The social graces of an online author

For your enjoyment: This week's curated craft of writing resources, plus an invitation to attend Office Hours for writers next Thursday morning to answer your writing questions.

Oct 19, 2024

In between tales of snowy, uphill treks to school (spoiler #1: I lived in the desert) and drinking out of the garden hose (spoiler #2: I was more of a bookworm), we oldsters love reminding the young-uns to mind their digital manners.

You see, back in the dial-up era, joining a new online space (spoiler #3: I hung out in chat rooms before most people had PCs or email) meant silently observing the action for days or even weeks before daring to speak up. You earned your space on the digital bench through patience and social restraint.

Today’s social media fracas shows us how far we’ve come, but authors should still prioritize respectful, non-grandstanding behavior. Promoting a book can still be effective without putting your book or your mouth on blast.

Let’s explore the rules of the road for authors on social media—and please keep reading for a special invitation to my monthly Office Hours Q&A call … all as we deepen our practice of The Writes of Fiction.

Yes, authors still need to follow social media etiquette rules

I still see a few writing blogs that chronicle the writer’s history of rejection. Guess what? Agents see them too. That can be an automatic reject. You’ll look like a potentially troublesome client.
And if you end up self-publishing, that stuff will make you look as if you chose your path because your book wasn’t good enough, not because you embrace entrepreneurship.
This is a tough business, no matter how you publish. Most authors go through 100s or even 1000s of rejections before they get a book deal, and most self-publishers spend years building a substantial readership.
Whining will not sell books. Get off the Internet and go write.—Read the rest from Anne R. Allen.

More on handling rejection:

Athletes don’t throw in the towel when they get cut during tryouts. They train harder and come back next season better than ever.
Musicians and actors know that an audition is as much about the director’s vision and needs for the production as it is their own skill.
Entrepreneurs don’t crumple when their pitches don’t generate interest or funding. They roll up their sleeves. Revision and iteration is the path new products and services take to market.

I could go on, so perhaps it’s fitting that writers should do a little less—less going on, that is. Less going on about rejection and more moving forward to generate still more of it.—Keep reading How to cope when your manuscript submission is rejected.

How connected settings give your fiction emotional depth

For example, it may be that the setting is symbolic of some past life event and serves as a reminder of what happened and the feelings associated with it. Imagine a character being asked to an important business lunch in the same restaurant where his girlfriend turned down his marriage proposal. Even though time has passed, maybe years, an echo of that hurt and rejection will affect him while he’s there and, in turn, will influence his behavior and mood.
Placing your characters in environments where emotions are triggered can also heighten inner and/or outer conflict. If you’re feeling tense in a school principal’s office, discussing your child’s misbehavior, your defenses might shoot up and cause you to take a combative stance—all because you yourself spent many hours in such a situation during your turbulent teen years.—Read the rest from C. S. Lakin.

More on blending plot with the other stuff: The plot’s unfolding impact on the characters lends an organic quality to the storytelling. The characters’ reactions and their attempts to derive meaning from the events around them make the story seem kinetic, vital, living.

This meaning can’t be adequately conveyed by exposition; that would be “telling,” not “showing.” Instead, giving readers direct access to the context allows them to discover the meaning for themselves. This means exposing your characters’ interpretive process—their emotions, thoughts, and reflections about what’s happening around them.—Keep reading Keep breathing life into characters.

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Writing flawed characters who don’t turn readers off

If we write someone with an overabundance of negative traits and behaviors that are a turnoff, the character will slide into unlikable territory. And yes, if the goal is to make a villain, antagonist, or other character loathsome, that’s fine–mission accomplished. But if we want readers to be on their side, too much surliness, negativity, secretiveness, or propensity for overblown reactions can cause a reader to disconnect.
Like a joke taken too far, it’s hard to claw an audience back once they’ve formed negative judgments, which is why we want to be careful and deliberate when showing our character’s negative side. Antiheroes tend to wear flaws more openly and can be semi-antagonistic as they battle the world’s constraints, so this line of likability is something to pay close attention to if we want readers to ultimately side with them.—Keep reading from Angela Ackerman.

More on characterization: When a character melts into tears because the donut shop is out of blueberry donuts (I know—it hits me right in the feels too), readers will wonder if the character is unhinged. Could blueberry donuts really play such a key role in the plot? Or is the author simply unable to convey how the characters are behaving in a believable way?

As long as you offer a frame of reference through your characters’ inner lives, readers will willingly travel fantastic places within your book, plumbing a serial killer’s psyche or accepting magic and alien cultures. Your character’s inner life is like the legend of the story map, showing how the regions of the story world relate to each other. Stiff, disconnected, or missing character reactions remove that key and scramble readers’ ability to make sense of the story.—Read more at The link between character thought and credibility.

6 questions to help you avoid repetitive scenes

At a certain point, most writers will receive critiques or edits in which whole scenes are circled in red with notes that read “nothing happens” or “they already had this conversation” or “this doesn’t advance the plot” or “feels like you’re padding the word count”—all of which are code for “repetitive scenes.”
Recognizing repetitive scenes can be tricky for authors (hence, the big red circles from critique partners and editors). Our deep immersion in our own stories inevitably causes a certain lack of objectivity. We may think a scene is full of new info when really the characters have already been there done that. Readers may not think too much about one or two repetitive scenes. But at a certain point, they will grow increasingly restless and frustrated with the story’s lack of progress.—Read more from K. M. Weiland.

More on scene problems: Scenes are designed to move the story forward by creating incremental change at the plot or character levels. Effective scene structure intrinsically sets up a domino effect: The unexpected outcome of one scene sparks curiosity about how the character will cope in the next, kindling the impulse to turn the page.

This is how complete, fully formed scenes get readers itching to see how the seeds of change will grow.—Keep reading The secret to page-turning scene endings.

Fiction Fuel

Artists have an interest in ... so-called inspirations; as if the idea of a work of art, of poetry, the fundamental thought of a philosophy shines down like a merciful light from heaven.
In truth, the good artist's or thinker's imagination is continually producing things good, mediocre, and bad, but his power of judgment, highly sharpened and practiced, rejects, selects, joins together; thus we now see from Beethoven's notebooks that he gradually assembled the most glorious melodies and, to a degree, selected them out of disparate beginnings.
The artist who separates less rigorously, liking to rely on his imitative memory, can in some circumstances become a great improviser; but artistic improvisation stands low in relation to artistic thoughts earnestly and laboriously chosen. All great men were great workers, untiring not only in invention but also in rejecting, sifting, reforming, arranging.—Friedrich Nietzsche via James Clear

A special invitation: Office Hours!

Got questions about your manuscript? Come ask.

Join our little craft of writing call, Office Hours, next Thursday morning. It’s an open Q&A where you can bring your questions about writing novels: story development, writing, storytelling technique, revision, editing … the whole craft shebang.

📅 Mark your calendar:

Thursday, October 24 · 9:00 – 10:00 a.m. America/Chicago
Video call link: https://meet.google.com/yxd-fhgt-gds
Or dial: ‪(US) +1 650-797-2312‬ PIN: ‪308 935 960‬#
More phone numbers: https://tel.meet/yxd-fhgt-gds?pin=9908063995001

Office Hours is a monthly event for paid subscribers of The Writes of Fiction. We rotate between morning, evening, and weekend times each month, giving everyone a chance to attend. We’d love to have you join this month—for free!—or every month as one of our regulars.

Won’t you join us on the 24th?

Onward,

Lisa

This is The Writes of Fiction, a curated trove of old and new thinking about writing designed to help you get better at the craft of writing fiction. And here’s your editorial assistant of the week. 👇