LTUE

For those who are unaware, I’m going to be a guest at BYU’s Life, The Universe and Everything symposium this week. I won’t be a guest of honor, though, probably because I have a beard.

This will be my first time hanging around the campus since I graduated. I look forward to it. I’m particularly excited to sneak out of the con and go to the Carl Bloch exhibit.

Anyway, my schedule for the week is this:

Thursday

4:00pm—Dystopias/Utopias

(Panel with: Robison Wells, James Dashner, Jessia Day George (M), Lesli Muir Lytle)

I’m quite excited for this one, because I really love these genres and like to talk about them and because James and Jessica are really awesome. (I’m sure Lesli is awesome too, but I don’t know her.)

5:00pm—The Art of Podcasting

(Panel with Dan Wells, Howard Tayler, and Robison Wells)

I find this one to be all kinds of hilarious, since my podcast is all of three episodes old. Still, I’m a rabid podcast fan, so assuming we’re talking about podcasts rather than how-to podcast, then I’ll be fine. And if it’s how-to, then I’ll defer to the brains.

Friday

5:00pm—What You Can And Can’t Do In A YA Novel

(Panel with Mette Ivie Harrison, Elana Johnson, Bree DeSpain, Robison Wells, J. Scott Savage)

This one promises to be interesting, because the obvious answer (having read lots of YA) is: you can do anything in a YA novel, and people have. The stickier question is: what should you do in a YA novel.

Saturday

1:00pm-3:00pm—Writing Excuses podcast

With Brandon Sanderson away at another convention, I’m going to be filling in as the third wheel as they record several episodes of the show. We’re also going to be playing several games from The Appendix podcast. It’s a crossover episode!

Project Six Weeks

I haven’t been updating every day, but things are moving forward well. Last week I had an epiphany of why the beginning of the book was so terrible, so I’ve actually gone back and rewritten the first four chapters from scratch, and I’m quite pleased with the change. Today I’ve already gotten 4000 words!

The Writing Excuses podcast (run by my friends Brandon Sanderson, Howard Tayler and Dan Wells) recently had an episode that has really stuck with me for the last week. The concept was that they were going back in time and got to give writing advice to their teenage selves. Their advice ranged from the very specific (Dan told his teenage self to stop playing video games) to the abstract (Howard’s advice was to quit waiting for things you can’t control).

I was listening to this podcast while driving through the barren wilderness of northern Nevada, and it gave me a lot of time to ponder: what would I tell myself? As a teenager, I was in a different situation than Dan and Brandon—I had no idea I wanted to be a writer. At the time I thought I’d be a visual artist. I didn’t spend my spare time conjuring up stories; I spent my time painting and drawing. So, any advice I gave my teenage self would be along more abstract lines: quit being lazy, practice harder, don’t assume you know everything, etc.

But if we’re talking about advice I would give myself in my early writing days, there are several things I can think of. The first would be the same as my advice above: quit being lazy. Early on, I didn’t like revising at all. Even my first published book was very rough, and it got published because of a miracle rather than because of literary quality. It wasn’t until my third book that I really learned the benefit of rewrites and revision. It was a painful lesson to learn. One major rewrite was caused by a hard drive failure, the other was at the request of my publisher. It was horrible at the time, but I learned how much better writing can be if you work at it again and again.

By the same token, I think I’d give myself the advice to work from an outline. I’ve always been a hybrid of discovery writer and outliner, but it was only relatively recently that I realized how helpful it is to know the structure of the story—especially how it’s going to end. I spent two and a half years muddling through a YA novel—one that had a fantastic premise—that had no end. I didn’t know the end, so I didn’t know the scope, and I type a hundred thousand words that just couldn’t go anywhere. On the other hand, every time I’ve outlined something from the very beginning—even if I go back and change the outline later—the books have gone much better.

All of that said, I wonder if giving myself writing advice back then would have helped anything.  To a large extent, I think that the best way to learn about writing is simply to write, to screw up, to write some more, to revise, to get feedback, and to keep at it.

I recently read through The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes. I’d read it before, back when I was first starting to write, and I remember thinking how stupid the book was. The advice was dumb, and it was obviously written by someone who didn’t know what they were talking about. Now, when I read through it again, I found myself nodding my head on almost every page, thinking about how correct the advice was. There’s a lot you can learn through How-To books, but I don’t think you really understand any of it until you write and write and write.

So, I guess my main advice to my younger self would simply be: Write. By amazing coincidence, that was the very first advice that anyone gave me when I started down this path. As I’ve mentioned before, eleven years ago my brother Dan told me “Everybody says they want to be a writer. Everybody says that one day they’re going to sit down and write The Great American Novel. The difference between a writer and everybody else is that they actually do it.”

So, what writing advice would you give younger self? Do you think it would even be helpful, or do you need to learn from experience?

As mentioned a few weeks ago, I was a guest on the Writing Excuses podcast recently. We recorded three episodes, all of which are now online for your listening enjoyment.

The first features me saying very little. I’m not the official guest on that one; I’m just filling in for Howard Tayler. The real guest is L.E. Modesitt, and the topic is How To Write Practical Fantasy. Since I don’t write fantasy at all (either practical or impractical) I didn’t have a ton to say. But I’m there.

The second also features L.E. Modesitt and the four of us (Lee, Dan Wells, Brandon Sanderson and me) take questions from the audience. If I recall we talk about how to write action scenes, common problems with military fiction, how to write distinct voices in dialogue, and how to schedule your writing time.

The last one (posted today) has Janci Patterson and me as the guest stars, and we talk about breaking into the YA market. (She also recently sold a YA novel, hers to Henry Holt.) We talk about how we did it, and give some tips and advice.

This afternoon (in about an hour) I’m going to be interviewed as a guest on the Writing Excuses podcast. The podcast is run by Dan Wells (my brother), Brandon Sanderson, and Howard Tayler, and they talk about all things writing-related. There are an awful lot of places on the web where you can get writing advice (including here on this very website) but these three guys are really SMRT. They’re educated, they’re experienced, they’re funny, and they’re even kinda humble, sometimes, relatively.

I’ve been on the show a few times in the past, talking twice about marketing (here and here), once about fight scenes, and one other time that I can’t remember what we talked about (I think).

A few other podcasts that I’m a fan of:

This American Life: From a writing perspective, this show is amazing in the way that they can play with your mind and emotions (but in a good way). It’s not uncommon for the show to lead you down one path only to pull a quick u-turn and tear down everything they’ve been building and create something entirely different. From a non-writing perspective, it’s just darn entertaining.

Stuff You Should Know: This podcast is run by the people at How Stuff Works, a website that I occassionally will use in researching stuff for books. The podcasts are not as authoritative as you’d hope–the guys occassionally spread an urban legend or two–but it’s still entertaining and informative (as long as you listen with a grain of salt).

Skeptoid: Speaking of urban legends, this podcast debunks them, everything from alternative medicines to ghost stories to cryptozoology. I enjoy this podcast for several reasons: first, it’s just entertaining to listen to crazy ideas get debunked. Second, I’m a sucker for conspiracy theories, ever since writing The Counterfeit, and I enjoy hearing about the theories, even though I know they’re baloney. Third, I love logic and the science of argument, and one of my favorite parts of this show is when they analyze a claim and explain the various logical fallacies. Good stuff.

Intelligence Squared: Another NPR show, this one takes big, current topics and then gathers together the best, most-relevant minds to debate them. And it’s not just a point/counterpoint style talk show, but a real Oxford-style debate with rules and time limits and rebuttals and, best of all, winners!

I’m running out of time to get over to the convention for Writing Excuses, so I’ll have to get to more later. But look these up on iTunes; they’re all free and you’ll have plenty in the archives to entertain you.