If only there was a magic formula, a secret trick that would improve your chances of getting published. Well, there is—but it isn’t magic or secret, and in the end, it can’t guarantee publication. But it’s still the best formula I know of for getting a shot at a contract. Some of this might not sound like good news, but I think it is, because in my opinion, talent is not the deciding factor in getting published. Instead, it’s hard work, patience, and an openness to feedback—things that are accessible to everyone.

Beginner’s Mind

This is a term that comes from Buddhism. What it means is to approach things with the attitude that you might not know everything, which allows for a willingness to learn new ways of seeing and doing. That’s what creativity is all about—seeing and doing things differently.

One of the best ways to keep an open mind is by reading. Studying novels. Taking them apart. Applying what you learn to your own work and practicing it. Another way is to take classes and workshops, go to conferences, listen to podcasts. Find out how others have done things. What works for them might not work for you, but there are many ways to approach the act of writing a novel. Try them on. See what fits.

Beginner’s mind also means being open to feedback. Honest critique. While feel-good feedback is nice, it won’t land you a publisher. You need to be resilient enough to hear that maybe this thing you’ve created could be better. Maybe there’s a kernel of a good idea there, but the rest of it is, well, compost, and you need to start over.

Does that sound harsh? It’s definitely unpleasant. But I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to start a novel over from scratch with only the shred of the idea left on the page. Two of my published novels were created that way, and I’m just putting the finishing touches on another that also came into being by way of the garbage can.

Bestselling YA author John Green talks about how 90% of his first drafts end up in the round file. Another bestselling author, Barbara Kingsolver, throws out hundreds of pages in the process of finding a novel’s voice. I used to think it was just beginners who threw out work (well, beginners, and me). But now I know this is the process.

Writing is rewriting. It was probably the first thing our novel-writing instructor said to us in the MFA program, and it’s the truest thing I know about writing. The great lines, the poetry, the character development—most of that gets created in revision. 

Steep Grade Ahead

Writing plays a nasty trick on us. Because we learn how to write essays in school—and maybe the odd short story—we assume we know how to write a novel. Writing is writing, after all. It’s words on a page. But that’s like saying that because a person knows how to play the piano, they will automatically be proficient at the saxophone. True, they’ll know how to read music—but that’s the only advantage they’ll have.

The learning curve for writing a novel is steep. I’m talking years. Maybe ten years. That was how long it took me, and I’d been writing for years before I tackled my first novel. And I’m still learning. Every novel I read or edit or write has something to teach me. There will never come a time where I’ll feel I know all I need to know about writing a novel. That shouldn’t depress you. I think it’s exciting, a testament to the genre’s potential.

The Querying Process

All right. You’ve put in the years, you’ve gotten the tough feedback and revised until you’re cross-eyed. It’s time for the rubber to meet the road.

When it comes to querying, improving your chances of landing a publisher is both simpler and more complicated than you might think. Follow the submission guidelines. Widen your scope to include small publishers. Write a decent query letter. Easy.

Your letter won’t make or break your submission. But there are a few things that will: your synopsis and your opening pages.

Your synopsis shows a publisher that you understand structure and can execute the great idea you described in the pitch of your query letter. If the structure is broken, the novel will be broken. They won’t want to read it. That’s why synopses are so hard to write. And it’s why publishers and agents ask for one.

Then come your opening pages, the true showcase of your novel’s awesomeness. You can write the best query letter in the world, but if your opening pages don’t land, if they don’t grip the reader by the throat and insist that they turn the page, the publisher won’t ask for more.

How do you understand structure and write fabulous opening pages? By working hard. By taking apart the structure of novels you’ve read and trying to understand how the author created their magic. By writing and revising and writing and revising. This is what Steven Pressfield meant by turning pro: taking your craft seriously, developing the necessary discipline to see a project through to the end, not being crushed by feedback but instead using it as a learning tool. There will be setbacks and rejections, but a pro keeps showing up day after day and putting in the work. A pro doesn’t give up.

That’s the magic formula. That’s what will give you the best chance of getting there.

Writers Helping Writers holds a monthly critique contest that can help make your opening gleam. Come back to our blog Thursday, February 20 for a chance to win a 1st page critique from Becca Puglisi!

MICHELLE BARKER - Resident Writing Coach

Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and editor who lives in Vancouver, BC. Her newest book, coauthored with David Griffin Brown, is Story Skeleton: The Classics. They are also the authors of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her novel My Long List of Impossible Things, came out in 2020 with Annick Press. The House of One Thousand Eyes was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and won numerous awards including the Amy Mathers Teen Book Award. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have appeared in literary reviews world-wide.

Michelle holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and is a senior editor at The Darling Axe. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Michelle below. Michelle’s books

The post How to Improve Your Chances of Getting Published appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

When I first started working on this post, I thought, only five? But as I compiled my worst writer nightmares, I realized they do fall under five general headings.

Fear of Wasted Time

Anyone who has either written a novel or been in the querying trenches understands this one all too well. Nothing moves quickly. Not the novel itself, which takes numerous revisions before it starts to sound readable, and not the querying process. Agents and publishers can easily take six months or longer to get back to you—if they ever do. And in the end, you can spend years writing, polishing and sending out a novel, all to receive… nothing. No advance, no publication, no interest.

But has it really been a waste of time? If you’re only focused on the result, then yes, it can look as though years of work + no published novel at the end (unless you self-publish) = a waste of time. But if you shift your focus to the process, suddenly everything looks different. Writing is, and always will be, a learning process. Every novel you write is destined to teach you something new. It should. If it doesn’t, that means you’re working according to a formula and repeating the same book over and over—and not moving forward.

The learning curve for novel writing is much steeper than most people realize. A lot of my clients are stunned to learn that two or three drafts aren’t enough to produce a publishable novel. Not even close. These writers are even more shocked to hear that many well-known authors throw work out and start over. No one would ever have such unrealistic expectations about learning to play the violin. Why should writing a novel be any different?

Here’s the thing: if you’re only doing this for the results, you’re in for a rough ride. If you don’t love the process—if the process isn’t the reason you write in the first place—then I highly recommend you do something else. The process is everything. The results are gravy.

Fear of Failure

Related to the fear of wasted time is the fear of failure.

• What if I’m not good enough?
• What if I’ll never be anything more than ordinary/mediocre/average?

No one starts out being good enough. And once again, cue the violins. Imagine you’re embarking on a lifelong dream to learn how to play that wretched instrument. How long do you think it will take to get good at it? I wasn’t sure myself, so I asked Reddit. The consensus seems to be: years. Maybe as many as ten, and then you’ll be decent—though not great—depending on how much work you’ve sunk into it.

Talent plays a surprisingly small role in this process. What’s key? Hard work and dedication. As with any skill, the people who make it look easy are the ones who’ve put in all the work.

In her wonderful book, The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp exposes this myth of talent when she talks about both Mozart and Baryshnikov.

According to her, Mozart said, “People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you… nobody has devoted so much thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.”

And Baryshnikov, even after he was the most admired dancer in the world, was still the hardest worker. Always.

You want to be better than ordinary, average, mediocre? You want to vanquish the fear of failure? Then get to work. Study the novels of great writers. Figure out what they’ve done and how. Practice. Swallow your pride. Get feedback and listen to it. Be prepared to throw work in the garbage. Learn. Read. Work harder.

This is the process. There is no other.

Fear of Humiliation

Let’s say you do work hard and get published. Don’t worry, success comes with its own set of fears.

I write (among other things) historical fiction. When my first novel came out, I was terrified that some history buff would come along and find errors in my work. Luckily, that fear had been motivating me for some time, so it caused me to be ridiculously meticulous about my work. Not only did I read numerous books, I also hired an expert to double-check my manuscript and used several beta readers who’d lived through the experience of East Germany.

Then I planned ahead for the dreaded experience of public speaking by taking every opportunity to get up on stage: going to open mics to read my work aloud, volunteering to introduce other writers—anything to rid myself of the fear of speaking to a crowd. It can be done.

Fear of Judgment

This is another one that might follow on the heels of success: what if people are offended by what I write?

Yes, your parent/spouse/whomever might be upset by your book. If you’re writing directly about someone you know and you’re worried they’re going to be offended, you have three choices: don’t do it, ask them first and get their approval, or tell it slant and deny deny deny.

Regardless, once the work is out there, you can’t control people’s reactions to it. You have to be okay with that—or else consider using a pseudonym.

Bad reviews are an offshoot of this fear—and some of them will be bad. Again, that’s out of your control. All you can do is write the best book you can—and then steer clear of the reviews.

Fear of the Blank Page/Screen

Part of dismantling this fear involves not believing in it in the first place. Part involves understanding that writer’s block is not really a fear of not being able to write; it’s a fear of not being able to get it right the first time (i.e., what if I’m wasting my time?).

Perfectionism is the enemy of productivity. First drafts aren’t meant to be perfect. They’re meant to be finished. It might be helpful to think of your first draft as an exploratory draft. I’ve also heard people call it the barf draft, but that might be a little too colorful for some folks. The point is, the first draft is all about figuring out what your story looks like. It involves trying things, taking chances, getting to know your characters. There’s no right or wrong here.

If you’re still worried that when tomorrow comes, you won’t be able to get started, try Hemingway’s trick of leaving off the day’s work in the middle of a sentence. Personally, I reread the previous day’s work to give myself a running start.

Any writer who is paying attention to the world around them and doing a lot of reading shouldn’t worry about running out of ideas. Ideas are everywhere. All you have to do is write them down. Keep an ideas file. Eavesdrop on conversations. Be an observer of human nature. Read—both within and outside your genre.

In Conclusion

Most of us are afraid of the same things—and most of these fears are within our control. When we expose them to the light and then deconstruct them, we see that in reality, there is nothing to fear… except hard work, that’s scary.

MICHELLE BARKER - Resident Writing Coach

Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and editor who lives in Vancouver, BC. Her newest book, coauthored with David Griffin Brown, is Story Skeleton: The Classics. They are also the authors of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her novel My Long List of Impossible Things, came out in 2020 with Annick Press. The House of One Thousand Eyes was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and won numerous awards including the Amy Mathers Teen Book Award. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have appeared in literary reviews world-wide.

Michelle holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and is a senior editor at The Darling Axe. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Michelle below. Michelle’s books

The post Five Fears of Writers (and How to Defeat Them) appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

When we think about suspense in writing, we naturally leap to thrillers and mysteries, genres that are known for suspense and rely on it. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us are off the hook. Suspense is an essential element in any story. Whenever we create a feeling of anticipation (or dread) that something dangerous or terrible is about to happen, we increase the odds that our reader will keep turning pages.

There’s suspense in romance: will the boy win over his crush?

There’s suspense in humor: will the joke land?

There’s even suspense in picture books: what will happen the third time little Johnny looks under the bed?

But suspense alone isn’t enough to keep your reader engaged.

Suspense Depends on Connection

The reader has to care about the character to care about what happens to them. If some stranger down the road is in danger of losing their job, it’s objectively sad but it probably won’t keep you awake at night. If it’s your partner, however, that’s a different story. You have a connection to that person. You care about what happens to them. You’re invested in the outcome of that problem. What will happen tomorrow at that big meeting? You can barely sleep thinking about it.

Just so in fiction. As an author, your primary job in the opening of a novel or story is to create connection. You want your reader to bond with the protagonist so that they’re invested in the character’s wellbeing. They care about what happens to them. Once you’ve done that, your job is to make the worst things either happen or threaten to happen so that your reader is on the edge of their seat hoping their beloved character will survive.

This is why it’s never particularly effective to start a novel with a car chase or a fight scene. If we don’t yet care about who these things are happening to, we won’t care how they turn out.

Suspense Depends on Future

Suspense involves the creation of anxiety in the reader over what will happen—not about what’s happening now. What’s happening in the moment involves (or should involve) either tension or conflict. Things are going wrong. Something is off. The character is uneasy. People aren’t getting along.

This is why foreshadowing and suspense go hand in hand. Foreshadowing prepares the ground for future disaster. If you don’t use foreshadowing, either your reader will feel cheated or the plot twists will seem too coincidental. But if you do foreshadow and your reader is paying attention, they’ll see the breadcrumbs and sense where they’re leading and think, No. Not that. Please not that. And voilà, you have created suspense.

Literary agent Donald Maass suggests including tension on every page. That means you should be giving your reader something to worry about on a regular basis. You should especially be doing this at the end of every chapter so that your poor reader cannot shut off the lamp and go to bed (yes, we authors are sadists).

I’m not necessarily talking about cliffhangers. While sometimes these might be appropriate, too many in a row will feel gimmicky. What I’m talking about is the creation of anxiety. The last thing you want at the end of a chapter is resolution. There is only one appropriate place for that: at the end of your novel.

Suspense Depends on Rhythm

Pacing and suspense are soulmates. You want to draw things out just enough to keep your reader hooked. If you take too long to get the job done, they’ll drop off to sleep. If you move too quickly, they might stop caring because you’re not taking the time to develop internal conflict. And internal conflict is what makes readers care.

Suspense Depends on Playing Fair

I can’t count the number of manuscripts I’ve edited where an author decides to create suspense by purposely withholding information from the reader, even though it doesn’t make sense and in fact breaks POV.

Example: someone asks your protagonist to do them a rather sketchy favor. But you, the author, decide to manufacture false suspense by not revealing what the favor is. This is an example of not playing fair and it breaks POV rules. If we’re in the protagonist’s head and he was present during the conversation with the other person, we should have access to what’s going on.

The suspense should not be in the favor itself; it should be in the fallout. What will happen now that this person has asked your protagonist to do something shady? Will they do it? Should they do it? What will happen if they don’t do it? There’s the real suspense. Simply withholding the dialogue makes the reader feel manipulated.

Suspense Depends on Stakes

What will happen if Tina loses her job? Again, we’re talking about future: anxiety, giving the reader something to worry about. There must be something at stake—consequences if things go wrong. The reader needs to be reminded regularly of what they are. And the consequences have to matter—both to the protagonist and to us.

This means all parties involved must care about how this terrible situation might turn out. Which means, for your protagonist, whatever is going on needs to be personal. Again, not Joe Schmoe down the road but Tina sitting across from you at the breakfast table. Your protagonist should have skin in the game.

Dramatic Irony Can Heighten Suspense

Dramatic irony involves putting your reader in the privileged position of knowing more than the protagonist. We know the businessperson they’re getting involved with is actually a con artist. Danger hurtles toward the protagonist and we see it coming—but they don’t. Dramatic irony can be a sharp tool to heighten suspense.

In Conclusion

Suspense belongs in every genre. Create connection. Make your reader care about what happens to the protagonist—and then give them things to worry about.

The future is unstable. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

MICHELLE BARKER - Resident Writing Coach

Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and editor who lives in Vancouver, BC. Her newest book, coauthored with David Griffin Brown, is Story Skeleton: The Classics. They are also the authors of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her novel My Long List of Impossible Things, came out in 2020 with Annick Press. The House of One Thousand Eyes was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and won numerous awards including the Amy Mathers Teen Book Award. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have appeared in literary reviews world-wide.

Michelle holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and is a senior editor at The Darling Axe. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Michelle below. Michelle’s books

The post Creating Suspense in any Genre appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

A character’s backstory is where all the gold is buried in terms of their motivations and misbeliefs. Who we are in the present depends to a large extent on what has happened to us in the past. It’s critical for you to know your protagonist’s personal history—but that’s a pretty easy thing to work out. There are numerous character questionnaires available on the internet that you can spend hours filling out.

What you do with that information, however, is trickier—and everything depends on it. If you front load your novel with your protagonist’s life story or give them a variety of quirks and habits that don’t get used in any meaningful way, you will be squandering all that valuable information you amassed and possibly even turning readers away.

Creating Connection

In your opening pages, your main objective is to create connection between the reader and the protagonist. But we don’t usually connect with someone who tells us their life story. If we’re unlucky enough to sit next to that person on a long bus ride, we get up and move. We connect with someone who intrigues us, who makes us want to know more about them. We interact with them, watch how they behave and what they say, and develop our own ideas about who they might be.

Here’s the key: we should want to know more about your protagonist before we actually find out. When it comes to backstory, keep your readers on a need-to-know basis. Show us who this protagonist is. But don’t tell us why they are the way they are—not yet. That’s something you should hold back for later.

In fiction, we also connect with someone who has a strong voice. Contrary to what this might sound like, voice is not (or not only) about the way your character talks. Voice is about who they are as a person, and how that’s expressed in the things they notice and how they relate to what’s going on around them. This is why it’s so important to know that backstory. If you don’t, you won’t truly know who your protagonist is, and they won’t come alive on the page.

But then you have to use this information. If you’ve given your protagonist an extreme fear of heights but then their narrative goal has nothing to do with climbing a mountain or hanging out with their crush who lives on the twenty-seventh floor, that information becomes mere window-dressing. You’re not using it in a purposeful way—i.e. as an obstacle to your protagonist getting what they want.

Using Your Protagonist’s Backstory

We need to be strategic about our protagonist’s backstory: when to use it, how much of it to use, and how.

Use backstory to create intrigue. That means dropping hints and clues in the first half of the book that slowly get answered in the second half. There should be very little in the way of backstory in the first half of your novel. Treat your readers like detectives. Assume your novel is a puzzle they want to solve—and give them the space to do it.

Sprinkle backstory hints into scene. Rather than sitting your reader down and info-dumping a long passage of family history on them, give us one dinner scene. Show us how your protagonist interacts with their parents, their annoying siblings (and maybe their siblings’ spouses), their children, a server. Every one of these interactions can reveal character if you let it.

Build backstory hints into voice. Don’t give us a long history on how your protagonist is miserably single. Set a scene on Valentine’s Day. Make them walk past restaurants and flower shops. Give us some snarky internal monologue.

Don’t tell us they’re the bossy eldest sister. Show us how they behave with their younger sibling. Don’t tell us that baking is their life. Show the way they see possibilities for icing in the shape of a flower.

Showing your protagonist in action rather than telling us about them allows the reader to participate in the process of getting to know them. You are trusting your reader, giving them space to think rather than spoon-feeding them all the answers. And readers remember things better when they participate in them rather than being told about them.

What About Flashbacks?

Flashbacks are the uppity first cousins of backstory. Yes, they involve dramatization, which lifts them out of infodump territory, but you should only use them when absolutely necessary. Why? Because they come with a built-in disadvantage: whatever you’re dramatizing has already happened. No matter how interesting it is, it will necessarily lack both tension and immediacy. If your flashback is too long, it has the potential to create confusion in your narrative. By the time your reader returns to the present-moment storyline, they’ve forgotten where they left off.

If you must use a flashback—such as to dramatize the origin of your protagonist’s misbelief—the best course of action is to get in and get out as quickly as possible. The longer you linger, the greater the chance for confusion. Use cues to let the reader know when you’re moving back in time and when you’re returning to the present moment. Keep your reader’s ease of experience in mind. If they have to stop and think about where or when they are, you will break immersion and take them out of the story.

In Conclusion

The backstory of your characters is crucial to know, but like research, it is information and needs to be handled with care. Your job is to bring that information to life in such a way that it becomes part of what happens, who these people are on the page. You should never have to stop the story to tell us anything about your characters. The story should be showing them to us at every moment. That’s how you create the essential connection that makes us want to follow them right to the end.

MICHELLE BARKER - Resident Writing Coach

Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and editor who lives in Vancouver, BC. Her newest book, coauthored with David Griffin Brown, is Story Skeleton: The Classics. They are also the authors of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her novel My Long List of Impossible Things, came out in 2020 with Annick Press. The House of One Thousand Eyes was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and won numerous awards including the Amy Mathers Teen Book Award. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have appeared in literary reviews world-wide.

Michelle holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and is a senior editor at The Darling Axe. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Michelle below. Michelle’s books

The post Behind the Scenes: How to Craft Compelling Backstory appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

Remember the scene in Pirates of the Caribbean when Captain Barbossa explains the pirate’s code? “The code is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.” Writing fantasy is a bit like the pirate’s code. There aren’t any rules, exactly, which is what makes it so fun to write. You can allow your imagination free rein.

But there is one “must have”: strong world-building. And world-building is one of those things that can easily get out of hand.

Guidelines For Avoiding Mayhem

Mayhem may include confusion, infodumping, logic issues, and cliches—all of which impact reader immersion. Here are some ways to keep your fantasy world under control:

Know your world, but don’t overshare: Fantasy writers spend a lot of time on world-building details to make their setting feel authentic. But then they often feel compelled to work all those details into the story, which can lead to info-dumping. Make peace with this truth: you will do more research and world-building than you can realistically fit into your novel. But rest assured, your hard work will pay off: more of it will seep into the setting than you realize. On a similar note…

Keep your readers on a need-to-know basis: Don’t overwhelm us with information. If we don’t need to know something at that moment (or ever), set it aside.

Think carefully before you include a prologue: Prologues are often comprised of a scene relating to the middle of the book that lacks any context. While you might intend yours as an amuse bouche to intrigue us, that lack of context will likely create confusion. But don’t err on the side of info-dumping by including all the things you think we need to know before we can start reading. In fact, we don’t need to know much. Instead…

Throw us into the world but use landmarks so that we’re not lost: Ease us in by including a few familiar things: a horse in the pasture, some daisies in a vase—something we know how to visualize. How you decide to name things becomes a big factor in this process. So…

Name things in such a way that we don’t need a glossary to understand them: If you look at the opening of A Game of Thrones, you’ll notice George R. R. Martin throws us into the story without any preamble, but he calls things by names that have clear meanings: the Wall, the Night’s Watch, the wilding raiders. We don’t need any explanation. We get it.

Too much terminology gets confusing: This includes long words that are capitalized for no reason and have apostrophes in the middle, and unnecessarily weird creatures with unnecessarily weird names. If it has four legs and a tail and it barks, call it a dog.

Play by the rules you’ve made: You can’t suddenly change them just because you’ve put your protagonist in a tight spot.

Remember, there is a world AND there is a story: The world should not be the story. No matter how cool it might be, your world is still just a backdrop for the main event: the characters, what they want, and what’s at stake if they don’t get it.

Honor the rules of logic and cohesion: Again, A Game of Thrones is instructive here. Every region in Martin’s vast world has its own customs and beliefs, its own clothing and food and weaponry. Each choice makes sense according to the climate and geography. Your little microcosm doesn’t have to be based on a real place, but it does have to feel authentic—which means it must make sense.

Keep your magic rules simple: If we need a flow chart to follow it, you’ll lose us. But also remember, magic must come with a cost. If there are no limits, the stakes will be too low, because anyone with magical skill will be able to spell themselves out of a tight spot.

Remember your protagonist’s internal conflict: It’s easy for externals to take over when writing fantasy, but we won’t care about what’s happening or where it’s happening, if we don’t care about who it’s happening to. Our connection as readers is to the protagonist. If you want us to follow them on their quest to achieve a narrative goal, the stakes should be personal. Give us a flawed protagonist who must transform themselves internally in order to succeed.

And speaking of conflict, embrace the grey areas in life: People aren’t generally evil for the sake of being evil, nor do they seek to rule the world just so they can ruin it. On the other hand, no one is one hundred percent good. Nuance is key. Oversimplification of people and situations creates stereotypes and predictable plot turns.

Oh, those tropes: While fantasy readers are looking for an ordinary and unlikely protagonist to rise to the position of hero/heroine, there are lots of ways to make this happen without them having to be orphans or chosen ones or discovering a prophecy that involves them. That’s not to say these things can’t work. They can—but try to make your story unique.

Oh, those characters that sound like someone from Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings: The wise mentor who sound like Gandalf or Dumbledore, the dark lord who resemble Sauron or Voldemort, the dwarves with long beards. Etc. While some of these characters are archetypical, you’ll want to avoid anything that feels derivative.

If you’re aiming to publish traditionally, make sure your first book can stand alone: The market is tough these days and multi-book deals for first-time authors are rare.

In conclusion

Writing fantasy gives you an opportunity to do something completely new and different. Is this a tall order? Yes. But that’s what makes it so fun. Even better if you can create a world that tells us something important about ourselves (like Lord of the Rings did with the corrupting nature of power, the strength of fellowship, and the surprising influence of ordinary individuals to make a difference).

That’s the true power of fantasy. By providing readers with an alternate world, you help us see our own with new eyes. And by adhering to the pirate’s code, you can do so without falling prey to the pitfalls that abound in this genre.

MICHELLE BARKER - Resident Writing Coach

Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and editor who lives in Vancouver, BC. Her newest book, coauthored with David Griffin Brown, is Story Skeleton: The Classics. They are also the authors of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her novel My Long List of Impossible Things, came out in 2020 with Annick Press. The House of One Thousand Eyes was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and won numerous awards including the Amy Mathers Teen Book Award. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have appeared in literary reviews world-wide.

Michelle holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and is a senior editor at The Darling Axe. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Michelle below. Michelle’s books

The post The Pirate’s Guide to Writing Fantasy appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

          When I first started writing fiction, I desperately wanted to be Margaret Atwood. I read several of her novels and, consciously or not (probably consciously), my writing voice started coming out a lot like hers—only minus the talent and the authenticity because… (wait for it) I’m not Margaret Atwood. I didn’t sell a single short story.

          Many years later I decided to write a thing (it was sort of a prose poem but really, it defied genre) completely as “me.” It turned out quirky, funny (if you share my sense of humor, that is), and weird—rather like someone I know. When I finished it, I thought, well, that was fun. Maybe no one will buy it, but who cares? It sold to the first magazine I sent it to and was later anthologized.

Too much has been made of the process of finding your voice as a writer, and I think it gets us into trouble. We believe it’s something that it’s not and then we make it way more complicated than it needs to be.

Contrary to what you might think, voice is not just a way of talking or sounding. It’s a way of being in the world. And how do we ‘be’ except the way we already are?

We never have to think about finding our voice as a person. Our voice is everything about us; it’s who we are, how we see the world. Why would that be any different on paper than it is in real life? When we put pressure on ourselves to “find our voice,” whatever we end up finding becomes more like a persona, a disguise, and then it’s not our voice anymore. It’s fake.

The process is a lot like dating. When we try too hard to be something we’re not, it might work for a little while and then it just…won’t. Because it won’t feel authentic.

Listen to any interview with Margaret Atwood and you’ll notice she sounds in person exactly the way she does on the page. Same with Stephen King. They’re not making up some new entity who they suddenly become on paper. Even though they’ve both created numerous convincing and authentic characters who are completely diverse from each other, we can still identify an Atwood or King novel by voice alone. Why? Because the essential personality of the author shines through those characters. How could it not? They created them.

But is it bad or wrong to copy other writers when you’re just starting out?

Actually, no. It can be a great way to get started—almost like a nudge that coaxes your true voice out.

Another exercise worth trying is to choose your absolute favorite novel and copy it out by hand. I’m not suggesting plagiarism or even mimicry. Instead, this can be an effective learning tool. I once wrote out the first hundred pages of All the Light We Cannot See and was amazed by what I picked up that I’d missed in two readings of the novel. Writing it out by hand allows you to see firsthand how the magic has been created.

But when it comes to finding your voice, the main thing you need to do is stop putting up roadblocks and instead allow the process to happen.

How do you do that? Here are a few ideas.

• Ask yourself: who are your favorite authors? What genres do you like to read? Explore what it is about them that appeals to you. Chances are there are some elements common to all of them.

• Try Natalie Goldberg’s exercises in Writing Down the Bones of keeping the hand moving while you write. What this does is silence your inner critic. If you’re busy writing, they can’t get a word in edgewise, nattering that you should be writing X rather than the Y that you want to write, or telling you that you’re no good or the work isn’t coming out the way it’s supposed to.

• Try Ray Bradbury’s idea in Zen in the Art of Writing of keeping word lists to discover your loves, your hates, your obsessions and fears. This was his way of finding his voice as a writer—which really amounted to nailing down who he was as a person. It might work for you.

Flannery O’Connor wrote: “The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.” What we are able to make live is directly related to who we are and what we love. If what you love is cowboys and westerns, then chances are when you write about them, your voice will sing.

People used to ask Stephen King why he was “wasting” his talent writing horror. Why? Because horror is what he loves. And what exactly has been wasted? He is arguably the best horror writer in the world. If he had ignored his obsessions and tried to be a literary writer, there’s a fair chance he would not have been as successful as he is.

If you want to find your voice as a writer, just be yourself on the page. There’s nobody more suited to the task.

Check out these additional posts about voice!
How Do You Find Your Narrator’s Voice?
Character Voice Versus Author Voice

MICHELLE BARKER - Resident Writing Coach

Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and editor who lives in Vancouver, BC. Her newest book, coauthored with David Griffin Brown, is Story Skeleton: The Classics. They are also the authors of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her novel My Long List of Impossible Things, came out in 2020 with Annick Press. The House of One Thousand Eyes was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and won numerous awards including the Amy Mathers Teen Book Award. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have appeared in literary reviews world-wide.

Michelle holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and is a senior editor at The Darling Axe. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Michelle below. Michelle’s books

The post Finding Your Voice as a Writer appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

Voice is one of those elements that can make or break a manuscript. If you get it right, the novel will live in the reader’s mind long after they put the book down. Without it, the story won’t quite achieve what you’ve intended even if all the structural elements are in place.

So… how do you find your narrator’s voice?

What Doesn’t Work

Here’s one thing that doesn’t work: verbal tics. How many times can you have your character repeat certain phrases before it starts to get, well, annoying? Not very many.

Here’s another: sarcasm.

Sarcasm is an easy voice to capture, so it seems to be the one many authors lean toward to make their narrator sound different. Cross it off the list. No one is consistently sarcastic, or angry, or melodramatic. When you make your narrator into a type like this, they come across as one-dimensional and unrealistic.

Who Is This Person?

The idea of voice only being a mood or a way of talking misses the bigger picture. Voice is a way of being in the world. For that reason, I would recommend approaching it from another direction: by exploring who this person is that you’re trying to bring to life.

While I don’t think character questionnaires are the way to nail voice, they can be a good steppingstone in getting to know your character—because I don’t think you can capture a character’s voice until you fully know who they are.

Look at how the answers to a few key questions can change the type of person you’re dealing with.

What does your character do for a living?

A baker will have a different way of viewing the world than a plumber or a doctor. They’ll notice different things, use their own analogies, have unique priorities, behave differently in various situations. You’ll know they’re a baker not because the author has placed them in a kitchen wearing oven mitts but because they see ideas for new pastries in the shapes of flowers. They’ll think like a baker.

If you were to read a story in which all you got was oven mitts and cookie trays, you’d feel like you were reading something generic—because the author would not have captured a baker’s way of navigating the world.

How old is your character? What is their marital status?

A twenty-something single woman will have a different way of dealing with people than a fifty-something woman who’s just left a long, dull marriage. Or maybe the marriage was abusive: that would give her another voice. Or maybe she’s never been married, but her sister is in a happy marriage: different voice again. She’ll have to manage Valentine’s Day; she might get upset by seeing couples at candlelit tables for two in a restaurant.

Voice is all about the lens through which your character views the world. One of the most significant things that clarifies this lens is their goal: what do they want in the story? If someone wants respect, they’re going to act in certain ways and say certain things that will be very different from someone who’s out for revenge.

Where do they come from? What kind of family do they have? Wealthy or poor, loving or abusive? Are they the first-born of a large family, or are they the baby? Are they an only child?

Every answer creates a type of person who will act and react in diverse ways. Many of these actions and reactions won’t be conscious, but they’ll be there, and they’ll cement in place patterns of behavior that will (hopefully) cause that character all sorts of problems.

But answering those questions is only step one.

What Next?

Now, you have to put your characters into action: slip on their shoes and see the world through their eyes. Usually that means writing your way into the story in one form or another: by journaling in their voice, answering interview questions in their voice, or (my preference) simply throwing yourself into the story world and getting them moving.

This is why it’s so important to differentiate the narrative voice from the author’s voice. Unless the author is the narrator, they have no business speaking up. Your reader will have picked up a particular book to experience the world from the point of view of a female scientist in the 1960s (Lessons in Chemistry) or a college student in the classics who becomes enthralled with an eclectic group of students with whom he doesn’t quite fit in (The Secret History). The extent to which the author can deliver on that promise also turns out to be the extent to which they’ve captured the narrator’s way of seeing the world, which is… voice.

Why Voice Is So Important

Voice is not the only thing in a novel. But if you don’t nail it, you won’t have used point of view to its fullest potential, nor will you truly know your story—because you won’t know the main actors who are driving it forward. It won’t feel authentic, and your readers won’t feel the same emotional draw that they’ll experience when a character comes to life on the page and says, Let me show you what the world looks like through my eyes.

Isn’t that why we come to fiction in the first place?

MICHELLE BARKER - Resident Writing Coach

Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and editor who lives in Vancouver, BC. Her newest book, coauthored with David Griffin Brown, is Story Skeleton: The Classics. They are also the authors of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her novel My Long List of Impossible Things, came out in 2020 with Annick Press. The House of One Thousand Eyes was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and won numerous awards including the Amy Mathers Teen Book Award. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have appeared in literary reviews world-wide.

Michelle holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and is a senior editor at The Darling Axe. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Michelle below. Michelle’s books

The post How Do You Find Your Narrator’s Voice? appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

We’ve all heard about the importance of finding your voice as a writer. Maybe you’ve had a critique from an editor who felt the narrative voice wasn’t sharp enough. Or maybe a critique mentioned the author’s voice creeping into the narrative and you found yourself thinking, huh? Isn’t that the voice I worked so hard to develop in the first place?

Well, yes. And no.

We each have a voice that we write in, and it’s as individual as a fingerprint. A novel by Margaret Atwood will sound different than one by Stephen King, and while this might be related to both genre and characters, there’s an ineffable quality to each author’s voice that seeps into their work regardless of how hard they might try to keep it out.

The trick is not to let that voice break the fictional dream you’ve created in your work.

This can happen in several ways: when the author has an agenda they’re trying to slip into the story; when they inadvertently break the POV by stepping in to comment on something; and when they succumb to the temptation to use what Elmore Leonard calls hooptedoodle.

Having an Agenda

When we write a novel, we often (hopefully) have something to say. Let’s call it a theme, the answer to the dreaded so what? question. The line between theme and message, however, is a thin one, and if you’re not subtle enough about your intentions, your reader will sense you’re trying to teach them something and will back away.

Having something to say should not be the same as telling readers what to think. It’s always better to give readers questions to ponder rather than answers to swallow. So, if you have an agenda, shelve it. Give us something to think about. But don’t tell us we have to think like you.

As Ursula le Guin so elegantly puts it, a story’s job is to achieve meaning; it’s a door that opens onto a new world. Messages are for sermons. If all you see in The Hobbit is a message about greed, you’ve missed the magic.

Let the Narrator Narrate

When the author’s voice creeps into a defined POV, you pull your reader out of the fictional dream. It’s jarring. In fact, this gets to the heart of POV, where consistent character voice is crucial to reader immersion.

In any deep POV you choose, you’ll be seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. That means everything—from what they notice to the analogies they draw—must be filtered through a lens that is not your own. Douglas Glover calls this language overlay, and it’s one of the most useful POV pointers I’ve ever come across. A sailor will not think the same way as a baker, and this difference can run deep. As an example, the sailor might always have one eye on the weather; a baker might be perpetually attuned to smells. Your teen narrator who suddenly knows the Latin names of plants will pull readers out of the story scratching their heads and wondering how this narrator has such easy access to this specialized information. Not to say it can’t work. If the narrator’s mother is a botanist and has been teaching him the Latin names of plants from the time he was a toddler, it will add another layer to his character. But that has to be established in the story.

An objective POV is all about what can be seen on the surface, so the author’s voice definitely shouldn’t be part of that. And in omniscience, there is still a narrator—but unless it’s you, the reader shouldn’t hear your voice.

Avoid Hooptedoodle

Our name might be on the cover of the book we’ve written, but we should never take center stage in our novel unless we’re doing something funky with metafiction. One of the ways we sneak ourselves into our work is with fancy writing that calls attention to itself for no other reason than to wave a flag and say look what I can do.

I’m a huge fan of poetic writing, but I’m also a firm believer in the importance of double duty. Every element in a novel should do more than one thing. A pretty description of the weather should also be a reflection of mood or an ironic foreshadowing or whatever else you have up your sleeve. If you’ve written a whole paragraph about the dark billowing sky, let it also reflect a building dread in the narrator or allow it to serve as a reminder that the body he dropped into the lake might not have been weighted down with enough rocks.

But if that billowing sky is only there for the reader to admire, then it sounds like writing. And as Elmore Leonard also said: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

Do your readers a favor: either take it out or give it a second job.

Finding Your Voice

The notion of finding your voice has never made sense to me. Your voice is who you are. No matter whose shoes you’re wearing in a particular novel, your voice will come through. If you don’t believe that, try reading one author’s entire body of work. You’ll meet a room full of characters who might all sound different, but there will also be something humming beneath them that they share: the person who created them.

You don’t have to find your voice. You are your voice.

What you have to do is write. A lot. Learn how to handle POV so that you, the author, remain the silent partner in this weird agreement you make with your readers when you bring a world to life. Don’t remind the reader that they’re reading a story. Allow them to believe in the dream.

As for crafting a character’s voice, well… that’s a topic that deserves its own post. Which it will have next time you see me here.

MICHELLE BARKER - Resident Writing Coach

Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and editor who lives in Vancouver, BC. Her newest book, coauthored with David Griffin Brown, is Story Skeleton: The Classics. They are also the authors of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her novel My Long List of Impossible Things, came out in 2020 with Annick Press. The House of One Thousand Eyes was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and won numerous awards including the Amy Mathers Teen Book Award. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have appeared in literary reviews world-wide.

Michelle holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and is a senior editor at The Darling Axe. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Michelle below. Michelle’s books

The post Character Voice Versus Author Voice appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

We all need down time in our writing lives—a planned vacation, Christmas with the family, a buffer between big projects. Sometimes we get down time whether we’ve chosen it or not (I’m looking at you, COVID). Whatever the cause, it can be good to put down our pens or shut our laptops for a while. Vacation is my time to catch up on reading, and I savor it.

But time away creates an inevitable problem: how to get back into the writing habit.

I try to coordinate vacations with the end of a novel draft and use my departure date as a deadline. For me, there’s nothing worse than leaving a novel half-written. More than three days away from a novel-in-progress and I have to read back a few chapters to remind myself where I left off and trick myself back into the rhythm of the writing. More than a week and I basically have to read from the beginning—to say nothing of reviewing all those cryptic half-written notes that no longer make any sense.

The solution is not don’t take time off. That can be a direct route to burnout. We can’t be on all the time. We need that down time to recharge our batteries. Filling the well, as Julia Cameron calls it—whether by reading or having new experiences or meeting new people. Or just doing nothing. It’s essential. Taking zero time off can result in work that feels stale; it can even kill your desire to write altogether.

But say you have taken time off. You’ve had a great vacation and now Monday looms—the day you’ve decided it’s time to get back to your desk, back to whatever creative project you’ve been working on. You’re nervous. Afraid you’ll be rusty. Or worse: you’re afraid that whatever magic allowed you to fill the blank page is most certainly gone by now, never to return.

Of course, that’s nonsense. But if you’re anything like me, those are the thoughts running through your head. And nonsense or not, they feel real enough to cause panic.

I’ve found a few ways to smooth out the return to writing after a significant break.
Maybe they’ll work for you.

Don’t Procrastinate

Set a date and time when you will return to your desk and SHOW UP, no matter how hard it feels. Don’t make excuses or talk yourself out of it.

Take the Pressure Off

When I was doing my MFA, my novel-writing instructor, Gail Anderson-Dargatz gave us a mantra to follow: write crap. We had a lot of work to produce in a short period of time, and many of us were novices when it came to writing a novel. Putting pressure on yourself to be the next Margaret Atwood or write a bestseller guarantees only one thing: a blank page. When you take that pressure away and allow yourself to write anything, as long as the words show up on the page you’ve achieved your goal. As Jodi Picoult puts it, you can’t edit a blank page. And chances are, whatever you come up with won’t be crap at all.

Start By Editing Someone Else’s Work

Sometimes it’s the act of sitting at your desk and moving your pen on paper that’s enough to reinspire you. If you’re editing someone else’s work, there’s nothing at stake for you. You’re not judging yourself. You’re not thinking, See? I knew I was no good, I knew the magic was gone. You’re helping someone else—and at the same time getting your mind back in the habit of thinking about craft.

Start By Editing Previous Chapters of Your Own Work

If you did have to step away from a half-written project, ease yourself in by reading a few chapters back—or even from the beginning. It’s like giving yourself a running start. Your body and brain will get into the groove and before you know it, the ideas will be flowing again, and you’ll be adding sentences to the draft.

Try Another Art Form

Creativity feeds creativity. If the idea of returning to your desk has you paralyzed, take a walk and snap some photos. If you play a musical instrument, put in some time at the piano. Draw, paint, dance. Creativity is a muscle. If you coax it, it will come back to life.

Try Using Writing Prompts

Prompts can be a fun way to stretch yourself, and the internet has so many good ones now. There’s no pressure in a prompt. You’re not trying to create anything coherent. You’re just writing for, say, fifteen minutes, and the only rule is to keep your hand moving. You can do that.

Tip: One Stop for Writers has an idea generator you can use to create prompts…or help brainstorm new aspects of a current project. Today is the last day to get 25% off any One Stop for Writers subscription.

Write In a Group

There’s a certain magic to writing in a group that’s hard to explain but I’ve found it to be undeniable. It’s as if creativity is contagious. When you surround yourself by people who are writing, you’ll write too.

The return back to writing always feels a little awkward and nerve-wracking at first. But persist and be kind to yourself. The habit will come back faster than you expect, and your work will be better for having taken the time away.

MICHELLE BARKER - Resident Writing Coach

Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and editor who lives in Vancouver, BC. Her newest book, coauthored with David Griffin Brown, is Story Skeleton: The Classics. They are also the authors of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her novel My Long List of Impossible Things, came out in 2020 with Annick Press. The House of One Thousand Eyes was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and won numerous awards including the Amy Mathers Teen Book Award. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have appeared in literary reviews world-wide.

Michelle holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and is a senior editor at The Darling Axe. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Michelle below. Michelle’s books

The post Getting Back in the Writing Flow appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

As writers of historical fiction, we might be tempted to believe our job is to teach readers about a certain event or era. While that might be part of what we’re doing, I would argue it’s not the most important part. The number one job of a fiction writer is to tell a story. A history textbook tells about history, but historical fiction should bring it to life by showing it. That’s our true mandate. It’s the difference between reading a menu and eating the meal.

But historical fiction doesn’t make this easy. Sometimes facts and figures need to be included; there are real events and people to take into account.

The thing we’re striving for in fiction is authenticity. We want our work to have the ring of truth to it. To that end, research is crucial. If we don’t do our research as historical fiction writers, we lose credibility with our readers. But researching comes with its own pitfalls. Information is dry and boring to read. The trouble is, we authors can get pretty fired up about our research. It’s cool stuff, plus we’ve worked hard to find it. The temptation is to use as much of it as we can. Indeed, the more research we’ve done, the more strongly we’ll feel about this.

But there’s a good chance that, for the sake of the story, a sizable amount of our research will never make it into the novel. We need to make our peace with that because research can easily get in the way of good storytelling. We’ll want to find a way to weave our research into the story seamlessly.

If we don’t, we’re likely to end up with an info-dump.

The Dreaded Infodump

An infodump is an extended section of telling (rather than showing), a chunk of information that is “dumped” into the reader’s lap.

Introducing readers to a historical era, explaining the political situation or a technical procedure—these are difficult things to do. The infodump makes it easy. You simply take a couple of pages—or an entire chapter—and explain it. This is why infodumps often show up either in prologues or first chapters. The author explains all the important bits to the reader up front before starting the story.

While an infodump might tell us about the world of the story, it doesn’t do anything to develop character, it doesn’t advance the plot, and it doesn’t really help the reader because usually there’s so much information crammed into one section, the reader won’t remember it. And it’s not presented in scene. It’s presented as information. Those are the moments in a story when a reader’s mind wanders.

Readers want to be immersed in the moment of the story. They want to feel like they’re standing beside our main character experiencing all the exciting things alongside them.

Infodumps also fail to create an emotional reaction in the reader. Most infodumps are written in a way that is cold and flat. When we fail to engage a reader’s emotions, we fail to engage the reader.

            To Avoid This Kind of Writing:

• Look for anything that isn’t happening in the present moment of the story. Have a close look at your sections of exposition. Backstory and world-building are common offenders.
• Figure out what needs to be explained only at that moment. Ask yourself: what does the reader need to know right now? If they don’t need to know it now, cut it, and save it for when they do.
• Trust your reader. They can piece things together; in fact, they like figuring things out. That’s part of the process of discovery involved in reading.
• If you’re unsure of whether you’ve given the reader enough information, try it out on someone. But beware of going from zero to overload if your reader asks for more information. Often, a subtle hint is all that’s needed.

Incorporating Research into a Scene

            There are a few tricks we can use to weave research into a story as seamlessly as possible:

• Integrate it into the scene. Make it relevant to something that’s happening in the moment. That way, it moves the plot forward. 
• Add tension. Make the information something that causes problems for the characters. Show their reaction. This engages the reader. If the information matters to the characters, it will matter to the reader. 
• Write it in such a way that it conveys something about a character’s personality. Then it adds to character development. 
• Keep it brief. A sentence or two of information is enough.
• Break it up. Don’t stick all your information in one spot. Sprinkle it throughout a scene. Remember, the story comes first.

Use Your Research Elsewhere

There will always be a difference between the amount of research we do for a historical novel and the amount that makes it into the book. But why not use that extra information in other ways?

• Write some non-fiction pieces about the things you discovered while researching your novel. This is also a great way to generate some additional buzz for your work.
• Add the additional research to your website or on social media for readers who want to know more.
• Get creative: turn your facts into a trivia game or add them to presentations when you’re promoting your work.

Research is never a waste of time. Even if it doesn’t make it into the novel, it will show in subtle ways. The more we read about the world we’re building, the more we internalize it, and that is guaranteed to lend authenticity to our work.

MICHELLE BARKER - Resident Writing Coach

Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and editor who lives in Vancouver, BC. Her newest book, coauthored with David Griffin Brown, is Story Skeleton: The Classics. They are also the authors of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her novel My Long List of Impossible Things, came out in 2020 with Annick Press. The House of One Thousand Eyes was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and won numerous awards including the Amy Mathers Teen Book Award. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have appeared in literary reviews world-wide.

Michelle holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and is a senior editor at The Darling Axe. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Michelle below. Michelle’s books

The post Historical Fiction: The Story Comes First appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.