I received a bunch of e-mail this week reminding me I promised to talk about craft in combination with goals. I was kind of hoping you would all forget, since this is a tough topic. Ahh, well. Here goes.

But first… I also had a great quote sent to me.

“You miss one hundred percent of the shots you never take.” Wayne Gretzky.

Yup. Pretty much sums up everything Heinlein said and what I’ve been rambling on about here for thousands of words. Take each writing session, each day, each week as a shot and fire, then reload and fire again the next week, the next day, the next session. It all adds up, but unless you do it, nothing will happen, and that’s a guarantee.

Okay, craft goals.

First off, let me define what I mean by craft by stating a negative. “I do not think pretty sentences are craft.” Or put another way, also in the negative. “Writing a pretty sentence is not being a storyteller.”

But that brings about one of the great problems with beginning writers becoming professional storytellers. In the beginning, we all focus on how to write pretty sentences, give a sentence the correct grammar and structure, make everything match some style manual somewhere. You got to learn it, so take a few English classes and learn it.

Then, take your copy of Strunk and White, walk to the window, open the window, and toss the book into a snow drift. Once you learn the English language basics, which I will assume that almost all of you reading this have done, then it’s time to focus on an entire different set of craft issues. Storytelling craft issues.

Beginning writer workshops often focus on grammar and pretty sentences. If that’s the focus of your workshop, run to the door and into the street, even if there’s traffic. You’ll be safer. A workshop like that is worthless to becoming a published fiction writer. In every workshop I have ever been in, I would not allow anyone to say “On page six, you have a misplaced comma.” If you like that kind of writing, my suggestion is quit trying to become a professional storyteller and become a copy editor. The industry always needs good copy editors. (Just don’t try to rewrite a real storyteller.)

And for heaven’s sake, turn off your grammar checker on your computer. You want a computer programmer telling you how to write and getting in the way of your creative process? Worst invention ever for a fiction writer. Worst. Period. Kills all voice, all personal style, and everything that makes your writing unique. If you’ve been using that grammar checker and getting form rejections, I just may have found the problem for you. Your stories are dull and all sound just like every other beginning writer’s story. Fatal problem. Turn it off, and if it won’t turn off, get a new word processing program that will allow you to turn it off. And spell check at the end of a story. Don’t leave that on either. Just gets in the way of the creative flow.

So, back to quality writing. No one gives a crap if you can write a pretty sentence in commercial fiction. What they care about is can you make your characters come alive, can you make the reader keep reading into the middle of the night, can you make a reader cry, can you make them laugh, and do both when you want, do you have voice, style, story structure, and so on? Pretty sentences just get in the way of most of that.

When someone calls a writer a “good writer” they are not talking about how many pretty sentences per page they have, they are talking about their stories and how they come alive.

Think it through if you’re having trouble with this. If every writer wrote exactly perfect Chicago Book of Style grammar, then every character would sound exactly the same, would talk exactly the same, and everyone in every book would speak in perfect English. Oh, yuck. Boring!

So, what craft issues would I suggest you all practice? Well, there are hundreds and hundreds.

Back when I was writing a lot of media novels, including Star Trek and other media books, I could never really start each book unless I had something to practice in that book. I considered all those media books practice, every one of them, and I had a blast in almost every practice session. On one book toward the end of my media days, I was having problems starting and Kris asked me, “What are you practicing this book?” I hadn’t set my practice goal for the book, and the moment I did, I fired right along on the novel.

For example, one book I decided I needed a lot of work on cliff hangers, so I studied what makes a good cliff hanger, how the end of the chapter only forms part of the hook, while the grounding of the reader in the opening of the next chapter is the second key to a good cliff hanger. I learned the types, the styles of cliff hangers, and then spent an entire book practicing them, using an event cliff hanger one chapter, a dialog cliff hanger the next, a scene jump cliff hanger the next. I got to the end of the book and decided I really didn’t know cliff hangers that well yet, so I spent the next two books working on cliff hangers again. For some reason, all the reviews on those books said they really “moved” and “were hard to put down.”

Now understand, I only had one practice focus for each book and I never told anyone what it was. I learned as a golf professional a long time ago that if you’re going to practice something, focus on only that and leave the rest of the game alone for the moment. One thing at a time. That’s key to good practice.

Another example: Early on I got tired of people telling me in my short fiction that I wasn’t writing thick enough, so Nina Kiriki Hoffman and I challenged each other to have all five senses in every two pages of every short story we wrote. Wow, did that challenge bring our characters and fiction alive. I kept that challenge up for two years and every so often go back and do it on a new story. I did it on one media novel as well. It was a very food-focused book.

Another example: Later on in my short fiction life, I got tired of people telling me I needed more setting. So I started one story with nothing but setting, no character, for five pages, basically making the setting a character. Yup, one of my best stories. I worked on that focus of practice for months and dozens of stories and then on five different novels. I am good at setting now if and when the story needs it.

So what to practice? Well, listen to those around you when they talk about your fiction, listen between the lines when your first reader tells you to fix something.

If your reader says, “The book slowed down here and here…” Or, “I skimmed through this part and this part.” Guess what? You need to practice grounding the reader with setting, with sensory details, and you need to practice pacing a great deal, and cliff hangers. Just a simple comment like that from a first reader will clue you in on a half dozen areas you are weak on.

ON THE NEXT STORY is where you practice that, focus on one of the areas only. Just one.

If editors are sending you only forms, then what does that tell you that you need to practice? Duh, openings. If you have a dull opening, no editor reads on and thus will not send anything but a form, so practice grounding the reader solidly. Read hundreds of other writer’s openings and see how they did it, type the good ones into your computer to see what their words look like on your screen and in manuscript format. Practice openings until you start getting letters from editors saying “They liked your premise or they read to the end.”

Figure out what to practice by the feedback you get from readers.

One thing to remember is that you can’t fix a flawed story. Think of an old tire with a tube. You can put a patch on it, maybe, to get it by, but you can’t fix it. The patch will still show. The problem is in the story, so best thing you can do is learn you have the problem, and make sure you practice making that problem go away in the next story. And the next, and the next, until you don’t worry about it any more at all. Other new problems will pop up.

So my suggestion in these writing sessions you are setting up is figure out what you need to practice first and do that on the next project or two. Read how-to books on the subject (not in your writing time), how other professional writers do it, and just pay attention to that one area when working on the novel or the story. Let everything else just be natural. Only one practice point per project. And stay with it for as many projects as it takes until you have it solid.

And if by now you don’t like the idea of the word “Practice” in relationship to your writing, if you still think every word is golden, if you don’t believe Heinlein’s Rules apply to you, then you might want to think about finding a new dream. You have no hope of becoming a long term professional writer, because of all long term professional writers I have ever talked with, or read books about, they all have a few things in common. They all believe in working to get better with every story and they all write and release. They know how to practice, to get better, and they always look to the next story, when finished with the current one.

So, only a couple more posts in this series, then we all fire into the new year. It’s going to be a fun one.

Cheers, Dean