Writing 101: How To Make Readers Visualize

Break it down to the basics, and writing is simply this: painting a picture with words. You have to use 26 letters, repeated in millions of different patterns, to make someone else picture exactly what you want them to see. That makes you a little bit insane, really. You've set yourself to an extremely ambitious and difficult task. But if you break it down to basics, there are a few tricks you can master to make painting with that word brush a little bit easier. 

Do You See What I See?

Picture me standing next to a tree. You're going to come up with an image of me, and an image of a tree, based upon your own experiences. If you're from the Pacific Northwest, you might be seeing a towering redwood in your mind's eye. Someone from the southern US may conjure up an image of a drooping weeping willow, or a fragrant magnolia. 

So maybe I ought to tell you to picture me standing next to an elm tree. If you've never seen an elm, you aren't going to be able to draw a clear image. So now I've got to tell you the elm is tall and slender, with a straight trunk covered in grayish bark. 

Is that picture getting a bit more clear? That's the first thing to remember: if you're going to draw a picture, draw a complete one. Give me enough details, as a reader, to fill in the details. The more clearly I can see that picture, the more deeply I'm involved with your story. 

• Make comparisons: Give readers a frame of reference when needed. Lot of people have never seen caviar, an expensive delicacy. So tell people it looks like shiny little black marbles, only about one-tenth the size. Most people have seen marbles. 
• Add color: Don't ever forget to include colors. Tell people to envision a girl and they will. Tell people to envision a girl with flaming red hair, and now you're in control of the scene.
• Include background: I can picture a red-haired girl floating in a white space, but it's going to feel much more real if you tell me to see her in a wide, flat meadow filled with small, white flowers. Include background, and paint a clearer picture.

Make your reader visualize, and you'll make them like your writing much more. Authors have to paint with words -- a monumental feat, to be sure, but not an impossible one.

Writing 101: Stop Being Humble

When you're an indie author, you have to be your own publisher, literary agent and biggest fan. In other words, stop being humble. You are an amazing writer and anyone who isn't reading your book is totally missing out. Remember that. Write it down if needed. Keep it close by...and when all else fails, just pretend. Because if you're going to promote yourself, you have to be capable of selling yourself. 

Buy Me

You don't have to convince readers to buy your books, whatever they're about. You have to convince readers to buy you as an author. That's the real secret to selling books. So first things first: convince yourself that you are awesome. If you can't do that, you certainly can't convince anybody else. 

Fooling yourself is an important part of being an indie author. But there's no reason to be ridiculous about it. Read and re-read your book. Check it, double check it, triple check it for errors. Make sure there are no plot holes or glaring grammar mistakes, no crazy punctuation and no excessive junk you don't really need. Once you feel comfortable that you have done the best you possibly can, there's no reason not to get out there and start marketing yourself and your work with absolutely everything you've got.

Now's the time to drop all pretense of being humble. Tell everyone about your book, and that it's great. Write down a few short, concise sentences that sum up what your book is all about. Repeat them, memorize them, and use them when people ask (and even if they don't).

Tweet about your book...every single day. Write Facebook updates about it. Blog about it. Guest blog about it. Look for book review sites, and sell it to them -- at least once a week. Post excerpts of it. Find Goodreads forums where you're allowed to talk about it. Give the damn thing away, always reminding everyone how fabulous it is. Once you get some reviews, make a list of all the good quotes and share them all over the place -- with a link back to the book, of course.

And meanwhile, conduct yourself like a professional author. You are always selling yourself as an author with everything you put out there, and you should always be in a mindset that you are an amazing one.

Writing 101: Don't Describe Too Much

I'm not too sure how it happened, but I started reading one of my really old books the other day. Predictably, I was quite appalled by what I saw. One of the many things I've learned is this: every single thing does not need to be described.

Adding Adjectives

What does that mean? Aren't writers supposed to be descriptive, paint pictures, put their readers in the middle of the action? Yes, to all of it. But there is such as thing as too many descriptive words. Let me give you an example of the type of stuff I've been reading in the past week: 

"It looks like rain," she said quickly, glancing to her left at Lola. 

Lola hurriedly rushed to the window, peeling back one side of the drapes to press her nose close to the glass. "It does!" She cried excitedly, turning to look over her shoulder at Dev. "It really does!" She added with a big smile. 

Bad, right? Felt like it was sort of dragging you along, didn't it? Let's eliminate some of those unnecessary descriptive words and see what happens: 

"It looks like rain," she said, glancing at Lola. 

Lola rushed to the window, peeling back one side of the drapes to press her nose close to the glass. "It does!" She cried, turning to look at Dev. "It really does!" She added with a big smile. 

When you use too many descriptive words, you may sometimes unintentionally repeat yourself. Excessive words also make the text feel clunky. In the example above, hurriedly rushed, for instance, is redundant. Clearly she's hurrying if she's rushing, so you don't need that descriptor.

Read your words more carefully, and remember that more isn't always more. Eliminate what you don't need to make your work more streamlined and easier to read. You want the writing to flow, and readers to turn the pages quickly because they're captivated by the story. It's impossible to be captivated if you've got too many words getting in the way.

Writing 101: Targeting Your Marketing

They say that being successful as an indie author requires spending a lot more time on promotion than on actual writing. But if you're just throwing stuff out there at random, you're not doing a whole lot of good. First, you've got to figure out where your target audience is. Then, you've got to actually target them. 

Ready, Aim, Fire

It's a lot like playing basketball. If you close your eyes and start chucking balls in the general direction of the basket, sure a few of them will go in. But if you open your eyes and actually aim at the center of the target, it's likely that you'll land even more of them. Targeted marketing just makes sense, and it will save you time that you can spend on actual writing.

• Define your age group. The first step in targeted marketing is defining the age group that would be most interested in your books. This is really easy for some genres, like children's and YA. You already know who you're writing for. When you write other types of books, however, it gets tricky. Romance novels can appeal to people of all ages, but women in their thirties and forties buy the bulk of romance novels. Scifi novels are largely read by people in their teens, twenties and thirties. Look at demographics and data specific to your genre, and get a better idea about who's most likely to purchase your books. 
• Define your gender. Both men and women read books, but they're largely drawn to different genres. Women overwhelmingly buy romance novels, as compared to men, for example. When you start thinking about gender, you can start getting really specific and figure out that teenaged girls are likely to be the most interested in your YA paranormal romance, for instance.
• Find your market. So now you know more about who your audience is. The next big step in targeting your marketing? Finding them. Where are these people? If you're spitting a bunch of links out on Twitter all day and your books are most appealing to college-educated divorcees, you're wasting a ton of time because Twitter is largely populated by teens and twenty-somethings. Facebook is more appropriate if you're looking for people who are a little bit older. Look up information about your target demographic. Find out which websites they like, what activities interest them and what sort of blogs they read. Once you figure this out, you'll know where to spend the bulk of your promotional efforts. 

Targeting your marketing is the best way to connect directly with your audience. Focus your promotional efforts, and you'll see much bigger results from your hard work.

Writing 101: When Fiction Writers Use Brackets

The Internet has totally blurred, if not altogether obliterated, the lines of good punctuation. Now, people are using punctuation to make little faces at the end of the sentences. This is not the use for which punctuation was originally intended, and it's darn confusing. Maybe that's why it's so difficult to know when to use brackets in fiction writing. It's almost never okay for authors to do so...even when you're writing about what happens on the Internet. 

Thou Shalt Not Use Brackets

Brackets are not a parenthesis...they're the more twisted cousin. While parentheses have gently curving lines, brackets have hard edges. That's to remind you that they're used only in the most extreme of circumstances. In fiction, they're used almost ever.

In other types of writing, brackets can be used for a handful of different reasons. 

• Math: In some complicated mathematical problems, brackets are used to show specific number groups or functions or what-have-you.
• HTML: Look at an HTML how-to anything online, and you're likely to see brackets. They're commonly used to show how the code is written.
• Quotations: Brackets are found in online articles and other pieces that contain quotes. When a word needs to be added or a pronoun needs to be changed to a proper noun, the word is put inside brackets.
• Direct address: The direct address is the only time you're likely to see brackets in fiction writing. As the name would suggest, this is when the author directly addresses the reader with the words inside the brackets. This by no means requires that you have an entire conversation with the reader. It's usually one to three words at most. It's always done to clarify or emphasize. Example: "Bob and Hugo stared on in shock. He [Hugo] decided to open the umbrella."

Fiction writing doesn't necessarily need brackets, because there are much better ways to clarify what you mean. Using them can help streamline and save time where otherwise a long explanation may be required. Brackets definitely have their place, but like any good punctuation they have to be used sparingly and correctly. Use too many, and it will just become disruptive.

Turning Pages in the Tower

"Really sucks you in and keeps you turning the pages as more and more twists arise."

"Such a great follow up to the first book in the series!"

Eastern Sunset Reads recently reviewed The Tower (Deck of Lies, #2). Read the whole thing to find out what the reviewer liked (and didn't like) about the book.

Writing 101: The Red Herring

Pick out the criminal in this lineup:

Which one do you think is the guilty party? Maybe this long-haired guy in the center? How about this Amish-looking fellow in the end? Maybe the guy with the short hair is trying to fool everyone, and he's the real perpetrator. From where I'm sitting, they all look like wrongdoers to me. 

But I'm actually the one who's wrong. 

This is a photo of the Beatles, not potential criminals. But when you look at the picture the right way, they look like they're up to no good. This is how a red herring works. 

Gone Fishing

It's not a fish when it's used in fiction. In fiction, a red herring is a person who looks absolutely guilty. You know they're the one who committed the murder, or stole the painting, or cheated on so-and-so, or whatever. But what you don't know is that you're seeing the character through a distorted lens, and a clever author is actually fooling you into thinking that person is guilty.

They're totally innocent when they're a red herring - that's what it's designed to do. You're busy suspecting this person and the real killer (or whatever) is hiding right there in plain sight on the page, probably charming you. Probably wooing you. And perhaps making you their next victim (not literally...just literarily).

Red herrings are, most often, characters. Sometimes they're objects, however, such as an item that appears to be the murder weapon but something else is actually the murder weapon. Red herrings are most commonly used in mysteries in order to lead you away from the real killer, but they can be found in many different types of fiction. 

A really good red herring won't start to stink until the end of the book, when the real truth is revealed. In the best-case scenario, the distorted lens is swept away and the red herring can now be viewed clearly. That sinister maid with the ulterior motive becomes a hard-working single mother. The professor who knows perhaps a little too much is simply a well-read, socially awkward man with a secret crush on one of the other characters. You get the idea. The point is, readers shouldn't suspect that something is fishy...until you want them to. 

Start sprinkling red herrings into your books, and see if you can misdirect and divert your readers long enough to keep them guessing until the very last page.

Writing 101: The MacGuffin, Good or Bad?

Many advice-givers, like me, will tell writers that every single word you put on the page should drive the plot forward, or otherwise give the reader important information. But that's not entirely true. When it comes to the MacGuffin and writing...well, anything goes. 

The MacGuffin remains a very controversial plot device, and some writers hate it. So today we settle the argument: is the MacGuffin good or bad?

Good Enough for Me

At this point, you may be wondering what the heck a MacGuffin is, anyway. This is a plot device that moves the story and gets characters where they need to be, but actually has nothing to do with the eventual outcome. MacGuffins usually appear, serve their purpose and promptly fade away.

You see the MacGuffin more in movies than in books, but a plot device like this can always span mediums. One of the most famous storytellers of all time is notorious for using MacGuffins in his plots. Looking for a few good examples of this technique in action? Turn to Alfred Hitchcock. 

His movies are riddled with the MacGuffin, and once you start looking you'll find it everywhere. For instance in Psycho, the missing $40,000 gets Marion Crane in position but then becomes utterly meaningless. Hitch emphasized the uselessness of the money by letting Norman Bates sink it in the lake. By the time the end of the movie comes, no one cares about that money anymore. That's a MacGuffin.

And it's a plot device that has served many noble writers very well. Sometimes, characters need to be in a certain place or meet a certain person before the rest of the story can unfold. If you use a MacGuffin to put them in that place, is it really a big deal?

Some critics will say that it is, and there are some who are very much opposed to the use of a MacGuffin. But I say what was good enough for Hitch can work for anyone (and haven't film students been trying to copy his work for decades?). When a book is well-written, a MacGuffin (or several) really doesn't matter. Readers aren't going to care as long as the story is interesting and feels complete, but you don't want to throw too many useless distractions into any narrative because that just makes it feel cluttered. 

So is the MacGuffin good or bad? Like any plot device, it's both. In the hands of a master, like Hitchcock, it works perfectly to create an intricate story. In the wrong hands, it just feels like sloppy writing. Choose your MacGuffin wisely, write it believably, and you won't go wrong.