Category: writing fiction

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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.

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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.

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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.

 

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How I Mark My Writing Progress

by David Kubicek

Many writers measure their progress by how many words they write each day. I’m not one of them. The words I write today may be discarded tomorrow or cut in the second or third draft. For me, the  words that matter most are the ones that end up in my final draft.

The idea for my young adult dystopian novel Empath first came to me in 2011. I wrote 25,000 words, wasn’t happy with the direction of the story, and set it aside for a few years.

In 2016, shortly before the election, I took it up again. The day after the election, I set it aside and didn’t work on it for six months.  The novel was a speculative fiction story set against the backdrop of a totalitarian regime 200 years in the future–I feared that by the time it was finished and published, bookstores would shelve it in the “Contemporary” section.

But eventually I took it up once more. I tried to take it in a new direction, wrote some new scenes and discarded them. Finally I discarded everything and started over. I did this two or three more times. I cranked out a lot of words, which I discarded before even completing  one draft. In all, I deep-sixed over 90,000 words, more than enough for a complete novel.

One reason I kept starting over was that Kassidy, my main character, was too passive. She reacted to things that happened to her rather than striving for a goal and making things happen. The other reason was that Empath was too much like many other young adult dystopian novels: heroine is pissed off at the leaders of her society, heroine leads a band of rebels to overthrow the government, etc. Ho hum. Yawn.  I wanted something different.

Then in January of 2020, out of nowhere, “something different” dropped into my head. A complete idea. That has never happened to me in all the years I’ve been writing. It dropped into my head at 10 p.m. and kept me awake for two hours as my mind worked feverishly to iron out some details. Apparently, while I struggled through these early drafts, my subconscious mind–a frequent collaborator–had been hard at work, and it chose this moment to reveal to me the fruits of its labor.

But it hasn’t been easy sailing since then. There are lots of kinks I need to iron out as I work through the first draft. With a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work I expect to have a complete draft of Empath by June 2021. I won’t give any plot spoilers but will describe it only as a young adult dystopian time travel romance.

One thing I want to make clear is that in my novel, the instrument of our present day civilization’s near demise has always been a plague because a pandemic is cleaner than an atomic war–it kills people but leaves the architecture intact. It was a pandemic in 2011 when I conceived of the story, and it is a pandemic today as the novel finally nears completion.  It’s not, as they say, a story ripped from the headlines; my story was in progress years before the novel coronavirus made the scene.

One thing I can say, though, is that COVID-19 has allowed me to do some hands-on research about what it’s like to live during a pandemic. But I would have preferred to do my research in a library.

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

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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.

 

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The Most Important Writing Lesson I Learned

by David Kubicek

This is the most important writing lesson I learned: Don’t be afraid to stop for a moment to examine things in your story, whether they are physical wounds or the characters’ actions and emotions.

I learned this in a summer fiction workshop at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln more years ago than I care to count. I had turned in a story called “Clinical Evaluation” [pause for shameless self-promotion–it’s in my collection The Moaning Rocks and Other Stories]. A petty crook is shot during a liquor store robbery gone wrong, and his body is taken to the morgue where Willy, an inebriated custodian cleaning the morgue during the graveyard shift, imagines that this guy isn’t dead but only paralyzed and is trying to alert someone before the pathologist starts cutting on him in the morning.

The manuscript I turned in described the victim’s wound as a “gunshot wound to the head,” and that’s all. My teacher, Charlie Stubblefield, said he wanted to see a more detailed description of that wound. He wanted me to really get into that wound. So I did that in the revision.

“Clinical Evaluation” was the first story I sold, to an anthology of fiction, poetry, and artwork called The New Surrealists. But the lesson I had learned was not only about being specific with my descriptions. The lesson is: Don’t gloss over things, whether they are one-paragraph descriptions or entire scenes, if they are relevant to the story.

 I follow Elmore Leonard’s rule—“I try to leave out the parts that readers skip”–so I sometimes find myself wanting to skim over something or cut it out entirely because I think it will slow down the story. But one thing you must keep in mind is that it will take you much longer to write a scene than it will take your reader to read it. So even if a scene seems to be moving slowly for you, your audience may zip through it quickly and enjoy reading it as much as you enjoyed writing it.

Just remember that each scene must have a reason for its existence. You are giving the readers information they need, or you’re moving the story forward characterwise or plotwise. This doesn’t mean that every scene that has a reason for being should be in the story. That’s something for you to judge in the second draft and for your beta readers to judge before you unleash your brainchild on an unsuspecting public. I always ask my beta readers to tell me what parts of the story they didn’t like and why–in particular, what parts of the story they wanted to skip.

You may think I’ve diverged quite a bit from describing that simple head wound, but I haven’t. The lesson I took away, the most important writing lesson I learned, is to not be afraid to stop for a moment to examine things in your story, whether they are physical wounds or the characters’ actions and emotions. Don’t summarize elements that may be important to your story, even if you may have doubts while writing the first draft. If something doesn’t work, you’ll find out soon enough, and you can fix it in a later draft.

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

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Writing by Ear: Learn the Rules First, Then Break the Rules

by David Kubicek

writing by earWhen writing fiction you may sometimes you can break the rules of grammar, but first you must learn the rules. It is a process I call writing by ear.

Several years ago there was a game show, hosted by Jeff Foxworthy, called Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?  in which adult contestants tried to answer questions from first through fifth grade textbooks. The questions got harder as the contestants’ winnings grew.

My wife, Cheryl, kept pestering me to apply to be a contestant. I resisted mainly because I would have to fly out to LA on my own dime to be interviewed. I’d been to LA a couple of times so combining what was basically a temp job interview with a vacation in sunny southern California was not that enticing.

Cheryl thought I would be good at this game because all of my life I’d read a lot on a variety of subjects and my head was, in her words, “full of useless information.”

On the show, the contestants chose from several categories like grammar, math, astronomy, history, etc. When I told Cheryl the first categories I’d choose would be history and astronomy, she was surprised. She was sure that I, being a writer, would ace the grammar questions. Her amazement deepened when I told her that grammar was my weakest area.

In elementary school I learned proper names for phrases and parts of sentences and what you’re supposed to do and what you’re not supposed to do in composition. But I forgot most of the technical terms years and years and years ago.

What I did learn, before I forgot the grammar proper names and rules, was how to use the language to create an effect. As I learned to write, some things remained as ghosts of my early grammar lessons. I know what nouns and verbs are, of course, because they are a crucial part of a coherent sentence. I know what adjectives are, and I use them sparingly so they won’t detract from the effects I’m trying to create. And I try to avoid splitting infinitives, but sometimes the prose sounds more natural if I split the bloody thing.

I write by ear, which means putting the words down in an order that will sound best, or read best, to help create a desired effect in the reader’s mind. And sometimes that means not going strictly by the grammar rule book–but I learned the rules before I forgot them.

So quiz me on science, history, or even math, but I would fail miserably at grammar.

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

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Rejections of Famous Writers

by David Kubicek

Struggling writers take heart. Every now-famous writer collected rejection slips. As an incentive to struggling writers, I’ve put together this list of rejections of famous writers before they became famous.

I heard a speaker at a writing conference remark that many talented writers remain unpublished while the works of many marginal or bad writers find their way into print. Writers who keep sending their work out will eventually be published. 

Among the rejection slips I’ve  received, my favorite was from a science fiction anthology: a full-page drawing of a dragon dabbing at its eyes with a Kleenex as its tears flowed down.  It was much funnier than these meager words can describe. I once showed it to a friend, also a science fiction writer, who didn’t find it quite as amusing. It’s a matter of attitude; I couldn’t do anything about the rejection, and it was a change of pace from the usual, uninspired  form letter.

For any aspiring writers out there who have trouble staying motivated in the face of an expanding  file of rejections, perhaps this list of the receptions of some famous authors and their work will help.

  • Crash by J.G. Ballard: “The author of this book is beyond psychiatric help.”
  • Dr. Seuss: “Too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling.”
  • Torrents of Spring by Ernest Hemingway: “It would be extremely rotten taste, to say nothing of being horribly cruel, should we want to publish this.”
  • The San Francisco Examiner, rejecting Nobel Prize winner Rudyard Kipling: “I’m sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.”
  • Lust for Life, Irving Stone‘s historical novel about Vincent Van Gogh: “A long, dull novel about an artist.” Sixteen publishers rejected the novel. When it finally saw print it sold more than 25 million copies.
  • Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach: “Jonathan Livingston Seagull will never make it as a paperback.” The novel eventually sold to Avon Books and racked up sales of more than 7.25 million copies.
  • Tony Hillerman, best known for his Navajo Tribal Police mystery novels was advised by publishers to “Get rid of all that Indian stuff.”
  • The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells: “An endless nightmare. I do not believe it would ‘take’ … I think the verdict would be ‘Oh don’t read that horrid book.'”
  • Although Emily Dickinson published only seven poems in her lifetime, an early rejection advised her: “(Your poems) are quite as remarkable for defects as for beauties and are generally devoid of true poetical qualities.”
  • Animal Farm by George Orwell: “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.”
  • So many publishers rejected The Tale of Peter Rabbit that Beatrix Potter published it herself.
  • Lord of the Flies by Nobel Prize winner William Golding: “An absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull.”
  • One publisher to another  on John le  Carre‘s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold: “You’re welcome to le Carre—he hasn’t got any future.”
  • The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean Auel: “We are very impressed with the depth and scope of your research and the quality of your prose. Nevertheless … we don’t think we could distribute enough copies to satisfy you or ourselves.”
  • The Deer Park by Norman Mailer: “This will set publishing back 25 years.”
  • Carrie by Stephen King: “We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.”
  • And my favorite:
  • Sanctuary by Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner: “Good God, I can’t publish this!”

Fiction editing is a subjective process. There will always be editors who think your writing is crap, but there are also editors who will be enthusiastic about it. You just have to find them. And the only way to find them is to keep sending out your work.

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