WiP Wednesday – Excerpt from Blood – Autumn Pixies!

It’s tricky to find excerpts from Blood I can share with you that don’t contain too many spoilers! This is a nice scene for October, since the autumn pixies show up to pester Dindi….

“The slender girls wore crunchy skirts of fall leaves…” (Art by Anne Stokes)

Do You Need To Know How Your Book Will End Before You Begin?

Looking back at all the on all the books I’ve started, I noticed that some stories I never managed to get further than a few chapters. I’ve accumulated dozens of Chapters One through Three on a particular tale I’ve been struggling over on and off for years. What’s wrong with these stories? What makes them different from the ones I started and finished?

It’s not that I never struggled with the books I eventually finished. Often I left them and came back multiple times. But I realized that there was a crucial difference. The stories I was able to come back to were the stories whose ending I already knew.

The mechanics of getting to that ending might have stumped me for a while. But even if I had to switch my car for a plane a few times, I knew my destination. I knew the payoff. That’s what kept me going.

I try always to begin a novel with the end in mind. The end may change along the journey, but at the start, I find knowing where I’m headed is crucial.

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Pancake Sunday Advice on Novel Writing

It’s pancake Sunday and we’ve got the whole gang, kids and cousins, here to chow, so this will be a sweet stack with some bacon on the side! And what the heck does that mean?

Moving on to writing rules…  Rules?! We don’t need no stinkin’ rules! But I love ’em anyway. As we approach NaNo, it’s time to start scouring the new and the bookshelf for the best advice out there. Here’s some insights I thought were spot on (the numbering is off). Visit the blog to read the whole thing:

1. I outline, but my outlines vary; I’ve written novels of 90K words where the outline was 30K in itself. I’ve written novels with 500 word outlines that have come in at 120K. The purpose of the outline is to map the journey in my opinion, but it is not the law.

Oh, outlines? Hello, YES. I mentioned a while ago I was experimenting with a “rich outline” that’s almost more like a draft for Book 6. How has that been working out? Extremely well, as it happens. It’s no panacea. I was a little worried that writing such a detailed outline, which was almost a draft, would just make me feel like I’d finished that part (see below for my problem with this) and like I didn’t want to revisit the material.

I did suffer a bit of that, but you know what? I revisit material all the time, and I had to revisit it a lot more with my other method, to the point where I’d become so sick of it I couldn’t work on the novel anymore. So far… this is better.

1. A hard and fast rule for ‘scenes-per-chapter’ is outside my purview. Rather, I approach chapters with an eye towards “what must be accomplished here?” This applies to character as well as plot/story. Each chapter is a brick in the road, in this sense. Not knowing the purpose of a chapter, in my opinion, leads to a bad chapter that you end up deleting later.
    
2. If you’re looking for some very literal advice, I would make a point of setting a word-count/day – something you can meet, but something that will test you. Then write that much each day. Not less, sometimes more.

   And don’t stop your day’s work at the end of a chapter, or the end of a scene, or even, if you can help it, at the end of a sentence. Leave yourself hanging. To mix metaphors, the element of the unresolved chord will bring you back into the work that much faster, especially if you’ve begun your work by rereading your previous day’s writing.

I’ll be honest, this last one doesn’t enthuse me, but I’ve heard it before, so it’s probably one of those things that depend on your personality. I’m not sure it would be a good idea for me. My worst habit is to leave things a little undone at the end but treat it as though it were finished, so I suspect that if I left a chapter dangling… it would continue to dangle as I just raced past it the next day. In fact, I know that would happen, because, due to completely unreasonable demands of my family, like dinner. (Seriously, what’s up with dinner having to happen every day? Wouldn’t every other day be fine?)

1. Final piece of advice? Scare yourself – not in the sense of writing something that gives you the creeps, but in the sense of pushing your boundaries; if you can write something that makes your own heart race or ache, the odds are you can give that same emotion to the reader. Don’t go easy – not on yourself, and never on your characters.

Ironically, stretching yourself as a writer can get harder once you’re published. You suddenly feel like every time you change clothes, you’re doing it in the middle of a crowd. So it’s tempting to just wear the same thing rather than risk public nakedness. As soon as I figure out how to combat that, I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, if you’re not published yet, and you fear that no one will ever read the book you’re writing, cherish that. Just think how freeing it is. No one need ever read the book you’re writing! You can write whatever you want.

Should Writers Blog About Writing?

Here’s the problem with writers who blog. What should we blog about? It seems like we’re always being told what NOT to blog about. To wit, you may be have received advice like this:

1.) Don’t write about yourself. No one wants to hear about what you had for breakfast, or your cat’s vet appointment.

2.) Don’t write about writing. That appeals to other writers–not to your readers.

3.) Don’t write about politics or other incendiary topics. That will alienate half or more of your audience.

If you take this advice seriously, the first thing you’ll notice is that most other writers don’t.

There are highly successful writers (who are also highly successful bloggers), like David Brin and John Scalzi, who blog about whatever stuff they want, including politics. There are gobs of other great bloggers, like Michelle Davidson Argyle, Lindsey Buroker and Joe Konrath, who write about writing. There are others who blog on specialty interests which have nothing to do with the books. Deb Harkness had a wine blog; Jodi Meadows blogs about knitting. Davin Malasaran blogs about the important question What’s Davin Eating? (It often includes updates about what his dog Peanut is eating too–sometimes the answer is books. See? Related to books after all.)

So, as usual the advice is only half right. Don’t be too quick to dismiss that half, however. I think a good rule of thumb for blogs is the same as for novels: begin as you mean to go on. If you feel like having a blog about your breakfast, just remember, you have to maintain that. If you’re going to talk about politics, you better have something insightful, not just something inciteful, to say. And do it regularly.

What doesn’t work well is to have a blog about cooking and then randomly thrown a post in about writing, and then another post about the presidential debate. Your regular readers will be wondering, What is this crap?  Consistency of topic is more important than what the topic is.

There’s only one thing more important than consistency, and that’s passion. Duh, right? It’s great to do your research into the perfect blog that will attract 20,000 readers per day, but if you have no actual passion for that topic, you’ll end up burning out quickly. And guess what? It’s better to have a blog on a specialty topic that you post to frequently than a blog on a super-popular topic that… has no posts.

Finally, for fiction writers, we need to remember that blogging is not our main form of writing. My novels come first. If I have to neglect my blog for a week, a month or a year, to finish a novel, I’m not going to apologize for it. (We have all been there, right? “Sorry I haven’t blogged in a while…”)

So here are my three “rules” for a fun blog:

1.) Blog about something you love.

2.) Begin as you mean to go on. Pick a main topic, plus a few related things you’re willing to branch out to sometimes, and stick with that.

3.) Don’t let your blog writing overshadow or squeeze out the time you spend on your other writing.

What actually happens for me is that when I’m going strong on my novel, I’m also usually more interested writing posts for my blog too. When I’m too depressed to write my novel, I’m usually too depressed to write  anything. Or do anything. (It’s not pretty.) When I’m excited about writing, I want to not only write scenes but write about writing scenes.

And that’s why I write about writing. I know a lot of my readers aren’t interested in the scaffolding behind the scenes, and I have no problem with that. But I don’t see my blog as just a big advertisement for my books. Sure, it’s part of the whole “doing social media” blah blah blah that writers, and everyone these days, is “supposed” to do. But if that were it’s only purpose, I couldn’t keep it up. I’m not much good at doing what I’m supposed to do. (This is one thing Dindi and I have in common.) I write about issues that are actually interesting to me. I give “writing advice” not because I think I’m such an expert (oh, I should have warned you about that) but because I am learning about it myself. As I figure something out (or think I have) I like to write about my process of discovery.  Then you’ll see some post about first chapters or subtext in dialogue pop up on my blog.  😉

Also, readers of mine who do read this blog… be happy if you see a lot of posts. It means I’m going strong on the next book….

Why Does Your First Chapter Suck?

When all else fails, add pixie dust.

 
The first chapter is the door to the rest of the book. The first chapter is a fist of firsts: first sentence, first hook, first introduction to the cast of characters, first goal, first twist, first turn, and first cliffhanger.

Newbie writers know this, and try to stuff everything into the first chapter.

And it sucks big time.

So what went wrong?

The newbie scratches her head, and re-reads one or two famous books in her genre and discovers … HEY! What the heck? Mr. Famous Writer didn’t put in any of that stuff about Theme and Setting and Backstory That Makes You Love The Character, and so on. What’s going on?

There are four possibilities.

1. Mr. Famous Writer has banked on previous successes but made a hash of it this time, out of laziness.

2. Mr. Famous Writer’s book succeeded despite, not because of, the first chapter.

3. Mr. Famous Writer knows how to break the rules in a way that still works—and in a way that Newbie Writers would be better off not trying yet.

4. Mr. Famous Writer did in fact follow all (or most) the rules of a good first chapter and simply did it so well that one doesn’t notice.

Newbie Writers always want to believe (1) or (2). Sometimes, they’ll grudgingly grant (3). But almost always, the Correct Answer is (4). The first chapter of the famous book in fact does do exactly what a first chapter should, but so smoothly and subtly – or so blatantly and obviously – that somehow the Newbie Writer can’t believe it.

When I say, “Newbie Writer,” I mean, “Guilty as Charged.” I’ve been there, done that, and I’m trying to learn better. With that in mind, I’m going to be looking at the first chapters of several well-known books in my genre (fantasy), to see what the author did, and why it worked. It’s quite possible, in fact, inevitable, that not everything in the first chapter (or book) worked for every reader. It’s easy, but stupid, to be dismissive when something obviously did capture thousands, even millions of readers.

What works? What makes a first chapter into the kind of door that invites the reader further into the book?

I’d say there are five “Firsts” that must be introduced — and must be awesome — to add up to a great first chapter:

1. The First Sentence
2. The First Hook
3. The First Character
4. The First Exposition
5. The First Twist

How those five things are handled will determine (or, at any rate, should determine) the tone and structure of the rest of the book.

The Goddess of Dance

Today I’m thrilled to join Anna Kashina‘s blog tour for her newest novel, The Goddess of Dance.