Recently, I've discovered a lot of misconceptions on what makes a book sizzle. With Harlequin Temptation starting their newest promotion, Temptation: BLAZE, the hotter Temptations, we have to assume that a great number of readers want steamy books, and Harlequin is filling a demand. My next book will be the first in the Blaze promotion, so I've received a lot of queries on what makes my stories different from other Temptations.

Many people seem to assume the number of love scenes or the "dirty" language involved makes a book hot. Nothing could be further from the truth. Dialogue standing on its own is meaningless. But dialogue that's part of well drawn characterization tells so much. It gives insight into the person, depicts feelings and insecurities and often, even background. So it isn't the language, but who's using the language -- and in what situation -- that is sensual.

And no matter how many love scenes you have between strangers, you won't find a high level of steamy sensuality. It could be sexual, yes, but there wouldn't be an emotional commitment, a building of acute tension, if you didn't know what the two involved characters had to lose, what their conflicts and needs were.

So if there is only one truly discernible element that makes a book more sensual than another, it would have to be the characters. But we make the characters, right? Sure we do. Which means we must chose to be very sensual. If we decide to depict a character who is by nature a sensualist, and we use good characterization, then we've created a "hot" book.

But rather than provide you with only my humble opinion, I decided to call on some of the experts, authors known for the level of sensuality in their books, and other new authors who are establishing themselves as sensual writers. I wanted to give different perspectives, to allow you to see the different angles of sensualities and how different authors go about building the sensual tension readers crave.

A personal favorite of mine, both as a wonderful person and a fabulous writer, Stella Cameron is well known for the sizzling sexual tension in her mainstream historicals and contemporaries. Her characters come alive as real people -- and that, Stella claims, is the key.

"What makes one writer's work more sensual than another's?" Stella asks. "Nothing that can be listed on a handout. From time to time we hear someone say, Don't take negative criticism of your work personally. It's what you've written that's being judged, not you. Garbage. Characters make our stories, and we make our characters. No, I don't believe they simply pop off and act alone -- with the aid of our nimble fingers -- and we have no control over them. Our characters come from us, from who we are as individuals. Bits and pieces of ourselves, mixed with bits and pieces of a whole heap of people we've observed or known, come down on the paper in those characters.

"So the answer is that if our stories are more sensual than some others (and this has little or nothing to do with the success of a book) it's because, with the particular mix of characteristics we have personally, and use from experience with others, we are sensual on paper.

"Language (dialogue) has everything to do with voice, the writer's and the character's. Crude language is never sensual. It can certainly be sexual, but if I'm to address the way I use language, and this is the example I understand best, then my absolute rule is that each character has a unique voice, and that I don't waver from that voice. My tough guy ain't gonna say, Shucky darn fellas, I think I'm gonna have to pinch you if you won't be nice. For this medium, I won't write what he would say, but be assured that I'd have no compunction about putting him firmly in voice. The slick, misogynistic womanizer forcing an encounter with a woman doesn't say, You make me feel different. You make me feel I want to be all I can be -- for you. I want to make love to you in a thousand different ways and I'm not sure where I want to start. Kid, if I can't have you, I'm going to be in pain -- and I don't have to explain where.

"You might say, well, he's made some pretty direct comments. But he's a 1997 kind of guy and, for my book, he's hero material. But Mr. Misogynist is going to express his intentions and plans quite differently -- that's when the basic language may come in."

True to her word, Ms. Cameron's characters are all unique and alive and vital. Her dialogue is as real as it gets, and always suits not only the characters, but their time period and the situations they're in. Ultimately, her books are very sensual because her characters are very sensual -- and human.

I don't do historicals. I wish I could, but it's not a talent I possess. I write contemporary novels, and I live in a contemporary world. Language has changed, both formal and colloquial. What a man of today feels, and how he expresses those feelings, is what makes a book sensual. I don't use "dirty" language. Neither do my heroes. But when used in context to the situation, the speaker's frame of mind, and the time period, much of slang can be highly sensual. My heroes, especially in sexual situations, are not shy, reserved men. They're men who know what they want, and aren't afraid to ask for it -- or go after it.

But long before the heroine is aware of what the hero wants, the reader must know.

As Paula D'Etcheverry, who writes as Pamela Ingrahm puts it, "It's the emotional responses sparked in the hero and heroine that eventually translates into the physical. Just physical sex doesn't do it for me. I want mind sex before body sex."

It's up to the author to depict the characters' sexual tension, to maintain that tension by keeping the reader in the characters' thoughts, attuned to their feelings, and to let the reader know exactly how badly these people want and need each other. When the hero and heroine do come together, it should be a culmination -- each and every time -- not just a stepping-stone scene. Gratuitous sex is never sensual.

We, as writers, must also keep in mind that the hero is a hero, and therefore must be sensitive to the heroine's needs and desires. I'm currently working on a book where the heroine suffered a rape when she was much younger. Yes, the hero wants her, very much in fact, but he's forcing himself to go at her pace, to judge her reactions and anticipate her needs. He wants her enough that he's willing to hand over all sexual control, to literally put himself at her mercy, something he's never done before. But it reassures her, and works perfectly to build incredible sexual tension. This particular hero is very sensitive, especially to womens' issues. It's part of his characterization, therefore a necessary part of the plot.

Deborah Camp emphasizes this idea. She says the sensuality is left up to her heroes. "He must know instinctively what my heroine needs and wants from him. If she is shy, he must know what to do to make her experience more freeing for her. If she needs to laugh, he provides the jibes and jests. If she doesn't need to talk, but only be shown how to love him, then he keeps quiet and lets his hands and mouth and other body parts do the talking. He also knows what to say to her before and after to put her at ease and make her understand that she's his one and only, that this union is as important and as cherished for him as it is for her."

Now, in an actual story, the hero may be showing the heroine all this, without even knowing it himself. By his actions, and through well placed introspection, we allow the reader to see the hero's emotions, until he can finally figure things out for himself. Knowing a hero is falling in love before he even knows it adds to the sexual tension. It's another climax for the reader to work toward, another reason to keep turning the pages.

Which brings me to another topic that's often misunderstood. The number or placement of sex scenes. Where do you put that first important sex scene to make the book more sensual? No, there are no hard fast rules. Deb Stover summed it up nicely. "We often hear comments about what point in a novel the first love scene should occur. Everyone has an opinion about this. Too early ruins the sexual tension. Too late leaves the reader frustrated. Wrong! There is only one rule a writer must remember, and it applies to all good fiction: Be true to character.

"The placement and explicitness of love scenes must be completely dependent on character. Forced adherence to non-existent rules and guidelines will make the intimacy seem forced and unsatisfying. If it's right for the characters to have hot sex early in the book and it's related to their conflict throughout, then go for it. If it works, it works. By the same token, some wonderful books don't have a love scene until near the end, or not at all. Not all books or characters are destined for sizzle and heavy breathing. That's okay, too!"

I also like to add that many very sensual books don't have a love scene until midway through the book, or even toward the end. The loves scenes themselves often aren't as important as building to the scene. A lot of really sexy, heated activity can go on -- and should go on -- before the actual intercourse. Building the need and desire between the hero and heroine is vital, so that the sensuality is then a part of them.

Lee Smith wrote, "I read somewhere that the hands-down most sensual scene in movies was Brett carrying Scarlett up those stairs. And then it was morning. It certainly was hot anyway."

The reason that scene was hot? Characterization. Brett and Scarlett behaved exactly how we hoped and expected they would. And without "seeing" what occurred, we knew, because we knew the characters. There had been a carefully developed "build-up" to the culmination. So the scene was satisfying, even without graphic inclusion.

So to sum up, you don't need a given number of sex scenes, or a certain type of language, to make a book steamy. There is no formula or description to a racier novel. All you need are sensual characters who remain in character. Keep them true, and they'll do all the work for you.

© 1997

by Peggy Moreland

In his book SECRETS OF SUCCESSFUL FICTION, Robert Newton Peck suggests that, " . . . a good author writes with a camera, not a pen." Let's consider, then, that if the author's eye is the camera, then his/her paper is the theater screen. What the author imagines or "sees" must be transmitted to the paper in such a dramatic way that the reader feels he/she is actually a part of the scene they're reading, experiencing it and seeing it in a physical sense.

In plotting our stories, we choose appropriate scenes to depict in the most dramatic way possible the message we wish to convey to our reader. These scenes are comprised of both action and setting, and it is our job to describe both in such a vivid way that our readers feel a part of the scene, that they have a sense of "place." If it's a love scene we are creating, our goal is to arouse our reader's romantic interest. This can be accomplished through several different techniques, one of which is setting. Through our ability to create and describe, setting itself can--and should--take on romantic tones.

When creating a scene, I choose a setting that is reflective of my characters' personalities and the story I'm telling, and I use the setting to enhance the action and to set a mood. Once I've decided on a location--whether it is a barnyard or a bedroom--I do a quick inventory of the setting and list everything that makes up that room or area. These are the things that I will have to work with in writing the scene, the props my characters will have available for use.

For means of demonstration, let's pretend we are writing a love scene and we are using a bedroom for the scene. Picture the bedroom lit with candlelight. Romantic music is playing softly from hidden speakers. A bottle of wine is sitting on the bedside table, uncorked. A crystal vase of freshly cut roses fills the room with its flowery scent. Satin sheets, cool to the touch, but soft on the skin, cover the bed. A fire crackles in a nearby fireplace and adds its own golden glow to the dimly lit room.

If we break this setting down into the simplest components, physically we have a bed, a nightstand, a vase of roses, candles, an uncorked bottle of wine, a fireplace.

Now let's take this one step further and sensually examine each of the physical components of the room, using the five senses. In the scene above, we have the soft glow of candlelight which casts a golden hue on everything in the room and which creates playful shadows on the wall. We have the heat from the fire, the smell of burning wood tangling with that of the scent of freshly cut roses. Beads of condensation pearl on the wine bottle and pool at its base. A cork lies discarded and forgotten on the carpeted floor. We have the crackling sound of burning wood shifting on the grate, the soothing sound of piano music. You have the flavor of the wine which the lovers will taste on each other's lips, the sensuous warming of the satin sheets as they move over them.

Add to this setting the emotions produced by our ability to arouse through action and we've placed our reader in the ultimate vicarious experience. The physical removal of clothing alone can be sensuous and titillating if paced well and described in such a way that the reader can visualize, almost feel the action.

If we are successful, the reader becomes a part of the love scene. She feels the scrape of silk against her own flesh when the hero slips the nightgown's thin strap over the heroine's shoulder, and the warmth of his hand as he drags it slowly down the heroine's arm. Goose bumps pebble her skin when the hero's fingertips skim the heroine's bare flesh. It is her breath that catches when the warmth of the hero's mouth closes over the heroine's exposed breast. And it is her sigh that blends with the soft music playing, her hands that circle the hero's neck to draw him closer.

This is just an example and a quick one, but I think you get the idea.

Warning: Don't set up setting! Have you ever read a particular passage of narrative and thought to yourself, "Boring. Where's the good stuff?" If so, and if you're like me, you probably start skimming until the story picks back up again. In my opinion, if a reader can pick out a paragraph or a section of dialogue and peg it as description or setting, then the writer isn't doing his/her job well. Feed setting to your reader in small doses and through a natural balance of narrative and action. And don't use description just to establish setting. Use it to carry the action forward, too.

Let's think back to that cameraman again and the tools he has to work with. In his camera bag, he probably carries a wide angle lens and a zoom lens, depending on what scene he's trying to capture. A writer has available to him/her these same tools.

Remember the movie "Paint Your Wagon?" Remember the opening scene? A wide panoramic view of prairie with miles of covered wagons stretched out across it, juxtaposed against a backdrop of wide blue sky. The opening scene in your book might be similar in that you are painting a grand view of the setting in order to give your reader a sense of "place." But use caution. Do not overload your reader with every detail that your wide angle lens offers. Just give them enough information to develop a sense of place, of time, then switch to your zoom lens and go for detail.

A handy tool to keep beside your computer or work area is an empty toilet paper roll. You know, the little cardboard tube. And, no, I'm not crazy. Use the tube as your zoom lens. Pick it up and look through it. You won't see much, but that's the point. This lens restricts your vision to one spot of something at the end of the tunnel, forcing you to focus there. Pick your scene, look through your zoom lens, zero in on the setting and the action taking place in that small spot and write what you see. If you do, and you apply the five senses to what you see, your writing will come alive with texture, color, flavor and sound.

To recap:

Establish the scene.

Create the setting, making note of all physical components.

Apply the five senses to each physical component and establish sensory detail.

Balance description between narrative and dialogue, remembering not to overload your reader with detail.

Use your description to move the plot forward.

Give your characters props to work with that are a natural part of the setting.

Use the tools in your camera bag, both the wide angle lens and the zoom lens, where appropriate, but use them with care.

© 1997 Peggy Moreland

by Lori Handeland

In his book HOW TO WRITE A DAMN GOOD NOVEL II, James Frey refers to rewriting as 'Re-dreaming the dream.' We dream the dream when we write the first draft, but only those who are able to re-dream that dream can hope to achieve publication.

Self editing is a very important aspect of re-writing. It is the last thing a writer does before sending the manuscript off to their agent or an editor. I look at self-editing as a final housecleaning chore. Not a lot of fun in itself, but don't you feel good when you're done?

I always do a final edit with a hard copy. There are so many things you won't see by reading your manuscript off a computer screen--beside the problem of going blind from reading an entire book that way. The printed word needs to be read, as it was meant to be read, on paper, so you can see the mistakes--and hear any with your inner ear. There is a flow that comes with a well written, well rewritten, well edited manuscript that you can hear when you read it. You must also be able to see your work as an editor or agent will see it. Too much introspection or narrative all in a row with no breaks for dialogue or adequate paragraphing makes a reader skip ahead for some excitement. Sometimes you don't notice this until you read your hard copy in the self-editing stage.

In the self-editing stage, I ask myself the following questions.

Are you telling instead of showing?

Showing keeps up your sense of immediacy and pace. The following is an example of the same passage from my next Love Spell release Dreams of an Eagle. The first is telling, the second, showing.

Telling: Genny heard chanting. The wind rushed about her ankles. Lightning struck nearby. Thunder shook the yard and woke the dog. He snarled.

OR:

Showing: The sound of chanting filled the yard, riding a sudden gust of wind that picked up Genny's skirts and swirled them about her ankles. The ground shuddered with heavenly thunder. Lightning flashed, close enough for her nostrils to flare with the heat. The dog started up from his sleep in the yard; a low, evil snarl erupted from his throat.

The only time when telling is better than showing is when you want the reader to experience the repetitive action in the same way your character does. For instance:

"The nights were too short after endless days spent experiencing West Texas from the back of a horse." We don't show every day--we don't need to--they're all the same.

Remember the RUE rule--R.U.E.--resist the urge to explain. Show a character's emotions by his or her actions instead of explaining how they feel:

Joanna was very, very angry.

Should be changed to:

Joanna slammed her palm onto the table. The china cup fell off the edge and shattered. She didn't notice.

Are you establishing your character gradually and unobtrusively?

Avoid thumbnail sketches in the author's point of view whenever a new character steps into your book.

Karen had a smooth walk and a jaunty way of talking that made everyone adore her.

Instead use action, dialogue or the thoughts of others to characterize. In the following from my novel D.J.'s Angel, the hero sees the heroine for the first time:

Despite the anger in the woman's stride, her face reflected no such emotion. Fascinated, Chris stared at her. Tall and lean, she carried herself with a confidence found only in women well able to defend themselves. Her russet hair had been cropped close to her head, short enough to remove the curls, but not enough to erase a natural wave. Fine bones defined a regal face that matched her bearing. Ivory skin that would have looked pale on someone else did not dare on this woman.

She stopped short, just inside the door, and glared at her band of followers.

"No comment," she snapped, staring down those who would have questioned her further. Surprisingly, the media backed off.

In this example we get a physical description through the hero's viewpoint and a character analysis from three sources: his thoughts of her, her words and manner and the media's reaction to her. The description is worked into the action of the scene and the thoughts of a character rather than being apart from the story--extraneous information obviously implanted by the author.

Do you impart information on the character on a need to know basis? If the reader doesn't need to know--don't tell her.

Are your characters speaking information that they wouldn't normally speak to another person? For example:

"Hi, Joe. I'm so glad to see you're not working at the wastewater treatment plant today. I suppose that's because of the beautiful, but unusual, 80 degree weather on a Wisconsin spring day."

Is your point of view consistent?

If you decide to use more than one POV per scene, use them for longer than one sentence and make sure the transitions flow. Personally I only use one POV per scene to avoid this problem. I also feel that every time you change POV you lose the tension you've gained for that scene. But that's a whole other topic. For this topic, check to make sure you're consistent in the approach you use. If you notice the change or stumble over it, you can be certain a reader will.

Is your POV established in the first sentence of the scene?

When you describe the surroundings, are you describing them in words your POV character would use? Would a rough and tough 1800's guy think like this?

He looked out over the gilded mountains and gave a sigh of ecstasy. He'd never seen anything so exquisite. Fushia flames shot from behind the indigo hills, giving voice to the advent of dawn.

I don't think so. Not only must your dialogue sound like a character's words, but make sure the thoughts do, too. A western outlaw's view of Wyoming will be a whole lot different than that of a 20th century man.

Are your dialogue mechanics sophisticated? (reflect adequate knowledge of proper writing technique)

Avoid 'ly'.

. . .she snapped, angrily.

If you're snapping, you're angry. Look for the verb that will get your point across without needing an adverb to qualify.

Get rid of any attributions unnecessary to understand who's speaking.

Use 'said' whenever possible. It fades into the background and is ignored by most readers.

People cannot snort, laugh or grimace words.

Try using action to tell who's speaking instead of attributions.

'Just leave me alone.' Genny turned away with a swirl of her skirts.

Remember ellipses . . . are for gaps and dashes for interruptions.

Have you checked for breaks?

Read your dialogue out loud to make sure your characters aren't talking on and on. Most people don't. Except when giving speeches.

Look for passages that run for more than 1/2 a page--too many words without dialogue will loose readers. The reader feels lectured to, crowded. A page without white space is visually uninviting. A reader will skip to a place with less text looking for some action.

Paragraphing can add tension to a scene. A one line paragraph can make an important point. This is an example from FULL MOON DREAMS, my July Love Spell release:

The guilt over Peter's loss haunted John still. Moments before they'd marched off to war with the 26th Wisconsin, John had sworn to his father he would watch out for Peter. And he had, throughout countless small battles and skirmishes with no names. They'd even survived the blood bath at Gettysburg. John dreamed about the battle yet: the screams of the injured and dying within the surgeon's tent where he worked, the canon fire and gunshots on the hills and forests outside the tent, the horrible silence when the fighting ceased and so many thousands lay slaughtered. He and Peter had survived every battle, still John had returned home without his little brother. He hadn't seen Peter since Lee surrendered to Grant and everyone went home.

Everyone except Peter.

That one sentence paragraph shows a lot about John's feelings for the loss of his brother.

Just as short paragraphs add tension, paragraphing less frequently creates a more relaxed mood.

Have you checked for unintentional repetition?

Do two chapters accomplish the same end?

Is a character described more than once?

Is the same word repeated too closely together? More than once in a sentence or in a couple of sentences.

Are you using common redundancies we've come to gloss over in our language. gathered together, sank down, climbed up, widow woman--and countless others. If one word will do it, use one.

Have you checked for sophistication throughout the novel?

Check action clauses that use 'ing' or 'as.' For example:

Disappearing into my tent, I put on jeans.

This is impossible. 'Ing' or 'as' clauses indicate parallel action. Make sure the two actions connected by these clauses can be done at the same time.

Remove all the its, thats, was's and hads you can. They weaken your narrative. You can't take them all out, but if you remove the ones you can, you'll be ahead.

Remove 'ly' verbs and replace with action words. For example:

Angrily she set the plate on the table.

Change to:

She slammed the plate on the table.

Beginning a sentence with 'there' makes the sentence wordy and weak. For example:

There was a man with one blue shoe and one brown shoe standing at my front door.

Change to:

The man standing at my front door wore one blue shoe and one brown shoe.

Do you have:

Too many italics?

Too many exclamation points?

Too many metaphors?

Too much profanity?

These items are most effective when used sparingly. Use them too often and they lose their impact.

Have you checked your general mechanics?

Check spelling with a spell check. If you don't have one, get one.

Make sure you are using the right form of the word.

their/there/they're

its/it's

who's/whose

On a final read through check for:

Two periods per sentence.

Two spaces between words.

Words your spell check missed. For instance, you've typed 'her' instead of 'here.' Your spell check won't get this because 'her' is spelled correctly, even though it's not the right word.

I'd like to suggest the following resources, which I used to compile this speech:

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Rennie Brown and Dave King

How to Write a Damn Good Novel and How to Write Damn Good Novel II, James Frey

Laura Baker's Style articles in the July, September, November '95 Romance Writers' Reports.

Self editing involves an ability to look at your work with an impersonal eye. For some this can be difficult. The best thing to do is to let your completed manuscript sit for a month, then go back and do a final edit. Time and distance can give you a clearer view of your dream. Always remember that the best books are not written, they are re-written. Also remember that books are never bought unless they are submitted. So do your rewriting, your self-editing and when you feel you've done all you can--send that book in and let me be the first to say--good luck.

by Roger MacBride Allen

Introduction

Some years ago, I had a chat with a man who repaired high-end fax machines for a living, back when fax machines were still a bit of a mystery to most people. He reported the appalling statistic that fully 95 percent of the service calls he made were unneeded, because the consumers could have fixed their problems with no help from him. Nineteen out of twenty calls involved such technical challenges as machines out of paper, machines not plugged in, machines not hooked up to a phone line, and machines not turned on. In short, if these folks had used their plain common sense and been willing to read and follow instructions, they would not have needed to call for repairs. The bad news, of course, was that the legitimate service calls only received five percent of the available time and attention of the repair technicians. The folks who needed the help most were denied it thanks to the people who did NOT need help and yet screwed up anyway.

It is in the spirit of preventing such needless service calls that I offer this list of mistakes made in writing. To the degree that you can avoid these standard deviations, you-- and your editor and workshop partners -- will be able to spend more time on other issues of greater substance.

Read over this list. Understand what these errors are, and try and see how they can get you into trouble. Learn to avoid them. I promise you that getting past these errors will represent at least half the battle of becoming a writer. Learning the craft of writing consists in large part of learning how not to do these things.

I have schlepped through a lot of student manuscripts in a lot of venues. I would estimate that the errors listed below comprise at least 90 percent of the problems I encounter. Most are fairly simple to avoid if you are aware of them, and can be easily fixed, once you know how to spot them.

Errors Of Style

The first errors I will discuss are in the area of how a story is written, rather than in what the story is about. You might also call these errors of structure: These are errors involving the structure of the story -- how it is put together, and the parts used to put it together.

1. Passive voice. This is the single most common error. More people make this mistake, and make it more often, than any other error in the writing of fiction. Let me rephrase that sentence, so as to illustrate the problem: This is the mistake most commonly made in all fiction. Note that in my second rendition, no one makes the mistake. It is simply "made." It is not clear that it is a mistake in writing. You could interpret the second rendition to mean that readers make the mistake. In passive voice, nothing is ever anyone's fault, because people do not do things. Things happen to people. "Irving ate the food" is active. "The food was eaten" is passive. Note that Irving has vanished completely. The food and the action of eating are made more important than the person who does them.

Writers most often drop into passive voice when they are unsure of themselves, when they don't want anything bad to happen to one of their characters, when they don't want their characters to do anything bad.

Remember that you story is all happening on paper. You can change everything later with a stroke of a pen. Don't be afraid. Be bold and adventurous. If you make a mistake, you can fix it later. If you kill a character, you can bring her back to life in the next draft. If your character commits a murder, you can give him a really good lawyer.

Note that passive voice cannot -- and need not -- be completely eliminated. See previous sentence for an example. There are times when it works.

2. Inappropriate use of summary narration. This is closely related to passive voice -- the two errors frequently overlap each other. Summary, or indirect narrative is the flip side of the coin from direct narration. You sum up events, tell about them, rather than show them. As anyone who has ever stayed awake in a writing class knows, you should strive to show as much as possible, and tell as little.

Direct narrative:

Henry walked toward downtown. He turned left on Smith Street. He stopped into Joe's Diner and he sat at his favorite stool. He ordered a ham sandwich for lunch, and made sure to smile at the waitress... (etc.)

Summary narrative:

Henry went out to lunch. Then he went back to work.

The first version is appropriate when you want to report on all of Henry's actions and his going to Joe's will have some impact on the story. The second is appropriate when the walk and the meal -- and perhaps the character -- are of secondary importance. Perhaps you, the writer, merely want to get Henry out of the way so Bob can be alone in the office to rifle through Henry's files.

3. Point of view errors & poor (or random) POV selection.

A good, solid rule of thumb: One scene, one point of view (POV) character. Jumping from one POV to another is downright confusing. If we readers have been inside Ned's head for the whole scene, then we are going to be really thrown if we are suddenly in Ted's head, hearing his thoughts and seeing Ned from Ted's point of view. If the point of view has shifted, and then the POV character turns and speaks to Ed, the reader will have no way of knowing if it is Ted or Ned speaking.

Allied with this mistake is the failure to chose an appropriate POV character for a given scene. Don't launch into a scene -- or a story or a book -- without due and careful consideration of the POV character. Who is the appropriate character? Who will have the most illuminating reaction, the most useful things to say, in a given scene? Whose thought would be most worth listening to for the scene in question? See: Bad Planning.

A side-bar, on an issue worthy of discussion on its own: Bear in mind that the narrator, the point of view character, and the protagonist can often be three different people.

4. Poor choice of tense and person.

You have three basic choices in tense: past, present, and future. Three more in person: First, second, or third. Eighty or ninety percent of all fiction is written in the past tense, third person, with most of the remainder written in past tense, first person. However, there are times when it makes sense to write in the second-person, present tense, or first-person, present tense (I just did a story in first present myself.) Each tense and person has its strengths and weaknesses, a subject beyond the scope of this list of mistakes. Suffice to say that a wise writer will consider the options carefully before choosing which to use. The foolish writer will launch into a story in whatever tense and voice pops into the writer's head (See: Bad Planning), or will write in plural second person future tense just to prove it can be done (See: Show-Off Experiments).

5. Time-control errors. The most common variant of this is the needless flashback. I have seen stories that started with a flashback, then jumped forwards in time 30 seconds. What's the point? I am convinced that a great many flashbacks happen because the writer has read lots of books with a flashback and felt the need to conform to a literary convention. Yes, flashbacks can be cool, and dramatic, and exciting. But bear in mind that part of the reason they induce a sense of drama is that they cause confusion and uncertainty. They are intended to make the reader wonder "What the hell is going on?" and read further. But drama based on bafflement and doubt is a tricky thing. Far too often, flashbacks merely make the reader wonder "What the hell?" and give up in befuddlement. Straight flashbacks are only the start of it, of course. I have seen many manuscripts that included flash forwards, a quick "meanwhile" to another locale, a jump back to before the flashback, maybe a dream sequence, and then back into real time. I have seen stories that were little more than nested flashbacks, one inside another, like a Russian doll.

Bear in mind that you, the writer, know more than the reader does about your story. (At least you damn well better know more.) You will be clearer on the state of play than the reader. But just because you know what is going on doesn't mean anyone else will.

Good rule of thumb: The reader will get unstuck in time before the writer does. See: Information Not on the Page.) An even better rule of thumb: Do not violate straight chronology without a good reason. Ask yourself: What purpose is served in the story by violating chronology? Does it make things more exciting? Does it clarify something? Or does it just confuse the hell out of everyone?

6. Unnamed characters. Of all the errors, this one puzzles me most. I cannot understand why people commit it so often. I suppose that it is out of a desire to induce a sense of drama, but it rarely works.

The classic example would be a twenty-page story, wherein we follow around a nameless protagonist for 15 of those pages. At long last, it is revealed, with high drama, that her name is -- "Jane." Wow. Or it could be any other name to which neither real life nor the story has attached any special significance. There is nothing surprising in a person's name. Everyone has a name. Revealing that your lead character has one too, and even revealing what that name is, will not likely shock anyone. The ONLY reason to avoid revealing a character's name is if you are doing one of those tired old things where there is a misfit little Austrian boy nearly hit by a horsecart. His life is saved by a kindly Jew and we find out the kid's name is --(what a shock!) Adolf. Even this is a rather tired old gimmick. (I have lost track of the number of stories I have read wherein a character later turns out to be A.H.)

The nameless character would be a harmless trifle were it not for the fact that this conceit requires the writer to perform all sorts of elaborate literary gymnastics to avoid revealing the name. I once read what was otherwise a fine piece of work wherein the lead character's name (and gender!) were hidden through the first 57 pages, including a fairly graphic scene of the character having sex. Neat trick, no? Neat trick, no. See: Show-Off Experiments.) This bit of legerdemain was accomplished by arranging that every person in the book just happened to talk to and about this person without using a name, and by the writer referring to the protagonist as The Ranger, the Leader, the captain of the band, etc., etc., etc.

It did not take long for it to turn stilted and awkward. Nor did the eventual revelation of the character's name and gender have any particular effect on the story, or have any dramatic purpose. The sex scene was especially baffling, as the writer, of necessity, could not reveal the sex of the character's partner in bed. While the writer made it clear what was being done, the writer, trapped by her own cleverness, was unable to make it clear who was doing what to whom. Oy. If your character has no name, or if you keep his or her name hidden with a series of allegedly clever artifices, you will spend 23 pages stuck with damn fool locutions such as "the boy in the shirt." Knock it off. If his name is Fred, say so.

Errors of Substance
Here, I am talking about "substance" in the sense of what the story is about: the ideas, rather than as opposed to the execution of those ideas.

7. The weird opener & the unintegrated opener. "Sarah walked down the aisle, still unclear why she had agreed to marry a giraffe. The groom, waiting patiently at the altar, resplendent in black tie, spats and spots, swung his long neck around to watch her approach, all the time placidly chewing his cud." Pretty wild, huh? The whole intention of that opener is to make you, the reader, wonder how such a thing could have come to pass. Well, I wrote it, and I haven't the faintest idea. Don't let this happen to you.

I have sat in on (but not taught, thank God) workshops devoted entirely to the opener, and there is even some reason to focus on the opener that intently. Those few words do have to draw the readers in, get them interested in the story, and all that. However, many writers pay so much attention to the opener they forget all about the rest of the story, with the result that the opener has little or nothing to do with the story. The reader keeps going, eager to find out about that giraffe, and does not discover for 10 pages that (God forbid) it was all a dream, or that the writer has some other equally lame excuse for an explanation.

I have come across an equally unfortunate problem -- the writer who launches in with a wild, randomly selected killer of an opening, having no idea whatsoever where the story is going. (See: Bad Planning.) In fact, this error could have gone under the head Planning Errors.) Yes, the opener should be interesting, intriguing, should draw the reader in. But it should also have something to do with the story, be integral to it. The story itself should be interesting enough that some element of it should make for a good opener. As with all the notes in this essay, this is equally true for a novel or other longer work.

8. Retread of the same old same old.

There are lots of stories that have been done before, and need not be done again. In science fiction, these include the-nuclear-war-wipes-out-everything-and-it-just-happens -the-last-two-people-left-are-named-Adam-and-Eve story. In mysteries, you have the detective who turns out to be the killer. In The New Yorker, you have stories about people on Long Island who have no problems, whining to each other about their problems. With the exception of the final example, these stories are unpublishable because they have been done to death. (For some reason, The New Yorker just can't get enough of whiny Long Islanders.) Even the surprise twists on these old chestnuts have been done. It has been said, with a great degree of justice, that there is no such thing as a new idea. I have more than once written a whole novel based on something I thought was dazzlingly new and original, only to discover I could fill whole bookshelves with books on similar themes. I at least like to think that my take on those ideas was different enough, fresh enough, that I could get away with it. There is no clear line between a fresh take on an old idea and a hack rewrite of a theme that has been beaten to death. But you should at least try to avoid writing stories about writers writing stories about writers writing stories about writers having midlife crises. At some point, even The New Yorker will say enough, already. God willing.

Errors of Motive and Results
In short, these errors involve the art and science of screwing up on the question of why people do things, or why things happen, and on the question of what happens as a result of whatever the author has dreamed up.

9. Confusing the author's motives with the character's. Your character wants to get home and sleep in his own bed. You, the writer, want him to be there when all hell breaks loose. You have a good plot a reason for sending him to the edge of the volcano's crater. But does he have reason? Your plot may require your heroine to fall in love with the sleazy thug -- but doesn't she have more sense than that? Is it in character for her to find such a scuz-bucket attractive? Or think of it another way. You are a lab scientist who puts rats in a maze. You plan to kill them and dissect them to see how learning changes their brain chemistry. This is not the rat's reason for going through the maze. The poor little bastard is just looking for a piece of cheese. Both writer and character must have a motivation for each action in the book. Much or most of the time, their motivations will not coincide.

10. Failure To Deal With Consequences. Let me give a prime and recent example. One of my students wrote a story set in a post- collapse world where the U.S. government had ceased to exist, manufacturing and transport had essentially stopped, and the only source of order was local fiefdoms. She still had the characters using paper money. This just would not happen.

Failing to deal with consequences has to do with more than technology. If you write a story about someone who grew up in an orphanage, and that person goes to a big family dinner at a friend's house, the orphan's background will affect his reactions to a roomful of grandparents. It will seem damned odd if he doesn't have some massive emotional response to the family relationship that been denied him. It can something subtle, like a city person using language and imagery that only make sense if you are from a rural area. Of course, science fiction and fantasy are especially prone to this law of unintended consequences. Some other examples, which have, sadly, seen print: knights in armor climbing aboard a starship. A high-tech civilization based on machines operated by uneducated slave labor. A world of cybernetic connection where anyone can assume any guise or appearance at any time -- and yet people are discriminated against for being what no can know they are. If you write a story where they finally do shoot all the lawyers, who'll try the cases when the guilty are brought to justice? Don't just ask yourself what if once. After you get your answer, ask yourself what if about the answer, and then ask it about the answer to your answer.

Development Errors
These are mistakes made in the process of planning a story. Suffice to say they are very tough to fix on page 432of your manuscript. The closer you are to the initial blank page when you deal with issues of planning, the better off you will be.

11. Bad planning. After waltzing through hundreds of partial manuscripts, and talking with hundreds of students who have gotten stuck, I have concluded that bad planning, the failure to work things out ahead of time, is the prime cause of stories not getting done.

This happens, in part, because inspiration is overrated. We have all seen the plays and the movies, read the books, where the lightbulb goes off over the writer's head and she suddenly starts cranking out brilliant copy non-stop. This is nonsense. It takes me something like six months to a year to write a book. If I had to be that inspired in order to write, I would have had a heart attack by now. The wise writer takes notes, jots things down, makes a mental note, mutters into a bedside tape recorder those things that seem inspired at two a.m. and are merely incoherent in the morning. Those jottings and mutterings and scribbles are inspiration preserved.

This essay is based on just such written, taped, and mental notes made over a long time. Those notes allowed me to crank this piece out in one day -- once I had the time and the notes and knew what I wanted to do. (However, just for the record, I have gone back and revised this article at least a half-dozen times as I have learned more, and as I have prepared it for different audiences. Don't be afraid to revise.)

Do a plot summary. Do character sketches. Work out the geography and the history of your story. Most importantly, know what the ending is going to be before you start. Know your ending, and you'll be able to get to it. But do not let yourself be locked in by your planning documents. (See: Not letting the story evolve.) A plot synopsis is not a blueprint, where everything is rigidly and precisely positioned, and if you move this pillar from here to there the whole damn thing will collapse. Your plot synopsis is a roadmap, showing where you are and where you want to go, sketching out one of many possible routes that could get you there. You could change direction, or pick anew destination -- or even a new starting point. But you cannot do any of that without first knowing the lay of the land. There is not much point in changing direction if you don't know where you are going.

12. Not letting the story evolve. In one of my short stories, the scene that inspired the story in the first place never appeared in the actual text. In one book, a scene intended for chapter one ended up as the start of chapter seven. In another book, a character I intended as a one-shot walk-on ended up as a central figure in the story. Planning is important, but it should not lock you in. If you knew the whole story in immutable detail before you began, writing it would be damned dull. Be prepared to explore the new paths that open on your story as you write. But don't overdo it. (See: Self-indulgent digression.)

Presentation Errors
In short, the question of leaving in what should be cut, and leaving out what belongs.

13. Failed Exposition.

This typically -- but not always -- happens at the beginning of a story. Instead of getting action, or the story, we get background, told from no particular point of view. Sort of an encyclopedia entry on the subject in question. For some reason, fantasies are particularly prone to this flaw. The story will open with a long explanation of how the castle (or fortress, or bus station) came to be there, and who all the ancestors of the current duke (or king, or wizard, or head chef) were, and how the magic (jewel or ring, or crown, or polo mallet) came to be imbued with its powers and then stolen (or lost, or locked in a spell, or pawned). We then spend the rest of the book in search of the map (or book of spells, or claim ticket).

As in the rather interchangeable example above, most of what goes into such expository lumps is pretty generic. All castles were built, all rulers had some sort of ancestors or predecessors, all macgufffins (that being Alfred Hitchcock's term for the magic jewel or secret formula or other gimmick around which the plot revolves) are important, and if they weren't out of the hero's possession, there would be no story. Much of such material can be assumed, or else you can work it into the story here and there, rather than spewing it all out at once. Rule of Thumb: The only things that should be in your story are those that get a yes to these two questions:

(1) Will this be of interest to the reader?

(2) Does it have something important to do with the story the reader is reading? (It doesn't matter if it is vital to some OTHER story that happened 300 years before your story opens.)

At times, I have caught myself injecting whacking dull history lesson into my books. When I do catch such things, I find that putting all the exposition in a character's head, and letting that person think about the data in question, often makes it more interesting and allows that character to offer his or her opinion on the subject. Othertimes I find it just plain whacking dull no matter what and I cut it completely.

A side-bar on the subject of cutting and pasting and inserting and changing text in this modern computer age: Do it. Don't be afraid to cut and paste ferociously. Hit the save key first, and keep a back-up of your original, but chop the working copy to ribbons. If the original is backed up, you have the liberating knowledge that you can doing anything you like to the working copy without doing any damage to your first version of your deathless prose. If you don't like the changes you have made, you can always print out a fresh copy of the first draft.

14. Information that does not get on the page.

This is pretty basic, but awfully common. In short, you, the writer, have imagined every element of your story so completely that you assume the reader knows it all too. You might neglect to give a physical description of a place or a person that you can see perfectly in your mind's eye. The only real check against this is to put the story to one side after you finish it, then come back to it a week or a month later, so as to achieve some perspective on it. It's easy to fix: just put in what you've left out.

Ego-Driven Errors

These have much less to do with the story, and much more to do with the writer. These are the mistakes made by a writer in love with every single one of his or her words, who secretly feels that the only possible reaction to his or her work is unalloyed reverence. To such writers, I can only say: Get a life.

15. Self-indulgent digression. Just because you are interested in something, that does not mean it belongs in the story. One of my students brought every one of his stories to a screeching halt with an off-the-point diatribe railing against the government for forcing psychotics to take mood-altering drugs. I told him if he was that interested in that subject, he should write a story about that subject, and get it out of his system, rather than injecting it into his otherwise good stories on wholly different topics. And maybe adjust his own medication while he was at it.

Just because you have done six months research on bonsai, that does not mean you should put five pages on tree-shrinking into your Japanese saga. Don't wander off on23 pages of some off- the-point concept that you happen to find fascinating. If it does not belong in the story, nuke it. (See: Failed Exposition.)

16. The error that is not an error. I have lost count of the times a student has explained why something that does not make sense really does make sense, if only I would read the74 pages of information he has on the subject, or if only I were (like the author) an expert on renooberated gravistrans. Whether or not the writer has his or her information right does not matter. The question is whether information feels right -- or wrong. A seeming error is an error because it has exactly the same effect on the reader as a "real" error.

It makes the reader lose confidence in the story, distracts the reader from the story and makes him or her worry about the error, and damages the reader's willing suspension of disbelief. Getting it wrong or seeming to get it wrong will have exactly the same undesired effects on the reader.

While we're on the subject of overdone research, I should point out that it is just as bad to get your research wrong-- or not do it in the first place. Assume that your readers are knowledgeable, and that some of them, at least, will spot what you got wrong.

An example from personal experience: Science fiction and fantasy writers seem to do a lot of stories that concern caves. These really bug me, as I like to go in caves, and most of these stories get every damned detail wrong. Caves in fantasy all seem to be airy, well-lit places full of perfect marble staircases and veins of pure gold -- which generally are not found in the limestone formations where caves usually form. When a story takes me into a cave like that, I ask myself -- Where is the mud? Where is the darkness? Where is cool, slightly clammy air? Where are the loose rocks on the floor, and the smell, and the bats? Even if the writer has, in reality, gotten it right, it is too late. Once I am in that state of mind, it will do no good at all for the writer to have five thousand pages of documentation on the principles of natural cave formation in igneous, ore-bearing, and metamorphic rock.

I always try to assume that someone who knows more than me is going to read my stories. If some detail conflicts with generally held knowledge, I will try and work in a sentence or two that explains my variant idea, or that at least acknowledges the existence of the generally received knowledge. Doing this lets the reader know I have at least taken common knowledge into account. It reassures the reader, keeps the reader from being irritated by what I got wrong, and thus prevents the reader from becoming distracted from the story. In short, I do a little research, and try to avoid both errors -- and seeming errors.

17. Writing to impress rather than communicate. I am convinced that this is in large part a product of what passes for writing in school, government, and business. We are taught, over and over again, to impress the boss or the teacher with how much we know, how many big words we can use, how important we can make our subject seem. If the meaning itself is lost in a blizzard of jargon, all the better. Few people have the nerve to admit they don't know what you meant, and if you yourself are unsure, a little bureaucratic vagueness can often serve to hide what you don't know.

Inevitably, something is lost when things are made pompous. "Never enumerate your feathered progeny until the incubation process is thoroughly realized" just doesn't have the same punch as "Don't count your chickens before they're hatched." Do not, under any circumstances, dumb down your work, but why be deliberately obscure? A good rule of thumb: Use the shortest words and simplest sentence structure that will convey the meaning you intend. A side-bar: In these dark days, we are deep in the thicket of politically correct verbiage. Ignore the trend. Say what you mean, not what you think someone would say you ought to have meant. After all, there are times you want to offend people. While there is little to be said in favor of hurting people needlessly, such idiocy has gotten completely out of hand. My favorite recent sample of this nonsense: the term "temporarily able-bodied, "denoting all those persons who unfairly do not have a handicap at the moment. This term was used in deadly seriousness. Fun people.

18. Show-off experiments. Someone reading this is going to think something like this: Ha! So Mr. Know-it-all says to follow all these rules. I'll write a story in future tense plural second person with all the characters nameless and of undetermined species. The plot will consist entirely of nested flashbacks, I'll make the whole thing up as I go along, and I'll put in anything I want, whether or not it is related to the story.

I once tossed out the concept of flying pigs in a class exercise wherein I was deliberately dealing with absurd plot elements. Just to show me it could be done, half the students came back with flying-pig stories. Some of them not bad. With one possible exception, every single story could have been improved by removing the pig. "Just to show them" is a lousy reason to write a story, and usually results in a failed story. We readers don't want to see how smart you are. We want a good story. (See: Writing to impress rather than communicate.) A while back, I came out of the theater with a friend of mine and said to her "That wasn't experimental theater -- it was too good, and it worked." In theater, and in fiction, we have developed the myth of the Noble Failure. The artiste struggles endlessly and produces a work so dense, so sophisticated, so brilliant that no one can understand it, and thus it is shunned by the critics and the public alike. The artiste, however, knows it is brilliant and they are all fools.

Very rarely, this myth is true. It is, however, far more common for someone to crank out a mass of technically inadequate, self-indulgent, incoherent drivel, and then hide behind the myth, rather than accept the failure of his or her own work. It's a tempting option. Writing crap makes you look stupid, whereas being a misunderstood artist makes you look cool, sort of the way wearing a beret does.

None of the rules, ideas, theories and so on that I offer in this essay are arbitrary. There are good reasons for all of them. They are based on my personal experience of far too many unpublishable manuscripts. On the other hand, none of these rules are ironclad, and I have broken most of them myself. Back on the first hand, more often than not, I have then gone back and patched things up so as to follow the rules. In short, don't go off into experimental forms and styles until you have mastered the basics. A final rule of thumb: Understand the rules, and know how and why to follow the rules, before you attempt to break them.

This article is copyright. Reproduction and distribution specifically prohibited. All rights reserved. Reprinted here with the author's permission.

by Amy Sterling Casil

When we criticise work, we are commenting for the purposes of publishability, and our goal is to help authors to become publishable and published writers.

For prose pieces, the following issues are critically important:

Plot - does the action make sense? Is what is written moving the story forward? Sometimes, the pieces are too short or are fragments, so a complete plot analysis isn't possible. Most pieces can be judged within the first few sentences for effective plot beginnings, however. That's what editors do.

Does the story start at the right place (the beginning?) Most stories by beginning writers start far too early - way before the key action takes place. Some, however, may start too far forward. These writers have taken the advice of "start with the action at full steam" too literally.

Is the pacing appropriate to the story? Too fast? Too slow? Just right?

Is the plot a real plot (a character, in context, with a problem)? Are things happening which seem to have no discernable reason or purpose?

Are there unconvincing coincidences passing for plot? "I saw Prunella at the A & P that afternoon. I couldn't believe it when she told me that she had the other half of the key to the Ancient Peruvian Treasure Box which I had been seeking, the very one which had brought upon the murder of Uncle Henry by the ravening pirates."

The ending: is the payoff adequate to the buildup? Does the ending make sense? Is it satisfying? Does it arise from character and situation or is it "deus ex machina," where the Cavalry suddenly comes riding in over the hill to save the hero and heroine? Most importantly: were the seeds of the ending sown in the beginning?

Hook - Is the beginning adequate to catch the reader's interest? Another key issue related to publishability. Is there the proper balance of action, dramatization, and narrative? Sometimes, more narrative is needed, as in the pieces where the author will begin with a lot of unattributed dialog. The dialog might be saying exciting things, like:

"I'll kill you, Jim!"

"No you won't, I'll rip your arms out of their sockets first."

"Darn you, Jim! Just pass me that ketchup."

OK, here's killing, anger, conflict . . . but who? Where? Who cares? Other beginning errors include hooks that are a bit too strong: and I've seen child abuse, rape, incest, this type of thing. The reader has to care about the story and characters first, not be thrown into a situation from which they will instinctively recoil.

Characterization - are the people of the story believable? In the case of some of the work we've seen, one wonders if the characters which are being written about are people. Some beginning writers use genderless, nameless characters. While this might have been done in some avant-garde writing, this isn't usually the type of writing which is accepted in the SF world.

Urge the basics:

Names - good ones - indicative of character, which make sense. "Tom, Dick and Harry" just don't cut it. With all the great names in the world, let's promote some creativity in character-naming.

Dialog and action fits with and supports character. Meek, sensitive characters shouldn't scream or suddenly pull out Ninja weapons unless it's a comic piece.

Gender, place, time, dress and manner of characters should all go together to support good characterization.

Physical descriptions are appropriate to the piece. A viewpoint character should not be able to describe himself, unless it's integral to the plot. The good 'ol, "Susie sees herself in a mirror" trick should always be pointed out to the author. Physical description of viewpoint characters can be done indirectly, by the reactions of others to the character and the character's own interaction with the world of the story.

Point of View - whose story is being told and who is telling it?

Omniscient narrators are pretty much on the outs in the current publishing world. The omniscient narrator hops from head to head, from scene to scene and place to place and there is no single point of view or voice, other than the author's.

First-person narrator. A difficult voice for the beginner, though many people often think it is "easy." The first-person narrator can only tell what he experiences and knows. This can be a powerful, but also a limiting voice. It is often thought to bring the reader into the story, but poorly-done first person narration has the opposite effect. The reader becomes aggravated by the character, and generally quits reading. A good example of when first-person narration is inappropriate: stories told by people who are dead or in comas, unless it's a horror or surrealistic story.

Of course, Dalton Trumbo's, "Johnny Got His Gun," the famous World War I story, was told from the point of view of Johnny who had no arms, legs, eyes and was deaf from a war wound - a unique and effective story not likely to be repeated.

Third-person narrator. Also called, "limited third-person point of view." This is the most common narrative style used in novels and short stories. The technique uses limited authorial intrusion, and done properly, can bring the reader in as close to the story or closer to it than can first-person narration. A point-of-view character is selected and the story told from that character's perspective.

Common mistakes include:

Head-hopping: switching back and forth between different characters' thoughts and opinions.

POV slipping: telling something that the POV character couldn't possibly know.

WRONG point-of-view character. Sometimes stories are told from the wrong character's point of view. This is an error in plot, related to the point-of-view issue. If the author more fully understood the story's plot, he or she would have automatically and easily chosen the appropriate character to "tell" the story.

Style - is the writing appropriate to the story? Style is subjective, but true errors in style are glaringly obvious.

Tone. Is a serious story being told in a flippant tone? Or a comical story told in a plodding, self-conscious style? Most common, especially with younger writers: inappropriate irony, otherwise known as "smarting off."

Anachronisms or Freudian slips. In historical stories, are characters using modern phrases? Or, do inappropriate comments slip into the narrative, for instance, in a tense scene of financial intrigue, does one character suddenly say to another, "I love your see-through blouse, Frieda?" Are characters acting appropriately for their age and stage in life?

Usage/Confusion errors. The gerund problem is among these. "Pulling on his boots, he leapt to the door with his gun." Gerunds used in this manner are usually associated with two unrelated clauses jammed together with a comma. The author needs to use separate sentences which portray clear and understandable action and narrative. This is lazy, confused writing.

Psychologically, I think it signifies a confusion as to what the appropriate story and/or action is, because most often, I've seen very beginning writers do it when they are tired or bored and don't know what to do with the story.

Misplaced modifiers and split infinitives also fall into this category.

Sentence fragments? Sometimes they are appropriate, if they seemed planned or intentional and are not excessively used.

"Taking the reader for granted." Otherwise known as "The urge to explain." The great phrase, "RUE" or "Resist the Urge to Explain," is used in the book Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, by Browne and King.

"I'll never darken your doorstep again, you thieving hussy!" Johnny slammed the door furiously. He was angry. He had never been so angry in his life. [Thank you, author, I got it the first time . . .]

Simply put, authors make this error when they use dialog, narrative summary and action to accomplish the same purpose. Dialog and action can both be strong methods of communicating plot developments; narrative summary less-so, but it has its place.

>> Thirty years passed and Monica had never kissed another man. << That's narrative summary - preferable to detailing Monica's turn-downs of men over a 30-year period.

Lack of variation in sentence length or sentence structure. Too many short sentences? Too many long, run-on sentences? A long sentence or two can be interesting, but not *every* sentence. An ungrammatical, confusing sentence is exactly that, and is never good writing.

Excessive use of passive voice. Passive voice is often mistaken for the past-perfect tense. Passive voice refers to the reversal of the "normal" subject/verb order of a sentence. Tenses of verbs serve to indicate time and order of events. When writing about the past, or indicating various moods, past-perfect verbs are very useful, and they have nothing to do with "passive voice."

"Bob hit the ball" is "active" voice, the normal sentence order in English.

"The ball was hit by Bob" is passive voice. The subject, "the ball," comes before the verb.

You might see something like "The speech by Mayor Bob was given in his usual sarcastic tone." Normal sentence order would be: "Mayor Bob gave the speech in his usual sarcastic tone."

Passive voice isn't a major point in fiction writing: if it is used to excess, there are usually other severe problems in plot and style which are more harmful than passive voice alone.

Internal dialog passing for emotions or plot. Many beginning writers do this. At its most extreme, the internal dialog is actually the author's own thoughts as they ruminate along the page, not those of the character. "What would Mary do? Would she fire the gun at John, or would she turn it on herself? What would happen if she fired the gun at the floor? How could she ever decide?" Please, Mary, decide. Please, author, don't tell us what happened until Mary decides. Sometimes, this sort of internal dialog can be unintentionally hilarious, like the authors who are going along with the story and suddenly say, "this is really boring. When is this going to be over?" Soon, I hope.

Dialog: is it good? A good ear for dialog is something which is difficult to learn. It's easy to spot when a writer is good at dialog. Conversations should be believable and serve to advance the plot. Good dialog is not realistic dialog, it is dialog which advances the story, shows character and echoes in the reader's mind.

"Maid and Butler dialog" is dialog where two characters tell each other things they already know. It is often used to attempt to tell backstory or to explain concepts the author thinks the reader won't understand. In SF, we know this as the "infodump."

Flowery dialog: sometimes found in Romance writing, Historical writing or Fantasy writing, these are characters who speak language which never issued from a human mouth. High language can be appropriate in all of those genres, but dialog like this:

"Margaret, your lips are as sweet as the nectar from a honeyed buttercup," Lord Brockston Bragg ejaculated.

"Oh, Brockston, I can feel your . . . it's . . . it's pulsating, Brockston," Margaret exhaled.

. . . is never appropriate.

Bad tags. "Said" is fine, as well as the occasional whisper or shout, indicating volume (but even that's not necessary). Bad tags include "exhaled," "ejaculated," "shrieked," "sputtered," "muttered," "murmured," and all other verbs attributed to a line of dialog instead of appropriate action, description and good dialog which speaks for itself.

Marianne cupped her hand by my ear. "He's going to try it now. Just watch," she said. Whispering is pretty much understood.

Bob sighed and opened his mouth, then sighed again. "Can't," he said at last. "Can't do it." (Beats "stuttered," or "sputtered," followed by "Bob stuttered. He had stuttered since he was seven and the Burnsey boys had whipped him behind Old Man Gruenpfluegel's barn.")

Originality and creativity. The most important part! We should be encouraging people to use their imaginations and to think beyond the first ideas which pop into their heads. Cliched plots and characters and situations, like "Worldmaster Gray" and "the spacefaring couple who crash on a planet and turn out to be . . . Adam and Eve!" fall into this area. Originality in character, plot and setting is very important and goes a long way toward contributing to the quality of any kind of fiction writing.

-- Amy Sterling Casil © 1996

This article is copyright. Reproduction and distribution specifically prohibited. All rights reserved. Reprinted here with the author's permission.

by Lori Handeland

How do you create the perfect ending? How do you find a way to put the finish on months of work? How do you produce an ending to your masterpiece that will make your story linger in the minds of your readers' long after they close the book?

It's not easy. But nothing worthwhile ever is. Sometimes you find your way through trial and error. Sometimes you find it immediately. And sometimes the perfect finish comes to you out of the blue when you're not even looking for it.

Now that we've learned how to start a book and how to get through the middle, it's time to search out our ending.

First and foremost, an ending must deliver on the promise inherent in the rest of the book. In a romance this means--A HAPPY ENDING! I can't stress that enough. I've judged several times in the Golden Heart competition and I've actually had to write on manuscripts "Don't kill off the hero at the end of the book." It makes editors cranky, not to mention a reader who's been promised the happy ending inherent in the words "romance novel."

In your ending you must use the same characters, conflicts, problems and tensions you've used throughout the book. Do not promise apples and deliver oranges.

Your ending will fail if:

You bring in different characters to save the day-for example, the old standard cavalry rides over the hill at the last minute to save your hero and heroine. The reader wants to see the characters they've come to identify with save themselves.

You switch to a last minute conflict in order to intensify your climax. For example, your hero and heroine are about to say "I do" and your heroine suddenly speaks up with the fact that she's Catholic and she can't marry a Protestant. Excuse me, but if her religion is a source of conflict she should have mentioned it before now.

You try to evade the promised climax. For example, you devise a peaceful compromise for all parties and no one loses anything. There is no conflict here and therefore no climax. No emotional growth.

How do you find an ending that delivers on your promise?

Think carefully about what your story has promised the reader both emotionally and intellectually. If you've written a very deep, dark love story filled with conflict--wonderful--but make sure your ending is as emotionally wrenching as the rest of the book.

Think about what forces you've set in conflict throughout the middle of the book. What ending will bring those forces into a plausible, satisfying climax, leaving some characters victorious and others vanquished? Or in other words, your hero and heroine happy and your villains not so happy.

Your ending begins with the climax--the moment you've been leading up to for the entire book, the moment when your characters must decide their final course of action. This is the turning point, the highest source of action both emotional and physical.

For a climax to succeed it must:

Satisfy the view of life you've implied in your story. In a romance this means happily ever after.

Deliver emotion. The reader should feel what the characters feel. If the character isn't feeling, this is not the climax.

Deliver an appropriate level of emotion. The level of drama in the climax must match the level of drama throughout your story. If you put too much drama into the climax of a quiet story, the climax will feel contrived, as if you're trying to inject artificial drama. If you put too little drama into a strong action story, the climax will feel flat.

Be logical to your plot and your story. The climax must grow out of the actions preceding it and those actions must have grown naturally out of the personalities of the characters. Deus ex machina (which means a god from a machine) refers to plots in which the climax depends on a new, outside force for the change. This is not a good idea and neither is coincidence. Though coincidences happen all the time in real life, in books they always look contrived. Go figure. You can still surprise the reader with an unexpected ending and not violate the above criteria. You just have to make sure the surprise is logical, warranted and the clues are laid down throughout the book and lead to its occurrence.

Your climax must be in proportion to the length of your story. If you write 20 pages setting up a tense situation, the resolution should not flash by in two paragraphs. It won't feel important enough. Draw the climax out as long as you can to increase the tension. For example, in my novel Charlie and the Angel, the hero realizes he loves the heroine, and though he doesn't feel he's good enough for her, he wants her anyway. So he rides to her house. "Yes," the reader thinks, "now's a good time. Go get her." He arrives to find she's been sent to a convent under a heavily armed escort. And he's off again . . .

Once you've written your climax, you're ready to write your denouement or the final comment. This is everything that comes after the climax and the function is to wrap up your story. You must show the consequences of the plot and the fate of any characters not accounted for in the climax. The characteristics of a successful final comment are:

Closure-give the reader enough information about the fate of the characters for them to feel the book is really over. Show the readers just enough of the character's future so they aren't left hanging. Try to tie up any loose ends earlier on if possible so you don't have too many to do this near the end. But make sure all the loose ends are tied up. Nothing makes a reader madder than searching for an explanation that isn't there.

Brevity-if the denouement goes on too long, it leaches emotion from the climax. End while the reader is still affected by our big scene. Generally, the more subtle and low-key your climax is in action and tone, the briefer the denouement.

Dramatization-show what happens to your characters in action or the denouement feels like exposition that's been tacked on after the story's over. Whatever action you use should be mild so it doesn't compete with the climax.

You should set aside these final elements in an epilogue only if it differs significantly from the main narrative in time or place or if it's radically different in style.

The last paragraph or sentence of a novel, the very end, should resonate, or set off a complex emotional reaction in the reader.

To create a resonant ending try the following:

Suggest connections between the story and a larger context--justice in your story, and justice for all.

Whatever emotion the story seeks to convey, choose the final action to evoke that emotion in the reader. This is why so many romances end with a marriage proposal, the actual wedding or the birth of a child. That's what these books are all about.

Have the last sentence imply the theme. In Laura Kinsale's novel Seize the Fire, the heroine tells the hero in the last few lines, "I'm here. I'm here and I love you no matter what." Not only do these words state the theme of the book, they state the theme of a romance in general.

The last sentence explains or reiterates the title. In my first novel Second Chance, the hero, Jake, has the last line. "We've been given a second chance, Katie, and I won't let you down."

The last sentence or paragraph echoes the opening sentence or paragraph. Pete's Dragon by Lindsay Longford begins with the line, "Every evening at twilight, the dragon came to the garden." The book ends with the words, "The dragon winked one final time at Petey and disappeared into the late-summer darkness.

But what do you do if you can't find the right ending or the one you've written isn't working?

Don't panic-usually if you wait long enough, put the book aside and don't worry about it, the right ending will become clear to you. This happened to me with Shadow Lover, my romantic suspense novel. I couldn't figure out what the problem was. Then finally it hit me. The wrong person "did it." Voila! The ending worked out fine.

Look at books you like and study their endings. Which endings do you remember and why?

Try writing the ending a few different ways and see which feels right.

Let a very trustworthy friend read the book and see if they think the ending works. Pick someone who reads a lot, perhaps a writer, but they must know the English language well, like your genre and be able to comment honestly. We all want to hear we're brilliant. But it doesn't help you to learn if someone tells you this and you're not. Also, having someone who reads mysteries and has never picked up a romance will not help you. They will tell you things that do not relate to our genre. As for me, I love endings. Maybe I'm strange--actually I know I'm strange--but that's beside the point. A lot of writers will say they get depressed when they finish a book, that they don't want to see those characters exit their lives. For me, I love the last few chapters of a book. I've got the hard work behind me, I know the characters well by this point, and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. When I come out of that tunnel, there's another book on the horizon, and therefore a new beginning on the way.

When you reach the end of your book, rejoice, you've earned it. Too many people never reach the end. When you do, you know you're special. The more books you write, the better writer you'll become. I firmly believe that every book is better than the last -- and every rewrite makes every book stronger.

The best thing to do when you're done with a story -- and by done I mean you've rewritten it enough so it's the absolutely best work you could possibly submit right now -- then send it out and start another. Never sit around and wait to hear the feedback on that book. Go on. Then if the worst happens and you get rejected, you'll already have another book half finished or three-quarters finished or done and you won't find yourself blocked by one person's opinion of your work.

One of the best endings I've ever read is the following from, Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon:

"And the world was all around us, new with possibility."

© 1997 Lori Handeland

by Melisa Michaels

The Apostrophe: When In Doubt, Leave It Out

The omitted apostrophe confuses meaning less often than the needless one does. If I write a note to tell you, "This is Janes dog," you'll likely know I mean to let you know the dog belongs to Jane. If I write instead, "Jane's friend's are writer's," and you know anything about the punctuation of English, you will be in some confusion as to what belongs to whom.

In general, the apostrophe means one of two things.

1) There is a missing letter where it is. For example, in "don't" there is a missing "o"; in "it's" there is a missing "i": each of these is a one-word contraction commonly used to represent two words. "Don't" means "do not," and "it's" means "it is."

2)Something belongs to someone. For example, "Jane's dog" means the dog belongs to Jane. "Fred's house" means the house belongs to Fred (or at least that he lives in it). Apostrophe-S is used to indicate possession.

Unfortunately, number 2 above presents a problem when a thing belongs to a thing. If we want to say, "The box has its label now," shouldn't we use "it's" to show possession? The answer is most emphatically no, we should not. "It's" means "it is." It never means "belonging to it."

And here I present you with a writerly secret about apostrophes: if the reader sees none where there should be one, she will imagine you've dropped it by accident, and that the result is a typographical error (a "tyop") rather than an indication of ignorance.

But if she sees an apostrophe where there should be none, she is unlikely to imagine that you added it by accident. Even if in this one case you really did hit that key without noticing, your reader is going to assume that you did it deliberately, in ignorance. It is a sad truth about readers. As a result, you're much safer if you follow the apostrophe rule: when in doubt, leave it out.

Phrase-Matching

A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject.

Luckily this rather daunting injunction is simpler than it sounds. An example from Strunk's The Elements of Style:

Walking slowly down the road, he saw a woman accompanied by two children.

The word walking refers to the subject of the sentence, not to the woman. If the writer wishes to make it refer to the woman, he must recast the sentence.

He saw a woman, accompanied by two children, walking slowly down the road.

Strunk considers this example adequate, and perhaps it is. Even without an understanding of "participial phrases" and "grammatical subjects," you should be able with moderate effort to extend this logic to other, similar sentences.

The next rule contains even more daunting terms:

Participial phrases preceded by a conjunction or by a preposition, nouns in apposition, adjectives, and adjective phrases come under the same rule if they begin the sentence.

If you don't know what those terms mean, you should still be able to see by example what is meant.

Wrong: On arriving in Chicago, his friends met him at the station.

Better: On arriving in Chicago, he was met at the station by his friends.

Wrong: A writer of popular self-help books, they hired her to write their company manual.

Better: A writer of popular self-help books, she was hired to write the company manual.

Wrong: Inexperienced as he was, it sounded easy to write a book.

Better: Inexperienced as he was, he thought writing a book would be easy.

Sentences that violate these rules are often ludicrous:

Being weather-damaged and badly infested with termites, I was able to buy the house at quite a low price.

Wondering which way to turn, a bird soiled my hat.

As a writer of popular romances, his computer was quite fast.

If your word processor has a spell-checker, use it. Be aware, however, that spell-checkers can only determine whether words are spelled correctly. They cannot determine whether the word in question is the one wanted. For example, had I written "they cannot determine weather the word...is the one wanted," a spell-checker would not have flagged it because, although "weather" was quite the wrong word, it was spelled correctly.

It is therefore necessary not only to spell-check by hand, but also to know more than your computer does about which word you wanted. A hardcopy dictionary is essential. If you know there are other words that sound like the one you used, it's a good idea to look them up, to make sure you selected the right one.

Did you say "they're" or "there" when you meant "their"? What about two, too, and to--have you used the right one? Do you know how to decide which of "you're" and "your" and "yore" you want? Depending on your regional accent, the words within these groups may sound identical. Have you really selected the correct one? Do you know how to tell?

A dictionary will help in every case. If you look up the word you selected and the meaning turns out to be quite different from what you intended, look up similar-sounding words until you find the one you wanted. You may be surprised how many words are commonly used incorrectly or mistaken for each other in speech.

Fred went to his brother's house to get his hat.

Whose hat is that? Can you tell from that sentence? I can't: the hat could belong to either Fred or his brother, or even to someone else entirely. All we know is that it belongs to someone male.

Sometimes it feels awkward to identify a pronoun. In the above example neither "Fred went to his brother's house to get Fred's hat" nor "Fred went to his brother's house to get his brother's hat" sounds quite as satisfactory as the original. Yet you do want your reader to know just whose hat it is; otherwise she may fuss about it so much she doesn't enjoy the rest of your story. Readers are like that.

The solution is to recast the sentence:

Fred went to his brother's house to get the hat he left there the previous day.

This is still mildly ambiguous, but will be understood in context. The probability that it is Fred's hat is increased.

Or if the hat belongs to the brother, you could say,

Fred went to his brother's house to borrow a hat for the party.

It could be that Fred's brother keeps a houseful of hats belonging to persons we have not met, but very likely he does not, and the hat in question actually belongs to him.

This sort of thing is important to the reader. If she is left in doubt as to whose a hat is, she will all too often keep worrying the problem long after a more rational being might have gone on to something else. What's worse, she'll bring it up again and again at the most inopportune moments, reminding anyone who'll listen that she was left in doubt in the middle of your book (she may make it sound as bad as having been left without water in the middle of a desert) as to the ownership of a hat.

Far better simply to tell her at the first mention of it that the hat is Fred's, or you may never hear the end of it. Nobody wants to spend her entire literary career worrying about Fred's hat.

Now that we have settled this pesky matter of the hat I feel comfortable mentioning that although the reader often seems to have only the frailest grasp of what's going on and therefore needs every clue possible to stay abreast of the fictional situation, it is unwise to assume that he or she will overlook the smallest discrepancy in your logic.

Perhaps you think that the person who could not tell that was Fred's hat you were talking about will not notice that Fred lived on Elm Street at the beginning of your novel and yet goes home to Ellis Street at the end with never a change of address mentioned in between. Not so. Readers will notice the oddest things.

If your protagonist puts down her blaster on page one, walks away from it, and yet has it handy in her holster to shoot another villain on page three, your reader will be testy about it.

If your protagonist has blue eyes and yellow hair on page forty-two, but has become a brown-eyed brunette by page ninety-eight, your reader will very likely be vexed.

There are a great many hazards in the path of a beginning writer that I have not even mentioned, and seemingly endless skills you will need to acquire. And when you have mastered them all, you will be left alone with that shockingly dense and perversely astute creature called "the reader," who cannot be trusted to divine the ownership of a hat but will relentlessly examine your every apostrophe for its purpose, meaning, and needfulness.

That creature is the one to whom you are telling your stories. That is your audience, and it can be appeased only with the greatest of care and attention to detail. It will notice when you change tenses in mid-sentence. It will snarl when you change points of view without warning or explanation. It will show its teeth when you confuse it, and it will be easily confused....except when you want it confused so it won't notice prestidigitation. Then it will remain steadfastly alert and attentive despite your best efforts to bludgeon it into insensibility.

That is the nature of the beast. Fortunately it is willing, even eager, to be amused. If you have done your research, mastered the tools of your trade, exercised all the skill at your command, and been consistent in your choices, you may please it.

Melisa Michaels is the author of the science fiction novels Skirmish, First Battle, Last War, Pirate Prince, Floater Factor, and Far Harbor, the fantasy novel Cold Iron, and the mystery novel Through the Eyes of the Dead.

Distribution of this article is encouraged as long as it is kept intact and proper credit is given.

by Melisa Michaels

As a writer, these sentences look odd to me.
This essay will be of interest to many writer's and literary type's.
I use to think things like this were a waist of time if you just want to write fiction.
Now I know that writers half to know there basics.
If you cannot find at least two errors in each of the above lines, this article is for you. Those lines should read:
As a writer, I find that these sentences look odd.
This article will be of interest to many writers and literary types.
I used to think things like this were a waste of time if you just want to write fiction.
Now I know that writers have to know their basics.

We aren't concerned here with flowing prose, glowing phrases, or any stylistic questions; before you worry about those things you need to know how to spell the words you want, how to choose from among similar words with different meanings, how to punctuate, and how to put the parts of a sentence together in such a way that the result makes sense.

Without this basic knowledge, not only will you have difficulty communicating, but you may produce unintentionally hilarious results. There are reasons for all the seemingly arbitrary rules of grammar and punctuation. Some of them can be dismissed once you know what they are; others cannot. To communicate what you really mean, you must know which rules can be safely broken; and to know that, you must know the rules.

The easiest way to learn them is (this is the good part) by reading the sort of fiction you want to write. But you have to (this is the hard part) pay attention to what you read. For best results you need to read a wide range of works by a number of authors, carefully noticing their spelling, punctuation, and grammar. And you need some way of determining which one is right when you find two or more of them in opposition on a given usage.

A copy of Strunk's The Elements of Style, read carefully and its lessons taken to heart, will help you avoid the most common errors. Between that and a few dozen of your favorite novels you'll have the beginning of a good education in accepted usage. Later you may choose to disagree with Strunk on certain points: but until you understand what he instructs and why, any deviation from his rules stands a good chance of getting you in trouble.

There are, of course, other works on usage and style that you might choose instead of Strunk. I suggest this one because it is not only available free on the web, but very small and inexpensive in paperback form, relatively easy to find, and as uncontroversial as an authoritative work on a sometimes ambiguous topic can be.

As you may already know, even the experts don't agree on some usages. This may sound as though it provides a ready excuse for any, er, let us say original usages you may introduce in your prose, but it does not. You will realize when you've learned the rules yourself that the astute reader can tell the difference between rules broken by choice and those broken in ignorance. The former sort may be innovative, imaginative, even brilliant, or only a careful rendition of some common oral tradition. The latter sort will seldom be anything but illiterate or amusing (or both).

Even to successfully render the careless speech of the streets into printed words that will "sound" to the eye the way the oral version would sound to the ear, the author must know precisely what rules are used and what rules are broken.

This is not to say that all this knowledge must be available on a conscious level, that you must memorize parts of speech and rules of usage and punctuation as children used to do in grade school. That might or might not be valuable. What is invaluable, possibly indispensible, is that you should pay attention to these matters, know what you're doing, and deviate from the accepted norm only by intention.

If the only way you can be certain of that is by learning remedial English by rote, then do so. If you already have a sufficient understanding of the parts of speech (whether or not you know them by name) that you can grasp the purpose of the rules laid down in Strunk, then you probably have no need of remedial English.

In any case and no matter what you wish to achieve with your use of words, language is your only real tool as a writer. You would not expect to successfully construct a wooden house without first learning how to use hammers, nails, saws, screws, and other woodworking tools (and quite probably practicing with them on smaller projects before embarking on the house). You should not expect to successfully construct a work of fiction without first learning the written language that will be your tool.

Of course, we all speak at least one language, and it is perhaps not amazing that so many people imagine that qualifies them to write in their native tongue. After all, they've been speaking it since babyhood. They are surely intimate with it by now.

What this does not take into account is the many differences between a spoken and a written language. You have no need, for example, to understand spelling and the rules of punctuation in order to accomplish oral communication. When you say, "the bare bear threw the ball through the wall," the person to whom you say it will very probably be surprised, but she should have no trouble understanding your meaning.

If you were to write, "the bear bare through the ball threw the wall," however, your reader would have to do strong mental contortions to get any sense out of it at all. Perhaps you can see from this alone that intimacy with a spoken language is not sufficient for the writer.

Punctuation presents some of the same problems. In speech you know when to hesitate for a comma and when to come to a full stop for a period. You've no need to know when spoken words should contain an apostrophe and when not. The person to whom you're speaking will determine your meaning from context.

If, however, you, don't. Know where' to put; punc'tuation, in your" writing: you'll run into some serious difficulties right quickly; and while many's the writer who can't spell worth a darn, we almost all of us know that "spelling" is not spelled "speling" and that "writer" is not spelled "writter." I am dismayed to have to tell you that a great many hopeful writers do not. Very likely they are able to pronounce these words correctly and so do not, in their everyday activities, reveal their illiteracy: but they are probably not competent to write marketable prose. They have not acquired even a cursory familiarity with their tools.

Written language is the tool of the trade. With skilled use of it you can work wonders, build universes, create gods if you like, and entertain thousands. Without sufficient understanding to enable skill, you will more likely amuse by accident than by design.

Melisa Michaels is the author of the science fiction novels Skirmish, First Battle, Last War, Pirate Prince, Floater Factor, and Far Harbor, the fantasy novel Cold Iron, and the mystery novel Through the Eyes of the Dead.

Distribution of this article is encouraged as long as it is kept intact and proper credit is given.

by Jerry Oltion

Work avoidance is one of the major paradoxes of the writing profession. Generally, writers want to write (or want to have written), but all too often we find ourselves doing anything else but. We'll mow lawns, do the dishes, polish silverware--anything to keep from facing the blank page. At the same time we know we eventually have to get to work, so we come up with all sorts of strategies for forcing ourselves to the keyboard.

Sometimes a single strategy works beautifully for an entire writer's career (for instance: for over 40 years Fred Pohl wrote four pages a day no matter what, after which he was free to polish all the silverware he wanted), but in my own case I've discovered that any particular strategy only works for a couple of months before I learn to subvert it. As a result I have to keep inventing new ones. I've come up with quite a few (some of which I've stolen from other people), which I offer here for anyone who cares to try them. They're not in any particular order, so don't feel compelled to work your way down the list. Just try the ones that seem interesting, and remember that some of them won't work for you at all. Also, while some of them are mutually exclusive, most of them aren't, so you can mix & match all you like.

Set a quota of pages written per day. Make this realistic. The object isn't to prove anything to anybody, but to give yourself a reasonable goal to shoot for, one you'll actually be able to hit every day. If you go over it, that's cool, but all you have to do each day is hit the quota. The catch: Extra pages don't count toward the next day's quota.

Set a quota of hours worked per day/week. The same applies here as with page quotas. Make it realistic.

Write a story or chapter a week.

Promise your sweetie a steady supply of bedtime stories.

Pay yourself an hourly wage for time worked, and don't allow yourself leisure activities (movies, dinner out, etc.) unless you can pay for it with this writing money.

Have someone else pay you for writing. Use the coin of whatever realm you happen to be in: someone else cooks dinner when you finish a story, or a friend buys you a cookie, or your significant other does that kinky thing with the chocolate syrup.

Write to music. Put two or three CDs in the player and stay at the keyboard until they're done. Crank it up. Boogie a little. That's not just background noise; that's the sound of you working.

Lighten up on yourself. Give yourself the freedom to write when the urge strikes, and not write when you don't feel like it. That's one of the attractive things about the popular conception of the writing life, right? So enjoy it!

Hide your wristwatch in a drawer. (Meaning: reduce your dependence on the clock. Let your inner circadian rhythms tell you when it's time to write and when it's not.)

Set a timer for a short period of time (15 minutes or so) and stay at the keyboard--no matter what--until it dings. Then do it again. Only allow yourself to get up after the timer dings, and always set the timer again if you stay at the keyboard. This will hold you in place long enough for the first impulse toward work-avoidance to pass, and you'll often discover yourself eager to keep going when your time's up.

Schedule your day's activities--and schedule writing hours first. This doesn't necessarily mean putting them first in the day, but putting them on the schedule itself first, so they get priority. Schedule everything: bathing, eating, sleeping, telephone time (outgoing calls, at least), walking the dog--everything. Then, if it's not on the schedule, don't do it. Schedule it tomorrow.

Form a support/nagging network of other writers.

Graph your hours and/or pages against those of your support group. Post the graph where you can see it when you write. Also post it where you can see it when you don't write.

Challenge other writers to finish a story a week, losers to buy dinner (or dessert, or whatever) for winners.

Generate story ideas mechanically. Roll dice and pick characters and settings from a list. Tumble a desktop encyclopedia downstairs and write about whatever it opens to when it lands. Throw darts at your bookshelf and write a homage to whatever you hit. The goal here is to demystify "idea" as a stumbling block. Ideas are a dime a dozen once you learn how to find them. Become a supplier rather than a consumer.

If you've been sitting on an idea until you think you're good enough to do it justice, do it now! You may be run over by a bus tomorrow. Even if you aren't, by the time you think you're good enough, the passion for it will be gone. Write it now! Write all your good ideas as quickly as you can after you get them. Don't worry about getting more; they'll come faster and faster the more you write. Before you know it, you'll be begging people to take them, like a gardener with zucchini.

Outline. Plan everything you're going to write, scene by scene, all the way through to the end. Do your research while you're outlining, so by the time you start writing the actual story, you're already living in that world. With a detailed enough outline, the actual writing becomes a matter of choosing the right words to describe what you've already decided to tell. You can concentrate on style and let the plot take care of itself, because you've already done that part.

Don't outline. Don't plan ahead at all. Feel the lure of the blank page. Trust your instincts and dive into the story, and don't look back until you're done.

Keep written goals, and revise them daily. (Production goals, not sales goals, which you can't control.) Rewriting them every day helps you focus on each one and think about what you can do at the moment to further it along.

Unplug the TV for six months. This is a tough one, but it's the one with the biggest potential for shifting your priorities over to writing. You can gauge your need for it by your resistance to it. If you can't imagine giving up your favorite programs in favor of writing (or if you're more faithful to your viewing schedule than to your writing schedule), you should probably remove the TV from the house permanently; but no matter what you do, give it six months, minimum, before you even look at it. Turn the screen to the wall. Seriously. What's more important to you: your writing or TV? Find out.

Turn off the talk radio. Same as above; if you can't give it up, you're making it more important than your writing. Even if you think you need it for background noise, substitute some other noise that doesn't engage the language center of your brain. That's for writing, not for listening, when you're at the keyboard.

Remove all games from your computer. This is just as vital as reducing your dependence on TV or radio. The key to all these suggestions is to reduce the amount of time you spend on unproductive stuff. If you play games to relax, put them on another computer in a different part of the house, and play them outside your writing time.

Ditto the above for email and web surfing. Don't allow yourself to do it until after you've done your writing for the day. If you're really addicted, allow yourself to read only one email message per paragraph written. Don't count paragraphs shorter than 50 words, either. I don't mean add up all your short paragraphs until you get 50 words--I mean don't count paragraphs shorter than 50 words at all. Write until you get one that's at least 50 words long. So what if you're in the middle of a stretch of dialog? Keep writing. (And if this email-as-reward system works for you, join a busy listserver!)

Reward yourself for success. Choose the reward so you'll work hard to earn it.

Read a book a day (for inspiration).

Keep 5 (or 10 or whatever) manuscripts in the mail at all times. Choose a number that'll make you stretch a little, but one you can realistically maintain.

Use every spare moment to write something, even if it's just one sentence. An extreme version of this: don't plan any official writing time; just use the spare moments in your day--but use them all.

Carry a note pad or tape recorder with you wherever you go. Use it to record ideas as well as the actual text of stories. Make it your external memory. The idea here is to keep yourself focused on writing no matter what else you're doing.

Keep more than one project going at once. Switch to another the moment you slow down on one.

Collaborate. You'll be less likely to slack off if someone else is counting on you to perform.

Switch tools. If you normally use a computer, write with pad and pencil for a while. If you normally write hard sf, write fantasy. Get out of whatever rut you might be in.

Change your writing environment. Rearrange your study, or go write in the library or a cafe for a while.

Keep yourself constantly "on." Start another project immediately after you finish one, before you even get up to stretch your sore muscles.

Don't think; just write. Keep the writing and editing processes separate. Don't worry about clumsy bits; you can fix those later. If you're writing on paper, intentionally cross out a few lines and re-write them so you won't have to worry anymore about messing up the page.

Edit for perfect copy as you go. This one works for some people, but not for others. If you find yourself getting too critical of your new material, stop editing during your creative time. But some people discover that they build up momentum editing, and when they get to the end of what they've already written, they're eager to forge ahead into new territory.

Write an hour for every hour you read.

Spend an hour a day in the library researching new ideas.

Rewrite a story a day. (Works best if you've got a lot of unsold stories lying around.)

Jump-start your creative juices. Start your writing day with a long walk in pleasant surroundings, or gardening, or doing something else that wakes you up and gets your mind working.

Identify your best hours of the day and write during those. Let other people take the leftovers for a change.

Paper your study walls with Playboy foldouts (or whatever else is likely to keep you in the room).

Evaluate everything in your life according to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Air is at the top. Food and shelter are close behind. What's next? Sex? Money? Where does writing fit in now? See if you can move it up a couple of notches. Write now, breathe later.

Give yourself regular days off. Most people get weekends off; why shouldn't you? An important point: Days when you tried to write but failed don't count as days off. Only days you've scheduled in advance count. Conversely, now that you've got regular days off, don't use your work time for personal stuff.

Take up a hobby. A lot of writers started writing as a hobby, and it slowly became their passion. That's cool, but it left an empty niche in your life where the hobby used to be. Find something else to fill it. You'll be amazed at how much you realize you missed that kind of thing. More to the point: you'll suddenly stop resenting your writing for not fulfilling that need, and you'll start to enjoy it for what it is.

Turn writing into a hobby. Not everyone has to be a full-time writer. If you don't want to (or can't) write full-time, or if you can't find another hobby that scratches the particular itch that writing did when it was a hobby, then make it one again.

Hack-write. Put words in a row for pay. Write anything you can get a contract for, so long as there's money in it, but here's the kicker: do the best job you can on it. Even if it's something you don't care about, do a good job anyway. You're practicing two things here: writing on demand, and writing well.

Build a ritual around writing. Start well ahead of the actual act of writing, and continue the ritual after you've finished work. The idea is to make writing an integral part of a bigger picture. Let the cat out, make a cup of tea, feed the fish, put on some music, light a candle, write, check the mail, fix lunch, do the dishes. Doesn't seem quite so ominous when it's buried among all that other stuff, does it?

Light a candle. Make it a big, wide one. Write until the wax pool is entirely molten, as far out as it will go. Anything less will "core" the candle, wasting wax as the wick burns itself downward without using the wax from around the edge.

Binge! Gear up for a major writing weekend. Get your ideas ready, set a goal, and plan to work every waking hour until you're done. Cook meals ahead of time and freeze them so you can just nuke 'em and keep going. Tell your friends you'll be out of touch. Turn off the phone ringer and put a message on your answering machine telling people to send the cops if they really need to talk to you that bad. Lock yourself in your study and don't come out until you've committed fiction.

Chain the wolf to the door. Buy expensive things on credit, quit your job, etc. JUST KIDDING! (But I tried it once, and it worked, too...for a while.)

One of the most frustrating things about writer's block is that there is no definitive cure. Unlike chicken pox, you can get writer's block again and again. There are, however, some strategies for get around writer's block when you encounter it.

Find out what's causing it

A good way to deal with writer's block is to be able to diagnosis it‹figure out why you're getting blocked in the first place. There are a couple of common reasons for writer's block.

Often, what you have is a stand-off between your creator and editor. As you move through the writing process, you go through several different stages: first you have to create some text, then edit it, then probably create and edit some more. You'll follow this path several times around until you finally get to a place where you feel your paper is ready to turn in. However, if you are trying to create AND edit at the same time, you'll often find yourself at a standstill. You'll find yourself trying to edit your text as you write it or even before you write it. For example:

-Do you have to have the each sentence absolutely perfect before you can move on to the next?

-Do you stop to look up the spelling of a word before you finish the sentence (sometimes forgetting what you were going to say by the time you get back to it)?

-Do you spend twenty minutes looking through a thesaurus for the perfect word before you can move on?

Strategies for Turning Your Editor Off:

-Try freewriting on the computer, with the monitor blacked out so you can't see what you're writing. This way, you force your editor to take a break so your creator can get to work.

-Jot random ideas down on slips of paper as you get them on your way to another class, at dinner, while you're watching tv. Later, compile your ideas in one place and you might surprise yourself with all the possibilities you have come up with.

-Write out ideas, rough outlines, or questions in crayons, markers, or anything that doesn't look like it's going to be a paper. Or, use paper that seems inappropriate for writing a paper--like the back of a bill or a flyer in your mailbox. This way, you won't feel like you have to have everything absolutely perfect.

-If you can't get words to paper, talk your ideas out. Make an appointment with a tutor in the ASC and discuss your assignment and your ideas. You might be surprised at all the material you can come up with by the end of the session. You can also talk about what's causing your writer's block and strategies for getting around it.

-Remember that a first draft is just that, and it doesn't have to be perfect. In fact, it shouldn't be perfect. Instead of trying to express your thoughts perfectly the first time through, think of this draft as a short hand paper for yourself. The purpose is to get your thoughts and ideas down in some concrete form so you won't forget them.

It could be that something entirely unrelated to what you're writing is bugging you, causing you to have writer's block. Maybe something happened earlier in the day to upset you and or even something great happened; either way, your mind keeps going back to it, keeping you from concentrating on the task at hand.

Ignoring your preoccupations and forcing yourself to continue trying to write probably won't get you anywhere: you won't be able to resolve your personal issues and you won't get any work done. You need to deal with your block first.

-Take a break from writing your paper, and freewrite about what is really on your mind for 20 minutes or so--if you get your worries and celebrations down on paper, then your mind will be able to let go of them and let you concentrate on other things.

-If you still can't concentrate after freewriting, take a walk, jog, play some basketball and let yourself think through your problems some more. Physical activity is also a great way of relieving stress and calming you down. Chances are you'll be better able to concentrate on the task at hand once you've blown off some steam.

-You might even need to go talk to a friend about the problem and try to resolve the problem before you can get some serious work done.

Even if they manage their time and follow writing guidelines, many writers will still experience a time when the words just won't come together, when they are simply "stuck" and can't think of anything to write. This is writer's block. Fortunately, a few helpful techniques make it possible to overcome the challenge of writer's block.

Experiment - Try to write in different places, at different times, and with different writing instruments.

Freewrite - Choose one sentence in a paragraph and write a paragraph about it. Then choose one sentence from that paragraph and do it again.

Cluster - Choose key words and ideas; then write associated ideas and words in clusters around them. This process often forms new ideas.

Be flexible - Be willing to throw out sections of text that are causing problems or just don't work.

Follow a routine - Follow a routine to get into the writing mood. Try activities like wearing comfortable clothing, using a certain pen, or listening to a particular CD or type of music.

Move - Physically move around, stretch, or walk.

Take a break - Get a snack or drink, talk to someone, or just relax for five minutes before starting to write again.

Concentrate - Focus on a different section or aspect of your paper. This sometimes leads to new insights in problem areas, while allowing you to get work done on another section.

Re-read - Read a print draft of the paper and jot down ideas while reading.

Relax! - The more you worry, the harder it gets to think clearly.

by Joanne Reid

A recurring topic on Internet writers' groups is writers' block. The writers discussing the cursed block range from beginners to old pros at the writing game. Here are some suggestions that came out in a recent discussion as possible reasons for writers' block.

Not thinking through a situation carefully enough

When the first blush of an idea strikes, the immediate feeling is to sit down and capture it on paper. However, rushing to write before the idea is fully formed can have detrimental effects...suddenly you find yourself painted into a corner with no way out.

No outline

This is related to the previous problem. Many experts believe that without an outline, you're doomed to failure. Even if it is nothing more than a few lines describing the story, an outline is essential. Even a brief article needs to have its beginning, middle and end sketched out before you begin. Otherwise, it is guaranteed that you will bog down.

Being bored with what you're writing

Don't write it. If it bores you, imagine how the reader will feel about it. If every section of the work you're writing bores you, dump the entire project. Chances are you are writing something not because you care about it but because you think this type of writing is easy. Confession writing and romance writing are often thought of, by amateurs, as "easy" markets where anything sells. Consequently many people who never read either attempt to rattle off a romance and suddenly find themselves blocked.

Not writing every day but only when the muse strikes

You must have a schedule for writing. Ideally, this would be every day. Even if you end up tossing out what you write, you've got to be serious about it. Real writers do not wait until the muse strikes. That is an indulgence purely for the dabbler.

Weariness

One problem for some writers is that they have a job that involves writing. They head in to the office, write reports, memos, whatever, all day long. Then they head home and the thought of looking at a keyboard overwhelms them.

There are two things such a person can do: quit the job or write in the morning. Neither is easy but if the person really wants to write, some adjustment in the current lifestyle must be made.

HINTS FOR BREAKING THE BLOCK:

Have several projects going at the same time

If you're burned out and can't finish one piece of work, switch to the other. Often putting the work in progress to the back of your mind helps. The subconscious mulls it over while you are consciously working on something else.

Freewriting

Since you have to be at your keyboard daily (or at least 5 days a week), develop the habit of freewriting. There are a number of creativity books which suggest starting off your day with morning pages. One of the most popular is Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way.

Simply write whatever comes to your head. If you can't think of anything, write that you can't think of anything. A good recommendation is if all else fails, describe what is around you.

The most dangerous (to your writing career) thing to do is to give in to writer's block. If you do, suddenly you will find that decades have passed and all you can do is mourn what might have been.

by Michael A. Banks

Have you ever been stuck in the middle writing project, unable to write and not knowing why? You probably shrugged it off as "writer's block," and waited it out. That's what most writers do when they can't make progress on a project.

Unfortunately, waiting often compounds the problem with frustration over not being able to write, and extends the block.

You don't have to endure all this. Writer's block is often nothing more than a technical impasse that occurs when you reach a point where you know something is wrong, but can't identify it. The subconscious wants to resolve the problem, and won't let you progress until you do.

When this happens, you can work your way around (or, if you prefer, through) the block by writing.

But how, you may wonder, can you write if you're blocked? There are two approaches. The more direct of the two is to start another writing project. This foils frustration over not accomplishing anything, and gives you the break you need. (After you've been away from any project for a few

days, you gain a fresh viewpoint on it--which is all you usually need to identify a problem in a manuscript.)

If you can't or don't want to start a new project, or have a deadline and must get the work out, you can still write your way out of the block. Write the parts you know how to write first. Jump ahead in your short story or novel and write a scene you know will take place. Or, you might even write the ending. If you're writing non-fiction, write a book chapter or article section that you already know how to handle.

Here again, you'll eventually gain a viewpoint or an insight that will help you work out the problem. At the same time, you'll avoid compounding your problems and extending the "block" with frustration.