It’s Walsh Week here at A. Victoria Mixon, Editor, with the final Top 10 Blogs for Writers guest post, by Therese Walsh, author of The Last Will of Moira Leahy.

Therese and her co-blogger Kathleen Bolton have established a reputation for themselves as The People to Know out here in writer-bloggerland. With a zillion (I counted them) interviews and thirteen monthly contributors—professionals from all over the writing and publishing community—their blog Writer Unboxed is absolutely my dream site to bracket this series of guest posts, first and last. (My first Top 10 guest post, Three Layers of Layering in Fiction, went up on their site way back in the end of January.)

And with no further ado I present to you the grand finale:

GUEST POST BY THERESE WALSH

I remember being on a long car trip with my family. I was sixteen, my sisters were eight and four. (Yes, that’s a gap!) They were bored, restless, making my parents crazy, and I don’t remember how it started—if it was my mother’s idea or my own—but I began to tell a story.

Once upon a time. . .

I had no plan, and I couldn’t tell you what the story was about, but I remember my sisters being completely mine. Focused on every word, every twist in the tale. Fifteen, twenty minutes passed this way as I threw together words, sentences, concepts, and grew characters on the spot. I freaked out a little bit at one point, like a pilot-in-training who just realized the teacher had suddenly passed out, leaving the pilot alone—alone!—in the cockpit with no idea what to do next.

Then what happened? my sisters wanted to know when I grew silent, but I’d already grounded that plane.

Larry Brooks recently stated that publishing is like toothpaste that can’t be put back in the tube. So is storytelling. I’d had a taste of it, and it was addictive.

I’d also had my first taste of fear. What am I doing? I’m not a storyteller, I’m faking it. This is just a game anyway, it doesn’t matter. Beneath all of that, a truth: I’m afraid I can’t finish this story, tie it together in a way that makes any sense, so I’m going to stop right now before something embarrassing happens here. The End.

Life happened. I took a job with Prevention Magazine as a researcher, then began writing short nonfiction articles for them. My daughter was born. I read to her a lot. And then that old addiction crept up on me. I began writing picture-book manuscripts. When my story ideas grew longer, rangier, I decided to try my hand at adult fiction. And I loved it. I was back in the pilot’s seat, soaring and happy. Maybe I’d crash, maybe I was a fraud, but who would know? There was no audience in my office: It was just the computer and me. Six years later, a happy ending: my debut novel, The Last Will of Moira Leahy, was purchased by Random House.

And here’s the kicker: two-book deal.

This was a good thing. A great thing. A dreamed-for thing. Something no debut author in her right mind would whine about after being plucked from the masses by Random House. But you know what went through my head, right?

What am I doing? I’m not a storyteller, I’m faking it. I’m afraid I can’t. Along with some new fears: The second book nearly kills every author. What if my agent and editor hate what I write? What if readers who loved the first book hate the second? What if it’s too different? Too similar? My contract says it’s due in two years; what if I need another six? What if I fail?

But a contract is a contract. I worked. I tried to intellectualize a process that for me is typically ¾ pantsing, and felt worse for it. I conducted research, wrote outlines, used literally hundreds of index cards to capture ideas as they came to me, then wanted to toss them all when it was time to organize those thoughts. I alternately felt convinced my work-in-progress was viable and there was no possible way it could be. And though I continued to write, and some days sat in front of my computer for the majority of my waking hours, the words were slow to come. It felt like the definition of a writer’s hell; I was battling a fierce case of resistance.

I overcame it, and I’m going to try to explain how, though I won’t pretend to understand all of it.

1. I confronted the possibility of failure.

What was the worst thing that could happen if I failed? I would have to pay back my advance. I would be unhappy with the message I would send to my children. I would lose credibility with my peers. I would have to reevaluate my future. I sat with those possible realities for a long time. I wrote them on paper and stared at them. Long enough, maybe, that something inside me said No. Not acceptable. That’s when #2 happened…

2. I gave myself over to the work.

My schedule essentially became this: Wake up. Sit down. Write. Don’t edit. Just labor. Until it’s time to get the kids. Then sit back down. Write some more. Ask hubby to pick up Chinese food. Eat. Sit again. Write. Maximize my time with my family. Sleep. Rise with the sun. Repeat. This immersion technique meant most of my analytical and creative processes were focused on this story. I worked hard to find answers to story problems, ID’ed routes around barriers that might’ve made me doubt the viability of my story as a whole. I began to love my story more fiercely—believe in it all the more, too—as characters came fully to life. It was a positive cycle: work, find problem, solve, be rewarded with new character insights, repeat.

3. I shut the door. . .

There were too many people in my head—and I don’t mean my characters. I mean reviewers, readers and the publishing professionals who helped turn my debut into a book. I had to consciously recall what had helped me complete my first story: there was no audience in my office—it was just the computer and me. I went inward like that once again.

4. . . .but I remembered that I was not alone.

Second novels happen all of the time. Anxiety over the second novel is common. So common that I was able to derive comfort from knowing that plenty of other writers had successfully overcome this type of resistance. My favorite inspiration? Elizabeth Gilbert’s speech on nurturing creativity for TED. (Olé.)

I recently turned in the complete draft of my second story. I made my deadline. And while there’s still work ahead—edits, and all that comes after—those initial fears have vaporized.

Writing is hard work. Before you’re published, when it’s just you and your story, writing is a little like flying a plane with a pilot by your side. You’re pumped on adrenaline, full of adventure, but you also feel safe. Signing that first publishing contract is like receiving your pilot’s license. You are cleared to fly, baby. But you will still ground yourself and your stories if you give too much power to your fears. Regardless of contracts, of readers and reviewers and all of that, what worked for me was remembering the most sacred and singular of all writing relationships: the one that exists between storyteller and story.

How do you quiet your inner voices to focus on your work? Have you battled back your personal fears and won? I’d love to hear about it.

Write on!

Therese Walsh is the co-founder of Writer Unboxed—which, if you don’t already know about it, you should—and can also be found on Twitter. Therese’s debut novel, The Last Will of Moira Leahy, was published in 2009 by Random House.

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If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too.
—Rudyard Kipling, “If”

So, last week I completely forgot to write about what I’d intended to write about, which was a talk I’d given the Wednesday before to my local writing club. But it worked out okay, because instead I wrote about pickles, and within a few hours it was all over StumbleUpon and I had a Pickle Revolution on my hands.

This kind of thing happens to me a lot—forgetting what topic I was planning to address. In fact, I was so sure it would happen that week when I gave my talk to the Writers Club (I’d just gotten back to town and had a headful of work I was still catching up on) that I sketched out notes and then downed a quick half-glass of wine about twenty minutes beforehand.

For the record: it worked. I talked non-stop for forty minutes before I even remembered I had notes.

Now I want to chat with you guys a little about the questions my local writers asked after my talk, because everyone everywhere has the same questions, and they’re really good questions, and you guys ought to be getting honest, straight-forward answers that make sense from industry professionals. But only too often you do not.

And although I originally wanted to cover all the questions from that talk in one post, it turned out I not only have too many questions, but my answers are way too long. So I trimmed them down to Four Questions, and I’m answering one a week for the next four weeks:

1. An agent told me to a) force my novel into a pre-set length, b) force my novel into a pre-defined genre, and/or c) “dumb down” my novel. What’s going on? Can’t I just write the best book I have in me?

Sigh. This is such a terrible situation, and you poor guys are like that excruciating character in the J.D. Salinger story, “The Laughing Man,” with your heads in vices until you come out all squished and looking like you’re laughing when you’re really screaming, “What is wrong with you people?”

The industry right now is a mess. Particularly since Black Wednesday of December, 2008, when the publishing houses, in a desperate bid to unload ballast as the unexpected shift in the economy began taking them down, laid off hordes of their in-house editors. What do you suppose happens to publishers without enough editors to edit their authors? That’s right! They wind up relying on cookie-cutter marketing stats to try to determine what to buy, hoping against hope this will allow them to continue to make money without contributing the literary value they were once relied upon to contribute.

Generic numbers. Rigid classifications. Ignorance.

The new publishing creed?

a) Yes, you must make certain wordcount milestones if you want a traditional publisher in these rocky times.

Tortilla Flats, The Postman Always Rings Twice, To the Lighthouse, Heart of Darkness, The Little Prince, all early Vonnegut and pretty much anything by Jean Rhys or Richard Brautigan or Camus, each and every one would be rejected out of hand as too short and therefore “unpublishable” by the number-dizzy of today’s agents.

Some of them are quite free with the information they won’t even respond to queries for novels under 70,000 words. Imagine being the one to casually dismiss the chance to publish half the classic literary canon just because those novels are too short.

But working within restrictions is part of the fun of craft, so this mostly means you just have to design your novels especially thoughtfully now, weaving in vivid, illuminating subplots for greater length or (even better) cutting and trimming down to the lean, mean tendons of your novel, the part that’s always, always moving your characters inevitably forward toward their doom. Thoughtful design has never hurt a novel. And it never will.

b) Yes, you must play the genre game to put your story into some prefab one or two genres.

Again, Louise Erdrich, Judy Blume, Anne Rice, Robert Heinlen, Madeline L’Engle, Raymond Chandler, Ursula K. LeQuin, Dasheill Hammett, J.R.R. Tolkien, all automatic rejects for their day’s genres according to today’s genre-fixated agents. So write what you want to write, make sure it is the best-written novel it can possibly be, and then call it by whatever genre predominates in it. (If it’s mainstream commercial or literary fiction, call it that.)

Be really clear on that bit: make sure it’s the best-written novel it can possible be.

Will agents notice you’re fudging? Who knows? At the very least they won’t. Or they’ll see the other genres in it and say, “Hey, why don’t we market this as blah-blah-blah instead?” and they’ll sell it to a genre imprint.

At the most you’ll discover you’ve serendipitously acquired one of the real agents, the ones who mean it when they say they’re looking for something “fresh and new,” something “challenging genre,” something “trendsetting.” They will notice, and they will love it. And you’ll do everything in your power to hang onto them, because they are the pros.

c) Make no mistake—aspiring writers are, indeed, being told by certain agents to “dumb down” their novels. In those words.

The bastards.

There is nothing we can do about this but stand shoulder-to-shoulder and refuse. Those agents are not savvy long-time professionals who have weathered the storms of the industry for decades. (If they are they ought to be ashamed of themselves.) They are mid- and entry-level grapplers on the sheer cliff-face of the business, buckling to mega-bookstore reps now infiltrating the publishing offices who don’t give a fig whether they sell books or T-shirts or cheap crap so long as they move merchandise off those Walmart shelves fast.

They’re welcome to foul their own nests scrambling mindlessly for ephemeral loot, reducing modern traditionally-published fiction to an unsightly blot on the landscape, if they like. But they’re not taking me down with them. If I can’t make my living upholding the standards of this craft I love, I will go into some other line of work.

And I have the whole history of literature standing behind me on this one.

Update: If you’re wondering who’s behind the shift in American publishing since the 1980s from literature to cheap crap, it’s actually a lot simpler than you might think. Bertelsmann.

Stay tuned for:

2. How do you know which independent editors are good and which are shysters?

3. What is this Line Editing thing of which I speak, and why do I keep speaking of it?

4. What’s the inside scoop on the state of publishing these days i.e. POD, ebooks, self-publishing, multimedia, et cetera? I mean, what’s really going on out there?

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. . .demystifies essential aspects of craft while paying homage to the art.”—Millicent Dillon, five time O. Henry Award winner and PEN/Faulkner nominee

“Teeming with gold. . .makes you love being a writer because you belong to the special 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

“This book changed my life.”—Stu Wakefield, Kindle #1 best-selling author of Body of Water and Memory of Water

“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

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In keeping with Dunn Week, I’ve got a guest post up right now on Judy Dunn’s blog, CatsEyeWriter.

You think storytelling is only the province of fiction writers? Think again. All of life is storytelling. Even business bloggers can appeal strongest to their readers. . .with storytelling.

How?

Join us for: Storytelling for Business Bloggers

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It’s Dunn Week at A. Victoria Mixon, Editor, with Judy Dunn of CatsEyeWriter. A fellow Top 10 Blogger for Writers, Judy teaches content marketing through her blog, coaching bloggers on how to get out there, stay out there and make it worth their while to be out there.

And she likes cats! The Grey Peril approves.

GUEST POST BY JUDY DUNN

I work with a number of aspiring authors, and the biggest fear they express is that this marketing thing—this author blog—will take over their lives.

That they will be left dazed and bleary-eyed, with no time, energy or clarity left for their most important creative work: their book.

I’ve worked with authors at every stage. Writers starting a blog in hopes of finding their book’s topic. Aspiring authors with works-in-progress. And self-published writers who realize too late that they should have been developing a reader base before their book came out.

Whether you are on the self-publishing track or you are looking for a traditional publisher, you need readers.

A blog gives you a home base.

A spot to illuminate your writing.

To shine a light on your best work.

To collect readers who grow to love you and your stuff and can’t wait to see more. (That would be your book.)

When writers come to me for help, I see the same mistakes being made over and over. But with a little thought and planning you can avoid these potholes. I’ve turned them into positives so you’ll know just what you should be doing.

1. Understand your blog’s goal

It’s much easier to write your posts if you know your blog’s mission. Is it to develop your fan base? To teach other writers about the craft? To capture the attention of industry professionals? To try out ideas and book concepts to gauge reader interest?

Knowing your goal helps you to reach out to the right people and grow your community.

2. Find your niche and your author brand

Knowing your focus helps you attract the right readers.

You are not looking for an audience of thousands. Just a core group of readers who love your stuff and can’t wait to tell their friends about you. So focus on your genre and niche audience and write about the things that will interest them.

Think about your brand as you create your blog. It’s simply the feeling you want your readers to experience when they see your name—the emotional connection you want them to feel with you as an author.

3. Set aside a sacred blogging time

I know. You have a book to write. But if you just publish one post a week (see #4 below), you can allot 30-60 minutes, say, every Wednesday morning at 8 am, and there you go, your weekly post is taken care of.

If you want to get ahead of the game, choose a morning or afternoon and create an editorial calendar: plug in topics/themes, one a week for three months. That’s 12 general topics that you can refine and refocus as each weekly post comes due. It will save you from the dreaded BSS (Blank Screen Syndrome).

4. Post consistently

If you remember the story of the tortoise and the hare, you know the ending. Slow and steady won the race. Instead of furious spurts followed by long patches of old stale content, pick a schedule and stay with it.

In my blogging workshops I say,” One kick-ass post a week is better than seven crappy ones.”

The advantages are huge: your readers know exactly when to expect a new post. You are cooperating with the Google gods if they stop by regularly (the day you publish) so they can index and post your fresh content. And, best of all, you are showing editors and agents that you can meet deadlines, even self-imposed ones.

5. Let your readers in close

Your readers want more than anything to get a glimpse of this person who is writing a book. They want a ‘behind the velvet rope’ moment.

Think of yourself as a character. In addition to a compelling, authentic About page, consider a bio box on the sidebar of your home page with an engaging photo and a couple of lines about who you are, what you write and the things you care about.

6. When you feel blocked, write more

It’s incredibly liberating to write right through a block. Seems counter-intuitive, but the more you write the easier you get back in the flow.

John Steinbeck once said, “Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”

If you are struggling, start stepping up your posts. If you usually write one a week, write two. Ideas will spawn more ideas.

7. Promote your posts with social media—but do it right

Social media doesn’t have to be a huge time suck.

For instance, if you are on Twitter, writing three tweets to promote your post in a ‘teaser’ format should take you no more than 15 minutes a week. In your tweet, shoot for curious or provocative or attention-grabbing, as you would do with any headline or chapter title.

On non-post days, just pop in once or twice with a short tweet about your life as a writer, an interesting fact, a quote or a scene you are working on.

8. Blog with unbridled passion

Don’t hold back. Don’t avoid emotion. Blog like a first grader.

9. Engage your readers in every post

In the business world, it’s called a call to action. For bloggers, it means asking your reader to do something at the end of every post. If you don’t, they might just think you wanted to share your thoughts.

When I started asking questions at the end of my posts, my comments doubled. Lots of readers don’t know that you want to hear from them unless you ask them.

10. Make it super easy for your readers to leave a comment

There may be many reasons why your readers are not leaving comments. One of the biggest is that you make it too hard for them.

If you make them copy letters and numbers they can’t read—even in a sober state—recite the alphabet backwards to prove they’re not an evil robot or give you the name of their first-born child, sorry. The barrier to entry is just too high.

What about you?

Do you have an author blog?

Thanking about starting one?

What’s your biggest challenge?

Judy Dunn is a blogger and content marketing specialist. Her blog, CatsEyeWriter, is one of alltop.com’s ‘best of the best’ blogs and one of the 2011 Top 10 Blogs for Writers. She is also on the blogging team at For Bloggers, By Bloggers.

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As we all know, there are more ways to make a mess of your manuscript than angels on the head of a pin. So I’m not going to try to hit them all here, just some of the main ones I see crop up repeatedly in the work of fresh, innocent, hopeful aspiring writers.

1. Too many protagonists

Omniscient narrator: everyone wants to do it. Nobody knows how. Even F. Scott Fitzgerald made a hash if it.

So the innocent aspiring writer tells themself, ‘I just go into the point-of-view of whomever I’m interested in at that part of the story.’

And the next thing you know, the reader is asking themself, ‘What ever happened to the guy with the headache on page one? Why have we never heard again from the woman with the mowhawk? Since when does the PARROT get a say in all of this?’

Boing-boing-boing. It’s everybody’s story, which means it’s nobody’s story, which means the reader has no one to identify with, and the call of stale cookie dough in the freezer echoes louder in their head than the call of your increasing series of conflicts.

Pick a protagonist.

If you’re designing two entirely distinct and separate subplots to weave in and out of each other, pick two. If you’re designing three or four distinct subplots, you can pick three or four protagonists (as Carson McCullers did in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and William Gibson did in Mona Lisa Overdrive), but you’d better be darn sure you need all those subplots, and with that many protagonists you’ll have to pick a primary one.

Then stick to them like glue. You don’t have to live inside their head with them. But make sure they’re the only one who gets a narrative perspective if you do zoom in for a close-up. Everyone else must SHUT THEIR YAP.

2. Sympathetic villain

This is a by-product of too many protagonists: the villain becomes the reader’s favorite.

How does this happen? And why?

Easy! Readers are fascinated by characters with powerful internal conflict. That’s why they read.

‘What if someone just like me—amped to the nu-nu’s on conflicting needs and desires without adequate resources to achieve any of them—were to land in the hottest of hot water?’

They don’t want to live through it. They want some imaginary character to live through it on their behalf. Vicarious triumph! It’s all the rage in fiction and has been for four hundred years.

So you give them a protagonist with only goodness inside, struggling courageously in defense of the brave and the free.

And you give them an antagonist, a seething bundle of angst and outrage and despair, determined to bring down the brave and the free because, goddammit, they deserve it!

And the next thing you know you’ve written Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, and your reader identifies with the guy underground.

Pick your protagonist, and then pile them sky-high with all the good and bad traits, the empathy and the greed, the sorrow and the malice, the heroism and the self-sabotage you have at your disposal. Make them fight themself. Make them lose. Make them rise from the ashes like a phoenix, and always give your reader the fleeting, contradictory, anguished hope that this time it’s going to be for real.

3. Book report instead of fictional dream

This is a simple one to fix, but it’s a ton of work, which is why it turns up in so many early-draft manuscripts.

Exposition: it’s not a novel, it’s a synopsis.

A novel is set almost entirely in scenes: action, dialog, description—characters moving and speaking and suffering and transcending in realtime. A synopsis tells the reader in exposition what’s supposed to go into those scenes.

Your work as a writer is to give your reader an experience of life. They don’t get an experience of life from reading a book report. If it’s a really, really great book report, it just makes them want to read that book.

Write that book.

4. Endless, boring climax

You have so much to say.

There’s so much that needs to go into this climax in order for the reader to get the full, shattering impact of your vision. There’s so much more that didn’t fit into the rest of the novel. You’re scrambling to pack it all in. It goes on and on and on. . .but you don’t notice because, you know, you love this stuff!

A climax by definition is the most powerful point in your novel, and power by definition hits hardest when it hits the smallest surface—which in fiction means the smallest number of words.

The craft of fiction is the craft of deftly dropping addictive hits of power into your manuscript at regular intervals to keep your reader hooked and salivating, building their addiction, until they’re so needy for your climax it takes barely a handful of words to blow them sky-high out of the water.

Henry James could do it with ONE word. Strive toward Jamesism.

5. Garbled resolution

And hot on the heels of the climax that never ends comes this one: the resolution that makes no sense.

The reader has stuck with you through 70,000+ words, hundreds of pages, soaking up those addictive hits of power until their pump is primed like nobody’s business.

And you give them. . .what? a limp noodle?

This happens most often because the writer has tried to plan out the resolution from the beginning. You’re not writing about your characters’ worst nightmares, you’re writing about your fantasies.

But readers have their own fantasies. Truly, they’re not all that interested in ours.

Write toward your climax. Keep your sights on the greatest possible challenge to your protagonist’s needs. Force them to face their biggest demons, squeeze blood from their stone.

How that all shakes down in the end is so important and profound you can’t possible predict what it will be until you’ve seen how your characters cope with this nightmare. You’re writing your novel to learn for yourself what happens to someone who’s had blood squeezed from their internal stone.

And you can’t teach your reader something you haven’t learned yet.

Remember: you also can’t write if you haven’t yet discovered those 9 Ways to Find the Time to Write.

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

Subscribe:

Many of you are already familiar with Larry Brooks’ site, Storyfix, where he teaches writers through his theory of the Six Core Competencies. When he invited me to write this guest post for him I did a little reading up to see where he’s coming from and learned he’s not only strong on structure—as you all know I am—but also on why professionals from other fields, like law and law enforcement, seem to make the switch to successful fiction careers so darn easily.

What do they know that the average aspiring writer doesn’t yet?

Join us for The Bootstrapping Writer—the Secret at the Core of Competency

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It’s Brooks Week here at A. Victoria Mixon, Editor, with Larry Brooks of Storyfix. Larry is a critically-acclaimed bestselling author of four psychological thrillers and writing instructor, with his recent release Story Engineering: Understanding The Six Core Competencies of Successful Writing. His following on Storyfix is impressive—those guys gave him the one completely landslide vote in the Top 10 Blogs for Writers.

And today he’s going to tell us why.

GUEST POST BY LARRY BROOKS

“Editing” is a loaded word. One that scares the bejezus out of many writers, and with good reason.

It’s like a visit to the dentist. The intention is pure, the goal is a better smile, and—unless you’re Jack Nicholson in Little Shop of Horrors—the process too often sucks.

In both the analogy and the reality, the best way to avoid this pain is through the proper care and maintenance of your God-given chops. Which includes daily habits and practices, a resistance to temptation and the occasional check-up to make sure there are no gaping holes that need immediate professional attention. Evaluating and coaching your own story toward optimal dramatic health is very much like someone trying to do their own dentistry.

But there is a way it can be done.

It is the very essence of the old cliché, “an ounce of dental floss is worth a pound of gold fillings.” It’s all about knowing enough to not fall into narrative traps.

Storytelling

Storytelling is based on creative narrative decisions, and you make them in the heat of the moment as you write because you believe them to be appropriate, compelling and in alignment with those professional-level expectations.

Which is precisely why you probably aren’t the best person to do an edit in this regard at the story level. You wouldn’t have done it that way if you didn’t think it’d work.

Or not. Maybe there’s a little voice whispering that something doesn’t make sense.

Story Editors

A story editor is the person who tells you that you need more tension here, better character arc there and that your inciting incident is about as provocative and interesting as the next Rush Limbaugh embarrassment. That it fits—or that it doesn’t fit—into the expected parameters of professional story structure and dramatic theory.

And in an irony that is worth paying attention to, the writers most capable of story-editing their own work are often those that need it the least. Just like a dentist knows enough to make flossing part of their nightly ritual.

It’s a question of professionalism versus amateur hour. Of knowing versus guessing. Of submitting to the craft versus not understanding that there are standards that demand your submission.

But how do they know?

Storytelling Craft

The criteria for an effective story are as valid during the writing as they are during the evaluation. Unlike a mental health counselor listening to another shrink spill their guts about what is making them crazy, writing a story does not suffer from literary blindness at the creative level.

And herein resides the key to it all: if you know how a story should work—structurally, dramatically, mechanically, professionally—then odds are you will make your creative choices as you plan and/or write it in a manner that is in alignment with those principles.

It’s when you don’t really own these basic principles, but think you do—perhaps because you’ve been reading stories for years, perhaps because you’ve taken a course or read a book—that frustration and rejection ensue. Even when you know you can write like Mark Twain and your ideas are as hot as those of a guy named Spielberg.

Storytelling craft is the separator between those who succeed professionally and those who don’t understand why nobody recognizes their genius.

If you know enough about the rules and principles of effective storytelling in the first place, chances are a) you’ll write a story that abides by them, b) you’ll be aware of any straying from the path in real-time, and c) if you’ve missed a step a quick re-read will focus on the obvious mistakes as easily for you as for an editor-for-hire.

At the professional level, editors are astoundingly valuable.

But don’t kid yourself, this game is different than someone banging out their first novel and hoping for affirmation by sending a few grand to a story coach. No, the professional author looks to their story editor for input at the micro-story level. Because their story is most likely already in alignment with the known and expected parameters of professional-level storytelling. Just like a proven professional turning up at an audition.

It’s all about the subtleties and nuances of character arc, the optimization of dramatic tension, the culling out of reader empathy and thematic resonance. The editor is there to smooth and ignite and shift, not reconstruct from the blueprint of what they were expecting to read.

The Choice

And right there is where the aspiring writer needs to make a choice.

Do I pay someone to evaluate my story to see if everything is in the right place, and effectively so? Or do I know enough about storytelling craft to determine this—the veracity of the structure of my story—on my own?

This question becomes the acid test for the writer looking to turn pro. Like flying an airplane, doing surgery or earning your tour card on the pro golf tour, there’s no faking it at the professional level. If you try to fake it you’ll die, the patient will go into a coma or they’ll boo you off the course.

If you think you can make this stuff up as you go, that you can fake it or that it’s just a matter of intuition. . .you can’t, and it’s not.

Worse yet. . .if you think there are no basic expectations and parameters for story structure—that you can skip all this mumbo jumbo about a hook and a first plot point and a mid-point context shift and the discreet missions of the four parts of your story and what the guy at the writing conference called character arc—or worse, you have no real solid notion about what any of that means. . .

. . .you can’t do that, either.

Not if you desire to turn professional and sell your stories, in whatever venue, to readers.

Publishing Success

The road toward success always has two lanes:

The first is the learning of the craft, an apprenticeship that can sometimes last for decades. There are tools out there, the most powerful of which is to internalize the basics and then begin to recognize them in the work of others, both books and movies.

The second is much faster. It’s where everybody in the game is writing their stories using the same set of standards and expectations. Which means it’s winner-take-all, may the best story land the deal.

Learn the craft. Your story doesn’t stand a chance until you do.

You’ll be surprised what you’ll notice once you know what to look for. And how it validates what you’re doing, just as it perhaps invalidates what you’d been doing before you knew.

Want a deal? Here’s one: send your Amazon.com receipt for my new book, Story Engineering: Understanding The Six Core Competencies of Successful Writing—which has spent much of the time since its publication as the #1 bestseller in the fiction writing category—to me (at storyfixer@gmail.com), and I’ll send you my ebook, 101 Slightly Predictable Tips for Novelists and Screenwriters, as a gift. Just say “Victoria sent me,” and it’s a done deal.

Larry Brooks is the creator of Storyfix.com, and the bestselling author of five critically-praised novels, including a USA Today bestseller. His newest book, Story Engineering: Mastering the Six Core Competencies of Successful Writing, was just published by Writers Digest Books.

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In keeping with Tice Week, I have a guest post up on Carol’s blog, Make a Living Writing.

Now, I know you guys are used to thinking of me as a fiction editor, probably because I keep writing all those posts about fiction. But that’s only after I went through the phone booth to climb into my cape. In the old days, I learned a great deal of my Copy and Line Editing skills out in the nonfiction trenches—twenty years in tech writing.

And the truth is I’m still out there, only now I only take contract work that doesn’t interfere with my independent editing. I love independent editing. But I do still have the industry contacts to make some bucks on the side.

So how do you get into tech writing? Pull down a cushy salary just for hanging around the office all day hobnobbing with other writers and putting words on the page? Don’t you ever wonder?

Join us for 5 Qualities of a Successful Tech Writer.

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It’s Tice Week here at A. Victoria Mixon, with Carol Tice of Make a Living Writing. Carol is another Top 10 Blogger for Writers, a freelance journalist teaching through her blog how to earn a living in the nonfiction field.

And she’s going to teach us something important about audience.

GUEST POST BY CAROL TICE

Have you ever written something you thought was just wonderful, but nobody seemed to care?

You’re not alone. Often as we writers craft a piece, whether it’s a blog post or a novel, we lose track of something important. In fact, this thing is so important it could make the difference between success and starvation.

Have you guessed what it is?

It’s your reader.

If you know your reader well, you are better able to deliver work they will devour. Too often writers run on assumptions about their reader and end up creating work that doesn’t find an audience.

Why does that happen?

It’s a function of human nature that we tend to universalize our own experience—that is, we think others think as we do, we think others want what we want. By extension, as writers we think we know our audience. C’mon, we know whom we’re writing for!

But often that’s simply not true.

You have to get acquainted with your reader.

I found this out a while back when I wanted to know more about who reads my blog, Make a Living Writing. How did I find out? I asked them. I took a poll and asked readers to introduce themselves and tell me about their writing careers.

I had the impression my readers were all newbie writers hoping to break into freelance writing. That’s whom I was writing to on my blog.

But what I discovered was eye-opening.

Only about half my readers were new to freelance writing. Many were experienced freelancers—they just weren’t earning as much as they wanted. They read my blog to learn more about how they could increase their freelance income. They needed more advanced tips about the freelance-writing life, not just break-in information.

I also thought my readers were Americans, with maybe a few British thrown in. But a little sleuthing turned up the fact that a substantial number of my readers are using Google Translate to view my blog! They are located in countries all over the world, from the United Arab Emirates to Nigeria to Ireland. Some are teens, and others are retired. My readers needed to know how to succeed in freelancing no matter where they are, no matter what their age.

You might even have to change what you write.

I did. I also added a translation tool that’s easily visible in a bottom bar on my site. Since then my audience has grown more than tenfold.

In the old days—say, pre-1997 or so—authors who wanted insight into their readers’ views had to hope those readers wrote letters to their publishers. Those publishers might then forward that mail to the authors, who could read it and respond to it. It could take weeks or months to gather enough information to form a useful picture of who readers were and what they liked about a book!

In our Internet age, of course, you can get this done in a day. All you have to do is fire up your computer and ask questions. I guarantee the answers will surprise you.

Many authors are using a website or blog as a way to stay in touch with readers, so that provides the perfect platform to ask a question or take a poll. A Facebook fan page would work well, too. You might find out you want to go after a different readership altogether. Or you might discover a fervent fan base in places you didn’t expect. Think of all the rock stars who fade to obscurity in their home country, while their careers go on because they’re big in Japan.

You’ll likely find out more types of people are reading you than you ever imagined. And once you’ve got some baseline data, keep checking in to find out how your readership is changing—because it will. Best of all, you will have a better picture of your readers in your mind when you write. You’ll have the tools to grow that audience, because now you know more about it.

But however you do it, learn who your readers are and what they like. Your future success is in their hands.

What do you know about your readers, and how did you learn about them? Leave a comment and tell us your methods.

Carol Tice is a longtime freelance journalist and copywriter. Her blog, Make a Living Writing, was recently named one of the Top 10 Blogs for Writers. Her upcoming Webinar is 30 Design & Content Secrets to Skyrocket Your Blog, presented with fellow Top 10 winner Judy Dunn of Cat’s Eye Writer.

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The challenge is to be oneself.—Derek Raymond

1. Unhook


You know what I’m talking about.

The number of hours a writer can waste on the Internet would make even the most hardened geek’s blood run cold.

Here’s my #1 tip to getting work done, the one that carves out time in my schedule every blessed day so my clients don’t gang up on me and appear at my door waving fistfuls of precious manuscript in righteous indignation over their heads.

You know that little doohicky with the floppy ears that plugs the blogosphere, Facegook, and Twitter into your computer like a cable plugging the Matrix into the back of your neck?

Reach right over and yank that sucker out.


2. Close your mouth


And a weird thing will happen. Everyone out there will stop listening.

There you’ll be, sitting at your desk or kitchen table or armchair or porcelain throne with a head full of words and nowhere for them to go.

Lightbulb!


3. Plug your ears


But before you bring out your manuscript or open your notebook or click that golden Open button, take a quick look behind you and all around. Are you alone? You’d better be. Otherwise you’re going to have to roll up some little bits of tissue and insert them (very carefully!) into your outer ears. Or take a moment to breathe deeply and hum through your nose until you’ve forgotten all about the other people in the room.

Whatever you do, don’t look up. That only encourages them.


4. Watch the clock


What time is it right now? And what time do you expect to have the biggest chunk of time available today?

Whip out a red pen and scribble that time on your hand. I write on the thumb part of the back of my left hand—always have, always will, even though 25 years ago I injured my arm and damaged a nerve so it feels kind of yucky.

Now whatever else you do all day, keep one eye peeled. About half an hour before that time, start closing down shop. Take care of anything that might interrupt you—like kids with appetites—and shut down the airlocks. You’re going into orbit.

Alone.


5. Take advice


Then pick up a really good book on writing advice, something that makes your head just want to detach from your neck and do a little dance across the room. I mean, a really good book. Something full of concrete, hands-on advice while also intensely encouraging and inspiring.

Let it fall open randomly and start reading. This is called divining, and it works for writing just like it works for oracles.


6. Doodle a name


If you get too caught up in the reading, pick up a pen and doodle your protagonist’s name on something. It doesn’t matter what—your arm, the margin of your book, your jeans, the back of the cat. The act of holding that pen and writing that name over and over links synapses in your brain and makes them start pumping juice toward the little grey cells allotted to that personality in your mind.


7. Drink tea


Don’t eat unless you’re starving. And don’t get yourself all jazzed up on caffeine or stupid on booze. Just make sure you have something warm and comforting you can reach without looking up, like a swimmer taking a breath, before you sink back down into the imaginary place you’re exploring.


8. Zonk out


And if the noise in the room or in your head is really loud, go take a nap. This isn’t copping out. It’s preparing you to stay up late after everyone else has gone to bed, after your part of the planet has turned off the lights and disappeared, when the quiet rises up around you like mist so you can see your characters come walking or stumbling and crawling out of it toward you.

Even if you try to do a runner at bedtime it won’t work because you won’t be able to get to sleep.


9. Disappear for a week up a river or a mountain, break a leg, and get snowed in
   
   And if all else fails, do what I’m going to do and just vanish into thin air. Leave your house. Go somewhere else. Trade apartments with a writer friend and force yourselves to communicate only by phone. Don’t back yourself into a corner where you actually injure yourself unconsciously, getting just that desperate to escape your daily routine.
   
   You know that feeling that you’re about to get sick and have to spend a day in bed, so you haul off and spend a day in bed so you won’t get sick?
   
   Do that.

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. . .demystifies essential aspects of craft while paying homage to the art.”—Millicent Dillon, five time O. Henry Award winner and PEN/Faulkner nominee

“Teeming with gold. . .makes you love being a writer because you belong to the special 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

“This book changed my life.”—Stu Wakefield, Kindle #1 best-selling author of Body of Water and Memory of Water

“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

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