Guest Post: Tonia Laird

*Allison pops in*

Okay - last guest post for me this week. (Come hell or high water, revisions for A Trace of Moonlight will be done by this weekend and I'll be back in the swing of things next week.)

That in mind, this week I'd like to introduce Tonia Laird, who is a friend and fellow writer/artist (She's got a super busy schedule so I was happy to be  able to snag her for a guest post here.)

<-- Check out her artwork!

OOO

So. You’re a writer. You’ve always been a writer. First, making up stories first about imaginary friends. Then, as you grow older, imagining the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are hanging out with you in the field behind your house. Michaelangelo was also so sweet, if a little slow on the uptake. Poor Leonardo, he was just boring. After that, you move on to X-Men, writing fanfics about Wolverine and his long-lost daughter, or Storm’s half-sister. (Oh, wait. So you didn’t do that? Are you sure? I mean… I can’t be the only one!)

Now you’re finished high school and you have to join the “Real World”. But really, the “Real World” is so boring. There’s barely any sword fights, and you’re still waiting for that epic mage battle to erupt in the streets in front of your house. So what do you do? You want to write for realz. How do you do that, you wonder? Well, I went down the creative writing class route. For the most part, I was ridiculously happy, almost giddy, about what I was learning and how quickly I began to recognize the problems within my own writing and how to fix them. I loved my instructors. I loved the majority of my classmates. We all had a very good thing going.

That is, until I took a fiction writing class in my second year. Normally, I’m a fantasy writer. That’s what I love to daydream about the most. However, to branch out and become “more rounded”, I took my first year and wrote in completely different styles than I was used to, thinking it would help bolster my style. And it really did. So much that I decided to take more classes outside of the “genre-realm” and save my fiction writing class to concentrate on my fantasy novel. Something I hadn’t touched for over a year.

Well, imagine my disappointment when the instructor announced in class he didn’t want any of that “genre” stuff in his class. There was a collective groan heard throughout the room. The majority of us were genre writers, and we were bloody proud of it. And now here’s this instructor, who I heard many good things about, and not only is he telling us genre isn’t allowed, but he says it with disdain. It was… disappointing.

So… instead of falling in line, which I probably should have, I thought perhaps if I wrote up my work as a period piece, I could get away with working on my fantasy novel. The instructor seemed fine with the first submission, but someone let it spill. This was a fantasy. He shook his head, but said nothing more of it.

When we had our mid-semester meeting with this instructor, he was pretty blunt. He tapped my latest submission a few times on the table, sighed, and finally made eye contact.

“You know… I know this is fantasy.”

“Yes?”

“It’s not that bad.”

“Thanks?”

“You know… you’d be a good writer if you just didn’t write genre.”

And…sigh. That’s all I could do. So… if I gave up on what I’m passionate about, I’d finally excel? I didn’t buy it. And I didn’t go back to school after being an animator to write what doesn’t interest me. So what did I do with that advice? Overall? I ignored it. Well, not totally. I would pull that memory to the forefront whenever I questioned what the hell I was doing trying to pursue a career in writing.

Basically, I used that advice as a challenge. I know that the instructor was actually trying to “help” in an old school type of way. But it’s the wrong advice. I personally don’t think anyone should try to steer a writer from what they love. What’s the point of living in your head if you’re not enjoying it?

This is my worst example, and I admit, it isn’t the tip of the iceberg for some other writers I know. And please, if you have any “bad writing advice” stories, I’d love to hear them. Commiserating is group fun!


Tonia Laird works as a writer for BioWare, is an avid monkey trainer, and wears size 6 hockey skates. One of these may not be true... Her blog, The Brawling Octopus, can be found here:   

http://brawlingoctopus.wordpress.com/

Do as I say, not as I do...unless I'm doing it well.

by Linda Robertson

As the howling winds and brought the storm to rage around the little cabin, the children roused from their sleep. They huddled together, wide-eyed and whispering in the dark. Across the room, the wrinkle-faced old woman who'd allowed them inside her rickety shack of a home, was sitting on the hearth ledge. She raised her head as high as her bowed back would allow. Her gaze slid unhurriedly from child to child. 


"She's looking at us," Cindy whispered.


Grace, the eldest of the girl scouts who'd become separated from their troop, shushed Cindy. When the rain began to drip on their heads, however, she began to doubt their safety. Her arms tightened protectively around the girls as if to reassure them, but holding on to them consoled her as well.


The old woman's hand reached out. It was gnarled. Her knuckles were huge, her nails broken. Her skin was covered in dark spots. Just when it seemed the crooked, pointing finger would the emphasize her  scolding, she gestured them closer. "Come, young ones, and let me tell you a story."


I first saw my agent speak at an RWA meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio. I did not belong to the group, but I'd traveled three and a half hours to get there just to take his seminar. It was time, money, and effort well spent. I learned sooo much from him. Like:

How does your setting make people feel? 

The italicized passage above should make you worry. Do you know why?

I didn't tell you anything about where they were except that it was a little cabin with a leaky roof, Not necessarily a scary place. I didn't say it had stuffed animal carcasses and spider webs all over; I didn't say it had flowery wallpaper and smelled like cinnamon and honey, either.

So why worry?

Because the characters are worrying. They are reacting to what is around them before I ever get to describe the environment.

The story should revolve around a problem/conflict that directly affects your (hopefully) sympathetic character.

Are you starting to sympathize with Grace already? She's lost and scared, but in spite of that she's acting protective of the younger girls.

"It's warmer by the fire," the woman said. "Come along."


Grace held the girls in place and none of them moved.


The old woman glanced up at the roof. It wasn't leaking where she was sitting. She fumbled around in her apron and pulled something out. 


Grace didn't know what it was until the woman pulled the sheath off of the short blade. She gasped. Her mind raced. How would she get the girls out fast if the woman came at them? Where would they go in stormy dark that she couldn't find them?


The old woman leaned forward. Grace thought for sure the woman was going to rise to her feet and come after them, but she reached a gnarled hand into a basket at her feet and pulled out an apple, which she began to cut slices off of and eat. 


The smell of the fruit filled the air.  Each crisp bite the woman took made Grace hungrier and hungrier.


"You don't want a story?"


Grace shook her head side-to-side. She wasn't going anywhere near that old woman. She had a knife.


"What kind of story?" Cindy asked.


The woman lifted a plate from a nearby table and began slicing the apple into pieces. "The kind you tell on stormy nights."


"I don't like scary ghost stories."


She put the knife away and offered the plate to the girls. "Then I will tell you a happy ghost story."


Cindy pushed away from Grace first. She tried to hold her little sister down, but Cindy twisted as she stood and slipped away from Grace as easily as she did during tickle-fights at home. 


Uh-oh.

They're little lost children, it's night time, there's a big storm, and now, the main character's baby sister is falling for the weird old lady's tricks.

Probably the single-most important bit of advice I gleaned from my wonderful agent is:

RAISE  THE  FRE@KING  STAKES!!!

Once you have begun to give your readers the story of a character they can root for, outlined the problem, start making it worse. If the scout troop's resident booger-eating brat wanted to buddy up to the knife-wielding granny, Grace probably wouldn't try as hard to keep her back. But her own baby sister? Mom and dad might ground her for life if anything happened to Cindy.

I knew after I heard Don speak that I wanted him to represent me. He had, hands down, the BEST writing advice I'd ever heard, all in one compact hardback, in common sense language. I bought that book: "WRITING THE BREAKOUT NOVEL" and the accompanying workbook. I fangirled at a convention months later and had him sign it for me. I can't recommend these books enough. But don't think I'm saying that I'm anywhere near having mastered story telling. I refer back to the lessons and sections of his book often as I write. Some places it shows. Some places, it doesn't. Some places I probably should have referred to the book and didn't. But I try. I try very hard to tell the story in my heart, the story that is true to my characters, and tell that story with as much impact as I can, throwing situations at my characters to test them, to watch them soar, and watch them fail...and pick themselves up again because they just won't give up on the goal. Why? Because that is life. That's what people do. That's what I do.

And, in case you're curious, Don didn't become my agent until eight or nine years after that seminar.

Because I didn't give up on my goal.

Worst Writing Advice

by KAK  

Top 5 Worst Bits of Writing Advice:

1. Write What You Know -- Gods help us, the aliens really have taken over the White House, Nostradamus is a zombie, and England is being overrun by Dukes.We don't talk about Maine. NOBODY MENTION MAINE.
2. Writing is like painting, one must copy the masters to become a master -- Pretty sure that's called plagiarism. Teachers know to copy and paste chunks of their student's papers into the search engines to check for such "practice." (We won't mention the oopsies that snuck by the publishers since the advent of the internet and web search engine.)
3. No Adverbs, Adjectives, or Complex Sentence Structure -- Apparently, the majority of Americans didn't pass 3rd grade English. See Spot read.
4. Dumb it Down / Don't Make the Reader Think Too Hard -- Right. We wouldn't want it to be known that reading could make you smarter. We get all the vocabulary we need from video games. That ability to connect the dots? Psht. That only applies to actual dots. On a tablet screen.
5. Break All The Rules -- When I grow up, I want to be internationally known as a douche. I'll show the business-side of publishing my mad genius by refusing to follow submission guidelines, meet deadlines, or accept editorial input. I'll amass hordes of fans by ignoring consumer-expectations of the genre and blurring the lines by calling my work of fiction non-fiction.

The best bit of writing advice I've received? If you read Jeffe or James's posts this week, then it isn't going to be a surprise.

WRITE.

 (and stay off the internet until you've reached your daily word-count goal)

LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND WRITING ADVICE

Walk into a room with 10 people and you will find a writer. Everyone is a writer, or knows a writer. I'm not knocking that. Hell, I LOVE writing. You want to write, by all means, you should. Go for it, rock it out, make it happen. So now we come to the truth of the situation though. If you have a writer in every room, you also have writing advice in every room, because the only thing we love to talk about more than writing is......well...nothing. Lots of advice on writing gets bandied about. The worst, absolute worst, piece of writing advice is anything that tells you to follow what's selling. "You should write a crappy romance with light BDSM elements because it sells." "You should write vampires because they sell." "Oh you should steer clear of vampires because nobody reads that." "You should write like Jodi Picoult" You should write like John Grisham" "you should write like YA books." SHADDUP ALREADY WILLYA! Listen to me dear readers because I am only going to say this once. IT TAKES A LONG TIME TO WRITE A BOOK. BY THE TIME YOU WRITE WHATEVER TREND YOU THINK YOU SHOULD FOLLOW IT WILL BE OVER. Plus, why would you ever want to shortchange yourself by ripping off someone else's gig? Let Jodi Picoult write her books. Let Stephanie Meyers write her books. You? You should write your own damned book. Trust yourself. Write what you want to. Go crazy. Make shit up. It's fun. Create your own world and then go in and screw with it like the maniacal, power-hungry god that you are but do it honestly. Now the best piece of advice is this: HEAD DOWN. MAKE WORDS. That's mine. I coined it. You wanna be a writer? Well listen up cupcake, writers write. It's simple. Not easy. Simple. Get to writing. And no, messing around with your author fan page or checking your twitter does NOT count. Make words appear on your screen that make a story. Get busy writin' or get busy dyin'. Seriously. Why are you still reading this? Oh, you want a NSFW inspirational Kevin Smith video? Okay, but after that you open up your damn story and you don't look away from it until you have a decent chunk of wordage. I mean it....don't make me come over there.

Remember, Always - no, wait! Never...

by Jeffe Kennedy

This is feeling like nostalgia week for me, so I decided to include a pic of me at the book launch party for Wyoming Trucks, True Love and the Weather Channel, lo, these many moons ago. Look at me - all rosy-cheeked with excitement. Makes me want to pat me on the head.

So, as some of you know, I've been over at Novelspot.net all week, talking in installments about my history as a writer. You can see the index here. It was illuminating for me, to review the path I've followed and see all the choices I made. I think that, as we're going along, we don't always see that we're making choices. We just do the best we can each day and hope that we're getting closer to what we want.

But we do make decisions. Every day, every time we sit down to the keyboard, we make certain choices about where we want to go as writers.

When I think about advice, being a child of the 70s, I recall Steve Martin's Grandmother's Song, which gives all sorts of instructions. It includes gems like "Be courteous, kind and forgiving," "criticize things you don't know about," and "be purple, obsequious and clairvoyant." He often gave spurious advice during his stand-up routines. One started with, "Remember: Always -- no, wait! Never..."

That's kind of how writing advice is. We're looking for guidance in making good choices, to becoming better and more successful and people mix up their "always" and their "nevers."

They're absurd concepts anyway. Sometimes I read lists of writing advice and growl. So, this is my vote for Worst Writing Advice:

Anything that includes "always" or "never."

Or that even implies a hard and fast line. If someone tells you to never use adverbs or always follow instructions, for example, pitch that out the window. Any Rules, with a capital R, really beg to be avoided completely.

Okay, so, now that I've just nuked 95% of the writing advice out there, what is the Best Writing Advice I've ever received?

Write Every Day.

Yes, I know this totally smacks of Always. It doesn't HAVE to be every damn day. You can take vacations and sick leave, okay? But otherwise, yes, writing every day makes a difference. It can make all the difference in the world. If you want writing to be your career, you have to show up and do your job every day. You want weekends off? Fine - as long as your butt is in your chair on Monday morning without fail. You need to do research? Fine - as long as it doesn't become a reason not to have to write. You're editing? This totally counts, as long as you're working on your edits in a steady, professional way.

That's what it comes down to. You want to be a career writer? Then treat it like a career.

Remember, you must always-- dammit, no. You must never-- No! I had it the first time.

Always keep writing.