Jeff Haws

Independent author

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5 Lessons from Writing Half a Book

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Lessons

I went into this book with the assumption that it’ll end up being between 80,000 and 100,000 words, which is pretty standard for a novel. In fact, 80,000-90,000 is even more in the sweet spot. Of course, I have no idea if things will work out like I planned, but it’s a pretty decent bet that’ll be my range.

As such, I’m halfway-ish there. On Monday night, I hit 40,000 words on my 25th day of writing, then 50,000 on the 28th day. Looking at what I’ve written and thinking about what’s left, I could see this being about a halfway point. But the characters could surprise the hell out of me and decide to do something I’m totally not anticipating. And, while that’d be kind of fun, I might have to take one of them aside and have a little conversation if they try to lead me too far astray at this point.

This is easily the furthest into a story I’ve ever been, and I’ve learned a lot during the process — particularly since I went into this not knowing hardly a damn thing. Here’s the 5 biggest lessons I’ve gotten so far: [Read more…] about 5 Lessons from Writing Half a Book

Stories about Stories — Even Losing Ones

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Losing

Last week, Creative Loafing published the winning stories from its fiction contest. I’d encourage you to go read them. The three winners did an excellent job, and I can definitely learn from what they did with the theme, which was “Space.” Each had a different approach, but I think they were all effective.

Of course, I was hoping I might be included in the issue. I submitted my own story to the contest back in November. Now, I wasn’t expecting in the slightest to win. I mean, that was the first piece of fiction I’d written in about 17 years, so it would have been a pretty big shock to win a damn thing for it. And, honestly, I don’t think winning one of these sorts of contests is even a coherent goal. All you know is, there are three judges who you don’t know, and you don’t know what their criteria are. All you can do is meet the guidelines, submit on time, and see what happens. [Read more…] about Stories about Stories — Even Losing Ones

The Worst Thing You Could Say About My Story

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Thumb

I’m used to getting bad reviews and hate mail. Close to 20 years in journalism will do that for you. It won’t make you rich, but it’ll certainly help harden you to criticism of your writing. I’ve had my byline published thousands of times, above stories both long and short, dull and exciting, fact and opinion. I’ve written stories I was very proud of (See my Writing section for a few examples), and ones I never wanted to see again after hitting the “Send” button. And, regardless of how I felt about them, there was always a chance I’d receive email or comment from a reader, telling me why whatever I wrote was garbage, and I should crawl into a hole and die. [Read more…] about The Worst Thing You Could Say About My Story

And So the Writing Begins …

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Start

Writing begins on my first book this week, and I’m excited about getting it going. This is sort of Stage 3 of the process of getting this thing done.

Stage 1 was just reading. That’s it. Admittedly, I hadn’t read much of any fiction in several years, concentrating my energy largely on news writing since, well, that’s what I was writing. I felt like I needed to keep reading different writers in that style, continuing to pick up style notes, new ideas and influences that could help me improve. That’s what you do, right? But, about six months ago, I decided this was a shift in focus I wanted to make, from non-fiction to fiction. And I’ve got a good friend, Stan Mitchell — a terrific and successful author already — who encouraged me to make it, probably because he thinks I’m better at this writing thing than I am. Whether I’ll be any damn good at fiction is yet to be seen. [Read more…] about And So the Writing Begins …

The Book I’m Writing is Not Mine

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Writing

This recent blog post from Mark Malatesta at Literary-agents.com was pretty striking for me to think about, the notion that the book I’m writing, this one I’m putting all this time and effort and energy into eventually producing for people to insult me over, isn’t really mine at all. It actually belongs to you, the reader. Maybe these blog posts do too. Or is that taking this whole idea a bit too far? Let’s look at this for a second.

With the book, I am, believe it or not, hoping to actually sell a few copies. It’s true. As such, once I pour out my blood and sweat for months, then do it again for a second draft, then let people read it and tell me how much it sucks, then finish a final draft, then answer a million questions about how to go about publishing, perhaps querying agents/publishers, the title, cover design, genre categorization, printing, price, and where I last saw my phone (pretty sure it was on the side table by the bed … hmmmmm), I’ll set out to sell the book to people. People who read. People who can’t read will be of little use to me, but I wish them well in their journey of life. [Read more…] about The Book I’m Writing is Not Mine