——————-

Okay, if you know me, you know that I don’t pull punches. In fact, my writers group has nicknamed me Blunt.  I don’t like it when people tell me I look nice when I know it looks as though I just crawled out of a sewer pipe. I hate it when people say that my writing is “Just great!” with that falsetto high pitch we all know means they are trying not to offend. It doesn’t help us improve ourselves when people placate us about how we look, or how we write.

So how do you figure out if your novel sucks and how can you fix it? Here are a few pointers I’ve picked up the hard, expensive way. Now pay attention, I’m only going to say this once!

-You have 90% narration, 5% flashbacks and 5% dialogue.  Okay, let’s be honest, it takes a freaking MASTER to keep the attention of a reader with this kind of breakdown. MASTER, not NEWBIE. And if you’re reading this, even if you’ve got several books out, you’re a NEWBIE, just like me.

Up your dialogue people! Every time you step into narration and flashbacks, you SLOW your reader down. Way down. Might even put the book down. So try, really, really hard to “up” your dialogue. Turn that narration into a CONVERSATION.

-Your Characters all get along and float through life. Okay, conflict is #1 in a story. Who the hell cares if their lives are perfect? Mine isn’t, I sure don’t want to read about someone who has a better life than me. Readers want a story to show them just how BAD life can get and how the hero deals with it. Look at every chapter, if there isn’t some sort of conflict, put something new in. Maybe the evil stepmother we all thought was dead comes back to life as a zombie. Or maybe the husband who ran off with the sister was really poisoned and now needs to be rescued! The possibilities are endless regardless of the genre, so make your characters SUFFER!

- You are getting complaints in your reviews of TYPOS! Please, please, please get at least one editor to go over your book! If you can’t afford an editor, there are ALWAYS options. Beg another author, do a swap with them and give them an “edit” on their book while they do the same for yours. But dang, there is a reason you can’t get reviews, or that the reviews you do get are 3 stars at best (not including family and friends in this of course because we all make them give us 5 stars ;p).

Typos, dropping plot threads (e.g. A character shows  up in chapter 1 but then never again and yet they seemed important, that is a dropped thread), and general issues with your “baby” (that I won’t go into here for sake of space) can be VASTLY improved by having someone in the industry do a pass. Not just your mom or your best friend. Someone who will tell you the truth, even if it makes you CRY!

-Last and final way to improve your book.  Learn your strengths and play to them. I write FAST PACED, high octane books that always center on the power of relationships between loved ones. That is MY strength. I can’t write police procedurals, I’ve tried. I can’t write children’s books, the kids get nightmares.  Figure out what your STRONG points are. Maybe you have a knack for building tension in scenes to the point of making people grip their books/Kindles in a white knuckle grasp. Build on that. Write emotional scenes so strong you bring tears to people’s eyes? Go for it! Full force on your strengths will make your book stand out from the crowd. Don’t try to be something you aren’t.

In conclusion, in this shifting world of self publishing going head to head with the traditional publishers, we HAVE to stand out from the rest.  And not because we are the best at sucking.

—————————-

After a 2 year period waiting on her agent to actually do something, Ms. Mayer dropped the agent, and  self published her first trilogy, A Zombie-ish Apocalypse which includes Sundered, Bound and Dauntless.  Her latest book, Dark Waters: Celtic Legacy Book 1 centers on the bonds of sisters while delving into the world of nightmares and magic. For more info on Shannon Mayer and her writing go to http://shannonmayer.blogspot.com or follow her on Twitter @TheShannonMayer

It is a long-ish post, but there are lessons for writers all the way to the end. Take it away, Ciara!

———–

Tobias Buckell

You could look at this book as an attempt by Buckell to make money out of short stories that he failed to sell. However, I find it an interesting look at the early work of a published author that we rarely get. I don’t know that I’d be so inclined to bare to the world how bad I once was if I was a published author!

There are lessons in here for a writer who might be struggling, as well as tips on Buckell’s own writing process that might help you. For example, Buckell says he wrote short stories for a long time because he considered it a faster way to learn how to write a story from start to finish, fail, and try again, than writing novels. He’s probably right. I did it the novel way, not being a short-story writer much, and it’s taken me 20 years to get here! And wherever ‘here’ is, it’s not the same ‘here’ as Buckell.

There is commentary from Buckell on the reasons for each story’s failure, but here is my own analysis as an objective reader and writer.

1. The Arbiter – This story does manage to move my emotions if in an incomplete way. In that respect it’s more successful than many other stories in this book.
2. Airtown – I completely failed to connect with the protagonist and the story felt like an opening scene or excerpt, incomplete of itself;
3. Abrupt Salvage – a step backwards from The Arbiter. Buckell attempts to engage our emotions but his characterisation and building of relationships is incomplete. The climax lacks impact. I was surprised when the story ended and was left expecting more. Buckell notes that many of his stories read like a chapter instead of a stand-alone story. I agree.
4. It Is Bitter… The first protagonist I really identify with. He’s got drive and motivation and it’s red-hot emotional! It pushes me to read but the ending is unsatisfying. This was an experiment with voice using present tense, and setting, wold-building and plot suffer as a result. Compare to the earlier stories to see how Buckell helps us identify with the protagonist.
5. Sea Legs – Buckell describes this as ‘well-crafted story porridge’. Technically well put together but nothing you want any part of! I can’t disagree with his analysis. Nothing major is obviously wrong with this story, except it’s just not all that interesting. Story porridge indeed.
6. Slowboat – A more emotionally engaging story but the events are just something the protagonist witnesses, they don’t affect him. Action is not driven by the protagonist and so the reader does not feel the true impact of the tragedy. It might have been better told from the POV of someone on the slowboat.
7. Closed Cycles – Buckell describes this story as a mishmash of all his previous mistakes. Despite that, I find the concept of it interesting, and it pulls me forward compellingly. The dialogue is a bit laboured as Buckell notes but its biggest failing is its ending. Buckell actually says he got to the end and didn’t know how to finish it. This is painfully obvious. The fact it compelled me despite its errors is testament to the fact sometimes story counts more than craft.
8. Ambassador – A long piece of short fiction, it has more than the one usual POV. I feel the story suffers for it and Buckell agrees. The world is also sketched out but the colours not really filled in leaving the reader with only a vague idea of the landscape. Buckell describes the story as ‘meh’. I agree on the basis it’s difficult to even say what’s really wrong with it. It’s just… meh.
9. Ranger Jim – Seriously? Yes, seriously. At least Buckell doesn’t even know what he was thinking when he named this. The story suffers, by Buckell’s own admission, in respect of world-building, but mostly what he was doing was trying to create a mood experimenting with a dystopian setting. He speculated if its real downfall was a reluctance to be sufficiently weird or failing to sufficiently characterise the protagonist. Even before I read it, I was willing to bet on the latter. It is a common theme of his short stories. When I think about how I might rewrite these, my first thought is to add more depth to the characters. In this case, he fails to closely examine the loss of the protagonist’s humanity and what it might mean. I am not a reader of dystopia, but this story doesn’t set the mood of an empty earth such as exists in King’s The Stand.
10. Free Antarctica – This story left me trying to keep up. This is consistent with Buckell’s own analysis that the story fell apart because of insufficient order and failure to think through the whole plot. Because I kept getting confused, I felt the story dragged on far too long.
11. Days Limin’ – This story has no plot and no conflict. It’s also told in omniscient which is one my pet hates, but let’s just put that aside. Buckell says it was inspired by an apocryphal tale. It’s really nothing more than a science fiction version of the same thing. I understand he was experimenting… but there’s no real substance to this.
12. Life! – A nice attempt at exploring the character and why the events were important, but the story does not immerse us deeply enough in the character or the emotional significance. It also lacks sufficient impetus at the moment of climax, due to insufficient foreshadowing, which Buckell identifies. A bit more dribbled backstory and a lot more emotional punch could have really ramped this story up.
13. Vacuum Cures Everything – Buckell describes this as a failure but it resonated and touched me enough that it must have been a close thing. He says he should have written the story from the POV of the robot but mostly he did. Some of the other POVs could have been culled but I think it was necessary to have one (the ship captain) to make the human connection in order to drive the emotional impact home. The emotional intensity could have been cranked up… but this one doesn’t have as far to go as the others. My favourite.
14. A Slow Burn Passion – I totally agree with Buckell on this one. The woman was intended to be ‘the story’ but I am so more interested in the POV character. Buckell says one way he could have fixed this would have been to make her the POV character (i.e. he chose the wrong POV character for the story he wanted to tell) but my mind resists this notion. The story I want to hear, it seems, is not the story he wanted to tell. At least he only made this POV mistake in a short story. I did it in a whole novel.
15. A Jar of Good will – This story has been rewritten 5 times and signals a break in pattern for Buckell who as a rule didn’trewrite. Three of these versions appear in Nascence.Version 2 – A 9k rewrite of a story originally 3 – 4k long. I’m not sure where it falls down. I’m inclined to agree with Buckell that the shorter version was probably better. Without having seen the original, I can say more words lends a tendency to waffle and include extraneous facts. I also find this story has no readily identifiable climax. It just kind of peters out. Perhaps too many words allowed Buckell to fall into the old trap of pulling the emotional punch. The POV character doesn’t seem to be driving the action either.
16. A Jar of Goodwill – Version 3 – Only a fragment of this story is included. I can see Buckell had cut scenes from Version 2 back to their bare essentials, and occasionally including detail he missed in the previous version – such as the fact two scientists are married before one of them dies. Despite that, this version was terminated at 3000 words. Why? Because nothing was happening. This was all lead-up and 3000 words is too much lead-up for a short story.
17. A Jar of Goodwill – Version 5 – Version 4 was a one page attempt that went nowhere and doesn’t appear in Nascence. This fifth version was rewritten in 2010 and published in Clarkesworld Magazine. In the lead-in, Buckell gives me information I didn’t pick-up in the previous two versions – the main character comes from a technologically-possible hive mind. This evidently wasn’t explained properly in the previous versions.

This version has been rewritten from the ground up with a different POV character. New cultural/societal concepts are introduced and old ones better explained. The old POV character is still included but better explained from an outsider’s eyes (better realised too I think). And most importantly, the POV character is driving the action. It is the choicesof the POV character that drive the story. This is a key lesson, writers – your characters cannot passively allow things to happen. They must make choices that affect where the story goes.

The most important lessons in this book relate to characterisation, I think, as this seems to have been one of Buckell’s major problems. If you fail to properly characterise, choose the wrong character, or your character doesn’t affect events, you will fail to connect with the readers.

And if nothing else, you can walk away knowing that even published writers were once bad writers!

——

Ciara Ballintyne

Bio: Ciara is a writer of high fantasy. She has been reading fantasy since she was 9 and writing it since she was 11. Born argumentative and recognising the long road to make money out of writing, Ciara wisely invested her natural inclinations in a career in law.

Blog: http://ciaraballintyne-fantasy.blogspot.com

Website: http://ciaraballintyne.com

Twitter: @CiaraBallintyne , Facebook

Writing to Shut You Up

This is true. When I keep writing, I don’t really have to listen to anyone other than me and the characters in my head, and that is a blessing for those times when listening to real people in real life becomes tiresome.

Do you ever write to shut out the noise?

Writing on Microsoft Word

John Naughton at Guardian asked recently: Has Microsoft Word affected the way we work?

“—has word processing changed the way we write? There have been lots of inconclusive or unconvincing studies of how the technology has affected, say, the quality of student essays – how it facilitates plagiarism. The most interesting academic study I looked at found that writers using computers “spent more time on a first draft and less on finalising a text, pursued a more fragmentary writing process, tended to revise more extensively at the beginning of the writing process, attended more to lower linguistic levels [letter, word] and formal properties of the text, and did not normally undertake any systematic revision of their work before finishing”.

My hunch is that using a word processor makes writing more like sculpting in clay. Because it’s so easy to revise, one begins by hacking out a rough draft which is then iteratively reshaped – cutting bits out here, adding bits there, gradually licking the thing into some kind of shape.

I never learned to type on a typewriter, I began writing on Word. But I do draft my fiction on pen and paper–it is a kind of more visceral, organic experience.

I like Word, make no mistake, it Is Very convenient—but a keyboard is less sensory for me than the pen scribbling on paper. Besides, I like using various colored pens, and notebooks of different sizes, with papers of different texture. Besides, it is easier to unhook myself from the internet, and focus on writing, if a notebook and pen is all I’m carrying.

Recently I started writing pen and paper letters to writer-friends, and that is a whole different ballgame– I like it, and have stuck to it for a few months now.

I don’t know if Word has influenced my writing in any way– I continue to write by hand almost everyday–but I’m aware I’m in the minority. I use Word for my work writing and for revising my fiction, and that is all there is to it.

Has any of you written on typewriters? Do you write with pen and paper? How is it different from writing on Word? Has Microsoft Word affected Your writing?

At the Library

Some of the best times in my life have been spent at a library. It was the one place I could find silence, the freedom to take out umpteen books, and leave them on the table after skimming through a few pages, forget about the world outside and the state of my life in it.

I still run to libraries when I need my space—and yesterday I did just that. After a work-related meeting I decided to spend the entire afternoon and evening at the Singapore National library, at its big central division, which is home to one of the most diverse collections I’ve seen in a library so far.

I felt a little guilty, sitting at the reference section (I needed to look through one book, but nothing serious), working on my fiction while intermittently browsing through random books—maybe I was taking up the space that someone doing genuine research needed. I sat there long enough–till the time I realized all other seats were taken up, and then vacated mine—hoping an eager research scholar would take it up!

I walked out for a meal, came back, and headed to the lending section…deciding that some of the blocks in the story I was writing came from a lack of research. I needed to know a few facts before I could get on with my narration. I love the that this library lets you search its catalog on your phone—the catalog is on a free library wi-fi network. Having picked up the books I needed I went in search of a chair and found one at the far end, surrounded by about 20 other chairs in different clusters.

To say that the first book I picked up was an absorbing read would be to insult it–it talks about a hugely successful individual coping with multiple personality disorder–each of the 13 individual personalities inside him has a chapter in his/her voice. I finished it in the 8 hours I sat at the library, without much movement, and only the occasional glance around me.

It is this morning, when I look back on the evening that I remember what I saw in those glances, but did not register at the time: an old man sleeping, open-mouthed, behind a newspaper, a middle-aged-gap-toothed woman in a cheong-sam sitting with a book on feng-shui while fitting her small body cross-legged on a chair—apparently meditating,  a young man in office attire with a laptop bag and headphones, dozing behind a book titled Sex after Fifty, a pair of schoolkids snogging behind one of the bookshelves (I thought the library had cameras and frowned on such activity, but apparently not), a woman of indeterminate age in heavy make-up sitting with a shoe magazine, periodically receiving low-beeping calls and repeating/ writing down dates and times in a breathy falsetto, while a hearing impaired young couple to my right kept up a sprightly conversation full of excited gesturing.

With all those images returning to me, I feel less guilty about hogging a seat I didn’t really need. Not because other people did it too, with lot less serious preoccupations than mine—but because watching this pantomime of unabashed humanity in a country known for its lifestyle governed by rules, that too at a strait-laced place like a library, was not only a treat for a writer like me, but could also be safely termed ‘research’.

When was the last time you spent a day at the library? How much of that time did you spend people-watching?

Would you murder to write a bestseller?

Maybe not a NY Times bestseller.  Maybe you dream of Pulitzers, Man Bookers, a Nobel in literature.  Whatever you consider writer-Nirvana.

Would you kill for it?

That deadly blank page demands courage.  Hard work, sacrifices.  But—murder?

You’ve heard it repeated ad infinitum: write from your own experience.  Write what you know.

If you’re a city dweller, the local zoo the only wildlife you’ve seen, the jungle you create in a story probably won’t pull the reader into its humid and slightly rotting smell as powerfully as, say, one described by someone that grew up in southern India.  And this mythical author would never recreate the vibrant diversity of a teeming metropolis like you would.

We write best what we know best.

But—to make a murder scene in your book jump off the page, you—the author—needs to be a murderer?

Yes.  That’s exactly what I’m saying.

Put down the knife and come back here.  You thought you’d go stick it in someone?  Bet you already had someone in mind.  That’s so sick.  And illegal.

Here.  Satisfy your twisted bloodlust instead by brutally annihilating your preconceived notions of—well, anything.  Water-board your biases.  Hack your limitations to pieces.  Use yourself as a guinea pig.

No, really.

My MCs got into a fight.  I’ve never been in one.  I’m a wuss girl.  I had no clue, and the characters knew it.  “We’re not girls,” they said, “or wusses.  Get it right or we go somewhere else.”

Desperate measures. 

I changed into old jeans, found a paint-spattered t-shirt, lured Rusty, my forty-pound Rottweiler, out to the yard.

After an hour I did look like I’d been in a fight.  Rusty, panting like a rabid predator, hadn’t had that much fun ever.

I aced the fight scene, growls and all.

Do I recommend an unsupervised tussle with a forty-pound dog?  Uh, no.  Unless you need an irrefutable excuse to jump in the shower.  But I do recommend this: do the unexpected.  Become an adventure junkie.  Expand yourself.  Become all eyes, all ears.  Let the world be your teacher.

When your head is suffused with experience from the flesh, when the pain you charge your words with is real, that potent muscle you call imagination has a solid foundation to make magic.

That’s the kind of writing that makes people pay attention.  Including Pulitzer people.

~ * ~

This was a guest post by Guilie Castillo-Oriard, who is a 38-year-old Mexican writer currently exiled in the island of Curacao.  She misses Mexican food and Mexican “amabilidad”, but the “laissez-faire” attitude and the beauty of the Caribbean is a fair exchange.  Plus, the bounty of cultural diversity on the island inspires great culture-clash-based topics that her talent is seldom good enough to bring to fruition.

Guilie is currently in the final revision process of her first novel, Restoring Experience, and working on another spawned during NaNoWriMo 2011.  She blogs at Quiet Laughter, and her short stories have appeared in Fiction365 and the newly published Lady Ink Magazine, as well as a few blogs, including an honorable mention in Clarity of Night’s contest this past July, which is when I made her acquaintance. We have been great blog buddies and twitter friends ever since. This is Guilie’s first guest post.

Book of Short Fiction

I started writing fiction nearly four years ago, in April 2008, and that was the year I also started this blog, as a place where I would post something every day—ah,well, as often as possible.

I was going through my old anniversary posts and here’s what I said over the years:

2011,  I said: It IS nice to go back and read my old posts, and comments by readers, and I hope I can carry this blog another year!

2010, I said: There would be light and shade, and at least 20 posts a month! (sigh…tall order) And there would be travel posts, mixed up with writing posts, depending on where I go, and what I do. So, hopefully, I’ll have a third anniversary post, eh, and other anniversaries afterwards?

2009, I said: I want to keep up this blog for as long as I can; and I want to watch myself grow, become a little smarter, a little wiser, more intuitive, with each day, each month, each year, each post.

So here I am, and this is how the blog did last year.

This year I made more of an effort, wrote a fair bit of fiction on the blog as well.

I took part in the A to Z Blogging challenge, which means I blogged 26 days in April. That adventure, surprisingly enough, led to the book: A to Z Stories of Life and Death, which, to my utter amazement, continues to sell to this day, without much promotion, if any.

2011 was a long year, personally, and an average year, writing wise.

But I’ve stuck to fiction, written bunches, published some.

And just like I did three years ago, I find myself eager to ‘watch myself grow, become a little smarter, a little wiser, more intuitive, with each day, each month, each year, each post.’

Amen.

———————–

It’s been done. All too many times, if you listen to some. The story is world famous, well known. Many know its details by heart. Yet it’s compelling and you have an idea you know is different—one no one’s done before. So how do you keep it fresh? Adapting a well-known story for fiction has many challenges, but above them all is the issue of freshness, avoiding predictability.

There are some techniques which work well to invigorate the retelling:

1)      Use the original story as character history/backstory so the parallels are interesting but you don’t have to follow it to the letter—In The Worker Prince, my debut novel, because my characters are colonists to space from Earth and Protestants, they share the religious history of Christianity so the Moses story, which inspired mine, is prehistory. Some parallels from that story occur, when a prince discovers he was born a slave and helps the slaves fight for freedom, for example. But having established that as prehistory, I was able to depart quite a bit from biblical elements like the plagues, miracles, and parting of the Red Sea to tell a different, although familiar story. The inspiration remains the same but the story takes new and interesting twists.

2)      Change the timeline (order)– What if the events are the same but they don’t happen in the same order? Sometimes the order of events is not vital to the story and you can make new twists and turns just be changing the order of events and, thus, how those various events affect each other. It can lead to new conflicts and new undercurrents which didn’t exist in the original story and make it more interesting for those familiar with the story on which yours is based.
3)      Identify the core elements and throw away less important ones—In The Worker Prince I did exactly this: keeping the idea of one people enslaving another under a ruthless dictator, a prince secretly adopted from slaves, ideological conflict, and injustice but dumping things like the Red Sea, years of exile in a desert, plagues, etc. It kept the story familiar and grounded in the tropes of the original while allowing me to take it in totally different and surprising directions. Some scenes and events are vital for the story to remain familiar. The same can be said of key characters. Others can be thrown away or reinvented to keep things original and unique in your telling.

4)      Reverse roles, species or genders of characters—What if your hero in the original story was male but in your story becomes female? What if a human character becomes alien or animal? What about a robot? What about other characters? Can your sidekick become the love interest? What if your antagonist becomes a relative instead of  a social acquaintance? What if the characters take on bigger roles and multiple functions they didn’t have in the original? The differences between genders, species, etc. can then be exploited for new aspects of your story and new twists and turns different from the original in fun ways.

5)      Change the setting—Setting your story in a culture and context far removed from the original can provide interesting opportunities. I set The Worker Prince in distant space far from Earth with different aliens and plant species, etc. It allowed me to have technology and related problems totally foreign to the original Moses story and made for a more fun and interesting telling for me as storyteller and for readers. The same can be true of resetting the story in a different decade or era from the one in which it originally occurred. Imagine, if you will, a steampunk Cinderella or Sherlock Holmes in the 24^th Century. All kinds of possibilities present themselves.

All of these suggestions are about making the story your own. If you can find ways to do that, you can create a fresh experience and telling while utilizing powerful elements of the familiarity and themes of the original story. Grounding your story in a well-known tale, definitely has advantages.  But a little creative rethinking can make it even more powerful and draw in an audience of people it might not otherwise appeal to. It’s fun to work from a familiar foundation and structure. Especially if you love the story, it can stimulate the imagination. But if everyone knows the twists and turns and outcome of your story, why should they want to read it? I hope these suggestions give you ideas how the old can become  new and fresh in the retelling.

Bryan Schmidt

Bryan Thomas Schmidt is the author of the space opera novel The Worker Prince, the collection The North Star Serial, and has several short stories forthcoming in anthologies and magazines. His second novel, The Returning, is forthcoming from Diminished Media Group in 2012. He’s also the host of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Chatevery Wednesday at 9 pm EST on Twitter, where he interviews people like Mike Resnick, AC Crispin, Kevin J. Anderson and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. He can be found online as @BryanThomasS on Twitter or via his website. Excerpts from The Worker Prince can be found on his blog.

‎3 5-star & 8 4-star reviews THE WORKER PRINCE $3.99 Kindlehttp://amzn.to/pnxaNm or Nook http://bit.ly/ni9OFh $14.99 tpb http://bit.ly/qIJCkS.

———————-

Thank you for inviting me to do a guest spot here, Damyanti!

I’m not sure I’m the most qualified to offer tips to writers who blog. Anne R. Allen recently did a series for writers that’s even more in depth. I guess Damyanti figured that after two years and a thousand followers, I’ve learned something along the way. (Fooled you!) With her vote of confidence, here are some tips from blogging Ninja Captain Alex:

CassaStar by Alex J Cavanaugh

Find your angle and blogging groove. Not all writers need to give writing advice, so find what fits with your personality. What are your passions? (Can you blog about them without making readers blush?) If you write about the things that excite you, it will come through to your readers. Select your topic(s) and style and go for it.

Establish a blogging schedule. Set a pattern that you and your readers can follow.

Short posts work best, especially for those who post more than once a week. People are busy – if the post is long, many will simple skip or skim. Basically your post should resemble a pamphlet on famous Bulgarian NFL stars.

CassaFire cover

Controversy gets attention, but… you don’t want to scare off potential readers and fans. Or potential publishers. Unless your book is really controversial, go easy here. Or go whacky! Nothing like a good dumpster fire.

Don’t talk about your books all the time. You’re here to make friends, network, and learn, not advertise. That doesn’t mean you can’t promote your work when it’s released. Just don’t beat everyone over the head!

Follow and comment on other blogs. If you don’t follow and comment on other blogs, don’t expect anyone to follow or comment on yours. Find blogs and people who share some of your interests. (Such as famous Bulgarian NFL stars.)

Don’t just follow writers or those of your genre, though. Follow a variety.

Participate in blogfests. They are a great way to get to know other bloggers and direct new people to your blog.

Be generous. Celebrate the success of others. Support others and never give expecting to receive.

Invite others to do a guest post on your blog. Ask to contribute guest posts on other blogs. (Or beg – begging is good!)

Be yourself. Don’t imitate another blogger’s style. You’ll sound fake. You can apply all of these tips while remaining true to your nature.

You will get out of it what you put into it. 

This Ninja does pour time into blogging and I visit a hundred sites or more a day. I’ve made so many great friends online, and with one book already published, it has translated into sales. But just as valuable is the friendship and support. And that’s worth a million bucks!

———

Alex J. Cavanaugh has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and works in web design and graphics. He is experienced in technical editing and worked with an adult literacy program for several years. A fan of all things science fiction, his interests range from books and movies to music and games. Currently the author lives in the Carolinas with his wife.

Available now-

CassaStar by Alex J. Cavanaugh

Science fiction – space opera/adventure

Print ISBN 978-0-9816210-6-7 $15.95

EBook ISBN 978-0-9827139-3-8 $2.99

Book trailer

Available February 28, 2012:

CassaFire by Alex J. Cavanaugh

Science fiction – space opera/adventure

Print ISBN 978-0-9827139-4-5 $15.95

EBook ISBN 978-0-9827139-6-9 $4.99

Book Trailer

So without further ado I’ll hand this over to Kelly:

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You don’t need an MFA to be a great writer—let’s get that out of the way, as it seems to be the biggest debate point in writer circles these days.  We all know this, we can all name at least twenty ‘great writers’ who had no training, blah, blah, blah. Okay, that’s done.  To MFA or not to MFA is not the question.

I want to talk to those who have decided, for whatever reason, that an MFA is the path they want to pursue and are actively looking into the various programs available.  Where is the first place you go when looking at programs? Their websites, of course, all of which are full of shiny things, and since we are writers, shiny things in general, distract us. They are all wonderful, but try to stay focused.

After you have been captivated by each programs residency locations, dazzled by their impressive list of faculty achievements and generally awed by their reported rankings and awards, you need to sit down and ask yourself a very basic question in order to evaluate which program is really right for you.

Why do you want an MFA?

1. I want to be a better writer: Of course, there is no guarantee that getting a graduate degree will make you a better writer.  There are a number of books you can buy that will help ‘make you a better writer’ so why an MFA?  Two of the most valuable aspects of being in an MFA program are the availability of workshops taught by the impressive faculty that dazzled you above and access to a community of writers, faculty and fellow students, who will be reading and critiquing your work.  What workshops are going to be available during your enrollment? Of course they will all be pertinent to writing, but are there enough offered that will suit your individual needs?  How selective is the program? (I think this is extremely important. Your fellow students will be critiquing your work, it would be nice to know that they have been selected based on their talent.)

2. I would additionally like to learn about literary theory: Some programs offer courses as part of their MFA that delve into literary theory. Is this something that you are wanting to learn more about?  Ask the questions.

3. I want to write fiction and poetry: Do you want to experiment with different types of writing? Screenwriting, plays, non-fiction, children’s fiction? Short stories, essays, a memoir? Or are you more focused on one thing, say writing a novel.  Are there opportunities to work in these other areas?

4.  I want to teach: An MFA is a terminal degree. If teaching is something you are interested in, what courses are offered in pedagogy? Are there opportunities to student teach after a certain number of hours have been awarded? Having coursework and experience when you graduate will be extremely important when you start looking for a teaching position.

5. I want to work in a publishing related field: Believe it or not, not everyone in an MFA program believes that the rest of their life will be spent writing books and waiting for the next book contract.  They are focusing on the ‘day job’ as well, and would like to do something in a related field.  As with the other areas above, inquiring about workshops and courses on publishing is a great idea, but also, add this one to your list of questions: Does the program offer any assistance placing you in an apprenticeship or similar program?

6. I want to publish: Some MFA programs offer access to agents.  This is a wonderful opportunity for you to pitch your work, if you are prepared.  Do you have a pitch? A query? A synopsis? Does the program offer help or training in preparing these valuable bits?

There are several MFA programs out there, and it is important for you to evaluate them based on what YOU want to get out of the program.  Make a list of questions not answered on their websites.  Send emails, make calls, get specific answers.  Talk to other students, past and present.  Then make your list of prospective programs based on your personal goals and submit your best work with your application.

And enjoy the journey….

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Kelly Stone Gamble is a freelance writer and author of Ragtown, a historical novel set during the building of the Hoover Dam.  She will graduate in January with an MFA in Creative Writing from Southern New Hampshire University.  Stop by her blog at www.kellystonegamble.blogspot.com to say hello, or follow her on twitter @KellySGamble