1) Canned laughs
Either a joke is funny or it isn’t. Having the author or characters pointing out that someone has just told a joke – he laughed in response to the hilarious joke – is like beating the reader over the head with the complete Get Smart box set. (insert laughs here) Laugh tracks ruin everything.
2) Street directions
I have a map book and Google Maps works pretty well, I don’t need them included in my novel.
3) Prologues
If it doesn’t fit in chapter one it shouldn’t be there. If chapter one isn’t exciting enough then the book has failed to start at the correct spot.
4) Epilogues
I will forgive this if it adds to the story, just as long as it is not just a chapter tying up loose ends. I really don’t care about the hero receiving medals from someone very important. The final chapter should be the end of the story, not a post script of lazy story telling.
5) Purple prose
There are few authors that can get away with flowery language and overly descriptive phrases. I wish authors would stop pretending that they are one of those few authors.
6) That wise old guy character
Why don’t authors just start naming this wise old guy Obi-Wan and be done with it. Sure, there is bound to be a need for a teacher, mentor, or knowledgable character in some stories. But so often the character may as well have been a cardboard cutout, just like Obi-Wan in Star Wars episodes I, II and III.
7) Getting the details wrong
Since when does a Glock have an external safety?* Cordite smell? Racking the slide? Why am I only listing gun mistakes?
8) Including the details
This is similar to the street directions of #2. The excruciating detail that the author has researched is great….. for the author. The reader just wants a story. Accuracy is nice, but overkill is tedious.
9) Using overly common or overly obscure names for characters
Overly common names just blend into the background for me. Overly obscure names might as well be written as @#$%.
10) Having an author name that is very similar to a big name author
I’m looking at you Dale Brown. It really feels like the author has let the marketing department try to rip readers off with the mistaken identity.
* I actually understand why this one occurs. Often at some stage in editing the types of gun are changed around and ‘Glock’ has become synonymous with ‘gun’. Thus it is quite common for someone to decide that the type of gun originally referenced needs to be changed to a Glock/gun and the details around this aren’t changed to suit.
I’ve just come across some interesting research on reading habits by the Pew Research Center. It shows what many readers already knew, that e-books continue to grow in prevalence for readers. But there are also less readers. Although, I will state that comparing 2012 to 2011 and drawing conclusions about people who have read at least one book is always troubling. Might as well be comparing New Year’s weight loss programs prior to February first.
Also: One book? In a year? That isn’t a reader, that’s someone who got an unwanted Xmas present.
Anyway, in 2012 75% of US adults (+16) had read at least one book, down 3% on last year. Print books were generally less popular in 2012 across all age groups not still in school (I guess students get to count class assigned books in a survey), and were read by 67% of US adults, down 5%. E-books were 7% more popular, with 23% of adults having read one in 2012, with all age groups embracing them, especially in the 30-49 age bracket. Audio books were slightly more popular (2%) at 13% in 2012, which would be interesting to relate to the rise of Audible and similar online audio book businesses.
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I guess now the question is, how do these data compare to avid readers? I’m betting avid readers have a closer split of ebooks to paper books in their reading.
Okay, so today I was going to dedicate a post to The Doctor and the 50 year thing, but I got side tracked with watching old episodes and this wonderful video. So instead I’m posting this interesting take on Writer’s Block by Amanda Patterson from Writers Write (original here). As per usual, my comments are in blue.
If you write one page a day you will complete a 365-page novel in a year. TA: Or 500 words a day is 182,500 words or two novels (one if you are writing fantasy, or got carried away).
You are crippling yourself by not starting to write. If it seems an overwhelming task to write a whole book, start with an opening paragraph, then a page, then a chapter. Your first sentence is the first step to being published. TA: Remember, you don’t have to start at the beginning, you can just write down the ideas you’ve had, then link them, or turn the ideas into proper sentences and paragraphs.
Most people who want to write have the belief in their creative success systematically driven out of them – by the business world, by their family, their ‘friends’ and their life experiences. TA: But don’t worry, they’ll be the first ones queuing up for a free copy of your book when it’s published. Tell them you’re busy!
If you were told you were going to die tomorrow, would you regret not having written? TA: Always good to write down the list of people trying to kill you, helps the cops no end.
These are the five most common excuses we hear at Writers Write.
Family: I have children. I’m the family taxi. I have to be there for my husband/wife. TA: Kids are there to steal your dreams and youth.
Work: I work long hours. I’m too tired after a day at the office. I have to work overtime so that we can afford a new car / bigger house. TA: Working on someone else’s dream, not yours.
Time: I’m too busy. I’ll do it tomorrow / next month / next year. I can’t write late at night / early in the morning. TA: Everyone gets 24 hours – well in a solar day at least, 23hrs 56mins in a stellar day – use them wisely!
General: I’m not inspired. I’m too old/young. I’m too tired/depressed/sick. TA: Seriously? Then just read the books others write.
Our Favourite: It’s not what you know but who you know in publishing. TA: Publishing isn’t writing, nor is it reading, nor is it the reason you write. Besides, Snookie “wrote” a book; publishers will publish all sorts of trash.
You can have your book or you can have your excuses. You can’t have both. !!!
Writing is lonely. Writing is hard work. Writing is discipline. There is no quick fix and there is no one to applaud or to criticize you. You will be your own boss and you will have to motivate and reward yourself. And after all of this you will face the possibility of rejection – the dedicated writer will not stop here.
Remember: You have permission to write badly. (In your first drafts, of course TA: or if your name is Stephanie Meyer or EL James, all your drafts and finished work are written badly)
Currently I’m doing a writing course, a real one, one that assigns homework! For my homework I was doing some research when I accidentally came across a webpage and general philosophy that I found interesting. By interesting I mean ‘rabidly sexist garbage that demeans both men and women.’
Now I have heard this stuff before, a lot of it stems from a lack of modern male identity in the post-feminism world. Whenever you have social change there will inevitably be a push-back and level of disenfranchisement of sectors who have no clear ‘voice’. They talk about being “alpha males” and swallowing the red pill, taking control of their lives and their women. This is, of course, just the excuse that bigots and morons need to write garbage like:
Paternity fraud is worse than rape
5 Reasons To Date A Girl With An Eating Disorder
Apple Should Have Never Hired A Female Handbag Executive
5 Reasons Women Should Come With HoFax Reports
This sort of shit really is pathetic. Take the first article as an example: in what world is child support worse than the second most heinous physical act? (NB: the worst is still murder, although combine the two and you have a new crime novel) Now if we were actually talking about misandry then there would be valid concerns and points to be made and opinions to be listened to. If we were talking about the role of men in society and how it has changed, again, legitimate concerns and points to be made. But how does the lot of men (and women) improve with this:
It should be noted that 30 something American women are not becoming traditionally minded or anything, but rather they are simply in a desperate rush to find the useful idiot who will put a roof over her head. Once an American man goes foreign, American females both in their age 20′s and 30′s are sloppy seconds and cannot compete with non-Western women…… It takes time but your chances of finding a quality girlfriend elsewhere are better, as opposed to in the States where men have to contend with the overweight, screwed up, tattooed, walking STD incubators that are pass for women today. TS: I kid you not, this is an actual quote from one of the articles.
You see, this is not a realistic view of the world. It isn’t even a snapshot of a small segment of society. These are the views of the next generation of sexists and bigots, the kind of people that will dish out emotional and physical abuse because they are ‘real men’. These are the views of the weak and insecure. These are the articles written by frauds of men.
I leave you with Steve Shives’ wonderful take on this topic.
At one of the places I worked there used to be motivational posters on the wall. I know that most of the quotes and pictures are meant to inspire but I’d really question who gets inspired by a pretty picture with a cheap phrase underneath. If that is the sort of stuff that inspires you then you really have to question how long your job will be around before a robot takes your place. Inspiration can come from many places and I’m sure that somewhere, someone, might have been inspired by a pithy quote or cool picture. They may have even created an ad campaign to sell toilet paper so that people can wipe their backsides with the glee of the pithy quote.
I think that inspiration is actually more like a playful kitten stalking a fly. The fly is just sitting around, minding its own fly-y business, taking a break between eating garbage and flying up people’s noses. The kitten is creeping up on the fly, thinking it is a lion about to pounce on an unsuspecting prey, that the kitten can’t be seen, despite the vigorous tail twitching in the air. As the kitten pounces, the fly, calmly, buzzes off to see if it can annoy someone, the kitten comes crashing down, bringing the urn with your dad’s ashes in it, smashing onto the floor. On the rare occasion that the kitten catches the fly and doesn’t destroy valuable items around the house, that is inspiration. The one off moment when your brain comes up with the most amazing idea that has ever occurred. An idea that will reshape humanity. An idea that will see you showered in champagne, chocolate and high priced hookers.
An idea that will have to wait until morning, because you were just about to fall asleep.
Now this is an interesting study and article. I have actually noticed this phenomenon myself when looking for crime and thriller authors and books from various generations. Everyone knows Robert Howard, Raymond Chandler and Donald E Westlake, they’ve pretty much stayed in print since they were released. But what about the other authors from the 1920s to the mid 1980s? On various writer forums you will find writers re-releasing their novels from the 80s as ebooks. This is the downside of copyright. Read for this article I stole am re-blogging from The Atlantic.
by REBECCA J. ROSEN A book published during the presidency of Chester A. Arthur has a greater chance of being in print today than one published during the time of Reagan.
Last year I wrote about some very interesting research being done by Paul J. Heald at the University of Illinois, based on software that crawled Amazon for a random selection of books. At the time, his results were only preliminary, but they were nevertheless startling: There were as many books available from the 1910s as there were from the 2000s. The number of books from the 1850s was double the number available from the 1950s. Why? Copyright protections (which cover titles published in 1923 and after) had squashed the market for books from the middle of the 20th century, keeping those titles off shelves and out of the hands of the reading public. Heald has now finalized his research and the picture, though more detailed, is largely the same: “Copyright correlates significantly with the disappearance of works rather than with their availability,” Heald writes. “Shortly after works are created and proprietized, they tend to disappear from public view only to reappear in significantly increased numbers when they fall into the public domain and lose their owners.” The graph above shows the simplest interpretation of the data. It reveals, shockingly, that there are substantially more new editions available of books from the 1910s than from the 2000s. Editions of books that fall under copyright are available in about the same quantities as those from the first half of the 19th century.
Publishers are simply not publishing copyrighted titles unless they are very recent. But this isn’t a totally honest portrait of how many different books are available, because for books that are in the public domain, often many different editions exist, and the random sample is likely to overrepresent them. “After all,” Heald explains, “if one feeds a random ISBN number [into] Amazon, one is more likely to retrieve Milton’s Paradise Lost (with 401 editions and 401 ISBN numbers) than Lorimer’s A Wife out of Egypt (1 edition and 1 ISBN).” He found that on average the public domain titles had a median of four editions per title. (The mean was 16, but highly distorted by the presence of a small number of books with hundreds of editions. For this reason, statisticians whom Heald consulted recommended using the median.) Heald divided the number of public-domain editions by four, providing a graph that compares the number of titles available. Heald says the picture is still “quite dramatic.” The most recent decade looks better by comparison, but the depression of the 20th century is still notable, followed by a little boom for the most recent decades when works fall into the public domain. Presumably, as Heald writes, in a market with no copyright distortion, these graphs would show “a fairly smoothly doward sloping curve from the decade 2000-20010 to the decade of 1800-1810 based on the assumption that works generally become less popular as they age (and therefore are less desirable to market).” But that’s not at all what we see. “Instead,” he continues, “the curve declines sharply and quickly, and then rebounds significantly for books currently in the public domain initially published before 1923.” Heald’s conclusion? Copyright “makes books disappear”; its expiration brings them back to life. The books that are the worst affected by this are those from pretty recent decades, such as the 80s and 90s, for which there is presumably the largest gap between what would satisfy some abstract notion of people’s interest and what is actually available. As Heald writes:
This is not a gently sloping downward curve! Publishers seem unwilling to sell their books on Amazon for more than a few years after their initial publication. The data suggest that publishing business models make books disappear fairly shortly after their publication and long before they are scheduled to fall into the public domain. Copyright law then deters their reappearance as long as they are owned. On the left side of the graph before 1920, the decline presents a more gentle time-sensitive downward sloping curve.
But even this chart may understate the effects of copyright, since the comparison assumes that the same quantity of books has been published every decade. This is of course not the case: Increasing literacy coupled with technological efficiencies mean that far more titles are published per year in the 21st century than in the 19th. The exact number per year for the last 200 years is unknown, but Heald and his assistants were able to arrive at a pretty good approximation by relying on the number of titles available for each year in WorldCat, a library catalog that contains the complete listings of 72,000 libraries around the world. He then normalized his graph to the decade of the 1990s, which saw the greatest number of titles published. By this calculation, the effect of copyright appears extreme. Heald says that the WorldCat research showed, for example, that there were eight times as many books published in the 1980s as in the 1880s, but there are roughly as many titles available on Amazon for the two decades. A book published during the presidency of Chester A. Arthur has a greater chance of being in print today than one published during the time of Reagan. Copyright advocates have long (and successfully) argued that keeping books copyrighted assures that owners can make a profit off their intellectual property, and that that profit incentive will “assure [the books’] availability and adequate distribution.” The evidence, it appears, says otherwise.
Plenty of what’s popular isn’t good, and plenty of what’s good isn’t popular.
There is a school of thought and snobbery that says anything good is not popular and anything popular is not good. I regard this as a myth. I can’t remember any good stuff that wasn’t popular, because who is going to remember stuff that wasn’t popular and good? Well, it is a little more complicated than that.
Back when I was in high school the music scene changed. No longer were pop bands like New Kids On The Block acceptable on the radio, now it was Grunge and heavier, alternate styles of rock that ruled the airwaves. In 1991 Nirvana released the seminal Nevermind, Pearl Jam released Ten, Soundgarden released Badmotorfinger, and thus the reign of Seattle and Grunge music began. Add to that the release of Guns ‘n’ Roses last decent album, Use Your Illusion (1 and 2), and the cross-over metal album that forced the Grammys to include a new Hard Rock/Metal category, Metallica’s black album, and you can see that it was a good year to be a pimply teen music fan.
At the time you couldn’t talk about music without talking about Nirvana or Grunge. With the release of Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream, the follow-up albums from Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and the influx of punk bands like Greenday and The Offspring, alternative music like Grunge was KING. Unless you looked at the charts.
Okay, so some easy listening pop music snuck through with some sales, but Nevermind and the single Smells Like Teen Spirit must have been top 10, right? Nope. Nirvana’s single didn’t make a dent in the charts until 1992, and even then it only cracked the top 50 in Australia (#46) and was #32 in the USA. Of course, rock and metal have never sold singles as much as albums, but Nevermind still only got to #17 in Australia and was beaten by frikin Garth Brooks and Michael Jackson in the USA.
Alright, maybe this is just a once off. The Beatles were huge, right? They combined good music with popularity. Well, in the UK, yes, but in the rest of the world, not so much.*
Before I end up beating you over the eyeballs with this example further, I’ll come to my point: popular has nothing to do with good. Sure, there are examples of good art also becoming popular. The examples I used were still very popular music acts whose influence will continue long after we’ve forgotten what a Bieber is. But people were still more likely to own an album by Garth Brooks or Vanilla Ice than Smashing Pumpkins.
This is why I think that good art is often remembered more fondly after the fact than at the time. Good art stands the test of time, influences others and finds new audiences. Popular art is often shallow, or is transient, which means the audience has forgotten it when the next popular thing comes along.
To quote Neil Gaiman, make good art. Make good art and popularity will be someone remembering your work long after you’re gone.
NB: This article is referring to Survivorship Bias, which is a form of sampling bias, and can be a form of logical fallacy.
* I wasn’t aware when I wrote this article of the actions of the US record label Capitol Records. It appears they did their best to make sure The Beatles weren’t popular in the US. I’d like to say I’m surprised by the things done by The Beatles’ own US record company, but tales of this sort seem to be all too common.
I’m not a fan of The Daily Fail. They really do seem to swim in the shallow end of the wading pool of intelligence. That said, today they featured an article from a very good novelist, someone with whom I’ve had some interesting conversations: David Thomas / Tom Cain. So like any good blogger, I’ve stolen the article and reposted it here. Enjoy!
All over the world, on countless flights, heading to an infinite number of sun-loungers people are burying their heads in stories about secret agents, serial killers, ace detectives, evil villains and sexy heroines.
Thrillers are a huge business. They make up about a third of all books sold, and 60 per cent of them are bought by women.
For the very top writers, the rewards are astonishing. In 2009, James Patterson signed a four-year, 17-book deal worth almost £100 million. At the peak of Da Vinci Code mania, Dan Brown was making more than £50 million a year.
For every one of those megastars, of course, there are hundreds of professional thriller writers who just about make it pay – even a best-selling paperback in the UK, shifting 100,000 copies won’t earn much above £50,000 in royalties – and thousands of wannabes. I’m lucky enough to come in the ‘make it pay’ category. So I know what the job entails. And trust me, it isn’t easy.
One Monday morning in June 2006 my literary agent sent out a book proposal to publishers: the first 150 pages of a thriller called The Accident Man that I’d written under the pseudonym Tom Cain. The book had a very simple, high-concept premise. Its hero, Sam Carver, was the man who killed Princess Diana. Her name appeared nowhere in the book. But on the night of August 31, 1997, Carver makes a black Mercedes saloon crash in Paris.
He’s been told the Merc’s passenger is a terrorist. But of course it’s actually a woman – the most famous woman in the world.
By lunchtime on Wednesday, I’d received a six-figure offer for the UK rights to the book and a sequel and Hollywood bought an option on the film rights.
Before you even try to write a thriller, take a good look at how other people have done it. It looked like an overnight success, but I’d spent two years producing one useless draft after another. My agent made it perfectly clear to me that I’d made a bundle of rookie mistakes. My plot didn’t hold together. My writing was hopelessly cluttered with unnecessary descriptions of Parisian streets and buildings as I tried to stuff all my endless research down on to the page.
The characters weren’t believable and the one the agency boss liked best – Carver’s love-interest, a Russian girl called Alix – was killed in the second act. The only crumb of comfort the agency boss could offer me was: ‘I never quite hated it enough to stop reading.’
In the end, we managed to fix all the problems. But in 25 years as a journalist and author, during which I’d written countless articles, edited three magazines and published half-a-dozen non-fiction books, nothing had been as difficult as writing a half-decent thriller.
But what if you want to write a thriller of your own? Here are ten tips that I would give to anyone who dreams of seeing their book piled up in airport bookstores . . .
1) Study the masters…
Before you even try to write a thriller, take a good look at how other people have done it. Read every book you can get your hands on, but watch great TV series and movies, too. The Accident Man was hugely influenced by the way the writers of 24 kept multiple storylines running simultaneously, each with its own cliffhanger, so there was always someone, somewhere, in desperate trouble. 24 was relentless, it never for one moment let you relax. And you always wanted more.
2) …but don’t overdose on them
I devoured Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books. I tried to imitate his terse, punchy, bone-dry style. The result was garbage. Then I realised that Lee writes the way he does because that’s how he naturally expresses himself. So I went back to the way I write naturally, and it made a huge difference. Your book will work best if it’s told in your voice.
3) Structure, structure, structure…
Property is all about location, thrillers are all about structure. Everything has to fit together with the precision of a Swiss watch, powered by a coiled spring. Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of The Jackal is a masterpiece of construction. I once drew a chart on a couple of sheets of A2 paper that consisted of a scene-by-scene analysis of Jackal, showing which characters appeared when, and how Forsyth balanced character development, plot and action over the course of the book. It really helped me understand the structural skeleton beneath the flesh and blood of the words.
4) Show, don’t tell
Always make your point through action and dialogue, rather than exposition. At the beginning of The Accident Man I had a few paragraphs explaining that Sam Carver was an assassin who created fatal ‘accidents’. An American publisher said: ‘Nice idea, but it would be much better if we could see him do it.’ So I wrote a new opening scene in which he killed a people trafficker by sabotaging his helicopter using a miniature spanner, a hacksaw and two blobs of Blu-Tack. So we saw Carver at work. Better.
Some thrillers are whodunits: the hero arrests the bad guy. Some are action thrillers: the hero kills the bad guy. Either way, you’re going to be thinking of new ways to kill people and cool weapons to kill them with
5) It’s the people, stupid
Stieg Larsson thought his Millennium Trilogy was all about the sexism and corruption at the rotten heart of Swedish society. But the millions who devoured The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo couldn’t care less about that. They just fell in love with an emaciated, autistic computer genius called Lisbeth Salander. It’s the characters in a book – and that means the villains, lovers and supporting cast, too – that make it work. So if you ever think, ‘I’ve got a great idea for a thriller,’ make sure you’ve got great characters for it too.
6) Grab them by the throat and their minds will follow
If you don’t grab your readers’ attention in the opening chapter, they’ll find another book. Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity has one of the all-time great opening sequences: a man, fished from the Mediterranean, unaware of who or what he really is, unknowingly possessed of all the deadly skills of a CIA assassin. The men from Hollywood threw away 90 per cent of what Ludlum wrote in the Bourne trilogy. But they kept that opening and it gave them a billion-dollar franchise.
7) Think like a killer
Some thrillers are whodunits: the hero arrests the bad guy. Some are action thrillers: the hero kills the bad guy. Either way, you’re going to be thinking of new ways to kill people and cool weapons to kill them with. So clip grisly news stories. Read books about real killers. Go on the gun-nut channels on YouTube. And read books by Patricia Cornwell and Jonathan Hayes. They’re professional forensic pathologists. Dead bodies are, quite literally, their business.
8) Count the bullets in the gun
If you want your readers to believe your story, get the details right. Either write about what you know, or do your research properly. Don’t have your hero firing 15 bullets from a Walther PPK if it can only hold nine. And speaking of James Bond’s favourite gun, Ian Fleming pulled off a brilliant trick when he created 007. The idea of a cool, sophisticated, lady-killing assassin, touring the world On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, bumping off bad guys who wanted to rule the world was as much a fantasy as Harry Potter playing Quidditch. But because the details were so brilliantly observed – Bond’s cars, his Sea Island cotton shirts, the exotic locations – it all felt completely real.
9) Always think of Option C
The fun part of thriller writing is getting your characters into dangerous situations and then getting them out again. An editor once gave me a great tip: put your protagonist in a situation where they have to choose between two options, A and B. Then write option C. In one of my books, Carver is on holiday in the Greek islands with a girl. They’re having lunch. The restaurant is attacked by gunmen. The girl is shot. Carver just escapes, after a frantic chase. He stops for a second to think. Should he go after the gunmen, or should he get the hell off the island? That’s options A and B. Then the phone rings. He takes the call. It’s the girl – the one who’s just been shot dead. And that’s Option C.
10) If you’re a man, ditch the dumb blondes and tough girls
You have a male lead, and chances are he’s going to want a girl. And she’s going to be sexy, sultry and splendidly beddable. That’s fine – being ravished by the hunky hero works for girls too. Just don’t make her a cliché. Very few men now dare write a ditsy, screaming blonde. But many dream up superchicks who are as tough and deadly as any man. Most women don’t see themselves that way. Strong, yes. Gorgeous, certainly. But intelligent, complex and vulnerable, too, if you don’t mind. And if you’re a woman, bin the bad guys and the goody-goodies. Men are more complicated than that.
…but finally, and most importantly
Forget the rules . . . except one. The first four, clunkingly tabloid words of The Da Vinci Code, ‘Renowned curator Jacques Saunier’ tell you that Dan Brown can’t write for toffee. There’s not a character in the book that’s close to being interesting and the ‘facts’ on which the whole thing depends have been debunked. Yet somehow it’s is completely unputdownable. So in the end, the only rule that really counts is: keep the reader reading.
‘Revenger’, Tom Cain’s latest Sam Carver novel is published in paperback by Corgi, £6.99. ‘Ostland’, by David Thomas, is published by Quercus, £16.99
I don’t like to claim a lot of expertise in formatting, layout and graphic design. That isn’t to say I can’t do it, nor that I haven’t produced a couple of my own publications and newsletters. But I found myself in an argument recently defending using both serif and sans-serif fonts, which is like arguing over what colour black you want to wear to a metal concert (that’s a no-brainer: the darker one).
Anyway, there are plenty of anal retentive science nerds like me who have gone and done research into what fonts work best for which applications. There are actually a surprising number of research studies on fonts and readability.
First, let’s define what is meant by serif and sans-serif fonts. (From Scribe Consulting) Consider the following characters. The first is set in Georgia, a lovely serif font. The second is set in Verdana, an easy-to-read sans-serif font.
serif
sans serif
Notice the small decorative flourishes at the ends of the strokes in the left character. These are called serif. The right character does not have these strokes and is said to be a sans-serif font. Sans is the French word for without. So I could be currently sans-pants.
The most common examples of these two font types are Times New Roman (serif) and Arial (sans-serif). Bleeding Cowboys would be an example of an overused serif font that is for try-hards, whilst Comic Sans is an overused sans-serif that shows a lack of taste.
Now there are some simple rules of thumb when it comes to using serif and sans-serif fonts, which are backed up by science. The first rule is that thumbs only hit the space bar once. The second rule is:
This is because the serif make the individual letters more distinctive and easier for our brains to recognise quickly. Without the serif, the brain has to spend longer identifying the letter because the shape is less distinctive.
The commonly used convention for printed work is to use a serif font for the body of the work. A sans-serif font is often used for headings, table text, captions, and ransom notes.
The third rule is:
Use sans-serif for online work
An important exception must be made for the web. Printed works generally have a resolution of at least 1,000 dots per inch; whereas, computer monitors are typically around 100 dots per inch. Even Apple’s much vaunted retina display is only around 300 dots per inch — much lower than print.
This lower resolution can make small serif characters harder to read than the equivalent sans-serif characters because of their more complex shapes. Yes this does give you an excuse to buy a 4K monitor for your computer. Go nuts.
It follows that small on-screen text is better in a sans-serif font like Verdana or Arial.
The average writer is normally not someone prone to being a gun or knife nut. Sure, they might have a gun or two, they may have a kitchen drawer full of knives, but that doesn’t mean they know which one needs to be used in the scene where the zombies have just broken through the barrier erected by the pirates who were lucky to survive the assault of the purple ninjas. That means extra research. And ninjas.
Below is a handy graphic that covers a few of the basic blade types of knives. Obviously there are variations on these types and, of course, the difference between a serrated and plain edged blade.
Also check out this handy video:
Update: The knife aficionado from the above video has just produced a new information video that I felt was worth including. He goes into the blade types and what they are best used for and why. Very informative if you want to brush up on knives.
Update: adding another graphic that covers a few more blade types.
Word limits are a funny thing. I’ve never had a problem being succinct, in fact I can be too brief in my writing. Yet other writers are known for sitting down with editors to cull half their manuscript. There are other writers still that should have sat down with an editor and culled half their manuscript and saved the readers all that page skipping.
This is one of the reasons to like Twitter. It forces you to practice creating a thought or sentence in a manner that may be foreign. For example, the complex phrase:
I disagree with your supposition as it is currently unsupported by any evidence, either presented by yourself or in the scientific literature, thus there is no way you can sway my position.
Can be replaced with:
Lol, moron!
This says everything that is needed and doesn’t dance around the topic. Conversely the reply to this can be shortened from:
Whilst you are allowed to disagree with me, my opinion still stands. I cannot provide a summary of the relevant scientific literature at this time, but this is information that is readily understood and referenced in the literature. Thus I will endevour to provide a few examples when I am able to, but in the meantime I’d invite you to read further on the topic, as I suspect that you will agree with me once you have.
Can be replaced with:
Well screw you and the horse you road up on.
The trick is to start with what your key points are and not overuse exposition to explain those points. The 140 character limit can help with this a lot.
In the meantime, if you aren’t a fan of See Mike Draw, I suggest you become one now.
As regular readers here know, I’m a science-a-holic and love research. I actually have an archive dedicated to a minor topic for my first novel, a topic that I make passing reference to, a topic that probably has me on a watch list somewhere. It was book research, I swear!
Below is an article by Chuck Sambuchino which I stole am reblogging from Writer’s Digest with a few of my own comments.
Ernest Hemingway said writers should develop a built-in bullshit detector. I imagine one reason he said that is because readers have their own BS indicators. They can tell when we writers are winging it. We have to know well the worlds in which our characters act. Readers don’t have to believe the story really happened, but they need to believe it could have happened. So with that in mind, I offer a few thoughts on research for fiction.
1) You can’t do too much research. In the military, we often say time spent gathering intelligence is seldom wasted. The same concept applies in writing a novel. You never know what little detail will give a scene the ring of authenticity. In a college creative writing class, I wrote about how a scuba diver got cut underwater, and in the filtered light at depth, the blood appeared green. Though the professor didn’t think much of that particular story, he did concede he liked that detail. In fact, he said, “The author must have seen that.” And indeed, I had. TA: Whilst I agree with Chuck’s point, there is such a thing as too much research for a novel. At some point you have to be writing and not researching. There will be some things that you just can’t know and some things that your readers really don’t need to know.
2) You can write what you know. We’ve all heard it before. Experience may be a cruel teacher, but it is a thorough one, and experience is the purest form of research. Things you’ve done in life can inform your writing in surprising ways, even if your characters aren’t doing those same things. When I watch the old Star Trek shows, I can tell the creator of those stories knew something about how a military flight crew works together. He understood the dynamics of a chain of command, how a commander learns the strengths and weaknesses of his team, how those team members communicate and work together. Turns out that Gene Roddenberry flew B-17 bombers in World War II. Roddenberry, of course, never flew a starship. But he knew from experience how the crew of a starship might interact. TA: Except that the away team was always the most important members of the crew and one poor guy in a red shirt; how does that make sense? The idea is that you get to be captain so you don’t have to go down to the planet, no matter how hot the green women are. I’ve commented before that Right What You No is not always good advice and that is what research is for. Sometimes research will be spending a day in a squad car or an overnighter in prison. Although, I don’t advise that, felonies are hard to live down.
3) You can do research on the cheap. If you can’t visit an exotic location, you can pick up the phone and ask questions. The worst that can happen is somebody thinks you’re crazy and they hang up. Then you just call somebody else. (Believe me; I used to be a reporter, and I’ve learned a lot by asking questions.) You can visit a museum, or a museum’s website. Develop an eye for small details. TA: Plus we have the internet now.
4) You can find anything on YouTube. Seriously. But you have to know your topic well enough to know how to search for it. In The Renegades, I have a character whose lungs collapse from a bullet wound. I wanted to find out how a medic would treat that condition. Sure enough, someone had posted on YouTube a video with detailed instructions on how to perform a needle decompression. TA: Just check to make sure that the video is reliable. There are some shams and woo on youtube, but that is a topic for my Mythtaken series.
5) You can find things anywhere. You’re a writer, so keep pen and paper within reach during all waking hours. You might get an idea from a news story on television, a song on the radio, or a Tweet from a friend. About a year ago, I was driving along on a warm day, listening to the radio with the windows down. An oldies station played “Wind of Change,” the Scorpions’ 1990 ballad hailing the end of the Cold War. I hadn’t heard that song in a long time, and I cranked it up loud. The power chords brought back memories of flying relief missions to Bosnia while based at a disused Cold War alert facility in Germany. Not really a pleasant memory–for Bosnia, the end of the Cold War brought something worse. But that flashback from early in my military career inspired a scene in the novel I’m working on now. TA: Same goes for inspiration.
6) You can use all of your senses. Find out what things taste like, smell like, feel like. Say, for example, you set your novel in Warsaw. Maybe you can’t afford to go to Warsaw, but you can go to a Polish restaurant. (See item number three above, about doing research on the cheap.) As you write one of your scenes, include a line about the texture and flavor of something your character eats. You’ve just made your writing more alive and authentic. TA: Just remember that you have far more than five senses, more like 14 to 20.
7) You can leave some things out. If you do thorough research, you’ll find more material than you need, and no reader likes a data dump. In my own writing, I could bore you to death with the details of aircraft and weapons. But a very good creative writing professor once advised me to let the reader “overhear” the tech talk. Say, if my character punches off a HARM missile, that might sound authentic and pretty scary. But scary would turn to dull if I stopped the action to tell you that HARM stands for High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missile, which homes in on anti-aircraft missile radars. Who cares? The damn thing goes boom. TA: Very good point. This point is all too often done with weapons or brands or street directions. No-one cares!
Since I began this discussion with a quote from a literary heavyweight of the twentieth century, I’ll end it with another: Ezra Pound said literature is news that stays news. And a novelist has nearly the same obligation for accuracy as a news writer. Your made-up world must ring true. Not even fantasy writers can completely escape reality; the old Star Trek episodes sometimes referred to real science, which made them more believable within their context. Though we invent tales that didn’t really happen, we drape them over a framework of real-life facts.
On the internet there is a scam born every minute. Whilst I love to receive email from Nigerian royalty, ads for another penis enlargement (the first one was enough, thanks), and fat loss supplements that promise not to kill me, there is a line I have to draw in the sand: scamming writers.
Most writers are hobbyists, writing because they love it. The handful that do get paid enough to be full-time writers are few and far between. So targeting writers with scams means that somewhere a monkey at a keyboard is not being fed today.
Yesterday in a writers discussion group a question was raised about whether a New, Amazing, Adjective, program that promises to give you the tools to write a 400 word article in 7 minutes.
Dear Fellow Article Writer (TA: read as mark or sucker),
Did you watch the video above? It’s hard to believe so many people would send me such raving, unsolicited testimonials about my product, “How to Write an Article in 7 Minutes or Less“. (TA: Testimonials!? Wow! I’m sold!)
If you did watch the video, you saw with your own eyes how I was able to take people who spent more than an hour writing an article down to as fast as 5 minutes per article! (TA: 5 minutes? I thought you said 7 minutes. Does this mean I get a 2 minute abs program as a bonus?)
….. (TA: edited out promotional garbage about money back guarantees and how only the scammer found the secret or developed it or whatever)
Here’s how it works.
Open my 3 special research sites. (TA: Wikipedia?)
Use my “skim and grab” research technique to find your
3 main points (Takes about a minute). (TA: Yes, because reading comprehension is for suckers.)
Outline each main point with two “sub points.” (another minute here). (TA: What if there is only one point?)
Use the “opening paragraph” template to quickly create the first paragraph (About 30 seconds). (TA: Insert generic filler paragraph, got it.)
Use the “main point” template to write paragraphs for each of your three main points. (2-4 minutes total time) (TA: So, standard writing….)
Use the “conclusion paragraph” template to quickly create the conclusion. (another 30 seconds). (TA: Insert generic filler paragraph at the end.)
Proof read your article, and then submit it to the appropriate directory. (1-2 minutes) (TA: Click spellcheck and hope it doesn’t miss anything.)
The cool thing about using these templates is you never have to pause to think…but… you also enough leeway so each article remains 100% unique, and of the highest quality.(TA: Yes, why would you want to actually put any thought into your writing. Highly overrated for quality content.)
Don’t worry: My method has nothing to do with plagiarism! (TA: Of course not, copy and pasting clearly takes too long.)
Anyway, you can learn all about my 7 minute article technique by reading my special report, “How to Write an Article In 7 Minutes”, and by watching the videos I made showing step by step how I do it.
But that’s not all… (TA: Steak knives?)
My first thought upon seeing the claim that you could learn to write an article in 7 minutes was that it was bullshit. The fact that people would question if it would be possible left me a little stunned, a little thirsty and thinking about having a nap. Clearly some people are going to be taken in by these kinds of scams. So I want to just illustrate my critical thinking process and how I avoided being scammed for $37 (I know, huge amounts of money).
Drawing from personal experience, I know that I’d spend more than 7 minutes just copying in the links to the research I’d be citing, let alone reading those articles. So the first check is to understand just how long certain tasks actually take you. This scam works on the idea that you don’t really measure the time it takes for common activities. You may know how long you spend on a full article or day’s writing, but not on the little parts, like one paragraph or one sentence. So when someone presents you with some figures, you are bound to think, “Well, I do spend a lot of time staring at the screen and checking my Twitter feed.” Suddenly you are partly receptive to the con.
Let’s have a look how long writing actually takes the average person. Being a science nerd, I like to have a few figures around on writing, reading, average number of Facebook posts per hour; you know, important stats. The average person has a typing speed of 60-100 words per minute, which gives you 400-700 words written in 7 minutes. The page claims a 400 word article with 5 minutes actual writing time, which is 300-500 words written. So unless you are setting world speed records, then you won’t have time to do anything other than write.
What about editing? Nothing is perfect on a first draft, nothing! So even if this is a 400 word article written in 5 minutes, you still need to edit. Reading speed is not the same as proofreading speed, with average speeds of 180-200 words per minute. That’s another 2-3 minutes.
This program is essentially promising that you will achieve touch-typing dexterity and speed that will allow you to write fast. It is also promising that you’ll have fantastic reading comprehension skills at skim reading speeds. And yet you will also somehow acquire a time machine to allow you to also plan, research and create a concise article at the same time. The fact that the scam makes no mention of boosting your reading and writing speed and giving you keys to the Deloren, shows that someone is wanting your money and your credules.
In the meantime, send me $40 and I’ll send you some templates that I guarantee will add inches to your penis and bust size, whilst making you an awesome writer and friends with Nigerian royalty. Trust me, no-one lies on the internet.
Tyson Adams 