After Patting Yourself On the Back...

So you finished your project, a novel, a short story, a play, whatever it is.  Take a minute and pat yourself on the back.  Now remove that hand from your back and put it back on the keyboard.  You’re not done yet.

Hashing out a first draft is only phrase in the life cycle of your work, and also vital is polishing up your work so that it will shine as brightly as possible.  Competition for publication can be fierce, and you cannot afford to put anything less than your best work out there. 

Revision ,  like writing the first draft, is a highly personal process.  Everyone does it a little differently and whatever works best for you is how you should do it.  Here are a few things I’ve found helpful.  

1.     Read for one element: There are so many things to look for, including grammar and spelling, pacing, style, etc, that you might be overwhelmed if you look for it all at once.  You might find it better to give the work multiple readings, focusing on a single aspect.

2.    If in doubt, read aloud:  If you stumble when you read, your reader might as well. If you are not sure, read the passage aloud and see how it flows.  This helps in a way that cannot be duplicated by reading silently.

3.     Your manuscript is not “for your eyes only.”: After spending so much time with your work, you are too close to it to see it completely objectively.  Though you need to go over it yourself, it is best to seek the help of others, at best, those who can give you their genuine opinion.  It’s a good idea to give the manuscript not only to those who know something about writing, but also to someone in your target audience.

No matter how you do it, remember that there is a time to revise and a time to refrain from revising. You cannot revise forever, or you’ll never see print.  Revise until you feel good about your work and then send it out into the world.  It sometimes feels like letting out a child out into the world to fend for themselves, but as long as you have taken the proper time to revise, you have nothing to worry about. 

The blog tour and launch party for my next book approach.  Come get the details at 

http://www.writermike.com/p/appearances.html

Don't Expect Lightning to Strike Twice

People often ask me "Where do you get your ideas?"

I'm sure most authors get that on a pretty regular basis.  I sometimes tell them "Ideas R Us."

Honestly, I'm not sure where ideas come.  The idea for "The Canticle Kingdom", when working at Target arranging stuff on the shelves. I didn't have on my thinking cap, and I wasn't even thinking about writing.  The brain is strange in that any little thing, a snatch of conversation, a strange image, even a song can spark an idea.  You can't really predict when these ideas are going to hit, but you can be prepared for them.

The know the old saying that "lightning never strikes the same place twice"? That's often true for ideas too.  And just like lightning, they can come quickly and powerfully and then be gone just as quickly.  If you are serious about writing, make a plan of where you are going to keep your ideas.  Always carry something around with you that you can write on, or can store your ideas in.  When one strikes, capture it as soon as you can. The shortest pencil really is longer than the longest memory.

Once you have that idea captured, make sure that you put it some place safe where you can easily get at it later.  I have a file which I back up on my computer that has all of my snatches of ideas so that I can visit them later when I'm looking for a new project.

You may never know how much an idea could be worth.  Just think it J.K. Rowling had failed to act on the idea for Harry Potter.  That idea was literally worth millions of dollars.  I'm not saying that all ideas are equally valuable, but if you don't preserve them, you'll never know.

This week on my personal blog, I outline a few important lessons learned at a book signing and reveal the cover for my upcoming release "The Last Archangel."  Stop on by!

Finding the Right Time to Write

I can’t keep track of how many times people have said to me “I would love to write, but I just don’t have the time” or tell me that they’ve been working on their work in progress for the better part of the last decade.

It’s true.  Life is busy.  I’m busy and I’m sure most published authors are.  I also wrote my first published book while going to school full time and working full time.  I think people would be better to say that “they don’t have a lot of time to write.” It’s really matter of making the best of the time that you have.  Here’s what I can say: 

1.       Set an optimal time to write: choose a time to write that best reflects your best time of day so that you can get the most out of your limited time.  If you are a morning person, this can mean getting up just a little earlier to make your goal.  If you’re an evening person, instead of watching a TV show, write a few hundred words. 

2.       Set achievable goals and keep track of them: I find that a word count goal can be a lot of fun.  Set a big one for your project (60K, 80K, 100K…) and then figure out home many you want to shoot for in an average day.  I personally like to shoot for 1,000, but that doesn’t always happen.  Don’t get discouraged if you get behind.  Just pick yourself up and shoot for the current day’s goal. 

3.       Always had something to write with:  I always have paper and pencil.  Barring that, I can write things on my iPod.  When you are waiting for a few moments in line somewhere, jot down a paragraph.  I have frequent choir practices and once I’m all settled in, if I have a few minutes, I take a second to write something.  I’ve written entire stories this way. 

The biggest thing to remember is that a slow, but steady effort can be much more effective that infrequent bouts of zealous writing.  If you are serious about writing, you need to make it a habit, something you just do every day. 

What sorts of things do you do to make time for writing? 

Also this week:

Win some great books, including “The Canticle Kingdom”: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=35901&id=151385984908782&l=484889d2f7

Preorder my next novel “The Last Archangel” for a great price:

http://amzn.com/1599558947

Tolkien Speaks in Defense of Fantasy

I thought this month I would highlight something from one of the greatest male authors of all time, J.R.R. Tolkien. I was introduced to this article by Michael R. Collings, a speculative fiction author with whom I shared a panel at Life, The Universe and Everything at BYU last month.  He talked about how Tolkien was sometimes for writing "just fantasy", hinting that his time might be better spent on loftier pursuits.  Here Tolkien defends what he does and explains why he feels like writing fantasy is a worthwhile pursuit.  

http://bjorn.kiev.ua/librae/Tolkien/Tolkien_On_Fairy_Stories.htm

So if you are ever faced with that comment, you'll know where to turn.   It is a long article, but I would recommend reading at least the heading titled:

Recovery, Escape, Consolation

-Michael Young

 

We Can Break Gender Stereotypes in Writing

Having just started a fun mystery serious by a male author that stars a female protagonist, the thought about male and female stereotypes in fiction has been on my mind lately. In the series, the Shandra Covington mysteries, by J. Scott Savage, the heroine breaks several female stereotypes, especially that guys always have bigger appetites.  She is a food fanatic and has the metabolism not to blow up like a balloon.  She prefers steak to salad and doesn’t ever stop to count the calories.  I thought it an interesting reversal of how many heroines are portrayed in fiction. 

I think a male author can effectively have a female protagonist and vice versa, but I think that in doing so, the author needs to make an extra effort not to fall into the rut of gender stereotypes.  I suggest the following as a start: 

• Men are more logical and women are more emotional.
• Guys like sports, working on cars, and weight lifting.  Women like cooking, gossiping, and decorating.
•  Men are afraid of commitment.  Women thrive on it.
• It’s shameful for men to show emotion.  It’s shameful for women not to.
• It’s a man’s duty to know how to fix the car, the plumbing or anything else around the house.  It’s a woman’s duty to know how to soothe a crying child or whip up anything from scratch. 

Shake things up a little in your fiction!  Have a man who likes to write poetry, or a woman who loves working on cars.  Today’s society is full of people breaking the mold, and that should reflect in your fiction.  What others stereotypes do you think are out there in fiction?  How can you avoid them? 

In a perfect example of breaking stereotypes, my newest release, “Portrait of a Mother” which comes out March 8^th, 2011, is a tender Mother’s Day story.  It’s very short, but I think it’s a tale both you and your mother can enjoy.  You can preorder it here: http://amzn.com/1599558106. 

From Storyteller to Author

My name is Michael Young and I'm excited to kick of "Man Cave Authors".  We are a group of five published authors, dedicated to showing what being an author is like from a man's perspective. In addition to myself, we have Dan Harrington, David West, J. Lloyd Morgan, and Frank Cole. We hope that we can help inspire other men (and women too) out there to pursue the amazing journey that is publishing.

Each of the five of us will take turns posting, and this month we're going to start out by telling our stories about how we became authors.

By today's standards, I grew up in a huge family.  Being the oldest of eight children, I was often called on to be the combination babysitter/entertainer, and spent many an afternoon and evening keeping my siblings entertained with stories. Sometimes we would even go out back on our trampoline and act them out.  I've always been blessed with a vivid imagination.  When people ask me where I get my ideas, I just shrug.  I wish I knew.

I started actually putting my ideas down on paper, or more accurately, word processor, in high school.  I took a few great writing classes and, one day, I decided I was just going to start to try to write a novel.  It took me about a year of working on it every day in the evenings, but I finished it: Face Value, a novel of 170,000 words. Looking back on it now, it definitely needs some work. I don't know if it will ever be published, but it was my first step in building my skills and confidence as a writer.  I realized I had the discipline to make it happen.

I had the idea for "The Canticle Kingdom" pop into my head one day while I was working at Target.  It was my second year of college and I was very busy between work and school.  However, I churned out just a little bit every day and over about a year's time, the first draft came together.  I attended a publisher's fair at my university and there met representatives from Cedar Fort to whom I pitched my manuscript.  They took it and sent it back a little later with a request for a few rewrites.

I took a few months to revise and then sent it back.  I must have checked my email 20 times daily for a response, but finally in July of 2009, I got the green light.  "The Canticle Kingdom" came out in February 2010 and it's been a crazy journey since. But that's another story.

Since then, I have been typing away at a number of other manuscripts and I hope to have some others out on the shelves soon.  Looking back, I think the biggest thing I've learned from the experiences I've had is that writing is a lot like the tortoise and the hare.  It is the slow, consistent commitment to every day writing that will help you get your projects done.  Intense, but infrequent bouts of writing will not bring the same results.

If you'd like to read more about my writing, please visit my personal blog at http://www.writermike.com.

Thanks for reading and check back later to hear from another one of the Man Cave Authors.