Novel writing

[Bucket]

So I'm considering putting my creative energy into a novel.

I've had a bible of sorts (more a collection of napkin ideas) rotting away on my hard drive for almost a decade, and I've done little but tinker with some elements and take a glance every few months, with little intent. As it stands I don't have anything concrete written. I wonder if I could start with a more focused outline, at which point I would probably write chapters/acts/scenes as they come to me.

Is anyone here into writing? What do you do to get things going? Do you belong to any fiction communities/websites online? What do they offer?

[MegaTurtleRex]

I'm doing an American literature subject this year and we have had to do bits of writing, I found Kurt Vonnegut's advice really good and see it reflected in games with good narration.

He is directing it at short stories but it applies to novels too imo.

[Creaphis]

In that vein, you can't really go wrong writing your novel like it's a short story. Where most first stories suffer is in the colossal mass of shit squashing the life out of their few interesting aspects. Cut out everything that doesn't have a really good reason to be there. Actually, scratch that. Most beginning authors go wrong by overthinking things and never putting even two words in a line. So, just do whatever.

I haven't found any fiction writing communities that I'm a big fan of just yet. I'm curious about this as well. However, this is partly due to the Groucho Marx conundrum: I won't join any club that would have me as a member. The Reddit writing communities drive me crazy because they're infested with frustrated, unproductive, clueless amateurs, just like me. On the other end of the spectrum you have sites like Everything2, whose idiolect I have yet to decipher.

[188DarkRevived]

Bucket said:

Is anyone here into writing?

Nowadays, asides from typing essays for teachers, I type weekly journals about my frustrations and concerns regarding my latest crush, because it somehow makes me feel better for short periods of time.
In the past I've been writing poems and fanfics about various things.

Do you belong to any fiction communities/websites online? What do they offer?

I used to have an account on DeviantArt, but now I only have one on FanFiction.net.
Here is the URL: https://www.fanfiction.net/~188darkrevived

[gggmork]

I've thought about converting my mental wank stream into writing before.. but then I remember I never get interested to read anyone else's fiction so what's the point in making my own. I agree with creaphis cracky sweet, except applying it to everyone not just beginners. Its just an accident of history that books have been the length they usually are because that was a sellable unit. A story could be like, a few paragraphs. And even then my attention span will be limited. I mean, what happened, did anything interesting enough happen to warrant this stupid story? "the universe blew up", there, that's a story, not just a title but a complete story, succinct and to the point. I mean something slightly noteworthy actually occurred in that story. It wasn't just some stupid old guy catching a fish, spawning homework and forcing kids to do "book reports" on it in the "education" adolescent dumbing down and holding pen. I mean if your story actually catches on, whole societies of poor sap adolescents could be forced to read it in school. I'd choose the 3 words more carefully if I was going to publish it. Plus there's absolutely 0 chance of money in it. Only one person out of a billion has their stupid story turned into "harry potter".

[darknation]

In no particular order.

Be prepared to spend years in an intellectual, spiritual and emotional vacuum. Posting at DW is good practice for this.

I personally avoid other amateurs like the plague; the best feedback I have received was from other vets, people who wanted to read the book rather than people who felt obliged to do so. Convincing others that your book is something that they actually want to read, however, is tricksy. People do not want to read an unfinished book. People do not want to read short stories, demented perverts on fanfiction.net aside.

Buy a thesaurus and glue up your ethernet port; the internet is anathema to productivity. Do not fear the delete key - if something isn't working then it's quicker and easier to delete that paragraph or chapter (or, once, the entire fucking book) and start over from scratch. Do not focus entirely on one novel - start something new every once and a while, purely because after editing and rewriting for going on five years now, I have developed a crippling fear of defacing blank pages. I may have lost the ability to write anything *new* at some point.

If writing is beating your ass, if you are hating every single word that you have committed to paper and absolutely cannot conceive of a way forward, then close the file and go walking. For two months. Open the file again when you've forgotten what the contents are. You'll be surprised and find you suck less than you remember.

Set yourself a deadline and double it. Wave to the deadline as you sail past, laughing maniacally and wondering how you could have possibly been so naive to think that you could finish a book in that laughable period of time.

The first draft will suck. The second draft will suck less, marginally. The fifteenth draft will suck more than the first draft did, because you are now clinically insane. The sixth draft might be pretty decent.

No one likes a Mary Sue. If you feel the need to stride into your fictional landscape then at least have the decency to throw yourself under a bus at the start of chapter three.

99% of the people who will post advice in this thread are idiots with no relevant experience. The other one percent are bitter, twisted failures who will gleefully shit upon your creative works regardless of merit and quality.

Writing can be a fucking lonely pastime.

[Technician]

darknation said:

99% of the people who will post advice in this thread are idiots with no relevant experience. The other one percent are bitter, twisted failures who will gleefully shit upon your creative works regardless of merit and quality.

I'll have you know I'm a professional blogger.

[Clonehunter]

I've written various short stories (No, they're not fan fics. Not most of them, anyways). Like DN said, just be prepared to find yourself starting over a lot. It's not a bad thing, and I've felt that starting over can actually help. And maybe if several ideas aren't working by themselves, try combing different ideas and see what ones fit together, write it, realize it sucks, scrap it, and then combine some other ideas.

[Mr. Freeze]

I've never been good at writing prose, just dialogue and worldbuilding. So I've put my energy into writing a RPG setting which takes advantage of the latter.

[geo]

I write, or wrote. Even had a novel almost published. Three months after signing a deal for 6% royalties, the publisher was bought out and the new publisher gave me 8 months to finish the editing process. I failed to have it done, because editors either wanted 50% of earnings or wanted a lot of money up front. I couldn't use my own editor, I had to use one of their editors. I finally agreed to not one but 2 of their editors. 1 dragged her feet for 5 months, the other dragged her feet for another 3 months. I had to pay these people for pretty much nothing.

The daunting part is they wanted me to cut 300+ paperback pages (100 full pages) down to 100 paperback pages. My original editor laughed at that and said that's one way to make sure your novel is shit.

Because I failed to meet the 8 month deadline, the new publisher wanted the advance money back. Thing is ... they didn't give me the money, the original publisher gave me the money. I had to use their editors instead of my own original editor.

Anyway, that kinda soured me. Now I just don't write at all. I used to write shitty novel after shitty novel. I could churn out 20 pages in a day with the right mood.

[AndrewB]

Seems like books are 20 years behind other media in the independence movement.

[gggmork]

geo said:

stuff

Frankly, that sounds like their business model, leaching off people who are trying to be creative, selling locked-in "editor" labor more than anything else, possibly with no serious intention to publish anything. If a goal is to make money, your main problem is advertising. I'm sure you could find some internet company that will print a bunch of book copies. Whether they'll sell at a high enough value or quantity to offset the cost of each copy and effort/cost of advertising is another matter. Plus printing a bunch of books just kills trees. If I tried this, I think I would do it 100% digital, maybe just post the entire thing on the internet and hope honor based donations could work, or devise a way to post the first 2 chapters and pay for the rest.. or release 1 book and hold additional books "hostage", not releasing until a certain donation amount is accumulated.

[Clonehunter]

gggmork said:

or devise a way to post the first 2 chapters and pay for the rest

Markets to kindles or whatever isn't a terrible idea, as there's a lot of digital books on Amazon. And as long as kindles and whatnot continue to grow in popularity, "Shareware" Novels might be a viable option in the future. Granted, Amazon gives you like, a four page preview, but this preview usually includes the copy right page and cover and at the end you end up previewing very little and often not enough to warrant your continued reading.

[Grazza]

Clonehunter said:

Amazon gives you like, a four page preview, but this preview usually includes the copyright page and cover and at the end you end up previewing very little and often not enough to warrant your continued reading.

The free preview of a Kindle book on Amazon is generally about 10% of the book, so it can be quite large in the case of a large book. It's actually a useful guide to the amount of content that you'll be getting. If the sample doesn't get past the prelims, then chances are it's more a pamphlet than a book.

You can put the copyright info and various other items (list of other titles, etc.) at the end of the book. This is more standard in ebooks than in print books, and is also useful if you want the free sample to contain more of the meat of the book.

[darknation]

geo said:

got played.

The solution is to do all your editing and send only the FINISHED PRODUCT to your agent. Do not accept an advance (or the vapourware promise of an advance) if there is still work to be done. No one, let alone a publishing house, accepts broken, half-finished books. That is not the way business is done. Advances are not granted for first time novels only half-written; advances are granted for finished books, to keep the author afloat between the actual sale of your novel and the indeterminate period before receiving your percentage, which is usually a year or more down the line.

Publishers don't just buy books from your agent and publish them three months later; they have release schedules. Comedy and autobiography sells better at christmas, serious works will be released prior to awards ceremonies etc. This is where your advance comes in, to let you eat and work in the meantime.

My own personal rule is that if anyone you haven't worked with before shows an interest in your book then they are probably vanity publishing / a ripoff editor house. Check these fuckers out before you sign shit. Google, as always, is your friend.

[pritch]

I've written a long novella / short novel and other long works. I have a Masters in creative writing, though since leaving uni and embarking on my current career I haven't written.

My advice would be to just have a go and enjoy it without putting expectations on yourself. I had to write for a tutor and a submission panel at university and, like geo, professionally a few times and the pressure of it pissed me off and put me off it, which is a shame as it had always been something I enjoyed. I knew then I wouldn't ever choose to write for a living.

On a more structural level, always figure out your ending and work backwards - try to get a "spine" in place with your plot - a set of vertebrae of key elements that you want to hang the rest of your narrative around - it's great to have a lot of ideas but it's really important to keep focus and pacing. You must know what is going to happen, and why it's going to happen, from the outset. That's not to say you can't change your mind but that's the exception, not the rule.

Get someone else to read it as you go - better yet get a few people - and they don't have to be pros, either, in fact it's best that someone who isn't another writer reads it.

Good luck!

[Flesh420]

Never take anyone's advice until you finish your piece. Otherwise it'll eat at you and make you think all sorts of retarded shit: I'm doing this wrong, that wrong etc. I've finished two novels and both I spent about two years thinking about before dragging pen across paper. With both novels I filled up two notebooks and allowed myself to write terribly, after both notebooks are full wait a few months and come back to edit, condense, throw at wall, rewrite rewrite rewrite. That's my method and it seems to work.

Edit: Also keep a gun near your writing area so if you grow frustrated you can shoot the fucker multiple times until hate evacuates through your finger tip.

[Creaphis]

geo said:

I failed to have it done, because editors either wanted 50% of earnings or wanted a lot of money up front. I couldn't use my own editor, I had to use one of their editors. I finally agreed to not one but 2 of their editors. 1 dragged her feet for 5 months, the other dragged her feet for another 3 months. I had to pay these people for pretty much nothing.

That's a great scam. It makes me want to get into the business of selling false hope. Question: what exactly did your contracts look like? Could you sue the "publisher" for the cost of the editing they never did? There's an obvious disincentive here for them to ever actually do it, which may help your case.

[Bucket]

Are you kidding? Most standard contracts these days start with, "You may not sue us for any reason, even if we completely piss all over the agreement stated below while raping your uncle with a tuna."

[Aliotroph?]

Bucket said:

Are you kidding? Most standard contracts these days start with, "You may not sue us for any reason, even if we completely piss all over the agreement stated below while raping your uncle with a tuna."

Companies with such agreements do tend to lose a lot of lawsuits anyway. I worked for one. Was hilarious watching them lose class actions and not change their thinking.

[Sharessa]

Well my first advice would be don't start with a novel if you've never written anything before. Rather, you should just write whatever comes to you. Keep a folder on your desktop full of ideas and rough drafts. Just write whatever comes to mind: short stories, fanfics, essays, observations or whatever else suits your fancy. Spend your free time posting on forums writing eloquent posts until you've learned to string your words together like a goddamn wordsmith.

Then you spend as much free time as you can spend putting digital pen to digital paper and processing your thoughts into a physical medium. Reading as much as you can while you do so helps as well. Well-written prose will absorb into your brain, invading your subconscious until you start pissing flowery words. Avoid any kind of fanfic communities, TVTropes, or anything of that sort. They speak a sort of language that's alien to any other known language and ends up poisoning their writing with terrible grammar and bad cliches.

Or else you can spend most of your free time planning what you're going to write, slowly cobbling together stories one drowsy late night at a time, reading over them at another date, then deleting them forever in frustration. That's the way I do it, anyway.

[geo]

gggmork said:

Frankly, that sounds like their business model, leaching off people who are trying to be creative, selling locked-in "editor" labor more than anything else, possibly with no serious intention to publish anything. If a goal is to make money, your main problem is advertising. I'm sure you could find some internet company that will print a bunch of book copies. Whether they'll sell at a high enough value or quantity to offset the cost of each copy and effort/cost of advertising is another matter. Plus printing a bunch of books just kills trees. If I tried this, I think I would do it 100% digital, maybe just post the entire thing on the internet and hope honor based donations could work, or devise a way to post the first 2 chapters and pay for the rest.. or release 1 book and hold additional books "hostage", not releasing until a certain donation amount is accumulated.

Yeah I'm pretty sure that was their business model. Fucking over their actual talents. I think the publisher changed its name too.

I never had an agent. I'm done with writing. I make more programming. I'm good enough with that to have an agent / manager.

To the person that said handing in a finished product to a publisher would work. Pulibhsers have their own people and nothing is really complete without a publisher getting its tentacles in it. Especially with a new author that has no idea what they're doing.

As for the contract, my contract was with the original publisher. There were no contract with the new publisher. In fact I told them my contract was with the original publisher, not them. No where did it say in my original contract I'd have to use the new publisher's editors. Therefore I wouldn't be returning their advance, since I was in no breach of contract. Its not even their advance and it seems like a scam. My mom was a lawyer so I had her friends look at the contract and what they sent me that I needed to repay the advance. They said I wasn't breaching the contract even if they bought the contract when they bought the company.

[Grazza]

From what you're saying, it sounds like a "real" publisher was bought by a "vanity" publisher.

"Real" publisher: pays advances, only contracts projects it believes are commercially viable, takes the financial risk, provides professional editorial work and expects to recoup the costs from sales of the book, etc.

"Vanity" publisher: no quality control, makes money from authors who are willing to pay just to get published, charges them for basic publishing services, doesn't expect to profit from sales of the book.

The contracts for those two types of publishers (well, only one deserves to be called a publisher...) tend to be radically different, so it's hard to imagine how a vanity publisher could take on real publishing contracts. Most publishing contracts do contain wording that means they remain in force following a sale of the company (with the new company taking on all the rights and responsibilities of the old one), but it depends on the precise wording, and the exact nature of the take-over. If something messy occurred, then different lawyers might give differing opinions.

Nowadays if you want to get published, and are willing to take the financial risk yourself (if only in terms of not getting anything like an advance), then Kindle provides an excellent route (you get 70% of the income, minus download fees, which should be trivial for a novel). They even offer a way to produce a hard-copy version. There is some technical complexity, but it should be manageable. Essentially it's a cut-down version of html/css, with a few additional features. Of course, if your English isn't as good as you think it is (true for most writers...), the product will suffer from a lack of editing. But there are freelance editors out there, and you have plenty of choice about who you use, and how extensively you use their services.

[Mr. Freeze]

Danarchy said:

good advice

As an addition: I keep a file named "Idea Mine" on my desktop. If I come up with or hear a good idea, line of dialogue, or something I think I can save, I put it into the mine for "mining" (AKA using) later. It helps me a lot when I get writer's block, especially when you don't format it at all.

[Sharessa]

Yeah, I've got a note file that I write down story ideas on. It's a good go-to when you get writer's block.