Ksenia Anske's Blog, page 28

One question to make your novel sell: DOES IT TURN?

Illustration by Makenna Alyse

I wish somebody told me this when I started writing. I wish somebody explained to me why some books sell, and some don't. I wish there was a manual written for every beginning writer that was something like Writing 101. I wish it were easy to learn the very simple truths I'm learning after blindly stumbling around for four years,teaching all of this to myself on my own. I'm happy that's it's only been four years, and not fourteen, or forty, which is the case w...

Why I'm obsessed with writing

Painting by Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber

I guess I'm so obsessed with learning how to write well, how to write so that my books will be read by millions, is because I want to tell my story, the story I couldn't tell as a child and was told to keep quiet as an adult. The story that almost made me take my life. The story I want others to know, so we can all stop it. So those who won't speak out of fear will perhaps speak up. If we all stopped hiding behind our fears, perhaps we could ch...

Writing your novel by writing one scene 60 times

Illustration by Ilya Kazakov

This is a theoretical experiment of sorts, before you roll your eyes at such nonsense. I had this idea brewing in my head for a while, after reading Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, and McDonald's The Golden Theme. The idea of foreshadowing took on a new aspect for me: it seemed what Steinbeck did wasn't so much foreshadowing as it was writing and rewriting and rewriting the same scene of a man losing his companion. Why? To get his point across. What was his point?...

My Scrivener novel template

Just so you know, it's not final and will probably evolve. Hell, it's not even half-final. It's like the very first version I made from scrubbing through the internets and the books and the blogs, and coming up with a kind of a hodge-podge concoction that works for me. For now. (Also, it's mostly based on the Hero's Journey plotting pattern thingy.)

For those of you who have Scrivener, HERE IS THE BLOODY TEMPLATE. Click on it and download it and use it to your heart's content and report how y...

The Chase, a short story

Art by Chris Garbutt

Right. So I've been waiting till July to post this as I didn't win the whole Hemingway writing contest thingy (Denyse Woods won it with her wonderful story Wallpaper), but then I forgot about it, and then I came across my notes and remembered! Here you go then. A short quick piece that will sorta kinda maybe get written into MARQUIS AND PLATO, my book about the cat and the pigeon. Or maybe not. In any case, it was an exercise and something to do for fun. I think I wrot...

The Hero's Journey plot and subplots explained

Illustration by Anya Milioutina

To me. I have explained it to me in a way that makes sense to me, not as a circle, but as a deep dark lake with deep dark water and a humongous scary monster sitting in a deep dark cave smack in the middle of the lake's bottom. Anyamagically transformed my quick flimsy sketch into the pretty diagram above, with the heroine (of course) jumping into said lake,about to meet her near death.

Okay, let me step back a little. I have only started learning about this...

Plotting tips, tricks, and templates

Illustration by Selçuk Demirel

Before you get all excited about this post, know this. I'm just learning how to plot and am quickly putting together a simplified, streamlined version of all plotting templates that I have found online and in books. One that works for me. For now. I expect it will change and keep changing in the near future as I keep learning. I intend to read every book on plotting out there (or as many as I can), until I puke plot out of my ears and out of everywhere else....

I was writing my books backwards

Illustration by Shintaro Kago

And I didn't see it. Until now. It hit me like a sledgehammer. Perhaps it was the accumulation of frustrations over not knowing what I was doing, perhaps it was just time. I don't know what it was, but I know that I won't be able to go back to how I used to write.

I used to dump an emotional mess on paper and then dig in it, sleeves rolled up, scraping out and cleaning and polishing something solid that I've stumbled upon, never knowing for sure if I should be...

Plots, timelines, genres, and more

Illustration by Kim Rosen

My plotting adventure continues. I have now finished the plot summary for Tyubik (though I will go over it again before starting Draft 5), and have done 4/5 of the plot summary for Janna. After having summarized about 1/5 of the book the hair on my head started moving. I couldn't keep all the dates and the places and the characters straight to be able to summarize them correctly. How did I even write all this? I got online, dug around for help, and found that many...

Plotting your novel: a guide for dummies

Illustration by Harriet Lee-Merrion

Before you get pissed at me for calling you a dummy, know this.I'm the first dummy here, and this post is largely me shouting at myself. LOUDLY.It turns out that for the last four years of writing full-time I had no idea how to plot and did it by my gut, which sometimes led me out the other end (Rosehead, Irkadura, Janna), and sometimes not quite (Siren Suicides, The Badlings, TUBE). It was random. If I wrote for too long (Siren Suicides), I got lost in...