Finding Your Inspiration

Most of the time when people ask authors - and even me, a newbie - where they get their ideas and inspiration, the answers are always stock phrases, like, "I go for a walk and the ideas just come to me," or, "I don't know. They're floating out in the ether until they end up in my head."

These answers aren't very helpful to budding authors who generally view the process of storytelling as some mythological, magical experience. (However, the tip about walking is great to help the writing brain!)

So, I thought I would write about what inspires me to write the often eccentric, undead-filled stories that I've been publishing as of late. Keep in mind that everyone is inspired in different ways, so some of these techniques may work for you, and the ones that don't can just be discarded.

The first step for me becoming inspired is to see or read a story that resonates with me deeply. What makes me hooked on something? Currently I am hooked on horror. To take that a step further, I am hooked and fascinated by supernatural horror.

What fascinates me about that particular genre?

I now go through and mentally come up with reasons for my addiction to the genre.

• I'm interested in the unknown and what happens to people when they refuse to pass on after death.
• I'm interested in the struggles of a family dealing with an entity that they cannot see.
• I'm interested in the process of figuring out how to battle an invisible foe - if they can be battled at all.
• What do you do when your house is no longer your home?
• Where do these ghosts come from?
• What is the history of an old home? How many life stories has it been witness to?

The list can go on for a while, but it's great to get those hooks into the front of my creative brain because those are exactly the hooks that I'm going to be using in my piece of fiction. Hopefully these hooks will also captivate a new reader.

What's also exciting about the horror genre is that I am free to create anything that I want. What terrifies me? As I said, I am afraid of the unknown. This allows me to write plots where unexpected and often times unexplainable phenomena will happen to my characters and they will react in ways that are human and realistic. When they were just coming to terms with their everyday problems, a supernatural problem will take the cake in their lives. This can be a zombie infestation, a rogue virus, or even a home invasion haunting.

Next in my journey of inspiration I will look for research and odd bits of information to fuel my imagination. Typically I will follow a thread on Wikipedia and follow the links deeper and deeper until I find something I've never read or heard of before. This is great practice because it will give you a well of information and anecdotes to sprinkle through your story. It also helps to read about real events that have happened to real people in order to ground your story somewhat in the real world. Even horror needs to be grounded for the audience to extend their disbelief, otherwise it becomes a farce.

Then from there I craft characters and their backstories and come up with the beginning of my plot outline.

This exercise is so rewarding. I highly recommend any new writers give it a shot and see how much more enriched their imagineering time becomes - and how quickly their notebook fills up with bits of information that can sometimes be too crazy to be real. But, you know the old saying that truth is stranger than fiction.

It's definitely spot on.

Can You Survive Book Two?

Or should I say, can I survive book two of the Can You Survive series?

I'm hard at work on a second "Choose Your Own Ending" book for adults and this time it's a much crazier scenario than The Zombie Apocalypse. I don't want to say too much about it yet, but let's just say that your escape options are limited this time around and there will be more chances for interaction with a bunch of secondary characters.

Writing one of these type of books has been very challenging in a creative sense and in an organizational way as well. I might try to document my strategy and write some posts about it if anyone's interested.

Until then, look for more updates coming soon! There may be a synopsis reveal in the near future...


Photo Credit:
Ben Earwicker
Garrison Photography, Boise, ID
www.garrisonphoto.org

Self-Publishing Tricks

Okay, the title of this blog is a little misleading if you are one of those people who are looking for me to tell you some super-secret tricks that you can use to instantly boost your books (or novellas, or what have you) to the top of the Amazon Kindle charts. I will tell you one trick that I've learned, but it's only one, and you really don't have much control over the outcome.

The trick is this: To have a book or story or product that people are looking for in the right place at the right time.

It's not marketing that has worked for me. I'll explain my reasons for this "failure" in a moment. But first let me tell you the experiment that I have been doing for the past two months.

I am a noob to self publishing. I've been a writer since I could hold a pen, and even begged for a typewriter one year (which I still have tucked away for inspiration). I published my first book, Macyntire & Hough, last September to a modest amount of fanfare for me. Mostly people I knew read the book, and I admit that it wasn't a genre that I typically write, though I have read a bunch of paranormal romances and thought they would be fun to write. The big problem is basically that I am a man with a  book geared towards women. Despite my bio, my Twitter and Facebook, and everything else that I did by-the-book, Macyntire & Hough is lucky if it sells one copy a month - and that is mainly because I dropped the price from $2.99 to $0.99 this past month. There is a sequel that I am nearly finished, but that is not the experiment that I am talking about.

I decided to take a dare, related to something that I was meaning to try for fun anyway, and that was to write a genre that I could never publish under my own name and see what happens. I won't reveal the pen name or story that I wrote just because, but I will say that it was something funny to write and definitely stretched my imagination a bit. This book was short because it was just a test, and I finished the entire eBook in a week, including the hastiest cover I've ever created. For this book, I created a female pen name and decided that whatever happened would happen, and then I could move on with my life once my curiosity was squashed.

Well, I have to say that I am surprised by the results. The numbers I have to share are hardly groundbreaking, but for a young man struggling to find the time to write - let alone market - his work, seeing this experiment yield such great results really lit a fire within my creative mind. I only told one person about the book, and they acted as my proofreader. I gave them a copy for free because it was a fun keepsake for a few hours of laughter. However, even without advertising or a great cover, this book in this particular genre sold copies. Compared to the one copy of my novel that I sold in January, I sold nine copies of my tiny pen name work. I quickly penned a second book under the pen name, and surprise - that one started selling too.

The failure of my marketing for my novel was that it was a hard concept to sell (surprising when it comes to paranormal romances!) and my gender is not exactly inviting for the women who read that genre. I would be more successful writing horror or a more manly genre, which I intend to do for my own author name. But, it didn't matter what I threw out there as marketing for my novel because it wasn't something that people were actively searching for, and whatever it sells from here on out, I'm fine with that.

I am still conducting more tests with this experiment - specifically, I am attempting to write some longer works compared to my first attempts, but my point is this: The only trick to selling eBooks is to have a product that someone is looking for, for the right price, and at the right place at the right time. Who would have thought that people in other countries would see these tiny books and give them a shot? I'm hoping that they will try my newest attempts when they are finished (which will be soon, if I can keep up my energy and find the quiet time to write). There really are no guarantees that your work will sell, but every person who sets eyes on my work and deems it worthy to throw down a dollar to own gives me a new drive to stretch my idea of what writing truly is.

World Building

As I start to explore a few different ideas I have, I come now to the part of the creative writing process where research is essential and world building becomes the foundation of everything else I will write moving forward. A lot of people I've read say that it is easy to get tired of the world you start creating when it comes to fantasy, but I look at it more as a challenge and a framework that the rest of my narrative will hang from so that it doesn't just come crashing down when I reach something that I don't know how to explain.

My process of world building so far has been to look at how things work in our own world and then tweak them to fit my own. I've started a map of the two continents I am creating with names of towns and bodies of water, and then filling in information about all the cultures and peoples that will live in these areas.

I am also making profiles for all of my main players, which I haven't done so far in my writing journey, but decided that this time I would give it a try. So, I'm creating a binder of sorts and filling in all the information I might need for these characters - including pictures of people who are inspiration, etc. It's pretty fun!

So, if I am not updating on here, you know where I am - either work, or working on something that will hopefully end up being an epic novel before the summer. There's another few things in the works, and I will have to start organizing my time more wisely now that I've had a break from the writing marathon. Lots of creative muscles are being stretched in the evenings!

How To Create An eBook

Here's a little shameless self-promotion, but also a bit of useful information for anyone out there who wants to know how I create my eBooks for Kindle.

I've written a modest-sized (41 page) eBook on how I created my novel, Macyntire & Hough from start to finish. This book includes all the information on my outlining process, how I keep track of drafts and the number of passes I did to the manuscript, and also a step-by-step guide to how I formatted my Scrivener document and compiled for KDP.

This book is only $0.99 on the Kindle Store. The process I detail as far as formatting is the same exact process I used to create this eBook, so if you enjoy the way it's all put together, you can achieve the same exact results for your own book by following the steps. (To be honest, I worked on a short story earlier in the week and ended up using this book as a refresher to how I had everything set up. There are a lot of things that go into an eBook, and it's great to have them all in one place as opposed to when I was figuring everything out with different bits of information and tips scattered on napkins and notecards!)

For those who love print, I don't have a physical option...yet. But I successfully made it through my first CreateSpace adventure and will see about making a "real" copy of this book soon!

I hope it helps!

Evolution and Using Nostalgia

Now that I am finished one project and about to wrap up a short story (my first in years - so that's a pretty good achievement) I am looking forward at my next novel. Of course, it's going to be a continuation of my series because I am running on creative steam from the first book, but I am also curious to see how my writing evolves now that I know the characters pretty well.

Knowing the characters is only part of the battle with a sequel. The goal is to throw so much stuff at these characters that they are forced to evolve beyond what they thought was possible. Look at Star Wars Episode V. Luke is forced to travel to meet Yoda and discovers that it's nearly impossible to become a Jedi. He can't harness the force easily enough, and he's ready to give up. Add to that the revelation that his greatest enemy outs himself as Luke's own father, then you have your characters dealing with such drama that they have no choice but to evolve with the story.

I think I have this kind of material for my sequel to Macyntire & Hough. For those who haven't read the book yet, a quick intro of my characters.

Tadin is a ghost who has been dead since the 1970's.
Shelley is a living human who shares an apartment and also a business with Tadin.
Maris is Tadin and Shelley's paranormal investigator friend.

There you have it. My core characters. Now I need to shake their lives up enough to get them moving. I've been meditating on the story for the second book and it's going to be much more emotional than the first time around. I'm very excited, and I'm doing research.

What kind of research?

Nostalgia is a useful tool to a writer because it allows us to revisit stories or times of our lives that were creatively empowering. I always think back to Star Wars and Harry Potter and can almost feel the electricity in the air from back then. The sense of excitement that these stories evoked within me was palpable and something that will always stay with me for the rest of my life. If you can look at that kind of nostalgia in your own life and harness the feeling that it brings to you, then you can use that feeling in your own work. What did you love about those stories? What made them connect on a deeper level with you?

As I move forward I am going to tap into this energy more and more to get my characters to the emotional state that they need to be. If you're also working on a piece of writing, give this technique of nostalgic research a try. It doesn't have to be a story. It can be music, television, or even memories of a trip. Fuel your creative fire and write!

The Editing Process!

I thought I would write a post about my editing process, since I've been learning as I go along and perhaps someone else will benefit from what I've found works - and what doesn't.

I have done all my formatting and finishing in Scrivener. Earlier in the writing process, I used Microsoft Word exclusively, but I have moved on from that after a long relationship. I found that software to be too clunky when it came to compiling a Kindle book. Scrivener also gave me a ton of tools that I use on paper and was able to utilize once my writing was formatted digitally.

Once I was finished my first draft I printed out the most basic, single-spaced version of the chapters I could get. This decision was mostly for monetary reasons since printing 200+ pages was more of an investment than I could handle at the time and keeping everything single-spaced cut the number of pages in half. In the end I had 132 single-spaced pages printed, and that's my entire first draft. For an idea on the word count, it was roughly 55,000 words long.

I am very old-fashioned when it comes to my writing and editing process. Usually I write a lot of the manuscript by hand and then type it out afterwards. I also work out of order and jump around from scene to scene as I feel compelled, so it was a big accomplishment to have a manuscript that was in one piece! For my editing, I used the printed document to scratch out sentences or paragraphs that didn't make sense or needed to be re-worded, and I wrote the adjustments in pen in the margins or in between the lines (I can write very tiny when I want to!).

I found that if I started from the first page and tried to make my way to the last one, my mind got very tired very quickly. I'm not sure if it was because I already knew the story and had read it twice, or if it was just my brain looking at the number of pages left to go through - but, I realized that this wouldn't work for me in the long run. So, I ended up jumping around from page to page - much the same as I did when I wrote the scenes. I got rid of the shortest pages first so that I looked like I was going faster than normal, and then tackled the larger pages with lots of description last. I made sure that every page was scribbled on before I moved on to the Scrivener document for finalizing the changes.

Here's the fun part in Scrivener. There are nifty drop-down tabs in the inspector of your document that you have total control over. I added a bunch of different descriptions like "First Draft," "Second Draft," "Final Draft." As I update the text, deleting the bad sentences and typing the revisions, I update the drop-down tab. This is a great way to keep track of what I have revised and what is still left to do.

I also go back on my printed document and add a check mark to the top right corner of the page after I add the changes to the Scrivener document. This way I can keep track physically of what I have left to add to the Scrivener document as far as revisions.

The entire editing process took me about three months - from handwriting the changes, to adding those changes to Scrivener. That doesn't include the time it took for my beta readers to look at the .mobi file I gave them and give me feedback. I consider that third draft the "final" draft after feedback from readers before publication.

It's a long process, but it's essential to having a polished piece to give to your beta readers. I want my writing to be as close to published as possible before it goes in front of other people's eyes. I am a very self-conscious writer when it comes to my fiction!

Hopefully this was useful as you plan your own editing process for your masterpiece in progress!

Hypnotic State

As I continue the toiling of working on my book and other assorted writing pieces, I continue to notice a trend when it comes to my muse appearing or not appearing. I've read and seen some presentations on hypnotism, and never really believed in it until recently. In my case, my muse seems to be connected to my hypnotic state.

When I was a child I would come up with most of my ideas while either running for the cross country team at school, or being driven places on the bus or in the family car. The act of moving and not having to focus on anything specific put me, unknowingly, into a meditative and hypnotic state. I was alert, true, but I was also tapping into my subconscious, seeing images of characters in my mind and hearing snippets of their dialogue to each other. After the run or the ride in the car, I would hurry to write down what I saw and heard, and that would turn into a few chapters of the latest manuscript. (In case you're wondering, yes, they are all still in a file box, newly rescued from the unorganized filing cabinet that was overflowing. They may have some water damage from a basement flood, but they are still readable - thank-you Smith Corona!) Today, I can put myself into that state by listening to music during the drive to or from a job, and sometimes simply going for a walk.

The illusive muse. She doesn't always appear, but sometimes she can be coaxed out of the ether. It's glorious when that happens!

Fanfiction: Yay or Nay?

I've read a few different blog posts that discussed the idea of fanfiction, and with Amazon's recent Kindle Worlds unveiling, I decided I would put my own two cents in.

I am a huge supporter of fanfiction. When I was a freshman in high school I was distraught that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was taking so long (indeed, it didn't even have a release date or title at that time) and was craving something to read that was Potter related. My friend Kim introduced me to fanfiction.net, and I was in heaven. There were five or six different full-length Harry Potter Book Fives on there, and I reveled in the exploration of different themes and characters who weren't the central heroes of Rowling's work.

Needless to say, I am a writer, and quickly found myself spinning my own Potter stories. I learned a ton about writing from beginning to end, as that was how I uploaded so quickly. I started planning ahead a few chapters at a time, and found myself up to 40,000 words within a year. Better than that, I got regular feedback from a handful of fanfiction readers (I've never met any of you in person, but I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your criticisms and your encouragement! I hope you're all doing well and still writing your own stories!). I also joined fanfiction.net around the time that the "hits" data was being tested. I could see how many people were looking at my work daily, from which country, and which stories were most popular. What a revelation! Imagine the encouragement that people from across the ocean were reading something that I wrote. It was powerful.

As writers, we all want our words to reach many people around the world. Will my novel entertain someone riding a subway car in the UK? I certainly hope so! Will someone in Los Angeles be checking out my books while they wait in rush-hour traffic? That would be fantastic. These goals would have seemed unthinkable if I hadn't started out writing fanfiction. Exploring the craft within the confines of a pre-existing world was a great learning tool for me, and a lot of the terminology that the website used ended up priming me for a future in digital publishing. I encourage anyone in school to check out all the fantastic work on fanfiction.net and elsewhere around the net.

But, what do I think about Amazon's Kindle Worlds? I'm a little lukewarm on the idea. So far none of the franchises that are involved are ones that I am into. Vampire Diaries? Meh. They're all a little too CW for my taste. Now, if they were going to start allowing people to write Smallville fanfiction, I would jump all over that! It's a neat idea, but until they broaden their scope, I'd much rather write fanfiction for a website and learn about the craft of storytelling while getting some feedback on my writing style. Even if I'm not making money from writing or reading fanfiction, I am getting something else out of it creatively, and that's providing entertainment until a new season of American Horror Story or Downton Abbey comes out!

Music As Inspiration

This is another writing tip that I've come across recently, but found that I've used it a lot without realizing what was happening.

I love genre. Going into a book store back when I frequented one weekly, sometimes a few days a week, I absolutely loved being able to walk to the horror section, or the computer technology section, and find a handful of books related to what I was interested in. Just recently I've started exploring some romances and also a few science fiction/dystopian novels. They all work so well within their defined genres - but they also surprise me when those genres are stretched and combined by gifted writers who love to play.

My first draft of the manuscript has thirty pages left to work through, and then I start the meticulous task of adjusting each page in Scrivener to reflect my notes. Once that's done, I'm sending out the completed piece for feedback, which will then lead to a final draft before publication. It's going to be hard work - and it has been mentally exhausting (I took a break from serious work last night to recharge, re-watching an episode of American Horror Story, season one!) but, I know that in the end it will be worth it. Even if this book isn't perfection, I hope it's entertaining, and I definitely learned a ton about story structure and revisions with this one.

However, as I near the ending of one project, my first ever completed novel, I am faced with a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I am thrilled that I've seen something through to the end. Just ask my family and friends how often I finish something of this scope, and they can count them on one hand! On the other hand, I am now free to work on something else. I have almost finished plotting out a sequel to my first manuscript, which was the plan from the start, but I am also curious to see if I can try something new in between that will speed up my writing process. I keep reading blog posts about fellow authors who finish a rough draft in three months, and darn it, I want to be like that! The ideas are there, but how do I nurture them into fleshed-out novels, or even novellas?

On the commute to work this morning I put in the fantastic, atmospheric, and chilling soundtrack to the film Insidious, by Joseph Bishara, and found my imagination going wild with a new idea I've come up with for a horror novel. This idea came to me a few weeks back and I jotted it down in a notebook, but was determined not to let it take over my attention before I got the second draft of my manuscript to my wonderful beta readers (who I hope are harsh on me so that I can really see what's not working, or what needs to be beefed up). Wouldn't you know that just listening to this creepy music in the car this morning got my brain working, and the characters leaped out at me - their struggles with the paranormal, their family situation, and the protagonist becoming clearer and more vibrant with every passing mile on the road.

If you are a writer like me and are searching for inspiration to nurture that idea in your mind, give listening to some genre-specific music a shot while you lull yourself into a meditative state. I find that driving is usually the sweet spot for me because I'm focused, but my creative brain isn't occupied. That leaves the door open for all sorts of wonderful revelations. If you're writing a young adult novel, give the top forty chart a shot. You might be surprised.

I don't listen to music while I actually write anything, but just getting the creative juices flowing is a huge head start for when I get to the blank page and start off sprinting. I think I might give that horror story more of a shot and see how quickly I can complete a draft when the going is good. Maybe a little distance from my other characters is what I need for a month or two before I seriously begin telling the second chapter in their story. We'll see!

Absolute Power!

It's been quiet for me in the online presence area because I've been cranking on the production of my first draft of the manuscript. It's been grueling, mostly because I'm working two jobs - which, combined together, equal about fifty-five to sixty hours. When I take out 8 hours or so for sleep (I need a lot more than I admit) and the two hours of commute time per day, that leaves me with about four hours a day before I pass out to eat, unwind, and also write.

I have been lucky since I'm able to sneak in an extra half hour at my weekend job for writing, but now I've come to the part of the journey where the first draft is "finished" and I am moving onto editing - or proof reading.

It's really fun, but - I have to admit that I am chomping at the bit to get this book out to my beta readers. I have a handful that are willing to give this book a read, and I hope they find it an enjoyable experience. I'm focusing so much on this first pass because it's where I can hone my sentences and be sure that there are no sloppy errors before it goes away from me and off to its first day of Kindergarten. It's going to be very emotional! But I am ready for a break, much like some parents must also be when school arrives.

My cover design is finished, and I am very pleased with it. I've showed it to a bunch of different people that I work with - different ages and genders, and received their feedback and initial reactions. It led me to change a font and also darken a few things so that the contrast looks better. Last night I spent a few hours tweaking the cover so that it will be the correct dimensions and file size to be included in my actual eBook. It was so exciting to load that thing onto my Kindle 2 and see how it looked! I also used the Kindle Previewer to see how it will look on different devices. I am totally prepared to use both my Kindle 2 and Kindle Fire to test this book when it is finished. That is my biggest fear - that some of the formatting will come out jumbled. So far that has only happened in the case of a few em-dashes that are not the correct character. So that's why those little question mark symbols show up!

It's such a blessing to have so much control over how this book will look. I have the ability to learn so much as I do it independently. That's a reward in itself.

It's very exciting to be making progress. I don't feel the weird, depressed stage that I struggled with just before I muscled through the end of the first draft. This is all new to me, since I haven't finished anything novel-length since high-school, and that was just for fun. This is a bit more serious - but that doesn't mean I don't love every minute of it! Hopefully there will be more updates soon.

On the flip side - has anyone actually checked out the new Lindsay Lohan movie, The Canyons? I'm about halfway through it and I gotta say, that is some strange stuff. I can't look away!

Skeleton of the Novel

I recently found an amazing eBook by CJ Lyons that talks about three-act structure. I was skeptical to check it out at first because I have not found many of the writing formulas to be very helpful in the past, but, boy, am I glad I gave this eBook a shot!

I love movies. I watch many of them. I also watch many television programs, mostly fictional, and I am always amazed when something hooks me. It's hard to figure out what really drags me along when I watch something like Downton Abbey, or Lord of the Rings - but it's undeniable that something catches me and gives me the desire to follow the episode or movie through to the end. I never thought it was the structure of the story. I always believed it had something to do with the plot, the setting, or any other myriad of things. But, the structure of the story? That sounds crazy!

But, I started a test outline of a novel using the three act structure the past two days, and I am blown away at how exciting it is to see the structure of a story as I come up with ideas for the plot and characters. It's like seeing the track of a roller coaster before actually zooming down the loops and curves. What I previously believed about fitting into a mold when it comes to story structure, that it would make me feel stuck and rigid - I am glad to say that the exact opposite has happened. Instead I feel like a million opportunities have laid themselves before me. Having a map before diving into a large project is essential for me.

If you have struggled with pacing, building tension, or any other novel-related issues in your own work, check out No Rules, Just Write! by CJ Lyons. It is well worth the time. I feel energized every time I read another section about the three-act structure. Now, for more time working with Scrivener...my new obsession!

First Person, Or Third Person?

This has been the great debate for me lately.

My soon-to-be-completed first novel (post-college, at least) is written in the third person. I decided this would be a good idea because I wanted to utilize a few different points of view, such as seeing the world through the villain's eyes, and also through the two central heroes. However, I have had to constantly remind myself that I need to include some of the thoughts that belong to my characters. They think - so my reader can benefit from what they are pondering at certain moments. This has been coming easier as I've went along, but some good revision will help out the first half of the book, which is already finished a first draft and waiting for the ending to catch up.

I've recently picked up an intriguing YA dystopian novel called Matched, by Ally Condi, and I am really enjoying it so far. I have noticed that there is a trend that most of the YA books - many geared to young girls - follow, and that is to tell the story through a singular first-person POV. This viewpoint is always the central heroine to the story.

Investigating different books with this first person structure makes me itch to try it myself. My previous attempt at a first novel was started in the first person, and then I chickened out and second-guessed myself. That manuscript, part of an eventual series that's been planned since my high-school days, is sitting in my desk drawer right now waiting for me to brush it off and try again. I will eventually, once I finish the work on my current book.

They both have their strong points and stumbling blocks, but still, this seems to be a question I struggle with more and more: First or Third?

Writing Tip: Notecards

This is a brief entry today, but one that I've found to be really useful in my writing so far. When working on a long piece, or maybe even a moderately sized story, try using notecards to write down your story beats and chapter happenings.

I use plain, non-lined notecards and generally use one per chapter. This allows me to mix them up if I feel that a section of the book should come earlier or later, or, more often than not, remove one or more of the notecards when they do not fit at all. This way I can save the cards that I am not going to keep in my current narrative and store them in case they become useful in the future. There isn't enough space in the brain to store all the ideas we have at once, so why try? Paper is easier to go back to when I'm in a hurry.

Of course, when I'm in a pinch, I have used other pieces of paper besides notecards. I even once used torn apart popcorn bags for writing down story beats when I had a down moment on my dinner break at work! Give this process a try if you are a slow plot developer. It might just provide the fluidity you need to see the story through to the end.