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January 5 - November 2, 2021
Do not think of us as traffic cops, or even driving instructors. Think of us instead as your onboard navigation system, available day or night, a friendly voice to turn to whenever you look up, lost and afraid, and think “How the fuck did I end up here?”
As a writer you have only one job: to make the reader turn the page.
If your reader doesn’t care what happens next—it doesn’t.
Typically, the plot of a good novel begins by introducing a sympathetic character who wrestles with a thorny problem. As the plot thickens, the character strains every resource to solve the problem, while shocking developments and startling new information help or hinder her on the way. Painful inner conflicts drive her onward but sometimes also paralyze her at a moment of truth. She finally overcomes the problem in a way that takes the reader totally by surprise, but in retrospect seems both elegant and inevitable.
A great many plot problems that show up in unpublished manuscripts can be resolved with a single strategy. Know what the chase is, and cut to it.
not write hundreds of pages explaining why you want to tell the story you are about to tell, why the characters are living the way they are when the story begins, or what past events made the characters into people who would have that story.
Remember that this drama has to carry the reader through 300-odd pages. The central dilemma of a novel should be important enough to change someone’s life forever.
Furthermore, it should be something of broad interest.
Don’t forget that from the reader’s perspective, the main story line is what is happening to the protagonist now.
Avoid creating scenes merely as places where a character remembers or mulls over background information.
If you find yourself unable to escape a Waiting Room, look honestly at your novel and consider what the first important event is. Everything before that event can probably be cut.
(There’s only one letter’s difference between “yarn” and “yawn,” and it is often a long letter, filled with childhood memories.)
You, an author, are providing a service to the reader: the service of telling a story. When you call somebody to provide you with a service, the IT guy for example, do you want to hear everything he knows about C++ machine language, SSID encoding, and public key encryption before he tells you how to get back on line?
Pick a pivotal action scene and start your novel in the middle of it, introducing your character when he is already in the midst of some gripping conflict, to get the reader instantly involved.
Once the story has some momentum, you can pause the action to bring the reader up to date with any background information that’s necessary.
If Chip does nothing on a tropical island but describe the wonders of being on a tropical island, it is just a Waiting Room with foliage—foliage which, furthermore, the reader has already seen on the Discovery Channel, in HD.
because you create your world from scratch, everything in it is a conscious choice, and the reader will assume that there is some reason behind these choices.
if there is gum on the mantelpiece in the first chapter, it must go on something by the last chapter.
In real life, people are riddled with chronic problems that are not addressed for long periods of time, if ever. But in fiction, all problems are just the opening chords of a song.
the reader will worry about those people and expect the author to do something about it. All such problems need their own little plot arc to give the reader closure.
Often you would do better to focus your reader’s empathy on the problems of your main character.
Sometimes the author is the last to know. It is all too easy to create a love interest where none is wanted.
While real life is full of attractive people who—let’s face it—never look at you twice, protagonists live in a charmed world where it is assumed that all the attractive people they notice are already halfway to the boudoir.
Always make sure your red herring is an integral part of the story. When you perform sleight of hand, every movement should seem natural.
There is a sweet spot for every novel—the right number of characters, the right number of events—where your plot achieves a realistic complexity without requiring color-coded pages to follow it. We cannot tell you what yours is, but we can tell you what it probably is not.
Some authors cannot bear suspense. As soon as the protagonist has a problem, the author rushes in officiously to solve it.
If a problem is worth creating, it’s worth hanging on to long enough to make the reader care. Most are worth hanging on to until the very end, when all loose ends are cunningly tied together in a rousing climax.
If your hero is going to save the day through some very specialized skill late in the book, it is best to introduce that skill early on and make it a part of your character’s life.
Do not reassure your reader that everything is going to turn out all right. Sometimes even a sense of confidence in the hero can amount to a tip-off that the happy ending is a foregone conclusion.
When there is a plan, things cannot go according to it. If they do, the plan becomes a spoiler, the action becomes dull and predictable, and the reader’s plan to finish your book is what gets derailed.
God can work with the most mind-bending coincidences, far-fetched plot devices, and perverse dramatic ironies, never giving a moment’s thought to whether or not his audience will buy it. You do not have that luxury.
What might appear to the characters as amazing good luck should for the reader have a certain feeling of inevitability.
Any scene can be killed by description of every meaningless component of whatever action the character undertakes.
The Benign Tumor is a scene, chapter, or entire section of a novel that can be neatly excised without any harm to the surrounding organism.
Here everything reminds the point-of-view character of something else. It’s like trying to leave the house with someone who keeps realizing they’ve left something inside. Then something else. Then something else. With this constant application of the brakes, the plot has no chance of ever getting where it’s going.
The more baldly convenient to the author, the less chance of success.
The reader is invested in seeing the hero resolve his problems himself, and feels disappointed when he doesn’t.
if the author had said, “Oh, I just realized my plot doesn’t work, so I’m going to add something from outside of my plot, okay?”
if you are going to bring in an otherworldly, fantastic, or science-fictional element, it’s a very good idea not to wait until the last twenty pages.
So who lives in Unpublished Novelville? Many of its most prominent citizens have no traits at all. They go through the motions of the plot with the vacancy of bored minimum-wage employees.
Descriptions like these make your characters feel like stick figures. No one thinks of himself as a brown-haired man of average height.
If you’re going to tell us something about a character, tell us something that we wouldn’t have assumed on the basis of species and gender. Err on the side of specificity. Novels are seldom rejected because the characters are described too well.
Making a character think about his own looks is not that difficult. Reminders are all around us. Any encounter with the opposite sex could reasonably cause a character to reflect—knowledgeably—on his own appearance.
A single item—black jeans, a flimsy halter top—will usually do the work. The well-chosen detail is always more effective than the exhaustive inventory.
the writer’s idea that Joe’s daily routine reveals his character. But few things give less insight into a man’s soul than that he has toast for breakfast instead of the poached eggs.
The cure for the Average Day is simple: cut to the chase
All this is meant to explain what makes Joe the way he is: it is a tour of Joe. The reader, however, is not baffled by the riddle of why guys don’t commit.
generally, unpublished authors are far more intrigued by their characters’ backstory than their readers are.
Perfect people are boring. Perfect people are obnoxious because they’re better than us. Perfect people are, above all, too good to be true. Protagonists should only be as nice as everyday people are in real life.
Unless the pet is a main character—the one who’s really solving all those crimes—cut it down to one sentence, or delete.
