Genre Explorations

I’d like to start off my two months of National Novel Writing Month preparations with an exploration of genres. Most people understand the concept on some level, but writers really need to be able to look deeper to see the patterns and expectations of different types of stories. It’s also a good place to start if you’re trying to figure out what you’re going to write for NaNoWriMo. Because there is so much to explore, I’ll start off by linking you to the Learn to Write Fiction workshop on Genres that I learned about when one of my NaNoBoston Municipal Liaisons reminded me about the course she put together. The number of resources listed is impressive and very helpful. I can’t possibly begin to put together a better list, so I’m not going to try. (Thank you, Jordan.)

The key article from that topic, however, is a blog post entitled ‘What Genre is my Story?’ by Renee Bennett that is a must-read for anyone who wants to write fiction. I’ll be returning to Orson Scott Card’s MICE Quotient in early October as it’s a very useful system of breaking down a story. It also can help you check that you’re focusing on the right elements for your genre.

The main genres of fiction are crime, fantasy, romance, science fiction, Western, inspirational, historical fiction, and horror. These are the headings you might see in a bookstore over the different sections in fiction. Renee Bennett’s article goes so far as to add literary fiction, mainstream fiction, and thrillers, but there are other headings like urban fiction or women’s fiction (“chick lit”) that are common as well. Given that not even all sources can agree on what the primary genres are, how are we, the writers, expected to get it right?

I think Renee Bennett puts it rather well when she starts her article: “Ever read about a ‘dystopian steampunk mystery’ or ‘epic fantasy conspiracy thriller’ or ‘romantic horror with an ecopunk twist’ or ‘weird West, with zombie superheroes’! Yeah. Genre is complicated.”

I couldn’t agree more. Still, I think any approach to genres is really about WHO the main characters are, WHAT the story is about, WHEN and WHERE the story is set, and WHY an audience wants to read that. The last one can be divided further; marketing categories such as ‘young adult’ (audience) can be mixed with ‘fantasy’ (specific genre), and then the number of keywords to associate from there is as short or long as you make it.

The strong point of the ‘What Genre is My Story?’ article is that the focus isn’t on the genre marketing category. Let’s face it, marketing has to come after you write the book. The focus is on the MICE quotient described by Orson Scott Card. What’s the most important part of your story? Is it the sweeping setting you designed from scratch? If you’re a worldbuilder before considering anything else, you may be happiest in the Fantasy genre. Westerns are also milieu-focused, it’s just a different kind of setting. I personally find a bunch of post-apocalyptic writing to overlap heavily with the Western genre, simply because the concepts of tough living, gunslingers running the world, perhaps frontier justice… all of those are very similar. The times and methods change, but the types of story being told remain. Consider Mad Max. How much is that still a lone ranger versus the untamed and wild lawlessness around him?

The four types of story building blocks are Milieu (setting), Idea (also information and What if? questions), Character, and Event. You have to have all four, but you can get away with focusing on any one of them more than the others, if you choose the right way. A fantasy book is always going to have a fantastical setting, even in Urban Fantasy, where the fantastical part is that vampires, werewolves, and other archetypal creatures actually exist. Sure, it can be Chicago, but without that fantastical addition to the Chicago streets, it’s not really a fantasy novel. Magical realism can happen whenever there’s a real setting with an added element that’s somehow magical. That goes for Harry Potter or Matilda.

This is where my understanding of the MICE quotient and writing from all the random stories I’ve written over the years start to diverge, however.  I will challenge any writer to make a novel gripping without strong characters. It seems to me like even if the fantasy world and the event that gets things going happen before we get into the characters much, all books are controlled by the characters for the simple reason that that’s how the reader identifies with what’s going on. You can tell me about some alien that thinks it might dissolve into atoms for sciencey reasons, but I have nothing to connect to. But, tell me about an alien that had a nightmare where they dissolved into atoms because of [insert theme here] and now they’re petrified of it actually happening… now you’re getting somewhere. The shift may be tiny, but it’s all about the characterization. (This is also why I prefer the who/what/when/where/why breakdown I mentioned above.)

If your characters are flat or not believable, it doesn’t matter how cool your setting is. Even the Lord of the Rings, an epic fantasy novel about entire countries and good and evil shifting the balance of power, it would be nothing without the characters. I will add that as someone who grew up writing fantasy, I tend to be unfairly biased, I think. The setting is a major part of the effort, and the inciting incident is major for both the main character and larger structures, whether that’s the remaining free people of the world united against the dark lord or just the school or class the character is in. It’s always bigger than one or two people, though, and a romance novel having an inciting incident that amounts to bumping into one another on the street feels somehow lacking to me. It didn’t occur to me that in genres where there aren’t major cataclysms and earth-shattering consequences, the characters still need to be just as big a part. Whether your plot is going to change the world or just the apartment in which it takes place, your characters are going to make or break your novel. If your hero’s flaw is pride, you are going to need to have his pride show up in a few places before it trips him up big time. Don’t just tell me he’s proud, that’s boring. If you haven’t planned out the character, you aren’t going to include any of that. Is their flaw even accounted for in the black moment? You can’t pull the plot out of the emotional nose dive without the character overcoming something and finding more they can use (whether that’s more information or just more internal drive) to do it.

Characters drive a story. Events may be outside their control, racing along whether they’re swept away or keep up (which the MICE quotient would call a focus on Events, not Characters), but the story being told is about how the characters deal with that. So ultimately, the key to any good story is the characters. Reading about MICE quotients and genre expectations tells you about how your readers are expecting the story to go. That’s great. Use it and shake it up a bit. I recommend reading about the hurdles of the genres you think you are interested in, and then throwing it all aside and thinking about interesting ways characters in such a story could be somehow new and different than other characters written about before.

Your Task, Should You Choose to Accept It…

Pick a few genres, and write down some ideas that you could write in November. If you have a comfort zone (say, SciFi/Fantasy, which is mine), pick two genres that aren’t in your comfort zone. Jot down some ideas about a plot, an inciting incident, or whatever starts to form a picture of how that story would go. Don’t forget the main characters! These don’t have to be worked out in detail, but some archetypes that would fit or would be interesting. Try to hit plot, characters, and setting in each, even if you’re not sure about any of them.

Bonus points: ask a friend for a writing challenge for one of them. Note: not the irritating friend who will immediately string together the worst keywords imaginable just to dare you to write something that will be crap to read or write. They don’t get the courtesy of being asked such things. (You know who you are.) Ask a friend who will say “oh, haven’t you ever written a mystery before? I read this story and thought…” or something constructive. Alternately, do this with another writer, and then mix and match parts of your ideas to come up with something new.

Here are my three, [mostly] unedited:

  • Romance: boy sees girl from distance/hidden/obscured, wants to reach out but [obstacle?]. Maybe this is literal, she’s blind, he needs to find new ways to approach her than his usual walk-up-and-smile, or maybe he can’t rely on his good looks with her for obvious reasons? Could be something less black and white, complicated social structure, foreigner(s), something? Didn’t I have a girl-goes-blind and her old boyfriend story idea I’d jotted down somewhere?
  • Horror: a summer construction project on an old Massachusetts private university digs up a buried cornerstone that reads ‘Miskatonic’. MCs are (or start with) a student who attends (or was going to attend?) and the construction worker’s son/daughter, who decide they have to investigate it themselves because no one is taking it “seriously”.
  • Science Fiction: archaeologist discovered something buried deeper than usual, only to find it’s an unknown spacecraft, or seems to be. Could I make this more interesting by setting it on a pre-space planet and leading with a fantasy setting smokescreen until they make the epic discovery?

I’m not sure if any of these really make me want to leap to declare them my NaNo novel, but they’re decent story ideas. Feel free to steal them to make something of your own if you like, but I will be most displeased if I pick up a book next spring and it’s word for word one of these three. You are the author. You come up with ways to make it your own.

I expect I’ll be ghostwriting through November, so any additional words written to reach 50k will probably not be romance from me. I could try something different enough to keep them separate, but I prefer not to let projects I’m writing for someone else interfere with (or be interfered with by) my own projects.

Next Up: Point of View!

Let NaNoPrepMo Commence!

It’s September (the beginning of the Prep-focused months before NaNoWriMo), which means if you haven’t started thinking about your National Novel Writing Month project for November, it’s high time to do so! (If you’re wondering what NaNoWriMo is, it’s a challenge to write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days, in this case during the month of November. It’s fun, it’s crazy, and it’s a great way to learn how to tell your inner editor to shut up so you can get a first draft written.) This is a long blog post – I wanted to get it all posted right at the beginning of September – but at least skim the headlines and then scroll down to the bottom where there’s a simple task to get you started thinking about novel prep.

Jump to Section:

I have a plan for the next eight weeks of preparation, but I wanted to start out with an overview and discussion of the order I will be posting articles. This is what makes the most sense to me this year, but if you’re looking for some of these topics in a different order than I’m posting them, you might try checking out the Prewriting and Planning Tips I posted last year. I would also be remiss if I didn’t remind everyone to Be Kind to Yourself During NaNoWriMo!

Let me stress first, there is no right way to write your book! Sure, writing classes in school always told you to do it their way, but that varies from teacher to teacher, high school to college, and so on. That’s not going to be what works for everyone, so there are a bunch of building blocks that I’m going to try and explore, and let you assemble them how you will.

September – General Topics

My goal for September is to start with big picture topics for those without a set plan yet, as well as writers with an idea for which they may not have figured out all the details. I’ve also learned how much fun it can be to push your comfort zone with my romance ghostwriting the last few months, so I would challenge any Wrimos (noun, pl. writers participating in NaNoWriMo) to consider trying a new genre, a new point of view, or to break a few boundaries.

These are more general fare for any writing, rather than specific to your NaNoWriMo project, but in exploring them you may be able to find a project if you don’t have one, or better define the project you have in mind. Maybe there are some ideas in here you can build on to create something you wouldn’t normally have thought to write!

October – Narrowing Focus

Once I’ve covered more general topics, October is going to be about focusing on your idea, which you hopefully have by now in some shape or form. 

  • Countdown to NaNoWriMo! (including MICE Quotient and Misc Resources): breaking down how different genres focus on elements in different order, based on Orson Scott Card’s description:

What are the different kinds of stories? Forget about publishing genres for a moment; there isn’t one kind of characterization for academic-literary stories, another kind for science fiction, and still others for westerns, mysteries, thrillers, or historicals. Instead let’s look at four basic factors present in every story, with varying degrees of emphasis. Balancing these factors determines what sort of characterization a story must have, should have, or can have.

The four factors are milieu, idea, character, and event.

Orson Scott Card, Characters and Viewpoint
  • Characters: without them, the world or plot isn’t as cool, so let’s get them started!
  • Setting and Worldbuilding: this is a lot to stuff into a single week’s post, but I’m going to try.
  • Plot: different approaches to writing an outline, recommended minimum (for pantsers, too!)

Hopefully these weeks will have enough resources and idea-fodder that you could conceivably use them to plan your entire novel! I’ve gotten it down to a point where I can write a full outline, detailed by chapter or at least by natural segment, in a week. So it’s entirely possible to do it in a month.

Recommended Starting Point: Organization

As a self-professed pantser (one who writes ‘by the seat of their pants’) instead of an organized planner, I know all too well some of you are groaning right now. ‘NaNoWriMo isn’t about being organized!’ some are complaining. But allow me to let you in on a little secret; even if you don’t start out with a plan, you’re going to want to keep track of things as you write. I also recommend having at least a general outline by the end of week one (November 7th). Why? Because sooner or later you may find yourself in the horrible plot hole. This is a rabbit hole like no other!

If you’ve never heard the term Story Bible, you may want to read this blog by J.M. Butler about creating one to keep track of your characters, setting, and plot details. You don’t necessarily need to start one yet, especially if you haven’t chosen a project, or even if you just haven’t reached that level of detail. But acquaint yourself with the concept, because it will serve you well as we go along. I’m not going to tell you how to organize yours, or what form it should take, or even if you might want to have it in a physical form or digital (I have done both over the years, depending on the project). I will tell you how I organize mine, but the point of the story bible is to have information organized how and where you will need it. That’s going to differ for a lot of people.

I would also recommend you get yourself some kind of daily planner or schedule, whether it’s calendar software on your computer or the internet or an old-fashioned, pen-and-paper planner, to set aside time both for your writing in November and your prep work before then. I used to be all digital, but I’ve recently fallen hard for the Self Journal by BestSelf, which is designed to be a 13-week system for setting step-by-step goals and achieving them, being more focused, and reflecting on things to be more mindful of what works, what doesn’t, and so on. This has really helped me – my first goal was getting this website set up, and here it is – and while you may not need quite such a large-scale planner, I’ve found the act of writing it down changes how much or how well I think about things. (They’ve converted me, and I was irritated at the cost of the thing at first. Very worth it.) So I might recommend trying a daily planner or even just a simple notebook where you have room to write your schedule on one side and notes on the other.

NaNoWriMo Community

This year National Novel Writing Month has made the decision to go digital due to the coronavirus pandemic. This is both great news and sad news at the same time, as I always look forward to seeing familiar faces and meeting new people at regional events each year. Now I’m not going to get that, though I already have spoken with my Municipal Liaisons (MLs for short, the people who are in charge of organizing regional events) and they have plans in the works. I look forward to seeing how it turns out! If you don’t know what region you might fall into, check out this helpful post about how to find your regional forum! (Please note: this and other forum links won’t load if you’re not signed in.) These groups are going to be people local to you, and even though in-person events have been banned, other locals might have tips for best cafes to write at if you need to get out of your house and suchlike – please be safe if you do go out!

That said, it’s going to be especially important to connect with the NaNoWriMo community online this year. I would start with the NaNo forums and poke around some. There are places to chat about everything and nothing, and I’ll highlight the Find Your Crew forum, too. Some of these are topical, others are just friends writing together. Whatever you might want to find for a peer group to discuss your novel with, you can find it there.

Some other ideas include real-time involvement via Twitter: the #WritingCommunity, the #NaNoWriMo hashtag, and the @NaNoWriMo official Twitter account. If you can find a writing group of people all doing NaNo at similar times, maybe Zoom or Discord would help keep you involved with other people digitally. There is some kind of NaNo writing sprints twitter account, but there are several and I’m not sure which is the official one, or even if the official one is the most active. If you try any of them and like them, let me know!

Your Task, Should You Choose to Accept It…

This week’s task is to build inspiration! Maybe you need a writing playlist, or it’s time to build an inspiration board on Pinterest. Please be aware that I do not recommend opening Pinterest during NaNoWriMo, or at any time you have to be productive. You’d be shooting yourself in the foot. But, for gathering a whole range of inspirational images, sites, and whatever might get you in the mood for your story, it’s a great site.

You should also try something suggested in Chris Baty’s No Plot? No Problem! and spend a few minutes writing down a list of things that you like in a novel. What do you read? Why do you read it? It’s logical that if you like certain things in the style, the themes, the characters, or the genre, you’re more likely to enjoy writing them. Fill a page in your notebook or word processor, and if you don’t have a notebook, now’s the time to get one! It’ll be handy to journal as you go through September and October to help organize your thoughts, and then once November comes around, it’ll be handy to journal on how you’re doing, issues that may have come up while writing, and brainstorming on how to fix them. I can’t recommend journaling the whole way through more highly.

Once you’ve filled a page with things you like, flip to the next page and fill it up with things you hate. What makes you put down a book? Movies and TV shows may have some ideas for you here, too. I don’t recommend basing a book on how to make a good movie, because pacing and style are totally different. But it’s pretty easy to tell when a movie has a crappy plot, or the characters are one-dimensional and boring. Those traits can absolutely find a home on your list of things you hate in stories.

Got that? Two lists. The Great List of Everything Awesome and the Horrible List of Everything to Avoid. Bonus points for the notebook (or writing software of your choice), a daily planner like I mentioned above, and any inspirational material that either gets you psyched up for writing, or gets you into the setting or characters you’re going to be writing about.

Next up: Genres!

Author’s Note: I’m not planning to go into too much detail on writing software during my NaNoPrepMo articles. This tends to be a rather personal preference, and I’ve used several over the years. There’s also nothing wrong with Word or Google Docs, there’s just some added benefits to writing software like character and place descriptions you can interlink for reference while you write. (This is much like the Story Bible I mentioned, but right at your fingertips while you’re writing.) I have used Storyist for Mac/iOS and now Scrivener, but there are other offers posted on the NaNoWriMo site which would be a good place to start exploring if you’re new to the software side of writing.

I currently have a Scrivener template I’ve been adding to over the last couple years. I haven’t had a chance to finish version 3 with all these new resources (which I would like to do by the end of the month but may not be able to), but version 2 is available for both Scrivener 2 and 3 on my creative blog.

If you have any questions about Storyist or Scrivener, or really anything I’ve put here, feel free to ask! I try to answer all the comments below, emails sent from my contact page, and anything posted on social media; I’m @MEfromson on both Twitter and Facebook.

Tips & Tricks for Freelancers!

This is part two of my Freelancing series for clients and freelancers, with a special focus on freelance writing. (Last week I posted 5 Basic Do’s and Don’ts for Clients.) If you’re not a freelancer, don’t fret! This is about what anyone (especially any writer) can learn from my experiences, so just jump down past the section for Freelancers to the section for Writers. The first section is fairly universal, so whether or not you’re not a writer, you might want to skim the first few paragraphs anyway.

I’ll be very surprised if there’s only one edition of this. Every job teaches me something new that I can apply to work going forward. This is only my first attempt at writing such a blog post, so keep an eye on my blog for periodic updates as I find new things to share. I apologize in advance for the wall of text.

If You Are Considering Freelancing

When I mention my ghostwriting to other writers, I often get two questions. The first is “why would you ghostwrite when you could just write yourself?” and shortly afterward comes “how did/do you make that happen?”

The first one is simple; I’m in debt and the covid-19 pandemic isn’t helping anything. I need the money. So as a means to an end, I can get paid to write a novel (my dream job) while using that money to get out of debt and figure out things like my website upgrade (coming very soon) and how/where/when to start querying agents with a manuscript. The short answer to the second question is that there are freelancing sites like Upwork, which I use, that will link up clients and freelancers for a fee – I thought Upwork’s fees were steep, but then I compared how much easier the work is when I don’t have to worry about the contract and payment details outside what I agree to do. Especially when your goal is long-term work with clients, it definitely works out. (Consider this a recommendation for Upwork.com, I have really gotten a lot out of it. And it’s not just for writers, either.) There’s a lot more to the answer than that, however.

Let me first say that freelancing isn’t for everyone. It’s lonely. At least now, in the era of coronavirus and digital work, you do all your work for people you may never see (though I do video chat with my clients occasionally), and you don’t have the same sort of feedback you’d be getting if you were able to walk down the hall and ask your boss if he has a second to discuss your idea. Sure, you can reach out to your client, but sometimes they don’t actually know the answer to what they’re looking for. This is especially true in the creative industry, I think. When I did some programming in the past, there may have been more than one way to reach the end result, but there wasn’t a question about getting there. Creative endeavors aren’t quite so straightforward. What is moving in one novel may sound cliche in another, or come off flat in a third. My job isn’t just to give them a story based on their concept, but also to give them a compelling and enjoyable one.

If you think you’d still like to try it, be aware that when you start out on a site like Upwork, you have no reputation as a good freelancer. Unless you can upload proof of certifications (notoriously hard for creative writing without spending tons of money on expensive courses), it’s going to be hard for clients to trust you. Due to this, your first couple gigs are going to be $5 or $10 jobs where your goal isn’t the money, it’s the feedback. As soon as someone posts 5-star feedback on your profile – preferably with a glowing recommendation, but not all clients have time or energy to write lengthy feedback – you become a more legitimate worker. I use the word legitimate not to suggest you weren’t, to begin with, but simply because now clients can see you are at least easy to work with and do the job you’re contracted to do; someone who paid you said so. My first jobs were to read and review books on Amazon and Goodreads. I will freely admit I enjoyed most of them, but felt like it was work with another that I would normally not have picked up because it was heavier subject matter. I may go back and read that one in more detail later, however, because it had a lot of good information I just wasn’t entirely able to process when I was reading it. (Remember when you read a book in a week for a book report in school, wrote the report, and then promptly forgot the book? Like that.)

I got lucky. I’m fully aware of that. I saw a ghostwriting contract in my feed of job requests that stood out to me. I’m not sure if it was my proposal, the two unrelated short stories I sent as examples of my style, or what it was that stood out to my client, but even though they decided to hire someone else for that job, they turned right around and offered me a slightly different one. I asked, and my client said the following: “I found a project for you because of your professional presentation. You communicated well with me and you were timely.” (Note the three key points: presentation, communicated well, and timely.) I can tell you that I was honest about my skillset, up to and including the information that I have written erotica, not just romance. I felt this was a fair full disclosure statement, and I think it helped in the big picture because they were able to more directly focus on what I could do. (No, my project is not erotica; it does have some steam.)

For Freelancers

When I asked about my ghostwriting proposal for the purposes of this blog, my client also informed me that the person they hired for the original contract wrote some and disappeared. This is a big NO! Do not take any contract you cannot complete. I can’t make a bigger deal of this. All it takes is one comment that says you can’t deliver and you’re done. No one will take you seriously from then on. Err on the side of not filling up every moment in your schedule. Even if something unexpected comes up and you can’t finish, do not just disappear. Communicate with your client and make sure to apologize if this means they need to find someone else to finish the project you started.

Communication is key to functional working relationships. (Okay, it’s key to pretty much all relationships.) This goes from the moment you are interested in a job, all the way through and beyond job completion. Don’t lie about your experience just to get a good job, because if they find you lacking later, you’re likely to get a lesser review, and it’ll make you less appealing as a freelancer for any later work. Everyone tries to make the most of what they do have that is relevant when applying for a job (online or off), so that is fine. Outright lies are not. If you get a vote of no confidence from a client in their feedback, it’s going to impede you getting other jobs with any and all clients, not just that one.

Your proposal might share your resume, CV, or listed accomplishments, but what really catches a client’s eye is attention to detail and personality. This applies to everything from checking if their name is mentioned in any of their feedback so you can address the proposal to them by name to making them smile or find something you wrote interesting. Engage your reader, both with your “I am” paragraph as well as including a “You’ll get…” section devoted to what they’ll get out of this deal. It helps to spin it around and give them a good idea of what that means from their point of view, not just yours.

Ask questions. In the proposal, if you have questions about the position, but keep those limited. Maybe three at most. If your cover letter (which is basically what a proposal is) gets too long, some clients are in too much of a hurry to read a long cover letter and they’ll move on, even if you could be exactly who or what they need. K.I.S.S. very much applies here. (Keep it simple, stupid.) If you get a response, that’s the time to ask your questions. Answer theirs first, because you need to put the client ahead of your own issues. The interview/discussion phase does need to provide you with all the details you need to do the job, however, and it’s going to rely on you asking the right questions. Clients don’t always know what they need until you show them. This includes asking if they want you to do X, where X is whatever potential aspect of the job they failed to mention. Examples from my work might include writing a teaser to go with a book I just wrote, formatting a manuscript after editing so it is ready for publication, or sending the client different file types to upload to various platforms or to import into their own software. They may not consider that ahead of time, but you need to. They’re hiring you because you know what the job entails from beginning to end, whether they do or not.

This is one of the big points of difference between applying to a regular job and landing a freelancing contract. If you get hired, the onus is on the employer to show you around and train you on any parts of the job you’re not already familiar with. Freelancers are selling themselves as experts (or at least professionals) in their field, which means you need to know the ins and outs of the way jobs that you’re applying for work.

Issues That May Arise

One of the biggest issues I’ve run into is getting hired for a project already having assumptions about how much or what the client has to hand me to get me started. Take ghostwriting, for instance. The current project I’m working on was broken down into fleshed-out outline, segments of 10k words, revision and rework, and then a final draft, each with different price tags attached. The client already had the main characters written out, their strengths and weaknesses, the plot hook, and basically what I would consider a complete concept, all ready to hand me as soon as I agreed. So for that client I asked for $25 for the fleshed-out outline.

Most writers are probably aware, the planning can take as long as the writing itself. But my client had everything organized and was so on top of things that I didn’t need to do a whole lot of work. It was easy to rearrange the character information into development arcs, figure out their high points and where they would break down somewhat, and more importantly, why.

My error was assuming another contract which seemed to suggest the same level of detailed organization had been done by the client. Assumptions are going to trip you up. Confirm everything. That client had a lot of ideas, but they weren’t organized well, the characters were cookie-cutter, and I had to keep asking for more information. I ended up cancelling that contract in the end; the final straw was being told the “big bad” was already someone she had mentioned, but not explained. I had to completely revise my entire concept of the story because I thought I understood who the bad guy was and the role they would play in the narrative. That was my mistake. So I contacted her and told her that there simply wasn’t enough planned out for me to be able to do the job, not on the agreed-upon schedule. I provided some resources on a number of the problem points, templates to write out characters, plot worksheets, and so on, and then suggested that she take some time to better organize before she tried to hire anyone else. I’d like to hope she found the materials I gave her useful, and since I didn’t see another job posting, she may have been able to work it out herself.

I have a contract I’m currently discussing where the client is new to writing, and I’m as much book-writing mentor, I think, as I will be the ghostwriter. The client does want a certain concept, and knows parts of it, but there’s going to be a lot of back-and-forth between us to get everything I would need to begin outlining. So while I proposed a similar breakdown of contract milestones (fleshed-out outline, segments of 10k words, revision and rework, final draft), the weight I need to put on the outline is going to be a lot more than $25. Really I need to go update the terms and insert a “working with client to reach fully conceptualized story” milestone first and probably weight it at least $100 so that I get compensated for the amount of work I think we’re going to do before I have what I need for the outline milestone. This contract isn’t immediately a “I’m sorry, I can’t do this by the agreed-upon terms” because I knew up front that it was a different sort of contract. Above all, know what your time is worth. If you don’t, your client certainly won’t.

On the same note, your time is worth money, so you need to know how to schedule your time. My current system is a combination of Google Calendar, the Self Journal by BestSelf Co, and the tomato-timer.com website, which runs a customizable 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off timer. When you plan using the pomodoro system, you know you can dedicate yourself to just the one task during the 25-minute period, and then break. I also do 50-minute focus sessions with 10 minutes off. (The timer is running as I write this, in fact.)

For Writers, Freelance or Otherwise

Some of the things I’ve learned from ghostwriting are relevant to any writing endeavor. I’d recommend learning to schedule your time as I mentioned one paragraph back, but that’s up to you. I understand wanting to write when the mood takes you. It is useful to make some time every day to write, even if the words never see the light of day afterward. (Expect a piece on trunk novels or novels ‘for the drawer’ soon, if I can squeeze it in around NaNoWriMo, otherwise it’ll be December.) I hate it when writing advice says making a daily habit of writing is crucial, but I hate it because they’re right. It really does make a difference. I write every day that I’m not confined to bed with a migraine, and even then, I write something if I can stand to look at a computer screen. It doesn’t have to be great writing, but focusing on putting thoughts on the page on a daily basis is a good start.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned recently is to have a plan. I’m normally a ‘by the seat of the pants’ writer, but that only goes so far if you’re being paid. If I run out of material and I don’t know what’s going to happen next, that starts to look like a deadline I’m about to miss. (And my stress level increases to match.) I will be posting some of my planning resources over the next two months as National Novel Writing Month comes closer, so I won’t go into every detail now. Even as a pantser, I need an outline and character details before I start writing if I’m going to be certain to stay ahead of my deadlines.

Journal as you go. This is a big one that I’ve been failing on a lot lately. I use a stream-of-consciousness journal when I’m brainstorming before starting a project, but it’s equally important to keep track of your thought processes in the middle of the project, perhaps even more so. Even within a planned outline, things change. I realized halfway through my first draft that I had underestimated the effect of the black moment on the heroine, and it was going to affect the story I’d laid out in the last half a dozen chapters. I did talk with my client about it, for any ideas, but I also started writing down my thoughts. I have the text file buried in my Scrivener ‘notes’ section for future reference. Sometimes it’s as simple as writing down the question you’re having trouble with and then laying out the possible answers; go through each one at a time and cross off the ones that don’t suit the story you want to tell. Some of my journal entries are silly, just anecdotes of ideas that occurred to me while writing that day. Others, like my Act 3 fix, are extensive. The point is that writing it down helps, if for no other reason than so you don’t forget ideas or concerns.

Focus on the flaws. Of your characters, in particular, since setting and events don’t have the same weight for the reader without characters that feel the ups and downs personally. I’ve found that if I write up a truly complete character from description to motivations to flaws, I can lay out scenes that have to happen for each point to be laid out for the reader or for things to improve upon the preexisting state. For instance, if the character starts out thinking the world is against them for reasons of their own, something has to affect that to make them rethink it. (The first time that view is challenged isn’t going to be an instant conversion, either.) The character development arc is crucial, but when you lay out your heroes (or in the case of my romance novel, the hero and heroine) and the development arc scenes, they fit together neatly and you’ve got an entire plot laid out. If you’re missing something, the plot hole becomes your next flaw to focus on.

For anything that doesn’t seem quite right, ask yourself why. Why doesn’t it fit that the hero goes to a certain place? (Is there a place better suited to your scene?) Why does the heroine refuse the first date? (Does she have mixed feelings, someone else she’s crushing on, or just doesn’t like her first impression?) Why does she want what you say she wants? Nothing can be arbitrary; it must all make sense. If you can’t justify your villain wanting to take over the world, then your entire plot falls apart. There are going to be rules for who wants what and why, and some of them are because your readers expect things to work a certain way. This goes for gravity as well as character motivations. Your readers’ expectations are going to be your boundaries. There are good reasons to push boundaries, and maybe break expectations, but doing it across the board is not acceptable, and you’ve been tossed aside in favor of something else.

More Insight to Come

I know this is a lot. I will work on trying to find a better way to organize it, but I think it’s more important I offer my advice than I get the formatting perfect. I’ll probably keep a list of things to post once I have enough material again, but if you have questions, please ask me! I will answer any questions I’m asked, both directly and in my next Freelancing article.

5 Do’s and Don’ts for Hiring a Freelancer

For freelancers and those looking to hire freelance talent, with a special focus on freelance writing. Once I started writing, this got really long, so I’ve divided it up as best I can. This is part one, for clients looking to hire freelancers.

I’ll be very surprised if there’s only one edition of this. Every job teaches me something new that I can apply to work going forward. This is only my first attempt at writing such a blog post, so keep an eye on my blog for periodic updates as I find new things to share.

How to Hire a Freelancer

I don’t know all the best sites to hire freelancers, but I do know that Upwork has worked amazingly well for me, and it’s one of the top sites for a reason. They have all the protections in place for both freelancer and client; they handle the money; it’s been seamless for me. The examples I’m using are all things that came across my own feed, so they’re related to creative writing or editing, but I think you’ll find the points are going to hit pretty much any field, and they’re not entirely specific to Upwork, either. This is how the process works from our end, so I can tell you not to do certain things.

5 Basic Do’s and Don’ts

1. DON’T tell freelancers you need [freelancer type] able to [generic freelancer skill of that type].

Guess what. We already figured out that part, because you posted a job request tagged that way! This may seem backwards, not to tell people what you’re seeking, but I’m specifically talking about the use of generic words.

I recently ran across a post on Upwork that said the following:

Need Ghostwriter for a screenplay 7 pages
able to articulated story creatively

Yes. That is the entire post, copied directly from the site.

Now tell me, how exactly does a freelancer write a proposal to that? Proposals are like job applications to a regular position. We focus on the top skills needed, the most likely methods of working together, hurdles that might come up, or experiences we’ve had that make us the right people for the job.

The worst part? The client is clearly an active person, because they have over two dozen other jobs already completed, and all of them are like this. Short and grammatically incorrect, with no particular hook to latch onto. Clearly no one told them their job requests are crap, so they keep doing it, expecting to get good work from each one.

How about this one?

Looking for medium level Creative Writing specialist.

Again, that’s the entire post. That much is also entered in when you make the job request. We, the freelancers, are already finding the job based on the experience level and job type requested. (It’s like any feed aggregator these days, whether it’s twitter, Facebook, or an RSS aggregator. You tell it what you want to show up, and it displays things that match what you asked for.) As a freelance creative writer at an intermediate level, the fact the job popped up at all already tells me those details about it.

Don’t waste your time or mine. With the number of posts I get in my feed, if I don’t see specific keywords, I’m moving on. And just so you know, Upwork has a way for us to collapse posts in our feed so we don’t have to scroll as far. If it’s not related to our skillset, for instance. If I’ve collapsed a post, that’s it. I’m not going to go back and rethink it later. There’s simply not enough time in the day for me to do my work AND spend hours reading job requests. Time is money.

2. DO tell freelancers you need a specific [freelancer type] able to use a very specific skillset as related to aspects of your project, which you then must list.

Building on the last point, I need to know what kind of project you’re working on. This is important both in the big picture and the details. No matter what industry you are working in, there are a great many niches within it. I write, but usually I only write fiction, not website content, blog or social media posts, or research papers. So if you’re seeking someone to write a research paper or a blog post, I need to know that so I don’t apply. If you say ‘writer’ you’re going to get a lot of people with no relevant skills for the job because they fall into the same big industry/category but not your specific niche.

If you identify a type of freelancer, please also include the topic of the freelancing. A blog post on a new yoga studio in town is hugely different than a blog about a weight loss diet plan or a blog about new technological advances. A novel that is contemporary romance is wildly different than a fantasy novel. (Ghostwriting is different than me writing something and putting my name on it, too.) Even a contemporary romance novel is a broad category. There are five “heat” levels from clean romance to erotica, and not all romance writers write all five. And then you’re going to have to identify themes and the situation (enemies to lovers, office romance, pretend marriage, holiday fun, etc). Obviously these examples are based on freelance creative writing, but it applies across a lot of industries.

Make sure it is very clear who you’re looking for, what project or job that person will be doing, and list the skills they need to be able to use.

3. DON’T tell creative freelancers your idea is going to make it big, guaranteed.

Okay, this may only be for the creative sorts of freelancing. Writing a story, making a movie, and so on. The number of times I have seen someone post a request for a ghostwriter for “the next New York Times best seller” based on their idea, or someone seeking an editor for words they (a person who is not a professional writer) have written “to make it a best seller”… it’s really humbling how many people think they’re the next best thing. It’s a stereotype of Hollywood, certainly, where people go out trying to make it big and rarely ever do, but in this era of the internet, it’s not just Hollywood anymore. Your idea is only as good as you can make it.

Please. For pity’s sake. Do not wave a flag above your head that says you have no idea what the industry is like. No creative writer or literary editor is going to want to work with you if your expectation is the best seller list. Why? If it was that easy to be on the best seller list, we’d be there already! Don’t get me wrong, shoot for the stars. However, if you’re going to be unsatisfied with anything less than the best seller list, I don’t want to pour my time and energy into a project with which you’re unlikely to ever be satisfied.

Nothing is ever guaranteed.

You can have a great idea, wonderful presentation, and still have it flop for marketing reasons. Authors are brands these days, and your brand is going to be part of the equation. If you don’t pitch it to the right genre and audience, the quality of the book doesn’t matter because you won’t see readers that want that type of book.

This is the nature of the creative industry these days, when everything is driven by social media, algorithms that show you want they think you want to see, and everyone jumping on the bandwagon for something the next guy did or said.

4. DON’T hide the project details from your freelancer.

This is really critical, and of the utmost importance, especially for creative industries. I never want to see “project details will be given after you apply”, or worse, “more information after you have signed an NDA”. Yes, I am a ghostwriter, and ghostwriting comes with an NDA attached so that I get paid for my work but hand it over to someone else to put their name on it. Non-disclosure is part of the job. That doesn’t mean I’m going to sign anything without knowing what you’re hiring me for!

If you’re looking to hire a ghostwriter for a story idea that you think is so amazing you aren’t going to tell anyone anything about it, you’ve already failed. To begin with, it’s very unlikely that your idea is new. It’s something of an understanding in the writing industry that there are no new ideas, only new interpretations. More importantly, however, you have to tell the freelancer enough for them to know whether or not they can do the job! They also need to know enough to decide if they want to do the job. If you asked me to write gritty military fiction, I probably can’t. I’ve no experience with the military, aside from other fictional interpretations, and no amount of research is going to make it feel like my characters are the real deal. So I need to know the topic you want me to write.

These are the two very important factors from the freelancer’s side. Can I? If so, do I want to? If you didn’t tell me enough to answer those questions, I’ve ignored your job request and moved on already.

5. DON’T rush through your job request or any communication with potential freelancers.

This may sound like common sense, but I’ve seen it far too often for me to not mention this. If your request looks like you typed it on your phone with your thumbs in the dark, and hit send before even reading what auto-correct butchered, you look like an inept person that will be a headache as a client. Don’t get me wrong, typos happen. Broken sentences, words that were auto-corrected to something that makes no sense, addressing a response to someone other than the freelancer you’re in touch with, and other errors that quickly rereading would fix just make you look bad.

You may be the one hiring me, but if you don’t look twice at your work, I’m simply not going to apply because I don’t want to have that become a problem later. Especially if your lack of focus could make me do something wrong, or get blamed for not following directions.

More Insight to Come

Next week I’ll have the How-to post for the Freelancers, as well as those considering trying it. After that I’ll probably keep a list of things to post once I have enough material again, but if you have questions, please ask me! I will answer any questions I’m asked, both directly and in my next Freelancing article.

Welcome!

Welcome to my new website! My name is Marie, and I’ll be your host this evening!

We have an array of tasty treats on the menu, from freelancing, to National Novel Writing Month, to snarky commentary on just about anything. Mostly good, solid, writing-related munchies. For the most part the menu is prose-free, that will remain on my personal blog for the time being. If you’re curious, check out the Plot Bunnies link on the main menu for some of the recent posts.

As a taste of what’s to come, please allow me to present 5 Do’s and Don’ts for Hiring a Freelancer and Tips and Tricks for Freelancers, on the house.

Lovely to meet you, and I hope I will be seeing you back again soon!
~Marie

Coming Soon: NaNoWriMo Prep Topics

November is National Novel Writing Month, and it’s coming up fast! Preparatory materials will be posted here on Wednesdays starting September 2nd, following a general sort of generic big-picture to concept-focused specifics plan. September will be general topics: the plan and some overview resources, literary genres, point of view and narration, ideas and conceptualization, and then rounding it out with different plot formulae. October will be more specific to getting enough written down that you should breeze through November: genre norms and weighted values, characters, plot, and setting. I will also try to have a wrap-up blog posted at the end of the month which will link to all the weekly articles I posted in one convenient place.

In the meantime, here are some old blog posts (links go to my creative blog) which I think are fairly timeless.