E-Books Are Not the Print Apocalypse

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I'm sure many of you heard the big news on Monday that e-books topped hardcover sales at Amazon, news that some like to interpret as another nail in the proverbial coffin for brick-and-mortar bookstores. And while it can sound like bad news, especially to those who side wholly with print books, I don't believe it's bad news at all.

Before I go on, I'd like to say (once again) that I love print books. Nothing beats the smell of a new book (except maybe new shoes), and I love having something tangible in my hands as I read and I love comparing the texture of the paper and most of all, I love collecting my books and adding them to my overflowing bookshelf. 

But I also love my e-reader. I love not having to worry about losing (or finding) a bookmark, I love being able to rest the e-reader on my lap while I sit outside without fear of the wind blowing the pages around while I'm trying to read and I love that I can carry as many books as my heart desires in a little device that doesn't weigh more than a couple pounds.

I think that sometimes people get caught up in choosing a side between print and electronic books and they forget that a book is a book and it doesn't matter what format the writing comes in as long as people continue to read. And really, that's the important part, isn't it? As long as people are reading, writers and readers alike have little reason to worry because as long as there is a demand for books (and by books I meant books in any format) there will be people who continue to write and publish them (and, I suspect, there are people who would continue to write books, even if the demand disappeared). 

So now on Monday (according to the NYT article I linked to above), Amazon announced that in the last three months they sold 143 e-books for every 100 hard covers they sold, and it makes some people nervous about the future of the print book. But guys, e-books are not the print apocalypse nor are they the demise of the book. Because while it's true that the rise of e-books may at some time or another eventually lead to print books becoming a little more difficult to find, I truly don't believe that they will disappear entirely, at least, not for a very long time.

We should celebrate the rise of e-books just as we would an increase in sales in print books—because a book is a book and a rise in sales is always good news for writers and readers because it means people are reading. 

And as long as people continue to read, what else matters?

 What do you think? Am I crazy to think that e-books are not the print apocalypse or do you agree that a book is a book regardless of the format? 

The (Not So) Surprising Key to Writing Quickly

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So not too long ago, fabulous author Beth Revis mentioned this guest post on Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America about how one writer (Rachel Aaron) increased her daily word count output from 2,000 words a day to 10,000 words a day. No, you didn’t read that incorrectly. If you have time to read the full article, I highly recommend it, (you can also read Beth’s take on it here) but if there’s one bit that really stuck with me, it’s this: it is much easier to write quickly when you know what you’re going to write.

Now I’ve written in the past about the pros and cons of both plotting and pantsing, and for those of you who aren’t too keen on plotting, I don’t think it’s a requirement to intricately plot out your entire novel in order to write quickly. However, as someone who has in the past indeed pantsed an entire novel (and enjoyed the process), I can say from experience that if writing quickly is your goal, it helps to know where you’re going.

The reasoning behind this is pretty obvious—as many of you are aware, I’m sure, the times when we don’t know what to write next tend to be the slowest and most excruciating writing days. They’re the days that we write a sentence, then stare at the screen, then decide we’re hungry and grab a snack, then think maybe I’ll find inspiration on the internet! and spend precious writing time trolling Twitter and tumblr (don’t deny it—you’ve done it). Even when we don’t seek distraction, the times we don’t know what to write next tend to not-so-coincidentally also be the times where you have to fight for every word (at least, it is in my experience).

So by setting down some landmarks and deciding what you’re going to write today ahead of time, you can save yourself the headache of slamming your head into the wall and jump right into the writing bit.

Although I pantsed the last WIP that I drafted up, I decided to actually outline the one I’m currently working on in a checklist format—and I have to say, it has made all the difference. No, I didn’t plan every intricate detail, and yes, I’ve changed things around as I started writing, but having a checklist of plot points that need to happen along the way has saved me huge amounts of time that would otherwise been spent wondering where to go next. With the outline kept close at hand, I have a pretty good idea what I’m going to write every time I sit down, and this has allowed me to really boost my output.

While I’m not writing 10,000 words a day (yet, anyway), this one change (combined with previously discussed speed writing techniques) has allowed me to achieve an average of 900 some-odd words per 30 minute #wordmongering session.

Now, if you’re a pantser you’re probably thinking, but I hate outlining. That sort of ruins the point of pantsing. Which would be true, except I’m not saying you have to outline your entire novel (I did, but you don’t have to). 

What I am saying is that before you sit down to write, it helps tremendously if you go in with a good idea as to what is going to happen. For Rachel, it meant writing down a brief list of things that had to happen in the scene she was going to write. For me, it meant looking at the next point on my outline and thinking about how my character would get there and what would happen during the scene before I actually started writing.

And just like that, writing quickly became easier.

What do you think? Do you have any tips for writing quickly?

How to Write Characters Your Readers Love

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Question: What do Sirius Black, Finnick Odair, Robin "Puck" Goodfellow, Kenji Kishimoto and Remus Lupin have in common? (Hint: They DON'T all die.)  

Answer: They're all non-main characters that many readers fell in love with. They also all happen to be male with relatively awesome names, but that's not the point. 

Point is, these five guys developed a pretty extensive fan base, despite the fact that most of them were side characters. So how does that happen? How do authors write characters that fans falls so in love with that when some of them meet untimely ends, readers shed actual tears over the loss? 

Let's take a quick look at each of the characters: 

• Sirius Black (Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling). Sirius Black is one of my personal all-time favorite characters ever. He's a highly misunderstood man who spent years of his life trapped in the worst kind of prison imaginable for a crime he didn't commit, Harry's only hope at a "normal" life in a loving home, fiercely protective of his godson (but not to the point that he tries to shelter him), and armed with enough wit to make Snape blush. Combined with the fact that he's an adorable/badass dog half the time, there isn't much not to like about Sirius. 


• Finnick Odair (Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins). Finnick is attractive, witty, infuriates/embarrasses Katniss on more than one occasion, and turns out to have to have a horrible past that makes you feel guilty for misjudging him as a total tool in Catching Fire (or maybe that was just me). Top that off with his unconditional love for a fellow ex-tribute who isn't all there, Finnick earns his spot as a fan favorite pretty quickly. 


• Robin "Puck" Goodfellow (Iron Fey Series by Julie Kagawa). (Slight spoiler) Puck is Meghan's long-time best friend and secret guardian with a sharp tongue and penchant for tricks and trouble-making, so when he gets friend-boxed, you can't help but feel bad for the poor guy. Furthermore, when he remains loyal to Meghan despite his unrequited love, readers love him all the more. 


• Kenji Kishimoto (Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi). I'm not spoiling much when I say we all know Juliette isn't going to fall for Kenji—that much is pretty clear right from the beginning. But we can't help but admire his spirit when he tries to woo her over to him anyway (and make us laugh while attempting to do so), and plus there's the whole risking-his-life-to-help-Juliette-thing. 


• Remus Lupin (Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling). After Sirius, Remus was probably my second-favorite minor Harry Potter character (tied with the Weasley twins), and I felt it important to include him because unlike the previous four, Remus is not funny. He's a very intense and serious character, largely afraid of himself and what he might do during a certain phase of the moon, and is entirely loyal to his friends and loved ones. Readers feel bad for Remus, and when he finds happiness we can't help but be glad that something good has finally come his way. 

So what do they all have in common that makes readers love them? 

They're all characters readers became emotionally invested in. They made us laugh and cry and sympathize with them. We learned about their darkest secrets and what makes them happy, what scares them and what makes them angry. Their creators didn't write them lightly—they're carefully written and fully-developed characters that we as readers can't help but love. 

The lesson is this: in order to write characters that your readers love, you need to invest just as much time and effort to get to know them as you did your protagonist. If you want your readers to remember the names of more than just your MC, you need to take time to really understand what makes your side characters tick, so that when time comes to write them, they feel just as real as your major characters. 

As a writer, you have to fall in love with your side characters first. Once you do, writing them so that your readers adore them just as much as you do will come that much easier. 

Who are your favorite side characters? What made you love them as much as you do? 

How to Spot Mary Sue in Your Writing

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If you've been a writer for any amount of time, I'm sure you've heard of the infamous Mary Sue and her brother Gary (or Larry) Stu. It's an evil name in the writing world as heinous as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named that makes every writer tremble in fear. 

Ok, so maybe not quite, but Mary Sue is a conniving little character that likes to slip into the unsuspecting writer's work, and if you aren't careful, you may fall victim to her sneaky ways as well. 

For those of you who don't know, according to Wikipedia (who had the best definition I could find), Mary Sue is "a fictional character with overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the author or reader. It is generally accepted as a character whose positive aspects overwhelm their other traits until they become one-dimensional." As I've already posted in the past about character flaws and mistakes, I'm going to focus on the wish-fulfillment/self-insertion bit. 

As new writers often haven't developed their Mary Sue radar yet, they tend to find Mary Sues cropping up in their writing most often. And it's not difficult to understand why it's so easy to accidentally write a Mary Sue into your work—as writers, we spend a lot of time trying to create new characters and get to know them, and sometimes as we get to know them, we start to realize that they remind us of...well...ourselves. What's worse, sometimes writers don't realize they've created a Mary Sue until halfway through the first draft (or even after the first draft is completed). 

Good news is there are warning signs that can tip you off to the possibility of a Mary Sue hiding in your writing that are relatively easy to recognize so that you can stop the invasion before it's too late. 

The Warning Signs: 

• You agree with everything your MC says, thinks and does. Always agreeing with your protagonist is a HUGE red flag. That's not to say that you shouldn't be able to justify their actions (you should), but if you don't disagree with your protagonist every once in a while, chances are you've been writing a character that's a tad too reminiscent of you. 

• You share the same strengths and flaws. Writing is often about balance, and there's nothing wrong with a writer sharing a couple strengths or flaws with their characters—that's natural, even. But if you're a perfectionist and a compulsive liar with a sharp tongue and quick wit and your protagonist is a quick-witted compulsive liar who also happens to be a perfectionist, then I hate to break it to you, but you may have just written yourself into your novel. 

• You share the same strengths and your protagonist doesn't have any flaws. Please see point two and this post. 

My point is this: as writers we spend a lot of time in our character's heads—we live and breathe our stories until our characters feel as real as our family members and closest friends, but we are not our characters. The moment you start to suspect that you may have fictionalized yourself, chances are you probably have.

If you're a writer, have you ever written a Mary Sue or Gary Stu into your writing? What steps did you take to fix it?

Writers: Start Acting Like Professionals

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I am an unpublished writer, and I'm sure many of you reading this are also unpublished writers. Despite my not-in-bookstore status, I decided a long time ago to take some writing advice that I'd read over and over again, namely, to stop acting like a writer who was trying to get published and to start acting like a professional. 

What I mean is if you treat your writing like a hobby rather than a job, then you'll be hard pressed to try to do those things that professional writers do, like finish novels and write until your fingers want to fall off and edit your work to death. If you treat your writing like a hobby rather than a job, then you really can't expect anyone else to see it your passion as anything more than just a hobby. 

If you treat your writing like another job, however, I think you'll find that not only will you become more productive, but you'll become more confident in your writing (at least, I did). 

But what exactly do I mean by acting like a professional writer? Well, let's take a look at some things most (or at least many) professional writers do: 

• Professional writers write to routine. Every writer is a little different—some write every day, others five or six days a week, others less, but the point is they develop some sort of method that works for them and they stick with it. Professional writers can't allow themselves to slack off for long—they have deadlines to meet and bills to pay and this is how they work. Which leads me to...


• Professional writers meet deadlines. Published authors are constantly working under a deadline—whether it's a draft that's due, or a proposal for the next novel or a synopsis or whatever the agent/publisher/reader needs, published writers live by deadlines. And in order to pay the bills and keep their contracts and continue progressing, published authors do what they have to to make sure they meet their deadlines. 


• Professional writers edit their work. I don't mean a casual sweep through, either—many published authors have been known to entirely rewrite their work from scratch or rip their drafts apart until the first draft is no longer recognizable. 


• Professional writers read a lot. I've written in the past about why this is so important, but it's no coincidence that most published authors also happen to be avid readers. Reading is essential to good writing. 


• Professional writers keep writing. When a writer's agent can't find a publisher who will buy their work, the professionals keep writing. When the book doesn't sell as well as they'd hoped, professionals keep writing. When the first draft looks absolutely horrendous and they start to wonder whether their story idea was worth writing at all, professional writers keep writing. Period. 

Now the secret is this: you don't have to be published to write like a professional. You don't need to have a contract to set deadlines for yourself, or create some kind of weekly routine. You don't need an agent or a publisher or a hoard of raving fans demanding your next book to keep writing and reading and editing your work and doing the very best you possibly can to write a fantastic story. All you need is you. 

The way I see it, if we act like professionals now, we'll be better off later when we actually are professionals with real deadlines to meet. In the meantime, we'll just keep doing what we do. 

What are your thoughts? Do you treat your writing like a job or a hobby?

Twitter-sized bites:

Stop acting like a writer trying to get published and start acting like a professional. (Click to tweet)

You don't have to be published to write like a professional. (Click to tweet) 

Writing Goals: How to Meet Them When You Don't Have Time

“Killing time isn't as difficult as it sounds. I can shoot a hundred numbers through the chest and watch them bleed decimal points in the palm of my hand. I can rip the numbers off a clock and watch the hour hand tick tick tick its final tock just before I fall asleep. I can suffocate seconds just by holding my breath. I've been murdering minutes for hours and no one seems to mind.”  — Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me (Page 127)

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A popular grievance amongst writers (and everyone else, to be honest), is about the lack of time in the day. And it's a fair complaint—time seems to race right past us, especially as we do workish non- writing things. Sometimes days go by so quickly that it feels like if you blink, you might just miss a couple hours. 

I'm sure many of you know the feeling. As most writers have other non- writing related jobs and responsibilities (i.e.: parenting, education, work...parenting while going to school AND working, etc.), it can sometimes be difficult to set aside time to write, which in turn can make meeting your writing goals significantly more difficult.Truth is, we're all busy people trying to juggle social life and work and family and writing and all those other things, and sometimes twenty-four hours in a day just doesn't feel like nearly enough time.

But as a rather wise, H. Jackson Brown Jr., said, “Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.”  (via Writer's Relief's tumblr). 

The key isn't to try to cram more hours into the day (because except on Day Lights Savings, that's impossible)—it's to learn to fully utilize the time that we have. 

You see, we're really good at killing time. Whether it's zoning out in front of the TV or scrolling through Twitter during our breaks, we have a tendency of wasting precious minutes, then wondering where the day has gone. Or we look at the clock and say, "No, I don't have enough time to write before I have to do x" and we go enjoy some time-wasting activities during our free moments. 

But the truth is you really don't need much time to pound out a few hundred words a day. 

I've mentioned Write or Die before, and I'm going to mention it again because I think it's especially helpful when we're short on time. If you don't know what Write or Die is, I explain it in more detail in my secret fast- writing strategy post, but in short, it's an app (available on the web for free) that times your writing session and plays unpleasant noises and makes the screen turn red when you start daydreaming or otherwise do something that is not writing. And the best part is you set your own time (options vary from five minutes to two hours) and word count goal (which you type in yourself). 

So let's say hypothetically, you're going to work but you found you have some extra time before you have to leave. Most of the time, I imagine, those minutes would be spent doing things that don't involve writing. 

However! Those are precious moments that could be spent added some extra words to your WIP. Using Write or Die (or just a normal timer), you can plug in five minutes (or ten, or fifteen, or however long you have) and get some words written. It doesn't sound like a lot of time, and no, I don't expect you to write a thousand words in five minutes (nor should you expect that from yourself), but if you use the extra free minutes scattered throughout the day to write fifty words here and fifty words there, it starts to add up. All you really need are a couple ten to fifteen minute focused writing sessions to get a few hundred words written. 

Writing goals can be easy to meet if you use your time strategically. Because no, we writers aren't always gifted with huge amounts of free time, but as long as we take advantage of the free time we do have, we don't need an abundance of time to keep the momentum in our writing. We just need to use the time we have. 

Do you take advantage of your free time to write? How do you manage your time? 

Short Story or Novel Idea: How Do You Tell?

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Every so often one of you amazing readers will suggest a blog post topic I haven’t covered yet (which is fantastic, by the way) and I’ll ramble on about how awesome you guys are for being such interactive and invested readers and then get to the point of the post. 

As you might have guessed, this is one of those posts.

This time, however, I’d like to hear from you guys. Because while I have some ideas on the topic, I don’t really write all that many short stories, and truth be told, it’s been a couple of years since I’ve written one (which, come to think of it, should be remedied), but I suspect some of you lovely readers are more recently acquainted with the short story writing experience. So. Here we go.

The proposed question, as many of you astute readers probably inferred from the title, was how to tell the difference between an idea better suited for a short story than a novel.

I find this question to be particularly interesting because it’s been a long while since I’ve really even allowed myself to consider whether or not an idea would be appropriate for a short story—to me, it’s been more of a question of whether or not I could write an entire novel based on whatever premise rose from the depths of my mind, and those that failed the idea worthiness test of time were labeled unworthy and discarded and ignored. I kind of imagine Odin’s booming voice as he screams, “YOU ARE NOT WORTHY,” at Thor, but that’s beside the point. 

Getting back to the question, though, once you’ve determined whether your idea is worth writing about at all (again, the test of time is a good indicator), a large part of the difference between short story ideas and novel ideas is the scope. 

You see, novel ideas have to be big—and I don’t mean that they have to have explosions and ridiculously awesome action scenes—I just mean that while you’re working with your new idea, you have to be able to develop enough nuances, subplots and layers to sustain 80,000 (or however many) words. And sometimes, especially if you’re a pantser, it’s a little hard to tell if your idea is going to survive three hundred-some-odd pages or if you’re going to hit page fifteen and say, “You know what? Maybe this idea isn’t worth a novel after all.” But the first step in answering the question of whether or not your idea is enough to sustain a novel, lies, I believe, in determining the scope of your idea.

Let’s take a look at an example.

The Hunger Games is big. There’s no way Suzanne Collins would have been able to as effectively fit all the setup, relationships, celebrity status of the tributes, horror of the games, rebellion against the Capitol and repercussions thereof in fifteen pages (and I don’t mean written in summary-like synopsis form, I mean written as an actual story).

However, way before The Hunger Games was the short story The Lottery written by Shirley Jackson in 1948, which certainly has many similarities to the beginning of The Hunger Games (you can read it for free online, if you’re interested). The difference between the two? You guessed it—the scope of the idea.

While The Hunger Games included various subplots (i.e.: the Katniss-Peeta-Gale love triangle, among others) as well as an in-depth look at the glamorization of the hunger games in the Capitol that only made the brutality of the games (in my opinion) that much more powerful in its effect on the reader, The Lottery included set-up, foreshadowing, some characterization and, erm, the results of the lottery (you’ll have to read it if you haven’t already to know what I mean). The former was way too big to be shoved into a short story format, while the latter fit very comfortable in a little over 3000 words.

So, in short, the main difference to me between a short story and novel idea lies in the scope of the idea. If you think you can fit it in fifteen pages, then it’s probably not worth dragging out into three hundred; but on the other hand if you think it might be difficult to condense into a shorter story without losing anything, you might want to consider writing a novel (or at least a novella) instead. 

Those are my thoughts, but how do you tell between a short story and novel idea? Have you ever had a short story turn into a novel, or a novel idea become a short story, instead?