Dialogue Tags

"You're really want to read this Amazing Post About Dialogue Tags," he said.  "It is thoroughly entertaining."

"You said the same thing about paragliding into a swamp bog," she replied.  "Why should I listen to you?"

"Because I speak so prettily," he laughed lovingly, with the tone of one walking on air.

Read more about Dialogue Tags for Squirt Guns

Dialogue Tags for Squirt Guns

It's the sharp voice at the start of the chapter.  It's the old man saying to go west, young man - west.  It's the young woman telling off that scumbag loser who wants to go on a date.  Yes: it's dialogue.

But dialogue can't stand alone.  It requires attribution, so we know who's speaking.  And this is where dialogue tags come in: the "he said/she said" of your story.  Here are some quick tips you need to follow in order to avoid voices that sharply cut with the jagged feel of rusty nails, old men who snort out directions, and young women who shriek out rebuttals...

Organizing 1-2-Writing

It's the ultimate nightmare: Organizing One's Own Website.  Yes, terrifying.  Like trying to sort piles of lizards into matching manila folders.  Only to find that the iguanas not only crawl around between the folders after you've sorted them, but that they change colors, so you have no idea how to color code them.  Yes, it's true: I lose sleep over this.

Tabs, Layouts, and Other Organizational Crud

Have I ever mentioned that I hate paperwork?  In my world, the only rightful place for paper is lounging around in piles across my desk, iguana-like.  Seriously - who needs a paperweight when you have a black hole of paper?  And yet my website is supposed to be organized and user-friendly...So I spent a couple hours last night trying to make it just that.  And it's hard.  Forget the two hours I spent trying to match my homepage color scheme to Blogger (btw: I hate the fact that it now looks better than it ever did before.  Darn you, Google, doing everything better, prettier, and easier than I can...)

Instant Freewriting Prompt

In the Member's Area today: find Immediate Inspiration through The Power of Lists.  Or, if you'd like a more in-depth discussion of getting in the Prompt-Formulation Zone, see our Writing Prompts Blog for Listing Your Way to a Good Prompt.

"Pulse" - A Poem of the Beat of the Soul

Posted today in the Member's Area and on Facebook

"Pulse"


It's said
sometimes
that the whole of a universe
exists
within.


It emerges,
positive and negative, energy and matter,
from this nothing
only known as...Read More in the Member's Area

Wake Your Fictional Characters!

How do you tell your characters to wake up?  When your fiction doesn't feel caffeinated enough, use this simple trick: annoy your characters until they fight back.  Go to our Member's Area to see this technique in action with Waking Up Dagny.

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1-2-Writing is building up to be Knowledge Central for Creative Writing Workshops.

Although much of the site is under construction, please check out the cool stuff that's already up-and-running:

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Hiring the Young to Save the Old

I'm thirty years old.  It finally sunk in about a month before my birthday - I'm getting old.  Or at least I'm not getting any younger.  But the entire world around me seems to lose ten years every time I look around.  Kids half my age are getting thousands of hits on YouTube videos, artists who don't remember the fall of the Berlin Wall are old enough that we can see their work beginning to mature.  And my goal is to teach people to use a seven-thousand-year-old communication technology: writing.It's a scary world, constantly changing.  And I simply can't type creative writing articles fast enough to keep up - not if I'm going to go to school full time, build a website, and market said website to all these kids who don't need a search engine in order to find writing workshop.  So I'm taking a new route: I'm hiring students to make things happen.

I feel strange, to a degree, posting this where potential job seekers might find it.  What does this say, after all?  That I'm so desperate for help that I'll write about my struggles online?  Not exactly.  It's more of an admission of the obvious - I am only one man.  I'm a single, solitary creative writer.  And I don't have ten or twenty years to wait before I "make a name" for myself just to "break even" financially.  And it's pretty clear that "making a name" will involve some kind of semi-personal contact with thousands of people.  And by semi-personal, I mean that they'll read my blog posts, they'll watch some of the videos I plan to post, or they'll enjoy some of the feedback I've written for stories they'll submit to my workshop.  But in this world, people are overwhelmed with material to read.  Somehow, as I writer, I have to convince all they people swimming through the deluge of the internet firehouse that my little drop of water is worth a second, third, or tenth look.

Hence, the need for help.  The need for younger help, help from students who grew up with this new world we've entered.  Yes, I have a new-found appreciation for Facebook - that still doesn't make me very savvy.  I'm still struggling to erect my secondary pages.  And Twitter?  I still haven't figured out how to post a Twitter Feed on my site.  I'm sure it's easy - I just haven't made it that far.

 

It's not necessarily the case that a college student would understand these particular tricks - it's more that the younger minds will better know how to look.  They'll be quicker.  They might not need to wade through quite as many pages of Google Search Results before finding the answer to the question.

 

And how do I know this will work?  Simple - it's from the way I've seen myself grow older even before I aged.  Even in college, I was ignoring the internet explosion.  Wikipedia didn't quite exist, and neither did Facebook.  Cell phones, to me, were fad, the kind of thing you carried around if you were incompetent enough to let your car break down.  Never mind that my only phone, now, is a cell phone - and I won't mention the time I hit a deer at two a.m. on an empty stretch of road.  I took on the trappings of technology with the grudging air of "I still know how to do this the old fashioned way."  Handwriting a paper, researching books at the library, laying out stacks of index cards with notes - yes, I learned how to organize paperwork in the days before laptops were cheap enough to buy.

Now, not everyone my age was like this in college, but a good number were.  A good number still are.  And then I look at the grad students who are five or ten years older than me, the ones who cannot type fast enough to outrun their own handwriting.  And then there are the faculty I've met who forward e-mails to someone else to have them forwarded to the students.  But I don't mind that much - it's my classmates who constantly forget to add people to e-mail lists who worry me, the folks my age who use "reply-all" as the only means of sending out a mass e-mail.  The faculty members, at least, recognize that they don't have time to build the lists themselves.

The problem now isn't that "the younger ones don't know how to do things the way we did them."  The problem, actually, is that we're doing things now that were simply never possible back "the way we did them."  Posting a video for thousands to watch?  Back in the day, you had to be an independent filmmaker of some means to make that happen.  Either that, or you worked for a news network, and they distributed your footage for you.  Or what about Holiday Greetings for all two hundred of your friends?  Even today I have a secret dread of Christmas cards and envelopes.  I've never sent out more than twelve in a single year - I am still racked with guilt for all the New Year's Greetings I never expressed.  And now?  Switch to BCC in your Reply All, and you've sent out more sets of good wishes in three minutes than you have in the entire rest of your life.

But this brings us around to the irony of my current project.  Back in the day - I mean back before the telephone - people used to write letters.  I mean letters.  The kind of letters that said "you've been wondering for the past month whether or not I died in that flu epidemic, and now you're going to wait and hope I reply again to prove that I still haven't died in the epidemic."  We don't have those now - at least, not often.  I have a couple hundred friends on Facebook - nearly all of them people I've personally known.  Already, in this post, I've probably written more than I've written to all of them in the past month combined.  Why express the deep flames of love when you can send a Flickr at any moment?

And yet I'm here to teach writing.  My goal is to teach others to express themselves with words in a world dominated by sound and images.  My aim is to encourage thoughtful composition in the Buzzed-Up universe of Twitter.  Aren't these goals in conflict?  This idea of using the technology of now to teach a skill of "back then"?

I don't think so.  As a writer, I believe there is a special quality in writing which the internet may never supplant.  Poems and novels - these collections of carefully-assembled words - still convey a level of meaning that can't be directed into a Flash video.  It's the compression here that matters, the presentation of thoughts so refined - so basic - that words alone are enough to convey them.  And the freedom of these words is incomparable.  Through written stories, a single individual can express lifetimes of experience without the conflict of other souls struggled for control of the camera.

But it is still hard, teaching this.  Writing might be an ancient art, but it becomes a new creation with each generation.  And with the internet as it is, we may one day need to fight to reveal just how rewarding a good story can be - not some snippets of IM conversation, but a story.  And when that day comes, we'll want to have as many authors ready as we can find.

So, in the meantime, I'll hire the folks who are most ready to live in both worlds, carrying the ancient torch of writing into the new land of electronic expression: the young.

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Creative Writing Blogs Rearranged

One of the toughest parts about building a website is the changing nature of the internet.  And by changing, I mean the kind of progressive churning seen only in boiling water and the subatomic fabric of spacetime.  Hence, a new domain for my creative writing blogs.

Originally, I held to a very strict ideal - I wanted all my blogs to be hosted on my own personal site, www.12writingworkshopsonline.com.  Now, the name is long, I'll admit - it's very search-engine friendly, though.  And there's a certain permanence to paying annual rates for an internet domain which has functional site scripts and free tech support.

 

So when I first took on the challenge of blogging my way to fame (still waiting for fame...), I insisted that every blog live on my own site.  First, I tried WordPress, but it never worked quite right for me.  Blogger seemed just too ordinary.  I thought a Blogger blog would doom me to a lifetime of free web service, writing blogs that would languish unnoticed on a page as flimsy and ignoble as some GeoCities mock-up (do you remember GeoCities?  So 2009...literally.)

Actually, GeoCities pages were not at all ignoble - they started the internet revolution which makes my own site possible.  The idea of free, unlimited bandwidth for websites is still incredibly new.  We take it for granted now, but that's only because technology changes so quickly that we've adjusted our own sense of time to compensate.  Ten years ago, Yahoo was trying to charge money for "premium" services to allow GeoCities residents to get more than 4 GB of bandwidth.  And now?  GeoCities is gone.

Which leaves us with a host of new online resources, each one tailored to do something that GeoCities never could: provide your domain of choice.  I picked up my first real website in Afghanistan - www.ryanedel.net.  It was a nice site to work on, but Yahoo didn't offer much in the way of script support, so the site couldn't expand.  It had no feedback forms, no online course software, no hope of installing a blog platform or, better still, a Member's Forum (and believe me, I tried).  This led to www.12writingworkshopsonline.com - my specially-chosen Search Engine Optimized creative writing domain.

 

And then the gods truly smiled upon the project: I discovered FTP publishing on Blogger.  Not only could I type my blogs in this easy, (relatively) hassle-free format, but I could post them on my own domain, reaping the benefits of SEO.

Little did I know how little I knew.  It turns out that blogging with Blogger means you don't have to really worry about SEO - your blog posts go straight to Google anyway, which gives you immediate search ranking.  It might not be great search ranking, but it is immediate.  Second, SEO can't save you unless other sites link to your own.  And this is tricky.  If you want a high ranking in the search engines, you need a good page rank.  And to get that, you need to convince the sites with a real page rank to recognize your piddly start-up.  And if your site isn't big enough for recognition, then your page rank won't go up much, and the vicious cycle of diminishing returns begins to gnaw on your soul.

Blogger, to a certain degree, offers a touch of security when your site is caught in the limbo between "established but not yet established."  It ensures Google recognition, which is something you can't get from WordPress alone.  And I've noticed that my Blogger blogs really do appear in search engines - they usually outperform my static pages (except for my index page - which is of course linked to all my Blogger posts).

Which means that my loyalty to Blogger - and search engine recognition - now trumps my own brand-name loyalty.  I've sold out my SEO-friendly domain in favor of something memorable and Blogger-based: www.12writing.com.

Is it the right approach?  I don't know yet.  I'm still working on so many aspects of the site that it's impossible to tell what will finally take off.  But this much I do know - the standard assumptions are always changing.  SEO, two years ago, was all the rage.  And it's still important, yes, but are keywords enough to overcome Twitter and Facebook?  What good is a wonderful video if it's not linked to YouTube?

That's right - everything changed again.  All those "dumb little services" I ignored have now become the social centers of the internet world.  Through Facebook, I've rediscovered friends I haven't seen in years.  With YouTube, I'm learning so much more about the internet than I could from just reading and guessing.  It isn't so much that the internet is changing, or even just that it's becoming more complicated - it's become better.  It's growing more sophisticated.  It really is crawling its way into our lives at every level.  And if not for this shameless desire to promote myself, I would have never realized.  I would have been left in the dust of my own "that's just a gimmick" attitude.

 

Oh well - I'm learning.  And so, with my prior thoughts of Technological Dominion of the Literary World stalled by my own lack of internet savvy, I depart from this post a humbled and recalcitrant man...

Ryan

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March 7, 2010 - Expanding the Site and the Member's Area

It's been too long in coming, but the latest Newsletter is finally here!  Read about the new look of the site, the Introduction to Fiction and Poetry Blog, and our Expanding Member's Area.  And, of course, we have new articles on Setting, Voice, and the Narrative Poem.  Click to Read More...

Happy Writing!
Ryan

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Listing Your Way to a Good Writing Prompt

Writing Prompt: Lists (20 minutes)

This exercise provides a way to find out what it is you really need to write about, the subjects and themes that are so important to you that you'd don't even realize their effect on your life.  This exercise is particularly useful for writing memoir, and it can also be adapted for poetry...


Step 1 - Choose Your Subject

To start, first choose a place, a subject, or an event.  Generally, you want to find something which you are intimately familiar with - your childhood bedroom, for example, or a memorable trip you've taken.  I recommend taking the first such idea that comes to mind, regardless of how emotional or dull it might seem - you'll find there's probably a reason it's the first thing you thought of.

Step 2 - Write Your List

Next, begin writing a list of nouns associate with this place, subject, or event.  Write continuously - don't pause to think about the nouns, just write them one-after-the-other.  You might end up repeating words, and that's perfectly all right - the goal is to keep the pen to the page.  For example, I might write about the inside of my refrigerator (it just came to mind):

ketchup
mustard
bouillon
soy milk
orange juice
sweet potatoes
mold
oranges
mold
mold
oranges
ham
eggs
pancake mix

It seems like a simple list, possibly a little too revealing (Mold shows up three times?  Why am I so obsessed with mold?  I don't see it in my fridge that often...)  Yet this list carries interesting meanings for me.  Normally, I don't have ketchup - I never buy ketchup.  But I have some that a friend gave me when he moved to another city, and my girlfriend loves ketchup.  I could write a story about how she also likes Thai fish sauce, and now I have a bottle of the stuff in my apartment.  Then we have the sweet potatoes, my favorite food.  It's sad when I have to throw them out because of mold.  Especially since I have to cook for myself to save money.  And saving money is part of my larger plan to become a writer - which would take me to larger topics like how I relate with my family, how I chose my apartment, and other areas of my life I wouldn't post online.  Then we come to the ham, eggs, and pancake mix.  No, there's no pancake mix in my fridge - and no eggs, either.  But breakfast is my favorite meal (particularly pancakes), and my mom simply refuses too cook messy food on the stove in the morning.  So no pancakes, and I spent much of my childhood eating eggs from the microwave - again, this leads to interesting ideas for further writing.

Step 3 - Write Like the Wind

The key to the exercise is to write quickly.  Jot down as many nouns as possible over the course of five minutes or so.  And then, once you have a good list (twenty nouns, more or less - sometimes I go with ten, other times I don't hear the muse until I hit fifty), set a timer for ten minutes.  You can go longer, if you like, but use the timer - it pushes you to write faster.

Now the fun part - writing the thoughts that come from your list.  Timer set, write what you're thinking.  Write whatever comes to mind.  Go as fast as you can, never raising the pen from the page (or never pausing your typing).  Don't worry about typos or grammar - these things can be fixed later.  The goal is just to get the thoughts out on the page, wherever they take you.  It may feel chaotic at first, but you'll find that a hidden order emerges as you write.

Step 4 - Repeat

The beauty of this exercise is that you can do it anywhere, anytime, without a specific prompt to start with.  Even if you're just waiting in line with a couple minutes, you can jot down the first five words that come to mind and then scribble away from association.  And a nice variation would be to rearrange the words into a poem.  Or, if you're primary aim is poetry, then simply write out lists of rhyming words - you'll be amazed by the associations you find.

Happy Writing!

Ryan

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The Expiration Date for Literature - Like Milk, Books Go Sour

First, a terrible admission: I don't read enough.  It isn't that I dislike literature on principle, it's just that it's very hard for me to find books which hold my attention.  And it's grown worse over time - it might be that I'm easily distracted, or it could just be that I don't have the patience of my younger years.  The Once and Future King, even, when I reread it, simply wasn't as riveting at 29 as it had been when I was 15.  And it's even worse when I go to the bookstore.  I might spend hours in the science fiction section (my genre of choice) and not find a single book that I really want to read, the kind of book where you're eager to invest the ten or twelve hours it might take to go through each page.

No go back a couple decades - or, tougher still, a century - to the days when books were even more wordy than they are today.  Pushing my way through Henry James is like getting a buy-one-get-one-free on root canals.  And Henry James is a great author - The Turn of the Screw is the classic example of a novel that literally thrives on deconstruction and "spook-factor."  I've read the book twice for class, and it fully deserves the literary reputation it's built over the years, just as it's earned the reputation for terrifying boredom.  I think I can safely say I'm not alone in my visceral desire to avoid reading this book.  Yet I also own three copies - again, a result of studying literature.  It's a testament to the quality of the work that professors are still assigning this work as required reading for many, many higher-level literature courses.

Unfortunately, there is a downside to this loyalty many hold toward the canon of classical literature.  Anyone who's read a riveting novel - Harry Potter, for example, or The Silence of the Lambs - and then tried writing a story realizes that the styles of other authors will bleed over into your own.  You can unwittingly find yourself trying to write like J.K. Rowling or Thomas Harris, losing your own unique voice to their mastery of the language.  And this isn't entirely a bad thing - this is actually how we learn to write well.  Just as children learn to speak from hearing the spoken word, we pick up the essential techniques of writing from our reading.

The problem is that many writers end up reading too much of the wrong books.  For me, if I spent all my days reading trashy science fiction, I would eventually write only trashy novels.  And - disturbing as this declaration may be - too much great literature has the potential to pollute your writing with an obsolete style.  If you simply read The Turn of the Screw, you'll know that the book would never sell on the bestseller racks at the grocery story today - it's great literature, sure, but very few in the general public would find it worth the investment.  Yet the literary writers of today - anyone in an MFA program, for example - are reading disproportionate quantities of old-fashioned literature.  To me, it'd like trying to make science fiction movies if the only experience you've had comes from watching Star Trek's Captain Kirk "boldly go where no man has gone before."  Yes, it's crucial viewing if you want to understand the science fiction tradition, but Captain Kirk and Buck Rogers alone wouldn't be inspiration enough if you wanted to produce something as edgy and modern as Battlestar Galactica.

By reading classic literature exclusively - by ignoring the new (and unproven) novels of the past ten-to-twenty years - writers may fail to absorb the changing face of literature.  And let's face it - the novel has changed a lot over the past fifty years.  Direct, clean prose has mostly triumphed over the older, wordier narratives of Dickens and Hawthorne.  It's a reflection of the modern era.  Today's readers, racing to keep up with Facebook, Twitter, and cell phone bills simply don't have the time to slog through fifty pages of text without a clear conflict in sight.  Sure, we can argue that people should make time for "good" literature, but the great books of the past aren't competing with just the pulp racks at the supermarket - they face stiff competition from ten-dollar blockbusters and the instant gratification of YouTube.  Then we have Netflix - why spend twenty-five dollars and a hundred hours of your time to slog through six or seven classical reads when you can take in maybe fifty movies for eight bucks a month?

As modern writers, we have to be careful that we don't condemn our selves to the "classics" pile before we've even published.  Never mind that agents and editors are looking for modern material with an edge - if you want to make a living selling novels, then you'll need to attract an audience that keeps coming back.  You need to target the individuals who are harried by the stress of modern life - you need to attract them with something new enough and entertaining enough to keep them fastened to their seats, eyes glued to Amazon waiting for your next book.

This requires that we keep abreast of not just modern books, but the new language of these books.  I hate reading lines like "in my estimation" and "as a subscriber to the local magazine" in stories written by students and classmates during the past month - phrases like this may not be dead, but they're obsolete. They carry the kind of impact one gets from quoting Shakespeare over the course of a dinner date - wordy, pretentious, overdone.  Trying to attract steady readers with phrases like this is like trying to build a successful car company using Henry Ford's original assembly line - unless you're selling to a crowd that really, really likes the Model T, you'll be struggling to break even.

So as you choose your reading, make sure to throw in good books of the modern era.  Cormac McCarthy's The Road or even Stephenie Meyer's Twilight will reveal the turns-of-phrase and plotting which have held millions of readers in their seats for hours at a time.  Neither book is perfect, I know (many sentences in Twilight read like an ivy shrub - tangled and growing).  At the same time, you'll need to read authors who are not yet well known.  Nascent talents will write the literature of tomorrow, and you'll want to learn from them if you want to keep up - Syne Mitchell's science fiction is a fine example, or Evie Shockley's poetry (both are great writers who are well-known in their own right, but not yet household names).

This involves taking some risks, of course.  You may purchase books with incredible opening chapters which lead nowhere (I hate posting this link, but here's a book I wanted to return after reading it: Old Man's War.  If you want to read the more timeless classics from which John Scalzi pulled his story, check out Starship Troopers or The Forever War.)  You might end up with books you can't finish.  Or you may even pollute your writing with the ills of the modern style: misplaced colloquialisms, blunt-force metaphors, and similes which cause your liver to bleed out into your spleen like a dank moldy sponge.  But that's okay.  Because, armed with knowledge, you'll watch out for these problems in your own writing.

And, of course, because you're a writer, you'll ignore half my article and keep reading the classics anyway - as you most very well should.

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Know Your Audience, Follow Publishing Guidelines

So I found out yesterday that I have to resubmit my MFA thesis with a different set of stories.  Now, before you worry, I have enough workshopped material for three more theses, so it's just a matter of picking a better set of stories.  Actually, I'm glad in a way - the material I submitted before wasn't my favorite.  But the fact that I need to resubmit shows the importance of paying close attention to submission guidelines.

According to common mythology, submission guidelines are more of a roadblock than anything else.  There is a kind of sacred merit for artistic work.  In books, movies, and conversation, we sometimes hear individuals speak of "being true to the art" as opposed to "giving in to fame" or, worse yet, "falling prey to lawyers and editors."

(At least, this is how I remember things growing up.  It's actually been a while since I've heard anyone voice this opinion.  It's possible that the economy has finally beaten the spine out of the writing community...)

However, regardless of artistic merit, any work you wish to sell must find a "home" in the publishing world.  And this can be difficult.  Or nearly impossible.  So here are some tips from a barely published writer:

1.  Guidelines, Guidelines, Guidelines

When you're sending in unsolicited work, read and follow the guidelines given by the agent or publisher.  If they ask for a two-page synopsis, don't send a twenty-page excerpt.

Now there's a bit of psychology behind why people often ignore this one.  As writers, we each like to think "I'm different.  My work is special."  And these facts are both true - all writers are different, and all stories are special.  But no one is so special that they can earn respect by ignoring simple directions.

2.  Politeness Pays

Imagine this scene: you are a thesis adviser.  One of your students has just turned in sixty pages of thesis that won't make it past the department chair.  You have to tell your student this and hope that new material can be found and submitted in time for the deadline.  Do you really have time for an argument?

Answer?  Of course not.  Now I'm not saying that writers should become "yes-men" to editors and publishers, but we need to be open to the bad news as well as the good.  Sometimes the truth hurts, and the reality pill seldom goes down easy.  But we all like to work with people who are able to adapt to change and then respond with a smile - publishers, editors, and thesis advisers are no exception.  And it's easy to forget, but our editors almost always have our best interests at heart.  My thesis adviser would very much like to see me earn my MFA - an not just graduate, but to really succeed in the program.  Agents and publishers want your books to do well - if they could write better books themselves, they would.  Instead they look for writers they can work with.

This is why early politeness and respect is so critical to being published.  Agents and editors have no idea how you'll respond to news along the lines of "fifty-seven publishers rejected your novel" or "this second half of the book?  You need to rewrite it."  But they do know that they will need to break such news to writers from time to time.  So they'll pay attention to how you react to the little things.  Something like "I'm sorry, I have to reschedule our meeting" shouldn't be met with "What?  You're my agent!  Without my book you'd be out of the job!"  Besides showing a lack of courtesy, such a response sends the message that you aren't open to change - and people who aren't open to change tend to ignore their reading public...

3.  Know Your Audience

Have you ever heard the phrase "they don't know what they should like"?  Or something along the lines of "readers just don't know anything about good writing"?  It's rare to find an author who shows such blatant disregard for his or her readers, but many authors ignore their audience in more subtle ways - and these subtle ways can be just as damaging to your popularity.

First, if someone criticizes your work, listen to what they're saying.  For example, I turned in a story to workshop last week which had the term "EMP."  Now for me, a lover of science fiction, "EMP" is short for Electromagnetic Pulse.  It's the reason Tom Cruise has to steal a mini-van after the aliens show up in War of the Worlds - it's the only car on the block that's been to the shop for a new starter.  But most of my classmates - lovers of more traditional literature - didn't know what EMP was.  And it's good now that I know - in future stories, I'll make sure to reveal what EMP is rather than assume that everyone will already know what it does.

And this is good.  It shows me an important weakness in my own writing - I tend to assume my readers already know the facts that I take for granted.  And I'll take this information to go back and write a better story.  Which brings us to...

4.  Always Write the Best Work You Can

Personally, I hate reading novels that are poorly written.  I hate it even more when a good author - a renowned author whose books I've enjoyed in the past - publishes a $24 hardcover that reads like plotless swill.  And there's a reason that book ended up on the discount racks, and there's a reason I'm still upset that I wasted six bucks to own it.  It weighs two pounds and I can't even finish reading it.  I would send it to Haiti for firewood if it was worth the postage.  (Wait, did I just promote the burning of books?  It's only because that six bucks could have bought me an iced green-tea latte with change left over.)

Nothing will turn off a reader - or a publisher - like badly written prose.  Never assume that prior success means your new books is "good enough."  The goal should always be to write a better story, to give your audience something new and improved.  And this is especially important for new writers.  If you write a story that does well in workshop, try to write a better story that will get published.  Once you're published, try to write one still better that will receive critical acclaim.  Just because that last group of readers liked your story doesn't mean any one of them would trade in a green tea latte to buy it.  And if you're going hardcover, we're talking about convincing a lot of people to give up a whole lotta lattes...

5.  Never, Never, Never Give Up
There comes a point when every writer must ask the following: "Is this my life?  Can I make a living doing this?"  Most writers, actually, must ask this question at least once every three or four months, depending on the alignment of paychecks and rent checks.

So let me tell you a little secret: you don't need to make your living as a writer.  Not today, you don't.  Working at Starbucks?  Take your complimentary green tea latte back to the keyboard.  Working as a lawyer?  Remember John Grisham.  Stuck doing laundry on your lunch break from the factory?  That didn't stop Stephen King.

Except for Christopher Paolini (author of Eragon), pretty much every published writer has held a full-time job that had nothing at all to do with writing.  I'm working on my MFA now, but before this I've worked summer jobs in medical records, spent five years in the Army, spent another six months as a bartender, and held more campus jobs than I can count.  And every time I walk into Chipotle or Starbucks, I check out their latest Help Wanted sign.  (You never know when you're gonna need a job that offers a free green tea latte with your burrito.)

Never mind that there are the English majors who don't need to earn extra money for college, or that some of them go on to grad school and then go on to teaching part time.  Sure, you might say their lives revolve around creative writing.  But they still need to publish.  They still face the same hurdles that we all face - they take those teaching jobs to pay the bills, and those jobs never pay well.  There's always another MFA grad just waiting to step in whenever someone finally gives in and moves back home.  And publishers won't publish a book because of an MFA degree from Iowa - they'll publish a book because it's good.  They might be more likely to read a manuscript from an MFA grad, but that's little more than a foot in the door.  (And no, it won't help to mail a prospective publisher a green tea latte - those things don't mail well anyway.)

So don't give up.  Keep writing.  Those black thoughts of tossing your computer out the window will pass.  Know that publication is not the most important thing in the world.  Even if you never publish a word, you can still be a very successful writer.  You can encourage your children to write.  You can run workshops at the local library.  You can even start your own website.  And always, always, always keep writing.  The "overnight success" in the publishing world usually takes ten to fifteen years hunched over the keyboard without an advance.  No, there are no guarantees in the publishing world, except this one: those who give up today cannot publish tomorrow.

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