I sure got busy around here the last week. Trying to finish up one novel while firing off some chapters and a synopsis for an editor who wants to see those. And getting ready for the upcoming Market Your Work professional workshop here starting Saturday. So a great kind of busy.

When I was talking about voice in the last post, I was talking more about a type of voice called “character voice” for lack of a better term. It is also very much author voice, just focused through a character.

Authors, especially beginning writers and younger professionals, can’t hear their own voices. And, to be honest, shouldn’t worry about it.

However, let me give you a few hints about getting more of your author voice into a story or book. Hint #1. Write very, very fast. White heat kind of writing. What that does is get your critical, high school English teacher voice out of your head and allows your own voice to spring to life. When writing fast, you are writing from a creative side of your mind, and the voice just comes. You can’t see it, but it is there.

Then, don’t rewrite except to fix typos and missed words. Don’t let that English teacher at your voice, at your words. The more you rewrite from the critical side of your brain, the more you cut out what makes your words, your sentences, your story unique.

Two suggestions no one will follow, but just thought I’d toss them out there for kicks.

A writer who has been around a while, who has studied this business for twenty to thirty years, can see voice, and have often learned how to control it. Not all authors, but some. I am one of those, and it came from me having to mimic an actor’s voice, syntax, structure, and pacing of of a sentence in work-for-hire. I had to write in words so that you fans would hear in your head Captain Kirk’s voice, or Captain Picard’s voice, or Data’s voice, or Will Smith’s voice. I couldn’t let Dean Smith’s voice come through. That would have been bad.

Trust me, doing that is hard to do, as many writers who thought writing work-for-hire was easy have discovered from the fans. So my training over so many books, plus working to get my own voice out of thrillers and write invisible prose taught me how to have my Dean voice when I wanted it and how to turn it off.

I also learned to control voice from doing ghost books for other authors. I’ve done a number of those and had to mimic the author’s voice to the point where no one would know that author didn’t do the book. Oh, man is that tough, but again it taught me to control voice. (And I get hired by New York publisher’s every-so-often to use this skill.)

So suddenly I have one of my own voice books to write, where my voice and over-the-top character voice had to be in there or the book just wouldn’t work. From invisible prose in the last thriller I wrote to heavy voice prose.

Talk about a sharp turn. <g> But what fun and what a challenge it has been.

Character and author voice is wonderful in many, many authors today. Meg Cabot is one of the best working. In his nonfiction, Dave Berry.

Invisible voice. The best is, of course, Stephen King. A master. The top of the top, the best writer working in the English language.

No voice, not invisible, not anything, is Clive Cussler. He’s a master story teller, but he drives other writers nuts with his writing. He just writes what needs to be there for the story and nothing more. Readers find it invisible for the most part, most writers have trouble with it. I am sure Clive doesn’t much care.  (Some day I would love to work on a book with Clive.  That would be a blast.)
So, if you are trying to learn how to be a published writer, go try to write Will Smith voice. You have a ton of examples where he plays Will Smith. Men in Black, Independence Day, the new upcoming super-hero movie.   Listen, type, listen, type.  Focus on the structure, the pacing, the type of humor, the quips, and so on.  His voice is the same in many of his movies and it is what has made him a super star. And if you can write it, you can use it for other characters in your own fiction and will have that skill in your tool box.

So, what is voice exactly? It is a thousand choices of details, combined with how the writer thinks, combined with how the character thinks, to make a character and a story come alive in a reader’s mind.

Read a chapter of a James Patterson thriller, then read a few chapters of a Meg Cabot book, and you tell me you can’t see what voice is. And what invisible prose is.

And tell me, those of you who know me, that you can’t hear my voice, my speaking voice, my “Dean voice”  in these posts. <g>

Cheers,   Dean

It has been an interesting month or so.  I’ve been working on a novel that is under a fairly tight deadline, and have a request from another editor for a novel that I have a pretty rough draft finished on, but needs a second pass to bring up voice.

And both of these books are complete voice novels.

For the writer who wrote the two original Men in Black novels back ten years ago, who wrote an entire Dixon Hill Trek novel, I thought it would not be a problem.  That will teach me to assume anything.

For a large part of the last five years, I’ve worked on taking voice out of my writing, making my prose invisible to the reader.  This came from working on James Patterson-like thrillers book after book and a ton of young adult books without voice.

So suddenly, I’m having to stuff voice back into my work, and wow has this been interesting, to say the least.  And, to be honest, it felt sort of freeing as well.  At least right up to the point where I handed Kris three chapters on the rewrite novel and she beat on it with a red pen and said the voice wasn’t there.

I had thought it was there.  But when a Hugo Award winning editor says it isn’t there, you sort of slink back to your office, sit in your chair staring at the screen, and wonder just what the hell voice is exactly.

Of course, that’s the writer doing that thinking.  As an editor and a teacher, I know what voice is, can even tell another writer how to bring up voice in a story.  But me, the writer, just sat there sort of disgusted with myself.  How, in a short five years, had I managed to take all my voice out of my novels so successfully?

So, I went back to basics.  I looked at other writers using strong voices, studied what they did.  Then I went back to focusing on the character and the details the character would see, and the ATTITUDE of the character while looking at every detail.  And I climbed inside that character’s head, planted myself firmly there, and wrote a new couple of first pages.

This time Kris read them, laughed (thank God) and handed them back to me.  “Got it.”

I went back to my trusty writing office, sat down at the computer and stared at the screen and asked myself “Got what?”  And “How did I just do that?”

I have written over ninety novels, been at this business full time for over twenty years, and it never gets boring.  From day one to now it has been just as fun, just as frightening, and just as full of unknowns every time I sit in front of a blank page.

So now I go back upstairs to work, pushing voice back to the surface of my writing every sentence, and with luck, making the voice strong enough to sell.

Cheers,  Dean

I got a couple of pretty interesting questions from my last two trips through history.  And both questions, in essence asked “What exactly is a short story?” (Only they were asked in very different ways. <g>)

So let me toss out a few basic thoughts about short stories.

Well, of course, a short story is under 7,500 words.  But, of course, it is so much more than that.  Just any random 7,500 words do not a short story make.  So what is a short story, exactly?

One writer told me in the past that a short story is the most important event in one character’s life.  Yeah, I pretty much buy that as well.

Another writer I admired said a short story is a single event worth telling about.  Yeah, that fits with the other description and I pretty much agree with that as well.

Algis Budrys described a short story as seven points.  1) Character in a 2) Setting with a 3) problem.  Character 4) tries to solve the problem and 5) fails.  Character builds up to 6) one final, huge try that either succeeds or fails completely.  Then somehow, the writer tells the reader in a 7) validation (imagine awards ceremony) that the story is over.

Yeah, but the structure he describes is also in every novel, with every character in the book in one fashion or another.  So Algis Budrys’s description is one of a “story” not necessarily a short story.  But he is still right.  That structure must be in a short story in some way or another.

English teachers worked out stories and short stories into beginnings (points 1-3), middles (points 4-5) and ends (points 6-7).   Yeah, simple but right as well.
I have also heard a few billion times that in a short story, every word must count.  Yeah, I buy into that as well.  The question is what do they count toward? Well, to the telling of the single event, of course.

And that was one reader’s question.  What do you put into a short story and what to leave out, how much depth to put in, how much to not put in?

Not a clue, since I am not reading your story.

My opinion in general, which is only my opinion and means not a lot, is that I put the details I need into the short story that go toward the event of the story, that make the reader like the character, and not one other detail.  Not one.  (Back to every word must count.)  If a detail goes beyond the event of the story, I leave it out.

So far, the focus on one event has really helped me with writing short fiction.  And, of course, it has also stopped me from linking a bunch of short stories together into a novel.  I have heard of a few writers trying to do that, and I have a memory of trying it early on because of my fear of the length of a novel.  But, of course, if each story is about one event, the most important event in a character’s life, it’s damned hard to link a bunch of those together to make anything readable.  It can be done I guess, but I would find it impossibly hard.  Just easier to write the novel.

One last thing about short stories.  People say, “They are sometimes harder to write than novels.”  I have heard that statement for years as well, and never really believed it because I was pounding out a short story per week.  For the record, I still don’t believe it.

Pounding out a five thousand word story about a single event is easy compared to the thousands of things that go on in a novel.

But, for heaven’s sake, don’t try writing short stories unless you enjoy reading them, unless you regularly read short fiction for pleasure.  If all you have ever read is novels, write novels.  If you don’t read short fiction and don’t like it, trying to write it for some writing reason will just drive you nuts.

All right, enough rambling thoughts about writing short stories for today.

Cheers

Dean

I had a good question from one writer after my last post as to how I made the move from short fiction to novels. At first, my reaction was to just say I just kept typing. But then I thought back on those early days and started to remember some of the feelings and the fears and the events.

First, a couple things to remember. Many, many writers don’t start by writing poetry or short stories, but jump right into novels. Nothing at all wrong with that. Nothing. Every writer is different, every road a different path to walk. I’m going to lay out what happened to me, nothing more. If something I say helps you, great, if not, don’t worry about it. Most people think many of my methods are just nuts, so no big deal.

Long story, so settle in. I started out with writing poetry. As it turned out, very commercial poetry, kind of silly poetry, and sometimes kind of nasty poetry. The first poem I wrote was back in 1969 when I was in college the first time. It was early fall so there was no skiing, and classes were boring and I was doing laundry. I had taken a notebook with me for some class and ended up jotting down a few poems about a couple of people who were in the laundromat while I was there. I wrote them all long hand in notebooks. It never occurred to me to send them out anywhere.

Over the next five years, I skied in the early days of what was then called hot dogging, but I wasn’t that good. I skied in the winter and played golf in the summer, working at golf courses in the summer and at the ski lodge in the winter, along with teaching skiing. I also tried to stay in college, pretty much unsuccessfully. For those of you who are history challenged, the reason was to keep from getting shot in Vietnam. I had no interest in school or a degree, just skiing and playing golf. But I also had no interest in getting shot.

I ended up quitting skiing after the winter of 1971-2 and a high lottery number. I headed for Palm Springs to become a professional golfer. I wrote nothing at all during those years in the desert but had a lot of other great experiences.

In late 1974, I decided that school might not be a bad option and headed back to the University of Idaho. There, for some reason, I set up a desk with a typewriter on it and nothing else. I couldn’t type, but for some reason I knew I wanted to try writing and that was my writing desk. I studied someplace else. That was only my writing desk. Weird, huh?

Now understand, at this point, I hadn’t written more than a few dozen poems in notebooks. Nothing else. And I had no idea, none at all, that a person could mail something they wrote, or even make a living at it. To be honest, I had never met a writer, and had no idea any of what I do now was even possible. None. (How I came to the realization that it could be done is a different post later.)

So here comes college, first year Architecture because for some reason the 20 credits of “F” that I had back in the sixties while trying to stay out of Nam just didn’t count toward anything. (It was amazing they even let me back into school, to be honest, let alone into law school years later.) Of course, in freshmen classes, you need English credits, so I signed up for a 101 creative writing class in poetry.

Instructor hated me, hated what I wrote, beat on it regularly. But I held on, writing about a poem a day for most of that fall. About halfway through the class, one of the assignments was to actually mail a poem to an anthology of poetry only from college students. The instructor told us how to do it, how to include a SASE, and everything. I mailed my poem and forgot it until a letter came back in the mail the day before the last class that semester. My poem called “Tasty Morsel” had been accepted in the College Poetry Review. I got paid I think $5.00 as well. Stunned, I went to the instructor and showed her the letter. I was the first student in eight years of her having students mail poems as an assignment that ever sold one of them. She hated me even more after that.

My first published poem appeared in COLLEGE POETRY REVIEW in December, 1974.

I sold over 35 poems and two short stories in the next two years before I stopped mailing out the poetry I was writing.

So, fast forward ten years over the stuff in the last post to 1985, the spring. I was living with my second wife in Lincoln City, working as a waiter four nights a week. Yes, I had a degree in Architecture and had gone to three years of law school. But I was working on becoming a writer so I waited tables. You know the drill. Starving artist and all.

It had been six years since I had sold anything, but I was still pounding away on my trusty electric typewriter, firing off stories. Over the previous year, I had come up with a bunch of novel ideas, mostly from short fiction, but just like the jump from poems to short stories, the jump from 5,000 words to 80,000 words just felt impossible to me.

I think from the spring of 1984 to the spring of 1985, I must have started and halted at least five different novels. Maybe more. I know it was driving me and everyone around me crazy.

Of course, I had no idea as to novel structure or anything else needed to sustain a long story. None. I was reading Lawrence Block’s columns and books and I think it was something he said about just doing it that got me going finally. Somewhere in February of 1985, I just decided to finish a novel no matter what. All my friends cheered.

I sat myself a ten page before-I-could-sleep goal. No missing allowed.

I hit it. Never missed. 30 days later I had finished my first novel.

And suddenly, it didn’t feel so impossible. The book sucked, I’m sure, but I don’t honestly know, since it was destroyed a month later in a house fire. I honestly don’t even remember what it was about.

I do know that two days after I finished the first novel, I wanted to make sure I could do it again, so I started a second novel. And I almost had it finished as well when the fire hit. I think that novel was about a ghost on a golf course. Again, no memory, no record left.

So, how did I make the jump from writing poems to short fiction to novels? Painfully. But the key was to set a goal, not care how bad it was, just finish the goal. 90 plus novels later, I still use that same goal structure.

Have they gotten easier to write? No. Every book is an adventure, every book scares hell out of me before I start. But one thing writing over 90 novels has taught me: I trust the process.

I know that if I sit down, write so much every day, do my best with every line, every word, it will all work out in the end, 80 to 100 thousand words down the road.

Set a writing goal per day. Trust the process.

Cheers, Dean

In the last post, I mentioned that I had gone from 1977 to 1983 without a short story sale, after selling two stories in 1976.  Truth, but for a little discussion about writing here, the truth is not the entire story.

In the fall of 1977 and the spring of 1978, while still writing some poetry and a few short stories, I wrote my thesis for my degree in Architecture.  In the fall of 1978, I started law school and wrote nothing but legal stuff for that first year, as would be expected.  In 1979, I wrote and mailed two short stories while still in law school, and then in 1980, I wrote and mailed four short stories, including two to the Twilight Zone new writer contest, which I expected to win.  Of course, I didn’t know that thousands of others had done the same, including my future wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch.  Neither Kris nor I won.  Dan Simmons did.  But I was very discouraged not winning and I stopped writing for a time.

So, from 1977 to January 1st, 1982, I think I only wrote about seven short stories and I doubt if any of them got more than three or four rejections, if that many.  In other words, I wasn’t working very hard at becoming a professional writer, but I was sure talking a good game.

On January 1st, 1982, while working three jobs, I decided to quit talking and get serious about actually doing the writing.  So in a challenge with Nina Kiriki Hoffman, I wrote and mailed one new short story every week.  And I kept the stories in the mail when they got rejected.

By the start of 1983, I had 45 different short stories in the mail and had not yet sold another one.  So I kept going.  One story per week, and keeping all the rejected ones in the mail.  By May and June of 1983, I had over sixty different short stories sitting on editor’s desk when the dam broke and within two weeks I sold three.  One to Damon Knight, one to Algis Budrys for the first Volume of Writers of the Future, and one to OUI Magazine.

I didn’t slow down, and by the end of the year, I had sold seven professional stories total.

So, when I say it was six years between selling stories, that was the truth, but not the entire story.  A thesis in Architecture, a divorce from my wonderful first wife, three years of law school, and building a business were all in the middle of all that, not counting running a bookstore I owned most of that time.  I actually spent all of 1982 and half of 1983 really working hard at it, really pushing and learning and writing and mailing before things started to happen.

So, if you are wondering why you are not selling short stories or novels, do what I did in the fall of 1981 and look at how much or little you write, how much or little you mail to someone who can write a check and publish you.  If the answer is just not much, like me, you have discovered your problem.   Time to do something about it.

I honestly don’t know how many of all those stories I ended up not selling.  I had a house fire in May of 1985 that destroyed just about everything, so my records of what happened to many of those stories in those years are very sketchy.  I do remember I kept writing at the story a week pace through 1984 and then wrote my first novel in 1985.  On a typewriter.  No carbon.  All of it was lost in the fire except for those that were published and that I have been able to find a copy of, or that came back rejected.  So I have no way of knowing what percentage of those I wrote in those early years eventually sold.   Maybe two in ten.  But still, in those three years before the fire, I sold almost twenty professional level short stories because I was writing one per week and mailing them and keeping them in the mail.

If you are looking for the secret to writing, it is simple.  Write, finish what you write, mail what you write, keep it in the mail, and then repeat over and over and over until you learn enough and get good enough to start selling.  Very simple, almost impossible for most people to do.

So how did I manage it in 1982, even while working three jobs and fresh out of law school?  Easy.  I figured that for three years I had busted my butt to get through law school, for something I would never use or wanted.  But I wanted to be a writer, so I figured I could work just as hard, spend just as much money writing and learning how to write.  So I went at it exactly the same as I did going at first year law school.  And within three years, I was a professional writer selling regularly.

It’s that easy and that hard.

Cheers,  Dean

Over in the second column I’ve added a few book covers of anthologies I have stories in. All but one of these came out in the last four months. It is very weird that I can go six months and not have a new short story come out, and then suddenly I have four or five in a few months.

Notice that all the stories I have just had come out (except for the one in Talebones) were written for an anthology on a certain topic. I personally love writing stories to a certain theme or topic. As a writer, it challenges me and makes me go to types and styles of writing I might never had tried otherwise. Also, it is often hard to make a specific topic, often very strange to my thinking, into a “Dean” story.

WIZARDS, INC. edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Loren L. Coleman has some great writers in it and I am very proud to be in it. The book came out in December, 2007. My story, called “The Keeper of the Morals” is about how magic and the corporate world might just mix. Of all of the stories in the books I have up, this is the straightest, the most serious, the most down-the-line of them all, which means it probably works better than some of my stories. I know for a fact that writing about corporation thinking was really hard for me to do, since I have never worked for one.

THE FUTURE WE WISH WE HAD edited by Rebecca Lickiss and Martin H. Greenberg takes the title and lets a bunch of us just run with the idea. You know, flying cars and all that stuff that sf said we should have. The book came out in November, 2007. In my story, “Cold Comfort,” I decided to take a twist on the idea that the aliens should be here. Don’t you wish they were?

IF I WERE AN EVIL OVERLORD edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Russell Davis is one of those books a writer can only dream about being invited into. My story “The Life and Death of Fortune Cookie Tyrant” was just too much fun, and is a very “Dean” story. Otherwise known as weird by my friends. I came up with the idea while opening a fortune cookie, of course. Yes, I managed to smash together the idea of an evil overlord and a fortune cookie.

THE MAGIC TOY BOX edited by Denise Little came out in 2006, but I wanted to include it here because I am very proud of the story in this one. “The Call of the Track Ahead” is really a love story, and a story about a man taking a chance for a dream. And it’s a story that fits the anthology. The toy is a train, of course. One of my more literary stories.

Anyhow, that’s a few more of the over 100 professionally published short stories I have out.

A little history, in case anyone is wondering,  My very first published short story, where I got a check (very small and I still have it), was published in July, 1976 in The Diversifier Magazine. It’s a nasty little horror story of about 1,000 words that I am stunned I wrote looking back on it. At the time, I was writing and selling poetry all over the place and thought writing a short story was just too much work. I think it was the sixth or seventh story I had tried.

My second story was published almost one year later (May 1977) also in The Diversifier Magazine. I found myself on a table of contents with Isaac Asimov, Robert Bloch, and a reprint of a Robert E. Howard story. The articles in it were by Robert Weinberg, E. Hoffman Price, Fritz Leiber, and Manly Wade Wellman. My story, “Frankenstein Love” was the anchor story in the magazine and had an illustration by Harry Morris, an artist I ended up working with 16 years later at Pulphouse.  It was also 1,000 words long.

I wouldn’t sell another story for over six years, not that I wasn’t trying.  And that third story, the one I call my first “professional” story was bought by Damon Knight.  (The Diversifier Magazine had a circulation under 10,000 copies, making it not professional at the time.)   The story Damon bought called “Flawless Execution” was exactly 250 words long and appeared in the CLARION AWARDS ANTHOLOGY.  Those were a long six years from that sale in 1977  to the one in 1983.  A very long six years.

Cheers,   Dean

I have two of the pages on my pen names done.  Sandy Schofield and D. W. Smith.  I’m still working on getting the books up on the Kathryn Wesley page and little stories about the writing of each book.  With luck, that will get done this week.

I have written under a bunch of varied names.  I sold short stories under the name Wesley Dean for a time, wrote an erotic novel under Edward Taft that was published, and have written a good half-dozen books under real people’s names, some I can mention and others I can’t due to contracts.  So I guess to cover some of these others, I’ll just have a general “other names” page at some point.

I have a number of novels right now out under submission under new pen names as well and will include those names if a book sells.

Also in the next week or so I’ll start a “workshops” page as well, with schedule and all that for the professional workshops coming up here on the coast.

Still building.  Thanks for checking by and watching the progress.

Cheers,  Dean

Down on the next column, you’ll see the cover of the new issue of TALEBONES, a wonderful magazine of Science Fiction and Dark Fantasy. The issue pictured is #36, the Spring 2008 issue, and I have a strange sf story in the issue. My story title is “The Thickness of a Warp” and is about the idea that if time and space can be bent, then how far can you bend it?

Yup, a “Dean” story.

I’m proud of the little story, and really happy that Patrick Swenson, the fine editor and publisher of the magazine, picked it up. I’ve been a fan of TALEBONES since Patrick started it many, many years ago, but this is the first story I’ve been able to sell him.

You can click on the picture and you will be linked with the TALEBONES web site.  There you can either buy the issue, or subscribe for a year. It will be worth your money, trust me. Great little magazine doing some really great work.  And they also publish some really fine books from many authors and run a writer’s workshop.  Click on the picture and check them out.

Cheers, Dean

Okay, I have to admit it.  I’m having a blast.  There is just something special about sitting around a comfortable room with eight or nine other professional writers talking about novels, about structure, about pacing, about character, about genre, about marketing and so many other topics.  I flat love it, feel charged by it, and wish I could do it a little more often, to be honest.

This weekend here in town is one of the professional writer’s workshops Kris and I put on at times.  This one is a simple novel workshop, with New York editor John Douglas helping us out from a distance.  Eight professional novelists from all over the country are here for this weekend, including four from Canada.  A couple of the local professional writers have come by as well, and the discussions are fantastic.  Tonight the topics ranged all the way from agents to the openings of books.

I get to do this all day tomorrow as well, and I’m excited.  Great fun, great learning, great company.  A wonderful day ahead of talking about novels and the structure and writing of novels and the business of novels.  And that’s about all I’m going to say about it, except that as a beginning writer, I always had a fantasy of published novelists sitting around talking about books and craft and business and in my fantasy I was one of those published novelists.

Fantasy can become reality and does with every one of these novel workshops.  At least for me.

Now, off to do some pages on a new novel and then get to bed.  It’s midnight and I just wanted to relay some of this excitement.

Cheers,  Dean

I finally figured out enough of this program to finish the Sandy Schofield page, listing all five of the books under that pen name that have seen print. I will go in shortly and put links on the pictures to Amazon for all of them but the Adventure Boys Publishing novel.

Actually, I just saw a picture of another form of the Adventure Boys Publishing Sandy Schofield book that saw print in a limited way last summer, but I have no copy of it. When I do, I will add it to the page.

I also wrote and was paid in full for three other Sandy Schofield books for Adventure Boys, but they have not yet seen the light of day, and may never. If they do, I’ll post them here.

Anyway, by looking at the Sandy Schofield page, you’ll see how this site is going to look for all the books. I’m going to write out what I can remember about the writing of each book as well. At least all of the ninty-plus novels I can claim, as well as new projects.

I’m also just started a “poker” page to talk about poker.  I will also do some posts about the world of agents from the writer’s perspective in the writing topic.

Things  are coming together.  Like a novel, one brick at a time.  Or something like that.

Cheers, Dean