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ABC: Always Be Crafting

July 22, 2019 by Val Neil

If you’re unfamiliar with ABC (Always be Closing), it’s a reference to Glengarry Glen Ross. Alec Baldwin can enlighten you here, but it will probably make some of you cry.

I’m in the middle of rewrites. I think we can all agree that editing is a slog, but I’m doing a developmental edit on myself which has been particularly painful. I had to gut chapters 10-18 and pretty much write them again from scratch.

I was looking forward to the next section of my book, which is pretty solid plot-wise and follows my new throughline nicely. I’d only have to do minor tweaks to sentence structure and stuff. Piece of cake. Right?

And then I see the first line of this chapter, followed by the cringe-inducing “he protested” as a dialogue tag. Ugh. I looked at the snapshots and saw why–this chapter hasn’t been touched since mid February, and it’s now mid-July.

ABC

How much better could I have gotten at writing since February? Better enough to recognize my failings in this opening. This much better:

ABC2

Now there are probably typos in there because it’s a first draft rewrite, but the writing itself is much better.

As a writer, you should always be working to improve your craft. So how does one do this? Read great books, read craft books by successful authors, read editing books, follow blogs on writing/editing, and follow YouTubers (take this last one with a grain of salt as a lot of them are newbies).

Critique partners are incredibly helpful, but only if they know what they’re talking about (I’ve had at least one who was recommending grammar “corrections” that were flat-out wrong). Try to find partners who point out different things. Some are great at tightening up your writing but cutting out redundancies. Others will let you know when you’ve got talking heads or white room syndrome (two of my issues). One of mine is all about strong verbs in place of “small, choppy sentences.”

Don’t be afraid of criticism! It’s better to hear this stuff from other writers than it is from your readers after you publish. If you get your manuscript edited prior to release, which you should, it will help minimize the cost because they won’t have as many issues to fix.

When do you have time to do all this research? I’ve found that some times I’m just less productive on the writing end. I’m sick, or it’s been a long day (I’m way better at writing in the mornings), or there are just too many interruptions to focus. Those are perfect times to read up or watch videos on craft. It’s a relaxing activity but you’ll still feel productive.

Overcoming Writer’s Block

July 15, 2019 by Val Neil

Getting stuck is usually a symptom of a larger problem–your story isn’t working.

Reasons You Might Get Stuck

1. You’re bored with the scene. If you’re bored writing, your reader will get bored reading. Maybe the scene lacks tension, or maybe it’s just not going where it needs to.

2. You’ve written yourself into a corner.

3. The plot is going someplace it shouldn’t.

4. There are other stressors going on in your life that are preventing you from focusing on writing. Self-care and mental health are important! That said, it’s usually one of the first three reasons.

Solutions

You don’t have to try all of these. Usually one will work. It all depends on how you’re stuck.

1. First off, save a copy of your work. Make a “cut” folder or however you want to organize it, and throw all trimmed stuff there. It’s a lot easier to cut/change things when you know you can go back to it if you need to (though you won’t, because if it was working you wouldn’t be stuck).

2. Go back to an earlier point in the manuscript. It could be one scene back or a few chapters. Find the last place where the story was last flowing easily and look for forks in the road, decisions the characters made, reactions they had, then try something completely different. This is the one most likely to work.

3. Shit on your protagonist. Your main character needs conflict. If things are dragging, they may have it too easy. Give them a problem to solve. Make things go horribly wrong.

4. Have your character attacked by monkeys. Or ninjas. Or aliens. You might not be able to use the scene in your novel, but it will get you writing something interesting and chances are you can use a variation of the scene somewhere down the line (so save it).

5. Try writing the scene from a different character’s point of view. Even if you think you know how each character would react, getting into their POV will likely give you some new insight. Combining this with #2 also helps.

I hope you found these tips useful.

Editing with Natural Reader

July 9, 2019 by Val Neil

Natural Reader is a tool I recently heard about from Heart Breathings and it’s revolutionized my editing process.

How it works:

You paste your text into a box and an AI reads it out.

“But I can just read it out loud myself, or have my critique partners do it!”

Wrong. Human brains love to read what should be there, rather than what is there. It’s why stuff like this exists:

Unlike a human, the computer it reads everything just as it is. It makes for a very impartial read.

Stuff you’ll catch:

double words
missing words
stupid typos like bisque instead of brisk 🤦‍♀️
REDUNDANCIES (You know that stuff your critique partners told you to cut, but you just don’t want to let go of? That shit. You can now hear how repetitive it sounds.)
FLOW
identical sounds
multiple uses of the same word

It’s also really nice to hear your work out loud. Editing is rough. I’m on my first novel, so I’ve definitely had a lot of bad days where I doubt myself and wonder if I can make it work, so it’s very validating to hear my story out loud and have it sound good.

How much does it cost?

Free: Two voice options, plus 20 min/day of premium voices

Premium: $10/month or $60/year. Access to all premium voices.

Not gonna lie, the free voices suck and there’s only two of them. They don’t inflect well and sound very robotic. You do get 20 minutes a day to access premium voices, which are exponentially better and come in a variety of flavors.

The website defaults to premium voices, then reverts to the free voices after twenty minutes. It can be quite jarring to go from premium voices to free, so keep that in mind if you don’t plan to pay. I paid just to get access to Peter back and to see how often I’d use the program. Now that I can see how often I’m using it I’ll probably do the annual option.

After editing each chapter I run it through Natural Reader, make my fixes, then download an MP3. This gives me another option for beta readers, as they can listen to my book on the go. Please note that you can’t use the MP3s for commercial use unless you pay for their Commercial plan, which costs a lot more than Premium.

Hiccups:

Some of the voices will trip over certain words, but you can tell them how to pronounce the words differently, though this may be a premium-only feature.
Voices act slightly different for things like em dashes. My preferred voice, Peter, is terrible at them, so I have to switch to commas for the reader.
If you past a much longer block of text, sometimes it will paste weird and you’ll get a block of words where the spaces between have been removed. likethisrighthere

Despite the hiccups, I can’t recommend Natural Reader enough.

Writing Characters

July 3, 2019 by Val Neil

I realized recently that my creative process for characters varies a lot from other people. Maybe this is due in part to the fact that I’m mostly a pantser. I see all these character sheets online and they are absolutely useless to me. Eye color? Favorite color? Astrological sign? Who cares! How is that relevant to who the person is?

If you’re likewise frustrated, here’s a quick and dirty of how I create characters.

Start From What You Know

Medea is autistic, because I’m autistic, and her sensory issues are roughly the same as mine (though I crank up the sound sensitivity a bit). Dawn is biracial (white and Vietnamese) because so is my niece. She’s fiercely protective of her friends because she doesn’t have many, which makes them precious. It’s the same way I viewed friends growing up, and while I never clocked someone for it, I did get into trouble for defending them and Dawn takes that to the extreme. Harper just wants to do good and make people happy, because that’s what my spouse is like.

I’m not saying copy everything about people you know, but cherry pick aspects of them for your characters. It will make them more real.

Look at Characters you Love

What draws you to them? Is it because they’re honest and always do the right thing? Is it because they’re a wise-cracking smartass? There are plenty of character archetypes out there for you to use, but this goes deeper. One person’s version of the mentor is going to vary drastically from another. Uncle Iroh is not the same as Yoda or Dumbledore, though they all fall into the “wise old mentor” category.

As an exercise, take a character you love and tweak them until they become something new. Maybe keep their moral code, but give them a different backstory, look, and mannerisms.

Start From What Interests You

Psychopathy is fascinating to me, and I dug in deep researching when writing Nikolai. I also love villain characters, especially the charismatic, polite, manipulative kind. While Nikolai ended up being a bit more sociopathic, it made writing him extremely fun, because his reactions to situations were so far from what I would do.

Figure Out Where They’re Broken

This is my favorite method, and it’s absolutely terrible. Give your character TRAUMA. All my characters have varying degrees of Bad Shit in their past which influence how they perceive the world. Nikolai has odd quirks around food and appearance. Medea goes from 0 to 100 when triggered. Dawn just wants to be loved.

Pick a situation that has the potential to fuck up your character and stick it in their backstory. Did they grow up poor? They might suck at managing money, or they might be very frugal. Did they grow up with excess? They might have no concept of what things are worth. Were they abused? Bullied? (If so, why?) Were their parents there, but emotionally distant?

Once you have a concept, write a brief scene or just think about…

How They React

People can have wildly different responses to situations. Let’s pretend your character’s father has a chronic illness that’s going to kill them. Does your character take on the burden of caring for them? If so, are they resentful? Are they so empathetic that it wears them down? Or do they leave the care to another sibling? Do they place their parent in a care facility?

When the father dies, how do they grieve? Do they cry and take a week off work because they can’t function? Do they bottle things up and go about business as usual, but break down later in private? Do they get angry and take out their pain on the people around them? Do they emotionally withdraw? Or maybe they had a poor relationship with their father and don’t care at all.

How your character reacts to things tells you a lot more about who they are than random physical descriptions. Put them in hypothetical stressful situations and see what they do.

Physical description should be the last thing you touch, unless it is relevant to the story itself.

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