How to Deal with Criticism

For all American Idol Fans :)

We all get it: “Your story is pretty interesting, but I hate the ending.” Or, “Your characters don’t seem real. In fact, they’re quite cliché.” Or even, “I fell asleep in the first five pages.” As writers, criticism is a part of life. Let’s face it: not everyone is going to love your story. So what do you do? Here are a few suggestions on dealing with criticism.

1. Cry and eat chocolate (in moderation). 

• There’s nothing wrong with feeling bad about getting negative feedback—in fact, it’s perfectly normal. So don’t be afraid to be disappointed. One caution, though: don’t wallow in your misery. Have a cry, eat a bit of chocolate, then move on.

2. Talk to someone supportive, who can remind you what you loved about your story.

• Sometimes criticism can blind us to our story and make us think that the whole thing is rubbish or that we should scrap all of it. But remember, just because you received negative comments doesn’t mean the entire story is trash-worthy. So instead of throwing it out, talk to someone who likes your story and get your passion for the story back.

3. Distract your mind from your writing by doing something entirely different. 

• Paint a portrait of your puppy. Plant petunias. Practice piano. Bake scones (and send me some!). Learn to knit or crochet. Do something productive, but make sure it’s not related to your writing.

4. Don’t look at or think about the criticism for at least a few days to a week. 

• Give yourself time to sleep on the feedback. During that time, don’t go near your writing. Don’t read it, don’t edit it, and definitely don’t throw it away. Just let it hibernate for a week or so.

5. Use the criticism! 

• Once you’ve waited a few days and occupied your mind with other things, you’re ready to return to your story with fresh eyes. Read the criticism and see where it might be true. Then edit your story using the feedback. Make sure you keep a spare copy of the original version, in case you don’t care for something you’ve edited.

• Honestly, although it’s difficult to edit something that we’re in love with, this step is the most crucial for the growth and improvement of your story. For myself, I’ve found that when I accept feedback and radically alter something I’ve written, it always comes out much stronger. Sure, it’s tough hearing your work criticized as “vague” or “flowery” (I’ve gotten both), but by the end of the editing process, I hope that you will be able to see that the criticism really helped propel your writing to the next level.

The hardest type of criticism to deal with is outright rejection without any reasons being given. If you don’t have any comments to work with, then follow steps 1-3 and then try to analyze your story by looking for weak parts that might have led to the rejection.

Criticism is tough. Still, I’ve found that it’s one of the most helpful and necessary steps in any writing. I’ve even grown to enjoy it over the years. What about you—is there anything you like about criticism? How do you deal with rejection?

From the Pixar film "Ratatouille"

Market Research - What? How?

Market research means gathering information about a particular category of products—in our case, information about books in the genre that we want to publish. It’s scouting out the opposition, so to speak. Here are 3 suggested steps for conducting market research for your story. Pay close attention to the questions in step 3—they’re the meat of this post.

1. Identify the genre of your book.

• Are you writing young adult fantasy or thrillers? Mysteries or chick-flicks? Picture books or poetry? Dystopian? Scifi? Steampunk? Whatever it is that you write, try to identify its niche (or, in the case of a cross-genre book, identify the two or three closest genres).

2. Look at bestseller lists and select the top 5-10 most popular books in your genre.

• For this step, the more books you identify and the closer they are to your story the better. However, only pick as many books as you have time to read and study. Whether or not you’re planning to self-publish, be sure to gather a sample from the top self-published books in your genre.

3. Read the top books you picked and study them using the following questions.

• First, read them just for the entertainment value. Notice the places that make you laugh or pull on your emotional heartstrings. See if the ending satisfies you or leaves you hanging.

• Then, take a closer look at the components of the book: are the characters male or female? What’s their age group? Their profession? Their goals and dreams? What about the characters’ names—are they strange alien names with numbers, old-fashioned Dorothy and Maude, or something new and quirky?

• Next, what about the plot of the book—is it fast-paced or slow-moving? Does it end abruptly? Is the villain vanquished in the end, or does he/she survive to fight another day?

• What about the setting—where does the story take place? What details made the setting feel compelling or vivid to you? Was there a sense of being enveloped a new world?

• Take a look at the details of the formatting of the book: how long are the chapters, roughly? Are they specially formatted? What sort of titles do they have? Is the book divided into parts? What typeface does the book use? What colors are in the cover, and does it feature a person or art or computer-designed graphics?

• Is it part of a series or a stand-alone book? If it’s in a series, how many books are there in the series?

• In what media are the books available—libraries? Bookshops? Amazon.com? Smashwords/other online ebook stores? Were the majority traditionally published? For self-published books, how successful were they? If you have access to information on how these books were advertised, pay close attention to that and take notes.

You can also repeat steps 2-3 with books that weren’t in the bestseller category, this time asking “What prevented this book from being a bestseller?” and “What did these books do that the bestsellers didn’t, and vice versa?”

One last caveat: your goal for your writing might not be to write and publish an incredibly popular bestselling book. In that case, you’ll need to re-define “success”: does it mean being a bestselling author? Does it mean being less popular but receiving rave reviews from everyone who reads your book? Once you’ve set your goals, look for books that have achieved what you want to achieve (preferably in your genre). Then, using those books, ask the questions in step 3.

Now for you: have you done market research before? Any interesting results? Any tips or advice for those just starting out?

Costs & Benefits of Self-Publishing

At one point or another, most of us will face the question that could determine the path of our writing career: “Should I try to publish traditionally or self-publish?” Right now, I’m debating about that question myself, so in today’s blog post I’ll consider the costs and benefits of self-publishing. Of course, every writer’s journey is different, and what works for some may not work for others. With that in mind, here we go.

Costs of Self-Publishing

• Lack of credibility. This is the single greatest drawback to self-publishing: when someone asks you, “So I hear you’re a published author?” you’ll have to reply, “Yes, I self-published.” And then you’ll hear the inevitable, “Oh. Then your book must not be that great.”

• Marketing yourself. While this is a drawback in that it takes more effort, energy, and boldness on your part, it also leaves room for a lot of freedom for you. You can market yourself however you want to. Additionally, keep in mind that most traditionally published authors are expected to market themselves to a great extent.

• Need for a certain amount of technical knowledge and connections to graphic designers, ebook formatters, etc. To be perfectly honest, self-publishing takes a bit of expertise—not that much, but a bit. I’d recommend finding a mentor who’s done it before to guide you through the process.

• Bearing the expenses yourself. It shouldn’t be that expensive—depending on whether you advertise at all and how much you pay for the graphic designer and other features—but you’ll still be paying out-of-pocket. And, sad to say, it might take a very long time before the profit accumulates enough to cover even a portion of your costs.

• Not as much editorial guidance. In traditional publishing, you’ll work with a professional editor to make sure your manuscript is truly the best it can be. With self-publishing, though, you need to find your own test-readers and line-editors and any other feedback that you need.

• No advance. I know most of us are not in it for the profit, but still…the thought of a nice tidy sum to reward all that hard work seems pretty beguiling. However, just to warn you, most advances for new authors are not that substantial anyway – especially when combined with positively feeble royalty rates (amounting to just a few percent per copy sold).

Benefits of Self-Publishing

• Control of elements like the cover, the title, the plot, the characters, the publication date, and so on. In fact, when you self-publish, you get to control absolutely everything. No more boring (or worse, completely mistaken) cover disasters here!

• A large percentage of the profit. Compared with miniscule royalty rates in traditional publishing, when you self-publish, you get most of the profit (even 80% or more).

• No waiting on others—the responsibility for progress is in your hands. This is both a scary thought and a motivating one. It's up to you.

• No need to wait for months or years of anxious querying to secure an agent and then have to face another round of months or years to secure a publisher.

• You can market your book however you want to, whenever you want to.

• Self-publishing is very flexible for length and genre of the book. If you have an out-of-the-box story that might not sell in traditional publishing, try self-publishing.

• All the rights. Forever. This includes the rights to sequels, to individual characters, and, yes, to movies.

Of course, there are many more considerations in self-publishing; this list is just the tip of the iceburg (to use a cliche). If you're interested in reading more on the subject, I found Aubrey Hanson's article about self-publishing very helpful.

What about you--what do you think are the greatest drawbacks and/or blessings of self-publishing?

All pictures courtesy of PublicDomainPictures.

It's All in the Details

The details you use in your story could be the most important part of your writing, because they are what brings your story alive to the reader. Without physical details, we wouldn’t know that Harry wears round spectacles or that Mr. Tumnus carries an umbrella.

To illustrate my point, let me show you a few examples. Which of the following makes the scene come to life in your mind’s eye?

A girl and a man walked down the street.

Or:

Two people walked down the sidewalk along Main Street: a little girl with serious brown bangs over her eyes and a middle-aged man, his charcoal suit hanging on him lopsidedly.

Or:

A 5-year-old girl wearing a floaty pink dress, her blue eyes wide, held her father’s hand as he led her down the cobblestone street of Paris, past Nicholas Flamel’s house.

In both of these latter versions, we can see the people and the place much more clearly. It would be even more clear if we could add another sentence describing the sensations of taste or sound or touch or smell that the two were feeling. In other words, the subtle placement of physical details in all five senses is the key to bringing your writing to life.

Easier said than done, right? Wrong! Here are some obvious places to inject more details into your writing:

1. In Names

We’ve been talking a lot about names the past few weeks (here, here, and here). Well, that’s because they’re so important—in real life, when we meet someone new, we typically learn their name. It should be the same in writing. Names are the one universal part of human experience. So use them!

2. In Character Descriptions

Introduce new characters by giving us more than just hair color/eye color. Sure, their physical appearance is important, but as someone once told me, “You don’t choose to be pretty. You’re born that way. It’s what you do with your looks that counts.”

So, in the same way, go beyond a character’s looks and focus on a key detail like a favorite concert t-shirt or the Beats headphones and pink iPod a character incessantly uses. Doing so makes that character come to life as a multidimensional person. For fantasy, use the wooden carved necklace a hunter never takes off or the moon-white earring of an assassin or the curved scars on a princess’ cheek. All of these little details can cut to the core of the personality of your character in seconds.

3. In Setting

Introduce each new setting using a minimum of two senses (usually sight would be essential). That means every time you have a new scene or your characters go to a new place or even enter a car, you should take a few seconds to describe the white leather lining of the seats, the peeling aqua paint, the smell of Chinese takeout lingering in the baby’s car seat. Let the place become real in your mind’s eye, then describe it so your readers can be engulfed by your story.

4. In Dialogue

Pepper your dialogue with gestures and descriptions. Make your characters interact with the setting: have your cleanliness-obsessed astronomer fiddle with her bottle of sanitation gel. Let your Rangers move around, checking that the horses are saddled properly, that the sentries are distracted.

Also, give your characters habitual gestures and hand motions to illustrate their speech—make your evil villain’s sidekick have a nervous habit of nodding, or maybe have your drama queen fiddle with her eyebrows when she’s nervous.

Whatever you do, add detail. Go back to each page of your writing and make sure you’ve added the necessary physical details so that, to your readers, your writing happens in a real place with real people. I guarantee you that you’ll learn a lot more about your story and your characters than you expect.

Can you think of any details you’ve read in stories lately that really stood out to you? Or what about in your own writing—written any cool details you’d like to share?

All photos courtesy of PublicDomainPictures.

End of Logline Book Giveaway

Thanks to everyone who participated in the giveaway of Jordan Smith's book Finding the Core of Your Story: The Quick and Easy Guide to Writing a Logline.

In my post, I asked you all to guess the length of my story's logline. Well, here it is:

"In the wake of Japan's 2011 tsunami, a teen girl from a broken family must survive and forgive."

That's a total of 18 words. Here's the three closest guessers:

GodsPianist at 20 words

Rosie at 15 words

Mark Coddington at 21 words

Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to everyone who entered! If you won, I'll be contacting you by email with the special code to redeem your book. For everyone else, go read it anyway!

How to Name your Characters

This baby is adorable! publicdomainpictures.net

“Mary—watch out! There’s a candy-spitting dragon coming in at twelve o’clock!”

“Aw, John, another dragon? Weren’t the fire-breathing-unicorns bad enough?”

That little snippet of dialogue could probably be turned into an interesting story—except for one major problem: the characters’ names. I mean, really, a fantasy story featuring dragon with main characters called Mary and John? That’s almost as bad as calling them Jane and Tarzan!

No doubt, as you’ve already learned from our little mini-series on names (see here and here), the names we bear and the names we give characters have extraordinary power. So as authors it’s important to focus on giving our characters the best names we can.

To do that, here’s a few tips.

1. Keep a name collection. 

• List all your old favorites, your fabulous invented names, those book characters that you can’t get out of your head—last names, first names, place names. List normal names like Jason but don’t be afraid to go wild with names like Leopold Vincent Williams III. Whatever you do, keep it so that you can have a handy reference for later use whenever you’re stuck and need a name in a hurry.

2. Think about the time and place of your story.

• If you’re writing historical fiction (or any story set in the past), be sure to research popular names at the time. Not taking the time to research a name can be disastrous: think, for example, of the Disney flop movie The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, where medieval characters had names like Veronica and Belthazar. No wonder no one liked the movie!

• If you’re writing fantasy, try to come up with different “sound systems” for each of your people groups. A sound system is basically a set of sounds used by that language, some similar to English, others different. Then select particular sounds out of the whole system to use for names. For example, maybe female names start with the sounds “Uu” or “Lo” whereas male names start with “Ma” or “Ki.” If you have multiple languages/people groups, make sure the names of each people group sound different enough to tell them apart.

• If you’re writing science fiction, the same tips apply as for fantasy, above. However, you may also want to consider names with symbols or numbers. Plus, if you’ve got aliens with different vocal organs from humans, you could try to come up with a way to represent those languages on paper. It’d be a challenge, certainly, but it could take your writing from forgettable to memorable.

• If you’re writing contemporary (on-earth-now) fiction, make sure the names are believable. If you still chose to use an outlandish name like “Dremnei,” have an explanation ready or else your readers won’t believe it. Also, be sure to consider the character’s ethnicity: you wouldn’t have a Japanese character named “Jane,” or an Indian character named “Will.” A great place to look for contemporary (modern) names is in movie credits, especially for the non-famous people like the crew members.

3. For unique names:

• Scramble the letters in a normal name to get a new name. For example, Ethan could become Tehan or Nateh or Ehnat or any number of other possibilities.

• Combine two common names into one. For example, Sarah and Janelle could combine to make a name like Saranelle or Janarah.

• Type a sentence, phrase, the lyrics of a song, or even a random string of words together without spaces. Look for possible combinations of letters to use as names. For example: asyoulikeit (as you like it) could be a name like Asy, Olik, or Keit.

• Use a common word and make it a name. Fiddle around with various spellings if you want to be a bit more subtle. For example, you could use the names Lavendyr, Thyme, Rust, or Rain for potentially strong, meaning-packed names.

4. Warnings

• Make the name pronounceable. When we read, we hear the words in our head, and every time we read a word we can’t pronounce, our mind slows down until it comes up with a pronunciation for the word. The harder a name is to pronounce, the more your reader has to slow down and the more distracted they can get from the story.

• Be aware of the associations with the names you chose. This is especially true if you use a famous name like Elvis. No matter how good your writing may be, it’ll be pretty hard to convince a reader to take a coldblooded assassin seriously if his name is Elvis. If you do use a famous name—the benefits being it could add great backstory to your characters—try to make it subtle. For example, instead of naming a character Audrey Hepburn, name her Audrey H. Lake.

• Be sure to consider what nickname(s) the name would give your character. People tend to use nicknames with people they know well, so using a nickname is a great writing strategy to add realism to your story. However, if your character’s name is “Imortelle,” she might be stuck with a nickname like “Tell” or even “Telly.”

• Think about the meaning of whatever name you choose. Sure, maybe the meaning won’t come up in the story, but it can add depth to a character nonetheless. Plus, you never know—the character’s name meaning might end up being an important factor in the story.

• Consider the sounds of the name: soft, gentle sounds like “f,” “b,” “sh,” or “l” might give a character a different feel than a name with hard, clipped sounds like “k,” “t,” “v,” or “r.”

• Don’t give multiple characters in your story similar-sounding names. For example, Billy and Bonnie will just confuse your readers. So will Jack and George and Jake and Jason. Make them distinct and memorable.

And that’s it—your simple guide for choosing the perfect name for your characters. Speaking of which, I think the names “Liddy” and “Dar” would be great for the fire-breathing-unicorn story.

Interview with J. Grace Pennington

Welcome, everyone, to the first interview on my blog. Today I’ll be interviewing J. Grace Pennington, a science fiction author who recently self-published her first book Firmament: Radialloy.

While our stories, styles of writing, and lives may be different, there’s always something to learn from others’ experiences. That’s why I asked Grace here today to answer a few questions from her perspective as a self-published author.

Grace, can you give us a thumbnail sketch of your story?

The year is 2320. Andi Lloyd is content with her life as the assistant to her adoptive father, a starship doctor, but her secure world turns upside down when she begins uncovering secrets from her past. When her father mysteriously starts losing his mind, she finds that she can no longer count on him to guide or help her. With mutiny breaking out on the ship, and two factions desperate for a valuable secret she holds, she must race to save her father and herself before time runs out.

Fascinating! I look forward to reading it.

What are some tips you have for writers?

Probably the biggest tips I have involve perseverance and hard work.  Somebody smart who invented the light bulb once said that "genius is about one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration", and that goes for writing, too.  Write when you're not inspired, write when you don't know what should go next, write when it's the last thing you want to be doing.  Writer's block actually doesn't exist.  When you feel "writer's block" strike, assess it.  Is it due to laziness, or a true lack of things to write?  If it's the former, press on bravely.  If the latter, work hard on planning what needs to be written.  But don't let yourself be conquered by a foe that doesn't exist!  Persevere.

Thanks for that encouragement, Grace.

What resources have been most helpful to you in your writing journey?

One of the most helpful things was the One Year Adventure Novel curriculum, which I went through with my sisters.  It taught me so much about story and how to make a story really work.  During high school I also did an online writing program called Write at Home for a few semesters, which was helpful in general writing skills.  But honestly, most of my help came from just reading, reading, reading, anything I could.  I noticed what was good and what was bad, and made mental notes with everything I read, to help me learn to tell good stories.

Sounds like good advice.

What made you want to self-publish? Do you have any advice for those trying to self-publish?

I've planned on self-publishing since I was about ten or eleven.  What always appealed to me most was the control that self-publishing allows.  The author gets to control the cover, the release date, how the book is marketed, everything.  The only downsides are that the author has to do all the work themselves, and that some people can be reluctant to buy a self-published book.  But in my opinion, the control is worth it.

I self-published through Amazon's CreateSpace, which is a very cost-effective way to do it.  They are a print-on-demand company, so you don't have to pay anything up front, and they automatically list your product on Amazon, so you don't have to worry about shipping or any of that.  Their books are good quality, too.  I'm planning on using them again in the future.

Thank you for having me on your blog, Sienna!

You’re welcome, and thanks for sharing, Grace! It was my pleasure.

You can purchase Firmament: Radialloy on Amazon, or order a signed copy from her website.

J. Grace Pennington is a homeschool graduate and a prolific writer, authoring novels, articles, film and book reviews, and screenplays. When she’s not writing you can usually find her working and playing with her family of eleven. Her greatest desire is to give glory to God with her writing.