I would write you all a really cool post with a brand-new, fresh list of ways to make yourself crazy by storytelling in writing. . .but we just spent the entire Thanksgiving holiday working like fiends to get The Art & Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual finalized for publication.

I swear to god, I didn’t think we were ever going to get this done. But we actually did. And it is now edited, polished, formatted, and even blurbed, just waiting this very minute for a few answers from our contact at Lightning Source before we submit it to them, Smashwords, and Amazon for the Kindle.

Grid willing and the creek don’t rise, it will be available through all regular channels like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s Books, even on order from your local bookstore, in print and ereader formats. . .very, very soon.

Boy, howdy!

The Art & Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

According to Publishers Weekly, the top 50 million books sold in the U.S. in 2009 were all written by the same 26 people. How does that happen? Think about it.

1. Readers know their names.
   
   You can test this one. Are you famous? Absolutely no facility with the written word, no writing experience, not a writer, never going to be a writer? Is learning to write, in fact, way down at the bottom of your To-Do list, somewhere near learning to groom poodles? But a whole lot of people want your autograph?
   
   Write a book. It will be published, it will be bought, it will make lots and lots and lots of money. Congratulations! You just proved the one fundamental, overriding principle of publishing.
2. They are professional salespeople.
   
   On the other hand, are you the opposite of famous? Does nobody know your name, not even your neighbor? Do you go to great lengths to be anonymous, to hide, to fade into the woodwork? Is Wallflower your favorite nickname? (This is me.) But you have a special genius with the written word that is not—as with so many of us—in our fond imaginations, but simply an inarguable fact? (I know. Dream on! But we need this for the sake of the argument.) And, as is true of any genius, you honestly deserve to make your living off this extraordinary talent?
   
   Write a book. Self-publish it. Do not market it. Do not tell anyone you wrote it. Do not sell it through any channels but individual personal request.
   
   Let me know how that goes for you.
3. They have been publishing for decades.
   
   On the third hand, are you not famous but trying? Do you have a work in progress? Did you start it this year? Do you have no previous experience as a writer, but a real affinity for people like Dan Brown, who appears to be interested in the same things you’re interested in and roughly as good at writing about them as you are? Do you get your faith in yourself as a writer from belonging to online critique groups and writing circles and forums where thousands of strangers trade untrained amateur feedback on each other’s manuscripts? Do you happen to know you’re better than almost all of those guys? Are you certain that publishing fame is just around the corner for you, if only some agent and/or publisher would realize your WIP is plenty good enough to stand up next to most of the shlock published these days?
   
   Write a first draft. Do not squander your hard-earned cash getting help with it. (Remember what they say: money always flows toward the writer.) Spend a long time sending hundreds of queries and being rejected. Become disgusted with the fame-obsessed publishing industry and self-publish. See above.
4. They would be just as successful at producing any other mass-market product.
   
   On the fourth hand, are you not famous or even hoping to become famous but simply in love with the writing process? Do you love being a writer—the practice of wrestling with this craft, studying what professionals are willing to teach you, reading the greats and analyzing their approaches and techniques, applying what you learn to your own work? Have you already dedicated decades of your life to this craft with little or no monetary reward? Are you baffled by the quality of what’s being published these days but too in love with the craft to waste time worrying about it? Is writing part of your personal identity? Do you have drawers in your house overflowing with manuscripts no one has ever read because it means more to you to write than it does to be read?
   
   Congratulations, my friend. You don’t need instructions on what to do.

The Art & Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

We’ve all done it.

We write what feels in our gut like the most heart-wrenching, glorious, meaningful story ever put into words, and we polish it until it’s as beautiful as language can be. Then we hand it around, to our writing workshop or critique circle or peer group or dedicated readers, and we sit back and wait for the compliments to come pouring in (“How did you do it? I felt like I knew these people! I’ve lived your story a thousand times in my heart! Your metaphors, exposition, insights—I am humbled! You’re so brilliant, I just want to shake your hand and give my keyboard over into your vastly safer keeping. . .”).

And what happens?

Those ingrates come back with raised eyebrows.

“Really?” they say with the most perfect deadpan faces. “This is what you’ve been up to? Honey, they’re starting a knitting class down at the Y next week. Maybe you’d like to sign up? I understand John Steinbeck was a great one for knitting.”

Grrrrrrrrrrrr.

1. Hand it out without waiting for it to cool off.


This is my personal favorite. I love doing this one. By the time I’ve finished a rewrite, that darn manuscript is so hot it’s jumping right out of my hands. It’s not my fault. My words are simply on fire. (Flaubert did it, too. And his friends made him set his manuscript on fire.)

You know what my first agent said about the draft I sent her of my first novel? “I love this paragraph.” Months later, after the manuscript had cooled off, I re-read the whole thing and was absolutely horrified. I called her to apologize, and she responded (rather callously, I must say), “See what I had to wade through?”

Let me tell you, you do not EVER want to hear your agent, of all people, say those words to you. Wowza. Trust me on this one.

2. Neglect to read other books.


Decades ago, John Prine said it: “Blow up your TV.” And he meant it. And he was right.

Far, far too many aspiring writers these days are trying to write fiction the way they see storytelling done in television and in movies. But fiction isn’t screenplay. The page isn’t film. They’re not the same medium.

Yes, it sucks for everyone that reading takes more effort than watching a flickering color screen, and when you come home from a long day at the office (and on the subway or freeway or bus to and from the office) it’s easier to pick up the remote than it is to pick up a book.

Nobody’s forcing us to do this work.

If you want to write fiction, you have to read it. It’s just like riding a bike—nobody ever learned how to do that by sky-diving.

3. Ignore previous feedback.


I know. You’re on the cutting-edge of fiction, misunderstood by your contemporaries, corrected and insulted by your peers, dismissed by the same kind of people who refused to read Jean Rhys, Bronte, and Jane Bowles. Probably the same people. Those cretins never learn.

Yeah, they misunderstand me too. I’m going to be dead four hundred years before anybody truly gets me.

But in the meantime, I’d better make an effort to roll with their feedback, at least for show. Even cretins sometimes luck into a good piece of advice. Just because they wouldn’t take it for their own manuscripts doesn’t mean I shouldn’t take it for mine.

4. Neglect to research writing advice.


And this one’s really hard, because not only is there a ton—a super-condensed black hole ton—of writing advice floating around out there, especially now that the blogosphere has turned everyone with a keyboard and a thoughtful expression into an aspiring writer, but a great great great great good deal of it is CRAP.

Of course, if you’re still aspiring and not an experienced long-time professional in this field, you have no idea what’s good advice and what’s CRAP. So you dutifully read it all, try like heck to sort it into some kind of logical sense, and synthesize it in the deeper, darker, slimier recesses of your poor overloaded brainpan.

And it’s like trying to reconcile the houses of Lancaster and Tudor, goddammit. You can’t do it!

Somebody is simply wrong.

I know—I did all that during my apprenticeship to the craft, too. It was hell. That’s why I do what I do now—putting so much advice out there free on the advice column and this blog and making so much of the basics available cheap through my book and magazine—because I want you to get the rudiments you need in order to judge for yourself what out there is really useful and what is nonsense being passed around by folks who want to be gurus more than they want to be adepts.

I don’t make my living on this freebie and cheap stuff. I make it behind the scenes, where the vast majority of you never even know it’s going on, in the individual manuscripts and emails and conversations I work on all day every day with individual writers. (Only my clients know, and they are extremely gracious about the time I spend on the freebie stuff for everyone else—hi, guys! This is me waving at you!)

However even if you can’t afford to hire me, I still want you to know what you’re doing. I’ve been alone in the world with my stories and dreams and words and typewriter and my empty back account, with no decent advice to rely on, for years and years. I know what it’s like. I’ve lived that way, I’ve suffered, and I swear—I feel for you guys. I do.

5. Neglect to take it.


But this one’s your fault. If you read nothing on craft except what you can find right here in front of you right now, on my blog (and there is a whole lot of other fabulous advice available to you out there—Flannery O’Connor, John Gardner, Anne Lamott, Annie Dillard, Raymond Chandler, E.M. Forster, Jack Bingham, Dave King and Renni Browne, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera), there is enough here to put you on the right track and keep you there.

You simply have to do the work.

6. Try to improve upon the greats.
   
   And this is where fanfic meets lazy because, I’m sorry, guys, Elizabeth Bennet is not improved upon by turning her into a potty-mouth 10-year-old’s ignorant joke on the tribal elders. You know why Austen’s characters are still vivid and present and oh-so-enticing to all of us out here with lesser talents 200 years after they first appeared on the page? Not because she made them shocking or gruesome or her era’s equivalent of marketable or racy or edgy. Not because she had a fab agent or an in with a good publishing house or a really killer blog. Not even because she won the 18th-century lottery. No.
   
   Because she learned the craft!
   
   That’s all. And you can do it, too.

And in case you’re hopping around on one foot now, since you’ve just shot yourself six times in a row (ow, my foot!), take comfort in the 5 Things All Writers Always Overlook.

The Art and Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”
—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .it demystifies the essential aspects of the craft while paying homage to the art.”
—Millicent Dillon, five time O.Henry Award winner and author of the PEN/Faulkner-nominated Harry Gold

“Teeming with gold. . .will make you love being a writer if only because you belong to the special little club that gets to read this book.”
—KM Weiland, author of Outlining Your Novel

The Art and Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”
—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“As much a gift to writers as an indispensible resource. . .in a never-done-before manner that inspires while it teaches.Highly recommended.”
—Larry Brooks, author of four bestselling thrillers and Story Engineering

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”
—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

All right, guys. It looks like the 5th Annual Top 10 Blogs for Writers Contest is being held for this year. Folks are over there nominating their favorite blogs written specifically for the in-depth edification and entertainment, the support and encouragement, the comedy and companionship, the sheer on-going benefit of our vast, shifting, complex, sometimes rueful, often bamboozled, always intriguing online community of writers.

Actually, I made all that stuff up. But they really are looking for nominations.

Boy, howdy, you get to vote! Who’s your favorite blogger for writers?

(You do realize there’s a particular answer I’m looking for here.)

(And, yes, you do have to go vote on their site, not mine.)

1. “What if. . .”
   
   Write down the “what if?” PREMISE of your novel. Then every time you look up, pondering where to go after a difficult scene, you will be re-oriented on your chosen path, kept within the bounds of the story you intend to tell. Make sure there is not only an initial premise, but also a problem with that initial premise.
   
   
   • What if 1950s hair-dryers were the doorways to an almost-identical parallel universe where the truth floats in the air over people’s heads whenever they lie—but everyone arrives there hair-first, so when more than one person arrives at once the truths get mixed up when they collide?
     
     1950s hairdryers = parallel universe of truth-words collisions
   • What if the world were secretly populated by a super-intelligent race that lives in fire and speaks a fire language that sounds to us just like popping and crackling, and forest fires were the result of psychotic episodes among the powerful politicians of their species? And the plucky members of a backwoods volunteer fire department discover this secret just in time to learn that the fire creatures have decided to wipe out humanity and start over again with a less dangerous species—but the fire chief is in the throes of an identity crisis in which they question the destructive influence of humans upon the earth?
     
     Fire race apocalypse vs. environmental despair of fire chief
   • What if dogs were secret agents with the ability to solve international crime if they could only be distracted from sniffing each others’ tails all the time? And they were now, decades after Eisenhower first warned Americans to beware the military-industrial complex, finally positioned to reveal the source of evil that has been chiseling away all this time at American political stability—but the evil-doers have concocted a special drug to put into the agents’ food that make their own tails crack-level addictive to sniff?
     
     Check Fido’s food for weird drugs!
2. “My protagonist needs. . .”
   
   Write down the enormous, gut-wrenching, overwhelming NEED in your protagonist that fuels your novel. What has that character devoted their entire life to obtaining—even if unconsciously? (Especially if unconsciously!)
   
   
   • Franky and Johnny need to consummate their love for each over the resistance of obstacles they create themselves in order to overcome their own fundamental terror of nihilism.
     
     F & J need to overcome obstacles re: fear of nihilism
   • Albert Reed McNeedleman needs to prove his mother’s creepily-possessive faith in him by becoming the most financially-successful used-car salesman in the blogosphere.
     
     Albert needs the most blogosphere used-car sales
   • Peony Surplus needs to reject the values of Buddhism with which she was raised, in particular the belief that destructive impulses must be tempered with humility.
     
     Peony needs to rebel against Buddhist humility

3. “My protagonist also needs. . .”
   
   Write down the CONFLICTING NEED that prevents your protagonist from satisfying their first need. Internal conflict is the heart & soul of fiction. For every need there is an equal and opposite need—this is what makes readers turn pages.
   
   

   • Franky and Johnny are really, really, really good at creating obstacles for themselves.
     
     F & J also need obstacles re: fear of nihilism
   • Albert Reed McNeedleman needs the emotional validation of his secret online identity as the revolutionary covert incest spokesperson, bringing support and healing to thousands of anonymous sufferers.
     
     Albert also needs his online covert incest exposee
   • Peony Surplus needs to succeed at running her dead parents’ groundbreaking Buddhist think-tank that is the source of income keeping her little sister in the hospital on life-support.
     
     Peony also needs to save her sister w/Buddhism
4. “My protagonist’s worst nightmare is. . .”
   
   Write down the worst thing you could possibly do to this protagonist to bring their two needs into opposition. This is the CLIMAX you are aiming for.
   
   
   • Franky and Johnny lose their creative capacity to create obstacles for themselves and must face life together without protection against their terror of nihilism—just as they unwittingly uncover the plot to disable the secret agent dogs who are the world’s only hope of uncovering the secret evil that is bent on global domination.
     
     F & J’s worst nightmare is: save world vs. succumb to nihilism
   • Albert Reed McNeedleman learns of the dilemma of the backwoods fire chief who is the only person in the world who speaks fire-language, and realizes he is the one person who can help the chief resolve the covert incest issues that his environmental despair masks—just when Albert’s used-car business rockets to the top of a global blogosphere competition to face off against their biggest competitor, in the used-car selling showdown to end all showdowns.
     
     Albert’s worst nightmare is: save world vs. most used cars sold
   • Peony Surplus is given responsibility for deciding whether to sell the think-tank to her parents’ mortal enemies, who plan to turn it into a Tea Party marketing franchise, and get out for good, knowing she is putting a finite cap on the duration of her little sister’s life just as she takes a turn for the better, or to lead a seven-month meditation fundraiser in which she must lead meditation upon the Four Noble Truths, Eightfold Path, and Three Marks, as well as all 31 planes of existence, in order to give the think-tank a new boost in popularity—just when she is shot through a hair-dryer into the truth-telling parallel universe and collides with the Dalai Lama.
     
     Peony’s worst nightmare is: rebellion vs. truth—plus now her hair is all tangled up with the Dalai Lama’s. . .oh, wait. That’s not a problem. He’s bald!

And when you’ve got your post-its up, be sure you know the 6 Ways to Shoot Yourself in the Foot.

The Art and Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”
—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .it demystifies the essential aspects of the craft while paying homage to the art.”
—Millicent Dillon, five time O.Henry Award winner and author of the PEN/Faulkner-nominated Harry Gold

“Teeming with gold. . .will make you love being a writer if only because you belong to the special little club that gets to read this book.”
—KM Weiland, author of Outlining Your Novel

The Art and Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”
—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“As much a gift to writers as an indispensible resource. . .in a never-done-before manner that inspires while it teaches.Highly recommended.”
—Larry Brooks, author of four bestselling thrillers and Story Engineering

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”
—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

1. It’s hard as hell.


Boy, nobody warned you, did they? You were going to have fun. You had this incredible idea about a wonderful fictional world peopled by amazing characters, with internal and external conflict like the Fall of the Roman Empire. You had words and pages and time on your hands. And you couldn’t stop. . .you couldn’t imagine ever stopping.

Fast-forward a thousand hours and a hundred pages, and you’re up to your hip-boots in this novel, with no end in sight. Which is not turning out well AT ALL. The sun has gone down, the mosquitoes are coming out, dark is falling. And you’re lost, miles from home without so much as a flashlight, wondering if you’ll hear the mountain lion the split second before it lands on the back of your neck.

This novel is making your whole life into one long (losing) wrestling match with the Fear of Failure.

You can wake up from this nightmare, you know. You can have a great dinner with your loved ones, sit by the fire until all hours with a good book, sleep in your own warm bed tonight.

You can turn off the story and walk away.

2. It doesn’t pay.


Why can’t the media shut up about J.K. Rowling and her income? Do they not realize how it burns your brain every time you hear her say, “You know, I was poor once, too”? Is it meant to be torment, knowing you also have a vivid imagination, perfectly good writing skills, and a way with the English language—just not the agent and publisher and marketing firm that keeps churning Harry Potter all over the news like foam out of an overloaded washing machine?

You’re never going to be richer than the Queen of England! Rowling’s got a lock on that market. And now nobody’s got the resources to match steps with her in this age of publishing track records and over-the-top marketing hype—especially not you.

It’s a losing battle, and you know it. You can stop competing any time.

3. It’s only a compulsion.


Truthfully, when you do something impossibly difficult even though it’s not your job, you know what you call that? Parenthood. And once you get into that game, you can’t get back out again.

But that’s not what this is. This is something you picked up because you wanted to, and you can put it down for the same reason. This manuscript will not be traumatized by your neglect. It’s not child abuse to lock it up and forget about it. There’s a whole world out there just waiting for you, a life for you to live.

You can go seize it.

1. It’s hard as hell.


Wow, is this not a hobby for wimps. I spent four hours last night trying to line edit my own writing, and by the time I got called to the dinner table I knew my poor, squashy brain would never be the same again. Physical pain. Being a writer sucks.

But I am so much better of a writer now than I was thirty years ago, when I started this exercise in insanity! I have so much more control over my language, my skills, my imagination. I’ve gotten so much more adept at going into that fictional trance where all the good material lives and so much more efficient at crystalizing it into words.

All those years of bone-breaking work, and now I get to wake up every morning to magic under my hands.

It’s a magic worth working like hell for.

2. It doesn’t pay.


Sure, some writers out there rely on their paychecks to determine the fate of their fiction. You know who’s #1 at that? A self-proclaimed “self-consciously commercial” ex-advertising executive. And you know what J.D. Salinger had to say about that kind of life? “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing.”

It’s true. The publishing industry has changed drastically. It’s not about craft now, it’s about product, and if you make the mistake of being good enough to earn money for your publisher, the pressures on you to produce copy fast will make mincemeat out of the luxurious submersion in fiction that was once yours.

The fact that you’re not making money at this is your saving grace—that’s what carves out the space in your life for this extraordinary adventure, rolls back the horizon in all directions so you can see as far as you like, drops the layers down and down into the depths where brilliance and detail and profundity lie. It’s what gives your writing life its wings.

3. It’s only a compulsion.


You can’t get around it. Fiction is not a nine-to-five job. It is an obsessive compulsion that would reign in your heart whether anyone ever found out about it or not.

The writing of fiction has nothing to give but itself—and that’s all you need. Amazing people doing wonderful, inexplicable things, following their destinies to incredible concentrations of circumstance and will. And you get to be there with them, not reading it (although that is also deeply satisfying to the soul), but living it. You’re the only one. Everyone else has to wait and read your record of the adventure later.

If you’ve got the compulsion, you’ve got it.

Put both hands on your heart and just stand there feeling blessed.

The Art & Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon