Last time I wrote about how the beginning of a piece is supposed to “hook” the reader, to make them have to keep reading past the first line, the first paragraph, the first page. Now we need to zoom out a little and look at the beginning of the piece as a whole. Specifically, we need to ask, “Is this the right place for the piece to begin?”

That may seem like an odd question: doesn’t an article, short story, or novel start at the beginning?

Not necessarily. You’ve probably heard that a story needs to start in medias res, a Latin phrase meaning “in the middle of things.”

Great. What things?

Things. You know. The action. The events. Which

One of the things I need to be concerned about that most SF writers don’t with most of their stories is that The Eternity Plague takes place in real places on a real planet–earth. Can I use the names of these real places–not just cities, they’re okay, but institutions–specifically the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in  Dallas.

Another potential problem is that one of my characters quotes song lyrics that are still under copyright. Can I use them under the “fair use” principle, or are the lengths of the quotes too long by some standard I don’t know. “Fair use” doesn’t have a hard-and-fast standard by which it’s measured, which makes sense in a lot of ways. But that also makes it difficult to know when you’ve crossed the line when the line is vague and blurry, not bright.

Frantically trying to get caught up after spending the last 3 days volunteering with the Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon, something I do every year to honor the memory of a friend of mine who was killed in the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building here. I’ve been a part of the event every year, as a volunteer, runner, or both, and this year was even honored with a profile interview in The Oklahoman, the city’s newspaper, even if the writer did misspell my name.

But enough of that! This is a writing blog! There’s lots of Great Stuff included this week: foreshadowing, characters who pop, pitching, the benefits of writing short fiction, book marketing, the value of reviews, burnout, learning from writing, and even some fun: one 2-year-old’s takes on books based on their covers...

Before I begin, remember that for each of the items I’ll discuss from now on, you have four questions to ask:

• Did it happen?
• Exactly where did it happen?
• What exactly is the problem? Or what just worked really well?
• What can the author do to fix it, if something needs fixing?

OK, so what is a “hook” and how can it be weak or missing? Whatever you’re writing—fiction or non-fiction, poetry or prose—you need to catch and hold your reader’s interest: you need to hook them. And you need to do it early. How early? Well, in a poem it has to happen right away, in the first few lines, since a poem is likely to be brief. But this is true even in a longer piece...

This morning I took another important step on the road to publication: I sent the manuscript off to a proofreader/copy editor. Whew. Little by little, The Eternity Plague is turning into a “real” book, as opposed to a manuscript.

There are still a few loose ends to tie up: either getting permission from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center to use the Center’s name in the story, or changing the name to something else; and getting a reading on whether the song lyrics my reporter character, Lisa Lange, quotes from time to time can be considered “fair use” or if I have to get permission to use them too.

If UT-Southwestern says no, that’s an easy fix: global find-and-replace is a wonderful thing. Getting permission for the song lyrics could take longer, if I have to...

If you read nothing else this week, read Joel Friedlander’s piece on the destruction of the writing web site Publetariat down in the Technology section. Protecting your blog or web site needs to be high on your priority list because there are slimeballs out there who will destroy web sites just for the pleasure of destroying them. If you have a WordPress.org-based site, I point you to a resource that will help you keep your site safe.

In addition we have posts on picking titles, getting everything right in a story, ending it well, ebook publishing options and resources, going to writers’ conferences, writer’s courage, and the differences between Microsoft Word formats and why that matters to you.

CRAFT

Kris Montee, one of the sisters who write as PJ Parrish, has plenty of great advic...

Before we get down to the nitty-gritty details of what to critique and how to do it, I want to give you a high-level overview of what the rest of this series is going to cover. We’ll look at twelve broad categories:

• Reader response
• Beginnings and endings
• Characters and characterization
• Setting
• Plot
• Flashbacks, flash-forwards, and backstory
• Narrative and dialogue
• Pace
• Description
• General story-telling problems
• Mechanical errors
• Positive reinforcement, and
• Other topics

Whew, that’s a lot! “But wait, there’s more!” Much, much more, as you’ll see in a minute.

Positive reinforcement gets its own section because writers need positive strokes, to hear that something they wrote actua...

It’s been a crazy week ’round here and things that should be getting done either aren’t, or are, but late. Like this post.

The good news is that one important task, finishing my last edits, including deleting an entire chapter, got done today. So, all that’ s let to do is write the Acknowledgements and front matter (at least in rough draft form) and the manuscript of The Eternity Plague will be ready to head off to my copy editor. And just in time, as other tasks await.

Meanwhile, in virus news, the latest strain of avian (bird) flu in Asia, an H7N9 strain, is once again killing a large percentage of the people it infects–while infecting very few people...

It’s Tax Day in America, which is anything but a holiday, with millions of people frantically trying to do what they could have done any time in the last 10 weeks, but then, who LIKES paying taxes? So this week we have one post on that very subject, plus pieces on blogging, storytelling, characterization, publishing, “tweetables,” and making time for writing. Enjoy!

CRAFT

I know for some people there never seems to be enough time to write, so adding one more writing task seems counterproductive if not impossible. But Dan Blank (@danblank) makes the case for 4 Ways Blogging Will Make You a Better Writer on DIY MFA. He argues that blogging (1) makes you publish, (2) focuses you on writing and getting read, (3) adds new ways to connect to readers, and (4) builds the habit of writing (I’...

I wrote in the previous article about keeping track of how a piece of writing makes you feel when you’re reviewing it. In this post, I was going to explore identifying why it made you feel that way, but I discovered I should introduce another topic first: “Is that what the author wanted me to feel?” Both questions—that one and “How did this piece make me feel?”—need to be followed by the questions, “Why did the piece make me feel this way?” and “Why did the author want me to feel that way?”

Now, of course, you can’t have perfect knowledge of the author’s intent if you’re not the author  (and sometimes not even when you are) but som...