Here’s the deal. There are many new, budding writers out there who have no idea what they’re doing. They’re fragile – they’re newborn writers and they’re flying blind, wanting to create all sorts of cool things with no idea how to do it. They can be easy to make fun of; I see the cliches and tropes they’re writing with gleeful abandon, I see the mistakes they make with everything from grammar to romance to characterization and I think ‘Oh honey. Ohhh honey.’

But me thinking ‘Ohhh honey’ and sipping my coffee with a Sage Expression on my face doesn’t really help anybody, and here’s the thing – I was that fragile, newborn, budding writer with no clue what she was doing. I took ideas from everything I read and was so ‘influenced’ by some authors that I was practically plagiarizing them. I had the Stereotypical Fantasy Characters – the brooding hero with the tragic backstory (and YES I still lOVE HIM leave me alone), the Feisty Independent Heroine (who was actually just a bitch, honestly, pardon my French. She was) and the sarcastic, hapless comedic character who didn’t….really further the plot in any way. Obviously the FMC needed a brother, so….there we are, I guess? Oh, and it was an ALLEGORY, PEOPLE, because Intellectualism™ a la the Door Within series. (Also I’m fine with allegory; I like a certain amount of allegory. We’ll get to that in another post.)

The point is, I’ve been there. I’ve done that. I’ve been writing since I was twelve, I’ve completed over ten novels and started + shelved a dozen others. I’ve tried just about everything. So here are some tips to help move your writing out of the….I don’t even know what to call that space. The Bad Place. These will help move you from The Bad Place to The Good Place; let’s call it that.

ONE: GRAMMAR IS ACTUALLY IMPORTANT

‘That’s what editors are for.’ I see this one a lot, even from writers who aren’t necessarily newbies. But here’s the thing – if you don’t have a good grasp on grammar, your writing will lack a certain amount of depth, description, and sophistication. (I don’t mean you need to be Arthur Conan Doyle or quirk your pinkie; it’s not that kind of sophistication.) Your writing will not be as good as it could be. That’s just the way it is, and it doesn’t have to do with typos. If you don’t know how to use grammar, you will not know how to write as well as you could. You can write passable things, sure, but there will be a childish quality to the writing that people will notice. (And I say they will because I do, every time. Every single time.)

Is grammar hard for you? Don’t despair! I didn’t even realize indentations were a thing until a year into my writing and my mom pointed out they were supposed to exist in a manuscript, and I realized – I’d been reading since I was a few years old, but hadn’t been paying attention to structure. Pick up a book (a good book, a book you know to be well-written and not just your average YA fantasy novel. Not that one. But not Jane Austen; that’s another load of…well, structure wasn’t much of a thing then, either). Pick up a Charles de Lint book, or a Patricia McKillip or an Allison Croggon book or even Brandon Sanderson. Pay attention to things like indentations. Pay attention to spacing and structure and pacing; pay attention to turns of phrase, the difference in each character’s speech and sound. Grammar can be fun and it doesn’t mean you need to sit down and take a course from beginning to end (unless you have a real issue with it in which case, you might have to).

TWO: SHARE YOUR WRITING

This one is hard. It still is hard, actually, although it’s gotten significantly easier over the past decade. But you have to do it. You cannot – I repeat, YOU CANNOT – reach your fullest potential as a writer if you don’t have feedback. And this means all kinds of feedback. It means finding some people who will tell you the truth. Do NOT share your writing with someone who tells you how MAGNIFICENT and MARVELOUS your writing is each time, without any critique. You know why? Because they’re lying, and they don’t want to hurt your feelings. If you’ve sent out ten chapters in a row with no constructive criticism from someone, they aren’t helping you. You want truly constructive criticism? Find a family member. Generally I don’t give manuscripts to my mom until they’ve been revised, edited, and proofread because I want it to be as good as I can make it, but once she reads it there’s nobody more helpful because she’ll tell me what’s wrong with it. ‘This doesn’t make sense.’ ‘There’s too much of X element.’ ‘Did you mean to do this here?’ But when she comes to me and says, ‘I need more,’ or proceeds to bring up her favorite characters for the next few weeks, there’s nothing more encouraging.

Find somebody who will tell you the truth. Will it hurt your feelings? Yes. Especially if you’re just starting out and don’t have a good grasp on things, because there will be more negative than positive for a while – but if this person loves you and wants to see you succeed, listen to them. Take their advice. Take a deep breath, strap on your helmet, and dive in. It’s more comfortable to believe your writing is just fine. But comfort won’t get you anywhere.

THREE: TREAT YOUR WRITING SERIOUSLY

Obviously writing should be fun. Writing is incredible. But let me show you a few phrases that might sound familiar to you – “Haha yeah, gotta follow the plot bunnies!” “My poor charries!!” “I know this doesn’t really FIT but it was so CUTE.” “Yeah I know this isn’t perfect, but I mean…”

No. Stop. Stop making excuses for your writing, and stop treating your book like it’s some kind of over-excited Pomeranian puppy. Remember, I did all these things and my writing never got better because of it. THAT I can promise you. (Nor have I ever seen anyone else’s writing get better because of it.) Plot bunnies? They’re an excuse to be lazy and not have to come up with any actual solid plot. Your poor charries? Oh honey. Ohhh honey. It doesn’t FIT but it was so CUTE? Yeah, it sucks, but cut it out. Cute or otherwise, if it doesn’t move the story forward it has no place. I don’t care how adorable it was, and neither will your reader once they finish the book and go, ‘You know…there were a bunch of scenes in there that made no sense, though.’ And as for ‘Yeah, this isn’t perfect, but’ – no ‘buts.’ No. If you know something you wrote was lazy, sloppy, or unresearched, then you have no excuse. Fix it. Make it better. I don’t care if this is just a first draft, your first draft should be as good as you can possibly make it. If you get halfway through a first draft and realize you don’t like it, or you already know the whole plot but that it needs massive revisions, then stop! Start another book, or shelve this one for later. Be flexible.

And just….please don’t call your characters ‘charries.’ It really does encourage you to not take them seriously, which you should. People don’t connect with Charries. They connect with characters.

FOUR: TORTURE IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR DRAMA

I mean sure, torture is dramatic and my books have a fair amount of it in different ways, but one thing I see amateur writers do c o n s t a n t l y (and I did this myself) is substitute physical pain for other kinds of drama. I mean I know – it’s hard to write genuine, believable pain, drama, and angst when you’re new at it, but don’t settle for just torturing your characters. It’s an amateur mistake and I’ve seen some new writers rely on it so heavily that they honestly creep me out a little so…tone down on the torture. Here’s a tip – try embarrassment instead. We all HATE to be embarrassed and most of us suffer from secondhand embarrassment, too – which is why it’s an important element to write. In The Last Samurai (one of those historically horrendous movies I will still watch) one of the characters is subjected to having his hair cut by enemy soldiers. It may not sound like much, but to him, it’s an abject humiliation. They don’t torture him – they just cut his hair, and the impact is far more powerful than if they’d stood around kicking or punching him.

FIVE: DON’T FOLLOW THE LIGHTS

I’ve seen new writers (and accomplished writers – looking at you, YA section in the library) do a Thing. This Thing is to have more character than they know what to do with, and try to give each character their Very Own Spotlight. This is absolutely fine if you’re an experienced writer – I love huge casts and weaving their storylines together. But it’s painful when I see someone who can barely write one character’s point of view try to write seventeen. The result is that each POV sounds relatively the same, gives nothing new to the plot, and winds up frustrating to the reader (this is one reason why, terrible plot aside, I never could get into the Divergent books. Everyone sounded exactly the same – but this is very common in young adult novels). Focus on writing one point of view. Focus on keeping it simple. Discover your strengths as a writer and pursue those – work those up so that eventually you can start turning your weaknesses into strengths, too. But don’t pile your plate three feet high in an over-ambitions attempt to Do All the Things. I have to remind myself of this even now, after almost fourteen years of writing. If you have an overload of ideas for one novel, step back and take a look at them. Maybe you actually have TWO SEPARATE books here! (I know I often do.)

So there we are – the five top tips I could think of off the top of my head. The point of this post was not to be discouraging, but to tell you I’ve been exactly where you are and made all the mistakes new writers make, and if someone had been able to point me in the right direction my literary life would have progressed faster than it did. If you LIKED this and have your own questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments and I’ll answer them in another blog post!

Oh, and here’s my last tip – don’t stop. Keep writing. Keep writing through both the gold and the trash. Keep it up.

That wasn’t going to be the original title but I threw it out as a joke and it was accepted so here we are. Having finished two of my newly favorite TV shows, Trollhunters and The West Wing (to be fair I didn’t finish The West Wing, I stopped watching after Sorkin left and it took a nosedive) I’ve been looking for something else to watch while I paint. I could paint in silence, or with music, but I’ve always been better at working when my brain can tune in to something else.

I decided, finally, to give Dark Matter a try. For those of you who don’t know, Dark Matter was supposed to be the answer to Firefly fans everywhere. (I’m not an avid Firefly Lover but I do ENJOY Firefly and have seen it several times.) I knew, in my gut, it wasn’t going to be any good. I’d seen the character pictures. Still, I turned on the first episode thinking, ‘how bad could it be?’

What resulted was…amazing. It was amazing, guys. It was so bad. It’s the kind of bad that pretends like it’s not really /too/ bad, but everything that happens is also bad and stupid, and I didn’t finish the episode. In fact, I’ll let you know how far I got at the end of this post, because right now I’m going to take you on a walk through some of the worst writing I’ve ever seen. It’ll teach you critical thinking skills, or something. It might just make you mad. It might leave you going ‘It really wasn’t that bad,’ and that’s………………….fine, too.

Let’s begin. Note: These reactions were taken straight from a Facebook chat I had with Arielle while I watched. She can attest that they are genuine, if edited for grammatical accuracy.

Dark Matter: A Dramatic Reading (kind of)

“Okay so I’m ten seconds – hang on let me check – okay fifty five seconds – into the first episode of Dark Matter and my tolerance for silliness is so low that I’m just staring at this tunnel in a space ship life support is at %15 and all I can do is go OKAY BUT REALLY HOW COME ANY TIME A SHIP IS FAILING IN ANY WAY IN ANY PORTRAYAL THERE’S RANDOM STEAM AND SPARKS FLYING OUT OF RANDOM PLACES LIKE THAT’S NOT HOW SHIPS WORK

Because a ship failing in some way is pretty boring to look at and we must have SPARKS and things because the voice going ‘life support at fifteen percent’ isn’t enough of a giveaway

Oh look a boring guy waking up from cryosleep. This is good I’ve never seen this before.

He takes off running immediately how long has he even BEEN in cryosleep

THE END.

I made it 13 minutes.

Yesterday a friend asked me if I had any advice on writing without an outline. I’m a panster. For anyone who doesn’t know, writers are typically divided into two camps – plotters and pansters. A plotter knows everything down to the last detail. They have pages and pages (and pages) of outlines for the series, the novel, the current chapter. They know what everyone will wear in X scene. They are generally impressive creatures with a long-term battle strategy.

Pansters, like myself, cannot work this way. The way we write sounds either whimsical or downright ineffective to most people, especially hardcore plotters. “How can you work that way?” “I could never do that.” “Don’t you need /some/ kind of outline?” are all things I hear regularly when I’m asked about writing. The answer: No.

Once I have The Story in my head, I start writing. I don’t need an outline. I can’t use an outline – and believe me, I have tried and tried again to be a more organized, structure-oriented writer. “It’s supposed to make me more efficient,” I’ve wailed, staring at a notebook full of detailed plotting notes. But the truth is, for a true panster, overthinking your novel can kill it.

I generally find plotters and pansters are people who approach life differently – plotters are destination-minded, pansters are journey-minded.

I need a vague idea of the ending when I begin a book, but it may change several times during the story and take me completely by surprise because I don’t need the destination to be solid. The development of my characters is more important to me, and that takes time and I need to be surprised. The less I know about my characters when I start, the more I unravel along the way and the more natural it feels for me to write it.

However, I don’t believe pantsing is any easier than plotting. It has downfalls, like hitting a metaphorical wall and sitting back, wondering how on earth you’re supposed to fix the mess you’ve created for everyone. It means not being able to continue until that one detail clicks in your head, because everything else rests on it. It means spending much of your writing time thinking, instead of referring to pre-thought-out notes. It means having writer’s block – something I’ve noticed is less frequent in plotters. (There are those who completely wave aside the concept of pansters altogether, viewing us as flighty, un-dedicated beings without the backbone to sit down and plot out a story. The truth is, we get just as much done as plotters; we simply have different ways of going about it.)

So, now that we all know what pantsing is, I have a little advice I’ve gleaned over a decade of writing and making mistakes.

• Go with your gut. This is incredibly important when I’m writing. If there’s something I really, really want to write, something I know I need to write, it needs to be written. Whether it’s a novel or simply a plot point – when I ignore these deep-seated twinges, I regret it. Every single time.

• Write when you feel like writing. One endless difficulty in my life is that I never just have ‘creative energy’ – it’s always a very specific type of creative energy. If I feel the need to write, I can’t turn that energy into drawing energy, even when I try. When you feel a surge of writing energy, write if you can. If you can’t physically get to paper or a computer, let your mind do some writing instead. There is no shame in writing when the inspiration strikes, because inspiration is like a muscle – the more you use it, the more you have. Inspiration takes work, and is well worth it.

•  Because we work more from inspiration than notes, let yourself be inspired. Watch things. Read books. Listen to music. Go somewhere new and pay attention. Sometimes I wonder why I can’t just sit in my room for days on end and keep up an endless supply of inspiration. Inspiration needs to be stimulated, and you don’t get stimulation from doing nothing.

• Don’t put limits on your book. You are free (within moral boundaries) to write anything you like. Don’t be afraid to add X character because ‘he doesn’t fit’ or let the plot take a sharp turn. Remember, there’s a good movie about aliens and cowboys and people liked it. Besides, it’s a first draft – not the end of all things.

• That said, don’t write with a ‘first draft’ mindset. I used to, and it resulted in many novels that ‘needed a lot of rewriting.’ Did they ever get the rewrite? Not most of them. Write well. Write tightly. Give everything your best effort, because we pansters don’t like the thought of rewriting, revising, and editing and so going back and doing all those things seems like a very daunting task that results in abandoned first drafts. Write your first draft like it’s the last draft, like this is the version that’s going to hit shelves. (Note: In the first draft, I don’t mind things like typos or some awkward sentences because the act of technically editing doesn’t daunt me that much. Figure out what does daunt you, and do your best to thwart it in the first round.)

• Have beta readers who give active feedback. Not the beta readers who leave your chapter sitting in their inbox until they can get around to it – the readers you know will react to each chapter. This kind of encouragement is incredibly helpful and spurs us to write better and better, knowing a real person is out there waiting to see what happens next.

• Plot. Sometimes I need to sit there and figure out what happens in a certain chapter. Sometimes you can’t blindly push through and you need to take an extra step – BREATHE. It will be fine. Nobody will slide in and take away your panster card.

• Remember – half the great writers you know and love are, or were, pansters. If they could do it, so can you.

“I met a lot of things along the way that astonished me. Tom Bombadil I knew already; but I had never been to Bree. Strider sitting in the corner at the inn was a shock, I had no more idea who he was than had Frodo. The Mines of Moria had been a mere name; and of Lothlorien no word had reached my mortal ears till I came there. Far away I knew there were the Horse-lords on the confines of an ancient Kingdom of Men, but Fangorn Forest was an unforseen adventure. I had never heard of the House of Eorl nor the Stewards of Gondor. Most disquieting of all, Saruman had never been revealed to me, and I was as mystified as Frodo at Gandalf’s failure to appear on September 22.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien,

in a letter to W. H. Auden 7 June 1955

A while back a friend asked, “You know that quote that floats around, the ‘every villain is the hero of their own story’? Do you think that’s true?” More recently another friend mentioned he’d been reading a book on writing and the author had claimed,

“The antagonist needs to be developed well enough that you can understand how he thinks and what motivates him, but he doesn’t need to have a full character arc and undergo transformation, like your protagonist does.”

If any of you know me at all, you know that dug under my skin like a red-hot needle. Doesn’t need a full character ark? Developed ‘well enough’? I don’t just disagree, I disagree vehemently and I’m here to tell you why.

The world of entertainment overflows with examples of poorly-written villains. Shallow, one-dimensional characters with nothing better to do than take over the world, get rich, or kill the Hero for that one slight that one time fifteen years ago. Pick a standard villain from any Tom Cruise movie (if you can remember them). Did they leave much of an impression on you? Did you care about them? Were they anything more than a plot device, something for the Hero to overcome with cool gadgets and witty banter?

No?

How about any James Bond film? It’s the same problem, dressed up in even cooler gadgets and even more monologues (and probably the same nuclear codes).

Did you care about any of these villains? Probably not (if you did, I don’t know whether to feel bad for you or be impressed at your ability to care for all and sundry). ‘Okay, but Mirriam,’ you might say, ‘it really didn’t matter. I still enjoyed X movie.’

Fair point. BUT. Think about a movie or a book with a villain that was so complex, so well-written, so three-dimensional, that he stayed with you. That he added to the story, that you were almost disappointed to see him foiled or defeated. (I’m saying ‘he’ but this post could also, obviously, go for any villainess you think of.)

You can sit through and relatively enjoy any new Tom Cruise action flick, but when a villain is written with care, you take a ‘fun’ story and turn it into something emotional that stays with you, because it creates emotional conflict inside you, the reader/viewer. You become attached to the hero (hopefully he or she is well-written) but you’re also attached to the villain, and you anticipate and dread the climax of the story because you know one of them has to go down and it probably ain’t the hero.

Or say you felt no sympathy toward the villain, not really. Their actions were evil; you wanted to see them gone. You hated them. They were everything you despise and you railed against the book every time they succeeded or gained an upper hand.

Villains should make you feel something.

They should be more than plot devices. They should be more than factory-processed clones of one another, spouting the same dialogue and acting on the same motivations.

Your villain is also one of your characters. He’s not exempt. I hear young writers talk about their characters ‘and the villain’ as if he’s in some other box in a corner, not really part of the main crew, and that mindset is extremely detrimental to writing a good antagonist.

Because here’s the thing – YOUR VILLAIN SHOULD BE EXACTLY AS IMPORTANT AS YOUR MAIN CHARACTER.

He is a different type of character. He’s there for different reasons. But without him, you would have no story. Without him, your hero would have nothing to fight for and nothing to overcome.

When you write a shoddy, one-dimensional, lazy villain, you insult your hero and your own writing abilities. Your hero should have what it takes to go up against the very worst. You should have what it takes to write the very worst. Otherwise it’s a sign you don’t believe in your abilities – or the abilities of your main character.

Over the course of several upcoming blog posts, I’ll be talking about different types of villains – the good, the bad, the beautiful – and discussing what makes a memorable addition to your cast of characters. In the meantime –

Who is your favorite (or most hated) fictional villain of all-time?