Unleaded - Fuel for Writers

Video Saturday – Elmore Leonard’s Advice to Writers

DayAlMohamed — Sat, 19 May 2012 15:13:59 +0000

Elmore Leonard, is an American novelist and screenwriter, and as he’s called in the video – perhaps the king of the hard-boiled novel. But even though he specialized in crime fiction and suspense, his earliest novels were westerns. I’ve to say, I’m more familiar with the movies that have been made out of his writing. That’d be works like Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Hombre, Mr. Majestyk and Rum Punch, which was filmed as Jackie Brown. His short stories have also been made into films – 3:10 to Yuma and The Tall T, as well as the current TV series on FX, Justified. Pretty awesome, yes? And I LOVE how he talks about the rhythm of dialogue and voices and how that gives a “sound” to your writing.

WWW: FILDI

DLThurston — Wed, 16 May 2012 17:30:19 +0000

I’ve been on a Ze Frank kick recently, and I think that’s one of the better kicks to get onto as he’s perhaps one of the most creatively motivational voices I’ve come across. Both in that he motivates creativity and motivates creatively. And Ze Frank is where I got FILDI from. What is FILDI? Well, I’ve been trying to find the video where he first brought it up, but I can’t, so I’m going to try and explain it in my own words.

FILDI stands for F*@% It, Let’s Do It. It’s that moment in the creative process where you realize that the only way something is going to get done is to buckle down and actually do it, the realization that you are the creator for your own little world and that nothing is going to come of it except by your own hands and the sweat of your own brow. It means that it’s time to stop playing around, looking at the project from every different angle, and doing everything except working on it…and actually work on it.

I’ve been doing what I can to channel my FILDI when it comes to writing this week, and I’ve learned that my FILDI is strong. It’s what powers me through 2000 words on a night that I really didn’t want to write to begin with. It’s what has my novella mostly outlined even though I hate outlining. My FILDI is me sitting down at a computer, opening Scrivener, and saying that I am going to write and that none of the little excuses running around my head about why writing doesn’t feel like a good idea at the particular moment are valid. Because it’s time to write.

FILDI.

The FILDI doesn’t always work. But when it does, it’s creative magic. So find yours, chase it down, catch it, then be nice to it to make sure it doesn’t run away, without being so nice that it starts to get complacent and fat. Like my cats. They have no FILDI, except when it comes to naps.

Video Saturday – Nora Roberts’ Advice to Writers

DayAlMohamed — Sat, 12 May 2012 14:57:42 +0000

Okay, today’s video from Nora Roberts isn’t so much “Advice to Writers” as it is talking a little bit about her own process. This Video Saturday is from her talk at the Washington Post to an audience of over 500. Nora Roberts has written more than 209 romance novels. She also writes hard-boiled futuristic mysteries as J.D. Robb but has also written under the pseudonyms of Jill March and Sarah Hardesty. As of 2011, her novels had spent a combined 861 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List, thats like 16 years! And of that, 176 weeks were in the number-one spot! Hmm, maybe I SHOULD pay more attention to her process.

WWW: Unleaded Strikes Twice!

DLThurston — Wed, 09 May 2012 17:30:56 +0000

I’m excited to announce that my story The South, Rise Again has been picked up for inclusion in Q&W Publishers upcoming anthology Old Weird South. I’m announcing this here on Unleaded because a quick browse of my the accepted contributors also turns up the name of fellow Unleaded scribe and Day’s Trust & Treachery co-editor Meriah Crawford!

There you have it, the big news, our humble little writers blog has put two contributors into a single anthology. Here’s a description of the anthology from the call for submissions:

The American South is a haunted place — full of ghost stories, native legends, persistent devils & angels, souls sold at the crossroads, and moon-eyed maidens living in the Okefenokee. The South’s best writers — Faulkner, O’Connor, McCullers — all keep this sense of the otherworldly in their fiction.

In this spirit, Q & W Publishers is looking for submissions for an anthology of short fiction and non-fiction that explores the fantastic, eerie, and bizarre side of the American South.

So look for Old Weird South currently aiming for publication later this year.

Back to more advice-y columns next week, I promise.

Balancing Writing and Social Media

Linda Adams — Tue, 08 May 2012 09:00:55 +0000

Writing a novel takes an incredible amount of time — often more time than I like! But of the bigger challenges I’ve found is balancing my writing with social media. Social media is becoming an essential tool of promotion for writers, both traditional and indie alike — and yet, what would be the point without a book to sell?

When I first got my feet wet with Twitter, I lasted about two months. It was fun at first, but then it became a huge amount of effort to keep pumping out tweets to remain visible. Between work, writing, and normal life things, it was overwhelming — and still can be. Sometimes I want to run screaming from the computer!

So these are 3 things I do to help keep social media from consuming my writing:

Use a Blog Reader. I subscribe to the blogs I read through a blog reader. This gives me the ability to do a quick scan of blogs I to pass along to my followers. I can ignore the ones I don’t want to deal with now and hit the ones I know will probably give me at least one link. I also will drop in on at least one blog and post a comment.
Schedule Tweets. I do Twitter early in the morning. I don’t write that early (takes a while for the muse to wake up!), so it isn’t taking away from the writing. I use Buffer to schedule timed tweets throughout the day. Then I scan through HootSuite for the conversations and use that program’s timed tweets to send those out. I also will scan for interesting links, and either retweet or post a comment to them.
Prepare blog posts in advance. I have a Word file for my blog and one for Unleaded. I reuse the file for the next post. Word is so much easier to use then WordPress’ editor because I can run a macro to search out all the unnecessary words and weasel words to make editing speedy (if only it could catch my typos!). I write my posts for the week over the weekend. I’ve found it’s best to do them at one time — it gets too stressful when I remember that I have to come up with a topic for tomorrow and don’t know what to do. WordPress handily allows me to schedule the posts, so once I’m done setting them up, I don’t have to think about them any more.

Right now, I’m running about an hour a day for Twitter, and the time it takes on the weekends for the blog. But by grouping everything together, it frees up chunks of time in the evening for novel writing.

Your Turn: How are you balancing your social media time with your writing? Do you have any other tips that weren’t mentioned? I’d like hear them! You can leave a comment by posting below.

Video Saturday – Garrison Keillor’s Advice to Writers

DayAlMohamed — Sat, 05 May 2012 14:41:57 +0000

Garrison Keillor is an American author, storyteller, humorist, and radio personality. You’ll likely recognize him the moment he begins speaking on the video. Why? He’s best known as host of the Minnesota Public Radio showA Prairie Home Companion. Today’s just a quick short little piece of advice we’ve all heard but it bears repeating, especially when we’re stressing over deadlines and unfinished pages.

FWW: A few shorts words

DLThurston — Fri, 04 May 2012 16:30:03 +0000

It was observed I missed my post this week. So a few words that I found. These come out of the short story collection Paradox Lost, collected from the publications of Fredric Brown. His widow opened the introduction:

Fred hated to write. But he loved having written.

I know I’ve been there. I’m sure you have. Nice to know others have as well.

“The Loch” by Steve Alten

Dana Gunn — Thu, 03 May 2012 05:16:48 +0000

Steve Alten has put together a sweeping story from the depths of the Sargasso Sea, Atlantic Ocean to the Highlands of Scotland, from A.D. 565 to 1330 to present day. Zachary Wallace, a marine biologist, the protagonist of Alten’s story is the typical flawed hero with family issues.

Unfortunately, the lack of imagination from the author begins with the names of his main characters: Angus, the father, as a trite name for a Scot, and Wallace, obviously taken from the famous William Wallace, hero of Scottish Independance. It continues with invoking the Knights Templar in the Prologue of the book and an attempt to explain Nessie.

The most interesting parts of the story deal with Zachary Wallace’s interactions with his fellow marine biologists in their quest for cryptozoological creatures and Angus Wallace’s womanizing. Neither of which are expanded upon enough to be a motivation or goal for either character.

Although the title of the book is “The Loch,” that is not the antagonist of the story. If so, one would assume this is a classic Man vs. Nature narrative. Instead, the story is very much a Man vs Self narrative with a flavoring of historical conspiracy theory and monster hunting thrown in as a back drop. A shift in focus several times in the story attempts to make a smooth transition from Man vs. Self to Man vs. Destiny and finally to Man vs. Nature, but the result is a loss of goal for the hero.

Alten’s dialogue is one of the saving graces of “The Loch.” His typical Scottish brogue is entertaining to read, but must almost be read out loud to understand in some cases. The banter between father and son is easy to read and quickly moves the story along. But, the use of the first person narrative detracts from the overall feel of the story and would possibly be better served by another point of view.

Finally, at the beginning of the chapters, Alten adds first hand accounts and eye-witness quotes regarding the “Loch Ness Monster/Nessie.” These accounts are most likely included to add to illusion of the monster haunting Zachary Wallace, but their inclusion belong in a cryptozoological anthology as they do not add or enhance the overall story of “The Loch.”

I give this story two flags, one for dialogue, and one for the effort.

Video Saturday – Maeve Binchy’s Advice to Writers

DayAlMohamed — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 14:24:21 +0000

This weekend I wanted to have another woman writer and was surprised at how hard it is to find videos of women authors, particularly those who write speculative fiction. However, for this week’s Video Saturday we have Maeve Binchy. Maeve Binchy is an Irish novelist, newspaper columnist and speaker. Many of her novels are set in Ireland, dealing with the tensions between urban and rural life, the contrasts between England and Ireland, and the dramatic changes in Ireland between World War II and the present day. She’s best known for her novel Circle of Friends (1990) which was made into a 1995 Hollywood movie starring Chris O’Donnell and Minnie Driver. And since the videos are so short, I thought I’d include two.

Maeve Binchy’s Advice to Writers

Maeve Binchy on Short Stories vs. Novels

WWW: Worldbuilding Through Textbooks

DLThurston — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 18:00:42 +0000

I’ll admit, I’m a bit obsessed about checking blog stats over at my site. Numbers of visitors, hits, pages per visit, Google search terms, I eat it all up. The other day one of the Google results stood out: “what were the two reasons that north carolina entered into a period of transition?” It looked so much like a homework question that I put it back into Google. Right as rain, I came across the textbook that the question came out of, as well as sites such as Wiki Answers that had the same question posted. That put me into Grumpy Old Man David mode, so I looked up the questions two chapters further on, and decided to write a post that had entirely wrong answers for all of them.

And then on Saturday I got a hit for one of the new questions. Awesome!

I tell you that story not to gloat about catching a middle school student doing their homework on Google (bah, punk kids on my lawn), but to pass on something rather accidental that came from the exercise. When I first answered the questions, the answers were unrelated to each other. For example, I said that the two actions Congress took at the beginning of WWII that affected North Carolina were ceding the state to Germany and then immediately invading to practice for D-Day. But that didn’t work with any of the previous questions. So I went back and changed the answers until they formed a single narrative.

At which point I realized what I was doing. World building. Specifically alternate history world building. Now I want to write a story in the world I created, which is a dieselpunk time travel story with a little bit of secret history built in. It was such an unintentional thing, but it turned out to be a really fantastic approach.

In my case, I got questions out of a middle school North Carolina history text book, but that was only because that’s what got me into it with that original Google hit. I’ve not yet tried branching out, but I suspect that middle school books might be the right level for this exercise, as they focus on broader looks at history. High school history focuses on tighter details. And while I did this with a history book and turned it into an alternate history exercise, I suspect it might work with a biology or geology textbook for the purposes of different planet world building.

I’d be interested in seeing if other people have tried this approach, or might give it a try in the future, see if it’s something where I got lucky and ended up world building, or if this is a legitimate approach.

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