Helping Writers Become Authors

How do you know when to heed criticism? How do you know what's worth listening to? You can start by asking yourself the following six questions.

Fiction writing doesn't offer many shortcuts or magic formulas. But today I am going to give you give you a secret ingredient in that coveted recipe for memorable and realistic characters. What is this ingredient? Dichotomy.

As much as we want readers to intellectually appreciate the intelligence of our writing, we need them, even more, to react to the underlying pull of the story and its characters with utter, unthinking emotion.

Facing the wide, blank unknown of a story can be scary. Putting one foot in front of the other, when you're unsure of the terrain, can be overwhelming. But when you can work your way backwards from a known plot point, finding your way becomes as simple as filling in the blanks. And the result is a story that falls into order like a row of expertly placed dominoes.

Whenever your comfort zone starts getting too comfortable, it's a sure bet you're no longer challenging yourself. Writing scared means pushing yourself to the limit, tackling projects that look unconquerable, and always forcing yourself to go just a little bit farther than you think you're capable of going.

Experienced writers have learned that less really is more. Readers have great imaginations, and experienced writers have learned how to tap into them to make their own work come across more vividly and more believably. Experienced writers have learned how to give only the essential details of a scene in such a way that readers imagine everything else.

Experiencing art is like watching clouds. Two people can lie on the same grassy hill, watching the same cloud formations. But how they interpret the shapes of the clouds is an entirely individual experience. You may see a poodle on a leash, while in the same cloud, I see a drag race.

Know your audience is a common tenet of all media. After all, if you don't know your audience, you can't give them what they want, right? Yes and no.

Unfortunately for us harried writers no surefire pattern exists for the perfect opening. However, most good beginnings do share a couple traits. Following are nine.

Guest post by psychologist/writer Carolyn Kaufman. Everyone talks about angst-ridden creative people, and I've had several readers ask me if angst is in fact a necessary ingredient for creativity.

As writers, it's often very easy for us to talk on and on about our characters' intentions. If we're not careful, we often let our characters' mouths run away with them, as they spend chapter upon chapter sitting around discussing and planning their next move. But guess what? Most readers don't care about what your characters are planning to do. They only care when they actually do it.

Art isn't something that thrives within set parameters. By its very nature, creativity must be free to grow beyond even its creator's initial concepts. When we sign up as genre writers - led on perhaps by our own love of certain types of literature, perhaps by the lure of the money and fame that attaches itself to successful genre writers - we may be making the best possible commercial decision a writer can make in his career. But, as artists, do we honestly want to put the money before the art? Is a career as a best-selling author worth surrendering the opportunity for deeper and broader artistic license?

When Ernest Hemingway spoke about the dignity of an iceberg being " due to only one-eighth of it being above water," he was speaking about the importance of the part of the story that isn't told. Those nine-eighths underwater are the ballast for the tiny bit that juts up to glisten in the sun. And, more often than not, those nine-eighths are almost entirely composed of one of the most important - and yet sometimes overlooked - facets of any tale. Backstory.

We're defined by what we do, by our jobs and our career choices. Mention a profession (mechanic, stock broker, bull rider) and definite images and presuppositions pop to mind. As writers, we can hardly afford not to take advantage of those presuppositions when crafting our characters.

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of sticking with a story, even when it seems beyond hope. It is true that not every story will be worth continuing, but every story is worth a second chance. Sometimes the most difficult and seemingly worthless stories are the ones that will explode into brilliance if only you grit it out and keep hacking away at them.