10 More Writing Tips from J A Konrath

As promised in my last post, here are 10 more writing and publishing tips from J A Konrath's amazing book, "The Newbie's Guide to Publishing (Everything A Writer Needs To Know)." 

11. Give your character flaws. Ask the following: “What personal, internal problem will get in the way of the hero reaching his/her goals? Addiction? Illness? Disability? Neuroses? Readers don't want characters to be happy. They want them to be tortured for 90,000 words, and then happy at the end. Maybe. That's the essence of a page-turner."

12. Ask yourself: “Who will make a worthy opponent for your protagonist?”

13.  Create a strong adversary. “Good vs. Evil is conflict in its purest form, and any sports fan can tell you that competition is a lot of fun.”

14.  “Conflict is the main ingredient for successful fiction. The question of ‘What happens next?’ is what keeps your audience glued to the page. Not pretty description. Not clever phrasing. Not cute dialogue. The motor that drives the story is conflict. The central plot of any story should be centred around a conflict. The sub plots should introduce more conflict. There should be conflict on every page, and even in every paragraph.”

15. Write what you like to read.

16. If you want to be a writer you have to make writing a priority.

17. Rewriting and editing is where you take a good book and make it great by cutting out all of the fat, exposition, and unnecessary action and dialogue.

18. When writing dialogue, make it sound natural. “People talk differently than they write. Writing is slower, more deliberate, and more thought goes into it. Speaking is looser, freer, less constricting, and less precise. Record some dialogue in natural settings—at the mall, on the phone, on the radio. Then transcribe what you heard. You’ll notice a big difference between the spoken word and the written word.”

19. Read everything out loud. You can find a lot of errors when reading using your voice, rather than your mind, because your mind tends to see things as you wrote them, not as they appear on the page.

20.  Get the scissors. Sometimes the words are there, but in the wrong order. Don't be afraid to switch sentences, paragraphs, and even chapters.

I'll be back next time with 10 more writing tips from J A Konrath.

10 Writing Tips from J A Konrath

I recently downloaded a Kindle ebook written by mystery, thriller, and horror writer J.A. Konrath. It’s titled, “The Newbie´s Guide to Publishing." It's a huge book with over 370,000 words of writing advice, tips, tricks, and observations. That's more than 1100 pages. It's the biggest book on writing and publishing ever put together.

Joe Konrath has written over 100 books, and he says he earns most of his income from ebooks that are read on Kindle Unlimited, and he’s sold more than 25,000 copies of his self-published ebooks.

I've been reading this ebook and have come across some worthwhile advice about writing fiction that I thought every writer would find valuable.

I made a list of 40 tips and tricks about writing that I thought would be the most helpful. I've divided the list into 4 sets of 10 tips, and I'll publish each set over the next four weeks.

So here are the first 10 writing tips from J A Konrath:

1. When writing a book, have a set daily word count to reach (he aims to write between 3,500 and 4,000 words a day). Don't turn on the internet until you've written your first 1,000 words, while you have a short break. Reach your word count no matter what, even if you're tired, it's late, and you want to go to bed.

2. Be entertaining.

3. If you’re paralysed with fear that your book sucks, do the following:

▪ When in doubt, keep writing anyway.

▪ Tell your internal editor to shut up until you’ve reached the end.

▪ Remember that you’re often a poor judge of your own work.

4. “I’m an advocate of cutting everything non-essential to the story. It’s the Kill Your Darlings School of Writing. If it ain’t needed, trim it.”

5. “Make each chapter, each paragraph, each word essential.”

6. “Well-drawn characters are important in fiction. If a reader doesn’t care about the protagonist and antagonist, it doesn’t matter how many roller-coaster twists the plot has. As writers, it’s our duty to make our characters memorable.”

7. One of the best ways to motivate yourself to write is by preparing an outline. “Here's the thing;  if you already have a template, you don't need motivation, and you don't get blocked. It's like painting by numbers. What an outline does is offer you a template. You simply need to fill in the colour.”

8. “In my books, I try to keep raising the stakes, constantly introduce conflict (both internal and external) . . . . Each scene has to have a point, a reason for existing. It has to fulfil some kind of purpose—reveal clues, enhance character, add suspense, raise tension, ratchet up the conflict.”

9. Your protagonist has to have a goal (or goals); that is, a dream or something that they desperately want. The plot centres on your protagonist’s attempts to achieve those goals. However, you need to make sure that your protagonist doesn’t achieve his or her goals until the very end, and maybe add a surprise twist in the end by thinking, "What would no one expect could happen next?"

In the meantime, torture your protagonist as much as you can. At every turn, ask yourself: “How can I make things worse for the protagonist?” (As another writer put it, chase your protagonist up a tree and then throw rocks at them.)

10. “Make sure the first chapter starts with action.”

... And there you have it. 10 ideas to make your writing great and the whole process simple.

I'll have 10 more for you next week.

Get off-line and Get a life

If there's one thing that annoys me every time I walk along a street, it's people walking towards me while staring at their phones. They're not even looking where they're going, and they have no idea I'm even there. So I wait until they're within a few steps of walking straight into me, and I yell," Look out!"

It's funny to see how much they jump, but it's also annoying that they are so inconsiderate (and stupid). 

A few days ago, I was in the food court at a local shopping mall, and there was a young woman at the next table, staring constantly at her phone. She wouldn't take her eyes off it for even a second. Sadly, she had her young daughter with her, who was desperately trying to get her mother's attention, even standing by her side, hugging her arm, and talking to her. But the woman ignored the child completely. It was as though she'd forgotten she even had a child. It was sad to watch.

But it's not just phones that people are addicted to. It's tablets and computers as well. This technology, originally designed to save us time, now seems to take up all our time. If we let it.

The truth is that phones, tablets and computers are mostly used as a distraction, because while we're "busy" online, we ignore everything else. And I'm not much different from most people. Once I start searching online, I can easily get lost down a rabbit hole and end up looking at things not even remotely connected to what I was originally searching for.

To stop myself from doing this (because it can happen often), I began doing what I call a Digital Detox. When I want to look at social media, I do a timed session for 25 minutes maximum. I've set 25-minute screen allowances on my phone and computer settings. I also take breaks from social media and news for a week or two at a time, because these sites can end up being depressing.

Entrepreneur Derek Sivers says he is now offline 23 hours a day, which he says improves his productivity as well as his mental clarity. https://sive.rs/off23 

I've also recently read about the benefits of being offline for most of the day, and I agree with them all, including Reclaiming Time, Mindfulness, Enhanced Physical Health, Increased Productivity and Focus, and Stronger Relationships.

I now spend most of my time disconnected from the internet, and it feels good. I sleep better, I can think more clearly, I'm (a little) less anxious, and I have more time every day.

I'm also much more creative when my mind is free to think. There may be a lot of ideas that can be found online, but they're not good ones, so I don't need to look up everything.

At the moment, I'm experimenting with only being online 2 hours a day max. A one-hour block of time in the morning and a one-hour block in the afternoon. And no internet whatsoever in the evening.

Being so limited with my online time not only keeps me focused while I'm online, but also keeps me focused when I'm offline because I can't look for answers, so it makes me think for myself more.

And I find I make better decisions.

Prioritise or Die

Do you know what your priorities are?

Does what you say you want correspond with what you do on a regular basis? 

If it doesn't, then you may feel as though you "die" a little inside every time you don't do what you always say you want to do. Or you may feel like you "die" a little inside every time you feel bad for not doing what you really want to do.

Author and self-help guru James Arthur Ray says you can tell what your priorities are by looking at the five things you do the most every day. 

For instance, you may say that writing is important to you, yet you do little or no writing, yet spend five hours a day watching TV or playing computer games, so clearly those things are your priorities. Or you might spend more time on social media than on putting pen to paper.

I believe that sometimes the hardest person to be honest with is ourselves.

So how about you? What is it that you really want to be spending time doing every day? Being completely honest with yourself is the only way to truly understand what you want out of life. Be true to yourself, not to what you think others want you to do.

Knowing what you want means first knowing what interests you, because if you have no interest in what you do, you won't do it.

And don't forget that priorities can and do change. When my kids were young, they were my main priority. Now that they're adults and can look after themselves, they're much further down the list.

These days, my list of priorities looks more like this:

My Home – I always take care of where I live.

My marriage – My husband, Dean, and I spend most of our time together.

My Writing – I write almost every day, sometimes for a short while, other days for hours.

My Health – I get plenty of exercise, and all my meals are home-cooked. Eating out and takeaways hold little to no interest for me.

My Crafts – I'm always productive, and even when I'm just watching TV, I'm knitting or sewing or doing something else at the same time. Home cooking is also my hobby.

These are the five things I spend my time on daily. 

They are my priorities, and each interests me greatly.

Mission Critical For Life
Start Living Life On Your Terms By Pursuing Your True Life Mission
https://cheritonhousepublishing.com/books/MCFL.html