My wife and I are Canadian but arguably our favourite time of year is U.S. Thanksgiving, when we set our work aside to watch football and eat turkey. Okay, for me, mostly to watch football. A sport in which one must learn to absorb and toughen oneself from a hit. Just as when publishing one’s work independently, one has to accept criticism to grow.

So in the spirit of Thanksgiving and football, I advocate authors, in particular self-published ones, to take an opportunity to give thanks to their reviewers. Not for the positive reviews, and certainly not the Amazon single paragraph five-star gushers, but rather the negative ones.

Yes, the negative reviews.

Even the most bruised ego can find comfort in that:
* Something about your book enticed the reviewer to select it over dozens of others.
* Something made the reviewer spend time reading your book, foregoing reading or some other pleasurable activity, such as watching or playing football.
* After reading it, the reviewer cared enough to dedicate additional hours solely to craft a custom review just for your creation.
* The reviewer respected you enough as a professional author to be honest.

A glowing review, while nice to read and share, is useless for your craft and possibly dangerous in the way junk food is tasty but harmful to an athlete’s condition. A negative review, on the other hand, helps you grow by providing clues to what might be missing in your craft, what others may fear to tell you, what you need to hear.

People you know might willingly overlook failings and try to be kind; detached reviewers, who must maintain integrity with their readers more than relationships with authors, need to be forthcoming. The issues may lie in the writing or perhaps simply a neglectful publishing decision. Every self-published book I’ve read, save one, has fallen short in some publishing fundamental. Mostly these fall under copyediting and proofreading, predictable but preventable casualties of bypassing the traditional publishing machine.

I believe a negative review ought to be valued as a step forward, a stage in your writing career to overcome. An internal toughening most great authors experienced in one form or another. Negative reviews may have knocked the wind out of them temporarily but the good ones, perhaps after a brief period of pain, got up stronger. Following such models bodes well for any author, as well as for the future of self-publishing in general. Indeed, your negative review might illuminate a weakness for another writer, inspiring one last copyedit or one last proof to make their final product more professional. That would be a positive benefitting all of us in the self-published world, for which we all can be thankful.

And I am thankful to you authors who have submitted your books for review. However, my Thanksgiving was in October; today I’m just glad the NFL and its players’ union sorted their mess out so as not to impact an American tradition I’ve come to enjoy in Canada.

I did admit in my very first signing for this book that the characters were all based on real people, despite the disclaimer on the copyright page saying “any resemblance to real people is completely coincidental,” but the events that take place in the book were – and still are – all fictional.  That being said, two of those people were in the room at the time I announced this, were already aware of this fact before I said it, and also happened to be two close friends of mine who knew I was going to base a character on them some day.  One such friend, who was not present at the signing, actually asked to be in my first book and told me what she wanted her name to be.  I granted her wish!  However, this MySpace stranger who emailed out of concern was not present at this event.  And as I said, I had never met him before, nor after receiving his email.

This humorous tale is not really the reason behind this post, but it raises the question of how much of our true selves or true lives do we put into a story.  It’s all very interesting to ponder the lines between fact and fiction and when and where they become blurred, and what gives readers reasons to think that what they are reading must be based on something true, especially when they happen to know the author.

Those who know me and know my background will certainly recognize specific settings in my books because I tend to use actual places, often businesses where I worked or hang outs I frequented in college. Many know that a park that plays a crucial part in The Other Side of What was based on a photograph I bought at an imports store and which hangs in my dining room still today. Zoe’s store is based on a conversation that a friend and I had often, dreaming of a business we’d open together to cater to artists.  I even used the name we called it: Hands Across the Board. Many people have emailed me over the years to ask if Red Square was indeed the bar that hosted 80s night on Wednesdays where they had danced the night away in college to remixes of Cyndi Lauper or the Safety Dance.  C’mon folks!  That’s an easy one.  I used the old club’s real name and exact description.

Those who have read Stealing Wishes, my second book, often ask me if I’m obsessive compulsive because my main character is.  I admit Blaine and I do have a lot in common: photography enthusiast, coffee shop background, Isherwood fan, sense of humor.  We’ve both broken hearts and had ours broken. And maybe I am a tad bit OCD – not to the extent Blaine is (I don’t sync everything in my life to the number 32), but I am definitely NOT Blaine.

Fellow author R. J. Keller says the same thing about her lead character, in a post on her blog from about a year ago, so aptly titled “I Am Not Tess Dyer.” R. J. says…

Tess and I share some similarities: eye color, short stature, a tendency towards being a smart ass. We’re both avid Red Sox fans and both live in Small Town, Maine. I used my own ‘voice’–so to speak–for the narration. (Tackling the task of writing a first novel was much less daunting that way.) But the actual events of her life were in no way taken from mine. I sat down to write WFS over two-and-a-half-years ago with absolutely no plot in mind. I had no specific axes to grind, no confessions to make, no burdens with anyone’s name stamped in big, block letters to set down. Just thirty-five-and-a-half years of being a human being to sort through and a certainty that I had the talent to make something out of it… So, although I can say that the novel is not factually autobiographical, I will admit that it is, perhaps, emotionally autobiographical. Still…I am not Tess Dyer.

I have always said writing is lonely.  It’s also personal. I’m reminded of a quote from an old retail regional manager I used to report to who said, “Fake it till you can make it!”  This quote was used in reference to being able to spit out your hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly figures such as credit card percentages and conversion rates (all that mumbo jumbo that retailers track and report to stock holders because it sounds important) to your district manager, who already knows your figures anyway but just wants to make you sweat a little.

I think we can apply it to writing as well.  No one has to know we have no idea what we are talking about.  We are writers after all and we are telling a story.  Use your imagination!  Make it up! Be creative! Many authors, including the best selling Dan Brown, create our characters based on our own fantasies or dreams.  Our characters are the perfection we have yet to reach, nor probably ever will. Still, many of us tend to write what we know about just to be safe, and there’s nothing wrong with that either.  While writing, I tend to stop and ask myself, “What will my friends and family think when they read this?”  And then I throw in something off the wall and totally bizarre just to really make them think, “Could this be true? Is this Shannon?” But it’s not just friends and family we are usually writing for, so it is interesting to wonder what makes a complete stranger connect themselves or the author (a complete stranger to them) to something they are reading.

Author Mark Zero and I recently discussed this in an email.  He said…

I imagine lots of people mistake you for Blaine just because it’s easiest for people to understand fiction in terms of authorial biography, especially first-person fiction. I get that sometimes, too, people trying to guess which of the characters in my books is me. I was at a Book Club party for one of my books, The French Art of Stealing–the main character is a Hitchcockian hero, an innocent man trapped by circumstances in a mystery not of his own making–and I could sense a palpable disappointment among the club members that I wasn’t more like my narrator. The narrator, it’s true, is a war photographer, with a very worldly bravado and lots of experience of harrowing situations in exotic locales, so I understand why they might have been disappointed to get me instead…

Here’s a line also from Mark, from the same email, which I’ve committed to memory because it’s quite brilliant…

…maybe that’s what people want, something concrete they can know, instead of veils of fictive distance.

And that’s why there are nonfiction writers, reporters, and journalists that will give it to them, right? Wrong! We all know that not even the news is concrete fact these days.  The television shows us only what they want us to see, and how do we know it’s not from a swayed point of view?  A certain book called Lies My Teacher Told Me seems to come to mind!  But we’re talking about fiction here.

And I think that’s why I find myself enjoying historical fiction a lot lately.  I like to be entertained with a fictional story that I don’t know anything about, but like it even more when a character or event I do know pops up in the middle of the plot.  Suddenly, the writer and the reader share a connection. In Joel Rose’s The Blackest Bird, we meet up with celebrated author Edgar Allan Poe.  Kim Powers wrote of Harper Lee and Truman Capote in the beautiful Capote in Kansas, displaying several conversations between the two mysterious writers that may or may not have happened in real life. Michael Cunningham used Virginia Wolf in The Hours to set a certain mood and craft part of the story (still one of my favorite books to this day).

Historians probably snub their noses at fiction like this because an author doesn’t necessarily preserve the character of the figure they are writing about, but the key word here is “character.”  Such writing, and use of real people as characters in fiction, serves an entirely different purpose.  Maybe the author feels a certain connection.  Maybe that person is their muse.  Or maybe the author wants to give the reader someone else to connect to for a while.  Sure, I knew who Virginia Wolf was long before I read The Hours.  I did wonder if what Cunningham wrote was true or not, but in the end I didn’t care so much.  All I knew was how the book made me feel when I turned the last page, and that is probably the magic Cunningham cares more about.

Even when an author writes themselves into their story, whose to say we are always going to tell the truth?  Guess what?  We don’t have to!  Even though we may use the traits of ourselves or the threads of lives we’ve witnessed, and whether we stay true to them or not is entirely up to us.  I’ve spent a great deal of time “writing what I know,” and I find that as I age as a writer, I know more.  Does that give me more things to write about?  Absolutely.  But going back to historical fiction, despite History never being a favorite subject of mine, I’ve recently found myself intrigued by a certain tragic event that never graced the pages of our textbooks.  It was a real event that fell to the back pages of the newspapers, buried by stories of a war coming to an end and the death of a president. Readers, already numb from tales of death and destruction, skipped over the news and while a few historians have retold the story, it’s also somehow become fodder in my head for a few characters (there’s that word again) that have a story to tell.

So, in my case, what do you do when you want to write about something you know nothing about.  First, avoid that phrase about writing what you know, and go out and learn about it.  Sure, you can’t go back in time and witness that day and time for yourself, but you don’t have to.  That’s what a writer’s imagination is for.  Let your ink pen to paper or fingers on the keyboard breathe life into the story, taking both you and the readers back. Embellish if you want.  Or stay true to the facts.  But either way, put a little of yourself in the story. It might be the color of your hero’s eyes, or the name of  the leading couples’ baby, or the way the villain walks, or maybe it all takes place on the street you grew up on.  Make it personal, if not for anyone but yourself.

Going back to Mark’s quote, close the “fictive distance” between you and the reader. And let your readers wonder… Is that me they are writing about?

Cheryl Anne Gardner over at PodPeep recently posted about quality vs. quantity, and I totally agreed with her from the start. The word count target on the calendar just makes me nervous, along with forum updates I’ve been getting from the St. Louis Region on the NaNo site where people are already bragging about reaching 40,000+. What creative force could one possibly muster up to create a manuscript of 40K in 13 days?  I admire it, but I think over half of it must indeed be crap.

And it’s the crap that frightens me.  I’ve written my own share of it now even being 7,000 words behind, but I constantly find myself wanting to go back and flush out (no pun intended) more of the story and its characters.  Instead, I force myself to keep moving forward and catch up with that damned calendar.

Mind you, mine is a story born of a concept which I could have wrapped up in one page back when I started.  It was a thought, an idea, a blink, a closed door deep in the recesses of my brain.  It consisted of three characters in the beginning and had no complete plot nor an end.  And I didn’t bother composing an outline before November 1st.  I simply sat down at the keyboard and hoped the characters would take over.

And they did.  It’s been tough, and I still don’t know what direction they are taking me in.  But it’s happening, and that’s the process I’m enjoying out of all of this.  This is a story I never would have written any time soon (in years even), had I not committed it to be this year’s NaNo Project.  So the birth of it has been slow, but nice.

Well…back to it….

(324 words wasted on this post)

There were two “pep talks” in my email box today, along with over one hundred email copies from every time someone posted something in my region’s forum. I have to admit I’ve been deleting most of these copies, and should probably just turn them off, because it’s just been basic chatter and sharing of quotes from what people are writing.  There’s also been some talk about some write-ins.  I do hope to attend at least one of those some time this month just for the experience. Years ago, I dreamed of walking to the local cafe with laptop in tow and hanging out for hours sipping lattes, people watching, and pounding out a best seller. Sadly, it’s never happened.  And I’ve never had a cafe within walking distance, nor one that I really felt a connection with and would actually hang out in ever since I left Memphis back in 2001. The Bookstar where I worked had a fabulous cafe; I attended several book club meetings and poetry slams there, but didn’t own a laptop at the time to conceive writing a novel there.  Too bad.

The pep talks I got today were pretty interesting. One was from Chris of NaNoWriMo staff.  Here’s the cheers he offered:

1) Your novel will not be as bad as you fear. In fact, by November 30 you will have amassed tens of thousands of words of very solid prose. You will come up with things that make you laugh so hard you have to wipe off the keyboard afterwards, and passages so moving that you will cry as you write them. Your plot will unexpectedly give birth to fantastic subplots, characters will reveal surprising and juicy things about themselves, and you’ll have some moments during NaNoWriMo that will rank among the most satisfying and happy-making of your life.

You will also, however, write some flagrantly nonsensical chapters, create pages and pages of dialogue that make you cry (in a bad way), and endure a few shameful days where the only thing keeping your word-count afloat is the fact that your protagonist has a habit of reading the dictionary aloud whenever she gets nervous. And she’s always nervous.

This is totally fine. All the books we’ve loved started out in a similarly imperfect form. They’re called rough drafts for a reason. No one gets a novel totally right on the first pass. This is true whether you give yourself a month or a lifetime to write the first draft. There’s an adage in noveling that you can revise a bad first draft into a great book. But you can’t revise a blank page into anything but a blank page. Take this to heart during NaNoWriMo. In November, all words are good words.

2) You deserve some fun. We get so focused on doing the things that pay the bills that we sometimes neglect to do the things that make us feel truly alive. You have a world of people depending on you—family, friends, co-workers, bosses, teachers. Taking care of everyone’s needs while still finding time to buy groceries and bathe every couple days can be a feat. Unfortunately, this means that activities like writing and art and music tend to disappear into the margins of our lives.

Think of November as an all-expenses-paid, 30-day vacation to novel-land. It’s a place where you can whoop and holler and dance the crazy dance. A place where you can conjure new worlds, dream oversized dreams, and explore the wilds of your imagination. For one month, you get to orient your life around your creative spark, rather than vice versa.

The second came from Jasper Fforde.  Never heard of him?  Me neither.  Here’s his bio from the email though…

Jasper Fforde is the best-selling author of the Thursday Next and Nursery Crime books. He has been writing for twenty years, but only published for ten. His training took a while. His eighth book, Shades of Grey, will be published in January 2010. He lives and writes in Wales, has a large family and likes to fly aeroplanes.

Here’s a bit of his pep talk, which actually isn’t too bad:

There’s a lot to learn, and you won’t have figured it all in 50,000 words, but it’ll be enough for you to know that you don’t know it all, and that it will come, given time. You’ll have written enough to see an improvement, and to start to have an idea over what works and what doesn’t. Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation. A manual on knitting can tell you what to do, but you won’t be able to make anything until you get your hands on some wool and some needles and put in some finger time. Writing needs to be practiced; there is a limit to how much can be gleaned from a teacher or a manual. The true essence of writing is out there, in the world, and inside, within yourself. To write, you have to give.

What do you give? Everything. Your reader is human, like you, and human experience in all its richness is something that we all share. Readers are interested in the way a writer sees things; the unique world-view that makes you the person you are, and makes your novel interesting. Ever met an odd person? Sure. Ever had a weird job? Of course. Ever been to a strange place? Definitely. Ever been frightened, sad, happy, or frustrated? You betcha. These are your nuts and bolts, the constructor set of your novel. All you need to learn is how to put it all together. How to wield the spanners.

And this is why 30 days and 50,000 words is so important. Don’t look at this early stage for every sentence to be perfect—that will come. Don’t expect every description to be spot-on. That will come too. This is an opportunity to experiment. It’s your giant blotter. An empty slate, ready to be filled. It’s an opportunity to try out dialogue, to create situations, to describe a summer’s evening. You’ll read it back to yourself and you’ll see what works, you’ll see what doesn’t. But this is a building site, and it’s not meant to be pretty, tidy, or even safe. Building sites rarely are. But every great building began as one.

So where do you start? Again, it doesn’t matter. You might like to sketch a few ideas down on the back of an envelope, spend a week organizing a master-plan or even dive in head first and see where it takes you. All can work, and none is better than any other. The trick about writing is that you do it the way that’s best for you. And during the next 50,000 words, you may start to discover that, too.

But the overriding importance is that the 50,000 words don’t have to be good. They don’t even have to be spelled properly, punctuated or even tabulated neatly on the page. It’s not important. Practice is what’s important here, because, like your granny once told you, practice does indeed make perfect. Concert violinists aren’t born that way, and the Beatles didn’t get to be good by a quirk of fate. They all put in their time. And so will you. And a concerted effort to get words on paper is one of the best ways to do it. The lessons learned over the next thirty days will be lessons that you can’t get from a teacher, or a manual, or attending lectures. The only way to write is to write. Writers write. And when they’ve written, they write some more. And the words get better, and sentences form easier, and dialogue starts to snap. It’s a great feeling when it happens. And it will. Go to it.

He does make some valid points, but I can’t say I agree with him 100%.  Yes, this is a good practicing tool, but I would hope that some writers who are taking the project seriously would at least hope some of their work would turn out to be good.  I know I do, and I think half my work so far is pretty decent.  First draft decent, at least.  If I didn’t believe my words had to be good, I’d just write the same line over and over again.  Heck, I’d copy and paste like a mad horse and “win” NaNo in a day.

50,000 words don’t have to be good
50,000 words don’t have to be good
50,000 words don’t have to be good
50,000 words don’t have to be good
50,000 words don’t have to be good
50,000 words don’t have to be good
50,000 words don’t have to be good
50,000 words don’t have to be good
50,000 words don’t have to be good
50,000 words don’t have to be good
50,000 words don’t have to be good
50,000 words don’t have to be good
50,000 words don’t have to be good
50,000 words don’t have to be good
50,000 words don’t have to be good
50,000 words don’t have to be good

Look at me!  112 words!

Sorry for sounding so pessimistic! Maybe I should just get back to that 1,000 words I need to stay on track now…

(659 words wasted on this post – that doesn’t include the quotes from the pep talks)

It’s now 8:32am, and after about 4 cups of coffee this morning I’m looking back on the evening and realizing I somehow hashed out 5,000 words the past eight hours and also managed to sleep some.  Since I’m way ahead of schedule, I took some time this morning to explore NaNoWriMo on Facebook and Twitter just to see what others are up to.

I found this cute little calendar in the Facebook Group.  It comes with  “cheerleader” comments and a daily word count goal.  I was happy to see I’m now three days ahead of schedule.

I joined the Facebook group although I was disappointed to find the statistic application on FB not loading properly (and still isn’t as of this post). I also posted a few tweets in hopes of finding some NaNo buddies since this is my first year participating. You’ll find me here if you want to buddy me.  I’m also debating on attending one of my own local write-ins taking place here in St. Louis throughout the month. There are 939 participants in my region.

I like the idea of all of this viral and community support, but why don’t we have this buzz the other 11 months of the year?  I know November has been deemed National Novel Writing Month.  We don’t celebrate Christmas outside of December, after all. But when it comes down to actually putting words on paper, it’s usually a lonely task. Even now, all the time I’ve spent Twittering and Facebooking and even writing this post, I could be pounding out those 50,000 words I’ve committed to this month.

But I’m going to try my best to do it!  Why, you might ask?  My record is four months for completing a first draft of an 80,000 word novel which I did in 2007, actually twice that year.  Like many others participating, I’ll try my best not to give up half way through; I’ll probably write a lot of crap; I should probably invest in Folgers stock too. But that’s why this month I’ll be taking some time each week to post some thoughts and opinions here on LLBR about my NaNo journey. So check back here to read my own pep talks…for myself…and for you too if you have joined the NaNo ranks.

Good luck!

(467 words wasted on this post)

While posting a review of The Lost Symbol over at Amazon, I was glancing over some of the other 955 reviews that were already there and came across this piece from one review mentioning Brown’s lack of talent for pacing a story:

Also, Brown doesn’t advance the story at a good pace. A good two-thirds of the book (I’m not exaggerating, I counted the pages) was filled with variations on such a scene:

Character A: Have you heard of X?
Character B (usually Langdon): Yes, but I thought that was just a myth.
Character A shows or tells B something.
Character B reacts with shock.
Then, insert scenes of people walking from one place to another, being chased.
Then, insert the sentence “Suddenly everything made sense.” At least for the next ten pages.
Repeat.

This outline made me laugh and got me to thinking, not to mention that I also totally agree with it after having read the book myself.  So many times, authors have a really good idea for a story or a scene, or maybe a handful of scenes but they don’t know how to connect them together or how to give the story layers. Or in Brown’s case, they just repeat what works..again and again and again.

The majority of stories told today are born from the concept of “quest writing.”  The word itself, Quest, dates back to Medieval romances and British literature.  King Arthur’s quest to find the Holy Grail is a prime example.

We start with a central character that (A.) the reader can relate to in some way and (B.) has some kind of “super power” or intellect that will help them later.  In Brown’s case, his protagonist is Robert Langdon.  Langdon is a professor at Harvard; he wears a Mickey Mouse watch and a tweed coat, and he’s claustrophobic.  And what about that super power?  He’s a symbologist and can crack puzzles and codes like nobody’s business.  I’m not talking Sudoku Puzzles either. And in the latest book, we learn he has the uncanny ability to remember every number he’s ever dialed on his cell phone.

Next, we present our character with a dilemma (or conflict).  There’s a treasure to find or a person to save, or both.  And some times the character (and the reader) don’t even know what it is.  Sometimes the consequences of finding said person or “cracking the code” is more important, and there are always things at stake for doing it.  In The Lost Symbol, Langdon is tricked by the “bad guy” into coming to Washington D.C. to crack a series of codes put in place by the Masons that will help the bad guy find “the treasure” he’s looking for. What’s at stake?  The life of a colleague.

Oh yeah, there’s a bad guy – the antagonist. We love a good villain or “black hat.”  Hannibal Lecter has always been one of my favorites because in the majority of Thomas Harris’s writing, Lecter is behind bars and his bad deeds are not the center of attention.  They’ve already happened, but the reader learns about his crimes over time as they are mentioned by the other characters involved in the current plot. The fact that he’s already done all of these horrible things prior to the first page in Silence of the Lambs makes him even scarier. True, Harris has gone back and given his readers the prequels and shown us how Lecter became who he was, but truth be known, those books were not the best in the series.  Sci Fi writer Ben Bova suggests that your writing should not contain a villain.  In his Tips for Writers he states, “In the real world there are no villains.  No one sets out to do evil…fiction mirrors real life.”  I beg to differ.

Then, the writer introduces secondary characters.  These characters usually help or hinder our central character from completing the task at hand. Introducing secondary characters also gives the writer opportunities to explore subplots to make those characters seem interesting and to have a life of their own. In The Lost Symbol, Langdon crosses paths with a CIA agent, Capital security guards, a priest, his colleague’s sister, more CIA agents, and the head of the Capital.  The lead CIA agent is a short, stern, Japanese woman with a cancerous scar on her neck.  The priest is blind.  The colleague’s sister is studying Noetic Science, and the head of the Capital is also a Mason. Obviously, I’m summarizing here to avoid giving away too much about Brown’s latest, but the few traits I’ve listed here are enough for you to see that these characters are each complex and intriguing.

At this point, writers often introduce an inner conflict for one of the characters.  It’s not the major conflict at hand that our protagonist is faced with, but it could determine the outcome.  Perhaps, the reader is deceived by a “false hero” and discovers the good guy is actually the bad guy.  Or there’s a romance between the central character and one of the secondary characters.  These inner conflicts usually blossom into “plot twists” in Dan Brown’s case.  I’m very glad that Brown doesn’t take the romance path with Langdon and his female sidekicks.  The chemistry is usually there, but not acted upon.

This leads us to the climax, or often too many times, the false climaxes (more plot twists).  Our central character is almost there.  They are about to solve the final puzzle, or the reader thinks they are just steps away from the treasure.  But the reader pauses and notices that there is still over 100 pages left to read! Just then, another minor dilemma happens or the bad guy sends someone or something in to try to stop them. Whatever happens, it throws our lead character off course or sends them in a new direction.

But finally, this hopefully leads to a big resolution.  Inner conflicts are solved.  The bad guy is caught, or killed, or gets away (until next time…muhahaha!).  The treasure is found. Our protagonist gets the girl. The world is saved.  And readers can finally exhale….unless of course, this is just the first part of a series.

So let’s recap…

A. Central Character

1. relates to reader
2. “superpower”

B. Dilemma

1. conflict at hand
2. consequences or stakes

C. Villain (bad guy)

1. what do they want
2. how to use the central character to get it

D. Secondary characters

1. subplots
2. help or hinder central character

E. Inner Conflict

1. romance
2. plot twists

F. Climax

1. false
2. resolution

This “quest” equation is not set in stone, although it has been followed for generations.  Don’t believe me?  Just stop and think of any book you might have read.  You’ve bound to have read something where the protagonist is faced with a “quest.”

The ability for an author to play upon the different parts and add their own variations is what makes a story unique and different. Maybe your villain is the central character.  Maybe your central character is not even a person….they’re an alien, a tree, a storm…maybe your villain is a car (Stephen King’s Christine).  Maybe your protagonist and antagonist are lovers.

The point is that this “write equation” is a good place to start if you are at a loss with what to do with your characters.  Like I said earlier, you’ve got a good idea for a character or a scene, but you have no idea where to go from there. With NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) right around the corner, a good place to start with organizing your thoughts is to create an outline.The equation is just a guideline, and your outline should be too.  If it changes along the way, that’s fine. A roadmap is a good thing to have if you don’t know where you are going, but who knows what you’ll discover if you make a “wrong” turn.

Oh, and if you are interested in reading my full review of The Lost Symbol, click here.

Houghton Mifflin publishes a popular book called 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know. While perusing the list, there are numerous words I’d have to ask someone to use in a sentence for me because I know I don’t use them in everyday language and I have no idea what they mean. There are exquisite words like gerrymander, lugubrious, obsequious, quotidian, and usurp. You can read the entire list for yourself by clicking on the title above, but if you love words like I do then be sure to grab your dictionary first! Senior editor Steven Kleinedler states, “If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language.”

Just the words “command of the language” makes me chuckle and brings back an odd memory concerning an old boss of mine from when I worked in a bookstore. She’d say “pacific” instead of saying “specific.” I cringed every time like nails on a chalkboard when that came out of her mouth. “You’re not being pacific enough!” she’d yell at our weekly manager meetings. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m just too Gulf of Mexico,” I’d reply to myself, holding back my laughter and hoping she didn’t see the grin on my face.

My (ex) boss knew what she meant and so did we, but she just used the wrong word or was mispronouncing it. Writers can definitely relate to such arguments when it comes to words like “their” and “there” or “you’re” and “your,” but at least those words sound the same and no one would know the difference when you are speaking them out loud. But as soon as you write them down, the wrong word will reveal all.

So, the 100 words I should have known got me to thinking about words all writers should know. Like any 21st Century writer would probably do, I Googled it. Just the words “writers should know” brought back a plethora (another good word) of information about publishing, plagiarism, copyright, and the like. All of those lists were “Things Writers Should Know About ___.” But I wanted to get right down to the physical words themselves and what they mean to writers. So, I grabbed my notepad and started my own list.

While I didn’t come up with a hefty list to compete with Houghton Mifflin, I did narrow my choices down to just a dozen words. They are just 12 simplistic words that can’t compete with the superiority of “chicanery” and “soliloquy” but without these words, I don’t think we could be writers.

And so I present in no particular order…12 Words Every Author Should Know and Use:

Creativity: One of my favorite writers, Truman Capote, said “To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music the words make.” Let’s face it. You have to have some kind of notion of creativity, some talent in putting words down in cohesive structure, a craft for telling a story, or a good imagination if you are writing fiction. That’s why they call it creative writing.  Now, if your writing a dissertation on Noetic science, the material itself may not be so creative to work with but the writer’s ability to put together facts and write a winning academic paper still takes creativeness.

Storytelling: Jean Houston said, “If you keep telling the same small story, you will keep living the same sad small life.” We’ve all got stories to tell, and I’m not just talking about those stories our parents told us from memory at bedtime. My father often shared stories with us when I was growing up. Once such story was about a call he got in the middle of the night from someone who had mistaken by dad for someone else who actually had the same name.

“I’d like to buy those cattle you showed me,” the caller said.

“I don’t own any cattle.  I think you have the wrong number,” my dad said.

But the caller was persistent that he had called the right person.  My dad was tired and just wanted to hang up the phone and go back to sleep.

“Put a check in the mail and go take all the cattle you want,” my dad finally said, and then hung up and went back to bed.

The end of the story?  My dad pauses for effect and then says, “I never did get my check!”

This story always made everyone laugh.  It later sparked the idea for a short story of mine, which eventually turned into a collection of short stories based on the small details like this that I remember from my childhood.  My dad had (and still has) tons of stories, but it was his ability to hold my attention while telling them, his skill as breathing life into it that is the reason I still remember them today.

So, practice being a good storyteller in your writing and don’t forget the pauses and nuances and details that capture your audience.  Don’t know if it works?  Read the story out loud to an audience and see if you captivate them.  And this is a perfect lead-in to our next word.

Listen: English novelist Nick Hornby said, “I think a lot of unpublished writers feel the same way. They’re not getting anywhere, and nobody’s listening to them.”  Publication aside, most people aren’t listening because you haven’t captured their attention or you aren’t saying anything worth listening to.  We’re writers.  We love to talk.  We love to tell a good tale.  But are we willing to listen to others when they want to speak?  This includes them wanting to give us feedback or constructive criticism.  You should. A good writer knows how and when to listen.  And as a schoolteacher of mine once said, listening is more than just pretending to pay attention.  Listening is absorbing what you’ve heard.

Surrender: An American writer and aviation pioneer named Anne Morrow Lindbergh once said, “If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.”  I added this word to the list for several reasons.  First, we’ve all heard the saying, “Surrender to your muse!”  Often, I sit down to write the story that I think is in my head; I’ve plotted out each scene and maybe I even know how it’s going to end.  But as soon as my fingertips touch the keyboard, the characters come out and take over and change everything I set out to do.  So, I let them.  I surrender to the story and let the characters go where they want.  I go with them. My last book started with a single sentence and a quote I liked; I had no idea where to go from there.  But I wrote that book straight through from beginning to end in just three months and self-published it a year later, all because I just sat down and let the characters tell the story.  Surrendering also means admitting your mistakes.  Know when you’re wrong and don’t be afraid of change.

Criticism: Ahh, the elephant in the room that no writer wants to look in the face.  The 3 star (or 1) review that came when you were hoping for at least 4 or 5.  We seek praise from our friends and colleagues, and instead we get slapped with criticism.  Writers (and authors) are the first to come to the defense of their work, even when it’s bad.  And that’s fine.  I think you should stand up for what you’ve written, for what you believe in.  And you should believe in your work. That’s great.  But you should also be open to hearing what other’s have to say about your work. Never, never, never be afraid of criticism.  You are not always right.  There’s always another writer, a friend, an agent, or an editor, just another person damn it!, who you should be listening to because maybe, just maybe, their opinion is for once better than yours.  Remember, the word Listen is on this list too. Know how to criticize constructively but know how to take criticism too!

Time: I hear it a lot.  “I don’t have the time or patience to write.”  My answer is always the same.  “Then don’t.” Writing definitely takes time and writers often seek out every ounce of it they can whether that be on a laptop in a cafe or on a notepad in a doctor’s waiting room.  I always carry a notepad with me everywhere I go and have been known to quickly jot down a thought at a redlight.  If you are like me, you’ve probably plotted out entire scenes or conversations in your head on the way to work. I also find that I’m more creative in the morning fresh out of bed with coffee in hand.  Through the week, I have a 45 minute window to myself before I have to get ready for work.  If I got up earlier, I’d have more time.  But my last book was written over 3 months within this 45 minute space of time and on the weekends. Like any hobby, if you want to write, you have to find the time to do it. Plain and simple.  Part 2 of that saying leads us to our next word…

Patience: Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”  You should be patient with yourself and with your story. Know that some days you will write pages, and some days you will only write a handful of words, if any words at all. The story won’t always go where you want it to.  The characters won’t always listen to your fingers. Remember what I said earlier.  If you don’t have time and you don’t have patience, then don’t do it.

Read: In On Writing, Stephen King says if you want to be a writer then you must do two things: “read a lot and write a lot.”  King even says you should be prepared to devote four to six hours a day to reading alone.  And if you don’t know what genre you should write in, pick the one you like to read the most.  While I don’t think I have that much time to devote to reading, I do try to do my fair share of it by reading some every single day.  This year I made it a goal to read at least 25 books for pleasure and I’m about to finish #20 this week.  I know many of you out there are laughing at me because you read much much more, and obviously read faster than I do. But I also read and study the books I review here at LLBR, and I’m always reading blogs and industry related news to share with our readers. I learned how to correctly punctuate dialogue by going back and rereading scenes in books I had. So, read for pleasure, but also read to learn, and to improve your own writing.  And as King also says, “If you sit down to write and the words won’t come out, step away from the computer and go read something.”

Rejection: Rejection sort of goes hand in hand with criticism, but for me they are two totally different things. Someone can actually like your writing and offer you a good positive critique.  For me, rejection means “no.”  Now many of you immediately think of getting rejection letters from agents, and yes, that comes with the territory if you are out shopping your work to the traditional markets.  I sent out close to 50 queries for my last book and only got back a handful of responses which were all rejections.  My favorite was the shortest: “This is not for me.” -Liza.  Going back to Stephen King, I believe he said that 99% of writing was rejection, or something like that.

In April of this year, I wrote an article called How Not to Reply to a Rejection Letter.  I hate that we can’t read every book that gets queried to us here at LLBR.  Sending out rejection letters is not my favorite part of running the site, but there are only three of us here reviewing the books that come through.  Each of us does read the preview of the book and tries to make a good decision about whether or not we want to continue reading.  A lot of our decisions are based not just on the formatting or quality of the book itself, but also on whether or not it’s a story that appeals to our interests or personal reading tastes.  So, when we say “this is not for us” it should be taken lightly because it’s not meant to be offensive.  It’s being honest. Rejection is indeed a big part of being a writer and getting your work read, not just published.  Accept it.

Loneliness: John Steinbeck said, “In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.”  Mark Twain said, “Be good and you will be lonely.”  Does that mean that most good writers are lonely?  Probably.  The art of writing itself is very lonely.  Most of us do it alone.  We sit down with a blank white space and a blinking cursor, and a head full of stories to tell or with characters talking to us.  Okay, so it’s lonely and crazy.  You can certainly expel your narrative demons by telling the story out loud, but a writer goes away to a lonely place and concentrates on putting the story down on paper, on filling that white space with words.

If you are like me, you tend to keep that story all to yourself until it’s completely done.  It’s like a really good lover that you just met; it’s wild and exciting and you want to have them all to yourself for a while before you introduce them to family and friends.  But there is a cure for the loneliness.  It’s getting to hold your book in your hands for the first time, or better yet, handing that book to someone else.  For me, it was always a dream to see my book on the shelf in the bookstore.  It’s hearing what others have to say about my book when they finished reading it.

Just beware that you don’t use writing to try to cure the loneliness.  It won’t work. There are so many great authors who traveled that path alone who have gone before us who can attest to that: Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde just to name a few of my favorites.

Character: I’m not talking about those characters in your head either who breathe to life somewhere between your fingers and the page. Character is first defined at dictionary.com as “the aggregate of features and traits that form the individual nature of some person or thing.” It is also “the account of the qualities or peculiarities of a person or thing.”  What does this mean to a writer?  For me, it means adapting those traits that make you a good writer.  Don’t always try to write like your favorite author, and certainly don’t borrow on their ideas.  Find the unique characteristics that make you an individual, that make your writing stand out from the rest.   A good example is the recent vampire phenomenon that’s run its course over the past few years and still going strong.  It’s fun to see what vampiric traits they have in common, which they borrowed from Stoker’s Dracula, and the new traits that make each of the stories unique in their own way.  And let’s not forget the stories that have piggy backed on the Harry Potter franchise. It’s fine to capitalize on what everyone is reading at the time if you have a good story to tell and you can sell it.  Just be unique about it and give your story those interesting characteristics that make it different, and better, than the rest!

Fun: What can I say?  If you want to be a writer, you’ve got to have fun doing it.  If your lead character is a professional sky diver, then get out there and try sky diving for yourself. If your story is told from the point of view of an old lady, then sit down with Grandma and ask her to tell you stories about her growing up.  Take notes but also record her actions and facial expressions.  If you are writing a story about an artist, take an art class.  Heck, take a creative writing class too while you are at it. Make the research just as fun as the writing, but the important part is to have fun in every aspect of what you are doing.  Have fun!  I still get excited when I sit down to write something.  My heart still races when I’ve finished a chapter. I cry and laugh with my characters as if I knew them. I do know them! Just like time and patience, if you aren’t having fun doing it, then don’t.  Or if it stops being fun, then stop doing it.  And go read something, or just go do something for a while that is fun…like looking up those words in the dictionary you should have learned in high school.

For those who might not know of Arden, here’s some information from the back jacket flap of the book: Born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, recording artist Jann Arden is undoubtedly one of Canada’s most precious resources. With six albums, 13 top ten singles, eight Juno Awards and a collection of other awards and honours, Arden’s “down home” personality has endeared her to millions of fans around the world. Away from her music career, Arden is an avid painter, active philanthropist and rising actress, having appeared in The Vagina Monologues, at the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal and in feature films. if i knew, don’t you think it’d tell you? is Arden’s first book.

While just about every other journal entry in the book has touched me in some way, there is one post in particular about words that really struck a chord with me:  We buy them every day. We need words to live. We hang them on our walls. Words are what I sell at the end of the day. We send them to our friends and our enemies. We need words to tell ourselves that we are here at all.

I immediately conjure up fifth grade playground wisdom that went something like “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”  But we know that isn’t true.  Words can hurt. Words can also heal and inspire.  Spoken or written, as writers it is unbelievable the power we can compose somewhere between our fingertips and the buttons on the keyboard. We just have to say the right words.

Words might just be the easiest thing to remember whether it be the words to a song, a line from a movie, a passage from a book, advice from a parent, or quite simply the first time our companions said, “I love you.”  In almost every review on this blog, we quote words from the books because they touched us in some manner.  The reviews themselves are words constructed into opinions to discuss and inform. Words tell us where we are.  They tell us what we are eating.  They help us understand a movie that is in a foreign language.  Words are one of the  few art forms that can be written, spoken, seen, heard, and even read.  We can read them in our mind to ourselves, or we can read them out loud. Words, and the ability to formulate the “right” words, are a writer’s creative fodder.

So, what are the right words? When I was in grade school, the Scholastic Book fair came around once a year and set up in our school’s library for a week.  I remember with the purchase of three books, you got a free poster of a tiger,  a red corvette, or some horses running.  So, while students were eagerly picking up copies of Charlotte’s Web, Bunicula, Heathcliff, Curious George, and Clifford, I fell in love with the 1987 Webster’s New World Thesaurus.  It is the only thesaurus I have ever owned, and it sits on my desk today as a reminder to me of the writer I always wanted to be. Its pages are yellow. Its cover and binding are torn and wrinkled. And as you can see from the picture, the outer width of the pages was decorated with my name and initials in red sharpie letters years ago when kids wrote “I wuz here” on every surface they could find.  Funny how even then we left our words behind to proclaim where we were. My 16 year old niece still does. There are tarnished paperclips still clipped to various pages inside. I rarely open the book today thanks to dictionary.com, but it is the words that I wrote (also in red sharpie) on the title page many years ago that have always stuck out in my mind when I sit down at my desk and write. Those words are “Dare to be Different.”

Sooner or later, writers end up using the same words.  A, an, and, but, and the immediately come to mind as a few words that you can practically find on every page of a book.  But it’s the order of the words on the page that tell the story, that evoke emotion, that breathe life into our characters.  The ability to use different words in different ways separate us authors from science fiction and mystery to romance and teen lit.  But in the end, they are all the same.  They are just words.  Or are they?  Can something so “black and white,” so grammatically correct, and properly spelled and formulated really be such a complex equation.  They make us laugh.  They make us cry.  They keep us up at night.  They bring us to our feet and make us clap our hands.

Words.  From the writer’s brain, to the page, to the reader’s mouth and heart, the journey is vast and complex.  Such power, these wonderful things called words hold over us.

Share with us some of your favorite words, whether they be a sentence from a book, a line from a song or poem, or something you remember from a speech or from a loved one.  Post them as a comment here. For as writers and readers, we all need words to live by.

With writing for children the specific target audience within the children’s arena must be defined in advance. Is the book meant to be a beginning reader book, is it for children who don’t read yet, or is the book targeted for the early middle reader or advanced middle reader? Each one of those categories within children’s books is very specific as to the requirements. The age range for the target can be as limited as one year. For example, a book can be written for the second grade reader. The target audience determines the range of unique words which should be used, the number of syllables of those words on average, as well as the total word count range.

With books aimed at adults, there is a little more lattitude as to target audience. Genres can be combined or crossed and there is more flexibility for experimentation with plot development, point of view, and tense.  Since books for children are necessarily written for developing readers, the rules must be closely adhered to in order not to lose or overwhelm your readers.

So how do you know what the rules are? The internet is a vast repository of information and a few searches will provide an overwhelming amount of detail to read through and digest. One good resource which I have found is Suite101.com under the writing and publishing section. You will find articles for all types of writing which can be used by the novice and experienced writer alike. In particular, there is a series of articles written by Jennifer Jensen which cover the basic rules for the different levels of writing for children and have links to more specific information about those categories, so this is a very good place to start.

Once you have digested the rules for the target audience you are writing for, the next step is to study other books in the target group. By analyzing what works and what doesn’t in the books which have been written for your target audience, you will gain a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t in your own work. This actually applies to writing in general and not just writing for children. Find a hundred books (or more) written for your target audience and read them. Use of the public library helps offset out of pocket expense for this phase.  Then choose the top ten out of those you have read to conduct an in depth analysis of the contents.

In order to thoroughly analyze the books you have selected as being the best in the category, you will need your own copy of these books, either in hard copy or digital format. My own personal preference is to have something in digital format so I can more readily conduct word count or phrase count analysis without having to resort to a manual bean counting method. I also don’t like to mark up hard copy books, but have no such qualms about highlighting, bolding, or adding notes to a digital copy. Determine in advance what writing techniques you will be looking for, so the same criteria applies for all books you are studying. Some of the things to keep in mind are:

• Good opening lines
• Good usage of telling and not showing
• Usage of metaphors and similies – which worked and which didn’t
• Realistic dialogue
• Verb usage – active vs. passive
• What senses are used in the book?
• How is the plot constructed?
• How do the characters develop throughout the book?

When you run across a passage which you feel is awkward or could be written better, take a few moments and rewrite it. This will help to solidfy in your own mind what didn’t work and why. In addition to this, for picture books, retype the words for the picture books and read through story without the pictures. Does the story flow? Is it easily understood? These are but a few ideas to help focus your thoughts and ultimately improve your own work. Writing for children can be very rewarding as you watch the delight in the face of your readers as they turn the pages, but it also can be very hard to get just right.