The Pecman

Both of these should be engraved in bronze and put on the front page of this site. I hate, hate, hate both of these things, and (except under unusual circumstances) they'll almost inevitably cause me to bail in seconds.

I would use published fiction as a better guide on how long or short chapters are. But even there, it's inconsistent. I've seen Stephen King do a one-page chapter for effect, and then go for 20 pages in the next one. Me, I usually wind up somewhere between 6000 words and 8000 words, and it seems to be about right. 19-20 chapters seems to tell the story -- at least it has for my last 3 novels -- and it doesn't feel too wordy to me. But: I'm not a fan of using emails, texts, tweets, IMs, or anything like that very often in stories. To me, stuff like that smacks me as a gimmick that takes you out of the story. I don't have a problem with communications being mentioned as a sideline, like a character grimaces when he sees an angry text from his ex or something like that. Once in awhile is fine; line after line of back-and-forth texted dialogue makes me wince.

Yes, absolutely, over a long period of time. And there have certainly been some great novels that took decades to write. But the old chestnut of trying to write 300 words a day or 1000 words a day or whatever is not always possible with certain kinds of careers and lives. Hell, I've knocked out 10,000 words in a marathon weekend, but a lot depends on the circumstances and pressure. I'm particularly sympathetic to people who are trying to raise children and have families in addition to working and trying to write. That's a degree of selflessness that's extraordinary to me. One truth is that, even when you're not able to sit down and actually get the words down on (virtual) paper while working a regular job or dealing with your family, I think the mental writing process often continues, even during the strangest times -- driving to work, eating lunch, having a conversation with a co-worker, riding in an elevator, etc. And I always, always keep a pen and pad in my pocket for those rare occasions when I get hit with an idea; some of the best ideas I've ever had happened just as I was fading off to sleep in bed, and I had to actually fight to just get the strength to reach over and jot down a single sentence. In a few cases, that sentence was the germ of an idea that pushed different novels of mine in pivotal directions, I think for the better.

I've multitasked within a story, sometimes jumping ahead a dozen chapters, finishing that chapter, then returning and writing my way up to that point. I have had several stories "in development" at one time before, but to me, it's too much of a brain whiplash to try to wrap my head around vastly different characters and then abruptly change to another group of characters.

Eventually, but not quickly. You can blow up a mountain with an H-bomb in five minutes, or chip away at it for years. As long as the mountain eventually comes down, the job still gets done. But there are days where chipping just isn't possible.

Give me a frigging break. I worked as a professional feature writer -- on real deadlines, paid, for 9 different newsstand magazines -- for almost 25 years. I know what it is to write for a living. Fiction is not the same thing. You forget that some people (particularly in my current day job) work 12 to 14 hours a day, before dawn and after dusk, on endlessly complex projects that take me far from my home and frequently leave me exhausted. I've had days where I fell into bed, too tired to even take my shoes off. So don't tell me that it can be done. I know it can't. Having said that: I've had no problem writing when I have sufficient spare time to do reasonable work. I have three completed novels -- two at about 120,000 words, one pushing 150,000 words -- and another one I intend to get back to. All four have been very well-received. As I said before, when I'm writing for free, on the net, I don't owe anybody anything except to do the very best work I can. If you're paying me, then all excuses are gone, everything else stops, and I'll devote 110% of my efforts to getting it done well, and on time. To me, that's the essence of being a professional. What's interesting for me is that the brain is constantly churning, and there have been weeks that have gone by where I kind of see the characters in my head, frozen in action, looking at me as if to say, "hey! Let's get moving! What happens next?" So the gears are still turning, and story issues are still being worked out even when I'm doing other things. Sometimes, the hardest part of writing is the thought process that comes before it. I find doing nothing is far better than cranking out bad work or trying to rush something that needs a lot more time in the oven. I didn't always have that luxury when I was staring a Monday 9AM deadline in the face, and I was frantically working all weekend long in order to crank out a 5000-word article or interview. But inevitably, I'd get it done... sometimes only a few hours before the deadline, but it'd be done, I got paid, and the editor was satisfied with the work. When I'm slammed with commercials and other aspects of my day job, everything else -- relationships, personal details, hobbies -- all those things have to take a back seat. If I had a restful 8-hour day job at an office, there's a chance I might be able to function, but not my life at the present. I just checked a manilla envelope that has all my notes on Pieces of Destiny, and I swear, there's about 86 little pieces of paper in there, some of which made it into the story, and some of which didn't. Many of those were written in the damndest places -- on planes, on film sets, in the bathroom, when I couldn't sleep in the middle of the night, even in meetings. Sometimes a single sentence generated two chapters, so you never know how beneficial the notes can be.

It can't be done! This is why I've had novels that took six years to finish. Just too damned busy dealing with the realities of life. I usually can't take an hour a day to write, because I'm just too distracted and can't focus, I don't have the energy, and/or what comes out if I try to force it just isn't any good. If I'm relaxed and have lots of time (plus a minimum of stress), I generally have no problem. If I had the luxury of a permanent roof over my head and a guaranteed source of income without a 9-5 job, then writing would be relatively easy. I envy successful authors who can set aside 3 or 4 uninterrupted hours a day to devote just to writing and nothing else. I need Proust's cork-lined room! I'll say this, though: some of the best new ideas I've had came up when I was in the middle of work. I'd have to remember to jot that idea down and get it into the story, and in some cases, they were huge, pivotal plot points that made a big difference.

Good material, or bad? If I'm really cranking, I can knock out 2000 words in 4-5 hours, easy. The trick is making it good. Just typing words on a page doesn't hack it for me, and there's far too many times I just stare at the blank screen, trying desperately to figure out what comes next. Often my problems boil down to transitions: how do I get from scene X to scene Y? Structural issues like this are tough to solve, and it's not just a question of words; it's more about the approach. I have to say, one of the most interesting parts of writing for me is: I dive back into a chapter, go back to the head, start reading, I begin to get into the story, then I scroll down and... blank screen! That compels me to want to write more, simply because I can't wait to find out what happens next. I wrote my first novel in about 30 days, 120,000 words total, and posted each chapter on the net every 3-4 days. That's fine and good if you don't have a 9-5 job and a bunch of other commitments. In the real world, I think devoting a couple of hours a day to getting maybe two good, solid pages -- 600-1000 words -- is a reasonable goal. And I make notes almost every single day, sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes for bits of story that aren't going to happen for many, many chapters.

That can work. I've cheated in some stories by giving some characters strong regional accents, so it's pretty clear who's talking and how their thought process works. I've used stutters, people who curse like sailors, people who have very clipped, precise speech, and people who are poorly educated, all in an effort to give each one a distinct voice. I think 3rd omniscient is risky, because it could become harder for the reader to choose which character to identify with. To me, most stories are about one central character and everything else revolves around them. But there are always exceptions, particularly a grand, sweeping epic with lots of speaking roles and a story that takes place over a long period of time. That hasn't been my thing, at least not thus far.

I usually go with a 3-act play kind of thing, but I also tend to end chapters episodically, kind of loosely inspired by TV (which is my background). I think there's an art to picking the right break, and also finding a way to keep pushing the story forward, which to me is kind of the essence of structure. I try not to over-outline, but I do at least jot down some bullet-points here and there so I know that by Chapter 5, so-and-so has got to die. It's always a discovery process, and once in awhile, I'll wake up in the middle of the night and say, "whoa! I gotta throw a completely unplanned idea into this other chapter!" So I've deviated from the bullet-points and the story arc on occasion. A couple of times, I've been guilty of letting the novel climax a little early, and I wind up having kind of an extended aftermath with an additional climax kind of jammed in to provide a big finale. I've done this twice, and it deviates from the normal act format, but it didn't bother me too much. My worst sin has been to kill certain characters off-screen, which is a mistake I try to avoid nowadays. I look back on some of that stuff and think, "jesus, that's such a cheap gimmick," but I got a lot of accolades from readers, so most of them didn't seem bothered by it (nor did my various editors and Beta-readers).

Don't think of them as rules; think of them as suggestions. Again, all the major best-selling books, as well as works by my favorite authors, generally do follow these guidelines. It's extremely rare I see them coloring outside the lines. Read just the two books I suggested above and tell me what you think. Again, even if you go through the first dozen ideas and say, "naaaaa, that doesn't apply to me" or "I don't agree with that," that's cool... but there's always the chance you'll stumble over an idea where you stop and go, "hey! I never thought of that before." So don't dismiss it out of hand. I've also read several books on screenwriting, and several biographies of major authors, and all of those helped in small ways as well. But I think I wrote about 1000 published (and paid for) articles before I cracked a single book on writing, save for what I had blitzed through in high school and college writing classes. Gotta tell you a funny story: in an English Lit class (class of all juniors where I was a freshman, much fun), I had to write a 2000-word paper on a book I hadn't actually read. I flipped through it the night before, wrote the paper, then turned it in, assuming I'd fool the prof. The next day, she handed back the papers where I was relieved to see I had gotten a C+ (not bad for knowing zip), but she commented, "it was clear to me you hadn't actually read the book, but you faked it so well, I had to give you a C+. You should consider becoming a writer." That really floored me, and was the first inkling I had that maybe it was a path I could take someday.

I think the trick is to make it 3rd person limited point of view, so that you're not constantly leaping into other people's heads. Assuming the story is just about one main character, we should hear his thoughts most of the time, and I would be very careful about doing it with other people. Internal monologues can work, to a point, particularly when the description is written in the same tone of voice as a specific character's dialogue. Stephen King does this extremely well, particularly when he describes a scene slanted towards the view of one specific character -- even a character we hate, one who's crazy, or is otherwise up to no good. It gives us access to more knowledge than the character knows, which can set up a lot of moments where the audience can say, "uh-oh! Our hero has no idea he's about to walk into a trap!" You don't have that capability in 1st person.

Don't knock it if you haven't tried it. I doubt that I got more than four or five good ideas from any of the books on writing I've ever read, but they if they even gave me a hint on something I'd never considered before, or perhaps forced me to consider an idea from a completely different point of view, then it helped. Just understanding the common mistakes most amateur authors make was fairly illuminating. I think the two biggest things I ever learned -- and they were significant lessons -- were: 1) don't be boring, and 2) most scenes work better if you start in the middle. Every major best-selling novel I've ever read generally follows both guidelines very well; too much online fiction does not. There are always exceptions, but writers who have the talent to recognize the need to avoid following the rules is something I don't see too often. I wrote non-fiction for 25 years after taking only two college-level creative writing classes, and did well when newsstand magazines were flourishing (which has sadly not been the case since 9/11). Writing fiction required a totally different set of muscles for me, and while I started writing my first novel before reading any books on fiction, I read a couple about halfway through the book, and it set me on a path that revealed the mechanism of storytelling in a way that was illuminating and very logical. It's kind of like watching a magician's performance, being amazed, then being allowed to watch the same illusions backstage, where all the tricks are revealed. Knowing how it all works doesn't necessarily make you a better performer, but it does give you a very different perspective than only being a spectator.

I'll give you A Morning in May, stolen from the lyrics of the song "Pieces of April." Some of these Revolutionary War novels may give you some more specific inspiration: http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/221.American_Revolutionary_War_Fiction

That's a good compromise. If you write in 3rd-person omniscient, then the "unseen narrator" can be extremely glib, well-educated, and comment as required. If it's 1st person, then your dialect, vocabulary, and knowledge are all limited to the character involved. A few times in 1st person POV stories I've been guilty of getting a little too poetic with their descriptions, and I try to cut that back a little bit in editing. I think you can get away with it a little bit, depending on the age, education, and sophistication of the characters.

I think the flaws only work for the hero if they find a way to overcome them. But there's always secondary characters who are going to start with flaws and stay the same... or, perhaps more interestingly, characters we initially think are OK or even good people, and then we learn over time they're terribly flawed, awful people. And there's certainly flawed people whom we can pity. But it's all part of the human experience. What I object to are stories -- particularly on the net -- where the characters are paper-thin, a lot of stereotypes, and we basically know who they are in one or two paragraphs. I particularly dislike them when they complain a lot, cry a lot, whine a lot, and are otherwise characters who don't take enough of an active role in their own lives -- they merely react to things that happen. I prefer people who make things happen, which is a lot more of a challenge to write. I also like to think that people are more complicated than a simple character sketch, and that people we initially see as villains might actually have some good qualities, and people we initially admire as heroes are more flawed than we want to believe. In all four of my novels so far, I've had different mixtures of these as characters. In fact, I haven't had a single villain who wound up not having at least some redeeming qualities. One (the title character of Jagged Angel) is a case where I'm not sure if the kid was completely narcissistic and anti-social, psychotic, or just had a bad temper... or even if he might have been redeemed, under the right circumstances. I left a little open to conjecture, kind of like a gay version of The Bad Seed (a book and movie I admire quite a bit, and acknowledged in the introduction). I pulled a trick in my new novel where there's a character that knows about some pretty awful stuff that's been going on, and we only find out at the end how bad they are. So they're not so much a terribly-flawed person... they're somebody who allowed terrible things to happen without stopping it. I think that was a pretty surprising reveal for most of my readers, judging by the feedback.

I don't think the lists necessarily work, but there are some good books on writing fiction that helped me quite a bit. The three that helped me the most: The First Five Pages by Noah Lukeman Fireside Books [iSBN #068485743X] How to Write a Damn Good Novel by James N. Frey St. Martin's Press [iSBN #0312010443 and #0312104782 and On Writing by Stephen King Pocket Books [iSBN #0743455967] Each book runs about 300 pages and costs under $10 each in paperback (half that if you pick them up used). All of them are useful to a point, with solid gold nuggets of wisdom scattered throughout, but none is perfect. I've read at least 25 or 30 books on writing (and have a shelf full of dozens more I haven't yet cracked open), I've taken a half-dozen college-level classes on writing many years ago, and I made a pretty good living as a writer and editor for a half-dozen newsstand magazines for over two decades. I readily admit that I'm far from knowing all there is to know about writing. But the three books above taught me more about writing fiction than anything else I've seen, heard, or experienced. Lukeman's book gives a good rundown on the top 25 things not to put in a novel -- specific items that will immediately turn off editors, agents, or anybody else who knows how to recognize amateurish elements. James Frey's original book (a classic that's been used in college-level writing classes throughout the 1990s) goes into great detail on how to build up the strengths you already have, and figure out what works and what doesn't. Frey's second book, How to Write a Damn Good Novel II: Advanced Techniques for Dramatic Storytelling, isn't quite as enthralling, but provides another dozen or so good ideas that can help any budding novelist. Stephen King's book is more a general philosophy on how the process works; the first half is a biographical essay on how and why he came to be a writer, and the second goes into the nuts and bolts on writing. King also gives the very good advice that to be a good writer, you also have to read -- a lot. And by that I mean published books with solid literary merit, not just amateur Net fiction posted for free. I find a steady diet of the latter can actually hurt you in the long run, simply because most of the truly good fiction out there are those you have to pay for.

Yeah, it's tough to write characters (especially lead characters) you dislike. But I've often found that it's the characters' flaws that make them interesting: maybe they have a bad temper, or they tend to criticize others, or they're impatient and snippy. Maybe they're overconfident, or they have a bad habit of being so arrogant, they step on other people without even realizing it. What can be fun is when they have their comeuppance over time, and by the end of the story, they're sadder but wiser, even (hopefully) changed people who are much more rounded and more human. I did this with a novel a few years ago, and I had a few people write in and say, "hey! I hate this guy! I don't want to read this story!" But the longer you stuck with it, the more you see the guy was guilty of making several bad choices in life, pretending he was somebody he wasn't, and eventually beaten down by a tough adversary and forced through circumstance to accept who he really was.

I don't think you can always reduce a novel to a bullet-point list. There are some interesting novels out there with unconventional structures that kind of defy rules, lists, and expectations. Having said that: I think the basic ingredients of conflict, compelling characters, and an ebb and flow to the drama -- with a twist about 2/3 of the way in, and a resolution in the final chapter -- are all pretty standard. And that works in movies, too. Jack Bickham's book Scene and Structure goes into a lot of this in detail. I think the key is to be able to see your novel at a glance and figure out where the dramatic highlights have got to hit. Having said that, I know there are writers who can crank out novels without an outline (I'm not one of them), and they somehow manage to create best-sellers with huge audiences. I do absolutely agree with Nigel Watts' observation that At some stage, your protagonist needs to make a crucial decision; a critical choice. You can point to some of the greatest stories in literature, film, and the stage that all do this: a moral choice that sets the adventure in place, or forces the hero to decide which direction to go in. The first time I read that was in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and at the time, I was fairly stunned in realizing how many great works hinge on the protagonist making a difficult decision.

Yes, I agree very much with this. It does help to physically visit a specific location if you have little details in it, like a famous coffee shop on the corner, or the fact that the street is one-way, or how a side-road is cobblestone but the main drag is paved. But generally, the internet and Google street view will get you by... to a point. I was stalled out for a year or two on a time-travel novel sometime back, and one thing that helped snap me out of it was that through circumstance I wound up working on a Western movie set here in LA, with about 10 fully-formed 1800's city streets. I think this kind of kicked me in the ass, because I finally got the experience of how muddy the streets were 150 years ago, what the sidewalks felt like to walk on, what the doors were like, and so on, and I think this helped push me over the edge to finish the novel. Watching a movie or looking at still photographs is not the same experience as feeling and smelling the place. This knowledge also extends to certain abilities the characters have, like whether they can sing, play an instrument, ride a horse, shoot a gun, etc. I can't necessarily do any of these things well, but I think as long as you can describe the sensation of doing these, you can create the illusion that you know what it's like. Famously, Stephen King has said he has never actaully killed anybody, but he has done enough research and visited morgues to the point where he gets all the little details right. To me, pulling that off is like being a magician on stage: you believe it when he does it, but then later on, you realize, "wait a minute! I think I was fooled!"

Yeah, I'm generally in agreement with that. I wrote a novel some years back that had a 14-year-old together with a 16-year-old (he might have even been 17, now that I think about it), and that might be a little edgy... but then again, Juliet was only 13 in Romeo & Juliet, and it's assumed that Romeo was at least 17 or 18 (within the context of the story). I'd have to say that things get dicey when one of the participants is an adult.

And I just posted the formatted eBook to the download section here on GA. Turned out pretty well, I think. This is a revised version that updates the original novel and fixes a myriad of small typos, and also expands the ending a little bit.

And just to revive an old thread: while I have no fear of putting sex in any of my stories, I concede that it's a personal choice and that what's "too much" for one reader (or writer) is "not enough" for another. While I think explicit sex is perfectly acceptable under the right circumstances, that doesn't mean you have to do the same thing every time. And there's no harm in occasionally being vague, with two characters having a conversation in the bedroom and then just adding a line that says, "and before he finished the sentence, we had yanked our clothes off and fell into a sweaty tangle onto the bed." And... end scene. No details. Subtlety is good, too. I think the most important rule is to concentrate on the emotion and senses rather than physical descriptions, and find a way to make the scene integral to the plot. I also think sometimes deliberately withholding sex can be very titillating, especially if one character is filled with desire and the other is angry, or there's some major reason why one can't sleep with the other. So not having sex can be just as important, particularly if it's a chapter before a scene where the two characters finally succumb.

It's possible. Very, very often, I've sat down and started writing and deviated from my outline, and wound up with a far better, more interesting direction for the story. So discoveries always can happen. I do think it's a good idea to have a vague sense of direction before you start, so you're not completely winging it. I know people who use it and love it, and I try not to tell other people how to write. For me personally, paper or extra notes on the computer work fine to me. The only time I would use a specific program to help write would be with a screenplay, since you have to fit a very specific kind of industry formatting that's rigidly enforced. For fiction, anything goes.

I like to do a little outline to do three things: 1) provide me a list of all the characters with birth dates, physical descriptions, and short bios (just enough to remind me that character X has blond hair and is a smoker, and character Y is 55 years old and is missing his left leg). Street addresses are handy as well, even if they're fictitious streets in made-up cities. 2) give me the overall "bullet points" to hit in each chapter, just broad strokes of the three or four major story points that have to occur so I have a general sense of direction and mood. and 3) a timeline of when all the events of the story happen. This way, if a character refers back to something that happened on March 15th, I can be bloody well sure it didn't happen on April 2nd. Nobody ever reads these documents but me. I detest writers who stuff character lists at the heads of their stories. To me, that insults the reader, as if they aren't smart enough to remember who everybody is. If Tolkien and Rowling can write novels with 120+ speaking roles and not provide character guides to the reader, then anybody can. I just finished a 120,000-word novel that takes place over a 3-week period in October/November 1864, and it was a real trial to try to remember whether something happened on a Monday or a Friday, particularly when the story was so dense. One important point: for me, it's wrong to over-outline a story. To me, much of the fun for the writer happens during the discovery process while writing, where you stop and say, "whoa! What if THIS happens instead?" If you've done page-long outlines on each chapter, there won't be nearly as many surprises. For me, I just jot down the bare bones of what's going to happen, sometimes just a vague sentence like, "Character A goes to City Z and meets Character B, and saves the life of Character C." The fun side comes in the details. But then... there are writers (notably Stephen King) who often claim that they work entirely without a net and sit down at the keyboard with no notes, no plot, and no ending, and just start writing until they stop. That generally doesn't work for me. J.K. Rowling famously claimed she cooked up the idea for the Harry Potter novels while waiting for a train in Scotland, but it took her several years just to figure out the overall story arc, develop the characters, and come up with the "rules" for the fantasy world they inhabited. Only then was she able to actually sit down and write the first novel. But fantasy is kind of a separate challenge apart from normal fiction.