Heather Graham contributing

Bestselling novelist Heather Graham, who also writes as Shannon Drake, is contributing a cool piece on what it takes to be a writer. As a mother of five, she downplays excuses and encourages dedication and persistence.

New York Times and USA Today best selling author Heather Graham majored in theater arts at the University of South Florida. After a stint of several years in dinner theater, back-up vocals, and bartending, she stayed home after the birth of her third child and began to write, working on short horror stories and romances. Her first book was with Dell, and since then, she has written over one hundred novels and novellas including category, romantic suspense, historical romance, vampire fiction, time travel, occult and Christmas family fare. She wrote the launch books for the Dell's Ecstasy Supreme line, Silhouette's Shadows, and for Harlequin's mainstream fiction imprint, Mira Books.

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Clarifying supporting clauses

Clarity is one of the keys to effective writing. Confuse the reader once and she glances over at the television set, the XBox, the iPod, or the romantic interest. Confuse the reader two or three times and you might want to reconsider your future career as a the next Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling.

Stray clauses are one of the killers of awkward prose, and I've always preached that if you can function competently at the sentence level, all the rest can be learned through study and practice. We'll get to comma usage later, but for today, let's take a look at descriptive clauses.

I recently edited a manuscript sample that contained a sentence "He killed his wife and children as they were asleep in their beds with a shotgun." I can't be sure, but I assume the killer used a shotgun, not that the warm-and-fuzzy family cuddled up with shotguns and teddy bears at night. The sentence could be made clearer either by shifting the descriptive clause closer to the "acting agent" (the man who used the shotgun) or totally restructuring the sentence.

One possibility is "With a shotgun, he killed his wife and children as they slept." Simple and effective, though not very artful. Personally, I would build a little suspense and use a series of short sentences--"The shotgun was cold in his hands, but warmth radiated from his sleeping wife..."

My first draft of a newspaper story I wrote this morning contained the sentence "Watauga County Republican Party chairwoman Pam Blume encouraged her fellow party members to work hard during Saturday's meeting..." I immediately caught the error, because she wasn't asking conventioneers to work hard just for that hour on Saturday, she wanted them to work hard during the entire election year. I moved the clause to the beginning of the sentence and ended up with "During Saturday's convention, Watauga County Republican Party chairwoman Pam Blume encouraged her fellow party members to work hard in the election year."

The basic lesson is to place the supporting or related clause as close the the subject as possible. An ancillary lesson, learned through years of mistakes and revisions, is simply to not write anything you have to revise later. Leave out the bad parts. Write good.
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Your friend, the compound modifier

In my freelance-editing work, one of the most common mistakes I see in all skill levels is confusion over compound modifiers. Believe me, it took me years before I understood them--luckily I had professional copy editors on my early novels. As with comma usage, it's still an imperfect art, no matter which style book you use.

I lean on Strunk and White's "Elements of Style" when in doubt, but even that sacred tome is fairly vague, calling them "compound adjectives" instead of "compound modifiers." The rule is pretty basic, though. When using two words working together to describe or modify a noun, they should be hyphenated.

A fine example is the title of the Hemingway story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." If he had used "well lighted," we might have wondered if the light had radiated from a well, perhaps by someone dropping a lantern down it. You may say it doesn't matter, because the meaning will always be clear, but why not help the reader as much as you can? After all, you have given her a very hard job in the first place, stringing a bunch of glyphs across a page or screen and expecting it to be translated just as you have imagined.

Try this one. You're in a science fiction story (or is it a "science-fiction story"?), and the orbital and rotational periods of the Earth have been altered. But you write "He walked under the late afternoon sun." You might very well mean the sun is arriving several hours behind schedule. But if you use "He walked under the late-afternoon sun," we know the two words are joined. Make sense?

Gayle Lynds, Queen of Espionage

We are pleased to have two contributions from author Gayle Lynds, whose advice has some weight--she's a professional journalist who turned her sights to fiction. Gayle has contributed two articles.

New York Times bestseller Lynds is the award-winning author of nine spy novels and has been called the "Queen of Espionage." Her newest, THE BOOK OF SPIES, is due in stores March 30 and is the beginning of her first series. Lee Child writes she’s “today’s finest espionage writer,” while BookPage claims: “Lynds has joined the deified ranks of spy thriller authors like Robert Ludlum and John le Carre” and the London Observer says simply she’s “a kick-ass thriller writer.”

I met Gayle through the Killer Thriller Band at the inaugural 2006 Thrillerfest, when she was helping organize the awards ceremony and musical presentation of The Killer Thriller Band, in which I was participating as bass player. (Alex Sokoloff, one of our singers, is also in Write Good or Die). Thanks, Gayle!

Rusch, Smith, Rose in the house

Two wonderful additions to the guide, as Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith have contributed use of two articles each. Smith is author of 90 books and Rusch is not far behind, and she's also written numerous award-winning stories. Both work in a variety of genres. Their blogs are highly recommended for the practical-minded writer, as they have been surviving and even thriving off of freelance fiction for 20 years. They also tend to shoot down conventional wisdom, or at least offer sound reasons why convention only works for certain people.

And international bestseller M.J. Rose has walked in as well...welcome, MJ! She's owner of AuthorBuzz and also created "The Reincarnationist" series, which you can find on your television as soon as you tear your eyes away from the computer...

Why writing advice is

I was writing on my personal blog about Laura Miller's Salon article on "Reader advice," and ended up musing about how most of the writing advice I gave was either wrong, or I refused to follow it, or both. Luckily, there are wiser people than me giving advice, which is why I sought a collaborative project that can really help writers in this rapidly changing era. To fit the times, the book will be organic, so look for a cute little "V.2" for Version 2 and so on as it develops in the months and years ahead.

Because even good advice can get dated (see: Ribbons, typewriter--buy in bulk), the worst advice can be cut out and more timely advice introduced. For example, with ebook prices shooting all over the map, you will not get any sensible advice on royalties or contract clauses for them, because nobody knows. Like all free advice, it's worth what you pay for it. Take what you need and leave the rest. And pass it on.

Some outlets, such as Amazon, don't allow free downloads unless you're a major publisher swinging some sort of deal, so the download will be set at the lowest possible price in those outlets, with any revenues donated to First Book, a non-profit organization that buys books for disadvantaged children.

Set-up is simple right now, with three sections: Craft, Business, and Art. I'm not sure there's much else a writer needs to know, except to ignore everything and write.
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Douglas Clegg and Alexandra Sokoloff on board

I am very pleased to have two brilliant and generous folks joining the project. Douglas Clegg practically co-invented (with MJ Rose) the Buzz Your Book concept and will offer tips on querying and promoting. Alexandra Sokoloff is a screenwriter and novelist with a great insight on storytelling.

Clegg is the author of more than 20 books, including Isis and the Vampyricon series, and was an e-book pioneer with the release of several e-serial novels in the late 1990s, and is a personal inspiration to me.

Sokoloff's books include The Price, The Harrowing, and The Unseen, and she's also the author of Screenwriting Tricks for Authors (And Screenwriters!). I taught with Alex at Deborah Leblanc's Pen to Press (a great workshop, by the way) and I learned more from her in a week than in the previous 10 years on my own.

We're assembling the initial version now to release through Haunted Computer Books, and since it's organic, we'll update and revise as the 21st Century unfolds.