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Advice For Writers

I’ve known for a long time that I wanted to be a writer.  I finished my first book just before I left college, then wrote a novel, and finally on my third try I wrote A Beautiful Blue Death. To publish a book this quickly (I’m 26) took a lot of good fortune and a lot of hard work.  A writer I once knew always said, “Talent is common, character isn’t.”  Nothing can replace character, but here are a few tips I got that helped me along the way.

 1) When you’re starting a novel, write a first chapter and a last chapter that have nothing to do with your plot.

 Everybody writes differently.  J.K. Rowling plots out her books meticulously, while E.L. Doctorow famously said that writing a novel was like driving down a dirt road at night – you know there’s a path, but you can’t always see it.  But I would recommend that anyone who is starting a novel begin by writing these two chapters.  They may not end up as your first and last chapters, but they’ll show you where your characters are coming from and what they’re moving towards.  Writing them will force you to think about the journeys you want your characters to take.  Plot is important, but it’s Harry Bosch who keeps readers coming back to Michael Connelly and Thomas Monk who keeps readers coming back to Anne Perry.

 2) Write a minimum number of words a day.

 Graham Greene could write 500 words a day; H.G. Wells could write 5,000.  What’s more important than quantity is consistency.  If you keep writing your 500 words even on days when you’d rather not, you’ll find your page count rising by leaps and bound, almost effortlessly.

 3) Finish a first draft.

 Stop rewriting those two paragraphs at the beginning of Chapter 3.  It doesn’t matter whether the sky is cerulean or teal; it doesn’t matter whether your protagonist is irate or enraged.  There’s a wonderful period after you’ve finished the last chapter of a book when you can go back and change all of those things, but if you do it from the start you’ll never finish a book.  No agents or publishers are interested in your highly polished first act.  They’d rather see an interesting, flawed, and fixable book.

 4) Send your manuscript to specific agents.

 You’ve finished your first draft.  You’ve edited it to the point that you’re starting to hate everything about it.  Your mom thinks it’s fantastic.  Your friends have come up with a bunch of useful suggestions.  It’s time to get it out of your hands.

 I can’t think of a single publisher which still regularly buys from authors.  Editors receive so many manuscripts from agents that they would be buried under reading if they had to look through their slush piles too.  So: go to Barnes and Noble, pick out books by the five or ten writers you most admire, and start looking through their ‘Acknowledgments’ pages.  Chances are, they’ll have thanked their agents.  Do a bit of research online and you’ll be able to send your work to somebody you know is interested in your genre or style.  You’re a thousand times more likely to get a read if you direct your sample chapters to Jane Smith at ICM rather than just to ICM.

 5) Join the community.

 As I went through the process of selling, editing, and now publishing A Beautiful Blue Death I got amazing advice and encouragement from writers as diverse as David Liss, Marcus Sakey, Anne Perry, and Louise Penny.  Each of them bent over backwards to help me.  And you know what?  If I ever reach their heights, I’m going to carry on that tradition.  Writers are usually pretty cool.  Contact them through their websites, go to mystery conventions….but don’t just send a few chapters and ask “Can you send this to your agent?”  Ask about their experiences, figure out what worked for them.  Chances are it will make you a better writer and, just as importantly, a better salesmen for your work.

 6) Always write.

 Whether it’s a journal entry, a poem, a history of the Mongol hordes, a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes, a letter to the New York Times, a recipe you heard about on TV, or your great novel, always write.  It’s what makes you a writer.  James Michener always said that you should write a million words before you publish one.  That might be a little excessive, but he’s right about one thing – all of the words you’ve put down to paper and then lost or forgot about or left in some old computer file, all of them mattered.  They’re the 90% of the iceberg below sea level.  They’re what make your big work, that last 10%, possible at all.

 Good luck!