The Craft Files
- How to Identify an Email as a Scam
I recently woke up to a minor milestone in my inbox: my first author scam email! Scammers have gotten pretty good at writing these emails, so even though I had heard about these scams through my networks and even heard from authors at my day job that they had received similar emails, I hesitated.
So, it seemed a good occasion to talk through some of the ways you can spot a scam email. Be aware, protect yourself, spread the word!
If you’re looking for more information on scams and issues within the industry in general, I always recommend Writer Beware, which does awesome work. They have already had some excellent and helpful warnings about precisely the kind of email I received, book festival and interview scams, and a lot of impersonation scams across the industry.
“Marshall Poe from the New Books Network” would like to interview me
No he wouldn’t.
Here’s an unfortunate truth about the publishing industry: Nobody is going to reach out to you for no reason.
There are, of course, exceptions, but we’re talking 1 in 1000000. If someone reaches out to you like this, STOP, DO NOT ANSWER IT, and think about it very carefully.
Here is the email that I received:
Dear Jes,
I hope you’re having a productive and enjoyable week.
My name is Marshall Poe, and I am the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the New Books Network, a podcast dedicated to in-depth conversations with authors about their recent books, intellectual journeys, and the ideas shaping their work.
I am writing to formally invite you to join us for a featured interview on the network. We focus on thoughtful, long-form discussions that highlight the creative process behind your writing, the inspirations that drive your work, and the broader themes your work engages with.
The interview is conducted remotely via Zoom, and we are happy to schedule a time that is most convenient for you.
If this is of interest, please let us know, and we will be delighted to arrange the session and share your work with our global audience of engaged listeners and readers.
We would be honored to feature you on the network and look forward to the possibility of speaking with you.
Warm regards,
Marshall Poe
Founder & Editor-in-Chief
New Books Network
Are they asking for money?
No. At least, not yet. The Writer Beware article on interview scams has an excellent example of why it is not not a scam just because it doesn’t mention money up-front. They provide an example of an author who has received a scam email and follows through with some responses. They express some initial interest in an offer and that is when the scammer makes clear that they need to pay in order for their work to be promoted.
Legitimate venues will not charge you for promotional appearances. In fact, it is usually good etiquette for the venue to offer the author who is appearing a monetary honorarium.
Is this venue real?
Actually yes, it is. The New Books Network is really a huge and well-respected podcasting network with over 30,000 episodes and millions of listeners, and Marshall Poe really is the founder and EIC.
Scammers deliberately impersonate real people and places like this and they’re counting on you not to look any farther. That’s exactly why we have to.
Strike 1: If this were real, Marshall Poe would not be reaching out to me directly.
First of all, this came to me from “hostmarshallpoe@gmail.com.” His real email address is “marshallpoe@gmail.com” (it is publicly available, otherwise I would not be listing it).
My day job is in books marketing at an academic press. I am not in charge of publicity, but I have worked a lot with our publicist and even coordinated some Zoom interviews and panels myself in the past. I have never reached out to an author we did not publish for our interviews.
If this request were legit, I would likely have received this email from a podcast employee at a generic internal email address (possibly something like interviews@newbooksnetwork.com, or even their publicly listed hello@newbooksnetwork.com), or maybe directly from one of their show hosts. If I were truly, ultimately going to be interviewed by Mashall Poe himself, I would not be put in contact with Poe himself until details had been ironed out and possibly a contract signed, and it’s possible I wouldn’t even really get to interact directly until the interview itself.
This can be different at smaller venues with fewer staff and less infrastructure, but the point remains. Ask yourself, why has the head of this podcast/magazine/blog/etc. reached out to me directly?
Strike 2: It does not make sense that they are reaching out to *me*.
I flatter myself, I’ve been making progress recently. People are learning my name (locally, anyway). I have a few local panel and reading events coming up and I’m so excited to read and meet new people at StokerCon. BUT! What have I done that merits the New Books Network reaching out to me?
Funny enough, the email itself cannot answer that question. They make vague references to “recent books” (I don’t have any yet!) and wanting to hear about the, “creative process behind your writing, the inspirations that drive your work, and the broader themes your work engages with.”
The email makes no indication that they have any idea what I write or why I would be a good fit for their podcast. Everything I have published is horror and the NBN only has one genre category: Science Fiction. Is one of their hosts planning to host episodes on horror? If so, why is that host not writing to me?
It doesn’t add up
It would be incredible to be featured on NBN! Alas, even if I waffle on every other point, the most damning evidence that this email is not real is the email address: hostmarshallpoe@gmail.com. Think about it: If you’re branding yourself as a creator, why would you not simply use your name as your email address? Which is exactly what he did. This email address does not belong to Marshall Poe. It cannot be real.
Take a deep breath, take a step back
It can be so exciting to receive an email requesting your participation in a podcast, panel, blog, you name it. It can feel like you’re being seen at last.
I’ve been taken in by a scammer at work before because I didn’t understand the game. Fortunately, I recognized it before everything went through and was able to keep the publisher from losing any money, but it was a very helpful experience. Scammers thrive off of making you believe that you will be missing out if you don’t do whatever they’re proposing, they’re often willing to negotiate (any money is better than no money!), and they’ll often make you feel like you have to make a decision right now otherwise you’ll lose this chance.
The best way to avoid being taken in by scammers is to not let them have that power over you. Give yourself whatever space you need to be able to read your emails logically and carefully. For me, that means taking at least 15 minutes or maybe even going for a walk to get myself away from the keyboard and let my initial emotional response die down. Do what you need to do, and then ask yourself these questions:
- Are they asking for money? If the answer is yes, that’s a red flag off the bat. The only opportunities where it makes sense for you the author to spend money is on convention table space. Submission request, interview offer, blog invite, agent query request? Nope, don’t give them money.
- Is the venue legitimate? If not, it’s a scam, but answering this question can be tricky. Many scammers impersonate legit companies, but they’ve also gotten good at faking nonexistent companies. Maybe the venue that reached out does have a website, but do they have an archive of previous posts or episodes? If you’re anxious about it, a quick search for “[company name] scam” will probably let you know if someone else has already identified the company as fake.
- Who is reaching out to me? Take a look at the email address and who the person claims to be. If they declare that they’re the creator, founder, editor in chief, head honcho of the venue you should take another look. Does their email address have numbers in it or some other modifier (e.g. “host” in my example)? Look them up. You might not be able to find a publicly listed email address for the person in question, but then why would they be reaching out to you?
- Why are they reaching out to me? Does the email include any information that indicates they understand who you are and what you’ve written? Have they added any details about why they want you to be a part of their podcast/blog/event? Perhaps they reference a type of publication (in my case, books) that you haven’t even produced yet.
Read carefully, think carefully, be patient. The industry is slow and the grind is long. Don’t get caught up with what can feel like a shortcut.
- Basics, Volume I: Voice
Voice is a tricky concept to define for a writer, and one that I struggled to understand early on. Worse, I couldn’t figure out how to actually spend time developing my voice as a writer.
Today, I’m breaking down the basics by defining the concept of “voice” and providing some examples, resources, and even a few exercises.
My goal for this post is to suggest ways that you can understand the voice you already have and learn ways to identify its elements and deliberately change it to suit your purposes.
Defining “Voice”
I love Sonya Huber’s definition of voice, both for its clarity, its musicality, and its own apparent display of her writerly voice:
When you’re inside a piece of writing that hums and crackles and sparks, when a real person is talking to you from the page, you’ve encountered a voice. ‘Voice’ is what writing feels like. It sets off sympathetic vibrations in readers. It gives us a sense of connection to another live human presence, creating a real and complex moment of communication.1
At the heart of how I think of voice is precisely this sentence: “’Voice’ is what writing feels like.” Fundamentally, it’s something we have already. You write in a voice already, whether you do so deliberately or not. A really successful writerly voice is often different from the way we speak.
Not that written voice is wholly separate from speech. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle have discussed the relationship of writerly “voice” to the more traditional voices of human arts-out-loud such as song and poetry. These are relevant even in a medium where the reader will frequently only “hear” your words in their own mind (although I always advocate for authors to participate in readings, and often reading your work out loud is a great way to tackle edits of a difficult passage!).2
All this being said, here’s my TL;DR definition:
The Definition of Voice (Part 1)
Writerly voice is how a story’s narrator talks to you. It is comprised of decisions about tone, diction, rhythm, point of view, grammar, sentence length, metaphor and simile, and just about any other writing device or technique.
I have seen some folks confuse voice with point of view (POV), but these are distinct concepts. A POV character (a character from whose perspective the story is told) can have voice, a narrator can have voice, but voice is a different beast altogether.
When it comes to voice in practice, identifying and developing your own voice, I have a slightly different definition:
The Definition of Voice (Part 2)
Your writerly voice is the way that feels good to you to write.
This gets us more clearly toward the direction of this post, toward voice as an objective, because frequently what people mean when they say they’re looking for a strong voice, especially from an editorial/acquisitions perspective, is a distinctive voice. You have a voice already, but the question is, how do you cultivate it into a distinctive voice?
Let’s put a pin in that for now and revisit it during the exercises below. For now, I want to dive into some examples to help give you a better idea of how voice can be visible in a story.
Examples of Voice
Voice can be slippery, a kind of “know it when you see it” idea, so I’d like to spend some time with examples. Let’s take a look at the opening lines of a few of my favorite books, and examine the differences between them.
I’m going to do three pairs of examples: two in third person by different authors and two in first person by different authors, to demonstrate how voice can sound from different POVs; and two from the same author (me!) to demonstrate consistencies in voice across different stories.
“In fifteen days, there will be no food in Aymar Castle.
She has done the arithmetic forward and back. They have been down to strangled rations for weeks now, and there have been mistakes. Thefts. Impulsive, desperate gorgings. Even if every soul in Aymar Castle keeps to their allotted portion—and Phosyne does not think that is likely—every soul in Aymar Castle will run out of food in fifteen days.
And though Phosyne is one of the few outside the Priory who can work sums, everybody else is bound to realize this soon.”
~Caitlin Starling, The Starving Saints***
“There was a fly walking on Cordelia’s hand and she was not allowed to flick it away.
She had grown used to the ache of sitting on a hard wooden pew and being unable to shift her weight. It still hurt, but eventually her legs went to sleep and the ache became a dull, all-over redness that was easier to ignore.
Though her senses were dulled in obedience, her sense of touch stayed strongest. Even when she was so far under that the world had a gray film around the edges, she could still feel her clothing and the touch of her mother’s hand. And now the fly’s feet itched, which was bad, then tickled, which was worse.”
~T. Kingfisher, A Sorceress Comes to CallWe can say a few things right off the bat. Both have started with a one sentence, declarative opening paragraph. Both have continued that declarative style to lay out the opening situations of their respective novels. We might start to point to the differences with tenses: Starling has chosen present tense, while Kingfisher writes in past.
However, there are some critical distinctions that take a little more study and have a huge impact on how each of these passages read: Cadence/rhythm, diction, and tone. Try reading them out loud.
While those first sentences feel similar, there is a downward beat to Starling’s while Kingfisher’s has a more even tone. This is about the situations, as well: Starling is describing an incredibly dire moment, while Kingfisher is settling into a moment that (we learn over the following few paragraphs) is emotionally crushing, but happens repeatedly. Starling builds tension with varied but ultimately shorter sentence lengths (for the most part). Her novel is also set in an alternate-medieval time period, so we see some of the word choice (she can “work sums,” for example, instead of “do math”) leaning into more archaic constructions. Kingfisher, meanwhile, settles into the emotional significance of the moment with longer, slower, more contemplative sentences that bring the reader deeply into her character’s experience.
Let’s transition into two examples of first person POVs and take another look at authorial voice there:
“The sight of this old train car saddens me, though I cannot quite articulate why. There is something unnamable about the rattling of empty wooden seats, so like the pews of a deserted church, that puts me in a lonely humor. It is an unusual feeling, since I have never in my life been alone.
Jagged mountains rise and fall outside the window, dotted with white trees and the occasional lodge long since abandoned to the wild. It has been one hour and forty-two minutes since the last snow-shrouded sign of civilization crawled across the landscape, and it will be fifty-four minutes before the next appears. This is not accounting for delays, accidents, breakdowns, avalanches, or seismically induced derailments.”
~Hiron Ennes, Leech***
“The whole mess began in a courtroom in Vsila, the capital of Nuryevet, where I was being put on trial for something stupid.
“What’s all this about?” I said, not for the first time.
“Charges of witchcraft,” they said; at least, that was what it boiled down to.
“Utterly ridiculous,” I said.
“We got some witnesses,” they said.
“Your witnesses can go fuck themselves,” says I, although not in so many words.”
~Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of TruthsThe differences here are a bit more readily apparent! They also are as much about characterization as they are a result of authorial voice. The narrator of Leech addresses us with details and precision that suggest their remove from people around them, establishing the setting and a certain level of the world’s technology. Ennes also has pursued an older grammatical style that lends itself to the tone and time period of the novel, but also impacts sentence rhythm. Ennes wrote, “There is something unnamable about the rattling of empty wooden seats, so like the pews of a deserted church, that puts me in a lonely humor.” But they might have written, “There is something unnamable about the rattling of empty wooden seats, which sounds like the pews of a deserted church, that makes me feel lonely.” (A clumsy attempt, perhaps, but hopefully you see what I mean.)
Rowland’s narrator, obviously, takes a far more conversational style. As with Starling’s opening, the short sentences move the action along quickly and provide a great example of where telling can be better than showing. And, of course, both of these passages feel distinct from the Startling and Kingfisher in more ways than simply POV. Again, I recommend reading these aloud to hear and feel the ways each author’s choices about structure, length, and language shift the rhythm and build tone and tension.
Finally, join me for a brief exercise in narcissism as I compare two of my own stories:
“The old Abbey loomed as hungry as it ever had in Albion’s memory. As the coach rumbled up the final stretch of road from the train station, the house crouched low over the drive, the lips of its stone façade pulling back from its toothy, jagged archivolt to open the way for him. Fog had left a sheen of moisture on every surface, and Albion drew off his leather gloves the better to feel the oak door, slippery under his fingers. The tongue of the faded pink carpet in the foyer splayed to savor him.
Albion breathed in the ancient interior. It smelled just as it ever had, of dust, silver polish, and damp. There was no hint of death to the air; they must have moved the body to the cellar to keep until Albion could deal with it.”
~”The House of Coiled Earth,” published in The Crawling Moon: Queer Tales of Inescapable Dread***
“After the vows had all been spoken and the feasting begun, it was time for the Skin Game.
The bride remained veiled at the high table—none but her husband would see her face until more private offices had been completed—but the young groom leapt up to lead the festivities.
He was barely more than a boy, but new bride and honey-wine emboldened him. His speech slurred as he crouched like a beast on one end of a feast table and chanted the rhyme.
In the wood I went a-hunting,
Cut myself a skin to run in.
Guess which shape I wear to-day,
Or wood come take thy skin away.The assembly laughed and clapped as chatter died, dancing stilled, the fiddler stopped his strings, and all gathered to watch or join in the game.”
~“Cut-a-Skin, Outside-In,” published in The Joining: Scenes of Wedding TerrorI wrote these stories two years apart, but I wanted to put them side-by-side because they are both “period pieces,” although one is more aristocratic and gothic while the other draws more from folklore. In this case, let’s focus on the similarities. I tend to vary my sentence length, but you can see my tendency to draw multiple elements down into a single moment. Punctuation like em dashes and semicolons stitch ideas together, and you can see I love a good list (“It smelled…of dust, silver polish, and damp,” and “chatter died, dancing stilled, the fiddler stopped his strings, and all gathered”).
These are not a perfect example of everything I feel my voice encompasses, but they show some of my tendencies, despite their differences.
Now let’s talk about how you might get there: Knowing and deliberately enacting your own voice.
How to Develop Your Voice
Here’s the bad news: the best way to develop and understand your voice is write, and write, and write a lot. It took me a few years to figure out my voice once I started actively working to improve my writing. There were three stages to that process. First, of course, I needed to understand what voice was. Hopefully, this post so far has at least gotten you on the road to that.
Stage two was learning to see my existing writing voice. This was challenging for me, because I initially couldn’t understand what I was trying to do that was different. I write how I write how I write. And while I was correct (voice is a thing you have, even if you’re not doing it intentionally) it was when I started composing sentences that kind of pinged for me—they hit little happy notes in my brain and chest—that I realized how I wanted to shape my voice.
Therefore, stage three was pursuing those pings, the way that felt good for me to write. As with the previous two stages, this came, quite simply, from a lot of writing and a lot of experimentation. Let’s move on to some exercises, though, that might help you along with stages two and three of developing your voice.
Voice Exercises
You can do these separately, but I would argue will work best if they are completed in order.
Exercise 1
This is a reading exercise intended to help you read for your voice and identify elements that you like.
You will need a writing implement in your preferred medium and color, a quiet space where you feel comfortable reading aloud, and a piece that you have already written, preferably short: a short story, a book chapter, a completed scene, a poem.
Read each piece aloud. Do not make corrections or changes at this stage. Just read it. When you reach a particular phrase, or sentence that you really like, make a note of it. After you have finished reading each piece, reflect back on those places you have highlighted. Think carefully about why you like each of them. What patterns can you find in the things you like? Consider the following categories:
Rhythm/cadence/sentence weight
Alliteration/rhyme
Sentence length/pacing
Diction/casual vs. formal vernacular/contractions
Elements like a pretty image matter, but we’re not looking for pretty images, we’re looking for how you describe them.
If you like, to obtain more data to work with, you might pick another piece and repeat the process, then compare what you have highlighted in both pieces. They do not need to be the same type of piece (although if you would like to do this for poetry, you may have the best results if you are comparing two poems).
Optional: Do this exercise again with a listener you trust.
Try to make a concrete list of the things that you have identified. These should be the things that you like the most, and may not necessarily be the things you do the most. Try to aim for four to six elements.
Exercise 2
Now that you have a list of the things you like about your writing, it’s time to do a writing exercise. The purpose of this exercise is to practice cultivating those elements that feel best to you when you write.
You will need your preferred writing implement (be it pen and paper, computer, dictation device, whatever), the list you created in the previous exercise, and a concept for the beginning of a new piece. (Maybe check this list of prompts if you’re in need of inspiration.)
Choose 2-3 of the elements on the list you made. Write the first few paragraphs of a new piece, deliberately aiming to use those elements that you have chosen. Keep it short! Don’t let yourself go over 300 words.
Put what you have written away, so you cannot look at it. If you need to, make notes of what happens, but for the next part you should try not to reference the words you have already used to describe events.
Chose a different 2-3 elements from the list you made. Write the story opening again, deliberately aiming to use those elements that you have chosen. Again, aim for less than 300 words.
Now, compare what you have written. Which works for you better? Which do you want to keep doing? If you like and you still have more elements on your list, do this exercise again. You can also try writing the opening again with your favorite of everything on your list. Experiment! It’s only 300 words, so take your time and have fun with it.
Developing Voice Requires Practice, Patience, and Experimentation
I hope this has proven to be a helpful breakdown not just of what voice is, but how to figure out what you want it to be. I’ve tried to give you some tools to target voice in your writing, but writerly voice is one of those things that you can only truly discover with real focus and intention. These exercises aren’t going to get you all the way.
Give yourself time and space to experiment, and also make sure you keep reading! Find things you like in other authors’ voices—what is it that you like about it? How might you adapt the things you like?
Good luck out there. Listen to yourself <3
Works cited
Bennett, Andrew and Nicholas Royle. An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory. 6th Edition. Taylor & Francis, 2023.
Ennes, Hiron. Leech. Tor, 2022.
Huber, Sonya. Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto. University of Nebraska Press, 2022.
Kingfisher, T. A Sorceress Comes to Call. Tor, 2024.
Malitoris, Jes. “Cut-a-Skin, Outside-In.” The Joining: Scenes of Wedding Terror. Edited by Jacob Steven Mohr. Crystal Lake Publishing, 2025.
Malitoris, Jes. “The House of Coiled Earth.” The Crawling Moon: Queer Tales of Inescapable Dread. Edited by dave ring.Neon Hemlock Press, 2024.
Rowland, Alexandra. A Conspiracy of Truths. Saga Press, 2018.
Starling, Caitlin. The Starving Saints. Harper Voyager, 2025.
- Fieldwork: How I Prep For a Workshop
I love a good writing workshop. The deep-dive seminars, the writing exercises, the conversation and feedback with and from other writers interested in similar things…
I’ve got another workshop coming up this May: The Author’s Journey intensive novel/la workshop with Crystal Lake Publishing.1If you want to take this yourself, I recognize that the price tag can be prohibitive. They do offer pricing plans, and the workshop offers a lot of bang for your buck. It is primarily aimed at genre writers, with the intention of getting you to the finish line on a novel or novella in just three months.
For this workshop, I’m going to work on a medieval horror-fantasy novel I have already started and I’m really excited about. I only have four chapters written, but I’m not entirely satisfied with them. This workshop includes focused help on the first three chapters, so I’m looking forward to the opportunity to get these nailed down so I have strong foundation as I move on to the rest of the novel.
And then, of course, I’m hoping it’ll help me power through the rest of the novel.
I know how I write: I can write quickly, which is to say that I am capable of shutting off the editor brain enough to just put words on the page. The problem is, my “quickly” still usually caps out at 2000 words per day. With a day job, a need for a rest, and a desire to spend time with my nearest and dearest fellow humans, I’m going to need to plan my time carefully in order to get my first draft done. (As Richard Dansky reminded me, the first draft doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be done.)
This is intended as a short blog series as I walk you through my strategies for approaching a workshop, especially an intensive workshop of this kind. As always, your mileage may vary if you try implementing my method yourself, but I hope it provides some direction.
In today’s episode: Setting my big-picture goals; planning the story; sketching and allocating my wordcount; and reflecting on feedback from the first milestone, a one-on-one story planning session with the head of the workshop.
Making the Workshop Productive No Matter What
I set out to make myself some big-picture goals for this workshop. I have participated in many workshops that taught me something new and made me feel energized to get to work. Unfortunately, I’ve also experienced the opposite, so I always find it helpful to sit down with myself and decide what I want for myself independent of the stated goals of the workshop. While overlap is allowed, I try to think about what I can achieve even if I don’t get much out of the feedback or the seminars don’t dig as deep as I was hoping for.
Hope for the best, plan for the worst, that sort of thing.
For this workshop, I certainly want to finish this novel draft if I possibly can, but what if I can’t? What else am I working toward that will stay with me when it is done, and I can achieve even if I don’t quite meet my word count goal? Here’s what I’ve settled on:
- Develop strategies for opening chapters.
- Improve not just character development but character voice.
- Learn to build tension that feels more organic.
Okay, now let’s get to work on the novel itself.
Preparing the Story: You Might Call Me a “Plotter”
I have always kind of resented the plotter/pantser/plantser designations that seem to make one’s approach to planning a story—or perhaps, let’s call it preparing a story—a hard identity rather than a collection of strategies that make writing a story possible. Nevertheless, I am the sort of writer who thrives in a structured environment, especially when it comes to need to go fast. Change will always happen when I’m writing the story, sometimes enough that I need to pause and adjust the trajectory of certain events, but I’m always going to start my prep with a solid outline. Preferably, a chapter-by-chapter outline.
Fortunately for me, I already did a version of this. I originally sketched out this story for a special call for novels that didn’t have to be written yet. Still, since I am unsatisfied with the opening three chapters, each of which introduces one of the three POV characters, I’ve been taking some time to look back over my outline.
So, there are three interlocking elements I’ve been focusing on, or rather, two elements upon which the third acts as a lens: characters and their arcs, the events that happen, and the theme that I want to explore using the first two. The theme is my lens, the thing that I bring to bear whenever I can’t figure out a problem that I am contemplating with one of the other elements.
Since I was having a problem with the first few chapters, the theme was where I started. It’s a novel about a Holy Grail quest gone horribly wrong, but its also a chance for me to dig in to my own thoughts and feelings about faith, in the divine, in other people, in ourselves.
Okay, great. So, each of my characters will have their own relationship with that theme: the excommunicated cynic who nevertheless desperately wants their quest to prove that the divine is real; the undead saint who knows (she thinks) that God is real, but feels that she has utterly failed him; and the woman masquerading as a knight, who trusts no one but herself.
In this context, I reviewed each of the things that happens—the plot part of my plotting—in their three chapters, and I realized I had focused too much on events and not enough on conversations. I think my way forward will be to make them talk to each other more. They are getting to know each other, sizing each other up, deciding what they think and believe about each other, suspicious that the undead saint can’t be what the Church says she is, while certain that their Templar knight is definitely a man. I will certainly need to get the story off the ground, but these characters bear so much tension between them, I think I’ll do best to let them be the ones to bear it up.
I’ll see what Joe says.
Word Count Planning and Calculations
This is the “feasibility” part of my workshop prep, especially because I know two things: 1) I will need and want rest over the course of these three months, and 2) I am going to have messy days where I don’t hit my word count goal, so I’m going to need a cushion. For this task, I’ve started using this fantastic word count, goals, and beats spreadsheet from Rowan Brighton Brown. I’m a sucker for a good spreadsheet, and this one has it all: percentage estimates for story beats, word count projections, a chart to let you see your progress at a glance. I’ve also done some customization on my version (e.g. I use number of words rather than page count), but if you’re looking for a good tracking sheet, I highly recommend this one.
I have started implementing word count tracking because the dark fantasy novel I am currently querying taught me that I cannot be trusted to just write until I feel done. My first draft of that book clocked in at 215,000 words. Yes, you read that right. The current standard for most adult fantasy novels usually CAPS at 100k. So, in order to even stand a chance of finding representation for it, over the course of more than I year I cut ONE. HUNDRED. THOUSAND. WORDS. From my novel. It is now at 115,000 and I do not think I can reasonably cut more without losing parts that are too important to strip away. This book taught me that I do not want to do that again! (However, I do plan to do a blog post on it at some point, because it also taught me great lessons about editing and deciding what is really important.)
Time for some math. Based on my outline, I will have twenty-five chapters. My chapters are typically 2000-2500 words, but some of them might run long. Let’s say 3000 words per chapter, putting the final novel estimate at 75000 words. This is great, as it puts me in the lower preferred end of novel length for adult horror novels. It’s a little bit short for fantasy, but I think that will be okay given the current state of the industry.
Now, we pull out the calendar. The course will run for 92 days. Assuming no days off, I should average 815 words per day. However, I will definitely have some days that are lower and others I plan to spend with family and friends or traveling to Pittsburg for the 10th annual StokerCon! Let’s estimate 20 total days completely off, meaning my final estimate is an average of 1042 words per day.
I breathe a sigh of relief. That’s not so bad! I had dreaded pushing for 2000 words per day for three months, which is a recipe for brutal burnout.
Finally, I do some word budgeting. Since I have an outline, I’ve sketched out rough milestones based on my novel structure. Some folks like to use Save the Cat, others the Seven Layer Plot. I built my novel basically by corrupting the traditional Hero’s Journey (this is a Grail Quest, after all) with John Clute’s Darkening Garden. By looking at the structure, I can judge that I should be approximately 30% of the way into my book when the characters hit the critical “Crossing the Threshold” point, and based on my total word count estimate, I should hit that point at around 15k words.
This might seem like an endless, frustrating exercise in unnecessary math, but I am giving myself guide rails. Again, I never want to have to cut 100k words from a book ever again. My milestones are not set in stone, and I’ll move as I need to, but setting out markers on the path means I’ll notice if I massively overshoot the wordcount on a particular section.
With that math done, it’s about time for me to have the first meeting with Joe.
Surprising Questions and Character Arc Planning
I might have been pitching my books too much lately, because I went into our one-on-one meeting subconsciously treating it like a marketing meeting—what is my book about and why would someone like it?—and workshop head, mercifully, had his head on straight and treated it as a planning meeting. I had prepped my pitch and comparable titles and inspiration and and and…
The organizer didn’t ask for any of that. Instead, the very first thing he asked was: How does your book end?
What a genius question. I instantly had to shut down my marketing autopilot and think like a writer again.
What are the events of the end of the book, and how are they a culmination of everything that came before? I doubly like this question for making me think about theme and character arcs, and for making me turn around and look back down the barrel of a story I’m used to seeing chronologically forward. From this angle, I can see new shapes and contours in the plans I have made to that point.
In the meeting, when I admitted I was not entirely sure about some aspects of the ending, he asked what answer I wanted to give to the thesis or question my book posed. This is a theme question, and I struggled briefly against the idea that the ending needed to be somehow authentic to how I see the real world operate. But then I remembered, this world is mine and I get to decide that I want my characters’ faith to be rewarded, even if that reward is messy and only creates new problems. I want them to look to the Beyond and find that something waits there. Now I have guidelines as I actually enact my outline.
Then we talked characters—not just wants and fears but what makes them keep going? Since I have three POV characters, one of the best parts of this meeting was chatting about how to make their perspectives feel unique. Aymeri is cynical going on pessimistic, so when I describe the world through which they are moving, he’s going to notice more of its degradation, collapse, and hopelessness in its manifestation as burning houses or mass graves. Hildegard, the mystic and saint, has access to the supernatural and therefore descriptions through her eyes provide a window into the movements of spirits and angels. And finally Florian, who is pretending to be something they’re not, will be most focused on other relationships and the way people relate to them, out of fear that they might discover Florian’s secret.
We talked about quite a bit, but the last thing I want to mention is our conversation about my first three chapters. These are not going to be entirely by formula, but they will sort of organize important first milestones and the information the reader needs.
The first chapter is showing the world that they are moving through, and we can even skip the quest-giving scene (to be reviewed in flashbacks or similar) to start. This chapter is for establishing clearly what kind of book is this? For me, this means showing the devastation of the world as they move through the countryside, and give the reader the first taste of the supernatural to teach them what to expect.
The second chapter can be where I first mention the quest, but is going to really pull in the horror element explicitly as I show that there is something out there that the characters are going to have to contend with.
Then, in chapter three, I give a clear sense of what the quest is, how it could save the world, and why my characters have every reason to distrust it. This is also going to be where the characters see the aftermath of one of the monsters for the first time.
I love coming out of a meeting like this feeling excited and energized. The workshop head gave me some explicit assignments to work through, so I’m gonna roll out now.
I’ve got work to do!
- Unfinished Clips: Story Prompts, Volume I
Here are twenty-five prompts for your writing pleasure and convenience! These are geared primarily toward genre writers, but use them as you will. If you end up publishing a story written with one of these prompts, I would love to hear about it!
- The only gift the water gave was a secret.
- The bells are a source of fear: They summon the Spirit, and when it comes, it conquers.
- It is your turn to work the miracle and prove you deserve your place.
- Pick up the closest novel and flip to a random page. Point to a random sentence (or look for a sentence you find evocative) and make this the sentence right before the first sentence of your story.
- One of the plants in the garden is dug up and missing.
- The hospital can’t find someone’s medical records.
- A flood washed out the road to work.
- The old radio you’ve had since you were a kid still works.
- You just harvested the first produce from your garden.
- It all started on the journey home.
- The last keeper of the lore is dying.
- The wood has a voice; what is it saying?
- Your best friend claims there is a pattern they have been seeing everywhere for weeks.
- Things you should not see on a road trip.
- Against your better judgment, you pick up a hitchhiker. You don’t remember making the decision to do so, or even stopping the car.
- The sun is not the sun.
- Prepare to meet your maker.
- Your least-favorite song is a plague sweeping the world. How does it infect? What are its effects?
- A character discovers a critical piece of evidence in an unsolved crime.
- They say a witch lives in the nearby wilderness, but when you get there, you cannot find anyone or remember why you came.
- What are the rules for surviving the Otherworld near where you grew up?
- A change is coming. What signs mark its approach? How do you survive it?
- The office building always has the lights on. No dark places are allowed inside the office building. Even the basement is full of light, flat and empty of shadows.
- The cameras caught something strange entering an apartment building.
- What do they extract from the mine outside town? What is the substance made of? What does it do? How does it make life different?
- Intellectual Scaffolding: Not-Writing, “Productivity” and Rest
Today I want to talk about one of the foundational concepts that powers my writing work: intellectual scaffolding. It is the support structure that surrounds your writing work—the ideas, beliefs, politics, inspiration, and values that inform the writing. It is something that always exists around our creative labors, whether we think about it or not. I find value in cultivating my scaffolding, and in so doing I have thought a great deal about productivity and mental rest.
You might have seen me talk briefly about it in P.M. Raymond’s newsletter, but I’d like to do a deeper dive. It can be a tricky idea to nail down because it’s not a thing you can hold in your hands. So, let’s start there.
What is it?
I learned about intellectual scaffolding in graduate school, from my dissertation advisor, Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith. She’s a fabulous writer, storyteller, scholar, and teacher, and her advice was as much about taking a healthy, holistic approach to my work as it was about the work itself. As we were discussing my dissertation progress during one of our advising meetings, I was frustrated at a lack of progress and was struggling with my analysis.
Dr. Lentz-smith wanted me to resist the idea that I could only do “productive” dissertation work by writing and emphasized that she and her husband (also an academic) had done some of their best work after being forced to put down their metaphorical pens for a while and focused on reading instead. What Dr. Lentz-Smith advocated was not a passive approach to scaffolding, but one in which we embrace the fact that our work doesn’t exist in a vacuum but as part of an intellectual community. To build that scaffolding for my dissertation, I should read more work in my field, attend more talks, and give feedback on classmates’ papers. Those kinds of “breaks” would be opportunities to absorb new ideas that might help consolidate those ideas already floating around in my head.
I learned it in an academic context, but we can so easily apply it to fiction.
Compare writing to a building: An outline would be the foundation, the bones of the building; the rooms are chapters or scenes; and then you furnish those rooms with details and dialogue. Intellectual scaffolding is not part of the building at all. It is, as the name suggests, the scaffolding that you build against the building in order to make it possible to install windows or mount siding.
I write horror and dark fantasy, and my intellectual scaffolding is informed by my dissertation on ideas of gender and race in family life and women’s family rights in the ’50s and early ’60s; my favorite video games; the latest Chinese historical drama I’ve been devouring; the novel I read last week; a “found footage”-style horror podcast. These are all things that have been metabolized in my brain and inform the ways that I think about writing character relationships, pacing, emotional reveals, and monsters.
How do we cultivate it?
I think that, in fiction, cultivating intellectual scaffolding means seeking out and learning from any kind of storytelling, and we are so fortunate in how many kinds of storytelling media we can draw from! But to be clear, I don’t build my scaffolding in the same way I might, for example, conduct research for a new story.
If you read my first post, you already know that I build in space for not-writing as part of my process. I strive for rest; anything that makes my brain feel energized and refreshed is on the table. However, I also take some time to think through what I have been absorbing. If I found it a satisfying experience, what satisfied me? How did the creators achieve that? Did a character relationship feel particularly strong? Is there something about how they wrote a relationship that I can try to emulate in my own work? Was there something unsatisfying? How might I “fix” the story to make it stronger?
I often find that when I turn back to the story I have been working on, I don’t simply feel refreshed but have new ideas for building a stronger narrative. Perhaps I’ve been chewing on a challenging scene or plot problem, or worried about how to build a relationship arc. These problems are not always solved immediately, but I also find myself asking myself new questions about my own work or imagining new possibilities.
However, as I mentioned, intellectual scaffolding has also been a jumping-off point for me to think about what I don’t do, and not-doing that deliberately.
Refusing “Productivity” (At least sometimes, when I’m not on deadline)
We live in a society where we experience a lot of pressure to make every moment “productive.” Capitalism teaches us to hustle, to make every moment valuable, to hurry up and get it done. To some degree, intellectual scaffolding is one way that I give myself permission to rest.
We know that rest is good for us! So many studies have told us that our brains learn and process new information and ideas better when they are well-rested, and I don’t just mean sleep. What intellectual scaffolding reminds me is that every moment has value, even those moments that do not actively add to our word count or result in something that can be directly packaged and sold.
Engaging actively with intellectual scaffolding means I listen more carefully to my body for signs of burnout. In my body, it usually manifests as sluggish thinking and an increasing need to sleep at strange times of the day. That’s my cue to put down the writing for a little while.
We can’t always put it down. Sometimes, the word count needs to happen! But I try to remember and will always encourage other folks to remember that you are always building new scaffolding.
Go ahead, read that book you’ve been excited about. Watch that show. Close your eyes and daydream. I get fantastic and unexpected ideas from daydreaming about things entirely unrelated to stories I’m working on.
You writing can and will wait, and will probably be stronger for the extra breath you’ve given it and yourself.