writing advice Archives - Laurell K. Hamilton

Fear, Bravery, and the Pikes Peak Writers Conference

This is a blog about things I haven’t spoken of publicly before. Things that I was advised not to share ever, but sometimes not talking about something makes it grow larger until you can’t work around it. I’d been meaning to write this blog and post the attached video for a year, but I just kept putting it off, and then a woman on Twitter posted about her experience. She thought she was a coward, but bravery only exists in the face of fear, and her bravery helped me find my own. She shared her experience with a very creepy man that had verbally assaulted her in her own home. He never touched her, no bruises to show, just horrible sexual language that he had no right to say to her. She was trying to explain to some men that a woman doesn’t have to be actually physically assaulted to feel unsafe or even to feel violated. She made her point, and my first similar experience was when I was only ten-years-old thanks to an obscene phone caller that reduced me to hysterics. It would be the last time I was allowed to come home after school by myself for years after that call. My family and I both worried that he would come find me and do what he’d talked about. Women are more likely to be the victim of sexual based crimes, it’s just the truth. I learned at a tender age that the world was not safe, and there would be other incidents as I grew older that confirmed that even people you knew weren’t always safe havens, but this blog isn’t about that, not really. The every day caution that women have to exert to go through the world is just the nearest shared experience that I could come up with to try to explain how being famous feels when it goes wrong. Okay, how it feels to me when it goes wrong. I’m sure there are celebrities that handle it much better than I do. I am sharing my experience here, my feelings, because in the end that’s all any of us can share.

This blog is an introduction of sorts to the talk I gave at the Pike’s Peak Writer’s Conference in Colorado last year. My husband filmed the talk with his phone, so that’s the quality of it (the volume is low), but it was the first time I spoke publicly about a lot of things that had happened to me in my career. The topic of all the key notes speeches that weekend were supposed to be on things that made you almost give up writing, like rejections, but Mary Robinette Kowal had done a hilarious speech the night before on that stumbling block, so I had to scrap my speech and start over. (By the way I just finished reading her book, The Calculating Stars, and I highly recommend it.) It forced me to think seriously about what had almost made me stop writing. Rejection was nothing compared to it. I decided to talk about it for the very first time in front of a room full of people I’d just met, or didn’t know at all. Now, I’m sharing it with all of you, with the whole internet, because it’s time I took back these pieces of myself that got broken. The only way I know to recover that part of myself is to write about it, and I can’t do that if I’m not wiling to talk publicly about it, so here we go.

Writing Your First Novel; or Good Luck, all you November Writers

It’s November and most of us in America are getting ready for Thanksgiving at the end of the month, but about 300,000 people aren’t worried about cooking the perfect turkey, or the on-going family debate of raisins versus no raisins in the stuffing. They have a very different goal this month – to write 50,000 words in 30 days. It’s National Novel Writing Month, affectingly known as NaNoWriMo. These literary adventurers will either have a rough draft of their first novel by November 30, or at least a good sized chunk of it.

That’s approximately 1,700 words a day for the month. If you figure about a 12 point font, double spaced, that’s about three to four pages a day for 30 days. If the page is dialogue heavy there may be fewer words, but if it is description heavy then it may be more words per page. Like a lot of things in writing, it depends.

I applaud everyone who’s taken up the challenge. When I wrote my first novel, Nightseer, I wrote two pages a day, every day before work. I was in a cube farm in corporate America and I’d found that I was too exhausted by day’s end to do anything creative; so I got up early before work and did my two pages. Let me add that at that time I was not a morning person, by any stretch of the imagination, but I wanted to write my book badly enough to find a consistent time to write, because consistency is what it’s all about when you’re writing novels. I’d written short stories for years but never had the guts to tackle a book length project. I’d been writing since I was twelve, decided I wanted to be a writer at fourteen, started sending stories out and collecting my rejection slips at seventeen. I was twenty-one and had graduated college and landed my first job, but I still wanted to be writer. I knew that if I hoped to make a living as one I had to write novels, short stories weren’t going to pay enough, so I put my butt in a chair at least five days a week and did two pages every morning. Two pages didn’t seem like much at first, but doing two pages day after day meant in three hundred days I had six hundred pages and at the end of two years I had even more pages and a first draft. I honestly can’t remember how many pages the first draft was, but I know I’m one of those writers that writes long and cuts a lot, always have been, probably always will be. Other writer’s first drafts are far shorter than the finished manuscript, so their second drafts are all about adding stuff in, instead of cutting. I would do seven drafts of Nightseer before I sent it off to an agent, who sent it around to publishers. I would do another draft to editorial order, mostly the editor pointed out that I hadn’t described a single piece of clothing in the entire book. I added clothing description and more physical description at the editor’s request, and I never forgot again (some may say I’ve over compensated).

Here are the most valuable things I learned in the two years it took me to write my first novel, that would eventually sell and begin my career:

1. Don’t revise as you write first draft.

Why, or why not? Because the greatest danger to any first time novelist is getting bogged down and not finishing the first draft of the first novel. Write your word count a day and just keep adding to the growing pile of pages; if you stop to revise as you go, perfectionism will catch you and sink you. You certainly won’t make the word count per day if you try editing while writing the first draft, or I wouldn’t. Even after writing 40 books, I still have to be careful not to start editing too much during first draft, because I’ll get stuck too. Once you have a draft finished, you can polish in the second draft, that’s what subsequent drafts are for, polishing.

2. Don’t stop writing your first draft to do extra research.

I’m going to assume that you wouldn’t have sat down to write a book without some background, or interest in the topic, so you’ve done enough research to do a first draft. Wait on extra research until you have hundreds of pages beside your computer and a finished draft. Why wait? Because if you’re anything like most writers that I know, including myself, sending us to a library is a dangerous thing because we’re surrounded by BOOKS! We have good intentions of looking up only the specific topics we came to research, but it’s a library, it’s like Aladdin’s Cave of Wonders, and just like Aladdin if we touch the wrong treasure we’ll never get out alive, or at least not out in time to make our deadline. The internet is equally deadly for research, maybe more so, because it’s always at our fingertips. Do not do extra research until the first draft is finished unless the fact you need is absolutely essential to writing the current scene, but usually it’s not. Beware that research doesn’t become a procrastination tool. I still type all caps – NOTES; WHAT DOES FIFTEENTH CENTURY UNDERWEAR LOOK LIKE? or, NOTES; WHAT FOOD WOULD BE AT A MEDIEVAL WORLD BANQUET? These were both notes I had in my first novel, but I didn’t need to know the answers to get my heroine undressed for bed or to have her confront her sister over dinner. My second draft was just filling in the notes, and my third draft was where I started polishing the language. You might say my second draft was research questions only.

3. Do not get caught up in the perfect opening sentence in your first draft.

You can start the draft with gibberish for all it matters, because the important thing in a first draft is all those hundreds of pages after that first sentence; without them, the first sentence doesn’t matter a damn. What? you say, The first sentence is very important! You’re right, in fact it’s vital. Your first sentence, first paragraph, will sell the entire book to the right editor and to readers after it’s published. But I’ve seen too many writers get caught up in making the beginning of a book perfect, to the point where they polish the first chapter over and over, and never finish the book. A great first line may sell a book to an editor, but it won’t sell a few chapters to anyone. The day’s when editors would buy an unfinished manuscript from a first timer are decades past. To sell a book, you have to finish it first. Even today the opening lines/paragraph is often the last thing I revise, not the first. I’ll agonize over the first sentence, but only after the rest of the book is polished and singing.

4. Write your idea, and don’t worry if it’s good enough to sell.

Your ultimate goal is to sell, but if you start worrying about selling before you have ever finished a single book, you aren’t just putting the cart before the horse, you’re buying a saddle before you’ve taken riding lessons. I don’t know if your idea is good enough to sustain a book, let alone good enough to be your first selling novel, but I know you have to start somewhere, why not this idea? Maybe it’ll suck, but maybe it’ll be great, you’ll never find out if you don’t take the chance and write it.

5. Last piece of advice that helped me write my first five novels, all of which sold.

The 70/30 rule. I found that seventy percent of my first drafts were garbage, but thirty percent was gold, but I had to write all one hundred percent of the draft to get that thirty percent of shining gold because it was scattered among the seventy percent of unusable garbage. My garbage quotient has gotten lower as I’ve gained more practice as a writer, but it’s still a good rule of thumb if you’re one of the writers that writes long and then revises like I do.

Good luck all you November writers! Happy Hunting!

My Three Best Pieces of Writing Advice

My best advice about writing is – write. Writers write. The more you write the better you’ll get at it. Writing is a skill and like any other skill from basketball to knitting, the more you practice the actual skill the better you get at the game, at making sweaters, or at writing stories. People treat writing as if it doesn’t require as much practice and dedication to craft as other things; why? I believe it’s because anyone can write. Anyone can sit down with a piece of paper and a pen and write. Anyone can sit down at a computer and type. The physicality of it is available to everyone who is literate and can read. If you know how to read, you can write something. It may not be a great piece of literature, but it’s words on paper and they’re right there in front of you. See – anyone can write, but not everyone can write well. That takes practice, dedication, and a lot of perseverance.

The above is the primary piece of how to be a writer, without it nothing else matters. But I’m about to give a second piece of advice that I’ve never put in a writing blog before because I didn’t realize how big a problem it was until recently. What is this new piece of advice? Stay off the internet. Yes, you read that right, stay off the internet. It’s a great tool for building a social network and promoting your work, and can be a good jumping off point for research. Never use other people’s websites as your only source for research, because most sites have no one policing them for veracity. Start on websites if you must, but don’t end there. That’s lazy research, which leads to lazy writing. It’s obvious that too much social media is like talking to your friends on the phone or having too many “business” lunches. It may all be helpful, even talking to friends can refresh you so you go back to writing with renewed vision, but if you do too much social anything it can hurt your productivity. Most writers can avoid picking up the phone and making a call, or going out the door to see people in person, but online socialization is harder to resist. It’s so easy to tell yourself, well I’ll just get on line for a few minutes; half an hour later and you’re still on line. I’ve done it myself. I’ve found that Pinterest and YouTube are especially time consuming for me. Twitter is easier, because there is a limit of 140 characters and then I’m done, or that’s how I felt at first. Now, I’m not so sure, because it’s also easy for me to think Twitter isn’t that big a time use, because of the individual messages being so short, but if I do too many short messages in a row, then it can add up to a lot of time. But what about promoting yourself and using social media as a business tool? It can be a very effective business tool, but not if you’re so busy trying to promote yourself and gain a larger online presence that you don’t get time to actually write. FaceBook was such a problem for me that I hired a media minion to post there, because I felt FB was too important to ignore, but it was also a huge time use that took away from my actual writing. I still do my own Twitter, but I’m trying to police myself better, because if I think its also taking too much time and attention, I may have to stop posting personally, which would be a shame since I enjoy Twitter.

I said time and attention above, and that second part is the other danger of the internet. I have found myself thinking, this, or that, would make a great tweet, or that would be a good blog. Now that’s all well and good, but if I find myself thinking about how to tweet, or Facebook, or blog, etc . . . and not about writing my novels, then something has gone wrong. The online media is supposed to support and promote my writing, not be more important than the writing, and if my first thought is what I’m going to tweet, Facebook, or blog, and not the novel I’m writing, then the social promotion is taking too much of my subconscious, and that part of my brain needs to be concentrated on writing my book. One of the most important tools for any writer is their subconscious. I know I’m in the zone for a novel when the book wakes me up early loud in my head with notes and the first few lines of the day. If I wake up thinking about any of my social media instead, then it hurts my ability to immerse myself in my novel, and immersion is what I need to be productive and make my deadlines. This leads me to the third piece of writing advice: Protect your prime writing time.

It will take some trial and error to figure out what your prime writing time is, and bear in mind it may change as you get older, or even with different books. Most writers have a time of day, or night, that they work best, once you find it, treat it like gold, because it is the time when your muse is talking the loudest to you. I work best first thing in the morning, let me add I wasn’t a morning person when I started writing like this, but over the years I’ve become one. I need to wake up and just go straight to my desk, if at all possible. I’m one of those writers that needs to not have anyone talk to me, or distract me in any way before I sit down at my desk in the morning. Anything more than tea before the first pages hurts my page count for the morning. The smallest interruption can disrupt me, and hurt, or even ruin, my morning writing session. I knew to avoid actual, in person people. I even wait to feed the dogs until after I’ve got a few pages for the day because if I take the time to take the dogs out, feed them, and then wait to take them out again, then I’m derailed. It’s the difference between sitting down at my desk ready to set the keyboard on fire, and sitting down at my desk with some of my energy spent, wasted on mundane things that could have waited for a few minutes. The dogs get a treat in my office while they wait for actual breakfast, and the dogs think that the office treat drawer is awesome. I’ve found that most of the mundane things that distract me from my desk first thing in the morning are all happy to wait until later; after I get my morning pages done.

So, in a nutshell: Writers write. Stay off the internet. Don’t let mundane things interfere with your prime writing time. Now, stop reading this blog and go write stories that only you can write.

Angels, Demons, and the Writer

The hardest thing about writing is that you are alone with your personal demons. Now let’s define terms; when I say demons, I mean personal issues so large, so painful, so intimately damaging, that it either cuts your soul to face them, or heals it. You don’t have to be writing about the issues that make up your personal demons to have them torment you as you write. Oh no, it’s more insidious than that, just as writing will call the muses to you, the angels come to dance around you in shining choruses, so creativity calls the demons. I’m sure there are writers out there that are so mentally and emotionally healthy that only angels come to dance around them when they create, but I’m not sure I’ve ever met one of those writers. Most of us are fairly self-torturing, emotional angst seems to come with the job description. I don’t mean we all go through life doom and gloom, oh woe is me. Some of us are fairly cheerful people, actually. What I mean is that when we sit down to write we are alone with our thoughts.

If the idea of being alone with your thoughts doesn’t give you a twinge of panic, then I’m not writing about you, but for most of the writers I know we both crave to be alone to create and dread it. Some days it’s all muse-driven inspiration and the pages flow like the proverbial water from the cleft rock. Those are the days that I love the best. The days that make me think being a writer is a great career and all I was ever meant to do, or be. Then there are days when nothing is coming down the muse-highway. I sit and I stare at the screen for hours, literally sometimes, or I write and erase, or I write and rewrite, and its all terrible. Or the writing is good enough, but it’s like dragging each word out of the void one painful inch at a time. Those are the days when I think, maybe I should have bought that horse farm, or become a field biologist, or . . . runaway and joined something, somewhere, anywhere but in this one room in front of this damned computer, trying to draw words out of thin air.

“If you can’t stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried alive–then don’t be a writer.”

― Graham Swift

Your angels tell you positive things and hold hands with your muse, or sing behind her like upbeat backup singers, but your demons . . . they sing other songs. They start out with actual issues from your past, and most writers have things that haunt them, its part of what fuels most of us, but after they hit the real issues the demons move onto other things, false things, lies. Demons are those voices in your head that tell everyone, “You’re not good enough. She’d/he’d never go out with you. You’re too fat, too thin, too short, too . . . something. Your thoughts aren’t important enough to fill a whole book? That’s boring, you’re boring. People will hate your writing. They’ll reject you. She/he will reject you.” See, everyone has those negative voices in their heads that I call demons, its just that some of us have louder ones, or more persistent ones, or maybe we just don’t know how to shut them out as well as you do.

I never sweated rejection either in dating, or in writing, I accepted it as a given in both. But it was just one boy saying, no, he didn’t want to go out with me. Okay, there, done. Now I knew he wasn’t interested so I could move on and find someone who did want to date me. I always saw it as their loss, not mine. Dating you have a fifty/fifty chance, but writing is much harsher odds. Writing is designed to get you rejected.

“My first Anita Blake novel, Guilty Pleasures, was rejected over two hundred times.”

“The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you can’t, you’re dead.”

― Warren Adler

I like writing quotes, they help me realize that what I’m feeling is felt by a lot of wordsmiths. I am not slogging in the literary salt mines alone, or at least while I’m digging in my mine, I know others are getting just as tired and discouraged as I am. I find that comforting, and one of the reasons I’m doing this blog is to reach out to other writers, especially the beginning ones and say, “Look it’s hard, even for me, but if I can do it, you can do it.” You are not alone.

But we are alone while we create, and most of the time that’s great. In fact a certain amount of solitude is absolutely necessary for most of us to write a novel, or even a short story. We need to be uninterrupted by real flesh and blood people while we play with our imaginary ones. But the rub is, alone with our thoughts means there’s no distraction from what’s in our heads, our hearts, our souls. We try to pour all that onto the paper and turn into fiction and share it with others, but . . . You knew there was a but, didn’t you? But the personal demons come like vultures on days when the writing is slow, and the muse is reluctant or missing in action. On days when the writing flows and shines, and it feels like magic, you can almost feel the brush of angel feathers on your cheeks, but on the other days, the hard days, if there are feathers anywhere around you, they’re black. Black isn’t a bad color necessarily, Odin’s ravens are black and He is a God of inspiration, poetry, language, and magic, so black wings can inspire and lead you to greatness, but they can also pick over the corpses of your dead dreams like carrion crows.

My demons don’t have wings of any color, or pitchforks, or any of the traditional Western ideals of devils and demons. My demons are the voices in my head that tell me, I can’t. That I’m turning perfectly good paper into garbage, or back in the day when there was no internet and everything had to be printed and mailed, “I was killing trees to no purpose.”

Those are the days when I’m most likely to post things on twitter about fighting dragons, but dragons are not demons. The latter come wherever they smell hesitation like blood in the water for sharks, they gather when they feel you weaken. A moment of doubt is all the negative voices need to whisper horrible things in your ear. One of the ways I chase them back, force them to shut up and leave me alone to create is to pick up my metaphorical shield and sword and go hunting the dragon. I see it as taking the fight to the monster, rather than letting the monster have the upper hand. On a bad day, the dragon wins, but I know that I will take up my sword, my pen, my keyboard, the next day and I will fight on.

I’m going to stop writing the blog now, because that can be a distraction from the actual purpose of writing novels. Blogs are so fast and so much easier than writing a novel, especially on days when the demons are loud in my head. I’ll leave you with some more quotes that seem appropriate for the topic of inspiration, personal demons, personal Angels, and dragons.

“If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.”

― Tennessee Williams, Conversations with Tennessee Williams

“An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why.”

― William Faulkner

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”

– Jack London

“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”

― G.K. Chesterton

People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it.

– Harlan Ellison

Down the Rabbit Hole and into the Maze:

The White Rabbit from The Nursery Alice by John Tenniel, Held and digitised by the British Library, and uploaded to Flickr Commons. A higher resolution version may be available for purchase from BL Images Online, imagesonline.bl.uk, reference 065443

I fell down a rabbit hole this week, not a literal one, but a literary one. No, I didn’t reread ALICE IN WONDERLAND by Lewis Carrol, but that’s where the original idea of following a strange rabbit down it’s hole and falling into something, or someplace, totally unexpected came from. I first heard the term ‘rabbit hole’ used for writing by Emma Bull on a panel at Archon, a science fiction convention here in St. Louis. I was in the audience back then because I had yet to sell a single story of my own. I had read and loved Emma’s book, “War for the Oaks,” and listened to any bits of writer wisdom from her with great attention.

She and her husband Will Shetterly both explained that for a writer to fall down the rabbit hole meant an idea, or subplot, that led you off your plotted path. They seemed to think rabbit holes were always a distraction and the writer should climb out and get back on their plot path as soon as possible.

Years later with my own writing group, The Alternate Historians, we continued to use the term in much the same way. If you are a writer that plots and outlines heavily then rabbit holes are truly a bad thing, but if you are an organic writer like me, sometimes the rabbit is right. I believe George R. R. Martin calls them gardeners as opposed to architects.

What does it mean to be an organic writer? For me, it means that sometimes all I know is the first sentence of a short story, but I’m going to sit down and write that sentence and see where it leads me. It means that once the world building is done, or sometimes in the midst of it, I’ll often start writing the first draft of a book because I learn things about my world and my characters by actually writing. What I learn goes into the character building, or even the world building. I often find that what looks good in notes, or plot outline, doesn’t work at all when you are in the middle of the story. I’m very much a throw it out if my characters have a better idea that comes more naturally to them and their world. A word of warning here: do not edit heavily as you write your first draft, especially as a beginning writer. You do not know how your process works yet, so don’t do what I do, be cautious, save everything, and edit once you have a complete draft.

For an organic writer chasing rabbits down their holes can lead to new ideas that help grow your world, your characters, and just make it all into your own Wonderland. Or it can be just a distraction that wastes your time, energy, and derails your book just like I was warned all those years ago. The problem is that you can’t tell the difference from the outside of the hole. You have to crawl inside and risk falling down and down, before you know if you’ll be talking to a hookah-smoking caterpillar, or just trapped in the dark, covered in dirt.

In other words, the hole could lead you to things you need to discover as a writer, or it could just get you lost and covered in rabbit poo. To find out which way it will go you have to chase the rabbit and be willing to climb into the dark and follow where it leads.

The Anita Blake novels, and the Merry Gentry series, have both benefitted greatly from me chasing rabbits through their tunnels. It has led me to some of my most creative and innovative ideas, or most poignant scenes, but it’s also led me to the dark end of a lot of tunnels, where I had to dig my way out, or back track and cut out all the writing I’d done while I was in that particular scene “tunnel”. I’ve lost a week, or more of work this way. Hundreds, if not thousands of scenes, characters, all useless in the end, but I’m still not certain that writing out the useless bits doesn’t shake something lose that I need.

When I was in high school, I read an article by Ray Bradbury, I believe it was exerts from, The Zen of Writing, but I’m no longer certain. I do know that I translated his wonderful, and much more poetic advice into this, “Every writer has about ten thousand words of crap in them, so you better start writing early and get the bad stuff out, so you can get to the good stuff.” I think sometimes books are like that for me, I need to write the stuff that doesn’t work, then cut it, to find the stuff that does work. I can’t prove that this is true, and maybe I just tell myself that to feel better about all the lost pages, but I can’t prove that isn’t true, either. I’ve written over thirty novels this way, so I’m not going to change my creative process, it works for me, but I’ll admit it’s imprecise. I think all creativity is imprecise, if you could measure it out to be precise it would be science, not art, though there is more than a bit of art in most good science.

I don’t mind following the white rabbit when I know that’s what I’m doing in a book. I’ll run the new idea, or scene, up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes. If they don’t then I delete it, probably put it in an outtake file, and go back to the original plot point where I diverged and keep writing. What I do mind is when I don’t realize it’s a rabbit I’m chasing and I think its more unicorn. For a unicorn, which is an amazing idea that will make the book even better, I’ll drop everything and give chase, but I hate it when I see a horn and think unicorn, but it turns out to be more jackalope.

Last night when I finished writing I began to suspect I had fallen down the rabbit hole. I was hoping I was wrong, because my deadline was upon me. I went to bed hoping I’d wake up and it would all make sense, but instead I knew it didn’t. It wasn’t a rabbit hole, it was a rabbit warren full of tunnels and it was all dark, dirty, and even the rabbits had fled. I had to own that I would be throwing out about twenty-five pages, or more. Days worth of work when I honestly can’t afford to lose the time, or the pages, if I am to make my deadline, but there it was, the brutal truth. I was trapped in the maze in the dark, and the only thing I could do was try to find my plot thread in the dark, and follow it back to the last point where the book really worked.

As a beginning writer it was easier for me to tell when the plot thread broke, because the writing wasn’t as good, but as I’ve had more practice, I’ve gotten better. In fact, I’ve gotten so good that my writing is great even when the character development, plot, or world building, has derailed. It all reads well, but that doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t make it the best the book, the characters, the world, can be.

I had to go back through this morning and read, painfully, where that character wouldn’t have done/said that. Oh, there’s where the magic system that I have so carefully built and explained to the reader totally imploded. Yes, it was an exciting scene, riveting, but it isn’t the way the magic works, so out it goes. Okay, so that whole scene goes. Wait, that entire plot line is out. It’s far too late in the book to throw in something this big; it will distract from the mystery which we have to solve in ex-number of chapters. I’m not an obsessive outliner, but I do plot my mysteries out in broad strokes, the closer to the end of the book, the more that outline is filled in and eventually becomes fixed. This close to the end of a novel I have to keep my eye on the goal, which is to solve the mystery in a fair manner that helps the reader feel that all the clues were there. I dislike other writers who cheat by pocketing clues and just almost lying to the reader, so I try to play fair myself. Yes, I am aware that some really big names in mystery hide clues from the reader all the time. I adore Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, but Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie are both guilty of hiding clues to keep the reader in the dark. Sometimes it works brilliantly, but it’s still a bugaboo for me as a reader myself, so I try not to do it to other people.

So here I am in the maze, which is the worst possible kind of rabbit hole. Not only am I in the dark, covered in dirt and maybe worse, but it’s not just a straight tunnel. I can’t just back up a few pages and keep writing, because there are tunnels leading off the main tunnel, so many lefts and rights that I’m not entirely certain which is the main tunnel, or if I came this way, or that.

I begin to suspect it isn’t rabbit droppings on my shoes, but Minotaur crap, and that’s much worse for the book, and for my deadline. My plot thread has broken off in the maze somewhere. I only know it’s not ahead of me, so I can’t keep writing the book from here, I must go back. How far back? I’m not really sure, but I have to find where the thread broke, so I can follow it back and rewrite from there, because the thread still in my hand leads to the heart of the maze and the ruin of the book.

I know I will find my way out of the maze, because I’ve been lost in here before. I know I will find my broken thread and trace it back, and then write myself out of the maze. I know, because I’ve done this before, and that means I can do it again. That’s really what an experienced writer has over a beginning writer, we know that we can do it, because we’ve done it. Success is like a shield to protect you from the monsters, both the outside obstacles and your own self-doubt.

So for all you fellow writers out there both experienced and not, if you find yourself lost in the dark take courage. First try to just back up, if it works, then it’s a rabbit hole, and you’ll soon be out. Dust the dirt off and keep writing. If you realize that some of the tunnel was great ideas, then dig your way up and out, and keep writing from there. If the worst happens and you realize you’re standing in the middle of the maze with a broken thread in your hand, and Minotaur crap on your shoes, then keep moving. You will find the other half of your plot thread, eventually. Once you find it, grab it and drop the other end, because the other end only leads to the heart of the maze where the Minotaur waits to smash you to has-been, or never-was pulp, and dance with castanets on your creative soul.

Signed copy of A Shiver of Light, if you order by 8PM tonight!

Here’s a link to a live interview I did last night at BookTalkNation answering questions about A Shiver of Light, Merry Gentry and all her men, plus yes, the babies will be born in this book! Uterine liberation, at last! I also answer questions about Anita Blake and her cast of characters, my writing process, how I world build, and my best advice for all you beginning writers.

If you order by 8PM tonight you can have a signed, and personalized copy of A Shiver of Light. I will not be personalizing at most of the events across the country, sorry, so this maybe your chance at that. Apparently, to sign as much as you guys want me to I’d need the biceps of Arnold Schwarzenegger. *laughs*

http://booktalknation.com/video/hamilton