Tag: how to

QUIZ: How should you start your novel?

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First, a Pop Quiz

I’m going to give you four openings of books, and you tell me how they hook the reader. Why does the reader keep reading?

1. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

2. First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack.

3.  When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim’s warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress. She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother. Of course, she did. This is the day of the reaping.

4. When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special significance, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

Here are the sources for the openings:

  1. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
  2. Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
  3. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
  4. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Here are my answers of what might be going through a reader’s mind as s/he reads the openings:

  1. That’s an intriguing idea. I wonder what more the author has to say or show about it. (Answers)
  2. I want to know more about this guy; he seems interesting. (Character)
  3. Immediate: What’s the Reaping? By the end of the chapter: What happens next? (Answers, Time)
  4. Who’s Bilbo? Where’s Bag End? Eleventy-first birthday? A Party? Hobbiton? (World)

Earlier this week I posted about WATCH, a method of figuring out which of four elements your novel focuses on. Each novel has all four, but novels generally stress one over the others. When you know which element is your focus, you have a good idea of how to start and end your novel, giving it continuity. The four elements are World, Answers (or theme), Time (or events), and Character. Read about them on the previous post.

Tricky Beginnings and Endings

Beginning and ending your book with your focus element is a helpful tip. It isn’t a rule. To Kill A Mockingbird begins with a statement about Jem, Scout’s brother, then talks about events leading up to his injury, and then the book ends on theme.

Tuck Everlasting begins with a mystery and ends with a theme, but the epilogue ends with more events. All together, the story is a Time story—readers want to know what happens next.

The Outsiders starts by talking about the narrator and ends with him wanting to tell the world about his friends. The book’s themes and plot and world are important, but the story begins and ends with character.

A Study in Scarlet is a mystery, but the first chapter is about Dr. Watson introducing himself and then being told about Sherlock Holmes. But even the character of Holmes is its own mystery, which is why the reader doesn’t want to know how the characters grow so much as answer the question of who they are.

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation begins with an “excerpt” from the Encyclopedia Galactica. It’s not difficult to guess that World is definitely a focus in his books.

A Note Regarding Prologues

Agents want to read and represent a book that hooks them from the first paragraph. That’s why plenty of agents despise prologues. But wait, you say, plenty of fantasy and sci-fi books start with prologues. If World is your focus, you’re more likely to get away with a prologue. If the focus is Character or Answers, then you likely should not have a prologue—backstory and answers should be revealed throughout the book. Don’t give your milk away for free if you’re trying to sell a cow.

If you are debating about including a prologue, first consider the following:

  • Is there any other way you can effectively incorporate this information without putting it at the beginning?
  • Is it really that necessary?
  • Do you care that many readers will skip over it?
  • Do you care that it might annoy potential agents or publishers?

If you absolutely must include a prologue, I suggest titling it Chapter One rather than Prologue. Include a date or time stamp there and on Chapter 2 to show a shift in time or place.

YOUR Beginning: Another Quiz!

When writing or revising your beginning, ask yourself what is important to you as a writer and as a reader.

Answer each question yes/no. Then rank your “Yes” answers in order of what matters most to you.

  1. Do you want to be thought of as poignant or thought-provoking?
  2. Do you want to be known as exciting?
  3. Do you want to be known for your imagination?
  4. Do you want to be known as an intimate person?
  5. Do you read books to escape?
  6. Do you put down a book if it’s boring?
  7. Do you enjoy books that make you think?
  8. Do you tend to forget about the plot in books you’ve read, but always remember the people?
  9. Do you want people to fall in love with your characters?
  10. Do you want people to enjoy your fictional universe as much as (or more than) you do?
  11. Do you want your book to be memorable for its themes?
  12. Do you want your book to be a page-turner?

What matters most from questions 1–4: ___ (1-A, 2-B, 3-D, 4-C)

What matters most from questions 5–8: ___ (5-D, 6-B, 7-C, 4-A)

What matters most from questions 9–12: ___ (9-C, 10-D, 11-A, 12-B)

If you answered mostly A’s (Answers)—Start your book with a theme and end it with the final statement on the theme. For the rest of the novel, be sure to illustrate (show) rather than explain (tell) so you don’t get preachy. These are the books that, when thematic and done right, change people’s lives and become their most beloved books. When structured as mysteries or capers, these are the most open to becoming series.

If you answered mostly B’s (Time)—Start your book immediately with the inciting incident, and end each chapter with a change of events. Finish the book with a final change of events (which might be a cliff-hanger if this is part of a series). These books are the ones that people can’t put down and recommend to their friends because it’s such a thrilling read.

If you answered mostly C’s (Characters)—Start and end your book with interesting details about the character. Voice is everything. So is making the character sympathetic by using rooting interests. These are the books that people fall in love with, that generate the most fan fiction.

If you answered mostly D’s (World)—Fascinate them with the world you create. Start with a regular day, if it’s really amazing. Otherwise begin with the most interesting places or event in your world, and end once the world finds a new normal. These are the books that people immerse themselves in—the ones that generate the most cosplays and fan art. They have a very high potential for spin-offs. (They are also the ones that have the highest costuming and CGI budgets when transferred to film!)

Choosing the best kind of beginning for your book

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Letters from Anne Lamott

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Motivation

No, I have not written correspondance with Anne Lamott, and I don’t have copies of any of her epistles. I do, however, have a copy of Bird by Bird, which I reread cover to cover today.

Two things that resonated with me particularly during this read had to do with letters, namely the first five of the alphabet.

Alice Adams’ ABDCE

In her chapter on Plot, Lamott reference’s Alice Adam’s formula for writing short stories. It goes like this:

  1. Action—This is how you start, how you get the reader reading.
  2. Backstory—This is how you set up for that action, after the fact, when the reader is already hooked and curious about your characters.
  3. Development—This is when you develop the characters based on their personalities and what’s at stake. If you know your characters, the plot will flow naturally.
  4. Climax—Everything comes together for the characters during the climax. Lamott says the climax needs to include a killing, a healing, or a domination. These could be literal or metaphorical. Either way, the characters are not the same after the climax.
  5. Ending—After the climax, the ending needs to make sense. “What is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean?” (page 62)

Plotters and Pantsers

There are two basic types of writers: the plotter and the pantser. I’ll use extremes to illustrate my point, and hopefully you’ll find yourself somewhere in the middle.

The extreme plotter plans before writing and risks writing something plot-driven rather than character-driven (I talk about that here). These are the people that write 28 trashy novels per year and somehow end up on the best-seller list. Their films generate a buzz and sell a lot of popcorn, but end up in the discount DVD bin five months after release. The extreme pantser writes by the seat of his or her pants, letting the story develop naturally and organically, and risks having an artfully written convolution that is unpublishable. These are the people who write fine literature that nobody particularly understands. Their movies are discussed primarily in film classes.

Sometimes you plan out a 4-foot-by-4-foot garden plot. You plant the seeds in even little rows, pushing them inches down into the Ph-balanced soil. But then you have a number of cold days, or not enough rain, and the spinach wilts and the corn grows and casts an eternal shadow over the unsuspecting peonies. Before you know it, the tomatoes are creating their own political party of radicals, hatching a plan to overthrow the oligarchy that is your authorship. Then you have to wonder if your garden needs a serious thrashing, if you should just plow it up and turn the whole thing into a compost pile, or if you should start a new, nonfiction book entitled “1001 Uses for Tomatoes.”

Sometimes you wander, barefooted, into a patch of wildflowers and lie gazing up at the clouds and enjoying the smells and sounds of the rustling, absorbing them into memory. You come back, day after day, while the Earth spins around and the seasons change, observing and absorbing, until you have a collection of lovely vignettes. But your editor just doesn’t see a story there. So you go back to your wildflower patch with a shovel, find a spot with a nice view, and you dig yourself a grave there and bury yourself up to your waist in dirt, and call a friend to come finish the job for you, because you can’t cover yourself completely without leaving some arm waving around pathetically.

Whether you are a plotter or a pantser, whether you’ve got a messy draft or are in the middle of a draft with no foreseeable future, you might want to consider a plot treatment.

Plot Treatment

A plot treatment addresses what happens and why. It tells you “who the people [are] and what the story [is],” (page 91).

Here’s how Lamott did it:

“I sat down every day and wrote five hundred to a thousand words describing what was going on in each chapter. I discussed who the characters were turning out to be, where they’d been, what they were up to, and why. [And] I figured out, over and over, point A, where the chapter began, and point B, where it ended, and what needed to happen to get my people from A to B. And then how the B of the last chapter would lead organically into point A of the next chapter. The book moved along like the alphabet, like a vivid and continuous dream.” (92-3)

Sound familiar? It’s a lot like Suzanne Johnson’s Relationship Arcs. Try my twist of a plot treatment with my Chapter Outlining Like a Pantser technique.

Don’t be afraid to plot. Plotting helps make your story a story. It gives you that beginning, middle, and end. Without it, you might have some nice images, but so does the Alzheimer’s patient down at Happy Acres. They might be real, truthful, and beautiful, but if you don’t link together the cat with three legs, your great aunt’s penchance for covering furniture with doilies, and the lingering smell of buttercream frosting together in a logical order, no one is going to have any idea what you are talking about, or why those things are important.

 

I’m a plotter, and I have an outline, but that plan has grown from my knowledge of my characters. They still surprise me from time to time, so if my outline changes, it changes. I don’t change my characters to fit the story, I change the story to fit them, but I have a pretty good idea of what decisions they’ll make for themselves based on their character.

I’ve spent half a decade with my characters, virtually taking them out to eat. Gareth and I always get cheeseburgers or waffles at indecent hours, constantly wiping our mouths of the ketchup or blueberry syrup as we talk about movies. Isolde and I get frozen ice cream topped generously with fruit and white chocolate or coconut, unless we are having a self-conscious day, when we’ll chat over salads between sips of lemon water. Robin is less predictable, wanting salmon one day and Wisconsin cheese baked macaroni another. I gaze at the menu in indecision while he talks about his latest wedding gig.

If you know your characters, the story will develop while they develop. If you don’t know your characters, take them out for coffee and let them order whatever they want. Listen to their story, and then go home and write it down.

I recommend borrowing Bird by Bird from the library, at least. If you are a habitual highlighter or underliner like myself, however, you can buy the book on Amazon here: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Cheating your way to 50,000 words

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Now, I value integrity more than the average human being, but sometimes I think taking a few short cuts is completely fine. Don’t think hard, think smart.

Here are my top 3 cheats to boost your word count, in order of least desperate to most desperate. 

3. Get all that clunky writing out of your system

Don’t forget that NaNoWriMo serves as an outlet to get down your first draft. If you think that what comes out of NaNoWriMo is even close to publishing standards, either you are kidding yourself or you have a sad, sad idea of what is publishable these days.

First drafts are excrement. Remember that. Just get it all out of your system, and leave the clean-up for the revision stage.

What’s clunky writing? Wordiness. Adjectives and adverbs. Flowery description. Get it out now, and if you find an editor worth his or her salt (or if you know a thing about deadwood yourself), then try not to cry when 2/3rds of your manuscript seems to be crossed out in red ink after the editor gets her hands on it.

***Update: After reading my post, a friend of mine showed me this post on “The Best of NaNoWriMo”—a Tumblr page you can hope you don’t find yourself on. Please note that I recommend that yes, you get the wordiness out of your system—it comes naturally to writers. But I do NOT recommend making an effort to be overly wordy. You should never attempt to be a lousy writer. Practice makes perfect, so practice good writing, else you become a perfectly awful writer that no one wants to have lunch with.***

2. Commit the sins of dialogue tags.

“The truth is, if you have a dialogue tag,” Lara said, “It should serve two purposes.”

  1. It should be as invisible as possible, placed at the beginning or end of the sentence, or in the middle at a natural pause.
  2. It should tell the reader who is talking.

Here are the 3 sins of writing dialogue tags:

  1. Thinking your reader is stupid. If anybody with a brain can guess who is talking, leave the dialogue tag out.
  2. Thinking that zero dialogue tags = mysterious, artistic writing. It isn’t. It’s confusing and annoying. Establish who is talking as soon as the dialogue begins, and then only use dialogue tags when things get confusing or you introduce another character.
  3. Thinking that dialogues are a place to express your creativity and use vocabulary words. I have a huge amount of respect for educators. Yet I’d like to take a ruler to the knuckles of teachers who give their students worksheets like, “Other words to use instead of ‘said'” because they are instilling into those malleable minds that bad writing will give you better grades. (Hint: it often does)

Dialogue tags are punctuation. Some really wonderful writers forget that from time to time, including Ms. J.K. Rowling, who used extended dialogue tags in her earlier Harry Potter novels. You’ll notice, though, that the better her novels got, the more invisible her dialogue tags were.

“I like that hat you are wearing,” said John exuberantly.

“Thank you,” Cordelia squeaked with a blush, “for saying such nice things.”

Reading the above is pretty similar to reading something like this:

I LIKE THAT HAT YOU ARE WEARING!

THANK YOU! FOR SAYING SUCH THINGS!

Unnecessary and loud. And while such boring dialogue shouldn’t appear in your novel anyway, if it must, make it more like this:

“I like that hat you are wearing,” said John.

“Thank you for saying such nice things,” said Cordelia. She covered her cheek with her hand to hide the blush.

Still awful, but better. If you want good examples of dialogue writing, I’ll see if I can get some time this weekend to illustrate how to do it well, using examples from authors other than myself.

But if you need more words, commit those sins! Get them out! (And then murder the tags as you rewrite.)

1. Include your notes and free-writing in there, too.

NaNoWriMo is sort of like a marathon of free-writing. The point is the word count, not the quality of what you are writing. One way to boost your word count and get the “creative juices” flowing is to start off each writing session doing a free-writing exercise. It will get you over staring at the dreadful white page and make your brain and hands get ready.

Then include this all in the same document as your manuscript.

My manuscript is a complete mess. It isn’t linear, I write different scenes from different parts of my novel at different times. I don’t have a lot of my notes included in the manuscript (yet), but I have some. (Most of my notes I typed on a typewriter and keep in a 3-ring binder.) I’ll write three versions of a scene because all of them are in my head at once. Keep it all, and count it all in your word count. When you get to the revising stage, then you can rearrange all the scenes into a logical order and decide which words to toss, recycle, or keep.

I’m hoping to get more writing done this week. I have a lot of new ideas for scenes, but they currently reside on sticky notes and hotel notepads that I have around the house. I’m not really trying to hit the magic 50,000 words this month—I’d rather go slowly building  a solid plan than a 70,000 word manuscript that doesn’t work—but once I hit 20,000 I’ll take a break to write a post on good dialogue.

Unless I hit a burn out before 20,000 words and need a break. But my breaks have mostly consisted of me trying to obtain work. Which reminds me—insert shameless plug—if you are interested in getting custom business cards designed for yourself, for writing conferences or whatever, I’ll give you a discount for being a fan on my Facebook page. Become a fan on there, and I’ll give more details this weekend.

Let me know how you are progressing, and if you’ve committed any of the sins or cheats yourself!

Plotting: Relationship Arcs

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I generally find it bad taste to summarize someone else’s words on my own blog, especially if I have less experience in the matter and have nothing to add. So head on over to Bestsellerology and read “Building a Plot, One Step at a Time” by Suzanne Johnson.

I hope y’all are getting in more words than I have been. Let’s get motivated, brainstorm little rewards after so many words written (one of mine is painting my toenails, another is eating OREO-topped pudding), turn off distractions, and write now.