I had two questions a while back from an aspiring writer. The first one was, “I’ve got thirty-thousand words written. Should I start looking for an agent?” I hate these kinds of questions because I can’t tell them what they want to hear. So after giving them what I figured was the correct answer, the follow up question was, “Okay, so once a writer finishes the book and gets an agent, how long before they can quit their day-job.” I admit, I was a bit dumb-struck and while my brain was going “Let me break out my divination toolkit” and refusing to come up with something encouraging, I finally settled on “I have no idea.”

I still don’t have an answer (that fortune-telling kit I bought is pure bunk; don’t waste your money), but I do have some thoughts on writers, writing, and their expectations.

So here goes…

Probably like most people, I was introduced to the 10,000-hour concept via Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success. (If you haven’t read it, it’s a pretty quick read and well worth the time).

To condense it to its most basic form, the premise for the 10,000-hour rule is that it takes ten-thousand hours of work/practice to become an “expert.” The specifics of what constitutes “work” or “practice” or an “expert” seem to have inspired a bevy of criticisms since the book came out in 2008.

I ran a quick search on “ten thousand hours rule” this morning and was surprised to find the links “debunking” the concept preceded a link to the book itself. My understanding is that search results are ordered by popularity which suggests that people have been far more interested in the articles “debunking” the concept than not. To be honest, I’m not surprised. Who wants to be told they’ll have to put in 10,000 hours of work on anything.

Yet, the articles didn’t so much debunk as get into the nitty-gritty of what constituted practice, work, and expertise, as well as pointing out that there are physical traits and aptitude that will skew the results (No duh, experts, thank you. Honestly, where would we be without you.)

Ten years after the book came out, I still recall the example given, in that if you work a 40-hour week (and spend all 40 of those hours actually doing your job, rather than in meetings, travel, etc.) it would take 250 weeks, or FIVE years (50-week year) to become an expert at your job. I remember this because it paralleled my own work experience. It’s about how long it took to unlock that “expert” achievement level, and if you switched jobs you usually ended up resetting the clock or moving it back a bit.

Then Gladwell wrote about what it would take to get to the 10,000-hours in FOUR years: an extra ten hours per week (50 hours x 50 weeks x 4 years=10K). Again, these numbers stick with me because working as a salaried engineer, it seemed that we were always working 50- or 60-hour weeks. Problem was, of course, that those ten or twenty extra hours weren’t always “work” in the sense that we were doing our jobs. Mostly I’m casting the stink-eye at meetings that could have accomplished their goal by memo and various time-wasters like mandatory company training, i.e. HR meddling and getting in the way of doing work.

So, what does this have to do with writing? Well, I’m always stunned by the number of people who proclaim that they’ve been writers for N years, as if that means something. It’s a totally meaningless number, unless “year” in this case means 2000-work-hours, and each one of those work hours represents actual writing or something directly related to improving your writing skills.

It does not include research, except when you take said research and figure out how to use it in the actual writing process. It does not include marketing (which is promotion of your writing, but isn’t writing). I would argue that it includes editing, if we’re talking about editing that involves implementing editorial requests (in this case an editor NOT being a person YOU pay, but a person who your publisher pays). I would also say that includes any activity that goes towards developing your writing skillset, such as continuing education. This could include a class, a book related to the craft or skills of writing, taking a book you enjoyed and studying how that author did what he did.

Most writers are part-time writers. They have day-jobs. There’s nothing wrong with this. It does however mean that if you only have ten hours a week to devote to writing, that it’s going to take twenty years to get to that 10,000 hours. Unless you’re incredibly lucky, well-connected, or already in the industry in some other form, you’ve set yourself on a long, slow path to success.

There’s a faster track, a ten year one, if you double up to twenty hours a week, stick to it, and don’t veer off of it.

Most writers veer off the path at one point or another. Life gets in the way. Things happen.

You’ve won the lottery if you can devote forty to sixty hours a week to developing your writing skill set. You could actually achieve that four- or five-year plan as if you had a job. But it’s still a four- or five-year plan. It’s not a one-year plan. It’s not 30,000-words and “Should I start looking for an agent now?”

Hard work is key. So are realistic expectations. Becoming a writer is a marathon, not a spring, although sometimes it does feel like you’re sprinting the entire time.

This is the last installment in my review of Koontz’s, How to Write Best Selling Fiction.

It is interesting to note Koontz’s fervent advice not to allow yourself to be labeled as the writer of any specific genre, i.e. a science-fiction writer or a mystery writer. Instead, go for the label of “writer.”

Just because we start out writing in our favorite genre does not mean that we will remain there, or be successful at it. We might find greater success in a different genre. How did we start this? Wasn’t it with epistolary Gothic espionage novels set on the planet Mars in the seventeenth century? I can see his point.

Nevertheless, Koontz spends an entire chapter (the twelfth) on two genres (science fiction and mystery) and how to write them well. I will tell you up front,  I skipped the section on writing mysteries, but I’m sure it’s as packed with good information as the part on science fiction.

The main focus was on bringing aliens to life, i.e. how to write them so that they are not (a) cardboard or (b) humans with spots painted on them. It is one of the best written pieces on the subject that I have seen, and best of all, Koontz provides us with great examples. I would recommend his book for this section alone.

The takeaway, for creating aliens as well as alien milieus, was the same: you need lots of specific details to make them believable. It is, by far, the hardest aspect of writing science fiction because you must not only come up with the details, but they must mesh and they must be believable. You must have the skill to create suspension of disbelief and maintain it throughout.

Within science-fiction, there are a number of genres, most of which Koontz does not deal with by name, but rather indirectly, via a discussion between writing near-future vs far-future stories. It would be of no surprise to any sci-fi writer that writing near-future is far harder than writing about the far future. The former requires extensive research and a skill for extrapolation, while the latter is more speculative and relies more on imagination. Whether you choose one or the other, the key to success lies in making it cohesive. If something stands out as a red flag, you must world-build to a sufficient degree to sell the red flag to an editor.

Chapter 13 deals with pitfalls and how to avoid them. Rather than summarize them, I’ll focus on the takeaway since it’s one that I rarely see emphasized: “a writer is only in competition with himself.”

There is also a short, somewhat useful section on overcoming writer’s block, but nothing that one couldn’t find via an internet search.

I skimmed Chapter 14 (Selling) because I think most of it is out of date. When it comes to selling, pretty much any of the books below are a far better investment of your time and money:

• Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Publishing (WMG Writer’s Guide) (Volume 5)
• Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Indie Publishing: A WMG Writer’s Guide (WMG Writer’s Guides Book 6)
• The Magic Bakery: Copyright in the Modern World of Fiction Publishing (A WMG Writer’s Guide)
• Creating Your Author Brand (WMG Writer’s Guides Book 16)
• Discoverability (WMG Writer’s Guide) (Volume 7)
• Closing the Deal…on Your Terms: Agents, Contracts, and Other Considerations (WMG Writer’s Guides) (Volume 14)

Chapter 15 consists mainly of a list of best-sellers deemed worthy of study. Like the chapter on selling, it has not aged well, but may be of use to some.

I hope you found these entries as educational as I did. I think that in order to be a successful writer one must continue learning. And it’s particularly difficult when it comes to writing, because so many think that stringing sentences and paragraphs together somehow automatically turns into fiction that will sell.

We can watch someone cook and get a fair idea of what’s involved. We can follow a recipe. But do we ever get to watch someone write? I argue that we cannot.

Even if one were to perch on a writer’s shoulder and watch them work, one would not be privy to what’s going on in the writer’s mind, what thoughts led them there. I think that writers think about writing all the time (even if only subconsciously). We spend a great deal of time inside our own heads before we are ready to sit down and type or put pen to paper. Therefore, even a keen observation of the “writing” process would miss out on all the essentials that went into getting the writer to the point where they sit down and start typing. Perhaps if the writer started giving the observer a running commentary, we might be able to witness the process of creation, but even that would be marred by the commentary itself, for if the writer is explaining to you why he chose one word over another, he is no longer creating.

Continuing with Dean Koontz’s, How to Write Best Selling Fiction…

In the chapter on Background (Ch. 9) Koontz gives several useful pieces of advice about how to incorporate background material (what might be called milieu) into a story. He goes into the advantages and disadvantages of using contemporary vs other types of settings. He also gives good advice on research.

The most important piece of advice is that details make the story authentic and I have to agree. Stories sparse on details tend to be a boring conglomeration of dialogue and action, the cardboard characters in a white room that are such a pet peeve of mine.

He goes into how to make even a mundane setting interesting and how to get readers to accept speculative elements.

He obviously wrote this before the “crime” of “cultural appropriation” was invented because he says (quite correctly) that no geographical or cultural element can be exhausted (not by one book or a hundred).

Certain people will insist that readers are tired of certain settings (countries, cultures) and only “marginalized” cultures and peoples are worthy of further exploration. The implication is that you as a writer, as a unique human being, cannot bring your own point of view or perspective to a story. How insulting to dehumanize the most relevant minority on Earth–the individual.

Chapter 10 –Grammar and Syntax– talks about the importance of getting two things right: background details and a respect for and knowledge of basic grammar. These are two mechanical elements not subject to taste. Koontz insists that since they are both skills that can be self-taught, they are not part of the mistakes for which a new writer should be forgiven. And don’t expect your copyeditor to fix it.

It should be noted that when he speaks of respect and knowledge of basic grammar, he is not speaking of syntax and style, both of which make your writing voice unique and should be left alone.

In Style (Ch. 11) he covers the differences between real-life dialogue and fictional dialogue and the pitfalls of making your fictional dialogue sound just like the dialogue you’d hear in real-life. He also covers how to make your dialogue better (so it’s a must read), including the pitfalls of using creative dialogue tags [I covered the same material in this blog post].

Cliches, simplicity and transitions are also covered in this chapter, as well as viewpoint. However ,due to its importance, I will save covering viewpoint for the next entry.

Yesterday I chewed through another seventy or so pages in Dean Koontz’s, How to Write Best Selling Fiction and ended up taking a lot of notes.

Some of the stuff I already knew, like the fact that it’s a helluva lot easier to break the unwritten and often unknown rules (and yes, they are rules, folks, not pirate code) of writing when you’re someone who has proven they can write effective within the standards, than some unproven unknown who has convinced himself that because Stephen King or GRR Martin did this, so can he.

There was some good advice on writing story complications and the acknowledgement that readers are willing to forgive a favorite author for one or two or even three badly written books, but their indulgence is not without limit.

The section on plot solutions was interesting and of far more help to plotters than pantsers. If you’re a plotter, I think you’ll find this section very useful. If you’re a pantser, there are still a few useful things on pacing the ending and writing a satisfying resolution.

One of the more interesting sections for me was the one on plotting for mainstream audiences (as opposed to category/genre ones). It was interesting because when he explained the difference between a mainstream story and category fiction, I had to re-read the section three times to make sure I read what I read. It did cast some light on my own writing, one that I’m still struggling to process. The gist of it is that a mainstream story (regardless of the genre it’s going to be put in) treats elements of story such as plot, characterization, background and theme, quite differently than category fiction. Neither is better than the other, except it is. The mainstream novel transcends genre and appeals to the mainstream, i.e. sells more copies.

Like I said, I’m still chewing that one over. This is why:

According to Koontz, science fiction authors concentrate on plot and action at the expense of all the other elements of good fiction. Now, do keep in mind that this book was published in 1981 and may have been written years earlier. [I don’t know if back then it took three years to bring something like this from manuscript to publication or if it took less time because it was Koontz; so let’s just assume it was written around 1980].

Since I’m primarily a science fiction writer, this section was of particular interest to me. Koontz goes on to say that in category science fiction characters are chess pieces used to advance the plot or mouth pieces to explain various scientific theories. And I don’t disagree. I have seen this far too often, especially in older works, and still see it in newer ones, especially those pegged as “hard” science fiction. It IS one of the reasons I moved away from that sub-genre, because if I wanted to read a technical manual, I’m perfectly capable of doing that. It’s one of the reasons Asimov never appealed to me, and even some of Clarke’s works left a bad taste in my mouth, especially after science became my work. I transitioned to being the kind of reader that read fiction for entertainment rather than to learn science because I was already drowning in science. College does that. And I don’t think I ever emerged from that phase. I wonder how many of my science-fiction reading cohorts have undergone the same transition.

Back to the elements of science fiction. One crucial element is a sense of wonder. Think exotic backgrounds such as alien worlds. Koontz says that this element often distracts from solid characterization and keeps a thematic structure from being integrated into the story. Again he’s talking about category sci-fi. I point this out because I can just hear you guys going, “But, but, what about …”

“What about Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.” [see, I filled in my own objection there]. What a coincidence! Koontz goes on to list it as one of the truly successful science fiction novels that gave us memorable, well-rounded characters. By “truly successful” he’s talking about a category sci-fi novel that appealed to mainstream audiences. Stranger in a Strange Land won the Hugo in 1962, back when that accolade meant that a book was commercially successful. Whether Heinlein or Stranger is to your taste or not, the point is that mainstream-quality characterization efforts paid off and took the book out of the category/genre ghetto and put it into the mainstream.

In Chapter 5 Koontz goes over the difference between plot and action as well as how to handle pacing and make non-action scenes fascinating. I found this far more useful than the trite “advice” of “omit the boring parts” which I think does absolutely nothing helpful. No one sets out to write a boring part–they set out to write a part that requires the delivery of information or the setup for something else. A book written with no downtime (what some call the boring parts) for the reader never gives a reader a chance to catch his breath and desensitizes him to the tension. It’s an exhausting read. To keep your reader from becoming exhausted, you alternate between scenes of high tension and scenes of low tension.

Chapter 6 covers the five traits that heroes need. One of those is imperfections, but there are wrong and right ways to handle those so that the character remains likable. The most interesting part of this chapter for me was the assertion that while a category/genre novel can get away with either a hero or a heroine, a mainstream novel should always have both. This goes against absolutely everything I’ve been told about writing, i.e. that your novel is always about one person (except in a romance where it’s about a couple). Koontz is NOT saying that every book should be a romance. He is saying that there should be a strong co-lead (not a sidekick or minor character or “team” member; a co-lead; now do you see why I’m still chewing on this one?)

While I found Chapter 7 (Believable characters) interesting because it had some essential elements, I skimmed a lot of it because I don’t do character sketches ahead of time. If you use this technique the list of questions to ask yourself about your characters might be very useful to you.

I skidded to a stop in Chapter 8 (Plausability). When Koontz says “plausibility” he’s talking about the need for high quality characterization as well as the ability to set a scene and unobtrusively integrate background material. You’ll be interested to know that most rejections stem from lack of character motivation rather than plot, so the discussion on motivation really piqued my interest and it should pique yours too. He goes into how to work the primary motivations of love, curiosity, self-preservation, and greed. The motivation of self-discovery is reserved for the “Literary” novel. That is, if the primary motivation is self-discovery, you have “Literature.”

There are far more details than what I’m summarizing here, so if you really want to grasp any of the concepts I mention at this surface level, I encourage you to read the book for yourself. I’m sure you’ll get far more from it that way and you’ll probably get different things from it than I did.

The motivation that caused me the greatest distress was duty. According to Koontz, modern readers have little to empathize with here, so duty should be a secondary motivation only, not a primary one. What a sad statement on the state of the world, then and (if still true) now.  I ran a poll in two Facebook groups and that target audience overwhelmingly disagreed. This was much to my relief, but still a source of distress for anyone aiming to make it big in the mainstream market since no exception was made for either historical or speculative fiction (as this chapter did not focus on category/genre) . Have things changed since 1981? Since the “me” generation?  It was interesting to see the debate unfold in the poll’s comments. Thank you to everyone that participated in my polls, especially for the comments, and a thank you to the group moderators for allowing me to post there.

While there was a lot in Koontz’s notions that I personally disagreed with (my worldview allows for both honor and duty as primary motivators even in today’s world) I pulled a lot of useful information on craft and technique from these chapters.

Koontz’s last motivation is revenge and he reserves it for villains.  He does address historical and speculative genres in a round-about way here, mainly through the opinion that most people today rely on the police/courts and that (with few exceptions) it’s hard to accept anyone but police/judges as the sole servants of justice. I think this is why I see revenge as a motivator for a hero mostly in fantasy, alternate history, historical or speculative settings.

I would be remiss in omitting a bit of writerly advice that everyone should consider: Know Your Audience. Because if you’re going to sell them on a concept they are not ready to accept (like the fact that the police/judges are not the sole arbiters of justice) then you have a different (and more difficult) world-building task on your hands than if you take the easy route.

Dean Koontz’s how-to book, How to Write Best Selling Fiction, came with more than a few recommendations. It’s a hard book to find. I had to use inter-library loan and I got the notice that it was available for pickup about halfway between Texas and Georgia. It of course went to the top of my list of things to tackle when I got back from DragonCon, because nothing makes you want to read something faster than a due date and a no renewal option.

The perceived value of this book was further enhanced by how much it seems to be in demand thirty-seven years after it was published. No, that’s not a typo. This little gem was published in 1981.

It’s got some of the most interesting chapter titles I’ve ever seen. For example:

Chapter 3: The Changing Marketplace. I’m sorry, but we’re no longer buying epistolary Gothic espionage novels set on the planet Mars in the seventeenth century. Readers seem to be tiring of that genre.

It made me laugh out loud. Wow, were epistolary Gothic espionage novels ever a thing? And on Mars in the 17th century no less? Guess I better cross THAT project off my list.

Interesting things I learned from today’s reading:

The demands of the average reader. There are eight of them. Very useful.

Why villains are easier to write than heroes. This explains so much about some of the awful stuff I’ve read where there is no heroic figure, so guess I’ll still with my initial bias to write heroic figures.

Favorite quote of the day:

…academe’s kiss is the kiss of death… its embrace is an assurance of eventual, total, lasting obscurity.

Yup, I knew this one. Still made me go “Right, on.” It’s nice when Koontz agrees with me.

How and why category fiction suffers declines in popularity. In some ways it’s so obvious it should not need to be said, but it did. Keyword is “quality.”

Why novels will never be replaced by movies or series. I think his reasoning is sound thirty-seven years later, so he was onto something. If you don’t agree, I suggest you try to novelize just the first fifteen minutes of your favorite movie. After you’ve taken down the description and the dialogue, make sure you add in the important stuff like evoking the emotions you felt when you first saw it.

What makes a well-written story. Words like “complex” and “extensively researched” and “thematically ambitious” were used.

Elements of a classic plot and why it’s NOT a formula, but a proven pattern that’s flexible and satisfying. Seems at odds with the above, but it’s not.

How to handle the opening of a story that requires that many characters be introduced and the story background be established before the story problem can take the stage. To be honest, I was getting a little worried up until I got to this one, because of his emphasis on starting with a crisis. Every single example he gave (where it started with a crisis) bored me to tears and I was beginning to think, maybe this is not a book for me after all. You have to share some basic theories of fiction to find usefulness in a how-to book.

And that’s just the first hundred or so pages, so, I’d say, a good start cause I’m still interested in what he has to say.