Category: Writers

Posted on

Tips to Help You Write (Everything) Better

by Erica Francis

Writing is one of those professions or hobbies that can mean different things to different people. But regardless of the type of writing we do, there’s always room to improve.

Create The Right Environment

Every writer has a type of environment in which they work best. For some, this could be a busy coffee shop, while others might thrive in solitude. Most of us, however, tend to write from our homes. Make sure that your home puts you in the right position to keep your mind clear. A few things you can do to push negativity out of the air are to clean and keep your writing area as uncluttered as possible.

Identify Your Goals

You’ve likely heard of the SMART goal strategy before in terms of professional aspirations. Turn this to your writing as well, whether you write for a living or just for fun. Know what you want to get out of your time. This will help you strategize a plan on what to say, how to say it, and when it needs to be said.

Use Writing Tools

Surgeons need scalpels, construction workers need drills, teachers need books, and artists need canvases. The point is that for every endeavor, there are tools that make them easier and more enjoyable. Writers have a host of free and paid tools, including those that help you tweak your grammar, keep your projects organized, and let you jot down inspiration and information to save for later.

Quit Typing, And Start Dictating

If you find that you think faster than you type, consider ditching the keyboard in lieu of a headset. According to Philips SpeechLive, dictation is up to seven times faster than typing, meaning you can get more out of your head and into a document. This will make you more productive and, even better, less stressed since you don’t have to worry about forgetting something that never made it from your brain to your fingertips.

Understand Your Audience

No matter what kind of writing you do, you have an audience. Get to know them, and you’ll be able to write in a way that allows your message to come through loud and clear. Keep in mind that you can’t be all things to all people. If you’re a marketing copywriter, for example, your job is to be upbeat, positive, and persuasive. When you pen fanfiction, you must be creative, descriptive, and able to invoke emotions.

Take A Course

Still feeling stuck and working on a memoir? Take a course that helps you identify the beginning and end of your story as well as what your memoir needs and what it doesn’t. You’ll also have no trouble finding plenty of free and paid courses online that can help you build your grammar skills, learn how to manage time, or get organized.

Stop Overthinking

Overthinking isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world you can do… unless there’s too much in your head to put onto paper. US-based Cleveland Clinic explains that overthinking can leave you jumping from one thing to the next and envisioning all of the ways that you’re making the wrong decision. Go with your gut. The worst-case scenario is that you go back and edit when your mind is clear.

Every word you write matters. When you want to refine your skills and make yourself a better writer, start by clearing out your home/workspace, which will also help you clear your head. This, along with the other tips above, can help you be a better writer, no matter what you choose to write.

For information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

Posted on

Learning How to Write Fiction

by David Kubicek

This is the way I learned how to write fiction.

At first glance it appears to be a simple formula. There are only four steps, but each of those steps requires lots of time and effort. Today, when everyone and his or her brother is writing blogs or books about how to write fiction, it is easy for the novice to become confused–especially since some of these blogs and books offer conflicting and even bad advice.

It’s unlikely that I’ll ever write a how-to-write book on writing because I wouldn’t be able to ramble on for 80,000 words. Following these four principles is how I learned, and I believe it is the best way for the serious aspiring writer to learn the craft.

Step 1: Read

You must be an avid reader.

A comment I sometimes hear from would-be writers is: “I don’t have time to read.” This comment is most often made by people who want to be published but don’t want to go to the trouble of learning how to write.

If you do not read, or if you don’t enjoy reading, you cannot be a writer. Period. Full Stop. Sure, you can write things down, but the chances that you’ll write something that people who read regularly will want to read are practically nonexistent.

From a practical standpoint, you need to read so that you’ll know what has been done before and how it has been done; this will help you to avoid writing something that has been done before in the same way it has been done before. What makes a story original is not the plot (there are a limited number of plots), but that unique something that the individual writer brings to the story.

Also, you need to read so that you can see how other authors developed their stories, and so that you can develop a sense of how to tell a story. This is crucial.

Reading must not be a chore. You must actually enjoy reading so much that you would read even if you didn’t want to be a writer. Readers not only set aside time in their day to read, but they often carry a book (or e-reading device) with them to fill those dead spots during the day. 

Finally, if you read only in one genre, you can become a capable writer. But if you read in a number of genres–as well as a decent helping of nonfiction on a variety of topics–you can become a good writer or even a great writer.

Step 2: Learn the Craft of Writing

This was a lot easier when I started than it is today. The internet is rife with bad writing advice. There was no internet when I started, and not that many books. I read everything I could find at the library. I subscribed to Writer’s Digest and ordered some of their books. I enrolled in a writing workshop at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL).

Keep it simple; learn the basics, learn how to tell a story. Taking a writing class or workshop is an excellent way to jumpstart your craft. Universities, junior colleges, established writing workshops, and classes led by established writers are the best way to go. If you come across an ad for a class that promises to teach you how to write bestselling fiction, don’t give them any of your money.  They are being either deliberately misleading, or they don’t know any better–and you don’t want to be associated with either of those situations.

The truth is that you can’t write a bestseller because writing doesn’t make a book a bestseller; marketing makes a book a bestseller. A book can be the next great American novel, but if no one knows about it, it will just sit on the bookstore shelf gathering dust.

On the other hand, a book that is terribly written may become a bestseller if it finds an audience (I know several examples of these, but we won’t go into that here). There is an audience for everything imaginable, even the most horrendously written piece of dreck.

Many of the current crop of internet-based writing teachers will go into great detail about things like archetypal characters and how you must make sure to hit all of the important plot points at exactly the right locations in your story.  That’s good advice–if you want to be an English teacher. If you want to be a good writer, learn by reading good writers. Just tell the story and let the English teachers and their students worry about the rest.

Step 3: Write

Write a lot. Write things that you plan to try to get published and things that you write for practice and have no intention of publishing.

When I started out writing short stories, an exercise I practiced–and one I highly recommend to aspiring writers–was to copy, with pen and paper, my favorite stories so I could get a sense of how a good story should flow.

You must copy the story in longhand, not type it, because it’s easier to space off when typing and just see words. Writing in longhand forces you to think about the words, forces you to think about the story and how it is developing. My hand cramped up from copying my favorite short stories just so I could learn how stories were put together.

Also, I wrote reams of stuff that I never intended for publication, just for practice.

Step 4: Seek Feedback

Ask people to read your stories and give you honest criticism. What did they like? What didn’t they like? Why did they like it or why didn’t they like it (if they know; sometimes people don’t like something without really knowing why)?

You need to impress upon them that you want their honest opinion so that you can improve; make sure they understand that you don’t want them to tell you what they think you want to hear. I got lucky. I was just beginning my writing journey about the time I entered college (as an English major, of course), so I was surrounded by professors and other students who were more than willing to give me honest feedback.

Later, after I was married, my wife Cheryl became my first reader. Her critique often began with four words that managed to be both a compliment and a criticism: “You can do better.” Then she would explain where I had dropped the ball and how I might fix it.

That is my writing advice, short and sweet.  If I were to write a book on how to write, I would have to come up with 79,000 more words to bulk it up a bit.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

Posted on

Editing Fiction is Subjective: The October Dreams Controversy

by David Kubicek

Editing fiction is subjective. The best stories don’t always make the most money while some seriously awful stories make millions.

An irritating misconception in our society is the notion that the size of one’s paycheck is in direct proportion to the quality and importance of one’s work. Unfortunately, this misconception is often applied to writers, even by other writers and editors, who should know that one editor’s gem is another editor’s piece of crap. Don’t believe me? Check out some rejections of famous writers here.

Many years ago Jeff Mason and I edited a collection of horror stories, October Dreams: A Harvest of Horror (Kubicek & Associates, 1989), because we weren’t happy with the quality of stories being published in the current crop of original horror anthologies. We thought we could do better, and judging from our book’sOctober Dreams reception, I think we succeeded, or at least we collected a group of horror stories as good as anything on the market.

After OD was highly recommended by Booklist, major distributor Baker & Taylor ordered it by the carton, making it  a best seller for our tiny company. One of the stories–“Mr. Sandman”, by Scott D. Yost–was selected for inclusion in Karl Edward Wagner’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories XVIIL Someone even tried to nominate OD for a Horror Writers of America award, which is where the trouble started.

We were informed that October Dreams was not eligible for an award because the writers were required to have been paid three cents per word or more to be considered “professional.” We’d had the audacity to pay our contributors one cent per word–which actually was per 1,000 copies printed, so with each printing our contributors would be paid again.

This set off a minor controversy. On one side were those of us who argued that work shouldn’t be judged by how much a writer is paid (writers are often undervalued anyway) but by how good the writing is. The other side argued–and these were mostly writers who met the three cents or more threshold–that writers had worked long and hard to be paid three cents a word or more and–God forbid–shouldn’t have to compete with writers who are paid less even if the story is better [my italics].

Professionalism does not have to do with how much writers get paid for their stories, nor does it have to do with how popular a writer is.  I know of one writer–who I will not name–who had a huge payday, on the order of $1,000 per word for two words, the words making up his famous name. The story attached to that name was utter garbage and would have been rejected immediately if it had been written by an unknown writer. 

Professionalism has to do with having cultivated the skill to tell a good story. It has to do with having learned the writing craft to tell it well. It has to do with having learned how to approach agents and editors when marketing your story. It has to do with how you handle rejection. And, above all, it means doing your best work even when you reach the level of fame where editors will pay you only for your name because your name will sell magazines.

Few writers are able to make a living writing fiction, and many highly-respected literary magazines pay only  in copies, and many excellent stories are rejected by many editors before they find a home. Editing is a subjective process and has more to do with how well an editor likes a story than on how well it is written or how much the writer is paid for it. A famous name on a story doesn’t necessarily guarantee its quality; how well the story is written does.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

 

Posted on

Be a Reader First, Then a Writer

What will the future of reading look like?

Self-described writers who don’t have time to read are just fooling themselves. You must first be a Reader before you can be a writer.

First, we need to understand the difference between a Reader and One Who Reads

I saw a statistic years ago that the average person reads one book per year (and the number of readers is still shrinking). These folks don’t make time to read every day. They read when they have time, usually a book that caught their interest, but they aren’t driven to read–they can take it or leave it, and in some cases it may take them a year to get through one book.

Readers, with a capital R, are on a mission. They make time to read every day. They always have books in their queue, so when they finish one, another is ready to go. You see them reading while they sit in waiting rooms, while they sit in their cars waiting to pick up their kids from school, and while they wait in lines at stores.

Readers know they will never be able to read all of the good books that have been published, and they know that many more good books are being published every year–and this idea frustrates them if they dwell on it.

Readers read. Period. If they didn’t have books, they would read condiment labels (like Burgess Meredith’s character in the Twilight Zone episode, “Time Enough At Last”).

I’ve also encountered people who describe themselves as writers but claim that they don’t have time to read. The bottom line is: in order to write something that anyone will want to read, you must first be a Reader, capital R.

Writing teachers may point the way, but reading will propel your journey. It will teach you the basic themes, it will teach you how to use the language to create emotion, it will teach you how to use technique, and it will teach you how to cut and revise–to write uncluttered prose and, as Elmore Leonard put it, “to leave out the parts that people skip.”

There are only 36 dramatic situations, and everything that has ever been written fits into one (or more) of them–if you’re not widely read, you most likely will write stories that have been told before in the same way that they have been written before. Writing is more than just telling a story. It is putting a new spin on an old idea–all writers do it. Self-described writers who don’t read can’t put new spins on old ideas because they don’t know what the old ideas are.

But there is one kind of writing nonreaders can do. They can have a fair amount of success writing labels for condiment bottles.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

 

Posted on

Day Jobs of Writers Before Their Big Breaks

by David Kubicek

Have you ever wondered about the day jobs of writers before they became famous?

Most writers have been faced with the challenge of making a living while waiting for that big break. Day jobs I’ve held included dishwasher, custodian, film processing lab technician, copy-editor, advertising copywriter, publisher and print shop stripper (it’s nothing risque; I “stripped” negatives into paper frames which were used to “burn” offset printing plates–with today’s direct-to-plate technology, strippers are disappearing like blacksmiths after the invasion of automobiles). Here’s a look at some famous writers’ day jobs  before they were famous.

Some of them eventually were able to write full-time, others never sold enough books and had to keep their day jobs, and others like Scott Turow (who continues to practice law) and John Grisham (who remains interested in politics and considered running for U.S. Senator from Virginia in 2006) maintain their non-writing career interests.

  • Dashiel Hammet: The author of hard-boiled detective stories and novels started out as a private detective. His first case?  To track down a thief who had stolen a Ferris Wheel.
  • John Grisham: Author of such legal thrillers as The Firm and The Pelican Brief, is an attorney who, from 1983 to 1990, served as a Democrat in the Mississippi House of Representatives.
  • Jack London: The author of White Fang, The Call of the Wild, and The Sea Wolf had a variety of experiences, including oyster pirate, gold prospector, and rail-riding hobo .
  • Langston Hughes: One of the first African American authors who was able to support himself by writing, he was, according to legend, discovered by poet Vachel Lindsay while working as a  busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. Hughes had dropped his poems beside Lindsay’s plate. In his poetry reading Lindsay included several of Hughes’s poems, which resulted in journalists clamoring to interview the “busboy poet.”
  • William Carlos Williams: The poet and fiction writer was an excellent pediatrician and general practitioner, although he worked harder at his writing than he did at medicine.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson: The American poet, philosopher, and essayist assisted his brother William in a school for young women they ran out of their mother’s house.  He later was a minister and lecturer.
  • Henry David Thoreau: He began as Emerson’s handyman, moved on to selling vegetables, returned to the family pencil business, was a tutor and a teacher.
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne: The author of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables was a weighter and a gauger at the Boston Custom House, which housed government offices for processing paperwork for the import and export of goods. Later he was Surveyor for the districts  of Salem and Beverly as well as Inspector of Revenue for the Port of Salem. He also wrote a campaign biography of his friend, Franklin Pierce, in which he left out some key information, such as Pierce’s drinking.  On his election, Pierce rewarded Hawthorne with the position of United States consul in Liverpool.
  • Dan Brown: Before striking gold with Angels and Demons, The Da Vinci Code, and The Lost Symbol, he was a high school English teacher.
  • Zane Grey: Early 20th century author of such popular novels as Riders of the Purple Sage, he would eventually publish nearly 90 books and sell more than 50 million copies worldwide. After years of rejection, he sold his first book at age 40 and was able to give up his day job as a dentist, a job that he hated.
  • J. K. Rowling: After her daughter was born and she separated from her husband, the author of the Harry Potter series left her job in Portugal, where she taught English as a second language, and returned to school to study for her postgraduate certificate of education (PGCE) so she could teach in Scotland. She completed her first novel while on welfare.
  • Ray Bradbury:  The author of Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, hundreds of short stories, and many television and motion picture scripts sold newspapers on a Los Angeles street corner for a few years until he was making enough story sales to write full time.
  • Mary Higgins Clark: After graduating from high school, she was secretary to the head of the creative department in the internal advertising division of Remington-Rand, a business machines manufacturer. She took evening classes in advertising and promotion and was promoted to writing catalog copy–future novelist Joseph Heller was a coworker. She also modeled for company brochures with aspiring actress Grace Kelly. Her thirst for adventure led her to become a stewardess for Pan American Airlines where she was on the last flight allowed into Czechoslovakia before the Iron curtain cut off east from west.
  • Harlan Ellison: The man who would later distinguish himself as a preeminent speculative fiction and mystery writer held many jobs before he was 20 years old, including tuna fisherman, itinerant crop-picker, hired gun for a wealthy neurotic, nitroglycerine truck driver, short order cook, cab driver, lithographer, book salesman, department store floorwalker, and door-to-door brush salesman.
  • Stephen King: While attending the University of Maine, he worked as a custodian, gas pump attendant and laborer in an industrial laundry among other jobs. After graduation he and his wife, Tabitha, lived frugally in a trailer with his meager income from teaching supplemented occasionally by a short story sale to the men’s magazine market. Then he sold Carrie–which Tabitha had rescued from the trashcan and encouraged him finish–and the King family’s income situation changed rather abruptly.
  • Scott Turow: The author of such best selling novels as Presumed Innocent and Reversible Errors, still practices law as a partner of the Chicago firm of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, although on most of his cases he works pro bono.
  • Nicholas Sparks: After graduating from college the author of such best sellers as The Notebook, Dear John, and The Last Song tried to find work in the publishing industry and applied to law school but had no luck in either area. So he embarked on other careers, including real estate appraisal, waiting tables, selling dental products by phone, and starting a manufacturing business.

This post is dedicated to my cousin, Unitarian minister and scholar Dr. Wesley Hromatko, who inspired me to look into the day jobs of some famous authors.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

Posted on

Ray Bradbury, the Salvation Army, and I

by David Kubicek

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”–Ray Bradbury

 

Fahrenheit 451The Martian ChroniclesThe Stories of Ray Bradbury

Forgive me for the tardiness of this tribute to visionary writer Ray Bradbury. I had intended to post it on the 99th anniversary of  his birth (Thursday, August 22), but my internet chose that day to have a spaz attack.

The Great Experiences

Ray Bradbury said there are three great experiences; the first is birth, the second is life, and the third is death. After a career spanning more than 70 years, he embarked on the third of those adventures on June 5, 2012, at the age of 91. For a while, on the 99th anniversary of his birth, Ray Bradbury was the top trending topic on Twitter, which means that lots and lots of people where tweeting about him–a rare thing for even a living writer.

Although Bradbury is most famous for his science fiction and fantasy, he also wrote horror, mystery/crime and mainstream stories, not to mention poetry, stage plays, teleplays and screenplays.

My Writing Mentor

Bradbury was my first writing mentor. I was an amateur astronomer during my high school years and devoured every book on astronomy at the local library. One day my mother gave me a paperback book she’d picked up in the 25-cent bin at the Salvation Army store. Since it involved space, she thought I might be interested, but she warned me that it was fiction.

That book was The Martian Chronicles, and I could not put it down. By the time I had finished reading it, I was determined to be a writer and write cool stories like Bradbury. My first step was to haunt the bookstores, the libraries and the paperback racks in drugstores until I had found and read every Bradbury book in print.

 My Study of Ray Bradbury

A few years later, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), I wanted to write a thesis about the influences of Bradbury’s early life on his writing. When searching for an advisor, I discovered something that amazed me–not everyone was a Bradbury fan, and the first few professors I approached turned me down.

The professor who finally agreed to supervise my work, Robert Bergstrom, had never read Bradbury before he agreed to take on the project, and our association continued long after the thesis was finished. Bob was a Beta Reader of my own fiction–including my novel In Human Form–for many years after I graduated.

The thesis took longer to write than I’d planned (about two years), and it was twice as long as it needed to be–I was required to write 40 pages but ended up with 80 because I had so much to say. In fact, years later, the editor of CliffsNotes mistook it for a Master’s thesis, so my credit on the CliffsNotes I wrote for Willa Cather’s My Antonia reads: David Kubicek, M.A., University of Nebraska.

Contacting My Mentor

I never met Bradbury, but in the few letters we exchanged, I found that he lived up to his reputation as a generous champion of budding writers . I was relieved–it can be a serious downer if one learns that one’s hero is a d*ck. We first made contact when I sent him a copy of my thesis. In the accompanying letter, I mentioned the dearth of information about him when I was doing my research.

Within a week I got a package from Bradbury. I was a little suspicious at first. I listened to it to see if it was ticking (I had said one or two things in my critique of his work that a writer might not be overjoyed to hear, but in my defense, I had tried to be objective). But it wasn’t a bomb–it was a copy of galleys for a book about Bradbury’s work that was scheduled for publication.

Curiously, my thesis–Ray Bradbury: Space Age Visionary–is listed on Amazon as “out of print–limited availability,” although it was, technically, never in print to begin with since only six photocopies had been distributed. My guess is that Amazon’s spider, while scrambling over the web, crawled up on the Special Collections cyber-pile at UNL’s Love Library, which had one of the six copies in circulation.

Bradbury’s Advice for Living

When I was researching my thesis, I came across this Bradbury quote in Writer’s Digest:

“I absolutely demand of you and everyone I know that they be widely read in every damn field there is; in every religion and every art form and don’t tell me you haven’t got time…! Stuff yourself with serious subjects, with comic strips and motion pictures and radio and music; with symphonies, with rock, with everything!”

Years later I realized that I had unconsciously followed his advice. I developed a great curiosity about many subjects, did lots of reading, listened to lots of different types of music, watched lots of movies, had lots of life experiences, etc. Every writer needs curiosity to properly explore the things he or she writes about, and I highly recommend that everyone–especially aspiring writers–follow Bradbury’s advice.

The Bradbury ChroniclesFor more about this amazing man, read The Bradbury Chronicles by Sam Weller, Ray Bradbury’s authorized biographer. I wish this book had been available when I was writing my thesis. Weller’s book is a great read and provides a wealth of information about a writer who has touched our imaginations and our culture. Every Bradbury fan should have this book in his or her collection. NOTE:  The hardcover edition was published several years before Bradbury’s death, but Weller has added a final chapter to the Kindle edition covering the author’s last years.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

Posted on

Education is a Life Long Commitment

by David Kubicek

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” – Ray Bradbury

Contrary to popular belief, having a college degree does not mean you’re educated. A degree is only the beginning of your education, the first tiny step. Education is a lifelong commitment. This is true for everyone but is especially true for writers.

Fortunately, I discovered this when I was in college. About midway through my course of study I took a good look at what I was learning. I was reading lots of books, writing lots of papers, and taking lots of tests. But what I really wanted to learn was how to analyze data and reach conclusions. I wanted to learning how to think. And the curriculum wasn’t helping me accomplish that goal.

I enrolled in the honors program, and under the supervision of a professor in the English Department, I undertook a research project which culminated in a thesis entitled Ray Bradbury: Space Age Visionary. I re-read all of Bradbury’s early work, analyzed it, and drew my own conclusions about it. The project was a good exercise in thinking for myself.

But even the thesis is only a beginning. I consciously made the decision not to pursue a graduate degree because I believed it would hamper my learning. Getting a degree is fine if you want to go into a particular line of work, like teaching, engineering, or business, etc. But you don’t need a degree to be a writer – the subject of my thesis, Ray Bradbury, only graduated from high school.

To be a writer you need a curiosity about everything, a hunger to learn how the world works, and a drive to understand people and why they do the things they do. You satiate this hunger by absorbing everything you can, soaking up information like a sponge. Read on a variety of topics, listen to a variety of music, watch films and TV, have new experiences, meet a variety of people, get out of your comfort zone once in a while.

There is an old Chinese parable about obtaining enlightenment – Imagine a palace with a beautiful courtyard. A young man peers through a tiny hole in the door, but he can’t see the whole courtyard at once. In middle-age he looks out on the courtyard through a small window; although he can see more, his view is still hampered. But as an old man he has thrown open the door and stands on the balcony where he can see the entire courtyard and beyond.

This illustrates the learning process throughout our lives; as we expand our horizons, the view becomes more clear.

To paraphrase Bradbury, stuff yourself with everything. The key is to continue to grow for the rest of your life by doing all the things I mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago. Don’t become stuck in time; continue to evolve. For writers, you can’t write about life thoroughly unless you strive to understand it – you never will understand it completely, but the important thing is that you continue to expand your world. For everyone else, the non-writers, you need to keep expanding your world or your world will become a cramped, cold place.

To understand our world and to change it for the better we must remember that a formal institution of learning cannot give us an education. Teachers and mentors can point the way, but ultimately we are all responsible for what we learn, and our education is a life-long commitment.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.