Jim Butcher's Blog

How to Get Your Story Started
or
Organizing This Frickin' Mess

by Jim Butcher
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So you've got a great idea for a story. You've got some good characters, some
good plot, maybe a great scene or two in mind. You're ready to plunge in!

If only you could figure out WHERE to plunge in.

Be wise and listen to me, young padawan writer: get a few things organized
first. It'll save you enormous headaches in the long run. I'm going to share
what I do before I start a novel wit

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Climaxes
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Caveat, on this article as on all the others: This is not the whole sum of wisdom on writing craft, forever and ever amen. This is intended to be a place for aspiring writers to /start/, a little bit of foundation with which you can begin to develop your own style. If you work with this stuff here, it can be an immense aid to you in developing your skills to a professional level. I know it's true because this is exactly the stuff that I learned, and it worked out all right fo

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For those who don't know it, I've stumbled into podcasting now. Well, technically, FRED has gotten into podcasting and I sort of stumbled along after him. The Butcher Block (Fred named it, not me) is going to be a quasi-regular podcast about my books and so on. The first one is all about the TV show, and addresses several fan concerns that have been raised as publicity and details for the show have been released to the public.

Check it out! :)

http://butcherblock.libsyn.com

Jim

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SEQUELS

And no, we're not talking about book 2. We're talking about the original meaning of the word sequel--the part that comes after, the next in the sequence. In the scenes of a book, you're getting all your plot-pursuing and action-taking and choice-making done.

Now you get to the hard part.

Getting your reader to give a flying frack about it.

To do that, you've got to win them over to your character's point of view. You've got to establish some kind of basic emotional connection, an empathy

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SCENES
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Scenes are important. Scenes are where all the plot in your book happens. Any time your character is actively pursuing his goal (as opposed to a character who is pausing to reflect or react emotionally to the events of the story) he is engaged in a SCENE.

The basic structure of a scene is simple. Your POINT OF VIEW character sets out in pursuit of a SPECIFIC GOAL. Someone else (usually, but not always, the antagonist) actively, knowingly tries to stop him. There is a CONFLICT

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I have learned a couple of things here.

1) You guys are way too kind. I mean, I was mostly posting those reviews because . . . well, they were just MEAN. I mean, for every one of those reviews, I've gotten three or four who were just as down on the books, but who laid out their reasoning for it in a calm, reasoned manner. I don't mind that kind of critique. It doesn't send me into raptures of delight or anything, but it doesn't faze me, either. That kind of thing can really be very useful.

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Dresden Files
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"Literacy"
I read the first three of these books on a reccomendation from a bookseller. He said they had been very popular among the younger crowd. I had just read the His Dark Materials trilogy on his word and it left me with such a profound satisfaction at the end that I was open and eager to suggestion. Silly me.
The Dresden Files novels are some of the most devisive, contrived stories I have ever read. It was like torture reading these books and by the third one I wa

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THE GREAT SWAMPY MIDDLE

Every writer runs into this, generally in every single book. The middle. It lurks between the beginning of your book and the exciting conclusion, and its mission in life is to Atreyu you right down into the yucky, mucky mire in order to prevent you from ever actually finishing.

The Great Swampy Middle (or GSM) knows no fear, no mercy, no regret. It doesn't come after you. It darned well knows that you're going to come to it. It knows that you're going to be charging

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So your story is all about conflict, right? And you can't have conflict without, well, people. Maybe your people look like sentient renaissance mice, or maybe they look like talking cats, but there are going to be beings running around your story with a bunch of conflicting desires. Those are your characters.

Sticking with the purely craft-oriented standpoint, we'll start with a basic question: what makes a good character?

FIRST AND FOREMOST, FICTION WRITERS, YOUR CHARACTERS MUST BE INTERESTING

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