Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

Several of you had excellent comments on my post from yesterday.

Mick noted that he uses GMail as a free online storage system. He just zips up various files (so they’ll be tidy and small) and mails them to his own GMail account. I know a number of other novelists who do the same. It’s a good idea.

Lynda asked what I meant about buying back my book from my publisher. When a book goes out of print, the publisher is relinquishing all rights to publish the book. (It’s actually a little more complicated than that–there is often some sort of time span during which they can bring it back into print, depending on how your contract is written.) They will typically offer you any remaining books in their warehouse at dirt-cheap prices. They will also offer the art-work and the electronic files of the text, in case you want to republish the book yourself. This generally costs around 100 bucks, and is worth it, in my opinion. This was what I was referring to in my post.

Karri claimed that DOUBLE VISION is just about the best book ever written. Thanks, Karri! I guess I owe you a fee for that endorsement. It was a fun book to write, and I hope it’s a fun book to read. One of the main characters has Asperger’s Syndrome. One of my writer friends is a clinical psychologist, and after she read DOUBLE VISION, she asked if I have Asperger’s. I took that as a compliment. I don’t have Asperger’s, but I know perfectly well what it’s like to not be a Normal.

A few closing thoughts on organization: I’m not naturally very organized. I made it through high school and halfway through college living my life pretty randomly. When I hit upper-division physics in college, I had a professor for several courses who was probably the most meticulous person alive. And I learned from him that if I was going to get anywhere in physics (or anything else) I had to learn how to write neatly, to take good notes, to put dates on papers so I’d know when they were written, and all sorts of other things.

I’m still not great at keeping things tidy. My desk is NEVER all squared away and clean, but I’ve learned to periodically take a few minutes and put away some of the mess. If I don’t, then inevitably my productivity goes down and down until I can’t get anything done.

Those of you who listened to the “Clean Up Your Act” teleseminars that I did with Allison Bottke know that Allison is super-good at keeping things organized, and that she doesn’t come by it naturally–she has ADD and is totally right-brained and if she didn’t constantly stay on top of the mess, she wouldn’t be able to get ANYTHING done. Allison is a poster girl for the idea that good organization can be learned by anybody.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk some about time-management, which seems to be a common bugaboo for most writers. For the past year, I’ve been working hard at learning to use my time effectively, and I have a few thoughts on the matter.

Thanks to everyone who wished me and my wife happy anniversary yesterday. We did have a good one.

I promised to talk today about how to manage all those pesky drafts of your novel on your hard drive. It’s really not complicated. The idea is that you always want to be able to get hold of any version of your novel, and yet not have the old stuff clogging up the new.

I organize my hard drive as follows. In my Documents folder, I have three main subfolders:
1) Archives
2) Friends
3) Personal

The Archives folder contains stuff from years ago–anything that I’m not currently working on or likely to work on ever again. I back this up to CD periodically, and also back it up to my iPod every few months, or whenever I move a bunch of new data to it. This folder doesn’t change very often, and the only changes I make are to add new stuff.

The Friends folder contains anything that friends send me that needs short term storage. Mostly, it contains electronic versions of novels. I don’t back this up at all. My feeling is that people only send me stuff that they have backed up all over the place. And it’s usually just rough drafts of things.

The Personal folder contains all my current stuff, including email, financial stuff, web sites, internet products, consulting jobs. And it also contains a special folder called Books. This is a very important folder. It holds all the books I’ve ever written and anything I’m working on now.

I back up the Personal folder to my iPod, but then I also back up certain of the other folders elsewhere as redundant backup. For example, I have a folder named “Critical Records” that contains all my financial stuff, such as tax records, etc. This gets backed up to a USB Flash Drive that I carry in my pocket all the time. I also back it up to online storage.

The Books folder is quite large, and is backed up to online storage. When I start a new book, I create a new folder inside the Books folder. For example, for my novel DOUBLE VISION, I have a folder named “Double Vision”. Inside that folder, I have a bunch of other folders.

One of those folders is named “Snowflake” and contains a Snowflake analysis of the book. (Actually, several Snowflake documents, since I produce several, and I update them as the story develops.)

There is another folder named “Proposal” which contains every version of the proposal for the book.

There is another folder named “Research” where I save all the online research for the book, including web archives, pictures, spreadsheets, pictures, etc.

Now we get to the point of today’s blog post. There are also several folders named “Draft 1″, “Draft 2″, etc. Each of these contains a series of Word documents. I use a naming convention that will make sure the files are in order. For this book, the naming convention is: “Double Vision Part1.doc”, etc. The book has four parts, so there are four documents.

Some of the folders have comments that my critiquers sent me for that draft. For example, The “Draft 4″ folder has the Word document for the draft, along with a couple of folders for the two critiquers who reviewed this draft.

Now that the book is out of print, there is a new folder named “Out of Print Docs” that contains the electronic version of the text that I bought back from the publisher. If and when I decide to republish this book using some sort of POD service, I can easily find the files I need.

Here is my procedure for doing revisions. When I write the first draft, I write it straight through and save the files in the “Draft 1″ folder. When it’s done and I’m ready to start revising, I duplicate the folder, rename the copy to be “Draft 2″ and delete any files inside it that are irrelevant to the task of revision. Then I just start revising the Word files in “Draft 2,” secure in the knowledge that I have a copy of “Draft 1″ elsewhere.

As noted, I backup my Books folder to multiple places–my iPod and my online storage service. When I leave the house, if I’m not taking my laptop, I take the iPod. If the house burns down, I’ll have either the laptop or the iPod AND I’ll have the Books info redundantly saved online somewhere. Call me over-cautious, but my books are important to me, and I want to make sure that it’ll take an Xtremely bad run of luck to lose all copies.

… to my wife.

Yes, today is our 25th anniversary, so I am blogging early today.

I’ll tune in again tomorrow with some comments on how I organize my novels on my hard drive so I always know where everything is and can always retrieve it.

See y’all tomorrow!

After yesterday’s post on how to start your story, several of you left interesting comments, but none more so than Camille:

The sound of paper shredding, a toilet flushing. Five months of her life, like refuse, gone.

Randy sez: I worked on my first novel for two and a half YEARS, then realized that it had a major problem that would prevent it from ever getting published. So I flushed it and started a new one.

That flush was metaphorical, by the way. Of course no writer EVER throws anything away, right folks? We keep it, because it might come in useful. Fact is, I flushed the next novel too. Then I finished the next one (but it never got published). Then I started a sequel, which I never finished. But . . . here’s the point:

There was one particular scene in that sequel that I liked a lot. Years later, when I was working on my novel RETRIBUTION, (which DID get published), I needed that scene. I went back and found it and reworked it a bit and used it. It’s one of my favorite scenes in RETRIBUTION.

Never throw anything away! And never let those voices in your head tell you that your time was wasted.

Here is the truth: no time you ever spend writing is wasted. You might spend years working on a novel that never gets published, but it might well be a necessary stepping stone on the way to publishing something else. Something better. That has been my experience.

I bet a number of you have experienced this too. Any examples, folks? Was there ever anything you wrote that seemed to have been a total waste — but later on you realized that it was a stepping stone to something else?

Thanks for all the comments on yesterday’s post. Those of you who read this blog, don’t neglect the comments!

Christophe wrote:

On the other hand, you have to grip your reader early and fast, making them so interested in your story or characters that they will keep reading. If you don’t start your novel with the main story line and add a ’smaller’ problem that leads to the ‘bigger’ problem later on, how do you grip your reader then?

Is it a case of switching priorities in your protagonist? First he thinks this smaller problem is what deserves his attention, then the bigger problem?

I’m asking this because this is usually the hardest thing in starting a novel (at least for me). How do you take the story that’s in your mind and that’s interesting to you, and turn it into something that’s interesting for your potential readers?

In the case of Lord of the Rings for example, Bilbo desperately wants to go traveling again. But then, he’s not the main character. Frodo just wants to have a normal (boring) life, which makes him an average uninteresting character, not a protagonist. His real transformation into a protagonist comes later. How do we know when is the right time for this switch? How do we know it’s not too late or too early?

Randy sez: Lots of good questions here. I recommend this strategy:

1) Start in the first scene with the protagonist. Show him/her pursuing some rather ordinary goal (or avoiding some rather ordinary problem). There will naturally be conflict and then a disaster. (This is the usual structure for a Scene, using Dwight Swain’s terminology of Scenes and Sequels. For a recap, see my article on Writing the Perfect Scene.

2) As soon as possible, escalate the conflict. This may happen at the end of the first chapter, or it may come in the Sequel that follows, but raise the stakes and shift the goal.

3) Repeat as needed until you’ve transitioned from an ordinary goal to a large goal that can drive the novel forward.

As for Christophe’s question about knowing when to do this, I would say to do it as soon as possible, but no sooner.

There is another strategy for starting a novel with a bang, by starting a bit into the story, then backtracking. THE DAY OF THE JACKAL starts this way, with the execution of French Lieutenant Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry. This takes half a page, after which the reader willingly submits to 14 pages of backstory on why the Lieutenant Colonel was executed (he had been part of a plot to assassinate Charles DeGaulle), and then the story continues with the aftermath of the execution.

In this example, the backstory was very recent, and could have served as the opening of the novel. The reason Frederick Forsyth started with the execution is that an execution is a more exciting start than a failed assassination attempt. There is something macabre about an execution that grabs the reader and won’t let go. (Readers of suspense novels understand this. Readers of sweet romances might not.)

The goal of your starting scene is to grab the reader’s attention. Whatever works is whatever works.

We’ll pick up where we left off yesterday on how to launch a story. However, first we’ll deal with Donna’s question:

My next question would have to be, since my WIP is a historical piece, how do I not add too much in the beginning but give a good sense as to the time period or even a specific year? This point is pretty well stopping me on my first draft.

Randy sez: You can always put a dateline at the beginning of the first chapter (or the beginning of each chapter). For example, “June 6, 1066″. Or whatever. That tells a lot in little space.

Barbara emailed me privately to tell her method for handling backstory. She first writes a “prologue” (which if I understand correctly, she does NOT include as part of the story). Then as she writes the first few chapters, she works in bits and pieces of that “prologue” into the story.

Randy sez: This should work just fine. The key thing is to ask every single piece of the backstory why it deserves to take up space in the story. If it has no good answer, then nuke it.

I liked ML Equatin’s comment that every person starts life as a newborn, knowing none of his or her own backstory. And yet somehow, we all manage to get along for quite some time, and none of us ever knows the whole backstory.

That really ties in nicely with what I wanted to say next, which is what to put in those first few chapters. The problem is that often it takes a while for the story to get up to speed. The protagonist generally DOESN’T know on page 1 what this story is about. Generally, the story interrupts the life of the protagonist by replacing his normal everyday problems with some MUCH BIGGER problem.

And that’s a key point. What you want to do is start your story with your character facing some ordinary, everyday problem. Then interrupt that as soon as possible with the new BIG problem.

Let’s look at some examples:

1) LORD OF THE RINGS. In the first chapter, our hero, Bilbo Baggins, is facing the happy problem of how best to celebrate his birthday. We’re treated to a longish account of the party and Bilbo’s mysterious disappearance from the party, which leads to hints about the evil dwelling in that pesky Ring. And that leads in succeeding chapters into the main problem of the story, which is that the Ring must be destroyed.

2) PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. In the first chapter, Mr. Bingley moves into Netherfield Park, and the initial problem is that the man simply must be met by the Bennett girls, but that can’t happen until their Papa first meets him. This happens in due course, and Bingley is charming, if shallow. And that leads, ultimately, to us meeting his friend, Mr. Darcy, who is the real love interest of the story for our heroine Lizzie.

3) PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN. Skipping the prologue, the first scene shows us Elizabeth facing the immediate problem of putting on a new dress from England with a corset. This leads into the fact that her daddy is setting her up for a marriage proposal from the commodore and her fainting and falling into the sea, where she’s saved by Captain Jack Sparrow. And soon enough, the real story gets rolling because Elizabeth’s pirate gold brings the Black Pearl to her.

4) OXYGEN. (Written by me and John Olson.) In the first chapter, our heroine Valkerie Jansen wakes up in the middle of the night at a remote site in Alaska where she’s doing biology fieldwork, and the nearby volcano is venting and she can’t breathe. She takes action to solve her problem, and next morning is visited on site by a couple of gents from NASA who want to make her an offer she really ought to refuse. And ultimately that leads to the main story, about a disaster on the first human mission to Mars. Note that the first chapter ties in neatly, because the main story is about not being able to breathe.

Note that in all four examples, the initial scene is about facing a problem in the ordinary world. But it ties in nicely to the full story. That’s a key principle. Make the initial problem tie in to the main story problem.

Several of you asked today about how to get a story rolling. So let’s talk about that today.

It is imperative these days to let a story get out of the gate fast. Backstory in chapter one is a big no-no. Readers are impatient these days to get into the story now. That may be good or it may be bad from an artistic point of view, but it’s reality.

The problem is that if a story is going to be deep, it needs to have deep characters, and deep characters have a lot of backstory. Those of you who are Potter fans know just how much backstory went into that series. And we were learning new things about Dumbledore and Snape in the final volume. Notice that the story was deeper and richer precisely because J.K. Rowling withheld that information until the final book.

So a key principle is to tell as little backstory as possible up front. Most authors have a tough time restraining themselves. “It won’t make ANY sense unless I explain about the widgets!” the author says. But the truth is that the reader won’t care about the widgets until she cares about the characters.

And your reader will only care about the characters if they are giving her a Powerful Emotional Experience. Early on in the story, that is going to mean a strong goal. Remember that a goal needs to be concrete and it needs to be worth having (by the yardstick that your character uses to measure everything, which is his own personal value system).

The goal does NOT need to be comprehensible. At least not early on. Goals often become fully comprehensible only by giving the whole backstory. Resist the urge to do that early. A bit of mystery is really OK, and if you do it right, will add to the appeal of the story. (Caution: If you do it wrong, you’ll annoy the reader.)

It may be that you are as weak-willed and spineless as I am on this point. No problem. Go ahead and write that chapter one with all that backstory. Write chapter two with as much backstory as you want. Ditto with chapter three. Eventually, you are going to run out of backstory and start actually telling the story. That will be the point at which your story actually starts. For most writers, by chapter four, they’ve hit the real story.

The trick is to not worry too much about all this in the first draft. Write it. Have fun. Enjoy the story.

Then when it’s time to edit the thing, save your original so you can always get back to it and then start editing on a fresh copy of the original. At this point, you have two options:

1) Salvage the early chapters that have all that backstory. You do this by asking every sentence of backstory if the reader really needs to know it AT THIS POINT IN THE STORY. If not, then cut it. If you follow this approach, you’ll wind up with savagely truncated first chapters, but they will move a lot quicker.

2) Delete the early chapters. Find the place where the story really starts and rename that as chapter one.

Should you choose Door Number 1 or Door Number 2? That’s up to you. It always helps to get a second opinion. Ask a trusted friend for advice. Of course, you’ll probably do the opposite of whatever they tell you, but at least you’ll have made a decision, rather than angsting over it for five years. The truth is that either approach will improve your story. So try whichever one seems most promising.

We’ve only made a start today on how to start your story. We’ll pick up again in the next blog with more.

Hi All:

Just a quick note to say that I’m desperately trying to get back into the groove on blogging. July was a tough month — I was gone for 12 days, and seemingly spent the rest of the month catching up from being gone. My email stack is MERCILESS, and I’ve been trying to knock that down before I get blogging in earnest.

I’m also playing catch-up on a couple of other fronts. Our homeowners’ assocation bought us a stack of wood to use to replace the old fence that runs along the back side of our lot. The fence is about 180 feet long, and I’ve discovered that 180 feet is a long way to go when you have to rip out old fencing, cut the new to fit, and then hammer it in! I don’t have to replace the posts — just the horizontal bars — but that’s enough. Luckily, my wife and kids are helping out a lot, but it’s burning the hours.

We’re also in the market to buy a pellet stove. It gets a little chilly here in the winter. We have a heat pump, but its efficiency goes down when the temperature goes below about 40 (Fahrenheit). We’ve got a fireplace, so we’re looking to buy a pellet stove insert that will fit in and will keep us warm. August is a good month to do that, but we’d like to get it done before September hits. And I HATE shopping. But we gotta get it done. If any of you have caveats or warnings about pellet stoves, email me privately. (No need to comment here on an off-topic subject.)

I also have to mow the lawn in the next few days. We’ve got about an acre and a half of grass-like substance that needs mowing. I haven’t mowed since before I left for the last writing conference, so it’s starting to get a little shaggy out there.

There! I actually wrote a blog today! Tomorrow, if all goes well, I’ll write a blog on WRITING. Post a comment here with some suggestions on what you’d like to talk about next. I’ve kind of lost momentum in the last few weeks, but we should be back up to full speed here in a few days.