Author Archives: Travis Heermann

The Critique Group Waltz: Is Yours in Step?

Having been approaching this Real Fiction Writer gig for something like 25 years, from fits and starts in the early days to the full-time efforts nowadays, I have considerable experience with in-person critique groups. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. There’s almost always some value, but is that overshadowed by hidden “costs”?

Critique groups have infinite permutations out there: genre, format, frequency, membership, etc. But something for new writers to keep in mind—easy to lose track of this in their exultant joy or fear that they won’t be able to find any other group—you are there to serve your writing.

You are there because you want something. Before you join, you should be clear about your goals and aspirations. After you’ve joined, reflect often on whether the group is serving your needs.

Critique groups are great for:

  • Helping fix problems with stories and novels
  • Exchanging industry news and opportunities
  • Increasing your writing skills
  • Camaraderie, community, and mental health

Benefits of Critique Groups (and their evil flip-sides)

“We meet on the fourth Tuesdays of odd-numbered months at 6 a.m. under the bridge. Bring your whole novel.”

The first criteria for determining whether a critique group is right for you is when it meets. The less easy, regular, and accessible its meeting times, the less useful it’s likely to be. I’ve tried groups that meet once a month or less, and they’re just not as useful, especially when I’m writing at a pace that a career demands. If your stuff only comes up for critique once every two or three months, ask yourself if that’s really enough for you.

  • Does the group format allows critiques of what you’re bringing?
  • Does the group meet often enough to form a cohesive unit? Too seldom? Too frequently?
  • Is the location conducive to a safe, open atmosphere?
  • What is the balance of give and take? If you have to contribute critiques on 80k words before you get to submit a single novel chapter, is that really worth your time?

Chicken Soup for the Bedraggled, Desperate, Down-trodden Writer’s Soul

Critique groups can be a great place to receive encouragement and support from fellow bedraggled, desperate, down-trodden writers. Finding your tribe for the first time can be an enormously valuable, uplifting experience. Cultivating them as friends and colleagues can reap benefits down the road as group members make some sales and advance their careers.

However, except for an infinitesimal, lightning-struck handful of the Anointed, a writing career can be best described as The Long Slog, and not everyone handles the daily reality of that with equal aplomb. Like a romantic relationship gone bad, your formerly brilliant group can devolve into a great seething swamp of bedraggled, down-trodden desperation—and suck you down with it. Jealously, resentment, and animosity can emerge in critiques, sometimes so subtly and unexpectedly that you don’t see it at first. Critiques should be honest, but also respectful and tactful. They should critique the work, not the writer. Group meetings should be a safe place for the exchange of ideas, supportive and constructive. You get enough emotional abuse from the rejection process without putting up with poison in a group of colleagues.

Balancing the Balance

One of the keys to a good critique group is that everyone should be at comparable levels of skill/career. However, that doesn’t mean you all have the same skill sets. In one of my current critique groups (I’m actually a member of two groups), two members are copyediting/language clarity vipers, another a gunslinging history expert, another with a fight choreographer’s eyes for the movement of a scene, and another with a firm grasp of a scene’s emotional landscape. This is the nature of an awesome critique group. (This group was a tremendous help in reviewing a rough early draft of Spirit of the Ronin.) Balance, Grasshopper.

However, while a broad array of skill sets is valuable, a broad disparity in skill level is not. When a group is newly formed or a new member comes in, balance can be thrown off. The give and take, the flow of feedback, needs to be roughly equal.

It can be extremely frustrating for a writer with more advanced skills and experience to critique the work of less experienced one, because she could, if she chose, pour hours of feedback into a short story where she can see the innumerable grammatical errors, punctuation problems, scene construction problems, clichés, incomprehensible plotting, false starts—the entire host of regrettable, understandable, and yet rankling newbie mistakes laid out before her like the vastness of the sea. Soon realizing this, she will wonder why, when she has insufficient time to write for herself, she’s spending so much time critiquing someone whose skills are still in the early stages. And the kind of critique that she needs—theme, rhythm, structure, nuance—is often beyond the newbie writer’s critique capabilities.

The flip-side of this for the newer writer is that the advanced writer is giving feedback that he doesn’t know how to use. He gets a manuscript back that looks dipped in the blood of a thousand red pens. And his spirit is crushed.

Building Skills Together

Another argument for joining a group of roughly similar level is that critiquing builds writing skills. It’s basic pedagogy in teaching English composition, and it’s a mainstay of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, of which I am an alumnus. Critique groups can expose your own unique writerly tics—over-description, overuse of “that” or “-ly” adverbs, underuse of plot logic—and help you fix them. Finding problems in the manuscripts of others teaches you how to find them in yours.

No one can critique to a higher level than their own set of skills. Some of the feedback from less advanced writers will be useful—all reader response is useful in some way—but in the end, the more advanced writer will be getting far less in the exchange, and the newer writer may get her manuscript bled upon with a red pen in ways that are unhelpful.

A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats

If you look deep enough, the literary world is filled with critique groups, pockets of famous writers who critique each other. George R.R. Martin, for example, is part of a long-time writers’ group that has been together for many years, and all of them are accomplished novelists. Such pockets exist everywhere, at all levels. If a group works well and remains together over years and decades, there are tremendous opportunities for members to help one another along this most difficult of creative paths. Promoting each other’s books, sharing industry information like anthology calls for submission, and “so-and-so talked to this editor who said…”

You likely won’t be able to join one of those pockets, but you just might become part of your own illustrious literary pocket.

Groups stay together because there is something about them that works for each member. Friendship, feedback, helping spackle over plot holes, giving triage to characters dying of two-dimensionality, and having some folks to thank on the Acknowledgements page of your bestselling novel. Those are the benefits.

Again, reflect on your needs and goals from a critique group and evaluate whether your group is meeting your needs. If you don’t feel like these are anywhere in sight, it might be time to move on. Or form a new group on your own.

About the Author: Travis Heermann

Heermann-6Spirit_cover_smallTravis Heermann’s latest novel Spirit of the Ronin, was published in June, 2015.

Freelance writer, novelist, award-winning screenwriter, editor, poker player, poet, biker, roustabout, he is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and the author of Death Wind, The Ronin Trilogy, The Wild Boys, and Rogues of the Black Fury, plus short fiction pieces in anthologies and magazines such as Perihelion SF, Fiction River, Historical Lovecraft, and Cemetery Dance’s Shivers VII. As a freelance writer, he has produced a metric ton of role-playing game work both in print and online, including content for the Firefly Roleplaying Game, Legend of Five Rings, d20 System, and EVE Online.

He lives in New Zealand with a couple of lovely ladies and a burning desire to claim Hobbiton as his own.

You can find him on…

Twitter
Facebook
Wattpad
Goodreads
Blog
Website

Mining the Pain

Pain is a part of life. Suffering is the human condition. It rains down on us and we wallow in it. It eats at our guts and we keep feeding it until there’s nothing left but a shell.

If there is anything that every single member of the human race holds in common, it is one thing.

Love.

All of us have loved. Most of us have lost. Lovers, children, parents, friends, pets. Betrayals, unravelings, deaths, or simply unrequited yearnings. All love comes together, and then it must, inevitably, come apart. Someone said that all love stories ultimately end in tragedy.

Rather than philosophize all the live-long day, I should point out that this is going somewhere.

Artists are uniquely suited among us to use that pain to illuminate the human condition. Music and poetry and prose comes along at just the right moment, lances that boil of loss that’s festering in one’s soul and lets healing begin.

On the way to the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2009, I was driving through the forests of upstate New York toward New Hampshire, with a background noise of hurt emanating from how a woman I really loved was breaking my heart. And then some song I had picked up on a free Starbucks iTunes card cycled through my iPod for the first time and blasted a hole in my heart ten-miles wide, splattering bits of my soul all over the inside of the car. The song was “Sometime around Midnight” by Airborne Toxic Event, and it evoked a tidal wave of sad, sick, helpless desperation that I swam in for the next several hours. I listened to it over and over, memorizing every word. That song, in that moment, was about me.

So I arrived at Odyssey, started getting to know my amazing classmates and teacher, and settled in. The first week brought in the award-winning horror writer Jack Ketchum as a guest instructor. During his lecture, he said something I will never forget:

“In your writing, examine love always, and binding.”

And then Ketchum went on to explain that stories are almost always about love coming together, coming apart, or strengthening, renewing, reaffirming the bonds between characters. There are, of course, exceptions, but anytime you’re dealing with human beings in conflict, the crux of the story is almost always one of love’s multitude of forms. Even war stories are often the about the camaraderie among soldiers.

His lecture crystallized for me what I had been writing about for years. And throughout the rest of the workshop, I applied this newfound insight in every story I wrote.

And all that pain I had experienced in the car, I poured into the stories. They were raw, dripping with emotion. But they were real.

Today, in the midst of writing this, I was procrastinating over on Facebook, and another quote popped up on a friend’s feed:

“Great writing is not perfect; it’s real. It bleeds and leaves a trace.” – Jordan Rosenfeld, A Writer’s Guide to Persistence

The writing I produced in the midst of that pain back then is still some of my favorite, because it all came straight from the depths. It was far from perfect, but it certainly left a mark on me.

Writers of all stripes are uniquely suited to distill our pain into art. But what makes it “art,” rather than commonplace catharsis? Does anybody really want to read your therapy? Unlikely. It’s not the fact that you’ve had the courage (or neediness?) to put your pain on the page and show it to people. It needs to offer the reader something of value: a unique insight or perspective. What do you want the give the reader as they walk away?

Growth is a good place to start. People lose patience quickly with those who wallow in their pain for interminable periods and never learn from it, never get past it, or repeat the same mistakes over and over, and so will readers. What did you learn from your pain? Will your characters learn it too? What does your story have to say about love and binding? This discussion is leading us straight into the idea of “theme.”

You may not know what your story is about until you type THE END, but you should be able to look at it with an objective eye and identify its theme. The hard part here is being able to look past whatever emotions you mined to build the story to look at it objectively. All that raw emotion feels absolutely, 100% true and real to you, but not necessarily to the reader. You still must have the ability to lead them into it.

Just like nothing should get in the way of love, the writer should allow nothing to get in the way of writing about it, especially not worries about who will read it. You may have loved and lost, but maybe you can get a good story or two out of the experience.

About the Author: Travis Heermann

Heermann-6Spirit_cover_smallTravis Heermann’s latest novel Spirit of the Ronin, was published in June, 2015.

Freelance writer, novelist, award-winning screenwriter, editor, poker player, poet, biker, roustabout, he is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and the author of Death Wind, The Ronin Trilogy, The Wild Boys, and Rogues of the Black Fury, plus short fiction pieces in anthologies and magazines such as Perihelion SF, Fiction River, Historical Lovecraft, and Cemetery Dance’s Shivers VII. As a freelance writer, he has produced a metric ton of role-playing game work both in print and online, including content for the Firefly Roleplaying Game, Legend of Five Rings, d20 System, and EVE Online.

In August, 2015, he’s moving to New Zealand with a couple of lovely ladies and a burning desire to claim Hobbiton as his own.

You can find him on…

Twitter
Facebook
Wattpad
Goodreads
Blog
Website

Convention Selling Tips

Let me start off with the caveat that I am not an expert merchandiser. Everything I’m going to talk about below comes from a few years of hand-selling my books at conventions. I know people who can do this immensely better than I can. I’ve seen them selling scores of books like veritable sales machines. For me, however… well, one can only push a natural introvert so far.

Nevertheless, my aim here is to offer a few basic building blocks for those who are just starting out. Hopefully these tips will let you meet people and sell books at conventions without coming across Joe Obnoxio, Desperate N00B.

I’ve been selling books actively at conventions for about the last six years, starting with the release of Heart of the Ronin in 2009. Since then, three more novels have come out from various publishers. I’ve also landed short stories in a number of anthologies, which I also I sell at tables and in booths in the exhibitor halls. I’ve sold at cons of every size, from a scant couple hundred to massive mega-cons like Dragon Con and Denver Comic Con. The point is not to give you a writing resume, but to say that hand-selling at conventions gets easier not only with experience, but also with more titles on your table, offering opportunities to appeal to different tastes.

Get on programming. The most efficient way to reach the greatest number of potential readers is to participate in programming. Target some conventions that you plan to attend. Their websites always have contact information for the programming organizer(s). Unless the convention is DragonCon or GenCon, which are both overwhelmed by programming requests, they are actively looking for professionals to sit on panels.

Did you see that keyword I slipped in there? Professionals. Behaving as a professional at all times goes a long way. Even if you don’t feel like one with only one novel or a couple of short stories, you can behave like one. Fake it till you make it. For more information on this, check out Million Dollar Professionalism for Writers, by Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta.

When you’re on the panel:

  • Be prepared.
  • Be erudite.
  • Be engaging.
  • Talk more about the other authors’ books. Writers who talk incessantly about their own stuff risk coming across as an egotistical jackass.

If you pull this off, the audience will recognize it, and some of them will seek you out after the panel to ask questions, which is the perfect time to tell them you have a booth/table where you’re selling your books.

Cooperate with other authors. Buying booths or tables at the massive conventions like DragonCon is cost-prohibitive, where costs for a booth run into the thousands of dollars. When you split those costs with fellow authors, however, the fees become much more reasonable.

The cost of a $3,000 booth split ten ways is a bargain when you consider that 80,000 fans with red-hot money in their pockets will filter past over the course of a four-day weekend.

So round up some of your author friends, form some sort of collective, and take a convention by storm.

Engage the potential readers one at a time. So when you have a potential new reader in front of you, what is an effective way to sell books? It is not to shove the book in her hand and say, “Buy this.”

  • Talk about the reader first. Engage them in conversation about the convention. Is she enjoying herself? The longer you talk to someone, the more likely he/she is to walk away with one of your books.
  • Ask if he/she is a reader. If it’s obvious she is, then skip this and ask what kind of books she likes. Nearly always, the response is so general that it’s not useful. “Science fiction and fantasy.” Your job then is to help her narrow it down. Urban fantasy? Military SF? Literary? Who has she been reading? What are her favorites?
  • The aim here is to steer her toward a book of yours that is aligned with her tastes. She’ll appreciate your thoughtfulness. And if there’s no chance of connection at all—she reads romance and you write horror—you’ll both know sooner, and she can go on her way, further appreciating that you didn’t waste her time.
  • In advance, create a one- or two-sentence sales pitch for each of your books, something that summarizes it in a nutshell. Make it as snappy as possible. When you have identified which of your books the potential reader might enjoy, give her your sales pitch.
  • If you’re selling in a booth with other authors, this could be also a chance to talk up your companions’ books. Maybe you lost a sale for yourself, but your friend will certainly appreciate it.

If you really want to build your sales skills, read a book or two on the subject of how to steer people into giving you their money. There is a tried and true structure to it, honed over decades of snake oil salesmen.

Once you’ve learned the method, the next thing you need is practice. Get out there and do it. Sometimes you’ll succeed and both the reader and you will walk away with that rosy glow of success. Often they will walk away, and your only choice is to wait for the next one to come along. Take what you learned from previous miss, adjust, and then do it all over again.

Don’t be a dick. Be gracious. Be friendly. Be humble. Just listen to the horror stories about how William Shatner or Harlan Ellison behaved on a bad day toward a fan for lessons in what not to do. If you’re reading this, you probably have not yet reached the literary stature of Harlan Ellison, so you cannot afford many social faux pas. A single, disgruntled fan in the age of the internet can truly hurt a budding career.

Final thoughts. The thing to remember is that competitiveness in this business is the chief signpost on the road to Crazy Land. You’ll make yourself miserable if you worry about how much you’re selling/not selling, comparing yourself to others. There are too many other opportunities for writers to make themselves miserable without jumping onto this one.

It is highly unlikely that you will sell enough books at a convention to cover your costs, so don’t get too caught up in that. Aside from the mental health aspect of meeting/hanging out with fellow writers, the main benefit is that you’ve made some personal connections with new readers, who are then more likely to become the kind of fans who will sustain your career in the long-term. They’ll come back next year to see if your next book is out.

And when you see the joy in their faces that they have, in fact, found this cool author they met last year, that expression is worth the cost of any convention to a writer’s soul.

About the Author: Travis Heermann

Heermann-6
Spirit_cover_small
Travis Heermann’s novel Spirit of the Ronin, will be published in June, 2015.

Freelance writer, novelist, award-winning screenwriter, editor, poker player, poet, biker, roustabout, he is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and the author of Death Wind, The Ronin Trilogy, The Wild Boys, and Rogues of the Black Fury, plus short fiction pieces in anthologies and magazines such as Perihelion SF, Fiction River, Historical Lovecraft, and Cemetery Dance’s Shivers VII. As a freelance writer, he has produced a metric ton of role-playing game work both in print and online, including the Firefly Roleplaying Game, Legend of Five Rings, d20 System, and the science fiction MMORPG, EVE Online.

In 2015, he’s moving to New Zealand with a couple of lovely ladies and a burning desire to claim Hobbiton as his own.

You can find him on…

Twitter
Facebook
Wattpad
Goodreads
Blog
Website

A Killer Combo for Writers – Dropbox + Scrivener

A hard-drive crash. A single corrupted file. An inopportune Bluescreen of Death. Your rickety old 386 DOS-machine coughs up semi-colons and expires in mid-sentence.

Perhaps it happens after several hours of writing, wherein you have finally squeezed gold—GOLD dammit!—from your fingertips. The chapter you’ve been working on was near perfect. You are the next NYT bestseller, the next National Book Award winner.

Perhaps your computer crashes in the middle of your brilliant opus.

Perhaps you retire for the day, unaware that horror has spawned, try to open up your project the next day and bask in the glow of its brilliance, and find … you don’t find it at all. It’s gone, gone, GONE!

This is, of course, the Writer’s Worst Nightmare, right up there with that one where they call your name to the podium to accept your Hugo/Nebula/Booker Prize/Oscar and you realize you’ve forgotten to put on clothes.

I’m here to offer you a way to make that nightmare go away forever. I use a couple of tools that are useful in and of themselves, but together, form an ironclad system for saving your work, susceptible only to nuclear apocalypse or alien invasion.

Dropbox—Dropbox is a service that lets you save all your documents in a regular-looking folder on your computer. The Dropbox folder acts like every other folder on your computer, except that all those files sync to all the devices linked to your account, computers, phones, tablets, etc. You can access your work from anywhere.

Your work is also saved on the Dropbox website, and here’s one its most valuable features: from the Dropbox website, you can access previous versions of your files. In effect, it saves your work at every step along the way.

Basic Dropbox is a free service, up to 2 GB. This is plenty of space for basic writer stuff, and I used this alone for several years until I finally outgrew it. For $9.99/month, you get 1 TB of storage space.

Scrivener—If you’ve been around writerly circles much, you’ve probably heard of Scrivener. Maybe you’re using it already. Developed by Literature and Latte, Scrivener is a writing package that focuses on the creative and organizational aspects of writing. It works on a different philosophy than MS Word, so each has its strengths and weaknesses. I still use both, but for different things. Scrivener, however, is what I use for creative writing. It’s so versatile that I’m still learning all the features, but here’s the part that’s relevant to this discussion.

Scrivener basically saves your work by the keystroke.

By the keystroke.

Dropbox + Scrivener = Nightmare-free Writer Dreams—Perhaps you’re starting to see the usefulness here when these two beauties are synergized (that’s my 50-cent word for the day). Put your Scrivener project files into Dropbox, and your work will be constantly saved by the keystroke, and automatically backed up to the Dropbox cloud in real time. This work also syncs whatever devices you connect, simultaneously.

But what if your file gets corrupted?

With Dropbox saving multiple versions of your files, you can restore previous versions, which minimizes the damage file corruption can cause.

If you’re averse to Scrivener, even saving your Word files in Dropbox helps minimize the damage caused by corrupted files. You can customize how often Word autosaves in the Options menus.

This combination once saved me about a week of work on a novel, which in other circumstances would have been lost. I was able to go to previous versions of the files in Dropbox and recover the version where three chapters had not been mysteriously eaten.

About the Author: Travis Heermann

Heermann-6
Travis Heermann’s novel Spirit of the Ronin, will be published in June, 2015.

Freelance writer, novelist, award-winning screenwriter, editor, poker player, poet, biker, roustabout, he is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and the author of Death Wind, The Ronin Trilogy, The Wild Boys, and Rogues of the Black Fury, plus short fiction pieces in anthologies and magazines such as Perihelion SFFiction River, Historical Lovecraft, and Cemetery Dance’s Shivers VII. As a freelance writer, he has produced a metric ton of role-playing game work both in print and online, including the Firefly Roleplaying Game, Legend of Five Rings, d20 System, and the science fiction MMORPG, EVE Online.

In 2015, he’s moving to New Zealand with a couple of lovely ladies and a burning desire to claim Hobbiton as his own.

You can find him on…

Twitter
Facebook
Wattpad
Goodreads
Blog
Website