Jul 31 2008
I'm a former assistant editor with advice about how to write novels, comic books and graphic novels. Most of my content applies to fiction-writing in general, but I also provide articles specifically about superhero stories.
We’ve added 12 articles and a new section on dialogue to our index of writing articles.
Jul 31 2008
Jul 30 2008
I wouldn’t recommend putting an animal in your title unless the animal actually features prominently in your book. No matter how obvious you think it is that Corporate Wolf is not actually about a Canis lupis, the red herring will throw off at least a few (and possibly many) of your readers. It would probably be worth your time to take out the animal name, particularly if your book will be on a shelf with fantasy or science fiction offerings.
Jul 30 2008
Archives are not a particularly effective way to organize your website’s content. A list of years and months doesn’t help readers figure out what sort of content your site offers. In contrast, listing a few of the categories you post in most frequently will help readers understand what your website offers. Archives are also inadequate because they’re daunting and impenetrable for new viewers. I wouldn’t recommend placing archives high in your sidebar, although you may that they are useful at the bottom because returning viewers like using them.
I recommend placing index pages ahead of archives. For example, readers that click on the entries in our Top Categories sidebar get sent to an index page where we tried to lay out our content intelligently. For example, our index of writing guides organizes 30 writing articles into seven sections, such as Characterization and Common Writing Mistakes. Readers can navigate through an index more easily than through a flood of articles thrown at them in no particular order. If readers can easily find the content that interests them, they are far more likely to actually read it.
What do you think? Which sites do you find particularly easy to navigate?
Jul 30 2008
Jul 29 2008
This article will help you write tight and effective dialogue, courtesy of Shut Up, He Explained.
Jul 29 2008
Fans of trippy science-fiction novels everywhere can rejoice that Neuromancer is getting a movie. In other good news, the movie poster shown by i09.com looks pretty stylish and suggests that it won’t be a remake of Swordfish.
The bad news is that Hayden Christensen, the same “actor” that ruined Star Wars and Jumper, is starring as Case. Dare I say that John Travolta could do this better? Egads. How could we have come to the point where John Travolta is the lesser of two acting evils? Hayden [censored]ing Christensen.
Jul 29 2008
It’s true! I read it in the Mineral Wells Index.
Jul 29 2008
The New York Times wrote an article on women bloggers titled Blogging’s Glass Ceiling, which they put in the “Fashion and Style” section. Comedically speaking, I don’t think there’s anything I can add to that.
Jul 28 2008
“You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.”
Nor can you sell a publisher a manuscript you haven’t written yet.* Get writing!
*Unless your past books have sold notably well, in which case I hate you.
Jul 28 2008
Unfortunately, summer is about to end in roughly two weeks. Cadet Davis has received a new-and-improved position as a writing instructor and I have eight months to complete a thesis and graduate. Accordingly, I don’t expect that we will be able to keep up the frenetic pace throughout the year. We will probably scale back to several thousand words of posts and 1 webcomic each week.
Jul 28 2008
If you’re interested in writing crime-based fiction, Modus Operandi: a writer’s guide to how criminals work is definitely worth your time. For example, if your police officer were investigating the theft of a truck and the merchandise inside, the book suggests considering these possibilities…
Jul 27 2008
Describing the weather sometimes helps develop the story’s mood and can emotionally affect the audience. However, I have a few main problems with the weather.
1. Authors tend to spend too much describing the weather independent of the characters. I recommend showing the characters interacting with the weather, ideally either raising the stakes or developing the character. If you’re writing a chase scene in the rain, one character might slip in a puddle as he’s trying to get away or struggle through the winds. Your protagonist’s wedding might be moved inside if it starts hailing, but if he’s stubborn enough maybe he’d refuse to move it.
2. Mentioning the weather in the first sentence of a book is rarely effective (“it was a dark and stormy night”). Your opening sentence has to convince readers to keep going and it’s difficult to imagine weather doing that. If you’d like to mention the weather anyway, I’d recommend using it to develop the lead character. For example, your opening sentence might be something like “Private Perkins hated the rain.” That’s not a great opening, but it uses the rain to faintly suggest that Perkins is unhappy because his life is boring and dour.
3. Please use weather in unexpected ways. Publishers have seen a lot of manuscripts that use dark storms to feel foreboding, or light-and-sunny weather to feel cheerful, or rain to feel sad and moody. When the guy finally gets the girl, why does it have to be sunny? I think it would be more dramatic if they passionately embraced in a light hail, myself.
Jul 25 2008
We have decided to take advantage of the thousands of hours we have spent reading frightfully bad submissions by compiling over 125 common mistakes into a questionnaire for first-time novelists. Give it a look!
Jul 25 2008
Writers use obscenities for the same reasons they put in exclamation marks: they want to show that a character means it. Like exclamation marks, obscenities quickly lose their impact and come to sound goofy with overuse.
To help illustrate how goofy obscenities can look, we’re offering a caption contest. Abuse obscenities to create a hilariously bad conversation between Agent Black and Agent Orange. (Agent Black is the guy on the left; by the process of elimination, Agent Orange is the mutated alligator).
Jul 25 2008
Today, a commenter at Nathan Bransford’s site said…
While I’m striving to write a book that I hope will be some kind of bestseller, I never forget that I’m also striving to write a book that *I* would want to read if I saw it on the shelf.
That is badly misguided. Whether you want to buy your book is irrelevant. You are not the audience of your book. Publishers do not want to publish a book for you. Publishers need to sell thousands of copies and they want books with that sort of appeal.
Authors that write a book they want to read tend to lose sight of the audience. I think that leads to self-absorbed and completely ineffective titles like “The Legend of Edarotag” and “Cimmeria’s Song*”. It may contribute to in-jokes and references that no one can relate to. As a rule, I think it’s safe to say that no one finds your interests as interesting as you do.
In conclusion, your career will probably be more successful if you forget about what you want to read and focus on finding what you can (and would be proud to) sell.
*These are both fictional titles (try reversing the letters in Edarotag). I hope that demonstrated how easily in-jokes can disgruntle mass audiences.
Jul 24 2008
1. Don’t let the contraction “there’s” lure you into grammatical traps. “There’s” means only “there is,” so it can’t be applied to plural nouns. I once asked an aspiring author if he really thought that publishers would want to buy a manuscript that he was pitching as “Tolkien in space.” “There’s many reasons to think they would,” he wrote back. That statement is incorrect (grammatically and otherwise).
2. Constructions like “there is” tend to create passive, slow sentences. For example, you might write “there are five buroughs in New York City.” It would be smoother to rewrite that as “New York City has five buroughs.”
Jul 22 2008
This short article will help beginning novelists avoid another five common mistakes that will usually cause publishers to throw out a manuscript.
Jul 21 2008
This short article will help beginning novelists avoid another five common mistakes that will usually cause publishers to throw out a manuscript.
Jul 21 2008
I loved the new Batman movie. I’d say that it was the best DC-licensed movie I’ve ever seen, but that would be damning it with faint praise. Although the action was low-key and frankly forgettable, the writing and side-characters really redeemed it. Instead of getting campy one-liners from the Joker, the script echoed The Lord of the Flies. It wasn’t exactly deep or insightful, but it was unexpectedly dramatic and entertaining.
Jul 20 2008
Beginning authors usually try to visualize objects by describing their color. Their characters have brown eyes and black hair and inhabit a world of green bushes and brown tables and grey clouds. Or, if they have a thesaurus on hand, maybe the grass will be emerald and the sky will be azure.
Color hardly ever suggests anything interesting about the character or object. For example, let’s say that my villain’s eyes are blue instead of green or brown. Who cares? Do blue eyes suggest anything about the character or advance the plot? If not, then the the detail is irrelevant and should be removed. Most color usage is irrelevant.
Jul 19 2008
Cadet Davis reviews and revises the titles of 30 manuscripts submitted to a writing workshop. This will help you evaluate and improve your titles.
Above Average
Jul 19 2008
I just got back from an art show where I was most impressed by the landscapes of Amy Taylor.
Jul 19 2008
I’m particularly fond of Gosmick Sans and Agency FB. Stay the hell away from Comic Sans, Times, Impact, and Helvetica. None of the default Microsoft Word fonts are particularly attractive. I recommend browsing through a free-font website like 1001 Free Fonts. I’ll have more thoughts on this later.
Jul 18 2008
It is tempting to write historical celebrities into any historically themed work (“look, there’s Winston Churchill!”). If you do so, please avoid these common mistakes.
Jul 17 2008
It’s time for our monthly header update. I’m embarrassed to admit that I drew some inspiration from the writers of the computer game Mass Effect… Continue Reading »
Jul 17 2008
I read a story today that started with the sentence “This story has to begin with a small lesson in geography.” First, starting a story with a geography lesson will earn you an instant rejection (see question #8 under the fantasy subheading). But I was almost as annoyed by the self-referential “this story.” When you remind the reader he’s reading a book, it’s harder for him to immerse himself in the fantasy.
Jul 17 2008
Cadet Davis reviews and revises the titles of 30 manuscripts submitted to a writing workshop. This will help you evaluate and improve your titles.
Above Average
Jul 17 2008
Vanity Fair had one of its journalists get waterboarded. Without getting bogged down in political and ethical debates, I think this piece is useful even for authors, even the authors of sword-and-spells fantasies. Could learning to write barrages of vivid and lurid imagery help your story? If so, keep reading.
Jul 16 2008
This article gives nine tips to writing a title that grips readers and sells your book.
1. Tell us enough about the book to make us want to read it. This is what separates bland, forgettable titles like The Dragon from classics like His Majesty’s Dragon. The more we can surmise about the plot, the better.
2. Do not use imaginary place names. Readers haven’t heard of Asgardia, Lukawanda, or whatever your fictional kingdom or city is called. Your invented words won’t interest us because they don’t mean anything to us. The only place names that will attract prospective readers are those that use English words, like the Temple of Doom. We can guess what a temple of doom is.
Jul 16 2008
Cadet Davis reviews and revises the titles of 30 manuscripts submitted to a writing workshop. This will help you evaluate and improve your titles.
Above Average
Jul 15 2008
Just because a character has an accent doesn’t mean he has to ruin all of his scenes. This article describes how to keep your characters from sounding like Hagrid.
Jul 14 2008
Empty interjections, like the word “well,” should rarely start a sentence. As a rule, if you can take out the first word of a sentence, it’s probably a good idea to do so. You should never waste words, but it’s particularly dangerous to do so at the beginning of sentences.
Here are some common offenders:
Jul 14 2008
Don’t have your characters spend too much time musing about events that have already happened in the story.
When characters are preoccupied with something that’s already happened, the author has probably lost track of where the story is going. You can give your story forward momentum by drawing our attention to what’s just around the corner. If someone tried to kill the protagonist yesterday, we will care more about what the assassins are planning for tomorrow than what the character thinks about the attack today.
If you are interested in building on what has already happened in the story, it will probably be more effective to try to have your characters investigate the mystery. But an investigation is very different than just musing with your friends and confidantes. An investigation will add evidence, either by looking for clues or trying to get witnesses to talk. Investigations are superior to musing because the search for information adds more to the story than just talking about what has already happened. (There’s also more potential for conflict, particularly if someone’s trying to sabotage the search).
Here are a few common scenarios that frequently lead to characters musing about the past.
Jul 14 2008
The Associated Press describes a California town that is so xenophobic that it has a vigilante “Border Patrol” tear down all the road signs that might help motorists find it. What a delightfully gruesome detail. Would you like a writing assignment? Write a detail that describes a fundamental flaw of a place or character. The more flavor, the better.
Jul 11 2008
The authors that try to present political or religious opinions usually confuse their opinions with insights. How is your message different from what people have already heard about abortion? For example, your readers have already heard many people chant “abortion is good” and “abortion is bad.” Is your story just another voice in the chorus or will it actually add something? Why will anyone care about your opinion? Do you have any unique perspective on the subject material? Do you have relevant professional or scholarly experience? Are you personally affected by the issue? Etc.
Jul 11 2008
Authors shouldn’t tell cue their readers to laugh. Consider the following comedic exchange. “What’s the difference between the Yankees bullpen and Pizza Hut?” asked John. Mary shrugged. “Pizza Hut delivers,” said John. They laughed. “They laughed” cues the readers to laugh at John’s joke.
That’s insulting to your readers. If your comedy is effective, readers will know when to laugh. Reminding them to laugh at something that wasn’t funny to them will just draw their attention to ineffective writing.
Here are some situations that are usually examples of laugh-tracking:
Jul 11 2008
According to TV Tropes, the CSI Effect is “the growing tendency of juries to refuse to convict if the prosecution fails to provide comprehensive crime scene analysis, even in trivial cases,” because of the influence of forensic crime scene dramas. Now, prosecutors sometimes try to weed out jurors that have watched CSI. That’s where conversations like this one come from…
Prosecutor: Have you ever watched CSI before?
Prospective Juror: Yes.
Prosecutor: Do you think crime scene investigation really works like that?
Jul 11 2008
Although I think the name comes off as a kitschy attempt at Real Ultimate Power, ultimately I think Dr. McNinja is far superior to RUP. Plus, because McNinja is a webcomic, it has graphics. Suitably badass graphics, of course.
Jul 10 2008
Gimmicky writing is when a writer tries something “new” that annoys readers, rather than actually giving a better reading experience.
Jul 10 2008
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