An Author and the Lingo - Matt moore - Biggest 'Aha' Moments in Writing

For an aspiring writer, finding a publisher can be more frustrating than writing the novel. But the problem might not be your novel, but your presentation.

Writing is an art, but publishing is a business. The better you understand this business, the better your chances of being published. After all, publishers are looking for both quality work and authors they can work with.

So what can you do?

First, bury your ego. Never think you're so good that you don't need to follow the—formal or informal—rules. There are plenty of great writers out there. The ones who follow the rules get published. The prima donnas complain no one appreciates their brilliance and that's why they're unpublished.

Attend conventions where publishers and editors will be. Go to their panels. Listen to their advice, their frustration, their experience. Vow to never do the things that make them angry.

If you have a chance, talk to them. Introduce yourself as a writer and ask what writers should do to make the publisher's job easier. You'll learn a lot. But don't use this as a lead-in to pitch your novel. In fact, if you begin with "Don't worry, I'm not here to pitch my novel" you'll put them at ease.

If you do meet a publisher you want to pitch your novel to, ask permission: "Do you mind if I pitch my novel?" or "Are you hearing novel pitches?" If a publisher says no, that's the end of it. Don't then ask if you can just "describe" your novel.

Understand how to pitch a novel. A 10-minute ramble about how your parents encouraged you to write and how a character is based on your best friend shouldn't be in a pitch. Google "elevator pitch". Rehearse it in the mirror. Be able to deliver it at a moment's notice.

Never finish your pitch with "Is that something you're interested in?" You should already know, either through your research before the convention or asking the publisher what they publish. (Side note: Most publisher are happy to talk about their business, their authors and the work they publish.) And if the publisher is interested, they will let you know.

Never tell a publisher to check out samples of your work and contact you if they're interested. Publishers are already swimming in submissions. Instead, check out the publisher's work and if they publish what you write, submit to them.

Follow submissions guidelines exactly. Submit your manuscript in Comic Sans? Do it. Ideas for cover art? Send them. Some guidelines include unusual requirements just to prove you read them.

Learn publishing lingo. For example, you submit a "manuscript", not a "book". Know what these means: "unsolicited submissions", "line edits", "slush", "standard manuscript format", etc.

Overall, publishers want authors they can work with. If you show you know how the industry works, you'll be more successful.

Matt Moore is a horror and science fiction writer who believes good speculative fiction can both thrill and make you think. His columns and short fiction have appeared in print, electronic and audio markets including On Spec, AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, Leading Edge, Cast Macabre, Torn Realities and the Tesseracts anthologies. His novelette Silverman's Game was published by Damnation Books in 2010. He's a two-time Aurora Award nominee, Friends of the Merrill finalist, frequent panelist and presenter, Communications Director for ChiZine Publications, and Chair of the Ottawa Chiaroscuro Reading Series.

He lives in Ottawa, Ontario. Find out more here.

Creativity Without Walls - Ellie Soderstrom - Biggest Aha Moments in Writing

When I first heard "plot and structure" I pictured chains and walls and a moat with some alligators swimming in it. I was thinking that my creativity would be bound and gagged and made to stick to a plot as predictable as every episode of Murder, She Wrote.

But then I read James Scott Bell's Plot and Structure, and it was like a bright light shone into my soul and showed me the way to create a good story. I realized that by following a 7-step structure (structure can be anywhere from 3-96 plot points) it actually released my creativity. Instead of using my creativity to change the structure and mess with things that shouldn't be messed with, I was pouring my creativity into such things as characters, settings, witty dialogue, prose, and clothing choices.

I also noticed that all my favorite stories followed a structure. Some are looser than others, but all of them have it. Picture the movie Memento, for instance. It's incredibly creative, and since it shows the story backwards you'd think that structure was thrown out the window. But it is actually one of the strictest story structures I've ever seen. 

So I urge you to play around with linear storytelling, but give your character an arc. Mess with time travel all you want but introduce the rise and fall of the antagonist. And you can have your protag locked in chains inside a moat with some alligators for the entirety of the book, but please...follow some plot points as you do it.

Rules of Writing - Graham Masterton - Biggest Aha Moments in Writing

Graham Masterton is a very busy man and a terrific writer. Luckily for us, he has offered up his entire selection of short articles, which he dubs 'Rules of Writing.' Here are a few of those articles, just to wet your appetite:

THE MIRROR METHOD: One of the best tips is to have a mirror on your desk next to your PC. When a character is about to say or do anything, try to duplicate their expression in the mirror. You may find that they do not actually have to say anything ... you simply have to describe how they look. I learned this from Ward Kimball who used to draw Donald Duck cartoons at Disney.

EDITING: Every morning when I start work I read what I've written yesterday and correct it and refine it. Even a change of one word can make an enormous difference to the impact of a scene.

The fine-tuning is all part of the fun. You just have to read what you've written and decide if it flows, if it contributes to the development of the plot and the characters and the general atmosphere ... and wherever it doesn't, alter it. For instance, Harry Erskine has just sat down in a white leather armchair behind a pillar in the lobby of a swish Miami hotel (the Delano) to talk to Amelia on his cell. But I didn't like white leather, I preferred light green leather because it is more unusual and distinctive and lends character to the scene. Cut pillar because we don't really need it. A cocktail waitress in a white designer uniform with gilt buttons comes up while he's talking and asks him if he wants anything from the bar. Cut cocktail because it's redundant. Cut designer because it's obvious in that kind of hotel. Argue about the necessity of gilt buttons (may cut these later, but like the toy-soldier uniform effect). Harry asks for a beer because he's a cheapskate. But then that's too cheap even for him, and he's trying to impress. He asks for a Nagayama Sunset even though it's $18 a hit. But he doesn't want to appear too serious about it, so he asks for a Nagayama Sunset 'but go easy on the nagayamas.'

Think constantly about what helps the story and what hinders it. At all costs avoid interrupting the reader's flow - so don't use unnecessarily obscure words or awkward sentence constructions. But you are allowed to relax with your language. 'She walked around looking as if everything she experienced was like, what?' expression.

IDIOM: Idiom is always one of the greatest challenges when one is writing about characters who live in a different country from one's own. I tend to set my novels in the United States because international audiences are familiar and comfortable with US settings, having seen them so often in movies and TV ... and of course the potential readership is much bigger than, say, the Isle of Wight. Of course there are thousands of different idioms throughout the US. The word 'berm' for instance, for the grassy strip seperating the two carriageways of a highway. In some parts of Philadelphia they don't water their lawns, they 'spritz' them. In Cincinnati they call soda 'pop' ... the same as in Britain. They also call pork 'city chicken.' In some southern states, couches are still called sofas. When I was writing A Terrible Beauty, set in Cork, Ireland, I had my friends at the local pub read all the dialogue to make sure I hadn't made any egregious errors.

LESSON ONE: Don't write, talk, and use your natural voice, as if you were telling the story out loud to a group of friends. If there is a knack to writing it is to tell a story without consciously 'writing' about it. So many amateur writers have a good tale to tell, but are too concerned about making an impression on the page. Forget the fancy similes and the impressive metaphors, just tell it like it is. But do learn your grammar, syntax, spelling, etc, otherwise your amateur status will really show. Just like a motor mechanic's amateur status would show if he or she didn't know how to fix an alternator.

Graham also offers a number of lessons, the first three of which I have posted below.

LESSON TWO: Don't describe, be there. Create a virtual world inside your head with weather, wind, noises, background music, smells and tastes. Forget about your PC ... let it melt and walk through it.

LESSON THREE: Never use cliches (except in dialogue where a character might reasonably be expected to talk in cliches). I recently read a new horror novel by quite a respected writer (well, bits of it, anyway) and he described total darkness by saying 'not even my hand in front of my face ... only darkness in its inky totality.' I mean, please. That's like saying night 'was like a coal-cellar ... only night in its nighty nightness.' Later he says 'a mental alarm bell jangled faintly deep inside my head.' Where else does a mental alarm bell ring except inside your head?

The short lessons and articles posted above are only a few of the articles and advice Graham offers for free, but I did not want to post them all (though Graham offered them all - just the kind of man he is). If you would like to read more, check out his web site here. You won't be sorry.

Graham Masterton is mainly recognized for his horror novels but he has also been a prolific writer of thrillers, disaster novels and historical epics, as well as one of the world’s most influential series of sex instruction books. He became a newspaper reporter at the age of 17 and was appointed editor of Penthouse magazine at only 24. His first horror novel The Manitou was filmed with Tony Curtis playing the lead. Walkers was recently optioned by Jules Stewart for Libertine Films. Last year Graham turned his hand to crime novels and White Bones , set in Ireland, was a Kindle phenomenon, selling over 100,000 copies in a month. This has been followed by Broken Angels. Graham’s horror novels were introduced to Poland in 1989 by his late wife Wiescka and he is now one of the country’s most celebrated authors, winning numerous awards. He is now working on new horror and crime novels, as well as giving lectures on sexual relationships.

My Aha Moment in Writing - Michael Collings - Biggest Aha Moments in Writing

My “ah-ha” moment actually came a long time before I seriously considered writing—either fiction or non-fiction—as a profession. I was a teacher, and any writing I did, I had long before decided, would be peripheral to my teaching. I had just received my doctorate in English Renaissance literature and, while waiting for a full-time position, was teaching one-class a semester each at three local (and not so local) community colleges, usually composition with an occasional foray into creative writing or survey of English lit.
On this occasion, I was teaching beginning composition at San Bernardino Community College. It was an unusual class. Of the thirty students, twenty-nine were thirty-five- to fifty-year-old master sergeants from a nearby military base, all men, all older than I was, all up for review or promotion, all needing this particular college credit to ensure success in their next step in their career. And one woman, a freshman at SBCC, eighteen, and if not actually frightened by the men at least tremulous and shy in her responses during the first session. She dropped before the next session.

So there I was, a brand-new Doc, ink on my diploma still wet, facing twenty-nine men who each had more life-experience than I, who wanted—no, demanded—every scrap of information I had to give them, and, even more, who wanted my lectures on English grammar and composition to make sense.

We were discussing semi-colons, always a trouble spot. With any normal class, I would have simply spouted the rule and run rather rough-shod over any questions or objections. Not with this class. When I gave them a rule, they asked “Why?” When I responded, they asked “Why?” Courteously but inevitably, they forced me to examine all of my pat answers and assumptions about not only semi-colons but grammar and mechanics in general and restate them in understandable, usable terms.

Intellectually, I knew that the fundamentals of writing were more important that just for providing subject matter for me to teach. My “History and Grammar of the English Language” course had been remarkable for opening my eyes and my imagination to why the language is so complex and how it came to be that way.

That class of master-sergeants, however, made me see that what I had learned was not dead material to be forgotten after the exam but living guidelines to creating meaning, to controlling meaning in written communication. As I grew, matured, and began my own career as a writer, I found myself stopping in the middle of a paragraph and asking how I would explain a particular point to the master-sergeants, then applying it to my prose.

I can’t remember any of their names, but they became one of the key influences in my teaching career. Thanks, guys.




My online review/response site is: http://michaelrcollings.blogspot.com/ 

I also have an older site at: http://www.starshineandshadows.com/ This contains older, frequently longer articles.

The Devil's in the Details - Tim Waggoner - Biggest Ah-ha! Moments in Writing

I wrote my first novel – a fantasy adventure titled A Wizard’s World – when I was nineteen. (Yes, it was awful, and no, I’ll never let anyone see it.) I had a lot of fun as I wrote it, but I kept having the nagging feeling that something was wrong. My story seemed flat, lifeless, and empty. One day as I was re-reading a scene I’d just written, it hit me: my scenes felt empty because they lacked the necessary detail to bring them alive for readers. I wasn’t sure what I needed to do to fix the problem, but I decided to work on being more descriptive overall, and kept on writing.

A Wizard’s World was never published, but writing it led to one of the most important realizations I’ve ever had about writing fiction. Authors don’t tell readers a story. They give readers tools so that they can tell a story to themselves. We’re like composers who write music and then hand it to a musician to play. The reader is the musician and the instrument he or she plays is their imagination. Writers need to know what “notes” will provide just the right stimulation to create a vivid, living world within readers’ minds. Here are some tips on how to do just that.

1. Write with a close identification with a character’s viewpoint, letting us know not only what the character is doing, but what the character is thinking and feeling (both emotionally and physically) as the story progresses. It doesn’t matter if you write in first, third or – more rarely – second person, the principle is the same. The great advantage written fiction has over other media such as movies, TV, games, etc., is that it can allow the audience to enter into a character’s internal world, thereby immersing us in the story. And that makes for powerful fiction. My mentor, fantasy novelist Dennis McKiernan, thought of this principle as if a viewpoint character has a shoulder-mounted camera that picks up everything the character sees and hears. This camera also has a cable running into the back of the character’s skull, recording the characters thoughts, feelings, and internal reactions. It’s the writer’s job to select the best bits of data to make a given scene as vivid and impactful as possible.

2. Visual media rely on stimulating two senses: sight and sound. But fiction can also stimulate readers’ other senses: smell, taste, and touch. Those latter senses are weaker in humans, and we need to be in physical contact with something (or close to it) in order to use them. Because of this, they’re more intimate senses and stimulating them can have a stronger impact on readers. So don’t forget to take advantage of them in your writing.

3. We experience life as a constant swirl of incoming data, but when writing, we’re forced to create using only one word at a time. To approximate the richness of human experience, provide a variety of alternating details in scenes (and even within individual sentences) – a bit of dialogue, a physical action, a thought, an internal physical reaction, a sound, a memory connection, etc. It’s a simple but powerful technique, one which is easy to learn and teach, and which can strengthen your fiction immeasurably.

Breathe life into your stories, and readers’ imaginations will soar.

Tim Waggoner’s novels include Supernatural: Carved in Flesh and the Nekropolis series of urban fantasies. In total, he’s published close to thirty novels and three short story collections, and his articles on writing have appeared in Writer’s Digest and Writers’ Journal, among other publications. He teaches creative writing at Sinclair Community College and in Seton Hill University’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing Popular Fiction program.

Website: www.timwaggoner.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/#!/tim.waggoner.9
Twitter: @timwaggoner

Blog: http://writinginthedarktw.blogspot.com/

The Artist and Society - Biggest 'Ah-Ha!' Moments in Writing - Allyson Bird

     After settling into my new life on a farm in New Zealand, and although I live in my rural wonderland, I’m daily aware of the issues which face us all, and tackle them in my writing. What with the rise of fascism again in Europe and a world where corporate greed and selfishness seem to prevail with little thought about society I’ll not run short of inspiration. 

     As life gets harder for most of us, struggle will be reflected in literature— in art—as it always has. I could mention George Eliot, William Blake, Balzac, Thomas Hardy, Mark Twain, Henry James, William Morris, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, William Golding, Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard and many more who wanted to explore the problems each of us face within society.

     Shelagh Delaney just came to mind. ‘A Taste of Honey.’ Set in industrial Salford and first on stage in London in 1958. The play explores gender, sexual orientation, race and class. Poverty.  A few generations of my family lived in the city—for over a century from 1807 to the 1912. Infant mortality—high. Living conditions terrible amongst the poor. I went to university there in the 1980’s. ‘A Taste of Honey.’ That play is firmly rooted in the theatre of realism. Exploring themes with honesty and compassion…add John Osborne, Lynne Reid Banks, and ‘Cathy Come Home’ By Jeremy Sandford, amongst others. As ‘austerity’ cuts make their mark we are taking that awful backward step and class is once more thrust before us. That word seems outdated. How about simply the divide between the rich and the poor which is getting larger each year, now. Where once I saw hope I feel sadness. Hunger, in the so-called first world countries, should now be a thing of the past. Monsanto. Monopoly. Madness. Since when did you hear the word monopoly and ever think that a good thing. In a game perhaps and yes perhaps we could call this a war game of sorts where the only winners are the large corporations. Nothing for the poor. In 2013. 

     I’m reading Ballard’s ‘High Rise’ again, too. ‘Lord of the Flies’ comes back to me time and time again. Ray Bradbury and ‘Fahrenheit 451’. Perhaps in reading these I’m hoping that it will never get that bad. 

     After all this what is my point? My advice to new writers. Write what you want. Write about what you believe in. Be brave. Write for yourself. Be honest.  Don’t hold back. Words have power. Perhaps they can change the world. Say what you feel you need to say.

Allyson Bird now lives and farms in the Wairarapa Valley, New Zealand. Occasionally she is drawn to strange places and people and they are occasionally drawn to her. Her favourite playground, as a child and adult, has been the village graveyard. Once she wondered what would happen if she took one of the green stones from a grave. She has been looking over her shoulder ever since but has never given it back.

Accomplishments : Winner of the HWA Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a first novel 2011 for 'Isis Unbound.' Winner of the British Fantasy Society Award for Best Collection 2009 for 'Bull Running for Girls.'

Geographical Location - Selene MacLeod - Biggest 'Ah-Ha!' Moments in Writing

     Character, plot, setting, atmosphere, these are all extremely important in creating the right mood to scare the pants off a reader. One way to accomplish this is by paying close attention to a story's geographical setting. Some horror subgenres--the Southern Gothic, for instance--are easily defined by their conventions. But did you know there's something called Southern Ontario Gothic? Neither did I, although once I read about it, I realized that it formed a framework for something I do as a writer--that is, I follow the "write what you know" guideline. 

     Unlike more "worldly" writers, I've never been anywhere farther than a couple of hours' drive from home. My stories are frequently set in the town where I grew up. Sarnia, Ontario is a working-class industrial town on the US (Michigan) border, and it has a culture, politics, and class structure that identify it very much as a character. It's got a beautiful landscape, on the edge of the St. Clair River and the southern tip of Lake Huron. Amateur hockey, bingo, and alcohol are pastimes. Too much education, or too far outside the "norm" (whether you're gay, fat, non-white, etc.) and you're regarded with suspicion. Unemployment is high and lots of people rely on the government for a monthly cheque, yet all the class politics that go with handouts are in play. In other words, it mirrors many small towns, and I hope this makes the place relatable to a reader. 

     The thing that makes Sarnia unique is its Chemical Valley, a steel mini-city that looks like a Giger fantasy, all vats and steel rigging and flaming towers that spew toxic chemicals. The sky at night is orange, and the last time I saw stars, I was a pre-teen. 

     My story "Home" (published by SNM Horror as "Born in a Dead World") is about an Indigenous woman suffering a miscarriage. She comes home to find her grandmother watching Stephen Harper's "apology" to the victims of the Indian Residential School program (Look it up on YouTube. Then watch the footage from survivors. I dare you not to cry). As they watch, her grandmother begins to tell her about the real horrors she and others endured at the schools. 

     Having grown up in Sarnia, in the shadow of the Chemical Valley and the threat of long-term health problems caused by pollution, I found that the town offered a strong backdrop for a horror story. The rate of two girls born for every boy and the high number of miscarriages among women on the Reserve is staggering. The juxtaposition of the Residential school system against the murder of people by the very air they breathe and water they drink created a strong emotional echo in me. As a Canadian with Metis heritage, I reacted with deep shame and impotent rage. And, of course, fear.






Bio: Selene is new enough to horror writing to still consider herself a hobbyist (that is, she thinks she can jump off the merry-go-round when she wants). Her work has appeared in anthologies from SNM Horror, Seven Archons Press, Static Movement, May-December Publications, and the upcoming Carnival anthology from NetBound Publishing.

You can read a story of her's here, or you can check her Facebook. You can read "Endymion" here. Lastly, you can find her blog here.