I write in Microsoft Word. It’s what I’ve used ever since it came out. CreateSpace has templates for paperbacks. I downloaded one of those after I published my first book and that’s what I write in—a CS Word template for a 6” by 9” book. There are a lot of other programs out there to use, but remember that they are all tools. Do not let the tool dictate your story, let the tool help you tell it. Whether you use Libre Office, Google Docs, Scrivener, or any of the others, make sure you teach it who’s the boss.
Most software programs come with free 30-day trials. Try one and see if you can produce a small sample of your book—a chapter or two with front matter and end matter—in the proper format. If you can use a tool, upload your manuscript into the website of your chosen distributor(s) (Kindle Direct Publishing, Nook, Kobo), and see the final product (.MOBI, epub), then you’ve mastered your tool.
Get your words down, because you can’t edit a blank page. I think a page full of bad words is still a good page, because I can rewrite it and that goes more quickly than creating it from scratch. Even if I end up changing every word.
I believe you should write every single day. It’s what writers do. It’s an escape. If you only wrote 1000 words a day, that’s 365,000 words over the course of a year. That is a lot of words. That could be from 30 minutes to an hour of jamming. Some days, I only get a couple hundred words, and that’s okay. There are plenty of other days where I get a lot of words.
I used to pants it, seat of my pants, but I don’t have the luxury of unlimited time anymore. When I’m in the zone, a moment of exceptional clarity, I will write an outline from start to finish. Usually it’s a rambling narrative with bad grammar and ridiculously long run-on sentences, but it is a complete story. I’ve written up to 10,000 word outlines, which makes writing the book so much easier. I am now including the outline in my books as bonus material, because the end story will deviate some from the original idea. The reader can see what I was thinking originally and then how it turned out. I am now an outliner for the simple reason that it saves me time.
Know your story before you start writing. Grip your readers right out of the gate. I write the first chapter—usually short, with action, brief dialogue, emotional conflict, and lots of unanswered questions. I then write the last chapter of the book—I have to detail how and where I want the story to end. All the rest makes up the learning journey that I take with my readers.
Knowing the story you want to tell and knowing all the details are not the same thing.
As part of my outlines, I will include key learning points, what I want to give the readers. Here’s a sample of what I wrote today for Darklanding Book 9.
Thad calls Shaunte and tells her that she makes him want to retire from being a soldier. She’s humbled, but tells him that’s who he is and taking that away from him would make him miserable and resent her. Just like she is a businessman first and foremost. It’s in her blood like being a warrior is in his. He formally asks her out on a date. The scene ends with her in her office, thinking about it, smiling.
And that’s the extent of my outline, but fleshing it out will come to when I start writing. I can see the scene because I’ve lived the scene. Write what you know has worked well for me. While deployed, it’s nice to talk with your wife and dream about being home. While home, doing the everyday life things, it’s easy to dream about being back in the war. Capturing the flashes of what people see and feel during those times will make for a nice chapter.
Writing the Story
How do you tell your story without creating discord? There are innumerable ways to create flow and even more ways to ruin the story’s flow. Let me give a couple of examples here, but your genre will be more tuned in to what those readers expect.
I have a list of words that I can use instead of the word “said.” But digging out synonyms isn’t the right answer. What you’re looking for is flow, telling a gripping story that keeps the readers engaged.
Imagine a group of three people talking.
“I’m hungry,” the young man said.
“I’m not,” his father replied.
“I wouldn’t eat what I’m smelling,” the young man’s sister said.
That prose seems stilted. Let’s color it in.
“I’m hungry,” the young man said, sniffing the air to catch the scent coming from the kitchen.
“I’m not.” His father wrinkled his nose and grimaced.
“I wouldn’t eat what I’m smelling,” the young man’s sister retorted, taking a step backward, away from the kitchen.
Or an alternative.
The young man stood in the doorway, sniffing appreciatively. “I’m hungry.”
“I’m not!” The young man’s father wrinkled his nose and grimaced.
“I wouldn’t eat what I’m smelling!” The young man’s sister took a step backward, away from the kitchen.
Let me recommend the Story Grid: What Good Editors Know by Shawn Coyne for more information on crafting a tale. Joe Nassise and Max Drake also have a great deal to offer in the world of craft. (Look for links and such in the bibliography.) The above is only one example of an infinite number. See the difference, look to your genre, and embrace a style that you like best.
Craft is critically important, but it is also unique to your genre. Lawyers write a certain way because they have to. Urban Fantasy is different from High Fantasy is different from Hard Science Fiction is different from Romance is different from… You get the idea.
Know what expectations there are within your genre. Study your genre– NO! Study it, don’t just read the books. What are the tropes? What is the most common writing style? You need to be unique, but not too different, and that is my blue collar approach. You want fresh stories told in a great way that is still within a style that readers expect.
K-Lytics published a great report on what it took to make $100,000 per year. Their conclusion based on the considerable data available to them? Publish great books frequently. Now that is the challenge, isn’t it? How can we make sure that our books get better and better?
Getting Feedback
Look for people who are able to talk about the story. Nearly every story is salvageable with the right advice.
Be open to feedback. If you have to explain, then you wrote it incorrectly, unless that’s what you were going for, and then you need to find the readers who you don’t have to explain it to. The story and characters must stand on their own. On rare occasions, the reader will miss something. Think how you can help future readers avoid making the same mistake.
I sold my very first story to a traditional publishing house, a small press. It has a 4.0 rating on Amazon, not too bad at all, but I look back through it and it makes me wince to read my own words. I could rewrite the whole series over the course of a week or two and smooth everything out, but that’s not exactly the point. Those books are good stories in survival fiction, although one reviewer said that they made me the laughingstock of an entire state. My biggest fans from End Times Alaska are Alaskans, so I think that reviewer is one of those outliers who enjoy trying to make themselves the subject matter expert.
I’m a fiction author. Fine. My story didn’t meet with your idea of how things would go. Easy day. We both move on. Life is still good.
This is one of the hardest things to do. You are going to take your baby, your story, and throw it out there for the unwashed masses to criticize. But they aren’t unwashed masses. They are good people like you and me. Some may take pleasure in being negative, but you’ll find there are many more people who are willing to talk about the positive.
Look at the negatives and see what they tell you. Look at the positives and see what they tell you. Somewhere in between is the truth. I have a number of books with a 4.9 star rating. I am humbled by the overwhelmingly positive response. In those cases, I talk with my editor to find what I did differently and then we try to leverage more of that in the next book.
Maintaining a constant dialogue with your edi
tor is key to improvement. Let me share some feedback that I received today when I asked a friend to look at the start to a new story.
Your writing is astounding, Craig. You have come a very long way from your first work which was excellent in its own right. I love the third-person omniscient perspective and the colorful commentary on the town as they come to port. By the time they reach the mayor I feel like I know the characters. An interesting bit of writer's magic there.
I expect you know how this made me feel. I have worked hard over the years to improve my prose. Listening to my editors (I have multiple, but it took time and money to bring the team together), listening to the readers, reading, and practicing. Always practicing.
How does one get an editor or team of editors? On the 20Booksto50k Facebook group, I started a self-promotion thread for editors to advertise. Anyone can peruse those posts and select a number of editors to try. Nearly all of them will do a sample of five hundred or one thousand words. Find one that seems to suit you best, as in the one who helps bring out the best version of you as a writer.
I’ve found more. I have developmental editors who help me keep my story on track. They do that for free because they like my stuff, and I like them. I don’t want to ever let the Double Ds down by telling a bad or confusing story. The Darklanding series is for them. It was their idea and I wanted to see them smile, so we made it come to life. When your editors become your close friends, everyone gets better.
For a single-pass line editor, you get a certain amount of proofing and grammar correction. For a double-pass, you’ll get continuity and even better spelling and grammar alignment. It’ll cost you more, so you have to assess if you received that much more value for your money. I’m good with a single-pass and a good group of beta readers.
Keep searching until you find an editor who you can work with. Talk about your schedule and don’t ever deliver a manuscript late or in sub-standard condition. Treat your editor with respect and you’ll be amazed at how great they can help you become.
Discipline
Being an indie means being all things. It means writing most of all. Telling the stories that become the product that bring in revenue to help you keep writing. Too many people never finish their book or finish it only to throw it aside because it's not a masterpiece.
Expect that some of the words will be horrible, and that's okay. We've all written words that make us do a double-take. What in the hell was I thinking? Find the good in the words. Find the smooth plot. If it's not there, fix it. You have the power. If you have a half-done book, finish it.
Don't be the writer who can't finish a story. You had a great idea once. Embrace it and bring it to fruition. Flesh out your characters. Bring them to life. Writing is how we escape. Reading is how our fans escape.
It's hard work, but once you're done, you'll find that you've accomplished something that almost no one else has. Look at the rest of the world. Seven billion people and Amazon shows titles from millions of authors. If you finish a book and publish it, that makes you one in a thousand. That means you are different from 99.9% of the people out there, many who said they wanted to write a book. If you make enough to write full-time, that makes you one in a million. But you can't get there if you don't finish books.
Be a published author. It’s the first plateau on the mountain of success. Join us, but it takes finishing the book before anything else. It takes writing, even when sometimes you don't feel like it. For me, that's when my most profound words seem to appear. On my editing pass, I can see what mood I was in when I wrote the scenes.
The readers can’t tell because they take the book as a single escape from their world. How do I know that? Because I published, people read my stories, and I hear from them, both good and bad. It all makes me better, and it started with writing that first book, from start to finish.
Finish It
If you start a story and it isn’t doing what you want it to do, you have three choices: rewrite it, keep going to the finish, or abandon it.
Rewriting a story when you’re in the middle guarantees that it will be a long and painful book. It’s also the perfectionist’s nightmare—a book that will never measure up.
If you’ve written to the minimum viable product level, then someone has already told you that they’d like to read on. What was sufficiently gripping to keep them interested? Do more of that. I know that sounds simplistic, but it could be that easy.
Readers have their expectations that start with the genre they think the book is in and with the framework you establish in the first chapter. Don’t try to build the entire world with a massive info dump in the first few pages. I would never recommend that—which is how I look at it as a reader.
Let me go to the first book in The Bad Company series. Here’s what I have for the first page and a half. I introduce three characters and a situation. The rest of the book resolves what you see in the introduction.
Combat action
A mission determined by someone not in the battle
Humor – “not that one, the other one…”
Everything that will make up the book is there—Terry, Nathan, Lance, combat, and humor. It is a military science fiction book, heavy on the military, but it’s also space opera, hence the introduction of the characters, even though most of the readership already knows who they are. We wanted to bring in new readers, so made this an entry point into the series without having to read the previous thirteen books.
But those are marketing issues and what we want to talk about is finishing the book. When the readers looked at the first couple pages below, they see the hook of the story, the issues that need to be resolved. As long as the story was working toward that end, then it was going to remain a sound story.
An explosion sounded and plasma fire flashed before his eyes.
Hidden in a remote corner of the Pan Galaxy, Nathan Lowell sat in his private office looking at the video communication screen. The President of the Bad Company frowned.
His Direct Action Branch was engaged and not in a good way. Nathan slowly shook his head as he watched.
Thirty-seven star systems away, General Lance Reynolds saw the same images displayed on his monitor. He chewed vigorously on his cigar. The report wasn’t what he had expected.
Colonel Terry Henry Walton, the man in the image, looked back and forth between the screen and something to his left. Ominous sounds accompanied the image.
“This first mission wasn’t what we contracted for, Nathan,” Terry yelled at the portable console that sat with a sideways tilt. He stared at a point off-screen, shook his head, and continued. “My first stop when I get off this rock is that dandy president’s office where I’ll wring his pencil-neck to get our thirty percent bonus and seventy percent kicker. And then I’m leveling his fucking palace!”
“Can you settle this with what you have?” Lance asked.
“Yes, sir,” Terry replied.
“I already told you once, call me Lance.”
“No can do, General. Can’t have you thinking I’ve grown soft just because I’ve been a pseudo-civilian for over a hundred and fifty years. Hang on.” Terry’s smile evaporated as he looked off-screen, his lip curling involuntarily. “SHOOT HIM!” he shouted.
The crack of hand-held railguns answered. Terry stabbed his finger at something neither Nathan nor Lance could see.
“Not that one, the other one,” Terry corrected. More cracks from the hypervelocity weapons. Terry nodded and flipped the bird. “Fuck you, buddy, and your stupid-looking stalk-head!”
Terry turned back to the screen. “Where were we?”
I wrote that first and then edited it often in order to help create the smoothest flow possible. And then I wrote the last chapter, which you see below.
So much combat that they were exhausted from fighting
Mission accomplished
They still have some humor
Terry’s head hung as he sat at the conference table. Micky didn’t know if he w
as awake or not. Char sat up straight, but her eyes were closed and her mouth hung slack as she was out cold.
The captain watched them briefly, believing that they hadn’t slept for the entire time they’d been on the planet.
“Smedley, activate the comm system and link us through, please.”
Nathan appeared and gave Captain Micky San Marino a hearty good morning. Micky smiled and pointed the camera at the leaders of the Bad Company’s Direct Action Branch. Nathan watched them, shaking his head.
Micky got up and walked behind the two, putting his hands gently on their shoulders. Terry about came out of his skin, making the captain jump back, stumble, and slam into the wall.
Terry mumbled an apology before blinking the hologram into focus. “Oh! Hi, Nathan. How’s it hanging?”
“You’ve looked better, TH. Although Char is spectacular as always. I don’t know why she strapped herself to a goon like you.”
The whites of Char’s eyes showed round as she forced her eyes open, making her look like a zombie.
Which was exactly how she felt.
Terry turned his head, saw her vacant expression, and started to chuckle.
“You have a way with words,” Terry started, before taking a deep breath and repeating the report that he’d prepared in his head.
After two minutes, Nathan stopped him.
“You know who Ronald Reagan was. Remember when he asked for the entire budget of the United States to be condensed down to one page? Give me that version.”
“We ended the war and we made more than we spent. We acquired a Podder and a Crooner for the team. They bring unique capabilities, diversity, strength of mind and character, all of that. I don’t think we’ll be misled again into fighting some knucklehead’s war for him. Were you able to talk with dickface?”
Become a Successful Indie Author Page 2
