Plotting Crash Course, Day Three: A New Book and a Perfect Review

This has been very much so a crash course … even more so than expected! I’ve done about a quarter of the posts about this as I expected to (but, to be fair, I intended to start in September and then stuff happened … blog parties, deciding to publish a book I had no intention of even finishing, etc.), and I’m not quite as well-prepared as I’d like to be with NaNoWriMo coming in less than a week.

Yesterday my copy of Outlining Your Novel by K.M. Weiland finally arrived! It’s absolutely beautiful. :)

It’s also full of amazing advice. I’m already about halfway through it. And everything I read makes me feel more guilty.

Fifty-page outlines (although this was for a 100,000-word-long novel).

Months upon months of intensive structuring.

Knowing everything (and I mean everything) about your book before you start writing.

The author (K.M. Weiland) notes that her methods aren’t for everyone; however, I must agree with her on one point; it would be fantastic to have a fifty-page outline … or even a twenty-five-page outline!

The more I read about how helpful these outlines are, how halfway through the book, you won’t be fixing a plot hole, how it simplifies the revising process, how it gives you more time for creativity as you don’t need to bother with structure because you’ve already got it down, the more attracted I am to the idea.

Well, I don’t have time to come up with a complete outline of any great length, but I’m definitely going to organize my notes the best I can!

In Outlining Your Novel, there are many helpful tips for getting your story together before you actually begin writing. One of the best ideas (in my opinion) is to write a review of your own book, a glowing review, a review by a reader who totally gets everything you want to express in your story and LOVES IT. This gives you a clear something to go for.

So, I sat down and wrote a review of At Her Fingertips. I wrote it from the perspective of, oh, a sixteen-year-old girl who loves reading and … archery. (Yep, that was totally random …) She’s also a huge fan of historical fiction, particularly that set during the Victorian era and including romantic elements and Christianity, of course. And, of course, she gets everything I want to express in my book perfectly.

She’s read the first two book in The Chronicles of Alice and Ivy and enjoyed them, but she loves At Her Fingertips best of all, as you’ll see in her glowing review which goes as follows. (It ended up being long, by the way.)

I just finished reading Kellyn Roth’s At Her Fingertips, and I must say … it was an amazing story! I bought as soon as it came out after loving The Dressmaker’s Secret and Ivy Introspective, but this was the best of the series so far!!!

At Her Fingertips is the story of Alice Knight, an upper class Victorian young lady who is about to come out into polite society. At seventeen, Alice is a little different than the eight-year-old we all learned to know and love. She’s a bit more critical than in The Dressmaker’s Secret, her simple view of the world gone, but we still see the old Alice there, as intense, independent, sensible, and overall charming as always. She’s the kind of character you like, though lazy people like me sure wouldn’t want her as a boss! When Alice says, “Go!” she doesn’t mean tomorrow. She means NOW in big, bold letters.

At the start of the book, I was a bit worried for Alice. I’ve always loved how she has such a strong faith in God. As a young adult, though, she has some hesitations in her faith. For instance, she deliberately ignores what the Holy Spirit is plainly telling her for a lot of the book. She tries to do what she thinks is the right thing, yet she keeps getting distracted. As I said before, Alice is not the kind of girl who sits around and thinks. She acts! And sometimes she forgets to do a little thinking first – or a little praying, though more accurately a little listening would be in order! She prays a lot; she just doesn’t wait for an answer.

But we all forgive her that, because, if anything, Alice is a human, and who doesn’t love a human? And I know God knows that, and I believe that if we see Alice again, God will still be working with her to weed out that “I’m too busy doing whatever I think You want me to do to listen right now, God!” tendency.

I don’t want to give away spoilers, but I will say that Alice definitely ends up at a good place in her relationship with God. But, of course, we all know Miss Roth will have a happy ending (even if it’s a bit bittersweet sometimes).

The odd thing about Alice (and I think it’s realistic, too!) is that when she does stop and think (or listen, or however you want to put it), she ends up with an interesting thought, or a new way to help someone, or a new battle plan (that is actually a good one!).

I think my favorite thing to read about in At Her Fingertips was Alice’s art. She lives large (as you probably already guessed), so it’s odd and enchanting to see (well, read about, but it feels like seeing) her sketch and paint the little details when we know she’s a big-picture thinker. You can tell from Miss Roth’s descriptions that she takes time to capture each detail of the scene, whatever that may be. You can feel Alice’s talent tumbling off the pages. That scene where she absent-mindedly sketches you-know-who (read the book!) is so fantastic (I knew right then who she was gonna end up with, though she obviously wasn’t thinking about it herself or even considering his appearance … but more on that later). Also, another great way to fit in a description of a character without boring the readers.