#writerblrg

[davidfarland]

On the door at my gym, someone hung a sign that says, “Motivation is what gets you started. Habit keeps you going.” I began working out regularly over 20 years ago. Since then, I’ve dropped about 75 pounds, and I’ve run or walked something in neighborhood of 22,000 miles. I can’t even imagine how much I’ve lifted in weights. But think about it, if someone had said to me, “Hey, Dave, why don’t you go run 22,000 miles?” it would have taken an awful lot of motivation to get me going. However, it only took a tiny bit of habit. Writing is much the same way. A lot of us try hard to get motivated to write a novel. But writing a novel is a lengthy process. Being motivated doesn’t help much, but developing good writing habits helps a lot. I learned long ago that exercise is hard when you’re starting out. If you run three days, you’ll want to quit at the end of them. That’s when muscle aches and fatigue are the strongest. But if you run for a week, you’ll begin to notice that you feel better on the days that you’ve run. Soon, the day won’t feel complete without some exercise. Writing is much the same. Jumping into a project is hard. Working on a novel for one day doesn’t really get you very far into it. But if you try making it a habit—if you bundle all of that motivation up and say to yourself, “I’m going to write for one hour a day this week,” you’ll find at the end of the week that you just don’t really feel that your day is complete if you haven’t spent some time engaged in creative recreation. With my writing workshops, I generally hold them for a week. I try to motivate my students to write daily during that time, if only for a couple of hours. The goal in part is to teach the writers and get them to develop new skills, but just as importantly, I’m trying to get them into the habit of writing. Quite often it works. I’ve gotten many letters from writers where the writer has said, “Hey, Dave, I got into the habit of writing at your workshop last year, and I’ve just finished my first/second/third/fourth novel!” Whenever I see that, I always feel as if the mission has been accomplished. So here’s the key to become a writer: Use your motivation to create a writing habit. Long after you have run out of motivation, you’ll still be writing.

[davidfarland]

How to Start Publishing a Novel

What makes publishing difficult?

So you have written a book, maybe a novel. How do you start publishing it so readers will be able to find it? And why is it so hard and complicated? Because there is no perfect way in which to hack or game the publishing industry.

Gaming the Publishing Industry

I was at a writing conference last week and noticed that several times I passed groups of writers who were trying to figure out how to “Game the System.”

In case you didn’t know it, every distribution industry tries to set up roadblocks for creators so that they can’t bypass the system. For example, if you were to make a movie and try to go out and distribute it to movie theaters yourself, you’d find that the theaters have contracts with the major distributors that require them to not show your movie. The distributors want to make sure that the huge movies that they’ve invested in advertising are available at all of the usual outlets.

In publishing, we have two different distribution systems.

The traditional publishing industry has its editors, and they have contracts with the bookstores and with the book distribution companies that are designed to keep you from selling your books at bookstores—and these contracts are very effective. If you’ve ever tried to start your own publishing company, you’ll see what I mean. Not only will distributors refuse to distribute your books, but I once struggled for days to get some television and radio companies to advertise a book—but they refused to work with anyone who wasn’t already a major publisher.

In traditional publishing, the publisher typically creates a “list” of books that they want to promote.

The #1 book on the list gets most of the advertising dollars. This might include things like in-store displays, money for cooperative advertising so that the bookstores will place the book on certain shelves with the covers facing out, promotion on radio or television or in magazines or newspapers, and of course money to send the author out on a book tour.

If you’re not #1 on your publisher’s list, you might not get any of these things.

Instead, your book is simply put out there and left to sink or swim on its own merits. Your editor might not even send it out for reviews from critics. And the publisher will actively stop you from doing too much. For example, let’s say that you don’t like the cover that your publisher gives you—either the picture or the typeface. What can you do? You can complain, and you might get some upgrades, but it is the job of the artistic director to make sure that the #1 book of the season gets the best cover and that each month when new books are shipped out, the monthly books look good, but not as good as the anticipated season hit. The reason for this is that the publisher doesn’t want to confuse the buyers.

They don’t want a mediocre book to have a great cover.

So as an author, you may find yourself trying to figure out how to “game the system”. This could include figuring out how to promote the book that your publisher won’t. In doing that, you might begin by advertising on social media. You can send books out to book bloggers, set up your own book signings, create a “book bomb” in order to generate some excitement for your release, and so on. All of that is fine, so long as you remember that the best advertisement for a book is to write another book.

Your current and future fans are always eager to see what you have next in the pipeline.

Indie publishers are often even more eager to game the system. In recent years, Amazon has been working to create a “system” that will reward good books with good reviews and promotion. Indie authors however, always seem to be bent on destroying that system. I’ve seen them buy favorable reviews (spending as much as $10,000 on a package), creating sock-puppets so that they can go online and create their own favorable reviews. They even use them to deride their competition, and of course trade positive reviews with other authors. As a result of such activities—all of which are immoral and some of them even illegal, Amazon has purchased review sites and now blocks reviews that they believe are fake.

In fact, I’ve known several authors who find that if their book does too well, defies expectations that Amazon has set, then their books are simply delisted—taken off of the bestseller lists, and even taken off of Amazon’s sales site.

To be frank, we need our distributors to create a fair and honest system that rewards great work.

How should we as authors handle this problem? I think that we need to promote ourselves in every way that we can, so long as it is honorable and honest. At the same time, put your emphasis where it belongs: On writing powerful works. If you do that, success will come eventually!

***

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[davidfarland]

David Farland’s Writing Tips: Beware of False Suspense

I have a saying, “There are ten thousand right ways to write any story, but there are a million wrong ways to do it.” I use this to point out that lots of things work, but new writers often don’t recognize that some things never work. So let’s talk about one.

“Suspense.” Suspense is a pleasurable state of excitement or anticipation that an audience feels when they engage in a story. Every story should engender some suspense, lest the audience wander away. What is suspense? It’s wondering if your hero will be tough enough to overcome the villain, learn who killed Aunt Edna, or somehow convince Rhoda to tie the knot.

But many new authors try to generate “False Suspense.” They try to create mysteries where there should be none.

It’s a technique that you’ve seen a thousand times in films. You know: it’s a misty evening and a mysterious figure is glimpsed walking along a cobblestone street in old London. The viewer is left to wonder if this is a killer on the prowl, or perhaps another victim. We see the person’s feet, the back of a cloak, a dagger protruding from a voluminous sleeve. Eventually the camera pulls back to reveal, at just the right instant, our heroine—a determined young woman—out hunting for Jack the Ripper.

The technique works in film, but so often it is too clumsy in novels. For example, I’ve seen stories where the author tries to hide the age, sex, and name of her viewpoint character. How wrong-headed is that? I mean, when you’ve got a viewpoint character, you’re seeing the story through that person’s eyes. The protagonists know who she is, what her gender is, and even how much change she has in her pockets among the lint.

The author in this case is trying to create what we call a “reveal” in Hollywood—a moment where the audience gasps in surprise. But hiding a viewpoint character’s name is just dumb. No one is going to gasp in surprise because her name is Sarah, or she’s female. You’ve got to pick pivotal moments to put in reveals.

In the same way, I’ve seen authors try to hide their settings, so that you don’t know if the story is set in New York or Singapore. Or maybe they’ll try to hide their main conflicts, so that you don’t know if this is a domestic thriller or a romance—all vital information the reader needs to engage in the story.

When we’re young and inexperienced, stories can be confusing anyway. As an eight-year-old, our vocabulary is often small or just different from the author’s, so we don’t understand some of the words. Even if we’ve heard a word hundreds, we might not recognize it in print. After all, spelling conventions in English are confusing.

As young readers, we are also hampered by the fact that we might not understand storytelling conventions. You probably don’t remember this, but as a kid, when you first read dialog, you really had a difficult time trying to separate it from narrative or description.

So if you’re a young reader, it can be difficult to get into the author’s world, to feel it come alive. Naturally, you might feel the author is being coy, withholding information.

Even if the author isn’t being coy, they just might be bad. In short, you’ve read stories by many authors who don’t know very well how to bring a story to life. Even good authors become inattentive and fail to properly guide the reader through their fictive universes.

Let me put this clearly: The author’s job is not to withhold mundane information, but to convey it. Your job isn’t to deprive the reader of story elements, but to create a powerful illusion of reality, a shared dream that the reader can easily enter into.

Sure, you as a writer may need to hook the reader by withholding some information. You might open a story with something like, “In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.” Now, Tolkien knew that the audience would wonder, “What’s a hobbit?” So he playfully begins to describe the hole instead. He tells us that it wasn’t a wet hole full of a sour smell and the ends of old dead worms, nor was it dry and sandy with nothing to sit on or eat at. “It was a hobbit hole—and that means comfort.”

In short, he creates a little mystery and starts circling toward it. Notice that as a narrator, he’s acting the part of an outside storyteller. He’s not revealing the story through the eyes of Bilbo Baggins—not yet. Instead, he’s slowly revealing what a hobbit is, and he keeps the reader squirming on his hook.

Now, there are some mysteries that the author can’t reveal. If you’re starting out a murder mystery, you might not want to tell us in the first paragraph “who done it.” That would ruin the mystery. But there are exceptions. You could tell us whodunnit, but withhold the information on why they did it, or how.

So the central information in a mystery is often parsed out slowly.

But you need to learn what to withhold and when. If you withhold trivial information, you’ll just infuriate readers!

Don’t “create false tension.”

It’s a cheap trick. Instead, in your opening, create a genuine conflict for your character and let the tension arise naturally.

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.” ―Toni Morrison

This week at Apex, we have New York Times Bestselling fantasy author Tracy Hickman speaking to us on Saturday morning.

Nov. 24, Julie Czerneda;

Nov. 28, Mauli "Junior" Bonner;

Dec. 1, Beth Meacham.

[davidfarland]

David Farland’s Writing Tips—Writing the “Big” Book

When you look at novels carefully, you will notice that the bestselling books of all time are usually big “doorstoppers.” In each genre, we see this pattern.

When the novel Dune was published, it was rejected by every publisher in the business until a company that sold engine books illustrating engine parts (so that you could easily order parts for repairs) decided to publish the novel. It became the bestselling science fiction novel of all time.

A Tale of Two Cities was rejected by so many publishers, the author finally published it himself with the help of an investor—and it became the bestselling mainstream book in English for the next 150 years.

With Harry Potter, the twelve largest publishers in the world rejected it because it was “too big” for Middle Grade readers. It has since gone on to sell 500 million copies and become the bestselling Middle Grade novel of all time.

Yet as authors, we are told over and over again to write skinnier novels. My editor at Tor used to try to cut every novel down to under 130,000 words. I like to write them a bit closer to 200,000.

I’ve heard several reasons why we should write skinny novels.

Publishers complain that paper costs are usually steep enough so that if you have too many pages, it’s hard to get customers to pay the higher price required for a big book. I recall one publisher complaining of a bestselling novel by Robert Jordan—“We’re selling millions of them, but we are wondering if we’re losing money on every book we sell, with today’s paper prices being so high.”

One editor pointed out that with fat books, there are only a couple of binderies in the US that can handle a book that holds over 400 pages, so they are tougher to make. Indeed, with mass-market paperbacks, we didn’t have glue that would bind 600-page books together until the mid-1980s.

Booksellers like Barnes & Noble often complained to publishers that fat books were unprofitable because they took up so much space on the racks. In fact, the US’s largest bookseller warned publishers that they would refuse to take fat books if the publishers kept printing them.

Yet people keep reading fat books. Indeed, I remember as a teen browsing through bookshelves at store, checking the spines, and rejecting many a highly lauded book just because they looked too darned thin for my tastes.

When I read, I used to think, I wanted to feast on a big book, and thin books left me feeling unsatisfied.

I used to suspect that the reason we like fat books had to do with their power to transport us. The most popular books tend to transport us to another time and another place. Writing about settings well takes a lot of space.

But creating vivid settings is only part of goal. We as readers want powerful stories told within those vivid settings. In other words, there was something about the plot of the story that made the longer books appealing to me.

Now I recognize that there are storytelling techniques that I like that require multiple storylines to be woven together at the same time. By keeping three or four storylines in play, an author can drive the reader into a deep state of hypnosis (the Theta state), where stories come to life more vividly than a lighter tale allows.

So, as writers we have a quandary. Do we write the huge fat books that readers love, or do we write the thin books that publishers and distributors want to stack deep on the shelves?

Or, is there a middle ground? When Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings, he intentionally wrote a “long book.” I believe that he understood the effect that he was trying to achieve. In the 1950s, he taught a class at Oxford where he discussed the importance of telling stories from multiple narrators so that an author could create a “dreamlike state” as quickly as possible.

So when he wrote LOTR, he imagined it as one huge novel. He typed it up and sent it to his publisher in an orange crate because, back then, orange crates were made of wood and were sturdy enough to hold his 2000-page manuscript.

The publisher looked at it and declared it an “act of genius,” but worried that they’d lose money on it.

So they broke it into three pieces and sold it as a “trilogy". Suddenly, authors could write longer narratives so long as we kept them in a series.

That means that you can write a sprawling story, but you almost need to devise breaking points in the story every 130,000 words to make it easy and profitable for publishers.

Or, you can just plan to publish an e-book, where printing and binding don’t matter. A survey on Amazon a couple of years ago found that in the long run, even in e-books, it’s the long books that tend to sell the best.

318R Workshop

From 1999 to 2002, David Farland taught a popular science fiction and fantasy writing class at Brigham Young University. Some of his students from those classes went on and made millions. Brandon Sanderson took it twice, and has become one of the bestselling writers of our time. Dan Wells also took it, and became one of the bestselling writes of dark fantasy of the past three decades. Stephenie Meyer took it, and has sold over 100 million copies of her Twilight trilogy.

Now, just for the fun of it, Dave is going to teach the class online. His new workshop, "318R" will feature much of the same content, only it will be better, because as Dave put is, "I've learned a lot."

It will also have the same assignments that Dave used. Each participant will be asked to write either three short stories or three chapters to a novel for critique.

The class will be limited to 20 people, and will be taught live on Saturday mornings from 10:00 to 11:00 AM MST. We'll have a total of 30 classes. They'll be taped, so if you miss one, you can watch the tape, even repeat it if you like. Seriously, this will take seven months.

But wait, there is more! In the classes at BYU, many students came to "audit" the class. They weren't required to take the tests or turn in assignments, but were encouraged to participate in the classes, and since their work wasn't critiqued, they only paid half price. So, we'll have twenty students who will get the whole "318R experience," but others will be allowed to sit in, ask questions, learn, and have fun. We'll begin on Jan 2, just in time for the New Year, and we will finish up in August.

The price for taking the class will be $360. The price for auditing will be $180.

If you're interested in attending, please send an email to davidfarland1@gmail.com with the word 318R in the subject header.

[davidfarland]

318R Writing Class by David Farland

From 1999 to 2002, David Farland taught a popular science fiction and fantasy writing class at Brigham Young University. Some of his students from those classes went on to make millions. Brandon Sanderson took it twice and has become one of the bestselling writers of our time. Dan Wells also took it, and he became one of the bestselling writers of dark fantasy of the past three decades. Stephenie Meyer took it and asked in a private consultation “How do I write the bestselling young adult novel of all time?” The book she devised has sold over 100 million copies in 37 different languages.

Now, just for the fun of it, Dave is going to teach the class online. His new workshop, "318R" will feature much of the same content, only it will be better, because, as Dave put it, "I've learned a lot."

It will have the same assignments that Dave used. Each participant will be asked to write either three short stories or three chapters to a novel for critique. Those who take the full class will receive feedback from Dave.

There will be 2 Classes. Each full class will be limited to 20 people, and will be taught live on Saturday mornings from 10:00 to 11:00 AM MST or 6:00 to 7:00 MST.

We'll have a total of 30 classes. They'll be taped, so if you miss one, you can watch the tape, even repeat it if you like. Seriously, this will take seven months.

But wait, there is more! In the classes at BYU, many students came to "audit" the class. They weren't required to take the tests or turn in assignments, but were encouraged to participate in the classes, and since their work wasn't critiqued, they only paid half price.

So, we'll have twenty students who will get the whole "318R experience," but others will be allowed to sit in, ask questions, learn, and have fun.  You can just hang out and learn, without any stress.

Each class will begin with a lecture, and I will have four quizzes, and a couple of shorter assignments, too. So, I might ask you for example to create a character sheet for a single character, or to read a story so that you can understand a certain principle.  But these assignments won't take more than a couple of hours per week, and we won’t have them on most weeks.

We will divide you into critique groups for assignments so that you will have three other people whose work you will need to critique. You'll also have "brainstorming" groups.

We'll begin on Jan 2, just in time for the New Year, and we will finish up in August.

The price for taking the class will be $360. The price for auditing will be $180.

Topics Covered:

The class curriculum will be solidified in January, but we’ll cover a wide range of information on writing, publishing, and marketing books.

The first class, “You can earn a living as a writer", explains how writers make a living in this business and also tells why most of them fail.

We’ll then move in week two to “Writing formed stories,” where I’ll explain the difference between short stories, novels, and epics—and give tips on how to write each well.

We’ll then move into classes on worldbuilding, characterization, developing your conflicts for books, and plotting novels—from simple short novels to epics.

We’ll then move into exercise on how to write completely immersive fiction that involves all of the senses.

From there, we’ll talk about how to submit novels for publication, and go into techniques for marketing your books.

We’ll then branch out into how to sell ancillary rights to your intellectual properties, including audiobooks, electronic book rights, videogames and film—both movies and television series

There’s a reason why the lecture time on this is 30 hours!

I hope you join us. Over the years I’ve had dozens of writers say, “I wish I could have been in that 318R class.” Well, now you can, but I can’t guarantee that I’ll be doing this again.

If you're interested in attending, please send an email to davidfarland1@gmail.com with the word 318R in the subject header and tell us if you'd like to enroll in the 10am or 7pm MST Class.

Or Reserve Your Access Now at: https://mystorydoctor.com/318r-writing-workshop/

Happy Holidays!

[davidfarland]

Apex Writer Special Call

This Saturday at 8:00 AM MST. I will be interviewing Tracy Hickman on Apex. Join live and be part of the call! Also,

At Apex-Writers we have Will Wight speaking to us tonight at 7:00pm MST, Nov. 17, 2020.

We also have Tracy Hickman on Nov. 21;

Julie Czerneda on Nov. 24;

Beth Meacham on Dec. 1; and

Stacy Demanski on Dec. 5.

Sign up to join us. https://www.apex-writers.com/

[davidfarland]

This Saturday at 8:00 AM MST. I will be interviewing Tracy Hickman on Apex. Join live and be part of the call! Also,

At Apex-Writers we have Will Wight speaking to us tonight at 7:00pm MST, Nov. 17, 2020.

We also have Tracy Hickman on Nov. 21;

Julie Czerneda on Nov. 24;

Beth Meacham on Dec. 1; and

Stacy Demanski on Dec. 5.

Sign up to join us. https://www.apex-writers.com/