Some good advice

There's always tons of advice -- both good and bad -- for the aspiring novelist like myself. In fact, I give out some advice myself. But I ran across a small bit of advice this week that I found quite comforting.

It came from Writer's Digest from a panel discussion last week that WD covered as part of its Live from ThrillerFest coverage. Thriller writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Matt Richtel moderated the panel that included spy novelist Alex Dryden, mystery novelist Lisa Gardner, author Alex Kava, and debut author Daniel Palmer. And based on the coverage, it was a great discussion.

Apparently, I lot of the discussion concerned writer's block but the participants also touched on things that have been particularly useful to them. Gardner suggests lighting a scented candle before writing. For her, it jump starts her creativity. Dryden offered two bits of advice he struggles with keeping himself -- write 1,000 words a day and plot every book from start to finish.

Daily goals are good but I don't think strict quotas work, at least not for me. I tell people to set a difficult but achievable daily goal and work to achieve it. And if you don't, try again the next day and just don't give up. As for plotting, I really like to be surprised with the story so start-to-finish plotting isn't truly for me. That having been said, I plotted my last novel and am plotting the next, though I always keep my mind (and the story) open for surprises that I didn't think of ahead of time.

But my favorite bit of advice came from Palmer -- actually, it apparently came from his father -- and it set my mind as ease.

He said, "It doesn't have to be probable, it just has to be possible."

I like that and in most genre I think it works. (Sci-fi and fantasy are probably exceptions.)

In "The Missing CD," which was just published in the racing anthology BEDLAM AT THE BRICKYARD, I lived out a fantasy of mine -- that of driving at speed around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. I have been to the track countless times and have walked on the track -- on both the oval and road-course portions -- but have never been in a vehicle on the track. I don't want to tool around at just over walking pace in a tour bus. I have seen the track from a camera-mounted view atop a racing car and I would prefer seeing the track from a speeding -- 65 mph or more -- perspective. It may never happen.

But in my story, a guy in a street car busted through a fence and into the garage area, hanged a left and headed for the track, where he did most of one lap between practice sessions for the Brickyard 400. I loved describing what the track looked like as he drove and how he approached and drove through the turns. It was almost as if I were there with him. Come to think of it, I was.

Now, was that probable? I doubt it. But was it possible? Yes. The chances of it happening are near zero, I think, but it is possible.

So, that bit of advice was helpful to me, though 18 months after the fact. But I will remember it going forward.

Thanks for reading and don't give up.