Don't Just Kill Your Darlings... Hurt Them

Writers are told often to kill their darlings.

This doesn't mean we all need to end our novels with planet-enfolding nuclear holocausts. It means that you have the bollocks to cut the scenes you love, but don't need. Slice the dialogue tags that make you smile, but aren't necessary. Exsanguinate the paragraph you feel is the perfect zinger, but all your CP's are saying is dead weight.

It's a hard lesson, killing those darlings.

Here's a harder one- hurt the people you love.

Yeah, that's right. Hurt 'em. These fake people that live in your head who you've nursed to life and massaged dialogue into for months or years need to be in pain every now and then. Let them step on the glass on the kitchen floor. Make them burn their hands on the stove. Allow the water to boil over and scald that first layer of skin off. Slide that knife right through their thumb.

Can you tell I'm not so good in the kitchen?

Beyond physical pain, if you want a truly realistic and moving story arc you are going to have to allow bad things to happen to them. Their husbands cheat. Their moms die. Their kids get sick. Their cat eats their guinea pig (I have a big cat). Their dog gets hit by a car. Their car gets hit by a dog.

You name it. Make it happen to them.

Of course, not all these thing at once. That would be one hell of an odd story. But you get the drift.

Don't step back so far from your perfect shining character that you don't want to make them suffer. Suffering is part of life and part of their journey, if you aren't willing to convincingly hurt them in order to sell the story then you're not the writer for this story.

Don't go easy on them just because you love them.

I started taking kickboxing lessons a couple of years ago, towards the rounding up to 40 part of my 30s. I am not awesome at it. I never will be. But I like kicking and punching things, and my instructor likes to piss me off so we get along well.

When I landed my first hit (a right hook to the kidney, thank you very much), I was so ecstatic that I threw my hands up in the air and yelled HOORAY!

And my instructor punched me right in my unprotected face.

"Never, ever do that again," he told me.

I am a much better defensive boxer for having been punched in the face, and my instructor is good at his job for not having any qualms about punching me. It's a good lesson for writers, too.

Don't pull the punches on your characters because you care for them. If you're crying when you wrote it, chances are a reader or two will tear up as well.

And that's awesome.

Is it MG or YA? Tips To Discover Who Your Audience Is

A common mistake among authors who write for the younger set is to refer to young adult and middle grade as genres. That's not the case - middle grade and young adult refers to the age range of the target audience, also called a category.

That's where things stop being simple.

Middle grade and young adult have overlapping areas, and what of the term upper middle-grade? What kind of content is acceptable in middle grade? Is it only the age of the protagonist that determines whether the category is MG or YA?

These are all great questions, and so I put together a brief podcast episode to address exactly this issue. Enjoy!

3 Steps to Writing Success

 by Maxine Kaplan

It’s a sad fact of life that some of the most imaginative people you’ll meet are also the most paralyzed. It’s even sadder when that person is you—or, since this is a post about me, I might as well just as say me.

I spent my life as a chronic procrastinator: clinically disorganized, in my own head to a debilitating degree, always sure that I wasn’t good enough just yet. Those qualities make writing a book hard. But I wanted to write a book. I wanted to write a lot of books. And eventually I did: The Accidental Bad Girl, my debut, came out from Abrams / Amulet on May 15.

So how did I do it? Was it because I suddenly had a surge of muse-given lightning-like inspiration? Um, no. Was it because I had an unexpected amount of free time and was bored? Hell no.

It happened because I managed to put myself in a position where my nerd-based anxiety and Jewish guilt worked for me for once. Follow along my step-by-step process to success:

Step One: Keep your expectations for yourself low, but do keep them.

As mentioned above, when drafting The Accidental Bad Girl, time wasn’t something I had an overabundance of. I had a full-time job, close family in town, and a burgeoning relationship that eventually turned into a marriage. I also don’t sleep and am always exhausted. Some nights writing was the last thing I wanted to do.

Here’s what I did: I set my daily expectations of myself so low that if I didn’t fulfill them I would feel like an ass. I wrote 500 words a day, one day off per week. The words didn’t have to be good. I could add unnecessary adverbs if I needed them to fill out the quota. But I HAD to put 500 new words on the page every, single day.

And I did. Because if I didn’t, I would feel incredibly guilty and unbearably like Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites—living in a den of slack. I was a middling, ambivalent student in high school, but straight As in college broke me of that option. It meant too much to me to not be a slacker, so I wasn’t.

500 words a day sounds like nothing. That’s because it is. But eventually it makes a book.

Step Two: Make friends with smart people who like to read

Unless you’re Krysten Ritter, chances are you do not have an agent or editor to lean on for notes once you churn out an inevitably crummy first draft. And maybe you’re thinking, “I’m a good reader; I can edit this all by myself.”

You are wrong. You will have a million thoughts about your work. Some will be correct, some will be ridiculous, and some will be neither. You need other voices to contribute to a critical mass of opinions, to verbalize your blind spots—I needed someone to tell me I had forgotten to put in stakes for god’s sake. So make some friends.

Why is it important that they’re friends? Because you have to want them to be critical; you have to want all the actionable notes you can possibly assemble. You have to want to be told what’s not working. Being told what’s good about your work feels good, but it’s not really all that useful. And it’s easier to want criticism from people you’re already pretty sure like you.

You could do what I did and luck into a crew of people who turned into writers when you were eleven (see my acknowledgments page). But the internet is a wonderful thing. The Electric Eighteens debut group was my lifeline this year—you can find your people if you look.

Step Three: Calm down and be patient

This is the hardest one, but I discovered a basic truth when writing my first book—and The Accidental Bad Girl is the first book I wrote, not just the first I sold. If you internalize this lesson, it will change your writing life:

You cannot fix what you do not write. You cannot polish what you do not revise. Go step by step and celebrate whenever you finish an iteration of making your story more its ultimate self. Keep going. It will take forever. But it’s there.

Look, I’m no guru. I’m just a thirty-something who doesn’t know how to put on eye makeup and writes in bed even though it’s bad for my back. I don’t meditate even though I should. I don’t do yoga, even though I really should. But I can do nerd. I can do guilt. I can do stubborn.

And sometimes that’s all it takes.