Gary

I get where you're going with this...

I certainly agree with you and find it funny that you mention Robert Jordan. I'm reading through the series right now and it certainly DOES take some time for him to get his characters from A to B.
I also have trouble sometimes balancing my efforts to flesh out all the details versus getting to the meat of the story, getting to something interesting.
I probably tend to try to get to the point, which sometimes leaves me wondering if I'm painting a vivid enough picture for the reader. However, I almost find it a necessity because I have eight main characters that I follow closely in my story line. I feel like I have to keep the story moving at a very fast pace. Too much detail surrounding one character, or even a couple, can be tolerated. But if I bog a reader down with to many details about Kayne, then Eyou, then Joan, then Taneli, then Betzalel... By the time I get back to Kayne, I run the risk that the reader might have forgotten why they cared about him in the first place.
Does anyone have any guidelines on how much effort they put into fleshing out the details? For instance, I always try to keep physical descriptions down to two or three sentences...

Hey Gary,
I totally know where you're coming from! My book, The Pillar of Light (The Legends of Milana series), follows a group of nine. It moves along very quickly, and I stick to the perspectives of a couple of people, but reserve the right to occasionally jump to the other nine (and I do).
And, as a reader, I eventually gave up reading Robert Jordan's stuff (gasp! I admitted that out-loud?!) because I got tired of reading about carpet and upholstery, when I wanted to know what was happening to Rand!
Anyways, I know that a great many authors plow through their first drafts, attempting to balance flesing and plot, only to have to go through and chop up all their painstaking work on their next draft.
So here's my tip: Do it backwards. Don't write a first draft, write a skeleton draft. I write like mad, put in the things I need to, and focus on getting where I'm going: the end. When a swordsmith creates a sword, he bangs it into a close idea of what he wants, then re-heats and works in all the details. When you have a skeleton done (not to mention that heady feeling of oh-my-gosh-I-finished-it), put the thing away for a month (Trust me, if it's worth anything, you won't forget it).
After you've gotten over you're euphoria, pick it up and read it. It's really easy to see where you need details, and I find it way more enjoyable to *add* richness, fun ideas, and all those neat tidbits that you're brain has been working on over the last month, rather than cutting up your work. Call this your flesh draft, and resist the temptation to edit silly little flaws - don't waste your energy, focus on fleshing out what needs it. If you're a real glutton for punishment, you can type the whole thing in from scratch, as it will probably change a lot!
Take another break.
Now, do your skin draft. Read it again. Does it make sense? Now you can cut anything that was "too much," do a spellcheck, look for consistency, grammar, etc. Get a friend to read it (be specific: do you want them looking for grammar or details or places where they are confused?).
I know, it may seem a bit backwards, but for some reason, working with the bare minimum and building on that is easier for me. Readers are always telling me they can "see everything so clearly!"
Good luck Gary,
Hope this helps a bit,
A.L. Travis
The Pillar of Light: The Legends of Milana series
www.altravis.webs.com

I do so hear you about that getting the charactor from point A to point B. I find myself choosing either to write for plot, and then going back to flesh it out, or writing for what I call Voice, and hoping the charactor will eventually get to Point B. Sometimes it is like trying to get children to go to bed on time.
While I enjoy either way, it would be nice to not have to choose.

On another note, Kristen, for a good example of how to slow down your writing, read the new Neal Stephenson. You might not want ot go as far as he does in his techniques, but his pacing is worth a look. Damn good book, too.

I just joined up with this group. Thank you all for the intelligent, hands-on useful comments.

And I have to admit that I threw Book 5 of Jordan's series against a wall in frustration, and never went back to it.

Book 5? You are not alone Tess!

I did it with book 1. Seldom have I ever failed to finish a book, and can usually identify why: either it doesn't fit my mood, or the eight deadly words apply: "I don't care about these characters at all." I have to feel that the characters are compelling, and I didn't think RJ created anything more than stock fixtures, though he did get very wrapped up in setting---six page descriptions of a town, for instance [yes, I exaggerate:]. I LOVED his "Prologue": THAT character jumped off the page and bit me, but when we turned from this mentally broken man to the main character, then he takes NINE chapters to get them on the road for their quest . . . . THWACK! I hit the wall, then threw the book against a wall.

I read the entire series. I think that's 12 books, but who's counting. As bad as it is that Robert draggggggggeeeeddddd me along for ... something like 7,000 pages and maybe 3,000,000 words is, by the time he died, he left twenty subplots open, along with two dozen main characters, half of whom were in some kind of lingering bondage, one way or the other. Robert Jordan's biggest sin isn't dragging us onward (bad at that is). It's being unable to finish anything because there was too much money in soap opera.

Ouch. I'm in a bad mood. Must be those two rejections that I got this week, both saying I can't write worth a crap. That while in the midst of reading two books that are mega-sellers that leave me wondering how they got published?

Gary Wedlund

Is he dead? I had no idea ...
For some bizarre reason that makes me want to revisit the series, though I doubt I will make it to the end.

I didn't know he was dead either. If he's dead, then I'm not sure I want to keep reading. I'm interested enough in watching the characters grow (especially Rand) that I've learned to skim through all the monotony. But WOW! That would be a big investment in time if there's no closure.

Gary, since misery sometimes loves company I'll share that I just received my first rejection from a round of query letters I sent out to agents for my first book 7:The Mahar.
I'm not trying to tell anyone that my book is going to be required reading when my grandkids take English Lit, but I think I can honestly say that I've spent good money on a lot of books that weren't as good.
As long as you KNOW that its good, keep on plugging and you'll find someone to agree with you.

That brings up another question to the post:

Are most of you working through agents, or straight with the publishers? Personally, I've been trying to secure an agent because of my ignorance in the industry.

I knew that Robert Jordan was dead, because I knew that Brandon Sanderson, one of my favorite new sci-fi/fantasy authors, has been asked to finish the 12th book in the Wheel of Time series.

Rick wrote:

That brings up another question to the post:

Are most of you working through agents, or straight with the publishers? Personally, I've been trying to secure an agent because of my ignorance in the industry.

I went straight to the publisher, twice on the same book. The first was an E publisher (they went out of business) & the 2nd is a triditional publisher. I did my reshearch and blindly plunged forward. So far, so good. My biggest problem is marketing, getting the word out.
Gary sorry to hear about the rejection, but that means one less rejection till you get an acceptance. Good luck.
G W Pickle

I don’t even know if we have literary agents working for authors in my corner of the world. At least it is not common. What does an agent do for you, and how much would you pay him/her?
Myself, I know next to nothing about the publishing industry, even after having published my first novel. I sent my manuscript to the most well known traditional publishers in my country, in alphabetical order. I got rejected by A, C and D before G picked me up. I actually doubt it would have worked out much better or faster if I had had more experience or knowledge. It seems to me that rejections and acceptances both happen by chance, half the time. As does success.

My biggest issue is also marketing, as I am with a small publisher. They've treated me great (and my book too), but they don't have the connections and pull needed to put it in all the stores.
I don't know which is better for my next book: finding an agent or finding a publisher with more oomph, or doing both. I've heard that even though agents take money, they generally make you enough that you're still making more than you would have without them.
But is that only as far as getting a contract and all that? I still think that after that it's up to your publisher to get the thing in stores. Does anyone know different?
A.L. Travis

My research shows that an agent is going to take somewhere between 10-15%. However, it is widely held that having an agent is going to make you more money overall.
I imagine that the big difference between Agent vs. Publisher is that an agent is probably more likely to get you in with one of the larger publishers. I assume that with a larger publisher behind your book, marketing will be less of an issue.

I know... "Imagine" and "Assume" don't always = reality.

Take a look at the following link. It summarizes most of what I've read about reasons to have/not to have an agent.

Well, far be it from me to know much about it, but I do have a few words of advise. The biggest is that agents don't cost much. 15% isn't a whole lot, and if you are being published by anybody at all respectable, you should get an agent to finalize the contract, even if there are no changes. Then you have an agent. It is by far the best way to get one because you are free money.

What an agent buys you is access after that point. Lots of major houses don't take submissions without an agent doing it for you. Rendom House, for example, falls under that category.

Almost every author who is published has an agent. Almost all of them complain about them. Still, you're talking peanuts for the flexibility of having an agent send your work to better houses.

The next thing to think about there is self-publishing. I think the playing field is shifting on us there. What is really needed is a process whereby self-published work can go through some kind of vetting house. That way everybody can publish, and the house can rate the work, giving seals of approval. The problem with self-publishing is that anybody can do it and thus a lot of really, really bad stuff gets out there. The public has reason to suspect it, as do the book stores.

The reason I bring that up is that all of the major publishers are now losing money. In fantasy literature, TOR owns 90% of the market all by itself. Nobody edits submissions. You get just about nothing but exposure to Border's shelf space and I am convinced that 80% of all published books happen because somebody knew somebody else. In this environment, it's a wonder any of what gets published is good and it's certain that Moby Dick would never have met press.

Let's go from there to the issue of how a book gets attention from a slush editor. Mike Resneck once told me that at Rand each slush editor has to move through 30 submissions an hour. Counting breaks, licking return stamps and any novel catching the eye enough to read two pages, that's about two paragraphs worth of reading per submission. Out of that, a slush editor might toss one manuscript up to a bigger editor a week. What this means is that every book has to grab you by the nuts within a hundred words. That tends to shape the products.

So, good luck.

Gary Wedlund

Hey Gary,

Are you trying to tell me that my chances of being obnoxiously rich and famous are less than slim?

It is a tough reality that, for most of us, we'll never get to see our names on the New York Times Bestseller list. Even if what we are writing might just be just as good as, or even better than, the works that reach those hallowed heights (and those delicious dollars).

What I think is important is the fact that we are all writing. Until someone wises up and offers me the mega bucks deal for my book, I squeeze in an hour here and an hour there between work, church, family, Guitar Hero, and the occasional three winks of sleep. Sometimes, during the wee hours of the morning, in the pale light of my monitor, I do dream of how wonderful it would be to turn my hobby into a lucrative full time job. However, to keep from driving myself crazy with dreams-of-what-may-never-be, I try to take a little satisfaction in the fact that my goal was to write a book. I may never make a dime on it, and some might try to tell me it was a colossal waste, but i get to check it off my "list" and don't have to worry about regrets.

Anyway... That's Rick's sermon for September 11, 2008.

So, getting back to Gary's point. Does anyone have any sure-fire tips, tricks, suggestions that have worked for you in your attempts to snag the attention of a good agent?

Oh, and it looks like I completely forgot to attach the link from earlier.

http://www.sfwa.org/writing/agents.htm

well...its my first time to write a novel...and sometimes i had difficulties on how to write it....but if theres some kind of online teaching on how to write a novel :)

Writer's Digest provides online courses. Though I have not personally taken an online course, I did complete a Writer's Digest correspondence course about five years ago and it was fantastic. Three of my assignments became chapters in my first novel.

I would suggest reading the book, The First Five Pages, as a nice and extremely easy way of getting a feel for a first time novelist. The book jumpstarts the writer and gets them thinking about how to at least start a novel.

My second suggestion is a writegroup.

My third is to just start writing opening pages, leaving it at that.

my fourth is to find a good novel and type out the text. That's right, copy it. Get a feeling for how the book flows by accessing the tactile brain.

My fifth is to realize that the first book is unsellable.

My sixth is to post the first page or two here, and let us trash it. Ask someone to rewrite it for you, and see what they concerned themselves with.

Hope that helps some.

Gary Wedlund

Gary
I guess I'm the exception to #5. My first novel(also my first attempt at writing a novel) was sold twice. My first sale was to an overseas E book publisher. They went out of business. I resold my book to a U.S publisher and it is now available as a paperback. Now,I'm busy writing the second book in the series.
G W Pickle

Bigtime congrats for that, GW. I guess I broke my own rule about never saying always. Say, who is that publisher. I have a need for a contact.

Gary Wedlund

My publisher is Trytium Press. They accept SF & F.
Their website is:

http://www.trytium.com/

David is a really a nice guy and I'm pleased with the end product. They do use LSI for their printing. It is POD but, it's top quality all the way. They really listened to me about the cover art and gave me almost exactly what I wanted. I just cant say enough good about this publisher. FYI, the contract is very author friendly. I hope this helps.
G W Pickle

Tifa wrote:

well...its my first time to write a novel...and sometimes i had difficulties on how to write it....but if theres some kind of online teaching on how to write a novel :)

One book I'd recomend is "Building Believable Characters" by Marc McCutcheon. It's a Writer's Digest Sourcebook. It not only helps creating characters for your story, but it give all kinds of discriptions of clothing, emotions, jobs, foreign names, types of homes and so much more. I can't say enough good things about this book.
G W Pickle

I'd like to pick up on these ideas regarding first person versus third person, and how it relates to characterization.

To start with, the biggest reason for using 1st person versus 3rd person, to me (and I suppose this is only opinion) is:
1) 1st person allows for a more powerful and introspective view of a main character.
2) 3rd person forfeits this advantage because the author has no way for the main character to communicate all of the scenes in the story through one perspective.

Consider the options available for 1st person, however. A main character might extract information from another character, for example, or read about a different scene. In one book I devoted two small chapters from a second characters 1st person POV by saying, "Years later, while around a campfire, I recall Mary telling this account of the battle: '........'" A first person character might even dream about some other view, or imagine it. It might be fun if the imagined scene is even wrong.

The idea, however, that 1st person allows better internal description, while 3rd person allows better external, is probably not a huge issue. I agree with the former, but not the latter. The only character who is harder to describe externally in 1st person is the main character, and that isn't really very hard to accomplish, considering all of the various ways this can be done. In fact, I think the many ways a person might describe oneself, or bear someong else describe you, much more interesting than how an omiscient view might do the work.

fusiongary

POV is a topic that interests me a lot. I did my first novel, City of Masks, in first person (through journal entries and a few other documents), though switching occasionally to a different person's journal. It was a lot of fun to convey that the person writing the journal was an unreliable narrator and didn't really always have a handle on what was going on. However, I think it also helped to draw the reader into his somewhat innocent moral perspective.

I like a challenge, so I'm writing my current novel (publicly on a blog, http://gu-novel.blogspot.com) in second person. The idea is that it's describing an immersive documentary some years in the future, where you, the reader/viewer/experiencer, experience the story from various people's points of view, though most often that of the documentary maker. What that does, I think, is give a more vivid experience of seeing the issues from different angles. (The documentary is on a disruptive technology.)

Somewhat connected: I came across some material yesterday on the different effects of using first-person and third-person perspectives in therapy (I'm a hypnotherapist), and blogged about it: http://hypno.co.nz/blogs/index.php/2008/... Basically immersion in a first-person view of an emotional experience will bring about a repetition of that emotional experience, but if you view your own past experience from a third-person perspective you are more likely to make rational re-assessments of it.

Going back to #65 - I don't have an agent (one is not really necessary in New Zealand, where Random House will - and did - accept my unsolicited manuscript following an initial query, though I would certainly be seeking an agent if looking to publish overseas), but I have recently posted an interview on my blog with a New Zealand author who, straight off the bat, secured a US agent and deals for six fantasy novels from major US publishers - two YA standalones and a four-book adult series.

How did she do it? By writing well - very well, from the little I've so far seen of her work - and carefully researching the appropriate agent to approach, and how to make that approach. Her name is Helen Lowe, and she discusses this in the interview at

http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/2008/0...

deleted user wrote: "Defining plot point, and what it can do for you:

In my current novel I’m stuck at a place where my main character is involved in several investigations. The police are after her. The vampire s..."

You have some valid points, but one thought that I try to keep in mind whenever I am writing is "does this scene, and everything in it have a purpose?" If it doesn't cut it. So, yes that might mean moving a character from point A to point B quickly, but if I mentioned the small nook in the gnarled tree on the edge of the trail, it is for a reason; it may be much later in the book, but it is for a reason.

You might call this plot points, or you might just think i am skipping over the 'getting there' piece but everything in your book must be there for a reason, even if it is something as simple as describing the shimmering sunset to reader why they need to care for the environment. It all has to have a purpose.

Quinton Wall
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