Read, Think, Write - it's what I tell my students, and it's what every writer should practice. For numerous reading lists, including my special interest, Shakespeare and his times, visit my personal MySpace page www.myspace.com/read_think_write.
My favorite genre is historical fiction and a good website for historical fiction afficiandos is: www.historicalnovelsociety.org. Their website includes historical fiction book listings, an online newsletter, information about upcoming conferences and contests, and a huge web listing of authors, agents, and publishers in the genre.
Beginning Novelists
•Do not write in a vacuum.
Before you finish an entire novel . . .
•Do join a critique group.
•Do not create a critique group that consists of your spouse or siblings. That's like taking your husband shopping and asking him, "Do these jeans make my butt look big." He'll lie if he has to, in order to keep the peace.
•Do join a local writer's group and attend ANY workshop they give. I always learn something, even when the workshop is on a topic unrelated to my writing, or it seems like I've been to the same workshop before.
•Do rewrite old essays into articles and GET them published. You need something to put on your writing resumé.
•Start reading novels for style, transitions, descriptive color, hooks, and dialogue.
•Know your market. If you are writing a detective novel set in the Old West, find out what successful writers in that genre are doing. A great place to look is Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com. You'll find books in even the most obscure genres with reviews and a synopsis. For example, this is how I discovered that readers who love Elizabethan novels, for the most part, hate Shakespeare-speak.
•Get it ALL down on paper. This is easier said than done. When I make a universal change to any writing, I want to go back and make all the changes to get it in sync with the plot. I think I rewrote the first 50 pages of my latest novel twenty times before deciding I would just make all the changes later. Keep track of universal plot changes in your Writer's Journal.
•That reminds me. The Writer's Journal. Go out and buy a small (meaning easy to carry around in your bag, the car, on the train, etc.) spiral bound notebook and keep track of ideas you have for your manuscript, changes you need to make to your manuscript, research you have done for your manuscript, books in the genre you have researched for your manuscript, and everything else related to your current manuscript. That way, when you need to look something up, it's all in one place.
•Finish your first novel. Don't get in the habit of tossing manuscripts on the flames.
Looking for an Agent or Editor?
You know all that reading you do for pleasure and research? There is usually a section in every novel/nonfiction book labelled "acknowledgements," which often includes the names of agents, publishers, and editors in the genre you are reading and writing in. Make a list of all these resources in your Writer's Journal.
Before shooting off your manuscript, do some research. That list of editors and agents you've created is only good if it is up to date. Make sure the editor that helped your favorite author with his/her last novel still works at the address you've jotted down. Start with the internet, it's a fast way to check who's in and who's out.
Your local library probably carries Writer's Guide to Publishing and it doesn't matter how old it is. It will give you a list of publishers and magazines related to your genre to research further, then double check addresses and agents.
Go to the editor/publisher/magazine's website and find their submission guidelines. After you find them, follow them.
A great website for looking up agents, designing query letters, synopsis, and other helpful hints is www.agentquery.com.
The Pitch Letter
I found writing a pitch letter as challenging as crafting a novel. And that's the point! You must spend as much time, effort, and energy crafting your pitch letter as you do writing your novel, essay, or article.
Again, before express mailing your pitch letter, check the agent/editor/publisher's website for their preferred format and mode of delievery (e-mail vs. snail mail). Believe me, they are all different.
Some Pitch letter Basics:
•Keep it to ONE page. Editors, publishers, and agents are BUSY. They don't have time for a five-page article on what you expect them to do for you.
•Use decent paper and standard formatting.
•Use spellcheck/grammar check. As a former employer who sometimes reviewed scads of resumés for executive positions, my favorite way to cull the pile involved finding cover letters or resumés with misspelled words or screaming grammatical errors and tossing them in the round file. This is also good advice when writing your article or book.
•Be positive, thoughtful, and witty; not a smart ass.
•Write a one paragraph synopsis of your novel. Think that's hard? Now write a one sentence synopsis of your book. One way of creating a synopsis is by summarizing each chapter, then delete chapter titles and reduce that to five pages, then reduce that to three pages, then one page. Only discuss the plot.
•Address the query letter to a person, not "Occupant." Briefly explain how you found the person you are contacting.
•Give a brief account of your writing experience—not every intimate detail of your life.
•DO NOT tell an agent/editor/publisher that your writing has been passed over by half the publishing world.
•Include why readers in your particular genre will love your book, but also how it differs from the 456,743 other books in the same genre.
Writing Basics
I hesitate including this because the more I read, the more I see author's breaking grammatical rules—including me.
I don't know when William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White first wrote their Elements of Style, but it is well worth studying. It's super short—the copy I have is only 85 pages—and worth the read.
•Avoid overuse of the verb "to be." My favorite professor's pet peeve.
•Avoid starting sentences with "It," "There is," or "There was."
•Limit common dialect and contractions to dialogue, and then sparingly.
•And the first of my personal favorites (meaning, "the hardest error for me to break"): Avoid Yoda speak, i.e. the pointy-earred little monk from Star Wars. "Tax returns they have filed," should be "Filed tax returns." "The newspaper was taken by the dog," should be, "The dog took the newspaper." "Plans to marry," should be, "Marriage plans."
•Favorite number two: Contrary to popular pens, adjectives do not strengthen verbs, they weaken them, creating prose of the most purplish kind.
tightly held = gripped, clutched
froze over completely = froze
tightly wrapped = bundled
energetically pull = jerk
slowly moved = sauntered
sat heavily = plopped
desperately wanted = needed
