Being a great client to freelance writers

Victoria — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 15:56:52 +0000

Hi Victoria, do you have any advice on how to avoid being a “difficult client” when hiring freelance writers? I recently launched an informational website, I work with freelancers very often and I’d like to make sure I’m not scaring candidates away. I’d appreciate your point of view, thanks – Mark

Mark, this is a fabulous question. Thanks so much for asking it. I thank you, and every freelance writer in the world thanks you.

YES.

There are ways to avoid being a “difficult client” to freelance writers. In fact, there are ways to be the best.

Pay on time

This is the biggest one. Freelance writers, who live off their writing skills and expertise, can sometimes spend way too much time trying to get paid for the work they have done and the contracts they have honored.

Most of their clients are honest and honorable and always pay on time as negotiated. These are the clients with whom freelance writers build fruitful and mutually-beneficial long-term relationships.

But every industry has its bad apples.

Freelance writers should never have to waste time chasing payment. They are professionals, so, please—you be professional too.

Pay them.

Pay them on time.
Be clear about your needs

This should be handled in negotiations, but only too often the client forgets something important or—worse—changes their mind after it’s been negotiated. This leads to very difficult conversations in which the writer is forced to vet you and probably decide to never work with you again.

So don’t wait until you’ve found a freelance writer before deciding exactly what you need. Determine all that beforehand. Have it worked out very specifically in clear language with appropriate lists.

Then when you hire the writer, they will know exactly what you need. And they’ll be able to give it to you.

Win-win!
Be polite

This shouldn’t really need to be said, but unfortunately it sometimes does. Freelance writers work long hours under deadline pressure, doing the best they can to give you exactly what you need. So respect the professional relationship. Be polite. Be nice! When they have to choose between taking your project and someone else’s, help them choose yours.

Also: be aware that there are professional freelance writers, and there are amateurs. In this Internet era, in which anyone can hang out their shingle selling services for anything, you might run across amateurs. They will be unprofessional. They will be unskilled. They will be a pain in the neck.

Every industry has its bad apples.

The best way to avoid them is to do your due diligence on freelance writers’ credentials, then pay proper rates and don’t try to underbid. As with so much else in life: you get what you pay for.

And if you do inadvertently wind up with an unskilled and/or difficult amateur? Stay polite. Use clear contracts and adhere to them. When necessary, cancel the project and, if there’s a problem, offer a kill fee (partial payment) so you can easily unload this useless relationship and get your project done by a pro. Don’t waste your time and energy fighting an amateur. Your time and energy are too valuable. Just disencumber yourself and move on.

Yes, you might pay for something other than the project you planned—you will buy the knowledge that THIS PERSON is bad news (along with, most likely, all their associates). As you build your list of potential freelance writers, this will matter. (Keep track.) And you will pay for a professional education through everything in their communications that, in retrospect, might have tipped you off. So now you know. You have acquired essential skills for vetting all other writers.

Seek out your favorite freelance writers and be great to them!

These are the skilled professionals who will help your business succeed.

How to Find the Meaning of Life Through Writing

Victoria — Mon, 24 Dec 2018 16:00:05 +0000

Whew!

We’ve all been through a long year.

So I’ve dedicated this month this year to the ephemeral, personal concerns: finding Joy and Fulfillment through Writing, finding Gratitude through Writing, finding Community through Writing.

And now we come to the Big Tamale of them all—the reason we’re all here on this planet in the first place—meaning.

The meaning of our lives.

We writers find it through this art and craft we love.

We really do.

How to Find Community Through Writing

Victoria — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 16:00:15 +0000

We’re talking about the joy and fullfillment of writing. We’re talking about how to find gratitude through writing.

And today we’re going to talk about how we find community through writing.

It’s not only about the words.

It’s not only about the readers.

It’s about all of us. . .being writers together.

How to Find Gratitude Through Writing

Victoria — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 16:00:11 +0000

Joy and fullfillment. Yes.

Are you grateful for your life? I am.

Are you grateful for just being alive? I am.

How does writing help me find that gratitude?

I’ll tell you a secret: it’s whole the reason I do it.

Gratitude.

Because we only get this one mortal coil. And we writers know how much that matters.

How to Find Joy & Fullfillment Through Writing

Victoria — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 08:47:15 +0000

And now that NaNoWriMo is over and the holidays are upon us, along with the ornaments and stockings and the book of Tigger’s Solstice Carols that my son and I made by hand when he was two—I’m bringing back my December series on deeper meaning.

I know as well as you do how exhausted you are by this time of year. I’m exhausted too. All that writing, all that thinking about our characters and our stories and our language and our readers. All that working, all that struggling.

All that living.

Why do we do it?

Joy and fulfillment, that’s why.

23 Inevitable Questions to Ask Yourself at the End of NaNoWriMo

Victoria — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 08:11:27 +0000

We did it!

We survived!

And now we have a few questions to ask ourselves. . .one, two, three, four, five. . .in fact. . .

Join us for:

23 Questions for the End of NaNoWriMo.

6 Golden Rules of NaNoWriMo

Victoria — Mon, 26 Nov 2018 16:00:18 +0000

As this month draws to a close and next month looms, we all have the same thing on our minds.

Yes, we do.

It happens every year, and every year thousands of aspiring writers have the time of their lives.

So let’s review our:

6 Golden Rules for NaNoWriMo

3 Vital Steps to Creating Your Protagonist for NaNoWriMo

Victoria — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 17:44:14 +0000

We’re talking about how to approach the first draft of your novel this month, in honor of NaNoWriMo, Last week we talked about the 3 Essential Guidelines for your overall novel, and the week before that we talked about Running into the Jaws of NaNoWriMo. And today we’re going to be talking about the protagonist’s character, because that’s the core of all storytelling. (I tackled this topic in 4 Post-Its to Stick Up Over Your Writing Desk, and I outlined the basic elements—which I’m going to talk about in greater depth below—in a series on how to write fiction wrong: How to Characterize Wrong in 3 Easy Steps.)

But, honestly, you don’t have to be doing NaNo to be starting a novel. If you’ve got holidays coming up in December, you might very well be getting yourself in gear to take advantage of them in the most luxurious way a writer can imagine: by writing!

Your protagonist believes they cannot survive without this

It’s a need so core to them that if you changed it you wouldn’t be writing about a human being anymore. What is it? Writers have been using the canonical primary needs for hundreds of years without wearing them out:
- survival
- love
- justice
Truly, these three needs have powered most of the fiction ever written. And there are still more aspects to explore in them. They’re that enormous. They’re that complex.

Some of the other things characters need are:
- to protect a child
- to heal a wound
- to learn the truth
- to have an adventure
These needs also have powered incredible numbers of stories. Remember Don Quixote? Out there scampering around the countryside on that mangy old nag with his reluctant sidekick at his stirrup? What was he up to?

He certainly wasn’t defending his life. And I don’t think he ever really had a chance with Dulcinea.

Justice. Adventure.

He needed them really badly.
Your protagonist can’t survive without this either

Because that’s what makes a story: two needs. Otherwise, it’s a bildungsroman, the story of a protagonist grappling with a whole series of internal conflicts, and modern readers don’t have the attention span to survive a bildunsroman anymore. They need explicit signposts on why they should care. (I’m sorry, Moll Flanders.)

But here’s the magic wand—you’ve already done this step. Yes, you have! Look above. How many stories are about two of those top three in conflict with each other? What if you mixed and matched two out of the seven? One of the seven with some equally-powerful but more subtle need?
- to prove a point
- to accomplish a lifelong goal
- to protect someone elderly (or otherwise physically or intellectually vulnerable)
- to escape evil
- to come to grips with their own dark side
You’ll notice that, no matter how subtle a secondary need you give your protagonist, it can pretty much always be traced back to one of those three canonical primary needs. And when you choose not to root your protagonist’s character in a secondary need quite that canonical, for whatever reason, you must add motivation to that subtle need through one of the canonical ones.

Also, although experts once swore mysteries were too ‘intellectual’ to accommodate romance, pretty much any story gets better when you add thwarted love to the mix.
Your protagonist has absolutely no intention of choosing between the two

Which means any situation in which they are forced to do just that serves as a rip-roaring, roof-raising, mind-bending catastrophe for your Climax. As country singers are so fond of reminding us, “My baby left me, I lost my home, and then my dog died.”
1. Say you have a protagonist who needs:
  Whomever they love, it puts them in danger. In danger of losing their job? In danger of losing their home? In danger of losing their sanity?
  
  When Jane Eyre had to choose, she lost all three. Well, she wasn’t totally plugged in to begin with, but I really don’t think that night on the moor could have helped much.
  
  Pit your protagonist against themself by giving them the two most fundamental needs in the human animal. It doesn’t have to be romantic love, either. It could be love of a friend, love of a place, love of a cause.
  
  Romantic love has the added attraction of sex, of course, which always gets the attention of the hormonally-bullied. (You know who you are.) Just keep in mind—and this is really important—you must address sexual issues through their grip on the personality rather than through simple textbook instructions. Your reader doesn’t need to learn how to do it. They need to learn how to handle the consequences when they indulge in something they know how to do all too well.
2. Or say your protagonist needs:
  Their pursuit of justice does nothing but put their life in danger. You know what that is?
  
  Every thriller ever written.
  
  This is why thriller works so well as series genre. Because you can pit your protagonist against themself through their need for justice—and the evil perpetrators’ efforts to kill them—over and over and over again until Doomesday and never run out of excitement.
  
  Be aware that thrillers get their layering through complicated technical subjects, so the authors of thrillers do a great deal of research into specific industries: law, politics, banking, history, international espionage, high-tech weaponry, et cetera, plus very often exotic locales. That all needs to be professionally-researched and very adroitly handled. For advice on how to use your research properly, read Roz Morris’ Nail Your Novel, in which she explains exactly how she used her research for eleven ghostwritten books, eight of which were best sellers.
3. Or maybe your protagonist needs:
  What would force a person to choose between what they want and what they know is right? Well, almost everything. Anne of Green Gables tells us all about it as she works her way through her daily life—the endless, excruciating decision-making process that never leaves us alone. It’s when she has to choose between the things she loves and the things she knows are right that she becomes important to the reader, someone they will carry with them internally for the rest of their life.
  
  Because such stories don’t have death hanging over anybody’s head, they tend to be more mild-mannered. That allows them to go deeply and profoundly into the human experience. Remember that your reader is reading not only to be reassured that life is worth living, but to learn something they don’t already know. If you choose to pit your protagonist against themself through these two very human (but not dastardly) needs, you’ll have to know something about those needs that the reader can’t figure out for themself. Just reiterating an experience identical to the reader’s own without adding anything original won’t hold their attention.

You can see how this simple pyramidal design gives you a protagonist your reader passionately wants to see succeed, even as you back that protagonist into worse and worse corners until you’ve backed them right against a wall.

Then your protagonist must always, in the Climax, choose. That choice is the secret ingredient that makes your story work.

This, my friends, is what we call sympathetic character.

3 Crucial Aspects of Writing Scenes for NaNoWriMo

Victoria — Mon, 05 Nov 2018 17:45:02 +0000

We’re talking about tackling first drafts this month, for the sake of all you NaNoWriMoers scampering around out there. We’ve looked at Running into the Jaws of NaNoWriMo (doing what into the what?), 3 Essential Guidelines for starting a novel in general (doing it how?), and 3 Vital Steps to creating your protagonist (doing it why?).

And today we’re going to look at writing individual scenes. Because that’s really the nuts and bolts of what’s going on in your squirrely little head right now.

Or anyway it had better be!

What you need to accomplish

We’ve been talking over on Jami Gold’s blog about the Story Climax, which is—it turns out—the Whole Point.

And this is true of every single scene you write, as well.

What’s the whole point of this scene? Why are you writing it? Why can your story simply not exist without it? Not because it’s:
- characterization
  
  That has to happen as texturing in other scenes, the ones that move the story inevitably forward toward its Climax.
- atmosphere
  
  See above.
- info dump
  
  See above.
The only thing that’s fair game for a scene is a simply inescapable step in the progress of your characters’ trajectory from the first moment they jump out of the pan until the instant the land in the fire.

Whatever that step is—that’s this scene’s climax.
How you need to accomplish it

This part is fun! This is the part about pitting your characters against themselves and each other and watching the fur fly.

Since all fiction is about cause-&-effect, it’s a given that your characters’ movement through a scene is all about their desperate grappling with their fates. This grappling is what causes whatever you’ve already decided needs to happen in this scene’s climax. And this grappling is enormously entertaining to readers.

This is why you’ll hear that every scene must have an aim. That simply means that every scene must have something that makes your characters fight. Nobody wants to see them lying around picking lint out of their navels. We want them to do something! And in order for that something to matter, they must have deep, fundamental motivation to do it, motivation rooted—you saw this coming—in their conflicting internal needs.

So they spend the grand bulk of this scene wrestling with something with everything they’ve got (sometimes in solitude, sometimes in dialog, sometimes in action, even, um, wrestling).

“I have to have it!”

“But you can’t!”

“Nooooooooo!”

That’s this scene’s development. It’s the bulk of the scene. And it’s a blast.
Why you can’t avoid accomplishing it

Because, naturally, if your characters could avoid going through all this hell they certainly would.

But they can’t. Because of the climax of the previous scene.

They did something in that last scene, made a decision and sealed their doom, and whatever it was acted as the effect that caused this scene. How does the opening of this scene show that, the immediate and dastardly consequences of those actions they thought—they thought!—in the last scene were the only actions humanly possible?

That’s this scene’s hook.

Now, most scenes average 1,000-2,000 words, which is four to eight manuscript pages. Use this information as you write. You can go ahead and write the climax first and park it there at the end where it belongs and then go back and fill in with lots of madhouse antics. I do this a lot. And it’s generally not too hard to figure out what to use as the hook that’s going to demonstrate the soup your characters are in now, because you’ve got the climax to that previous scene sitting there staring you in the face. That’s where they were giving their all trying to avoid this exact situation.

Just be aware as you write this first draft of how many pages you’re looking to fill.

3 Essential Guidelines for NaNoWriMo

Victoria — Mon, 05 Nov 2018 17:43:31 +0000

Every year I write a series of NaNoWriMo posts, like the admittedly bizarre 5 Ways to Make Your Novel Unforgettable, 5 Ways to Make Your Novel Helplessly Addictive, and 5 Ways to Make Your Novel Inescapable. Last week we looked at Running into the Jaws of NaNoWriMo. And for those of you who learn better in conversation than through written instructions, I’ve even been interviewed on video by Joanna Penn at The Creative Penn blog. Joanna asks me for pointers on how to approach writing the sequel to her Kindle best-seller, Pentecost—pointers I explain as universal to storytelling in general, so they can help you dive into writing your own new novels.

So let’s review very quickly how to make that a swan dive and not a cannonball:

Know why this story matters

Somewhere, somehow, at that one moment when they can least afford it, your protagonist is going to come up against themself in a spiritual dark alley. And it’s going to be bad.

They have always, all their life, sincerely and desperately believed they could not handle this confrontation. Chaos, madness, mayhem, yes. But not this.

And that heart-stopping confrontation is why you’re writing this story. Handling the impossible matters to readers—it’s honestly the only thing that does.

That’s your Climax.
Be great fun to run around with

The bulk of a novel is just for fun, thrill, excitement, unending adventures that leap from one peak to another as though in Seven-League Boots. Your reader’s grappling with one drama! Aaagh! They’re grappling with another! No! They’re back to grappling with the first drama again! Eeee! There’s a new drama they didn’t see coming!

Back and forth, round and round, in and out of the complexities of your plot they run full-tilt, flapping the pages of your book as they go. They can’t stop!

That’s your Development.
Understand Backstory

Don’t get too attached to the first scenes that it occurs to you to write. Those are your warm-up scenes, and chances are almost certain they’re Backstory, not Hook.

Write them! Have a fabulous time! But be willing to set them aside in their own little outtakes files later, when you’re far enough into this story (possibly at the end) to be able to see what originally happened to force the decision that got your protagonist into this whole impossible mess in the first place.

That’s too important of a scene to toy with by getting yourself emotionally-dependent upon it right now. Just take lots of notes as you work on your novel so it will be a truly fabulous opening scene when you do eventually write it.

That will be your Hook.

And because we all live here in the twenty-first century, I know as well as you do how hard it is to squeeze NaNoWriMo into your already-packed schedule. So remember the 9 Ways to Find Time to Write.

Take a deep breath, run to the top of the highest pinnacle you can find, and start flapping your wings. Welcome to NaNoWriMo!

Is all your hair standing on end yet?