adventure with five strangers.

That’s worth a blog post on its own, but I’m allowing the memory to fade and don’t want to bring it back by writing about it.

Ventura and Beyond

So here I am in my hotel in Oxnard, CA, right near the border of Ventura. It’s 6:40 AM. At 7:30 AM, I’ll be in a soundproof booth, recording my words of wisdom and mouse clicks for another new course. I’m not sure if I can talk about it yet, but you’ll hear about it soon enough. I’m happy to be here, despite the clouds and rain.

Once I get home, I’ll get back on my regular schedule of blogging. I need to blog. If I don’t write here at least four or five times a week, I get a little crazy. So just have some patience and I’ll do the best I can.

Freelancers Don’t Get Sick Pay

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We actually work for a living.

It occurred to me the other day that there’s a huge difference between employees and freelancers. I don’t mean to say that I suddenly saw the light — I didn’t. I’ve known the differences for a long time. But the other day, I actually stopped for a moment to think about them. I thought I’d share some of my thoughts here, laid out in a simple table to make comparison easier.

EmployeesFreelancers
Employees can stop looking for work once they get a job. The only times they need to look for work again is if they want to change jobs, they get fired, or they need a second job.Freelancers are always looking for work, even when they’re working. The ability to earn a living depends on having the next job lined up.
Employees seldom have to worry about losing their jobs to someone who claims he can do it cheaper.Freelancers are constantly competing for work with others who claim they can do the same job for less money.
Employees usual do one job at a time, although that job might entail several concurrent projects for the same employer.Freelancers often work on several jobs for several clients concurrently.
Employees are usually given all of the tools and equipment they need to perform their jobs. These tools are usually purchased, maintained, and updated by their employers.Freelancers usually have to buy, maintain, and update all of the tools and equipment they need to perform their jobs.
Employees often spend part of their workday socializing with coworkers around the water cooler, coffee room, offices/cubicles, cafeteria, etc.Freelancers often work alone. Most time spent socializing is not time they’re being paid for.
Employees often get benefits that include paid vacations, paid holidays, paid sick days, health care, pension contributions, profit sharing, and bonuses. There are holiday parties, company picnics, and sometimes even birthday cakes.Freelancers don’t get benefits. If they can’t work because of illness, they don’t make money. In the U.S. (and some other countries), they have to pay for their own health care, often at extremely high rates. There are no holiday parties, company picnics, or birthday cakes.
Employees have a predetermined workday, such as 9 to 5. They also get scheduled days off, like weekends and holidays. If they don’t feel like coming into work, they can take a paid sick or personal day off. The flip side of this is that an employee has a limited amount of time off.Freelancers work as long as they need to to get the job done. If that means 12 hour days and lost weekends, so be it. If they don’t feel like working in the middle of a job, that’s too darn bad; the job needs to get done on time. The flip side of this is that a freelancer can have as much time off as he wants, as long as he works enough to earn enough money to survive.
Employees are usually not bothered by their bosses outside their normally scheduled workday.Freelancers can be bothered by clients any time the client wants to make contact (although most clients keep contact within their working hours).
Employees can have annoying or even stupid bosses.Freelancers can have annoying or even stupid clients.
As long as an employee performs his job to some level of satisfaction, he’ll likely remain employed.A freelancer needs to perform high quality work for every job to set himself apart from the competition, with the hope that the client will either give him future work or recommend him to others.
Employees get paychecks. The government ensures that they get paid.Freelancers issue invoices and spend time following up on accounts receivable. They sometimes have to remind, nag, and then possibly sue clients to get paid.
Employees have payroll taxes taken from their pay and remitted to the government. In the U.S., their employers pay 50% of their social security tax liability.Freelancers don’t usually have taxes taken from their pay and remitted to the government. They are required to submit taxes quarterly, along with the related paperwork. If they don’t submit on time, they could be penalized. In the U.S., they are personally responsible for 100% of their social security tax liability.

What did I leave out? Employees and freelancers, use the Comments link or form to fill us in.

The Trouble with Tech Editors

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Not usually the problem.

From about August 10 until just the other day, I was working on a book revision. It’s my third pass at this software manual that’s now distributed in ebook form. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to mention what it’s for, so I won’t. It doesn’t really matter, does it?

This book was unusual in that for the first time, it was the technical editors that gave me headaches. (Usually, it’s heavy-handed copyeditors.) My publisher waited until the last minute to contract me and everyone else who worked on the book and, because of that, they had trouble getting a good technical editor. They wound up with two people who apparently have nothing better to do than hang out in the support forums for the software and quite possibly hang on every word posted there. The first one worked on Chapters 2-14 before going on vacation. The other one worked on the rest of the 23-chapter book.

The problem I had centered around their apparent misunderstanding of what their job was. The first one kept commenting to tell me to add every known technique for performing each task. I’d decided early on to stick to menu commands and shortcut keys whenever possible, but she kept telling me to add this toolbar button or that hidden dialog option. It got on my nerves until we told her to stop. The other thing she did was introduce obscure problems that people in the forums have, apparently expecting the book to cover them all.

The other tech editor also drew upon his forum experience, this time expecting me to include marketing material that would clarify information about the features so forum participants would have less to complain about. The book’s a straight how-to — technically, it’s the software manual — so addressing the issues of a handful of forum whiners (the worse kind) isn’t part of the program. But what really got me mad was that this second editor was apparently unable to follow the instructions as written and kept telling me that things didn’t work. I’d have to go back and follow the instructions to see where I’d screwed up. But every single time, the instructions worked exactly as I’d written them. This was a huge time suck.

To be fair, they each did have a few comments that were actually worth acting on. I made a handful of changes that improved the book. That’s what their job was — to help me improve the book. But they didn’t seem to understand what would make the book better. All they seemed to know was what would make the book longer.

What neither understood is that I had about 15 days to revise a 600-page book. That’s not enough time to rewrite the book. All I had to do was add or change material for new or changed features. There weren’t many changes. The book, which was originally written by the software developer’s staff, had very few tech edit comments in the two previous editions I worked on. So I couldn’t figure out why these two editors kept coming up with comments that no one else had.

It’s the damn forums, I guess.