What a Beginning Writer Needs to Know

By DeAnna Knippling

The task of learning how to be a writer (or, in general, a creative type) is an enormous one, a lifelong project. Lately I’ve been pondering, as I look back on what I’ve done and what I wish I’d done, the elements that helped me become a writer. What helped? What was a waste of time? What should I have done sooner? And what was pushed on me that I didn’t need?

In no particular order, what I’d advise a beginning writer to do and learn:

blog.princetontutoring.com

1.  Establish in your heart of hearts that stories are important, so that you don’t have to spend time spinning your wheels asking yourself if you’re wasting your time trying to be a writer.
2. Understand that there’s a difference between plot and story. Plot is the ordered events of what you actually read; story is what sticks with you afterwards. Lots of people (including writers) confuse the two. Walking through the woods with your grandfather is a story--but it is not a plot.Writing poetry will help you write communicative, emotive sentences in fiction.
3. Grammar is the algebra of writing: it’s hard and seems random and constrictive and pointless. But once you have it, you can solve all kinds of problems with it.
4. Get in the habit of looking things up, on your own, without having to be linked to them. The dictionary, a style guide, the library, the Internet. A writer has to have a great deal of general knowledge about the world in order to lie convincingly; this is one set of research skills, ongoing research. A writer also has to have the ability to get in, get one piece of crucial information in five minutes, and get back out without losing focus on what he's writing; specific research.
5. Look up the Dunning-Kruger Effect. It applies both to you and your critics.
6. Read widely. Read books that you normally wouldn’t read. Read in depth. Read books on a certain theme, subject, genre, etc. Read constantly. Read scripts as well as watching the movie, seeing the play, reading the comic. And never be ashamed of what you have loved to read, even if it doesn’t hold up well later. 
7. Type others’ words in the same way a composer practices other people’s music.
8. Look up Heinlein’s Rules. Consider that nobody is perfect, but that attempting to achieve ridiculous goals is often more effective than attempting to achieve a bare minimum.
9. Look up the 10,000-hour rule. This is not everything you need to do to become a professional writer. 
10. Read books on writing, listen to writers’ advice, find out how your writing heroes put together a career. If you spend $15 on a writing book and take one tip out of it and toss the rest, it was probably worth it. If, however, you are taking advice from people who don’t write and publish, then it probably costs too much at any price.
11. Analysis and critical thought don’t kill your writing ability; they just teach you which rules are the most fun to break. Likewise, emotion and sentiment don’t drown books, but infuse them with flavor and perfume that endure long after the book is gone.
12. Write every day. Not necessarily creative writing at this point, but honest writing. You’ll know it’s honest if it’s ugly.
13. Make notes of what you like and why--characters, stories, settings, sentences.
14. Spy on people’s conversations. Writing down a conversation turns it a good deal of the way into dialog. Not all the way, though.
15. It is perfectly acceptable to dislike any given “classic.” It is nevertheless useful to have a sense of the history of writing, especially in your favorite genres.
16. Areas of general interest:
17. Develop the ability to gather information and the ability to resist using it all in the same story.
18. Study other writers’ techniques by typing things in first, then applying different methods of thoughtful analysis picked up from various writing books and other sources.
19. Practice techniques by writing and completing new stories.
20. Practice honesty.  Do not censor language, emotion, memory, or taste in the first draft.
21. Gather a multitude of opinions on any given subject, so that you do not persist in errors, including the error of not forming your own opinion, apart from your mentors.
22. Area of technical focus:
23. Writing clearly and in an interesting fashion.
24. Reproducing natural-sounding dialog.
25. Creating characters who are driven by their nature, rather than by authorial necessity.
26. Writing plots that allow the most interesting, memorable events to happen in a logical fashion.
27. Making settings that allow the reader to step aside from their current existence: at this point, focus on making the setting logical, consistent, and used in every scene at multiple points.
28. Set up conflict that the characters cannot resolve immediately or simply, yet that must be resolved.
29. Start thinking about the feel of a story, with whatever terminology you choose: theme, mood, atmosphere, emotion, etc.
30. Make a commitment to take care of yourself. Death comes easily to creative types, death and drug abuse and, even more pervasive, forgetting that you are more than a disembodied carrier of stories. Your body and mind are fragile, and so are your relationships. If you isolate yourself from the world, your fiction will be the poorer for it.
31. Criticize the work, not the writer. No matter how little one likes another writers or their stories, they are still more allies than enemies. Anyone who tells you otherwise just likes drama, which admittedly is an issue among writers. Look up the Dunning-Kruger effect again and bite your tongue.

Admittedly, this is both a lot of work and just the beginning.  Beginning writing is the area which most writing books and classes focus on:  for some reason, people seem to want to tell beginning writers that a) it will be a lot of work, yet b) hide the amount of work it will actually take once the basics are mastered.

Here are a few of my favorite reading and research suggestions for beginners:

• On Writing by Stephen King
• Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, by Joseph M. Williams
• Merriam-Webster.com
• The works of Bill Bryson, whose works constitute a general education in and of themselves, but especially A Dictionary of Troublesome Words and The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way
• 100.best-poems.net
• Nightmare Magazine's list of Top 100 Horror Books, or the top 100 list of any particular subject you'd like to write on
• The Telegraph's list of 100 novels everyone should read, or any other cross-genre list of excellent books
• The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron
• Any given book on writing by John Gardner, but especially The Art of Fiction
• Any given writing book or article by Lawrence Block, but especially Telling Lies for Fun & Profit
• The Chicago Manual of Style
• The Writers' Digest Write Great Fiction series, which has separate books focused on dialog, character, plot, and description/setting
• The best-of-the-year anthologies in any given genre; the years' best lists on various sites
• The bestseller lists in the NYT; the bestseller lists in USA Today.  A comparison of the two is also interesting and productive

What are yours?

About the Author: DeAnna Knippling started freelancing in May 2011 and wouldn’t be able to do it without her wonderful family and friends, especially her husband. In fact, she owes a lot to Pikes Peak Writers for helping her be a better writer, especially through the Write Brains, both in the lectures and in meeting lots of other writers.


Her reason for writing is to entertain by celebrating her family’s tradition of dry yet merry wit, and to help ease the suffering of lack of self-confidence, having suffered it many years herself. She also likes to poke around and ask difficult questions, because she hates it when people assume something must be so.


For more kicks in the writerly pants, see her blog at www.deannaknippling.com or her ebook How to Fail & Keep on Writing, available at Smashwords, B&N, Amazon, and OmniLit.

A Little Extra Reading in 2014

By Stacy S. Jensen

Reading is one of the best craft exercises for writers. In addition to being entertained, I learn something every time I pick up a book.

Thanks to the size of most picture books, I can enjoy and study dozens of these each week. My only limitation is how many I put on hold at the library and how I coordinate those pickups with a curious toddler in tow.

I often forget about other genres and adult novels. To avoid missing these great works, I plan to improve my reading routines in 2014.

I also want to give back to authors, who offer an adventure or some reflection — quiet or riotous — when I open a book or turn on my Kindle. I want to add more #amreading hashtags to my Twitter feed. I want to relax more with books.

I have a series of 12 posts on ways readers can help authors and their own writing through reading. Most don’t involve money. Thanks to our wonderful public library system, I do most of my reading for the minimal taxes our family pays each year.

Here’s my first post:

TRY

You thought I was going to say read.

Nope.

My first way to help authors and your own writing is to TRY: 

• a new author.
• a new genre.
• a new format.

Reading time is precious, so it's normal to stick with an author you know. However, there are lots of wonderful debut authors each year just waiting for you to give their book a whirl.

There are even new genres to explore like New Adult (or just maybe one that you haven't touched in a while, like science fiction or memoir).

One way to try out a new book is to change up your reading format. Maybe you like the crack of opening a new hardcover book, but try reading in a digital format on a smartphone, tablet, e-reader, or even a computer desktop. This delivery method helps many self-published authors share their work with the world.

Getting out of your comfort zone may help with your current work-in-progress. I know it makes me think about my characters in different ways and gives me new ideas.

By trying books by new writers, you have little to lose. Well, sometimes you will find a rotten one, but its golden when you find a book that sings to you.

Are you willing to try new genres or new authors when reading?

(This post originally appeared on January 6 at stacysjensen.com.)

About the Author: Stacy S.Jensen worked as a newspaper reporter and editor for two decades. Today, she writes picture books and revises a memoir manuscript. She lives in Colorado Springs with her husband and toddler.

A Shift in Wonder

By DeAnna Knippling

There are some spoilers here, but in general nothing you couldn’t get by watching some trailer.*

Some things fall apart when you look at them too closely.

For example, Cabin in the Woods. If you’re a True Fan, skip down a bit, because reading this will just make you mad. I got to the end and felt like I’d been sucker-punched. Not with the last scene - nope, I was perfectly happy with that. But with the climactic battle right before it.

Who was the main character of this movie? Who changed the most, who learned the most, who had a real arc from beginning to end? Okay, now, who was the main actor in the climactic scene?

Not the main character. For a couple of  writer/directors who are supposedly all about strong women, she fell flat. Pure-d-flat. Did not resolve her problem on her own. No, she had a man do it for her. Fun movie?  Sure. I enjoyed the rest of it - blood, gore, guts, low humor, and final twist in the denoument - all of it. But that climax. What a stinker. And don’t try to deus ex mansplain me into thinking that she wasn’t the main character, or that really, she had some valid choices to make at the ending. Nope. None of the other characters changed (if a character solves a problem by doing what they normally do, then that’s not change - subversive guy was subversive, who saw that coming?!?), and the only choice she made at the end was to passively accept what the guy said was The Right Thing To Do. Big whoop.

Another example.

When I watched the first Star Trek reboot, I liked it. Then I read some of the critics, not the professional ones who have some interest in encouraging the movie-going public to keep buying movie tickets, but the amateurs. They gleefully pulled Star Trek to bits, turning it into illogical nonsense. As I’m writing this, I just got out of a showing of Star Trek: Into Darkness. I’m going to stay away from the reviews for a while. Because I just loved the movie, and I don’t care how unrealistic it was. The story was good, nothing is perfect, and screw the naysayers for a while. 

And yet. Cabin in the Woods. I am that naysayer.

Flaws in books are even harder for me to accept. I recently discovered, due to a recent increase in my reading superpowers, that a book that I have read so much I had to repair the spine isn’t the book I thought it was, and that the person who’d done a lot of the heavy lifting of making it grrrrreat! was me. For example, there were dozens of scenes that didn’t move the plot forward. I won’t say which book it is, because in a later series he’s fixed this issue, and honestly I...I can’t take the risk that he’ll somehow find this blog during a vanity search. No book is perfect, and I loved this book once, and he has my loyalty. But I don’t know that I’ll ever read my beloved, patched copy of it again. 

Again I’m a naysayer, or at least a nay-thinker.

I mentioned that I have recently increased my reading superpowers. What I really mean is that I’ve been studying better, typing in parts of stories, writing outlines for them, finding out how authors use conflict and structure and all that on a different level than I used to. If writing is the exhale part of being a creative writerly type, then reading is the inhale part, and I’ve learned how to inhale more deeply lately.

Part of me is saddened by my new reading superpowers. 

Because I feel like I’m losing a certain level of innocent “wow!” in reading, in watching movies, in participating in stories. My daughter comes up to me and tells me about books that she’s read, and I often have inappropriate reactions (eye rolling, mocking laughter, general killjoy naysayerisms). I can’t love stories the way an eleven-year-old does anymore, and part of me wants that back.

But part of me is enriched, too.

I pull down Dorothy Sayers and am freshly amazed. I read a James Patterson and I laugh, because his books are so perfectly orchestrated. Donald Westlake isn’t just funny anymore, he’s a god. I read a Loretta Savage and curse with pure envy on her POV structures.

More recently, I just finished studying Mark Lawrence’s Prince of Thorns, breaking it out chapter by chapter, until I could see at least a little bit of how the conflict in each scene built upon previous scenes, layer upon layer upon layer. It makes me want to reread A Clockwork Orange, oh my brothers.

I feel like I lost one kind of wonder in order to gain another. 

Is it worth it? Someday I hope it pays off and helps me sell more stories. I hope it is paying off already, as I write.

But as it is, it’s sometimes hard to talk to people about what I learn from stories. One of my favorite bits in Star Trek: Beyond Darkness was the part where people are trying to get across the falling ship. Those scenes weren’t amazing...and yet, from a storytelling perspective (and as far as I can tell at this point) they were perfect. Please don’t talk to me about the technicalities of how it could never have happened that way at the moment. I don’t want to know.

Hypocritical. And yet there it is.

I think in the end, foolishly, I want the things that are brilliant to be laid open, so I can see their brilliance - no analysis of mine can lessen true shininess - and the things that are  less than brilliant to stay hidden, so at least I can enjoy the powers of my own imagination in filling in the gaps, the artlessness, the learning curves of other creative types in the process of gaining their own superpowers, too.

Except the ending of Cabin in the Woods. I want a secret director’s cut in which Our Heroine lays that bad b---- down.

*And why are they called trailers, anyway?  Good grief.


About the Author: DeAnna Knippling started freelancing in May 2011 and wouldn’t be able to do it without her wonderful family and friends, especially her husband. In fact, she owes a lot to Pikes Peak Writers for helping her be a better writer, especially through the Write Brains, both in the lectures and in meeting lots of other writers.

Her reason for writing is to entertain by celebrating her family’s tradition of dry yet merry wit, and to help ease the suffering of lack of self-confidence, having suffered it many years herself. She also likes to poke around and ask difficult questions, because she hates it when people assume something must be so.

For more kicks in the writerly pants, see her blog at www.deannaknippling.com or her ebook How to Fail & Keep on Writing, available at Smashwords, B&N, Amazon, and OmniLit.