NaNoWriMo

There's been a bit of discussion on the IWW's Writing list about NaNoWriMo, and so we now have a poll here on the blog.

Note the upper right hand corner of your computer screen.

And vote!

• What is NaNoWriMo?
  

• If you intend to NaNoWriMo and would like your progress chronicled here on the blog, you should send your contributions here.

Writing Exercises and Word Limits

From Carter Jefferson,
Co-Administrator, IWW Practice List

A member of Practice-w, an IWW group that sends out an exercise for its members to do every week, asked the other day just what the exercises are good for, and why we put stringent word limits on submissions. We have lots of members, but others might be interested in the answer I gave him.

Everybody I know has been frustrated by the word counts in the Practice exercises. Back when I submitted an attempt to do the exercise every week, now and then I used to run over by the three or four or twenty words and hope the admins wouldn't notice--but they always did, and I got my wrist slapped.

The word limits have two purposes, one practical, the other didactic.

If we didn't have word limits, there's no way anybody would critique more than a couple of submissions every week, which would be bad. With the limits, a crit is not hard to write, so everybody is likely to get several, and everybody knows some crits are worth more than others. The more the better.

From the learning mode, everybody also knows that many of us who write tend to use a lot of words to do a job a few would do infinitely better. The word limit challenges us to cut the useless and keep the ones that do the work effectively. I came to fiction writing after a newspaper career in which I thought I'd learned brevity--boy, was I wrong! Practice-w helped me learn to make every word count, and that's one of the things the list is for.

Finally, every member has her or his own use for the exercises. Some use them as goads, a way to force themselves to write at least once a week when they're feeling dry. Some see them as just exercises that hone one skill or another. Others use them to try new things, to write in ways they haven't before. Many see them as a chance to experiment--to see whether a germ of a story idea might be worth pursuing. And some make flash pieces of their responses to the exercises, using the tips critters give and going on to publish those subs for money or pure satisfaction. Who knows? There may be other reasons as well. One I wrote was a love letter, but nobody knew that but me and the recipient thereof.

Every one of the many lists in the IWW helps a lot of people. For me and some others, Practice-w, word limits and all, has been invaluable. However you use them, we're pleased to offer an exercise every week that some people will find inspiring, useful, or just plain fun. Members must submit a piece that meets the requirements of the exercise once a month, and do at least one critique. If you'd like to join this group, please send us your request at this address.

Engineering "Deceptively Simple" Writing

An Essay on Discerning Meaning
Albert Ervine

May I provide an analogy that could illustrate "deceptively simple."

Most people, when they hear a machine described as "sophisticated," think of something mind-bogglingly complex -- sort of like one of Rube Goldberg's contraptions, but with bells, whistles and flashing lights instead of the midget. The picture is false. A truly sophisticated machine is one that could not be simplified in any way and still do everything it is supposed to. A sophisticated machine inspires the viewer to say, "What's so special about that? Anyone could do it." Anyone could not. It took months of ruthless pruning to get it to its present condition.

In my previous existence -- 1950-1985 -- I was a machine design engineer. When I was just starting, I received a sterling piece of advice from a contract draftsman who worked for us. "If it doesn't work, don't see what you can put on to make it work. See what you can take off." As he explained it, the piece you eliminate costs nothing to make, never malfunctions, never breaks, and never wears out. When you have eliminated everything you can, you should have a pretty good piece of equipment. Then make sure that each piece can be made with the least machining possible.

One result of this refining is that nearly every machine I designed is still running and doing its job, some of them fifty years after they first went into production.

Deceptively simple writing is the same. If one word will do the job -- both in meaning and atmosphere -- then two words are excessive. Victorian writing tended to wordiness; the writers were being paid by the word, so the more diffuse the writing, the better the pay. Still, there were memorable exceptions. Can anyone improve on Dickens' description of Mrs. Fezziwig as "one vast, substantial smile?" I read that before 1939, and it stuck. Deceptively simple writing does. Verbosity doesn't.

---

As Mark Twain wrote, "The difference between the right word and the almost right word, is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."

Love Is What You Make of It

An Essay on Observation
by Greg Gunther

My family has a captive white rabbit. It arrived one day, unbidden, in a cage that someone put in the corrals behind our house. They could see that we had goats, sheep, chickens, and horses on our zoned-for-animals lot in this bedroom community, and figured that a spare rabbit would not be turned away. They were right.

My ten-year-old granddaughter named it Cheese for reasons of her own, and we put it in a bigger cage in her bedroom. On sunny days, we prop open the door to the outside deck, and let the bunny have a little bit of freedom.

The bedroom has a tile floor that's easy to clean, especially since he makes use of a litter box as a cat would. When Cheese is not in his cage, he has his little domain.

You would think he would have been happy, but he wasn't.

Oh, he let himself be petted, and nibbled people's shoes for attention, but he moped a lot. Listless like a depressive inattentive to his meds. We gave him kale and lettuce in addition to store-bought rabbit food, and never let his water bottle run dry, but something was missing.

And then, the white bowling pin appeared. It had been sitting on the shelf, a gift to my granddaughter on her eighth birthday. As often happens, when it fell off, no one bothered to pick it up. The bunny began playing with it.

That night, we heard thumping and bumping from the bedroom, and came to see Cheese pushing the bowling pin around, having a great time. It was almost his size, and the same color white. Later, we saw him licking it, nuzzling it, and finally becoming amorous with it. The bowling pin never complained.

Cheese no longer mopes. He loves his bowling pin, Bunnita. They're a lovely couple.

Metaphor, Imagined Worlds, and Writing

My good friend Shayla Mollohan, poet-presider over the IWW's Poetry list, sent me a link opening a window on the magical world of one Mr. Potter, known as Harry to his friends.

A confession: I have read only one or two pages of the first tome in the Harry Potter saga. I don't get it.

Here's the paragraph offering an insight to what I -- and other well-meaning readers like me -- might be unable to acknowledge.

" ... there is a certain kind of fantasy story that seems to be able to reach beyond the edges of the normal fandom. It seems to be able to cross the boundaries and appeal so strongly to people that they sometimes don't even notice that they're enjoying fantasy ... The people who don't like Harry Potter seem to be the ones who haven't tried it yet. It's universally appealing, like pie and Anderson Cooper. That means, of course, that Harry has something to teach those of us who want to write, create, air or sell sci-fi/fantasy television shows."

That I don't like Harry Potter is no reflection on anyone but me or anything but my taste in writing.

The article is from The New Republic, and it's available on-line.

---

A wise person will also take the time to read one of Shaye's poems -- Enough -- while at the computer. Click here to find on her Web site as reprinted from Whatever Remembers Us: An Anthology of Alabama Poets, Negative Capability Press, 2007.

"The Secret" and How We Write

Dave Swinford, one of the IWW's long-time administrators, and I recently participated in a group discussion about The Secret, and it's application to life in general and to writing in particular.

The discussion also ranged over The Lucifer Effect (see the recent blog post), and touched on the possibility of whether choice is mandated by neuro-biological factors or is through conscious motivation of free will. Finally, some in the group proposed that The Secret is simply a restatement of, or possibility an amplification of, The Law of Attraction.

Dave and I also brought up the issue of quantum physics in the discussion -- the possibility that the absolute definition or determination of all things is improbable. I was especially intrigued with that proposition -- as it applies to free will and the act of creative writing -- because, in a search of The Secret's Web presence, I learned that Dr. Fred Alan Wolf, a quantum physicist, was involved with the movement.

Does that mean we can will quantum movements? I don't know. How could I -- or anyone else know -- given good professor Werner Heisenberg's theory -- Heisenberg, uncertainty paper, 1927?

Of course, about all I know about quantum physics is that it provides a glib excuse for not outlining my next essay.

The real question is, of course, how does the Law of Attraction in supposition or in fact apply to writing? Will use of The Secret feed our ambitions and our talents to write and to be published?

Should we act as if we will be the next J.K. Rowling or John Grisham, call Gulfstream and order a new G150?

Dave had some interesting thoughts, which are best quoted here with minimal editing.

First, I would assert that calling it a "Law" is misleading people into thinking it is some sort of magic formula. In actuality, it is a principle or universal mechanism in exactly the same way that gravity is a principle or universal mechanism. There is no evaluating intelligence that selects what to send in response to what is received. Rather, what is returned is a matching vibratory pattern that will take shape in terms of the receiver's beliefs and expectations. Like gravity, this principle works even if one is totally unaware that there is such a mechanism or principle at work, even if one's only awareness is limited to the observed consequences of this principle in action.

So, this principle produces an inside-out process. It begins with what one believes, which informs or shapes what one thinks and projects outward. The mechanism receives the projected thoughts as a vibratory pattern and it returns a like or similar vibratory pattern. That returned pattern is just countless probability waves that will collapse into reality only as things the receiver believes to be possible and/or desirable. If one is "blocking" something one believes he/she wants, it is only on the receiving end or in terms of limiting beliefs that one does such blocking. One can only collapse the probabilities into things one believes in.

If one lives in India as an Untouchable who believes he is unfit to receive all the good things in life, one has no ability to collapse the probability waves into anything resembling prosperity. Someone living in poverty in this country might look around and for various reasons alter his belief from impossibility to "I have a dream" and I am willing to believe that if I work at it, I can achieve that dream. I can, step by step, alter my beliefs and expectations until I have shifted into truly expecting the desired result to manifest. There are those rags-to-riches stories to prove that this is indeed possible.

Thus, an accompanying slogan to affirming is to "act as if", which many people take to mean that one should visualize and imagine the desired result. However, the key word is "act". One must take actions to convert the desire or dream into something more than a wish or imagined result. By acting on the dream or desire, one begins to manifest small results that help one to replace the limiting beliefs and expectations with a strengthening belief that "yes, this really is possible."

So, yes, one can delude themselves into believing that all they have to do is visualize and think and they will attract what they are visualizing and thinking about. They neglect to take actions that will replace old limiting beliefs with new, accepting beliefs. Also, many people forget or do not realize that this principle of attraction is totally inclusionary. It rejects nothing and always sends back matching vibratory patterns. Thus what one focuses on is what one attracts. If one focuses on what one does not want, which is something most people do without even realizing they are doing it, what will be returned is a vibratory pattern matching what one does not want. If one focuses on what one lacks, what is returned is a pattern that one's limiting beliefs will collapse into more lack.

So, in order to move from poverty to riches, one must first believe that it is possible to do so and then, one must act to shift this new possibility from a mere wish or desire into a belief and expectation.

I will put it in terms of a slogan that was rife on campuses when I was starting college in the early 60's. It was often trotted out as a reason for joining the Peace Corps. "If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for life."

Let me rephrase that slogan in terms of the principle of attraction.

If you give a man a fish, you confirm his belief that he is powerless to take care of himself. If you teach him to fish, you instill the belief that he has the power to care and provide for himself.

I generally wake up happy in the morning, and curious about what the day might bring. Considering that, the Law of Attraction seems useful -- pessimism is a negative force, and I try never to sandpaper the shine from my emotional well-being by approaching the day an antagonistic attitude.

But, as another person in the discussion noted, there's useful wisdom to be found in Samuel Goldwyn's words, "The harder I work, the luckier I get."

And writing is no different. Grisham and Rowling applied butt to chair and words to paper. Hard work, indeed.

Finally, as one of the administrators of the IWW, I felt empathy with the concluding portion of Dave's final post in the discussion.

Thus, the very best form of contribution implicit in the two ideals is to assist others to release old limiting beliefs and to instill new empowering ones. We are, in our own ways, attempting to inspire new empowering beliefs in those we share with and work with ... that is, empowering the principle of attraction.

Teach a person to believe in themselves and their abilities, and you empower them to believe in and accept that which they desire. It works. We see the results in our participant's successes.

The E-book Advantage

An Essay
By Bob Liter

Like most authors of fiction I wanted to be published by a print publisher, preferable one of the majors, and see my book or books sell big time. I wrote away, finished the first novel, and sought an agent.

I got various replies to my queries but none of them included a request to see my novel, a mystery. "Too derivative," one agent said. Another said, "The market for a book similar to this is tight right now."

Others said they were not sufficiently in love with the manuscript to attempt to sell it. And there were a lot of "no thanks."

So I tried to sell directly to publishers with no success. Damn. I'd spent a lot of my retirement time writing this novel and I wanted it published. I never considered any type of vanity press. The only thing left was electronic publishers. Such a publisher, the first one I sent it to, agreed to publish it. I wasn't that happy about it. Far short of my goal.

Since then I've written eight more novels, tried to sell then through agents and to print publishers without success, and wound up submitting them to the publisher of the first novel. All of them have been published on the internet.

Did I mention the advantage? There is one. If any of my novels had been published by a print publisher they might have been a hit, made me a lot of money, but more than likely they would have suffered the fate of most print-published novels. A few copies would be sold, then the book would be remaindered, destroyed or burned - whatever - and never be seen by the public again.

Ah, but my e-books go one forever, apparently. They all are still available, they all continue to sell, sometimes once a month, sometimes zero for several months, and occasionally as many as 50 a month.

I get royalties - not much but some - and someone is reading my stuff. So that's the advantage. Once they are published they remain available to the reading public, I get a little money every three months to remind me that someone is buying my stuff.

I've just finished another novel and will start by trying to get an agent to handle it. Then try to sell it directly to a publisher. After both of those efforts fail I'll send it to my e-book publisher.

---

Bob Liter is the author of eight novels -- "The Nick Bancroft series is power-packed," says one reviewer -- and you can read the first chapters here. Of course, you also can check out Bob's musings on his blog.

Writings about Feminism

A recent rant on the IWW's Writing Discussion list lamenting the popularity of writing wherein violence against women provided the central dynamic provoked this response from Carter Jefferson, who said the ...

... "rant, which included a good deal of sense in my opinion, along with some hopes that aren't likely to be realized anytime soon, made me focus on something I've wondered about lately.

"The feminist movement of the 1970's came about to a large extent as a response to one book: The Feminine Mystique, which had as much impact on politics and social mores as did Silent Spring in another area. Yet it's been years since any book that could be labelled "feminist" has aroused much interest. Recently, Jessica Valenti published a book about attracting the modern women who spurn the title of feminist to join the fight. From the review in Salon, I doubt that it will amount to much.

"But what's keeping others from writing serious books about the current not entirely satisfactory status of women? The scholarly field of Women's Studies, which barely existed thirty years ago, thrives in academia. Excellent books on the history of the woman's struggle have been published, but of course they don't sell many copies. And in a few years new books about the suffrage fight will be coming out--women only got the vote in 1920, in case anyone has forgotten.

"Where is the Betty Friedan of today? "

A Successful Writer on Writing

Random thoughts from the quicksand
by Richard Lewis,
author of The Flame Tree and The Killing Sea

1. I write daily, 1000 words (contract deadline helps wonderfully to motivate) which sometimes takes only an hour, meaning there are many hours left in the day to do and to be other things as well.
2. If I go into a bar and meet a man (or woman) who says "I'm a writer" when I ask him what he does, I assume that his writing is what's paying for his drink.
3. I've sat for an hour in front of my computer and nothing comes, another hour where a hundred words finally comes forth each one like a gnaw on granite, and yet another hour where those words are changed until erased until I'm again left with a blank monitor, and I consider this all part of writing.
4. Thinking can indeed be part of writing--much of my pre-sleep thoughts have to do with what I'll be putting down on paper when I get up (after my mediation and kids which always come first). So that does help reduce the actual time, although not as much as one might think, because I find that it's during the actual act of writing where my thoughts are not only formalized but also actually come to me out of nowhere (I suppose the previous thinking time might have cleared the underbrush for the latter to happen)
5. I've been writing since I could read. Wrote my first story when I was six, about a yawn that traveled the world. I knew that writing was my talent,but I wanted to be other things. I didn't start writing seriously, daily, until ten years ago, when I was 40. It took me four years and four learning curve novels to finally write one that was published. I had to put in the time to struggle and fail and learn--and that time I had to put in in order to be a good and competent writer was the time I spent writing.
6. Well, I lie--part of of learning to be a good writer is reading, reading, reading (with a critical eye helps best of all. I also found several craft books to be of help (and how-to books is another contentious issue).
7. Still, in order to improve as a writer, I had to write! And writing every day made me improve faster. This is another area where I don't see a short cut.
8. I would still prefer to be a world class mathematician than a writer--math at it's highest level is to me an art, and a mathematician can discover something that's never been known before, and for the rest of history he or she will be known as the discoverer. Writing? There is nothing new under the sun, just new ways of saying the same thing.
9. I procrastinate by writing these posts.

---

Read more from Richard Lewis on his blog, where he notes, "I was born, raised, and live in Bali, Indonesia, with my family. No TV as a kid, read lots of books. Wrote my first short story at 6 about a yawn that traveled around the world. University educated in the States. Bailed out of a marine geology PhD program due to technical difficulties with my soul, which did not want to be shackled to a career. Bounced around. Surfed a lot. Didn’t start writing seriously until ten years ago. Now I’m pretty obsessed with it. To the horror of my old surfing buddies, I take as much pleasure in turning an original phrase as in getting tubed."

Write Every Day--or Maybe Not

by Chester Morrison, an IWW member

I have about 11,000 words invested in a first draft of a novel I want to write about my experience in Iraq. It has taken me a month to get this far writing in spurts: one day only a single sentence, a few days later maybe a thousand words.

I let my best friend read the first chapter (he doesn't read much fiction, but he is my best friend) and he offered some lukewarm encouragement. I let my sister read three chapters because she reads everything Stephen King writes, which I thought might be a good acid test, and I can usually tell when she's fudging an opinion. She liked it. But she is my sister. I stalled for about a week, after 10,000 words, and started looking for a workshop. I joined this one, and made my first post to the Writing list after listening to a Talk of the Nation segment in which Walter Mosley offered advice for writers.

Mosley described something close to my own experience. He said if you're writing every day you are deeply involved in the story and you stay that way, but if you leave off a day or two you might as well be back at the beginning, which to him is the most difficult part of the process. Mosley recommends that you write a minimum of an hour and a half every day without fail, and then reread the product of the day before and make only minor edits. So in my post I asked members of the IWW if this was the case for all novel writers--or if it was possible to walk away from it for a day or two and expect to pick up the flow without a creative pause.

Each reply to my post was unique, but there were two distinct threads running through the answers. While everyone generally agreed that writing every day was an excellent habit for a developing or even an established writer, several writers admitted they didn't do that, and that skipping a few days didn't affect their returning to the flow of the story. They could regain that flow by reading their way back into the narrative. Others felt that writing every day was essential; developing that habit made the act of writing second nature, less vulnerable to the interruptions from the environment or well-reasoned excuses. Again, the uniqueness of each reply was the stand-out feature, which left me pondering my own situation.

I am retired from the Army, but still work those five weekdays. Besides my wife, my oldest son (21) and his girlfriend live with us. So does my 19-year-old son, who is trying to decide what to do with his life now that high school is over. And I have a daughter entering high school next year. Everyone works, except the daughter, and schedules keep the house active from my five-thirty wake-up until after midnight. No one (except my best friend and sister who I used in weak, confirmation-needing moments and have since sworn-off) knows I am trying to write a novel, which may sound strange, but I just felt it would be better that way until I am solidly entrenched, say maybe forty or fifty thousand words. As I mentioned in the opening, I have written in spurts when I was alone in the house--very productive spurts, but I realize I can't continue that way.

And that seems to be the best notion coming from the writers who replied to my post: write every day--it's a good habit. At least until I publish something, and then perhaps I can fall back on some advice I remember reading somewhere that was attributed to William Faulkner: All you need to write is pencil and paper, some tobacco and a little whiskey.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chester Morris says: "I live in Northwest Florida, married 26 years, father of three (four counting son's girlfriend), fifty-five years on in this journey. I am in the Novels and Writing groups, and have completed my first three critiques and subbed Chapter One of my novel.

I May Not Make Much, But . . .

by Barry Basden, an IWW member

Most writers hope for fame and money, but they also need to write for their own pleasure, if only to sustain themselves while researching markets and doing the grunt work needed to pull a story or article together. We can push our pet projects, or use our talents in politics or for whatever purpose grabs us. We might even help other people while we help ourselves.

My cause is military history. I got into saving World War II stories because the sister of my wife's best friend was married to an ace fighter pilot, one of the few hundred with at least five air victories. I joined the Friends of the Aces and started going to their reunions, where I heard amazing tales of air combat and survival that have never been recorded. Some of these guys were in wheelchairs and they were starting to die off at an alarming rate. Soon their personal stories would be as lost to us as those from the Civil War or World War I.

I felt a visceral panic, and sent letters urging them all to record their stories, offering help in any way I could to preserve them. I got nice letters back from several, including Tex Hill, but no takers. With his son, Tex later published his adventures with the Flying Tigers. I like to think my urging had something to do with it, but others had been after him for years to put it all down on paper.

Next, I began doing oral histories for the Nimitz Museum in nearby Fredericksburg, Texas, which has a nice archive, but where transcripts can gather dust for years. To get the stories of veterans in front of the public, I set up a small publishing company and began actively searching for manuscripts. On an obscure internet listing of vets looking for publishers, I stumbled across Bob Rogge and his story, which contained some of the most riveting combat scenes I'd ever read. They became Fearsome Battle; With the Canadian Army in World War II Europe.

Then I taped a brief 3-hour oral history with Charlie Scheffel for the Nimitz and dutifully sent in the transcript, but I couldn't get his story out of my mind. Finally, we agreed to try to make a book of it. Almost six years later, after some great editorial help and suggestions from the IWW nonfiction list, Camroc Press published Crack! and Thump: With a Combat Infantry Officer in World War II.

I do this because I love it so. There hasn't been much money in it, but the letters I've received from old soldiers or their family members who've read Charlie's story make it very gratifying.

Charlie's happy, too. Recently he got a letter from a woman whose husband fought with the Big Red One in North Africa and Sicily at the same time Charlie was fighting with the 9th Division a few miles away. She wrote that her husband is now in failing health and asked if Charlie would please inscribe a copy " To Bob, a great soldier." She ended her letter simply: "He's my hero."

And then there's always the next book, like the diary of a mechanic with the Tuskegee Airmen, or maybe the letters of a WAC who served with Patton and Bradley in 12th Army Group Headquarters and wrote to her family from London on June 6, 1944:

"You talk about the tension over there about the invasion, what do you think we
think about it? Sometimes I get sick. Of course we aren't blind, nor deaf, and
some things we know, and sometimes I sit in conferences and get shaky. I can't
swallow the lump in my throat."

You can see I'm not really a writer at all, just a sort of manic amateur historian. I don't know markets, or if you can make any money writing this stuff, though occasionally a book like Flags of Our Fathers breaks through. But then, lightning can strike in any genre.

Anyway, take a moment, if you will, and consider what your own personal love may be. Think about using your writing skills to share some of that love with readers who may not even be aware your subject exists. You never know how many folks you might touch, or in what ways.

-------------------------

Barry Basden is CEO, janitor, and majority shareholder, of Camroc Press, publisher of military history. In high school, he says, he hung out with the actors and poets. But five colleges, ten years, and countless false starts later, he became a CPA and financial manager. Go figure.

Now he's back dealing with what he's always preferred: stories. He tried to explain that to his mother one day a few years ago and she stopped him in mid-sentence. "I've always known you love books," she said, "ever since you hitchhiked home from New York with no clothes and only books in your suitcase."

Moms. They know stuff.

Self-publishing: Ten tips to make your book shine

By Bob Sanchez, an IWW member

We self-publishers fight a lonely battle, finding readers for our wit and wisdom. We write alone, and now we sell alone and search for ways to market our work. How do we entice readers to open their wallets?

Those questions are often premature. Before asking how you're going to cope with all those book orders, you need to make sure you have a quality product. Because you won't have a publisher's editor or copy reader working with you on that, you need all the help you can get.

So here are ten tips to make your book, fiction or non, the best it can be.

#1 Use a spell-checker, but only as a first line of defense. Then you look for misspellings the spell-checker won't catch, such as then/than, to/too/two, tail/tale, or its/it's.

#2 Read your manuscript critically, as though you weren't the author. Some things to check include complete chapters, well-organized paragraphs, complete sentences, and accurate punctuation.

#3 Be consistent. If you capitalize a word once in the text, chances are you always want to capitalize it. Decide whether you want one space or two at the end of a sentence, and stick with it. Never change your font or type size without good reason. If your work consists of more than one file, be sure that every file is formatted identically.

#4 Get honest, competent critiques. Leave your mother and spouse alone; your family has better things to do than fawn over your work. Avoid critiques from anyone who has an emotional stake in making you happy, because that isn't what you need. The Internet Writing Workshop is an excellent source of constructive, informed criticism.

#5 Use your judgment. Even good critiquers may give you conflicting advice. Remember that it's your project, so the final decision is always yours.

#6 Refer to a style manual such as the Chicago Manual of Style, which is the most widely accepted guide for standard writing.

#7 Make a style sheet. A novel or other large manuscript can involve lots of small stylistic decisions by the author. Keep a pad of paper with a running list of things you don't want to have to keep looking up. For example, a cartoon I liked showed a bank robber writing a note and asking the teller, "Is holdup one word or two?" Think of words you often misspell or don't know how to capitalize, and write them correctly on the list.

#8 Follow your publisher's guidelines religiously even if they don't insist.

#9 Repeat tip #2.

#10 Review the publisher's proof carefully. When you receive the publisher's proof isn't the time to look for typos; you should have done that already. The publisher may even charge you if you fix many of your own mistakes at this stage. Instead, look for their errors. Are illustrations in their proper places? Are pages and chapters numbered properly? Look at every page's overall appearance. Is each one properly aligned? Is any text missing?

If you follow these simple (but not always easy) tips, I can't guarantee best-sellerdom for your book, but I can promise you this: Your book will be far superior to the vast majority of self-published books. You will have a quality product.

-------------------------

Bob Sanchez is a retired senior technical writer who recently self-published his comic novel When Pigs Fly (iUniverse, 2006). Kirkus Discoveries declares that "Sanchez's breakneck narrative never lets up," while Midwest Book Review states, "Bob Sanchez writes like Carl Hiaasen on speed." He is working on his next novel and plans to self-publish again.

Does Size Matter?

An Essay by Wayne Scheer, an IWW member

I've been thinking about the issue of size lately--the length of a story, that is. I keep hearing differing views from people I respect. One person argues that flash fiction--stories under a thousand words--is just an exercise, describing a moment in time without fleshed out characters or plot. Others argue that it is precisely the succinctness of these stories that make them so emotionally authentic.

I'm tempted to repeat the old adage that a story should be as long as it needs to be, and let it go at that. But bumper-sticker philosophy never really satisfies, so let me write in order to see what I mean.

I want to defend short writing because I do a lot of it, and have found a modicum of success in ezines like flashquake, Flash Me Magazine, and Whim's Place. Going short has been good for me. It's improved my editing skills, and it's forced me to think in terms of vivid images. The difficult challenge is to wring honest emotion from a story so short and to bring the story to a natural, satisfying conclusion.

The tendency is to go for a quick shocker of an end. But the writer of flash fiction soon learns that shock and authentic feeling are two very different things. These aren't easy to write and the editing is downright painful, yet I've written some flash stories under two hundred words I'm proud of.

On the other hand, these short pieces are obviously limiting. I can't allow myself the luxury of a digression. Usually I can't even include a relevant description if it requires more than just a quick analogy. I certainly can't just sit back, relax, and see where the characters lead me. Because of this, too often these short pieces come more from the head than the heart.

I fear what writing these kinds of stories might be doing to me as a writer. The novel I thought I'd be well into by now has been pushed onto the proverbial back burner because I think in terms of what I can leave out of a story rather than what I should put into one. My writing is tighter for it, but my sense of story, good old-fashioned plot, remains underdeveloped.

I also enjoy writing the flash surprise ending story. I know they're gimmicky and often characters are just props, but they're fun to write and fairly easy to publish on the Internet, so I assume others find them fun to read as well. I see nothing wrong with amusing myself and, I hope, my readers. These stories help keep me in shape for longer pieces by forcing me to concentrate on the challenge of preparing the reader for the ending without giving it away. In a piece this short, foreshadowing is particularly tricky. These stories usually contain snappy dialogue that helps the reader "hear" my characters, since I don't have the space to describe them. The trick is to make them visible through their words. And there's at least the sense of a story here that moves beyond just a central scene or moment in time.

For me, these surprise-ending, under-a-thousand-worders are fairly easy to write. Too easy. Especially the funny ones. And I have a lazy streak these stories feed on. I worry that perhaps my fascination with such short writing is really a rationale for avoiding more difficult writing challenges.

Then there are the serious, short pieces, the ones about fifteen- to twenty-five hundred words, the kind with a message that, I hope, packs a solid emotional punch. For the emotion to work, or the idea to express itself organically, the characters and situation have to be believable. There's a little more space for description and narration, but not much. I still have to be extremely selective or the story runs off like a horse in the wild. These stories don't come easily to me. They often start as a two- or three-hundred-word flash and develop through revision, when something personal, hidden at first, rises to the surface. I always find it a thrill when this happens because I know I'm on to something real.

Longer stories, of course, are good, too. I try to work on longer pieces while I'm also writing shorter ones. I don't know why I do this because it drives me crazy. But I think it may have something to do with my own personal defense mechanism. My longer stories tend to get to me on a subconscious level; they creep into my dreams. Even when I think they are fictional, bits and pieces of myself and people I know appear in ways that surprise me. I find that the longer stories are good therapy and, having the space to develop characters and extend a plot, also makes for good
writing exercise.

At any rate, they take a lot longer; I revise them extensively and rarely find a home for them online. Longer stories need print publications and this means long waits for responses, surely a test of patience.

So what have I discovered after musing on this matter of size? Probably nothing more than stories should be as long as they need to be. But I'm also more determined than ever to keep writing, no matter the length of the story.

Size really doesn't matter.

-----------------

Wayne Scheer began writing about five years ago, after retiring from a teaching career. Since then, he's published over one hundred stories, short and long ones, in both print publications like The Christian Science Monitor and such e-zines as The Pedestal, Thought Magazine and flashquake. He doesn't know if that impresses anyone, but it impresses the hell out of himself.

Successfully Selling Essays

Long-time IWW member and successful author Dawn Goldsmith notes that she sold an article several years ago to Writers Weekly in which she outlined her favorite essay markets. Click the link to read the article, or review a few of her suggestions here.

• Christian Science Monitor, The Home Forum section - "Pays $75 for short pieces (300 words) to $160, on publication. The Home Forum submissions should be original, upbeat personal essays from 400 to 1,100 words. The two mistakes they see most frequently are 'essays that are mere descriptions, that lack forward motion or a theme' and 'essays in which the story has obvious meaning for the author, but he or she has failed to communicate the significance.'"
• Field and Stream Magazine - "Pays from $100 to as much as several thousand dollars, depending on the quality of the work, the experience of the author, and the difficulty of obtaining the story. Study essays in past issues and know the magazine before submitting."
• Skirt! Magazine -"Payments vary for essays of 800 - 1,000 words written to reflect a specific theme for each issue and targeting a female audience. E-mail submissions accepted and response time is remarkably quick. Read the online essays at skirtmag.com for examples of style and voice."
• The Sun Literary Magazine "Pays up to $1,500 for major essays (up to 7,000 words); $300 to $750 for other essays; half-price for reprints. Favors personal writing."

IWW Practice Exercise: "Generation Gap"

• Exercise: Generation Gap
• Prepared by: Carter Jefferson
• Posted on: April 1, 2007

Exercise: In 400 words or less, write a scene involving two characters related to one another by birth or marriage, one more than 75 years old, the other at least 25 years younger.

The characters may be almost anyone: mother and daughter, grandfather and granddaughter, first cousins or siblings, uncle and nephew, even wife and husband. Don't tell us their ages--let them show us.

The setting may be a family residence, a nursing home, a golf course, a kitchen, a prison, anywhere. They may be meeting after a long separation, or they may live together and associate with each other daily. See if you can give us an idea of their previous attitudes toward each other--loving, hostile, or something else--and explore the emotions generated during this meeting.

Do the characters ring true? Does their dialogue seem lifelike? Is the scene properly set? Consider all aspects of the writing.

Previous exercises are archived.

Carter Jefferson, Co-Administrator Practice List

What is Creative Non-Fiction?

An Essay by Carter Jefferson, an IWW administrator

When you want to start an argument, ask this: Just what is Creative Non-Fiction, anyhow?

To put it mildly, people tend to disagree about that definition. I'll give you mine, others can give you theirs, and then you can dream up one of your own.

Suppose I go out to the airport and a glider pilot takes me for a ride. I decide to write about this. I have, I think, four choices.

I can write what newspapers call a "feature story." I might give some background--how many recreational glider pilots there are in the area, what organizations they have built. Then I might discuss the length of runways needed, the price of a new glider. I'll wrap this all around Joe Pilot, who will be at the center of things, and tell what he feels like when he's in the air. I'll write about what the inside of an airborne glider sounds like, and other pertinent facts. But I'll never use the word "I" except when I quote Joe. I'll be the unseen narrator. Readers will learn a lot about gliding. I wrote that one for the Fort Worth Press a long time ago.

The next possibility is the short story. I'll think up a way Joe could be in love and his glider obsession gets between him and his girl, put in lots of conflict and tension, and write a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. It's fiction, but it's based on reality, and readers may learn a good deal about gliding, because I won't make up the background.

Or I can write about me. I drove to the field, enjoyed the view, talked to Joe, he took me up. Every step of the way, and it's about me and how I felt. It's all true. Readers may learn a lot about gliding, but the story is really about me and how I felt. That's a memoir. Many, perhaps most, people nowadays see memoir as a division of CNF. I don't. Memoir is a genre all its own.

But I could make it a CNF piece. I'd be in it, but the focus would be on the sport, on Joe, on the glider, not on how I feel about it all, not on my experience. Readers would learn a lot about gliding--they'd go along on my maiden flight.

To me, CNF simply takes the cloak of anonymity off the narrator and removes any obligation for "fair and balanced" reporting. But the narrator must tell the truth as she sees it; it's not fiction.

And the piece is not about the writer, but about whatever the subject may be--a hanging, a baseball game, ghosts, what have you. The writer is there in the background, telling the story, and the writer has feelings and opinions, but the story is about the subject. Gay Talese's work about Frank Sinatra is not about Talese; it's about Sinatra. "The Right Stuff" is not about Tom Wolfe; it's about the astronauts.

Let the debate begin.

Shifting Point of View Within a Scene

An Essay by IWW Admin Dave Swinford

You've elected to tell your story using multiple points of view. So far, you have written each scene or chapter in the POV of a single character, letting the scene breaks or chapter breaks indicate a shift in POV. Now, for various reasons, you want to start the scene in character A's POV and near the middle of the scene, shift the point of view to character B. So, how to accomplish this without confusing or startling the reader?

Simply ending the first section of the scene in character A's POV and starting the next paragraph in character B's POV is usually too abrupt a shift. It may surprise readers and jar them out of the fictional reality you have worked to establish.

As with most craft issues, there is no single best or correct way to shift point of view within a scene, but I have found it helps to signal the shift in a way that logically draws the reader's attention from character A to character B.

I liken it to a relay race. The audience watches the progress of the race by focusing on runner one, who is carrying the baton. When runner one reaches runner two, there is an exchange of the baton, and the audience now knows that runner two is carrying the race.

The simple physical act of passing the baton signaled this shift , and one can employ a similar technique when shifting point of view within a scene.

For example, in the first half of the following scene, character A has been delivering a report to character B. The report has been routine until the last item, which presents an unexpected twist. All of this has been written through the POV of character A, who concludes her report with:

"What do you make of it, sir? I have to admit, I was totally gobsmacked." She leaned forward, not having to fake her interest. She truly wanted to know what the Super thought.

Carson reached and meticulously aligned the papers in the open folder. He knew he was stalling, but he hated having the unexpected lobbed at him, especially when it was followed by a request for his input. It wouldn't do for a superior to admit he had no ready response, so he would do as his own Super had so often done. He would toss the ball back into the junior's court.

"A good, succinct report, Kelly. However, before I offer input on the final item, I feel I need more information. You were on the scene. I was not. Other than being gobsmacked, what was your initial response?"

The eager anticipation in Kelly's eyes vanished like a light being switched off. Clearly, she was taking his response as a criticism or reprimand. Why did female officers have to be so bloody sensitive and take everything so bloody personal? If he were going to offer an intelligent reply, he really did need more information.

The simple action of character B straightening the papers drew the reader's attention and signaled the logical shift into his point of view. Had the paragraph begun with Carson's reaction, "...he really hated having the unexpected lobbed at him, especially when it was followed by a request for his input....", the reader would have been switched from the POV of Kelly to that of Carson without warning, a shift that might have jarred the reader out of the fictional reality. That small bit of action, the aligning of the papers, provided a bridge from one point of view to the other, making the shift feel logical and smooth.

So, if you do want to shift point of view within a scene, one good way to signal that shift is to use a bit of action to draw the reader's attention from POV character A to POV character B. Pass the baton smoothly, and most readers will follow the shift without even thinking about it.

This Week's IWW Practice Workshop Exercise

These exercises were written by IWW members and administrators to provide structured practice opportunities for its members. You are welcome to use them for practice as well. Please mention that you found them at the Internet Writing Workshop. Information about the IWW and all its individual lists can be found on the IWW Home Page.

"Every picture tells a story" (Version 2)
Prepared by: Rheal Nadeau
Posted on: March 8, 2003
Reposted on: January 11, 2004
Reposted on: January 16, 2005
Reposted, revised, on: March 25, 2007

Exercise: In 100 to 300 words or less describe a single moment in time -- a snapshot that tells a story without dialogue or action, but is capable of capturing a revealing moment that evokes an entire story. Use simple descriptive language, and remember to show, not tell.

• Often a scene, a photo, or a drawing, can tell an entire story without any action, words, interpretation, or explanation.
• A walk can reveal a half-eaten orange lying on the ground, a gate hanging from one hinge, or an elderly gentleman standing at the corner of a busy street. An empty house with broken windows, leaves floating in a swimming pool, or an abandoned toy on a side walk--all lend themselves to this exercise.
• With careful attention to detail, help the reader to see that defining moment in time.
• If you include people in the scene, remember to describe the scene as if you were looking at a snapshot.

Critiquing suggestions

What is the single revealing moment you take away from the scene's description?
What part of the writing helped you to see the moment hidden in the picture?

Writing Challenges

Sandra Smith says, "Some of you might find this of interest.

"Look on bottom right and click on writing challenges.

"They're presenting a writing course under the title of book in a year.

"I just saw it, so not sure exactly how it works, but apparently they're doing a section a month, starting with plot. The second one is characterization, and the current one is conflict.

"They also have articles on writing a synopsis, publishing glossary, what proofreader's marks mean, etc.

"Although Harlequin publishes romances, most of this information applies to all genres.

"I am not associated with this site in any way, and will not receive benefit in any form if you should happen to visit it. I'm simply passing along information to those who might be interested in writing/publishing tips."

Sandra writes under the name of Cassandra Barnes, and her latest novel is Jenny's Legacy.

The Joys of Research

The Joys of Research
by Carter Jefferson

This afternoon I visited the Boston Public Library, where a fifty-ish man with a mop of white hair fit for a Dickens movie helped to make my day.

For some time I've been messing around with stories about an Irish woman, in 1886 one of the first "typewriter girls" in Boston. Some of those fictions were subs for exercises for Practice-w; none has been worked over and submitted for publication.

About a year ago, I read a whole slew of histories of women, and of Boston, all of which strongly implied that my stories had to be fairy tales, because no Irish girl could get such a job in Boston at that time -- the heavily Anglo-Saxon ruling class called the Irish trash, and kept them in the most menial positions. No question, those experts were right about the anti-Irish sentiment, and that women in general got very few decent jobs. That sort of cooled my enthusiasm for Katie.

But she kept coming back to mind. I read somewhere that the public library employed a few women at that time, so one day I asked at the welcome desk if the library had records I could look at. The greeter didn't know, but he gave me the phone number of a man he thought could help. A few weeks later I called the number. No answer, so I left a message asking that he call me back, though I considered that unlikely. But in less than an hour there he was, and he told me to go to the microtext room and ask for city records. That's what I did today.

The bushy-haired man not only had the records, he produced a reel of microfilm in only a few minutes, telling me all the while things I already knew about the history of Boston. I had to look at some excellent photos he'd taken of various gravestones in local cemeteries first, but finally, after scrolling through reports of the activities of the police, accounts of the street department's expenses, and the transcript of a long civil suit, I wound up with what the library had reported in 1885.

Six -- count 'em, six! -- of the library's 146 employees were women with Irish names. One was assistant librarian at the North End branch; others had responsible positions. A Miss -- we can be pretty sure she was a "Miss" -- Mary McGrath had worked there since 1868.

So Katie can get a job, if she has the right credentials, and you can be sure she will, for she has a job to do for me.

Morals: Don't believe everything you hear or read, no matter who tells you. And if you want to know something, there's probably a way to find out.