Category: golden rule

Sorry there was no post last week. Wednesday-Thursday turned into this blur of flight cancellations, rescheduling, re-re-scheduling, re-re-re-scheduling, and all the while coordinating with Blackstone’s marketing and publicity folks about the event I was supposed to be going to and hopefully still would end up at…?

I made it. Barely.

And yes, somewhere in there I forgot to write up a ranty blog post.

So, a few weeks back I mentioned how one of the cool things about following a bunch of writers is getting lots of tips and advice. And there is tons of it out there. Actual digital tons. Some of it ends up being stuff I enthusiastically agree with. Some of it… isn’t. Sometimes it’s things that don’t work for me, but may for other people. Sometimes they’re things that only apply to a certain point or stage in our writing careers. Being able to sift through writing advice is, in my opinion, one of the best skills an aspiring writer can develop.

And—pretty much inevitably—someone decides to make a list. It’s how the internet works. If there’s more than one thing, we have to have an order. A priority list. A number-one-thing-to-do! This is the most important rule when it comes to writing! Ravens hate this one trick that will save you years!

Anyway…

For your enjoyment and possible education—and with the Golden Rule firmly in mind—here are my top ten tips for writers. I made up an earlier version of this seven or eight years back but I figured what the heck—it’s the internet. There’s always space for an updated list.

1 – Write Every Day
The controversial one, right up front. Allow me explain. Or defend myself, depending on your personal feelings on the matter.

I’ve said more than a few times that my intended audience here at the ranty writing blog, since the very beginning, is the folks hoping to write professionally. Maybe as a side gig, maybe the stars line up and they get to do this full time as a career. If that’s not you—no worries at all. There’s value to your writing no matter why you want to do it, and I think a lot of the things I talk about here are usable no matter what your end goal is.

With that in mind… if you follow any pro writers on social media, a very common thing you’ll see is that all of them are writing every day. Yes, even the ones saying you don’t have to write every day. I post about toys a lot, but guess what? I’m writing every day, five or six days a week.

If I want to do this for a living, I have to think of writing as a job. Yeah, sure, we’re not all there yet. We were just saying that. But the whole reason I got here was because I stopped treating my writing like a hobby and started treating it like something that had to happen every day.

Yes, lots of things count as writing. We’re going to get to that, don’t worry.

2) Read
It’s three weeks into September as I write this and I’m picking up my 24th book of the year. I think that works out to a book every… eleven days? My final count for the year is probably going to be in the 30s. And that’s not counting research material, news articles, and things like that. Or stories I get in other formats– movies, tv, podcasts. As I’ve mentioned once or thrice before, I’m a big believer that you can’t have output without input. People who think they can write without reading, well… they’re going to have some problems. A variety of them, really.

So read. Read everything you can. Read things in the genres you know and love, but also try to read books by people you’ve never heard of in genres you’re not a fan of. Push yourself to grow and learn and experience more.

3) Learn to Spell
I’ve talked about this many, many, many times. Learn words. Learn how to spell them. Learn what they mean. Words are the bare-bones foundation of writing. Wanting to be a writer when I can’t spell is like wanting to be a chef when I don’t know the difference between salt and flour.

Never be scared to grab a dictionary or type something into Google. I do it all the time, even just to confirm I’m right about exactly what a word means. Nobody’ll judge you for it. But they’ll absolutely judge you if you get it wrong.

4) Exercise your mind
This is kind of related to Tip #2. I think our minds work just like a muscle. We can’t just do one thing with them all the time. Spend a little time doing something else. Build a bookshelf. Build a model. Cook a meal. Sketch something. Paint something. Sing something. Hell, balance your checkbook. Do your taxes. Give your brain a chance to flex in different ways and it’ll work better overall.

5 ) Exercise your body
Another sad truth about writing. It generally involves sitting on our butt and, well, that’s kind of it, physically. Sadder truth—our brains needs oxygen to work. Oxygen comes from blood, and blood flow increases with exercise and decreases when we… well, sit on out butts.

So exercise actually makes it easier to write. This doesn’t mean go get a gym membership or run a 5k every morning. If you can do that, great, but just stand up from your desk or kitchen table and move around a bit. Go for a walk. Play with your cats. Do some jumping jacks. Stretch! Just get that blood flowing.

6) Learn the Rules
Nobody likes to hear this part but… there are rules to writing. Like spelling (see #3 up above). They exist and they exist for a reason. Rules are the common ground we share as authors and readers. If I don’t know the basic rules of a language, I can’t be surprised if I can’t communicate with people who speak that language.

Likewise, there are rules to storytelling. Again, not unbreakable ones, but they’re real and–on one level or another–we’re all aware of them. Certain universal expectations, and also some that are more tailored for different genres or styles. I need to have a good sense of how these rules work if I want to tweak or openly subvert them.

7) Enjoy it
Whatever reason I have for writing, I should be having fun with it. Yeah, even with all the rules and spelling and exercise. Writing should be enjoyable. Why would I want to spend all my time doing something I inherently don’t like? Write about stuff you love and ideas that fascinate you. Let writing be the high point of your day, and let that enthusiasm carry through onto the page.

And please ignore those weirdos who talk about starving artists or suffering for their art or any of that nonsense. All that approach does is make you… well, not like writing. Why would I approach this in a way that makes me not like doing it? Believe it or not, you can be a real writer without ever once feel tortured, traumatized, or misunderstood. Like so many things, if writing makes me feel miserable and frustrated… maybe I’m doing it wrong.

8 – Actually write it
I 100% believe that a lot of things count as writing. The planning and outlining. The twenty minutes kind of staring into space, or maybe the long walk where I quietly murmur dialogue to myself as two characters talk in my head.

But at the end of the day, the only real yardstick we have for progress is making words appear on the screen, the legal pad, the expensive little notebook, or those parchment scrolls you make yourself at your secluded cabin out by the lake. I can attend all the conferences and seminars, read every instructional book, or skim every random blog post with a list of rules, but if I never actually write anything… does any of it matter?

I was that guy for a while. I could tell you a lot about writing, what it meant to be a writer, what I planned to write, what real writers needed to do… but I never wrote anything.

The only way to move forward is… writing.

9 – Don’t be Scared to Break the Rules
So there are rules. No question, no discussion. Rules exist. We were just talking about that a few paragraphs up. But I don’t need to be trapped by them. I shouldn’t feel like rules are the end-all, be-all of writing. Just because someone can quote a rule that my story breaks doesn’t mean I’m doing anything wrong. It doesn’t mean I’m doing anything right, either, just to be clear, but it doesn’t mean automatic failure.

Y’see, Timmy, the rules are there as sort of a baseline starting point. Learn to do X and then we can talk about Y. They’re trying to get you past all those mistakes we see again and again and again in submission piles and sophomore writing classes. As Django Wexler pointed out a while back on Bluesky, all these rules have the silent, unwritten coda of “…until you know what you’re doing.”

Writing is an art. Even if I’m writing for commercial purposes, it’s still an art. And art is unique to every artist. I can use creative misspellings and odd story structures and characters who don’t fit perfectly in that heroic mold. Or the heroic tights. Or the heroic top… which seems to have shrunk a little in the mid-section since I became a full-time writer. We learn the rules so we can learn how to break them for maximum effect.

For example, you could tell everyone you’re doing a top ten list and just stop at nine. That’s okay. It’ll give people a chuckle and they’ll be more likely to remember the other things you said.

And that’s that.

Oh, if you’re in the Southern California area, this Saturday I’m going to be at Artifact Books in Encinitas signing copies of the Dread Coast anthology with a bunch of other authors. You should stop by and hang out, maybe pick up a copy. It’s for a good cause.

Next time… well, it’s getting near the wonderfully gruesome time of year, so let’s talking about cutting out that pound of flesh.

Until then, go write.

Okay, this one’s going to feel a bit random, but stick with me…

My junior year college roommate was a friggin’ brilliant guy (he teaches biochemistry now). We used to stay up late working out the solutions to scientific problems like “how many hamburgers would it take to reach Pluto?” and other important things we did not get a Nobel prize for. It really was one of those higher-education experiences you only seem to read about– we just liked figuring out the answers to things, and we were in a position where we could spend a random hour (or more) doing it.

And—again—not being rewarded with a Nobel prize for our scientific work.

Anyway, John introduced me to the idea of invisible math. If you and I are on opposite ends of a lawn and I toss a baseball to you, there are so many measurements and calculations that need to be made. Think about it. Distance. Height. Speed. Weight of the ball. Force to put behind the ball. The torque of your arm. Arc. Rate of descent. Air resistance. Wind resistance. And there’s more past that. Every time we throw a baseball, there’s so much invisible math behind it.

But most of the time… we just throw the baseball. Our brains do all that math subconsciously for us. They’re pretty cool, right?

In fact, weirdly enough, if you think too much about any of these things as you’re getting ready to throw, you’ll probably mess it up somehow. Try to concentrate on two or three of those factors and you’ll almost definitely mess up your throw.

Which, of course, brings us to Lindsay Lohan.

If you somehow didn’t know, Lindsay Lohan was a fairly talented Disney kid who eventually moved into “older” roles when she could. But as her roles became more and more serious, her performance became more and more… Well, let’s politely say erratic. Unpredictable.

Now, if you are familiar with Ms. Lohan, I know the easy thing to do is giggle, maybe punch down a bit, and point at all the reports of addiction and abuse that came out as she got older. But please consider this. She was a pretty solid child actor. Seriously. She carried a bunch of movies. But even after she got cleaned up and dealt with some parts of her life, her performances were still kind of all over the place.

Now, I don’t know Lindsay Lohan. I think we were living in LA at the same time, so we’ve probably been within, say, a mile of each other one or thrice. Maybe even a few yards? Point is, I’m kind of guessing here, based on my own experience.

That said, I’d bet real money when she started doing “serious” movies, now that she was a real actor… people started telling her how to act. Maybe she took a class or got a coach. Doing a bit of ye olde method acting, perhaps? Maybe she started putting serious thought into motivations and stage business and presence.

I bet she started thinking about how to throw the baseball.

See where I’m going here?

For most of us, when we first decide we want to tell a story, we just sit down at a computer or pick up a pen and… we start writing. That’s it. We don’t think about grammar or structure or character arcs. We just write about cool stuff we like. Romance. Monsters. Space battles. Wizards. Ninjas. Lizard people! We make characters who are basically us (but cooler! and more popular!) and they go have adventures of one kind or another.

But eventually (hopefully!) someone sits us down and talks to us about grammar. And story structure. And character arcs. Maybe even themes! They tell us how to write. Maybe it’s a schoolteacher. Or a college professor. Maybe it’s a book we willingly picked up, not knowing the awful things it was going to teach us.

And it’s my personal belief that people have one of three reactions at this point.

One group of people essentially say, well, screw this. Turns out writing is way harder than I thought it was. And a lot less fun. And they walk away from this and go become frustrated studio execs or bureaucrats or something.

The second group says wow, I didn’t realize there were so many important rules. I better follow them all! To the letter! At all times! And these people keep writing but it loses a lot of the fun for them and I think.. well, most of them stop being any good. They get so focused on all those rules and guidelines—the stuff we never actually register—that they lose the ability to actually tell a good story. They’re more concerned with making sure the math works out than they are with throwing the baseball.

And the last group?

They’re the ones who take this new knowledge, sift through it, and apply it where they can. They keep writing and try to work with it, rather than wrestling their writing to fit all the rules. They know sometimes all this stuff matters and sometimes… you’ve just gotta write like you’re nine again. Dance like nobody’s watching. Write like nobody’s going to read it. There’s a time and place for all those rules, but its not right now.

Please note I’m not saying ignore the rules. Rules help. They really do. But that’s the key– the rules are there to help me tell my story. They shouldn’t be shaping it. My story doesn’t exist so it can be an example for how all the rules work.

Really it’s a forest-for-the-trees thing. I want to be aware of the rules. I want to know them. I want to understand them. But I don’t want to be focused on them.

My focus should be on my story.

Next time… I think I may babble on about the different ways we can get from A to Z.

Until then, go write.

So, a few times here on the ranty writing blog I’ve talked about diminishing returns. The idea the more you read and study about a topic—say, writing—the less you’re likely to get out of it. F’r example…

Most of us start of by picking up a few books on writing or maybe taking a creative writing course in high school or college. Depending on where you live or what you’ve got for resources, maybe you attended a conference or convention where you got to listen to writers, editors, and agents talk about writing. I know I did.

Eventually, though, we need to stop with the books and classes and online seminars because we hit a point where the information just starts to repeat. We’re just hearing the same things over and over again. Yeah, sure, maybe someone might put a new spin on this or give a better example of that, but was it really worth the fifteen-to-one hundred-ninety dollars I paid to learn it? Or the time I put into reading/ attending it?

But since it’s the start of the year, I wanted to talk about another kind of diminishing return. And this one’s a little more personal. For each of us.

Sooner or later, we all develop a certain approach to writing that works for us. A process, if you will. Everyone’s process is unique. I tend to work at my desk, but maybe you work best at a coffee shop on your tablet, and she writes best on her phone, and he (to fall back on an old example) does all his best work with dictation software while wearing that ren faire corset. Whatever it is, we’ve tried a few things—maybe a lot of things—and figured out what lets us get the most literary bang for our writing buck. And that whole metaphor fell apart but you see where I was going with it.

For some folks, these habits and methods we’ve accumulated work great and continue to work great. Project after project, we know we can do A-B-C-D and get a great manuscript. So naturally, we keep doing it.

But sometimes, for any number of reasons, my process begins to be less efficient. It doesn’t give me the same results as fast. Or maybe it goes just as fast, but the quality has slipped a lot. Maybe time and quality are both the same but it feels like it’s taking a lot more effort. Our returns, one might say, are diminishing.

And yet… we stick to it. Because this is our process. We found it. It works for us, right?

Right?

I was lucky that very early on in my writing process I had a mentor/ professor who emphasized not getting pinned down to one thing. Most of the time our class would be in our assigned room but sometimes, just for the heck of it, he’d have us all move to another room. A virtually identical room, yeah, but oddly enough we’d all end up in different seats, next to different people, sometimes facing a new direction just because of how that room was set up. When it got warmer he had us meet outside by a big tree once. One time (after making sure we were all old enough) he took us to the professor’s lounge at the top of the campus hotel and bought the class a round while we talked about the latest round of stories and writing.

I didn’t like using outlines for a long time. I had bad results with them, so my book-writing process was much more free-form. But eventually I decided I needed to get better with them and have a lot more things figured out ahead of time, because my career was taking off and I needed to be able to talk with my agent and editors about books I hadn’t written yet.

I also tend to write here in my office at my desk. I know the setup. I know my surroundings. Some people (like my beloved) might call it cluttered, but I find it so comfortable and familiar I can easily focus past all of it. And yet sometimes I still do other things. About 2/3 of the first draft of Paradox Bound was written on legal pads in a coffee shop back in LA. At the moment I’m about 60K into a new project (TOS, if you’re subscribed to the newsletter) and that’s also mostly written on legal pads, too, sitting out on the back deck. Because it just worked better.

So here’s your New Year’s nudge. Take a long, hard look at your process. Has it diminished? Is it still working as well as it used to? Does it give you the results you want?

If it isn’t… change it. Try something new. Do something different.

This is a scary idea, I know. The worry that I might try something new and that might not work, either. And now I’ve wasted more of my precious writing time smacking my head with legal pads or drinking overpriced coffee or strapping myself into this goddamn corset that wasn’t even the color I wanted! Trying something new feels risky.

Yeah. It is. Art is risky

Y’see, Timmy, we’ve got to take some risks now and then if we want to improve, and sometimes that means accepting we should try doing things differently. So be open to new ideas. Be open to the idea that you might need to be open to new ideas.

Next time… maybe I’ll talk about a few other things we should accept.

Until then, go write.

Welcome to the far-flung future of… 2024!

Anyway, I often start off the year with a little post about why I do this. How the ranty blog got started. What I tend to blather on about. Sort of like that first lecture in most college classes—here’s what we’re doing for the next six months.

But let’s flip it around

Why are you here? What are you reading this for? What do you hope to get out of this?

Are you just here because you like my books and you’re looking for fun facts or advance news about upcoming projects? Nothing wrong with that. You can get a lot of that out of the more-or-less-monthly newsletter. You can sign up to get it delivered right to your inbox or just wait for it to show up here on the ranty blog at the end of the month

Are you curious about my process? Maybe you want to know how I came up with that character or some insight into why I set things up like this. Also a valid reason to be reading. It does come up here now and then, usually as an example. Hell, there’s a few dozen posts here that reference my first finished novel– The Suffering Map – and what a cautionary tale it turned out to be.

Are you thinking about writing something yourself? Maybe you’re already in the process of writing something? Heck, maybe you’ve completed something? Good on you. Whichever, maybe you’ve ended up here looking for the next step. Could be one of the very first steps. Could be one of the last ones. Maybe it’s somewhere in the middle and you need a helping hand or a little nudge or a firm kick in the butt.

Honestly, you’re the folks this is mostly for. I blather on about a few different things here, but mostly I’m just trying to make the kind of resource I wish I’d had access to back in the day. One place where I could just type in, f’r example, “structure” and find a bunch of explanations and examples. And maybe not have someone basically say “wow, you’re doing everything wrong” the whole time.

Or maybe… you’re here looking for the secret word? The word that makes writing a novel easy? The word that gets you an agent and a publishing contract and your first hardcover? That word is mellonballer!! Seriously! Drop it into an opening paragraph, a cover letter, a casual DM with an editor and behold! Champagne will fall from the heavens. Doors will open. Velvet ropes will part.

No, of course they won’t. I think (I hope?) all of us here know there’s no secret word that makes some part of this easier. No magic phrase. No trick. A very large percentage of getting to do this as a career (if that’s what you want) is just doing the work. Not finding a clever way to get around doing the work.

So if that’s what you’re here for… sorry.

Anyway… I guess that tells you a little bit about what I’m doing here after all. Drop a comment down below, say hi, and let me know why you’re here.

And since we’re talking about the start of the year, next time I’d like to talk to you about your resolutions.

Until then, go write.