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NaNoWriMo Every Day

I started writing books when I was…let’s say twelve. I first wrote Taming Fire while I was in college (ten years ago now), but I didn’t really hit my stride as a writer until 2007. In 2007, I finally finished two novels (my second and third). It felt awfully good to finish up two books at once, but those two had been slowly coalescing for most of five years.

So at that point, I was ready to accept that my “pace” for writing novels was about 2-3 years per title. To put that in a perspective that’ll be useful later in this article, those two novels combined came to 180,000 words. So I was writing about 36,000 words a year.

For that matter, the original version of Taming Fire (what you know as Taming Fire and The Dragonswarm), ran 140,000 words, and I wrote it in four years. That’s 35,000 words a year. See? I had a consistent, stable pace.

Then in November of 2007 somebody convinced me to try out a project called National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for short). The goal of NaNoWriMo is to complete a short novel (50,000 words) within November’s 30 days.

The rules are totally unenforced, but they say you have to start at the beginning of a new project, you have to write 50,000 words on that one project, and you can only count words written between 12:00am on November 1 and 11:59pm on November 30.

That’s it. You don’t have to finish the novel. You don’t have to edit it. (In fact, they strongly encourage you not to.) Quality isn’t at issue. It’s all about setting an aggressive pace.

I’d been trying for years to get my dad to write, and my sister had expressed an interest, and I was still on a high from finishing those two books in the summer, so I decided to do it. I got Dad and Heather to join, and we dove in.

I knew just how ridiculous 50,000 words in a month was (from my established pace of 36,000 in a year), but it couldn’t hurt to try, right? Even if we failed miserably, we’d have the beginnings of a novel to build on later.

To my surprise, it wasn’t ridiculous at all. That first year, we all three won (meaning we hit 50,000 words before the 30th). And I did better than that. I wrote all the way to the end of my novel…at 118,000 words.

Yeah. That changed my perspective a little bit. It was actually a pretty good story, too.

I’ve never recreated that NaNoWriMo experience. November’s always a busy time, and my life has gotten hectic, and (the real heart of the issue) I didn’t really have anything left to prove after that. So I’ve limped through or I’ve muddled the rules or I’ve just skipped NaNoWriMo altogether in the years since.

But I still use “NaNoWriMo” as a yardstick for writing. To complete 50,000 words in November, you need to average 1,667 words a day. I usually prefer to schedule my writing around weekdays, and leave myself the weekends to either decompress or catch up, so that requires 2,333 words a day Monday-Friday.

(To put it in that context, my phenomenal first NaNoWriMo novel averaged 3,933 words a day.)

Last week I talked about my due dates and the crazy ambitious schedule I’ve been wrestling with this semester. In the two months since I quit my day job, I’ve written

  • 50,000 words on The Dragonprince’s Heir (The Dragonprince Trilogy, #3) for Master’s Project
  • 20,000 words on Faith (Ghost Targets, #5) for Writing the Novel
  • 15,000 words on Oberon’s Dreams for Tutorial in Writing

That’s 85,000 words in two months, or 1,393 words a day. Oh, but I’m not done. I probably mentioned this last week, but if I’m going to pass all my classes (and graduate), I have to turn in 40,000 words on Faith for Writing the Novel at the end of the semester.

Another way of saying that is that I have to write 20,000 words between now and 10:00am on Wednesday, May 2.

And since I’m heading to Little Rock in a couple hours to visit Dad and Heather over the weekend, another way of saying that is that I have to write 20,000 words in three days. So…remember that first NaNoWriMo novel that I wrote unbelievably quickly? I have to double the rate of that one if I’m going to pass this class.

Don’t worry. I’ll do it. I’m amazing. But still…I really shouldn’t be using up time hanging around here. So…see you sometime next week!

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Soccer Song

Through no fault of my own, my two-year-old son Alexander decided early to reinforce gender stereotypes by loving sports of all kinds. For a while there, he demanded the same lullaby every single night before he’d go to sleep.

“Baseball song!”

I don’t know where he picked up “Take Me out to the Ballgame” — strikes me as a kind of outdated tune — but he adores it. The kid learned how to count from, “One! Two! Three strikes you’re out!”

One night Trish was in there, singing him to sleep, and after she finished “Take Me out to the Ballgame,” Alexander wailed,

“Again!”

Trish said, “No. I already sang the baseball song.”

“Soccer song?”

Trish laughed and said, “There is no soccer song.” She kissed him goodnight and came out to tag me in, so I went in, gave the kid a hug, and told him to sleep well.

He piped up again, all pathetic,

“Soccer song?”

and how could I say no to that? So I made one up for him:

Soccer ball, soccer ball,

They don’t score any points at all!

Soccer ball, soccer ball,

It’s just a game about running!

Needless to say, he loved it! New favorite. And you thought I could only write books. Hah!

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Due Dates

My big news for this week is that the masterpiece is done. Late in the day on Thursday, I finished rewrites on the first draft of The Dragonprince’s Heir (The Dragonprince Trilogy, #3).

It’s a good thing I did, because Thursday was my due date for that one. I emailed a copy of it to the three professors on my Master’s Defense Committee: Deborah Chester, J. Madison Davis, and Mel Odom.

Among them, they’ve got hundreds of published novels. They’re going to spend the next ten days reading through it, then on May 3 I’ll complete my Master’s degree by standing in defense of the manuscript. I’ll have to explain the storytelling choices I made, characterization, my publishing plan, all of it.

I’m taking it pretty seriously (I’ve got a lot invested in this program), but I’m not too concerned. I know my stuff, and I’ve really done a good job with this novel. The nice thing about it is that I’ll be getting three hours of detailed feedback from a panel of experts.

I’ll have a month to incorporate their feedback and get a couple rounds of edits from my publishing team before I release it in June.

For those of you just visiting the site to find out where Book Three comes out: That’s good news. We’ve got a complete manuscript a month in advance, so we can definitely get the book out in June.

I’m also excited to have a finished draft so early, because it gives me the chance to offer some Advance Reading Copies again! I’ve had people asking about those at my Facebook page, so I know there’s real interest.

My goal there is to wait until after my defense, process the feedback from my processors (which won’t take more than a week or two), and then send out ARCs in mid-May. Once I’m ready to do that, I’ll announce it pretty loudly here, at Facebook, on Twitter…anywhere you might be listening.

In the meantime, I’ve got another due date pending. The day before my Master’s Defense, I have to turn in 40,000 words for my Writing the Novel class, and I currently have about 15,000 done. The good news: That’ll get me half finished with the Ghost Targets book I was already planning to release in August.

Ah, who am I kidding? It’s all good news. Everything is wonderful. I love being me.

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Caleb Drake (An Excerpt from The Dragonprince’s Heir)

I just started on the rewrites of The Dragonprince’s Heir, and I already found an excerpt I want to share with you.

Well, I say it’s an excerpt. I should probably call it an excision. It’s three or four paragraphs describing Caleb Drake from the point of view of Daven’s son, Taryn, fifteen years after the events in The Dragonswarm.

It’s also heavy-handed exposition that slammed the story to a crawl, so I’m cutting it. I was planning to save it in a Google Doc somewhere just in case I later decided to refer back to it or maybe work it in at a more appropriate point later in the story.

But it’s solid characterization in a pretty compact form, and it’ll give you a glimpse at two of the main characters (and their relationship) in the upcoming novel. So I decided to share. Hope you enjoy!

Caleb followed behind me like a terrible shadow.

I hated him. I had not always hated him, but I had feared him all my life. Father loved him. Mother loved him. She certainly needed him. But long after the desperate fear of imminent destruction had passed from this place, Caleb remained the shadow of death in my Father’s bright halls. I remembered happy feasts. I remembered storytelling and ballads sung. I remembered joy in the Tower of Drakes, but I had never seen it in Caleb.

Caleb had taught me to fight when I was four. He had given me my first knife when I was six, and taught me how to use it to maim or kill. I was ten when he taught me the mace, and twelve when he taught me to use a crossbow. But he had never taught me to use a sword–my father’s weapon. He had refused me every time I asked.

He was severe and casually cruel. And he was powerful. He commanded more respect within these walls than anyone but my mother. Even she deferred to him, I sometimes thought, though I was likely the only one who knew. And I alone within the fortress did not scrape and bow. I alone did not love our warrior hero. He resented me for it.

Now he would go to meet the king. He would stand by my mother’s side, tall and scary with my father’s blade slung on his back. Forty-thousand men gathered outside the fortress gates, a king and four wizards and six noblemen there in the Great Hall, and Mother would put Caleb forth in balance. And we would win. No frail king of a broken land could challenge the name my father had made.

I’ll probably resist the urge to do more of these, because within a chapter or two I’d be treading close to spoilers, and there are people who care about such things.

Still, this one seemed harmless enough. It’s from the third or fourth page.

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Starbucks

You know the guy sitting in the corner at Starbucks, typing away on his laptop and just desperately hoping someone will ask him what he’s doing so he can brag about his novel.

That’s me.

Well, not really. I’ve got enough social anxiety that I’d usually prefer to be ignored, and that’s more true than normal these days because I’m so busy. Even if I had the confidence to brag to coffee shop strangers about my books, I wouldn’t have time to right now. I need to write the next chapter!

But I am typing away on my laptop at Starbucks. I’ve also been at Vintage Timeless Coffee (a local indie) and Full Cup (another local indie) and On the Border (I much prefer chips and salsa to coffee) and IHOP…anywhere I can get a WiFi connection. I’ve even broken down a time or two and popped into the college library.

I know. It’s weird. I haven’t been inside a library since Google.

Anyway! I was really excited about getting to work full-time as a writer, but it’s surprising how difficult it really is to work full-time as a writer. I spend a lot of time cruising around, picking places, packing up the laptop and unpacking it, then cursing when it runs out of power and I realize I left the charger at home.

I’ve tried working at home, too. That’s worth a post of its own, but here’s the short version:

  • In order to write my stories well, I have to leave reality behind and step into my story world for hours at a time.
  • My family is, frankly, too wonderful for me to easily leave behind. If I even have the option, I’ll focus on them instead of my story, so I have to get out of the house or I’m useless.

So! I’ve been a full-time writer for several weeks now, but I’ve barely outperformed the writing I was getting done in my free time before. I’d like to say I’ve been having a lot more fun in between, but I have such frantic deadlines that I’ve really just been stressing about word count.

But there’s good news to follow on the bad. Last week, I met with an office manager at a local place called PC Executives who provide “Executive Suites” in the Oklahoma City area. That’s a handy way to rent an office when all you want is an office–a little room with space for a desk and a couple guest chairs.

They provide the receptionist and the expensive scanner/printer/copier and the fancy break room and all the services you’d have at a “real” office, and you get a little place to call your own.

It’s a short-term solution (the Consortium is going to need a big place of its own before too long), but the nice thing is that they’re set up to be a short-term solution. I should be able to start using my office sometime this week, and I’m not stuck with any kind of long lease commitment.

Hmm. I don’t know if this will be at all interesting to you guys, but on my end, it’s all kinds of awesome. I can’t wait make the commute again, show up at work, sit down at my desk, and put in my eight hours.

Or seven. Or…well, four. And then fourteen. And back to seven. It’s not about punching a clock, man! It’s about having a dedicated place. And this time, it’s dedicated to storytelling.

I can’t wait.

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Cracking Skulls

When I was young, my parents owned a little hobby farm outside a little town outside Tulsa. This surprises people who know me now, but as a kid I spent all my time outdoors. I never got into comic books or G. I. Joe and Transformers, because I wouldn’t sit still long enough.

I loved to be out on our land, roaming through the hills and trees or splashing through the streams. Out there in the woods, I was some kind of hero. Sometimes King Arthur, sometimes Robin Hood, sometimes Robinson Crusoe surviving the in wild.

And then, sometimes I was David, the shepherd boy who would be king. I didn’t know the sadder stories then, just that it all began with a shepherd boy who would be king. And I was a shepherd boy.

My parents had a little herd, and we had a bit of grazing land just down the hillside, and I would sit on an outcrop of stone and watch the sheep and tell myself adventure stories. It felt right, that I should be a shepherd. It was a proper beginning to the story of my life. I probably complained at the chore, but the narrative element pleased me anyway.

But sometimes the narrative broke down.

Sheep are big and brutish creatures, but mostly they’re pretty easy to care for. I was…maybe eight or nine. I wasn’t very big, but I could swing the gate to let them run off down the hill, and when the sun was setting I could chivvy them back up and pour the feed.

The only problem, really, were the rams. They were always big and mean, and we had one or two I hated. They were dumb, and mostly easy to avoid, but once or twice I got a smacking from one of them and ended up bruised and bitter.

I remember one harsh winter, when the snow lay thick and we’d burned through our stock of firewood, and we finally got a break in the bad weather. Dad decided to take advantage of it, so he bundled up us kids–my two sisters and me–and told us we’d go out playing in the snow! He took us to the top of the long, wooded slope, pointed to the bare wall outside the back door, and told us to go gather firewood.

We went off grumbling, but it was not a miserable task. We kicked at the snow, and slipped and slid along the hillside, and threw snowballs at each other from fortified positions. Maybe we grabbed a stick now and then, but mostly we were playing.

And then, seeing how much we were benefiting from a little time outdoors and thinking the sheep had been cooped up just as long, Dad turned them loose to go romping in the snow. He was not a harsh taskmaster. He left his two flocks playing, and went to gather the wood we really needed.

Alas, that blasted ram found us, and he was in a rotten mood. Up along the fenceline at the top of the hill, I was playing with my sisters when the beast came charging along, his little hooves churning up mud and snow, his huge, curved horns lowered for the strike. Someone screamed. We ran. We dodged. Perhaps one of us slipped on ice and went sprawling, and shouted nobly, “Leave me! Save yourselves!”

I…don’t remember precisely how it happened, but in the end he treed us. The stupid, woolly behemoth had all three of us straddling one low-hanging limb, and he was stamping and pawing at the ground below, snorting great gouts of steamy sheep breath. We shouted and hollered for someone to come rescue us, and our knight in shining armor was my dad.

He came trundling down the path, head cocked curiously at the sight of his three kids arrayed on an ominously sagging sycamore limb. And there below us was his prize ram. Dad had proved more productive than the rest of us, and he came innocently down the path, his arms loaded with big, cut logs.

Oh, how many times had we tried to convince him this animal was a dangerous monster? He’d never believed us, but now the beast spotted him and turned his way. We tried to shout a warning to him, but he couldn’t understand our clamor. We could only watch as the creature, mad with rage, charged straight at our helpless father.

As it got close, his eyes got wide. He shouted, “Yelp!” and dropped his load of timber. Six stove-size logs fell like hammer-blows on the sheep’s hard skull, and the animal stumbled drunkenly past my dad, then sank down in the snow for a nap.

My sisters and I dropped to the ground and ran toward Dad, cheering and laughing that the beast had finally met its match. That must have shown him! Go Dad! What a hero.

But he wasn’t laughing. He ignored our celebration and left the wood he’d cut and gathered where it had fallen. He went to the animal and bent down over it, raised its head and gently prodded at the spot the logs had hit.

There a spot of shiny blood in the dense black wool. It wasn’t much, and rams are famous for their hard skulls, but Dad had hurt one his animals. I saw him cry a tear or two while he checked the wound, while he checked that the animal was only stunned, then he sent me to the house for gauze and some antibiotic ointment. He nursed the wretched monster like some precious pet, and in the end we all five walked together back to the yard.

I borrowed something of that memory for “Auric and the Wolf.” It’s one I think of often. I’ve learned a lot from my dad, and most of it was not when he was lecturing.

Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.

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Overworked

My day job is killing me.

I’m not complaining! My day job is a dream come true. It’s also a frantic sprint from the moment I wake up until I collapse every night.

Writing is not exactly the leisurely, contemplative life I imagined as a kid.

Faith

I think last time I posted I was panicking about a deadline for the first third of Faith (Ghost Targets, #5). I made the deadline. It was a close-run thing, but I managed 12,000 words in three days while out of state celebrating my in-laws’ anniversary.

When I got home, I turned in my pages to the professor and then immediately started panicking about my next deadline. That’s the one you all care about, I’m sure.

The Dragonprince’s Heir

I’m attempting to complete The Dragonprince’s Heir (The Dragonprince Trilogy, #3) as the final project for my Master of Professional Writing degree from the University of Oklahoma. In April I’ll submit a finished manuscript to a panel of three much-published authors (Deborah Chester, J. Madison Davis, and Mel Odom), and then a couple weeks later I’ll have to go before them and defend it as a publishable work.

If they approve it, I’ll receive my Master’s degree. If they don’t, I won’t. Simple as that. This is my masterpiece, in the original sense. It’s fitting that it’s also the culmination of the series that made me famous.

But given the importance of that project, I hate that I’m having to rush it as much as I am. The book is about 2/3 done at 60,000 words, and I have the rest plotted and outlined, but I’m rapidly running out of school year.

In short, I need to write 30,000-40,000 words (approximately 120-150 pages) in the next three weeks.That will leave me just one week to revise the whole thing up to a standard my judges will consider “publishable.”

The good news is that it’ll leave me seven weeks to publish it. That’s longer than any of our projects has ever had to process through Consortium Books. Again, given the importance of the project, I love that we’ll be able to take it slow.

Into the Flames

And with all this hanging over me, I had to interrupt my writing time last weekend because of a critical deadline at my day job. My other day job, I guess I should say.

This week we published Jessie Sanders’s debut novel, Into the Flames, which is a young-adult urban fantasy with some incredibly engaging characters. I read it as a partial manuscript over a year ago, approved it as a rough draft, and spent the last year waiting anxiously to find out what it became.

That finally happened last weekend. Two days before we took it to press, I finally cleared my schedule and curled up with my Kindle to read the final draft.

It was phenomenal (of course). Halfway through the afternoon Saturday, I looked up at the end of a particularly exciting scene and said, “Is this really my job?”

I love it. I love the writing, and I love the publishing, too. Every bit of it makes me better at my craft and brings better works to the reading public. That’s a rewarding feeling.

Auric and the Wolf

Meanwhile, I’m working on other projects of my own, too. I’m helping develop a new digital book production company, I’m preparing some Dragonswarm short stories for the Consortium of Worlds collections, and I’m publishing the short stories I co-created in the world of Oberon’s Dreams.

“Notes from a Thief” is already out (with a recently redesigned cover that’s just stunning). And in the last week I did a big rewrite on “Auric and the Wolf,” in which I made the kid actually fight the wolf. Much more exciting that way.

That one should be out in a couple weeks. I’ll let you know when it’s available.

Live Life

I was also contacted out of the blue by someone from the University of Wisconsin who’s putting together an anthology called Live Life. They asked me to contribute a work (or works), with all proceeds going to The American Cancer Society.

And I just happen to have a perfect piece: the literary story “Building Plans” I wrote for Advanced Fiction Writing last fall. It’s about a single mother who’s widowed young and trying to find some way to make her life go on working. Seems pretty fitting, really.

I spent today mostly getting caught up on chores, but tomorrow I’m back to writing on the Dragonprince. Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.

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Self-Employed

Last July, I started selling a lot of books. Last December, I started making a lot of money. Not just enough money from the self-publishing that I could afford to quit my day job, but enough that it was costing me money to keep going to work every day.

Still, I kept going to work. There were lots of good reasons (not the least of them fear), but the biggest was this: After three years of working on one major project for the Federal Aviation Administration, I was almost done.

The documentation team for the long-range radar branch of the FAA is a pretty modest group. We had a brand-new manager and two editors with no formal documentation training, plus me. And we were just wrapping up a major overhaul of the vast majority of our radars.

So I sat down at the end of December, decided I could afford to quit tomorrow, and decided to stay on until the end of February, mainly so I could finish up that documentation project and leave the team in a survivable situation.

At 3:45 last Friday afternoon, I finished the project I’d been working on for three years. I sent an email to a handful of my coworkers with some contact info in case they wanted to stay in touch (or buy my future novels), then I dropped off my badge and parking decal and left forever.

(Father in Heaven, I hope it was forever.)

Anyway, Monday morning saw me self-employed. I’ll actually be working as a full-time employee (CEO and head publisher) for my non-profit, The Consortium, Inc., but that doesn’t start until April. In the meantime, I’m nothing but a writer.

I’ve had an awful lot of people asking me how it feels to be free. Some things worth taking into account before I answer that question:

  • It’s only been a week.
  • During that week, I’ve gotten hit with a couple huge unexpected expenses, and watched sales on all my books decline frighteningly.
  • I’ve had a cold. Monday someone asked, “How’s your first day being self-employed?” and I answered, “I should’ve called in sick.”
  • I’m frantically trying to catch up on an overloaded school schedule that I’d been severely neglecting for the last six weeks while I finished up at work.

And even with all of that, I’m loving it. Even with all of that, this week has been among the most productive in my entire adult life, and every bit of it has been worthwhile work that matters to me personally.

  • I published Camouflage (Ghost Targets, #4) this week.
  • I coordinated on cover art for a couple other books I hope to get published in March.
  • I dusted off an old short story that I hope to get rewritten and published in the next few weeks.
  • I read back through The Dragonprince’s Heir (The Dragonprince Trilogy, #3) and wrote several thousand new words on that one, for the first time since last fall.
  • I wrote several thousand words on Faith (Ghost Targets, #5).

That doesn’t cover any of the business-y stuff I took care of, and best of all, I did almost all of it during business hours. Sure, I spent my evenings laying around being worthless because of the cold, but I also watched TV with Trish and read a couple good books and tried out some lame videogames.

It’s been a really great week. And this is just the beginning. Trish started shopping for office space this week. I can only imagine what I’ll be able to get up to once I’ve got a dedicated space and a reasonable routine.

Everything is wonderful. Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.

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Just Getting Started

Hey, there! This is the home page of international bestselling fantasy author Aaron Pogue!

That’s me. Yes, I call myself that. Wouldn’t you?

You may already be familiar with my writing advice website, Unstressed Syllables. I started building that one back in 2009, before I was an international bestselling fantasy author, and when AaronPogue.com was an unavailable domain.

I’m still writing at Unstressed Syllables, but I would like that site to become (or, rather, to remain) a destination for writers looking for writing advice. Teaching has always been important to me, but I wanted another page I could dedicate to my readers.

It’ll take some time before I find an effective balance between the two sites, but I’ll eventually manage. In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter or friend me on Facebook to keep an eye out for the most important bits.

And, of course, be sure to check out the books. I’ve got links in the sidebar.

Thanks for stopping by!

Sincerely,
Aaron

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The Week in Words (August 21)

At the Editor’s Desk

This week was so busy it ran into next week! Sorry for the late newsletter, but it’s been delayed by some truly exciting projects, so I’m sure you’ll forgive me.

Master of Professional Writing

This week I attended the orientation for new graduate students in the Master of Professional Writing program at the University of Oklahoma. It’s a two-year graduate degree that focuses on writing novels, non-fiction books, and screenplays. You know I’m already focusing pretty heavily on the first two of those, and I’ve got secret dreams of seeing Gods Tomorrow as a screenplay within my lifetime, so there’s incredible potential here.

I said a little bit more about orientation (and my expectations for the coming semester) over at the Consortium blog, in case you’d like to know more.

Gods Tomorrow

I’ve also spent most of the month really wrapped up in last-minute improvements to a two-year-old manuscript. That’s because I’m planning to self-publish Gods Tomorrow in early September.

It’s a huge undertaking, but I’ve been making rumblings here lately against the publishing establishment, and I’ve been linking you to article by J. A. Konrath who makes screeds against the establishment, so I’m doing my due diligence. I’m going to publish my best, most polished, most promising manuscript as a total gamble, and let you know what I learn.

Of course, I’m doing everything I can to bias the results, so I’ve been pretty busy planning a coverart photoshoot with the amazing Julie V. Photography (not to mention contacting Julie Roads for some help with the back cover copy).

On Unstressed Syllables

This week we covered two major topics: after exhorting you to accept your expertise as a writer (I called it “writing in the deep end”), I went on to demand that you obey some writing rules again.

Sunday I introduced the Technical Writing series on expertise with a story about throwing my daughter in the deep end of the pool, and watching her struggle back to the top. Ugh! Just typing that makes my stomach tie up in knots, but it turned out to be a good thing.

Then on Monday I talked about pretending to be an expert writer. I’ve spent most of the last year practicing what I preach, as far as that goes, and it’s definitely turned out to be a good thing.

Then Tuesday I tried to tell you how to overcommit yourself as successfully as I have done. It’s all about stretching your competence, and I’m pretty confident that’s the only way anyone has ever earned the rightful title of “expert.”

On Wensdy (as we sometimes say it in these parts), Courtney told us what she learned about writing this week when she returned to her writing Bible, a memoir/textbook written by Stephen King; in essence, she told us — as he told us before — to use the words we know and stay away from the big and fancy words, no matter how tempting they might be. I think it’s good advice. How about you?

Thursday I introduced the Creative Writing series on writing rules with a story about a high school math teacher who let me sweat it out, before doing me a tremendous favor. Who would have thought math could be so suspenseful?

On Friday I talked about suspense, and the challenging balance of surprising your readers without keeping them in the dark. One of those things is a requirement of good writing, and the other one is absolutely against the rules. Fun.

Saturday’s article cleared things up a little bit, though, because real suspense isn’t built out of ignorance. The best way to write suspense is by creating real concern for fictional characters. Once that’s in place, you can do more to worry your readers by revealing what’s in store than by hiding the things they need to know. It’s liberating…and incredibly powerful.