Writing Fiction

50 Open Source Resources for Writers

Via Job Profiles.com, a list of 50 Awesome Open Source Resources for Online Writers.

They include various free word processors and reference tools. I can't vouch for any of them, but it might be worth the time it takes to download some and experiment a bit.

Getting over writer's block

A commenter wrote:
I've been writing for a while. I have the common potential novel problem (At least it seems common to me) where I have no difficulty writing the short story and enjoy it. However, when I try to write anything over a few thousand words, I lose my pace. My story seems to slow down and stop going anywhere.

So I started a new project to see if I could just get over that hurdle. (My own blog.) And I've hit it again. Now I look back and wonder if I had a strong enough of a hook in the start. Or is it strong enough, but comes too late. Are the character motivations real? Is anyone other then me going to care about them?

Then, what should I do when I know where the story needs to go, but don't know how to point the character in that direction? Is a new catalyst point needed?

Do you have any advice on how to get over this hump of self-doubt and writer's block?

Well, I've certainly written myself into some blind alleys. About 40 years ago I was on fire to write an SF novel. I bashed out about 100 pages and stopped dead. It took me almost a decade to get a grip and finish the novel, which was published in 1978.

Sometimes it helps to get serious, perceptive, constructive criticism. Such critics are rare. We are almost never married to them, or otherwise emotionally entangled with them.

I finally got through to the end of that novel (The Empire of Time) while teaching courses, helping raise two little girls, doing a master's thesis, writing another novel, writing a nonfiction book, and walking a black Lab named Max. Maximilian Kilian offered not a word of advice, but he dragged me out on night-time walks where I had to think a lot. That helped.

It also helped when I started writing letters to myself, and discovered that this was a good way to free my inner editor. That editor had watched my inner writer get into awful trouble, but hadn't had a way to say so.

Stories often stall when our inner editor can't stand the crap our inner writer is cranking out. We don't know why, but the story suddenly looks dumb.

But let your inner editor explain what's wrong, and something strange happens. You're listing all the awful problems and errors in the story, just like the most brutal reviewer, and suddenly you begin to see solutions to the problems. So you write them down too.

Turn that letter to yourself into a journal, which you add to every day or every week--whenever you feel the need--and you have your own editor, blasting your goofs and praising your successes and pointing out where to go next. I don't create a journal for every novel, but it's a huge help when I do feel I've run into trouble.

That's not the only way to fight writer's block. If your novel seems to run out of content, you haven't been cruel enough to your characters. The key to a long, interesting story is a four-word phrase: Not only, but also.

Whatever the main problem your characters face, they need more misery. Something has to complicate their lives, which are already at risk. It's the combination of "not only but also" that will really show us what your characters are all about, and make us interested in their fate.

A student of mine once showed me the start of a novel about a legal secretary having a hot affair with a rock star. (She was a legal secretary.) She couldn't figure out where to go with the story once her lovers staggered out of bed.

OK: Not only are they having an affair, but also the secretary's boss is running out of work and money, so they may both be looking for new jobs soon. Not only is the secretary's job in danger, but also her new sweetie's band has a rotten contract that's going to take him on a months-long tour for almost no money.

Now we've got ourselves a story! Secretary saves her job by introducing her sweetie to her boss. Boss saves his business by getting sweetie a tough new contract. Other rock musicians hear about this and come pounding on his door, asking for new contracts too.

Not only is secretary happy, but also her boss now looks at her in a different light and wants to steal her away from her rock-star sweetie...

So the key to getting a manuscript to novel length is to keep inventing "but also's" that will show us more and more about the characters and their predicament.

So there are two ways to fight writer's block: Be mean to yourself by writing down all the problems in your story, and be mean to your characters by giving them even more problems than you have!

Maxmilian Kilian is long gone, but I now have two Australian shepherds. They drag me out for even more walks than Max ever dreamed of, and I do a lot of thinking about the current novel. Now that I'm just retired from teaching, I hope to finish the novel before too long.

A reminder: Read and re-read One Hundred Years of Solitude

This weekend, The Globe and Mail published another in its list of the "50 greatest books": One Hundred Years of Solitude. Excerpt:

Gabriel García Márquez, then a little-known Colombian journalist, wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude over a period of 18 months, in seclusion, in Mexico City. The book was published in Buenos Aires in 1967, heralding a new literary wave from Latin America and becoming the most important novel ever published in Spanish on this side of the Atlantic.

If you haven't read it yet, put down that trashy Dostoevsky thriller and get serious. If you've already read One Hundred Years of Solitude, get it off the shelf and read it again.

It took me two or three tries to get into, but I was young and dumb circa 1970. Once I did finish it, I was young and dumbfounded. Who knew you could write a novel like that? And even if you were allowed to write a novel like that, where would you get the talent? Several re-readings later, I still have no answer.

Everyone who grew up between El Paso, Texas, and Tierra Del Fuego, Chile, thinks it is the story of their own home town. (I spent four years of my boyhood in Mexico City, so I understand that.) North Americans who read it suddenly and rightly worry that they've missed the best part of life.

Some critics call him "Gabo," the nickname for Gabriel. Not me. He's the maestro, the one who breaks the rules we mortals never dare break, and who puts magic in our heads.

When you've finished One Hundred Years of Solitude, get going on the rest of his work, fiction and nonfiction alike. Yes, it will indeed be on the final exam.

Judging writers by their writing, or their private lives

In the Guardian, Lionel Shriver raises a good point in connection with the late literary titan Norman Mailer: It's time for Mailer's ghost to rest in peace. Excerpt:

Critics are divided on whether literature should be analysed through the prism of the writer's life and psyche or should be read without reference to its author purely in its own terms. I would like to vote for Plan B.

Harvard University is going for A. Its library missed out on the papers of its illustrious alumnus Norman Mailer, who sold them to the University of Texas while still alive in 2005, including numerous novel typescripts, what in publishing goes by the wonderfully redolent name 'foul matter'. So Harvard has bought the papers of Mailer's lover instead.

In North America, the manuscript of a published novel is called "dead matter," but I take the point.

Shriver raises an issue all writers ought to think about. Many writers are more famous for their private lives than their public utterances.

Mailer, of course, marketed himself as much as he promoted his books. So did most of his contemporaries, and they were just following in the footsteps of the previous generation.

More people know Scott Fitzgerald for his Jazz Age revels, and his insane wife Zelda, than have read The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise. Dashiell Hammett was an ex-private eye, the lover-mentor of Katherine Hellman, a drunk, and a political prisoner; more people know that than have read his stories about the Continental Op.

Mailer's reputation survived the stigma of stabbing his wife, but Norwegian author Knut Hamsun, internationally successful, became internationally despised when he supported the Nazi occupation of Norway in World War II. Some people can't or won't read Atlas Shrugged because they know too much about Ayn Rand's private life, or detest her philosophy and politics.

The issue really has two aspects: Should we read (or shun) a writer because of his or her sexual behaviour, financial problems, or alcoholism? And should we read writers whose political views are in line with ours, and ignore those whose politics disgust us?

When I read Fitzgerald, or Malcolm Lowry, or any other writer with a complicated private life, what I know about that life makes me marvel that the author got anything written at all. I may also understand why alcohol, for example, is a big issue in such writers' work. That at least makes me think about the talent required to write under such disabilities.

But I hope I can still read their work as literature, just as I would read a novel by an author I didn't know anything about. I want to judge The Great Gatsby as a vision of 1920s America, not just a tarted-up diary of Scott and Zelda's lives. And I want to understand the storytelling that Fitzgerald put into his novel, so I can make my own work a little better.

As for authors' political background, I know it's going to influence the kind of story they tell, but I try not to let it get in the way of my reading. Every novel is anecdotal evidence for the author's vision of the way the world works, and that vision will certainly reflect the author's politics.

So I can read Robert Heinlein, for example, and love his stories while rolling my eyes at his bizarre political views. His world is a great place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there. And in any case, his politics reflect Heinlein's era, not our own.

Similarly, I can read Jack London's The Iron Heel, a lurid vision of a capitalist tyranny, and groan at this supposed socialist's fear and horror of the American working class. But I remind myself that "presentism" is a vice: We simply can't impose our modern values on the writers of a century ago.

(There's a story idea, by the way: Someone in the early 22nd century, studying the barbarous values smugly held by the ignorant and benighted savages living in the early 21st century.)

We know frustratingly little about William Shakespeare's private life, but his plays and poems stand up very well regardless. So I'm with Lionel Shriver's Plan B: Judge a piece of writing on its own terms, and for the light it throws on your own private life—not on the author's.

Chapters in a Novel

Casey, in comments, asked:
Should a manuscript be broken down by chapter or should it be one continuous story?

It depends on the kind of story. Gabriel García Márquez, in The Autumn of the Patriarch, wrote his novel in four "chapters" that are also four paragraphs. Every chapter is one unbroken stream of prose.

The maestro can get away with that, but we ordinary humans would be silly to try it. (You still ought to read everything he ever wrote, if only so you can feel what it's like to have a genius inhabit your brain.)

I'm going to try to answer Casey's question in a slightly strange way, so bear with me.

The basic direction of any story is from ignorance to awareness—often a very sudden awareness, the "shock of recognition" that makes you say "Aha!" or "Oh my God!" We start out knowing nothing about the characters and their predicament, but every scene—every paragraph, every sentence, every word—adds to our understanding and prepares us for the next revelation.

We know more at the end of a sentence than we did at the beginning. In effect, we say "Aha!" or "Oh my God!" after every sentence. The same with a paragraph, and with a scene. A chapter generally contains one or more scenes, and each scene tells us (and the characters) more about the situation.

Sometimes we're way ahead of the characters, because we know more about them than they know about themselves. At other times, we still haven't learned enough to make sense of what the characters are doing, so we keep reading to learn more.

A chapter is a kind of mini-novel, where we and the characters start out relatively ignorant. By the end of the chapter, we (and maybe the characters) have learned a lot—especially about the predicament the characters are in. Knowing what we've learned, we also know how much more we and the characters have to learn before they succeed or fail in their endeavours. So we plunge into the next chapter, ignorant all over again.

So chapters are convenient ways to break up a story, and to emphasize some problems over others. The problem at the end of a chapter is more serious than the problem in that chapter's first scene. When we go into the next chapter, we know the stakes have been raised, and the cost of failure will be higher.

But the length of the chapter is up to you. Kurt Vonnegut wrote bite-size chapters, maybe just a page or two long, and each chapter ends like a punch in the nose. Other writers are comfortable with much longer chapters. My novels seem to break naturally into chapters of around 5,000 words, but that's just me.

So if you want to use chapters as organizing units of your story, end them when your characters have come to some crisis in their lives—when they understand more clearly just what a jam they're in.

How Many Pages Make a Novel (again)?

I had no idea, when I first posted on this topic back in 2004, that it would turn out to be one of the most popular posts on the blog...judging from the number of people who arrive here after asking Google that question, and from the number of comments.

Here's the latest comment:
I have written a young adult science\fantasy novel that is 60,782 words. I have no clue if I need more.

Sixty thousand words is a reasonable length for a short novel. I don't keep up much with the young-adult market, but my impression is that a YA novel can run anywhere from 20,000 words to 60,000. So in that sense your story's the right length.

To make sure, visit the websites of some YA publishers and find their notes for submissions. They'll probably tell you what their length requirements are. (If they don't, find a book from the publishing house you're interested in, count the number of words on a page, and multiply by the number of pages.)

More importantly, ask yourself if you've written the right 60,000 words. Maybe the manuscript needs cutting, or you've left some loose ends that need another 5,000 words to tie up.

The first thing you owe yourself, as an apprentice writer, is to tell your stories as well as you can, at whatever length the stories want to be. Only then should you worry about what publishers want.

A New Blog

You may enjoy some of the posts at a new blog I've set up: Books and Writers offers recycled book reviews I've done for The Tyee, plus comments on other books I've read and on writers I think deserve a mention. I look forward to your comments there.

Editing: How Much is Too Much?

A good question from a reader named Cassandra:
I'm 16 and have written a few handfuls of novels, novelettes, and short stories. I've been told by other writers that my writing is pretty good, but I always want change something. Either the color of this, or the plot of that. My question is, "How do you know how much editing is too much editing?" I always want to change something, given the fact I'm still learning change is good. But I don't know when’s the right time to quit. Do you have any advice for me?

Years ago, Robert Heinlein published his Five Rules for Writers, and I've done my best to pass them along:

1. Writers write. They don't sit around moaning about how much they would write if only they had the time, or the inspiration, or a better computer.

2. Writers finish what they write. Even if they end up hating every comma and syllable, they grind away to the bitter end. It's good discipline, and sometimes you actually write your way out of the problem.

3. Writers never rewrite, except to editorial order. What a slap in the face to every teacher of English and creative writing! But carpenters don't rebuild a house over and over again; they make sure they have a good plan and build it right the first time. Outlining may seem boring compared to banging out page after page, but it's critical.

For a professional writer, this is especially important: Spend too much time rewriting, and your income drops to pennies per hour. But for apprentices, I admit that rewriting can be helpful. It forces you to pay more attention to what your manuscript is trying to tell you, and you may learn a lot. The hazard is that you can edit your story to death.

4. Writers put their work on the market. They don't just make their friends and relatives read it. Besides, the editorial opinion of friends and relatives is rarely helpful.

5. Writers keep their work on the market until it sells. Rather than collapse in self-pity after the first rejection, they send the manuscript off again, and again. Even a rejection letter can be instructive. I'm eternally grateful to Judy-Lynn Del Rey for her dismissal of my novel Icequake--I was telling, not showing, she said, and she was right. I got a grip, rewrote the novel, and sold it (for far more than Judy-Lynn could have paid me).

Heinlein argues, and I agree, that people who break these rules just don't get published. If I hadn't broken rule #5, I'd probably have published my first novel at age 26 or 27, instead of age 38. Instead, the manuscript stayed on my shelf until it was hopelessly dated. (It's now in my papers at the University of British Columbia, where some unlucky PhD candidate may run across it.)

So to get back to Cassandra's question, when you want to change something in a manuscript, ask yourself: How does this change advance the story? Does it teach us more about the characters, the setting, the plot? Does it affect the outcome? Or is it just a demonstration of my high opinion of myself as a writer?

Hemingway said the test of a good story was how much good stuff you could cut out of it...that is, "fine writing" that was just showing off. We might now have a different definition of "good stuff" from Hemingway's, but the principle is sound.

Advice to Teenage Genius Writers

Munoz, a 14-year-old in Spain, posted a comment earlier today about the progress he's made on his novel and asking how to find an agent. So here's my answer—the link to a post from the summer of 2006: Writing Fiction: What if You're a Prodigy?

And for all you other teenage geniuses out there: I'm not trying to poop your party. Notice that very few important writers published their very first novels. Mozart's teenage work is worth listening to, but even he might have been embarrassed to hear his youthful compositions when he was in his 30s.

So write like mad, and put your heart and soul into it, but don't expect to publish. What you're doing now is for the future Ph.D. students, looking in your early unpublished work for the signs of later greatness.