So far this year, I’ve written six short stories, which I’ll be wrapping together into a collection that will be released this summer. I’ve submitted all of them to multiple publications, and they’ve all been rejected. I’ve published most of them on Amazon, and haven’t had enough sales to buy a bagel and coffee.

But the effort – nights, weekends, lunch breaks, early morning train rides – hasn’t been wasted. Through the constant experimentation allowed by short fiction, I’ve learned quite a bit about outlining, character development, dialogue, and endings, among other things.

The most helpful lesson, though, has been discovering my own writing tics. One of my editing passes is always a sit-on-the-hands-and-just-read-the-story exercise. This is the editing pass where I try to pretend the piece was written by someone else. I examine whether I’ve left holes in the plot or other mysteries that wouldn’t be clear to a reader who’s not inside my cranium. Occasionally, I’d find one of these oversights. But every time I did this read, some writing tic – a repeated word or construction – would grab my attention.

After a while, I decided to start keeping track of them, and I now have a list of fifty of these little buggers. I now devote an editing pass to interrogating each one of these tics to make sure they are essential in their place and whether there is a stronger phrasing I could use. I haven’t banned these words from my stories – it is incredibly stupid to ban any word or expression from your work – but they often serve as indicators of weak language, imprecision, or missed opportunities.

For example:

I used to start a lot of sentences with some variant of “There was.” This construction is a holdover from my days of adolescent Hemingway reading. The vagueness of the two words lends a detached, Voice of God effect to a sentence, rather than keeping the reader planted in the character’s head, seeing the world the way a particular person would see it. Most of these I’d rewrite to focus on the main object being observed. So “There was a weathered boat bobbing in the ocean” would become “A weathered boat bobbed in the ocean.” Tighter. Cleaner. More immediate.

I also used to hang “began” or “started” in front of a character’s action. Those are simply unnecessary words, and they can become distracting when repeated too often.

The last one I’ll talk about is “thing” words. Something, everything, or just plain old “thing.” These words crop up when I’m writing quickly and can’t think of the exact right word, but I don’t want to stop the flow so I drop down a “thing” and keep going. “Thing” words can be replaced with a more precise word almost every single time, and the sentence is immediately improved. “That was the thing that annoyed her the most” becomes “That was the habit that annoyed her the most.” “Something about the place gave him the creeps” becomes “The way no one made eye contact gave him the creeps.”

Making these changes during editing feels like being at the optometrist with my face in the phoropter and having the little lenses click over, sharpening the clarity of my vision bit by bit.  What’s interesting is that scrutinizing my own work in the editing phase has made me so familiar with these tics that I have since cut down on them during the composing phase without much conscious effort. The stronger phrasings have become instinct.

Does anyone else devote a whole editing pass just to tic removal? What are your writing tics?

I have a confession to make. Sometimes, when I’ve hit a rough patch in my writing, I watch Tony Robbins videos on YouTube for a boost.

I know that literary types like us aren’t supposed to like motivational types like Tony Robbins – because he’s rich and in better physical shape than us pale basement dwellers – but the guy dishes out some sound advice, even when he’s just pointing out things that should be obvious. One tactic he frequently recommends has stuck with me: If you want to succeed in a particular endeavor, find someone who’s already succeeded and copy what they did.

Because I want to become a popular science fiction author, and because the evidence suggests that self-publishing is the best way to achieve that, the obvious model for me is Hugh Howey.

For anyone who hasn’t heard of him, Howey is an independent author whose seventh published work, Wool, blew up into an international best-seller. He’s still writing while at the same time sailing around the world on his 50-foot catamaran. That’s not exactly the life I’m shooting for, but it’s not too far off the mark, either.

Helpfully, Howey has made modeling him easy by publishing a blog post called So You Want to Be a Writer, half of which is devoted to the craft of writing. That post, combined with a studious reading of Wool, serve as a solid crash course in how to create fiction that demands to be read.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

Read widely and borrow from other genres. While Wool is ostensibly a dystopian science fiction novel, it’s also three romances and two mysteries. The romances raise the stakes on the action, and the mysteries serve as a propellant for the plot at times when mortal danger isn’t in the forefront.

Let your heroes have flaws. Wool’s major protagonist, Juliette, has refused to see her dad for years for reasons that I – as a father of two young girls – consider not to merit the torture of shunning a parent. But this fault springs from the same source as her heroic qualities, making both sides of her more believable.

Let your villains have virtues. The antagonist, Bernard, is doing what he thinks he needs to do in order to keep everyone in the silo alive. His resolve and his willingness to make difficult choices is admirable.

Suspense allows for intellectual depth. I used to think that suspense and intellectual heft were competing forces in fiction, that more of one meant less of the other. Wool destroyed this notion for me. Suspense makes the presentation of larger ideas more palatable. Passages in which characters are thinking deeply aren’t boring if they occur while they are in danger. This also lends veracity to the story. It’s natural that characters on a precipice would have racing thoughts and that they would engage big problems and concepts when they are at risk of losing everything.

Don’t be afraid to take risks or play with structure. Wool’s opening chapter about Holston and his wife would serve fine as a standalone short story. But it’s also an effective inciting incident for the rest of the novel. I can’t recall any other novel that starts that way, and it had me hooked from the beginning. Wool also employs some time-jumping and other devices that keep the story barreling forward.

Clearly, there’s a lot more to writing compelling fiction, but these are the lessons that hit home on my first pass through Wool. When you’re trying to accomplish something difficult, it helps to know that others have done it before. It helps even more when those people look back and shine a light on the path for you. So thanks, Hugh Howey.

And thanks, Tony Robbins.

And how that helped me start writing

For most of my life, I’ve been that annoying writer friend. You know, the one that always says he’s going to be a writer, who talks about how much he loves writing, who tells you all his ideas for all the books he’s going to write. And then never writes a damn thing.

Actually, I would write some damn things from time to time. A scrap of a story here, a bit of dialogue there, a character sketch on a napkin during a coffee break. But never a full story.

Many different obstacles – most located inside my skull – held me back from dedicating myself to my craft. Among the largest of these hurdles was my insistence that straight-up literary fiction was the only genre worthy of a true artist and intellectual like myself.

That stupid idea finally died three years ago, when my wife and I watched the movie version of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. The movie grabbed me in a way few films do, engaging me intellectually, emotionally, and viscerally. The action propelled the plot, the humanity gave the action meaning, and the movie’s confrontation of big ideas kept my brain churning long after we’d shipped the DVD back in its little red envelope.

After watching that movie, I realized that most of my favorite movies were sci-fi, from the Star Wars trilogy up to more recent films like District 9 and Moon. The appeal of these films for me was how they tackled the strangeness of the universe in a way that’s not possible in genres restricted by current reality.

That embrace of the hypothetical and fantastic was the missing propulsion without which none of my attempts at storytelling could ever take flight. My subconscious had always wanted to skirt the boundaries of reality, to suffuse my narratives with the spooky, the mysterious, and the ridiculous. But some voice inside me always rapped my knuckles, telling me those devices weren’t the tools of serious writers. That’s why I’d always gotten too bored with my work to ever finish a story. And it’s partly why I stopped even starting stories.

After Cloud Atlas, I tried my hand at a sci-fi short, Beyond the Pillars. It was the first story that I couldn’t wait to return to writing every day, the first one I found myself daydreaming about away from the keyboard. Most importantly, it was the first one I finished.

Now that I’ve found my natural genre and am writing regularly, I’m no longer the annoying wannabe writer guy. I rarely discuss my work around my friends, and I never talk about stories in progress.

I don’t need to waste my breath convincing myself how much I love writing or showing others how writerly I am. I’m having too much fun actually writing.