First-person narration is tricky. It often suffers from several major problems.

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Reading through The Watchmen, I notice that they used Captain Carnage as a minor character.  Damn!  I loved that name.

We shortened our interactive quiz to 40 questions and about 20-30 minutes.  If you’d like to get published, give it a try!

I can definitely relate to the protagonist of this article.

Arizona State University student Alex Botsios said he had no problem giving a nighttime intruder his wallet and guitars.

When the man asked for Botsios’ laptop, however, the first-year law student drew the line.

“I was like, ‘Dude, no — please, no!” Botsios said. “I have all my case notes…that’s four months of work!”

Police said Gabriel Saucedo entered Botsios’ apartment through an open window early Thursday morning. When Botsios woke up, Saucedo threatened him with a baseball bat, police said.

He was just like, ‘I’m going to smash your head in,'” Botsios said.

At that point, the law student wrestled the bat away and began punching Saucedo, Botsios said.

“I basically grabbed him and threw him this way, and he held onto the bat so it threw him to the ground,” he said.

Police said they took Saucedo to the hospital for stitches before they arrested him on charges of armed robbery and kidnapping. Other than a bruised knuckle and a few scratches, Botsios was unharmed.

The controls worked pretty well, but the visuals and musics made this game a chore.

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When I’m reading a novel manuscript, immortal characters make me roll my eyes.   

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This is the music that plays on the insanely hard Battletoads bike level.  If you’ve never played this game, let me offer a taste of how ridiculously impossible it was.

If you’d like to comment on a movie, this is a good place to do so.  (We may relocate movie-related comments made elsewhere).

Some authors make or commission sketches about their novel so they can visualize it better.  That’s fine, but please do not include any in the query package you submit to a publisher.  (If you’re writing a graphic novel, please see this guide to graphic novel queries instead).

Art will probably not make your novel query seem more appealing!

1. It feels amateurish.
2. Publishers pick manuscripts based on the author’s ability to spin an interesting story, not on his ability to visualize the characters or make them look interesting.  Consequently, any art you included would distract from your most important qualities.
3. Even if you’d like to use your illustrations in a novel, publishers are wary about the cost of illustrations.  Author/illustrator Jane Eldershaw says that “it can be surprisingly difficult to talk publishers into using illustrations, even for non-fiction and gift books. I’d suggest (especially if you’ve never been published) that you not mention illustrations until you have a publisher who adores your prose. Then suggest they look at books that have been illustrated in the manner you envisage and wheedle.”
4. Do you have sample cover-art you’d like your publisher to consider? If so, please show it after your manuscript has been accepted.

Many stories create suspense by withholding important information (like the killer’s identity, in a mystery) until the end. But publishers usually reject works that are cryptic. How can you make your work intriguing (good) rather than cryptic (painful)?

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This story’s a little bit gross.

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Check this out.  The singing’s surprisingly good… the animation not so much.  I present to you “The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.”

Michael Crichton was one of the only modern novelists to have a lot of success with single-word titles.  He passed away today, so to commemorate his memory we have a one-word title for this parting post.

Occasionally, an author will breathlessly offer some revelation about a character’s origin.  (Luke and Leia are siblings!  Sylar is actually a Petrelli! That mysterious old man is actually a god!)  Secret origin stories are rarely effective.  If you’re doing a secret origin, here are the biggest potential concerns.  If you can avoid these, I think the secret has promise.

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OK.  We’re writing a rough draft of Superhero Nation for National Novel Writing Month.  If you’d like to beta-review our novel synopsis, we’d really appreciate that.  If you’ve already left an email or comment asking to be a beta-reviewer, we have also e-mailed this synopsis to you.

If you’re not sure what to write about, here are a few sample questions that may help you do a beta-review.

• What do you think about the characters?  How might we make them more interesting, likable and/or dramatic?
• Is the plot coherent?  How might we make it smoother?
• What are some ways we could draw the plot out without making it feel padded?

UPDATE: I’ve made a diagram showing plot-links between the characters.

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Are you in need of a writing exercise?  Try writing a story with one of these titles.

• Breakfast on the Rooftop
• The Dream of Centuries
• The Bride’s Got a Gun
• Man Down!
• Dancing in the Kitchen
• The Beginner’s Guide to Nuclear Apocalypse
• Bob’s College of Knowledge
• Weirdbeard, California

This is the first panel of the webcomic issue we’re planning to release on Friday.

It’s ridiculously hard to come up with unique superpowers, but let’s try this.  The ability to inflict blindness.  I suspect it would work pretty well in novels and comic books.

National Novel Writing Month starts in two days.  We’re going to finish our first novel manuscript.  We need beta-reviewers.

What this would entail: We’ll give you our novel’s outline, 2-3 pages describing what we envision happening throughout the book.  Over the course of the month, we will write chapters to bring that synopsis to life.  We’d like you to read these chapters and offer advice.  That might look like any or all of the following.

1. Suggest where we might go from there.  Do you have any ideas about what the next few chapters might look like?
2. Mention any glaring weaknesses in our story, characters, dialogue, plot, etc.
3. Suggest any possible improvements.

So, what’s in it for you?

1. Authorial networking. On any given day, I get between 30 and 40 manuscripts, comments and emails.  That’s on top of my writing, studying and thesis research.   So my time is really stretched.  However, if you help beta-review our work, I will assuredly make time for you.
2. Altruism. We really need the help.
3. Marketing. Your publisher may ask you to get other authors to review your work so that you can place favorable blurbs on the inside cover.  I’m not very fond of tying my credibility to other people’s work, but I’ll make an exception for a skilled author that has helped me in the past.

If you’re interested, please either leave a comment or e-mail us at bmckenzie05–at–gmail–dot–com.

Beginning authors tend to overuse “said bookisms,” which are words used to replace the word “said.”  For example, in the sentence “I’m ready!” he declared, declared is a said-bookism.

Using more than a few said-bookisms per page will probably make the dialogue feel melodramatic and stilted (“I’m hungry,” he uttered). Some common said-bookisms are potentially distracting because they aren’t actually a way to speak.  For example, “I knew you’d come back,” she smiled lazily conflates two actions: the speaking and the smiling.   No, she didn’t smile those words.  It would be clearer and probably more publisher-friendly to change the phrase to “she said with a smile” or give the two actions their own sentences.

Additionally, animal-sounds are unusually annoying.  It doesn’t take much of him clucking and her purring to sound absolutely ridiculous.

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If only I had realized that before picking it as the topic for a research paper.

If your characters are comfortable, chances are that the story isn’t doing anything interesting. “Could you pass me a crumpet, dearie?” Far too many manuscripts get bogged down in characters chatting. Scenes that focus on chatting are typically boring and pointless. Fortunately, you can easily fix these scenes by adding discomfort and conflict. What if the two conversants hated each other but couldn’t avoid talking? What if John and Margaret had utterly failed on a joint project at work and they could only keep their job by moving past what had gone wrong? Or what if John were obnoxiously, madly in love with Margaret? Suddenly the scene has potential. Dramatic possibilities abound.

Here’s a webcomic to help remind you to keep things uncomfortable.

You have 170 days to file your taxes.  Don’t be late!

Art taken from this artist at DA.

…but Summer Fun Cthulhu is rocking out in style!

This quiz will help you diagnose some common manuscript problems. If you’re not sure why your answer was right or wrong, please see our explanations either by waiting until the end of the quiz or hitting “previous question” during the quiz.

If this quiz helped you, submit it to Stumble!

Superhero parodies are very hard to write. Generally, you can’t parody something that treats itself as ridiculous to begin with.  This means that poking fun at ridiculous elements of superhero stories, like what superheroes wear, is usually unsuccessful. Fortunately, many elements have more comedic potential because the stories take them seriously.

1. Superhero origin stories have always been outlandishly tragic, but since roughly 1990 it has just been ludicrous. Instead of just watching his loved ones get murdered, the hero might get betrayed by the CIA, set on fire, sent to hell and then return as some sort of crazyass demon-hunter.

2. As superhero stories progress, the writers run out of material and the likelihood that the stories will take bizarre twists approaches 100%. He’s a clone! His parents were superspies! His aunt marries a supervillain! His girlfriend falls for a werewolf! He grows six arms! He writes his girlfriend out of history by making a deal with the devil! And that’s just Spiderman. Don’t even get me started on the total strangeness surrounding Jimmy Olsen.

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