Just Write The Fucking Thing

Someone contacted me via the comments on this blog and asked for advice on how to start writing a story. For those that missed it (and in the hope other people will find it useful) this is the response I sent:

"I will give you the best piece of advice I was ever given: just write the fucking thing. Getting the words down on paper is the hard part. And it doesn't matter if your first draft sucks. All first drafts suck. The important part is that you write the story. Then, when you've finished it, you can go back and edit it, polish up the text to make it shine. Editing is easier than writing. So, if you have a story to tell, just write it down without worrying how it sounds. You will not hit perfection first time. But you will get a completed first draft that you can then work on, to bring it up to professional quality. A lot of people make the mistake of trying to edit as they go along - of trying to make each sentence perfect before moving on to the next - and that is deadly. Just write. Tidy up later. Go for it"

Advice For Writers

Over at Velcro City, Paul Raven has a gargantuan list of links to excellent advice for writers old and new. Check it out: http://www.velcro-city.co.uk/the-writing-advice-links-they-are-legion/

Five Useful Writing Tips

1. Never tell anyone the plot of your story until you've finished writing it. Once you've told your story, even in outline, some part of you relaxes. The story-telling urge is fulfilled. You've seen your audience react to it, and actually writing the story then becomes something of a chore, like you're repeating yourself. It's much better to keep the urge alive, driving you on until you've got the story down on paper, and you can then present it to the world in all its glory.

2. Write first, edit later. You can go back and polish the first draft once it's finished. The important part is to get the bare bones of the story down on the page. Editing comes later. If you spend hours working and re-working every sentence, trying to get it perfect before moving on to the next, you'll never get anywhere - which is one of my biggest problems and one I have to consciously work against.

3. Think long and hard before you use a word other than "said" to attribute dialogue - and don't modify it with an adverb if you can help it. Words like "whispered", "hissed", "screamed", "blurted" should be used extremely sparingly, if at all. "Said" is much better. It doesn't get in the way. Using a word other than "said" can sound clumsy - especially if you then modify it with an adverb like "suspiciously", "urgently", "happily", "grimly", etc.

4. Write the story one scene at a time. If you're going to eat an elephant, you have to do it one mouthful at a time. In the same way, you can't write a whole story or novel in one go. Break the narrative up into a series of important incidents, and then write a scene describing each incident.

5. If an editor askes you to make changes, make them. Don't be precious about your masterwork. If an editor has taken the trouble to write to you to suggest making a change to your story, it means they're really interested in it, and usually (if you're sending your work to reputable editors) they'll know a damn sight more than you do about what sells in their particular market. If they suggest a change, make it.

How To Start Writing A Story

1. Think of a painful lesson you've learned in life
2. Apply that learning experience to a set of characters...

Reference Books For SF Writers

I thought I'd share some of the reference books I've found particularly helpful while writing science fiction stories. All these come highly recommended:

1. About Writing - Samuel Delany
2. Entering Space - Robert Zubrin
3. Gabay's Copywriter's Compendium - J. Johnathan Gabay
4. Ernest Hemingway on Writing - Ed. Larry W. Phillips
5. How To Write Damn Good Fiction - James N Frey
6. The Starflight Handbook - Eugene F. Mallove & Gregory L. Matloff
7. Mining The Sky - John S. Lewis
8. Big Questioons In Science - Ed. Harriet Swain
9. No Plot? No Problem! - Chris Baty
10. Introducing Relativity - Bruce Bassett

Do you have any reference works you use time and again? Drop a comment and share your favourites...

What Advertising Teaches Us About Fiction

Whatever your opinion of advertising or direct mail, it has a lot to teach us about the art of writing fiction. For instance, most advertising copy aims to:

1. Grab and hold the reader's attention
2. Keep them reading
3. Provoke an emotional response
4. Prompt them to act

In order to do this, advertisers (and direct mail letter writers) follow a tried and tested formula, known as AIDA – which stands for:

1. Attention (grab it!)
2. Interest (keep it!)
3. Desire (provoke it!)
4. Action (prompt it!)

Usually the headline and the first sentence are designed to grab the attention, and the second, third and fourth sentences are designed to hook you in, to keep you reading while the benefits of the advertised product or service are lovingly laid out before you, filling you with desire…

I have seen research that suggests an advert in a magazine has less than 3 seconds to catch the magazine reader's attention before they flip to the next page. Direct mail letters have about 5 seconds. That means the whole message needs to be communicated incredibly quickly using emotive, well-chosen words – words and phrases that will appeal specifically to the intended audience. The title needs to intrigue enough to make the reader read the first sentence. That in turn needs to draw them irresistibly into the second – and so on. Questions are posed and answered. Short sentences keep the pace brisk.

Now, let's apply all this to fiction.

When we submit a short story or a novel to a publisher, we are competing with many other manuscripts. We need to grab attention fast, and hold it. The title needs to simultaneously set the mood for the story and be intriguing enough make the publisher want to read the first sentence… And the tools we use to do it are the same ones the advertisers use:

• Know your audience and write for them.
• Start with a killer title that they can't resist
• Hook them in with the first sentence and don't let them go.
• Get them emotionally involved as soon as possible. Make it personal. Give them a reason to care.
• Use as many short sentences as possible to create pace.
• Use evocative words that conjure impressions in all five senses – smell, taste, touch, sound, and sight.
• Be clear and say what you mean. Don't bog the narrative down in long-winded description that adds nothing to the text's momentum. Say what you need to say as quickly and efficiently as possible, and move on.
• Avoid clichés.
• Use positive, action-packed phrases to make your prose come alive.
• Say what something is, not what it isn't. Instead of saying "The car wasn't very clean" say "the car was filthy". Instead of saying "Jake wasn't very pleased" say "Jake was furious."
  

Advice For Writers

Thanks to Paul at Velcro City, I've found a website with some excellent articles on the craft, habits and business of writing. It's called Write To Done and it's written by Leo Babauta, better known as writer of the Zen Habits blog. My favourite articles on the site include:

• How To Write First Thing In The Morning
• How To Hold Yourself Accountable As A Writer

Free e-Book: Time Management For Creative People

I just stumbled across this - a free e-book from poet and business coach Mark McGuinness called Time Management For Creative People, designed to help you maintain your creative focus while dealing with other commitments.

Naming Characters

Sometimes when you're writing, it's hard to come up with a good name for a character. That's when I turn to my spam email folder and scan the randomly-generated sender's names. Just today, for instance, the folder contains emails from:

• Cornelia Kraft
• Abe Keeler
• Roland Floyd
• Nixon Doyle
• Caeser Murphy

Iain Banks Interview

Iain (M) Banks discusses writing with The Guardian:

"Don't try to perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the damn thing. Accept imperfections. Get it finished and then you can go back. If you try to polish every sentence there's a chance you'll never get past the first chapter."

The Complete Flash Fiction Check List

Guy Hogan has some excellent advice on writing flash fiction (and some great examples) on his blog. Most immediately useful is his Complete Flash Fiction Check List.

Finding The Time To Write

It's not easy. I have a full time office job and a young family. By the time I get in front of my keyboard I'm too tired to catch up with my email, let alone write anything of any quality. So, it's reassuring to know that most writers have the same problem. James Van Pelt writes in The Fix:

My routine is to always finish 200 or more words a day. On one hand, this looks like a terribly low bar to leap over, and laughably easy. Numerous novels are over 100,000 words, after all. Wouldn’t it take forever to finish a novel at 200 words a day? Well, not really. It would only take 500 days, less than a year and a half, if I never miss a single writing day. If you are one of those folks who are trying to figure out how to write and still keep up with the normal demands of your busy day, where will you be in 18 months? Will you still be trying to figure out when to get your writing done? Will you still be worrying that there isn’t enough time? Or will you have your novel finished?

Sunday Times SF Article

Brian Appleyard explores the "sniffy" British attitude to science fiction in an article for the Sunday Times.

"The truth is," Aldiss has written, "that we are at last living in an SF scenario." A collapsing environment, a hyperconnected world, suicide bombers, perpetual surveillance, the discovery of other solar systems, novel pathogens, tourists in space, children drugged with behaviour controllers – it’s all coming true at last. Aldiss thinks this makes SF redundant. I disagree. In such a climate, it is the conventionally literary that is threatened, and SF comes into its own as the most hardcore realism.

He goes on to claim that HG Wells was responsible for the bombing of Hiroshima and Astounding magazine caused the Cold War...

First Drafts

If you're a perfectionist like me, and you spend ages on a first draft trying to make every sentence perfect before moving on to the next, there's a link on today's Velcro City Tourist Board to a quote from Anne Lamott that you might find liberating:

"The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, “Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?,” you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper, because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you’re supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go — but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages."

Marketing Advice for SF Writers

Here are links to four excellent articles Jason Stoddard has written for writers wanting to promote themselves online:

• Building a personal online brand
• Marketing for Writers - session #1
• Marketing for Writers - session #2
• Marketing for Writers - session #3

Bristol Evening Post

I had my picture taken last night by an Evening Post photographer. It will accompany a short "local author signs double book deal" piece about me in tomorrow's edition of the paper.

I then met up with three other SF&F writers from the local area: Colin Harvey, Mark Leyland, and Jo Hall. We had a relaxed evening in the White Hart, talking about the ups and downs of SF&F writing, and aim to get together again in June.

Submission Update

I'm currently waiting for decisions on 14 submissions - including 1 novel, 6 short stories, 2 pieces of flash fiction, and 5 poems - and waiting for 3 short stories that have already been accepted by Interzone and Infinity Plus to appear.

Making Stories Stronger

Jetse de Vries has a thought-provoking piece on his blog about what to leave out of stories to make them stronger. His comments remind me of the following quote from Ernest Hemingway:

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them."

Marketing Advice for Writers

Jason Stoddard has some excellent advice on his site for SF writers wanting to create an online presence.

Interzone Celebrates 25th Anniversary

For many years, my ambition as a writer was to have a story published in Interzone - the UK's premier SF&F magazine. And that ambition was realised when my novelette 'The Last Reef' appeared in issue #202.

Over the last 25 years, Interzone has been the launch pad for the careers of some of the genre's brightest stars - and has featured writers like Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Iain M. Banks, Stephen Baxter, Paul Di Filippo, Greg Egan, William Gibson, M. John Harrison, Ian R. MacLeod, Michael Moorcock, Kim Newman, Christopher Priest, Alastair Reynolds, Charles Stross...

The anniversary issue (#209) is released in March. Buy it here.