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.

Rewrote the police scene, and it’s taking the story different places.

That’s the thing with changes like this. If you don’t re-write as you go, you take the story down one path, but the re-write takes it somewhere else. The more you keep writing on the original, the more re-writing you do at the end.

Sometimes, when you get to the end on the original plotline you can’t be bothered doing the rewrite. It’s gone too far.

I’m not sure how much of draft two we’ll have left when we finish draft three. I forsee large chunks being omitted.

This draft is already a much better story.

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.

Over at Pro-Blogger, Darren Prowse’s group writing project for December is Reviews and Predictions—looking back over last year or making predictions for next year in your personal blogging niche. I thought I might enter. Here’s mine.

My prediction—we will have a better chance of being published next year, and here’s why.

Calder plays online computer games. (We actually started a blog about it, but found we couldn’t keep up with all the blogging, so sadly, that one dropped by the wayside.) She mostly plays Runescape. She found, when she started, that a lot of people were extremely helpful. They gave advice, they gave her stuff, even went with her to show her how to do things. Now she’s an old-timer (I think the term is no longer a noob), she does the same for other people. As she says, people were decent enough to help her when she had no idea, it’s up to her to pass that on.

The fiction writer’s blogging community is a lot like that.

People help each other. They swap information, they share experiences. Not only that, people in the industry pass on valuable advice to us ‘noobs’, advice we can use to further our chances of attaining that ultimate goal—becoming published.

Take query letters for example. You can’t sell a book if you can’t write a good query, and a good query needs a hook. Yet most of us can’t write them.

We know what our story is about, we think it’s good, but can we describe it well enough to hook the agent who is reading the query? No.

The best way to learn what makes a good query is to compare what works with what doesn’t. The Crapstravaganza (Crapometer IV) that Miss Snark is running at present does exactly that. 700+ hooks from aspiring writing, designed to show what works for her as an agent, and what doesn’t. She’s up to 160, and less than 10% have made the grade. Believe me, it works. Seeing the bad hooks, interspersed with the occasional good one, really makes a difference. I know I am going to come away from this with a better query for Potion, and a better one for Barrain if it’s ever good enough to send it out. We’ve come a long way from the cringe-inducing days of the first draft of Barrain and the query for it that we sent off to Wizards of the Coast.

Miss Snark isn’t the only agent to comment on queries (but the Crapometer is far and away the most outstanding). She isn’t the only agent to blog.

Most agents don’t get much out of blogging, relatively speaking. A little publicity, potential for better clients in future. Given that she’s anonymous, Miss Snark doesn’t even get that. The agents do it to help others, and to share information. One agent—and I can’t find the quote sorry, or I’d attribute it to her—said that she blogs to help others, because so many people helped her when she was starting out.

Sound familiar?

One day we hope to be published authors. Whether we ever are or not, I like to think that other people reading our blog might find some value. They can take heart at some of the things we share—like just how bad a first draft can be, but if you believe in the story you can fix it; like how two people with totally different ideas can write together and make it work.

We’ll get there, with the help of the blogging community.

I envy those people whose voice comes across so strongly in non-fiction writing.

I recently re-read Holly Lisle’s “Mugging the Muse—Writing Fiction for Love and Money“. This is a woman who packs valuable advice about writing into a package that also puts across, among other things, her angst at a failed marriage and her determination to succeed.

Read Lisle’s writing diary. It, too, is strong, powerful writing.

Kathy Sierra, one of the writers over at “Creating Passionate Users“, is another one who writes non-fiction with passion and personality.

Calder has a stronger personal writing voice than I do.  The funny thing is, when I edit her work I tone down the voice. I don’t know if this is poor editing on my behalf, or just so many years of technical writing training me to take out unnecessary extras.

Not that technical writing has to be boring, mind you, as the Passionate Users people show, but a strong voice in writing is often very personal, and few businesses like personal in their content.  They may also have multiple writers, and it’s hard for one person to write in the personal style of another.

In a way, I suppose, ‘corporate impersonal’ is just another voice, and I have trained myself to write in this voice for the last 15 years.

Does the voice you write with in non-fiction carry across to your fiction?  Can someone who has read your non-fiction pick up a novel and recognise that you wrote it?

For Holly Lisle I would say, definitely yes. Read Sympathy For The Devil. I think the same voice that came out so strongly in Mugging the Muse comes out here as well.

Even though I can’t see it, Calder says a recognisable voice comes out in our writing too.

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 »

We have talked a bit about how we edit our manuscripts, but it’s always fascinating to find out how other people do it.

Most people do similar things, but not necessarily in the same order.

Blair, in reply to a question on the Scripts message board on the Wordplayer site, tells how he checks for spelling, plot and characterisation, first. He fixes these and then sends his script off to industry people he respects. Very similar, by the sound of it, to the way we do it.

Barbara W. Klaser completely re-wrote her second draft, even changing point-of-view characters. We’ve done that before. Quite dramatic changes can happen.

Although it’s more about fixing your story than about More Better Writing, Part 2, Christopher Meeks gives some good advice about fixing your writing in general. I particularly like the way he says

“There is no bad first draft… First drafts are for you alone, a place where you allow yourself to make mistakes while you let your creativity flow.”

Christopher Meeks, More Better Writing, Part 2.