[I wrote this quite a while ago and have repeated it a few times in this blog. It made the rounds on other blogs somewhere in the past. Why does this zombie rise again out of its grave to persecute you, dear reader? Because I still think it’s good advice about what NOT to do when writing a novel, so I’ve updated that advice a bit and repeated it here yet again. If you’ve been a fan of this blog for a long time, and you’re tired of seeing this, just skip today’s post.]

 (5) Don’t dwell on minutia. That’s the minimalist idea yet again. Moby and 20,000 Leagues again come to mind. Assume the reader already has a good idea about how to brush his teeth, for example—I’m reminded of those websites (do they exist anymore?) where one watches someone go through their day. Boring! I have better ways to spend my time. If a character goes from point X to point Y, the reader doesn’t need to know what happened between X and Y, unless it’s essential to the plot (he sits on a butterfly and changes the space-time continuum?).

(6) Don’t be cute. The TV series Lost had many followers, but most people were turned off by the convoluted pseudo-spiritual and multiple endings, and the many flash-forwards were confusing, to say the least. The writers were too cute. I’ve seen this happen in novels I review. I might be old-fashioned, but I avoid flash-forwards entirely. Garcia-Marquez in one of his novellas, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, gets cute and announces the ending right up front, then spends the rest of the novella telling the reader how that came to pass. He gets away with it—he’s a Nobel prize-winner, after all. Generally speaking, though, you won’t. (Deaver’s worst book was one he wrote in reverse—way too cute! I stopped reading after Chapter Two, i.e. the second chapter from the end.)

(7)  Don’t use clichéd plots. Yeah, I know, there are only so many different story types, but I’ve read about too many twins separated at birth, too many aliens that seem like mafiosos, a plethora of amnesia victims running from bad guys, hordes of star-crossed lovers with families that don’t understand (R & J is not Shakespeare’s best work), and so forth. In particular, if I can map your story into one of Shakespeare’s plays by any stretch of my own fertile imagination, I’m suspicious. Clichés also reduced my enjoyment of the Star Wars trilogy—too many plot elements were lifted straight from Isaac Asimov and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ work, as well as ninja and fairy tales.

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[I wrote this quite a while ago and have repeated it a few times in this blog. It made the rounds on other blogs somewhere in the past. Why does this zombie rise again out of its grave to persecute you, dear reader? Because I still think it’s good advice about what NOT to do when writing a novel, so I’ve updated that advice a bit and repeated it here yet again. If you’ve been a fan of this blog for a long time, and you’re tired of seeing this, just skip today’s post.]

The media once was fixated on spontaneous symmetry breaking and the Higgs boson (the so-called “God particle,” a name that would surely make Mr. Higgs cringe).  The Higgs mechanism (i.e. the spontaneous symmetry breaking) is necessary to give mass to some of the vector bosons in the electroweak or weak and electromagnetic interaction theory. (Can there be more than one God particle?  Interesting question!)  Forgotten in all this media hoopla is the theory that led to the idea of quarks and gluons, the Eightfold Way of symmetries popularized by Professor Gell-Mann.  (Note that I refrain from using the term “discovered.” In theoretical physics, the math is “out there.” You just have to figure out what math matches up to experimental data (not a trivial task by any means). Experimental physics is where “discoveries” are made.) Here’s the update: I’ll concede that maybe the Higgs boson has been found. Now the uproar’s all about whether dark matter and energy exists. (I reviewed a book on Bookpleasures about those two phantasms; the answer is: not yet!)

Now that I’ve had some fun imagining your eyes glazing over as if you’d just had tequila mixed with sleeping pills (not recommended, by the way) while puffing on a few joints (if it’s legal where you are), let me say that this post is not about physics. (My eyes are glazed too, because the above is hardcore physics, and I’ve been sipping my Jameson’s while writing the sequel to Rembrandt’s Angel like a madman.) The Eightfold Way I consider here is the shining path that leads you to a finished novel that someone might want to read. It’s my distillation of rules for writing a novel—a distillation that is not the quality of a fine thrice-distilled Irish whiskey, but I’ve put some thought to it and would like to share (I’d like to share the Jameson’s too, but the internet hasn’t discovered e-drinking yet).

What are the rules for successful novel writing? (Note that the bar for “successful” is low here and is defined as producing a manuscript that someone might want to consider for publishing—of course, that someone might be you if you’re indie.) There are many rules, and everybody has his or her own list. All writers are not equal—what works for one might not for the other.  Moreover, since I’m not David Baldacci or Stephen King, you might think that I’m being a bit presumptuous—I am not a successful novelist.  I might be considered prolific, but, by my own standards, I’m not successful (in the more general sense)—I would certainly like to have more readers. Nevertheless, I’m an avid reader. Since I’m also a novelist, when I read a novel, I read with a critical eye, especially in my capacity as a reviewer (that’s usually two reads, the first as a casual reader, the second as a reviewer—the two hats are different, of course). Readers rule, especially nowadays when there’s a plethora of novels available just waiting to be read. My Eightfold Way is reader-oriented. It’s a list of DON’Ts if the writer wants to keep his readers happy. Are you ready?

(1) Don’t just write about what you know. In fact, the adage “Write about what you know” is completely off base. I don’t know who said it initially, but he or she clearly wanted to eliminate the competition. Here’s the scoop: If you have no imagination, you shouldn’t be a novelist. I’m not just talking about sci-fi, either, where this rule is obvious. If you’re writing a romance novel about vampire love or a thriller about finding a serial killer, I bet you have no direct experience in either (not $10k—how about one of my eBooks?). Your imagination has to rule your writing.  Moreover, what you imagine has to be put into words that move and still make sense to the reader.

(2) Don’t confuse your readers on time, place, or point-of-view (POV).  The action in my novel The Midas Bomb, for example, covers only a week. (That’s the first novel in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series.”) I had the timeline laid out, of course, but I soon realized that the reader could be confused by the rapid succession of events, especially since flashbacks are mixed in. Consequently, the day and time are a subheading to each chapter. (One reviewer expressed appreciation for this, so I know I made the right choice.)

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First, whether you’re traditionally or indie published, let’s revisit some general advice: (1) Write your story, give it your best edit, and send it to beta-readers, in order to produce a manuscript (MS) that you can do something more with. (2) Leave the rest to the pros: final edits, cover art, and marketing. If you’re indie, that means NEVER be 100% DIY; if you’re going the traditional route, your publisher will take care of everything except s/he won’t help much with marketing.

That doesn’t mean you can’t help out with #2. Here I’ll focus on cover art.

Step One: Develop some ideas for your cover. That shouldn’t be hard. There are scenes in your book that probably could make a good cover. You know your book best, and you’ve imagined those scenes in order to write the words describing them. Choose a few to suggest to your cover artist. S/he might want to go abstract, though. Work with your cover artist to develop those cover ideas.

Step Two: Decide what text you want on the cover. Your title and name (or pen name) are important. I don’t recommend long titles or one-word titles. But I’ve written about titles before (just last week, in fact). Relative font sizes are important—generally your title should be in larger font unless you’re a famous author (in which case you probably won’t be worrying about any of this!). Avoid subtitles on the front cover. They can go inside on the cover page. That goes for series titles (#N in the X series).

For print versions, back cover material is important. Include a blurb and short author bio at the very least; add your pic and a few review extracts if you have them (they can be reviews of previous books in the series, or just reviews of your other books). Don’t make the back cover cluttered, though. And only put the title and author on the spine.

Step Three: Think about how the book will look on online retail sites where thumbnail images are used. That implies simple is better—title and author must be visible even in the thumbnail image. This also implies the cover must look good in multiple resolutions. Your cover artist professional can handle all of this, of course, but the ultimate responsibility rests with you.

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I want to expand a wee bit on what I’ve said about titles in this blog (much of that is contained in my little course “Writing Fiction,” a PDF available as a free download—see the webpage “Free Stuff & Contests” for other free PDFs and download instructions). In particular, I want to discuss series titles v. book titles and how they should shake hands if possible (big caveat there). I’ll use my own oeuvre for examples (both good and bad) because I know it best, and I know what thoughts I had when I created the series and book titles. Believe me, I’ll learn from this analysis too. (If you feel that this is a veiled marketing effort, you’re wrong. It’s more in line with “confession is good for the soul.”)

My detective series is called “The Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series.” Donna Carrick, of Carrick Publishing, the publisher of this seven-book series (maybe there’ll be more), and I often call it “C&C” for short. That title accomplishes two things: it tells the reader it’s about two detectives—NYPD homicide detectives, in fact—and it fixes in their minds the main characters. That’s all and good, but it fails in one respect: their cases often become national and even international; in other words, they often go beyond NYC where they usually start. That international aspect is an important of the series and makes it much more than a series of books about police procedural, but I’ve chosen to emphasize that national and international aspect in some of the titles.

Consider Aristocrats and Assassins: while there are wannabe aristocrats in the U.S., especially among one-percenters, the true aristocrats are in Europe.  In this novel, that’s where all the action takes place. On the other hand, I failed miserably with Family Affairs and Gaia and the Goliaths because the titles don’t indicate that much of the action is international or has international implications, and it is and does.

On the other hand, these last two titles work in other ways. Family Affairs is all about families—Detective Castilblanco’s, Detective Chen’s, and another character’s (although you have to wait a wee bit for that twist to appear). And if you recognize the word “Gaia” as the Greek name for Earth, you might make the leap and conclude that the novel has an environmental theme, and that is international.  Authors can make these trade-offs between series titles and book titles. I don’t know how well I’ve done that, but it’s a lot better than one-word titles that don’t say much—another “Gone…” book or alphabet book (“A is for…”).  We need to put some thought into series and book titles.

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Even if you’re creative and want to write your own stories, there are plenty of people who throw up roadblocks—sometimes not intentionally, but irksome all the same. Many “writing coaches” will tell you to “know your market” or “write to sell.” I’m sorry. I don’t ever recommend that advice. You should write what you want to write, what you can be passionate about. That’s why including themes in fiction to make plots more interesting are so important to me, for example. As a reader, I don’t read fluff, even if fluff is the fad; as a writer, I don’t write it either, even though that’s they say that’s where the market is.  Each of my books has at least two themes. And I write want I want.  You should too.

Maybe not following all the writing gurus’ advice is why I don’t have many readers, but those gurus often have some words of advice that just don’t sit well with me: “Don’t worry if you book doesn’t sale. Just write the next book.” Maybe, like me, you’ve done that a few times, not because the writing gurus say so, but because we have many stories to tell…and we want to tell them! Yes, I realize the market can be fickle, but that’s just the point: I have to be true to myself and write the kind of stories I like to read, not those that someone tells me to read or write.

The pundits might also say, “Don’t set the bar too high, because most writers don’t sell many copies of their books.” Yes, those are the stats—we sell even less now on the average because readership is down in general. Older people read more than millennials, according to stats, yet other stats say young people are the most likely to read ebooks (different samples or ways of collecting the stats, I’m sure).  Don’t get the idea that you should be writing geriatric fiction or ebooks for millennials, though. If your book comes out that way, but market pressures should never affect your art.

Older people like exciting fiction just as much as anyone, although they might like it not to be fluff. And young adults probably do too, if they bother to read—that uptick in young readership with Harry Potter is a thing of the past, and the number of them preferring ebooks is irrelevant if not many are reading. Video games, streaming video, music and music videos, and social media take more of everyone’s entertainment time now, but especially for young adults and millennials. So why shouldn’t we write what we want to write, ignoring the pundits who want us to be consoled about our meager book sales by the fact that other authors are struggling too?  Some consolation!

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We all know how Facebook contributed, unknowingly or otherwise, to elect Trump and support BREXIT. If not intentionally, then their business model needs serious fixing; if intentionally, someone needs to go to jail! Other social media sites, email services, and web browsers are also guilty of sharing our personal information with anyone who will pay them money.

How does this affect authors? Why should we be concerned? Because nowadays social media and email are valuable tools in many ways, we would like to know that it can be trusted to keep our readers’ information safe. It’s now obvious we can’t do that.

Verizon owns both AOL and Yahoo now. Google’s Gmail is required by many cellphone providers. All three, like Facebook and Twitter, have privacy policies that allow them to steal information from those emails and sell it. The big boys are up to their necks in data mining. It’s not just the data-mining firms anymore.

Microsoft hasn’t done anything particularly wrong (I don’t know about Bing if it still exists, or their mail packages), but they are terribly annoying. It used to be that I could pick and choose what updates I wanted in Win 8.1 or Win 10. Now I can’t. Even worse, Microsoft now takes over my computer, downloads, and installs crap that I never use.  My choices are “Update and Shutdown” or “Update and Restart”—when that takes valuable time away from my writing, you can imagine how I curse Bill Gates and his band of thieves. I should also mention that they’ve decided not to support certain versions of Office so they can charge me for a new one. That’s not just abuse—it’s highway robbery!

Add to all that the Dark Web where I’ve seen pirated versions of ebooks, including my own, offered for free, and one has to wonder if the internet is an author’s friend. But it doesn’t stop there. Net neutrality is dead. Congress killed it. Authors’ businesses are small potatoes compared to mega-corporations. Don’t you think that internet service providers will coddle the users who will pay more? I already experience daily several periods of slowdowns or drop-outs as Comcast panders to their big money clients. They’d rather have gamers and streaming video watchers hogging the bandwidth than tend to an author’s needs. Nobody reads anymore, right? Literacy and reading be damned.

The only thing an author can do is to speak out against this abuse from tech companies. They’ll probably try to make sure the word won’t get out, of course, but the word is already out. And we can always attack them in our fiction. In libris libertas…and let’s have a saner and safer internet!

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Did you miss The Secret Lab? This sci-fi mystery for young adults features four tweens in the future living on the International Space Station who try to discover the origins of a mathematical mutant cat. Available in ebook format on Amazon and Smashwords and all their affiliated ebook retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo etc) and in a print version on Amazon.  And don’t miss the next A. B. Carolan YA sci-fi mystery The Secret of the Urns—coming soon!

In libris libertas!

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes think about what my life might have been if I chose to follow one of the professions that attracted me as a kid. Beyond the usual fireman, policeman, or doctor, I had a few unusual ones on my childhood list.

I read a lot—comics at first and then short fiction and novels. Many of the latter were sci-fi, so I imagined myself as a space explorer. Dare I say “rocket man”? In other words, a fellow who flew spaceships and went where no one has gone before in the cosmos. The closest I came to that was in my previous life as a scientist. I suppose some of my sci-fi that’s more space operatic owes a bit to those imaginings, but my ETs as an author are a lot better (see, for example, The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection).

I also read mysteries and thrillers (back then the latter were called adventure stories). I imagined myself as a detective, either PI or cop, a fellow walking around with a toothpick in his mouth and solving complex crimes. I suppose my Detective Castilblanco owes some of his characteristics to that imagining. Of course he’s hooked on Tums, not a toothpick, because he likes spicy ethnic foods (so do I).

I loved music, although my tastes were somewhat abnormal, I suppose. At first, my instrument was the trombone. I imagined myself in a dance band or orchestra; I liked both, and I did both, not professionally of course because I realized I wasn’t quite good enough. That trombone solo in Mahler’s third mentioned in the sequel to Rembrandt’s Angel? I could play that. Later, I learned the guitar (folk music took off) and sold that in Colombia to buy a tiple, a typical instrument from that country. Around forty, I learned the piano.  My teacher actually got me to play some Beethoven, but now I just play melody with the right hand and chords with the left, noodling with the help of a fake book (no relation to “fake news”). Music plays a big role in Mayhem, Murder, and Music, a free short story collection you can download (see the webpage “Free Stuff & Contests” for directions).

I also thought I might become an anthropologist or archaeologist. I read all the books about anthropology I could find in our hometown’s public library—Margaret Meade and a lot of others. I decided human beings were just too complicated to study scientifically. That’s how I opted for science and mathematics; both seemed a lot easier than studying human beings.  Some of that predilection for the social sciences went into the short story “Marcello and Me,” which A. B. Carolan has turned into a spiffy new novel (see below—the main character Asako is a sociologist).

With all the above, some readers might ask why I’m now a fiction writer. There are many reasons, of course, but you can probably imagine one: With my characters, I can do all the professions mentioned above! Not only that, so can you, dear reader. Only writing fiction allows that.

The only occupation mentioned that hasn’t been filled by one of my characters is anthropologist, although Asako comes close (much closer in Carolan’s book than in my short story, in fact). Creating such a character seems difficult, but I like challenges. Given all the good books and good authors, does any reader know of any novel where one of the main characters is an anthropologist? I might be onto something here.

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Did you miss The Secret Lab? This sci-fi mystery for young adults features four tweens in the future living on the International Space Station who try to discover the origins of a mathematical mutant cat. Available in ebook format on Amazon and Smashwords and all their affiliated ebook retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo etc) and in a print version on Amazon.  And don’t miss the next A. B. Carolan YA sci-fi mystery The Secret of the Urns—coming soon!

In libris libertas….

As opposed to ETs? Or a contradiction? As a reader, I peruse a novel as if I’m going to review it, which I often do. Reading that way, you’re bound to notice things. One common observation I have is that some authors’ characters don’t seem human, even if they’re supposed to be.

Sometimes I can see that an author does this intentionally, creating a “larger than life” cartoonish character. This often occurs in humorous stories. When it happens in more serious prose, a reader has to wonder. A character doesn’t have to be cartoonish to seem less than human, though.

The spectrum of human behavior is wide, but every point on it is human. You can create a psychotic villain, but his (or her) abhorrent behavior still must seem human. A protagonist might make superhuman efforts, but they still have to be humanly possible given the character’s mental and physical conditioning.

Good fiction has to seem real, even sci-fi and fantasy; within the worlds the author creates, characters must seem real. Some Harry Potter characters have strange powers, but in the wizards’ world, that is normal behavior.  And they have very human emotions otherwise.

We often describe certain characters as two-dimensional. What we really mean is that they don’t seem human. Secondary characters often seem two-dimensional. Authors can make those seem more human in the descriptions of how the main characters interact with them.

This isn’t as difficult as it seems. I’ve been observing human behavior since I was a child, both directly and indirectly in the media. That’s all you need to do. Just make each character’s behavior an amalgam of some of that observed behavior.

In other words, every author should be an amateur psychologist, noting how people react to other people, settings, and situations.  We tend to be introverts, but that doesn’t stop us from being observers. In fact, maybe introverts are the best observers…and best writers. Extroverts will often step in to be part of what’s going on; introverts can sit back and observe both introverts and extroverts. By collecting notes on human behavior, they can create better characters.

Of course, don’t forget to study yourself! A bit of self-analysis goes a long ways. You know that person the best, or should. There’s nothing wrong with including characters with your best and worst traits, for example. Any trick that makes you a better writer is fair game. And knowing ourselves well just might save us the cost of a psychologist or psychiatrist!

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For readers interested in interesting stories and characters—humans and ETs, heroes and villains—The Great Spring Thaw Sale continues. For example, The Collector just went on sale.  Check my Smashwords author page for all my ebooks. Even if they’re not on sale, the prices are very reasonable.  And all books are as current today as when I wrote them.

In libris libertas!

Sometimes a reader or interviewer asks me, “Do you have afavorite novel?”  While I often write about favorites in posts to my Facebook page on Tuesdays, my general answer is that I have a lot of favorites. I don’t measure them by how much I remember about the story, nor by whether I’m motivated to read them a second time, but by the memory of how much the story entertained me and/or made my life more meaningful. All the book hype in the world can’t tell me if that will happen.

I’ve recently noticed many mystery novels have hype something like “…and the reader will experience a story with an unexpected twist.”  Maybe even twists.  Other people I know have noticed this too. Some overly zealous marketer (who doesn’t read?) must have thought, “Mysteries, twists,” and decided including the keyword “twist” in a blurb or its title would sell books. I don’t know about you, but I ignore a book with that kind do hype.

Part of the enjoyment of a book lies in the discovery process—not in someone telling you it’s going to happen, but when you discover it happens. Whether they’re twists in a mystery or action in a thriller or a monster’s curse in a horror story or quirky ETs in a sci-fi tale, discovery is part of the excitement.

I suppose this relates to spoilers. Hype can be a spoiler. Saying “There’s a great twist” is almost as bad as saying who the murderer was, and so forth. Whether publicists write such hype or the authors do, it’s not effective. Just the opposite!

Book hype also occurs in reviews. I’m guilty of that myself sometimes, expressing enthusiasm for a book I’ve read with zero-content words and phrases. First, reviewers are readers, and sometimes they act as cheerleaders, publicists more than critics. I’m speaking to criticism, of course, in the general sense of a careful analysis of book quality—the good, the bad, and the ugly. As reviewers, we can play the hype game, but we’re obligated to back it up with analysis. Very few reviews on Amazon do this. They should be ignored if they don’t. (Unfortunately Amazon encourages this. They’re only interested in the ranking so they can calculate their average.)

So let me write some generalities: A novel has a chance to be one of my favorites if it’s filled with delectable discovery opportunities, a story that is a full meal of new and wonderful tastes. I like to think that I write such stories; I certainly try to do so.  How could I not expect other authors to do the same? And I don’t want some publicist to give away the ingredients of my zesty dish before I can taste it!

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Free fiction. Want to get to know my fiction writing? I don’t give my novels away—they’re already bargains, as you can see on Smashwords—but I can provide you with some appetizers that are free: Check the list of free PDFs on my webpage “Free Stuff & Contests” and then follow the instructions for downloading.

In libris libertas!

As I work on one of my projects, the sequel to Rembrandt’s Angel, I’m fighting the content editing. For those not accustomed to writer’s jargon, there are three kinds of editing: content, copy, and proofreading. I do the first as I go, and it’s mostly cut-and-paste, and often just cut.  Someone else or I do the second after the manuscript is done, and the third kicks in when we have to make final checks on the product (this used to be done with galley proofs, and still is, in some cases).

Seat-of-the-pants writing, that is, not using a rigid outline, leads to content editing as you go. I find that to be more efficient. I’m not good at following an outline even if I create it, finding outlines too restrictive with negative repercussions for flow and spontaneity. That’s a personal choice, of course.  At any rate, I’m having trouble doing the content editing for the sequel.

The novel will be another mystery/thriller but also more historical than Rembrandt’s Angel. For any historical fiction, there’s always a lot of background material. Usually I have no problem pruning my prose, but there’s so much good material in this case that it pains me to delete it.

In other words, I’m suffering from the opposite of writer’s block. Esther Brookstone and Bastiann van Coevorden, the two main characters from Rembrandt’s Angel, are such great characters that it’s tempting to surround them with all the good material available and not delete it. I suppose this conundrum is better than not knowing what to write. I wonder if it’s a characteristic of historical fiction.

I’m a writer who believes in the Goldilocks Principle, a minimalist writer looking for just enough description and narrative, not too much or too little, especially in my mysteries and thrillers. In storytelling, less is more. If writers have a story to write, they shouldn’t be verbose and just tell the story succinctly. (This is probably why I’m a fan of short stories. My collaborator, A. B. Carolan, offers a new one this week, by the way.)

But there’s nothing minimalist about history, especially in this new sequel that will cover more than two millennia. I know I can resolve my conundrum if I work at it, so I’ll keep struggling. I don’t want to take the easy way out, i.e. leave all that prose in the story just because it’s great material.

Two examples illustrate the dangers in not doing this. J. K. Rowling became more verbose as the Harry Potter series progressed, and my enjoyment of it diminished. And I enjoyed Ken Follett’s Eye of the Needle more than his later historical novels. These are my perceptions, of course. Other readers might like verbosity. And, is it verbosity if it’s great prose? That’s a delicate question.

I’ve never suffered from writer’s block. My muses, really banshees with Tasers, know this; they and some characters like Esther and Bastiann, push me to write the next story. I’ve never asked them if they want me to stop cutting out material. They’d probably just answer, “Use it in another story.”

Sometimes authors just have to be brutal with their prose. Sure, save those beautiful or deep prose passages; they might be useful at a later date. But always keep in the back of your mind the following mantra: Less is more. Many readers don’t want to get bogged down in superfluous narrative.

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Prepare for the sequel by reading Rembrandt’s Angel. This mystery/thriller about a Scotland Yard’s obsession to recover a missing Rembrandt is available on Amazon and Smashwords and its affiliates (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc). Or ask for it at your favorite bookstore (if they don’t have it, ask them to order it).

In libris libertas…