I’m sorry to hear that Miss Snark is putting away the blogging pen.

Her site was useful and entertaining, and she dispensed a lot of good advice to unpublished writers out here in net space. I have a special fondness for the Crapometers, particularly the last one.

If you have been reading the same sites I have, you will notice that as a writer, eventually you will need some sort of presence on the web.

It seems that even for an unpublished writer trying to get an agent a place on the web is a good thing.

Be warned, however, that a bad web presence can often be worse than no presence at all, so if you are going to do it, you must make an effort.

For a writer, this includes:

• A site that looks professional.  A gaudy site with lots of flashing things on it is the equivalent to turning up to a business meeting in a tatty old track suit
• A site that has few or no typos, spelling or grammatical errors. We all make these, it’s just that as writers people expect us to have less (or preferably none).  We need to be more diligent.
• A web site that is up-to-date.  Even if your website does not include date specific information, ensure it still looks topical by keeping the copyright notice current and removing obsolete references or dead pages.

Despite all this, you decide to go ahead.  What else do you need to think about?

• Cost—Do you want to pay for your own web site or do you want to use something free, such as Blogger, My Space or Live Journal?
• Can you afford, or even do you want, to pay to have your web designed
• How much time can you afford to maintain it?
• How much effort do you want to spend on it?

All these questions need to be considered when thinking about a web presence.

Even if you don’t want a web presence yet, at least think about buying your author domain name.  (We own www.rowandai.com.) It’s relatively inexpensive, and you don’t have to do anything with it, it just saves it for when you do need it.

I am currently reading Jared Diamond’s “Collapse“, subtitled “How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive“.

If you write fantasy or science fiction and want to build worlds, this is another book I recommend.

Collapse talks about the impact of climate change, environment, friendly/hostile neighbours and how society responds to these first four problems.  The way it responds then determines whether that society survives or fails.

The world we created in Shared Memories was devastated by a war 40 years previously.  In that war the people in our story lost their ability to produce energy, lost immediate access to major food supplies, and lost most of their healers. 

The population crashed.

When we wrote it I wanted the population to drop by 80%.  Calder convinced me it would be more like 50%.  I eventually came around to her way of thinking, but after reading Collapse I’m starting to think that an 80% drop in 40 years is still possible.

We’ll stick at 50% though, because to drop 80% the world would need to be a closed system, with no outside contact at all.

Our world—Roland’s world—did have external vistors and contact with others, albeit slowly.

The great thing about books like Collapse is that they show you how other factors, not just politics, influence a society, and make it survive or fail.  As writers we often focus on the politics and omit the rest.

Here are some of the other factors we should be considering.

I have mentioned before what I think about writing courses, and how my experience to date with universities hasn’t been much good.

Calder started a part-time writing course at the local TAFE this term.  From what she has told me, it sounds pretty good.

She chose three subjects:

• Writing and editing
• Photography for writers
• Web design.

She had her first classes last week.

In ‘Photography for writers’ she learns how to use a camera and take photos for articles.  She also has to write the articles that go with the photographs.  They will be marked on the article as well as on the photography.  After all, this is a professional writing course.

Likewise with ’Web design’.  Here they are asked to create web pages, and put content on them. Again, they will be marked not just on their ability to create the web pages, but on the content they include.  After all, this is a professional writing course.

So far, I’m impressed.

I had a lot of fun participating in ProBlogger’s group writing project. Got some pingbacks to my site, too, and I’d like to ping everyone who pinged me back, but … I can’t get you all in sorry. This blog is dedicated to writing, and the posts must have some writing content. Maybe next time I’ll talk Calder into posting on The Loneliness of the Home Trader, or on her tax blog.

Here are some writers who participated

I know all bloggers write, but I’m talking fiction writing here, mostly novelists. I also chose only those people whose blog seemed dedicated to writing, rather than just had writing among other topics. I started out with good intentions, and was going to visit all 282 blogs. But after I realised I was still on day one, and would be here for hours (and hours) more, I just picked on the blogs that sounded to be obviously about writing, or that I couldn’t guess what they might be about.

• Designs for the Future by James
• This Year; Next Year by sbpoet
• My ball wonders… how bout yours? by Rashenbo
• A Writer’s Reflections by Karen
• A Writer’s First by Leo

If you’re a writer and I have left you out, please forgive me and drop me a line, and I’ll add your blog to the list.

Titles I could see as novels

• Saving the Planet One Lunch Break at a Time by Lorna
• One Hundred Footsteps by Beth.

Almost everyone who uses the web has favourite sites. I’m like most people. Here are my personal top five writing sites for 2006. The sites I visited time and again.

Wordplay

This is probably my favourite writing site. Terry Rossio, one half of the Ted Elliot/Terry Rossio writing partnership, has written a great series of practical articles on writing and selling scripts. Sometimes Ted chips in too. There’s also a forum discussing movies, and one dispensing advice on scriptwriting. I often re-read the articles on this site.

Ted and Terry are the writers behind Shrek, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Mask of Zorro.

This is not a beginners site. If you go onto the forums and say, “I’ve decided to become a screenwriter, because I’ve heard you can make lots of money from it,” you’re liable to be told—politely of course—by other members of the forum to go away and write something, and learn some more. Many of the people on this site are already in the business. It’s the place to go if your agent sets up an appointment for you to pitch your screenplay, if you have a tecnical question about your script, and so on.

You might think that as a novelist, a screenwriting site has nothing to teach you, but if you can’t get something to improve your writing career out of the articles here then you are truly remarkable, or you are kidding yourself.

The site has been down for the last two weeks. I don’t know what the problem is.

Miss Snark blog

I’ve been blogging about Miss Snark for a couple of months now. This woman is a practising literary agent and gives good general advice about submitting to agents, writing query letters, mistakes to avoid and so on. But her piece de resistance is the Crapometer, which really goes into what she, as an agent, looks for in the query letter or hook, and dissects those sent in by readers of the blog.

She has run four of these to date, and if you don’t write a better query letter after reading these I’d be really surprised.

A fantastic service to writers.

C. J. Cherryh

C. J. Cherryh is a published author. She writes a progress report that I read on a regular basis.

There’s not a lot about writing, mostly a word count and the occasional comments on how the novel is going. I find it interesting because it shows just how ‘normal’ a writer’s life is.

Creating Passionate Users

Another site I re-read, particularly the Kathy Sierra articles.

I’m a technical writer. I love it when I come across other technical writers who write strongly, and with passion about technical writing.

Some personal favourites:

• Code Like a Girl
• Conversational writing kicks formal writing’s ass
• You ARE a marketer, deal with it
• Better beginnings: How to start a book, presentation or article
• Two simple words of passion (my personal favourite, with a nod to Kevin Broidy at Seattleduck, which prompted Kathy’s article).

The posts are worth looking at for the graphics alone. They’re mostly 50’s style photographs with talking bubbles and they go so cleverly with the associated articles.

Publishers Marketplace

This is the first place I look for agent information, or even if I’m just browsing about writing in general.

I waste a lot of time just browsing, but also pop in for the occasional serious research—like finding out whether an agent is appropriate to query, and the agent’s website and/or address. I also find a lot of new writers/agents blogs this way.

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I have been following the Rejecter’s disillusionment with her MFA (here, and here) with interest, because I went through a similar thing when I did a Master of Arts in Professional Writing.

With one exception, my course was a waste of time. Sometimes it seemed that the only thing I learned (outside of that one exception) was that if you wish to write commercially, don’t go to university.

Why not?

Because many of university lecturers have no experience outside academia. They have no idea of what is commercial, and by commercial here I mean business writing as well as fiction.

The one exception was the professor who taught screenwriting. He had been a screenwriter for 30 years before he took up teaching, and it showed in what he taught and how he taught it. 

I learned more about screenwriting from him in one semester than I did in the rest of the course.

Sadly, he died in my first year (vale Peter, you were fantastic). The new screenwriting professor had spent his life in academia, and it showed.

The individual professors I had were lovely people, I might add, but they really needed some practical experience if the real world about what they were teaching.

My experience was not unique, as the Rejecter’s blog shows, but others have done such courses and got real value out of them.

Interestingly enough, the university I originally contacted to do my MA recommended I try elsewhere, as they didn’t have anyone on the faculty who wrote in the genre I like to work in.

So what makes a good writing course?

Read the rest of this entry »

It takes a lot of work and a long time to finish a novel.  I have heard it gets faster (months rather than years), but it’s still a lot of work.  Some days you are overcome with enthusiasm and can write forever.  Other days all you want to do is throw the whole thing in. How do you maintain the enthusiasm over the months—years—that it takes?

There are lots of techniques people use to keep writing.

Writing with a partner has to rank as one of the best techniques I know.

Other people join writers’ circles or critiquing groups. The continued stimulation of having to produce for the group keeps them on track, and being around other people who are doing the same things you are (writing a novel) adds extra encouragement.

Deadlines help. If you are lucky enough to have a contract to fulfil and a date to deliver to you might have other stress-related problems, but you definitely have a reason to write. As the famous quote goes, “Nothing concentrates the mind quite so well as a deadline.”

But what if you are a solitary writer, trying to hold down a full-time job, balancing life and family, trying to find time to write. How do you keep writing? How do you maintain the enthusiasm.

Nowadays, many people turn to the internet.

The web is a great tool. It allows you to reach out and talk to other people like yourself. You may be the only person you know writing a novel, but you can find dozens of them online.

How do you find these sites?  Here are some suggestions:

• Use a search engine like Google to start with.  Search on every logical word you can think of.
• Read blogs like this and follow the links. The links in the blog posts themselves, and the links on the sidebar. That’s how I get many of my favourite sites.
• Look up your favourite authors, see if they have sites, and check out any links they include
• Look up the big book publishing sites. They often have links and forums.

That’s just a start.

This allows you to join the web writing community.  The important thing is to not let it take over your life, so that you spend so much time with the community your writing loses out.

It’s nervewracking the first time you put your writing in front of someone else.

What you need from that first person is a balanced analysis of your work. What you want (and expect) is praise.

When you are looking for praise, the last thing you want is an honest assessment of your story. Any negative comments are taken personally—as criticisms against you, rather than against your story.

You defend yourself—your story—rather than listen to the feedback.

If you want honest critiques of your story, get over the initial hurdle of your ego. Otherwise it’s a waste of time asking for critiques.

If you ask for feedback, accept it graciously, or don’t bother asking for it at all.

On-line writing forums are great, but if you don’t manage them carefully they can become a black hole that absorbs all your writing energy, leaving you no time for writing.

I know from personal experience.

Some danger signs, and how to avoid them.

Logging on to the forum before you do any writing

I used to do this to get into the mood for writing, and for a while it worked. But then I found I was spending so much time on the forums I had no time left to write.

Nowadays, I do my writing first and visit the forums later—if I’m not too busy writing to bother.

If I ever do pop into a forum before I start, I watch the clock, and try to get out within the hour.

The dead end relationship

Any forum loses members through natural attrition. People drop out, or get other interests.

In my experience a forum that has shrunk to a dozen or less active members, all of whom know each other intimately (on the web, at least), and whose posts can really only be understood by the other regular posters, is not worth it.

If you find that you are one of those last half-dozen posters on a site, and that it has become a general purpose chat session rather than specifically about writing, maybe it is time to jump ship.

Most forums have a finite life. Sometimes it’s kinder to let a dead forum go than to hang on to the bitter end. (The bitter end being when the person hosting the forum pulls the plug.)

If you really like the people in the forum, then by all means keep in touch, but if you’re in it for the writing don’t hang around simply out of loyalty.

The too scared to post forum

Everyone should lurk a little in a forum before they post.

Like any other social setting you need to know the do’s and don’ts before you start blasting away with your own opinion. 

Once you know the etiquette, however, you shouldn’t be afraid to contribute.

If everything you post gets savaged, find another forum. You are not doing yourself or your writing any favours by sticking around.

(Inappropriate posting is a totally different matter—worthy of a whole subject to itself. I am amazed at the number of writers who ask people to review their work, for example, on forums that clearly state they do not do this.)

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Used properly, online writing forums can be a great tool for a writer, but choose your forum carefully and beware of the traps mentioned above.