The Pecman

I think you can use an old story as a jumping off point, but it damn well better be 1) good and 2) respectful to the original. I'm not sure if a painting would necessary relate to life in 2014. Maybe a cell phone photograph or something like that would be more timely.

No less than Stephen King has said that after he does a first draft on one of his novels, he routinely flags all the adverbs and gets rid of 90% of them. "Very" is high on that list (though it's technically an adjective and not an adverb, same deal).

My first novel, Groovy Kind of Love, concerned a kid who was a competitive swimmer in high school. I was also on swim teams during those years of my youth, so I know that experience well. I can't smell chlorine today without immediately going back decades and remember exactly what that experience was like. One thing I tried to capture was the sound you hear while crashing through the water, where you hear momentary bursts of the audience applause while you're turning your head to breathe. The actual contest times are dependent on age levels, and I never got anywhere near Olympic performance -- this was strictly local and regional events. In fact, I don't even think we did 100-meter races except as relays, usually in 25-meter pools. I think in the latter part of high school, as the participants hit 17 or 18, they do step up to 50-meter pools, but I never swam in one of those in Florida. 2012 Olympic Swimming Qualification Times

I think every novel dictates a specific approach, and there are no rules set in stone. I think this is the kind of thing you have to do with your gut. I tend to maybe lean towards about 1/3 description and 2/3 dialogue, but there are moments in the story where that might get reversed. I also like to describe what the characters are doing during dialogue, so one might be idly kicking a rock down the road, another might be fiddling with his or her sleeve, or another person might be self-conscious about a blemish they just discovered. I also tend to describe body movements, so somebody will say a line as they lean forward, or they nod their heads to the door, or various bits of direction. Just straight dialogue to me comes across as too on the nose and too boring. (I don't dispute that there are great writers who can get away with this; I ain't one of them.) My best advice would be to start looking at one of your favorite published novels written by a favorite author and examine the construction of the book. Look at the structure of the novel, and note how each chapter is started, how transitions in time and place are handled, and how they move from description to dialogue. Sometimes, I think you can just slam right into dialogue and let the reader figure out where it takes place; other times, I think you have to be very specific, to make sure the reader isn't momentarily confused. The single best tip I ever observed was to always start scenes in the middle when possible. Don't give us all the superficial stuff at the beginning -- start in the middle and hit the climax early. For example, if it's a church service, don't start with the drive to the church, parking the car, walking up the steps, finding a seat, sitting down, and waiting for the preacher to start the sermon. Bang, start right with the preacher yelling. All that other stuff gets cut out. If there's a specific need to describe the mood, the time of day, the sounds, the smells, the feel, and the place, then take your time. I have to say, sometimes when I read novels these days, I find myself enjoying them on two levels: I get into the story and feel the emotion of the characters, but I also nod my head in understanding how the writer has used an effective technique -- almost like a magician's trick -- to move from one place to another or put my head inside another character's. It's almost like glimpsing the machinery behind the rides at Disneyland: entertaining and colorful on the outside; technically dazzling and complicated on the inside.

I think there's a way to use description in an effective way that establishes the mood and then gets out of the way of the characters. I generally tend to use description only when the scene moves to a new place we've never been to before, to describe how the place feels, looks, and smells. I do agree that it's a good idea to engage all the senses, and that includes mood. Of all modern authors, I think Anne Rice is sometimes guilty of going a little overboard at this. I can recall a scene in one of her vampire novels where she took three pages to describe an abandoned house in the woods, and what the place was like as a character walked up to it and walked around inside. It was three pages until there was any dialogue. Was it effective? I think you could have accomplished the same thing in half the number of words, but the book got great reviews and made millions of dollars. When I first started out writing novels, Monica Wood's book Description: Elements of Fiction was a godsend to me. I think a mistake a lot of beginning writers make is to try to do far too much in dialogue, which takes up much too much space compared to description. An average day can be described in about two or three paragraphs, since you can summarize what happens, where it might take 20 pages to do the same thing in dialogue. A balance between the two is what I think you need for an effective novel, but trying to come up with that balance takes a lot of work.

What's funny to me is when I have a secondary character (or even more minor than that, just a background player) that somehow made such an impression on the readers, some of them write me and say, "hey, are you gonna bring so-and-so back?" or "but whatever happened to that other guy?" I'm sometimes embarrassed, because generally the character was put in the scene just for a specific plot idea, and once that was done, I was done with the character and moved on. But sometimes unexpected things click with readers, and they want more. Hey, if nothing else, I appreciate the fact that they're paying attention and aren't just noticing the lead characters.

My favorite creature like this was Stephen King's "Oy," the billy-bumbler from The Dark Tower series. It was kind of a combination of a badger, a raccoon, and a dog, but highly intelligent and with a limited ability to speak a few words. Terrific creature, very loyal, brave, and willing to sacrifice itself even in impossible odds. I hope they get this right if and when they ever make a film of the books. I gotta admit: the Treecat looks dynamite, a very beautiful animal. I could live without the six arms -- what is it, from John Carter?

It's hard to do that for me, because when you start examining the whole concept of Zombie stories and concepts, they started falling apart faster than a deteriorating corpse. At some point, the only reason they're walking is magic, and you can either buy into it or not. I gotta say, though, recent shows like The Walking Dead pull it off so well, I just toss disbelief out the window and get into the characters. In truth, Walking Dead is kind of just a soap opera at its core, with horror on the fringes; it's more about how the humans survive and get along (or fight amongst each other) than it is about the zombies per se. They do an extraordinary job at making me believe in the characters and their situations, week after week. I noted that the producers have finally answered a question I had, namely: if the Zombie apocalypse has gone on for at least a year within the Walking Dead framework, why haven't the bodies started deteriorating more? And so now, the bodies are more decrepit than they were. But there's always a supply of new humans who died recently to create new, "fresh" zombies. If you can put a new spin on this old idea, more power to you, James!

Some very useful links there, Mr. Wilde! Much appreciated.

I had a character in one of my novels charged with murder, so I read an entire non-fiction book on what it was like to go to prison, and also a series of articles on police procedure and death by lethal injection. It opened up my eyes to a whole world I knew nothing about. The details made the story a lot richer and more vivid. Often, I adhere to the old chestnut "write what you know." But that doesn't mean you can't force yourself to learn more, and then have the ability to write about experiences far beyond your own life, time, place, and circumstances.

I had a case where what I thought was a minor character was just there to serve a specific plot reason, and once that was over with, I had the character move away. Much to my surprise, the character came back into the story with a phone call a few chapters later, and wound up being part of the ending. So that was an unexpected surprise. It's an interesting problem when the characters take on a life of their own and sneak back into the story. That's the only time it's happened to me, out of four novels. (So far.)

I just did a quick check of my last novel, and I used the "F" word a grand total of 18 times -- but that was spread out over 124,000 words. Not a bad ratio. And I think most of those were done as "oh, F you," that kind of thing... not in a sexual way. But the story has no shortage of sex scenes.

Ah, that is the question. My take is, they have a lot to accomplish in the end of 1864 and the first few months of 1865. Don't forget that our two boys couldn't even get back to 2013 if they wanted to for now, because the only time gateway is inside a cave that's partially collapsed with mud and (soon) snow. When it thaws out in April 1865... we'll see. But who's to say they wind up in 2013? What if it's 1945? What if they materialize in outer space? What if they wind up back in The Land of the Lost with dinosaurs? Time-travel is a tricky thing.

Love the Beatles, love all the music, but the soundalikes on Glee left me cold. I thought they were very perfunctory, corny, and added nothing to the genre. I think the Glee producers are desperately flailing at trying to put energy and life into the show, which is not gonna be easy with one of the leads dead of an overdose. I think nothing short of introducing 7 or 8 new (much younger) characters could help. And forgive me, but I'm tired of looking at "high school kids" who are close to 30.

A friend of mine just complained to me about the use of the word codswallop in the Harry Potter novels, which I think is hilarious. It's a perfect word to use in lieu of "crap" or other swear words. One character says, "well, I think we should just do what he says," and the other says, "I think that's a lot of codswallop." A perfectly reasonable word, and very appropriate for a fantasy story: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/codswallop

Work harder! Dialogue is just another building block of good storytelling. To me, the key is having a good balance between dialogue and description. Stories get clogged up much too much with excessive dialogue, and excessive description robs the story of the personality quirks and distinctions between different characters. I think Monica Wood's book on Description goes over that in great detail, and Nancy Kress' book Characters, Emotion, and Viewpoint provide a lot of details on how to craft effective dialogue. Both were very helpful to me when I first got into fiction about 13-14 years ago, and you can pick these up cheap used on Amazon for a buck or two apiece. It'll take you a day or so to read them, then just keep whatever insights and tricks that work for you. And read the great authors you love, particularly books you've read before, and pay attention to how they delineate each character, how they give each one a distinct voice, how they handle overlapping dialogue among multiple characters, and when the writer chooses to create a scene with description rather than dialogue (and vice versa). A morning breakfast could take five pages to do in dialogue, or you could do it in two paragraphs in description; neither is correct -- whatever serves the story best is what you need to use. Only relying on one of these is wrong; I think you have to use a combination of both to make the story readable and keep the reader's interest going.

That's all well and good, but don't make the mistake of confusing a love of reading for an ability to write. Not the same thing. To me, you have to have both to be a good writer. Lessons are only as good or as bad as the teacher giving them; I've had good and bad English teachers, and some of them found ways to make the classes very interesting, even challenging. Perhaps we're much different here in America than in England. That's fine, but again, passion and ability are not the same thing. They still need to have a sense of why good writing works. Once you know the basic principles, it's interesting to go back to a favorite novel, take it apart, and figure out what makes it tick. It's interesting to me to do that, and say, "ah, I see why the author withheld an important detail here," or "oh, that's a bit of foreshadowing there I never noticed before." Understanding the mechanism underneath good writing is very important. Knowing good grammar, the rules of spelling, syntax, and all that other stuff is tiddly-winks. It's the creative part of the process that's hard: coming up with a plot, figuring out how who tells the story and where it takes place, finding obstacles for the hero to overcome, fleshing out the other characters, making the villains believable, and so on. To me, a key is understanding that every story's hero wants something, and generally the story is about their struggle to get it (or their tragedy in not getting it). If the students were a little older, I'd suggest they read Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, because it shows that many, many stories all come from the same place.

I don't think you can learn to write and hate English and all the associated rules. Some stuff you just gotta know. The rules I go by are pretty simple: get to the point, don't be boring, start scenes in the middle, avoid long stretches of dialogue, don't get bogged down by everyday activity, keep the story moving, and make the reader want to read more. But on top of all that, the basic plot has to make sense, and the characters have to be people you care about. Before you can do that, you have to have a sense of grammar, spelling, syntax, and all the associated rules. Once you know them, then you can break the rules in selective cases. I think the students need to be aware of this. It's no different than driving a car: you may hate speed limits, you may dislike having to wear seatbelts, and you may not know how to read a speedometer, but those are rules you have to live by if you're going to drive. Where you go is up to you. James Frey's How to Write a Damn Fine Novel has some pretty good advice. Another one that has some good basic rules is Noah Lukeman's The First Five Pages, which has a lot of rules on how to get to the guts of the story very quickly so that it won't be rejected by publishers. I think there are enough topics in both that could easily be the subjects of a dozen or more 1-hour classes, even if the students argue whether the advice is applicable or not. Me, I tend to pick and choose which rules I use, but these two books in particular were good enough that I read them a couple of times.

I'm sometimes put off by contemporary teenage characters who don't swear more, and who act in ways that I don't think are very believable in 2013. For example, I can recall a recent online story where the two teenage characters referred to each other as "love," as in, "be careful when you go to the store, love!" or "don't forget to take your raincoat, love!" Call me crazy, but I don't think 15- 16-year-old kids talk this way in 2013.

I agree completely. I would rather write 1000 words of perfection in one solid weekend than crank out 50K of crap that I know doesn't measure up to the rest of the story. Having said that: I wrote my first novel in 30 days, and that was 120,000 words. So... it can be done, provided you have the inspiration and environment that allows it. In my case, I happened to be working on a project that didn't require my absolute attention 12 hours a day, so I was able to dash off a paragraph here and there in the middle of work, and actually could do 3000-4000 words a day (and a lot more on the weekends when I was home). (I later spent another month rewriting and trimming it, and I think the rewrites were a lot slicker and better crafted.) It helps that I can type fast. But so much of writing is just staring at the blank page (screen, to you infernal young folk) and trying to decide which direction to go next. It's not always the writing that's hard; it's the thinking that comes before that. Once I know where I'm going, then it's just a question of scooping out my brain and pounding it into the keyboard. If the brain's got nothin', then I'm not gonna do the rest of it.

This one is my favorite:

I'll give you one:

If you're ever published in traditional print, your editors will chide you for the double space, because it's a waste of paper and looks bad typographically. They'll just run a global search (as Mark says above) and replace two spaces with one space. Very standard deal at newspapers, magazines, and book publishers. I learned to type back in 1967 (which dates me) and stuck with two spaces for more than two decades, but broke myself of the habit by the late 1980s, when I was frequently contributing to newsstand magazines. Even then, my last pass of the completed manuscript would always include a two-space/one-space search, and there would inevitably be a few stragglers in there. That still happens even today. It ain't the end of the world. I'd worry a lot more if the story has guts and if it makes sense and if it grabs the reader. Spaces are of trivial importance in the grand scheme of things, but once you get the hard stuff like plot and character out of the way, it's not that big a deal to fix the minutiae. Read this essay on double- vs. single-spacing between sentences on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing And read Robert Bringhurst's book The Elements of Typographic Style, which explains a lot of this stuff in extreme detail. There's an art to great typographic design, and kerning, hair spaces, and sentence spacing are all part of it. Not a simple subject.

I also came to fiction from a journalism background, and I quickly realized that a lot of fiction involved delaying giving the reader the who/what/when/why/where/how of the plot. But the reasons had to be carefully structure and logical, so the whole thing becomes a discovery process, and that influences the writing style for each. One thing I did carry over from journalism was to try to keep the sentences punchy and short. Like this one. BTW, I know FSU very well, having gone there in the 1970s (and actually studied journalism and creative writing for a time). Interesting school, but man, Tallahassee is a wacked-out town.

Yep, I think this is good advice. 5000 words would be a short chapter to me, though I've gone to as much as 9000-10,000 words for special occasions, mainly moments where I don't want to break the chapter on a scene change for purposes of structure and keeping things moving quickly.