The Final, Definitive Guide to Word Counts for Short Stories, Novellas, Novels, and More

How many words make a novel? It's an age-old question. I have done a seriously ridiculous amount of research and have the definitive answer for how many words in a short story, novella, novel, and everything else.

We start where everyone always starts, with Wikipedia. The four-part breakdown is pretty simple. Short story to 7,500 words, novelette to 17,500, novella to 40,000, and beyond that is a novel.

Piece of cake, right? But what about flash fiction? Where's that fit? One source suggests anything between 53 and under 1000.

But wait, that same source says short stories have at least 3,500 words. Anything between 1,000 and 3,499 has just fallen into a forbidden void. That's dangerous, because nature and writers alike abhor a vacuum.

A second opinion comes to the rescue with a refinement on short stories, separating them into short-short and long-short stories. The short-short is a very awkward name, so I propose we call it the Old Mac Donald (like the farm, with a short-short here, a short-short there, etc.)

There's still some void, but it's small and containable.

A long-short is just as problematic. Using the writer's favorite tool, creative synonyms, we could call it a big short. Big Short? That's a movie! It was a book first, but with all respect to author Michael Lewis the most famous name here is Christian Bale.

Recapping:

 We have to add in an important pivot point in the graph. McSweeney's submissions famously said submissions of exactly 742 words used to get accepted to the site as if by magic. That golden rule is, alas, no longer true, but the magic number remains.

But that presents a logical problem, with two different lengths both called "flash". We could separate them into microflash and macroflash, but with that perfect Goldilocks zone in the middle, literary history calls out for Mama Bear Flash and Papa Bear Flash. For consistency, we also have to dump the reference to McSweeney's in favor of baby bear (we can't name the just right length after Goldilocks; she's a burglar and a thief).

Now we have some problems on the low end. The unsubstantiated story of Hemingway's "For sale: baby shoes, never worn," slots in nicely at six words.

Shorter than that and you don't have a story, you have a byline. As for 1-2 words, frankly, you're staring at a screen, trying to figure out how to start. You've got writer's block.

After 6, we get into a murky area. You've got a couple handfuls of syllables, but you haven't gone very far. Up to, say, 17 words, it's probably just a haiku. It's not a sure thing, but wise gambler takes the best odds.

Finally, we can get to the novel. Hand-waving everything over 40k is far too open-ended. For one thing, 40k is too short for modern times. "Old" novels might fit there, but not new novels. Heh, that's ironic. "Novel" means new. Old novels are "old-new." Who's the expert on old-new things? They Might Be Giants, with the lyric, "Old New York was once New Amsterdam."

As everyone knows, books are metric. That gives us an important milestone at 100,000+. And finally, if we've gone past 120,000, we're definitely into fantasy (or rarely sci-fi) epic territory.

There are deeper milestones. "Ulysses", at 262,869 words, makes one complete Odyssey.

By the time you've reached 350k, you have clearly (and coincidentally, since this famous author's top 7 longest novels roughly average this length) written the Dickens out of a book.

When we reach the length of "Gone with the Wind" I think it is frankly safe to say we have given a Damn.

Beyond that, and I admit I'm getting tired here so I'm going to stop with the fancy naming and just let the titles speak for themselves, there are several clear roadmarks.

Recap:

 Two exceptions, because we need more granularity. In a Chabon book, one character is working on a 2,611-page novel, which at 250 words per page sets fine boundary for a "Wonder Boy" of a book.

Then there is a saying, sort of like Gladwell's somewhat debunked 10,000 hour rule that a writer's first million words are practice. Once you hit that, it's go time.

In summary, the final, definitive, universal, totally accurate and un-arguable for all time list of how many words does it take to have a short story, novel, or any other kind of non-poetic (except haiku) literary work:

Wait, sorry. I have clearly made some mistakes. Kilo is 1000, and Old Mac Donald is 1000. A Kilo-Mac Donald ought to be a million. Also, I have failed to recognize the squidgy Balette space, where the Bale and the Novelette overlap. That plus a typo where flash went to 9,999. Still, every system is imperfect. It would be foolish to scrap all this hard work and start over, right?

My Inspiration for Writing "The Great American Novel Returns"

The Great American Novel Returns exists to celebrate the public domain. Art belongs to the world as a part of our shared culture. For practical business reasons we let the creators hold on to their inventions for a time, but it's a temporary monopoly. Eventually all great stories become part of our collective experience and should be free to re-use, adapt, and build upon.

The book is a "mashup," blending an old work with something new. The idea has been around forever. How many myths have been reworked, how many classics retold? Shakespeare, maybe the most-referenced writer from the past, was himself working from stories that were old in his day. But the idea has taken on a life of its own in recent years. Since I first heard about Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies I knew I wanted the chance to take an existing work and treat it like a LEGO kit: break it apart and reassemble in a way that featured both old and new.

One problem was I didn't want to tackle the same books everyone else was already tinkering with, so Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, and most other writers from before the twentieth century were out. Also, I didn't want to go that far back in time. Weren't there new-old books being freshly put in the public domain? For twenty years—my entire adult life—the answer was no. The last copyright extension, the 1998 "Mickey Mouse Protection Act," created a gap, putting creative access to artistic works on pause for two decades. That ended this year, with a crop of works from 1923 finally entering the public domain in 2019.

Among them was the song "Yes, We Have No Bananas." I couldn't make a book out of that, but I hope for the life of me someone eventually does. Then I found The Great American Novel by William Carlos Williams. I knew little about Williams and nothing about the novel, but I have always loved the half-jesting, half-striving implications of that phrase, and immediately knew that was the one to work with. Williams still inspires many poets, but I think his books, and this one in particular, are mostly forgotten. It deserves to be revisited and recalled as a piece of our history and culture. That is part of what I hope to do by dragging his old words along on a road trip with my new ones.

How did I do it? The final result contains three roughly equal portions:

One third is text from the original The Great American Novel by Williams. The parts quoted represent maybe half of his original work and are presented with only minor modifications.

Another third of the book is a conversation with Williams’s text, adding commentary, playful discussion, and a century’s worth of insight and events.

The remaining third is a straightforward story, a road-trip buddy adventure of a car and a computer who set out together to discover America. This part came about because Williams's original satire had hundreds of scenes and talking points, but basically no over-arching story, and the best way I could conceive to make a satire of a satire was to put a story back in, but one that has machines exploring man-made world.

Now available on Amazon.

My Year in Writing: Invisible Strides

It's the season for annual lists and summaries. Looking at some other authors' "This Year in Writing" posts and threads has me thinking about my own.

The short version is this: If you were looking for Aaron Rath words in 2018, you would have found nothing, unless you want to count a few hundred Twitter posts. But behind the cloak of invisibility, a lot has been going on.

I started the year on the third month of a "quick and dirty" project that was supposed to take six weeks, a novelization of Twilight Heroes, a computer game I used to run. I'd spend another six months not making much progress there before starting to understand I needed to rethink the scope and tone of the book. It's on the shelf now behind some other projects, but I think I've slowly come around to understanding what I need to do to finish it. Late 2019 is likely.

This year I made my first real writer friend, someone to talk to about craft, good books, an accountability partner, and mind-expander. I can't overstate the value of having someone in a similar position and equally obsessed with the hobby to share things with.

Up until this year, everything I had done has been self-published. It seemed like an adventure, and also fewer hoops to jump through, and I'm frequently a do-it-yourself-er. But a combination of exposure to the writing world on Twitter, stories from my writing buddy, and tidbits gleaned from dozens of writing-related podcasts (Book Fight, Writing Excuses, The Drunken Odyssey, Ditch Diggers, I Should Be Writing, How Authors Work, and several more) all nudged me toward considering the traditional route as well.

The final push was a challenge from Barrelhouse, putting out a call for "that one unpublishable thing you really love." I figured, what harm could there be in sending something I knew was unpublishable and having it rejected. So I created a Submittable account, dredged up an unfinished Joycean homage from 1998, figured out how to actually finish the thing and sent it out. My first ever submission to a real publication, more than 30 years after I'd decided I wanted to "be a writer." It was fun and painless, so I sent more.

Naturally, I got my first rejection. Several of them. Because that's how it works. A low success rate is to be expected, and maybe it took me a few decades to come to terms with it--I'm still resistant to fetishizing the rejection process the way many seem to--but it felt normal. But I did write several new short stories.

I also got my first acceptance! A short story sent to a literary journal. I haven't talked about it yet because I'm not sure when I'm supposed to. It seems like mostly that happens on publication, and I'm still waiting for that part. I don't know what to expect there, either, but I'm being patient and hopeful, because it seems like patience is a huge part of the print world.

Most of the summer and fall went to a new project, a novella-length mashup adaptation of The Great American Novel, by William Carlos Williams. That book will be entering the public domain in January, part of the first batch of books in roughly 20 years, since they passed the last copyright extension. I've always wanted to do an adaptation of an old work, and this one grabbed me from the title. It nearly lost me again afterward because the book itself is difficult and experimental, but I found a way to tackle it. I'm deep in revisions now, and also waiting for 2019 when I'm free to make use of Williams's old words. It should be out by spring at the latest.

Finally I've been asked to ghost write the memoir of an old friend. We're about halfway through with that project. It's going well and is on pace for a mid-summer release.

In summary, one and a half books, a literary journal acceptance, a friend, and massive shifts in my world view. All of it invisible on the outside, of course, but it feels like one I'll be pointing back to for decades to come.

7 Paths to Self-Improvement

I  have a featured guest article that posted today about the Seven Axes of Development (a.k.a. SAD ... no, that needs work) that I used to shape my recently published Quirkz Handbook with the Really Long Title, called "7 Paths to Self-Improvement."

Full Article here: https://www.pickthebrain.com/b…/7-paths-to-self-improvement/

“Show, Don’t Tell” Must Die

If we could obliterate the commonly used critique, “Show, don’t tell,” today, it wouldn’t be soon enough. Why?

It’s pithy … too pithy.

The phrase is short and sweet, a three-word Band-Aid that can be applied to many different failings. It may seem useful to have a versatile phrase which quickly encapsulates the issue and suggests a fix. Problem is, it’s so dense it tends to require extensive follow-up explanation. I’ve read lengthy articles on the topic, page after page, as a supposedly competent writer tries to unpack what “show, don’t tell” really means.  

Worse, there’s a great divergence of opinion on that subject. Some say it’s a call for more detail or vibrancy, as in the apocryphal Chekhov quote, “Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” Sometimes it’s a call to make a passive moment more active. Others suggest the rule really only applies to emotion, where you need to demonstrate realistic feeling rather than flatly indicate that it’s happening.

But if your three words could be indicating any or all of the above, how is the writer to know? From context, maybe. Or maybe it’s a vague and lazy panacea, when something more specific would be appropriate.

It’s most often said to those who understand it least.

Due to lack of experience, beginners are the most prone to all of the faults listed above. If they knew how to do it better, they would. Delivering a deceptively simple catch-phrase about showing instead of telling doesn’t really explain the complexities of what needs to be fixed. It may be fine to nudge an experienced author on occasion if one of their scenes is flat, but there’s a good chance a new writer’s whole story suffers from multiple different show-v-tell flaws. Giving them three words is frankly almost no better than giving them nothing.

It’s the hammer of the critique world, and it turns all problems into a nail.

There’s an expression, if all you have is a hammer, then every problem starts to look like a nail. “Show, don’t tell,” is likely to be the first and most common of all criticisms for beginning writers. It becomes the first tool applied to their work, and then in turn is the first tool they lob at someone else when they get a chance to critique, repeated ad nauseam until more subtle tools have been learned.

By golly, I’m going to stick someone they way I got stuck.

Maybe I’m venturing too far into psychology here, but I’ve seen critiques get a little … shall we say competitive? I think there’s a lot of writers who, when first jabbed by “show, don’t tell,” particularly if it’s delivered in a snide tone, hold on to that moment and then pay it forward with a certain amount of vengeful relish. “My drill sergeant pounded it into me, and now I’m going to pound it into you,” I can almost see in their eyes, hear in the tone of their voice.

I could be wrong about this one. Maybe I’m just personally lousy about showing too often, and well-intentioned advisers really needed to hammer the point home to save me. But I’d swear at least some of the time I could see the “gotcha!” in their eyes.

What should we do instead?

I stand by my headline. I think the phrase “show, don’t tell” should die. It would be better for most writers, and especially beginning ones, to get a much more targeted criticism instead of an inscrutable mantra. If it’s too passive, tell them it’s too passive. If they’re glossing over details that would be more interesting if depicted thoroughly, say that. If you don’t think the emotional content is believable or gripping enough, explain how it could be more vibrant.

Besides, if the person delivering critique is supposed to be enough of a writing hot-shot to give advice to anyone else, shouldn’t they be able to do more than just repeat the same three words over and over? Where’s their originality?

Q&A: What Does Fractal Storytelling Mean?

What is the "fractal storytelling" from your novel Stranger and Better supposed to mean?

Short answer: your guess is as good as mine. Heh.

Longer answer: from the beginning, the idea of patterns was laced into the book. There's "The Pattern" (an acid-induced vision), Ish's Zen rock garden pattern, metaphorical patterns of Martin's stay at the school, and a lot more. The ultimate pattern was supposed to be a fractal, a self-repeating pattern that was particularly popular during the years of the book (1992-1998, roughly). You could get posters and screen savers, and it made little appearances in pop culture (though its most famous moment is probably a lyric in Frozen's "Let it Go").

I thought I'd try to adapt that concept to the narrative itself. My early interpretation was that the book would often start a scene or idea, delve into a different scene or series of concepts, and then slowly work its way back out (in other words, sort of like the Seinfeld backwards episode, but in two directions). Each chapter would open and close with two halves of the same scene, and lots of other moments would zoom in or out between layers - the same way if you're looking at a fractal, you can zoom in and out, because it repeats itself.

Later, I decided it wasn't working very coherently, so I straightened out the entire story to be chronological, thinking I needed to look at it in order, before I could choose how to artfully pull it out of order. Eventually it seemed that it was better to tell the story mostly chronologically, and I needed to come up with another way in which a story could be fractal.

My next idea was that certain themes would repeat themselves. Scenes would parallel each other, sometimes direct repeats, sometimes mirror images, or occurring in other variations. For instance, there's one paragraph that appears three times, verbatim, but it comes as a response to three totally different scenarios, and then triggers three totally different results. Certain locations are revisited with different combinations of people, certain conversations are rehashed with different friends, or in some cases the same point is rehashed with the same friend, to a different conclusion. There's another scene where Martin's friend Leon ends up running away from him while standing in a park; in a much later scene, Martin ends up running away from Leon at that exact same spot.

Originally, briefly, I thought maybe I could make an entire book out of four themes: drugs, angst, lust, and competition, which would make up the four sides of the squared-off spiral that recurs as an image in the book - call it the four walls of the structure, or the four cardinal directions. Even further, I thought maybe I could even rotate through them, always in order. Probably two-thirds of the scenes do cover one of those four elements in some way, but as a guiding structure for a novel I couldn't make it work. It's on my wishlist for things to try again when I'm more skilled.

I dropped the four directions/themes idea, but the repeating scenes angle did make it into the final draft. Still, it didn't seem enough by itself to make things really "fractal." To add another dimension, I decided what the book needed was layers of commentary. So there are points where Martin comments on himself, on his writing, and on the writing process. But then I've worked in a kind of editorial train-wreck, where the characters who are supposed to have been assembling the book for publication start making comments about the narrative, and in some cases begin to bicker with each other and provide meta-commentary and meta-meta-commentary on the text. This culminates with a final layer, mostly revealed in the book's conclusion, which I won't explain to avoid spoilers. 
  Stranger and Better is available in digital format from Amazon ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06ZZKVT62 ) and in print from most major online retailers.

Q&A: The Five Drafts of "Stranger and Better"

The dedication in Stranger and Better indicates that parts of the novel are 18 years old. How does that happen, and what changed in the interim?

I wrote the first draft between 1998 and 2001. It took that long in part because it was my first effort and I was still learning how, but also because it was 200,000 words, nearly twice as

long as the final project. Some of that was lack of focus, some of that was inability to condense, and some of that was my habit of reading 600-page novels and believing mine needed to match.

The original version had only 9 chapters. They were theme-based rather than chronological, so you'd have a chapter about Ish, a chapter about Kim, a chapter about Ginevra. All the subcomponents were mixed up, but that was supposed to be okay because it was fractal, which in the early version just meant "jumped around a lot, while folding in on itself." Each chapter began and ended with the same scene or idea, book-ending the other events. Each chapter also had a theme (quintaphones, spoonerisms, Dali paintings). Those items are still in the final product, but more scattered rather than concentrated. So those ideas broke down a little, but I think it ultimately made sense, because chronological continuity really helps follow the rest of the story.

The last chapter in particular was problematic. I had front-loaded a lot of the difficulties and angst that Martin feels, and the final chapter was supposed to be a combination of acid trip, flashback, and total re-assessment of his experiences. It was fifty pages long, two thirds of it in italics for the flashback, and very jumbled. Also, after a lot of reflection, it just felt dishonest, to paint a miserable picture and then say, "Oh, by the way, here's all this other stuff I kept from you." Some of that was supposed to reflect Martin's mood, so it wasn't so much a total lie as just what he was focused on, but it still didn't seem right.

For most of the next decade I didn't know what to do with the book. I knew it wasn't polished enough, but I didn't know how to self-edit. Maybe I still don't (maybe it's not even really possible), but I started and stopped a couple of times. Then my brother (who is an editor) gave me notes on the first chapters, and I started up again. But that still left me 7 chapters short of a final product.

In the meantime I'd been writing other books, and eventually published Chicagoland in 2013. Working with an editor on that project taught me a lot about brevity, coherence, and making sure everything in each scene is actually relevant to something.

I finally decided I wasn't doing "fractal storytelling" right, and figured the only way to sort it out was to first write the entire book chronologically, and then figure out how to interleave the sections meaningfully. So I completely straightened the narrative and cleaned it up. That was Draft 2.

Somewhere around there I realized that Martin's philosophy major needed to take a more prominent role, and decided on a quest for the meaning of life as the main thrust of the book. On top of that, I'd learned to recognize junk scenes and pointless digressions, letting me cull about 30% of the old book, while adding a new 25% in meaning of life sections. I did the same thing with a whole bunch of other scenes that were passive discussions, which were re-written to be more active. That was Draft 3.

Then I read a lot of Vonnegut one spring, and decided to introduce the concept of fragments found in a library. That introduced the section numbers and pulled the story further into pieces. Around this time I also realized the chronology had problems. I had to make Martin start college a whole year earlier in order to line up events, and then for pacing and narrative development about a third of the book shifted order, changing semesters and years until it all fit again. Thus was Draft 4.

Around there I roped in a couple of test readers, who noted the book still wasn't coherent enough and started kind of slowly. So I really played up the meaning of life, took out some more scenes that I liked but could finally recognize as not useful to the story, and then also re-inserted a flashback into the first year, so that I could open with an acid trip rather than letting the book start slowly. That made the fifth and final draft, and is where I decided to polish, beta-test, and publish.

Stranger and Better is available in digital format from Amazon ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06ZZKVT62 ) and in print from most major online retailers.  

Q&A: The "Stranger and Better" Numbering System

Most sections of your novel, "Stranger and Better," are numbered. Can you explain the system?

 At one point, I thought the book would unfold as a mystery, following a librarian character who unlocks a numeric code and uses that to locate and piece together all the entries. That eventually proved to be unworkable, partly because I couldn't come up with a good enough mystery code, and also because I didn't want to make the book 20,000 words longer, just for the sake of a mystery.

The final implementation of the code was supposed to reinforce the "fractal" theme - repetitions and iterations, mostly, more easily depicted and understood with short numbers than in the text. There are a couple of sections that mirror each other, either with an opening and closing, or a reversal, and their section numbers are mirror images (427 and 724, 421 and 124, 26 and 62).

Many of the remaining section numbers serve as a shorthand for the content of that scene. You definitely don't need to know the code to appreciate the text, but I hoped if someone was following along they'd pick up little hints and enjoy it on a second level. It's not particularly deep, just a sort of paint-by-numbers style (3 is Ish, 4 is happiness, etc. - it's more or less spelled out in some "editor's notes" inside the text).

Finally, we have the jokes. 101, 201, and 301 apply to sections with introductory, intermediate, and advanced philosophy. The 39 section mentions Rolling Rock, 151 involves rum, we've got "???" in a section on forgetfulness, 420 in a marijuana scene, and so on. Occasionally the number on the heading just matches a number inside the scene (Camel 99s), and on the really subtle side we've got section 413 which is code for the letters D (4th) and M (13th) in a scene that talks about the initials DM.

Then there's 42. At this point it's a cliche more than a joke (for those who know Douglas Adams) so I didn't want to play it up too much, but it appears twice in the book. Once as a header to a section about the meaning of life. The second is more subtle, but a book about the meaning of life also needed to have 42 chapters. 

Stranger and Better is available in digital format from Amazon ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06ZZKVT62 ) and in print from most major online retailers.

'Stranger and Better' - The Origin Story

Stranger and Better is actually the first novel I wrote, but it's the third that I will publish. How does that happen? Well, I'll tell you.

It began with a story a friend wrote. He was someone who I knew from Oberlin, a good friend there who needed some time off and moved back home to Chicago. When I graduated I also ended up in Chicago, and we continued our friendship there. One day he showed me a story that he had written. It was raw, emotional, triumphant, subversive, insane, brilliant, and funny, in equal parts. It dealt with someone trying to find his way after college, but a good chunk of the action occurred as a flashback in college, a college which wasn't Oberlin, but could have been. 

Among the things that stood out were an acid trip that goes very weird, a foil of sorts with an unpronounceable name (Athmudx), and a few memorable phrases, including: "you're a wingnut", "blah, blah, blah, and like, whatever, blah, blah, blah", "a stomach full of vinegar and beach sand", and "pizzly little drizzle." It was great, and I enjoyed it tremendously. As an aspiring writer with no demonstrable results to show for my aspirations, I thought I could do worse than to start by trying to match that caliber of story.

About that time, my friend returned to Oberlin to finish his degree. I drove out there with him, and during the trip we talked about writing. We shared a love of Vonnegut, and in talking I mentioned one of my own conversational quirks, a tendency to trail off in the middle of a sentence with an "and-" or a "but-", realizing that I'd already said all that needed to be said. "Vonnegut ought to work that in to one of his stories, a running gag or catch phrase," I said.

"Nah, Vonnegut doesn't need to do it," he said. "You should write that book."

"Maybe I will," I said. And I decided then I'd write my own story, and it would be a graduation present for my friend. I placed the story in Oberlin, our shared connection, and I would have a foil with an X in his name (Ixthyaki), and I would use all the catch-phrases. 

It was December 1998, and I figured four months would be plenty of time.

Roughly 200,000 words later, toward the tail end of 2001, I finished the first draft of what was then called Major Dilemmas. It had everything I intended (except the phrase about the drizzle, which somehow I never worked into a novel, despite it being set in Oberlin) and a whole bunch of stuff I didn't know I needed to say until I'd said it.

After that I spent months floating it around to friends and family, trying to gather feedback, sort out what needed to be done. I liked it, but I knew it needed work, and I also didn't know what kind of work. So I let it sit while life went in a dozen different directions. A few years later I dusted it off and cleaned it up a bit. An old family friend was kind enough to look it over and provide some feedback, which included maybe polishing up the strongest chapter and shopping that around. Over five years I twiddled with that chapter, again realizing I didn't know what to do.

So I set it aside, wrote first drafts for another three or four other novels, invented a computer game and spent five years managing that, only ever now and then wondering about Major Dilemmas. Finally I wrote a first draft of a book that seemed good enough to publish, so I did. I tried a second novel, more niche but more successful. I meant to do a sequel to the second, but on a road trip I woke up one morning, got in the shower, and by the time I was clean I had plans to completely rewrite Major Dilemmas: this time more fragmented like Vonnegut, with a library mystery as backdrop, and layers of editorial commentary to make it weird. 

Three rewrites later--and eighteen years from when I started--and it's finally something I'm content with. As I say in the book's dedication, some of these words are old enough to be an Oberlin College student now. 

Book Cover Concepts

I've been working on some cover concepts for the novel. I think I've mentioned by now it's a fantasy novel with themes related to classic computer games, particularly role-playing games. I'm fairly well set on the title, The Eight-Bit Bard, to evoke a blend of older electronics and fantasy. 

You can click on any of the images to get a larger pop-up to see them in detail. I'd love to hear your preferences.

Concept 1: A classic graph-paper map to further emphasize the computer game roots.

Concept 2: A lute and sword for the bard, but pixelated for a hint of computery-ness.

Concept 3: Simpler, cleaner. More old-time bard, less emphasis on computer.

Concept 4: More colorful, bringing back the sword.

 

 

Fun with Grammar Check

Before letting anyone else see your writing for the first time, it's always a good idea to run a spelling and grammar check. For a project the size of a novel, this generally means clicking Ignore several hundred times to ferret out a few dozen mistakes. Note that by this point I've reread the thing multiple times, checking all the red squigglies as I go; don't think for a second my first draft doesn't have a lot more mistakes than that.

I'm probably not the only one, but when I write I make choices that the spellchecker doesn't always agree with. Creative names, an accent that calls for innovative spelling, (parenthetical clauses the spellchecker can't follow), and cutting short a spoken sentence--all of these can bring out a swarm of red or blue squigglies. Most of what spellcheck flags can be chalked up as a difference of opinion. For the record, I'm looking at red squigglies under the word "squigglies" right now ... and I'm okay with that.

The grammar checker, though, now that one can be fun. More than just suggested improvements that I'm declining out of some sense of artistic freedom, in many cases it's flat-out wrong, sometimes outrageously so. I know the tool has gotten better over the years. Back in the late nineties I remember a version that would throw out objections like, "This sentence does not appear to have a verb," even when it clearly did. I told myself one day I'd run some great works of literature through a grammar checker and reprint the most hilarious annotations as it corrected Hemingway or Steinbeck, Fitzgerald or Salinger. (I was about to throw out a name like Joyce, but we already know his grammar is intentionally broken; that's part of his charm, so using him wouldn't be playing fair. Same for Kerouac, or even the heavily accented dialogues of Twain.)

But that was nearly two decades ago, and I still haven't managed to get around to the project, so in the stead of laughing at grammar check failing to handle fine literature, I'll use my own writings instead.

We'll start small. Very small: it's. According to the stats, I used "it's" 319 times in my upcoming novel, tentatively titled The Eight-Bit Bard. Of those instances, spellcheck is convinced 11 cases ought to be its instead. These include selections like, "It's okay," "You think it's poison?", "I don't think it's working," "It's part of the job," and "It's his map." All of these cases I do mean it is, and not "belonging to it." Oddly, the software never once flagged one the other way around.

Did it have some troubles with statements and questions? It did. "Next to him lounged a halfling in reinforced leather" doesn't need to end in a question mark, no matter how much grammar check begs. Likewise for "I was happy to let him have it."

Since this is fantasy, I can see how it might try to replace the word "mages" with "images" occasionally, but that's not going to improve the story. And while "I was a bard back then" might trigger the same skepticism, trying to replace it with "I was a bad back then" isn't helping. And, frankly, "I could see a rend in the ectoplasm" is not secretly supposed to be a trend in the ectoplasm. My characters are adventurers, not business analysts, by Infernus.

As for pronoun-verb agreement, I think grammar check has been taking notes from my four-year-old, who still starts sentences with "him went" or "us are". Suggested corrections included, "I was willing to grant the idea that, on a purely aesthetic level, man-flesh tasted much well than troll flesh," "Don't let they touch you," "Teleport we back outside," and the surprisingly simple, "Neither did me."

Homophones are knot just for humans. Grammar check suggested that rather than a whine, the dog sank to the ground with a wine; I cannot tell you know came over me; combat broke lose; and the dwarf has got away with people. The computer has got a way with words, for sure.

Saving the best song for last: who wouldn't want a finely tuned arm, rather than a finely toned one? Right?

Writing a Blurb Request

Since I just published my first novel, I am now pursuing my first blurbs. I'll be honest here. I've only written one blurb request, ever. That may not sound like it makes me the most qualified to teach others how to request a blurb, but when a famous person tells you to do something, it's difficult not to comply. Because the response to my request was an enthusiastic, "I think you should write a blog post about how to ask for novel blurbs, because this is far and away the best one I've ever seen. Is your novel as funny as this email? If so, I'm going to love it."

With that kind of endorsement, I figured I ought to follow through. If blurb requests were a game, I would stop right now and revel in my perfect an untarnished record. But that's not how the blurb game works, so I know I'll be writing more requests in the near future.

Backing up, I should clarify something. Novel blurbs are those quotes, usually by someone famous, telling you why the book you're looking at (by someone you may not have heard of) is worth reading. Authors pursue these quotes to give their books a stamp of respectability. Even the best blurb may not sell a book by itself, but it may nudge someone who's on the fence, and it gives us authors something to talk about when we plug the book in social media, beyond just repeating, "You should read my book. Please read my book," over and over.

This is going to be a two-part post. Today I'll talk about the mechanics of writing the request. My next post will include the actual request, to serve as an example (and because it's funny, and I want to share it with people).

Here, in six deceptively difficult points, are things you should consider as you write your blurb request. They're not written in any particular order, but you should cover all of them.

1. Establish a connection
Give the author a way to relate to you. This might include mentioning times when you actually corresponded or met in person, or might be as simple as explaining you read and enjoyed their books. Let them know why you think of them as a good blurbing authority. (And no, never actually refer to them as a "blurbing authority." That just sounds wrong.)

2. Be clear about what you're requesting
Make sure you actually tell them what you want, i.e., a blurb. Believe it or not, I almost forgot this step in my first request. It's easy to get caught up writing to someone who's a bit of a celebrity, trying so hard to make a good impression that you leave out the thing you're asking for. Don't do that.

3. Be nice, considerate, understanding, obliging
This should be obvious. You're asking for a favor, and both of you know it. So it behooves you to show good manners at all times. Don't presume to send a copy of your book with the blurb request, wait for them to agree first, and then be sure to ask what format (print, digital - and which type of digital document) makes things easiest for them. They may also tell you that it's a three-month wait list for blurbs, and you will have to decide whether to accept or decline politely.

4. Offer them something
I'm not talking about a bribe here. Blurbs are supposed to be honest quotes, so you're not buying their endorsement. But there's plenty of room to put into your request something they can appreciate. This might go back to just telling them how much you've enjoyed their work, or how it relates in your life, but it could also mean including humor or a little creativity, for instance. There may be a delicate balance here, but I think if you can present something enjoyable to a busy author, it makes it easier for them to say yes to finding time for your request.

5. Speak to your audience
As a writer, you darn well better already know how to speak to a specific audience. With a book you're writing for a large audience, so the lines may be fuzzy, but with a blurb request you're speaking to one person, and this is an excellent opportunity to fine-tune your message to that person. Don't be bland and generic.

6. Offer your thanks
This should be obvious. It's included here because it's so important you don't want to forget it. Express your gratitude with each correspondence, too, not just the first one.