In case any one is interested, I just cut the first 5 chapters from book 1. It doesn’t get exciting until then. Now I need to come up with 15,000 words of a more exciting start for this book.

Why are beginnings so hard? I guess it’s because so much has to be introduced, and at the same time it has to be well written and engaging.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and working on my query has really made me see how dull the first five chapter were. Now to come up with something better.

As you may have guessed, I’m writing my query for book 1 at the moment. Why am I not working on book 2, you ask? Way back when book 2 was nothing but an overblown 4-page story(overblown by about 80 pages) I had extreme trouble with one scene. I couldn’t figure out how to get one character from one place to another. My answer was highly convenient, but I left it in because I couldn’t think of anything else. Now, I’m at that bit again, with the same problem, but this time I refuse to sully the story’s integrity by using convenience. Hence, I moved on to my query for book one while the scene simmers in my mind.

I’ve been trying to write a good query letter for about six months now. Every attempt was boring, or stagnant, or lacking emotion. Writing a query is hard. Trying to sum up what motivates your character, the conflict, the stakes, while using good wording and a unique voice (and get across some emotion) is not something that happens overnight.

Anyway, I am very happy to say, that after 5,000 words of attempting (a query is 250 words at most), I finally have a good hook:
Almost half a millennium of magically enhanced life has given Zachery an acute fear of death, and he is dying.
So that’s half the battle, right?

I feel like I’m cheating using it, because Zachery’s fear of death doesn’t really come into play until pretty late in the book. What I worry about is that an agent will read the query, love the hook, but not see it reflected in the start of the book. Ah well. I’m going to stick with it for now.

Aside: I’m changing to a post when I feel like it schedule. I’ll still try to update weekly, but those updates will be more spontaneous.

Hey, it’s Wednesday.

I have news, too. I’m 10% through the first draft of book 2. That’s why it’s been so quiet around here. I’ve been putting all my time into outlining and starting this draft.

Other writers may laugh at this, and a lot of you may wonder how I ever wrote book1 when I say this, but for the first time today, I really had to consider two character’s points of view. Unlike book1, this book has more than one POV character and the characters are completely different.

I was writing from Zan’s (whose name will change) point of view, about Zachery and while I really had to consider her reaction, I also had to think very carefully about his. Zachery is a complicated fellow and he has a way of talking and doing things that is almost opposite to the way Zan does things. When I’m writing from Zan’s point of view I have to be careful to curb my enthusiasm when it comes to Zachery’s dialogue. I’ve cut a bunch of small talk from the last scene, because while Zan is into making conversation, Zachery isn’t.

It’s a new thing for me to have to think this much about character actions. It’s a lot easier when you have one character to worry about. I wonder should I have been worried about this stuff in book1. Should this have come up before now, and because it didn’t, does that mean all the characters in book1 except for Zachery, are shallow and one dimensional?

It’s something to bear in mind for book1′s next revision.

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Shoutout

I would like to give a shout out to Nathan Bransford. He’s running an opening paragraph competition on his blog: 4th Sort-of-Annual Stupendously Ultimate First Paragraph Challenge. That post and the ones that follow are interesting.

Reading all the entries has given me a good idea of what I like in an opening paragraph, and I think I have to say that the opening of book1 does not contain the magic ingredient. I think it’s too much about the surroundings and not enough about Zachery’s wants / needs / conflict / him being an interesting character. I think I need to open with a display of recklessness.

I was reading an article about creating articles recently, where the writer said he can only write when he’s inspired. He gets an idea and if he doesn’t go with it straight away it fizzles and he stops working on it. He said he’s so driven by this wave of inspiration that if he stops in the middle, he can’t continue when he gets back to it because the inspiration is gone.

I completely understand where he is coming from, but I don’t agree with him. I used to be like him, waiting for inspiration and once it hit, sitting down for a 7 /8 / 12 hour stretch to try to get the whole story (or drawing, it used happen a lot with drawings) done before I had to stop working on it for the night. Usually if I didn’t get the piece finished by then, it never got finished. I get the impression a lot of young writers work this way.

The bad news: it doesn’t work. If you want to write a novel, you have to be able to take the inspiration and tame it so that you can use it whenever you need it. You must be able to draw that creative / excited energy out for the entire length of writing the novel, which could be a year or more. Any published author will tell you that writing a novel takes persistence and a strict schedule more than inspiration. That flash of brilliance is just enough to get you started, it’s up to you to take up the idea and carry it through to completion.

‘But how do I do that?’ you ask. Self-discipline, a good writing schedule and deep understanding of your story and characters helps. Really, you are the only one who can answer the question. I guess you need to ask yourself how much your story means to you, how strong is your desire to finish it. For me, I want to be a writer. I’ve wanted it for a long, long time. That need to be published is what keeps me going; you have to figure out what drives you, and use that to push yourself along when the inspiration wears off.

Everyone makes mistakes. I make mistakes every other sentence when I’m typing. It’s big no big deal. I hit backspace and continue on. I don’t even think of it as a mistake, really.

Mistakes in writing are a somewhat more subtle creature. If I make a mistake in the plot of chapter 1, I may not realise it was a mistake until chapter 10. By then it is a big deal to correct it. Some mistakes slip by unnoticed. I don’t notice the mistake until well into editing and I’m staring at this one scene wondering why I can’t get it to shape up properly.

I can be pretty slow to realise that I made a mistake. No one wants to admit that they are flawed. Since writing is a part of me, I find it had to see when I’ve made a mistake, or when something isn’t working. But I’ve figured out a marker or waypost that can help me find and deal with mistakes.

Spotting the Elusive Mistake

I find it very hard to spot mistakes in plot /character / conflict while I am in the middle of a draft. Editing is usually when I start to notice them. Spotting mistakes starts with a small feeling of something not being quite right. I’ve been over this scene 3 or 4 times and it’s still not working. Now, it usually takes my brain a few days to realise why this scene isn’t working out. It was a mistake, things should never have gone this way.

If you find yourself stuck or don’t know what to do next, maybe you need to ask yourself if your story is sound. You need to check for mistakes back down the plot, or maybe the mistake is in the scene you are on at the moment. Finding the mistake is the hard part. Forcing yourself to admit that something is wrong is not easy, but you’ll feel more in control of your writing and less frustrated at whatever scene isn’t working once you do.

Erase that mistake

So, you know something’s wrong. What to do now? When I make a mistake typing I don’t even think about deleting it and typing it right. It should be the exact same with writing. Delete it. Don’t think about the time you spent writing it in the first place. Accept that it is flawed and cut it out. That’s the hard part.

Now all you have to do is go again, with something that actually works. For me, this part usually goes very smoothly. I know what’s wrong and I know what I have to do to fix it. I usually spend a lot more time agonising over the mistake than I do rewriting it.

The next time you get stuck and have no idea why, think of this post. I hope it helps.

I’m not doing Nanowrimo this year (reason at the end of this post), but I would like to wish all the people who are participating luck. Keep at it, no matter how bad you think your novel is. I’ve done Nano a few times, and what I’ve realised is that Nano isn’t about writing something good. It’s about writing something vaguely resembling the story you want to tell. It’s a head start on draft1. It’s about getting rid of the obstacle presented by a blank page.

It’s much easier to work with something you already have than to write from scratch. It took me three tries of Nano to figure this out. My first attempt I wanted to get perfect. My second attempt was a kind of personal curiosity (it turns out that writing 50,000 words while on a 6 week camping road trip isn’t a good idea). The third try was about getting the story down, no matter how bad it was. And it worked as well as it was meant to.

The story I wrote is appalling. The writing is atrocious. The plot is nothing but a group of scenes strung together by the flimsiest of threads. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I know what works and what doesn’t work. I know my characters’ motivations, and I have a better idea of how the plot should resolve.

Better still, it means that when I sit down to write the book properly, I don’t have to face a blank page. I already have a framework, no matter how bad it might be. And for that, I will always be an advocate of Nanowrimo.

* * *

The reason I’m not doing Nano this year is because I’m in the middle of moving house. That’s why there was no post last week and why there will be no post next week. In fact, this day next week, I will be on a plane to America. I’m excited, but the move has meant that I’ve done no writing at all in the last two weeks (it feels like two months), and I probably won’t do any for a few weeks after we arrive (I’ll be too busy getting used to my new surroundings).

I’ve mentioned the things I’m working on in other posts, but I figured I should dedicate an entry to getting everything straight. Let’s start with what I’m working on right now.

For the last few years, I’ve been writing a fantasy that centres around Zachery and his attempts to save the world from itself. It’s rather magic-heavy, and I like to think it’s a pretty fast paced adventure.

Artificer

I started writing it the summer I finished college (2006). I used the snowflake method to draw up progressively longer outlines. The outline I ended up working from was 23 pages, and included headings like POV Character, Characters Present, emotional angle, description, chapter number. It was divided into 80 scenes, or so. November of that year I started writing draft 1 and by the end of the month I had 55,000 words. (Thank you NaNoWriMo.) It took me a full two years to write the other 70,000 words. (One year of that involved travelling around the world.)

April of 2008, I started editing the horrid mess that was the first draft of my book. It was called The Fall back then. The Fall is a horribly cliché title, so you can imagine what the story was like. Not wanting to face a rewrite (and not really understanding that I needed to rewrite) I messed around with it a bit, tweaking paragraphs, changing a few things here and there.

By September of 2009, I had made very little progress. I sat down one day and made a schedule for the next 6 months. I wanted a good story by March 2010. One that was unique, exciting, infinitely better than what I had. Even though it had taken me a year and a half to face the fact that I needed to rewrite most of the book, it was the best decision I made. March came around and I had something better. Not amazing yet, but good. The feedback I got made me face the problems that still existed. So, I took another 3 months and came out with draft 3.

I’m now on draft 3.2 and have a query letter that I’m still not happy with. I haven’t sent it out to any agents yet, because it makes the book sound boring. So, that’s my current situation.

Familiar

When I was still in college, I had this idea for a short story. Two girls whose lives get really strange when a demon shows up at their door. I imagined it would be about 3 or 4 pages. I wrote it by hand in a yellow page notebook. 188 pages later it was finished. It took me the whole college year to write, September 2005 to May 2006. I originally wanted to write this story as a graphic novel, but I don’t have the same persistence to stick with a bit of art that I do for a bit of writing. Zachery was the bad guy in this story. I liked him so much, I gave him his own trilogy. This story is book 2 of the trilogy. At the moment it is only 32,000 words, so it needs quite a bit of work.

Fiendling

Book 3. I wrote this for NaNoWriMo 2008. Like my first NaNo attempt, I got to 50,000 words and just stopped. I stopped in the middle of a sentence, no less. This book is half written, and it is terrible. It is probably the worst 50,000 words I have ever written. I imagine I’ll be tearing it to pieces and rewriting 95% of it. The good thing is that rewriting Artificer has given me loads of ideas for this book. So I’m actually enthusiastic about getting to it – after I’ve done some serious work with Familiar.

2000 and Beyond (Before?)

I’ve also been working on a thief/magic adventure since I was about 12. I’d written about 10,000 words when I lost the file and had to start again. I did start again, and wrote 4,000 new, better words. I imagine I’ll be rewriting the whole thing again, though. I actually think it needs a whole new re-imagining. It think it’s a bit too straight-forward as it is at the moment. I’ve come to be wary of ‘quest-type’ fantasies (it’s easy to fall into clichés with them), and this was ‘quest’ at it’s most unimaginative.

So there you have it. My writing life all neat and summed up.

I’m not sure if there will be a post next week. I’m going away and can’t guarantee I’ll be at a computer / have the inspiration to write.

I have had problems with my opening scene since I wrote it. Until now, I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it. I knew that it wasn’t good enough, and that was all. I read back over it today (looking for inspiration for my query letter) and I realised that the opening scene is utterly stagnant. Nothing at all happens. There is no action.

Make Things Happen

This is my personal preference but, I love books that open with action. I can’t stand a lengthy description where nothing at all is happening*. An opening that shows the main character dealing with a serious problem lets readers see his personality so much better. They instantly feel like they can relate (or not) to your main character based on the way he reacts and deals with the situation.

Now, I’m not saying open with a battle or a deadly fight. You can, but when I say action, I mean anything at all that brings the plot forward in time.

Examples

Your character is in a situation, say someone has just broken into his home. In a static opening, your character will stay where they are but he might look around, listen to the noises around him, and think about someone invading his privacy. He might also think about the people he knows, and try to figure out why this is happening. Has someone he knows let themselves into his house?

All this is fine, but all of it together at the start of a book is a bit much. There’s probably not going to be enough to keep a reader interested.

Take the same opening and straight away move your character from where he is. Immediately time comes into play and it feels like the plot is moving forward. This is what you want. You want readers to get a sense that something is happening. If you open with action, you have your character move through the house and confront whoever has broken in. Or, have him flee in fear. He should react as is appropriate for his character, but he should do something.

Things happen in Time

Time is the key to action. If you ask yourself, ‘Does time move forward in this scene?’ and if the answer is, ‘Yes,’ then you should have a scene that contains action. The only time this might not be true is if you have a montage kind of thing where you are showing time passing, but very little is happening.

Thoughts and description don’t happen in time. All thoughts and description stop the story. And you don’t want to start your book being stopped. Start in full sprint and you’ll have a better chance of catching your readers up in your momentum.

- – - – - -

*except the opening to the Belgariad, where Eddings is going on about Garion’s childhood – I like that opening. But that opening is so chock full of emotion and description it’s hard not to like it.

As a writer, I like to think I control everything about my story. The truth is, I control very little.

As soon as someone reads my story, I have lost all control of it. Every person who reads my story will render it differently. Names will change, both of people and places. Locations will look different. Even characters’ personalities will shift considerably. I no longer control the story, the reader does.

They invent my world all over again, using my words as a template. What they see in their mind as they read my words is not the same thing that I saw in my mind as I wrote the words. Where I see the main character as determined, they might see him as egotistical. Where I pronounce words with long vowels, they use short. I can do nothing about this.

My story doesn’t exist until someone reads it. I need readers to manifest my world and my stories. This is where things get dangerous. With all of us having control over the world, some people might expect things to go a certain way. If they see a character as strong, they expect him to do heroic things. If he does not act in accordance with their picture of him, they will be disappointed. It’s my responsibility, as the progenitor of the work, to give a clear template upon which readers can create the story.

How do I do this? By writing clearly, by giving my readers time to form a picture of each character and setting before I introduce more of them; by keeping things simple, by explaining the way things work and sticking within the rules.

I want to add, for the writers out there, your view of your world is no more right or valid than that of your readers. If they see the main character as egotistical, then he is egotistical. Don’t try to tell readers they are wrong, because they are not wrong. Everyone who reads the story creates the world, and they are all right.

In the words of Umberto Eco, “The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.”

This is more of a note to self:

When moving on to a new draft be careful to save the file with a different number at the end. When I went from draft 3 to draft 3.1, I didn’t bother to create a new file. I figured the changes I was making would be small, a word here, a line there. Oh no. I rewrote whole paragraphs, deleting bits without considering that I might want to reuse some of the stuff I was deleting.

So, writers (and self), when you are starting a new draft, even if you think it is a simple proofread, please save a new file.

Numbering revisions

I usually save the large numbers for full rewrites. So the difference between draft 1 and 2 is pretty extreme, as is the difference between draft 2 and 3. I’ve pretty much nailed down the plot in draft 3, so revisions from now on will be 3.1, 3.2, etc. That is, until I decide I’ve changed enough of the core plot that it needs to be called draft 4. I don’t think that will happen any time soon.

Right – short post this week. I’ll have something a little more thoughtful next week.