How Do You Know Your Writing Is Good?

A few weeks ago, my girlfriend and I were at a local restaurant catching up with two of our friends. Over our various fried foods and beer, we started asking each other what we were working on. I shared I was investing time each day to practice writing, which piqued my friend's interest.

“How do you know if your writing is good?” he asked.

I paused. “You don’t know.”

The question stayed with me and perhaps it’s something you’ve wondered too.

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The following guest post comes to us from writer and entrepreneur Dan Murphy. To read more of his articles, check out his blog at DanMurphy.me

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When you’re writing, there’s no instant feedback mechanism. It’s not like Super Mario Brothers, where you make it to the castle or not. In school, you handed in your writing to a teacher. In real life, there are no grades.

Even if you do give your writing to someone, there is no universal standard of quality. An English professor and a friend writing for a craft beer blog will have very different opinions.

“Good” writing is relative. Even the greatest literary works of our time have bad reviews on Amazon.

For a beginner like me, it’s even tougher. After writing, editing, re-reading, and editing again, I compare my work to the articles and books I enjoy. Most of the time, I feel I miss the mark.

So, what can I do to improve?

I can take time each day to close the gap between where I am and where I want to be. Anyone can.

The Importance of Feedback

The only way to close this gap is to get feedback on your work. The biggest challenge is allowing yourself to be open to it. 

Feedback isn’t always easy to receive. I’ve invested time writing and revising my work, and I’d like it to be viewed as perfect.

Then a friend or colleague emails me saying my writing is far from perfect. I made huge mistakes. The advice is good, but my ego takes a hit.

All of this is perfectly fine. These temporary letdowns and stings are how the gap is closed.

I’ve learned that temporary stings are just that: Temporary. It’s important that I put my ego aside and focus on how the feedback will help hone my writing. The sting is just my ego getting in the way.

If someone takes the time to correct you and offer suggestions, pay attention. Feedback, when offered in a pleasant and helpful manner, is a gift. Be grateful. Look to apply it. Ignore it at your own peril. This is how you improve.

One thing to keep in mind: A thing needs to be bad before it becomes okay, okay before it becomes good, and good before it becomes great.

Where can you get feedback? Here are a few places:

1) Feedback from friends

Feedback from friends is valuable, but can be tricky to get.

Friends may fear that if they’re brutally honest it will destroy the relationship. To receive useful feedback, you need friends that will be 100% honest.

A few of my friends and I have relationships based on complete honesty. We both understand being honest may be a temporary pain, but there’s no malice behind it. If you can find friends open to giving you honest feedback, do it.

Feedback like “It’s good” or “I liked it” isn’t helpful. If they say “it sucked,” ask them what sucked about it. You may have to dig a little. If they don’t feel comfortable, don’t ask them to do it.

It is possible that friends don’t know good writing from bad, and that means their feedback would be limited, or not very helpful. If they tear through a book a week, they could be helpful. Someone who stopped reading a book because it was terrible may be a great candidate.

Another sad reality: Many people won’t—or simply can’t—take the time to help. Even if they try, their feedback may be far from helpful. This is part of the process. Continue to look for the person that will provide the feedback you need.

2) Ask someone whose writing you admire

When my friend Christy writes an email or a blog post, it has style and grace to it. She produces colorful sentences that flow. Her word choice and sentence structure are diverse. When comparing her writing to mine, I feel like mine falls short.

I want to write more like her, so I reluctantly asked her for help. She obliged, and has been amazing in pointing out where I could improve.

She checks three boxes: she’s a great friend, honest with her feedback, and a great writer.

When reaching out to someone, make sure it’s someone accessible. You may admire the writing of Stephen King, but he’s not available to give you feedback now. Or ever.

A writer with a lightly-trafficked blog [Like me!], a journalist writing for a local news publication, or an author beginning his or her career could be accessible. Ask to review their articles before they are published, help them gain exposure, or offer to proof their unpublished book. Give before you can receive.

3) Trade services or goods

If you don’t have money to pay someone, there’s always the option to trade goods or services. See what a potential reviewer needs help with, and offer to do that task for them in exchange for some critiquing time.

A little tip: Before you do this, make sure to determine the scope of the trade before you begin. What will you do? How much will you do? When you complete the task, how much proofreading time will you receive?

People value services differently. If you agreed to paint a ceiling for someone in exchange for critiquing time, you may value the task at $1,000, and the other person may value it at $300. Hammer that out first so neither party feels it was an uneven trade.

4) Pay someone

Editors all over the world offer critiquing services at a reasonable cost. Check out services like UpWork, Guru, and Freelancer. Post a job on one of these sites asking for help with your writing.

These sites allow you to explain the scope of the job and what you’ll pay. The job description could contain something as simple as, “I’ll pay $X per hour/article/page to receive assistance with my writing.” Compared with trading goods or services, the scope of the job is clearer, so no one feels like they’re shorted in the end.

Before engaging anyone, view the rankings and reviews of the potential hires to determine who is a good fit. Of course, the most important part is finding a person you can communicate with, and who understands your writing goals.

If you think someone is a good fit, hire them short-term and see how the relationship works. Don’t be afraid to switch editors if one isn’t working out.

5) Join a group, online or off

There are plenty of writing groups. If you're interested in an online group, a quick search on Facebook will show a few to check out. Some are public (anyone can join) and some are private (you need to request access).

A tip for Facebook groups: Before or after joining, look at the size of the group. Some groups are too large to be effective. Feel free to lurk a bit and see if the group is a good fit and contains other supportive writers.

Search Facebook for events that cater to writers. You can also use Google to look up “writing groups near [city]” and see what turns up. Another resource is Meetup.com, which lists thousands of in-person events, including writing groups. Check if your local library hosts workshops or events.

There are a ton of ways to find these events. Start digging and see what you uncover.

6) Start your own group

Almost a year ago, I started my own group for writers on Medium. The idea was to motivate myself to write more and help others when I could.

I started with a post on Facebook stating I was forming a writers group. At the time, I had no idea how it would be run. Only after people showed interest did I figure out the rest. Now it has a nice membership and is growing a few members at a time.

Anyone can do the same. Put something on Facebook, Twitter, a forum, or wherever you find other writers. Even if you get just one other interested person, that’s a start.

I didn’t plan how my group would work, but you might want to plan yours before you start. People will expect the group to have structure and will look to you to provide it.

Even if you plan thoroughly, be open to adjustment as the group evolves. When I started, I received article submissions via email. After almost losing a few, I moved to a submission form. I’ve also changed the format of the emails to tighten things up, reduce clutter, and make things clearer.

7) Read books on writing

Books on writing cost less than a large pizza (and have fewer calories, I assume) and can help you determine if your writing is on the right track.

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott covers a vast number of topics in an entertaining way. Her section on putting perfectionism aside was a huge help in completing my drafts. She covers how to overcome mental hurdles like jealousy and writer's block, a topic other books omit. She also has a section on how to get help from others, and decreasing your learning curve.

William Zinsser’s On Writing Well is filled with methods to refine your writing. His first section focuses on writing principles and how to keep things simple. The chapter “Words” shows how caring about words helps you select better ones while avoiding clichés. If you’re stuck on how to start or end an article—both cause me difficulty—there’s a chapter on this.

Apply What You’re Learning

Learning how to write is easy, but writing is hard. Focus more effort on the hard part. Writing and revising will show you where your struggles are. Once you start understanding your struggles, you’ll learn what you don’t know and know what you need to learn.

These are the sources of feedback that I have found most effective. Of course, there are other ways that you may discover on your own. See what works and discard what doesn’t.

No matter which methods you decide to use, always experiment with new ways to obtain feedback. This is the fastest way to improve as a writer.

Write for Yourself, or the Reader?

I read a lot about writing. I've almost always got a craft book open in my Kindle library (right now, it's James Frey's How to Write a Damn Good Novel), and my inbox is clogged with newsletters from half a dozen writing blogs.

In books, blogs and forums, the one question I see more than any other is this:

"Should you write for yourself, or for the reader?"

In other words, should you just write whatever you feel like, and let the chips fall as they may? Or should you look at what readers enjoy, or what's selling, and try to write like that?

This is a great question, and one of the most important that any writer faces. Unfortunately, the common wisdom is very polarized. I believe in a more balanced approach.

In short, I think you should write what you want to write, but write it how the reader wants to read it. (Like this quote? Click here to tweet it!)

The longer answer is that a writer should write what he knows, and that usually means what he wants. As far as the story/conceptual content of a piece, you kinda have to write for yourself, or its a chore and you hate it.

But you can't ignore the reader's hopes and expectations either. That's a path of least resistance issue. If you write only for yourself, to the exclusion of the reader, readers will simply take the path of least resistance and set your book down. Demanding to be read, but refusing to consider the reader's feelings makes you a dictator (one of the many reasons I despise lit-fic authors).

Thankfully, you can have it both ways. In reality, you have to have it both ways. If you write purely for yourself, you'll be an arrogant prick at best, and languish in obscurity at worst. If you write purely for the reader, you'll produce forgettable genre trash. If it's really well written, it might sell, but what writer aspires to make zero impact on their reader?

Writers want to be known. We want to be read, or we wouldn't write.

The thing is, no matter what you're like, there are people like you out there. No matter what you want to write, there are people who would enjoy reading it, if you could only get it in front of them. So you have to write what you want, figure out who also wants it, and write it in such a way--and in such places--that they can enjoy it.

As always, life is more complex than the binary questions humans love to ask about it.

The Seven Heavenly Virtues of Fiction Writing

You hear about the Seven Deadly Sins everywhere, but it's rare to hear about their opposing virtues outside of a church. Heck, even there, it's rare. I went to Catholic church and Sunday school for the first sixteen years of my life, and I found out about the Seven Virtues from Wikipedia.

I won't try to sell you on these virtues as a lifestyle (though most of them are pretty hard to disagree with), but when it comes to writing, we're all guilty of at least one of the Seven Deadlies, at least some of the time, and that means it's good to know the opposing stances. The virtuous writer is likely a happy writer, whether she is successful or not.

The Seven Heavenly Virtues of Writing

Humility

The opposite of pride, humility takes many forms for a writer. First and foremost, humility means never assuming you know everything, or even "enough" (what's "enough" anyway?). Language and storytelling are always changing, so a writer should always be learning, period.

Humility also means submitting to the will of an editor or publisher. While a writer has every right to defend his work, he must acknowledge that there is wisdom in the experience of overseers. A soldier on the ground may think it's wise to ascend the hill in front of him, to attain the high ground. But the General knows that there's an enemy army on the other side, and mounting the hill will invite disaster. 

The editor and publisher have the bird's eye view. In a good writer-editor relationship, there will be times when the writer is right, and times when the editor is right. But it takes a humble writer to see that.

Another form of humility is placing one's own agenda--be it fame, literati recognition, or a soapbox message--second to the desires of the reader. Don't forget: people read to enjoy themselves. I've never read a book because the author deserved it. I only read things that I enjoy. I love an author who makes me think, even challenges my worldview, but if you can't make me enjoy the ride, I'm getting off.

Humility is about creating a path of least resistance for the reader. If you want to be read (and if you didn't, you wouldn't write), you need to make it easy, worthwhile, and enjoyable for the reader, or you simply won't have many readers. It won't matter how good your writing is.

Kindness

The opposite of envy, kindness is all about how you regard your fellow authors. Whether they are above or below you in skill and accomplishment, they deserve your respect.

I will admit, I struggle with this one. If you've read this blog for very long, you'll know. I make a lot of hot-headed statements about amateurs and hacks. They're mostly for comic effect, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit I occasionally believe what I'm saying.

Cultivating humility helps one be kind. We are all students of this mysterious craft, and we are all on different paths. There is no single trajectory from novice to bestseller. Heck, not everybody wants to be a bestseller. And some bestsellers got there by sheer dumb luck; Stephanie Meyer sold Twilight to the very first person she submitted it to. Meanwhile, Frank Herbert's Dune was rejected over twenty times, even though it had already enjoyed success as a magazine serial.

You can guess what readers will like, but you'll never know. Even the people in the crow's nest (editors and publishers) don't know. They just guess better. 

Fiction is a crazy, unpredictable game, and it pays to have good sportsmanship. That's what kindness is all about. Respect the people who aren't as far along as you. Help them if you can. And learn from the people ahead of you. Don't waste your life trying to be them, or hating them for being on top. When it comes down to it, we're all on the same team.

Charity

The greedy writer will write anything to gain fame or recognition. The charitable writer shares themselves with the reader.

Few people read a book because the author deserves it, but everyone who reads does want a piece of the author. Readers want a story first and foremost, but they want that story to come from a unique voice. They want the story to embody some kind of artistic vision, no matter how humble. To attain true fame and recognition, a story must feel genuine.

That's what charity is all about. The greedy writer writes so that she may take. The charitable writer writes because she has something to give.

Figure out what you have to give, then figure out who wants that thing, and give it to them. It's simple, really. If you look at the demand first, then try to become whatever fills it, the result will feel contrived and artificial. But if you find your audience based on what you want to write, then use the audience's desires to guide and hone your offering, it becomes a give and take. It's tough to strike the balance between writing for yourself and writing for the reader, but authors do it all the time. The key is charity; a willingness to give. Without that, you're just a beggar.

Temperance

Writing that indulges the author's poetic or descriptive whims is gluttonous. Temperance, then, is when you only give what is necessary, when it's necessary.

When you're in the trenches, up to your elbows in words, sometimes it's hard to know how much is too much. We're all guilty of a long-winded, tell-y description once in a while. But that's what makes editing so great. We aren't committed to the first words we choose.

Temperance, then, is your inner editor. No, not the negative one who says you're a hack. The other, reasonable one, who says "maybe you should tighten that up a little." It's perfectly fine, even advisable, to turn this voice off when you're writing a first draft. But once the draft is written, this voice should take charge and hone your writing down to its leanest, meanest self.

In this sense, temperance takes on another meaning. We temper metals by repeatedly heating, quenching, reheating and quenching again. This process removes the hardness and brittleness of a metal, and makes it tougher and more flexible. Your writing should be the same. Smooth over those rough spots. Rebuild brittle sentences so they don't shatter on first reading. You want your writing tough--assertive--but flexible enough that anyone can understand it. Tempered writing can withstand the test of time.

Chastity

That word is bound to bum a few people out, so let me be clear: chastity is NOT abstinence. Chastity is merely the avoidance of empty sex and violence.

In writing, this means only including graphic details when they really matter. There's no sense in showing a character getting their hand cut off unless that disability is going to change the way they behave. There's no reason to show two characters making love unless the act has consequences, good or bad. Either they fall in love, or they regret the encounter and that regret drives their choices from that point on.

Chastity is not avoidance of sex, drugs, violence, and cursing. Chastity means taking something "impure" and making it pure by imbuing it with meaning. Sex between loving partners is wonderful. Meaningless sex between strangers leaves them feeling cold. It's the same way with writing. A steamy sex scene, or a gruesome fight can fire our passions if it means something. But if it's just there for show, it will turn us off.

Even when the sex and violence do matter, there's something to be said for restraint. After all, reading is about stimulating the imagination, and the imagination is always more satisfying than reality. Think about it: a horror movie is always less scary once you've gotten a good look at the monster. It's the unknown that scares and tantalizes us. A woman clasping a sheer cloth across her chest is sensual. A woman with her ankles behind her head is just pornographic, and frankly boring. You can't give everything away right away. In writing and in life, Chastity is the art of savoring the reveal.

Patience

The wrathful writer crafts a story as a means to an end. The story serves his message. The patient writer doesn't feel the need to cram anything down the reader's throat. The patient writer understands that people change gradually.

I'll admit that sometimes it's good to be shocked out of your complacency. Sometimes we need the horror of war to motivate us toward peace. But if we're to sustain that peace, we must gradually change our attitudes toward our enemies, or history will repeat itself.

Writing with a message works the same way. Maybe you want to convince the world to go vegan. You can't just show people a cow in front of a band saw and expect them to convert on the spot. If anything, it will only make them dislike you for exposing them to that cruel reality. As a writer (or a speaker, for that matter), you are just a messenger. The idea you want to convey is bigger and probably older than you. Chances are you don't even own this idea you're trying to sell. So unless you're peddling one of the few new ideas in the world, people aren't going to hear what you're selling. They already know all about it. All they're going to hear is how you're selling it.

People are stubborn. They only change when they decide to. People rarely change for others, and when they do, they screw it up as often as not. To enact change through storytelling, you have to make people want to change. and that means being subtle. They have to think it's their own idea. That means planting a seed, surreptitiously if you have to, and waiting for it to grow. And that takes patience.

There's another kind of patience that wise writers practice too, and that's waiting for success. Successful writers will tell you that it doesn't come overnight, or even at all. The writer who claws and scrambles after success like a dog scratching at his cage is just wearing himself out. He'll quit before the gatekeeper lets him through. But sit and wait patiently, and the gatekeeper can be kind. And the writer will be wiser and happier for it.

Diligence

Alright, maybe you shouldn't just sit and wait. Be patient, by all means, but use your time to improve your craft.

Again, sloth is probably the most common and deadly sin for writers. It keeps great books from being written, and good authors from getting better. Whatever you write, whatever your goals are, there's always a way to grow. Anyone who doesn't believe that is prideful, but that pride is probably masking sloth.

I believe one of the deepest flaws in our society is that we go through a period of education, and then at a certain point we're "done". But that's not really how the human mind works. Humans always need to be growing. The minute they stop, they start dying.

So if you're a well-educated writer, whether you have an MFA, or just a stack of dog-eared craft books and a full RSS feed, get over this idea that you're "done". There's always more to do.

Even if you've accepted that learning is a lifelong process, there may still be a lesson for you to learn about diligence. You may be the best writer you can be, but each piece you write must go through a similar process of forging to become the best piece it can be. Just because you're a hardworking author doesn't mean you crap gold. Even successful authors need to edit. Every word should be questioned.

Forget "good enough". "Good enough" is for losers. Make your writing as good as you can, no matter how much work it takes. You can't expect devotion from readers if you don't plan to repay them in kind (Like this quote? Click here to tweet it!). People can tell when an artist is resting on his laurels.

Furthermore, diligence is about finding the writing habit. Figure out what your peak hours are in a given day, and try to use them for writing. Figure out what habits, settings, and motifs put you in a diligent state of mind. Writing is art, but it's also work. In fact, it's mostly work.

Get to it.

Bonus Virtue: Hope

Though it's not listed among the classical Heavenly Virtues, in my preliminary readings for this article, I encountered several mentions of the idea of hope.

Hope is a uniquely human phenomenon (as far as we know). Hope is a happiness that looks to the future. Animals, smart as they may be, are governed first by instinct. Instinct lives in the present. Instinct is either satisfied now, or it desires something now.

Humans, however, willingly sacrifice in the present to store up treasures in the future. Looking fondly to that future is what we call hope.

As a writer, you must always have hope that you will succeed. You must hope that you become the best writer you can be. You must hope that you will land a literary agent, or successfully market your self-published book. You must hope that readers see and hear what you're trying to show them.

And a good writer will instill hope in her readers. Sad endings and negative character arcs have artistic merit, but in the end, readers are unlikely to return to an author that makes them feel like shit. If you use a negative character arc to teach the reader a hard lesson, you should at least leave them feeling like they're better people for having learned it. If you make them feel like they're a shitty person living in a shitty world, they won't be lining up to buy your next book.

Maybe people deserve to feel shitty. Maybe you believe that. But even if they do, the don't want to, and that means they're not going to willingly subject themselves to something that makes them feel that way.

Is that the kind of writer you want to be? Someone who readers unwillingly subject themselves to? If that's you, you're probably not reading this.

Good books give us hope, even if it's bittersweet. Keep that as your goal, and you'll never stray too far from the virtuous path.

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Well? What did you think? Was I too harsh on the sins? Are the virtues naiive? Let me know in the comments!

The Seven Deadly Sins of Fiction Writing

Alright. I'm not the first to publish a blog article along these lines. You caught me. What can I say, it's a grabber!

Despite how often people trot out the idea of the Seven Deadly Sins, I still think there's some use in listing the worst things you can do to damage your writing and your career. What you don't hear about often are the Seven Heavenly Virtues, which oppose the better-known sins. That's what I plan to add to the discussion; not just the diseases, but the cures.

First, though, we have to take a look at the bad stuff:

The Seven Deadly Sins of Fiction Writing

Pride

For a writer, pride can take many forms, but it usually boils down to one poisonous thought: "I'm better than other writers".

Many who are stricken by pride may not even admit it to themselves, but deep down they labor under the pretense that they, above all people, know what they are doing. These are the amateurs who think they don't need to learn grammar, story structure, and self-editing skills. These are the journeymen authors that think their lengthy publication record exempts them from criticism.

Most successful people in the world agree that successful people never stop learning. Recently, I saw a video that highlights another disturbing facet of this notion: once you stop learning, you get old. When a writer decides he or she knows everything they need to know, that's the moment they begin their inevitable descent into irrelevance.

If life and history have taught us anything, it's that new ideas and innovations are constantly overtaking established methods. The person who balks at new knowledge refuses to accept this. Even if a writer really did know everything about writing, language is a living, changing organism, and there will always be new things to learn.

So never assume you've seen it all. They're coming up with new stuff all the time. And never assume you can't learn something from someone just because they're in an earlier stage of their career than you.

Envy

Writers are readers (at least they should be), and that means we all have our favorite authors that inspire us. Many of us feel indebted to a particular author for motivating us to start writing in the first place.

Envy is what happens when that admiration turns bad. Instead of learning from our idols, we hate them for their success, or we try to ape their style in an ill-conceived attempt to ride their coat tails.

The more time you spend talking shit on other writers, the less time you spend growing in your own career. That's the real sin of envy; by focusing your emotions and efforts on another person, you do yourself an injustice. Sure, some famous writers are hacks. Some of them didn't work for their success. Some of them don't deserve it. So what? How does that affect you? Are you under the impression that every writer deserves an equal share of the fame?

Be inspired by others, of course. That's part of how you learn. But don't focus on them. Work to improve your own writing instead of tearing down that of others.

Greed

For writers, greed can be related to envy. Greedy writers hop from one trend to the next, writing whatever they think will sell. They see a successful movement, and they drop what they're doing and try to write something that will fit in.

Greedy writing is devoid of theme. It lacks identity. Even if it's well written and edited, the writing is missing the spirit that makes true originals worth learning from.

In writing, greed is another perversion of inspiration. Greedy writers are posers. They're fickle. The moment something drops below a certain rank on Amazon, they're off to find the next trend. They have no ideas of their own, nothing original to say, and while they might occasionally entertain, their work is quickly forgotten. Readers, whether they're aware of it or not, can sense fluff. That's what greed produces: fluff.

Gluttony

Speaking of fluff, gluttony is when a writer is so obsessed with words and clever ideas that they crowd out the story. Purple prose is a well-known pitfall, especially for beginning writers who have not yet learned the wisdom of restraint. Beyond the words themselves, though, there is a sort of violet-tinged aura that some stories take on when an author tries too hard to stuff them with whiz-bang, neato ideas.

Gluttonous writing is filled with unnecessary detours, either to flex the writer's poetic muscle, or describe some pet object, idea, or character in exhaustive detail. These are the writers who spend whole chapters describing the social machinery of a futuristic society, but somehow don't derive a plot from all that information. These are the info-dumpers. These are the people who include a list of the name of every crater on Mercury, even though the reader has no need to know them.

The fruits of gluttonous writing are ultimately distractions from the story. Everything in a story must matter; every object, idea, or character must advance the plot and draw the reader more fully into the author's world. You can't make a story "cool" by hanging a bunch of neat stuff on it. You can't make a novel poetic by tacking a bunch of florid descriptions onto every scene. Every addition must serve the whole, or else be cut out.

Lust

Similar to gluttony, lust is when a writer fills his or her book with lurid tales of sex and violence as a way of shocking the reader into paying attention. Don't get me wrong, readers love a sexy, violent story, and I'm no exception. But when those scenes are shoehorned in at moments where they don't matter, or when they go on so long it becomes obvious that the story is just an excuse to exorcise the writer's lust (for flesh or blood), that's a problem.

People love sex, drugs, violence, and swearing. But that doesn't mean that including those things will make people like a story more. Cheap thrills are just that: cheap. It takes no skill to toss in some debauchery just for the hell of it. Making the debauchery matter, however, can make for gripping writing. Don't shy from red-faced vitriol or red light district pleasure, just make sure they're in the story for a reason. And for God's sake, don't make us sit through page after page of that stuff. It gets embarrassing after a while.

Wrath

Wrath is when a writer creates a story only as a means of expressing some fiery political, religious, or philosophical view. Granted, narrative can be an effective means of elucidating a philosophy, but ultimately it does a disservice to the fiction itself.

The issue here is similar to gluttony and lust. A writer should not write a story as an excuse to do something else (Like this quote? Click here to tweet it!). If you want to be a poet, be a poet. If you want to write steamy love scenes, erotica is your game. If you want to spread your ideology, you should be writing essays. Why hide your true objective under a shroud of fiction? To me, it's a sign that the writer lacks confidence, especially when it comes to philosophy. If your ideas aren't strong enough to stand on their own, or if you don't feel capable of defending them, maybe you shouldn't be trying to sneak them into reader's minds by disguising them as a story.

Furthermore, when you write a book to espouse an ideology, you're spreading yourself too thin. You're doing two jobs; crafting a story and defending an argument.  I'm all for political and philosophical themes in fiction; my work is full of them. But a good story must be its own objective. If you're guiding inspiration is a message, and not the story itself, you will choose the message over the story whenever the two come into conflict. The result is a weak story, which in turn makes your message harder to digest. Ultimately, it's counter productive.

At the risk of sounding heretical, this is why I'm not a fan of so-called "literary" fiction. This is why I, an avid reader, was always the vocal dissident in any English class. Many of the books I was forced to read just didn't hold my attention. I read them, and I enjoyed more than a few, but I could always tell when a writer was just using a boring, barely-there story to bludgeon me over the head with some pet idea. I wish I could have put my finger on it at the time.

Sloth

Writing is a stationary pursuit, so perhaps it is fitting that the most common and most deadly of the seven sins is sloth. We all know our own capacity for laziness in writing, and it infects us at both the micro and macro levels.

On the micro level, we have lazy writing; common missteps like too many adverbs and adjectives, or empty words like "very" and "beautiful". Many of the articles on this website are dedicated to fighting lazy writing.

On the macro level, writers are often lazy in their approach to the task. We're all guilty of this sometimes; we don't always feel like writing, or we simply can't muster the energy to do another round of edits on our latest work. Even if we do find the energy, we half-ass the job sometimes. And who among us is immune to the dreaded writer's block?

Sloth is arguably the most deadly sin of fiction writing because no matter how it attacks, it prevents you from building your story world. Readers cannot read what we do not write (Like this quote? Click here to tweet it!), and they cannot visualize what we frame in lazy writing. Either way, readers are left wanting, and we are left wallowing in obscurity and self-pity.

Unfortunately, there's no one-size-fits-all solution to sloth. Writing is a habit like any other, and it must be undertaken deliberately and repeatedly until not writing is more vexing than writing badly. We may die before we accomplish everything we want to, but if we write anyway, at least we will have done something.

I've always believed in lofty, even immodest goals. Set your sights on the mountain's peak. You may not reach it, but you'll get off the ground.

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Next week, I'll take a look at the virtues that oppose these sins. If any of the above sound like you, hopefully my thoughts will be helpful!

The Long-Term Approach to World-Building

Writers who use contemporary settings often set their stories in places they've lived, because they know the little back-alley details that make those places come to life. They populate their stories with people they know, or alternate versions of themselves; look at how many Stephen King books are centered on novelists from Maine.

Historical fiction writers have the treasure trove of human history to delve into. They can cherry-pick people, places and happenings to fill their stories. Today, writers can even take virtual tours of places they've never been using Google Maps, or learn a foreign land's history on Wikipedia. Wherever and whenever a story is set, there's a ton of information on it at a writer's fingertips.

...unless you set your stories in the future, or in mythical lands that never existed. We always hear that you should write what you know, but that old adage takes on a very different meaning for fantasy and sci-fi writers.

Spec-fic authors must engage in thorough world-building. For every fact a contemporary fiction author can look up, spec-fic writers must invent one. (Like this quote? Click here to tweet it!)

It's a tall order even for the most imaginative person. I'm often asked how to go about world-building, and unfortunately there's no simple answer. I like to think I'm pretty imaginative, but the truth is world-building is a long, slow process of compiling tidbits of information, most of which will never see the light of day. But there are a few general strategic tips I can give that have made my world-building experience a little more fruitful.

Take it slow.

Don't sit down to your NaNoWriMo project on November first and start trying to build a fictional universe. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither was Narnia or Ringworld. These things take time, and it's best to start long before you ever try to set a story in the worlds you create.

You won't be able to flesh out a setting all in one go. As James Scott Bell would say, you have to send it to "the boys in the basement". Even when your conscious mind is preoccupied, your subconscious never stops working. Let your world-building goals stew in your head, and allow tasty morsels to bubble to the surface a few at a time. One way to do this is to...

Keep a world-building journal.

I use Google Keep, but Evernote or a good old-fashioned Moleskine notebook might be the solution for you. Use whatever you're comfortable with, just make sure it's something you have handy all the time. You can't expect to keep a day's worth of ideas in your short term memory while your idea journal waits on your desk at home. You're going to forget something.

I have a terrible memory. I always have ever since I can--or can't--remember. For most of my life it was just a cross I had to bear; people were always getting hurt because I forgot something they wanted me to remember. Understandably, they thought I didn't care about their lives.

Now, I've outsourced most of my memory to Google Calendar, Keep, Mindly, and Any.Do. And every time some setting tidbit comes to my attention, I write it down. Sometimes these are ideas that come to me unbidden and without method--something the boys in the basement send up as a surprise. Other times, it's something I've been trying to think of for days. Still other times, I'll experience some piece of sensory information--a smell or an odd sound--that piques my interest. I keep a "Sensory Info" log where I dump all this stuff, and over time I gradually digest it into my setting notes.

Just today, for example, I noticed how the crawfish chimneys in my yard have become so thickly clustered that the dirt looks like brown cauliflower. Now that the ground is dry, they crunch underfoot like gravel. You can expect to see a description of that phenomenon in one of my stories some day. Only they won't be crawfish, they'll be some strange alien bugs.

Which leads me to my next strategy:

Tweak real-world details.

Just because you're a spec-fic author doesn't mean the wealth of information available to the modern human is useless to you. If you read or hear something interesting in the news, think about how a similar event might play out in the future, or the mythic past. How would the latest mass shooting have been different in the middle ages? In a police-state future, what additional hoops would shooters have to jump through to wreak their sad revenge on society?

If you see an object or place that catches your interest, think how it might be different in a spec-fic setting. Does the neighborhood coffee shop have a reason to exist in Middle Earth? If so, what would be on the menu?

Read history, and think how certain leaders would have acted differently in different time periods. How would World War II have been fought if Hitler was an evil wizard, or a genocidal AI?

Everything in today's world can be useful to you, if you get in the habit of asking yourself the right questions.

Set all your stories in a single fictional universe

This might be considered cheating, but it works for me. All my stories are set in the same universe, even if that fact is never advertized to the reader. Ideally, the reader isn't required to know that.

The main reason I do this is because I really admire writers--like Isaac Asimov or Frank Herbert--who developed a consistent story universe that spans multiple books or series. But as I've fleshed the setting out more and more, I've realized that it also makes it easier to build settings for individual stories. With an ever-growing story world, I never have to start from scratch, and every story adds its own cache of details to the whole. Keeping stories in a single universe might sound hard, but I've actually found it's easier than going back to the drawing board every time.

Another fringe benefit of this strategy is that when I flesh out one little corner of my story universe, it will occasionally throw light on some other corner that I never intended to discover. Developing the setting for a story often means coming up with imaginary histories, and sometimes those histories can inspire other stories, unexpectedly link up with other works in progress, or become new stories in their own right.

The one downside to this strategy is that I actually have too many ideas. I will surely die before I see all of them put to good use. But...so what? Even if some of this stuff never sees the light of day, its existence still makes my job easier. My own awareness of the story universe deepens and informs the little tidbits I show to readers. So long as I don't make my imaginary history a prerequisite for enjoying my stories, there's no harm.

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Whether or not the above strategies are helpful to you, one thing is for sure; world-building is not a quick or easy job. It's going to take a lot of time and effort, so it's best to adopt a long-term strategy and not expect fast results. But if you're patient, and you pay attention, you can create a world as real--or more so--than anything in contemporary fiction.

Can You "Just Write"?

When I first decided to seriously pursue writing, I didn't think much about what I needed to do to prepare for a career as a writer. I just decided to do it, sat down, and started.

Why is that?

Can you imagine starting any other career that way? You wouldn't say "I'm gonna be a fireman!" and start running into burning buildings. You wouldn't say "I'm gonna be a stockbroker!" and start...actually, I don't even know what you would start doing. Go to a stock exchange and start shouting?

Anyway, I find it odd that writing is a career that people think they can just do. I mean, in a sense it's true; there's no national writing organization whose dispensation you need, no training you must complete. There are organizations and schools you can go to, but nobody is going to make you. If you want to be a writer, nobody is going to stop you.

But just because you can jump in head first, doesn't mean you should. Most writers agree that writing well is hard. No matter how good a communicator you are, there's a lot to learn when it comes to crafting fiction.

Writing fiction is like coding. Your manuscript is your coding environment--a blank text file, or the HTML template of a blog like this one. And the mind of the reader is like a web browser; it reads and interprets the code. Whatever you do in your manuscript has an effect in the mind of the reader. Sometimes it's the one you want. Sometimes it doesn't matter if it looks exactly the same to everyone, so long as it's close enough. And sometimes, if your code is faulty, the browser simply can't understand it.

You wouldn't say "I'm gonna be a web designer!" and start writing websites without learning HTML. You might do what I did and get set up with a platform like Blogger or Tumblr, but you wouldn't go tinkering with the site's template unless you at least knew HTML and CSS. Hell, this website's template still intimidates me a little, and I've learned a lot in the last year.

The point is that writing, for whatever reason, seems to be one of the few careers that people think they can jump into without learning anything new. What is it about fiction that makes us feel like we can start messing around without learning the language first?

My best guess is that we think we already know the language because we speak in our native tongue every day. But it's important to realize that everyday speech is a completely different language.

A language is more than words and their dictionary meanings. Ask any linguist. A language is a complex system of rule-based information exchange. Language can exist in any of the five senses, and often it exists in more than one at a time. English is a language we hear and see, but when we talk to each other we also receive signals with our other senses. When someone smelly comes up and talks to us, it colors our perception of their words. If we still have the taste of our partner's lips on our tongue, it changes the way we hear their words. If someone says something while caressing your inner thigh, you're liable to interpret it differently than if they said it while punching your face.

In everyday speech, we have the entire lexicon of human body language supplementing what we hear (or see, if you're using ASL). A speaker's posture and gestures give subtlety and nuance to their words. Depending on the speaker's face, the same sentence might sound true, sarcastic, dishonest, or exaggerated.

In writing, however, words are all we have. There are a handful of tricks like italics to add emphasis, and punctuation to organize things, but we don't have anything as intuitive as body language to help transfer meaning.

Therefore, when we write, we must choose our words much more carefully than we do when speaking--and not just because we have fewer channels open. When we speak to each other, the words themselves are ephemeral. We rarely recall the exact words we say, or that were said to us, we recall their meaning. Not even that, we recall our own interpretation of their meaning, whether or not that was their intended meaning. All but the most profound words disappear like smoke in the wind once they're spoken.

One of my all time favorite quotes about writing actually comes from the 1982 Jim Henson masterpiece The Dark Crystal. When the main character is asked what writing is, he gives the best definition I've ever heard: "Words that stay."

Writing stays. Writing is permanent (or at least semi-permanent). A writer must make sure she wants her words to stay. She must make sure they deserve to stay. Which is not to say they must be some James Joyce-esque outpouring of the eternal human soul, but they must create the correct effect in the mind of the reader, or they don't deserve to stay. (Like this quote? Click here to tweet it!)

Many of us write every day, even if it's just a grocery list, or our name at the bottom of a receipt. We fill out forms, write emails, and post sticky notes. It's writing, but it's still a different language than fiction, because the information they transfer seldom requires much imagination. Fiction invites the reader to imagine things which don't exist, and may never exist. There's room for interpretation, but if you want to write fiction, you have to know the code.

Maybe you think you can "just write". Maybe you think your editor will just "fix it". I did, when I started out. But I was constantly frustrated by people misunderstanding or not understanding my stories. Eventually I had to accept that the burden of clarity was on me. So I learned the code.

Think you can make it as a writer without learning grammar and storycraft? Let's have an argument in the comments! Gimme your best shot!

The Ten Commanments of Fiction Writing, Part Ten

As a student of the art of fiction, there are several axioms and pieces of advice that I come across again and again; "show, don't tell", "write what you know", "don't trick the reader", etc. These aren't items from a single book, they're everywhere. Some of them surely originate with specific authors, but as ideas they've taken on a life of their own, becoming more than something one person said.

In this series, I will try to gather all those admonitions, encouragements, and adages into a single, definitive list; the Ten Commandments of Fiction Writing. Hopefully this will be as fun and educational for you as it is for me.

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Commandment Ten: Thou shalt write what thou knowest, and know all thou mayest.

I think I might have gotten the "Olde English" wrong in the title. Wanna fight about it?

ANYWAY...

This last commandment is one you're sick of hearing: write what you know. It means you should share your experiences in your stories. It means you should create characters you understand. It also means that if you're a middle-class white guy like me, you don't try to write from the point of view of a poor black single mother during the civil rights movement. Wittgenstein put it best; "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent."

But there's another side to this old adage, and it's this: as a writer, it is your business to learn and experience everything you possibly can.

Direct experience is best. Every experience available to the human mind has its own secrets. People don't always talk about all the emotional subtleties, and as a writer you can make the experience more real for your readers by exposing them. But sometimes direct experience isn't a wise option. You shouldn't try heroin so you can write about being a junkie. You shouldn't murder someone so you can capture the mind of a killer more accurately.

In those cases, the best resource we have is other stories. Books, movies, and quality TV shows have a lot to share, and they have one additional advantage that direct experience doesn't: they're already structured into stories. Art imitates life, but it is not equal to life. Life is messy. Stories, in order to be comprehensible, should be much more orderly. So it behooves the writer to experience as many stories as he or she can.

But as long as you're living, you might as well try to have some life experiences too. They don't necessarily have to be the big, earth-shaking ones. Every day doesn't need to be a passion play. But the world is subtle and complex, despite its humdrum appearance. There is poetry all around you; from regional dialects, to the unique flavor of a particular coffee, to the unexpected struggles of your fellow humans.

If you've taken my advice about taking notes, you know what I'm talking about. Writers should be keen observers of everything around them, particularly human nature. Watch the people who come through your life. Listen to the way they talk. Study their body language. See the face they present to the world, and try to guess what's behind it.

Never turn down an opportunity to learn about something. Be curious about the things you don't see in your everyday life; from the secret pain of a depressed person, to the daily routine of your local garbage man.

Even the most menial things like the floors you walk on contain hundreds of things you never think about. You never know what might spark an idea. Open yourself to the physical world around you. Pay close attention to all five of your senses, and always be on the lookout for details that aren't obvious. 

I remember the exact moment I started doing this myself. I was in a subway station in LA. Other than the years I spent there, I've never lived anywhere with a subway system. I had been on the NY subway when I was younger, but my senses weren't as keen then. This particular day in LA, I happened to notice the rush of air that proceeds the arrival of a train. You can feel it even before you hear the squeal of the train's brakes. This detail isn't particularly life-changing, but it gave me pause. It makes perfect sense why it happens; the air is being displaced by the train just as water is displaced when you slip into the bathtub. But I had never heard anyone mention it before. And its exactly those kind of details that make a setting real.

Details like that exist for all the five senses, and they cover the entire spectrum of human interaction. If you tune in to them, they will begin to populate your writing even without deliberate effort. The mere act of observing them plants them in your subconscious, and they begin to naturally emerge in your work.

Being open to the world around you is one of the most important habits a writer can develop. If we're to write what we know without writing exclusively about ourselves, we'd better know everything we can. (Like this quote? Click here to tweet it!)

The Ten Commandments of Fiction Writing, Part Nine

As a student of the art of fiction, there are several axioms and pieces of advice that I come across again and again; "show, don't tell", "write what you know", "don't trick the reader", etc. These aren't items from a single book, they're everywhere. Some of them surely originate with specific authors, but as ideas they've taken on a life of their own, becoming more than something one person said.

In this series, I will try to gather all those admonitions, encouragements, and adages into a single, definitive list; the Ten Commandments of Fiction Writing. Hopefully this will be as fun and educational for you as it is for me.

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Commandment Nine: Thou shalt edit thyself, and allow thyself to be edited

This one shouldn't come as a surprise coming from me. But I firmly believe that all writing deserves to be subjected to brutal, merciless editing.

And not just polishing as you re-read. No. I mean tough editing from someone who knows grammar, punctuation, and the principles of fiction. Someone who won't pull any punches. Someone who will tell you flat out that your story sucks, if that is, in fact, the case.

I've met writers and editors that believe that editing should be done with a light touch, in order to preserve the writer's voice. But I don't agree.

For one thing, if a writer's voice is so fragile that it can be undone by suggesting some more sentence variety, or asking them to avoid over-abundant alliteration, then that writer needs to accept that their voice may not be fully developed yet. If you're afraid an editor will strip your voice out of your work, you must not trust your voice. If it's there at all, it will survive even the harshest edits.

The deeper issue is that too often (arguably most of the time) authors use this amorphous, ineffable thing we call "Voice" as an excuse to avoid editing. Once you invoke the divine mystery of Voice, all meaningful analysis comes to a screeching halt. (Like this quote? Click here to tweet it!) After all, Voice is nearly synonymous with a writer's taste in words, and as the old maxim says, "in matters of taste, there can be no disputes." (If I encounter this argument an editor, it usually signifies to me that the writer is in the First Stage of competence, and will not benefit from my participation)

Appealing to voice is the same logical fallacy that occurs when someone invokes the divine to avoid being proven wrong. It's a cop-out. I'm a believer myself, but if you ever catch me saying "because God says so" when you're critiquing my opinions, you have my permission to slap me. Gimme a good rap on the beak, set me straight.

When a good editor critiques a piece of writing, they should be prepared to defend each note with logic (I'd say the same for any time anyone tells another person to change in any way). Every change the editor suggests requires a reason, and I will be the first to admit that if their only reasoning is personal preference, you should feel free to disregard that particular note. That's not to say you should dismiss it out of hand, though. If you respect the editor at all, you should at least consider their opinion, because it's likely based on experience. And if you still disagree, no good editor will insist you take their suggestion anyway.

The thing to remember is that editing is a mostly thankless job. Editors don't get royalties. You don't see famous editors walking red carpets. Nobody gets rich editing books. In the majority of situations, editors don't even get credit. Pick a novel off your bookshelf, and scan the front matter for the editor's name. Unless the author thanks them in a dedication, I'm betting it's not there.

Editors exist to serve writers. Unless the editor is an idiot, every decision they make has the same goal: to make the book easier to read. Any editor who tries to take over another person's story is an idiot, because they're not going to get credit for it. And remember what I say about the path of least resistance. Readers, by and large, only read books that are easy to read.

One final point: writers must learn to self-edit, at least to some extent. You can't just vomit all over your computer screen and expect some superhero to swoop in and make it a bestseller. If you put that much of the burden on your editor, you don't really deserve the credit, do you?

Expecting your editor to just fix everything is the same as a musician who can't sing expecting the recording engineer to just autotune all the wrong notes. The end result feels fake. Cognitive dissonance is built into the final product, and the audience can sense that something is off, even if they can't quite say what. Some of them won't care, but do you really want to bank your whole career and reputation on people not caring that your work is shoddy?

Writing is a creative endeavor, to be sure, but the writers who attain sales and recognition do so by working hard. You can't expect to dance around like a woodland nymph, surviving on inspirational Pinterest quotes, and then suddenly have Peter Pan the literary agent sweep you off your feet and carry you to the land of success.

You better work, bitch.

The Ten Commandments of Fiction Writing, Part Eight

As a student of the art of fiction, there are several axioms and pieces of advice that I come across again and again; "show, don't tell", "write what you know", "don't trick the reader", etc. These aren't items from a single book, they're everywhere. Some of them surely originate with specific authors, but as ideas they've taken on a life of their own, becoming more than something one person said.

In this series, I will try to gather all those admonitions, encouragements, and adages into a single, definitive list; the Ten Commandments of Fiction Writing. Hopefully this will be as fun and educational for you as it is for me.

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Commandment Eight: Thou shalt not meddle with point of view

I've talked a lot about point of view. I've talked about how to edit for point of view. It's pretty obvious that I'm opinionated on the subject, and I've taken the time to express those opinions. So this is going to be a short post.

I've also talked a lot about the fictive dream. The fictive dream is the joy of reading fiction, and anything that meddles with it threatens that joy. And POV is the portal through which we enter the fictive dream (like this quote? Click here to tweet it!).

POV is a delicate thing. In the hands of a master, it can produce startling effects. In the hands of a careless amateur, it can make a story totally opaque.

When you supply too much information, you clog the portal with facts, and the fictive dream disappears. When you shift unexpectedly from one POV to another, you close one portal, and force the reader to search for the new one. When you use a first person narrator to tell a story whose scope goes beyond that character's experiences, you build the portal too narrow. When you use an omniscient narrator to show and tell everything, you build the portal too wide, and the reader is unable to focus.

If you have doubts about your ability to wield POV, err on the side of caution. Don't try to pull any tricks just for the sake of being tricky (as I've said before in this series).

And most importantly, think about what you can and cannot know, given a certain point of view. If your detective story is written in first person, your detective can't know what the murderer is doing while he's walking the beat. If you're writing in an intimate third person, you can't see what's going on behind walls or across vast distances. If your narrator is retelling stories from her past, remember that she is going to have a different perspective on those events than she did at the time.

In short, don't fiddle. POV is a tool, not a toy. Pick the right tool for the job, and don't mess around with it, or you'll hurt yourself.