Norman Maclean's dream come true.

Yesterday, the Pulitzer* committee decided (for the first time since 1977) not to award a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I'm not on the committee and can't speak to the decision, but a lot of other book people have used the occasion to commemorate some of the terrific novels that were published in 2011. I'd love to hear your suggestions, of any genre, in the comments.

Norman Maclean was snubbed by the Pulitzer committee in 1977 for A River Runs Through It. Despite being passed over for the award, though, Maclean got to live out what I think is many, many writers' dream. Maclean himself described it as "Probably the only dream I ever had in life that came completely true."

Go here, to the always-worthwhile Letters of Note blog, to see for yourself-- but you might want to queue up the Cee-Lo Green first. (Cee-Lo is NSFW.)

(*A pet peeve of mine: it's pronounced "PULL-litzer," not "PEW-litzer.")

Write the hard parts.

SPOILER ALERT, if you're not caught up on the following:

Bones (TV)

Mad Men (TV)

Brilliant advice from my SJGA colleague Lindsay Ribar, whose debut YA novel The Art of Wishing will be published by Dial Books for Young Readers next year.

As a friend of mine noted after seeing Lindsay's tweet, we've all experienced this from the reader's or fan's perspective: it's immensely frustrating, as a fan, when a longed-for moment between characters happens "offstage." My friend singled out the TV show Bones, which finally hooked up the two protagonists after SIX SEASONS, but didn't tell the audience for several episodes that the long-awaited hook-up had in fact happened. Why would you, as a creator, do this to your most loyal fans?

Here's another example: on Mad Men, the most recent episode ("Mystery Date") seems to have finally gotten rid of one of the most-loathed characters, someone the fan base has hated since at least his most infamous appearance back in Season Two. This was done in more or less the final scene of the episode, and the fan base consensus seems to be that the scene in which it happened was utterly cathartic. When something important happens, we want to witness it for ourselves, not have to be told about it after the fact. And indeed, TV and movies have trained us not to believe in the finality of something (like a character's death) until we've seen the body. Having an event reported to us, even by a character we deem reliable, doesn't "count" in the same way.

Don't click on this link (or the previous one!) unless you have nothing to do for the next three hours. I'm not kidding. http://tvtropes.org

As a writer, you have a contract with your audience: trust me to tell you the story, and I'll tell you everything you need to know.

I know those scenes are the hardest to write. It's so much easier to let someone recap the big dramatic moments after the fact. But doing so is a disservice to your audience, and it undermines the trust you've worked so hard to build in your readers.

Write the hard parts. Write the secret parts. Write everything your readers want to know about the story, whether your characters want you to reveal it or not. Especially if they'd rather keep it to themselves.

Monday morning thought.

“Consider the postage stamp: its usefulness consists in the ability to stick to

one thing till it gets there.”

-Josh Billings

More writing tips from elsewhere.

Lots of good stuff here.

"Leave out the parts readers tend to skip," indeed.

Fun quiz

Are you an introvert, an extrovert, or an ambivert?

Most writers, in my experience, tend to be introverts-- maybe it's easier to glue yourself to the keyboard (or the notepad and pen) if you enjoy alone time-- but one of the complexities of publishing in the modern era is how much publicity and promotion we ask authors to do in service of their book. It's part of the job, but I think it's hard for a lot of people. It would be for me!

What was your quiz result? I am "likely to be an introvert," which is the understatement of the century. What parts of the process are hardest for you?

Five tips for revising your novel.

1. Write a synopsis of the novel-- the whole thing. There are two good ways to do this, for the purposes of this exercise: one is to reread the novel and jot down notes as you go about what needs to go in the synopsis. The other technique is essentially the opposite: write a synopsis of the novel without rereading. Is every chapter of the work present and accounted for? Does anything jump out at you, structurally or otherwise? How many walks at the beach/the woods/the streets of Manhattan does your main character take?

2. Read the novel aloud. The whole thing. You can find someone to read it to or just read it to yourself, but it really does need to be read out loud. I always find sentences I trip over by using this technique, which is a pretty sure sign that the phrasing in that bit could use some fine-tuning.

3. Similar to #1, but suitable for more "visual" people: create a storyboard. Does too much of the action take place in one location? Does the story jump around too much? How's the flow from one scene to another?

4. Make a list of all your characters' names. Most writers, if they've chosen character names they like, will unconsciously return to the same set of sounds (phoneme set? I never took linguistics, and don't know enough about the terminology to effectively look this up) over and over again. So you get novels that include characters named Jessica, Erica, Annika, Veronica, and Monica. Morgan, Aidan, Evan, Damien. If the names are too similar, it's hard for your readers to tell the characters apart. (Watch out for recurring first letters, too-- the "J" is especially common in my experience.) Time to do some renaming. On the plus side: if you decide to have a(nother) kid, you've got a starter list of possible baby names. So there you go.

5. Print out a hard copy and go through with a highlighter, marking all the dialogue tags. Are there too many? Not enough? How flowery do they get? If a writer uses dialogue tags like "exclaimed" too frequently, it tends to be a sign that they're not very confident that the emotion behind the character's statement is effectively communicated. If this sounds like you, and if you're right to be concerned, it's the dialogue itself that really needs work.

Eyes the color of the ocean.

This morning, I got out of bed, washed my face, looked in the mirror and sighed. I haven’t had a hair cut in ages, and trying to do anything with my shoulder-length, dishwater-brown hair is hopeless.

I just put you to sleep, didn’t I?

It’s a boring way to start a blog post, but it’s a worse way to start a novel.

Much like New Year’s Day, a morning feels like a new, and natural, beginning; the perfect place to start. But unless you’ve got a very good reason for starting there—meaning the narrative absolutely must begin with the alarm clock—you’re more or less guaranteeing that your novel’s going to take too long to get going, and you’re going to lose the reader’s interest as a result.

I can think of a few exceptions to the “no mornings” rule:

-a story that takes place in the course of a single day (Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day)

-a story in which hitting the snooze button or forgetting to set the alarm (or something else that happens in that very first early morning scene) sets off a chain of events that form the core of the story (the 90’s film Sliding Doors)

-a story that starts off being about the banality of the protagonist’s life (the film American Beauty) or the opposite of that (Kafka’s The Metamorphosis).

I’d love to brainstorm some more examples in the comments—I’m sure you’ve got some great ones!—but suffice to say that most of the manuscripts I see that start with this trope are not doing so successfully.

Likewise the character’s appearance. Unless an element of that appearance—a missing limb, perhaps-- is the single most defining characteristic of that person, why on earth should it be the first piece of information you give your reader?

Awful examples of this one abound—and could start their own Bulwer-Lytton style contest, if one doesn’t already exist. Maybe we’ll run a “bad character descriptions” contest (your own inventions, not ones you’ve found elsewhere) sometime soon.

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you know that I’ve (as of a year or so ago) started taking on a lot of romance and women’s fiction clients. I mention this because it feels like romance, as a category, should be the easy exception to this: of COURSE it matters what the characters look like, because the whole point is that it’s a love story. Especially if you’re telling a “love at first sight” story, it may well feel like, yes, the heroine’s auburn hair IS the most important detail to lead off with.

I think you’re wrong.

I’m not saying you should never give your readers a physical description of your characters. I am saying that when you give us that description, you need to find a way to make it feel organic, like that moment in the story is the only possible moment at which to deliver that information. For romance, why not the moment when the hero/heroine first lay eyes on one another?

One last thing, a Tip for the Day, if you will, that a friend and colleague alerted me to. The modern world is full of resources for writers in the most unexpected places. When you’re writing your description of your titian-haired detective, and a phrase pops into your mind, start typing the phrase into a Google search bar. If Google “suggests” the description you had in mind, that’s a pretty good reason to come up with another one.

As you know, Bob.

"As you know, Bob." Are you familiar with this phrase? We (agents and editors) use it a lot as a shorthand. It's a first cousin of a phrase that we're all taught beginning in elementary school: "show, don't tell."

One of many things novelists have to watch out for, when it comes to good ol' show don't tell, is not to drop in a big block of background information in one (or, heaven forbid, several) paragraph(s) of narration. You have to find more artful ways of giving your readers the information they need to follow the story. This is especially tough, as a number of you can attest, when you're writing in an "alternate world" situation like sci fi or fantasy, because there's so much worldbuilding that needs to happen. That's part of what we love about reading stories in those genres: the immersion in a world that's not our own. The staircases at Hogwarts move on their own.

But you as the writer put in a lot of time crafting the details of that world. You probably have a "story bible" that's longer than the manuscript itself, explaining all the nuances of how different the gravity is on the planet where your novel takes place. That's GREAT. As a reader and as an agent, I want you to know all of those things about your work. But what I don't want is for those details to get in the way of the actual story. I don't want the plot to grind to a halt while you detail the etymology of a word you made up. If I really have to know that in order to "get it," you as the author have to find another way to explain it to me.

(Likewise historical fiction: you've done an incredible amount of research to make sure your novel is as historically accurate as possible. It's easy to want to "get credit" for all that time in the library by shoehorning one too many facts into the novel. The story suffers.)

"I know," you're thinking. "I'll put it into dialogue. That way it doesn't count as a big block of exposition, and I've escaped the 'show don't tell' pitfall."

Well, maybe. There are at least two things you have to watch out for, in the exposition-as-dialogue scenario.

First of all, and this is kind of obvious, but based on some of the submissions I get, it's worth mentioning: you can't put quotation marks around a paragraph of exposition and call it dialogue.

Secondly, if you're going to put these details into a dialogue format, it has to actually work as dialogue-- meaning it has to consist of things that one character in the novel would actually say to another. This needs to sound like a real conversation. You can't have Character A feeding all the information to Character B, when Character B's part of the conversation reads like this: "Oh. Mmm hmm. What do you mean? Can you say more about that?"

And now we come to "As you know, Bob." This term refers to a specific subset of dialogue-as-exposition, where both characters already know all the information being explained to the reader. "As you know, Bob," points to a conversation that's really obviously fake: if Bob already knows everything Jane is about to tell him, why would Jane bother explaining it?

Does your manuscript bear signs of "As you know, Bob?" What techniques do you have for ferreting out those moments in your work? Do you have any pointers for providing those crucial world-building details in a more subtle and non-plot-derailing way?

A must-read.

If you're reading this, I'm guessing this link is going to prove useful.

Which one is your biggest bugaboo? I've narrowed it down to two, myself: 20 and 22.

Go read the post. Then come back and tell me a story, and tell me what you're going to do differently.

happy new year

For last year's words belong to last year's language

And next year's words await another voice.

-T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Little Gidding)

I'm not dead yet

...just swamped with client-related work, unusually so for the post-Thanksgiving "lull."

But here's your chance to tell me all about your NaNoWriMo experience: did you win? (Let's talk soon about "winning" NaNoWriMo and why I have mixed feelings about it -- remind me.)

What was your word count?

Did you meet your personal goals?

Are you pleased with the outcome and/or the work in progress?

When will you start revisions?

What advice would you share with a would-be NaNo-er, based on your experience?

Tell me, tell me.

NaNoWriMo: The joys of measurable goals

I'm on Day Four of Crazy Week and, I have to say, pretty delighted with my progress. (If you've queried me recently, sorry to say that's been the bottom of the priority list lately, but the inbox is getting some attention this afternoon.)

I posted, half-jokingly, on Twitter yesterday that I just bought a book called LEARN TO MANAGE YOUR TIME, but wasn't sure when I'd get to read it. I love books like that (shameless plug here for my client Erin Rooney Doland's UNCLUTTER YOUR LIFE IN ONE WEEK), where it feels like a book can provide all the answers to your needs.

But I can't be the only one who sometimes confuses buying the book with reading the book, can I? As if the book's purchase would osmotically impart all of the book's wisdom to me. Sigh.

One major thing (of many!) that I have in common with anyone who strives to make money from their writing is that I have to figure out how to organize my time. There's nobody to tell me what my priorities should be, though there are quite a few people who would like a say in the matter, and I am the only person who gets to decide what goes on the day's to-do list. All my deadlines and all my work projects are more or less self-imposed.

That's scary sometimes, and there are certainly days--weeks--when I have to dig deep to find my motivation.

My mom would tell you that I've always worked best under pressure, which might help to explain why despite the stress, I'm having a really good week as I crank through as many list items as I can. Deadlines, even when they're pretty arbitrary and of my own making, are really, really good for my productivity.

I think the connections to NaNoWriMo here are pretty obvious: nobody makes you sign up, and nobody makes you produce the word count. You've all done this to yourselves. But signing up for something like NaNoWriMo is a way of publicly stating that what you're doing is important to you, and worthy of the time and attention it demands.

If you can't make time to write, you can't write anything.

Here's a post from the amazing Neil Gaiman giving his NaNoWriMo pep talk; it's well worth the read.

Check in in the comments and let us all know how you're doing (and what your word count is)!

NaNoWriMo: What are you so afraid of?

Here's a quick prompt for anyone who needs a NaNoWriMo (or other) boost:

What's the one thing your protagonist most fears?

Make that fear come true.

What happens next?

NaNoWriMo: Almost the halfway point.

Hi everybody!

November's a busy month around these parts, too-- I try to get as many things wrapped up before Thanksgiving as I can, so this last full week before the holidays is a mad rush of sending out submissions, wrapping up contract negotiations, and general desk-clearing.

It's tough to get a lot of people's attention between Thanksgiving and New Year's. There's a lot going on outside of work, and even though publishing doesn't party at the holidays like it used to--a friend of mine tells stories of champagne fountains ("tell me again about the rabbits, George!") at a publisher's holiday party-- it's still challenging, at most publishers, to get enough people in a room to make a decision about whether to acquire a manuscript. This presents the risk, from my perspective, of an editor's enthusiasm for a project cooling off before the bosses have had a chance to weigh in. So, with some carefully-thought-out exceptions, the tenor of my job changes quite a bit at that time of year.

But if things feel hectic for me, I can only imagine how the NaNo participants among you must be feeling, staring down the barrel of that 50,000 word count, with a little over two weeks to go. (Okay, that was mean. Sorry.)

If you're proceeding "chronologically" through your manuscript (writing page 1, then page 2), as a client and I were talking about this morning, then you should be near the novel's half-way point. Given the pacing of NaNoWriMo, it's not a great idea to do much editing as you're cranking out the pages, but if you can avoid switching your "inner editor" all the way on, you might give some thought to the pacing in this part of your story.

I wrote, briefly, in my first NaNo post about what I and a lot of others call the "flabby middle," that plague of writers everywhere, the primary symptom being that the story runs aground for some chunk of time. Imagine an Agatha Christie novel in which Miss Marple stops searching for clues for a little while, and instead describes her current knitting project for ten or twenty or thirty pages. (I might actually like that, but I am a knitter, and I have eclectic taste.) The knitting part might be pretty interesting, and it might be beautifully written, and it might be true to the character, but if it's not moving the story forward in a meaningful way, it should be frogged.

Here's a suggested first-draft technique for avoiding the flabby middle: write a one-sentence summary of each of your chapters. Simple as you can. Doesn't matter if it would read as very cryptic to someone else. If you get to a chapter description that reads like "Character goes away and thinks about what just happened for a while," then that's probably going to read like a flabby middle, unless that character makes substantial progress of some sort during the scene, and unless there's no other (more active!) way for that progress to take place.

Do you have any techniques for avoiding the "flabby middle?" Got any battle-of-the-bulge horror stories? And what's your word count?

NaNoWriMo: useful links

Day Two!

I'm hoping you're not actively procrastinating on your NaNoWriMo project just yet, but if the excitement's starting to wear off and the panic's starting to set in, here are some useful links to take a look at. There is a TON of great advice out there; here are a few of my favorite pieces.

Terrible Minds on NaNoWriMo do's and don'ts

The Struggling Writer on advice from two years of NaNoWriMo "wins"

Galleycat is publishing a tip a day for the month of November

Shameless client promotion: Vicky Alvear Shecter on making NaNoWriMo work for you

Nathan Bransford did a NaNoWriMo boot camp last year, with more to come

I'll share more in a week or so, if these are helpful, but here's my big piece of advice: turn off the Internet. Get off Twitter. Install a browser add-on like LeechBlock if you have to. Limit your distractions so you can focus on what you really want to get done: 50,000 words of a novel.

But once you've met your word count goal for the day, come back here and tell me in the comments section what that word count is.

NaNoWriMo: It Begins!

Today's the day! How's everyone doing so far?

Post your word counts in the comment section!

NaNoWriMo: How do you get started?

Tomorrow's the day: the official start of NaNoWriMo 2011. All over the country (really, the world!), writers are sharpening their pencils... or charging their laptops, hoping to start tomorrow with a bang.

NaNoWriMo, as you no doubt already know, has all kinds of "rules" about how far into a work you can be before it's "cheating" to use it as your NaNoWriMo project. Fair enough. The idea is not to end the month of November with something super-polished (ha, ha), but to get some words-- a LOT of words!-- on the page.

The official NaNoWriMo organization website says that the only things you're allowed to have done before beginning your novel on November 1 are outlines, character sketches, and research. All well and good.

But here's the thing: I know a lot of you don't work from outlines, maybe CAN'T work from outlines. I know because I've seen the look on your face when I ask you to write an outline or a synopsis. Even when you've already written the manuscript, outlining the plot feels incredibly daunting and unpleasant.

I had the privilege of attending a terrific breakfast panel at the RWA Nationals convention in New York back in late June. The speakers were Steve Berry, Diana Gabaldon, and Tess Gerritsen: incredibly successful, incredibly prolific writers all. And guess what: none of them really write from outlines. Diana Gabaldon, I seem to recall, doesn't use them at all. (She is just as funny as you think she's going to be, by the way.) Tess Gerritsen, who seems extremely organized and "together," doesn't use them either. She wrote an interesting post about her process here, if you want to take a look. But it was Steve Berry's remarks about using outlines that really stuck with me: he said he's used outlines in the past, and it's an effective way of making sure you've got your structure in place from the first draft, but it really sucks all the joy out of the writing. Working on the book became a task to be dreaded, rather than something to look forward to.

This is the opposite of the way I'd always figured I would try to write a novel myself (which might serve in part to explain why I've never actually "gotten around to" it)-- but for all three writers, surprising themselves with what comes next is an important part of the writing process.

Maybe this all comes down to a question of what you're more scared of: a creativity-squelching outline or the ominous and terrifying blank page.

But basically, either way you go about putting your manuscript together, you have my blessing.

Here's a little pre-NaNo reading for you, though, so (regardless of your stance on outlining) you can be mindful of some key points in creating a successful and satisfying novel. I expect you're already familiar with Cheryl Klein of Arthur A. Levine Books; here's a talk she wrote a few years ago called "A Few Things Writers Can Learn from Harry Potter."

NaNoWriMo: Getting Started

The response on the last post was pretty overwhelming-- yay!-- it sounds like a TON of people are gearing up for NaNoWriMo this year.

So let's do this! From now until the end of November, I'll theme my posts here around NaNoWriMo. I'd love to hear from newbies and from past NaNo participants alike: what sorts of information would you like to see here? Basic cheerleading, writing prompts, stories of NaNo successes, useful links? Funny, unrelated YouTube videos?

I'll be back here soon with lots of good NaNo stuff-- but in the meantime, have you completed your official sign-up yet?

NaNoWriMo: a quick survey

According to the countdown clock on the official website, the start of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is only five days away!

I've written about NaNoWriMo before, here, but I'm curious: how many of you reading this plan to participate this year?

Let's do a quick survey in comments. Here's the rundown on what I'd like to know:

1) Are you planning to do NaNoWriMo this year?

2) Have you done NaNoWriMo before? If yes, how many times?

3) What genre would you say best fits your planned NaNoWriMo project?

Provided we've got a good number of people participating, I'm thinking of "theming" the November posts on the blog. I'll do a combination of my own advice and a lot of helpful links from around the internet.

I'm going to spend this NaNoWriMo on the sidelines (alas), but would love to cheer the rest of you on in the process!

Writing Prompt and Mini Contest: The Best Money I Ever Spent

Here's another writing prompt for you.

The Best Money I Ever Spent

I'm really eager to hear what you come up with for this one, so let's do a MINI CONTEST: pursuant to this week's blog post about how to write a bio paragraph in your query letter, winner gets a bio paragraph critique here on the blog.

As before, post your response to the prompt on your own blog, and put a link to the post in the comment section below. Let's give this one a deadline of Monday, September 26.

Tell your friends. If I get at least 20 contest entries, I'll post my own response to the prompt next week.