In case you didn’t see last week’s post, I’ve been trying to interview Roz Morris, aka @dirtywhitecandy.

She’s the author of eleven ghostwritten novels, eight of them best sellers, owner of Nail Your Novel fiction-writing blog and author of her own self-published book on fiction techniques, Nail Your Novel.

She invited me to a wrestling match, threw me and then admitted she’s scared the occasional kickboxing teacher.

And she won the last round.

Welcome to Part II of eavesdropping on critiquer and independent editor Roz and Victoria. . .with wine:

V: Welcome back, Roz! I’ve been quite busy making up stuff about you for the interview in case your life is more boring than I think it needs to be.

Roz: Unusual things about me? Um. . .can’t think of any. Ah, no, this might do: I once got hit by a train—

V: A train?

Roz: Yes. I’ve got a little scar. I was actually hit by a train door, and it got a bit melodramatic. Some schoolboys opened it as the train was arriving, it swiped me on the forehead, and I bled all over the platform. People started screaming. An ambulance turned up, in dread of what they would see. Instead of a squished body on the track they saw me with a pad on my head, dripping blood and having a voluble argument with a fat station guard, who wanted me to tell him it was my fault. After stitches and advice on concussion (which I forgot the moment they told me), I was able to call work and say I’d been hit by a train but would be in the next day.

V: You forgot the moment they told you! Good grief. That is a concussion. No wonder you forgot to stay home from work. What were we just talking about?

Roz: Research.

V: Oh, yes. Tell me about the greatest lengths you’ve ever gone to for the sake of a book.

Roz: I’ve done some odd things in the name of research. I was interested in people who have themselves frozen in order to be brought back to life, so I looked up the English chapter of Alcor and went to visit them. I took some friends, and we pretended we were interested in having our corpses frozen. I snooped around their operating theatre, asking all sorts of cheeky questions. I met their other members, who together formed a character dynamic that was crying out to be written about.

I sat in on a meeting and made sure I was at the main desk, where I found all their recent mail—so I started to read it all. Amazingly, they didn’t stop me. There were letters from people wanting to do work experience, obviously not suspecting that they were asking for work experience in preparing corpses to be revived. Great afternoon. I haven’t written the novel yet, but it’ll be used in some way or other.

What’s the oddest thing you’ve done in the name of research? I know you mention writing fiction—do you still do that, is it on the back burner?

V: Yes, I’m still writing fiction. I’ve started a mystery about an independent editor. I made a bunch of outlines with white scenes on black construction paper over the holiday and taped them up over my desk. I have corkboard on the wall with tons of notes stuck to it. My son just stands in front of it all and muses.

As far as research? Chriminey, my whole life has been research. I’ve traveled a lot. The oddest research I ever did was probably the stuff I did against my will, which was drive around South America and Europe with my family for several years when I was a kid. That’s not the kind of research you ever get over. Someday I will write my memoir of it, and it will be poignant and significant and heartbreaking. But not today.

Roz: I want to read that book!

V: You know, my mother actually just sent me a whole album of photos I hadn’t seen in thirty-five years, along with her journal of that trip, which I had never seen at all. Talk about material.

Let’s chat about the format you work in. Most of my work is on-going over a period of weeks or even months. But you work for a place that commissions single critiques, is that right? And you’ve done reader reports for publishers and agents?

Roz: Most of my editing work is one-off critiques. Some is for private clients, some for the critiquing agency. Do you want to hear a bit of boasting?

V: Of course.

Roz: My first client became a New York Times bestseller after following my advice on his manuscript. My most recent client just got his MG novel in a bidding war and is now getting foreign deals.

My critiques often become reader reports because clients often submit them with manuscripts—but some industry people feel you shouldn’t do that. I copy edit and proofread for publishers too—which is necessary but not terribly creative. If we talk about that for five minutes it gives everyone time to go out and refresh their glass. . .

V: . . .(Talk talk.) We’re back!

Roz: I also do a lot of work that wanders over the border between editing and ghosting. I’ve rewritten manuscripts that have great content but whose authors were non-English speakers, or dyslexic, in too much of a hurry to write their own books properly—or whose editors have thrown up their hands in despair. I find that perversely fun—to take wordy murk and fillet out the interesting stuff. And then of course there’s the true ghosting, where I write the book from scratch. I’m not allowed to tell you who I’ve done that for. Not just because of contractual obligations, but because some of them are trained assassins and I don’t look good in a bullet-proof vest.

V: Swear to god, I’ve never even seen myself in a bullet-proof vest. Your life is way more interesting than I thought it was.

How do you get your jobs? Did you stumble into a gofer position at a publishing house at a tender age and just work your way up? Or do you know all the London literati and have cocktails with them every weekend? (And will you invite me if I ever turn up at Heathrow?)

Roz: I get most of my work through contacts, although I quite often send CVs to people and tell them I want to work for them. Seven times out of ten they probably bin me, but it’s how I got the work with the critiquing agency—and that worked out very well.

My first published book happened because my husband was commissioned to write a novel for a series, and when he delivered it the editors changed the brief. He couldn’t rewrite it because he had other projects, but I’d been dabbling with writing for years so he told the publisher that I would write the replacement. They had no other option, so they agreed. I gulped, got my head down and wrote. Six weeks later they accepted the manuscript—and I realised I was going to get away with it. After that initial back-door break, it slowly built up.

And if you ever turn up at Heathrow and don’t call me I will never forgive you.

V: My husband and I just had our annual winter conversation about a vacation in Europe. One of these years we’re simply going to pick up and go, so keep your brollie handy.

How much can a writer make for ghostwriting a book?

Roz: It all depends on the deal. It really helps to have an agent fighting your corner, to get a proper share of royalties and other rights. You can earn a lot because the books will be properly marketed—otherwise the editors wouldn’t be able to justify hiring a ghost as well as paying the ‘author’ whose name is on the cover.

But there are also unscrupulous companies who lure a writer into a ghosting job, pay them a flat fee, ask for unreasonable numbers of rewrites and don’t pay a royalty at the end of it. Or the terms and conditions mean that the writer doesn’t get royalties on sales that aren’t full price, such as book clubs and foreign deals.

Even worse, some unwary souls are conned into writing a book ‘for a share of the back end’. I did that once, got nothing and never did it again.

V: Warning heeded. Have you ghostwritten mostly fiction or nonfiction?

Roz: I’ve mostly ghosted fiction, but I’ve done one memoir as well. That wasn’t any particular plan—just the luck of the draw.

V: Are you still writing those ghost-novels? (I think I just broke the English language.)

Roz: Not at the moment, but there’s something in the pipeline. Right now, though, I’m pinning down my own WIP on the wrestling mat.

V: How’s that going?

Roz: More ups and downs than a bride’s nightie.

V: [laughing] Roz.

Roz: It’s been tough finding the strongest way to tell the story—I had to invent several new revision tools to get it right.

Now I’m on the detailed edit, which is ruthless in the extreme. I’m lopping out passages that are perfectly good but are holding back the pace. The outtakes file is three times as long as the actual text. Yesterday I congratulated myself on a joke that was dripping with several shades of irony—and today I hacked it out because it gave slightly the wrong tone for the scene it was in. You can tell I get a bit obsessive, can’t you?

V: This the the writing life, folks.

Roz: And, most difficult, I’ve based one of the characters on a longtime friend and this week had terrible news about him. All books put you through the mill, but that’s a bit impolite of fate, really—especially when I’m trying to concentrate on a book. But he’s got a bit better, so maybe we can cautiously raise a glass. (Ahem. Stop hogging the vino, Mixon. . .)

V: Oh! Excuse me. Say when.

So what’s the one thing you’d like to say to aspiring writers about this work we do—both the writing and the editing? What’s your editorial secret?

Roz: My secret? Oh, that question wasn’t for me.

V: Well, it was. I already know my own secrets. I think.

Roz: Ah! I started to reply, then figured it might be a tail-end question for the blog readers to encourage them to chat in the comments.

V: I never do that. I figure if they feel like contributing to the mayhem they know they’re welcome to, and if they’re shy they don’t want me making an issue out of it. I just have faith in their grasp on the general protocol.

Does this mean we’re done talking about fiction? Shall we break out the bubbly? Here. Let me peel you a grape. . .

Roz: Toodle-pip!

Roz Morris, aka @dirtywhitecandy, will give you creative aneurysms. You should probably talk to her about that. She can be found at her blog, on Facebook, and on Twitter.

Please join us for more editorial conversation with Roz and Victoria in our four-part series: We can’t leave fiction alone—Talking Fiction.


TOP 10 BLOGGERS FOR WRITERS—GUEST POSTING:
Later this week I’m trading guest posts with K.M. Weiland of Wordplay.

Welcome to Sunday! This is a special one.

For those of you late to the Top 10 Blogs for Writers game of 2010/2011, let me summarize:

Someone mentioned this contest to me one day back in December 2010, and I called upon my legions of beloved readers and clients to throw my name in the hat.

You guys did.

My blog made it into the finalists, or the Top 20 Blogs for Writers. And I cried a little.

Finally, you guys actually managed to push my blog all the way to the Top 10 Blogs for Writers.

And my heart promptly exploded.

So for three months at the beginning of 2011 the Top 10 Bloggers for Writers traded weekly guest posts. We had a blast.

Please help me inaugurate those months of frantic behind-the-scenes scheduling, topic negotiation, head-slapping, and sometimes hysteria with my first guest post of the series, this one on that venerable writers’ blog, Writer Unboxed (where I now write an advice column for their newsletter, Ask Victoria).

I decided to kick off by explaining in detail the most confusing and ambitious aspect of fiction I know—I thought I’d start big.

Join us today for:

3 Layers of ‘Layering’ in Fiction, on Writer Unboxed

I know. She’s absolutely hilarious, isn’t she?

And she’s got even more value-add than that! She’s also a ghostwriter, and on Monday she’s going to tell us how she got into that line of work, plus what she’s working on now, plus why she’s not going to have herself frozen after she dies, plus what happened the time she got hit by a train.

I swear to you. She said all this stuff.

Unfortunately, though, I got no pictures of her in a bulletproof vest. So that’s a little bit of a disappointment.

Join us Monday!

Roz Morris goes by the online moniker @dirtywhitecandy, which all by itself is reason enough to interview her.

But on top of that she’s also a ghostwriter with eleven novels under her belt, eight of them best sellers, a critiquer for a London manuscript-critiquing agency, owner of the fiction-writing blog Nail Your Novel and author of her own self-published book of original, hands-on fiction-writing techniques, Nail Your Novel.

Plus she’s one heck of a hilarious human being.

So I went over to her blog and dragged her back here for an interview, and wouldn’t you know it, it stopped being interview almost immediately and became instead a wonderful, rollicking after-dinner ramble about our craft, this extraordinary work of editing fiction—all over not just email and my blog but also Twitter, where she challenged me to a brief wrestling match and promptly threw me.

Ow.

Please join us now for a trans-Atlantic date, as we guzzle wine and talk fiction editing:

Roz, what’s the one thing about writing that writers don’t know that makes them need editors? (I just wrote a guest post on this—I hope you don’t answer the same thing I did, or it’ll look like I’m plagiarizing you.)

Roz: Two reasons why writers need editors. One, because they can’t see their own blind spots. Even experienced writers have bad habits they don’t realise are jarring—such as blithe unawareness of POV changes and lapses into telling instead of showing.

Reason two is because all writers are too close to the story. We know it from the inside out, whereas the reader comes from the outside in. You can’t judge how well you’re drawing the reader in and what you’re drawing them into, any more than you can do your own cosmetic dental work or see your own bottom (unless you’re very talented).

Hope that isn’t what you wrote, too. If it is, at least leave in my bottom joke.

V: [laughing] No, it’s not—at least not enough for it to sound like I stole it from you. But it’s the general gist of my opinion, as well. I mean, it’s not even really opinion when you’re talking on this level. It’s just a reality of the craft, part of the creative process. Everything looks very different from the perspective of inside, but you can’t create anything if you’re afraid to step inside it. (This is starting to get back to your bottom joke, isn’t it?)

If you could, Roz, what kind of client do you wish you could take home with you forever, even if they can’t write for beans?

Roz: The kind who genuinely wants to learn how to communicate with a reader and finds it endlessly fascinating. Most of us can’t write for beans when we start. We learn because we can’t leave it alone, and we develop our awareness of what works and what doesn’t—and we’re ruthless with ourselves, being disciplined with our weaknesses and doing whatever we can to practice our art better.

The next question you’re probably going to ask is, Does that mean everybody can write well? Maybe some won’t have the facility that others do. But no one should think they don’t have room to improve.

I don’t ask for much, do I?

V: I’ll tell you, I don’t buy the business about some people being born to write and others not. I’ve read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early novels. He ought to have been banned from owning a typewriter. He ought to have been banned from walking past a typewriter. And yet he wrote The Great Gatsby and later proved the extent of his developed skills in The Last Tycoon.

It just goes to show anyone can do it.

So what kind of client do you wish you could launch off a tower over shark-infested waters?

Roz: The kind whose manuscript is deeply flawed and doesn’t want to hear any criticism. Most of us get a little grumpy when we see pages of criticism, especially when we think the novel was finished. That’s understandable, and I’m not complaining about that. But some people seem to imagine they are paying for an ego trip, to be told how brilliant their work is, and when you point out what isn’t working they tell you you’re wrong. Sometimes they will tell you they have friends who are writers or are in publishing—although they usually remain vague about why this reflects on the quality of their manuscript.

I had one client whose novel was promising but needed a lot of work. When I told her this, she proceeded to tell me she had friends who had ‘worked on Hollywood movies’ in a vague sort of way and thought ‘the novel sounds good’—which was probably supposed to have put me in my place. I also have friends in Hollywood, and I know darn well that book wouldn’t have been seriously considered or optioned. Her loss, I suppose—she paid all that money for a report that told her how to fix a book and refused to believe it needed any work.

Right, tell me who you’re throwing to Jaws.

V: Hollywood, hmm? I wish I were important enough to know writers in Hollywood. Hang on a sec—I do.

Yeah, I have to heave a pretty deep sigh when I get a client who takes umbrage with serious, detailed, constructive advice because it runs counter to their visions of genius. We all secretly believe we’re geniuses. And we’re all wrong.

Honestly, I think I’ve only had one or two of those in the two years I’ve been doing this work—which is in my opinion an excellent reflection upon the aspiring writing community out there.

But I had a lot of these people when I was a technical writer and editor, computer engineers who couldn’t tell a sentence from a side of fries but regarded writers as unnecessary obstacles between them and their adoring publics. By comparison, fiction writers are a real dreamworld of courtesy and humility.

Roz: They are, and what’s lovely about them is that most of all they believe in making a worthwhile book.

V: Yes. That wonderful belief in fiction that is the reason we all do this work. Of course, if you’re smart enough to hire an indie editor, you’re probably smart enough not to argue. Same goes for therapy, you know. Nobody’s listening to your protestations but you.

Roz: It’s interesting you should mention therapy. The writers who’ve written a novel as therapy are the most sensitive and potentially aggressive about criticism. It’s always hard for writers to learn the patience to disembowel a manuscript that is precious, but those who have written too much from the heart can easily feel that when you criticise you’re judging their life.

Editors need to develop special antennae for it.

V: It really is like practicing therapy, only with imaginary people. I love listening to clients talk about their characters. I love the process of discovering who they are. You are probably not as interesting as your novel—that’s a hard one for some people to swallow. But, you know, to serious writers it’s a godsend. I’m not as interesting, either, as my skills—what I bring to a manuscript.

Roz: I always feel I’m not nearly as interesting, brave or remarkable as the characters in my books. Mind you, I wouldn’t like to live their lives either. Characters I write about will be pushed in ways I would find intolerable.

V: That’s it, isn’t it? Fiction is about characters coping with things far worse than anything the readers will ever cope with. That’s how they reassure us we’re going to survive our own lives.

So, when you do a Developmental Edit on a new manuscript, what’s the first thing you look for?

Roz: First of all, I consider whether I’ve been grabbed by the story and the characters, as I would if I was reading any book. I always read analytically, whether I’m reading for a client or for pleasure—I can’t shut the crit goblins up. I make copious notes, and gradually strengths and weaknesses emerge so that my report arises naturally from these.

V: What’s the last?

Roz: When I’ve got to the end I mull over what the writer was trying to do, whether they’ve succeeded and whether that’s the right approach. The final thing I consider is the manuscript’s suitability for the market.

You, if I may be so bold? Oh, sorry. You’re bold.

V: [laughing] I just got that.

The very first thing I look for is a gripping hook. I read a 1966 mystery last night—by Lawrence Block and called rather preciously The Canceled Czech—and halfway through the first chapter I was sitting up shrieking. The next page made me shriek louder. By the end of the chapter, I was in convulsions, insisting on reading it to my (rather bemused) husband. That’s what you want in a hook.

As I read through a client ms the first time, I’m mostly, like you, just reading to see how hard the story grabs me. When I run across a rip in the fabric of the fictional dream, I jot down a quick note. Then I read a second time, outlining for proper plot structure, making sure all the pieces are in place. Discussion of characters grows out of that kernel. It takes me longer to mull over the characters, where they’ve been, where they’re going, what’s working and not working, what the writer has yet to bring to the surface. Character is a more complex issue than structure, which is why so much modern stuff gets published without being any deeper than the little puddle left in my wine glass right now. . .

I read everything I lay my hands on analytically, too. It makes me enjoy a good book more and allows me to bail early on crap I shouldn’t waste time on. I read a ton of fiction in this job, constantly developing my expertise. I simply don’t have the time to waste.

Roz: I am nodding so hard I’ll soon need to call an osteopath. Reading analytically doesn’t spoil books for me—it increases my pleasure. And I have no patience at all for a book that doesn’t grab me—unless there is a research reason for me to read it. Sorry, back to you.

V: [laughing again] I thought you were handing me the wine bottle.

Roz: Gerroff. Mine.

V: [laughing harder] Stop being so funny, Roz. You’re wrecking this damn interview—

Join us again next week for Part II of:

We can’t leave fiction alone—the Roz Morris interview
After-Dinner Wine-Induced Fiction Editors’ Wrestling Match

Roz Morris, aka @dirtywhitecandy, will probably also be silly with you if you just ask her. She likes smart-alecks, Scottish accents, and pulling suspicious faces. She can be found on her blog, on Facebook, and on Twitter.

Roz Morris of Nail Your Novel and I have been bouncing nonsense tweets off each others’ foreheads on Twitter, while sharing behind-the-scenes fellowship in this wonderful craft of editing fiction, for some time now.

So when we both turned up as finalists for the Top 10 Blogs for Writers a few weeks ago, I knew my moment had come.

But her wit’s just too quick for me. She got me in a headlock and turned our ordinary interview into a hilarious verbal ramble, including a brief Twitter wrestling match.

Join us Monday for editorial talk of fiction, developmental editing, our favorite and not-so-favorite types of editing clients, Hollywood writers, how editing relates to therapy, and wine (plus a bottom joke—not mine):

This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no fooling around
No time for dancing, or lovey dovey. I ain’t got time for that now—
—”Life During Wartime” David Byrne, Talking Heads

So. . .I just had a disturbing week.

Way back in December, right before my vacation, two different aspiring writers had coincidentally asked me to do Abbreviated Developmental Edits on novels with a preponderance of p*&$%rnographic sex and over-the-top disgusting violence in them. I get queries like this now and then, and as usual I told them I don’t do that stuff. P*&$%rn is free all over the Internet so there’s no point in amateurs trying to sell it, and I’ll never encourage anyone to abuse the written word by gratuitously exploiting disgusting violence. I love and respect the written word, and, besides, I live on this planet with the rest of you. My sweet son also lives on this planet—in fact, my whole damn family lives on this planet. (So does yours). You’d think it’d be self-evident what a bad idea it is to try to ratchet our communal tolerance for disgusting violence. That’s just crapping in your own nest.

I do edit ‘edgy’ fiction because it’s all about epiphany through Hemingway’s delicate art of omission, and that’s literature, but I wouldn’t give the time of day to Howard Stern.

However, both these writers insisted they really, seriously wanted my professional feedback on how to make their novels as polished and publishable as they could be. (I had quite long conversations with them before they even hired me.) And both—as many do—claimed to be writing ‘edgy’ fiction for the sake of epiphany. So I agreed to work on their novels as ‘edgy’ works aimed at epiphany, and I put their manuscripts on my schedule. Unfortunately, when their turn came last week I was surprised to see the p*&$%rn and disgusting violence still everything I’d already told them it shouldn’t be. In one novel it turned out to take up almost a third of the ms.

I could have sent the ms’s back and asked them why they wanted to pay me for advice they refused to take for free. But they’d taken up slots on my calendar, and I had other clients thinking they had another week before their ms’s were due on my desk, so instead I buckled down and plowed on through, giving the writers the detailed professional feedback I promised, not just expensive ego-massage, but around 7,000 words on everything they needed to know in order to turn what they had into solid, polished fiction thousands of readers might love—fiction all about epiphany.

It was a very long week.

I told them (again) to leave out the p*&$%rn and disgusting violence.

Let me be really clear, folks: if you want to create fiction about the dark underside of humanity, you have to study how it’s done. Simply clobbering your potential reader over the head with things that will shock and disgust them is not fiction. It’s ANTI-FICTION. You remember that fiction is all about creating a response in the reader, right? Well, clobbering people over the head creates really the wrong response.

1. P*&$%rnography
   Like a dirty French novel, combining the absurd and the vulgar, you’re not charmless.
   —Lou Reed, Velvet Underground
   
   Yeah, they changed the word. Ha ha. It’s a marketing tactic to try to shuck off negative associations, but direct-mailing is still junk mail, and everybody knows it. There is a significant difference between erotica and p*&$%rn, but the purveyors of p*&$%rn don’t want you to know that.
   
   Sex in fiction has been in circulation since long before Anais Nin made a couple of cents a page churning it out for elderly men until Henry Miller took her under his wing. The French became known for erotic fiction, and it was highly racy for many, many decades to get caught with a novel in brown-paper wrapping. Now those books are kind of endearing. Nin wrote about an aging prostitute posing humorously in her client’s military cap.
   
   We’re all adults here, and that means we’ve already found out about sex. Surprise! You’re not teaching us anything we don’t know. In fact, we’ve all had so much sex we actually know what we like and what we don’t like—we didn’t wait for you to come along and tell us. We’re really not very patient people.
   
   Include subtle sex scenes if you need them to show how the forward progress of your plot affects your characters, write p*&$%rn for your own entertainment, or sign on with one of the little indie publishers playing Anais Nin for the modern consumer, but please don’t fool yourself into believing laborious sex manual instructions are anything like high tension for the reading masses. Sex is old, old, old, old news. From what I can gather, human beings have always been at it.
2. Disgusting violence
   Who killed Bambi? Murder murder murder!
   —the Sex Pistols

   
   I know. They put it in violent movies and TV shows. Blood and guts spattered everywhere. There are big-name authors out there writing cardboard cut-out characters and boring plots who try to spice up their lack of content with disgusting shock tactics. If you’re ‘hip’ you’re supposed to be numbed to it—or at least pretend to be.
   
   Those authors get away with it because readers know their names, they’ve been writing for a very long time, and their publishers give them editors, not because the books are any good. But you don’t have all those perks, so readers’ perception of the quality of your writing isn’t going to be skewed.
   
   When you insist on shoving readers’ faces in gore, hauling out every single revolting cliche you can remember from all the gross things you’ve ever seen on film or thought up yourself, that’s not tension, that’s just nonsense, and if you go too far with it those readers will laugh.

The truth is the aspiring writers who bring me this kind of shock-jock stuff are pretty predictable. Most think they’re quite tough cookies. “It’s the ugly truth—it’s in your face! You don’t get to run away, you ignorant pantywaist. You have to take it—take it—take it!” Not all of them are like this. But most.

Well, first of all, no reader has to take it. They’re the ones with the checkbooks. The failed aspiring writer is the one who has to take it, all on their lonely while potential readers walk away.

And, second, I’ve worked with abused children for years. I know a whole lot more about the ugly truths of the real world than the majority of folks out there trying to gross readers out. So I don’t have a lot of patience with posers.

And, third, how do the most uber-macho of these Incredible Hulks respond to requested editorial advice on their masterpieces? Ayuh. You guessed it. I have clients writing picture books about cute little bunnies in art school who are tougher about taking advice than the worst purveyors of militant “take it—take it—take it!” No one’s tender little feelers are as easy to bruise as those trying to batter everyone else’s.

We’re all soft, ignorant, vulnerable, and quaking. You are, I am, everyone is. It’s the human condition. There’s no point wasting readers’ precious time trying to prove you’re the one extremist toughie who’s not, especially if you’re an even bigger pantywaist than the rest of us.

Readers simply won’t buy it. Because fiction is about the truth.

Fiction is about making the page invisible and an experience alive entirely within the reader’s mind. Sex scenes and ‘edgy’ violence, like other taboo subjects such as profanity and child abuse, are all about what’s not said, that fragile membrane between what the reader imagines and what they are just about to imagine.

The trick is to identify that membrane and make it invisible to the reader. Whoosh. Suddenly they’re inside your fictional world.

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

Remember when I asked you guys whom you’d like to see in the Top 10 Blogs for Writers of 2010/2011 at Write to Done? And some of you said, “Justin Bieber”?

Just kidding. I don’t even know who Justin Bieber is (only that his name crops up everywhere).

No—many of you, with a graciousness and golden heart to inspire awe, hied yourselves on over there and made your nominations. And I thank you. I actually copied the nominations you made for me so I could read them every morning while I’m pulling myself together for the new workday, to remind me exactly what I love about this job—how it’s the best job I’ve ever had in my life, better even than running the children’s room of an indie bookstore, the job of my dreams.

A week or so later, Write to Done brought out the list of finalists, the Top 20 Blogs for Writers, and you guys had put me on it. You did! I was absolutely touched and honored. This is heavy-hitting company. You’ll recognize a lot of the names.

And last week they announced their decisions: the Top 10 Blogs for Writers 2010/2011.

Awwww.

I’m speechless. (Almost.) I want to tell you all how much your kind words mean to me. Thank you so much for your support, your comments, your enthusiasm for this amazing craft. I love fiction, I love working in it and living through it, I love talking about everything that goes on here. The truth is if I got paid to write these darn blog posts I would never shut up.

Which is fortunate because, as soon as I heard the news, I was asked to write a guest post for Write to Done. And it’s up now: The 7 Secrets of an Indie Editor.

I got carried away and confessed everything—in my profound gratitude to all the aspiring writers out there.

You people are shaping the dreams of the world.

1. I will watch the world every day with the eyes of a fly.


I’m assuming you know what flies’ eyes look like. But in case you don’t, think of disco balls with independent locomotion. You, personally, are walking through this incredibly vivid, visual, aural, tactile universe all day long every day with all the receptors you will ever need for brilliant fiction. USE THEM.


2. I will record the world like an ADD stenographer, whether I think I can use what I’m recording or not.


Writers are the last people to know if they’re ever going to need any particular bit of real life. Just because your head’s in the clouds doesn’t mean you never come back to earth. You have to. That’s where you catch your breath so you can bounce into the clouds again. And while you’re here, you need to stock up on random stuff, or else your stories are going to be made of very thin, very cliche, very boring material indeed.

You don’t even have to listen to yourself record. Just be the stenographer. The sheer act of writing lodges it all in your head.


3. I will write like Gertrude Stein on quaaludes and cut it like Edward Scissorhands on speed.


Stein wrote everything about thirteen times in thirteen infintisimally-altered ways and then insisted Alice B. Toklas read it back to her to see if it made sense. It did not. But it was the one way to discover that writing is about words—the arrangement and order of words—and if you’re not a meticulous enough craftsperson to care about the arrangement of your words, then you’re not a writer, you’re just a debutante.

Of course, Stein’s work is virtually unreadable the way it stands, so once you’ve given your system that gamma globulin shot of reality, you have to go back through and cull out every single thing that interferes between your vision and the reader’s imagination. That means 99% of it. Or 100%. Depending upon how meticulous you were.


4. I will mentally plot a brief action scene every time I see anyone do anything.


Everything anybody ever does is a miniature plot: it has a point at which it starts, development of detail, and a final purpose. You know why you always find what you’re looking for in the last place you look? Climax!

Practice this on the most boring actions you see. Practice it on the most fascinating. Boring ones are simpler and more obvious, aren’t they? Ask yourself at which point you stop picking your nose.


5. I will only write one line of dialog for everything three five I think I need.


Actually, you can go ahead and write all five. But cut four of them. The rest are padding. And page-turning fiction has no room for padding.

You think literary fiction gets a free pass? Read some Dickens. Austen. Bronte. Balzac. Graham Greene. Proust. Dostoyevsky. Great literary artists never pad.


6. I will explore my characters like a wrecking ball in an aquarium.


Everyone sees the shimmery, shiny reflection off their beloved characters’ faces first and foremost. That’s what you fall in love with. But there’s a tsunami inside every single individual roaming this planet, and if you can’t find that in your characters you can’t write anything interesting enough to hold a reader’s attention.


7. I will delve into the hidden links between giraffes and ice floes, seashells and cell phones, shoelaces and aircraft carriers, vistas and thumbnails, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera every day before breakfast.


Because this is what art is: finding the hidden links that hold the bizillions of disparate elements of our physical world together. . .and illuminating them. And the best time to see those things are while you’re still groggy, with one foot in the dream world where those links make total, bizarre, self-explanatory sense.

Those are the knots we’re all so hungry to understand in this cosmic web of light in which we’re caught. You can’t describe the cosmic web. All you can describe are how the individual knots are tied.


8. I will not write exposition for a year.


White noise. Interference. Leave it out.


9. I will not write internal dialog for a year.


Seriously, guys. Exposition and internal dialog are just you getting between your story and the reader.


10. I will make a habit of contradicting myself.


Because life is paradox, and the depths of paradox are the layers that make up real, three-dimensional, fictional worlds.


11. I will never, ever, ever be perfect.


You think you’re going to squeak by this one, slip a little perfection in when nobody’s looking because, gosh darn it, sometimes you’re just that good? Sadness! You’re really not. So stop tying your thumbs together and let the infinity of possibilities teach you how to write.

P.S. Thank you to Shane Arthur for suggesting I set up comment subscription. I should have done it for this blog ages ago, but I probably would never have gotten around to it if you hadn’t mentioned it.