And yet more great leads

I have a few more favorite leads I thought I’d post. Some of them are the kind that make you feel something terrible is coming, but others promise something different - fun, for instance. The trick is that whatever you promise in your lead (suspense, humour, romance, an engaging quest), you deliver in the rest of the book.

As you read each one, pretend you’ve never read the books and ask yourself what questions or expectations the various leads brings to your mind.

“At CBA Television News headquarters in New York, the initial report of a stricken Airbus A300, on fire and approaching Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, came only minutes before the network’s first feed of the National Evening News.” Arthur Hailey, The Evening News

“This is the story of an adventure that happened in Narnia and Calormen and the lands between, in the Golden Age when Peter was High King in Narnia and his brother and his two sisters were Kings and Queens under him. In those days, far south in Calormen on a little creek of the sea, there lived a poor fisherman called Arsheesh, and with him there lived a boy who called him Father.” C. S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

“Sunday morning Clarence Bunsen stepped into the shower and turned on the water–which was cold, but he’s Norwegian , he knows you have to take what you get–and stood until it got warm, and was reaching for the soap when he thought for sure he was having a heart attack.” Garrison Keillor, Leaving Home

“As I left the railway station at Worchester and set out on the three-mile walk to Ransom’s cottage, I reflected that no one on that platform could possibly guess the truth about the man I was going to visit.” C. S. Lewis, Voyage to Venus

“It was growing late and still there was no sign of Engaine.” Thomas B. Costain, The Black Rose

“‘Tom!’ No Answer. ‘Tom!’ No answer. ‘What’s wrong with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!’”Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversation in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’” Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

“Rob Nevin looked from his friend to the application form on the table between them and back to his friend again. ‘You’re kidding.’” Gordon Korman, No Coins Please

“A fire rages in Albion. A strange, hidden fire, dark-flamed, invisible to the eye. Seething and churning, it burns, gathering flames of darkness into its hot black heart. Unseen and unknown, it burns.” Stephen Lawhead, The Endless Knot

“The nice thing about pain is that it comes in all sorts of sizes - from the …Mini: ‘Excuse-me-you’re-stepping-on-my-bare-feet-with-your-baseball-cleats’ type of pain, to the Medium: ‘I-sure-wish-we-weren’t-going-through-this-red-light-with-that-semi-truck-coming-from-the-other-direction’ type of pain, to the Maxi-Econo-Sized: ‘What-does-this-bully-mean-when-he-says-he’s-going-to-give-me-some-free-dental-work?’ type of pain. Then of course, there’s the…Giant Industrial Strength version which I was about to experience…” Bill Myers, My Life as a Human Hockey Puck

“When my brother Tom began telling people in Adenville, Utah, that he had a great brain everybody laughed at him, including his own family. We all thought he was trying to play some kind of kid’s joke on us. But after he had used his great brain to swindle all the kids in town and make fools of most of the grownups nobody laughed at my brother any more.“ John D. Fitzgerald, The Great Brain at the Academy

More strong fiction leads that grabbed me

I am continuing to post leads that I consider very strong. Now, since we are all different, what grabs me may not grab you. But I will try to tell you why they grab me. And you might learn from that.

“A cold wind blew off Hanging Dog Mountain and I had no fire, nor dared I strike so much as a spark that might betray my hiding place. Somewhere near an enemy lurked, waiting.” Louis L’Amour, Jubal Sackett

The word “cold” implies trouble. I don’t like being cold. Something’s wrong. “Hanging Dog mountain.” Could you get more eerie than that? “I had no fire.” I see the image of someone with no fire in a campfire pit, huddled up and maybe shivering. “Nor dared I strike so much as a spark” - Ah, not any person. Someone who is thoughtful, who knows language, who has a poetic turn. And of course, the inevitable questions - why doesn’t the person dare? Why is the person here? What’s wrong? What’s going to happen? Will the person survive? Who else is there lurking in the cold, maybe watching? Ah, “an enemy lurking, waiting.” I can’t possible stop myself from reading on. I want to know who this person is and if he or she is able to survive.

“There were two men in one village, and they had the same name–each was called Claus; but one had four horses, and the other only a single horse.” Hans Christian Anderson, Little Claus and Big Claus

This is from a fairly tale, not a book, but the implied threat in those simple words “the other only a single horse” resonates with me and I want to know what happened, because of course, something did happen. And I want to know who these two men are, and what they do to one another.

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

There is no threat here, but what keeps me going is curiosity. What is a hobbit? What kind of comfort can you have in a hole in the ground? And the writing, with its vivid description of the “nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell” leads me to think there will be more of this sort of hole in the story, too. And more great writing. But most of all I want to know who this creature is that lives in a hole in the ground in comfort.
“I must make it clear from the start that ultimately I did have a choice: but that’s always easy to say in hindsight. Right? You hear about this sort of thing all the time: the ‘I don’t want to get involved” syndrome. To myself, I’d rationalized my behaviour over the years as ‘minding my own business,’ something I’d honed to a razor’s edge.”Rick Blechta, When Hell Freezes Over

I relate to this person who would rather not get involved. But it’s clear that there was a choice, and the person chose to get involved. What happened as a result? Who is this person who wanted to stay uninvolved and had honed “minding my own business…to a razor’s edge”? Will I like this person? Is this person like me?

A challenge for you.

1. Take 20 of your favorite books and read the first 2 or 3 lines and analyze them. What questions do they bring to your mind? What feelings do they bring up in you? Do they arouse your curiosity? Your sense of justice? Your interest in a character or a situation?

2. Write down what you can learn from them. Share some of the best here in the comments section.
3. Then go and read some of your own leads and see how they compare.

Top 10 reasons why you should write 25 short stories before you write a novel

Ed Hoch passed away on January 17th at the age of 77. For those who don’t recognize his name, Ed was one of the pre-eminent short story writers of all time. He wrote close to 1,000 short stories, most of them in the puzzle mystery genre. For over 35 years, he had at least one story in every issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He was certainly one of only a handful of authors in recent years able to make a living strictly by selling short stories. Those who knew him found him to be a very kind, likable man. Having spoken to him briefly and seen him on panels at mystery conventions, I would add that he was quite informative as well.

I speak to a lot of aspiring writers, and I find that a majority of them want to write a novel (or are already writing one). In Ed’s honor, I thought I’d list my top ten reasons why short stories are a better choice - especially for a new writer.

10. Writing a novel can take a year or more. A short story can be written in a short time - a month, a week, maybe even a day. You can write a lot of short stories in the time it would take to write a novel.

9. The most important part of any great novel or short story is the characters. When you write a novel, you’re stuck a long, long time with a few characters. You may find you don’t like them. Or you may find they don’t work well for you. If you write short stories, you can invent new characters for every story. You can try a lot of different kinds of people. Or aliens, animals, even rocks that talk…

8. Every story and every novel need great openings. When you write a novel, you get one opening. You might end up rewriting your opening fifty times, and then throw it out in the end. When you write short stories, you can try a variety of different kinds of openings and see what you like and don’t like.

7. When you write a novel, you get one plot-line. If it doesn’t work, too bad. When you write a number of short stories, you can try a variety of different genres, different kinds of plots, and different resolutions.

6. If a short story isn’t working, you can just toss it into the trash without feeling you’ve wasted too much time and energy. If a novel isn’t working, it’s a lot of investment to throw away.

5. A short story can later grow into a novel if you find you really like the characters and see that the plot could grow. You might even use the original short story as a scene or chapter in your book.

5. Most people write to say something they feel is of importance, whether it’s about their faith, saving the environment, or encouraging everyone to practice safe sex. Because new writers often don’t know how to send a message without having it take over, some novels become very little more than propaganda. Writing a number of short stories, each with a tiny aspect of your message, will not only help you learn how to include a message in an acceptable way, but also help you find markets for your work and readers with similar interests.

4. Some people are natural short story writers. They have tons of ideas, like to work quickly and finish things up, and don’t have the patience to spend a lot of time on one thing. You can read what Ed said about why he wrote short stories here. On the flip side, some novels are really short stories with a whole lot of unnecessary padding. Better to learn how to trim and streamline than how to add unnecessary verbiage.

3. Unless you’re really, really famous, more people will read a short story in a magazine or on an internet site than will ever read your novel.

2. Writing a novel before you’ve written some short stories is like marrying the first person you date. Usually, it’s better to meet a few people before you make a commitment. Writing a number of short stories in a variety of genres will help you hone in on both what you enjoy and what you write best.

1. It’s possible to spend a great deal of time and energy writing a novel without learning a great deal about the craft of writing. Time and effort alone don’t equate with gaining skill.

God told me to write a book!

What you choose to write is, of course, between you and God. But one of the biggest mistakes I see new writers making is thinking that whatever is on their heart absolutely must be published as a book, and the sooner the better.

This is problematic for several reasons.

The main difficulty is that if you have little or no writing experience, you may simply not be ready to write the book yet. While there are a few people who’ve produced something really good on their first attempt, developing excellent writing skills normally involves a learning process. I’ve seen quite a few books and other things that “God told” someone to write that were - well, let’s just say they weren’t ready to be published and leave it at that.

Think about it. If I believe God is telling me to become a school teacher, I can’t just start walk into a classroom and start teaching - I have to first go to university and get a teaching degree of some sort. Or I may believe I should become a doctor, and I can just see myself helping people. But first, I have to go to medical school and then do an internship and a residency…

Writing a book is actually a very complicated undertaking; one that involves not only writing ability, but also organizational skills, knowledge of the market, understanding of the publishing industry, and the ability to promote oneself effectively.

So, while your ultimate goal may be to write a book, it’s a great idea to kickstart the process by joining writers’ organizations, reading books and blogs about writing, and then writing some short articles or stories on the topics that interest you. Ideally, you should have those articles critiqued, first by your peers and then by experts. Then send them out to editors of appropraite publications. As you do all this, you are slowly working yourself up to writing that book. Kind of like getting a degree.

Not only that, but creating articles out of some of the ideas for the book and selling them will actually make book editors more interested in you. And the articles can possibly be used later as chapters for your book.

The main thing is that you take your time and do a good job and not rush something into print that simply isn’t ready yet. Yes, there are all kinds of companies out there ready and willing to take your words and produce a book with your name on it. But after the initial burst of excitement, reality usually sets in, and you realize you’re in over your head. There are always people offering get rich quick schemes, too - but I hope you wouldn’t use them either.

There’s a second reason why you shouldn’t rush to write that book - I’ll talk about it tomorrow.

Judging books by the cover

You’ve heard the statement, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Well, maybe we shouldn’t, but the reality is we do! All the time!

Because of my work with writers, I see a lot of covers. And I have to say that while some of them are good, far too many of them are not. In fact, one of the two biggest problems I see with self-published books is that they look self-published. By that, I mean that if you put a self-published book on a shelf beside a book published by a large royalty-paying publisher, chances are very high that the self-published book will look duller, less interesting, less exciting, and well, less professional.

Very simply, some of the common problems with covers.

• Not having a professional graphic artist design it
• Not paying for the top quality, full-colour, glossy printing
  
• Not paying someone to write top-notch cover copy
• Not studying the genre you are publishing in well enough to know how to make the book look as though it fits.
• Cutting corners so the costs aren’t too high

How can you get around these problems?

• Spend a day in a bookstore or get catalogues from publishers and study the latest books - especially those in the genre you’re writing in - romance books look a lot different from mysteries; memoirs look very different from self-help books.
• Don’t get a friend to design the artwork unless that friend is a professional who does this all the time (even someone who does graphics but not books will likely not have the expertise you need).
• Hire someone who understands marketing and promotion to help with the words that go on the cover (especially the back cover). Titles need a blog of their own!
  
• If you insist on going to a vanity publisher (place you pay to publish your book) take control of every aspect and bring in your own design, etc. if you need to. One vanity publisher I know has only done a few covers I consider excellent, and in every case the author brought in their own cover design.

Without an attractive cover that fits in with the other covers on the shelves, no store except maybe the one in your home town will want to carry your book. Why should they? They know their customers are going to judge the book by the cover.

You’ve written a book: now what?

Most of the time when new writers tell me they’ve written a book, what they actually mean is that they’ve completed a first draft of a book. And if you know what you’re doing, you don’t rush off to find a publisher for a first draft.

What you do next is let it sit for a week or so while you work on something totally different, and then sit down to read your book in editor mode. Basically, you try to pretend you’ve never seen it before, and you do an objective critique of it.

If your book is fiction, and you haven’t read Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King; The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes by Jack M Bickham: Revision by David Michael Kaplan; Making Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern; or most of the books in the Writers Digest Elements of Fiction series, I’d suggest you go to your local store or join Writers’ Digest book club and buy as many as you can afford and read them first.

If your book is non-fiction, look for On Writing Well by William Zinsser, A Writer’s Time by Kenneth Atchity; The 28 Biggest Writing Blunders (And How to Avoid Them) by William Noble, or one of the many books on specific kinds of nonfiction from Writer’s Digest or other publishers. Since each chapter of many non-fiction books may be viewed as a single entity, books on writing articles could also be helpful. Eg. Writing from the Heart by Marjorie Holmes; the Elements of Article Writing Series from Writer’s Digest.

At this time, you also need to refine your target audience so you know exactly who you’re writing the book for.

Next, you write a second draft. How you do that is up to you. Some people just start writing again from scratch. It depends on how much it needs to be changed. What I do is save everything I have as a new file and then start taking it apart and moving things around and rewriting sections, and do forth. I like to think of that first draft as the clay I need to work with in order to create a masterpiece.

I look first for big problems or issues, and ignore most of the little things like spelling and grammar and so forth. Focus on the plot - does it work - and the characters - do they feel real? Or in non-fiction, are the chapters in the right sequence? Does it flow? Have I missed any key areas? What research still needs to be done to make sure everything is accurate?

And when you have that done, you do it all over again and again, as needed. You likely want to get a critique from another writer or two, or a really knowledgeable reader. At some point, you may want to pay for a really good editor to do a substantive edit (more about that next time.)

When you’re satisfied with the plot and the characters in your novel, then you look at the description, the dialogue, the accuracy of the details, and the time sequences.

In your non-fiction, check out the flow of your ideas, make sure all the relevant points are there, look at the illustrations you’ve used, refine your transitions, check that there is something for the reader to take way, and make sure every aspect is good.

Keep refining until you get down to the last bit - the spelling and punctuation, and so forth.

I revised Shaded Light 17 times. True, it’s a very complex book with multiple plot-lines and 14 points of view. My other books have been revised more like 7 or 8 times. Well, Friends Like These took maybe 10 times. My non-fiction books took probably 5 or 6 times.

The bottom-line is that you aren’t just “writing a book” in the sense that once all your thoughts on paper you’re finished. Even if you have done some editing as you wrote (something I don’t encourage), you still need to work with the end product. What you’re actually doing is crafting and molding and shaping it it so it says exactly what you want it to say and so that every single word you leave in has a function.

Yeah, I know. Sounds like work. But, actually, writing a book IS work. As the old saying goes, the idea - the “inspiration” is only a small part of the entire process. The other 90% involves “perspiration”.