Hi Victoria. I have a question for you. Hope you don’t mind. A friend who raises service dogs has written a children’s book. Her story is about a service dog & puppy raiser, intended to teach children about disabilities. She’s wondering where to go next. I know it’s hard for you to say, not having seen the book, but what would be her best next step? Submitting to agent or editor? I was wondering if you had any insight into children’s lit publishing, as I don’t, and my friend has finished her book —TamaraNFamily

Hi, Tamara! I know you work for a nonprofit foundation that helps pets, so this sounds like a story close to your heart.

If your friend has never published before, she needs to get an editor before querying. Children’s lit has very special requirements, which is complicated by the fact that kids change so much as they age, so a book about raising service puppies for Young Adults will be quite different from one for Middle Grade, which again will be vastly different from a Beginning Reader, which is very different from a picture book.

Your friends needs an editor who can help her develop and polish her manuscript for that magic click in the mind of the child of the age she wants to reach. And she’ll need some help understanding the market for her audience so she’ll know how to present the book to an agent.

For children’s lit, in particular, she’ll need a good fit with her editor. While it’s true that a professional editor should be able to work effectively in any genre in which they have experience, there are some professionals who choose not to develop their skills in certain genres. (This is even more true of agents.) And, at this point in history, probably 90% of the aspiring editors out there right now hanging out their shingles have no experience in most genres, much less specialized ones like children’s lit. (These aspiring editors are cheap because they’re not professionals. I’m a very cheap gardener, myself. I wouldn’t know a radish from a rutabaga, but I’m willing to let you pay me $35/hour to find out!)

So your friend should be careful. She should research every editor she considers, to make sure they really do have the necessary experience for her special book. She can write to them and ask about their background in her genre. Find out how long they’ve been editing professionally. She can even ask for referrals. Otherwise she runs the risk, at best, of wasting her money and, at worst, of getting exactly the wrong advice—especially in a specialized genre—from someone guessing blindly in the hopes that she won’t be able to tell.

Children’s lit is a hoppin’ genre right now, although that’s mainly YA. Educational books for MG and younger will always have a smaller niche audience. In fact, self-publishing has a long and varied history in those smaller niches.

You may find yourself one day selling her book through the auspices of your nonprofit! A lovely partnership indeed.

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How many multiple genres are allowed in a story? Are genres to be paired specifically, i.e. paranormal romance, paranormal suspense, dark fantasy? Or are there other multiples that are acceptable? And how many genres are too many?—Barbara Martin

First, Barbara, thank you for being so very patient. I know you asked me this in the comments on 13 Ways to Add Depth to Your Genre Novel way back in June, and somehow I missed it. I’ve talked about this topic a bit under Wordcount, genre, dumbing down—Indie Editor FAQ

The secret truth is there is no limit. You can use as many genres in whatever combination you can make work, which is how new genres are born and agents and publishers get those ‘fresh and new’ stories they’re always saying they’re looking for.

However, officially they want you to stick to the genres that already exist (although pretty much everyone will go for any genre with a romance angle added).

Before Anne Rice ventured into freaky waters with Interview with the Vampire, nobody took literary vampires seriously. Sure, there were random horror novels that used the vampire motif, but mixing vampirism with literary fiction in a novel of human heartbreak? No, no, no, no, no. No reader would believe vampires had real feelings like human beings!

But she mixed genres. And she started a movement.

I recently saw children’s writers discussing in all seriousness on Twitter whether Judy Blume should be categorized as MG or YA. The thing these children’s writers didn’t know is that Blume is the one who created the distinction. When Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret came out it was children’s fiction. But because it dealt with subject matter that current children’s fiction professionals didn’t know what to do with, they responded by trying to categorize the difference between what you can market to young kids and what you can market to teens. Ergo! Two new ‘genres’ are born.

Genre is not fiction. Genre is marketing. And that’s only taken over the publishing industry in recent decades.

So write what you want to write the way you want to write it. And make it brilliant.

The marketers will probably have a whole other batch of genres cooked up for you by the time you’re ready.

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Hi Victoria, I am a young writer, and a total newbie, but not a pantser. I spend months thinking my plot over and getting to know my characters’ inner angels and demons before I ever get to the keyboard.

Thank you in advance for reading this. I appreciate your time and I hope to hear your professional opinion that I highly respect.—Nastia Slesareva

Ah, Nastia, struggle is wonderful! And internal conflict—being torn between two fundamental, overwhelming needs—is golden.

What actually happens in a story is that the characters frequently burn up the first half trying to find a way out of their problems: they keep choosing ways to cope, and those ways keep resulting in hotter and hotter water, bigger and bigger problems, even through and past their first Plot Point, which is the climax of their first Conflict. Those are choices. They’re just choices in the wrong direction.

Then, around halfway through the story, the characters must decide to try a new way of handling their problems: instead of trying to get out of them, they must forge through them to the other side. That’s the midway, the Fulcrum, and it’s the climax of the second Conflict, upon which the entire weight of the story swings. That must be what Swaine was referring to—the first half of the story is the set-up for that point.

The significance of the Fulcrum is that, when you’re dealing with internal conflict (and all conflict, really, can be traced to internal needs, otherwise it’s meaningless), that’s the point at which the characters must stop flailing wildly toward meeting first one driving need and then the other and begin the complex task of coping with the fact that their solution, at some point, is going to be about the irreconcilable abyss between the two. This is a really hard pill to swallow. It hurts. And so the third Conflict, which eventually climaxes in the second Plot Point, is a humdinger.

That means the Faux Resolution, which comes after that second Plot Point, dupes the characters into believing they’re not going to have to choose between those two driving needs after all. Psyche! Just kidding! They think they’re going to get away with some kind of compromise that doesn’t, honestly, turn out to solve things. In fact, the effort to avoid their nightmare is the straw that breaks the camel’s back, and it brings the final nightmare on.

So that your Climax is the point at which those characters face their ultimate hell: choosing between two mutually-exclusive needs, neither of which they believe they can live without. This is very often the need to hide from their problems in some way—even after they believe they’ve stopped hiding—and the need to face their demons in all honesty, their shadow sides, and grapple with the one thing in the world they most do not want to grapple with.

It is the monumental effort of that grappling that explodes your story off the end into your reader’s own epiphany.

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Hi Ms. Mixon,
I’m 15 years old and I’ve loved to write ever since I can remember, but for the last two months or so, I’ve been stuck staring at a blank page. Whatever I try to begin seems stale and tacky, and my narrative voice has become awkward and grating. I’ve tried stream-of-consciousness writing, writing in different genres and styles, going outside to hunt for ideas, and even simply describing whatever happens to be going on around me, but nothing seems to work. I’ve had dry spells before, but nothing like this, and I hate that it’s sucking the joy out of something I love so much. Please, can you help me?—Heba

Ah, Heba, perhaps you’re not clear on exactly what you expect to produce. You’ve tried a lot of great writing experiments, and yet. . .what went wrong? Surely you produced some words? That counts!

It’s possible you’ve picked up an Internal Critic recently, and their constant commentary on your writing—in the process of getting it down—is the problem. Were you in a class about two months ago in which someone inadvertently taught you to self-edit as you write? Or did somebody give you negative feedback on your work? To excess? When you weren’t expecting it? Is there someone now in your life trying to ‘assist’ you to become better without actually knowing how such ‘assistance’ works? Have you met someone recently you would like very much to impress?

When I was 15, my dad was extremely ambitious for me. He gave me oil paints and an easel and then tried to critique my amateur, untutored attempts at painting (based on watching an afternoon TV show he called “The Happy Little Painter” in which a fairly competent guy demonstrated painting with lots of asides about ‘happy little strokes’). The problem was that my dad isn’t a particularly happy little person and was even less so back then when he had a house full of angsty teenagers. So you can imagine how very helpful his criticism of my painting was. “Why can’t you do it like that guy on the show?”

Not enough little happiness in the world to answer that question.

Eventually the process degenerated into him asking me why I wasn’t Nadia Comăneci, the Romanian 14-year-old who won three Olympic Gold Medal in 1976. Which was perhaps the least helpful critique I’ve ever gotten in my life.

I did not become a painter (much less a gymnast). However, he left me alone about writing, so I did become a writer.

The best way to begin your cure is to disassociate yourself from whatever is causing you to read your work as “stale and tacky,” “awkward and grating” as you write it. I mean, maybe it is. Who knows? But who cares?

Write for the love of the writing. You can write standing on your head backward with the wrong hand, if you like, and so long as you’re enjoying it, nobody gets to say you’re doing it wrong.

In Dodie Smith’s lovely 1930s novel I Capture the Castle the brilliant-author father has been suffering a dry spell for ten years when his children finally lock him in the castle tower with a cot, some food, and a typewriter and refuse to let him out until he types something. He types pages and pages of, “The cat sat on the mat.” Weeks on end: “The cat sat on the mat. The cat sat on the mat. That cat sat on the mat.” Eventually this evolves into a novel exploring the acquisition of language by a young child. From that simple beginning.

Keep writing whatever you feel like writing. Let it be terrible and don’t worry about judging it. Just write it if it feels like being written.

Avoid trying to ’say something.’ Focus on recording tangible details. Flannery O’Connor described writing as recording whatever stimulus you receive through your five senses. Go ahead and record that—in long, excruciating detail. Everything. Unedited. The more stuff you write that you know you’ll never use in a publishable piece, the greater your freedom will grow. You can write anything! Garbage! Tripe! Vomitous spew! You betcha! And all great writing grows out of that freedom.

You’ll never run out of material to describe in your immediate daily experience. You’ll never run out of dialog to record that you and your friends and family say all day long every day. Keep a detailed journal. It counts!

Read books you love. Don’t try to mimic them. Just read them, enjoy them, use as they are meant to be used—for the sheer pleasure of reading. When you don’t feel like writing, don’t. Go out in the world and have adventures. You’ll write about those whenever you’re in the mood.

You’re very young still—you’ll go through a lot of ups & downs as you work your way through life with this craft at your side. So don’t worry about it, just claim it in your own unique, individual, quirky-&-boring, tacky-&-refreshing, cliche-ridden-&-special way. Sometimes more quirky—sometimes more boring. It’s okay! Let it be that part of your life where you get to screw up as badly as you darn well please, and nobody can stop you.

Your skills will improve. By osmosis, if necessary. And then when you’re an old, crusty, opinionated professional like me. . .they will still be there for you.

Your writing belongs to you. Nobody else.

Also see: 2 Tricks for Breaking Writer’s Block in One Day.

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I would like to write in Historical, Fantasy, and general Fiction genre. I am currently researching about the Tudor period for a novel I would someday like to write. Also I am considering graduate schools. Do you have any advice on good programs for my interested genres?—Melanie Lambrecht

Ask your BA professors first. They know more about who’s working in academia and where than anyone outside that sphere.

Grad school is a place to hone your understanding of your chosen field. So who do you want supervising you? The people in your field you admire! Lots (and lots and lots) of publishing authors these days teach grad school. Research your favorite authors and find out if and where they teach.

Personally I’d love to take classes from Elizabeth Tallent, who is now teaching at Stanford—I’ve been reading her since the 1980s.

Grad school is also where lots (and lots and lots) of aspiring writers make useful contacts with professional authors who can help them break into the field. So once you get there be aware: you’re there for the sake of your career, not as an extension of dorm life. Work really hard. Do whatever you have to do to become really good at this craft. Successful authors who teach can’t possibly give a leg up to every single student they see in their classes, so they watch only for the ones who look like they’re going to make it even without help. Those are the students with the commitment and skills to make an inch of assistance go a mile. And being able to give each one of them an inch gets a lot of talent a whole lot of miles without burning out the teacher.

Don’t get caught up in the competition to be Teacher’s Pet, just do your work and prove it: you’re worth paying attention to.

Can you succeed as a writer without grad school? Absolutely. I don’t have an advanced degree. Hasn’t stopped me from teaching myself more about the craft of fiction than almost anyone I know and developing a thriving business as a high-level indie editor based on that knowledge. All it means is that I can’t teach at an accredited college, so some of the smaller, less visible writers conferences won’t invite me to teach workshops. Bummer for them—those folks won’t even invite critically-acclaimed authors who’ve been nominated for PEN awards and the Pulitzer Prize. (Seriously. Then they complain about the trouble they have attracting enough writers to make their bills every year.)

Proving your commitment and skills, being respectful of others’ gifts of their time and attention, taking the limitations of certain aspects of the industry in stride—this is how you’re going to have to behave to succeed in the world of publishing, anyway.

You might as well get started now.

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I have reached a sort of writers block where I want to write, but when I get to the paper nothing comes out. I feel like I’ve lost the inspiration I used to have. Any tips on what to do?—Melanie Lambrecht

Yes.

Get up.

Go outside.

You have nothing to write about because you’ve run out of experiences that stimulate your imagination. This happens to aspiring writers a whole lot more these days than it did in the old days before the Internet came along. I mean, what are they going to write about? Sitting on the computer all day? Reading random blogs that they forget two seconds later? Tweeting about having nothing to write about?

You’ve lost your connection to the physical world from which all storytelling comes. You’ve run out of the wonderful, real details of your senses that make up three-dimensional scenes, which are what fiction is.

So turn off the computer and go spend some good, rich, complex time out in the real world being alive. Wander the streets and neighborhoods. Wade through the fields and creeks. Put on your mudstompers and walk in the mud. Go downtown and watch people, ride a bus and eavesdrop, hang out in coffee shops and cafes doodling, sit on a park bench and breathe in the summer. This is the only summer of 2011 you’re ever going to get.

Buy a notepad and cheap, useful pen (I like black Pilots) and record life as it goes on around you (leave the computer at home!)—everything you see and hear and taste and feel and smell. It’s a vast, vast world. You’ve got five senses. Use them.

Far too much is made these days of the writing. But what are you going to write if you don’t have a life to write about? Or if you don’t have time to pay attention to that life as you live it? If you’re constantly being pressured to make wordcounts, to write stories, novels, only things you can sell?

Forget all that stuff—you’ll have plenty of time to turn material into stories once you’ve practiced until you’re an expert at finding and appreciating and recording material.

Go pay attention. To this moment. And the next, and the next, and the next.

In great, fabulous, meticulous detail—write that.

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Hi Victoria,
I’ve been stumbling across your blog many times and many of your articles are are marked as favorite under my Stumbleupon account. I have nursed my passion for writing since high school and I now will be entering my Junior year of college. I would like to write in Historical, Fantasy, and general Fiction genre. I am currently researching about the Tudor period for a novel I would someday like to write. I was wondering if you have suggestions on ways to manage research and maintaining historical accuracy.–Melanie Lambrecht

Why, thank you, Melanie. How kind. I know I get the majority of my visitors from Stumbleupon, but I never know who’s sticking around and who’s just passing through.

Yes, your research must be meticulous in this day and age, as so many professionals are writing about their specialties and the availability of information is simply staggering. Your competition is fierce—your research has got to be as good as (or better than!) theirs.

So I’m going to do something a little different with this question: I’m going to refer you to a book. Roz Morris has written and self-published a small book called Nail Your Novel in which she teaches all about handling research. Roz has ghost-written eleven books for which she needed to do a tremendous amount of research, and her book is based on how she handled it.

I’m guessing she did it right, too, because eight of those eleven books became best sellers.

I know she’s in the middle of revamping it—altering the interior design and (I think) even re-doing the cover—but it’s the same information, whether you get the original or revamped edition.

I use her advice. Everyone should.

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Victoria, You have changed my whole outlook on what good writing is and is not. Thanks.

I am from the South. Texas to be exact. I am writing a story about the South. The hill country of Tennessee to be exact. I am confused about whether to use or not use contractions, local idioms, expressions, and other regional influences in my writing. I have read conflicting opinions about these matters. We in the South use very colorful and often specific expressions, many of which are cliches. I understand cliches being a problem and that fresh expressions make for fresh writing. So, how should I handle this problem? Thanks and keep it out of the ditch!—Jocko

Ah, you’re talking about the difference between narrative voice and dialog. One is the author speaking, and the other is the characters speaking.

The trick to showcasing dialect is to make it the smallest percentage of your writing possible, casting the rest of your writing in standard English. Because dialect requires effort on the part of the reader, it is most attractive to the reader for whom that effort is the least i.e. readers from the writer’s native area. However, this eliminates a huge percentage of your potential readership. So you appeal to that huge percentage by casting the majority of your work in English we have all agreed to understand the same way, by virtue of dictionaries and school. Keep alternate pronunciation of words to a minimum to give them the greatest impact.

On the other side of the coin, because regional influences are surprising and unique and often intensely vivid, they create a wonderful opportunity for the writer to flesh out their story in a three-dimensional world. So they’re a goldmine—particularly if this is regional influence bred into your bones, so just the right snappy turn of phrase tends to surface at just the right moment from your decades-old subconscious. Put that in your characters’ voices. Showcase it with Standard English in your narrative.

I have a whole chapter on this in The Art & Craft of Fiction. The short version is: lean on your idiomatic language and expressions, your regional cliches that are not cliche elsewhere, and try not to draw attention to yourself with fancy dialectic punctuation and spelling.

In particular, if you’re a Southerner, read Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty to learn how to do it right. Those two were masters.

(My Gampie was from Fort Davis in the Fort Davis Mountains. Although he moved to Southern California as a young man, he never lost his twang.)

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A very well-read friend of mine, who is not a writer, keeps giving me the sage advice of write what I know. I’ve tried that. I don’t like it. I much prefer to let my somewhat askew of center brain go to places of imagination which I have never experienced or seen. Am I crazy or what?
—Jocko

Well, Jocko, yes, you probably are crazy. Welcome to the club.

You know this is actually a really important issue for writers. I talk about it a bit in The Art & Craft of Fiction. It’s true, the advice to ‘write what you know’ truly is sage advice but highly misunderstood.

The rationale for writing what you know lies in authenticity. All fiction hinges on authenticity—the details of your characters’ world, the way they speak, the way they move, the logic of how their mistakes blow up into ever-bigger and -bigger mistakes until their lives come crashing down upon their heads.

Now, if you write realistic stories about characters who live lives quite similar to yours, then you don’t have to waste a lot of time on research. All you have to do is carry a notebook around with you as you go bumbling about your daily business and take notes on it: describe what it looks like where you eat your meals, describe what it looks like where you work, describe your favorite bars and hang-outs, describe your home and friends’ and family’s homes. Study the ways in which you and the people you know speak and express yourselves, your gestures and expressions and mannerisms, your body language, your noises, your subtleties, your silences. Study the cause-&-effect of how events in your lives play out. Study it carefully.

However, if you write fantasy or sci-fi or mystery or horror or some permutation of those umbrella genres, you’ve put yourself in a position in which you can’t do your research the lazy way, just by being you. You have to spend a lot of time—a whole darn lot of time—getting to know your characters’ world. It’s not right there in front of your face. You have to seek it out.

If you’re writing sci-fi you need to study the science upon which your characters’ world is based, and you need to study the logic by which reasonable extrapolations might be made that would result in the events you want to explore. If you’re writing mystery or horror you need to study the craft of mystery or horror so you know how to lay clues and interweave red herrings, build tension through verbal techniques and understanding of human psychology, in order to give your readers the thrill for which they read. And if you’re writing any type of fantasy—just making it all up yourself—you need to do an astronomical amount of world-building, ala J.R.R. Tolkien. All that iceberg, as Hemingway said, holding your story up and giving it its dignity.

This is a ton of work. And it takes a seriously long time.

So mentors and teachers often advise aspiring writers—whom they suspect of being in a bit of a hurry and unaware of the extraordinary amount of time it takes to learn to write well and then do it for each and every novel, much less spend all that time inventing entire worlds—to stick with the easy path and fill their writing with whatever they can easily observe.

However, on the other side of the coin lies the fuel of all great fiction, which is the writer’s own unique, quirky, unreproduceable take on how all those details interact with each other and create layers of meaning above and beyond the dry facts. And that’s what’s happening to you when you long to let your “somewhat askew of center brain go to places of imagination.”

Go there! That’s the fun of writing fiction.

But no matter what stories you choose to tell, if you want them to be any good or to matter in any way to your reader—you still have to write what you know.

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I struggle with critiquers having a mind set of ‘just the facts’ style of writing, paring the story down to the bare bones, but maybe that’s not the writer’s ‘true style’ and the critters can’t see that, so even when the mss. is whittled down to its essence, there still seems to be something missing–it lacks life, character, voice, whatever you want to call it. Especially troubling to new writers who haven’t found their voice yet. My sense is that it takes that proverbial ‘million words’ to even begin to find one’s voice. If that’s true, I’m not even a fifth of the way home …so back to work. —Chris

It sounds like you’ve got two problems going on at once, Chris.

One is that peer critiquers can’t really guide you in learning your craft. They don’t know any more about it than you do. So you really, seriously need to take their advice with a grain of salt. Half of it will be good, and half will be bad, and until you’re more accomplished than they are you can’t tell which is which. They more or less cancel each other out.

The advice to write in scenes rather than exposition is good advice, and there are important reasons for it. If there’s something missing when you whittle your ms down to its scenes, write more vivid scenes. Think up more intense events for those scenes—not violence, but internal struggle. And keep in mind that if you haven’t yet learned to detach from your work, you’ll assume just because your early drafts came out of you in one form that means they can’t live in any other form. They can, and they will.

Exposition is a tool in the writer’s toolbox, but it’s a tricky and, actually, not essential one. You need to get really good at writing scenes before you try to get really good with exposition. The one leads to the other.

The other problem is that it sounds like you’re struggling with voice and prose pretty early in the game. Don’t worry about it in first drafts or even at this stage in your writing life. Just write clean, clear sentences full of detail recording what you see your characters doing. Go out and take notes on the real world to practice seeing the details that are there. Go home and pay attention to your characters—make lists, draw diagrams, doodle their names all over your margins.

But don’t pressure yourself to develop a voice. As Christopher Isherwood said, just be a camera. All else flows from there.

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