Writing - 'well written guide'

My non-fiction genre writing guide Write a Western in 30 Days is still picking up 5-star reviews.  The latest is:

'A definitely well written guide to help you through the writing process.'
Amazon.com review, dated 7 March 2017. Thank you, Brian L. Smith. 

That was my intention, to help in the writing process. 

There are 17 positive reviews on Amazon.com and 9 on Amazon.UK. (1 month ago, C Mitchell said, 'Thank you Nik for pointers, inspiration and focus. Great read.'

Whether paperback or Kindle, the book has proved to be useful to beginner writers and even old hands who want to try a different genre.

                                                                    Available here

Just released: third volume of my collected short stories, Visitors... 9 stories about the Old West.

Available here 

A fourth volume will be released soon, with a fifth to follow in due course.

Excellent book!

Thank you, reader/writer Gary Townsend for this review of 4 January on Amazon Com:

'Excellent book! Never mind the bullet points, Morton provides good, clear instruction and accompanies it with great examples from one of his own novels. I found this book filled with solid advice, easily applied. At the end, there's a long list of westerns one can read to become more familiar wit the genre, if one isn't already, and there is also a short market listing, too.'

His one caveat is the market listing, which can become outdated. True, and though it could be updated for the e-book, it couldn't for the paperback, so the publisher is unlikely to do an update. The Robert Hale reference should be changed now, to read Crowood, for example.

 

Available as an e-book and paperback

Useful for writers of all genres, not only westerns...

The Magnificent Mendozas - review

My thanks to western aficionado and fellow scribe Ray Foster for reviewing my novel The Magnificent Mendozas (2014).

Here's an excerpt:
'... Armed with a strong cast of characters the story flows with lightning speed that takes it into "unputdownable" territory.

'Ross Morton is a writer who entertains and knows his craft (check out Nik Morton's book "Write A Western In 30 Days"). There will be those who will think of a certain movie and there is a tip of the hat to it but this is not the major element as events encompass more "heroes" than the title suggests.'

Please check out the full review at Ray's blog, 'Broken Trails' here

I enjoyed writing this one as for some years I'd wanted to pay homage to that classic western movie. When I read that at the time the Mexican authorities were a little irate that their countrymen were all seemingly depicted as helpless peons, I thought about switching it around, and make the Mexicans the heroes - male and female - who help out a gringo township. Then the fun started, inventing suitable heroes. Then it seemed obvious - use seven circus performers!  Inevitably, there are changes of viewpoint when scenes shift; I was striving for a cinematic effect. And as Ray hints in his review, a number of the townspeople do heroic things too.

I must admit to being surprised that in the new movie of The Magnificent Seven, while they played with the ethnic mix, they didn't dabble with gender.


The Mendoza troupe comprises Mateo, the leader, and his wife Josefa, both expert knife-throwers; Antonio Rivera, sharpshooter; Juan Suaréz, gymnast and trapeze artist with his companion Arcadia Mendoza, who is also good with bow and arrow; José, younger brother of Mateo, a trick rider who lusts after Josefa; and Ramon Mendoza, escapologist. In order to penetrate the cordon of desperado sentries and free the townsfolk, the troupe employs many skills – tightrope walking, knife-throwing, archery, horsemanship, sharpshooting and escapology.

Writing - Book titles

We know that a book title can't be copyright. So it can be used often. Naturally, it's advisable not to use it if a book has recently been published with that title.

Like many an author, I've come a cropper with book titles. When I sent my manuscript off for Blind Justice it was pointed out to me that this was quite a commonplace title. So I changed it to Blind Justice at Wedlock, which seemed to have a certain ring to it.

My vigilante book Sudden Vengeance first started out as A Sudden Vengeance Waits, but that latter title had also been published! But even the former title had been used, in 2009. Sometimes, you bite the bullet and let it go, so long as there's no confusion for any potential reader.  As I had planned several books in the 'Avenging Cat' series, it was inevitable that the first book's title, Catalyst, would not be unique. As its successors were Catacomb and Cataclysm, I had to live with that too; the publisher Crooked Cat's excellent themed covers helped identify them as being in a single series.


When Anthony Horowitz wrote the latest James Bond book, Trigger Mortis, I thought the title was both amusing and original. My review of that book is here

But I was wrong. The title was used by Frank Kane in 1958!

So, yes, try to be original when selecting book titles, but don't beat yourself up over it either. 

I discuss book titles and chapter titles in my book Write a Western in 30 Days - with plenty of bullet points! (pp68-71).

Writing – word-count – progress

From time to time, we hear writers talking about how many words they’ve written ‘today’. 

Some writers say that a book has taken months or even years to write. But in all probability it hasn’t. The writer wasn’t spending all hours on that book. The work was interrupted by ‘life’ – family, friends, work that pays the bills, holidays, and a multitude of other commitments that get in the way.

Writing a novel, I feel, is work, not play. Enjoyable work, granted. But it should be treated the same as ‘work’. 

The normal working day consists of eight hours. Yes, I’m sure that many writers spend eight hours in any particular day working on their book – that is, thinking, researching, juggling words and phrases, tweaking, and even writing new material.

For quite a while now, I’ve advocated that it’s helpful to keep a record of progress, and one of the ways to do that is by using a spreadsheet.

I write in ‘sessions’ – they may be for an hour, 2 hours, or even 30 minutes. I record each time period session. When the sessions add up to 8 hours, I call that a ‘day’.

For interest, I’ve looked back on my latest work, The Khyber Chronicle, which has just hit 45,000 words (about 35,000 to go!)

For the last 5 days of work (that is, 5 x 8-hour sessions), the word-count came out thus:

Day     word-count

1          5895

2          4816

3          5189

4          4975

5          8231

I go into this aspect of calculating word-count on pp18-19 in Write a Western in 30 Days – with plenty of bullet points! (Suitable for not only writers of westerns, but writers of all genre fiction). There are a few good reasons to apply this method. It isn’t the only method, it may not be the best, but it works for me.

Naturally, writing the requisite number of words is only the beginning. Then comes the self-edit, the checks for logic, plot holes, lack of description and all the rest. But getting the words down in the first place is the most important part. Something to build on, to hone thereafter.

Good luck!

Writing – analysing a writer’s work-2

Many years ago, when I embarked on writing fiction, I studied a good number of novels in an attempt to see how they worked – paragraph structure, dialogue, scene changes, pace, characterisation, etc. It’s a useful exercise for beginners.

I’m going to post the occasional analysis in this blog, though it’s a little invidious, analysing a writer with only one sample of his (or her) work, but here goes.

The Writer: D.H. Lawrence
The Work: Love Among the Haystacks, 1930 (reviewed in my blog here)

If you’re intent on writing short stories, it makes sense to read short stories – preferably in the market you’re aiming at. Sadly, in the magazine world, there are no outlets these days for men’s adventure and action short stories; women’s magazines still proliferate, the most popular being Women’s Weekly and The People’s Friend in the UK. To counter-balance this state of affairs, there are a good number of online webzine outlets worth investigating.

Sometimes, it’s helpful to review short stories by accredited masters of the form. One of these is D.H. Lawrence, who wrote many, which can be read in collections such as The Prussian Officer, England, My England, The Woman Who Rode Away, The Princess and Other Stories, The Mortal Coil and Other Stories and Love Among the Haystacks.

The stories in this collection (Love Among the Haystacks) are a mixed bag and I feel they are not the best of his work. Of course his bucolic descriptions put the reader into the scene: ‘The two large fields lay on a hillside facing south. Being newly cleared of hay, they were golden green, and they shone almost blindingly in the sunlight…’ This is the beginning of the story. Modern critics and writers tend to avoid setting the scene like this at the start of a short story, and advocate diving straight in, perhaps with dialogue between the protagonists. The scene can be glimpsed through the eyes of one character, too, unlike here where it’s conveyed  with an omniscient point of view.

The omniscient POV is sometimes necessary for a short story, due to the limited length. Here, it’s ‘tell’ all the way, with little emotional involvement. ‘Geoffrey turned white to the lips, and remained standing, listening. He heard the fall. Then a flush of darkness came over him…’ (p14) He has just knocked his brother Maurice off the top of the haystack, but there’s no mention of gut-wrenching shock, the stopping of his heart, no physiological change in response to this potentially fatal action.

I was surprised to discover lazy writing, too.

‘Nay, lass,’ smiled Maurice.

‘Aye, in a bit,’ smiled Maurice.

‘There’s nowt ails me, father,’ he laughed. (pp18/19)

This kind of writing occurs frequently in popular fiction, but I’m surprised that it is present in literary fiction. As I’ve written in my book Write a Western in 30 Days: Ever tried smiling while speaking? There should be a full stop at the end of the speech and ‘He smiled’ capitalized. (p125)

You will have noticed his use of dialect, too. This can limit a readership and slow down the story. Is it correct, anyway? It’s so easy to get it wrong. There are little ways to suggest dialect without going overboard. A few recent TV productions have suffered due to a director’s insistence on realistic vernacular. Why do they do it? If we’re writing about French people, or Russians, we don’t write in their language, we use English – perhaps with the odd word or phrase (artificially thrown in). Avoid dialect!

Word repetition. All writers suffer from this ailment and only dedicated self-editing can remove the repetitions. Usually, they’re word-echoes, lingering in the head while putting down the first draft. There’s nothing wrong with using the same word more than once in the text, but preferably not on the same page or even in the same paragraph. On p65, we have ‘look of unspeakable irritability’ and five paragraphs lower, ‘crumpled mask of unspeakable irritability’ followed in the next paragraph with ‘almost gibbering irritability’. That’s enough to make most readers irritable. In four consecutive paragraphs there are four repetitions of ‘repulsion/repulsive’ on p119.

Yet his writing is famous for good reason. Digging deep into human psyche, perhaps: ‘She leaned down to him and gripped him tightly round the neck, pressing him to her bosom in a little frenzy of pain. Her bitter disillusionment with life, her unalleviated shame and degradation during the last four years, had driven her into loneliness, and hardened her till a large part of her nature was caked and sterile.’ (p40)  And from the other point of view, we have: ‘Geoffrey pressed her to his bosom: having her, he felt he could bruise the lips of the scornful, and pass on erect, unabateable. With her to complete him, to form the core of him, he was firm and whole. Needing her so much, he loved her fervently.’ (p41) Nothing graphic, but heartfelt, it seems.

No man is an island, yet each person has the potential to be isolated and alone even in a crowded room. In many of these stories, he tackles that aloneness, trying to come to terms with it.

From time to time writers need to read earlier writers’ work, to learn how they did it. And of course if you’re planning on writing a historical piece, then immerse yourself in the work of writers from that period, to gauge the style of dialogue and the vocabulary used.

My favourite D.H. Lawrence books are The Rainbow and Women in Love.

'A necessity for any writer...'

An unexpected 5-star review popped up on Amazon COM today for my book Write a Western in 30 Days. It’s from an established author, George Snyder, who’s an award-winning writer of crime novels. He lives in California. Here’s his endorsement:

“As a writer about to move into the western genre, I found Nik Morton's book filled with valuable information. Easy to read and loaded with tips, including landscape description, weapons of the era, and types of horses. The book is a necessity for any writer thinking to turn out western stories, in 30 days or longer.”

Thank you, George Snyder! 

[A good number of reviewers have stated the book's useful to writers of any genre, not only westerns.]

I can recommend George Snyder's book Baja Bullets

A thriller in the first person, where the voice is authentic. Baylor Rumble is quite a character, tough, 47, accomplished seaman and fighter and can easily sustain a series.

It starts out with him taking two girls on a treasure hunt but turns sour when drugs are involved. There’s murder, castaway at sea for weeks, and revenge… Bay suffers at the hands of bad guys but always gets up for more – well, he would, wouldn’t he, since he’s narrating?  I found it reminiscent of the Travis McGee books by the late great John D MacDonald.

After the spilling of more blood, it ends, as promised, with Bay’s life changed forever. But with the promise of more adventures to come.

Snyder is another good writer, who knows his characters and has a good sense of pace and place and can visualize well for the reader.

You can find his books here: