All of writing in an hour [redux]

What I've been up to.

Sorry about not posting on the daily, everyone. I’ve been exhausted. Marketing freaking kills me. Most of my energy has gone into Upstream Reviews.

Anyway, last year, I gave a speech to a high school English class. Apparently, in Texas, “I’m a local author” actually means something. Who knew?

They liked me enough to invite me back. Who knows why?

So, here it is, everything you ever wanted to know about writing … that I could jam into a one hour class, with enough time to accommodate a Q&A session.

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Howdy.

My name is Declan Finn, probably the most prolific author you have never heard of. In the last ten years I’ve published approximately 45 novels—because I stopped counting after 40. Professor McNichol has asked me to talk a bit about my writing, including how I got here.

First of all, if you want to write just to write … you can simply do that. And you don’t have to take a single class in writing to do it. I started at 16, before I took my lone writing class in high school.

Back then, I created fiction around a science fiction TV show called Babylon 5. I watched the show, read everything about the show, started inserting my original characters into the corners of the show that were never explored. I created my own stories within that universe.

At the time, I had not known that I was creating something called “fan fiction.” Because in 1998, I barely dealt with the Internet if I could avoid it.

Eventually, my fan fiction grew beyond the TV show, and generated original stories, world building, my own alien species. In 15 months, I had created over two thousand pages of text. And by that, I mean I probably made four thousand pages, because I was 16, I didn’t know that publishers used double spacing.

Orson Scott Card, author of the novel Ender’s Game, has been quoted as saying “The First Million Words are practice.” And my fan fiction probably that word count, if not more.

Keep in mind, much of this fan fiction was written during summers, where I could write in 36 hour stretches. I had no social life back then, since my books were more interesting than the people around me. Thus, I had no problem locking myself in an office for hours on end.

Well before the end of those 15 months, I had essentially rewired my brain. I needed a notebook by my bed because ideas would not let me sleep until I wrote them down. I took notes on real life anecdotes so I could use them in a planned murder mystery set in my high school. I looked at locations with an eye to making them set pieces in novels. And I did.

So before anyone asks, “Mister Finn, where do you get your ideas?” the answer is that I approach life with a functional mindset and build stories out of whatever’s lying around.

Before I left high school, my fascination with writing led to me being branded a terrorist…

For those of you paying attention, that’s called “a hook.” It should catch the attention of your audience. If you intend to write fiction at a professional level, keep that in mind.

Before I continue, I had not actually planned to do anything to my high school. One evening when I was particularly punchy, I had fallen into the works of classical English comic operettas written by Gilbert and Sullivan in the late 1800s. You probably are familiar with some of their tunes, even if you don’t know the pieces offhand. But the one song that got me into trouble was a song called “I have a Little list.” It was funny, and wrote a version based around my high school.

Long story short, my parody got out, and led the high school to throw me out for “acts of terrorism.” Please keep in mind, this was March of 2000, before 9-11 redefined terrorism for most people. If you don’t know what 9-11 is, ask your history teachers.

By the time I was in college, I knew I wanted to write novels professionally. I took history in college, because that’s where all the stories are. And trust me, there are some things that happen in real life that you can’t get away with in fiction. I was good at history, because they were just stories that actually happened.

In fact, I fell into one historical subject so hard and so deeply, I turned it into a trilogy of novels. Back then, it was trendy to create novels built around history. The history was terrible and the writing was garbage, but some of those books became so hyped, bookstores could make bestsellers out of trash. If you don’t believe that garbage can make money, I suggest you borrow a James Patterson novel from the library. The odds are good that the novel you grab would fail any writing class. But it doesn’t matter, that man can market a book.

You want to know where to get ideas from? One class during my own college days was “Christian Spirituality and Mysticism.” We spent one class discussing the charisms of saints: Padre Pio bilocated. Thomas Aquinas levitated—and since he was so fat he made his own jokes about it, that sounds worrisome. Saints who smelled evil. Saints who raised the dead.

My first thought was “Slap a cape on a saint, and you have a superhero.”

At “smelling evil” I thought “That would be useful for a cop.”

I immediately had a character who was a cop, with the charisms of a saint. So obviously, I had to have a possessed serial killer, because that makes sense, doesn’t it? A demonic criminal matches the protagonist. It became Detective Thomas Nolan, the lead character of my series Saint Tommy, NYPD. I milked that premise for 12 novels, and I’m still writing short stories around him.

If you think a Saint as a protagonist is boring, I advise that you read Butler’s Lives of the Saints, and see just how colorful some saints are. Between saints who are flaky (such as Thomas Aquinas) Saints who didn’t even like other people (such as Saint Jerome, who liked his pet lion, and Saint Ambrose, the hermit down the street).

There is a fantasy author named Jim Butcher, best known for writing Fantasy. He got into an argument online. The discussion was about tropes—think of a trope as a meme in storytelling, from “the villain is really the hero’s father,” or “this scoundrel really has a heart of gold,” or even “this agent of chaos will do the correct thing, if only as a last resort.”

Jim Butcher’s discussion asked, “Can an overused trope be good if the author is good enough?” Butcher argued that a good author can spin a good story out of anything. It became a bet. Butcher’s opposition dared him to write a story based on an overused trope. Butcher insisted, “No, give me two tropes.” The tropes he was given was “Lost Roman Legion” in “the Land of the Pokemon.” He turned it into a series called Codex Alera, and made enough money to build a house from scratch.

So, yes, you can get ideas from whatever’s to hand.

Good news: if you can wire your brain into finding ideas everywhere, then you will never have writer's block. Since I was 16, writer’s block is what happens to other people. It’s also a handy paperweight that is easily thrown.

I’ve been asked to talk about “process.” I have discussed a bit about outlining. For the most part, outlines are suggestions. They’re the dots you have to connect. My first outline was for a Saint Tommy, NYPD novel called Hell Spawn. The outline dictated that there was going to be an entire chapter of my heroes pounding the concrete, going from one institution to another. But I was bored, and it was just easier to throw in a car bomb.

Just because you outline doesn’t mean you’re locked into it if the needs of the story dictates that the pace needs to change.

My initial process with my fan fiction was to write a series of short stories and string them all together, and call them over the course of a novel. Later on, as I mutated the fan fiction into my science fiction series White Ops, I had to change a great many things. One story was a hostage taking of “Disney Planet,” and I turned the 30-page short story into a full novel about a hostage situation on “Yesdin Planet.” Please remember, big companies have lawyers.

Between writing short stories and outlining novels, I would build characters first and drop them into plots. From there, I would see how the pinball reacts to getting knocked around the machine. You’d be surprised how well that can work. The characters will make decisions you, the author, will not see coming. But sometimes they work. And sometimes they don’t and you have to backtrack, dragging your characters kicking and screaming all the way.

If I talk like your fictional characters are real people, who act like they have free will, this is why I call writing “Legalized schizophrenia.” When you build people from scratch, and you know what their parents and their grandparents did, you create their hobbies, their likes, their dislikes, you’d be surprised just how real they can feel. Occasionally, I have picked a person in real life and I liked the rhythms of their speech, so I just create a voice filter, where I have a specific voice say what I write, and see if it matches.

Your next step after you write is editing. Personally, I cannot edit something I write. I have to put the draft aside, work on something else, and come back to it when I have forgotten parts of it. Why do this? Because sometimes, you can read a sentence, and you read what you meant to write, not necessarily what’s on the page. When I started out, I would run one manuscript past my entire family of readers. My mother would read the newspapers and correct it. My sister was an English major, so I put her to good use. My father was good at conceptualization and execution. So I had an editing team to work with from the time when I was 16.

If you cannot assemble that yourself, you’re going to have to pay for it, and that can get very pricey very fast.

When editing, please get out of your own way. If you are not familiar with the term “murder your darlings,” it’s the point in editing when you have a line, or a paragraph, or a page, where you just love everything about it. It is so good. It is so awesome. And you may be forced to delete it. Or at least cut it from this book. As I said before, I cut a chapter an outline for Hell Spawn because it killed the pacing.

However, that chapter managed to fit book two perfectly. Sometimes, you have to murder your darlings. But, you never thrown anything out, because you don’t know what comes in handy later.

And yes, editing can be a pain. The last two book projects I edited, I cut fifty thousand words from one book, and 75 thousand from another. For those of you who want to do the math, I cut 200 pages from one book, and 300 pages from another.

My simple advice with dealing with edits is simple: Do Not Take It Personally. Some things don’t fit. Some things will kill the pace. Some elements will just be out of place. It happens. Do not spend your time fighting with the editor who made the comment. Try to objectively evaluate the edit, fix it as best you can, and move on.

A quick side-note to this: Sometimes, the elements of your writing you have to spike may be tantamount to preaching. I know it’s unlikely that any of you will have that problem at this stage of your life. However, books may touch on subjects you feel strongly about. I had an opportunity to preach in Hell Spawn. It’s a long story, but suffice it to say that my villain was part of a politically protected occupation. I brought in the villain’s employer, and she waxed poetic about the profession for maybe five pages.

I did not put in my opinions. My character voiced no opinions. In fact, the ONLY opinions expressed were the ones I disagreed with, taken directly from real-world sources. I took real-world quotes and stuffed them into the character’s mouth.

Some reviews STILL whined that I was preaching by making the other side “too cartoonishly evil.” The moral of that story is, sometimes you just can’t win.

While I have talked about the creative side of writing, there is something I must stress. And I’m not sure that I can stress it enough. Yes, you can “just write,” and let it sit on your hard drives and in your notebooks. That’s fine.

But if you intend to make money off of your writing, writing is a business.

If someone tells you that writing is art, and that someone spins lofty notions that disregard thoughts of profiting from your work, tell them get thee behind me Satan, because they are not helping. Art has never been separate from money, and I’m not talking about modern day money laundering.

Personally, as a full-time writer, I write full time. It’s a 9-5 job. Sometimes, an 8-6 job. And if you have the house to yourself, you can keep writing until you can’t see the screen anymore. I don’t recommend that, because you’re going to spend more time the next day trying to figure out what you meant to say, because the last paragraph or two you wrote will be gibberish.

But don’t worry, it gets worse.

Because if you become “a writer” because you think that will get away from people, you’re wrong. You are so wrong. Because after you’re done locking yourself alone in a room with your manuscript, then comes selling the product. And I don’t mean selling it to a publisher. That’s a different problem. Whether or not you self publish, or go into traditional publishing, you will have to sell the book.

While James Patterson has largely devolved into one of the worst writers on God’s green earth, he makes money by being a marketing machine. In fact, he is one of only 300 authors who sell more than 1,000 copies of a book in a year. Take note: 96% of the book market does not sell more than 1,000 copies a year. Which means that most of the books on the shelves of bookstores do not make the author more than $2,000 a year. Anyone working a minimum wage job will make more than that working for two months, while putting in the same ten hours a day.

Even most traditional publishers are of limited help. I recently had an author acquaintance enter into talks with a publisher. They asked “How’s your social media presence?” She said, “What social media presence?” They kicked her to the cub because they expected her to do all the marketing of her own novel.

So, hate to break it to you, but if you want to write professionally, you will have to do the majority of the selling. I have to tell you, marketing is the bane of my existence. I don’t know what your age bracket thinks about social media, but I am literally on every platform known to humanity, and some that aren’t. Sometimes, my 9-5 involves getting into a flame war online because someone doesn’t like that you’re X, or Y, or Z. Maybe they don’t like your face. They don’t like your tone. They don’t like your book. Sometimes, they don’t like the fact that you have published, they’re still on page one of their grand masterpiece, and they need someone to go after.

Both threats to my life have come over my writing. I already told you one of them. In the age of social media, I don’t see that risk going away.

Personally, I tried getting into traditional publishing in 2010.

Correction: I spent three years submitting two different book series to dozens of agents from 2007-2010. I stopped counting rejections around the 300 mark.

In 2010, I had an agent and everything. Except I had gotten a foothold at a time when major publishing houses were firing people in job lots. After two years of my agent trying to get me a hearing at a publisher, I gave up. I self-published. Between 2012 and 2014, I had published a murder mystery and five thrillers. I kept sending out queries to publishers, until 2014, when I was personally invited to send to someone I knew online who was an acquisitions editor. Perfect, right? They accepted my vampire novels. The first one got published in 2015. Excellent.

The publisher was bought out two months later, and they were happy to kick me to the curb.

I ended up self-publishing all four of my vampire novels. Two of them were nominated for a Dragon Award. In 2017, I caught the attention of another publisher. They published nine of my ten novels at the time. They then published my next 8 novels, my Saint Tommy NYPD series. Perfect setup, right?

That publisher folded in 2023.

I now have three publishers, only because I knew them all personally through a decade of working my butt off.

Oh, and even when I had a publisher, I still self-published. I released another murder mystery, two more thrillers, and a history. Because unless you’re going to play in one genre exclusively, you may need more than one publisher. There are some authors who use a different pen name for each genre they write in. I don’t recommend that, but you may draw a different conclusion than I did. Personally, I have enough voices in my head, I don’t need more.

Do not scoff at self-publishing your own work, or going into the independent publishing route with smaller publishers. Believe it or not, self-published and independent works are over half of the book market these days. I don’t mean that they’re half the output, I mean that they are half the sales. That’s the number that counts.

And having a traditional publisher will not save you. If kids your age have heard of the Battletech franchise, it is a massive conglomerate spanning decades. One of the major authors in that franchise, Blaine Lee Pardoe, wrote dozens of novels for Battletech. Only recently, he was targets by some nut case, who stalked him, harassed him, and got him fired from Battletech. Pardoe is currently writing his own series, called Land & Sea. It’s ten books deep, and turning into his own franchise. But he’s put in decades of work, and can bounce back like that. So if you do get a publisher, don’t get too attached. They have no loyalty to you, and can, in some respects, echo some of the worst tendencies of high school—at least mine.

If you want my advice about writing … knock yourself out. Write whatever you want, whenever you want. But learn from my mistakes, and be careful who you show it to.

Write what you know? You don’t have to. No one wants to know about my grandfather the drunk, my grandmother the sociopath, and I, personally, am very boring. My life has only been threatened twice. That’s not enough action for even one of my own novels. A bestselling author like David Weber does not lead space fleets, no matter how often he writes about it. I am not a police officer, nor a saint. Nor am I a vampire. I am clearly not an action hero.

Stephen King is … technically … not a demonic clown, no matter if his online behavior indicates otherwise.

If you want my advice on writing professionally?

First, read. Read fiction to keep your mind open, and read nonfiction to see just how odd reality is. I find that you write what you read. If you’re writing science fiction or action, read some Edgar Rice Burroughs at one end, and some Timothy Zahn at the other. You can learn from everybody. Sometimes, you learn what to do, and sometimes you learn what not to do.

Second, write on a schedule. As a professional, I write from 9-5, every weekday. The book will not write itself. You probably won’t have that amount of time. But even if you carve out thirty minutes every day, and write one page a day, 365 days is a whole novel.

Third: Gain some knowledge of the field. Look into traditional publishing, small presses, and self-publishing, and decide if you want to go into any of them. Given the current conditions, I don’t recommend traditional publishing, but by the time you get around to making something you think is publishable, things may change .

Item four: This is a business. At least read some books on marketing. If you’re heading to college, perhaps take a course on marketing. Also, get some experience in graphic design. AI will not do all that work for you; it won’t even do half of the work for you. Trust me, as someone who made two of his own book covers, you will want to have experience with graphic design. Either that, or get some friends in the business and art departments.

Final bit of advice: I said you don’t have to draw on personal experience to write. You don’t. But please research. If you’re writing action novels, go to a gun range, a self defense class where you have to hit something, and perhaps block a few punches.

Anyway, that’s pretty much everything I know. As an author, people tell me that they want to be a writer. I will tell you simple that, no, you don't.

Sure, you can hotwire your brain to write. It’s easy. I did it to myself when I was 16 by accident. I just wanted this idea out of my head. A million words later, I had novels.

To be a writer, your brain is basically ON all the time.

You're (re)writing TV shows and books. You're calling plot twists.

When the story goes a different way, you want to rewrite it because your idea really was better.

That news story is now part of your thriller.

Your demonic plot to destroy a city becomes current events within a year or two. Been there.

Sometimes, you’re basing people on friends. Don’t worry, they never recognize themselves.

You didn’t pay attention to that conversation with friends / family about something really important to them, because something they said ten minutes ago started a plot outline in your brain.

Your brain occasionally overclocks from writing from 8-6, and you may recall that you should eat something.

You take a break so your brain can cool down, but then the compulsion to keep writing presses on your brain like a heavy blanket.

You need a notebook next to your bed so you can make notes— because the ideas don't let you sleep until you write them down.

There's a difference between “I want to be a writer” and “I have to be a writer.”

If you want to be a writer … no, you don't. If I could do it all over again, I’d have been an electrician or a plumber. I'd probably be using electricity to kill people in murder mysteries, but I'd have a 9-5 job I didn't have to take home with me.

If you HAVE to be a writer? If you are compelled to write. Then you don't really have a choice. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, and good luck.