Randy Ingermanson's Blog: Advanced Fiction Writing, page 4

Exporting Notes From an E-book to Your Computer

If you read a lot of e-books, you may find yourself wishing you could highlight interesting segments in your e-book reader and transfer them to your computer. 

You can! At least, you can on the e-book readers I’ve tried. 

I do most of my reading on the Kindle app on my iPhone, so I’ll show the process I use. If you use a different app or a different device, the exact steps may be somewhat different. You’ll need to experiment to figure out how to do it on your system.

But if you do a lot of research, this is a process that will save you boatloads of time, so it’s well worth figuring out. 

Step 1: Highlight the Section You Want to Capture

On the iPhone Kindle app, you can highlight anything by selecting it with your finger on the screen. 

The image below shows a screen capture of the entire first page of my novel Son of Mary, with more than four paragraphs highlighted. 

Step 2: Open the Notes Section in Your Kindle App

On the iPhone Kindle app, whenever you touch the screen in a non-highlighted area, a toolbar appears at the top of the screen, and one of the icons in that toolbar is the Notes icon.

The image below shows a screen capture of the first page of my novel after I touched a blank spot on the screen. I have drawn in a red arrow to point to the Notes icon in the top toolbar. 

When you touch that Notes icon, the Notes Section of the app appears on the screen.

Step 3: Click the Share Icon in the Toolbar

On the iPhone Kindle app, each Note you’ve highlighted shows up with a small header that tells the location the Note came from. You can scroll through the Notes Section and see every snippet that you’ve highlighted all through the book. 

Notice that the paragraphs have been all smushed together from the segment I highlighted in my book. You can undo this later, after you’ve emailed yourself the Notes.

The Notes Section has a toolbar on top. There is a Share Icon in this toolbar.

The image below shows a screen capture of the Notes Section. I’ve drawn in a red arrow that points to the Share Icon. 

When you touch the Share Icon, a dialog box appears at the bottom of the screen that gives you the choice of exporting your Notes to Flashcards or Email. 

Step 4: Choose Your Export Option

Assuming you want to e-mail your Notes to yourself, choose the Email option on the dialog box. 

The image below shows a screen capture showing the dialog box at the bottom of the screen. I’ve drawn in a red arrow that points to the Email button in the dialog. 

When you select the Email option, an Export Notebook page pops up that lets you choose how you’ll format the citation of your Notes. 

Step 5: Choose your Citation Option and Export Your Notes

Choose whichever citation style you like best. The default style is None. 

Once you’ve chosen the citation style, click the Export button in the upper right corner of the Export Notebook page.

The image below shows a screen capture of the Export Notebook page. I’ve drawn in a red arrow that points to the Export button. 

You’ll notice at the bottom of the screen there’s a line of text that tells you how much of the book you have exported as Notes, including the Notes you’re about to export. The publisher of each book sets a limit on the amount of text you can export as Notes. The Kindle app won’t let you export more than that.

Once you’ve clicked the Export button, the e-mail app on your phone will pop up, ready to e-mail yourself an attachment with your Notes. All you have to do is enter the email address you want to send the Notes to, and then send the e-mail.

Step 6: Go to E-mail and Open the Attachment

Your phone has now sent you an e-mail with your notes. Go to your e-mail account on your computer and find the e-mail. There will be an attachment file in the e-mail with a name that ends in “.html”. 

On my machine, I found the best way to open this attachment was to right-click the attachment and select “Open With…” from the menu. This pops up a subment with a number of applications. I chose Microsoft Word, and this opened up the attachment nicely in Word.

Step 7: Reformat Your Notes

As we saw earlier, the paragraphs in your Notes are all smushed together. You may need to do some reformatting to make the Notes look nice. 

Do whatever reformatting you need to do.

That’s all!

Your e-book reader and your computer system may be different from mine, so the steps you take may be a bit different. But the process above should inspire you to figure out the exact set of steps to transfer notes from your e-book reader to your computer. If you run into problems, you may need to use a search engine to find exactly how to do the job on your e-reader and your computer.

Have fun!

The post Exporting Notes From an E-book to Your Computer appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Creating a Minimum Viable Product

Most writers are perfectionists, and that’s good. It means we like to produce excellent quality writing. 

Most writers are perfectionists, and that’s bad. It means we’re never done. 

The art of being a writer is to balance that good perfectionism against the bad perfectionism. 

There’s a way to do that. It’s a method that has become wildly popular in the world of entrepreneurs. 

The idea is to rapidly create something called a “Minimum Viable Product” and release it to the world. 

But you don’t stop there. Once you’ve released it, you continue to improve it. Forever. 

Let’s elaborate on all that.

What’s a Minimum Viable Product?

A Minimum Viable Product is three things:

A Minimum Viable Product is a product. It’s something useful to the world. Twitter is a product. An author website is a product. A blog post is a product. 

A Minimum Viable Product is viable. It actually works. It’s not something half-baked that you just throw out there. It does one thing and it does it pretty well. Twitter lets people communicate in little snippets to a list of followers. An author website tells the world about an author and their books. A blog post puts out one idea. 

A Minimum Viable Product is minimal. It doesn’t try to be all that it could possibly be. It’s the smallest possible version that can be released. When Twitter was first released, it didn’t have all possible features. Not yet. That came later. When you create an author website, it doesn’t have to be packed with 500 pages of content. Not yet. That might come later. When you write a blog post, it’s not a whole book. It’s one post, 500 to 1000 words. More words will come later. 

To summarize, a Minimum Viable Product is a useful product that actually works pretty well, but it’s not as perfect or complete as it will be someday.

Why Release a Minimum Viable Product?

The reason you release a Minimum Viable Product and not a maximal perfect product is because the fastest way to achieve a maximal perfect product is to release new versions of a product rapidly. 

You should of course make your Minimum Viable Product reasonably good (you want it to be viable), but you don’t have to make it as big as you can (you want it to be minimal), and you can’t possibly make it perfect on the first try.

And why release it rapidly? Because then you can start testing it. Does anyone actually want it? What do people like about it? What do people dislike? What could you do better in the next release? What’s missing that you should add next? 

When you release a Minimum Viable Product rapidly, you now have incentive to improve it, because now you’re hearing from actual users. And they may well have ideas for making it better that you never thought of. 

What Does a Minimum Viable Product Have to Do With Novelists?

Everything. 

Novelists create many different kinds of things that could be released rapidly as a Minimum Viable Product. Here are a few examples:

A scene to show to your critique group A synopsis to take to a writing conferenceA proposal to show to agents and editorsA first draft to show to your critique buddyA second draft to show to your editorA final draft to hand off to your proofreaderAn author websiteAn author newsletterA landing page for an email signup formA marketing planAn advertising campaign

Nobody will ever get any of these perfect on the first try. You should absolutely do your best to make it as good as you can. But you should also recognize that small is beautiful and fast is better than perfect. 

Create a Minimum Viable Product—one that works but is small. Get it out to the appropriate audience. Ask for feedback. Don’t feel hurt to learn it’s not exactly right yet. Try again and make it better next time. When you hear that it’s good, add more to it. Write another scene. Or another synopsis. Or another proposal. Or another draft. Add pages to your website. Send out your newsletter regularly. Build out your marketing plan to be more advanced. Create more ads. 

Build. Release. Get feedback. Improve. And then do it all over again. 

It may occur to you that each step in my popular Snowflake Method is a Minimum Viable Product for the next step. And you’re absolutely right, although I didn’t realize that when I created the Snowflake Method.

An Example Video Course I Loved Watching

If you’d like to see a Minimum Viable Product created in real-time, let me refer you to a short video course. It’ll show you how to create a Minimum Viable Product that most authors will need at some point in their life—a landing page to gather signups for an email newsletter. 

I thought I understood Minimum Viable Products before I watched this video. And I did, mostly. But watching the video reinforced the ideas in my brain, and it helped me see how the idea of a Minimum Viable Product applies to practically everything I do as a writer. 

The video is part of a whole set of video courses called “Thrive University.”  

As you might guess, the people at Thrive University don’t create free courses out of the goodness of their hearts. They sell an amazingly powerful set of marketing tools, which they call “Thrive Suite.” I recently bought Thrive Suite for myself and I’m incredibly excited to finally have all the tools I’ve been wanting for the last 20 years for building my website into a dynamite marketing machine. 

After I bought the tools, I decided to become an affiliate. In simple terms, that means that if I refer someone who buys Thrive Suite, I get an affiliate commission.

I’ve been using Thrive Suite for several weeks now, and I love, love, love it. But Thrive Suite is a story for another day.

For the moment, I recommend that you just watch this short video course on building a landing page as a Minimum Viable Product. The course is absolutely free, and I expect it’ll revolutionize your thinking. 

See if you agree. Click here to go to the “RAPID Landing Page Building” course on Thrive University.  (affiliate link)

And have fun!

 

The post Creating a Minimum Viable Product appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

How to Make an Action Plan

Nothing happens unless you take action. 

But you don’t want to take random, chaotic actions. 

You want to take intentional actions toward some goal.

To do that, you need an Action Plan. 

One problem with most projects is that you don’t know all the steps required to complete the plan. 

The solution is to make an Action Plan that evolves in time. As you work through the steps in your evolving Action Plan, you’ll continually add new steps, because you’ll learn more and more about how to do your project. Eventually, you’ll run out of steps, and at that point, your project will be done.

The Theory Behind Action Plans

I wrote a very long article on the theory of Action Plans in the November 2020 issue of my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine. Look for the article named “Executing Hard Projects.” (All past issues of my e-zine are archived here.)

If you want to learn the theory, you can read that article now.

It’s great to understand the theory, but theory is not enough. If you actually want to execute a hard project, you need to put the theory into practice. 

You do that by building an Action Plan. 

If you’ve never done that before, it might seem complicated.

So I’ve made a couple of templates for you to use. Most writers use either Microsoft Word or Scrivener, so I’ve made a template in each format.

I’ve also made a sample Marketing Action Plan for a hypothetical writer who wants to market their books better. I’ve written in the first few steps in the Action Plan, so you’ll see how you use the Action Plan. But I haven’t created the whole Action Plan for you, because I don’t know your exact marketing needs. You need to create an Action Plan that’s customized for you. Only you are qualified to do that. 

The template files and sample Action Plans are compressed in a zip file named “Action_Plan_Templates.zip”.

How to Get the Action Plan Templates

The Action Plan templates will cost you nothing. Just click this link and the zip file will download to the usual Downloads area for your web browser.

After you download the file, you’ll need to unzip it. Here’s how:

On a Mac, just double-click the zip file and it’ll uncompress into a folder with the various template files. If you’re using Windows, uncompress the zip file using whatever method you usually use for your version of Windows. If you’ve never done that, you’ll need to Google how to do it. How to Use the Scrivener Template

The Scrivener file is an all-in-one file named “Action Plan Scrivener File.scriv” that contains both the template and the sample Action Plan. I recommend that you keep all your Action Plans in this same Scrivener file. 

To create a new Action Plan within this Scrivener file, do the following:

Right-click the folder named “My Action Plans”. A menu will pop up. Select “Add  >  Next Text From Template  >  Any Action Plan”.A new document will appear named “Any Action Plan”. Rename this and edit the document. 

 The new document has directions on how to fill it in. Follow those directions to create an Action Plan that will evolve as you learn more and more about the project you’re trying to do.

How to Use the Microsoft Word Files

You’ll find two Microsoft Word files in the “Action Plan Templates” folder. 

The template file is named “Action Plan Template Word Document.docx”. 

The sample Action Plan is named “Sample Action Plan Word Document.docx”. 

To use the template file, just make a copy of it and edit that. Keep the original template file so you can use it again and again for other Action Plans in the future. 

To use the sample Action Plan, just open it and see how I filled it in. It has some directions to tell you how to keep building out your Action Plan as you learn more and more about the project you’re trying to take action on. 

Want to Learn More?

I’ll be talking more about Action Plans in the next issue of my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine. 

If you’re not already subscribed to that, you can find out all about it and sign up here.

In the January 2021 issue, I’ll be talking about how to build out your Marketing Action Plan in 2021. This will probably take several months, because marketing is a large and complex topic. But we’ll take it one step at a time, and focus on the marketing tasks you should do first to build a powerful marketing machine that will work for you while you sleep.

Stay tuned!

The post How to Make an Action Plan appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

The Success Equation

Nearly six years ago, in the January 2015 issue of my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, I wrote an article on what I call “the Success Equation.” In that article, I identified four crucial factors that determine whether you succeed or fail as a writer.

And what is “success?” I’ll define it right from the get-go as the amount of money you earn from your writing. You can define success differently, if you like, and I have no quibble with other definitions. But other definitions tend to be much harder to measure. Whereas it’s easy to measure your earnings. So if you prefer an artsier definition of success, that’s fine. But in the rest of this blog post, just substitute the words “Dollars Earned” every time you see the word “Success.”

In any event, back in early 2015, I believed that Success is the result of multiplying four critical factors.

Then about two years ago, I read Professor Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s brilliant book titled The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success. Barabasi is a network scientist who’s compiled a massive amount of data about what makes some people successful. 

After reading the book, I amended my Success Equation to include one more factor. 

Here’s my amended Success Equation, the one I now teach on the rare occasions when I teach at conferences:

 Current Success = (Past Success) x (Target Audience Size) x Quality x Production x Discoverability 

Note that those are multiplication signs. If you fail in any one of them, then you are going to fail as a writer, because zero times anything is zero.

If you do moderately well in each one of them, then you should be pretty successful. If you are outstanding in each of them, then you will be astonishingly successful. Because the whole is not the sum of all the parts. The whole is the multiplication of the parts.

Let’s look at each of these factors:

Past Success

It’s just a fact. If you’ve already published one best-seller, then your next book is likely to be a best-seller too. Because you have a built-in crowd of people waiting for you to give them “the same thing again, only different.” Everyone expects you to succeed again, and that gives you a huge advantage.

On the other hand, if you’ve done very little so far, then your next book has a much lower bar that people expect it to jump. 

If you don’t have a great track record, this means you’re going to have to work hard on the other four factors so that your current book will do “better than expected.” Which means that next time, you’ll have raised the bar of expectations. If you do that five or ten times, you can bootstrap yourself from a low level of success to a very high level of success.

Let’s note that, very rarely, an unknown author will write a massive best-seller on their first book. But you shouldn’t count on that happening. You’re vastly more likely to succeed by working hard and smart over a long period of time. (People win the lottery, after all, but that’s a bad retirement strategy. Whereas a good retirement strategy is to save 10% of your income right off the top and invest it in something that grows faster than inflation, such as stocks or real estate.)

Target Audience Size

Your Target Audience is the set of people whom you intend to be delighted by the kind of novel you’re writing.

Don’t waste time trying to identify your Target Audience by demographics—age, gender, social status, etc. For most novels, demographic information is useless.

What matters is psychographics—the emotional hot buttons that your novel is going to push. Your Target Audience is the set of people who like having those particular hot buttons pushed.

It really is as simple as that. The purpose of fiction is to give your reader a Powerful Emotional Experience. (I invented this phrase for the very first talk I ever gave on fiction writing, back in the fall of 2000. I have never changed my mind about this. The reason your reader reads is to get a Powerful Emotional Experience. So the reason you write should be to give your reader a Powerful Emotional Experience.)

Now the question is how many people are in your Target Audience? You can’t know this exactly, but you know perfectly well if you are pushing the emotional hot buttons of a large group or a small group.

Quality

Everybody seems to have a different definition of Quality.

For example, if you Google around, you’ll discover that a fair number of reviewers believe that Dan Brown, the author of The DaVinci Code, is a low-quality writer.

Various reviewers will tell you that Brown uses words poorly, has an agenda, and is a terrible researcher. And on and on.

So why is Dan Brown so successful? I say it’s because he delights his Target Audience. And the market rewards him for that.

Quality is in the eye of the beholder, after all. So here’s my opinion, and you can decide for yourself if it’s sensible: If you’re a writer who wants to succeed, your Target Audience’s definition of Quality is the one that matters.

I define “Quality” to mean “how well do you delight your Target Audience?”

It’s a simple fact that Dan Brown has a large Target Audience and his books delight them. He punches the set of emotive hot buttons that they want punched.

That is high Quality writing. Most readers don’t read mainly for beautiful writing. They don’t read mainly to avoid being exposed to an agenda (actually if they like the agenda, it can be a plus.) They don’t read mainly for great research.

Most readers read mainly for a Powerful Emotional Experience. The more powerful it is, the higher the perceived Quality of the writing.

For the record, I’m not in Dan Brown’s Target Audience. But it’s obvious that he’s making his audience happy. Dan is a high-Quality writer. Ditto for James Patterson, who knows exactly what his readers want and delivers it.

Production

Production is the number of books you write per year.

All other things being equal, the more books you write, the more Success you’ll have.

Dan Brown writes a book every few years and each one is a massive sky-rocket.

James Patterson writes a book every few weeks and each one is a pretty good rocket.

That’s why James is the #1 selling author in the world in this century. Production matters.

Beginning about ten years ago there’s been a trend among indie authors to focus on Production. It’s good to be productive, and it’s something I’m trying to improve on, but in my opinion, this should come after you’ve clearly identified your Target Audience and got your Quality up to snuff. When those are clicking, then start ramping up your Production. Set a weekly quota of time you’ll spend writing, or words you’ll produce, and then meet that quota. Every week of the year. 

Why not focus first on increasing your Discoverability before you think about boosting your Production? Because some of the most valuable tactics for raising your Discoverability require you to have several books out. So you’ll find that a steady Production schedule makes it much easier to build your Discoverability.

Discoverability

Discoverability means how easy it is for your Target Audience to discover your work.

The number of books published in the whole history of the human race is said to be more than 130 million.

Your book is one of that 130 million-plus. How easy are you to find?

There are many ways to increase your Discoverability, and I can’t possibly cover them all here.

I’ll just make one key point. The best methods of Discoverability are the ones that require the least resources from you. You have limited time, energy, and money.

If you spend all your time, energy, and money on methods that barely affect your Discoverability, then you’re going to fail.

Mapping Your Future

The order of these factors matters. When you plan out your career, first choose a decent-sized Target Audience. Then study the craft of fiction writing so that you can deliver the highest Quality possible for that Target Audience. Then set a steady Production schedule and push out books into the publishing pipeline at the best speed you can that doesn’t sacrifice Quality. Last of all, focus on a few effective methods of raising your Discoverability. 

Nobody can predict the future, and all plans are going to smash head-on into reality. Still, it’s better to plan than not plan.

In mapping out your future, remember that the main thing is to focus on the main thing. You have no control right now over your Past Success. It is what it is, and your goal is to build your Success over time by working on the things you can control. You can control them by asking yourself these four questions:

Can you write for a larger Target Audience?
Can you increase your Quality by finding a way to delight your Target Audience better?
Can you increase your Production?
Can you increase your Discoverability at minimal cost in time, energy, and money?

Those are the things I think about as I plan my own writing career.

The post The Success Equation appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

When You Just Can’t Finish That Novel

So you’ve been working on your novel for years, and you can’t get it across the finish line. You’ve tried everything, and there’s just no more gas in your tank. What do you do when you just can’t finish that novel?

Meredith posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Hi Randy,

Big fan of yours over here. I love that you answer questions on your blog and thought this might be a good one for you. 

I’ve been working on a novel for about 4 years now. It keeps shifting — the characters stay roughly the same, but the genres and plots change. I keep getting about 75%-80% of the way through an outline (either through Snowflake Method or my own) and then end up with a blockage. I’ve workshopped this book in a WIP format and got pretty discouraged by feedback both at the idea and at the word level. I took a 3 month break from it to work on other things and have returned, but keep having the same problem.

Is my issue psychological? Is it work ethic? Every time I think I’ve unraveled what this particular book is, I feel stuck again. Is it because my idea isn’t any good? Is it because I’m not any good? What gives?

I’m at a point where I’ve written probably a novel’s worth of content in many different scenarios, from many character viewpoints, as many different genres. I feel very lost in the woods here. Is there any way out?

Best,

Meredith

Any advice you can offer would be appreciated. I’ve completed several shorter works in my day but never been able to crack a novella-length work. This one keeps eluding me.

Cheers,

Meredith

Randy sez: I can sympathize, Meredith. Here’s why…

I’ve Been There 

I’ve had projects that seemed to take forever. I’ve had projects that got me bogged down to a standing stop.

I was looking through my old files last weekend and came across my very first novel. Which I restarted several times, changing the title, changing the characters, changing the plot, changing a lot of things. 

That novel never got published. I think someday I’ll come back to it and publish it, but it’s not burning a hole in my brain just now, so I’m working on a project that is.

In fact, the current project I’m working on is ridiculously hard. It’s a four-book series. Each book is very long. And I’m making good progress on it. I recently published Book 1 and I’m a few scenes away from finishing the first draft of Book 2.

In every measurable way, this project is massively more difficult than that first novel I tried.

How is it that I can do this hard project now, when I couldn’t publish that (much easier) project 25 years ago?

Writing Makes You Strong

The answer is time. I’m 25 years more experienced now than I was back then.

So as I was browsing through that story over the weekend, it occurred to me that the project wasn’t a failure. 

It was a success—precisely because it taught me things I needed to learn. I wrote 5 or 6 unfinished or unpublished novels before I finally sold one. Each of those was a necessary stepping stone along the way. The value was in the doing, day in and day out, for years and years.

It wasn’t a failure to walk away from those projects. It was school, and I’m a better writer because of them. As I recall, Stephen King didn’t get published until his sixth novel. Those first five weren’t failures. They were metaphorically his kindergarten and his third grade and sixth grade and ninth grade and eleventh grade. Then he finally wrote one that worked, and he metaphorically graduated. 

Switching Gears is OK

So Meredith, here’s my thinking. I might be wrong, because I don’t know enough about you and your writing, but I think you might have chewed all the sugar out of this particular piece of gum. You might be done with it. It might be time to move on to some other project. And give yourself permission to put this one away for good.

That’s not a failure. You developed crucial skills that you couldn’t possibly have developed any other way than by working on this project. Now you have those skills, and the next project will develop other skills that you also need.

I’m of course just guessing here, but I’d say to go write another book. It’s possible you won’t finish that one either, but the very act of working on that project will build “writing muscle” in you. 

If you do that long enough, you’ll get to where you want to be as a writer.

Good luck! And please email me again in a year to let me know how things are going.

Got a Question for My Blog?

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

The post When You Just Can’t Finish That Novel appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

When Your Outline is Too Long

So you got carried away writing the synopsis for your novel and now it’s too long. What do you do? Did you waste your effort? How do you use all that material? And how does all this fit into my wildly popular Snowflake Method?

Lindsey posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Hi Randy, 

I am a first time novel writer and I find your snowflake method very helpful. I completed steps 1 through 3 fairly confidently and was excited to move onto step 4. I wound up getting too caught up in details and writing nearly SIX PAGES of story line. The worst part? I haven’t even gotten to my story’s first disaster yet. 

I’m not sure what to do next because I feel like I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole and don’t know how to pull myself back to a reasonable-sized step 4. Should I just save this content for later and head back to the drawing board to create a shorter, more cohesive step 4?

Help!

Thanks, Lindsey

The Purpose of the Snowflake Method

Randy sez: The purpose of the Snowflake Method is to help you write a solid, well-structured first draft of your novel. All we really care about is getting that first draft written, no matter what process we use to get there. The reader will never know or care how we got the words down on paper. The only thing the reader cares about is:

How good the story is.
How fast we get the story written.

So there are worse things in life than writing a very long outline in Step 4 of your Snowflake document for your novel. In the grand scheme of things, six pages is not too much to explain 100 pages of story.

What you have, Lindsey, is a useful tool for creating your Scene List in Step 8 of the Snowflake. Every paragraph of your outline will cover roughly one or two scenes of your novel. This is a little ahead of yourself, but that’s not a crime.

I do think there’s value in writing the shorter synopsis, though, because it will ensure that you’ve got a balanced story structure. So let’s try to put you back on track without wasting any of that hard work you’ve put in so far.

Getting Back on Track

Here’s what I recommend:

Save that six-page synopsis somewhere—you can call it Step 6.5, your Super Long Synopsis.
Now try to summarize it in one page. This will be the first chunk of your Long Synopsis in Step 6. 
Now try to summarize it in a single paragraph. This will be the first chunk of your Short Synopsis in Step 4. If you’re not clear on how you could possibly make it this short, remember that you already wrote an even shorter version of it in Step 2, the one-paragraph summary. 
Write three more paragraphs to summarize the first half of Act 2, the second half of Act 2, and Act 3. Keep these short, focusing on just the details that lead up to the major disasters. You now have a full one-page Short Synopsis, which is what Step 4 is all about. Make sure it is an accurate expansion of your one-paragraph summary from Step 2.
Go on to Step 5, the Character Synopses. These can be as long as you want. You might want to use some of that material from your Super Long Synopsis here, if any of it is special information about one particular character. 
Finish Step 6, the Long Synopsis. You already made a start on it, but now finish it, trying to expand each paragraph of your Short Synopsis into a full page. If you feel the urge to write more, do your best to restrain it. You are still working out the big picture here. Details can come later. 
Finish the other steps of the Snowflake as you like. When you get to Step 8, which is the Scene List, resist the urge to write more than one sentence about each scene. If you really have more that you want to write about each scene, save it for Step 9, where you can amplify on each scene as much as you want. There is no limit in Step 9. You can write as much or as little as you like.

Good luck on this, Lindsey! I confess that I haven’t often seen a writer go over their word count on the Short Synopsis. Usually, writers hate synopses (I’m not too fond of them myself), and they want to write less. The fact that you’ve written a lot more tells me you’re excited about your story.

And if you’re excited, your reader probably will be also. 

A Reminder

As a reminder, if you like using the Snowflake Method and want a software tool to make it fast, easy, and fun, then my program Snowflake Pro might be the thing for you. Version 1.2.1 is now available, and anyone who bought either an earlier version of Snowflake Pro or my book How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method is welcome to download the latest version for free. All the details are on my Download Again page here.

Got a Question for My Blog?

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

The post When Your Outline is Too Long appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

On Writing Fight Scenes

Writing a fight scene is easy to get wrong. It’s also easy to get right. This blog post is adapted from a classic article I wrote in my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine back in October of 2006. That’s a long time ago, so I thought it was worth updating and posting on my blog.  

We’re going to get down into the details in this post. Fight scenes are really easy, if you know the rules. And what are the rules?

Some Fight Scene Rules-of-Thumb

Show, don’t tell 
Make it happen in real-time 
Enforce causality 
Show sequence, not simultaneity 
Favor completed verbs over continuing-action verbs 
Show the fastest stuff first 
For every action, show a reaction 
Use interior monologue and dialogue to set the pace

These rules of thumb all exist for the same reason. The reason is that your reader wants your fiction to show them a movie in their heads. The rules of thumb force you to do that.

A Wretchedly Bad Fight Scene

I could explain all the rules in boring detail, but that would be Telling you. Right now, I want to Show you. So here’s a wretchedly bad fight scene that violates all the rules. Read it first, mock it all you want, and then let’s analyze it to see why it’s so awful.

After taking six or eight or maybe even ten punches and kicks to all parts of his body — such as the solar plexus and shins and head — Arnie was hurting quite badly, although perhaps not as badly as when Mrs. Weevil gave him a D in spelling in third grade when he KNEW “potato” had no “e” in it.

In any event, Arnie ducked his head and spun to the right, simultaneously kicking out furiously with his foot and shouting that Bruce was an ambidextrous excuse for a moron, just after he saw Bruce throwing another punch at him. But none of this worked, because before he could do any of that, Bruce jumped high in the air and kicked Arnie in the eye, so none of the stuff Arnie tried actually worked because he was lying there on the ground wondering if he was ever going to see Cindy Lou Who again, who had grown up to be quite cute, even if she wasn’t so much back in seventh grade, and also he was screaming in agony.

“Want some more, you little lout?” Bruce said as he kicked Arnie in the kidneys about fifteen times and then grabbed his head and pounded it on the ground. All this time, Arnie was jabbing Bruce in places like the groin and stomach, but it didn’t do any good until the end when Bruce fell over in a faint, just after Arnie cried “Uncle!”

It goes without saying that this is horrible beyond words. But why? What makes it so bad? The short answer is that it violates all the rules of thumb I gave above. 

The long answer is going to take a bit of work. Let’s look at each of the rules and see how our horrible fight scene violates each one.

Show, Don’t Tell

Our example scene violates this rule almost continuously.  Look at the first sentence:

After taking six or eight or maybe even ten punches and kicks to all parts of his body — such as the solar plexus and shins and head…

The reason this is “telling” is because those punches are all lumped together into one big glop, making it impossible to say with any certainty how many punches there actually were. That’s not showing your reader a movie, it’s just bean-counting.

Nor are we sure exactly which body parts are getting all the punishment, although we get a list of a few parts that might be getting whacked. Or might not — who knows? But your reader can’t visualize a punch to “all parts of the body.” 

And furthermore, what’s Arnie doing while he’s taking all those punches? He can’t possibly be patiently accepting them. Does he throw a counterpunch? Beg for mercy? Phone E.T.? We can’t see this scene. We can’t see Arnie. We’re just being told about it.

Don’t show “six or eight punches” to an unspecified part of the body. Show one punch to the gut. And then…

Make it Happen in Real-Time

When a fight happens in real-time, you see one punch and then right away you see the response and then right away you see the next punch. In real-time, when the action is falling fast and furious, you don’t have time for musing like this:

Arnie was hurting quite badly, although perhaps not as badly as when Mrs. Weevil gave him a D in spelling in third grade when he KNEW ‘potato’ had no ‘e’ in it.

Backstory has its place in a novel. But not in a fight scene. A fight scene is now, not back in third grade. You’re trying to show your reader a movie in their head. Any backstory you put into a fight scene stops the movie cold. 

Enforce Causality

When I talk about causality, I mean that a cause should be shown first, and then the effect afterwards. If you show the effect first, and then the cause, it looks absurd. As in this paragraph:

In any event, Arnie ducked his head and spun to the right, simultaneously kicking out furiously with his foot and shouting that Bruce was an ambidextrous excuse for a moron, just after he saw Bruce throwing another punch at him.

So let’s untangle this. What happened first? Arnie saw Bruce throwing another punch at him. But that’s shown last in this sentence. The effect is shown first, and it’s a long sequence of events that I’ve drawn out ludicrously: Arnie ducks his head. Arnie spins to the right. Arnie kicks. Arnie shouts. Only after we see all that do we see the cause for it all.

That’s just dumb. If you’re showing your reader a movie in their head, don’t run the movie backwards.

Show Sequence, not Simultaneity 

It rarely makes sense to try to make two different actions simultaneous in a fight scene.

Why? Because a fight scene is chock full of all different sorts of actions, each of which takes a different amount of time. If one action takes a tenth of a second and another takes two seconds, the action will feel distorted if the author asserts that they happen simultaneously.

In our example, we’ve got this gem:

Arnie ducked his head and spun to the right, simultaneously kicking out furiously with his foot and shouting that Bruce was an ambidextrous excuse for a moron.

You can duck and spin to the right pretty quick. You can kick pretty quick. But how long does it take to shout that bit about the ambidextrous excuse for a moron? A lot longer. All this action/dialogue can’t happen simultaneously. So it’s a heinous crime to say that it does.

Even if lots of things are actually happening all at once, your reader can only read about one of them at a time, because the words are written in a linear sequence. So don’t say they’re happening all at once. It’s a direct violation of what the reader is experiencing.

Favor Completed Verbs over Continuing-Action Verbs

Use simple past tense verbs such as “kicked” or “punched” or “shouted” rather than those pesky participles such as “kicking” or “punching” or “shouting”.

The reason for this is simple. When you say “Arnie jabbed Bruce,” you imply that it happened quickly and it’s now over. Which is what the camera would show. When you say “Arnie was jabbing Bruce,” you imply that it’s going on and on and on. But a jab happens in a few tenths of a second, so your mind has no option except to see the jab happening over and over and over again. Or happening in super Slo-Mo. Either way, it’s not much like a fight any more.

In the middle paragraph, we’ve got the worst of all possible worlds, because we’re mixing completed verbs with continuing-action verbs:

…Arnie ducked his head and spun to the right, simultaneously kicking out furiously with his foot and shouting…

This kind of writing is enough to make anyone cry.

Show the Fastest Stuff First

When you sequence a group of events that are happening at roughly the same time, show those that happen fastest before you show those that happen slowest. Look at this segment:

…none of the stuff Arnie tried actually worked because he was lying there on the ground wondering if he was ever going to see Cindy Lou Who again, who had grown up to be quite cute, even if she wasn’t so much back in seventh grade, and also he was screaming in agony…

This has numerous problems, but note this: we show Arnie ruminating about Cindy Lou Who (which could take a couple seconds, given what a slow wit Arnie is) and then we see him screaming in agony (which he should be doing pretty fast, with all the kicks he’s getting.) If you’re going to show these, it’s better to show him screaming first and then show him ruminating.

For Every Action, Show a Reaction

If Bruce punches 6 times and Arnie jabs back 6 times, then you need to shuffle these actions together, rather than lumping all the punches together and then all the jabs. Look at the text:

“Want some more, you little lout?” Bruce said as he kicked Arnie in the kidneys about fifteen times and then grabbed his head and pounded it on the ground. All this time, Arnie was jabbing Bruce in places like the groin and stomach…

So Bruce is performing a whole bunch of actions all lumped together, and only then do we see any of the reactions from Arnie, which are also all lumped together. The net effect is to smooth out the fight sequence into a bland oatmeal of muffled actions. You can’t see a scene like this in your head. Oh, sure, you see something. But it’s nothing like what the author intended. It’s a muddle, not a movie.

Use Interior Monologue and Dialogue to Set the Pace

Pace is important in a fight scene. It’s utterly unrealistic to show a nonstop flurry of actions and reactions.

Real fighters will exchange a series of punches or kicks or whatever. Then they’ll back off and look each other over, catching their breath and watching for weaknesses. A real fight has ebbs and flows in the pacing. You show the faster parts of the scene by short sentences that show only the actions and reactions. You show the slower parts of the scene by longer sentences that show actions and reactions interspersed with interior monologue and dialogue.

Your goal in a fight scene is to make it take just about as long to read as it would take to happen in real time. You do that by controlling the pacing.

In the fight scene above, we have blocks of both interior monologue and dialogue tossed in at the very height of the action. Those would work much better during the lulls between the punches, while the fighters have stepped back to catch their breath and plan their next move.

Not Even Wrong

The example I’ve given above does not even deserve an F. It’s too horrible to merit a grade at all. It’s too horrible to rewrite. The most merciful thing we can do is forget it ever happened. 

As homework, you might look at a fight scene from your own novel and ask if it follows the eight rules of thumb I listed above. If it doesn’t, can you fix it? Or should you scrap it and start the scene over?

Got a Question for My Blog?

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

The post On Writing Fight Scenes appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

My Recent Podcast on The Story Blender

Recently, I was invited to be a guest on the popular podcast The Story Blender, hosted by best-selling novelist Steven James. Steven is also an internationally known speaker on the craft of fiction writing.

Steven and I had a very wide-ranging and animated discussion on the Snowflake Method and fiction writing. If you enjoy listening to podcasts, you can listen to my episode on The Story Blender here.

You may have already read Steven’s book Story Trumps Structure, a well-known book on the craft of fiction writing.

Back in May, Steven’s publicity people invited me to read his latest book Synapse for endorsement. I read it and really enjoyed the novel. Synapse is a futuristic book about AI and the question of just how much like a human a robot might someday become. It reads fast. As I recall, the final sentence of my endorsement was, “Start sweating now.”

Then in August, I met Steven at a writing conference. We had a great time talking about a thousand different things, mostly on writing, but also on pretty much everything else.

That’s when Steven invited me to be a guest on his podcast. We did the recording in early October, and I had a fantastic time. I hope you’ll find it fun and useful in your writing journey. And I encourage you to subscribe to Steven’s podcast, The Story Blender. You can subscribe to The Story Blender here. Steven’s past guests have included James Rollins and George R.R. Martin.

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How to Make Your Reader Care About Your Characters

How do you make your readers care about your characters? Is there some foolproof way to do that? If so, what’s the secret? 

Jim posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

What’s the best way to include background info on a character in the first few chapters so readers will care about him or her?

Randy sez: Making your readers care about your character is extremely important. If your readers care, they’ll probably keep reading. If they don’t care, they probably won’t. 

Is Backstory the Answer?

It’s easy to think that telling your reader the character’s backstory is the magic ticket. After all, if your readers know your character’s whole life story, won’t they want to know how things turn out?

Yes, probably. But the problem is that your character’s whole life story is long, and your readers are impatient. They want to see what’s happening right now. Your reader won’t care about your character’s backstory until they’ve emotionally committed to the frontstory.

If telling the backstory isn’t the answer, then what is?

The Short Answer

The short answer is that you need to make your readers relate to your characters. But that’s not a very good answer, because it doesn’t explain how you do it. 

We’ll get to the long answer in a bit, but first, let’s look at an example of a best-selling novel that highlights how hard it is to make your reader relate to your characters. Let’s look at the novel Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card.

Ender Wiggin, Boy Genius

Ender Wiggin is a six-year-old boy genius. He is scooped up by the government and sent to an orbiting battle school where he’s going to be trained to command an interplanetary fleet of starships in a desperate bid to save the human race from being destroyed by an alien race that’s already on its way to planet Earth.

Can you relate to Ender? Is your life like his in any possible way?

If you’re thinking no, then you can see why this is hard. 

So how does Orson Scott Card make you relate to Ender within the first few pages?

By putting Ender in a situation everybody can relate to.

Ender’s First Two Scenes

In the very first scene, which only lasts two pages, Ender has a painful medical procedure. Everyone can relate to that. So the reader is quickly on Ender’s side. The procedure doesn’t go well, but Ender muddles through. If all scenes were like this one, readers would relate to Ender, but they wouldn’t care that much about him. Because so far, Ender hasn’t shown how to rise above his hard situation. But the next scene is different.

In the second scene, Ender is ganged up on after school by a group of bullies. Everyone can relate to that. But this scene doesn’t end the way a bullying scene usually ends. Most people get beat up by the bullies. Ender isn’t most people. Ender fights back—and he wins. Partly by luck. Partly by being clever. Partly by bravado. And partly by pure desperation. The point is that Ender finds himself in a hard situation that most people can relate to. And he shows how to win. 

That, I think, is the secret to why so many readers care about Ender. Even readers who aren’t six years old. Even readers who aren’t geniuses. Even readers who will never go to battle school, command a starship fleet, or fight aliens. 

But all readers have faced an uphill battle against bullies. And they want to believe that there’s a way to win. Within just a few pages, the reader knows that Ender can win. And the reader is on Ender’s side. In the rest of the book, Ender goes on to face bullying that grows exponentially harsher. At each level, he grows and becomes tougher.

The reader wants to live Ender’s life. The reader wants Ender to show how to fight the bullies in the toughest situations imaginable.

The reader cares about Ender.

In Summary

If we can boil this all down to two main points, we have these:

Put your character in a hard situation that your reader can relate to.
Show your character responding to that hard situation in a way that gives the reader hope.

Once you’ve done that, your reader will care about your character. And the reader will even care about your character’s backstory.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

The post How to Make Your Reader Care About Your Characters appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Crash-Proofing Your Novel

What do you do if your computer crashes and you lose your entire novel?

That would be bad.

That would be horrible. 

That should never happen, but it does happen to some writers every year. And once a novel is lost, it’s lost.

The only solution is to travel back in time and backup your computer before your machine crashes. 

There may well be a computer crash coming in your future. It happens to most people at some point, if they live long enough. It’s not fun, but there are two levels of not-being-fun:

If your machine was backed up, you buy a new computer or get the old one repaired, and then you restore the machine from your backups, and you’re good to go. This will waste a day or two of your life and cause you some stress and cost you some money. But you won’t lose your novel.
If your machine was not backed up, you buy a new computer or get the old one repaired, and then you have to rewrite your novel from scratch, because you can’t restore it.

Does your future self have a backup system in place?

If the answer is yes, then you’re good. No need to read the rest of this article.

If the answer is no, then let’s pretend your future self has traveled back in time to right now, and let’s change your future. Let’s get you set up with an automatic backup system to protect your precious novel.

You have three main options for backing up your system:

An external hard drive that sits on your desk.
An online backup system that lives in “the cloud”.
An online syncing system that lives in “the cloud.”

All three of these are good options. I use all three, because they all have pluses and minuses. Your novel is important. Keep it safe every way you can.

Backing Up To An External Hard Drive

An external hard drive is a small box that sits on your desk. You connect it to your computer with a cable. Any modern computer comes installed with backup software that will constantly keep your backups up to date. Whenever you make changes on your computer, the software will save the new copy to your backup hard drive. And it will keep the old copy, so you can get back to the way it was before. 

These days, external hard drives are cheap and hold a lot of data. I recommend you get one that holds at least 1 TB (that’s a thousand gigabytes). It’s not much more money to get 2 TB or more. You can get a very good external hard drive with loads of memory in the $100 to $200 range. You can get a decent one for under $100. 

That’s not pocket change, of course. The question to ask is how much you’d be willing to pay to get back your novel if you suddenly lost it. If you’d be willing to pay more than the cost of an external hard drive, then get it. 

You can order a good external hard drive online. Once it comes, power it up and connect it to your computer. Generally, you can connect with a simple USB cable, but there are other options. Check to make sure you buy one that connects to your machine.

If you’re using a Mac, your computer will ask you if you want to use your new hard drive to backup your system using “Time Machine.” What is Time Machine? It’s Apple’s free built-in software to backup your machine. Click on Yes and your system will walk you through the setup process. Then it’ll start backing up your machine. Probably in less than an hour, it’ll be done and you’ll be all backed up.

After that, as long as your external hard drive is connected to your computer, Time Machine will backup any changes you make. So you’ll always be up to date, or very close.

If you’re running a Windows machine, you can learn exactly how to do backups by doing an online search for “how to backup to an external hard drive using windows.” Follow the instructions and you’ll soon be all backed up.

If the world were perfect, that would be all you need. The external hard drive would be always there with a backup of your entire sytem. 

But the world is not perfect. Your house could be destroyed by a fire, a tornado, a flood, an earthquake, or some other horrible disaster. That would destroy your computer and your external hard drive. A burglar could break in and steal them both.

So you need a second backup system. You want a backup that doesn’t live in your house on the same desk as your computer. 

Backing  Up to an Online Backup System

An online backup system lives somewhere else, in a secure place connected to the internet. It’s run by people who live and breathe security. Their job is to sell you a service—backing up the data on your computer to their secure computers. Using encryption and a password, so only you can read that data.

You just need to log in to their website, buy the service, and tell it what files to backup.

You’ll need to pay a monthly fee or an annual fee for this service, and that buys you some extra peace of mind. 

What online backup service should you use? That’s up to you. There are a number of good ones, but they change from time to time. I’d like this blog post to be relevant five years from now, so I recommend that you do an online search for “best online backup services.” Your search will probably show you several articles in computer magazines that compare the various services. PC Magazine usually runs an article once a year that compares the best current services. Read that article or a similar one and make your choice.

The advantage of an online backup service is that it’s very secure. It’s much less likely to be destroyed than your external hard drive.

The disadvantage of an online backup service is that it is usually much slower than an external hard drive. If you have lots of data on your system and if your internet service is typical in speed, it might take days or weeks for your system to get fully backed up. And it would probably take a few days to fully restore your system if you ever need to. 

So that’s why I recommend using both an external hard drive (Plan A) and an online storage service (Plan B). That way, you get high speed and high security.

And because I’m cautious, I also recommend Plan C, which is to sync your computer online.

Syncing Your Computer Online

Many people these days have more than one computer. They might have a machine at the office and a machine at home and maybe a light travel laptop. 

And it’s handy to have those machines all able to see the same data. An online syncing system lets you do that. Then you can work on your novel at work, at home, on the road, or wherever. As you make changes on one machine, your changes get stored online and then they get updated to your other machines. Again, this is secure, so only you can see your data.

If one of your computers has to go to the shop for repairs, you can continue working on your novel from any of your other machines. Very handy when you need it.

If you have a Mac, Apple has made it very simple to sync everything in your Documents folder and Desktop folder using their iCloud service. To learn how, do an online search for “how to use icloud for documents and desktop” and follow the directions. 

There are other online syncing services that are popular for both Windows and Macs: DropBox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, etc. Do an online search and choose the one you like best.

You might ask how an online syncing service is different from an online backup service.

An online syncing service is geared towards syncing the current version of your data between several machines. It may also keep older versions of your files, but that’s not the main focus.

An online backup service is geared towards backing up the data of a single machine, along with previous versions of the data on that machine, in a way that makes it easy to restore files that have been lost. (Of course, you should verify that your online backup service actually saves all the previous versions back to the beginning. If a service doesn’t do that, I wouldn’t want to use it.)

So there you have it. Plan A is an external hard drive. Plan B is an online backup service. Plan C is an online syncing service. I use all three because my data is valuable to me. You get to decide which you’ll use, based on your own needs.

Homework

If your computer crashed today and you lost all your data, how much would you pay to get it back? (If it was possible to get it back.)
Do you have an external hard drive for backups?
Do you have an online backup system?
Do you have an online syncing system?
What actions will you take to keep your data safe?

One Last Thought

I’ve been writing a column in my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine about once a year for the last several years on the subject of setting up automated backups. I know this gets repetitive, and it’s also scary to think about.

But every single year, I hear from a few people who email me to say that they took my advice, and then a few months later their computer crashed, and then they restored everything.

And they write to thank me for saving their data.

I hope very much your machine won’t crash, but I hope even more that you’ll be prepared. It takes a little effort today, but it’ll pay off for the rest of your life. And you’ll sleep better knowing your data is secure.

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