Write Art Music
Eddie W. Presley lives on the Space Coast of Florida amongst the oranges, sunshine, and beaches. When not writing, he indulges in making and collecting music, creating and trading art, and as many Disney visits as he can work in between. He is a long-time bookseller and retail worker, and now, at long last, he is writing the types of stories that he would love to read in the modern fantasy genre. His current low/dark fantasy series, The Dance of All Beings, includes: The Holy White Fire, The White Dragon, and The Ivory Pick.
Not only well written, but a lot of fun to read. Its format is not normal, but once you understand that it started life as a play - it falls in line pretty quickly. Well worth a look if you're interested in something different and challenging.
There are not a lot of tricks to writing, and many of the tips are routinely disproved whenever a new Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer book is published.
Still, if I had to give tips to a new writer, who wanted to write fiction novels professionally, I would say, until you're being paid enough as a writer to make a living, work a job that is flexible with hours and plan to work at least 40 hours a week between your wage paying job and your writing job. I would also say to try to leave 2 days a week free from either job to get real life done. When you're at your writing job, consider it a professional job - get showered, get dressed and work a minimum of two hours before a 15-minute break, and use the internet only for research and aiding your writing task. It's harder to do than you think. Your first instinct is that you can saunter over to your computer, wearing nothing but some undies hanging from your hips, and you can work with a twitter feed open... and a facebook page open... and your blog open... and then it's 3 hours later and you're still scanning facebook for that one meme... Be professional - take care of your business postings and e-mails right off the bat and then settle in to work by the clock.
If you're a new writer, you need to work with the style guide by your side and keep referring to it. If the little squiggles keep appearing on something and you don't understand what Word is trying to say, look it up and learn the rule of thumb. You can't successfully break the rules if you don't know the rules. Learn all that you can about grammar and use more than one word processor with a grammar function to comb through it. Use a word processor that will read it aloud to you - you will catch many things that you didn't know were mistakes until you hear them out loud in jarring fashion. You can't break up text like e.e. cummings until you understand why and how words work together and have rules for their placement. Otherwise, it looks like you're trying to be the new Stephen King and failing miserably.
While there are no "wrong" words, there are exercises for new writers to do that make their writing immediately stronger.
1. Start all your sentences with the noun/verb: Pat said, The dog barked, The fire raced, the taco backfired... you may not wind up writing a whole novel like this, but it will immediately show you how punchy your writing can be like this, and it can help you lose most if not all of the passive voice that may have been plaguing it.
2. Remove all adverbs... and not just because Stephen King said to. If you do this as an exercise, you will find your sentences probably need no edits and are stronger and more direct. Those that do will require you to make your sentences stronger instead of describing the action post the verb in the sentence. You will force yourself to be stronger at how you structure your sentences and present the information within. If you have to say Joe moved quickly away from the fire... then you haven't done your job describing the fire adequately.
3. Make an exercise of not using exclamation points unless absolutely necessary. When you do use one it will have more impact.
4. Make an exercise of removing all dialog tags. Like with adverbs, if you have to describe how something was being said after the fact, then you should rewrite it so it is understood how it is spoken and leave off the tag. A whole lot of "said's..." may seem boring, but better a line of said's then dumping in a thesaurus worth of variations. Over use of tags makes your writing seem amateurish - especially when heard out loud - and anything you can do to streamline and tighten up only makes the work better.
5. There are many lists of "those words" - the words that get repeated often. Do a google search for authors who talk about their personal pet peeve repetitive words like then, than, just, actually, etc. and do a word search on your document for those words and eliminate them outright. Re-read the work and do whatever edits you have to - chances are you'll do very few - to clean up the text.
Well, we can be honest here - there are a few camps out there of what to do when faced with a prologue. There are the diehard skippers who never look back. There are the ones that always read them, and then there are those who will go back and read it later if the text is intriguing enough to warrant it. I'm definitely in the skip it and go back later camp, but it also depends on the length of the prologue and what it seems I'm going to have to sit through.
If it's really long and it's something that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away and is foreshadowing of foreshadowing, then that's a problem. If I had to caution a new writer on their prologue, I would say, try your story without it and just jump right in. However, as a writer who wants to play with all the toys myself, I would caution a fellow writer to consider the structure of the tale they want to tell, i.e. is the prologue a twenty-page info dump? Is it written in another style? Is it involving a host of people that haven't anything to do with the current cast of characters? Well, that could be a problem. I don't blame a new writer for wanting to flex all their muscles, but if you want that prologue to be read by most, then keep it short, keep it punchy and make sure that it's memorable enough that when something does loop back to it, the reader goes, AHA! and not, What the heck was that about?
In the original draft, my prologue started with, My name is Albert and I was nine-years-old when I died... and that's a pretty solid opening line. The biggest issue the 1st readers had reading that version was that Albert was set up here and then never referred to again. Of course, as a writer, I'm going, 'but it's all part of the big picture that you'll see over time! No, really!' And lot of other blah blah blah. It was all the same things that make me say, SKIP! when faced with such a prologue as a reader: lengthy, with characters that are not in the rest of the book, (or at least on the book jacket). The length of that first draft was too long for the publisher to commit to, and that forced me to restructure the book into 2 parts. I had to take a hard look at how the beginning bridged to the middle and then bridged to an all-new ending point.
I took a passage from the new Bully Part 2 and placed it at the front of Part 1 as a prologue. Son, I'm gonna hit you... is also a great opening line. It is a clear foreshadowing of actions involving the main character and the darkness he faces - both of which are clearly on the book jacket itself. It's short. It's punchy, (literally). Albert moves to the first chapter, and, having the option now to restructure the work, I took images and ideas from Albert's chapter and repeated them throughout so that even if Albert himself doesn't reappear, you can feel his ghost throughout. To reinforce Albert, he appears in a short and punchy prologue to Part 2, and following that, another appearance in Part 3, and by Part 4 he takes the stage as a major character.
I'm still not sure the Albert chapter fully works, but once the entire series is read, it all makes sense - blah blah blah. It's been a long time getting to this point, and having the book actually see print, so I'm going to flex my creative muscles and write prologues and vaguely dramatic foreshadowing - though there is one thing I won't do - an epilogue - that's surely the mark of an amateur! HA!
Here's an article on stories with multiple personality disorder.
That's not entirely what this is about. Watching several of the new genre made-for-tv series on Netflix and Hulu, I frequently stumble across something I've had to work on in my own writing: Would this character really do this?
The most recent example on tv was from Agents of Shield where the character of Quake goes into a battle with the Big Bad of the current story arc and doesn't smoosh him into the wall, nor once the Big Bad is down, does she take him with her to be put into one of the quarantine cubes at Shield. Quake was trained to fight specifically by Mae, the badass warrior woman who takes no prisoners. She was also trained as an Inhuman to work with her ability. She has also been trained in "what you do with a Big Bad" by Shield itself. In this fight, she tosses him back from her and then goes in to fight hand to hand. Mae would have never trained her to do this. She eventually beats him back and leaves him (so the writer's can have him improved like the bionic man and return to haunt them). Shield would have never trained her to do that. She would have crushed him full stop as her first move and then she would have taken him back to the jet. The writer let go of the "rules" of that show's universe to allow the trope of the Big Bad escaping to plague them once again to occur.
Writers need to stand back and look at the motivations of their characters and ask themselves:
Why? Why are they doing this - Why is this stay at home mom... why is this super villain... why is this charming man about town... putting up with... setting up... ignoring... this Rube Goldburgian machination to make this other thing happen? Is there is no clear motivation for action other than there wouldn't be a story without it? Then you have a serious plot hole that needs to be filled in. Also, characters change as a writer writes, and it just may be that the character you wind up with may not have ever been motivated to commit those earlier actions.
If this goal is really what the character wants - is that really how they would really go about accomplishing it? Does she really set up a convoluted scheme with a local butcher to get an usual cut of meat to her local favorite restaurant and ask them to prepare it in the unique way, using these rare far eastern ingredients she had to special order in to impress her teacher that she was more worldly than she seemed ... or ... does she weigh the pros and cons of just talking to her teacher and fessing up?
What are the other characters doing? Are they just getting out of the main characters way as they do things, or do they have something to say? The main character is an FBI agent on a tough case, but he's acting like a lone wolf and is for some unknown motivation not using the FBI resources. Does no one stop him and remind him of protocol? Does no one say, "Um... you have actual assigned cases that we work on as a group. Your job's in jeopardy by working on this side case instead of doing your assigned cases..." or "Um... you're part of a huge unit of investigators and we work together... and we have all these computers that we use to figure out the stuff you're trying to poorly discover on your own..." Sometimes figuring out motivation can undo an entire story idea. Sometimes it just means from a certain plot point forward - it's not the book you were planning to write, but a new story that has yet to be written.
As a writer you have to be able to step back from a work, even let that work sit in a drawer for a period time, until you can come back to it with fresh eyes and ask yourself, is this really what would happen. Is it too clever or too cliche for its own good? Did you like writing that twist ending so much that you are overlooking the fact that it makes no sense to the story? I've been very sad to let pages upon pages of plot drift away, going up in smoke because the actions of the characters made no sense. It allowed the neat little bow to go right on top of the finished product, and it was sure fun to write, but once pulled apart and reworked, the story only became stronger because the characters acted honestly and the plot will go into new directions that are better than what was there before. Sometimes you're not so lucky and the whole story goes away, but better to let it go than to add another cliche filled book to the heap of genre cliches already out there.
And Bully the Bear Makes A Great Valentine's or St. Patrick's Day Gift!
This was one of those early books of fantasy that I have hung onto ever since I first got it. The story is pretty straight up, typical, fantasy of the time, but the interior illustration by Zucker is really what sold it. I poured over them for hours, copying them and trying to emulate them in my own daffy little pictures I drew.
You can still get it if you look hard enough. I think Amazon only has them as second hand now. It's worth a look if you like dragons and fantasy mixed with some really cool pencil illustrations.
Here are parts 2-4 of the interview I did with BellaOnline:
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art34311.asp
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art34439.asp
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art34559.asp
It's where I ramble on way too much, but it's a first go at such things!
3. Annie Proulx - Barkskins
'...From Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain, comes her masterwork: an epic, dazzling, violent, magnificently, dramatic novel about the taking down of the world's forests...' She could stop after this one, but you can always hope for one more.
2. Ethan Canin - The Doubter's Almanac
'...In this mesmerizing novel, Ethan Canin, the author of "America America" and "The Palace Thief," explores the nature of genius, rivalry, ambition, and love among multiple generations of a gifted family...' This book is also a joy to read from a writing standpoint as much as it is from a plot standpoint.
1. Michael Chabon - Moonglow
I'm going to drop this one in at the top because it's Michael Chabon and that means it's probably better than anything else out this year, and that can be said because David Mitchell didn't release a book this year. It's part novel, part autobiography, part memoir, part biography, and it's all good. It's to savor from the characters and story to the literary work on display.
Amazon.com: https://goo.gl/JjlRhv
Amazon.com: https://goo.gl/46dPYM
Amazon.com: https://goo.gl/09mKvC
Part One of Four of an interview I did with BellaOnline. It's a bit windy, but it's my first one. :)
Now Available - It's a Good One...
NOGGIN - (n.) 1) a small vessel or cup, 2) a measure of alcohol like a gill - a noggin of whiskey 3) the head or upper part of the body - a soccer ball bounced off his noggin [IRISH SLANG] I'm gonna' knock a knot on your noggin! [SOUTHERN AMERICAN SLANG] 4) Oral Sex [URBAN DICTIONARY] 5) The mind/brain/head space of a mutos or animal spirit which can house other sentient entities and physical representations of memories and magickal abilities. [FROM THE DANCE OF ALL BEINGS CYCLE BY EDDIE W. PRESLEY]
I'm gonna keep it...
CODDIWOMPLE - (v.) [English Slang] - To travel purposefully toward an as-yet-unknown destination.
I received one Christmas, from my mother, the box sets that contained the rules for Dungeons and Dragons, and I was quite intrigued by the esoteric nature of the concepts within. As compelling as the ideas were, the actual process of playing the game was a confusing jumble of jargon and text scattered throughout several booklets. My mother was even concerned that it was a bad gift, but I assured her it was ok, that I liked it quite a lot. Even once I got the gist of it, however, I had no way to play the game as it required a group of friends that I considerably lacked at that time.
When I went to college at the Savannah College of Art and Design, I lucked into getting invited to play with a group of students that saw a castle and dragon doodle I did in class one day. From there we managed to play a version of the game that kind of fit our playing style. I don't think we ever knew much beyond the core mechanics.
Those core ideas made up the world that I would go on to create and run with another group, and they became the core ideas that made up the world I would eventually write about. It does sound silly, but when you wind up creating original history, myth, politics, social orders, gods and religions, a multiverse, magick, nations, towns and villages across an original 'world', you tend to want to use it for other creative projects.
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons First Edition Books.
The book, in my hands, looks great. It feels solid, and it looks polished. I can't wait to get part 2 out there to finish this part of the Cycle!
I was introduced to whimsical fantasy in the 70's when I went searching for new sci-fi at the local bookstore near my home in Huber Heights, OH. I first read The Source of Magic and then A Spell for Chameleon. This book, however, became my favorite and truly, if you stopped here, you'd have read all the Piers Anthony Xanth books you'd ever need to. What's not to love - it has damsels, giant spiders, centaurs, a boy who can talk with inanimate objects, time travel, kings, and castles - it was tailor made for me to enjoy at that moment. I did follow up with the next two trilogies, but by then it had really overstayed it's welcome. A compendium of the first three Xanth novels would sit well on any fantasy fans shelf.
It remains in print and on Amazon for a decent price, showing it's enduring quality.
Diana Krall performs live.
The Art of Walt Disney was first seen by me at a bookstore in Ohio that my parents would take me to in the late '70s. It cost $65 and that was outrageous at the time to spend on a book for me as a youngster. It's a massive tome filled with amazing illustrations and artwork and a ton of text on Disney's work as an animator from Kansas to California and then later as theme park designer. It remains a brilliant if slightly sanitized account of the man and his work. I have a later edition from the 80's that I bought in a little bookshop in Savannah, GA when I was in college and rolling in that government going to school money. Later I got a new edition with a slightly modified cover that also included more information on the theme parks plus a 'beyond!' section.
First Editions are going for as high as $2000 - but you can also get it from Amazon resellers for as cheap as $.01 (plus $4 shipping).
In middle school - or junior high school as it was known back then - I got into science fiction books after stumbling upon The Source of Magic by Piers Anthony. After that, I was all about big sci-fi and fantasy books, and it was easy to get a whole stack of 'em from the Science Fiction Book Club. One of the first books I got was The Foundation Trilogy by Asimov and I clearly remember showing it off - proud that I was carrying around such a weighty tome as my 'casual reading.' One young lady looked at it and said, "The Foundation of Triology? You read math books?" And faced with the options of agreeing or unwinding it to explain that it was a compilation of the classic works of Asimov and what they were about, I just said, "Yes." She went away somewhere between Impressed and What a Dork. - the usual.
Science Fiction Book Club editions of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy are going for as much as $90 online... go check your stacks!