1001 Ways to Write Great Fiction, Get Published, and Earn Your Audience

Buy From: Writer’s Digest / Amazon / B&N / iBooks / Indiebound

Check the book out on: Goodreads

The Official Description

The journey to become a successful writer is long, fraught with peril, and filled with difficult questions: How do i write dialogue? How do I build suspense? What should I know about query letters? Where do I start?

The best way to answer these questions is to ditch your uncertainty and transform yourself into a KICK-ASS writer. Wendig will show you how with an explosive broadside of gritty advice that will destroy your fears, clear the path, and help you find your voice, your story, and your audience.

You’ll explore the fundamentals of writing, learn how to obtain publication, and master the skills you need to build an army of dedicated fans. No task is too large or small for the kick-ass writer. With his trademark acerbic wit and gut-punch humor, Wendig will explain:

How to build suspense, craft characters, and defeat writer’s block.

How to write a scene, an ending — even a sentence.

Blogging techniques, social media skills, and crowdfunding.

How to write a query letter, talk to agents, and deal with failure — and success!

Whether you’re just starting out or you need one more push to get you over the top, two things are certain — a kick-ass writer never quits, and Chuck Wendig won’t let you down in this high-octane guide to becoming the writer you were born to be!

Hey, What The Hell Is This?

This is a compilation of a lot of the “25 Things” post from this here website. It contains a lot of stuff you’ve seen before, plus some new entries (crowdfunding! hybrid authors! writing a scene!). And the whole thing has been revised top to bottom — cleaned up and tightened with the EDITORIAL WRENCH. *ratchet ratchet ratchet*

Oh, and it’s my first writing book in print.

So, if you want my advice in hardcopy? That’s how you get it, thanks to Writer’s Digest.

Wait, Is It Still Super-Vulgar?

My writing talk tends to fall into the “hard-R NSFW” and “occasionally eye-bulgingly profane and probably NSFL” categories. This book ain’t quite as hardcore as all that, and is probably equivalent to a soft-R rating or even PG-13 rating. (The biggest edit in this case was, quite honestly, removing the instances of the word ‘fuck.’ Though I love the word, one hopes my writing and storytelling blather still holds up without that particular dash of spicy lingo.)

I am totally good with having a book of writing advice out there that isn’t quite as naughtily-tongued as this blog, because here some teachers and professors may be more comfortable using this material without having to first attack it with a black permanent marker or camping hatchet.

Why Should I Buy It?

Because, hey, it’s a whole bucket of writing tips in one place.

Because it’s the one way you can get my writing bloggerel in physical form. (Also, now that it has been summoned into this corporeal plane it can be killed by a pitchfork forged from nun-kissed steel. IT IS OUR ONLY HOPE WE ONLY HAVE ONE CHANCE.)

Because it’s nicely organized! And has an index!

Because it refrains from every giving you the One True Way to be a writer and instead prefers the metric assload of options crammed in this here toolbox approach.

Because you want to give something back to this blog.

Because it’s this blog distilled down and oozed forth onto bookstore shelves and HOLY CRAP HOW AWESOME IS THAT? *vibrates through the floor*

Because if you don’t I’ll send this chimpanzee to your house.

Thanks, folks! If you check it out, please enjoy.

If not: would you mind spreading the word via your social media channels or the telepathic tentacle-bundle you share with all your other psychic buddies?

Last week’s challenge: “1667.”

Once again, time to write just the opening line to a new story.

No more than 15 words long.

Plop your opening line in the comment section below. Only one entry, please.

Then, the following week, it will be the task of other writers to pick one opening line that they will use in a new piece of flash fiction.

If you write the line that is most chosen by other authors, I’ll send you a signed physical copy of my new writing book, The Kick-Ass Writer. I’m not doing the picking, so your goal is to write a line that excites other writers enough for them to write a story using that opening line.

Tricky? Could be.

So, get to writing.

You’ve got one week — due by Friday, November 15th, noon EST.

(I’ll send the physical book and pay for shipping if you’re in the United States. Outside the country, you’ll have to front the shipping, I’m afraid, or be okay with an e-book copy.)

I have it on good authority that I don’t need to tell you who John Picacio is. Oh, hello, sci-fi and fantasy artist with a metric fuckload of awards and nominations? He’s put together a helluva Kickstarter that’s got a week left, and I’m honored to have him here talking about his take on the Mexican card game, Loteria. Here he is to talk about it a little and, OOOH PRETTY, demonstrate some of the magnum-sized art-tacular bad-assery he’s bringing to the table this time around:

How many of you out there have heard of the Mexican game of chance called Loteria? Even better — how many of you have played it?

If you know how Bingo is played, then you know how to play Loteria. If you’ve eaten in a Mexican restaurant, then chances are you may have glimpsed Loteria images.

The original game looks like this:

I played it as a kid with my mother and grandma. I loved the icons on those cards. They’re a constellation of the everyday mixed with the otherworldly — a quintessentially Mexican combination.

What would happen if these cards weren’t just cartoonish icons? What would happen if I re-engineered those fifty-four cards with new artwork by me and fashioned them as a deck of Mexican Tarot? Here’s a peek:

Here’s the ‘La Sirena’ card from the traditional Loteria game:

Here’s my ‘La Sirena’ card from my new Loteria:

Here’s the ‘El Pescado’ card from the traditional Loteria game:

Here’s my ‘El Pescado’ card from my new Loteria:

Here’s the ‘El Arpa’ card from the traditional Loteria game:

Here’s my ‘El Arpa’ card from my new Loteria:

Here’s the ‘La Rosa’ card from the traditional Loteria game:

Here’s my ‘La Rosa’ card from my new Loteria:

Getting the idea?

I’ll finish the first dozen artworks before the end of 2013, in time to be featured as my 2014 John Picacio Calendar. I want to finish the entire set of fifty-four artworks by the end of 2014. It will be like climbing Mount Everest, but I’m committed to making this new modern Mexican Tarot into a reality.

It’s going to be an amazing art ride, and I invite you to be a part of it.

You: I suck.

Me: So, NaNoWriMo is going well, then.

You: It’s making me feel like a shitty writer is what it’s doing.

Me: That’s a shame.

You: No kidding. I think this thing I’m writing is crap.

Me: It probably is.

You: That is maybe the worst motivational speech I’ve ever heard. “That thing you’re writing is probably poopshit so you might as well give up and go dunk your head in a bucket of cat piss.”

Me: No, no, don’t do that. If you’re going to dunk your head in any kind of animal urine, you have to specify: tiger urine. Tiger urine is full of magical powers. Tiger blood, too. Actually, all tiger-based fluids are useful for giving you superpowers, including heroic erections and/or powerful labia — like, labia so powerful they can crush steel I-beams with the sound of a thunderclap.

You: Well, I don’t have any tiger piss, all I have is this shitty first draft that I’m going to not finish because I do not want to commit more shittiness to the page and into the world.

Me: See, you’re missing the real opportunity, here.

You: Opportunity?

Me: The opportunity to suck.

You: That sounds like the opposite of an opportunity. An opposurtunity.

Me: Giving yourself permission to suck — even just a little bit — is actually quite freeing. I mean, let’s clarify: you’re writing a first — or even a zero — draft for NaNoWriMo. You could argue that the value of the 50k draft that will be birthed wet and struggling from this process is that you can use it as a very robust outline/treatment for the rewrite. And you’re not relegated to one-draft-and-done. You get as many of these as you like. I think it was Delilah Dawson who said that it’s like a video game with endless lives. You get as many chances as you need to get it right.

You: I just get more chances to suck, you mean.

Me: Sure! Yes! You do. Isn’t that a little bit liberating? Most jobs you get one, maybe two chances, to get your work correct. To thread the needle, to get a hole-in-one, to bullseye that womprat.

You: Bullseyeing the Womprat is the weirdest sex euphemism I’ve heard.

Me: Can I tell you a story?

You: Is it about that time with the gallon of lube, the chimpanzee, and the salad bar at Wendy’s? That story always makes me super-queasy, and yet… somewhat aroused at the same time?

Me: It is not that story.

You: Oh, okay. Then go ahead.

Me: It took me five years to write Blackbirds. And in that time I wrote — jeez, I don’t know how many drafts of that book. Five? Six? They were terrible. I go back sometimes and I look at them, and all I can do is make that face that looks like I’m smelling shit somewhere, like maybe the stink is on my shoe, or my hands. But really, the stink was on those pages. Bloated, meandering story pages. But I needed to write those pages. I needed to suck! I needed to suck in order to learn how not to suck. Any task demands a level of practice and course correction — and what you get out of that is a thing worth more than a monkey made of gold: you cultivate sweet precious instinct.

You: Feeling a little better. Go on…

Me: The thing is, going back and looking at those pages, I can see the twinkling gems buried in all the fetid ordure, too. Like, turns of phrase I’d eventually go on to use, or ideas that would appear in the final draft or in some later book. But all that fetid ordure was part of it. A key part!

You: Sucking is a necessary evil, you’re saying.

Me: Necessary and an almost certain part of the process. If you try something new — running a mile, hitting a fastball, hunting humans for their meat, building a giant doom-bot — you don’t expect to get it right on the first fucking try, do you? No. You do not. But somehow art fails to deserve the same slack in the rope. You can’t write a bestselling novel or paint a Louvre-ready watercolor right out of the gate, yet with inevitable suckitude you’re all ready to burn everything to the ground and go and commit to a life as some cubicle-monkey somewhere.

You: Nothing wrong with being a cubicle-monkey, Mister Judgeypants.

Me: Didn’t say there was! Particularly if that’s what you want to do. But if you want to be a writer, then write. And suck. And write your way through the suck.

You: I just feel like NaNoWriMo concentrates too much on quantity and not enough on quality.

Me: It does. And it’s not an entirely invalid criticism — but, that’s part of its design. Yeah, sure, this process is all about quantity over quality. But to get to quality, you first have to create a quantity. You have to commit to a word count. You have to fill pages. You have to finish this draft to get to the next draft.

You: So, sucking is a kind of gauntlet.

Me: It is. An instructive one. Plus, NaNoWriMo has an Everest-like quality to it. You climb Mt. Everest and get to the top, nobody gives a shit how well you did it. You made it to the top and you’re alive and you weren’t molested by some Yeti and you didn’t fall down some kind of ice crevasse. Finishing a first draft of a book, no matter how sucktastic, is a thing worth celebrating. That’s not the end of the work, not by any stretch, but it’s a strong first foot forward.

You: Still, don’t you think 1667 words per day is kinda demanding?

Me: *laughs so hard he throws up*

You: Why are you pukelaughing?

Me: Because I write 2-3k per day. It’s demanding, sure, but hey: ART DEMANDS.

You: But aren’t you afraid that speed kills quality?

Me: Are you trying to convince me that my work sucks?

You: Wh… uh, well, no?

Me: I see the criticism that NaNoWriMo is all about speed and with speed you lose quality and blah blah blah — that’s a toxic meme. A meme that has literally no bearing on actual writing reality. First: it assumes that speed-of-output is tied to quality. It’s not. It took me five years to write Blackbirds. It took me 30 days to write the sequel, Mockingbird, and I think the second book is far stronger than the first. (It took me about 45 days to write The Cormorant, which comes out soon.) Second: it assumes that, again, your draft is one and done, that you’ll never write another draft. It took me a little over a month to bang out the first draft of Under the Empyrean Sky and a full year of tweaks and full rewrites to get it up to speed. It took me two months to write The Blue Blazes, and two months to edit/rewrite. Every book is different. Every book gets whatever time it needs and whatever time you’re willing to give it. This isn’t science. No equation says a swiftly-written book is just a lump of dross. And nothing says that a bad first draft can’t be written into a fucking amazing second draft. Or third. Or thirteenth. We write till it’s right.

You: This is actually sort of helpful.

Me: Once in a while, I manage.

You: So I’m allowed to suck.

Me: Encouraged, even.

You: So I can be a real writer, now?

Me: The real writer writes. See the graphic at the fore of the post, if you please.

You: Cool. Now, if only you can help me catch up. I’m behind on my word count.

Me: We’ll talk about that one a little later.

You: TEASE.

Me: It’s the fifth day. By now you should be, what? Roughly 8,000 words? So, did you do any kind of prepping or planning? Any outlining at all?

You: I did. Wanna see it?

Me: Sure, yeah, lay it on me.

You: *hands over a piece of paper*

Me: This is just a bunch of drawings of dicks. A whole sheet of dong-doodles.

You: Mm-hmm.

Me: *looks closer* Aaaaaand they appear to be mounting an offense on the Death Star.

You: See the X’s over the testicles?

Me: I do.

You: They’re X-Wangs. Get it? X-WANGS.

Me: Remind me to burn your house down and eat your cats.

You: That’s awfully harsh.

Me: You reap what you sow, Captain Howdy. Anyway — so, if you have no prep, no plan, no mindmapping or outlining, you’re pretty much driving without a map, you’re trapeze-swinging without a net, you’re dirty dancing without the ghost of Patrick Swayze.

You: Wow, Swayze’s actually dead, so — in that movie, Ghost, I wonder if it’s retroactively real.

Me: Wait. You’re — what? No. What? Can I keep talking without your inane interruptions?

You: I DUNNO, CAN YOU?

Me: *hits you in the ear with an open stapler*

You: OW JEEZ CRAP

Me: As I was saying, if you’re operating without an outline — hell, even sometimes when you are working with an outline — you can end up feeling a bit unmoored in terms of the plot, like you’re floating without a tether —

You: I do sometimes feel like an old person lost at Wal-Mart. Somehow I keep ending up back at the tires. Always the tires. I don’t need tires but there I am, at the tires, just endlessly circling.

Me: Yes, I suppose that describes the feeling somewhat.

You: So, what do I do? Am I fucked? I’m fucked. You’re telling me I’m fucked.

Me: I would do no such thing. You have options. First, you could actually do an outline — outline from where you’re at now, but let’s assume you’re not going to do that.

You: That’s good because I’m not going to do that.

Me: That means you’re pantsing it — which is writing by the seat of your pants, not writing without pants. The latter is a hallmark amongst writers, of course.

You: I’ve noticed that you’re letting it all hang out, which is very disturbing to me.

Me: Eyes up here, Howdy. Point is, when you’re going at it without any prescribed notion of where to take the story, you need a the instinct to tell you how to move the story forward — plot, character, theme, whatever — in a compelling, engaging way.

You: And you’re going to tell me how to do that.

Me: I will at least present you with some options, sure — options that help you organically grow the story’s architecture. Like hammering bones into a floppy-fleshed body to give it a skeleton.

You: That’s gross. But at least that metaphor didn’t have poop in it.

Me: We’ll get there, don’t worry. So, part of this whole organic story architecture thing is that you’re creating plot on the fly — you’re a kid with a flickering flashlight stumbling through the dark forest. The first thing to do is let your characters lead the way. Most writers come at their story from the plot side of things — they say, IT WOULD BE COOL IF X-Y-AND-Z HAPPENED. It’d be cool if the spaceship crashed and released moon-wolves into New New New York and then blah blah blah with the thing and the that and the stuff. It’s all very event-focused, very incident-driven. And that can work, but for my mileage it’s too external. The greatest most natural-feeling plot is formed by the decisions of characters. You don’t need to duct-tape the bones to the outside of the body — the characters, actually, are the bones. And the muscles. And the connective tendons. Hell, they’re the whole fucking meatbag enchilada. They will make choices and they will confront their problems with solutions and in doing so plot happens.

You: But I thought you designed a plot and then slotted characters into it.

Me: Some writers do. And that can work. (Realistically, in writing and storytelling, anything can work.) But that’s externally-driven. And, for the writer, it ends up being a whole lot harder to pull off because you’re trying to mash these two things together. Here, look at it this way: Plot does not poop out characters. Characters poop out plot.

You: And there’s the poop metaphor.

Me: I told you we’d get there. Leading with the characters and not the plot also stops your story from having characters who are purely reactive — you don’t want them there just to react to events. Proactive characters, characters who talk about stuff, decide stuff, and then do stuff, are the characters we like to see. These are characters who get ahead of the plot instead of trailing behind it like fumbly puppies. That’s what we mean when we say characters have agency.

You: Lead with characters. Got it. What else, word-nerd?

Me: One more thing on that subject, actually — this is why romance can really work, either as a genre or as a component of your story. Because romance is all character. It’s all about the desires and decisions of people in your storyworld. You can literally get away with your story being a character who loves another character and who spends the entire story trying and failing to make that love blossom. That shit can work. Romance understands that plot is made of people.

You: Trying and failing. Cool. But how does that trying and failing part happen?

Me: Well, that conveniently takes me to the next two components, which are tangled up together in a sort of… slurping story-based 69 position.

You: Not sure if I should be titillated or horrified.

Me: You can check both boxes.

You: What are these two sexually-entwined story components?

Me: Pacing and conflict.

You: BO-RING.

Me: *staples your other ear*

You: FACK GAAAAH okay I mean, oh I am so totally interested please go on.

Me: Thank you. Pacing, right? Pacing is the acceleration and deceleration of your narrative. You want the sense that we’re always increasing speed at the same time we’re gaining height and momentum and yet your tale can’t be all acceleration. That can be too intense and, after a while, downright boring. In practical terms, imagine a road trip that takes you down a variety of roads: backroads and highways and freeways and alleyways, but all the while we still get the sense of increasing speed and increasing danger. A story moves forward, then pauses for oxygen. Then it moves forward more quickly, more perilously: and again, more oxygen. Action danger peril! Then pause for a breath, for recollection, then — MORE ACTION DANGER PERIL. Then pause. The pauses grow shorter. The action danger peril grows not longer but more intense.

You: So, like sex.

Me: Well. Yeah, kinda. Good sex, anyway. Actually, sex is a pretty good example. Because great sex (or at least memorable sex) can all about a lot of moods and feelings coming together. It’s about a variety of positions — Missionary to Doggy-Style to Monkey-Steals-the-Plums to the Devil’s-Triangle to the Denver Omelet. And it’s about the pauses between those position shifts, too — the laughing and the continued foreplay and the awkwardness and the fumbling for protection. Sex is about pacing. And rhythm. And overcoming conflict. And people! Sex is about people.

You: Huh.

Me: Anyway. With Freytag’s pyramid, the fact it depicts an incline is interesting — because you can get that sense of cresting a hill, like with a roller coaster. But I also like the idea that story should be a descent — the feeling that there is an intense gravity to the narrative that draws you down, down, down. Every plateau is just another temporary respite from the ineluctable slide. It’s a ride you can’t get off. It’s quicksand. The best stories feel that way, don’t they?

You: I’m going to say yes because I believe it but also because I don’t wanna get hit by a stapler.

Me: Smart.

You: So sometimes I want to speed up the descent. Sometimes I want to slow it.

Me: Bingo. And you do this in a lot of ways. Dialogue and action tend to speed up our reading; description and exposition slow us down. Conflict is actually a great accelerator — introducing new conflict or amping up an old one (by, say, raising the stakes). Introducing problems, perils, complexities, limitations: if we’re invested in the character, then these conflicts draw us deeper and deeper into the story. And we fall faster and faster.

You: I don’t know what “raising the stakes” means.

Me: You can read this: 25 Things To Know About Your Story’s Stakes.

You: tl;dr

Me: That’s very rude, that tl;dr thing. And it suggests you’re stupid and impatient.

You: That’s because I am stupid and impatient.

Me: Fine, fine, here’s the gist: the stakes are what can gain or be lost by the characters. The stakes are the combination of the character’s problem and the character’s proposed solution to that problem. It’s what the character wants — or what the character fears will happen. What’s being offered up into the middle of the table in terms of the narrative poker game you’re playing? Or, more dramatically, what’s the sacrifice? In Die Hard, John McClane’s wife and his relationship to his wife is what’s on the table. It’s her life and, by proxy, his.

You: Man, you talk about Die Hard a lot.

Me: You say that like it’s a sin. I’d use more bookish examples but almost everyone has seen Die Hard and, for what appears on the surface like a dipshit rah-rah action movie, it’s actually got great construction that contains a lot of the things that make a story great.

You: I like the part where Professor Snape says ‘the Eff-a-Bee-a-Eye.’

Me: Whatever. Do you understand the stakes, now?

You: Yeah, sure, yes. So, how do I create or… evolve the conflict?

Me: It’s like this: you put a nut on a rock —

You: You put your nuts on a rock?

Me: *ignores you* — you put a nut on a rock and you drop a chipmunk on the ground five feet away, and the chipmunk will run to climb the rock and steal the nut. A simple, uncomplicated journey: the chipmunk wants the nut and he satisfies his desire. Imagine though that you’re an antagonizer, and your job is to stop the chipmunk from getting the nut. Which means complicating the critter’s journey. You dig a trench. You pick him up and throw him ten feet away. You attack him with chipmunk ninjas. You introduce a chipmunk vixen who wants the nut instead. Ah, but now let’s consider the perspective of the audience. Those watching from afar will think you’re an asshole, and they’ll root for the chipmunk. And every time that fuzzy little sonofabitch gets closer, they’ll inch forward on their chairs, eager to see him get that tasty goddamn nut. Every setback will hit them in the solar plexus like a hard elbow. Storytellers think they’re writing for the audience. They’re writing, in a way, to hurt the audience.

You: Sadist.

Me: *gestures with stapler*

You: See? Sadist. Anyway. So what you’re saying is, I need to obstruct my character’s journey. To complicate his mission and to make his problem harder before I make it easier.

Me: Ayup. This is where I suggest: 25 Ways To Fuck With Your Characters.

You: You say ‘fuck’ a lot.

Me: What can I say? I like a lot of spice in my chili.

You: So, anything else? Or am I free to go write now?

Me: One more thing. Mystery. If you’re struggling to find a way forward, or you’re starting to feel bored — introduce mystery. It can be a big mystery. It can be a small one. But take a number out of your narrative equation and replace it with a variable — a big-ass motherfucking question mark. Question marks are shaped like hooks for a reason: they will hook the reader and drag them deeper into the story. Again, mysteries lend gravity to the tale you’re telling.

You: So, like, who killed Doctor Slobbernuts?

Me: … sure, provided you never ever say the word ‘slobbernuts’ to me again. A murder mystery is a good example of a big mystery — those are usually reserved for early on in the story, though they can also pop in in the middle to accelerate the tale. But smaller mysteries work, too — who sent the character a love letter? Who left the little cairn of smoldering cigarettes on the road outside the house? Why is that orangutan following me, and who gave him that cavalry saber?

You: I may have given him the sword.

Me: You sonofabitch.

You: Revenge for the stapler. He’s hunting you, now. He has your smell.

Me: I’ll get you for this.

You: I know. Any more words of inspiration, slobbernuts?

Me: Listen, just keep it interesting. Boredom is your greatest enemy. Entertain yourself. Switch gears. Have characters make hard decisions. Introduce troublesome choices. Fear stagnation. And try to make everything make sense. Once more: let the characters lead. You do that, with them cleaving to their character traits and doing things that make sense for them (instead of making sense for some external plot) and you’re good to go.

You: Ferris Bueller, you’re my hero.

Me: *stapler to the neck*

You: GAAAOW

*elbow elbow elbow*

The opening round of the Goodreads Best Books of 2013 contest is live.

It is full of really wonderful books. (I mean, holy crap, have you read V.E. Schwab’s Vicious, yet?) A bounty of great books on there by wonderful authors: Robin Hobb, Richard Kadrey, Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, Joe Hill, Margaret Atwood, James S.A. Corey, Marko Kloos, John Scalzi, Hugh Howey, Diana Rowland and so on. Hell — three of my Taco Brothers are on there: Kevin Hearne, Brian McClellan, Jason Hough. Proving I eat tacos with bad-ass people.

Again: amazing group of books and authors. Bonus: new books to buy and read!

Last year, I had no book in the 2012 first round — ahh, but Goodreads allows for write-in books, which is how Blackbirds popped up last year. That’s awesome, because it means the readers loved the book enough to put it there. This also means you could, ohhhh, say, write-in a book this year like The Blue Blazes (paranormal fantasy!) or Under the Empyrean Sky (young adult fantasy/sci-fi!) were you so inclined.

Or you could write-in other books by other great authors you really enjoyed this year!

So, please go, and support the authors and books you’ve enjoyed.

If that includes me, fistbump.

If it doesn’t, no worries!

*burns down your house*