I make fun of workshops and creative writing classes, a lot. I took one creative writing class when I was in high school that taught me all of diddely squat, and I never attended a workshop since I didn't even know such a thing existed until I had already started selling professionally. I think that the way to improving as a writer is simply to read a lot and write a lot, and to quote Stephen King "oysters don't learn to make pearls by going to pearl-making seminars."

But a writer is not an oyster, and writing is far from a natural process. It's a craft that we have to learn, and one way to learn, maybe the most effective way but by no means the most efficient way, is to make mistakes and have someone correct them. I imagine some of this stuff gets covered in creative writing classes and workshops, but I learned them by getting stories rejected with detailed crit from editors. Or from other writers or reviewers or readers who send me e-mail. These are some things I've learned over the past 8 years since I've started writing professionally, things I wish I'd known before I started.

1. Be a do, not a be. Gordon Van Gelder sent back a detailed set of notes for the story I wrote with Jonathan Andrew Sheen, "The Bad Hamburger." He had already bought the story and his acceptance was not contingent on our making the changes, but he thought some of his edits would strengthen the story. We ended up taking almost all of his recommendations, not because he's a great authority on what makes a good story, but because all of his edits did improve the story. Well, most of them, anyway. I think he wanted to make the dog into a cat. But he made one suggestion that stuck with me through the years. He told us to comb through the manuscript and look for every appearance of a form of the verb "be" and look at those sentences closely. Could we re-write those sentences and make them stronger? We usually could, and did. "We were surrounded by the enemy," becomes "The enemy surrounded us."

2. Oh, murder those darlings. It's not that I hadn't heard the "murder your darlings" advice countless times before, it's one of the most pervasive writing homilies around. I had to learn the hard what what it means. A darling is a phrase or a paragraph or a chapter or even a whole plot thread that you love but that doesn't push the story along. I can only imagine how many good pieces of writing ended up on the cutting room floor because, like me, most new writers think a darling is any piece of distinctive writing. I chopped a whole bunch of good stuff out of some of my earlier stories because I misunderstood this advice. My first story, "Vasquez Orbital Salvage and Satellite Repair," as well as RADIO FREEFALL, are full of quirky writing because I hadn't mis-learned this advice when I wrote those. And, if I do say so myself, they're pretty good. I don't think I found that voice again until "City of Reason."

3. Readers want to like the bad guy, a little. When you paint the antagonist all black, he becomes part of the furniture. Make him just a little bit right and he transforms the whole story, takes it to a new level.

4. The protagonist is the person most changed by the events of the story. You really do need to know who the protagonist is. Stories are not real life, stories are pieces of morality made entertaining. In real life, everyone is the good guy in their own stories, but in a story, not everyone is the protagonist. And if no one gets changed, no one learns or loses or triumphs or falls, you don't have a story. I struggled for a long time to get the ending of "Language Barrier" right, but I couldn't because I didn't know who the protagonist was. When I figured it out (it's Dane, by the way) it all fell into place. I knew all along that Audrey Callico is the protagonist of MACHINE INTELLIGENCE, but my test readers didn't get it. I had to make it clear that Audrey not only brings about the resolution, but she has to change to make it happen.

5. Conflict is the engine of fiction. I took a leadership training course a few years ago where I learned how to harness conflict to make things happen in business. I also learned how to harness conflict to drive a plot. Conflict is when you have two opposing ideas trying to share the same space at the same time, but when you resolve the conflict in a healthy way, the emerging idea is a new thing entirely that belongs to both parties. Everyone owns a piece of the new idea and everyone pulls in the same direction to bring that idea to reality. That's when it's done right, but we all know that it very often is done horribly, horribly wrong. I spent a lot of time early in my writing career writing lifeless stories because I only introduced a single idea and worked it through. When your antagonist is simply a wall standing between your protagonist and the resolution (see #3) nothing interesting happens.

I imagine I still have a thing or two to learn about writing. And I also imagine I'll have to learn these things the hard way. I know I've got a lot of writers reading this blog. Anyone else have a piece of writing advice they had to learn the hard way?