Randy Ingermanson's Blog: Advanced Fiction Writing, page 2

The 80/20 Rule And Novelists

I got interested in the 80/20 rule more than 10 years ago, when Amazon added a feature to their Author Central site that showed each author how they ranked among all the other authors. I immediately realized that this revealed exceptional insights about the earnings of all published authors. (Amazon removed this feature after a few years, maybe because they realized that it gave away more information than they had intended.) 

How could this feature give away “too much information”? Because sales of books follow (approximately) the 80/20 Rule: about 80% of the money is earned by the top 20% of all authors. And the 80/20 Rule is “recursive,” meaning that 80% of 80% of the money is earned by the top 20% of the top 20%. Doing the math, that means that 64% of the money goes to 4% of the authors. 

And likewise, 80% of 80% of 80% of the money goes to the top 20% of the top 20% of the top 20% of authors. Doing the math again, that means that 51.2% of the money goes into the pockets of the top 0.8% of authors. Or, if you want to round those numbers slightly, the top 1% of all authors get about half the money. 

If that sounds like something Bernie Sanders would say, all I can say is that you don’t have be a socialist to acknowledge the simple fact that this is reality. There are deep mathematical reasons for this, and it’s the way markets work. 

If you’re still wondering how this could be “too much information,” I’ll refer you to a blog post I wrote a few years ago that showed how much information you can extract from a single data point. Based on one piece of information Amazon revealed, I derived a mathematical formula to estimate the number of authors who sold at least X books per year. Just plug in X and you get out a very good approximation. That formula was valid in 2014. The formula for our current year would be somewhat different, but not very different. Because the 80/20 rule is a good approximation to reality. 

Is the 80/20 Rule Bad News?

A lot of writers see the 80/20 rule as terrible news. They would summarize the situation as this: “There are a few big winners and a lot of big losers.”

I don’t see it that way. For starters, there are a fair number of people who earn a decent amount of money from their writing. Yes, only a very few earn millions. But many, many authors earn thousands or tens of thousands. And quite a few earn hundreds of thousands. That’s not bad news. That’s good news. It’s possible to get paid well for your writing. 

But there’s better news. The 80/20 rule applies to many different aspects of life. One place where the 80/20 rule probably applies is my famous Snowflake Method. A small number of words can summarize most of the design of a novel. A small amount of design work can provide the blueprint for most of your novel. 

But for this blog post, I’m going to focus on how the 80/20 rule applies to another aspect of life that’s important to all of us—learning new stuff.

An example is in order.

The 80/20 Rule In Learning a New Language

Let’s say you decide you want to learn a new language. As a random example, suppose you decide to learn German. A quick search of the web tells me that there are more than 300,000 words in one standard reference book. 

That sounds overwhelming. How could you ever learn 300,000 words? It would take a lifetime. 

Yes, it would take a lifetime, but I guarantee you that most native German speakers don’t know all those words. The reason is because some words are more common than others. Some German words are extremely common, and others hardly ever get used. 

And the 80/20 rule is a very good estimator for how many words are super common. 20% of the words get used about 80% of the time. The calculation I did above applies here. 1% of the words get used about 50% of the time. 

So if you learned the 3000 most common German words, you’d be able to understand half the words you come across in a typical German document. 

In fact, it gets better than that. If you run the calculation out a bit further, you’ll see that by learning just the 100 most common German words, you’d be able to understand about a third of the words you find in a typical German document. 

That’s actually pretty amazing. You could learn 100 words in a week. And you’d be able to read a German newspaper and see those words all over the place. Even with that very limited vocabulary, you might be able to get the drift of an article. 

Of course, you wouldn’t understand everything. But you’d understand something. And then if you take several more weeks and expand your vocabulary out to 500 words, you’d be able to understand about 41% of the words in a typical German document. That’s amazing! 

No, you wouldn’t understand the whole German language. Yes, you would be able to get along if you suddenly found yourself in a random place in Germany. (Actually, since a great many Germans speak excellent English, you’d probably be fine, even if you spoke no German. But why would you want them to have all the fun of speaking a foreign language, when you could have some of that fun yourself?)

The 80/20 Rule in Learning Anything

The 80/20 rule applies to learning just about anything. If you learn the 1% of the concepts in any field that are most commonly used, you can get a grasp of about half of what gets said in that field. I must emphasize that you won’t have a complete grasp. You’ll have a very incomplete grasp. But you’ll understand it surprisingly well, and that has value.  

As a practical example, you can learn the absolute basics of Photoshop by watching a one-hour tutorial on YouTube. You won’t be a great graphic designer after one hour. But you’ll be able to open somebody else’s amazing Photoshop file and see how they put it together. And you’ll be able to make at least some simple tweaks to it—fix a spelling error, or adjust the colors, or swap out a logo. And that could be extremely useful to you. 

But A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing, Right?

You might be thinking that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and therefore it’s dumb to learn just a little about a subject. 

I don’t agree. It’s dumb to learn just a little about a subject and then imagine that you’re an expert. Ask me about the arguments I’ve had with ignorant people who thought they knew more physics than me because they watched some YouTube video for an hour. 

If you only know 1% of a subject, then you only know 1% of that subject. There’s no way to change that. But if you maintain your humility and remember that you only know the basics, you can easily stay out of trouble. The people who get in trouble are the ones who think that knowing 1% makes them an expert. Do a search sometime for the phrase “Dunning-Kruger Effect” to see how common that is. 

So why should you learn that 1%? Because knowing 1% gives you the ability to talk to an expert and ask intelligent quetions that few other people would even think to ask. And when you’re doing research for a novel, the ability to pick an expert’s mind is gold. 

There are experts out there who would be happy to help you figure out something for your novel. Maybe they’ve spent a lifetime studying a particular subject. And you come to them and say, “Look, I’m a complete novice in your subject, but I’ve got this question….” And then you ask something that proves you took the trouble to learn even a tiny bit about their subject. 

Most experts will be thrilled to see that you took that trouble. Most experts will go the second mile in giving you their insights, once they see that you cared enough to learn even 1% of their subject. 

That’s why you might consider becoming a 1% novice. You can’t possibly spend a lifetime on every subject that interests you. But you could spend a month to become a 1% novice. And knowing a little about a lot of things can be valuable. 

The post The 80/20 Rule And Novelists appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Your Best Writing Conference Ever

You might have heard that a writing conference is the best place you can possibly go to make the connections you need to succeed as an author. 

I’ve said this many times, and it’s absolutely true. There is no better investment you can make in your writing career than to go to a writing conference. 

But you might have heard other writers with a different opinion. Here are some of the things you might have heard:

“I went to a writing conference and it was awful. The editors and agents all stuck to themselves, and all the writers were novices who knew absolutely nothing. It was a complete waste of time and money.”“I went to a conference and I felt so intimidated, I spent the whole time crying in my room. The food was worse than rat poison, and nobody was at all friendly. I hated every minute.”“I made appointments with 2 editors and 2 agents at a conference. The agents shot me down and the editors both asked me to send them something, but then I didn’t hear anything for 6 months. When they finally contacted me, they sent form rejections. The whole thing was pointless.”Yes, Bad Things Happen at Conferences

It’s true that bad things happen at conferences. Those terrible experiences I listed above really happened to real people. Not just once. Not just a hundred times. They’ve happened to tens of thousands of writers. 

But great things happen at conferences too. Of my 5 closest friends outside my family, I met 2 at writing conferences, I met a 3rd through 1 of those 2, and I met a 4th through a writer’s email loop that I learned about at a conference. (I do have 1 close friend I met at work, so not all my friends are writers.) 

And I have hundreds of friends I met at conferences. Yes, hundreds. They’re not all super close, but I’ve shared good times with each of them, eating meals, talking fiction, hanging out at the bar. (I’m famous for always ordering milk, but most of my friends can’t handle such strong drink and have to settle for something with alcohol in it.)

But yeah, I’ve been to conferences where I felt incredibly intimidated. I’ve been to conferences where it was super hard to get access to the editors and agents. I’ve been to conferences with awful food. I’ve been to conferences where every agent or editor I talked to wasn’t interested in my writing.

But every single conference I’ve ever been to has been a great experience. And I’ve left most of them thinking, “Wow, that was the best conference ever!”

What Makes A Great Conference Experience?

You may be thinking that I must be taking some sort of happy-chemical to make me think awful conferences are actually great. 

Sorry, I don’t. Great conference experiences don’t come out of a pharmacy. 

Great conference experiences come from aligning your expectations with reality and then acting appropriately. 

Here are the 3 realities of a writing conference:

All the editors and agents are overwhelmed with a flood of wannabe writers trying every possible trick to get their foot in the door. Which means that every agent and editor is playing defense every second, just to keep their sanity. They literally have to be on guard against manuscripts being shoved under the door of the bathroom stall. Most of the writers are at their very first conference. They are scared to death of the editors and agents, but at the same time, they’ve been told that this is their one chance to “network” with these bigshots and make a good impression. And they are intimidated by all the other writers, because they see other writers as the competition in a zero-sum game. A few people at conferences are seasoned writers who’ve been to a number of conferences and know some of the editors and agents. In fact, the editors and agents welcome talking to these writers because these writers are not acting desperate. 

Here’s the secret to having a great experience at a writing conference: Make friends with writers you resonate with. 

Yes, it’s really that simple. And yes, I said to put your focus on other writers. You will eventually also make friends with editors and agents, but that can take a few conferences, and it takes some luck. Whereas making friends with other writers is a sure thing.

So How Do You Make Friends With Writers?

You can make friends with writers in many ways. Here are a few:

Ask another writer what sort of fiction they write and then ask intelligent questions about it. Ask another writer how their writing career is going. They will tell you it’s not going well and will explain at length what’s wrong. If you know something that might advance their career, tell them. Expect nothing in return.  If you see somebody who looks miserable, take the time to talk to them and see if there’s anything you can do to help. 

Your goal here is not to use other writers to advance your career. If you go in with that kind of attitude, other writers will see through you right away. Don’t be That Writer.

Your goal is to be a decent human being who helps others with no expectation of any kind of reward. 

I guarantee that if you talk to even 10 people at a conference with the goal of helping them, 1 of them will resonate with you. You’ll discover that you have a lot in common. By the end of the conference, you’ll be friends. And you’ll leave the conference feeling happy at what a great time you had.

And I guarantee that if you talk to 50 people, you’ll find someone who will turn into a life-long friend. And you’ll leave the conference thinking it was the best time you ever had in your entire life. 

“But I’m An Introvert!”

You may be thinking that you can’t possibly do all this. Because you’re an introvert. Introverts don’t reach out to others. 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. About 95% of writers at writing conferences are introverts. I’m a flaming introvert. Always have been. Always will be. I’m probably more introverted than you. But nobody has to know that when I go to a conference. 

Even an introvert can ask another writer how they’re doing. That’s all you have to do, and the other writer opens up. 

No, you don’t have to become friends with every single writer you interact with at a conference. You can’t possibly do that. You’ll resonate with a few and you’ll not resonate with most. The ones you resonate with may turn into friends. But you can be a decent human being to everyone, even if they’re not nice to you. 

This should go without saying, which means it probably needs saying. A writing conference is not a place to go looking for romance. 

But Shouldn’t You Be Networking?

No, you should not be networking at a writing conference. You should not be networking anywhere. You should scrub the word “networking” from your brain. Never, ever, ever think of another writer as a person who can help you advance your career. That way lies dragons—and the worst of the dragons are envy, greed, and malice. 

Always, always, always think of other writers as fellow runners in the grand marathon of life. Some are running too fast for you. Some are running too slow. But some are running at just your pace. These are your natural pack. Run wild and free with them. Howl at the moon together.

But What About Editors and Agents?

Eventually, you’ll meet editors and agents. This can happen at meals. In the hallway. In the lobby. At the bar. Or when you make an appointment with one of them to discuss your writing. 

Treat editors and agents like anyone else at the conference. After talking with a few dozen or a few hundred writers, you’ll be comfortable doing this. It’ll feel like the most natural thing in the world. 

You won’t resonate with most editors or agents. But some of them, you will. Some will even become friends. Be a decent human being to all of them, and when you find The One, you’ll know. And they’ll know. And at that point, your writing career will change forever.

How long will this take? That’s impossible to say. It could take a couple of conferences. It could take 10. Or 20. It might never happen. Not every writer is guaranteed a slot in traditional publishing. Some writers are happier acting as their own publisher. 

But every writer can go to any writing conference and have a great, incredible, stupendously wonderful time. And all you have to do is treat other writers the way you’d want to be treated. 

The post Your Best Writing Conference Ever appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

How to Be a “Bad-As” Editor

Here’s an exercise you can do to make your current novel better:

Search your manuscript for the word “as”. Remove it from every sentence that uses “as” to make two events simultaneous.

That’s it. very simple. Extremely effective. 

A few examples will make this all clear. In each example, I’ll show you the wrong way to do it, followed by an explanation of why it’s wrong, followed by a better option. 

Example 1

Wrong: Joe threw a punch at Eric as he approached. 

Why it’s wrong: Your purpose as a novelist is to create a movie in your reader’s brain. This sentence throws up several speed bumps for your reader. Let’s break it down to see why. 

The sentence has three events, and they happen in this order: 

Eric approaches Joe. Eric gets within punching range of Joe.Joe throws the punch. 

Now you can see three things that went horribly wrong. 

First, the sentence puts things out of order. The sentence shows Joe throwing a punch and then it shows Eric approaching. 

Can’t the reader figure out that things are written out of order? Yes, your reader can do that by using logic. But now you’re making your reader’s brain work much harder than it should. The reader has to cut the video you made, reorder it, and splice it back together. That’s a speed bump in your reader’s brain. Readers put down books that have too many speed bumps. They usually won’t be able to say why, other than “it just didn’t feel realistic.” Now you know why. It didn’t “feel realistic” because you made your reader edit your movie. 

The second horribly wrong thing is that the sentence uses the word “as” to say that these things take about the same length of time. But they can’t possibly happen at the same time. It might take several seconds for Eric to approach. It takes a tenth of a second for Joe to throw the punch. 

Can’t the reader figure out the timing problem? Yes, again your reader can use logic to mentally speed up the approach of Eric or slow down Joe’s punch. But either way, the movie looks all wrong in your reader’s brain. 

The third horribly wrong thing is that the sentence uses the word “as” to say that these things happen at the same time. But they don’t. Eric has to approach and get within range before Joe can punch. Even if you had put them in the right order, that pesky “as” would still be saying they’re simultaneous when they aren’t. See how silly that looks: Eric approached as Joe threw a punch at him. 

You know the drill by now. Yes, the reader can sort things out by mentally editing your hashed-up movie into something sensible. No, they should never have to edit your movie.

It’s your job to edit the movie so the reader can see it on the first reading without editing. Something like this: 

Eric walked up and put out his hand. “Hey, buddy!” 

Joe slugged him in the gut. 

Example 2

Wrong: The front door swung open as Madeline strode in. 

This one’s better. Things are shown in the right order. The two events take about the same amount of time. But Madeline can’t make her grand entrance until the door’s open.

Better: The front door opened, and Madeline strode in. 

You might be thinking I’m just being persnickety here. I only changed one word. But it’s the one word that destroys the movie in your reader’s brain. 

Wrong words matter. Your reader can’t picture the door swinging open at precisely the same time that Madeline strides in. The door has to start swinging open, and then the door has to move at least a foot, and only then can Madeline can get in, no matter how slim she is. 

Example 3

Wrong: George clenched his teeth as his face slowly turned red. 

The problem here is that clenching your teeth takes a tenth of a second, but your face takes several seconds to turn red. The events are shown in the right order, but they happen on different time-scales. 

Better: George clenched his teeth. His face slowly turned red. 

Again, it’s only a small change, but now the movie doesn’t need any editing. The reader can see it exactly the way it’s written. 

Kick ‘Em in the As

In my critique group, we refer to this process as “kicking ‘em in the as.” Here’s the full process:

Search for the word “as” in your manuscript. For each “as”, ask the following questions:Does one event start before the other? If so, remove the “as” and write them as two phrases or two sentences, with the events in the correct order.  Do the events take different lengths of time? If so, remove the “as” and rewrite the sentence in an order your reader can visualize.Are the events actually simultaneous and do they actually take the same amount of time? If so, see if you can possibly remove the “as” and order the events from most important to least important.If the word “as” is not being used to say that events happen simultaneously, it’s probably fine and you can leave it in. Your job as a writer is to kick the bad “as” and keep the good “as.” 

Try kicking one of your scenes in the “as.” It should take about 5 minutes. Then read it and see if the scene looks more like a movie in your head. 

Congratulations. You are now officially a “bad-as” editor. 

The post How to Be a “Bad-As” Editor appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

The Holes In Your Novel

This happens to almost every novelist who ever lived, and it’s probably happened to you: 

You wrote your novel the best you know how. You did everything right. The story flows. The characters rock. The setting shines. The theme pulses with life. You set the manuscript aside for a few weeks to let it cool. Then you come back to it and…

And you find that your characters sometimes do illogical things. Or they are more clever than anyone could possibly be. Or crazy coincidences ruin their plans. 

In short, you have holes in your novel.

The Two Horns of the Dilemma

At this point, you have only two choices:

Fix those holes by adding more stuff to your story. Ignore the holes and be true to your vision. Throw the manuscript away because it’s flawed.

I know those are three options listed, but you’re a real novelist and you would rather swallow crushed glass in a gallon of bat urine before you’d throw away a manuscript you sweat blood on. So option 3 is not an option. 

But what do you do? Fix the holes or leave them alone?

What Happens When You Fix the Holes

You can and probably should fix the holes in your story. Generally, this is not hard. 

If your characters are doing illogical things, you can make them logical by adding more information to the story that makes it clear that it’s actually the best choice in a bad situation. Or you can change their reasoning process so they use better logic to get to the right action. Or they can do something more logical.

If your characters are more clever than anyone has a right to be, then you can give more information so their cleverness is more plausible. Or you can add another character, which helps because two brains really are better than one, so their cleverness is now more plausible. Or you can just have them choose a less clever solution, which will probably add complications to the story. 

If you’ve got crazy coincidences that seem too unlikely for words, you can add some reasons to make it clear that it’s not really a coincidence after all. Or you can just add more events, so that you don’t need a coincidence to bring two people together at just the right time. 

When you’ve done all this, your novel is probably going to be longer. Because every way to fix the holes in your story requires you to add information to make the holes go away. It’s almost impossible to fix story holes by making the novel shorter. 

After You’ve Fixed the Holes

Once you’ve fixed the holes in your story, you’ll do the right thing and set it aside. You’ll wait a few weeks and come back to read your masterpiece. And now there’s a problem …

There are new holes in your story. You fixed the old ones, but the fixes created new holes. Hopefully you have fewer holes in your story. Hopefully, they are smaller. 

But you’ve still got holes in your story, and the same two horns of the dilemma. Only now, your novel is longer than before. More complicated. More pages to print. And pages cost money. 

You can repeat the process if you insist. You can fix all the new holes, exactly the way you fixed the previous batch. Go right ahead. Do it all again. 

And when you reread the manuscript after a suitable pause, you’ll find a whole new round of holes. We hope they will be fewer and smaller than before. But maybe they won’t. And for sure, your manuscript will only get longer. And meanwhile, the clock is ticking. You are getting older. Your readers are drumming their fingers waiting for your next book.

The Sweet Spot

There is a sweet spot here. You want to fix the most gaping holes, yes. But you can’t continue the process forever, no. You need to get the book out. 

Seth Godin, the legendary marketing genius, is famous for saying that you need to ship your product. Whatever it is, there comes a point when you just ship it, even if it has a few flaws. 

This means you will get reviews complaining (rightly) that your characters do illogical things—they are too stupid to live. Other reviews will complain (rightly) that your characters are incredibly clever—an unrealistic “Mary Sue” who can’t possibly exist. 

Please note that some reviewers will make both complaints, maybe even about the same character. Your way-too-smart Mary Sue is also too-stupid-to-live. Yes, really, somebody will say that. 

Other reviewers will note the implausible coincidences in your story. 

And yet other reviewers will complain that your story is too long. 

You did your best to hit the sweet spot, and you may feel like you failed. But did you?

No, you wrote a novel. All stories have holes. Yours does too. The best you can do is to shoot for some balance. If the complaints about “too stupid to live” are roughly balanced by “too smart to be plausible”, then you probably got it about right. If the complaints about “too many coincidences” are about balanced by the ones about “the story is too long” then you’re good. 

So you hit the sweet spot. Congratulations. 

Now go write another novel and do it all over again. You will never write a novel without holes. And that’s OK. Just ship. 

The post The Holes In Your Novel appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

What Happened In This Scene?

I’ve run a critique group for years and years. Every member of the group typically brings one scene to each meeting to be critiqued.

By far the most common question I ask after reading a scene is: “What happened in this scene?”

It seems like a simple question, but it covers a lot of ground:

How is the lead character’s situation different at the end of the scene from the beginning of the scene? How does this scene advance the main story? Is this scene a story in its own right, with a beginning, a middle, and an end?

Let’s look at each of these questions to see why they matter. As we’ll see, these questions go progressively deeper. 

What Changed in the Scene?

A scene needs to change things for the lead character of the scene. It might make their situation better. More often, it makes things worse. Sometimes, it leads to a change of direction for the character. 

If none of these things happened in the scene, that’s a problem. Your reader just invested several minutes reading a thousand or more words, and nothing changed? Your novel is about how your characters change themselves and the world around them to solve a problem or meet some goal. Every scene needs to contribute to that change. 

Imagine Luke Skywalker and his mentor Obi-wan Kenobi meeting Han Solo in that cantina scene in the original Star Wars movie. They talk for a bit. Kenobi tries to persuade Solo to take him to the planet Alderaan. But Han Solo doesn’t want the job. Eventually, Kenobi and Solo agree to disagree, and they both leave. 

If that’s the way the screenplay had been written, it would have wasted a terrific scene. The cantina had incredible atmosphere, but the scene would have been pointless. Because nothing changed. Every scene needs to change something. 

But not all change is created equal. Some kinds of change matter, and some kinds don’t…

Did the Scene Advance the Main Story?

Imagine a new version of the cantina scene in which Luke and Kenobi sit down to talk with Han Solo. Kenobi asks how much Solo will charge to give them a ride off the planet to Alderaan. Solo convinces them to abandon their journey so they can become dentists providing free care to needy aliens. 

That would be a remarkable change. But it would wreck the main story. (Important as the battle against gum disease is, it’s not Luke’s battle). In the main story, Luke and Obi-wan Kenobi have information inside the droid R2-D2 that will expose the weakness of the Death Star, the weapon of the evil Empire. They need to take that droid to Alderaan and hand it off to the Rebel Alliance who can use it to destroy the Death Star. 

So the only kind of change that makes sense in the cantina scene is something that gets Luke and Kenobi a ride off the planet. 

That could actually happen in ten seconds, if that’s what the director had wanted…

Is the Scene a Story in its Own Right?

Imagine yet another version of the cantina scene in which Han Solo is standing at the bar. Kenobi taps him on the shoulder and says, “Say, could you fly me and my buddy to Alderaan?” Han Solo shrugs and says, “Sure.” They walk out, arm in arm. 

Done in five seconds. That does change things for Luke and Kenobi. And it advances the story. But it’s not very interesting. It’s not a scene, even if you dragged it out for five minutes. 

What’s missing here is that a scene needs to be a story. A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Typically, the lead character starts with a goal, runs into conflict, and faces some kind of setback at the end. Less commonly, the lead character starts with a reaction to some setback in a previous scene, wrestles with a dilemma, and then comes to a decision at the end. (See my article, Writing the Perfect Scene, for more on this.)

The way the actual Star Wars cantina scene plays out is fairly complex. 

Luke goes to the bar and orders a drink while Kenobi goes looking for a shady character who might give them a ride. A space alien picks a fight with Luke, and things get progressively worse. Pretty soon, Luke is in trouble up to his ears. At which point Kenobi intervenes and tries to placate the trouble-maker. But the alien won’t be placated, and Kenobi finally whips out a light saber and cuts off his arm.

Next, Kenobi and Luke sit down with Han Solo and his partner, Chewbacca. Kenobi asks if his ship is fast. Solo brags about it and offers them a crazy high price for a trip to Alderaan. Luke and Kenobi don’t have the money, but Kenobi counters with an offer of some cash now and a super crazy high price when they get to Alderaan. Solo agrees to the offer, but now there’s trouble…

Two Imperial Storm Troopers are at the bar, asking questions. Clearly, the ruckus Kenobi raised by cutting off the alien’s arm is about to catch up with him. Luke and Kenobi make a quick exit, leaving Han Solo to smile at the Storm Troopers. 

When the Storm Troopers move on, Solo crows to Chewbacca that this could really save their skins. It’s the first sign we’ve seen that Han Solo has his own problems. Chewbacca leaves to get the ship ready to fly. On Solo’s way out of the bar, his troubles escalate…

A bounty hunter named Greedo intercepts Han with a blaster leveled at his chest and forces him to sit at a secluded table. Han claims he’s got the money to pay off Jabba the Hutt, only he doesn’t have it with him right now. Greedo gloats over Han and tells him it’s too late. It’s clear Han has only seconds to live. But he distracts Greedo long enough to shoot him from under the table. 

So Han’s in even bigger trouble than before. He still owes Jabba the Hutt, but now he’s killed Jabba’s bounty hunter. 

That’s the scene, and it’s quite a little story all on its own. And it serves the larger story in three ways:

Luke and Kenobi finally have a ride off the planet, which was the reason for the scene in the first place. Problem solved, but…They are in serious trouble because of the disarming of the alien, which puts the heat on them to get off the planet quickly, and…Han Solo is in even more trouble with Jabba the Hutt, a problem that will come home to roost in a later movie in the series.Three Questions for That Scene You Just Wrote

When you finish a scene, take thirty seconds to congratulate yourself. A scene is the basic unit of fiction, and you’ve added another unit to your growing pile. That’s all good. 

But now give yourself a reality check, with these three questions:

What changed in the scene? Does that change advance the main story? Does the scene work as a story all by itself, with a beginning, a middle, and an end?

These questions may uncover some weaknesses in your scene. If so, don’t panic. It’s a rare scene that can’t be saved. Once you’ve found the weaknesses, make a note and save it for later. You don’t have to know how to fix the scene. You just need to know why a fix is needed. You can either fix it tomorrow, or fix it someday when you write your next draft. 

But fix it. Every scene needs to carry its own weight. Every scene. For more thoughts on how to fix a scene, I’ll refer you to my book How to Write a Dynamite Scene Using the Snowflake Method.

The post What Happened In This Scene? appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

How to Plan a Series of Novels

Writers often ask me how to plan out a series of novels. They usually phrase the question like this: “Can I use the Snowflake Method on a series, instead of just using it on a single book?”

The answer is that it depends. You can always do it, but the way you do it will depend on what kind of series you’re writing. There are three kinds of series that authors typically write:

Every book stands alone, so a reader can read them in any order without losing anything.Each book works as a story, all on its own, but they combine into a larger story, so a reader would typically want to read them in order, even though it’s not absolutely necessary.Each book is just one chunk of a single large story, so a reader must read them all exactly in order, or the story won’t really work.

Let’s look at each of these and talk about how you can plan your series.

When Every Book Stands Completely Alone

In some series, every book stands alone. You can read the books in any order, and you won’t miss anything. You can read some books and ignore others, and you won’t feel left out. 

A classic example of this is the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child. Jack Reacher is an ex-military cop who has left the service and hitchhikes around the country. He’s not looking for trouble, but trouble keeps finding him, and he finds ways to bring the bad guys to justice. The books are not in consecutive order.

If you’re writing a series like this, then you only have to plan out each book as you write it. If you’re using the Snowflake Method, then you just write up a standard Snowflake document for the book. But you don’t have to plan the series. You can let it evolve as you write more and more books. This method works nicely for seat-of-the-pants writers. 

The books in a series like this might be out of chronological order, and there’s no harm if they are. In case they are chronological, some might refer back to earlier events that happened in another book in the series. If you do that, then give the reader any required  backstory, because you can’t expect that the reader will have read the other books. 

You do still need to keep your characters consistent, so you might want to keep a running character bible that you can use from one book to the next. That lets you keep your character consistent. You might also want to keep a running timeline, so you don’t accidentally create a backstory where one of your characters was in two different places at the same time in the past. 

Step 7 in the Snowflake Method is all about creating a character bible. Snip that out from the Snowflake document for your first book and save it in a separate file for the series as a whole. Then you can use it to get a running start on the next book in your series. And after each book, update the character bible with any new characters, or any new character traits for old characters. 

And that’s it. This is a simple way to go. The main disadvantage is that every book stands alone, so a reader will only read more books in your series if they’re invested in you, the author, rather than if they’re invested in the running story. (Because there is no running story.)

When Every Book Works Alone but is Part of a Larger Whole

In some series, each book makes a fully satisfying story in its own right. But it contributes to a larger narrative. 

A classic example is the Harry Potter series. In each book, Harry faces some new challenge and wins. But each time he wins, a new facet of his battle with Lord Voldemort emerges, opening the way for the next book in the series. 

This kind of story requires planning at two levels. You have to plan out the story of each book. But you also have to plan out the larger story for the series. 

If you’re using the Snowflake Method, then you need to write a Snowflake document for each book. And you need a separate Snowflake document for the series as a whole. 

Your character bible will probably live in the Snowflake document for the series. You probably don’t even need to revise it for each book. 

But you’ll need a synopsis and scene list for each book separately. And you’ll need a separate synopsis for the series as a whole, where each book in the series has to be summarized in one or more paragraphs in the synopsis. 

This is hard work, but it has the great advantage that once your reader buys into Book 1 in your series, they’re in for the duration. And that might mean a lot of other books.

When Every Book is Just a Chunk of the Larger Whole

Occasionally an author will create a really big story that just won’t fit into a single book. 

The classic example is The Lord of the Rings. It was divided into three books by the publisher, but the author created it as a single very long story. 

This kind of story only needs planning at one level. It’s just a very big level. No book stands alone, so you don’t need an individual Snowflake document for each book. You only need one big Snowflake documet for the series. 

This can be quite challenging, because the bigger a story, the more moving parts it has. And the harder it is to keep it all from breaking. Again, this kind of series has the advantage that once your reader starts in with Book 1, they’ll keep reading. But it has the disadvantage that some readers might not want to commit to reading a long series. And other readers may not realize that the story doesn’t resolve at the end of Book 1. Until they finish the book, and then discover that there’s no resolution—the situation merely got worse for the lead characters.

Should You Write a Series?

A series of novels can “promote itself.” It does this in several ways. 

At the end of each book, you can write a blurb to promote the next one. In an e-book, you can add a link to the sales page for the next book in the series. Readers who read one book in the series may click a link at the back of the book to go to your website, where they can sign up for your newsletter. Then each time you launch a new book, your newsletter promotes it. When you have a series, Amazon will likely show the other books in the series in a carousel of images with the header, “You May Also Like…” 

So if you like the idea of having your books promote each other, and if you can handle the complexity of a series, it makes good economic sense to write one. 

The post How to Plan a Series of Novels appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Writing Fiction on a Big Stage

Most novels have a few viewpoint characters and maybe a couple of dozen other characters, set in one or several locations. 

But what if you’re writing a novel with hundreds of characters in many dozen locations? How is your reader going to keep track of it all? 

That is what I call “Fiction on a Big Stage.” It’s not for the faint-hearted. 

Recently, I reread Tom Clancy’s epic novel of a putative World War III, Red Storm Rising. I got a cheap copy on BookBub and made the mistake of reading the first chapter. Four days later, I came up for air. The book was written about forty years ago, but it still feels oddly relevant. Ukraine is now on the opposite side, and there is no more East Germany, but a whole lot of the story feels very today.  

Red Storm Rising takes place on a really large stage—the US, the Atlantic, Europe, and the Soviet Union (the book was written when there still was a Soviet Union). Some of the viewpoint characters are: a Muslim terrorist, a US intelligence analyst, a Russian member of the Politburo, a US sub captain, a tank driver in Germany, an American meteorologist in Iceland, the captain of a US Navy boat, a Russian general, the pilot of a US stealth bomber, and more. And each of these has a network of several named characters around him, along with dozens or hundreds or thousands of folks with no names. 

And yet it’s not that hard to follow the story. How does Clancy pull this off? There are two specific techniques Clancy uses to help you remember it all:

The lead characters are tightly connected. The lead characters are highly mobile. A Small Network of Lead Characters

The American military officers mostly all know each other. At the beginning of the story, several of them actually get together. When WWIII kicks off, they all go their separate ways, but they stay in communication. 

How does this help? It reduces the number of characters. Instead of each lead character having a separate network of people to interact with, they have networks that overlap. So the same people keep popping up. 

On the Soviet side, the Politburo man’s son is assigned as an aide to the Russian general, and this son serves as a link to connect them. 

Highly Mobile Lead Characters

On the Allied side, the US intelligence analyst gets flown out to Europe to serve on an aircraft carrier. When that gets hammered in an early battle, he gets moved to the UK, where he jumps into action elsewhere. Wherever he goes, you can be pretty sure there’s going to be a serious naval battle that he will observe. 

In Iceland, the meteorologist escapes into the wild when the base at Keflavik is overrun by a Soviet invasion. He teams up with a few other military guys and eventually with an Icelandic woman, and the group gets around to every place there’s a battle. If there’s any military action in Iceland, they’re on site. Since the Soviet battle plan “Operation Polar Glory” uses Iceland as its key element, this puts the reader right at the strategic center of the war. 

On the Soviet side, the Russian general and the Politburo man are the two most competent men in the nation. If there’s a battle to be won, the general is there. If there’s scheming to be done against the corrupt Politburo, the relatively good-guy Politburo man is on the scene. If communication needs to happen between the Politburo and the front, the Politburo man’s son is right there on the job. 

So Clancy’s method is to choose a dozen or so viewpoint characters and work them  unnaturally hard, so that they see all the action. This is very hard to pull off, but Clancy does it about as well as anyone can. 

If you look at other novels set on a large stage, such as The Lord of the Rings, or the Harry Potter series, you’ll see these same methods being used. Because they work. 

Fiction on a Smaller Stage

What does this have to do with you? If you’re a typical novelist, you’re writing on a much smaller stage. So what can you learn from Tom Clancy?

Two things: 

Network your lead charactersKeep your lead characters moving

Networking your lead characters means that you make sure “everybody knows everybody”—as much as that’s feasible. Sometimes it isn’t, but if you can arrange early on for some convenient relationships between lead characters, do so. 

What does this achieve? It reduces the number of secondary characters. If your lead characters all know each other, they don’t need go-betweens. They don’t need introductions. They can interact with each other directly. 

Keeping your lead characters moving means doing all in your power to get them on stage at every opportunity. If they have to hop on a supersonic jet, or take a broom, or walk the Paths of the Dead, then make sure that’s an option in your storyworld. 

What does this achieve? It reduces the number of lead characters. If you want to show action, you need a viewpoint character on stage to see it and experience it. Having mobile lead characters means that a smaller number of them can see all the action. 

None of This Happens by Chance

Networking your characters doesn’t happen by chance. Mobility doesn’t happen by chance. These things happen because you intentionally make them happen. 

If you’re a Seat-Of-The-Pants writer, you make this happen by having great instincts or by careful rewriting after your first draft is done. Or both. 

If you plan your novels in advance, either by using the Snowflake Method or by some other planning technique, you make it happen by knowing up front that you’re going to need to make it happen. And if necessary, you may need to rewrite afterward to make it better. Because no matter how well you plan your novel, it’s going to come out on the page different than you planned. 

The post Writing Fiction on a Big Stage appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Where Is Your Novel Going?

A story is not like real life. Very often, real life feels like it has no direction. Lots of random stuff happens, and we get through it, or we don’t. We may have plans, but they usually don’t work out. Or they do work out, but then we discover we didn’t want what we thought we did. That’s real life.

A story is different. In a story, your lead character has direction. They don’t know it right away, but they soon figure it out. Then the story is about whether they get where they’re trying to go. They run into roadblocks, and at first, they have no idea how to tackle them. But they learn, and pretty soon they have new skills that allow them to get over, under, around, or through the roadblocks. After working the problem for a while, they reach a do-or-die situation where they have to apply all their new skills to get where they wanted to go.  In the end, they either get there, or they fail trying, or they get somewhere else that turns out to be where they really wanted to go but didn’t realize it. 

Four Act Structure

All of the above has a name: the famous “Four-Act Structure.” It also has another name: the equally famous “Three-Act Structure.” These are secretly the same thing, but they have two names because writers are not great at math. In the Three-Act Structure, the middle Act is nothing more nor less than the middle two Acts in the Four-Act Structure. So they’re the same.  

Here are the four components of the Four-Act Structure:

The lead character figures out where they want to go in the story. At the very end of Act 1, the lead character commits to getting there, whatever the cost. The lead character hits roadblocks and fails repeatedly to get past them using the wrong methods. At the very end of Act 2, the lead character realizes that they’ve been doing it wrong up till now, and sees there’s a better way, and commits to doing it right from now on. The lead character hits more roadblocks and now begins to have some success getting past them. The lead character realizes that none of these roadblocks are the root problem to be solved. At the very end of Act 3, the lead character commits to attacking the root problem. The lead character attacks the root problem using their newly acquired skills and either succeeds or fails. If they succeed, it’s because they deserved it. If they fail, it’s because they deserved it. They may fail at their original goal, but succeed at some other, better goal. If this happens, it’s because the lead character deserved it. But That’s Not How Real Life Works!

No, real life doesn’t work out that way, most of the time. Your reader doesn’t want your story to be “just like real life.”

Your reader wants your story to be “the way real life would be if there was justice in the universe.” That’s why your story should always end with the lead character getting what they deserve. That’s justice, whether your lead character succeeds or fails. 

Stories are about our longing for justice in an apparently unjust universe. Let’s be clear that we have no idea if the universe is actually just or not. It doesn’t look just. Sometimes bad things happen to good people, and sometimes good things happen to bad people. But nobody wants that, except bad people. Decent people wish the universe were just, and they desperately hope it will turn out to be just in the end. 

And that’s why your reader wants to see your story end with justice for your lead character. Nothing can erase the desire for justice from your reader. You can break a lot of rules in your fiction writing, but here is one I strongly urge you to never break: 

Always give your lead character what they deserve in the end. 

The post Where Is Your Novel Going? appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Where Do Ideas Come From?

I’ve been thinking lately about where ideas come from. They often seem to blip into your head out of nowhere. And that feels very random. Do you just have to trust to luck for your creativity?

I’m pretty sure the answer is no. Creativity is not about luck. There seem to be three common elements for a creative leap to happen. And you have control over all of them. 

Just Showing Up

A long time ago, somebody told me that “90% of life is just showing up.” 

That doesn’t mean just showing up and doing nothing. It means showing up on a regular schedule and putting in the effort. 

For a novelist, it means writing every day, whether you feel like it or not. Most professional writers have a quota. It might be a time quota or it might be a word-count quota. But they put their butt in the chair every day and write. 

Creativity is about solving problems in new and original ways. You can’t be creative if you don’t know what the problem is. And you learn the problem intimately when you show up every day and do battle with it. Even if you don’t solve it instantly, you learn what the problem actually is.

Filling the Well

Creativity often happens after you’ve spent a lot of time reading other people’s work. If you’re a scientist, that means reading the papers other scientists have written. If you’re a novelist, it means reading other people’s novels. 

Novelists often call this “filling the well.” You’re seeing how other people have solved the same problems you’re tackling. 

Some writers worry that they’ll wreck their creativity by reading other writers’ work. They’re afraid that somehow, this will lead them into Cliche City. Or worse, into plagiarism. 

That won’t happen. Reading other people’s work will teach you what the cliches are. If you read all the cliches enough times, you’ll hate them too much to ever write them. 

As for plagiarism, you can avoid that easily by not using other writers’ words. Use your own words, and string them together into your own sentences and paragraphs. 

It’s fine to get ideas from other writers. In fact, most ideas are variations on other ideas. 

My rule of thumb is that 1 + 1 = 3.  

What that means is that I often take ideas from a couple of sources and then add something new to the mix that’s my own. And the whole is more than the sum of the sources. 

As your creativity develops, you’ll sometimes find that 1 + 1 = 7. 

Down Time

Most of my really creative ideas come at 3 AM. Or in the shower. Or while I’m driving. Or talking to a friend. Or out on a walk. Or or or. 

The creative spark almost always comes when you’re not trying to force it out at your desk. 

So you need down time, when you’re not working. When your brilliant subconscious can pop that clever new idea into your brain. And it will feel like it came out of the blue. 

You Made It Happen

But it’s not really out of the blue. You did what you needed to make it happen: 

You spent hours at your desk trying to tackle the problem and failing and trying again and failing.  You spent more hours reading what other people have done. You gave your conscious mind some down time, so your subconscious mind could solve the problem.

And that’s where ideas some from. Do your part, and the ideas will come. 

Expect them when you least expect them. 

The post Where Do Ideas Come From? appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Writing the Perfect Synopsis for Beginners

If you’re trying to sell your novel to a traditional publisher, you must learn to write a synopsis. It’s almost impossible to sell a novel without writing a proposal, and a key element of your proposal is a synopsis of the plot. 

If you think you can avoid this by hiring an agent to sell your novel, that’s not going to work. It’s very difficult to get an agent without showing them a proposal, which must contain a synopsis. And once you’ve got an agent working for you, they’ll insist you write a proposal for every novel you write, before they submit it to a publisher. An agent will critique your proposal, but they won’t write it. That’s your job. 

So how do you write a synopsis, if you’re an unpublished novelist?

First, the bad news. If you’ve never published a novel, then you need to have a full, polished manuscript of your novel, ready to submit to an agent or editor. It’s almost impossible to get the attention of an agent or an editor without one. 

That sounds horribly unfair, but it’s understandable. Agents and editors have all seen hundreds of dreamy-eyed writers who can write three killer scenes but lack the discipline to finish a novel. So agents and editor will insist a beginner must have a full manuscript in hand. 

Now, the good news. If you’ve got a complete manuscript, it should take you no more than 4 hours to drill out a perfectly respectable synopsis of your novel. That’s fast! You could have it done in a day or two. Here’s how…

The Length of Your Synopsis

How long should your synopsis be? It should be whatever length your intended agent or publisher says. If they ask for a 2-page synopsis, they mean 2. Not 1, not 3, and definitely not 55. Synopses are single-spaced, which works out to about 500 words per page. So a 2-page synopsis will be about 1000 words, give or take about 50. 

Agents and editors love writers who follow instructions, because they are inundated with manuscripts and they’re looking for ways to thin the herd. Don’t be thinned.

But now you have a problem. If your novel is 100,000 words and you have to write a synopsis of 1000 words, you have to cut out 99 percent. How do you do that?

The answer is that you don’t cut from 100,000. You start from zero. Here’s how…

Your Scene List

If you’ve got the full manuscript, then you probably also have a list of scenes somewhere. (If you’re a fan of my Snowflake Method, then you wrote your manuscript from a Scene List, and you can just pull that out.) 

If you don’t have a Scene List, it’s easy to make one from your manuscript. Create a spreadsheet in which every row contains a sentence that summarizes one scene. If you’re determined to get this done, you can drill out a Scene List in about two hours. It doesn’t have to be fancy—the Scene List is for your eyes only. Quick and dirty is fine. 

The payoff for having a Scene List is huge, so two hours is a very small price to pay. Please do it. 

When you’ve got your Scene List in hand, note how many scenes it has. This might be as low as 50 or as high as 200. A typical number would be around 80 to 100 scenes. You need to know this number before you move on. 

Your Word and Paragraph Budget 

Now you need to work out your word budget for your synopsis. As an example, if you’ve been asked to create a 2-page, single-spaced synopsis, then that’s about 1000 words (at 500 words per page). If your novel is 100 scenes, you can only afford 10 words per scene, which is not enough. 

Almost always, you can’t summarize every scene in your novel. This is crucial to understand. A synopsis is not a scene-by-scene recounting of your story. It’s less detailed than that.

So what do you do? You’re going to cluster your scenes into Scene Groups—groups of scenes that are related to each other. Your strategy will be to write one paragraph for each Scene Group in the novel. This is gold. This is the most important point in this post. One paragraph per Scene Group. 

Figure that you can write about 10 paragraphs per page, each about 50 words. So if your page limit is 2 pages for the synopsis, you can’t have more than 20 paragraphs total. That’s your paragraph budget.

And since each paragraph summarizes one Scene Group, that’s also your budget for Scene Groups. So you need to know your budget for paragraphs before you move on. 

Creating Your Scene Groups

Once you know how many Scene Groups you can have, you know how many scenes each must have, on average. (If you have 100 scenes and your budget is 20 Scene Groups, then each Scene Group will have an average of 5 scenes.)

Knowing this is power. The power to slice your story to the bone.  

Work through your spreadsheet and mark out your Scene Groups. The easiest way is to select several rows at a time and mark them all with some particular color, so you can see which scenes are in each Scene Group. Once you decide you’re going to do this, you can do it amazingly fast. Give yourself 15 minutes to mark out your Scene Groups.

You must be ruthless here, but it’s not hard when you know your budget with certainty. The math is unforgiving. You know how many Scene Groups you’re allowed to have. Mark them out. 

Writing Your Synopsis

Now write your synopsis. For each Scene Group, summarize it as best you can in about 50 words. Write in third person, present tense. A typical paragraph might look like this: 

Sally discovers her best friend Joe dead in her driveway, and the murder weapon is her own gun. The police arrive and ask Sally to come to the station to help them figure things out. Two hours in, she gets caught in a lie and realizes she needs a lawyer.

That’s one paragraph, summarizing probably 3 to 5 scenes in 50 words. It’s not beautiful, but it skates a straight line through the heart of the story. 

I wrote that paragraph in about 2 minutes, and I don’t even have a story to go with it. I just pulled it out of thin air. If you have your Scene List in front of you with all the Scene Groups marked out, you can write a paragraph for each one in 3 minutes easily. Easily. In one hour, you could have 20 paragraphs written, and that’s a typical synopsis. It’s not fun, so do it fast, like you learned to eat your broccoli when you were a kid. 

But It’s Boring!

Your synopsis is probably boring. There’s no dialogue, no action, no interior monologue, no emotion, no description. It’s all just narrative summary, and you hate it already. You feel certain no agent or editor could possibly enjoy it.

You’re right. No agent or editor ever enjoyed reading a synopsis in the whole history of the human race. Yet they all insist on one. Why? Because they can skim it in one minute and see if you have any understanding at all of the large-scale structure of a story. Any competent agent or editor can do it. Any competent novelist can too. 

So the point of writing a synopsis is to expose the story structure of your novel for the professional eye of an agent or editor. By following the procedure I’ve sketched above, you guarantee that your synopsis exactly matches the structure of your novel. As long as your novel was well-structured to begin with, your synopsis will be too. 

If you’re not sure that your novel is well-structured, then I’ll again point you to my Snowflake Method, which is a 10-step plan of attack for getting the first draft of a perfectly-structured novel down on paper. You don’t have to use the Snowflake Method to write your novel. Some novelists prefer to just write without planning, and that’s fine. But the reason I mention the Snowflake Method is because if you understand how it works, you understand story structure. Even if you use some other method for writing your first draft. 

Good luck, and have fun!

The post Writing the Perfect Synopsis for Beginners appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.