You can’t honestly believe that getting your writing advice here is any kind of boon when you finally sit down and write the inevitable masterpiece that you have locked away somewhere, deep within your brain - back behind those years and years of Law and Order plots and caloric indexes. You just like to compare notes. I do the same thing. It’s fun to sit down and take a stab at the hundreds of other writers peddling their wares, checking up on the competition. It’s okay. We’re on even ground really. If we added up all the books published between the lot of us, it’d be a solid and very sexy looking 0.

A flip or two through my vast and sickeningly yellowing collection of half finished novels, unpublished short stories, and love-lorn poetics will show you that I’m no different from any other aspiring artist…I start a million and one projects and might, someday, if I (and everyone I’ve promised to dedicate a novel to) am able to whip one out, I’ll be the happiest person on the planet.

For now though, returning to the track that is novel writing and that unfinished masterpiece you occasionally glance upon with the same withered stares that your neighbor’s emaciated, yowling cat gets when he pounces on your garbage cans, here’s what’s next. Don’t let it die. Forget the million other projects you never finished. This is your masterpiece. It’s the million and first project and deserves better from you.

Every year, I participate in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. The rules are simple and the project simpler - write a 50,000 word novel in one month, November to be exact. In the weekly emails sent out to help bolster self esteem and motivation for participants, all sorts of fun, smarmy advice is present, but the one thing I found most interesting (and ultimately helpful) was this: Week 2 is the hardest. After the first 12k words or so, the novelty has worn off and the weariness kicks in. The second half of the uphill climb is painful and long, but once you hit the summit, it’s all clear sky, you’re over half way done.

This doesn’t directly apply to your novels of unlimited length, creativity and time to finish. It’s for people trying to write 1700 words a day for a month. But, here’s the best part; it’s more or less the same thing. Once you’ve kicked in three or four dozen pages and find that your characters might be boring or that your settings are starting to crumble from your own disinterest or worse yet, you didn’t work on it for a while and can’t remember where you are. Step back, take a gander at what you have and remember how awesome your idea is, how fantabulous that masterpiece will be when it’s done, and make sure to throw in something half way interesting to keep your own attention.

If the writer’s bored, your readers will be twice as much so. I’ve actually peaked this point before, overcoming the depths of despair and boring exposition in the middle of a book. Not to say that my conclusion is as splendid as I would hope, or as exciting, but I got there….and some day I’ll get to the end. Oh sweet glorious ending, how I long for thee.

So, in a nutshell, step 9 is this: don’t get discouraged or overwhelmed after a few chapters. Keep going - there’s something there that got you started and by all means, don’t add to that ever growing pile of the painfully incomplete novels and stories of the past.

The epic poem is one of the earliest and most enduring forms of literature in our history. The first works of fiction in recorded history are almost entirely epic poems; Beowulf, Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Aeneid (and soon to be Theodore the Wonder Duck). The list goes on and on, all of them studied today as the building blocks of literature and the art of the written word. It’s a lost art really, poetry supplanted by prose sometime after the invention of the printing press.

The rise of the novel saw that poetry was relegated a special place in the pantheon of writerly arts, the kind that is respected but often not read and surely not accepted by the masses. Yet, at its apex, the epic poem was just that, the popular culture of its day, sung by traveling bards to the masses as well as royalty as their form of entertainment. None of it was written down until later in its life and yet it is so perfectly preserved as to make that entirely hard to believe.

For those that find the hankering after reading The Odyssey to write their own epic poem, there are some basic tenets to the structure, pattern, and general incredibly hardness of these poems that you’ll want to keep in mind:

\ 1. It’s in verse. Specifically, the non-rhyming kind of verse. Much of the great works of our day are written in verse, and usually they don’t rhyme. Shakespeare is iambic pentameter, meaning five sets of two syllables. Epic poetry is hard to pinpoint, mostly because none of it was written in English to start with. The works of Homer and Virgil (The Odyssey, Iliad, and Aeneid) are all in dactylic hexameter, meaning six separate syllable segments. Yes, all 550 pages of the Odyssey are written in verse.

2. The poem starts in a very specific way. You’ll want to begin by telling the reader what they’re about to read. Give a rundown of your hero. Theodore the Wonder Duck sails the great seas in search of the lost Golden Mallard. Make it sound as majestic and heroic as possible with lots of epithets and big words.

3. Evoke the muses and the gods. Tell the story of Theodore through the words of another, calling upon supernatural powers to give your pen the strength to write. “Oh Muses, sing of the great Theodore, Wonder Duck of the Silver Lake of Justice. Sing unto me his exploits in the great oceans, searching for that long lost idol of Gold.” Something like that, only a few lines longer.

4. Now hop into the action. The story will often take off from a position of action. You’ll jump in with Theodore in the midst of a battle against the Labrador of Despair, Keeper of the Forbidden Forest or some other arena. Your epic poem is epic remember. It’s got to be big and scary, and all of your enemies need to be worthy to the feats of your hero.

5. Now, tell your story in dual mode. Usually, in the Odyssey at least, you’ll find your hero already halfway done with his quest, but retelling the first half. It’s a technique known as Media Res. Retell all that stuff that brought Theodore to the Isle of Crystal and into the care of the Great King Foghorn, then move on to the second half in which he finishes his quest.

6. The quest needs to be a mixture of the supernatural and the heroic. Your hero is not entirely powerful and capable of completing his mission without outside help. Jerry the Pizza Man might step in and pull the Labrador of Despair inside the house, saving Theodore from his vicelike grip. Likewise, the Gods can be against the hero. Jerry might be offended by Theodore’s presence in his yard and whip out his .22 hunting rifle.

7. Descriptions of war should be big, bloody, and long. These are the biggest sellers when telling a story to a group of people, the battle scenes, and the epic poems of old display this more than amply. The Iliad is essentially a great big long poem about war. Keep in mind that the battles should be won by your hero, but never completely. He must come away with bruises and angry Gods to hound him. That is until the last battle of course.

8. The last battle is a resounding defeat of all forces by Theodore. He returns home with the Golden Mallard and it’s robbed by Jerry and his henchman, Labrador. The two take the Mallard to the Forbidden Forest and Theodore must retrieve it one last time. In the end, Jerry and Labrador should be dead or so thoroughly defeated they have no will to go on living.

9. Theodore the Wonder Duck is a god among ducks.

Your epic poem may or may not be about something slightly more adult in nature, but it should try and use the conventions of old to frame it. Don’t be afraid to mess with them and rewrite the structure though. Some of the greatest works (ahem…Wonder Duck) are just that.

I’ve been throwing in extra steps now for a good seven steps and you’re probably wondering if writing is ever actually just writing. But, your patience and perseverance have finally paid off. You’ve arrived at step 8. The big eight…the magic eight….ball. I’m still working on my jargon.

As for the place at which you’ve arrived, you are now ready to start writing a novel or short story or whatever work you decided you want to spend so much of your agonizing time on. And the best part is that you’re ready to do it. Now, I’m not someone to give you actual writing advice. I just offer tips on the steps you better be taking to make sure you’re ready to be here at step 8.

Everyone has their own methods - those weird rituals that translate into a better written project than if they didn’t drink a half gallon of clam juice first (true story….don’t ask). I won’t judge those methods because for some people they work, and for others they don’t. Personally, I can only write supremely well on a tight deadline, usually late at night when my eyes are doing that sticky thing and stuff starts to blur. I’m a stress writer. Some of you might be the opposite, where you must write during the middle of the day, right after lunch when you’re feeling satiated and happy. But I need the looming threat of failure to pump me through the gauntlet.

It’s all in the approach. Here are a few tips though.

Have everything you need with you. If you know you’re going to need food and drink, bring it to your desk with you. It’ll keep you from making excuses to go to the kitchen every 20 minutes. The odds are you aren’t really hungry, you’re just looking for an excuse to move around.

Do you like music when writing? Most people do, but some don’t. Give it a shot. If you find yourself thinking more about the lyrics than your own words, try some classical. If that doesn’t work, go for the absolute seclusion method. Door closed, no music, no tv, dog in a crate somewhere.

Set reasonable goals. Tell yourself to write a 1000 words a day. Even if you end up deleting 2000, at least you wrote your 1000. That’s about an hour of writing a day (faster if you’re into it) and translates to some real progress on a steady basis. If you wait too long, you’ll find it’s hard to remember what exactly you were writing about.

Don’t ask for feedback from your friends and family until you’ve got something substantial done. If you ask every chapter or two, they’ll make the comments that are there to make and you’ll be spoiling to edit and rewrite parts before you even finish the whole thing.

Which brings me to the last point. Don’t edit it until it’s done. Write an entire draft before you actually start to edit your work. If you edit while writing, you’ll eventually become one of those three chapter writers that just write out three chapters of a book and start editing and rewriting them over and over before moving to chapter 4. On the plus side you’ll have three really good chapters…

I had a dream once after working on a story for a couple hours before bed. My characters were all there, talking to each other, throwing around a football, eating chips and salsa, reading the newspaper….having a normal Sunday afternoon. I woke up and realized that I had no idea what I was going to do with all these interesting, yet wholly bored individuals. I had bored my characters to the point of harassing my dreams with their dull as dirt days. They weren’t boring. I’d seen to that. Each one had a nice little back story, likes, dislikes, allergies, childhood trauma. They were real people to me, with real problems (they weren’t really real people to me…let’s go ahead and clarify).

But, they were fully developed enough that I didn’t feel like I could write them into a situation that I didn’t know what they’d do. No situations though. So, what next? Write up some crazy shit for them to do.

The next step in the long and wondrous journey is to write up an outline for your story and your plot. Story and plot? Yes, they are entirely different. The story is what actually happens to your characters. Jimmy went to an island and got stranded. He was eaten by a tiger. The plot is the sequence of events with which you show what happened. Jimmy is a naturalist doing a fly by of an island just discovered near Africa. He jumps from the plane to reach the island. A tiger seeks his food in the jungle. Jimmy realizes he’s lost and seeks his own food. The tiger finds his food.
The rescue teams wonder how a tiger got on the island.

Jimmy’s in a tiger’s belly in both, but you actually described how it was shown in one, and why Jimmy was there. Plot throws in the motivation and the cause and effect relationships as you describe them in your story. If you’re not planning on ever mentioning that Jimmy was a TV naturalist, it’s not part of the plot, but if you casually allude to it at some point, it is. You’ll want to start with the story, which at this point you should already have a pretty good idea of.

What will your characters do? Now, what happens after they do it? Simple right. Ask the basic questions?

Who - You’ve done who. Your characters are fleshed out, dancing around in your dreams, reading the paper and drinking lemonade, waiting for your lazy ass to figure out the rest.

What - What’s going on? What are they doing in the story? Are they Ninjas or housewives? This is the story.

When, Where - Same question, pretty basic. Setting and timeline are usually built into your brainstorming early. You might decide to start messing with time though as you write the story, telling things out of sequence or flashbacking. Know this early, or you’ll confuse yourself.

Why - And this is your plot. Once you know everything else, who you’re working with, what they’re doing and when and where they’ll do it, you can start filling in the things that really matter like motivation and fallout. What happens to make Jimmy go to that island? Why is the tiger there? Why does Jimmy go into the jungle right away for food? These are questions that you’ll answer in your story, so they become part of the plot.

When you sit down to outline, start from the outside and work your way in. Work out a basic idea of what’s going on and then start filling in the details. it makes the process easier and usually helps to fill in and huge, monstrous plot holes that arise from writing straight through and forgetting that character X was in fact shot in chapter 2 and should still be in the hospital, but now he needs to be in Place Y and you don’t know how to get him there.

It’s time to start doing some real work here. More than what you already did, but less than you expect. Still taking those baby steps, remember that. As I mentioned in step five, the next stop is outlining. And outlining is different for everybody. It’s chock full of pitfalls and mistakes, and all sorts of traps that you can create for yourself, which you’ll find pop up just about everywhere, but shouldn’t be a problem because you’re smarter than that, right? Yeah, I thought so.

You’ve got your first sentence all worked out, a starting point and a mood for your character, and ideally starter points for your research and themes and all that other fun stuff.

Now, you get the wonderful option of writing up a bit of outline. Like everything else though, you’ll be taking little itty bitty baby steps. Don’t step out of line, or you’ll be shot….repeatedly, in the body.

The first step in outlining is to craft characters that people will care about. By now, you’ve got something of an idea of what you’re working with - who your leads are and who your antagonists are. At least what they need to do to make your story work. You’ve got the pieces from Ikea all over the floor, now it’s time to pull out the instructions and start putting pieces together. You’ll have your Sloonstag chair in no time, so long as you don’t forget the third T-screw in the cross support, then you’ll be sitting on the floor with your face planted in carpet.

When in college, this was the one step in the whole process that we tended to receive the most actual, written instruction in. Every instructor had a worksheet or a book to read, or a specific method to go through that fleshes out a character fully enough to make them believable in any fiction. I actually kind of like the worksheet idea, though honestly I never actually used it. But here’s the general idea.

1. Start with background. Gender, birthplace, family, height, weight, hair color, clothing style, education, goals in life. Pretend you just met someone. Write down every detail you notice about them just from looking, and now start asking them questions. You’re going to start broad at first. You wouldn’t ask a girl you met on the street who she slept with last. You’d ask what kind of music she listens to. It sounds corny, but if you get to know your characters slowly, everything else feels more natural. If you fill in the blanks that matter only to your story, it feels contrived and leaves too many holes. When you’re writing your novel, you want to feel like you’re writing about someone you know, with more background details than you’ll ever write about.

2. Now start asking the more specific questions. What kinds of food does he eat? Who did he spend Christmas with last year? What’s his favorite television show, and when did he last have sex…in a car? Don’t feel like you have to think of a million and one questions and fill out a survey, just think of things that you wouldn’t normally know about someone and know them. Here’s a good thought. Go to Myspace and click on one of those stupid 16 year old’s surveys they like to fill out so much, with 100 questions on it. Now fill it in for your character. You’ll never know everything, because this is a fictional character, but when a situation comes up in the story, you’ll have enough background to base your traits on quickly and easily. You’ll know how your character should react.

3. Write up a short background, a meaningless story about them that displays a certain range of emotion. Write about a traumatic experience from childhood maybe, or a problem had while in college. Something short and unrelated to your novel that helps to flesh out a voice a little more clearly for him. This is a great exercise, it’s quick, and most often you’ll be able to use it in your work later.

4. You only have to do this for a couple, three characters (depending on how broad your work is). Other characters tend to spring out of these backgrounds. When you write about the protagonist’s past in depth, you’ll tend to outline and describe the parents, and the family, and an ex-girlfriend, and the current girlfriend. It’s easier then to build on that and create compelling supporting characters later on.

Good luck with this one. It gets ignored way too much. The flattest, most cardboard characters in books tend to be created for the sole purpose of the role they play in the book. Go beyond that, and you get something more just from the effort, regardless of your intentions when writing later.

Oh man, it’s time to start the writing now? That’s awesome. So step 5 is writing it right?

Kind of? What do you mean kind of?

Slow down and chill, alright. You’re ready to start writing, but not the whole thing. It’s like getting into a hot tub. First your toe, then your leg, then slowly submerge until you just dunk the rest of your body. You’ll see. But, for now it’s just the tip of your toe. Throw a frog in a boiling pot and he’ll jump out right?

And here’s the deal. I skipped the outlining phase for now. You don’t outline quite yet and here’s why. You need to establish a tone, a voice and a basic train of thought before you start outlining any of the rest of your story. I find that if you outline the whole thing right off the bat, you end up spending the entire time trying to make all of your ideas and characters match that outline. No, that’s never a good thing, so the best place to start in my opinion is to write up a little bit and see what comes of it, then start visualizing the process into an outline.

And so….(drum roll here)….write the first sentence. That’s all. It’s not so simple as it sounds though. Don’t over think it or anything. The odds are that it will be deleted and replaced a dozen or more times before you ever actually have a “first sentence”, but I guarantee you that the amount of thought that goes into the words you first write in your story will be ample to get you rolling on an outline. A few simple rules though.

1. Don’t start with a cliche - no mentions of alarm clocks waking anyone from deep sleeps, bright and sunny days,no onces, upons, or times, and definitely no mention of ‘when i was a kid’. It’s all corny and cliche and even if you end up using it in the long run, don’t start with it. It’s like shoving a big smell sponge in between your ears and trying to fire the same neurons and synapses into green cleaning materials instead of your brain. It just stinks.

2. It doesn’t count it if it’s just a quote - Quotes are fine for starters, but simple useless speech like, “I don’t think so, Johnny” doesn’t do anything for you. So, ignore that and start with more. Who is Johnny and what did he just presumptuously ask for. Move past the crap on the surface, because that crap on the surface has probably been floating there since you first came up with your idea. It stinks and needs a flush. Get to the meaning and motivation behind it all.

3. You should mention at least one of your characters and something even you didn’t know about them in this space. It opens up the dialogue between you and what you’re going to write without forgetting the actual purpose of the story. It makes so much more sense to flesh out the characters in the story than on a sheet of paper somewhere. Just doesn’t always work out that way.

4. Don’t necessarily stop at 1 sentence. Give it a go and keep writing if you can. But don’t get too carried away if you’re not sure where you’re going with it. There should be a clear objective in every paragraph you write. Don’t just scribble for the sake of scribbling words. Freewriting is for outlining and brainstorming. This is the actual story and you’re only going to clog it up with a bunch of junk if you start experimenting here.

You should have a general idea of where you’re going now. Some kind of seed in the back of that sponge in your head that tells you what kind of character you’ve got and what you want them to do, for at least the next chapter or so. I recommend sitting down and going through this process every chapter or so, that way you don’t craft too long and unforgiving an outline later on. You’ll never stick to it and it doesn’t help your story…ever.

Step four is probably the least static of any step you might take in the composition of said masterpiece. It’s a short stop on the way to starting, but it never actually ends. You’re always going to be stuck here, looking back to Wiki and figure out a quick and easy answer to how many types of spider monkeys there are in the tropics (13 by the way) for your serial killer zoo keeper novel.

So, what are the keys to the process, if any at all. First off, you want to write a good story, you need to be sure of what you’re writing. Going back to the spider monkeys, you want to make sure you actually know what they eat. If you say they eat leaves, when they really eat 90% fruit and nuts, some zoologist somewhere is going to notice and write you a note that wastes your time. Not everyone knows the difference, but you get the idea. For those that do, your failure to research is distracting. Don’t distract your reader with lazy writing. And if it’s less specified knowledge, like say something political or the date of someone’s birth, or words from another language, more than a few people will know that you didn’t take the time to get it right.

Laziness will kill a novel as quickly as bad writing (quicker if you can pull off both). So, how do you keep track of your facts. You haven’t even started writing yet, so what are you researching. It makes good solid sense to have a basic idea about a topic before you start writing.

Your zookeeper has a lot of knowledge that you don’t. He’d kick your ass on jeopardy. Wipe the floor with you and send you home crying. But your reader won’t know this unless you start doing a little research to write all that superior knowledge into your piece. He needs to know things that you don’t already know and so you need to go and find those things. Read some books about animals. You’re not going to know anything if you don’t at least pretend. So dig out a few zoology books, some Doctor Doolittle, those Zoo Books from elementary school, whatever you think you need to write convincingly about a zoologist in a serious novel.

And then keep all those resources around as well as bookmarks to Wikipedia articles and a quick draw on Google and you should be good to go. Remember, you don’t need to actually know anything, just have the capacity to lift knowledge and use it carefully in prose.

Brainstorming? Oh man, boring. I know that’s what you’re thinking, but it’s not so bad. No really, just hang around for a minute or two. This can be fun if you make it fun. Besides you’ve got your confidence and your idea firmly intact, so what can go wrong

Brainstorming is an age old generalization that really just means “I go write random shit down until something good comes out”. In fact that’s what I like to say to people. I’m gonna write random shit down until something good comes out. Good ol’ IGWRSDUSGCO. How could you forget that? It’s a necessary step in almost every creative process unless you happen to be a master genius of your craft, in which case stop reading my writing right now.

There’s no where to start on this one. It’s an acquired artform, much like the rest of the process, but more so because everyone does it different. But there are a few basics that I can throw your way that everyone should remember.

First off, don’t ever actually stop brainstorming. You should have a list or a notebook in which you write down random ideas anyways. Just carry that around with you and instead of thinking on the world at large, just think on your story idea.

Think smaller, not big picture. The big picture is intact at this point. Pardon me for a second while I dilute myself to a corny circus metaphor, but imagine your novel as the entire circus. You just thought of the idea, which is a plan of sorts, saying where things will go. Now you need to brainstorm. You don’t start putting the circus together by putting up the main tent and then sliding poles underneath it. You need to think a bit. Where can the tigers go that they won’t eat the horses. Where will the carnies sleep. Where will the patrons wait in line. All of the details have to be thought out first, then you put the big tent up.

Same idea here. Think of the little stuff. Who’s your main character? Background? Motivation? Hopes and dreams. If she could have one wish what would it be. To be Ms. American Teen Princess…..anyways, you get the idea. Write from the inside out. Like cooking a turkey.

Keep it organized while your at it. If you don’t, you’ll find that all your awesome ideas are incredibly hard to find. Number pages in your notebook and keep a small chart on the back two pages with a table of contents saying what you’re doing on different pages. It’s a little time consuming, but trust me it’s worth it when all you need is to find the nationality you decided to make the next door neighbor’s hair dresser and you have to read through 80 pages of randomly scribbled notes.

Freewriting. Don’t just think of ideas and write them down. Try spitting out random thought after random thought in succession. It’s a great exercise anyways, but even better when you have a starting point. You’ll weed out a large portion of what you write as mindless excrement, but there’s always a few gems to be found.

Most of all don’t forget that it’s an open process. Don’t get stuck in routine. If you have an interesting method or idea, say slapping random words on a white board or taking character names from your DVD collection, go for it. Writers get to be as eccentric as they want. Comes with the meager pay and hungry winters.

Saw this over at 101 Reasons, and even if you’re not quite that cynical, keep in mind that this is entirely true…for all of us

So, you’ve decided you aren’t the bane of all things intellectual. You have the basic ability and the necessary confidence to sit and transfer your genius to the blank space in a word processor (or if you’re feeling cozy and retro, a moleskin notebook). Step 2 then, you ask?

Yup, now it’s time to whip out that idea you were so eager to throw at me before I set you back down in your over heated seat. It’s time to dust that puppy off and lay it on the table, stretch it out and start poking and prodding to see what dishes you can make with it.

Putting the mixed food metaphors aside, let’s take a look at your idea. There are a few things you need to consider before you jump in and start writing.

1. Does it Make Sense
How many ninjas are there? Do they or do they not have the ability to defy gravity? And if so, are they in 15th Century Japan? You can’t craft a brilliant idea if it’s riddled with holes and stupidity. You’d better have a general idea how your main character became a master of acrobatic martial arts. Same goes for the small stuff. If it seems iffy, it probably is.

2. What Genre is it?
Now don’t get me wrong here. I’m not a genre-centric critic. In fact, I’m as big a fan as any of mixing and recalibrating ideas and possibilities. Tweak my perceptions, please. But, if you’re doing that, make sure you know you’re doing that. Don’t keep telling everyone you know that you’re writing a mystery novel, then start throwing in aforementioned ninjas and ancient chinese dragons. Unless of course, you know that’s what you’re going to do. The gist here; know what world you’re working in. All the better to immerse yourself in later.

3. Characters
You need people in your world. I have tons of ideas I’ve written out entire outlines for, thoughts I got giddy about because of the concepts, but whenever I needed a character I just wrote a random name in, or a broad description (short blond). Create convincing, fully realized characters for your world. If you have a halfway decent idea you’re working with, you should already have a couple or more characters ready to go.

4. Can You Write It?
Seems like a duh, but I’ve also been down this road a few too many times. Different styles require different approaches. Don’t outline an epic action adventure story if you suck at writing action sequences. Not to say you shouldn’t try. Always try. But, when you try and fail, don’t pretend that what paltry exposition you can whip out as Jack Strider karate chops a Russian spy in the neck is going to make up for your pitiful description of the fight. Write what you know, or can learn to know, or at least pretend to know.

It seems pretty straightforward, but your idea needs to make sense. It needs to be fun for you, and have enough leeway for you to create as you write. It can’t be out of your league, and it shouldn’t be so vague that you start trailing off on tangents that don’t make sense. Basically, don’t be blind and gagged going into yourstory.