Writing Tips (Sometimes): The Highlights of Pantsing A Novel

You may remember, I wrote a book called How To Pants a Novel last year (this month is the one-year anniversary!). But I also wanted to write a letter with the highlights, in case you don’t have time to sit down and read a book about something you’re already doing (or you have no interest in doing).

The process for pantsing a novel is simple:

1. Sit down with your writing tools (computer, pen, dictation, whatever).

2. Find your glimmer.

3. Say what comes to mind.

4. Don’t stop, and don’t let the world or your imposter syndrome or your fears tell you what it should or shouldn’t be.

That’s it! Brilliant.

A little explication, in case you need more.

I feel like Step 1 is somewhat self-explanatory. However you write is how you write, and you need your basic tools to get started. Some people need a private office or to be in a coffee shop; others need a special candle burning or a cup of coffee. Whatever environment and tools ease your process, get them. And schedule time to write regularly. It doesn’t have to be every day, certainly. But if you teach your brain that you will let the ideas out, then when you sit down, the ideas will come that much more readily.

Step 2 is a little less self-explanatory. By “glimmer” I just mean some kind of starting point. This might be a completely blank page for some writers. It might be a single image for others. Or a single word. Or a scene. It might be a hazy flicker of an idea. Honestly, though I know people like to think of pantsing and outlining as separate things, it could be an outline. I’m not going to argue with your process, and I think pantsing and plotting are a lot more similar than people like to pretend.

Next, say what comes to mind. Or write it. Or dance it. Or act it out. Let the story come out, however that looks for you. For me, it’s like turning on a faucet. As long as I remain focused, the story just flows. I do want to add here that this is a practice thing. The more you practice letting the words out, the easier it gets. There will, of course, still be hiccups and blocks and clogs in the hose. But generally speaking, the more you do it, the easier it becomes. Five minutes or five hours, doesn’t matter. Just let the ideas out and write them out, whatever they are.

Finally, just keep at it. Don’t stop. I don’t mean you shouldn’t take breaks. Definitely take breaks. But keep coming back to that page. Let the ideas keep coming. You may need to reread some of what you wrote. You may need to go for a walk or take a class or talk to a friend. You may need to source ideas from real life or other books or wherever. That’s all part of the process too. Just remember to keep coming back to the page.

And that’s it! That’s the process of pantsing in a nutshell.

Now, all that said, I think there’s a lot more to it, which is why I wrote a book on it. The book goes a bit into some Internal Family Systems method of understanding the internal workings of why pantsing works the way it does for me. It might not work that way for other people, of course. But in a world where most books on writing, and craft courses and workshops emphasize outlining as the “right” or “better” way to draft a book, I really want to have more conversations about the how and why of pantsing. Not because I expect anyone to change or alter their process, but just in case they can find ways to make it better, faster, and more rewarding.

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Writing Tips (Sometimes): The Drawbacks of An Oversized Imagination

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Me & Blueberry just hanging

Throughout my life, ever since I was a small child, I’ve been accused of having an overactive imagination. I know, “accused” is a strong word, especially since some people said it affectionately, others said it laughingly, and most said it exasperatedly.

And the truth is, I’m not the only one! Most fiction writers have at very least active imaginations, if not overactive. And this active imagination is critical to a writer’s ability to do their job. Fiction writers invent new people, imagine strings of worst-case scenarios, and create entire worlds out of basically nothing.

But while this active imagination is useful to our craft, it can actually hold us back in other areas.

Such as in the process of developing a business around our writing. Or when we’re building a marketing plan. Or trying to make decisions about publishing and distribution.

Just because we can imagine a scenario, good or bad, doesn’t mean that it’s the right scenario to be basing our decisions on. I can imagine a full business structure with hired employees filling all kinds of roles from CEO right down to janitor. I can imagine renting or owning a building to conduct my business from, and rubbing elbows with the famous actors who are going to star in the TV shows based on my books. And I can see all kinds of tasks I could currently perform that would create a solid foundation for said business.

But should I be doing all those tasks? Or should I be writing more books?

One really common area I see this pitfall frequently is in discussions about readership.

Imagine an author who has one, maybe two or three books published. They have 200 followers on Facebook (mostly family and people they knew in high-school), 25 newsletter subscribers, 128 Instagram followers, and 7 BookBub followers (all other authors from an author Facebook group follow-a-thon). In total and assuming no overlap, 360 people who have chosen to engage with their brand for some reason or another, and maybe 15% of them are strangers to the author (or possibly bots).

Then, this author has a new idea for a new book. It’s different from their first, second, and third books. A different tone, a different genre, different themes. And they are terrified that writing and publishing it will “upset readers.”

What readers, might I ask?

There is endless conversation in the writing community about “what readers want.”

What do readers want in your newsletter? What do readers want you to write and publish? What do readers want you to post on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter? What do readers want your brand to look like? What covers do readers want? Will this ending piss off my readers? What if I kill off this character? What if… what if… what if… But what about the readers?

And most of the time, these questions come from authors who have no readers. Or who have very few, at best.

Sometimes it feels like collectively, we have created an imaginary monster that haunts our writing, our branding, our business—the looming colossus, the invisible watching eyes, the sinister and pernicious Dastardly Reader, who has the power to destroy our careers with a sneer and a bad review. They peer over our shoulders and growl at cliffhanger endings, hiss at overused tropes, and spit acid whenever we dare do something (can I even say it aloud?!) out-of-the-box. And if you dare publish a work with anything the Dastardly Reader dislikes, they’ll sweep in and burn everything to the ground with one fiery breath.

Well, I have good news for you.

The Dastardly Reader is naught but a figment of our collective oversized imagination.

This is not to say that we all should completely ignore what our readers feel, think, and want (although, I do think this is still a perfectly valid creative strategy for some authors). Rather, that the key word here is our readers.

Every author has a unique audience; yes, even authors who write to market. You may have some crossover with other authors, sure. But your audience is yours and yours alone. So, what your audience wants may be different than what another author’s audience wants.

For example, if you see a newsletter guru in the author community recommend writing short emails, and then proceed to write excruciatingly long emails for their own audience—this is because they’re giving you general advice, but then applying specific, strategic choices to their own business, based on their own audience.

There are lots of strategies out there for figuring out what your reader wants: sending out surveys, creating reader groups and letting them talk to you, inviting them to email you, reading reviews (proceed with caution!). But I think the most frustrating time for an author is right at the beginning, when you have no readers. No one participates in your reader group. No one responds to your emails. And you can’t even get reviews in the first place.

So how, then, are you supposed to make decisions about what your readers want, if you don’t have any readers to ask?

Beware: this is the exact moment the Dastardly Reader likes to show up and start poking and prodding at you. So make sure you acknowledge it for what it is: imaginary.

My advice would instead be this: do what you want.

Do you want to play around with that overused trope? Do it. Do you want to leave some kind of potentially-obnoxious cliffhanger ending? Do it. Do you want to have a messy and chaotic social media presence? Do it. Do you want to send out really long (or really short) emails? Do it.

The thing that makes your brand unique is you. The thing that makes your audience unique… is also you.

You can always follow someone else’s template for a business model if you want. You can always change your approach. You can always grow, learn, and refine your tactics and methods.

But I honestly believe that there’s no time better than at the beginning to focus on figuring out what you want in your books and your business. When there aren’t any real eyes watching your every move, when you have no obligations to anyone, and when you don’t have an audience to “disappoint.”

Explore, experiment, evaluate—and don’t let that Dastardly Reader get in your head.

Blueberry’s favorite sleeping spot: the stairs. No, it doesn’t look comfortable to me either lol

Writing Tips (Sometimes): Repetition, Repetition, Sweet, Sweet Repetition

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Me and Josh, one year ago, at a wedding!

Have you ever heard the term, “epizeuxis”? I first heard the word reading Mark Forsythe’s book Elements of Eloquence, which, if you’re a word nerd like me, I highly recommend reading.

Epizeuxis is a form of repetition, in which a word or phrase is repeated exactly and immediately. You may recognize, “Tiger, tiger burning bright.” That is epizeuxis. Or “Never, never, never, never, never,” from King Lear. It doesn’t have to be a single word only, however. “The horror, the horror,” from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is also epizeuxis.

Another example, and one of my favorites, is from N.K. Jemison’s book, The Fifth Season. It says:

“But this is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
For the last time.”

If you haven’t heard of epizeuxis, though I imagine you’re familiar enough with the technique, perhaps you’ve heard of diacope. Diacope is another form of repetition; Mark Forsythe calls it a “verbal sandwich,” and the most famous example of it is, “Bond, James Bond.” Or perhaps you’re familiar with this one: “Oh Captain, my Captain.”

Similarly to epizeuxis, diacope can be a repetition of a phrase, not simply a single word. “They told me, Heraclitus, they told me” is also diacope (William Cory).

There are a couple different types of diacope besides this one: the elaborative diacope and the extended diacope. The elaborative diacope includes some kind of adjective or adverb that makes the second repetition changed in some way. If diacope is a sandwich, an elaborative diacope has mayonnaise on one slice of bread.

The most famous example of this is from “America the Beautiful” by Katharine Lee Bates: “Sea to shining sea.” The word “shining” changes the second “sea,” just a tiny bit. It’s the mayo.

An extended diacope is simply a longer one with more words in the sandwich. I like to think of it as a towering hamburger with every topping you can imagine—lettuce, tomato, onion, you name it. Take this example: “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo!” or, from our collectively favorite musical, “Alexander Hamilton, my name is Alexander Hamilton.”

And what happens when you add epizeuxis and diacope together?

You get lines like, “Repetition, repetition, sweet, sweet repetition.” Or “Alone, alone, all all alone/ Alone on a wide wide sea,” which is from “The Ryme of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

I’ve been exploring techniques like this more often lately. In my experience, they’re not often discussed in the general writing community. You see a lot of comments like, “Don’t use adverbs!” but not a lot comments like, “I included epizeuxis in my most recent WIP and loved it!”

The main criticism of using tools like this, because of course somebody is adamantly opposed to it, is that it creates “purple prose,” which according to Wikipedia is: “overly ornate prose that may disrupt a narrative flow by drawing undesirable attention to its own extravagant style of writing.” (Oct 2022)

The great thing about this definition is that it’s entirely subjective! Whether or not “overly ornate prose” may or may not “disrupt a narrative flow by drawing undesirable attention” to itself is completely, utterly, one-hundred percent subjective.

I personally find that language in prose that’s too simple and plain draws unnecessary attention to itself (I say in a very snobby way lol) just as much as overly elaborate language can. And sometimes, I like it anyway.

What we like is personal, and it’s nobody else’s right to tell us the kinds of tools and techniques we should or shouldn’t use in our writing.

For me, the most important question is: what are these types of tools good for? Certainly, they create emphasis. Impact.

And there’s the answer. Use them when you want to create emphasis. Impact.

Use them to add weight to a moment.

Epizeuxis and diacope are like neon signs that say, “Dear reader, pay attention to this moment.”

So, if you want the reader to pause for a moment in a scene or on a phrase, just repeat, repeat, repeat—the key is to repeat.

Awwww look at my sweet potato taking a nap in the sun.

Writing Tips (Sometimes): Calling Bullshit On The Rules of Writing

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Another throwback this month: this is me and my little brother, Evan. He’s a music producer now; doesn’t look like this anymore lol.

I recently heard someone say, “I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions.” To be clear, it was Stephen King who said that, and he wrote it in his book On Writing, which you may have heard effusively recommended to you like it’s the modern-day writing Bible.

If you haven’t figured this out yet, I have a lot of opinions, and my opinion on this particular quote is very strong. Which is that in this particular instance, Stephen King is full of shit.

Now, because I’m a writer and a lover of nuance, I’m going to give our esteemed horror writer a break here. He continues on to say in On Writing that he does use the occasional adverb in his own work because they occasionally serve a useful purpose, but he thinks they should be avoided in most cases, and newer writers tend to use them as a crutch, which is actually what he suggests you refrain from doing.

All fair enough, I suppose. But this has not stopped the writing world from latching onto this piece of advice and shouting it from the rooftops on Mr. King’s behalf: in Facebook groups when an unwitting newbie asks oh-so-innocently, “I’m doing NaNoWrimo for the first time—what writing advice would you give me?” someone will inevitably yell, “Don’t use adverbs!”; or in a critique group, when a critiquer goes through and crosses out every single adverb; or when a new editor has made it their god-given responsibility to eliminate every use of an adverb from every manuscript that crosses their desk.

To be clear, I like dandelions and I try to spread them everywhere I go. They are good for the bees.

And if the road to hell is paved with adverbs, there’s probably good reason for it. Like the fact that hell is an extremely, terribly, ridiculously awful place to travel to.

Personally, I like adverbs. I think they are useful. And I plan on using them whenever I damn well please.

But “avoid adverbs at all costs” isn’t the only rule that is repeated incessantly within the author community. Many writers cite rules like, “show don’t tell,” “use an active voice,” “use simple vocabulary,” “keep sentences short,” “don’t use metaphors or cliches,” “write every day,” and the list goes on.

There are rules for writing, rules for publishing, rules for design, rules for distribution, rules for marketing, rules for running an author business, and rules for exactly how a writer should spend every minute of every day of their writing life. There are rules for how to interact with other authors and how to interact with readers, rules for how much your work should cost, rules for when to give something away for free, rules for how often to appear in public and exactly how you should look when you do so, and rules for what types of author photos you should use. Rules for how many people should read your work before you publish or submit, rules for the process you should follow going from rough draft to published work, and rules for exactly how many words should be in each chapter. And for how many chapters in each book. And for how much percentage of the book should be reserved for each part of the story.

(In fact, someone reading this right now probably thinks I used the word “rules” far too many times in the previous paragraph and will probably email me to say I should have written it differently.)

There’s a reason I titled this post “Calling Bullshit On The Rules of Writing.”

It’s because all the rules are bullshit.

Because I’m a lover of nuance, I will say that I think there is generally a grain of truth in most of the rules that get thrown around. There is usually a useful piece of advice to be found somewhere. Like in “Show don’t tell”—Yeah, in many cases, it makes more sense to add detail, action, description, and active voice to draw your reader into the story and create an emotional experience. But on the other hand, telling can also serve to help draw your reader into the story, by allowing the reader to have the information they need without boring them out of their minds in the meantime.

No reader needs to know every detail of how every character spends their time (ever heard of pacing? Or tension?) so sometimes saying something like, “The character was happy to skip going to the grocery store with their mom,” is a million times better than saying, “The character dashed outside to meet their friend, relishing in the sensation of happiness that flooded through them at the realization that they didn’t have to collect groceries with their mother that afternoon.” It depends on the voice, style, and tone of the piece, as well as the genre conventions and needs of the story.

The same is true of adverbs. Sometimes, it suits the story better to say, “She smiled gratefully,” as opposed to “She flashed him a grateful smile,” or “She squeezed the man’s hand, wishing she knew the perfect words to say to express the grateful feeling that filled her as a result of his kind actions.”

It depends on the story.

But my main beef with the rules of writing is not just that they lack nuance and don’t always apply.

Nope.

Mostly, I hate the rules of writing because they make it so easy to forget that writing is supposed to be fun.

Writing is art! Writing is play! Writing is an expression of emotion, an exploration of an idea, a journey, a progression, a sparkle of delight.

Writing is like cooking a bowl of soup or rolling through a field of dandelions or traversing that inexorable road to hell. It’s challenging and rewarding and terrible and exciting and beautiful. And fun.

So what if there are “too many” adverbs in a piece? What are the stakes?

Is someone going to terribly suffer from a dreadfully painful heart attack because I capriciously used one too many adverbs? Or perhaps the ghosts of Strunk & White will rise from the dead to murder me because I dared engage in the heinous crime of purple prose! Perhaps all of my ancestors will roll over in their graves from the agony of my tacky use of cliches! And if my metaphor usage is like driving a car without an engine, starting a fire with damp wood, or beating a dead horse with a stick… exactly what harm is that going to do?

There may be consequences, of course. An editor might not like it. A reader might not like it. Your mom might not like it. Your English teacher might not like it.

But the good news is that it’s your art. The only person whose opinion ultimately matters, is yours.

And if you need to make some adjustments during revisions to meet the needs of a client, a teacher, an editor, a publisher, or whomever, you can do that.

But in the meantime, just remember, the rules are bullshit and writing is fun.

Another throwback of me and a llama. My uncle dared me a $1 to kiss it, so I did lol, and he had to pay me a dollar.

Writing Tips (Sometimes): Shoving Your Reader Over A Cliff (Metaphorically Speaking!)

Let’s talk about cliffhangers! I already wrote about this on my blog a while back, if you want to check that out, but I wanted to take a few minutes to add to my thoughts on the topic. And if you want to get these delivered straight to your inbox, click here!

Cliffhangers are a hot topic in the writing and reading world, and what’s interesting, is that people tend to have extremely intense feelings about them. And usually, their feelings are “I hate this!”

But I recently encountered a book (Ledge, by Stacey McEwan) and all of her readers kept referring to this “crazy” cliffhanger at the end, but they loved it. They loved it so much they all rushed out to preorder the next book in the series. So being the curious type, I bought the book to find out what made this book so damn special, that it could have a cliffhanger that no one hated.

Imagine my surprise, when I found—it wasn’t a cliffhanger! At least, not in the way I personally understand cliffhangers.

This got me to thinking: people use the word “cliffhanger” in several different ways. And there’s not much nuance or consistency behind it. I personally don’t like certain types of cliffhangers, but the one at the end of Ledge is great, and does what the author intended—which is make you want to dive right into the second book of the series.

So I sat down and contemplated the various types of cliffhangers. What types of story elements might be called a “cliffhanger” and what is one supposed to do?

The dictionary was unhelpful in this matter, because all it suggested was that a cliffhanger is a suspenseful ending. And all things considered, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially when you’re writing a series.

But the nuance here for me, is that suspenseful is different than disappointing. I like to keep my readers in suspense if possible! But I don’t want to disappoint them.

So how? How do I create that end-of-story suspense without disappointing my reader? 

For me, the answer is in understanding the different types of “cliffhanger” endings, and how many readers feel about them.

Type 1: The Truncate

The first type of cliffhanger is what I think most people hate. This is when a story ends before the climax of the book, or before the main conflict of the book is resolved. The book that pops in mind for me was Cinder by Marissa Meyers. Now, plenty of people loved this book. It has a great premise, an interesting character, strong world building, and is a unique approach to a fairytale retelling.

But it ended very abruptly, in what felt like it was mid "dark night of the soul moment," without answering the main question of the book. Some readers dove right into Book 2 as a result; I opted not to, because I didn’t want to subject myself to the same disappointment multiple times in a row.

This is where true cliffhangers get tricky. Does it create the suspense you’re going for? Or is your reader going to get mad and put the series down, never to return?

Type 2: The Embankment

The second type of cliffhanger is an embankment. In this type of narrative, some kind of resolution is reached, but there is little to no falling action. We may find out what happened at the end of the book—the character arc may have been resolved, or the climactic moment solved—but the book ends immediately thereafter.

I’m going to use one of my own books as an example of this: City of Dod in the Land of Szornyek series. In this book, the characters get to the end of the story. They fight the big battle. They survive, more or less, at great cost to themselves. But then the book ends with the characters facing a journey. There is little to no falling action, no resolution of some of the subplot arcs—it’s just GIANT BATTLE… The End.

This type of cliffhanger can still be frustrating to some readers, especially those who like resolution to the subplot threads as well as the main plot in a single book. However, it can also be a good way to pull the reader into the next story.

Type 3: The Flabbergast

A flabbergast is exactly what it sounds like—“Well, I didn’t see that coming!”

The cliffhanger at the end of Ledge by Stacey McEwan, I think qualifies as a flabbergast. The book takes you through the climactic moment, and then even has some falling action as some of the other questions are resolved, and then something crazy happens right on the last page, during the resolution.

When this type of ending is combined with an embankment, it can create a double whammy for the reader, making it feel even more like a cliffhanger ending.

Hopefully, in most cases, these types of endings are both satisfying, and also create that kind of suspense that makes the reader want to run out and buy the next book in the series.

Type 4: Threads

Truthfully, I don’t think threads are really cliffhangers at all, but they are a way to create suspense that pulls the reader into the next book, so I’m including them.

Threads are when the author deliberately leaves questions unanswered at the end of a book. The characters will go through the climactic moment, have the classic falling action, denouement, and but still have some questions when all is said and done.

I think most readers can tell the difference between threads and cliffhangers, but there are some threads that are pretty big questions—especially series arc threads which leave huge questions hanging over the character’s heads.

There are different types of threads, but the thing they all have in common is that they start in one book, and end in a later one. The longer the series, the more threads there are likely to be.

Threads can be found in every genre, but are especially common in science fiction and fantasy. For examples of threads, check out a series like Millenium’s Rule by Trudy Canavan, or Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan.

Type 5: Fizzlers

Fizzlers are simply endings that suck. Endings that leave us disappointed and bitter and frustrated with the author at how the story played out.

The whole story was there—the beginning, middle, end; the conflict, falling action, resolution—but it just… fell flat.

Whether or not an ending sucks is a very personal and subjective question. But I think there is a subset of readers who will refer to shitty endings as “cliffhangers” even if they are nothing of the sort.

Fizzlers can look like a lot of things. They can have the resolution happening offstage, so you don’t see it. They can have unbalanced, disappointing rising action and climaxes—like when you’re playing a video game, do all the work to get to the final boss, only to kill the final boss in like five seconds. Sometimes, instead of making forward progress on solving their series arc problem, the characters go backwards. Sometimes a favorite character is killed off.

But the thing that remains constant is that the reader was disappointed.

Sometimes a story is just not what the reader hoped for. And that’s okay. Not every book is for every person.

Choosing To Use A Cliffhanger

There are lots of reasons why a writer might choose to use a cliffhanger at the end of their book (or at the end of a chapter or scene!). Perhaps it was just right for the story. Maybe they like cliffhangers. Maybe it’s to get the reader to pick up the next book. Maybe it’s common in the genre they’re writing in.

Despite the general rage toward cliffhangers, if you want to use one, feel free! They can be a useful tactic for creating suspense in your story.

But, I recommend knowing what type of cliffhanger you’re using, and understanding what impact it has on the narrative and the reader.

That way, when you shove your reader off the cliff, you can do so with confidence.