Most every writer’s heard of scene and sequel. Jack Bickham’s Elements of Fiction Writing is some of the best instruction on novel structure out there. But he, and I today, aren’t merely talking about plot. The key is to apply structure principles to your characters every step of the way. Because, as Robert McKee tells us, plot IS character.
I’ve studied with both these masters. Bickham, in addition to devouring his books, I bought a workshop series from and wish I’d had the chance to hear him in person before his death. McKee, who isn’t dead but some who attended the three-day scriptwriting seminar attended most likely wished him so, was worth the money and travel expense ten times over, given what I walked away from his course better understanding about the real source of good writing.
It’s character.All the plot rules, setting rules, structure rules, symbol rules, and any other thing that someone’s tried to make you think is most important to story, is actually about CHARACTER. Because your story is about character. Each scene and its sequel, each element and act and conflict and motivation… It’s all about character.
If you want to write, write. If you want to publish, prepare to work your ass off getting very, very good at your writing.This business is all about soul. And I’m not just talking about your unique, creative voice–though that’s incredibly important, too. Today, I’m talking about grit. Stick it out, find your own way, stop waiting for everyone else to make this crazy business sensible and welcoming and easy, G-R-I-T.
I write my books; I edit for other authors. I’m close to offering my first two book contracts for Entangled Publishing. After publishing 16 novels of my own and reading countless propsals others have written over the years, all I know for sure is, this is all about soul.
Have you been rejected (like me)? Figure out if you have what it takes to get up the next morning and start over from nothing–because every published author must do that each and every time they meet a deadline.
Do you have a day job (like me)? Buckle down and accept that your personal life off the clock belongs first to the book you need to finish, not your hobbies and social (media) life–because the majority of published authors don’t make enough off their writing to support their families, so we’re all hoofing it to make ends meet while trying to stay creative in the dark hours of early morning.
Do you have a busy family (like me)? Love them and care for them, the tell them your entire life doesn’t revolve around them and they’re going to have to take care of themselves the 1,2,3 hours a day that you devote to your writing. Otherwise, they’ll consume you (and maybe that’s what you want, if family is the excuse you’re making daily for not creating new words).
Have you been dealing with an illness (like me)? Deal with it, by all means, your health is everything. But for Dog’s sake, knock off saying your illness is responsible for you not moving forward in your writing. I don’t mean to be insensitive or unkind, but whatever your condition is, I assure you I can find others who’ve managed to succeed battling far worse circumstances–because they refused to quit.
Soul is the thing that lives and breathes inside us, regardless of the piles of s**t raining down on our worst days.(more…)
What challenges us emotionally in life, challenges our novel writing. What we’re best at in life, becomes what we look forward to most in our writing process. I teach this dynamic all the time–and I live it. If you’re a seat-of-the-pants writer, it wouldn’t be a coincidence if you’re not a list maker or a planner in the “real” world.” If you LOVE to revise (like me), it’s likely that analyzing things and breaking them into their orderly parts is you everyday zen (at least it’s something that doesnt’ drive you nuts the way it seems to for everybody else).
Flip that around. If the unknown scares you, and you tend to plan for likely outcomes before you embark on a journey, drafting a new novel won’t make you warm and fuzzy (I tend to call the feeling a blank Page 1 invokes in me abject terror, but that might be a bit extreme for the rest of you.)
But if you’re the wanderer, dreaming of a backpacking trip through Europe where you merely have a start point and a destination and you’ll figure out pesky details like lodging and food and transpo along the way, well…you’re nuts! Eh-hem. What I meant to say is that I suspect writing blind into a new story is a mighty lovely place for you. Until you hit The End, and have to go back and break things down into their parts, rework your rough draft pieces into a better whole, then knit everything back together (which anal retentive, geeky analytical girls like me tend to think of as Nirvana ;o).
My point to my students is never that either one or the other of these approahces is bad, in either life or writing. But that it’s best to know your strengths and weaknesses and to play one up, while compensating for the other. If it takes you forever to write a draft (to the point that you revise and revise and revise your first 100 pages while never writing the rest of the novel), take a look at why. If you can’t “make” yourself go back and revise a first draft because all the fun’s gone out of the story for you now that you know how it ends, and the idea of working with it anymore makes you nauseous, take a look at why.
“Being practical, yet innovative…” A friend and freelance client emailed that sentiment to me during an exchange about the beautiful novel I’m helping her take apart and revise. I’m pushing her to dig deep. She’s wanting to keep as much as possible of the beautiful inspiration that drove her to write in the first place. And she should–as long as the reader feels equally inspired to devour her beautiful words. Which is what revision is all about, and what makes it so hard and time consuming, and why the majority of those who attempt to publish never make it to a book contract–it’s VERY hard to craft a story that readers will love half as much as you did when you first envisioned it.
Let me repeat. Rewriting a manuscript until it’s reader-ready is hard. Brutal. Seldom pretty, at least at first. And it takes time.To analyze. Re-evaluate. Re-focus. And only then, to revise what you’ve already painstakingly completed. The process takes a creative artist out of her comfort zone and dumps her into the hell of picking apart word and character and theme and plot choices, drilling deeper until the true meaning and purpose of each piece is (effortlessly) crystal clear to a reader.
This isn’t a post on the method and technique of revision. I’ve done that already, so scroll back through How We Write, or attend one of the half-dozen workshops I’m already scheduled to give this year, the majority of which will include a discussion of rewriting. This is a blog about attitude. Fortitude. Determination to maintain your unique writer’s voice, while doing the writer’s day-to-day job of reaching others through story.
If you can’t commit to doing that, once it’s made very clear to you how hard and uncomfortable and unpleasant that part of your job can be, then that successfully published novel of your dreams won’t become a reality, no matter how wonderful your original idea might have been. I fact, it’s that very commitment to making your story everything it should be that protects that innovation bursting to live through your imagination.
By successful, I mean a story that reaches into readers hearts and souls and pulls out the best and worst of who they are, all while you’re transporting them to a fictional place that existed only in your mind before they began reading your words. (more…)
Without conflict, your story has no forward momentum. Your characters have no motivation to act. There’s no goal they can’t achieve. So, in commercial fiction at least, there’s no reader engagement, no matter how well what you’ve written is, well, written. For lack of a better analogy, you need combustion that will lead the reader to expect some future explosion that’ll keep them on the hook through the rest of the wonderful things you plan to do.
And I’m not just talking about suspense plots.In addition to writing (and now editing) romantic suspense as well as crafting sci-fi/fantasies that are full-on thrillers, I also write home and family dramas (straight contemporary romance) where the same level of escalating conflict and tension must still exist, in order for the reader to care enough to turn the page.
Conflict is how readers identify with your characters. It’s how the story transports the reader through a purely fictional journey. How deeply do the dilemmas you put the protagonist through resonate? How carefully do you craft the internal motivation and goals and tension the character must resolve, and are there external factors (anchors and stumbling blocks) that drive that person to do and behave and learn and grow and fail and, ultimately, succeed?
Conflict IS NOT petty arguments and bickering between the leads.(more…)
Yes, I have five different book proposals in the works (four of them with my agent or with publishers, waiting for acquisition, finger’s crossed), but I’m also stretching my more technical/editorial muscles in new, exciting directions–I’ve been hired as an Acquiring Editor for the NEW Dead Sexy romantic suspense line at Entangled Publishing.
And today’s the launch/announcement of our new baby!
If you know Nina, as I do, you’ll be as excited as I am by this announcement. She and I and our other newly hired editor Susan Meier are already working with authors and thrilling stories you’re going to love, come the May launch of Dead Sexy. What a great team, including our managing editor, Vicki Wilkerson!
The Dead Sexy editors were successful, award-winning, best selling authors first. All of us.Now we’re following our passion for teaching and nurturing and helping other writers fulfill their publishing dreams.
We at Dead Sexy strive to be the exciting home every successful romantic suspense author is dying to have. And Entangled is a digital-first publisher that puts authors first. An amazing partnership from the get-go!
Now that you know what’s kept me away from regular blog posts these last few months, let me say it’s great to be back. I couldn’t be happier about the horizon before me ;o)
Secret Legacy is finally here! I can honestly say that no other book has captured so much of my fascination and imagination. Those of who who’ve been following the blog for a while know this truly has become the book of my heart in so many meaningful ways.
Check out all the cool stuff that’s happening. Help me celebrate! There’s something for everyone.
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Dark Legacy, Book 1 in the Legacy series, is a FREE EBOOK May 2nd – May 9th. Grab your copy of the digital download. Begin the psychic fantasy journey from the very beginning, at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Borders and Diesel Books. Then look for the .99 cent promotion from May 9th – May 23rd, and the $2.99 promotion from May 23rd-June 6th.
The REAL secret to writing best selling novels… That’s what Jenni and I are talking about on How We Write. And what we’re saying is, THERE IS NO SHORT CUT. Eh-hem. Sorry, didn’t realize I was yelling.You might have noticed by now that this sort of thing torks me a bit. Folks who give/sell sure-fired advice, keys to the kingdom, THE WAY to your published Eden. They don’t often work. They tend to demotivate over time, not lead us closer to our overall objective–success.
Too often once you follow these ten easy steps, you realize there’s nothing of substance on the other side. And the guru you’ve gotten the list from has mysteriously moved on to giving advice like “how to be the most popular tweeter on the planet,” and you begin to realize that this person’s objective is to give advice. Because THAT’S what he/she thinks will make them a best selling author. God forbid that the person giving advice about writing personally follow through on any of what he/she’s saying and get back to writing novels themselves.
I exaggerate. There’s some great advice out there, and you should soak it all in. But always remember that this is work. This isn’t a race. And you can’t force your way into being “successful” at it by following a set of rules that promises to be the answer to all your problems.
We’re not selling quick and easy in HoWW. We’re talking about our processes (because Jenni’s is different than mine), and how you need to discover your own. We spent a month exploring what character means to a real, in-progress novel. March has been about plotting and structure, and Jenni wraps up the discussion by touching once more on narrative structure, and going just a little deeper than before. But she’s also ranting, like me ;o) Because the point we try to make in each post is that narrative structure and conflict lock and character plotting and so forth are just frameworks in which your story needs to work. They’re NOT your story, and too many people will tell you differently, and that gets us cranky.
Your story is what happens on the page and in the reader’s mind, once the list of things that makes a good story, mechanically, are taken care of.(more…)
Jenni made one thing clear about Conflict Lock last week: the conflict box seems simple enough, but when you try to chart conflict without motivation, which is essential to drill to the core of what drives your external story, things can get tricky. Lets get right to some examples to illustrate what we mean (review our posts from last week again here and here if you need to catch up), then I’ll wrap things up at the end of the post and get back to talking about what’s MOST important…character ;o)
My first pass at the conflict box for my WIP was a fail:
Pretty good, right?
But notice the amount of yadda yadda. Never a good sign in a chart that’s supposed to be very simple. (more…)
Jenni’s going to explain the Conflict Box over on her blog today. HoWW is all about plot this month, and it’s time to get serious about the external conflict that drives story and our critiques. And unless you lock and load your protagonist’s central goal and what stops him/her from achieving that goal, your plot won’t believably propel the protagonist or the reader through the story.
You can tell from Jenni’s and my last two posts, that plot isn’t my drafting happy place. Character is. But, as I’ll be teaching once again this weekend with the Central New York Romance Writers Mini-Con, character IS plot. Your two lead characters (the protagonist and antagonist) must have external goals that are in conflict with each other, in every scene/chapter/act of the story, or you’re not crafting characters that will drive each other to grow and change on the page. And, the part I like best, those external goals and conflicts must derive from who these people are as characters BEFORE you create the on-the-page situations and obstacles that get in the characters way.
A hard and fast rule: the protagonist’s goal must drive the antagonist’s conflict in your story, and vice versa. Think of it in revers–if the antagonist of your novel isn’t complicating your protagonist’s race to achieve his goal, you don’t have much of a story, right? No matter how beautifully drawn your characters are, you won’t have the core external conflict that will keep a reader turning pages to see what happens next. (more…)
