You see, reading isn’t as cut and dried as you might think (gasp!). It’s not just an exercise for people who get bored while sitting. A good reader considers how they read, who they read, the people they read with. Here are a few things you can do to be a better reader.

1. Collect Books

Especially books you want to read. It’s true, anyone can fill out their shelves with yardsale junk, but a good reader fills them with books that look interesting. I keep my books in a green trunk, it doesn’t matter how you present them, just find books you’ll like.

Ways to do this: search the Goodwill, hit used bookstores, steal from your friends, cruise the library stacks, check goodreads.com, ask other writers. I’ve gotten books based on cover art alone, so don’t be shy. The more books you have, the more likely you’ll hit on something you like. Not that every book will be a hit which brings us to:

2. Put Down the Book

Don’t waste time on a bad book. There’s not enough time to read everything and sometimes there are better books to read. If the first thirty pages feel like a marathon, put the book down and go on to the next one. You haven’t given anything up, you haven’t disappointed your sixth grade English teacher, you haven’t ruined a classic because you didn’t like it. If you needed it for school, get the sparknotes. You have better things to do, better books to read, so don’t spend a lot of time on Melville’s whaling terminology pamphlet unless you really enjoy that stuff.

3. Read Before You Write

Here’s what I write when I don’t read: Bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeech.

It’s important for writers to read, it’s important for writers to read, it’s important for writers to read. I can’t repeat it enough, yet I’ve seen people who thought manga would catapult (nay, trebuchet!) them to new levels of authorship. You need to read good books in order to write.

And read outside your comfort zone! Read poetry if you’re a fiction writer, for example. It helps immensely with how you construct language. And if you’re a poet, read fiction.

But no matter what you do, read before you write.

4. Read Critically

Here’s a list of mindless entertainment to help your brain recharge: attack dragons in Skyrim, watch Bruce Willis shoot some dudes, listen to Daft Punk in the gym, laugh at the bro jokes on Comedy Central. Then, when you’re ready to think, grab a good book.

It’s true, reading is a medium for thinkers. You read at your own pace which means a few things: You can reread the chapters you didn’t understand, put notes in the margins, dog ear good sections, put the book down and talk to yourself for a few hours (I’m not the only person who does that, right?). You have the chance to think in a critical manner as opposed to the rapid fire culture of television where every second needs to be filled. It’s a slower, more thoughtful medium.

I’m not saying you should draw diagrams in every page after you consider the meanings of each word, pipe in mouth and pencil in hand. Just think while you read.

5. Find Reading Buddies

Lastly, and most importantly, remember that you don’t live in a void. You don’t order fried martian casserole from your robo-butler in the depths of a secret moon base. Plus if you lived in a vacuum, you would not be reading this.

Since you live on Earth with seven billion people, you should talk to them. Let others know what you finished today. Post on your facebook what you thought of Ulysses and it’ll spiral into an entire conversation on masturbation. You need to find people who will argue over Meursault’s death, who remember the pimp that punched Holden Caulfield, who felt Joseph Heller went off the deep end.

And lend good books to friends. Even Jesse will let me know what she thought of the novels I give to her  (she tells me the language was uninspired and nothing held her attention). Books aren’t written for a vacuum. Find company to enjoy them with.

So go out there, find a good friend, and read your asses off.

Yeah, we were doing the same thing.

Welcome back to the Juniper Bends writing experiment! We haven’t been super active recently because of Life (that bastard) but in the next few weeks we’ll feed the blog a steady diet of Writing like we’d planned all along. Writing like: Articles! Events! Book reviews! Semi-colons! Gerunds! Similes! Iambic pentameter! Basically enough that y’all will come here every weekend for a dose of minty fresh literary posts (and occasionally scalding wit, watch out for it).

And I want to do a quick shout out to everybody who attended the Juniper Bends Reading. We had a blast thanks to authors Mandy Gardner, Collin Garrity, Rose McLarney and Jerry Stubblefield. They brought diverse and excellent writing, some real gravitas, and a little wine to complete the evening. Thanks again and let’s hope the next reading lives up to this one!

Check in next week for an article on how to read. Trust me, you need the help.

(If this list isn’t gritty enough for you, try October, month of blindness awareness, pizza, opals, and pagan celebrations.)

April is a good month for poets. We can sit on the porch, wear sunglasses, and write.

Winter gets me into the bad habits of watching lots of (good!) television in my bed, sleeping late, and not writing as much as I would like. This is partially because it is expensive to heat my apartment, so staying in bed is the best warmth option; but it also because everything is the same grey color for three solid months. Grey trees, grey sky, grey asphalt. Grey is lovely, but my poetry relies heavily on color as fodder, fuel for its verse. Consequently, my winter poems are mostly about death and rainstorms.

The response to many months of not-so-brilliant poetics? The 30-day challenge of National Poetry Writing Month (otherwise known as NaPoWriMo). Nto dissimilar from NaNoWriMo (wherein writers work on a novel draft to polish and wrestle the remaining 11 months), NaPo challenges poetry nerds to write a poem every day in April. Many poets defer to writing several in a sitting, then skipping a day or three (ahem), but the 30-poem challenge remains (that’s a whole chapbook, folks).

These poems don’t have to be complete, or even near complete, or even real poems. Half the time, I end up writing “ugh I hate working at the grocery store before a rainstorm. Everyone is batshit crazy and forgets their canvas bags,” before abandoning my computer in favor of drinking tea and looking out the window. But from this small moment in the time between other things, I begin to consider my myriad food service jobs, making lists of weird customers and co-workers, and remembering stories. I make lists of images, brainstorm titles on the backs of grocery receipts, think in meter.

Poetry is always in the back of my mind, even while I am busy writing consulting, bagging natural groceries, or running errands. With NaPoWriMo, poetry takes a more central space in my brain, becoming an undercurrent, a benevolent riptide of thoughts, pulling and pulling. The fragments that I puzzle together are not unlike seashells: often fragmented, sharp, and duller when dry, but they are poetic bookmarks. As of now, I have 14 scalloped edges of things that may or may not become poems. This is certainly better than nothing.

A side note for the curious: Some NaPoets post their pieces on the internet. I am saving mine for my collected works.

GUT Symmetries – Jeanette Winterson

Oranges are Not The Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson

The Guardians – Sarah Manguso

The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion

Bluets – Maggie Nelson

How Should A Person Be? - Sheila Heti

I Was Told There’d Be Cake - Sloane Crosley

A Visit From the Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan

I’m wondering, after perusing the interweb for Good Women’s Books Lists, if this series of women author-reading falls under the Feminist Reading Challenge. I want to say yes because, while I’m not a joiner, I am an avid feminist, but I worry because the sample list is a who’s-who of young adult reading for girls. Whatever.

As of now, I am instituting my own Literary Feminist Reading Challenge! The goal: read lots of books by amazing feminist writers of any gender! Yay! If these books end up being exceptional (or, perhaps, dreadful), I’ll be sure to let everyone know.

#1 Get Your Writer Friends to Send You Their List of Preferred Journals

If we writers have anything going for ourselves, it’s arguably that we’ve got each others’ backs. (Though I’ve heard unconfirmed reports that in MFA workshops, this is not necessarily the case.) Ask around in writing groups, workshops, creative writing departments, and book clubs: what journals do you read? If you’re asking people whose work or taste you already respect, chances are good that they’re looking at publications that you’ll respect too.

#2 Make a (Community) Master List

Excel junkies, this one’s for you. Bust out those spreadsheets and go to town. Organize by genre, deadlines, contests, fee-based submissions, color-coded by attitude, whatever. It’s worked for Duotrope. This is an opportunity for your Type A side to shine. And if this isn’t you, team up with your more office-supply-oriented writer friends. Buy them coffee; make them a quiche. Google Drive is crucial for this option.

#3 Socially Network

Remember when it was cool to hate on Twitter? Yeah, not anymore. Journals from all over the world tweet and retweet submission deadlines, contest parameters, new issues, cool articles by other writers, and loads of other pertinent (and impertinent) stuff for writers. We like @submittable, @pankmagazine, @revhousemag, @pshares, @thelitpub, @Neon_Lit_Mag, and about 30 others. Your best bet? Search for your fave lit mag. Chances are very good that they have an active account and follow other cool journals as well. Facebook and Tumblr are other great places to look for your favorite lit mags and find new ones.

Epilogue

The moral of this story is that the internet is a really big place, and there are tons of websites to meet all your writerly needs (like Juniper Bends!). WriteToDone releases an annual list of top writing blogs; The Paris Review is possibly my favorite for interviews, surrealist genre-melds, and reportage of random other writer news; and we here at Juniper Bends are implementing journal reviews and overviews here in the new year.

Of course, you can always neglect this list and cough up $50 for Duotrope services, but wouldn’t you rather spend that on shiny new books from your local indie bookstore? I think so.

However, there do remain things that should never be touched by the long fingers of poetry. These things may be tantalizing, omnipresent, and even inescapable; yet this does not mean that they belong in a poem. This is a list of five words that should never under any circumstances find their way into a poem.

1) Love

Take a look at any pre-20th century canonic poem (see: John Donne, William Wordsworth, John Keats) and you may begin to understand why this word mustn’t be used in poetic material in the 21st century. The aforementioned writers, along with many others, did a bang-up job of beating love to death, attempting to revive it through Romantic, Blake-ian mysticism, and then parading it around, propped up in some creepy ritual pose, arms and tongue wagging. Love is dead, friends. (I’ll think we’ll give Keats a pass on this one, just since he had tuberculosis, which sounds, by all accounts, pretty damn awful.)

Anyway, if you love something or someone enough to write about them, you’d be doing them a gross disservice by reducing them to the trite birthday-card tackiness of the term. What do you even think of when you think “love?” Come on folks, we all know it’s cheesy pink hearts and rainbows and flowers and gross boxes of processed chocolates swathed in plastic wrap and plastic ribbons. No thanks. If you love something enough to write a poem about it, you want to make your audience love them too. (This is an example of something that does not work.) Think: how does this thing look in a slanted sunlit room with yellow walls? How does the smell of home remind you of the thing, or vice versa? What is that smell? What are their colors, their shapes, their sensations? How do you fit into them, how does it feel in your hands? These other questions do the work of the “why?”

These sensory details do the hard work for you. It’s the most evocative for a reader to get transported to the experience with the poet, not told a secondhand story about how the poet felt. This brings us to our next word:

2) Feel

This one’s a toughie. Feeling has long been the driving force behind much poetry. Feeling blue after a breakup? Write a poem! Feeling slighted by the cute girl in your Fiction Workshop? Write her a poem! Feeling aroused by the sensual encounter in your latest romance novel/crime thriller? Write a poem! However, feeling does not have value within a poem itself. It instead acts as a replacement for an actual experience.

“She felt warm after escaping from the burning house.” SO NEUTRAL. Likely, she actually was warm, or rather, hot. An alternative: “Her skin blossomed red with the heat after escaping from the burning house.” Isn’t this a bit more evocative? Can our reader not connect a bit more with the active, detail-oriented language of the latter clause?  feel is a problem faced by writers of all genres: active voice. The use of strong, motivated, even “muscular” verbs do wonders to the momentum and fleshiness of a piece of poetry. Especially within poetry, every single word makes an enormous impact on the overall feel of the piece. Choose verbs that are muscular, active, invigorating; thicker, more passive verbs can be glossed over in prose, but in poetry, where every word carries immense weight, the right word choice is crucial.

Further traps of feeling include talking about your (shudder) feelings: ”He left me standing under the awning in the rain. I felt more alone than I’d ever felt in my life.” Yawn. Boo-hoo. Cry me a river. Here’s the world’s tiniest violin, etc etc. How about something like, “as his red jacket faded away into the wet streetlights, I tightened my scarf around my neck, tight as a rope, and waited alone for the midnight bus.” We know from this latter passage how the speaker felt, because you’ve done the work to show us. The noose, the rainy street, the midnight bus. Come on. That’s working!

3) Seem

The most succinct way to deal with “seem” is to ask “well, is it or isn’t it?” This is a valid question in a vast world of seem. 2) Feel is a LOT like “seem.” It implies a lack of commitment to a truth, to making a claim and going forth with confidence and concrete examples. If my tenure as a writing center employee has taught me anything, it’s that all good writing has some base characteristics: specificity, detail, flow, and a warrant (i.e. why you’re writing the damn thing). Not that poems are just essays suffering an identity crisis, but the tenets of strong & effective language remain.

4) Fear

This is just shorthand for what you’re actually experiencing that you’ve been told to call “fear.” In truth, we feel sweaty palms, blood thudding behind our eyes, bright flashes of scenes from our worst nightmares: guts flying, scraggly-haired pre-pubescent girls creeping out of a stone well, a monster with daggers for teeth, whatever. To say, “I fear you leaving me,” doesn’t create a sensation. It sounds like a teenager’s journal entry. What will happen if this “you” leaves? Will the walls tumble down in an avalanche of plaster? Will the stovetop swelter into a lava monster and gulp the breakfast nook down for a snack? Will the swimming pool birth its own slimy frog monster that eats babies like flies?

When talking to linguistics nerd Amy about this, she said something about the “signifier-signified” relationship, wherein we relate abstract groups of letters (our old pals words) to complex, multi-dimensional concepts and experiences of the world. We all have similar ideas of the abstract experience of “fear.” Take us somewhere new.

5) Freedom 

I blame the Beat poets for this one. Thousands of teenaged record collectors and Young Democrats organizers flock to Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, and other white dudes-cum-poets sitting around the suburbs wanderlusting. This is OK. We like wanderlust. We don’t like reading the same regurgitated version of Howl for over 50 years at open mics around the world.

Freedom is perhaps the most worthy of the topics listed here to write a poem about. The trap is falling into something we’ve all read a bazillion times in our hippie-dippy poetry intro course. Ask instead: what does freedom smell like? How do you dress for freedom? Who gets freedom? Get political! Get concrete! Make us feel freedom when we close our eyes, wind whipping around us like Thelma & Louise!

Epilogue

The other day in Rosetta’s, the local punk-vegetarian-casual-kitchen, Amy, Chett, and I were getting a post-writing group snack (writers <3 vegetarian food). On the specials board behind the register, there hung a sticker proclaiming: “FEAR is the enemy of LOVE and  FREEDOM” (or something equally meaningless). These abstractions are everywhere, even in the punk-DIY veg*n restaurant. If poetry makes the familiar strange, problematize the vague allusions of concepts; spice up the mundane; challenge your reader to go beyond the page!

The next reading will take place in the winter (late February/early March), and I can only hope that we can match the brilliance of this event. I’ll bring more wine next time. Friend Juniper Bends Reading Series on Facebook for more updates.

Stay tuned in to the blog; we’ll be featuring interviews with our readers over the next few weeks. We get to pick their brains; you get to read about it.

Friday Nov. 9th: The Juniper Bends Reading Series’ Third Anniversary

As you all know from Jesse’s write up, the Juniper Bends Quarterly Reading Series will be celebrating its third year running with a reading on Friday, November 9th (that’s tomorrow, y’all) at Downtown Books and News. Join us at 7pm to hear great writing from local authors including Katey Schultz, writer at large; lyric artist John Crutchfield; UNCAsheville faculty member and novelist Katherine Min; and fellow JBAC members Jesse Rice-Evans and Chett Tiller. It promises to be fun, is completely FREE and open to the public (with wine available by donation), and so there’s really no reason for you not to be there

Saturday Nov. 17th: NaNoWriMo All-Day Write-in

You may or may not be aware of the furious wordsmithing that happens in November as part of National Novel Writing Month. An international movement, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, or simply NaNo for short) invites anyone with a story and a means of composing words to write a fifty-thousand word manuscript  in the course of the month of November. Slipshod words, sloppy plotlines, and rambling are all welcome: the point is to generate fifty thousand shiny new words to work on over the next year (before November shows up again).

Anyways, this year, JBAC is joining forces with NaNo in Asheville (AsheNoWriMo) and the UNCAsheville University Writing Center to host the “All-Day” Write-in on Saturday, November 17th. Stop by UNCA’s University Writing Center (located onthe first floor of Ramsey Library) at any point between 11am and 5pm for some writing company, word wars, bursts of inspiration, and what-have-you. This event is FREE and completely open to the public. Coffee and some light refreshments will be provided, though you get brownie points for bringing something else to share.

Sunday Nov 25th: Speedshopping Round 2

Last but not least, Speedshopping is back! JBAC presents Round 2 of its experimental workshop and networking experience, hosted by Apothecary Community Art Space. Bring in two copies of a short (2-4 page) excerpt of your latest masterwork and get feedback from REAL LIVE authors in a variety of genres. Almost like a swanky night at speed dating, you will have 10-12 minutes to swap excerpts, exchange pointed critique and a few well-placed adjectives before moving along to your next partner. We’ve got essayists, metafictionists, plot junkies, and enjambment fiends. Come enjoy coffee & tea (donations appreciated) and groove to some funky jams.

Be There!

We hope to see some folks out and about at these events, and we encourage you to spread the word, show up drunk, and bring friends. Either way, we hope you enjoy, get out there to read, write, and celebrate, and stay warm as the winter weather starts creeping up on us.

The Juniper Bends Reading Series continues, featuring amazing local writers, good company, and a good time all around.

The next event will be on November 9th at 7pm hosted by the lovely folks at Downtown Books & News. Since it’s our 3rd anniversary, there will be wine for your enjoyment (by donation please and thanks!) as well as brilliant literary styles of multi-genre writer John Crutchfield, novelist Katherine Min, the realist storytelling of Katey Schultz, the musings of absurdist fiction writer (and JBAC member) Chett Tiller, and some of my own poetry!

I will also be acting as (f?)emcee for the evening, and we’ll follow up the reading with drinks and festivities at covert artist haunt The Prospect (best jukebox in town!). Bring friends, we hope to see you!

And that’s fine!

Masturbating’s fine.

Sometimes it’s even necessary.

But in the end, we don’t like it when people do that in public.

And that really is the difference. There is writing that you do for yourself–writing that can be as weird and masturbatory and unreadable as needed–and then there is writing that you intend for other people to read: public writing. This includes anything that you feel the need to share with others, regardless of genre or style. If you intend for someone, anyone, to read something you’ve written and give you praise, criticism, or feedback, then you are no longer writing privately, and you need to take audience into consideration.

There are many ways that considering your audience will help you polish and hone your writing, as well as make you a more successful writer, but I wanted to bring up three points that I think are glossed over too often.

1. Your audience has no reason to read your work (unless you give them one)

As much as traditional literature classes and workshops may have skewed our perceptions of this fact (hey, we all had to read and comment on that one kid’s useless horror story in Workshop X! And I certainly did NOT read Christopher Marlowe for fun!), it remains true in every case that, no matter how great you think you are, there is not a single person on this earth who is obligated to read your work.

So, make it worth their time. In the greater scheme of things, people do not read stories, poems, or essays because you wrote them. People read things  for one of two reasons. Sometimes, it’s because their teachers and professors (i.e. the academic establishment) have determined that the writing has cultural, social, or historical value. But far more commonly, people read a work because they enjoy reading that particular piece of writing. Whether they enjoy the evocative and surprising language, engage with the intelligent plot, or fall in love with the wonderful characters and personalities of the work, your writing needs to have something that will draw a reader in, something they will find interesting, or they will not read it. Which brings us to the fact that:

2. Your audience knows what they like

And they know it far better than you do. You can make intelligent guesses about what a person will find appealing, but this requires you to have a sense of the person you are writing for. It’s been said before, but it bears repeating: you cannot be all things to all people. You can, however, be the most awesome writer in the world to the group of teenage girls who want to be Katniss, or the most evocative voice in modern poetry to that one reviewer from the New Yorker.

Identifying your audience helps you do this. It is the only way for you to know how to shape your ideas and your writing into the form most appropriate for your goals. Aside from the obvious concerns of style and voice, there’s the fact that different groups of readers have different expectations from their literature. People who read mysteries know the most common mystery tropes like the back of their hand, and if the butler ends up guilty, they are likely to throw your book at the wall. In a similar vein, people who read a lot of lyric essays will not be impressed by your twist ending, but rather by the intensity of your prose. But knowing these conventions not only ensures your writing will fit into a framework your readers will understand—it also allows you to circumvent those conventions in ways that will interest and surprise your readers, rather than alienate them.

And if all else fails, always remember what interested you, not as a writer, but as a reader. And if that sentence sounded completely alien to you (what do you mean, “as a reader”?) then perhaps you should stop writing, stop looking at this article, and go find some literature to read instead. Because if you can’t even be bothered to read other people’s work, why should anyone bother with reading yours? Which brings us to our next point:

3. Your audience is the only group that can give you the feedback you want

So many writers out there are frustrated by their inability to gain the recognition they think they deserve. But the truth is this: until you acknowledge your audience, getting the feedback you want is impossible, because you’ll have no idea where to look for it–nevermind find it. Especially if you’re looking at writing as a career choice, having no idea who your audience is amounts to self-sabotage. Choosing where and how to publish, knowing whom to query, deciding which reviewers to solicit–all of that depends, ultimately, on your goals and the readership you are hoping to build.

I’m going to say it again: knowing yourself as a reader comes in handy for this. Knowing what you like, what you don’t like, and who’s writing and publishing different genres and forms immediately gives you some sense of where your work might fit in–and where it definitely won’t.

Writing groups and workshops are another important step to figuring out your audience and readership. I can’t stress enough how much support and feedback a close-knit workshop can give to us as emerging writers. But again, even writers’ groups require you have a sense of audience–and that can be difficult for those of us who write across different styles and forms. I know I won’t be showing my genre fiction to Chett, Jesse, Allison, or Eben, simply because I’m not writing that for readers like them. But when it comes to my creative nonfiction, I know they’ve read and written enough of that sort of thing to give me useful feedback.

What it comes down to is this: writing is a form of communication. And communication requires someone to receive a message–no receiver, no communication. It doesn’t matter how much blood, sweat, or tears you put into your writing–if it doesn’t communicate something to someone else (anyone else), or aspire to communicate at all, then keep it confined to your bedroom, please.

Chapter 1- Forgotten Hope

Mary’s tears slowly trickled down her face, dropping and mixing with the water and sending ripples flowing outwards from the spots where the landed. The little noise they made was drowned away by the sobs of the child, who stood waste deep in the salt-less sea. The moon was shining and the shimmering ocean’s waves glimmered in its white light… Besides the few shiny-winged insects that would flit past her every once in a while, Mary was alone…

I wrote that sometime in High School, back when I had a goatee and this thing on my head that I called “my ponytail.” It’s only one of the many genre stories I wrote which included science fiction, fantasy, and video game fan-fiction.

For those wondering, fan-fiction is a story based on an established fictional setting–like if someone wrote a World of Warcraft biography of their avatar, or used the characters from Full Metal Alchemist in an original story.

When I started writing this post, I wanted to just beat on fan-fics, genre, and my adolescence. But the truth is: the fan-fiction I wrote is important to me. It started me writing. You see, fan-fics have built in characters, built in tropes, built in plot structures, and some people need that to get their brain juices flowing.

The reason I need to address fan-fics today is because a lot of people get excited about the poorly written stuff. I’m thinking of Fifty Shades of Grey and the equally derivative pile of flattened trees, Attack of the Mormon Vampires. I’m not even opposed to BDSM or the supernatural, but the writing in those stories makes me ashamed of popular fiction.

I want people to write good genre, but none of the guides out there focus on what I’ve found to be important. Because of that, I wrote a little something for genre and fan-fiction writers. These are simple things, but they’re effective, and they’ll make you that much better.

1. Go for quality over quantity

Most genre writers gear up for the long haul when they should be focused on what’s in front of them. Robert Jordan died before he could complete his Wheel of Time series. And do you know where he is now? He’s dead. George R.R. Martin of Game of Thrones fame might follow suit, and the people in charge of the television series stay up at night because of this.

In some ways, these men are terrible influences. They have all read Tolkien, who read the old medieval literature, most of which needs to be locked away for crimes against pacing and poetry. In trying to get at that pseudo-medieval tone, all of the contemporary genre writers sacrifice language and storytelling for long outlines and plot.

Instead, consider sticking with and completing a shorter story. Most of this stuff is practice, so maybe it’s better to do something you’ll complete rather than a sweeping epic about a giraffe-barbarian. If the reader can’t get into the current sentence, your giraffe-barbarian’s climactic battle in space will mean nothing.

So set a word limit and try to trim your plot. Focus on a few key scenes. Enjoy the wording. Don’t dwell on the backstory.

2. Work with language

Both writers and readers should have fun when it comes to the language. Do fun things with it.  Feel free to get poetic and experiment with tone and dialogue, with sentence structure, with everything. If you’re focusing more on the setting than the words, you’ll miss out on a golden opportunity to enjoy yourself.

There are a few things that will make your language immediately better. Use active language: that means show, don’t tell (duh). Avoid ellipses (…) in your dialogue. They look like ants. Oh, and stop using adverbs. “Mary’s tears slowly trickled” is bad. It makes me feel naughty in a way I don’t like.

Truth be told, you should feel pain all the way through the excerpt I shared. It’s loaded with overwrought descriptions, typos, confused action, and all those words I used to convey absolutely nothing. Any decent book about writing will help you get rid of those things. I’d suggest Writing Down the Bones, and we’ll have reviews of other nice craft books on this blog in the near future.

3. Focus on the story over the ideas

A story is what you write. An idea is what you’re writing about. That idea for a half-cat cyborg elven race of psychics might be cool, but not every cool idea can survive as a story. It takes a good writer to make a good story, and it also takes practice.

The excerpt I showed you had what I considered to be an amazing idea driving it. There’s this girl, right? Her brother has been kidnapped by fairies, right? And she has to go back to the fairy lands in order to save him and all this stuff that honestly sounds too fucking boring and terrible to mention now that I’m older.

But don’t throw your ideas away, just use them intelligently. Asimov is an example of a good idea driven writer. His short fiction always has that seed of an idea, but he executes the idea well and doesn’t let the premise get in the way of his writing. His ideas about artificial intelligence become stories about buddy cops (read Caves of Steel or Naked Sun if you’re confused). Yours ought to do something similar.

4. You are not special, your characters are not special

Fan-fic almost always lives out some sort of fantasy. Either the author lives out a fantasy life as the protagonist, or the author expands on their favorite manga/tv/novel series. Usually in a sexy way. Mulder and Scully will never do it on-screen so fan-fic can be a great place for them to get it on.

But there’s a difference between you and your fantasy. You are not your work. Good writers separate themselves from their characters because writing a thinly veiled masturbatory fantasy takes no special skills.

The Mary Sue litmus test will let you know if you’re screwing up. There are hundreds; just google them. The basic premise of Mary Sue is that the closer the character is to yourself and/or to an orphaned telekinetic anime angel, the worse. An interesting character doesn’t need psychic powers to be powerful or complex.

5. Accept and digest criticism

It’s obnoxious when an inexperienced writer ignores criticism. Maybe criticism hurts their self-image as a latent talent (anagram!) or maybe it feels too combative. Either way, refusing criticism can quickly become a downward spiral; the writer only accepts praise and gets an inflated opinion of their terrible writing and characters.

You aren’t writing in a void, so just accept that others will judge your writing. Use that judgement for something positive. If you have ever finished a first draft and considered it “complete” or wanted glowing praise, then writing is not for you. Please stop.

Fan-fiction doesn’t  need to be terrible

This is only the tip of the iceberg. Fan-fic can be something wonderful: I’ve even seen what I consider “good” fan-fiction, stuff that literary people would be proud of.

How can I say that in good faith? Because I believe that limitations breed creativity, and there’s nothing more derivative and limiting than genre and fan-fiction. Fan-fic is the chance to prove yourself. It’s a practice form, a chance to make the most out of something else.

So get out there. Write some fan-fic. The worst that can happen? You give up. The best? You get better and then write something truly amazing.