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What Character Arc Isn’t

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

Today’s post is by regular contributor Susan DeFreitas, an award-winning author, editor, and book coach. She offers a wide range of courses on the craft of fiction, as well as a free ebook, Cracking the Code: 10 Craft Techniques That Will Get Your Novel Published.

I write a lot about character arc, and I talk a lot about it with my clients.

Because if there’s a magic bullet for creating a novel that sucks the reader in, holds her attention, and ultimately makes her feel like it was worth the 6+ hours it took to read that book, character arc is it.

Many writers are clueless about the importance of a character arc for their protagonist, but I find that even those who do understand how important it is often still don’t know what it takes to actually make one work in practice.

Basically, there’s one key mistake they’re making: When it comes to the major events of the plot, they’re focusing on how their protagonist feels in the moment, based on different issues in their past, rather than on how that emotional reaction connects with their character arc.

To show you how this works in practice, let’s build a little story, starting with just the plot.

Example 1: Just the plot

Callie is a programmer working on AI development. She’s been assigned to the team developing Ella, a large language model designed to provide therapy to those who can’t afford a human therapist, when she makes a discovery: the online therapy that Callie herself has been paying good money for, ostensibly for empathetic human support, is in fact being provided by a prototype of Ella.

Incensed, Callie calls out her online therapy provider for false advertising. Her customer complaint is handled by a chatbot (she knows this, because she helped to build it) and passed on to a “customer care associate” (also an AI, which she can tell by the way it responds to nonsensical statements) and then ultimately to the therapy company’s Director of Communications (an actual human), who tells her that he’s sorry, but he cannot confirm nor deny that her therapist is an AI, though he would be happy to provide her with a free month of therapy, because she sounds pretty worked up over all this.

Callie hacks the transcripts of her own therapy sessions and confirms that she was talking to an AI program, but she can’t go public with this information without sharing her own deepest, most private matters with regulatory authorities, and the public in general. Will Callie sit tight on all of this, or will she reveal these secrets—both hers and that of the online therapy company?

Example 2: Incomplete or unfocused character arc

Let’s say the author looks back over this plot and decides they need to “get a character arc in there.” So they develop different elements of the protagonist’s backstory that might make the events of the plot more meaningful—and create a real change for the protagonist at the end. 

So the author decides that Callie starts off in this story a very private person, and her big secret—the reason she needs therapy in the first place—is that her family is super toxic. Oh, and Callie is also crippled by perfectionism, due to her super-critical, no-good family.

So in this version of the story, when Callie discovers that her empathetic human therapist is, in fact, an AI program, she’s angry—not just because this company has engaged in false advertising, but also because this version of the program isn’t as good as the one she’s working on, and it shouldn’t be out in the world, it could say the wrong thing and hurt someone (that’s her perfectionism).

And when she’s ultimately passed on to the Director of Communications at that company, she’s intimidated at first, because that guy reminds her so much of her terrible father. She convinces herself that her therapist has to be human, because “Sheila” is so much like the mother she wished she had, growing up.

She hacks her transcripts, just to make sure, and finds out that Sheila is an AI. But she can’t expose the therapy company without exposing her own transcripts about her terrible, no good, manipulating family, and if she does, they’ll be hurt, and maybe disown her.

Callie decides maybe ultimately that’s for the best and does it anyway.

In this version, you could say there’s a character arc—a real change in the protagonist over the course of the story—but it feels like it’s all over the place. Is this a story about cutting ties with toxic family members? Is it about overcoming the desire to protect yourself in order to protect others? Is it about not being so hard on yourself that you require therapy, from either human or bot?

Given this progression, I have no idea. And neither would any reader.

Example 3: Complete character arc

So let’s see if we can narrow this down to something that actually makes sense.

Growing up, Callie was taught not to “spread her business around town,” which essentially meant never asking for help. That’s why, when she got doxxed by a veritable army of trolls as a woman in tech, and developed PTSD around it, she went for an online therapist: Not because she couldn’t afford an in-person therapist, but because going to a therapist at all felt so shameful to her that she wanted to do so as anonymously as possible.

So this AI developer discovers her therapist is an AI, and that her only recourse to exposing this company’s false advertising would be to expose herself—not only as needing therapy, but needing therapy because a bunch of teenage yahoos called her a bunch of misspelled curse words on Twitter. What would her family think? What would the world think, given the confident online persona she projects? Moreover: Would the trolls come for her again?

But maybe doing what she has to do to expose this company’s lies will also show the world just how real the psychological damage of doxxing can be. And maybe if she’s brave enough to ask for help from her online allies in fending off these trolls—showing the same bravery she did in seeking out therapy in the first place—she won’t be so alone this time.

Which means that the events of this story will now force this protagonist to face her greatest fear, making herself vulnerable and asking for help. And when she finally does, for the sake of the greater good, chances are good that readers will stand up and cheer—in part because it’s clear what this story is actually about: It’s about overcoming the fear of asking for help.

The upshot

Character arc isn’t a thing you can create with a patchwork of different issues and emotional reactions. It’s a thing you create by focusing on one clear thread that runs the whole length of your novel, with each and every plot development pushing the character to confront one particular internal issue—and, ultimately, make a change for the better.

The Peril and Promise of Writing in First-Person POV

Photo by Gaetano Cessati on Unsplash

Today’s post is by author Amy L. Bernstein.

Writing a novel is all about making choices—dozens on every page. Choosing the right point of view (POV) is arguably the most influential choice a writer makes. And choosing first-person POV, well, that may be the most complicated choice of all.

Why?

Because when you build an entire story around the “I” voice, you commit to installing the reader deep inside a single skull. In the hands of a skilled writer, there’s no more fun place to hang out.

“I am the vampire Lestat.” So begins Ann Rice’s rollicking novel, and we quickly realize we are to be guided by an enormously entertaining and self-absorbed narrator with a sly sense of humor.

“Call me Ishmael.” Like Lestat, Melville’s moody anti-hero (a self-described “simple sailor”) takes us on a vivid tour of city streets with a dose of social commentary on the side, followed, in this case, by a harrowing boat ride to track down a whale.

Lestat and Ishamel are each in their own way enormously charismatic and deeply observant of the world around them. A lot happens to them; they are also agents of their own destinies, at least in some respects. These are wonderful skulls to occupy.

No wonder some of today’s best writers gravitate toward first-person because, as Anne Tyler says, “It can reveal more of the character’s self-delusions” than, say, third person.

But to effectively execute this elevated brand of first-person narrative, writers must navigate a complex set of rules and avoid any number of pitfalls that will turn a novel into a flat, dull expanse of prose. I suggest that first-person POV is the most misunderstood and also the most difficult voice to master.

Let’s explore some ground rules (not an exhaustive list!) and common pitfalls before turning our attention to whether writing in first-person is the right choice for your story. (Spoiler alert: It’s often not the best choice.)

Rule #1: Constraint

The moment you elect first-person POV, you relinquish the option to tap into an omniscient narrator who knows all, sees all, and can travel at will through time and space, or walk through walls, when called for. (This is ironclad unless you write a fantasy main character who possesses omniscient powers, but that’s the exception that proves the rule.) The narrator can only process information the way we do in the real world: through her senses. This rule straps the writer into an exquisite straitjacket.

Rule #2: Complexity

A first-person narrator can lie to himself and everyone around him, but an attentive reader will always know, or have a good guess, about what’s really going on. That’s because the first-person voice exists on two planes simultaneously. On one plane, the main character speaks his truth (however deluded) within the context of the story’s self-contained world. (Rule 1 requires this.) Meanwhile, the reader is analyzing the narrator’s motives and circumstances—and drawing conclusions about what’s really going on. The writer needs to be true to the narrator’s voice and situation while remaining aware of the reader’s craving for moral and emotional ambiguity and conflict.

While this rule also makes sense for third-person POV, it’s worth stating explicitly that using first-person doesn’t let a writer off the hook with respect to composing a layered, nuanced protagonist. Writing “I said…” or “I believe…” doesn’t equate to simplicity.

Rule #3: Development

First-person narrators should undergo change just as their third-person counterparts do. The “I” voice in your story is, by definition, unalterably anchored to one person but that doesn’t mean its essence is fixed from first page to last. To the extent that we get to know this person intimately, to love them or hate them, or even find them unknowable, the narrator still needs to embark on a psychological journey. The self-referential “I” is a constant, but the character’s motives and degrees of self-awareness should fluctuate. Lestat, after all, proves an unreliable narrator with shifting desires—alternately bloodthirsty, smug, ambitious, and remorseful.

Adhering to such rules takes patience, persistence, and a hell of a lot of writing and revision. The author Karl Marlantes (Matterhorn) lamented that a lengthy early draft of one of his novels culminated in “psychotherapy drivel.”

Alas, writing drivel is easy to do when wrangling the first-person voice. Here are some of the POV traps writers often fall into while trying to master the form’s particular aspects of constraint, complexity, and character development.

Pitfall #1: Over-relying on the power of “I” 

The easiest error is to fall back on sentences that begin with “I” because, after all, you’re in the head of an “I” person. This is a prose-killing mistake. Imagine getting through an entire book with this cadence:

I walked into the living room, where both my sisters were already seated on the couch. I asked them who called this meeting. Sally said she did, but I didn’t believe her. I looked at Toni but she didn’t say a word. I couldn’t wait to get out of there, but I couldn’t leave just yet.

This passage lacks meaningful context and subtext; the “I” here is rather airless. We may technically be locked into one skull, but that’s all the more reason to craft a narrator with the power to imaginatively describe interior and exterior landscapes (physical and psychological) as well as to surmise (or project) what others are thinking and feeling in relation to one another as well as toward themselves. Doing so will help you to de-center your narrator’s consciousness, so that the scene isn’t all about, or only about, them. 

In The Fault in Our Stars, John Green accomplishes this by turning “I” into “we” in some scenes, which essentially pulls the camera back away from a perpetual close-up:

We had a big Cancer Team meeting a couple of days later. Every so often, a bunch of doctors and social workers and physical therapists and whoever else got together around a big table in a conference room and discussed my situation…

Pitfall #2: Sticking readers with a boring narrator

If you’re going to lock us into one skull, please let it be a very busy and interesting one. (If you make the first error, you’re likely to make this one, as well.) A dull narrator has banal thoughts, participates in low-stakes events or waits passively for things to happen, and doesn’t do enough to help us get to know other characters, let alone chew on the scenery a little. These narrators aren’t people, they’re weak filters for storytelling. (If they were my tour guides at an exotic locale, I’d fire them.) They lack a distinct point of view and aren’t sufficiently wrestling with their own conscience and the outside world. A boring narrator suffocates the reader and doesn’t do enough work on their behalf. We need people like Mark Watney in Andy Weir’s The Martian, whose fierce intelligence continually shines through while he’s trapped on Mars:

First, I put on an EVA suit. Then I close the inner airlock door, leaving the outer door (which the bedroom is attached to) open. Then I tell the airlock to depressurize. It thinks it’s just pumping the air out of a small area, but it’s actually deflating the whole bedroom.

Pitfall #3: Over-limiting what the narrator can know or do

This is so damn tricky. One head, one heart. Everyone else is unknowable and your narrator can’t, in fact, see through walls, so how is she to know a murder’s taking place in the next room? In fiction, we can draw on the heightened capacities of all five senses to generate hunches, incite a narrator to action, and create every shade of emotion. We can also deploy time, through flashbacks and other devices, to give our narrator scope to think, feel, and act. A narrator may, for instance, dream that a murder is underway in the next room, and awaken to the sound of muffled screams. Life offers endless possibilities for the “I” character to venture far afield, literally and figuratively. Even interior thought can be made as lively as a high-speed car chase, as in this passage from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre:

What a consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon! How all my brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection! Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle fought! I could not answer the ceaseless inward question—why I thus suffered…

If you choose first-person, you must let your character get out and about, so to speak, and avoid assuming that we only know what they (literally) see in any given moment.

Pitfall #4: Confusing the narrator with you, the author

We’re discussing fiction here, not memoir. Every author brings aspects of their own personality into their writing, but don’t reduce your first-person narrator to you. As Doris Lessing observed, “It’s amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.” Lessing may be right, but you want to avoid slipping into an intimate “I” voice that turns out to be you—the way you speak, your likes and dislikes, your foibles, unless you’re crafting a roman à clef. Remember that your goal is to create a multifaceted fictional character who lives in, and is shaped by, the world of the book. That’s not you, or your world—or not exactly.

By now, you may feel yourself cautiously backing away from using first-person POV. And to be honest, you’re right to be skeptical. It should not be a default choice, but rather a highly examined one.

Imagine how different the Harry Potter series would seem if J.K. Rowling had elected to let Harry narrate his own hero’s journey. Her choice of omniscient voice defines the books’ collective DNA.

How do you know if first-person POV is right for your story?

Begin by asking three key questions. If the answer to any of the questions is a resounding yes (you are as sure as you can be), then first-person POV might be the best choice. If you’re unsure or the answer to all three is no, you’re probably better off avoiding first-person altogether.

Is the main character undergoing an experience, journey, crisis, or series of events that is truly unique? That is, whatever is happening to this character isn’t happening to anyone else, even if others are around to bear witness in some fashion. (The Martian’s stranded astronaut is a case in point.)Have you invented a protagonist with especially sharp powers of observation? Someone who is perhaps very “voicey” or, as Rachel Kushner says, the narrator is “very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.” (Think of Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. He’s too obnoxious to be spoken for in third person.)Do you want the reader to over-identify with the protagonist? Some genre fiction (notably, but not exclusively, romance and detective fiction) deliberately erase almost all distance between reader and protagonist as a way to maximize the reader’s entertainment and enjoyment. Crime writer Patricia Cornwell openly confesses, “In the first person, the readers feel smart, like it’s them solving the case.”

Writing a compelling first-person novel requires creative ingenuity, extraordinary empathy, and, I believe, a boatload of courage. Never assume that the “I” voice is the easy way to go, because it never is. But if your heart’s set on charting this course, then please write the most compelling, infuriating, conflicted character you possibly can. Confuse us, infuriate us, and make us fall in love with the skull where you’ve stuck us for the next several hours.

Examples of First-Person Character Traits

Explore some of your choices for the protagonist’s voice

Distinctive/Obtrusive. Opinionated, loud, obnoxious, ditzy, immature, etc. The protagonist’s voice cannot be confused with anyone else’s and the reader is often forced to pay attention to the protagonist’s wants and needs. Comes in handy for unreliable narrators.

Reliable. A truth-teller trusted by the reader. Likely an admirable hero, a character who inspires respect and masters adversity in an ethical way. But we still want complexity and conflict (not Dudley Do-Right). Often shows up as the worthy love interest in a romance.

Reticent/Recessive. Protagonist focuses on others rather than self. The words “I” and “me” are used sparingly and the reader’s attention is not constantly on the protagonist. Female heroines in historical fiction are sometimes deployed in this way. So are neuro-divergent characters, such as Eleanor Olyphant.

Observant. Sharply notices the world around them and reports out with detailed or evocative language. May be a good choice for a novel with many personalities and a lot of action or adventure. Good for complex world-building as well.

Unobservant. Scenery and environs seem to go unnoticed, usually because the protagonist is fixated on other things (interior or exterior). A neurotic (but hopefully entertaining and redeemable) protagonist might fit this bill.

Why Preparing a TED Talk Makes You a Better Memoirist (Even If You Never Intend to Get on Stage)

Today’s post is by author and book coach Suzette Mullen.

A couple of months ago I did something that left me feeling somewhere between a wet noodle and a very burnt piece of toast.

Picture a TED talk, with a Zoom room as the stage, and a memoir writer in a fugue state with dry mouth and shaky legs giving a 10-minute talk without notes.

I’d been practicing this talk for weeks as part of a public speaking course that had one simple assignment: put together a signature talk. The talk could be related to your business. Or about a cause you’re passionate about. Or it could simply be your story.

As a memoirist, my story was the logical choice. I had to be able to speak about it succinctly and persuasively on all those podcasts I hoped to be on to promote The Only Way Through Is Out, my memoir about coming out and starting over in midlife (releasing February 2024 from the University of Wisconsin Press). Upping my game to promote my book was the reason, after all, that I had chosen to put myself through public speaking hell in the first place.

Within days of the start of the course, the doubt demons began whispering in my ear:

You don’t have anything worth saying.
Everything you want to say has been said before—and better. Hello? Have you heard of Brené Brown & Glennon Doyle?
Do you even have a story, really?

Ten minutes to tell the story I had written 200-plus pages about. That I had wrestled with for years. That I had written oh-so-many drafts of.

I stared at a blank Google doc.

I had no freaking idea how to condense my story into ten minutes.

I started to question whether I even knew what my story was really about.

Yep, I was questioning this even though I’d written a successful query and gotten a book deal.

Figuring what your story is REALLY about is the biggest challenge for most memoir writers.

To borrow from Vivian Gornick, what’s the story beneath the situation?

As memoir writers, we know the situation, the things that happened to us, the plot-level events. We know our subject matter. The grief of losing a long-term partner. What it’s like to come out at midlife and leave a whole life behind. What it’s like to live next door to a serial killer and not know it (as was the case with my book coaching client Jamie Gehring who wrote the true-crime memoir Madman in the Woods: Life Next Door to the Unabomber).

But what are the real stories beneath those situations?

That’s a question every memoir writer should ask themselves before they start writing and continue to ask as they write—and in my case, ask even after the book is finished.

A simple question that isn’t simple to answer.

Instead of bailing on the public speaking course (which I really wanted to do), I went back to basics, to the same steps I coach memoir writers through when we work together.

Here are the steps I took when I was struggling to articulate my story for my ten-minute “TED talk”—and that you can also take at various stages of your memoir journey to get clear on the deeper story you were meant to write:

When you don’t know where to startWhen you are stuck in the messy middleWhen your memoir is complete and you need a list of talking points to promote it1. Make a list of 5–7 key moments and write a short paragraph for each one.

These scenes are often referred to as “tent pole scenes,” those key moments that you know will be in your memoir no matter what. If any one of those scenes is removed, the tent (i.e. the story) will collapse.

Here are a couple examples of my tent pole scene paragraphs:

I came out to my mother. Told her I was considering leaving my marriage. She didn’t understand. She thought I was too old to start over. Part of me believed she was right. I had only lived one way for my entire life.

When I confided in my sister, she said, “Suzette, you know how obsessed you get with things.” She implied that this was a phase. That I was having a midlife crisis. It wasn’t a phase or a midlife crisis. Still. Who risks everything for a life they’ve been living only in their head?

Just make a list and write those short paragraphs now.

Don’t worry about the order of the scenes. That will come later.

2. Find the commonalities in these key scenes.

What do these scenes have in common? Are there metaphors or images that are repeated? Can you see a pattern in these stories that you didn’t see before?

When I did this exercise, I noticed a pattern of safe choices, the idea of avoiding “bumps in the road,” and the use of the word “glowing” to illustrate how I wanted to feel in my life.

If you’re in the midst of drafting your memoir or you’ve completed your draft, likely you’ve used some image systems or have a number of metaphors running through your draft already.

If you are just beginning your memoir journey, here’s your chance to discover some of those patterns.

3. Choose one commonality and prioritize the stories that illustrate it.

Choose the metaphor or pattern that shows up the most in your key scenes. In a 200-page book, you will have several, but remember we’re talking about a ten-minute talk here!

This one thing will be the golden thread to hold your talk (and possibly your memoir) together.

Review your key scene list and move up the stories that best illustrate that pattern or metaphor.

You may be able to layer in another metaphor or idea later, but start with one. Remember, this is a ten-minute talk!

I chose “glowing” as the main idea to center my talk around.

4. Create an arc with your top stories.

Now it’s time to turn these separate stories into a capital T Talk that has a beginning, middle, and end. Note, this exact arc may NOT be the eventual one you choose for your memoir, but it should reveal the change in you as the protagonist of this story. It should reveal the essence of the real story you want to tell.

I started my talk with a story of when I was a preschooler and wanted to disappear after I was chastised for breaking the rules, and I ended the talk with a moment when I walked through the streets of my new hometown toward my first Pride event ever, hand in hand with the woman who would later become my wife. And guess what? I was glowing.

5. Make sure you explicitly connect the dots and spell out the message of the story.

This is a test for you to make sure that you know the point of your story.

Write 1–3 sentences that directly communicate the message of the Talk. “Tell it” versus “show it.” In a short 10-minute TED talk, we want to bring home the message directly after we’ve illustrated it with stories. You may or may not want to do the same thing in your memoir, depending on your style. The balance of “showing” vs. “telling” can vary dramatically. But for the purpose of your Talk, make it obvious.

Here’s how I spelled out the message of my story:

We are all imprinted by our beginnings, those early memories we hold inside us. I grew up believing that life was about being careful, not making mistakes, following the rules, and avoiding the bumps.I wanted the glow I saw on my friends’ faces—and later I would realize that the glow comes when we are willing to make mistakes, break the rules—feel all the feels—including the bumps.It’s never too late to experience the glow. It’s never too late to live out loud, to live authentically and fully. AND it’s never too late to change your story.

Hey, I did have a ten-minute story after all! And it WAS already inside the pages of my memoir—I was just too close to see it at the time.

You have a story too—a story that only you can write. If you are struggling to find it, try out these five steps to get clear on the story beneath the situation. Let me know how it goes! I’ll be cheering you on to find your story in the first place—or rediscover it if you’re lost in the messy middle or even at the end of your memoir journey like I was.

And of course, there’s a sixth step you can take: Pitch your talk! Really, do it! Maybe you won’t find it as terrifying as I did to speak in public without notes. And even if you don’t pitch it now or ever as a signature talk, you’ll have a stable of stories you can pull out for those podcast interviews you’ll be landing for your book launch.

Pitch Yourself Before You Pitch Your Book

Today’s post is by author Catherine Baab-Muguira. Join her on Wednesday, July 26, for the online class The Author Platform Accelerator.

So much querying advice is the same. No matter which article you’re reading, which podcast you’re listening to, or even the particular genre you’re working in, the guidance rarely varies: Start with story. Spend your first paragraph hooking ’em with plot, characters, conflict.

It’s fine advice as it goes, but when it reaches this level of ubiquity, a problem arises. Most every writer is pitching agents in the exact same way, and it follows that agents’ inboxes are full of lookalike queries. Under these conditions, is it any wonder that agents rarely respond in any personal way, instead relying on form rejections? Perhaps the reason form rejections predominate is because form queries predominate.

Pause for a moment and imagine you’re an agent. Every hour of the day, every day of the year, your inbox is filling up with queries, and 90% or more of those queries spend the first paragraph breaking out all the usual story details about who’s involved, what’s at stake, yada yada rising action, bla bla bla cliffhanger, ad infinitum. The mind glazes over. To read through it all must feel like you’re singlehandedly bailing out the Titanic, and we all know how that story ended.

I’m familiar with this scenario not because I’m a literary agent but because I spent 12 years querying in the conventional way. Then I stopped, reevaluated, began using a different technique I’d gleaned from my day job in email marketing … and basically everything changed. Within one week of sending out my new query letter to eight agents, I received offers of representation from four of them, at which point I faced the incredibly first-world problem of picking among them.

Granted, I was doing a few things differently, including writing in a new genre, and I cannot say precisely what worked. But having eaten, lived, and breathed email marketing for way too long now, I believe I know. What made the biggest difference was changing my first paragraph, and more specifically, pitching myself first, not my project.

Here’s what that looked like in practice:

Hi, [Firstname]—

I’m contacting you after coming across your profile and realizing that you agented [Book Title] as well as [Book Title]. My name is Catherine Baab-Muguira, and I’m a writer who’s contributed to New York Magazine’s The Cut, Playboy.com, Salon.com and FastCompany.com, among others. My June 2016 Quartz essay, “Millennials Are Obsessed with Side Hustles Because They’re All We’ve Got,” has been shared on Facebook more than 50,000 times and also became the focus of an April 2017 episode of NPR’s On Point.

Why query this way, leading with oneself? Let me count the ways:

For starters, if everyone is querying the same way, there’s likely no advantage in your querying that way, too. Successful querying is about standing out, not fitting in.Professionals tend to want to work with other professionals. If you begin by establishing your professional bona fides, then you’ve cleared a potentially major obstacle, right at the beginning.In the same vein, people tend to care about who’s talking at least as much as what’s being said. It’s a mental shortcut we all use to cut down on noise, and its why email marketers agonize over the “from line” of their messages, over whether to sign an email as though it’s from a particular person or the brand that one is representing, etc. Long marketing lecture short, if you lead with whatever personal information makes you seem the most credible, then you’re putting thousands of years of human evolution on your side. Most importantly, the person receiving your email is likelier to keep reading. 

Why does this all this matter so much? It’s simple. Nothing is as important as an agent reading past the first paragraph of your query. If they don’t read past your first paragraph, they won’t read your second paragraph—much less your manuscript.

You don’t have to be a freelance journalist like me to approach agents in this way, either. When helping friends with their query letters, I’ve pulled the following wowzer details from the pits of paragraph four up to paragraph one, where they belong:

I was part of a Pulitzer-winning reporting team for the New York Times.I was the first woman ever to make partner at [cutthroat Manhattan law firm].I was a Wall Street analyst who witnessed high-level investment scams.

Talk about burying the lede! I only wish I’d had this kind of cred to tout when I was querying. Still, my gnawing professional envy isn’t the point. Are you burying the lede in your query letter, too?

Maybe, like my friends, you have a high-status or relevant job. Are you a public defender, a doctor, a librarian, a Wall Street vet, an advertising copywriter, some other kind of media worker, or a PhD in literally anything?

Or you could have some more unusual and intriguing way of making a living. Maybe you’re a maximum-security prison guard, a backup dancer, or a nanny to some obscenely wealthy and dysfunctional family. Any of that could be interesting, especially if it’s relevant to your project, so consider positioning it front and center. Ditto any significant social-media following (say, 10,000 followers or more) that you may have.

Now, perhaps you don’t have a high-status or unusual job, which is true for many of us. Have you published any short pieces? It only takes two journal publications or freelance bylines for you to be able to say, “I’m a writer who’s contributed to [publication] and [other publication].” Meanwhile, freelancing is relatively easy to get into. Get hustling on that front, and in a few weeks or months, you could be opening your query in a whole new way—coming across like you’re established, legible, seasoned, a pro who knows what’s what.

At the very least, it’s worth thinking through why you might want to defy the conventional (and all too common) querying advice. I don’t know about you, but I get tired just thinking what it must be like to be an agent on the receiving end of endless, highly similar solicitations. It makes me want a beer. And a nap. And a day off. If you’ve been querying a long time—12 years, anyone?—then you might try something new. The change could be as simple as the first paragraph of your query, and your writing fortunes just might change, too.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, join us on Wednesday, July 26 for the online class The Author Platform Accelerator.

It Might Be Time for a Reality Check on Your Writing Goals

Photo by Robert Șerban

Today’s guest post is excerpted from A Small Steps Guide to Goal Setting & Time Management by writer and creative writing tutor Louise Tondeur.

“God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

Reinhold Niebuhr

A goal assumes you want to change something in your life.

And The Alcoholic’s Prayer suggests that there are some things we can change and some things we can’t—some things we can set goals for and some we’re better off forgetting.

We need wisdom to tell the difference, or a blunt and honest look at ourselves.

Many books on goal setting leave out this step, urging readers to do anything in their power to achieve their goals. But there are two important caveats they seem to forget, and they’re important if you’re going to give your goals a reality check:

Would you really do anything to achieve this goal? Some things may be more important than this goal. It depends what it is. You can be pretty certain that a goal like “stop smoking by the end of the year” has almost no downsides. But would you really risk losing your friends and family or your health in pursuit of a goal?In an age that celebrates so-called eternal youth and the power of the individual whilst telling us we can achieve anything we want to, there are actually some things you can’t do.Different goals for different people

This is the secret behind the Alcoholic’s Prayer: pinpoint what you genuinely need or want to change.

For example, I’m never going to qualify for the Olympics. I’m not doing myself a disservice by admitting it and it doesn’t matter how hard I apply myself or how many times I say positive affirmations.

But it’s not all or nothing: almost everyone will improve their lives by exercising a bit more.

So during lockdown I decided to start doing yoga regularly. Looking at my son, I knew I wanted to be fit and healthy enough both to look after him and to watching him grow up. This is a big deal for me because it requires a change of attitude.

For me, “do yoga regularly” is a better goal than “win a medal at the Olympics” or “run the Chicago marathon.” But if you are a prospective Olympian: good luck!

The wisdom to tell the difference

You’re giving your goals a reality check, but how do you tell the difference between what you can change and what you can’t or what you need to change and what you don’t?

First, get up off the sofa and do something. For example, I started with ten-minute beginner yoga videos on YouTube. An elite athlete might speak to a coach or doctor before undertaking a challenging training program. Make the action something small, but something concrete. Have you:

Spoken to an expert?Been on a short course?Spoken to someone who’s already achieved it?Done your research? Do you know enough about it to know whether this goal is for you?Accepted your limitations?Low risk? Jump in!

The next stage in giving your goals a reality check is a risk assessment. Firstly, if the risks and the costs are limited, seek out the opportunity to jump in and try something for a short amount of time with low-risk involvement.

For example, if you want to write comedy or screenplays, try one of the Arvon Foundation’s at-home masterclasses. Your risk is limited to the cost of the course, and a couple of hours of your own time. Conversely, don’t commit a large amount of time and money to a project without considering the implications.

Reality check exercise

At this stage of the reality check, ask yourself the following questions and write down the answers in your journal. This is your risk assessment:

What are the financial implications? What initial steps can I take for free?How much will it cost if I continue? Be careful here: buying equipment or paying course fees isn’t the same as achieving your goal.What are the risks to the other areas of my life?What else is important? What is more important?Are there any health implications?Have I discussed it with family or friends?Can I make the time and space?Is this the right thing for me now?Can I make the commitment?Why do I want to achieve it?Does it fit with my values?You might not need to commit (yet).

My favorite quotation about commitment comes from a book about exploring:

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. 

W. H. Murray

Once you commit, the magic starts to happen: the kind of magic that’s a result of your determination to succeed. Your brain looks for what you tell it to look for, so if you commit yourself, your brain will look for opportunities to fulfill that commitment. It feels like magic, and in a way it is: everyday magic.

But you don’t have to commit until you’re ready. It’s possible to plan first, to do your research and look at your options before committing, because that kind of preparation frees you up to think about possibilities without the frightening prospect of them becoming reality (yet).

Make sure you watch out for the moment when it is time to commit. Preparation can become procrastination.

Dream the impossible or get more specific?

This is a conundrum. We’re told we need to let ourselves dream, to imagine the impossible, but honestly speaking, is that really an option? Doesn’t that kind of advice lead to disillusionment and cynicism? Conversely, we’re told to “be realistic” and we might have convinced ourselves not to expect too much.

Does it matter when a goal seems impossible, improbable or deluded?

Here’s the problem—and paradoxically those who recommend blue-sky thinking suffer from it, too: impossible dreams are often too broad, too wishy-washy. Telling someone to dream the impossible is too general: how on earth do you implement that kind of advice?

What we need, as a solution to the impossible dream paradox, is a big dose of honesty and a big dose of specificity. Often when stated specifically, a goal is no longer impossible, improbable or deluded—but it would still cost us something to achieve it. Once it’s made specific we can work out that cost.

Who says?

Who told you the dream was impossible? If it was someone very significant—a parent, a teacher, a partner—then it is hard to be objective. How much did they know about it? How has their own life experience limited their outlook?

Again, getting as specific as possible about the steps you would need to take and the time and money you would need to invest will help remove the mysticism around this apparently impossible dream. They might be right. They might not be. If you’re really not sure, test it out by breaking this goal down into its component parts until you get to something you could achieve today—and taking that small step.

What are the consequences?

Stop and do this now. Ask yourself what the consequences of this goal are. If you had achieved this goal what would the rest of your life look like? Work out the consequences. Make sure that you include the emotional consequences too.

In planning to achieve a goal you do take a risk: you risk failure. You risk having to face up to the idea that you tried but it didn’t work. Usually—it depends on the goal—the journey makes that risk worthwhile. I suggest looking this one square in the face before you start, but limit the time you spend doing so.

Get specific to overcome the psychological barriers

The latest life improvement guru might tell us that we’re thinking too small or that we should think big, but isn’t that also too general to be useful?

Well, yes, but sometimes lack of confidence does make us put psychological barriers up. What’s the solution?

Get specific again and turn a specific doubt into an achievable goal. It’s possible to learn to do all of the following things and/or to get expert help. What each one needs is an investment of time:

“I could never start a cake-making business, I don’t know anything about marketing.”“I could never teach in Germany, I’m terrible with languages.”“I’ll never have a baby because the doctor says I have to lose weight first.”

Here’s how to talk yourself out of barriers such as these.

1. Try inventing the BIGGEST outcome you can, using and reversing the doubts you have about it. Write it down. Have fun with it. We’ve dealt with the serious side, now you can play:

“My cake-making business dominates the market in cupcakes.”“I learn five languages and travel around the world giving master classes in my subject.”“I joined a weight-loss program and have started a family. Now I give advice on weight loss, fertility and family planning.”

2. Can you get even bigger? (Notice that these get more specific as they get bigger, and not less specific.)

“I write a series of books on cake making and become a celebrity baker, making regular appearances on television. I become known internationally as an expert in both home start-up businesses and cake decoration. I take on trainees each year who are specially chosen from the long-term unemployed.”“I am a multilingual expert in my subject, training thousands of other people to teach it. I set up academies the world over using my specially developed learning and teaching style. Many of my teachers go into schools up and down the country to start language clubs for young people.”“I have adopted four children and had two myself. I run a business helping women to get fit for pregnancy. I have marketed the franchise internationally and so far I have helped thousands of women to have a baby or to live a fulfilling life without children. I donate a portion of my profits to women running start-up ventures in the developing world.”

What you’ll notice when you make your dreams bigger like this is that when you get specific they no longer feel vague and unformed. You might not want to achieve the biggest version of your dream but you should now know how to work out the small steps you’d need to follow in order to get there. You might realize that this goal isn’t what you want after all, or something you’re able to achieve right now. That’s okay too.

3. What’s the first small step required to realize your so-called impossible dream? Keep getting smaller until you find something you could do today.

“My first small step was enrolling in a free course for new businesswomen run by the local council. Actually, it all started when I picked up a leaflet in the library.”“My first small step? I have a good friend who speaks German, who went back to college. We worked out a skills exchange. He needed help with his essays and in return he helped me to learn his mother tongue. It all started when I invited myself to dinner and his very large family were chatting away in German.”“I’d say my first small step was making that first phone call to a weight loss counselor. It all started when I got brave enough to pick up the phone.” Test your goals: your reality check

Go through your list of goals. Now that you’ve thought about reality checking, do you need to make changes? Are any irrelevant? Unachievable? Some (seemingly) impossible goals are okay—but make them as specific as you can. Have some concrete smaller goals too. If you have few big dreams, introduce some, or make one or two of your goals bigger. If you have few concrete smaller goals, set some now or make some smaller. Come back to this reality check as regularly as you need to, or whenever your goals get too general and vague.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, be sure to read A Small Steps Guide to Goal Setting & Time Management by Louise Tondeur.

The Forgotten Element of Story: The Author

Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash

Today’s post is by book coach and Enneagram teacher Dani Abernathy.

Have you ever thought you put too much of yourself into your fiction?

You read through your manuscript and, woah, you are all over the page. It’s not just that characters reflect your own struggles, hopes, and personality traits, it’s that your hopes and fears are laid bare on the page. So you do your best to mute yourself. You alter characters, blunt your unadulterated emotions, make things a little less passionate. Writers aren’t supposed to put too much of themselves into their story, right?

Or maybe you’re the opposite. You don’t want your writing to seem biased, clouded by your own experiences. You shape your characters into people who don’t share your background, beliefs, or love for puppies in teacups, because good writers keep distance between themselves and the page.

Here’s what I think: the more closely connected you are to your story, the more impactful it will be.

Stories change people. They’re like a secret door, bypassing hatred and fear to engage the reader’s empathy, connection, and humanity. More than ever, we need true stories (even those set in fantasy worlds) that help people understand folks who aren’t like them. True stories don’t happen by keeping yourself separate from your story. They happen when you write bravely, honestly, and with purpose.

You are the most important part of your story.

It’s not your protagonist, or your plot, or your prose. You are the single irreplaceable element of your novel. You provide the life, meaning, and impact no one else can replicate. If story is a tree, you are the roots. The stronger the root system—the more connected you are to your story—the more vibrant, healthy, and enduring your tree will be. In my work with writers, I’ve seen how establishing your roots can get you unstuck, help you discover the story you really want to tell, and create a living narrative.

Here are three elements of yourself that can strengthen your story.

1. Your backstory

Our stories don’t come from a void, they come from the experiences, passions, wounds, families, and failures of our lives. No matter how much distance you try to establish between yourself and your novel, I guarantee that the seed of this book has been with you for a long time. When I ask my clients to explore their past in relation to their novel, they always find a link. When you identify how your novel was inspired by your own backstory, you’ll gain clarity about what this story means, excitement to keep going, and a greater sense of purpose.

Here are a few steps you can take to explore the ties between your novel and your past:

List the most formative experiences of your life. These don’t have to be “big” moments. They can be small things that had a large impact.Think about recurring events. Have you moved a lot? Do you have lifelong health struggles? Have you always felt like an outsider? Are all your childhood memories on the back of a horse?What are your passions and interests? List your current hobbies and those you’ve had throughout your life.Look for connections in your answers. What stands out to you? What ties these things together? What surprises you?Now consider your work-in-progress. Where do you see your backstory coming through in subtle or obvious ways? What does this reveal about your novel and why you’re writing?2. Your values

Values influence every part of your life—your family, day job, relationships, habits, and yes, even your writing. When you understand and embrace your values, it gives you permission to go all in on them. If you realize your top value is love, the shame you sometimes feel about writing romance novels will vanish. When you embrace your value of excellence, you’ll stop beating yourself up for how long it takes to finish a project; excellence takes time. Identifying your values can provide clarity and direction in every area of your life, especially your writing.

Questions to find your values:

When have you felt most alive, aligned, and purposeful?What do you most admire in other people?What makes you the angriest?Looking at your answers, identify three to seven values.

It takes time to find your values. If you found dozens of values, see if you can group them into categories like service, self-discovery, environmentalism, or comfort.

Whatever your values, I want to assure you that there are no wrong values. All values are legitimate and worthwhile. I encourage you not to manufacture values that seem noble and admirable, but to embrace your actual values. Trying to have someone else’s values will only lead you somewhere you don’t want to be. When we embrace the things we truly care about, we can move toward them and better not only our own lives but others’ as well.

3. Your impact

Most writers don’t think about the impact they want their writing to have. Perhaps you’ve considered your ideal reader, but reader avatar guides rarely reach the deepest levels of connection with your reader—the things that really draw your reader to your book like shared experiences and desires.

I teach writers to identify three levels of impact: world impact, reader impact, and self impact.

World impact: How you want to change the world through your book.Reader impact: How you want your novel to speak to and affect your readers. This is the most obvious level of impact.Self impact: How you want your book to change yourself. This is the hardest level of impact to find and the one least acknowledged. It can take years of therapy to realize what purpose this book is serving, so don’t worry if you can’t identify your self impact right away.

Finding your levels of impact will help you understand what you’re trying to accomplish through your writing. Yes, you want to write a book and get it into the world, but why? Why does it matter to you? What do you hope this book will do, for the world and yourself?

Use these questions to identify your levels of impact:

World Impact

If you got everything you wanted—the theme park, Netflix series, and bestseller status—what legacy do you want your book to have?If your book was magic, what would it fix in the world?

Reader Impact

What do you want the reader to take away from your book? What do you want to linger with them?If your book was magic, what would it change in your reader?

Self Impact

What questions are you trying to answer through your writing?What wounds do you hope to heal?If your book were magic, what would it change in your life?Don’t write safe, write true.

If you want to write a book that impacts people on an emotional level, that changes them, don’t separate yourself from your story. You can only be as honest with the reader as you are with yourself, so take the time to understand how this story has grown from your experiences, is shaped by your values, and what you hope to accomplish through it. Embracing the you in your story can feel frightening, but it’s the best way to craft a novel that is truly unforgettable.

Gray Space: Making Room for the Reader

Photo by Karolina Grabowska

Today’s post is by author and book coach Janet S Fox.

Elision is not a word that is often used in story crafting, but it should be. To elide is to omit, or to leave out. And we need to know as much about “leaving things out” of our stories as we do about the things we love to add.

Why elision? Because the emotional connection that’s made between the writer and reader is strengthened by what the reader brings to the story—their experiences, dreams, hopes, and longings. When we let the reader fill in our intentionally left blanks, we invite them inside our imaginary worlds.

As writing evolved from cuneiform and hieroglyph to alphabet, we became primed to make associations between symbols. Like the pleasure we take in solving a puzzle (Wordle, anyone?), humans have learned that it is pleasurable to fill in gaps in text, and now we associate emotional connection directly with reading.

When writers use elision, this is much like the way that visual artists use white space: by creating space within images, the viewer’s brain fills in what’s been left out to complete the picture. I coined the term “gray space” for what writers do when we elide, as we link gray matter, writer brain to reader brain, to fill in unsaid ideas.

And yes, this is another way of understanding the adage “show, don’t tell.” The difference lies in this question: how do we “show (not tell)” something without a single written word, which is what elision (leaving things out) implies?

Let’s look at the craft techniques you can use to make gray space.

Dialogue

When dialogue is used to convey concrete information from one character to another (especially information that characters should already know), it feels clunky, mainly because this is not the way people usually communicate. Actual living dialogue is fluid and awkward, and runs in fits and starts, full of interruptions. While you don’t want to write the latter kind of dialogue any more than you want to write the info-dump, you can create a balance between those two, by using the gray space of subtext.

Subtext is what is implied by what is left unsaid. Characters who know one another will talk around subjects, especially if they are fraught with underlying tensions. Affection may take form as suffocation. Troubleshooting may come across as accusation. Misunderstandings will increase tension, and misunderstandings are often generated by what is not being said bluntly and plainly. 

The best example of gray space in slant dialogue is Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “Hills Like White Elephants”, where the couple never mentions the difficult event they are discussing:

“I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.”
The girl did not say anything.
“I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it’s all perfectly natural.”
“Then what will we do afterward?”
“We’ll be fine afterward. Just like we were before.”
“What makes you think so?”

The couple not only elides the subject, but they avoid directly addressing how they feel about it and more importantly about each other. As readers, we grasp their pain and isolation, and the fraying of their relationship, without being told.

Internal monologue

Your point of view character(s) will generate internal monologue, which is critical to understand the characters’ emotional states. But internal monologue can be shaded and slant, too. Inside our own heads, we often lie to ourselves, especially if we are hiding from wounding experiences.

In Christina Soontornvat’s A Wish in the Dark, Pong, hurt and betrayed, hides from his wish:

Pong didn’t share his thoughts with Somkit. He closed them inside himself, where they hardened into a physical thing, making a box around his heart.

Memories as analogies can serve to elide the truth, as Sara Pennypacker does in her novel Pax: 

But what he loved more was the fence behind it. The fence told him exactly what was his responsibility and what wasn’t. A ball fell inside that fence, he’d better field it. A ball soared over it, and it wasn’t his to worry about anymore. Nice and clear.

Peter often wished that responsibility had such bright tall fences around it off the ball field, too.

The truth that Peter has not explicitly said, the truth of his feeling of responsibility over his mother’s death, is something he has hidden from both himself and from others.

These internal roadmaps are placed early in both stories, driving readers to yearn for Pong and Peter to complete their journeys to healing.

Gesture: action and sensory detail

Because we are hard-wired to take cues from body language of those around us, if the actions of one character are not clear to another, bad things can happen. Use what you leave out to convey emotions that may be misunderstood or misinterpreted, which increases tension and creates the desire to read on.

Pennypacker makes her main character Peter’s first interaction with Vola in Pax feel menacing: “She came closer and thumped the ball into the glove a little harder.” With that single physical gesture, and without a word or other indication as to her intent, Vola is a scary figure. Is that a true interpretation? Pennypacker intentionally leaves the reader and Peter in the dark.

Setting conveys emotion but the more we let the reader decide what that emotion is, the better. A dark forest can be a refuge or a threat, or both. A storm can be a cloak or a danger, or both. Leave out the explanations and let the reader derive meaning by injecting their own experiences of forests and storms into the moment.

The moment of highest tension in Pax, when Peter despairs he will ever be reunited with his fox, is given added power by the image of a once-comforting forest that has been shredded by war: “All the trees in the lower field were gone, uprooted and blasted to splintered logs.” We read on, pulled by anguish, desperate with precarious hope, surrounded by this shattered landscape.

Rhetorical devices

Finally, use devices like endowed objects to convey information. An endowed object (something that carries deep thematic meaning, like a locket, hatchet, toy soldier, or scar on the forehead) when used carefully can substitute for a thousand words of explanation, if the writer has made clear the emotional connection to that object early in the story.

Trust the reader to get what you are trying to say without doing anything more than presenting the object, as Suzanne Collins does in The Hunger Games, when Katniss uses her mockingjay pin to send signals of trust to her allies and rebellion to her enemies. Readers yearn for those “aha moments” of recognition.

The benefits of gray space

The most obvious benefit of using elision is to heighten the emotional response of your readers. By leaving things out of your narrative you allow the reader to fill the gap with their own memories and associations, and this results in that “getting lost in a book” feeling we all want our readers to have.

The second benefit of gray space is to heighten tension. Leaving things out of the narrative allows the reader to speculate, to wonder, to move closer to the story. Tension increases as the reader tries to fill in those blanks, predict outcomes, guess at what’s really going on with those two lovers.

For the reader, this is all at play in the subconscious, and in fact the deeper the better. But for us writers, we must be aware that what we leave out is as important as what we put in, so we must become skilled at deliberately crafting scenes rich with gray space.

How My Newsletter Helped Me Land an Agent and a Big Five Book Deal

Today’s post is by author Nancy Reddy (Instagram: @nancy.o.reddy).

I’d been querying agents for nearly two years when I got a promising email. After some kind rejections and a couple of “I really like this but—” close calls that break your heart, this agent’s enthusiasm made my pulse race. “Imagine my surprise and delight when I saw your name,” she wrote, describing herself as a fan of my newsletter. She said she’d love to talk more about the nonfiction project I’d described in my query letter.

I’d been writing my newsletter, Write More, Be Less Careful, for just under a year at that point. It had started as a daily writing prompt to celebrate National Poetry Month in April 2021, and I’d continued after that, sending newsletters two or three times a month with writing tips and revision exercises, interviews with writers and other creative types, and encouragement to keep writing. I envisioned it as a place to bring together different parts of my brain: my own creative practice, my love of teaching writing, and my research expertise in the field of writing studies. Across those parts of my life, I’d thought a lot about why writing is hard, and I’d developed strategies for doing it anyway. I imagined the newsletter as a way of sharing those ideas with other writers. I didn’t start it as part of my efforts to get an agent and a book deal—but it ended up playing a pivotal role in that journey.

I’d landed in that agent’s inbox via AWP’s Writer to Agent program, through which writers who are registered to attend that year’s conference can send a query letter and five pages for the consideration of participating agents at five agencies. I ultimately had meetings with three agents through that program and received offers from each. I chose my agent, Maggie Cooper at Aevitas, the one who’d mentioned my newsletter in her initial email, because I was excited about her vision for my book. Of those three offers, Maggie was asking me to make the most dramatic revisions to my proposal before we went out on submission—but I trusted that her guidance would get us there. And her vision for the book was informed by her reading of my newsletter. Because she knew my voice so well through my newsletter, she was able to read the proposal I’d sent her and see her way to something even better, something both warmer and more sellable.

After revising the proposal for nearly nine months, we went on submission in mid-March and sold it (at auction!) in April. I’m thrilled to say that my first nonfiction book, The Good Mother Myth, which blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history of science to examine the origins of our bad ideas about what it means to be a good mom, will be published by St. Martin’s in 2025.

Ultimately, my newsletter isn’t the thing that sold my book—but writing the newsletter changed my work for the better and has helped build relationships that are valuable for my writing life. Whatever stage of your writing career you’re in or whatever goals you have for your writing, my experience writing a newsletter has a few key lessons to offer.

Start your newsletter early, and don’t think you need huge subscriber numbers for it to be worthwhile.

When Maggie wrote to me, I had only 300 or so subscribers, but they were a smart, engaged bunch. Everyone starts small, and worrying about your reach at the beginning will only slow you down. (And, realistically, even those 300 early subscribers were a lot more readers than I was reaching when I published poems in literary journals or articles in scholarly journals.)

There are so many scary stories out there about platform, and every writer who’s been on the internet for more than a minute has heard of agents or editors who won’t even look at a writer unless they have 100K followers on social media or 10,000 newsletter subscribers. But my story shows that it’s still possible to get an agent and sell a book to a major publisher without huge numbers. If you’re reaching people who are interested in what you’re doing, you’re well on your way.

Your newsletter doesn’t have to be the same topic or content as your book, as long as it’s something you can write about regularly.

In a post at Before and After the Book Deal, Courtney Maum explains that newsletters work best when you’ve developed a clear specialization and lots of range within that topic, something she describes as “niche topics with a long-ass runway.”

Rather than sending a Christmas-letter style update, use your newsletter to think about what you’re offering readers.

There’s an old-fashioned way of thinking of a newsletter as just a record of what you’re writing, where you’ve published, and so on. But even if you’re really doing enough to fill a regular newsletter, the audience of people who want a complete report on your recent activities is more or less limited to your mom. (Even Jasmine Guillory, who’s always publishing a new book and recommending books on the Today Show, includes a recipe in each issue of her newsletter!) Instead, start your newsletter by thinking about what you can offer your readers.

In a newsletter like mine, what I’m offering is obvious: writing tips, exercises, prompts, encouragement. Other newsletters offer personal essay round-ups, salad recipes, tips about navigating the publishing world, advice for parenting through diet culture, to give just a few favorite examples. Even newsletters that are less obviously service-oriented still have to keep a reader and their needs and interests in mind. Who are you writing to, and what can you offer them? When you’re shooting something directly into somepne’s inbox, you’re always reminded of the reader at the other end of the send button.

Keeping a reader in mind can benefit your writing beyond just the newsletter. That difference in perspective was one of the crucial changes I made in revising the book proposal: instead of just displaying all my research, I had to think about what it would mean to a reader. What would my reader want to know? How could I inform or entertain or comfort them? Writing regularly to the readers of my newsletter—and getting feedback in the form of likes, comments, and emails—helped me refine that perspective.

Consider how you can build community and engage readers.

There’s so much pressure in publishing, especially in nonfiction, to build a platform, and it’s easy to think of that as just follower count or subscribers. But building a platform (I can’t help but hear that in a kind of scary announcer voice) can be pretty demoralizing as a task. It’s always easy to see other people’s bigger numbers, and I didn’t become a writer because I wanted to stand up on a stage and get people to look at me. (I’d rather sit in the back with my notebook, thank you.)

For me, it feels a lot better to think about community, rather than platform, and a newsletter can be a great vehicle for building community. I’ve used my newsletter as an excuse to reach out to writers whose work I’ve admired and a way to celebrate friends’ writing. Writing can be so lonely, and that’s especially true if you’re working on a long-form project or struggling through finding an agent or publishing a book through contests. Sharing your work with readers through a newsletter is one way to alleviate that sense of isolation. My newsletter has helped me build relationships with other writers, both people who are readers of my newsletter and people I reached out to because I loved their writing. (I write on Substack, which has some nice community-building features baked into the design, but you can build community on any newsletter platform.) Think of your newsletter as a space to celebrate the things you love with people who share your interests.

In the end, a newsletter is unlikely to be the single thing that sells your book or otherwise launches your writing career. I still had to write and revise (and revise and revise and revise) my book proposal, and the books, poems, and essays I’d published were an important part of convincing first my agent and then editors that I could write the nonfiction book I was developing. But my newsletter was vital in the shaping of the proposal, and it’s been a great way to network with other writers. I’ve been a writer long enough to know there aren’t any magic shortcuts into finishing or publishing a book. But a newsletter can make the writing more enjoyable along the way—and it might be a surprising tool to unlock something new.

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How to Figure Out Which Writing Advice Fits You Best

Today’s post is by romance author and book coach Trisha Jenn Loehr (@trishajennreads).

There’s an endless supply of advice for writers. But when you come across this oversupply of often contradictory information, how are you to parse it and figure out which advice fits you—your story, your personality, your skills, and your writing style?

The process is surprisingly similar to figuring out which clothes work for your body and lifestyle. The best way to know if something fits is to try it on—just like you would try on a pair of jeans at Target. Because just like jeans, writing advice is never one size fits all.

Here are five things to do when trying on and evaluating the fit of writing advice.

1. Check your closet—what do you need?

Just like with clothes, you don’t want to waste your time or money on pieces you don’t need. When you jump to try every piece of writing advice or new writing tool you come across, you will likely end up spending all of your time doing that instead of writing.

If you already have a jacket that is in good shape and keeps you warm and works for your climate, you wouldn’t go buy a new $400 coat just because somebody said it was the best jacket they’d ever worn. The same goes for writing. If you already have an outlining method that works for you, why spend time learning different outlining methods? You don’t need them.

So, before you try out any writing advice, first think about your current writing life. What problems do you need to solve or hurdles do you need to get over? What are you struggling to get right on the page? What’s blocking your progress toward your writing goals? If the advice doesn’t aim to solve a problem you already have, ignore it for now.

2. Gut check: are you interested in this tool or piece of advice?

Just like when choosing clothes, we often have a visceral reaction to writing advice. When you first see it, how does your mind or body react? If you are immediately intrigued and picturing yourself in that sweater, great. Grab it off the rack and add it to your fitting room to try on. If you come across a writing method that turns on a lightbulb in your brain, get ready to try it out.

But if you immediately feel yucky when you come across it, it’s probably not for you. That gut reaction is often a solid judge.

However, if what you’ve been doing hasn’t been working, take a pause and consider why this new advice feels gross to you: Is it because you’ve tried it before and had a bad experience? Or is it making you uncomfortable because it’s so different from anything you’ve tried before, maybe even the opposite of what you’ve been taught?

Your gut feeling is important, but sometimes it’s worth considering new ideas, especially if the old ones aren’t working anymore. Listen to your gut but be willing to ruminate. Trying something that at first seems strange might be worth a shot.

3. Try it out.

You can’t tell if clothes fit your body unless you try them on. Writing advice is the same. Once you find something that seems like it might solve a problem and appears like it might fit, you must try it out. You can try it once or a bunch of times over a few days or weeks. See how it feels. Does it feel empowering or constricting? Does it feel authentic or forced? Does it inspire or bore? Is it moving you toward your writing goals or holding you back?

The key to trying things on is to truly try them and, if possible, try a few similar items so you can compare. Don’t just read the book or watch the webinar. If you need help planning your story or figuring out if it has narrative drive, make a Save the Cat outline and an Inside Outline. If you need help getting the words on the page without getting distracted, do some solo Pomodoro sprints and attend a writing group that does writing sprints together.

It might feel like too much time to spend when you just want to get an answer or a tool and move forward, but like grabbing the first pair of pants you see when you walk in the store and not comparing it with another size or style usually means you end up with a pair that you’re not 100% sure about. The first piece of writing advice you hear doesn’t always work out.

4. Once you’ve tried it on, assess how it feels.

Taking time to reflect on what you’ve tried is just as important as trying out writing tools or advice. Sometimes you want to just quickly throw a pair of jeans on, make sure you can button them up, glance in the mirror, and then head to the checkout. But trying things on thoughtfully demands that you assess it from all angles.

Take a few moments to think how it feels and how it compares to the other things you’ve tried. Even better, write out your thoughts about it so you can process them visually too. Did following that advice or using that tool feel good? Did your gut feeling about it stay the same or change? Did it help you solve your problem or was it another hurdle in your way? Did you make progress on your writing project? When you compare the two things you tried, which felt better?

Once you’ve identified what feels good and helps you move forward on your writing project, you can confidently know what fits…for now.

5. Just as bodies and seasons change, leading us to need new clothes, so do our writing needs.

A tool or piece of writing advice that works today might not be a good fit for you on your next project. And that’s totally okay. When a writing tool or method stops feeling good, give yourself the freedom to put it back in the closet and go shopping for a different tool that will work better.

There’s nearly unlimited writing advice available on the internet. Take what works for you and leave the rest behind for others.

Villain Logic: The Key to Solving Your Thriller’s Climax Block

Photo by cottonbro studio

Today’s post is by author and book coach Samantha Skal (@samanthaskal).

Writing a tightly plotted and twisty thriller, mystery or suspense novel can feel like assembling a puzzle where none of the pieces seem to fit. This pain point often makes itself known when we sit down to write the climactic scene, when everything must come together and be explained, and we realize that some aspect of our story setup is fundamentally broken. The protagonist can’t have the “A-ha!” moment we want them to, because the logic doesn’t work, which means we can’t write forward or through. And because we’re already so deep—months and years of writing, planning, and revising—this block takes on epic proportions and can feel like an insurmountable wall.

Obviously, by the way I talk about this, I’ve been there, and I’m here to tell you there’s a path through.

The solution is a deep dive into the villain’s logic: understanding the motivations, logical actions, and misinterpreted “on screen” clues of the villain.

Before we go further into this, let’s take some time to define what a villain is, and isn’t.

The villain is the antagonist, the foil to the protagonist.

In a mystery, thriller or suspense (MTS), the villain is a person who has their own character arc, their own wants, needs, and beliefs, and their own goals. They are the star of their own story, and while they might not be on the page as much as the protagonist, they are no less important.

While there may be many obstacles the protagonist is up against—internal misbeliefs, an illness, the weather, dragons—in 99% of modern MTS novels, these other obstacles are not the true antagonist of the story. These things may add to the complexity of the story and serve to make life more difficult for the protagonist, but they are not the ultimate foil for the protagonist. That ultimate foil is another person who, ideally, wants the opposite thing from what the protagonist ultimately wants. This conflict is what drives the MTS story forward to a smashing conclusion.

In a modern three-twist thriller, the villain is also the person the protagonist will ultimately face. The classic face-off happens in the climactic scene, where the protagonist thinks they’re not going to win, but because we’re writing to please MTS fans and the genre expectations are well established, the protagonist will win. Good triumphs over evil, and the world is restored to some kind of order, for now.

Sometimes, however, the protagonist will face someone they think is the ultimate villain in the climactic scene and conquer them, only to learn at the very end, in the final twist, that there was actually someone else behind the Bad Things happening throughout the story. This final twist may or may not result in the ultimate triumph of good versus evil, but things will always be okay again by the end of the story.

Perhaps you’re thinking here that you know all of this. You know what an antagonist is. You’ve created the perfect conflict, where your protagonist and antagonist are diametrically opposite in their goals.

But you’re still stuck at the climactic scene, where everything has to come together and be explained so your protagonist can have their big realization about what’s actually going on.

The key to moving through this climactic block is a deep dive into your villain’s logic, motivations, and actions, and how those actions show up for your protagonist “on screen,” “on screen” being defined as things the reader can “see” through what the point-of-view character notices.

In other words, the villain’s actions as they appear to the protagonist are the secret to unlocking a climactic “A-ha” moment.

Let’s assume your villain is doing Bad Things and doesn’t want to get caught or stopped. As such, there will logically be very little the villain would allow the protagonist to see or find. There aren’t going to be big neon signs pointing to clues about what’s really going on. But, because our protagonists are clever, tenacious, and motivated to stop the Bad Things, they’re going to be out looking for these clues.

And here’s where the fun comes in: Any “on screen” clues the protagonist sees can be misinterpreted.

Misinterpretation is one of the very best ways to lay the groundwork for satisfying twists.

Because twists are a key part of the modern thriller, the driver behind the climactic scene, and are ultimately tied deeply to villains, let’s talk about this.

Modern thrillers have three twists: One at the midpoint (50%), one at the climax (~85% to 90%), and one at the very end (~98%). There are of course exceptions, but aiming for this formula is a great place to start.

Twists are (as defined on a panel I once watched at Thrillerfest by two of my favorite thriller authors, Ruth Ware and Clare Mackintosh) the answer to a question the reader didn’t think to ask. Twists only work when the reader has been presented with just enough “on screen” evidence so that they don’t guess the twist before it’s revealed, but when the protagonist figures out the truth, everything makes sense and is logical from the standpoint of looking backwards at what we (as the reader) know.

As such, we need to, as authors, think about what we’re allowing the reader to see “on screen” and when they see it.

Which means we need to deeply understand what the villain is doing when, why they’re doing it at that time, and how the protagonist might see “on screen” some evidence of that action (and misinterpret it). Readers go along with what the point-of-view characters are thinking and feeling, making this misinterpretation the best way to lead the reader into thinking they should be asking question A, when really they should be asking question B. Question B is the twist we’re setting up.

In order to make all this work and make the climactic puzzle work, the first step is to make a detailed outline of what your villain is doing “off screen.”

Figure out, if you haven’t already, what the villain ultimately wants.

Ask yourself: Why do they want this thing? What drives them to want to do these Bad Things? To what end are they doing all of this? Why aren’t they giving up?

Then, because this is MTS and we have a protagonist who is trying to stop the villain from accomplishing their goal, we need to figure out how the two of them clash, from the villain’s perspective. This thought exercise may not end up in the finished manuscript, but is imperative for us, as authors, to know.

To figure this out, I suggest creating an as-is outline (a chapter-by-chapter summary) of your current manuscript. Keep it high level and brief, about 5–6 lines for each chapter, and detail what happens. Even if you’re a champion plotter and have a 70-page outline, deviation from the outline is common. If you’re a discovery writer (also known as pantsing), this is a necessary exercise so you know what’s “on screen” for the reader.

As you go, make bullet points underneath each chapter summary of the “on screen” actions from the villain, so it’s crystal clear what the reader has seen before the climax.

Then, ask yourself and add to your as-is outline document as needed, the answer to this “off screen” question:

Where is the villain in every single chapter, and what are they doing to further their goals? What is the villain doing while the protagonist is off on a wild goose chase over there?

Then we get into the fun part, the unblocking part. Now that we know what the villain wants and to what end they’re going to such extremes, we have the logic nailed down.

The next step is to make sure there’s enough on the page and “on screen” for the protagonist to misinterpret. This will allow us to write forward through our climactic scene and the final twist, where the protagonist will have their “A-ha!” moments and understand what was actually going on.

To that end, ask yourself:

Are the villain’s actions toward their goals logical? If not, what can be adjusted so that their actions align with their end goal?Are things getting worse for the villain over time, so that it’s logical that they’re being pushed into the rock/hard place climax, or is there an easy out they can take? If there’s an easy out, can it be eliminated by some action of the protagonist’s?When/if the protagonist accidentally gets close to uncovering the villain’s dastardly deeds, how does the villain change course? What could they do to lead the protagonist astray? How does that action show up “on screen” and how does the protagonist misinterpret that action? Could the protagonist attribute that action to someone else?How does what the villain thinks the protagonist knows affect the villain’s actions? Could the villain also misinterpret the protagonist’s actions, and take a new action (that the protagonist sees) based on that assumption, which in turn confuses the protagonist?Are the villain’s “on screen” actions enough for the reader to make sense of the villain’s logic, when everything is revealed in the end?

The climactic block in thrillers is, in my experience, mostly driven by the fact that we, as authors, don’t understand our villain’s motivations, their end goals, and what their progressive, logical actions are toward that goal. The protagonist can’t have the climactic and final twist “A-ha!” puzzle-pieces-in-place realization if the “on screen” actions from the villain aren’t present, hence the climactic block we started with. The work above forces us to look at our actual on-the-page story as it’s currently written, and see the gaps in what’s “on screen” and what’s not.

Once we understand the villain thoroughly, approaching this climactic block from a zoomed-out view where we’re looking at the entire story and what the reader knows via the brief “on screen” moments, can create a workable path through to The End. Villains are the stars of their own stories, and picturing your story from their viewpoint can often illuminate the solution.