Notes from Stackpole's "Writing in the Post-Paper Era"

At Gen Con 2010, I attended one of author Michael A. Stackpole's seminars entitled "Writing Success in the Post-Paper Era". The seminar description mentions that Stackpole was "the first author to offer fiction on the iPhone/iPod Touch through Apple's App Store" and that he would give attendees "an up to date look at the digital revolution and explain how you can profit and develop your career". He definitely delivered on that. Below are my notes:

• For every hardcopy book sold, two are printed.


• The economics of publishing are such that if 25% of the copies of a book sold are digital, publishers will drop the paper version.


• If you intend to make a living writing, you need a professional web site, a Facebook presence, and a Twitter feed. All of these will help get your name out there and draw people to your work.


• If you do a blog, everything you write, tweet, or post on Facebook should be entertaining. It should also be positive, and professional. All of these things become part of your image, and you want to present the image of an entertaining professional with a pleasant personality. If you come across as a moody jerk, a loser, or a person who sulks over all their rejection slips, that's not going to help your reputation.


• You should be able to generate 500 words on pretty much any topic and make it entertaining. If you can't, you probably shouldn't be looking at writing as a career.


• A good, professional WordPress design will cost you $150-200. You should consider that an investment in your future, and not go with one of the free, cookie-cutter themes on the web. (Like the one I'm using here, I guess...)


• Buy domain names for yourself, your main character names, and book titles. That will make it easier for people to find your site and your work.


• Mr. Stackpole uses Zen Cart on his site to handle payments and shopping cart duty.


• Paypal can provide a good payment option for customers. Make sure you get a merchant account with them, though.


• Put writing samples on your web site. This will help readers who are new to you decide whether or not to buy your work.


• Non-technical documents/books priced at over $10 will pretty much not sell as e-books.


• Pricing recommendations based on his experience: $2 for up to 10,000 words. $3 for 10-40,000 words. $5 for 50,000+ words.


• He recommends a metric over "word count divided by 10,000" to represent "hours of reading enjoyment" for your work. Price based on that metric and describe your content in that terminology. The term "pages" doesn't really apply in a digitial setting. Even describing in "word count" doesn't work. What you're really selling is the hours of enjoyment someone will get from your work.


• Consumers tend to be more concerned about the time cost of entertainment than the money cost.


• We'll start seeing more digital serial stories in the future, similar to TV episodes, that are sold for casual reading sessions and priced as above.


• The three main formats you should consider publishing your works in: PDF (optional), ePub (works for all devices except Kindle), and Kindle format. Those three formats should cover just about any e-reader your customer might have.


• Stackpole recommends "Legend Maker" software on the Mac for creating the eBooks.


• At some point there is probably going to be a "big collapse" of traditional publishing. Until then you have no reason not to submit your work to traditional publishers.


• Physical books will drive readers to your web site. That's good. You get money from your web site faster. Publishers tend to pay 6-9 months after the sale of the book. Payment tends to be around $1.35 from the sale of a $10 paperback. Sell a $2 short story through your web site, and you'll pocket around $1.67... so digital publishing is a better deal for the author. More money, sooner.


• As far as editing and proofing services, for a short story, it's sufficient to have another writer look it over. For a novel, hire a freelance editor.


• A good strategy for offering samples on your site: Put up installments of a serial story free. Take them down after a week or two. Put up the next installment. Near the end, offer a digitial omnibus collection of the entire series, including the as-yet-unpublished installments. People will buy them to get the parts they're missing and read the parts not available yet.


• In the digital age, there are no "established authors" anymore. You are as established as your web store.

Mr. Stackpole offers a "Digital Career Guide" for $30 through his web store that offers more detail, recommendations, and information. I purchased a copy at Gen Con but haven't read it yet. I hope to publish a review when I do.

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Notes on Creating Conflict in a Novel

While attending Gen Con 2010 this year, I attended the "Creating Conflict" panel in the writer's track. The panelists included Anton Strout, Chris Pierson, Brad Beaulieu, and John Helfers. The seminar description was:

Make war, not peace! Ruffle the feathers of your characters. Stir the pot of emotions. Add a fistfight or two. Craft a clever and entertaining argument among your heroes. Not all conflict has to be bloody or increase the body count, but it does have to keep the reader turning the pages. Our panelists discuss the art of adding a dash of conflict to your pages.

Below are my notes from the seminar:

• Conflict drives everything in a book.


• Conflict happens whenever two or more characters (or forces, or philosophies) are in opposition.


• Conflict should build over the course of the story, starting small and growing larger.


• It's important that you, and your reader, understand "the bad guy" and why that person does what they do. You don't have to AGREE with the villain, just understand what makes them do what they do. Few, if any, human beings are intentionally "evil".


• The term "psychometry" refers to knowing the history of an object at first touch. (One of the authors used that in a story. Sounded interesting to me so I made a note of it.)


• Having characters make the wrong choice because of their personalities can help build conflict.


• In achieving a goal, the character should try an easy or obvious solution, but fail. Then try a harder solution, and fail... and so on until the goal is achieved.


• Consequences of characters' choices and actions should be explored. They might achieve their goal, but at what cost?


• Characters (and by extension, the reader) may not know the "right choice" for solving a problem.


• The two important points to consider in a conflict: What are the stakes? Why should we care?


• Conflict should be meaningful and advance the plot.


• Conflict should start as early as possible in the story.


• During action scenes (like fights), you want a level of descriptive detail that is appropriate to what a character in that situation might actually notice. For example, during a frantic martial arts battle, we shouldn't see something like this:

The blow connected with Fred's chin, knocking his head back. As his face turned toward the ceiling, Fred noticed the wallpaper border around it. The pattern looked familiar somehow. Of course! It was the same border his mother had put around the walls in their home on the Cape. He wondered if he would ever get back to that house. The summers there were so relaxing...

(A sequence like the above would stop the action DEAD in the story, and it's unlikely anyone in the middle of a fight is going to reminisce about wallpaper and summer homes from their childhood. They might think back to a similar hit from a previous battle and how they reacted, but even that recollection is likely to be short and to the point.)

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Writing Advice from Bestselling Author Aaron Allston

While at the Origins 2010 game fair, I had the opportunity to attend some writing seminars by New York Times bestselling author Aaron Allston. Mr. Allston has published many novels, including a variety of novels for the Star Wars and Terminator franchises, as well as his own "Doc Sidhe" series. On Mr. Allston's home page, he posts information about projects he's working on and includes a link to an online store where his writing can be published in eBook formats.

Here are some of the bits of advice Mr. Allston shared during his "Style and Mood" seminar:

• Write all the way through a novel or story from beginning to end without stopping or editing any more than absolutely necessary. This will keep you from walking away from the work or getting bored with it before it's finished.


• Do not set out to create "art", especially in the beginning. Set out to tell the story you want to tell. As you perfect your craft, you'll get better and your work will begin to approach what others (and you) will see as "art". If you set out to create "art" you'll never achieve it, always comparing the work you're doing to some lofty goal.


• A genre is a way of deliberately limiting your writing to appeal to a specific subset of people. This is why some literature teachers don't see science-fiction as art, as it isn't designed to appeal to "everyone" but just to fans of that kind of work.


• Mr. Allston recommends watching the show Dexter as an example about someone who is trying to be "human" and isn't.


• Avoid writing "the shocking truth". He gave an example from a news story about a woman who had been attacked with an ice pick and didn't realize it until she got home, when she discovered "the shocking truth" that there was an ice pick stuck in her back. This kind of phrasing is trying to tell the reader (or viewer) how to react to the story, rather than sharing the facts and letting the reader react based on that.


• Avoid the use of adverbs and adjectives like "the pain was excruciating". That's not a very clear image. What is "excruciating" exactly? Better to use a description like "it was like having someone scrape off part of a vertbrae with a file". We may not have a good mental image of "excruciating" but we can probably envision that "scraping" example very clearly.


• Similarly, if someone is described as wearing "red shoes" it may be accurate, but if there isn't more to the selection of the color than that, it's a useless detail. Why did the person choose red shoes? What do those red shoes make the people around the wearer think of them? Is the wearer tasteless? Is the wearer trying to attract attention?


• When you're reviewing and editing your work, look at every adverb and adjective. Consider replacing it with an expansion like the "scraping" example above. Don't do too many of those, however. Maybe 1-2 per chapter of a novel is enough.


• Mr. Allston feels that Robert Heinlein was a master of brevity in dialogue and description.


• Manage dialogue without any euphemisms for "said", such as shouted, uttered, murmured, or "ejaculated". Find other ways to let the reader know who is speaking, such as the characters' word choice, sentence structure, or dialect.


• If you have written a scene and there is unwanted emotion in it (e.g., the bad guy looks more sympathetic than the hero), use the "Perry Mason" technique. In that show, the victim of a murder is always depicted as a bad person, so that the audience and the other characters in the story don't get too upset about them dying. By making the victim appear to be "awful" you can remove the emotional reaction to their death. Similarly, you can downplay any emotional reaction by offsetting it with other feelings.


• Humor is anything that tends to make people laugh. Comedy is a genre, where there tends to be a setup and a punchline. People in a comedy say and do things just to set up the joke, things that a normal person in that situation might not do.


• During action sequences, sentence and paragraph length should be shorter. Descriptions should be the minimum necessary to depict what is going on.


• If you use time dilation (making something appear to happen in slow motion), don't overdo it. A paragraph or two at the most should accomplish what you need. Even if the hypothetical time dilation continues on for quite a while, it's not advisable to continue it in the text.


• There shouldn't be large blocks of dialogue during action scenes.


• In an action scene, if a character is doing something unexpected or unusual, provide only the minimum amount of exposition necessary to explain the action. For example, if a pacifist picks up a gun, show them hesitating to do it but realizing it's necessary to protect a loved one, then move on to pulling the trigger.

During his seminar on plot analysis, Mr. Allston provided information including the following:

• The "point" of your story should be something you can express in a very short sentence, like "Family pride leads to murder."


• The "themes" of your story are ideas that you explore or express during the course of the story. These can generally be summed up in a single word, and there should be from 1 to 5 in a story.


• "Arcs" (usually character arcs) are the personal progression of a character, from the beginning to the end of the story. These should not be an external change, like a new job, but a deeper and more profound internal change (like Scrooge going from a grouchy old miser to a decent, generous guy).


• "Scenes" or "Events" are things that happen in a story in a confined space and time with specific characters involved. If you change the location, it's a new scene. Change the time period, it's a new scene.


• If a scene in the story isn't accomplishing something to move the story along, it should go.


• Scenes in a story generally do one or more of the following:


• 
  
  
  
  • Establish characters: Their conflicts, names, descriptions, etc.
  
  
  • Establish facts: Any back-story, history, off-screen events that happen, or time-critical information getting to characters
  
  
  • Reiterate or Re-establish facts that were already established, such as showing a subtle fact seen earlier more clearly, or allowing characters who weren't present earlier to learn of a fact and react to it
  
  
  • Point to the future: foreshadowing and scenes that set up a situation now for a pay-off later (e.g., picks up some papers and later finds a winning lottery ticket in them)
  
  
  • Complicate matters: Add obstacles the slow things down, or a "quest" that the character must finish to get something needed to resolve the main conflict. These can also include "reversals" where we learn that something isn't what we thought it was (e.g., drug dealer is really an undercover cop).
  
  
  • Move things along, facilitating progress in the main story: This can (and where appropriate should) include the character looking at the options to solve his or her problem and choosing one, with the possible repercussions of the choice spelled out.
  
  
  • Reposition characters: Move them physically or emotionally where you need them. For example, getting them on a bus so they're across town at the right time, or having them get bad news that makes them sad at a critical time.
  
  
  • Address one of the themes: For example, if "loyalty" is a theme, test a character's loyalty in some way.
  
  
  • Address the point of the story: For example, show the good guy becoming corrupted.
  
  
  • Address a character arc: A spineless character has to make a choice that helps him grow, or chooses the wimpy option and sets himself up for failure later. Characters should, by the way, fail in at least some scenes. If they always win, it becomes melodramatic.
  
  
  • Wrap things up: resolve a sub-plot, resolve the main plot, or reveal something like a character realizing he no longer wants the thing he's been pining for the entire novel. Deliver a pay-off from an earlier scene. Give emotional closure.
  
  
  
  


• Having multiple purposes to a scene can misdirect the reader. You can introduce something seemingly minor (e.g., an unplugged clock radio) that comes into play later (e.g., character is unsure of the time something happened).


• During your review of the story, analyze each scene. Does it accomplish something? Can you hide additional things in the scene for a pay-off later? Should there be more action or a theme expressed? Does the scene accomplish "enough" to move the story along?


• Good examples of plotting include: The Godfather 1 and 2, It's a Wonderful Life, and "A Man of Prosperity"


• An example of how a scene can serve multiple purposes... Imagine that you've established that Kate and Jack are a married couple. Jack lost his job and is forced to work a crummy part-time job that he hates. Kate is the major breadwinner. Each night, she comes home from work, takes a nap, wakes up, fixes them dinner, they talk for a bit, and go to bed. One day, Kate wakes up to find her alarm clock didn't go off. It's not completely unplugged but it's unplugged enough to be "off". It's dark, and she hasn't fixed Jack's dinner yet. She comes out and finds him watching his favorite show. She apologizes to him. He blows up. He follows her around berating her. At one point, he grabs an old clock off the wall, shoves it in her face, and asks her if she sees what time it is. Tells her he's been waiting around for her. Smashes the clock over her head. In fear, she runs to the bedroom and locks herself in.
  
  What did this scene accomplish for the story? It depicts Jack's chauvenism, his tendency toward violence, and the couple's rocky relationship. It showed a fight between the couple. It also establishes something more subtle: the time that the fight took place. Jack showed her the clock before smashing it, so Kate saw the time. Imagine now that Jack's boss, whom he hates, shows up later in the story as murdered on that day and time. Kate believes she knows where he was. But does she? Her alarm clock was unplugged. Jack could have set any time he wanted on the smashed clock before she saw it. The show he was watching could have been on his DVR or VCR. The scene also therefore establishes reasonable suspicion in Kate's mind that her husband might be the killer. The reader will likely focus on the argument and violence, not thinking about the time on the smashed clock or the unplugged alarm clock until much later.

I thought Mr. Allston did a great job explaining his points and providing concrete examples of what he meant by each point.

I look forward to learning more from him at a future seminar.

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NaNoWriMo 2009 – Winner!

It's November 29, 2009, and I've just completed over 50,000 words toward a fantasy novel I've tentatively titled "Rogue Mage". Having reached 50,000 words before the end of November, I'm now a 2009 NaNoWriMo Winner!

The novel I've been furiously writing this month is set in a medieval fantasy world, very loosely based on medieval England. It focuses on two characters, Felicia Rothban and Aaron Blackwell.

Felicia, in her youth, was a very stunning woman. She was also somewhat shallow, and used her looks to seduce men who were handsome, powerful, and/or rich. Felicia was also quite crazy about flowers. While having a relationship with a powerful mage (wizard, magic user, etc.), Felicia's window box full of flowers began to die. The mage, Eldren, cast a couple of spells that brought her beloved flowers back to health. He then went off to battle, and the flowers died. When he returned from battle, Felicia was mourning the death of her flowers. She begged, pleaded, and finally seduced him into teaching her enough magic to keep the flowers alive.

Eldren took quite a risk doing this. In the Realm, all magic users must belong to the Mage's Guild. The Guild is a powerful organization chartered by the king, to recruit, train, and police magic users. They do not tolerate people outside the Guild practicing any sort of magic. The punishment for teaching magic to a non-Guild-member is death. The punishment for knowing magic outside the Guild is death. Eldren makes Felicia well aware of the risk they are both taking. Apart from the spells he knows for keeping plants healthy, the only magic Eldren shares with Felicia is a spell to heal injury to human beings. This he taught her to help keep her alive.

Felicia later left Eldren for someone more wealthy and powerful, a Lord Clemmons. Clemmons was a married man, but promised to marry Felicia when he ended the relationship with his wife. He bought Felicia a small cottage in a remote farming village and asked her to wait there for his return. Years passed with no word from Clemmons. Felicia was destitute and had no way back to Capitol City, where she'd spent most of her life. She had no skills, and her beauty was beginning to fade. All she had was the magic she'd been taught. She made the best of her situation in the small farming village she'd been left in. She told the farmers she could heal their sick crops, but was a bit vague on how. They accepted her help, because she got good results and helped increase their yields. They believed she was probably a mage but she had never admitted this.

Aaron Blackwell was a young man who had grown up in this small farming village named Agrinnia. He was a smart boy, but not very coordinated or muscular. This put him at a marked disadvantage for farm work, and he was frequently bullied and ridiculed because of his physical weakness. However, Aaron's father got him a job at the scrivener's where he worked. Aaron spent his days copying books, contracts, and other documents for the scrivener's customers. One day, on his way to lunch, two farm boys carry the struggling Aaron into an alley and rob him, beating him severely in the process. He stumbles into the nearby inn and collapses at a table.

Felicia walks in and sees Aaron's state. She takes pity on him and casts a spell to heal him. When he sees her pull a scroll from a case she carries, he recognizes it as looking a lot like something he had been copying at work. He realizes the woman is a mage and the book he is currently copying must be a spellbook. He then finds a way to get a spell out of the heavily-protected shop where he works - by memorizing it. He writes it down outside the shop and starts to study it. It's written in a language he can't understand and uses symbols that mean nothing to him. While he's looking over the paper, Felicia comes into the inn. She comes over to ask how he's feeling, and sees the spell. She turns white and tells him he must hide it immediately. He asks why. She explains that if he's seen in possession of this paper by a Guild mage, they will most likely kill him.

Later, Felicia realizes that the best way for her to get out of town is to learn more magic. Aaron has access to a lot of it, and it's clear he's been getting bullied on a fairly regular basis his whole life. In exchange for the spells he can provide, she agrees to teach him how to use them. Unfortunately, because Felicia received only the most minimal training herself, they aren't able to understand many of the spells they collect. They have to try them out and see what they do in order to determine their value. In time, they become friends and lovers.

One day, Felicia is asked by a local farm boy to help with a sick crop. She follows the boy to their farm. While walking through a barn, the boy turns and attacks her, attempting to force himself on her. She fights back, but he is too strong for her. She remembers a fear spell Aaron stole for them, and casts it on the boy. He runs out of the barn, across a field. He trips and hits his head on the stone wall around a well. She kicks him out of anger, after verifying that he's still alive. She leaves. The boy later dies and his parents believe Felicia has murdered him. The national police force, known as the Realm Patrol, investigates. They determine the boy's death was indeed an accident but bruises on his body match the shoes worn by Felicia. They charge her with assault and imprison her.

In prison, Felicia is visited by Eldren, the mage who taught her to cast spells. She tells him her story, including the use of the fear spell. He asks where she learned that, since he didn't teach her. She tells him she sometimes buys spells from people who find them in a dead mage's belongings. He doesn't tell her, but he's not satisfied with that explanation. He happens to be the mage who invented the fear spell and only a few others (whom he taught personally) know it. He sends an apprentice to investigate, under the guise of having a spellbook copied. Aaron copies an interesting-looking spell from this book and gives it to Felicia. She tries it out, and ends up causing a giant, brightly glowing ball of energy to appear over the forest near her home. The apprentice now knows there is a problem and returns to his master.

Eldren and three other mages return to Agrinnia. They pull Aaron from the scrivener's shop and take him to Felicia's home. They confront her with evidence they've collected. She tells them she's been trading spells to Aaron in exchange for romantic favors, and that he knows nothing of what he's been copying for her apart from recognizing the general look of written spells. She also points out that it was Eldren who taught her magic. The mages kill Eldren first, for violating Guild law, then kill Felicia. Aaron is allowed to live after they try to determine if he knows any magic. He finds out they got him fired. He now has no source of income and no Felicia. However, he has inherited her home. He sells it, and decides to go to Capitol City to join the Mage's Guild, hoping to destroy it from within.

He's admitted to the Guild and assigned to a master mage named Elric. Elric begins teaching Aaron magic, and takes him on a mission into a neighboring country. There, they need to find a way to neutralize the magic used by the local population, to pave the way for their king to invade the country.

As my 50,000th word hit, they were in the other country, posing as businessmen who hoped to make money there. They realized they would need enough month to be able to pass as wealthy businessmen, which neither had. Aaron had spent his inheritance getting to Capitol City, bribing his way into the Guild, and reaching Elric. Elric had a bit of money, but not enough to pass for a businessman. He tells Aaron the answer is to rob a secure bank in the village they're passing through...

That's where the story stands as of the moment... I expect to finish it some time in December, then clean it up a bit. When I think it's at least "tolerable" to read, I'm planning to publish it as a PDF and make it available here for people to download and read. Right now, it's incredibly rough. NaNoWriMo focuses on writing speed rather than writing quality, so my novel contains a lot of wrong turns and foreshadowing for things that I intended to write into the story and never did. If you were to read it in its current form, you'd most likely come to the conclusion that I absolutely stink as a writer... and I wouldn't blame you. All I really have here is a very rough draft for a part of a novel, not an entire novel and certainly not a good, polished one.

In any case, NaNoWriMo was a fun experience and I look forward to participating in it again in 2010.

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I’m a NaNoWriMo Participant This Year!

I first heard of the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) last year, but never bothered to investigate it or learn much about it because I figured there was no chance I'd be able to write a novel that would be worth anyone judging for a contest.

As it turns out NaNoWriMo isn't exactly a "judged" contest. It works something like this... Starting on November 1, you begin writing a 50,000 word novel. If you complete and submit that novel by November 31, you're considered a "winner". You receive a "web badge" and downloadable certificate you can print out. Not exactly the greatest prizes, but there are some corporate sponsors offering nice prizes. The makers of the Macintosh writing software "Scrivener" are offering a substantial discount to the winners on December 2, 2009. An on-demand publisher will print a free "proof" copy of your book and bind it for you. They'll also optionally help you sell it via Amazon.com and other outlets.

If you're curious and want to check in on how I'm doing and what I'm writing, here's my profile on the NaNoWriMo site. As of this writing, I'm way behind the goal. On the other hand, I only really started this effort on November 4, so I'm about 3-4 days behind most other participants.

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