How to Get Published

by John Bowers

It seems that more and more people are taking up writing every day. Many of these new would-be authors are people with careers who haven’t attended an English class in decades. What they learned about grammar in high school, if anything, has long since faded from their memory.  Yet some of them are pretty good story tellers, and as such deserve a decent chance at publication.

Unfortunately, for most of them it will never happen, simply because they don’t possess the mechanical skills to get their work reviewed. Visit the workshops or read the slush piles and you’ll be amazed at some of the mistakes new authors (and even some published authors) make. While the stories are sometimes pretty good, the nuts and bolts of grammar and punctuation are missing. There seems to be a lot of confusion about exactly how to format a story. (more…)

by Al Kalar

Last week I was talking with Christine Golden, Editor in Chief of Golden Visions Magazine (science fiction short stories). During the discussion, we found we regularly encounter some of the same problems in manuscripts.

1. Redundant speech tags.

John shook his finger in my face. “You need to straighten up and fly right, flunky, or you’ll find yourself without a job,” John said.

There’s absolutely no reason for “John said”. We already know who’s speaking because of the first sentence. (more…)

by Mike Carambat

[Mike belongs to an online writing workshop for "hard" science fiction writers, Science Fiction Novelists. The question came up about accents. How much is too much? At what point does the writing out of a character's accent become a distraction?

This is Mike's contribution (reprinted with his permission), edited somewhat for understanding since it's taken out of context.]

At last a subject which hits rather close to home for me.

In my book (I’ve only still got the one), I drag you all over the friggin’ planet. You meet people from England (upper & lower classes), Russia, Croatia, Germany, India, America (North, South and Central) and even Australia. Not to mention, I use dialects and euphemisms from the 1900s and modern day. (more…)

by John Bowers

If you’re anything like me, nothing is more fun than writing a novel. Just the idea of starting a new one fills you with giddy anticipation, and you can hardly wait to get started. But once you begin, sometimes you run into problems you didn’t anticipate - how should my character react to this or that situation? Should he run or fight? Is he smart or dumb, assertive or indecisive? Does he know first aid? Can he handle a gun? Would he call the cops or take the law into his own hands? Is he smooth with the ladies or painfully shy? Can he dance? Can he swim? What color are his eyes?

These and many other details are important to your story, and if you haven’t answered those questions before you start writing, you can screech to a halt in a hurry. The problem may be that you haven’t defined your characters before you started writing, and without some ground rules you, the author, simply don’t know how they should react to given situations.

What you need, before you start writing, is backstory. (more…)

by John Bowers

Writers hear a lot of talk about grabbing the reader’s attention on page 1. Editors, agents, and publishers aren’t likely to look at your manuscript if you don’t grab their attention right away, and if they don’t look at it, they won’t publish it - and if they don’t publish it, no one else will ever have a chance to put it down because it just didn’t grab them.

So it’s a no-brainer that you need to get that reader’s attention right away. And the only way to do that is to hook them immediately - which is why this part of your novel is usually called the “hook”.

Some hooks, of course, are better than others. It is generally agreed that you have until the end of the first paragraph to sink that hook, but that in itself can be a problem. If the first paragraph is too long, or poorly constructed, the reader might not even last that long. So I say, Bait the hook. (more…)

by D. Keith Howington

It’s your responsibility to feed dialog into your readers’ minds without causing them to do a double-take and have to go back and read a bit again. When that happens, you’ve lost the mood, and lost the reader. Too much of that can lose them permanently.

We all know the basics: that “said” is essentially invisible, that using adverbs like “angrily” to convey feeling is risky, and that using speech tags such as “he smiled” are physical impossibilities and jarring to the reader. (more…)

by John Bowers
Any writer who hopes to be published in any genre has, hopefully, consulted many sources of advice on how to proceed. Almost every such source, whether book, article, or blog, will tell you that before you submit (and this is especially true with fiction), you need to polish your work.

Polishing means many things; it includes proper grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, and even formatting per the target publisher’s requirements. One of the biggest items in polishing is spelling.

Many people have trouble spelling. For some it’s just a matter of aptitude; for others it may be that they had no desire to write until they were already out of school, much too late to concentrate on those spelling lessons. And, I suspect, some people just don’t care.

But if you want to write - and get published - you need to start caring. (more…)

by John Bowers

One of the hardest things I face when writing a novel is keeping the story consistent. Writing a book-length story may take from a few weeks to a few months, and you put the story down a few hundred words at a time. Over a period of several weeks, it’s sometimes hard to keep track of what happened earlier, and consistency can suffer.

If you’re writing from a detailed outline it may be easier, but if you’re like me, outlines are too restrictive. When I start a novel I usually have a general idea of what the book is about, three or four high points I want to hit, and a couple of characters. From that starting point, the adventure begins, and I usually don’t end up where I thought I might. But the journey is fantastic-I discover the story as I go, just as the reader does later on. (more…)

by John Bowers
One of the great things about reading a good adventure book is the atmosphere in which the story takes place. If the author is good, you are transported to whatever setting he describes, and wish you were actually there as events take place. Atmosphere is critical to a good novel, but how hard is it to create?

There are many kinds of atmosphere. Initially we think of the setting, like a cool autumn day where the trees blaze with color and a delicious little wind stirs the leaves around your feet; or a sunny beach where the sun bakes you brown and the surf crashes loudly while circling seagulls screech overhead-but atmosphere can be more than that. Atmosphere can be a pall of gloom that settles over a city under siege, a joyous giddiness that infects the guests at a wedding, or a cold dread that stalks the streets where a serial killer remains at large.

You can develop an exciting plot, colorful characters, and lots of action, but without atmosphere, your novel is missing a key ingredient. (more…)

by Al Kalar
One of the pieces of advice I give writers is, “join a writing workshop”. No, not a one-day “become a best-selling author” given by Famous Writer. I’m talking about a peer-to-peer workshop that’s really a club.

Well, I do follow my own advice. I’ve been a member of an online workshop since the late 90’s and I learned a LOT. I still learn more on a regular basis, but I also dispense advice (everyone does from the day they join).

This last weekend, I critiqued a submission from one of our members. The writer is a big fan of “classic” pulp science fiction and decided to write his book in a similar style, including a rather lengthy “foreword”. I took him to task over the forward (it violated my favorite “rule”: get right into the story, explain later if at all). I also objected to the fact that he started with four separate story lines (part of the reason for the forward). (more…)