"Where have I read that before?" or The Dangers of Social Writing Groups Online

Plagiarism has been around far longer than the Internet. In fact, I had a poem published in 'Seventeen' magazine when I was 15 years old. About a year later I was informed that there was a girl who used that same poem to win a statewide poetry competition in Alabama. It took months for people to put together that this had happened. - Megan McCafferty

If you've been writing for any length of time and you've been in the online community, it can be reasonably assumed that you've at least heard of, if not participated in, the great November writing escapade known colloquially as NaNoWriMo, or more formally as National Novel Writing Month. For the uninitiated, it's an all out write-fest, where you as the writer pledge to write at least 50,000 words in a single month. Yes, 50,000. That's the size of a small novel!

Participants of NaNoWriMo are near fanatical about this. Preparations are made, sometimes months beforehand, to ensure a successful NaNoWriMo. You'll find forums on their website, blogs written about all aspects of the event, and you can even find groups on Facebook and Google+ dedicated to helping their members with all things literary. I'm personally a member of the Facebook group, and in the short time I've been a part of it I've learned many things. Some of the things are directly related to my writing, but other things I've learned are less tangible, albeit no less important.

An interesting development occurred last week. A fellow member discovered that some of her writings that she had posted on a website had been stolen and then resold in many places, Amazon included, as an original of the thief's work. In fact, it was discovered that this "author" had stolen eleven different stories by seven different writers. It is currently unknown how much money she's made of her thievery, but the theft has cost the original writers so much more than money. Reputations were on the line. Some of the stories weren't ready for release. They were posted online to writing websites as an attempt to get input from fellow writers to help perfect their story and make it marketable. Now, the story is out there and there's no getting it back. The NaNoWriMo crew has fought back admirably. They've contacted the places that were selling the on-line books and most have responded by taking down the stolen articles. They've contacted the thief herself, but so far there hasn't been a response.

It's a frightening, depressing thing that happened, but a very important lesson was learned by many, including me. That lesson is to never put your entire story online. This may seem self-obvious, but many writers use the websites in the hopes of getting help they may not be able to get otherwise. It's very important that you, the author, limit what you put out in the open. If you do put something out there, limit how long it's out there. Even that won't help as much as you'd like, however. Remember the cardinal rule: Once it's out on the Internet, it's always out on the Internet. There's no taking it back! Try to rely instead of the input of friends and family. Join a writers group. Go to writing conferences if you have the time (and the means, they're rarely cheap). If you must, put some of your work online for critique. Just be careful -- The work you post could be someone else's idea of a great way to get "published."

All The Worlds A Stage... And The Writer is the Stage Hand.

“If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.” ― Martin Luther

I've done a lot of reading lately. No, not in the usual sense, where we as writers should find ourselves waist-deep in the worlds of other writers on a daily basis, but in the sense of what I call "Professional Soft Reading." You know, social media, tips and tricks from the professionals, novels on how to write novels. The usual mediums that writers use to notify other writers of their current status, and how to get to where they are. (You may note that this blog is one such medium, which I will freely admit. Whether it is worth the reader's time is something I leave to you, the reader).

During my latest round of perusing, I've come to notice a lot of questions arising, particularly amongst my friends in the world of NaNoWriMo, around the subject of world-building -- that ancient literary art of creating a setting in which we can weave our tales. Questions arise over how best to describe the world, and how much work should go into creating this world. Many complaints are voiced about the work involved, the planning that must be done, and whether it really is worth going through all that trouble. I never really understood the reticence toward this part of writing. For me, it is the one task of a writer I enjoy the most.

When I speak of world building, I speak of it from the point of view of someone who writes fantasy novels. And perhaps it is because I am a fantasy novelist that I love this part of my job so much. The typical fiction novelist has their own world building to do, to be certain. They have their settings to make, their cities to create, their houses to construct and their history to remember. But, for the most part their world is already built for them. It's like having a large coloring book. You know, the ones we had as kids, remember? Usually themed, but always they contained page after page of black and white images ripe for us to color and fill in as we saw fit. We would grab our Crayola crayons (Please tell me you never had to use Rose Art!) and make our tigers orange and our skies blue... but sometimes, our brains would go off on its own tangent and suddenly the tigers were green and the sky a pale purple. And that is what it is to be a writer. We get to color our world as we see fit with our literary crayons.

But with the fantasy writer, it becomes tougher still. We don't have nearly the outline of a world that others have. We have to create the tiger from scratch, so to speak. I think of this as both a blessing and a curse. The blessing comes from being able to really let our imaginations take over without having silly things like physics keep us from creating our world. It can be anything we want it to be! The curse comes along with responsibility. While the world can be anything we want, we must always remember that until it is fully described, it remains in our head, uncolored and undefined. We have to give rise to our world and all its weirdness, and we have to do it in such a way that the reader becomes entranced and lost in that world.

For me, it always helps to have a complete picture of the world before I begin writing about it. The imagination is a fluid thing, and ideas and thoughts remain watery and malleable until we get them out of our heads and onto paper. Even then they are changeable, but less so. It could just be me, but I've always felt that writing the ideas down helped to make me feel like I have something to put my back to as I sit down to write. With my current novel, Godzwar, I've taken that idea to the extreme. I have had the entire world in my head, with bits and pieces put in place while playing Dungeons and Dragons with several friends of mine. To keep my forgetful mind from forgetting the details of these bits and pieces, I've actually created a Wiki for the world. The wiki covers many aspects of my world -- religion, politics, geography, important historical events and people. I find in doing so that I'm able to use the wiki as an excellent reference while writing. It is, in effect, an encyclopedia of knowledge that I use, just as a non-fantasy fiction writer would use Encyclopedia Britannica (Or, the Internet in these modern days) to help fill in gaps in his knowledge for his book. If you are world building, I highly recommend doing the same with a Wiki site. If you'd like information on how to do this from a techie point of view, feel free to comment and I'll give you some tips.

As well as Wiki, there is also the classic ways of world building. For me, this including having bull sessions with friends of mine, players of my D&D game who have their own ideas about the world in which they played. They will get their due accolades in my acknowledgments, but I don't think they will really know how much they have helped. It is so useful, having a network of people who are willing to help you in such things. If you're not using your friends for this, why not? Pick people whose ideas and opinions you trust of course, but definitely use them. The conversations you have with them will help you expand your own ideas on your world, and that in turn will make your world ultimately more interesting for your readers. And that's what it's really about in the end, wouldn't you say?

One more thing, before I close this blog, and that is in how I (and you) should describe your world to your reader. Many, many time I'm sure you've heard how awful it when a new writer deluges his readers with so much description and useless information to describe their scenes. It makes your story, well, boring... and boring is the last thing we want our readers to feel! So I say, detail your world as much as you possibly can outside your book. Use that detail to help make your book fuller and richer, but only put to paper the important things about your world. In other words, don't describe for the sake of description. I won't go into too much more on that. If you want more, read On Writing, by Stephen King.

In the meantime, get those ideas on paper!

It's time to get serious, or, "The life of a real, actual writer."

“Writers write while dreamers procrastinate. ” ― Besa Kosova

There is an old adage which states: "Those that can, do. Those that can't, teach." While I'm sure this is certainly true, I can't help but take this quote and make it appropriate for my writing life in the past year: "Those that can, do. Those that can, but don't, never learn."

This has been the case for me. As an aspiring writer, I have reading from many sources about ways in which I can become better at my new-found craft. Resoundingly, the advice given is to "write, and keep writing." Unfortunately, I didn't follow this advice very well of late. I made the mistake of reading over my previous writing and saw it for the sophomoric effort that it was. My first book effort, entitled "In God's Own Words," was an idea I attempted unsuccessfully to bring to life. The story was an interesting one where Aliens are discovered to believe in God, and what happens after that. There was never a successful conclusion (you should read that as, "I never finished the novel") for several reasons:

The story became uninteresting

This was a hard one to accept, but the story just frankly wasn't that exciting. I made some memorable characters, and they did interesting things, but in the end the world in which they lived was one that no one would care about. I know this because I found that *I* didn't care about it. I realized that if I, the world's creator, didn't care what happened, how could I expect the reader to care? Answer: I couldn't.

The story precedence was clichèd.

The original idea was the typical "Alien Autopsy" thing, where a couple of doctors are brought in to save the lives of two aliens who crash-landed (this time in the 80s instead of the 40s). I thought I could get away with this since the action afterwards was so different, but in the end, it was still an alien crash-landing. Again, BORING.

Momentum was lost

At one point in writing the novel, I became stuck. I knew what I wanted to happen, but I could find no way to make it happen without sounding hacked and, again, clichèd. Ideas of secret agencies, fundamentalist churches, lone antagonist on a desperate search to find answers... all of it had been done, and done well by those much more qualified to write than I am. I felt like the story wasn't adding anything new to the mix. Once I got to that point, I couldn't go further.

Editing before its time: The ultimate book killer!

Since I couldn't go forward, I went backward. I read the chapters I had written, and I noticed how infantile my writing was. I had learned so much since I first put digital pen to digital paper! I read over my work and recognized it for what it was: A fleeting attempt at a first try. This was the final straw. The story just wouldn't be told, or at least, not yet. I may still yet re-visit Jennifer and her adventures, if for no other reason than to get the story out of my head for my own personal gain and enjoyment. For now, it goes into the vaunted writer's chest, to gather dust and bide its time.

So, there I was. And there I stayed, for the better part of a year, I became a non-writer. Life got in the way, work time began to leak into personal time. We moved to the wonderful world of Orlando, Florida. Other things became important. Some of them were even warranted. But still, I had that urge to write. I don't think it ever really went away, not that I expected it to. I was reminded again and again about another story I had once worked on. The story kept coming back to me, and soon, it nagged enough at me that I felt I had to continue work on it. That work is named "Godswar."
Godswar began as a D&D campaign I ran several people through back in 2010. Using "Old School" rules, I let the characters tell the tale of a story I had in my mind for some time. The story is actually a pretty good one, as good D&D campaigns are wont to create. I've begun work on it again, and it's feeling very, very good! I'm excited again, about my writing. I'm discovering that what I write is now readable, and that's a good thing. Whether it's good enough to be published, well, that remains to be seen. But at this point, I don't think it really matters. It's a story that I'm dying to tell, and it will be told.

For now, that's enough.