So on Halloween night when you get home, do you ever take a picture of the collected swag? Or at least dump it on the bed and ogle?

Well I don’t Trick or Treat much anymore, but here’s (most of) my BEA swag, all organized by size.

Mmm . . . free books.

When buying books, I usually avoid the back cover (spoilers!) and go straight for the first-page test. Judging a 80,000-word document on the basis of one page may seem cruel and unusual, but I’ve found that most books reveal a lot about themselves in that first minute. At least, they reveal more than real-live human beings when you first meet them. A human, after all, might just be having a bad day.

So here’s a quick BEA-swag-related First Page Test for your delectation.

Chain Mail, by Hiroshi Ishikazi (Tokyopop)
(fourth from right, bottom row)

I stood in front of the mailbox and cried. Snow fell around me, frosting my hair and shoes, slowly blotting out the words of the test results I held in my hands. Out of over twenty-five thousand test-takers, I had placed first in Japanese, Mathematics, Science, Basic Studies, and General Studies. I had finally made it.

But it was too late. My mother was gone, and she wasn’t coming back. If I had only studied harder, if I had only gotten these results a month earlier, maybe it would have made a difference.

Melting snow slid down my back. I shivered, remembering the sound of flesh striking flesh . . .

Things that brought me in:

1) “I stood in front of the mailbox and cried” is a lovely first sentence. We are somewhere specific, and something specific is happening.

2) I like “frosting” a lot, because it’s being used in a slightly unusual way, and is strong visually. And there’s something perfect about the snow alighting specifically on the character’s “hair and shoes.” Hair, because it reveals that she’s not wearing a hat—she just stepped out to grab the eagerly awaited mail. And shoes, because she’s looking down at the letter, and also because she’s crying—staring at your shoes is not usually a sign of happiness. (I’m assuming the protag’s a girl because of the cover, by the way.)

3) Wait, she’s crying because the test results are perfect? Brain was ready for the opposite. Unexpected is good.

4) The second paragraph sets off a wave of micro-mysteries for the reader. How did her test results make her mother go away? And is her mother dead, or something else?

5) “Melting snow slid down my back. I shivered, remembering . . . ” is a cool way to physicalize the bad memory. And “flesh striking flesh” is definitely bad, bad, bad.

Things that kicked me out:

1) The construction “test-takers” is clunky to me. Like, why not say “students”? I mean, we know this is about testing. You could just say “Out of twenty-five thousand, I had placed first” and it would make sense. Still, the term is probably just a literal move from the more elegant Japanese. Translations get a few extras free passes, because I like the odd feel of an ocassional literalness.

2) Maybe we’re going a little too quickly into the explanation of this little micro-mystery? I’m not a fan of flashbacks that start before we’re fully in a scene, which always seems stagey.

These are minor quibbles, though. I’d definitely keep going.

I’ll be doing more of these soon. It’s a fun and easy way to dispense writing advice. But I won’t be doing any American authors, for reasons that I will soon reveal.

And in fairness, I’ll be putting up my own first page soon . . . Extras‘, that is. So you can mock it to your hearts’ content.

One: The Last Days comes out tomorrow! (More on that tomorrow.)

Two: Those of you who are writers may want to check out Justine’s blog, in which she tells How to Write a Novel. (Including my patented content-management spreadsheet trick.)

That’s it, except to say that our readings last night went exceedingly well. Thanks to everybody who came!

So I had big plans to continue my Elmore Leonard writing rules, but the heat in NY has reached Farenheit 741.5, the temperature at which it is only possible to read manga and graphic novels.

Luckily, other people are blogging about writing and are being extremely funny. Look on in awe as Maureen Johnson, author of The Bermudez Triangle and 13 Little Blue Envelopes, shows what it’s like to be on deadline with a book.

Pretty much like this:

Thanks to Justine for that link. And now I go back to Paradise Kiss.

While I was finishing Specials my fictional brain started to break, so I decided to take some time off from narrative. Fortunately, a collection of letters written by the great hard-boiled writer Raymond Chandler leapt from the depths of my Sydney storage unit and into my hands.

Chandler’s technique for writing letters was to stay up at night drinking and talking into a tape recorder (a wire recorder in those days, actually). The next day his secretary would type up his rantings and send them in the mail. This led to many a drunken tongue-lashing, and a fair amount of solid writing advice, being preserved for posterity.

As I re-read the letters, I realized that I’ve stolen a lot of Chandler’s writing techniques over the years, especially his “four-hour rule” (see below), which I’ve expounded to many a writing class. So I figured it was time to ‘fess up and show all of you the source material.

So here is the unalloyed Raymond Chandler on the subject of writing:

1. Letter to Frederick Lewis Allen, editor of Harper’s Magazine
7 May 1948
My theory was that [the readers] just thought they cared about . . . the action; that really, although they didn’t know it, they cared very little about the action. The things that they really cared about, and that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialogue and description; the things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain of his face and his mouth was half opened in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. He didn’t even hear death knock at the door. That damn paper clip kept slipping away from his fingers and he just wouldn’t push it to the edge of the desk and catch it as it fell.

That paper clip image is very goosepimple-making, a classic noir example of the crumpled little guy facing oblivion. Of course, we all know that a guy trying to pick up a paper clip on a hoverboard would be cooler. And like, especially if the paper clip exploded . . .

This next motivational technique is one I always tell aspiring writers to try:

2. Letter to Alex Barris, an interview by mail
18 March 1949
The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day at least, when a professional writer doesn’t do anything else but write. He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor. But he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks. Write or nothing. It’s the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored. I find it works. Two very simple rules, a. you don’t have to write. B. you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself.

Put those two rules on your refrigerator and you’ll have a novel within a year. Or at least someone else who uses your refrigerator will.

The letter below reminds me of something Kingsley Amis said: “Sometimes the hardest part of writing is getting the characters out of the pub and into the cab.” Writers don’t just get stuck at the earth-shattering, life-changing decisions that our characters make; the little details of reality management are actually quite tricky and frustrating. Never assume you’re a crap writer just because you can’t get someone across a room—it happens to all of us.

3. Letter to Paul Brooks, a publisher working on a Chandler collection
19 July 1949
When I started out to write fiction I had the great disadvantage of having absolutely no talent for it. I couldn’t get the characters in and out of rooms. They lost their hats and so did I. If more than two people were on scene I couldn’t keep one of them alive. Give me two people snotting at each other across a desk and I am happy. A crowded canvas just bewilders me.

This letter to Alfred Hitchcock contains fantastic advice for writers as well as film-makers. Just substitute the words “wicked-cool sentence” or “scintillating simile” for “camera shot.”

4. 6 December 1950
As a friend and well-wisher, I urge you just once in your long and distinguished career . . . to get a sound and sinewy story into the script and sacrifice no part of its soundness for an interesting camera shot. Sacrifice a camera shot if necessary. There will always be another camera shot just as good. There is never another motivation just as good.

Beyond his anti-Agatha Christie snark, there is an excellent point below about the difference between novels and short stories. A lot of writers who excel at the story level don’t think to “turn the corner” when attempting the longer form.

5. Letter to Dorothy Gardner, secretary of the Mystery Writers Association
January 1956
The trouble with most English mystery writers, however well known in their world, is that they can’t turn a corner. About halfway through a book they start fooling with alibis, analyzing bits and pieces of evidence and so on. The story dies on them. Any book which is any good has to turn the corner. You get to the point where everything implicit in the original situation has been developed or explored, and then a new element has to introduced which is not implied from the beginning but which is seen to be part of the situation when it shows up.

Speaking of snark . . . bet you didn’t know that Raymond Chandler’s brief foray into science fiction actually predicted the rise of Google as an information search service. Check this out:

6. Letter to H.N Swanson
14 March 1953
Did you ever read what they call Science Fiction? It’s a scream. It’s written like this: “I checked out with K19 on Abadabaran III, and stepped out through the crummaliote hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels. I flicked on the heat bars and the Bryllis ran swiftly on five legs using their other two to send out crylon vibrations. The pressure was almost unbearable, but I caught the range on my wrist computer through the transparent cysicites. I pressed the trigger. The thin violet glow was icecold against the rust-colored mountains. The Bryllis shrank to half an inch long and I worked fast stepping on them with the poltex. But it wasn’t enough. The sudden brightness swung me around and the Fourth Moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google had told me it wasn’t enough. He was right.”
They pay brisk money for this crap?

Yes, Mr. Chandler, they do.

You can buy the collection, edited by Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane, right here.

People in writing groups often ask me, “What do I do when I get conflicting advice? How will I ever decide which way to go?”

My answer is: “Try it both ways and see which works! Don’t just write one ending, write three!”

It’s a medically proven fact: Writing the same scene several different ways won’t actually kill you.

Take a cue from visual artists. They make a hundred pencil drawings of a subject before even starting with the paint. They paint the same dang pot of flowers a dozen times, with only slight variations. They doodle in their sketchbooks all day, making stuff no one will ever see. But they rarely sit there and just complain about a compositional problem without putting their hands on a brush/pen/piece of clay.

In my second novel, Fine Prey, I actually wrote a scene that I knew wouldn’t be in the final draft, just so I could visualize what had happened “off screen” in the story. Weird, but it worked.

In another case, I lost a short story and had to write it again from scratch. Then I found the original again. (Argh.) Guess what? The combination of the two–taking the best elements of each–was better than anything I would have reached by fiddling endlessly with that lost original. And the experience of writing a story twice and then comparing the two versions helped me understand it in ways I wouldn’t have otherwise.

You see, paper is magic: Making marks on it changes your brain. So, don’t sit around trying to think your way out of problems, write your way out of them. The best place to find answers is on a piece of paper or a glowing phosphorus screen.

One quick note
Of course, thinking about writerly issues in the shower or while jogging is a fine habit to get into, because otherwise that’s just wasted time.* Please understand that I’m not against thinking; I’m only against thinking that thinking on its own will get you out of a hole. Shovel also needed.

*Except for the being hygienic and fit, which is somewhat useful.

The most common questions I get from fans (other than “when is Pretties coming out?”) are those about writing. Where do you get ideas? How do I get started? How do I keep going? How do you get published?

Of course, it’s not surprising that a lot of people who like to read also want to write. And fortunately, I love talking about the craft and business of writing. But I do find myself answering the same questions and giving the same advice again and again. So I’ve decided to start to put my stock motivational speeches together into a series of posts call, oddly, “Writing Advice.”

To give these posts visual interest and the appropriate authori-tie, I wasted many long minutes designing this exceedingly lame logo:

So let us begin at the end:

Finish everything!

There will always be a part of your brain that wants to give up when characters aren’t behaving, when you don’t know where to go next, when the inspiration has faded. Don’t give the start-something-else part of your brain any extra leverage, or it will win every time. And once it starts winning . . . Well, let’s just say that the not-finishing habit is a hard one to break.

It’s easy to think up logical reasons to stop writing a story. You say to yourself: “This sucks. Why waste any more time? I’ll start something new that inspires me!”

Yeah, well, the inspiration of a new story is exciting. But if you wind up not finishing ninety percent of what you start, guess what happens. After a few years you’ll have written 100 beginnings, 40 middles, and only 10 endings. Which means you’ll be great at writing beginnings, only so-so at middles, and you’ll suck at endings. Which means you will almost certainly keep faltering between the middle and the end of every story, which means you’ll keep giving up and not finishing . . . Rinse, repeat.

And that’s a hole you don’t want to fall into. So finish, even if you know this story isn’t going to win you the Nobel Prize—it’s good practice to type THE END.