From bestselling author Dave Farland:

For the past two posts, I’ve been speaking about how to get “zoned in,” to reach that mental state where your writing time is the most productive and where the quality of your work is at its highest. I spoke about the importance of getting rid of all external and internal distractions, and I suggested that you need to move into your writing zone slowly, often by performing writing exercises. Now comes the third step:

Step 3: Play. Shakespeare once said “The play is the thing.” I think that he understood that playing with words, with ideas, with characters in opposition—brainstorming as he wrote—that was the key to writing well.

. . . .

[W]hen you’re writing, you very often have a bunch of characters in conflict, but as you begin to write, you find that one of them feels more fascinating to you, more genuine and real than the others.

New writers will often complain at that point that a secondary character has “taken over” the story, yet I sometimes wonder if they haven’t really just “found” the true story, the one that feels deepest and most important to them. Many times I’ve found that the author in such cases is writing about a heroic character that is larger than life. The protagonist feels hokey and shallow. It’s when the writer begins exploring a minor character that the tale comes to life for them.

. . . .

So as you play, you begin to discover the story that you most want to tell. Characters come alive, and you find yourself envisioning scenes that you never intended to include in your tale. Fresh new themes suggest themselves, and that requires even further departure from your original plans.

In short, it is not until we begin playing in the woods of our subconscious that we can find ourselves lost in them.

. . . .

The subconscious mind, which resides in the right hemisphere of the brain in most people, spends a great deal of time trying to make sense of emotional issues. It’s constantly trying to help us resolve issues related to frightening images, powerful sexual urges, or unkind words. It tries to alert us to dangers that the conscious mind is too preoccupied to deal with. That’s what happens in humans. We have two brains connected with a little bundle of fibers, and so each of the brains works somewhat independently. As artists, we’re trying to tap into the reservoir of wisdom locked in the creative part of our mind. But that can’t happen if we’re feeling stressed, if our subconscious is trying to deal with other issues. If it’s already working overtime, you’re not going to be able to get much out of it.

Link to the rest at David Farland

From Dave Farland:

In my posts, I prefer to concentrate on storytelling, rather than talking about the art of creating powerful prose or talk much about the business side of writing, but today I’m going to make an exception.

Yesterday, I noticed that a fellow writer (she’s young, she’s hot!) put up a note on Facebook that said, “Will marry for health insurance.” It’s both funny and sad.

Here in the United States, health insurance can be hard to get, and if you can get it at all. In fact, my friend Kris Rusch has said that the single most frequent cause for a writer’s career to become derailed is that the author has inadequate health insurance.

. . . .

So what is “adequate” insurance? That’s hard to answer. In 2003-2004, my wife and I were living in California. We purchased the best insurance that we could possibly get.

However, that insurance didn’t cover everything. When our daughter needed help, we chose to spend an extra $40,000 for services that weren’t covered. We knew that it would put our financial health in jeopardy, but made a tough choice. After all, what’s more important, a few thousand dollars, or the life of your child?

In fact, it turned out that the insurance didn’t cover what we thought it did. A few months later, our insurer refused to pay for services that their policy did appear to cover. They left us in the lurch. I contacted a good lawyer, looking to sue, and he spent a couple of days researching the case. As he put it, “The things that they offered on page 4, they took away on page 33. They’ve had an army of lawyers working on this document for years, and it’s pretty ironclad. A lot of people have sued, and if you do, you’ll just waste your money on legal fees. I’m sorry.”

These excessive health costs caused a domino effect, and eventually we lost our house, our car, and our life savings, narrowly avoiding bankruptcy.

. . . .

Now we’re facing another health crisis. We moved to Utah in 2004, and we were able to keep our insurance until early 2006. But when we went shopping for insurance in Utah, we found that we weren’t able to buy it at all. We tried. We couldn’t get personal insurance for my family because I have type II diabetes. My condition is not bad—I don’t take insulin. In fact, as my doctor put it, I’m one of the “lucky few who seemed to have beat diabetes” through a combination of exercise and diet. But private policies won’t cover me, and when I tried to get a group policy, that didn’t work either. No one wanted to have a diabetic in their group, raising their rates. We tried a number of approaches, until my insurance agent just said, “Give it up, Dave, you just can’t get it here.”

. . . .

In any case, we then looked at finding a job that would allow us to get insurance through an established group policy. My wife found such a job and worked at it for nearly two years, but the company laid her off at the height of the recession. Since she is hearing impaired, getting a job is difficult for her. After searching for 18 months, she took a new job for the State of Utah, helping to teach handicapped children, but people in her position don’t have any benefits at all. So health insurance isn’t an option through work, either.

. . . .

With our son Ben’s longboarding accident, which happened three and a half weeks ago, we are approaching $700,000 in medical bills for the month, and our overall bill, once we get him through rehab and his future brain surgery, should run well over a million dollars. Obviously, we are checking into programs to help cover costs, and we’ll look at negotiating the prices down as low as we possibly can, but this is grueling.

. . . .

[G]etting insurance is a must. At some time in your life, you will probably need it. Buy a smaller home if you have to, or get a used car instead of new. But make insurance a priority.

Link to the rest at David Farland and thanks to Eric for the tip.

When PG was still doing litigation, he banged heads with a big health insurance company twice. Won both times. Two of the best days of his life.

Following are details about another way of helping Dave with his son’s medical bills. May 4th is the magic day:

Star Wars Twitter Bomb: Tweet, RT, and share throughout the Twitterverse and other social websites! The goal is to get #helpwolverton and #davidfarland trending on Twitter and Google+ on May the 4th (Star Wars Day) and encourage the kind people online to donate and help.

Please encourage people to participate on other social media websites, primarily Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, blogs, and anything else. Several independent studies show that spreading the word will significantly increase your midichlorian count.

The twitter bomb fundraiser is for David Farland’s son.Dave has written many Star Wars novels and contributed to anthologies such as Star Wars: The Courtship of Princess Leia, Star Wars: Tales from Mos Eisley Cantina, Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters, and Star Wars: Tales from Jaba’s Palace.

We’d like to celebrate Star Wars Day by letting their family know that “the force will be with them” in their time of need. Donate and spread the word! Share with everyone you know and on all social networks.

Suggested Tweet (Feel free to improvise):

Help Star Wars author’s son on Star Wars Day! Visit http://www.helpwolverton.com to learn more. #davidfarland #starwarsday #helpwolverton

From Dave Farland:

People will judge your movies and stories regardless of how insecure you may feel about it. Sometimes their judgments will be fair and accurate, but just as often they’ll be biased, foolish, unfounded or downright deranged.

So you need to know as you come into this business that you’re going to get criticism. You’ll get it from professional critics, from editors, from agents, from housewives, from retirees, from inmates in prison, and soldiers in the field. You’ll get it from ten-year-old kids and great grandmothers. You’ll get it from people in Russia, Latin America, Australia, and Greece. You’ll get it from your spouse, children, and your own parents. On some occasions, you might get it from all of these people in a single day!

So don’t fool yourself with the notion that you can be a writer or a filmmaker and not get criticism.

. . . .

In fact, there is only one rational reaction to it: listen to each criticism, evaluate its validity, and resolve to improve your work as a result of those criticisms that are valid.

. . . .

You can try to change their minds, but arguing with such people wastes your time, saps your creative energy, and generally doesn’t gain you any converts. You won’t change their minds by defeating them in an argument, but very often I’ve found that I gained someone’s trust simply by showing them a little kindness. On more than one occasion I’ve had someone complain about a work that they had misread, and simply by treating that person with compassion and respect I’ve found that readers who had sworn that they would never read anything I’d written again have become die-hard fans.

Link to the rest at David Farland and thanks to Eric for the tip.

Dave also shared a summary of the results of the Book Bomb for his injured son in which many visitors to The Passive Voice participated:

Nightingale Best Seller Rankings

Amazon

#84 Paid in Kindle Store

#1 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Contemporary

#1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Fantasy > Contemporary

#2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Fantasy > Paranormal

Barnes and Noble

Sales Rank: 122

Million Dollar Outlines Best Seller Rankings

Amazon

#121 Paid in Kindle Store

#1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Education & Reference > Writing, Research & Publishing Guides > Editing
#1 in Books > Education & Reference > Writing, Research & Publishing Guides > Writing > Editing
#6 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction

Barnes and Noble

Sales Rank: 248

In order to help Dave Farland with medical expenses arising from injuries to his 16-year-old son, a book bomb for Dave’s books is underway today.

By purchasing one of Dave’s books today, you’ll not only be helping him via increased royalties, you’ll be improving the visibility of his books on Amazon by bumping up their sales rank.

From Dave’s blog:

Thank you for the outpouring of support yesterday, especially to those who spread (and will spread) the word about the Book Bomb through social media and on their blogs. I have a few update for you all.

We now have a website dedicated to Ben, thanks to James Duckett, who put it together. The site has updates about Ben’s status, links to the donation page, and talks about the book bomb. The address iswww.helpwolverton.com/.

For [today], you should know that anything purchased through these Amazon links for Nightingale and Million Dollar Outlines will help Dave. He gets a small percentage of anything purchased through those links.

So, if you want to buy several other books or products tomorrow, with or without Nightingale and Million Dollar Outlines, please do.

Link to the rest at David Farland

A word of explanation about the links in the excerpt: They’ll take you to two of Dave’s books, but they also include his Amazon affiliate information. This means that, in addition to the royalties Dave will earn from book sales, he’ll receive a 6-7% affiliate fee from anything you purchase on Amazon within 60 minutes of clicking the link.

So, if you click on Nightingale, then buy the book plus a new laptop (or three other books or a blender, Kindle Fire, etc.), Amazon will pay Dave a 70% royalty from the sale of his ebook plus 6-7% of the purchase price of both the book and the laptop.

PG read Nightingale when it was first published and loved it. He’s had comments from people who have purchased Million Dollar Outlines in the last couple of days who thought that book was extremely valuable.

Both as a creative writing professor and a speaker at many writing conferences, Dave has provided valuable assistance to other authors for many years. A long list of successful authors credit Dave for their success.

Now is an opportunity for the writing community to give something back to Dave while he is dealing with a terrible tragedy.

From Dave Farland’s blog:

As many of you know, Dave’s son, Ben, was in a serious long-boarding accident last week. He is 16 and suffers from severe brain trauma, a cracked skull, broken pelvis and tail bone, burnt knees, bruised lungs, broken ear drum, road rash, and is currently in a coma. His family has no insurance.

We are having a book bomb this Wednesday on behalf of Ben Wolverton to help his family out. You can view the event’s facebook page here.

For those that don’t know, a book bomb is an event where participants purchase a book on a specific day to support the author, or, in this case, a young person in serious need: Ben Wolverton.

Many of you have expressed sympathy for Dave and Ben and have asked if you could help. Now you can. We need you to help Ben get the most out of this book bomb. Right now we are focused on spreading the word and telling others about it. If you could share this event on facebook, twitter, pinterest, your blog, or through email, please do. This is a way everyone reading this can help, whatever their financial situation.

On Wednesday, we will have the book bomb. If you haven’t yet purchased Nightingale or Million Dollar Outlines, please consider doing so on Wednesday. If you have already purchased them, you can donate money to Ben and his family here.

Link to the rest at David Farland

From MobileRead Forums:

On Thursday Dave Wolverton / David Farland’s teenage son was critically injured in a longboard accident. Ben and his family were life-flighted to Las Vegas where Ben has since been in a medically induced coma. He has had multiple emergency brain surgeries to attempt to control the swelling in his brain.

. . . .

Ben went long-boarding with a friend up near Snow Canyon, a scenic place with lots of rolling hills. They had never been there before, and Ben’s friend, Tyler, went down a steep hill and thought that it was too difficult for Ben’s board. He turned around to warn Ben, but by then Ben had already been thrown from his board.

Apparently, Ben was thrown forward and rolled head-over-heels several times. That’s why he crushed his skull (down near the hind brain), and then hit his back hard enough to bruise his lungs, then broke his pelvis/crushed his vertebrae, and so on. Beyond that, he has bad “road burn” on his knees, shoulder, back, hips, and so on, and a split lip. With the concussion, his ear drum broke, and he lost a lot of blood through his left ear and again through his nose.

Link to the rest at MobileRead Forums

From author and former writing professor Dave Farland:

In case you haven’t noticed over the past few years, I talk a lot about storytelling—about the parts of stories—inciting incidents, character arcs, climaxes, and so on. I also talk about writing as a profession, but I don’t talk much about the art of composing beautiful, lyrical sentences. There are some good reasons for this.

First of all, I think that there are those who can teach it better than I. When I was studying at the university level, I had some wonderful poets and professors to learn from. Nearly all of them had a strong literary bent. By this I mean that they were writing stories for magazines like The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, or The Southern Review—the most popular of the literary magazines. They were adept at teaching things like style, voice, and description.

Yet none of them wrote genre literature. None of them were writing thrillers or romances or science fiction. Which brings me to my second reason for not wanting to teach these skills: I’ve long been interested in trying to understand the things that my teachers couldn’t tell me about.

What my teachers didn’t teach was story structure. In fact, at the time that I was going to college, I literally could not find a single book on how to plot a novel. A couple came out just as I was ready to publish my first, but storytelling seemed a mystery to me.

. . . .

You see, the literary reaction against formed stories that took place in the early 1900s made it unpopular to teach things like “How to Plot a Novel” in college courses. Part of the problem was that my professors had never learned it themselves. There were those in academia who insisted that life is a random series of events, and if we write formed stories, we’re sort of perpetuating an absurd lie. Ultimately, if life is meaningless, then we can’t make sense of it.

. . . .

I want to emphasize something: a great plot doesn’t make a great story. Over the years in Hollywood I’ve seen a lot of scripts with promising tag lines. Yet very often, the dialog was only adequate, or characters weren’t fleshed out, or the descriptions were just pedestrian.

Link to the rest at David Farland

From Dave Farland:

In life, at times we have to sift through the hype, the clutter, and the nonsense and find out what advice is worthwhile and what is not. Several times per week, people will email me with questions that start off, “I was reading a blog by (name of author), and they said (assert alleged fact). Are they right?” Sometimes the author is spot-on. Many times the author is partly right, and I have to explain things a little further. Other times the information is drivel.

Sometimes even stellar authors give bad advice. On Friday I noticed a link to a column from one of my favorite authors—a bestseller, an award-winner. I linked to it, hoping for a gem of wisdom. His eight pieces of advice could be summed up in a few words: “Don’t ask me, just get off your butt and write.”

To me, the author seemed rather contemptuous of struggling authors. This person knows a great deal about writing, and revealed none of it. If you followed his advice, you would at least get something written, but it would be no better than if you had never listened to a word that he said.

. . . .

It’s true that most of the time when we as authors give advice, it falls on deaf ears. Too often the people who ask for the advice never heed it. I know many would-be authors who have been studying for twenty years and have never finished a novel.

But some students take advice. Some people come to the craft with a fire in the belly, a hunger to learn. Several of my students have gone out, written their first novels, started their careers—and made millions. One of them has made hundreds of millions.

Link to the rest at David Farland

From NYT best-selling author and former writing professor, Dave Farland:

Recently I wrote about the importance of creating powerful emotions in stories, but with that comes a caution: don’t get maudlin. Here are a couple of rules.

1) Protagonists don’t cry. If your protagonist does cry, then it frees the audience so that they don’t have to. Hence, if you’re trying to draw genuine tears from a reader, your characters shouldn’t be crying.

2) Let the emotion come naturally. Many authors will begin to fall into “purple prose” when they want to elicit emotion, and so they write in heightened, flowery images. Don’t. If you say something like, “In that moment, his love for her erupted like crocuses, touched by the sun after a long winter,” you’re working too hard.

Nor do you need to talk about an emotion that a scene elicits in the protagonist. In fact, be wary about even naming an emotion. For example, your protagonist sees a dead body, and you want to have her reel away in horror. So your first impulse might be to say, “She gagged and reeled away in horror.” But all you have to do is create the dead body—using sight, smell, touch—and then have her reel away. We shouldn’t need the words “in horror.”

So simply create the scene as completely as you can and let the emotion arise naturally from the incident.

Link to the rest at David Farland

From author and former writing professor, Dave Farland:

A few years ago, a young man won a short story competition for Reader’s Digest—two years in a row. This was a remarkable accomplishment, given the size of the contests. When asked how he had done it, the writer responded with something like, “It’s easy. The story that makes them cry the most, wins!”

He’s right. I’ve spoken to many an editor who will admit that the story that has the strongest emotional payoff is the most likely to be chosen for publication or for awards. You see, a tale should not be judged “objectively.” It’s meant to be a subjective experience, to arouse emotions.

Yet as writers we are often trained to back away from situations that honestly elicit tears. We don’t want to be accused of being maudlin.

I’ve seen the value of drawing tears myself. With my novel In the Company of Angels, when I was having my editors read it, I got several calls from my final editors. These were people that I was paying, and they both pleaded for more time to finish the edit because they were “crying too hard to see the page.” The problem was, they weren’t even near the end. So I watched my wife; sure enough, I kept her crying continually during most of the last 140 pages. I don’t think that it was coincidental that the novel won the Whitney Award for Best Novel of the Year, when competing against many other fine books. The story that makes ‘em cry the most, wins.

. . . .

You will notice that at the “climax” of a story, very often we have a “reversal,” a moment where it appears that the villain has won, but where the protagonist finds a way to turn the tables and pull victory from the jaws of defeat. I used to wonder why those reversals felt so necessary, until it struck me: a good reversal multiplies the number of tears that the reader must release. We may cry tears of frustration, shared agony, dread, relief, and joy—all within a few pages. When that happens, we as readers feel cleansed inside.

Link to the rest at David Farland