C h a z z W r i t e s . c o m

See all my books at AllThatChazz.com.

08/16/2010 • 8:23 AM 2

How to Get the Time You Need to Write Your Novel

Writers who complete their books often steal time and sometimes buy it. You might have to get up earlier or stay up later (or both) but you’ll find lots of tips here on how to get your first draft written. Don’t get sucked into the idea that you need huge blocks of time to make progress. Sometimes all you can do is little bits, but if you write consistently, the little bits will add up. I have a draft of a novel to edit, but I’ve also started another. Summer is very child-intensive for me, so I have a notebook and every day I make progress on writing the new book with a calligraphic pen. The second draft will be typed, of course, but I’m stealing time here and there to get it done. I can get words on paper at the kids’ swimming lessons. Typing’s preferred, but getting it done is the higher goal. Find time. Find time to write every day.

Are you losing writing time to petty errands? That may be a sign of procrastination. Resistance can easily be rationalized but it doesn’t serve your goal of getting a draft written (and eventually published.) Outsource where you can. Getting a babysitter for movie night is a good break, but we also hire a babysitter just so we can get work accomplished without interruptions. I hate to mow the lawn so I hire a teenager to do it for me. For the few bucks it takes to get that done, it’s also saving me valuable writing time. When I hear that mower crank up, it’s also a reminder I should be writing. Buy time.

Maybe you aren’t getting it done because you are not prioritizing. If working out is really important to you, you schedule it, just like a meeting or a dentist appointment. Same with writing. Is it on your calendar? Does your family know writing time is, in fact, Writing Time in big block letters on the family schedule? If you want time, you have to be clear with the people in your life that the time you set aside for writing is sacred. Make time. Value your time. Defend your time.

Surprise tip:

Do not multitask. Doing more than one thing at a time is inefficient.

Find efficiencies. How are your keyboarding skills? Are you a fast typist? Faster is better. Publishers want prolific writers with gestational times more like a rabbit than an elephant. I recommend the Mavis Beacon keyboarding programs to increase your typing speed. If you cannot type quickly, have you tried Dragon or some other dictation strategy?

Don’t ponder. Work from a rough outline so you can plow ahead instead of plod. When we compose, our typing speed typically slows. This is not the way to go. Edit later. Whether you’ve got any kind of plan for what you will write that day or are more of an exploratory writer, punch the keys and don’t stop. The faster you type, the faster your book will be written. Resist the urge to tinker. Messing around with comma placement doesn’t get your first draft done. Save time and write fast. Editing is for later. It is impossible to edit a blank page.Don’t waste time. My general rule is, I don’t watch reruns unless it’s a must-see (bearing in mind that most must-see TV, isn’t.) There are a lot of things I don’t want to do. If they can be avoided, I don’t do them. The biggest time suck is the temptation to surf the net. When you’re writing (at that sacred time you’ve set each day) don’t open your browser and don’t check your email more than twice a day. I type on a little keypad called the Neo. It has 700 hours of life off three AA batteries, it doesn’t heat up like a normal laptop and best of all, it has no internet access. I can take it anywhere and write without even the temptation of internet distraction (read: games and porn.)

A special note about Twitter:

I love Twitter, but as Seth Godin says, “Twitter is never done.” You must be careful how you use it. Here’s how: I post frequently on Twitter. (Plug: you get fresh updates on the latest publishing links on your right of this screen so this blog always has updated content through the day.) However, I never post to Twitter from my desktop. Twitter is for the in-between times. Twitter is for down time. Twitter is productive time when you would otherwise be unproductive. Twitter is for commercials (if you aren’t already saving years of your life by saving your TV shows on PVR and zipping through commercials.)

I use Twitter to:

Help people find links to useful information.

Say something funny and read something funny. Life is tough. @thesulk makes me feel better about our common destiny as worm food.

Answer questions and connect with people I wouldn’t otherwise.

If it isn’t useful or funny, I’m doing something else.

Please do follow me (@RChazzChute) on Twitter for the latest on the best book publishing information.

BONUS:

Do not consult your thesaurus as you write your first draft. If you’re searching for another word, you’re slowing down.

Compose in sprints.

Ten Steps to be a Writer

1. Write. Most people want to write. Most don’t. Don’t be that guy.
2. Head down. Hands on keyboard.
3. Do not worry about rejection. (If you figure out how to do this, help me understand.)
4. Set a deadline. Don’t make it too far off and take it seriously.
5. Keep your work circulating. Repeat until you succeed.
6. Seek support. Eschew those who don’t support your dreams.
7. Be original. Don’t try to be the next anybody but you.
8. Read. It’s how you connect with experience beyond your own and it helps you improve your writing.
9. Don’t be a schmuck. Learn about the publishing industry so you can navigate it.
10. Don’t be a fraidy cat. Normal is for the mediocre. Dare a stab at immortality. (Did I mention you should write? I mean now!)

Filed under: publishing, Writers, writing tips, 10 tips for writers, Be a writer, writers, writing tips

08/12/2010 • 8:59 AM 0

Book Covers that Sell: 10 Crucial Elements

Your book’s cover needs:

1. A designer (99% likely.)

2. Color (usually. The Road was all black with white lettering). Not green. Green covers never sell unless the book is about golf or lawn care. (Royal blue sells better than other colors.)

3. A known author’s name. (If you’re not at all known, it would really help if you got that way. Go rob a bank or save the president or something. Get a life, and, as Zola said, “Live out loud.”

4. Failing #3, a great quote recommending the book by a known name.

5. A compelling picture. What “compelling” is, is subjective (though we do know sex sells.)

6. If not sex, violence.

7. If not violence, awe me or lure me with a (relevent) image that makes me curious.

8. A great title. A short title. (Something I can remember from the local radio interview to the bewildered bookstore clerk: Fight Club, Portnoy’s Complaint, The Dome, Calculating God, God is Not Great, The 4-Hour Work Week, White Teeth, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City.)*

9. Repeat #8 again. Kick me in the teeth with that title. (Rather than a long title to explain more, let the subtitle do that work if you must.)

10. The back cover is a cover, too. Sometimes I pick up a (usually self-published) book whose back cover is blank (and put it right back on the bookstore shelf.) That’s not clever, eye-catching or minimalist. It’s wasted advertising space. Your story blurb must be killer. Happy quotes by big reviewers/authors help if you have them.

*This is tends to be more so with fiction titles. Non-fiction titles have more latitude and tend to explicate more. Still, give me pith (as in The 4-hour Work Week example above, there’s little doubt what’s it’s about. It also happens to be a great and useful book which I just read and certainly recommend for those looking for freedom.)

Filed under: Books, publishing, writing tips, 10 Tips, blurbs, Book Covers that Sell, Sell Your Book

08/11/2010 • 8:46 AM 2

Create more interesting characters (Superman vs. Batman)

Superman and Batman. They are both orphans, but that’s pretty much where the similarity ends. Batman is the world’s greatest detective and/or a psychotic bad ass, depending on what vintage of comic you’re reading. Superman is an all-powerful boy scout with too few weaknesses. Batman is just a human who risks his secret identity every time he pulls his underwear over his Kevlar long johns.

Batman is more interesting. His story is dark so there’s more to explore. He is weak compared to Superman, but for story, you don’t want a hero who is safe from just about everything. You want a hero who is in danger every second. Then you put your characters through the grinder.

Don’t fall in love with your characters because, for your story to be at all readable, you’re going to do some horrible things to them.

Filed under: writing tips, Batman, create more interesting characters, Superman

08/10/2010 • 9:01 AM 1

Writing Tip: 3 Common Exposition Mistakes

1. Don’t let your villain explain everything to the captured hero (e.g. “I expect you to die, Mr. Bond, but first let me give you a tour of the rocket base whose deadly payloads are aimed at Topeka!”)

2. Don’t allow your exposition device to go on too long. Your hero should struggle to solve the mystery, a little at a time and with a few red herrings. If your protagonist finds the one person who knows it all–and all is explained in one big info dump—the narrative will lag and it’s a variation of deus ex machina.

3. Avoid overexplaining. Enough said.

Filed under: writing tips, common mistakes, exposition, writing tip

08/09/2010 • 8:30 AM 0

3 Cliched Openings to Avoid

1. Don’t start with your protagonist waking up in the morning.

2. Don’t start with your protagonist starting a trip.

3. Please do not start with a dream…unless you’re writing Inception 2.

Filed under: writing tips, cliches, openings to avoid, writing

08/06/2010 • 9:41 PM 0

How Not to Write a Novel: The Bookfomercial

Filed under: Books, publishing, web reviews, writing tips, book trailer, bookfomercial, How Not to Write a Novel

08/06/2010 • 12:28 PM 0

Your Computer Will Crash. Who you gonna call?

Sorry to scare you with that headline, but let’s face it, it’s going to happen. Your disk won’t last forever. At some point, system restore won’t work. Your motherboard will die and you’ll be faced with the blue screen of death. Hemingway’s wife lost his fiction on the train. You’ve got similar problems heading your way eventually. Entropy takes its price in our blood and—in the case of an author with a dead computer—tears.

How will you save your book? Where will your most precious files be? Have you printed everything out? Are you ready to find and retype all that? I didn’t think so. Me, neither.

SOLUTION 1: The cheapest backup is your own email. Label it well so you can find it again and store it on your email server. Just email it to yourself.Google allows you to do the same thing with a slightly fancier interface. When the end of your computer comes, your masterpiece will be somewhere that isn’t on your computer. That’s good, though slow retrieval file by file could be a real bitch.

SOLUTION 2: I’ve tried a dedicated external backup drive. I hate it. It’s cumbersome and the disk filled up too quickly. It was so frustrating to use it sits on my desk disconnected. The user interface sucked and it just couldn’t seem to do the job without confusing me. That’s $70 gone. (I got it on sale or I’d be $40 angrier.) If you’re a masochist, you could buy one, too.

SOLUTION 3: Carbonite. For about $55 bucks a year, this service will copy everything and, when the end comes, restore it quickly and easily. It will be as if your old computer’s ghost is resurrected on your new computer. Carbonite, I believe, is the best solution.* I signed up for the free trial once I heard about it from the Slate Culture Gabfest podcast. It works on the upload while you aren’t using your computer and its workings did not interfere with my work (unlike my TrendMicro security program! Grr!) Peace of mind is easily worth $55 a year.

*I’m not a shill for Carbonite. I’m just a believer.

And now my books, and all their many drafts, are safe.

Filed under: getting it done, web reviews, writing tips, Carbonite, restoring files, saving your book, system crash

08/03/2010 • 8:42 PM 0

Freelancing doesn’t mean free. Get paid!

Too many writers are working for free, or nearly free.

First, let’s talk about lit journals. My Chapters doesn’t even carry any of them anymore. They have tiny readership. You could dedicate yourself to putting your work up on your own website and you could have more readers in a day than many lit journals have in a year. You could argue that wouldn’t be easy (but anything that’s worth doing isn’t easy.) In the end, you’d have more exposure through your own site (assuming your work is any good) and your readers would be your readers.

Many lit journals pay in subscription copies AKA bird cage liners. You’re supposed to be so bowled over by the fact that you’re published in a tiny journal that you don’t mind a payment of zero. Prestige is illusory and or fleeting. Publication in a journal that so few people read can make you feel great. It doesn’t make the achievement important to your career. Writing credits are nice, but they aren’t the most important component of a query letter. Like the AMC commercial says, “Story matters here.”)*

Or they’ll say you have to “pay your dues.” No. You don’t. You have to work on your skill, but getting rejected by literary mags doesn’t improve your skill. Writing and editing do that. You learn nothing from rejection letters other than the fact that you’ve been rejected.

Once upon a time, writers could actually make some decent money out of writing for magazines. Kurt Vonnegut did. Stephen King bought beer with his stories in Screw. Back then, writers saw any magazine that would publish (and pay) for fiction as a gateway to the big leagues: writing longer works, like the Great American Novel. Then the world changed and no one was reading Screw for the stories, anymore.

Journals aren’t a gateway to publication in a larger venue anymore. If an agent is trolling the lit journals for talent, you have to wonder why when they should have a stack of queries on their desks to sift through. Agents don’t need lit journals to act as screeners for new talent, so neither do you.

Next target: freelancing does not mean free. When someone asks you to write for free, they’re devaluing your work (and worse, mine!) You can be sure everyone else in the process will be paid. They’ll pay for their computers, the electric company, the printer and everything else. Why not you, who is providing the content? (You know? The reason anyone picks up the publication? You write the stuff in the hole between the ads!)

When you write for someone, it’s a responsibility. Certain requirements must be met. For instance, you can’t libel anyone or plagiarise someone else’s work. You may not be guilty, but that doesn’t necessarily mean no one will complain (or sue.) In other words, writing entails risk, usually just to your ego at the hands of someone writing a letter to the editor to complain about your take on reality. Don’t assume a risk you won’t even be compensated for minimally!

Charging for your work means you value your work and know that others should do so, as well. Failing to charge means they won’t take you seriously. Someone might say they are letting you “try out.” How will that work? You sweat out a piece for them, charge nothing and they’ll maybe pay you next time? How well do you think you’ll be compensated when you’ve already set your base price at zero?

You get the idea. But I hear someone crying out, “What about the exceptions? Am I an exception?” Yes, there are exceptions. If you’ve never written anything and need a clip file, okay. Choose something small and gain some experience. Don’t wallow in that pit too long.

What about gifting? Scott Siglar built his current success on giving away his books on the internet as podcasts. He was smart about it, though. He not only built a fan base, he gave out his fiction a little at a time. A lot of readers became fans of his fiction and proceeded to buy the book because they just couldn’t wait for next week’s installment. (Seth Godin talks a lot about gifting and being smart about it. Read his stuff before you try that path so you can be smart about it, too.)

Insisting on getting paid doesn’t mean you aren’t flexible. Here’s a story from the trenches that happened to me recently. A client wanted me to ghost an advertorial piece (3,000 words) for a magazine. He hopes to get a lot of people signing up for his courses and the magazine will give him a free full-page advertising page in return for the article. This isn’t an uncommon arrangement. He asked if I would write it for him. I gave him a consult so I knew the parameters of the job. I thought about it and named my price. $850 + HST.

That wasn’t the budget the client had in mind, so he had some sticker shock.

I understand that sometimes a fee can seem like it comes out of the blue, but I gave him my reasons:

1. Ghosting always costs more. His name would be on it. I’d be the invisible guy who did the work. No publication credit bumps up the scale.

2. As with the credit, he’d also retain the rights in perpetuity. He could use my work however he wanted for the rest of his life. (Ad excerpts, emailing, flyers, brochures, web copy etc.,…

3. Part of pricing is to identify what the work is to accomplish. In other words, what’s the client’s ROI (Return on Investment)? I command high fees for a speech for an association because my work will drive up membership numbers for said association. Likewise in this case, it wouldn’t take very many people signing up for the clients’ courses to pay my fee (which is starting to sound paltry, isn’t it?)

4. I checked. The ad page the client is getting in exchange for the 3,000 word story sells for $600. If one page of advertising (where the copy is sparse), shouldn’t my multi-page rate reflect that fact?

So the client balked at the full fee. What to do?

I negotiated. I said, no problem. I’ll cut my fee in half if he writes it and all I have to do is edit it. That will take less of my time, so that’s fair to me and okay with the client.

FUNNY ADDENDUM: The client found that writing the 3,000 word magazine piece is not easy. I talked to him on the phone and sent him a rough outline to structure his thoughts. I’m making sure that the editing job won’t end up taking up too much time that way. This client is a good guy who respects my work. He let me know that he’s going to try to plow ahead, but if I have to take over, he’ll get me my full fee, after all. Either way it shakes out, I will feel good about the project because I gave away a little, but got a lot. And so will the client.

If you get your cheque and think, “That’s it?!” or you’re grumbling about the time lost while you work, it’s definitely time to take up animal husbandry…or raise your rates. I hope you aren’t raising your rates up from zero!

*BONUS: If they have to pay you in bird cage liners, they are undercapitalized. Most of these journals don’t pay until publication. If they’re that underfunded, there’s an excellent chance they won’t even be around by the time they get to publishing your story. It’s happened before. Lots.

Filed under: agents, publishing, Rant, writing tips, freelancing, getting paid

07/31/2010 • 3:07 PM 1

Smash Writer’s Block: Write Hardboiled Fiction

You aren’t going to feel like writing all the time. Set an egg timer and tell yourself you’ll just write for ten minutes. That’s one very hardboiled egg. You can manage ten minutes. Write as fast as you can and don’t pause to think. Don’t pause to look back and edit. Just go!

How this helps:

1. It gets you writing. You don’t need big blocks of time. Lots of writers knock out entire books in short segments. Little bits of stolen time are how stay-at-home moms and dads live. Do it consistently and you’ll build your book.

2. This technique forces you to move forward and not dither over split infinitives. Revise later. Write right now.

3. Once you get started, you will often find you’ll want to keep going. You may not have started off in the zone, but by promising yourself just ten minutes, you will often end up there and decide you want to stay, persevere and write more.

BONUS:

Some will say, “I don’t have even ten minutes.”

(I have heard this.)

Answer:

Sorry to say, these people are whiners. You don’t have ten minutes? Really?

Reality check:

You aren’t that crucial. You aren’t that important. You’re experiencing resistance. Go work on yourself and find out why you’re manufacturing drama. And ask yourself, do you really want to be a writer?

You don’t always have to be “in the mood” to write. You do have to take responsibility for not writing.