Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

Understanding the high-level structure of a novel is hard work. It’s also rewarding work, because if you can discipline yourself to do it, you’ll understand what’s most important in your story and you’ll be able to help the marketing people at your publisher when you get your book published.

Camille posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I’m working on a proposal for a completed novel using the Snowflake Pro. Cool thing, by the way.

Stepping up from a one sentence summary to one paragraph using 5 specific sentences is crazy hard, at least for me. How do you make each of these into fully inclusive, coherent, non run-on sentences? Can you give a 5 sentence paragraph example from a hi-profile book or flick?

Randy sez: Thanks for the shout-out on Snowflake Pro, Camille.

Let’s review first what our goals are with these summaries. When you write a one-sentence summary, you are creating a marketing hook that anyone can use to tell their friends about your book. So the one-sentence summary is a selling tool.

Now when you go to expand this to a one-paragraph summary (in five sentences), you have an entirely different goal. You are doing a reality check to verify that you are meeting your reader’s expectations for what a story should be.

A story is not just a disconnected set of episodes. A story guides a reader through a series of connected events that provide a Powerful Emotional Experience. The big emotional payoff comes at the end, when the lead character either gets what she wants (a happy ending), doesn’t get what she wants (a sad ending), or gets some of what she wants but pays a price (a bittersweet ending). The payoff is bigger if most of the story makes it clear that the lead character has very little chance of getting what she wants.

Now it’s impossible to get what you want unless you actually know what it is you want. That needs to be defined early in the story. But before the reader will understand what the character wants, the reader needs to know a bit about the character.

That explains a whole lot about why I use a five-sentence structure, which looks like this:

1. Write a sentence to tell who your lead character is and their initial situation in the story.
2. Write a sentence that summarizes the first quarter of the story, ending in a disaster which forces the lead character to make a decision on how she wants the story to end. This defines the Story Question: “Will she get it or won’t she?”
3. Write a sentence that summarizes the second quarter of the book, ending in a disaster which makes it look like the lead character won’t get what she wants.
4. Write a sentence that summarizes the third quarter of the book, ending in an even worse disaster which makes it appear that all is lost.
5. Write a final sentence that summarizes the ending and tells whether the lead character gets what she wants or not.

When you do this, you have to strip out all unnecessary details. Leave out all subplots and minor characters. (If you insist on putting those in, then you get those long run-on sentences in which the lead character’s issues with her remote and emotionally detached father get in the way of explaining why she and the hero can’t get together, because you’re constantly explaining stuff that you think is important which is sort of important but not as important as the really important stuff.)

Camille asked for some examples, so here are a few which I lifted straight out of the examples in Snowflake Pro:

For Gone With the Wind, which is a massively complicated book so it needs to be radically cut down:

Spoiled Scarlett O’Hara thinks her life is ruined when Ashley Wilkes marries Melanie instead of her. Scarlett marries Melanie’s brother and is quickly widowed, leaving Scarlett to protect Melanie during the burning of Atlanta. They barely escape to desolated Tara, where Scarlett’s family is sick, dead, starving or insane–and about to lose their home. To save them, Scarlett marries Frank Kennedy and takes over his business enterprises, which eventually leads to Frank’s death. Scarlett marries Rhett, but her obsession with Ashley eventually drives him away.

For Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone:

On his eleventh birthday, orphaned Harry Potter is invited to leave his miserable life with his aunt and uncle to attend a school for witches and wizards. Harry learns that an evil wizard, Lord Voldemort, tried to kill him as a baby and lost all his own powers instead. When Harry nearly dies in a jinxed game of Quidditch, he suspects that sinister Professor Snape is responsible. When Harry has to do a detention in the forbidden forest, he witnesses a shadowy figure drinking unicorn blood, a magical life preserver. Harry sets out to stop Snape from returning Voldemort to power, only to face Voldemort himself.

For the movie Pirates of the Caribbean:

Elizabeth, the governor’s spunky daughter, tries to save Port Royal from evil Captain Barbossa, but ends up becoming a prisoner of his ghostly crew. Her admirer Will Turner sets out to rescue her with the help of Captain Jack Sparrow, Barbossa’s greatest enemy. Pirate-hating Commodore Norrington rescues Elizabeth and Jack, but refuses to save Will–until Elizabeth rashly promises to marry him. They rescue Will and defeat Barbossa’s pirates, but Norrington sentences Jack Sparrow to be hanged . . .

For the book Pride & Prejudice:

When Lizzie Bennet and her sisters meet some wealthy young men at a ball, Lizzie takes a keen dislike to one of them, Mr. Darcy. Lizzie’s sister Jane falls in love with Darcy’s friend Mr. Bingley, and Lizzie takes an interest in Mr. Wickham — whom she then learns has been financially ruined by Darcy. When Lizzie visits her married friend in Hunsford some months later, Mr. Darcy seeks her out and proposes marriage to her, but she rejects him flat out. Lizzie soon finds out that Darcy is a better man than she had thought, and she is beginning to regret her rejection when her sister Lydia runs away to live in sin with Mr. Wickham. When Lizzie learns that Mr. Darcy rescued her sister’s reputation and when he learns that she no longer hates him, the two realize that they were made for each other.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

How do you find the very best critique group for you?

Rebecca posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

A couple months ago I celebrated my first official year as a “pre-published” writer who spent all her time learning the craft by writing and studying in isolation. Live and learn, I say, and then don’t do it again. The good news is I have recently changed all that by attending my first writing conference and by observing three writing critique groups. The conference was definitely something I will repeat time and time again. The writing groups were all exceptional and now I must pick one (or all) of these writing groups. My questions are: What advice to you have on finding the best writing critique groups? And, depending on how often it meets, would it be wise to join a couple?

Randy sez: It all depends on where you are on the road to publication. If you haven’t already read my article on this site, “Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Author!” you should probably read it right now to get yourself oriented.

If you’re a Freshman, then you need a critique group to help you figure out where you’re strong and where you’re weak. The horrifically scary thing here is that you’re probably weak in most things. That’s the nature of the beast. You don’t start out in med school being a great brain surgeon. You don’t start out in flying school being a great fighter pilot. You don’t start playing chess as a grandmaster. Writers who can’t deal with that never make it past the Freshman stage.

If you’re a Freshman, I’d recommend finding one critique group that is reasonably nurturing. You really don’t need a group that’s going to destroy your ego every month. However you also need a group that’s going to hold you accountable to writing on a schedule. You will never escape your Freshmanhood unless you get to the point where you’re writing several times per week.

If you’re a Sophomore, then you have figured out a lot of things. By now, you know if you’re plot-oriented, character-oriented, theme-oriented, or setting-oriented. You also have some sort of clue of how you work best: You know if you’re a seat-of-the-pants writer or a Snowflaker or something else.

If you’re a Sophomore, your biggest need is probably a constant reminder that you still have a long way to go and you really aren’t J.K. Rowling just yet. A little knowledge, as they say, is a dangerous thing. Sophomores need to bear this in mind. You need a group that can help you strengthen your strengths and shore up your weaknesses. You also need at least one published author who can give you a bit of guidance in your career development and your marketing.

If you’re a Junior, you desperately need a mentor who is going to help you polish your goods to greatness. These are hard to find. The kind of mentor you need doesn’t necessarily hang out in critique groups much. It’s possible you won’t be able to find a critique group that can fill this need and you may need a critique buddy who is at your level and really gets your writing or you may need someone you can pay to do a freelance edit.

If you’re a Junior, you may very well be the best writer in your critique group, and that means your group is not helping you all that much. That doesn’t mean you should abandon your group. It just means that most of what you learn in the group will be in those “Aha!” moments when you’re critiquing someone else and you suddenly have an insight that’s good for you. Do remember at this stage that even the lowliest writer in your group may well be a great reader who has a key insight on what’s missing in your writing. They most likely won’t have a key insight on how to fix it, unfortunately.

If you’re a Senior, much the same goes for you. Seniors these days generally have an agent, and your agent is going to play the same role that your critique group played when you were a Freshman.

Now Rebecca’s question was partly on how to find a critique group. I can’t answer that easily. There are a lot of places to look for critique groups, but you find them wherever you find them. If you belong to an online organization, it may have a bunch of online groups.

The organization I belong to, ACFW, just recently had a whole class on how to do critiques, and now it’s forming online critique groups. (My daughter Carolyn took the class and is now doing critiques. She’s not a fiction writer; she wants to be an editor someday.)

If you have a community college that has writing classes, you’ll probably find a bulletin board somewhere near the creative writing department that lists critique groups.

I found my first critique group after going to a writing conference that was put on by a regional writing guild in San Diego. The guild had a number of critique groups and I joined one. This group lasted for several years and took me from green Freshman to frustrated Junior. It couldn’t take me beyond that, because nobody in the group was published.

When I finally realized that, I started going to large national writing conferences. At one of those, I met John Olson, who has been my writing buddy ever since. At another, I met Meredith Efken, who has been my freelance editor ever since. At other conferences, I’ve met other key people in my life: Tracy Higley, Jeff Gerke, Jim Rubart, Tosca Lee, Mary DeMuth, and many others. I also met editors and agents who’ve been my guides along the way: Steve Laube, Chip MacGregor, Lee Hough, Wendy Lawton, and many others.

So the moral here is that a critique group will get you rolling, but eventually you’ll need more than that. You will meet many friends at writing conferences, but you only keep them by maintaining contact (usually by e-mail).

One last comment: One good critique group is better than two weak ones. You really want people who know you and understand what you’re writing. You get that by continuity. You should pick a group that meets as often as you need, but no oftener. For a freshman, once a month is probably fine. If you’re really intense, you may be able to meet every two weeks or even weekly, but that’s a tough pace. You have to have time to write.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

I went out of town last Thursday, so I missed out on our regularly scheduled blog on Friday. I spent the weekend at a writer’s retreat with a bunch of my closest writer friends and we all had a wonderful time.

This is imperative, I’ve found: You need to spend time with other writers once in a while. It recharges your crazy-batteries so that you don’t slip-slide into the gray murk of normal life that will kill your fiction writing.

Kevin posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I’m a teen working on a complex novel idea. I haven’t written much as of yet (I have been working on plot development with the Snowflake Method, googling tips for writers, and getting critiques on a first chapter that I’ve been working on through other sources), but I am wondering what are your thoughts on symbolism. I am finding myself trying to cram symbolism everywhere, and am often acting very pick with word choice so that the symbolism isn’t wrecked. Am I simply overdoing it? I am afraid so, for it seems to me that symbolism is hardly noticed by readers today, mainly because I did not learn of its existence until this very school year.

Randy sez: Kevin, I think you’re the first teen who has e-mailed me this year who wasn’t obsessing on the question: “If I’m a teen writing fiction, will anyone take me seriously?” I don’t know quite why teen writers consider this the most important question. It isn’t. The first question editors or agents ask about any writer is this: “How well has this writer mastered the craft of fiction?” If the answer to that question is, “Extremely well,” then age doesn’t matter.

Really, I mean that. Age doesn’t matter. A teen writer with great craft, in fact, will probably have an advantage because that then becomes a selling point.

So congratulations, Kevin, on not asking what all the other teens are asking and for asking something that will advance your craft.

Now on to the actual question. I have three thoughts on the importance of symbolism in fiction writing:

Symbolism is like salt. Salt keeps the food from tasting bland. A little salt goes a long way. The “right” amount of salt is when you don’t notice that it’s there and you don’t notice that it’s missing. Too much salt will make you gag. Too little will make sure you never eat at that restaurant again.

Symbolism is like romance. If you obsess over making romance happen, you probably kill any chance that romance will develop. You cannot force romance. You cannot buy it (although you can buy something similar, which tragically turns out to be the exact opposite of romance). Romance happens when you weren’t looking for it. It grows when you just let it grow. Romance adds joy to life, but only when you aren’t trying to make it the only thing in life.

Symbolism is like humor. If you have to explain humor, it isn’t funny. If the humor is already there, you can tweak it to make it more powerful. If the humor isn’t there, no amount of trying will make it be there. With humor, 90% of the game is timing.

Kevin, it sounds like you may have “new toy syndrome.” This happens to all writers as they learn new elements of the craft and suddenly it seems like they’ve just got to use that new toy everywhere. Don’t sweat that. It happens. Keep working on your craft and pretty soon you’ll add yet another new toy to your collection, and then the symbolism will assume its rightful place in your arsenal. Then your only worry will be how to rein in the next new toy.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

As many of my Loyal Blog Readers know, I write a monthly humor column featuring a fictitious plumber named Sam, who has a unique perspective on the world of fiction writing.

In the most recent column, posted a few weeks ago, Sam finally discovers that he is fictitious. Or as he says it, he is “fictionary.” You can read the Fictionary column here.

With a heavy heart, I must announce that Sam is retiring. Or more correctly, I am retiring from my monthly column, at least for a while. I hope to bring Sam back someday. He’s been a strange friend, but always loyal. Right now, and for the next few months, I’m stressed for time, and something had to give. That “something” was Sam. He will be missed.

Tessa posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I followed the Writing Fiction for Dummies book to the letter after I wrote my novel, all except the part about a scene list. I thought it would take too much effort. I realized yesterday that I need to shift the scenes around, and I so regret not writing that list.

I’m going mad with trying to figure out how it all connects if I move two of my scenes earlier (so that the REAL story question of the book is in the first quarter, and not closer to the middle). There’s ton of things happening in the first 1/3 to keep the reader occupied, and I’ve been dropping clues left and right, all carefully concealed to the best of my ability.

The real story question is basically if the kids should choose between good or evil, but up until then the reader will have thought that the story question is how to get home, since that’s what the kids have been doing up until about 1/3 of the story.

How to get home is the ultimate goal, and the story question of the whole trilogy (this is book one).

How important is it to have the true story question of the book in the first quarter as opposed to nearer to 1/3 of the book?

Thanks in advance. I’ll appreciate help with this.

Randy sez: That depends on which of the “five pillars of fiction” are most important in your novel. The five pillars are Storyworld, Characters, Plot, Theme, and Style. For a plot-driven novel, you really want the story question to be as clear as possible as soon as possible. For novels driven by one of the other pillars, it’s okay to be fuzzier on the story question and to delay it a bit.

Let’s look at a few examples.

THE GODFATHER is a novel about a Mafia family in New York in the 1940s. This novel is, in my opinion, driven by the Storyworld itself — a world of violent crime, backstabbing, and dirty money. The story question takes quite a long time to emerge: Will Michael Corleone ever be able to come home? And the novel would be a fine novel, even if this story question was never clearly asked or answered.

THE TIME TRAVELLER’S WIFE is a novel about a man who has a genetic flaw which causes him to spontaneously travel through time, and it’s about the woman who loves him. I would call this a character-driven novel. As the story continues, it gradually becomes clear that it’s rather dangerous to be a time-traveller when you always end up at your destination buck naked. But the story is about the characters and their love for each other, which transcends time. Even if the story question were never asked, this novel would still work. So it’s okay that the story question only becomes clear late in the game.

THE DAY OF THE JACKAL is a novel about a group of terrorists trying to assassinate Charles de Gaulle in the early 1960s. This is a plot-driven novel and a very good one. The story question is very simple: Will they succeed? The story question sharpens up early in the story to this one: Will the Jackal kill de Gaulle? This is remarkable, because the reader knows very well that de Gaulle was NOT assassinated. Yet the story works because the reader believes that the story could have happened, in principle, exactly as told.

THE SHACK is a novel about a man who spends a weekend with God in the shack in the Oregon wilderness where his daughter was murdered. This is a theme-driven novel in which the primary question is theological: How can a good and all-powerful God allow innocent children to be murdered? The story question is related to that: Will the protagonist come to terms with his loss or won’t he? But again, the story question is actually less powerful for the reader, who cares more about the theological question than a story question about one man’s loss.

It’s a rare novel that’s driven mainly by style, although I suppose I could think of one if I worked at it hard enough. In literary novels, style is very important, but generally they also have either a strong Storyworld, Characters, Plot, or Theme to carry the narrative forward.

So getting back to Tessa’s question, is it okay for her to finally make her story question clear at the 1/3 mark instead of the 1/4 mark? Tessa, if your story is strongly plot-driven, then you probably need to rethink things and bring that story question closer to the beginning of the story. Otherwise, you may be fine as you are.

Question for my Loyal Blog Readers: Think about the current novel you’re working on. At what point does the story question become crystal clear to your reader? Is it soon enough for the category of fiction you’re writing? Leave a comment and tell us!

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Bill posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Well I think I am ready to get started. I purchased your book to day and downloaded the Snowflake software. I was also a system architect and I know the power of databases and sequenced activity.

This question has probably been asked a thousand times and I apologize in advance.

Should I read the book first or jump into the software and read the appropriate section for that stage later?

Also, it would be really cool to have a forum here so that struggling writers can share with each other and you. If there is one then I apologize for being too dense to find it. LOL.

Randy sez: A lot depends on what your learning style is, and that depends on how your brain is wired. Some people learn best by trying first, and then learning a bit of theory to help them understand what’s going wrong. Other people learn best by reading the theory first, and then going and doing it.

The hazard of writing first is that you might spend a long time writing badly, when you could have saved yourself a huge amount of work by learning from the experts.

The hazard of reading first is that you might never actually write anything at all, because you’ll always want to read “just one more book before I get started.”

If you’re a “write first, read later” kind of person, I’d suggest that you give yourself a set amount of work you’re going to create on your own. You might decide that you’ll spend one month writing every day. Or you might set a goal of writing three chapters. You’re free to choose your goals here, but I strongly recommend that once you hit those goals, do these things:

• Get somebody else to read your work and critique it.
• Once you have a critique, go read up in a book on how to deal with the weaknesses that were exposed in the critique. (Since you’ve already bought my book WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES, just leaf through the table of contents, find the chapter that deals with a particular topic, and read that whole chapter.)
• Set yourself another writing goal and repeat the whole process.

If you’re a “read first, write later” kind of a person, I’d suggest you set a limit on how much study you’re going to do in advance. Since you’ve already bought my book, and my book is a general book that aims to give you a broad foundation, I’d suggest you read carefully through Part 1 (Getting Ready to Write Fiction) and Part 2 (Creating Compelling Fiction). Then SKIM the rest of the book (on editing your book and getting it published). Then get busy writing.

• Work through Chapter 3 of my book (on choosing your target audience–this is critical)
• Read Chapter 4 (on creative paradigms) and choose the one that seems best for you.
• Do any action items in Chapter 5 (on managing your time and your work space)
• Start writing! This may mean starting in on the Snowflake method, if that is your creative paradigm. It may mean just typing words every day (if you’re a seat-of-the-pants type of writers.
• As you feel a need to study more, do so, but don’t let that keep you from writing. Most all writers ultimately learn by doing. Learning the theory is great and it’s very important. That’s why I wrote my book and created my lecture series–to teach you the theory. But you will only get good when you internalize that theory by writing.

One final note on your comment on the need for a forum: I would like to have a forum. It’s been suggested several times by my Loyal Blog Readers, and I think I’m long overdue to create one. Like everyone else, my time is limited and I haven’t yet found the time to launch a forum. I work best when I focus on one thing and execute it well. I have a strategic plan for this web site, and a forum is part of that strategic plan, but it’s not the next step. When the time is right, I’ll do so. So stay tuned. I do have some major improvements planned for the next several months.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Daniel posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

BTW, I’m currently in chapter 9 of your dummies book. I love it! It’s
absolutely great stuff especially the 7 layers of plot and how to use
one layer to get to the next in the chain. I read James Scott Bell’s
Plot and Structure book and got the doorways of no return down pat,
but I never understood how the pieces all related together before.
Kudos for explaining it so simply. I realize now that I’ve been trying
to write my synopsis as a scene list. Go figure.

And I seem to be tackling my own project from both ends. I’m naturally
an edit-as-you-go but this is only after much outlining. Again,
synopsis –> scene list. Arggh! Thanks so much for sharing your
knowledge. It keeps me and all your other faithful blog readers from
getting stuck in this long process. We wouldn’t know what to do or how
to begin without some help and you provide this in spades!

I know this email is getting longish, but I do have an intellectual
question for you and your blog. I’m curious of your response. Here it
is: How is a book like Twilight - which is consistently talked down by
industry professionals for it’s lackluster composition - so
successful? Essentially, I see Twilight as a success because Stephanie
Meyer did one thing and one thing only very, very well - she captured
the emotion of falling in love. However, emotion is not one of the
five pillars of fiction and none of them are done particularly well in
her book: minimal setting, flat characters, weak plot, weak theme, and
adverbial style. Maybe my question is best phrased as, “how does
emotion fit in with the pillars of fiction?” It’s not one of the five
yet if done correctly it can support an entire series. So is emotion
woven into all 5 pillars? Or is it the foundation of them? Or do they
support a roof of emotion? I need a visual.

I begin to think we need a new set of pillars that include emotion and
the concept of flow. (Or does writing this just show how green I am?)
On a related note screenwriters are graded on a similar scale. But in
their case, if the story idea is interesting enough everything else
can be poo and they’ll still make the movie. See
http://livingromcom.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/05/script-coverage-a-few-awful-truths.html
for the awful truth.

Randy sez: Thanks for the kind words about WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES and also the shout-out for Jim Bell’s book PLOT & STRUCTURE. Jim is a good friend of mine and I really love his book. I learned a lot about story structure from him years ago when I was first getting published and it was a huge help. There is a reason that Jim’s book is almost always #1 on Amazon’s list of books on writing fiction. It’s a terrific book.

Now to your core question which I will recast as follows, “What makes Twilight fly?”

Really, it all comes down to the fact that the point of all fiction is to create a Powerful Emotional Experience in the reader. If you do that, then your reader will love your work, no matter what rules you break, no matter how bad your grammar, no matter which “pillars of fiction” you ignore.

Rightly so, in my opinion. I once had Sol Stein as my mentor when he ran a workshop for a small group of writers in Laguna Beach back in the early 1990s. Sol is a living legend and I think we were all in awe of him. He knew I’m a physicist, so he autographed one of his books to me as follows: “Physics is facts; fiction is Truth.”

I’m going to have to disagree with Sol on both counts. (The mark of a great teacher is that he doesn’t create clones who parrot him–he creates students qualified to argue with him, so I don’t think Sol would be bothered at all that I disagree with an off-the-cuff remark he wrote in an autograph. He’d be pleased that I can think for myself.)

In my view, physics is Truth and fiction is feelings. If you want facts, go to an accountant or an engineer. (Both of these classes are fine folks but they deal mostly with concrete facts, not so much with abstract Truth.) Fiction can deal with Truth and often does, but that’s not why people read it. They read it for the emotive punch it gives them. That’s why I read it. I bet that’s why you read it.

So what makes the Twilight series fly? I’ve read the entire series and mostly enjoyed it. Twilight’s primary audience is teenage girls. The lead character in the Twilight series is an intelligent young girl with a lot of angst. Her angst works perfectly with this audience. Girls this age want an answer to the question: “Will anybody love me, even if I’m different from normal people?” The answer in the series is a resounding “Yes!”

Everybody, in fact, asks this question at some time or other, which explains why Twilight has done well outside the narrowly defined niche that it was aimed at. Yes, you can find all sorts of “problems” in the craft of the series. No, that is not particularly relevant to whether Twilight works as fiction.

Twilight gives many, many people an Extremely Powerful Emotion Experience. That’s why it flies. Stephenie Meyer earned her money. Of course, she has room for improvement, like every other writer on the planet. But she’s doing the main thing right. Kudos to her for that. (For the record, I’d rather be a werewolf than a vampire. For whatever reason, I’d rather be hot and furry than cold and stony. So my sentiments were with Jacob over Edward.)

The purpose of the “Five Pillars of Fiction” (that’s a slightly weird term I coined a few years ago) is to let you categorize the main aspects of a novel where you have a chance to create emotive punch with your reader: A plot, a character, a setting, a theme, and style can all resonate emotively with the reader.

But never, never, never forget the reason for those pesky Pillars or for all the rules on writing. The whole point is to create an emotive response. There are many paths to publishing nirvana. It doesn’t matter how you get there. It matters that you get there.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

David posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

If an unpublished writer, with a completed and polished but still unsold novel, and maybe more novels (and some non-fiction ideas) in various stages of development, has severely limited time to put into writing (let’s say 10 hours or less per week), how will that time be best spent? The way I understand it, these are the demands for a novelist’s time:

- writing
- craft development (the words)
- art development (the story-telling)
- story research
- market research
- querying
- industry research (queries, proposals, agents, trends, etc.)
- publishing industry relationship building
- platform building
- self-promotion
- marketing education/development
- idea capturing and future work development
- critique group
- probably something else I’m missing

How would you rank these in importance for an unpublished writer?

Randy sez: Holy Smokes! That’s a hard question, and one we all face. A lot depends on where you are on the road to publication. If you haven’t read my article, “Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Author!” then you should probably read that first. It spells out the various stages you pass through as you go from novice to pro.

If you’re a Freshman, then you should focus on craft first. Learn the skills of writing good fiction. You do that by writing a lot, by getting your work critiqued, and by studying the theory of fiction (from books or lectures).

If you’re a Sophomore, keep doing that, but also start learning a bit about the industry and also how to write a proposal.

If you’re a Junior, your craft should now be very good. Keep improving it, but now begin to focus on how to sell your work. You should be going to conferences and meeting agents and submitting your work. This is hard and scary and can be crushing (if you have an attitude that you must succeed instantly or your life is a failure). But it’s necessary and all published authors go through this stage.

If you’re a Senior, then all of the above, but now you need to be also thinking about building your platform. This may be public speaking (for a few authors) or a blog (for others) or magazine articles (if you prefer print to the web) or podcasting (if you’re good at talking) or some other way of building your platform. Or you can do as the vast majority of writers do, and simply skip the platform-building altogether. You won’t die if you do this. You may end up with a GREAT publisher who promotes you effectively. But the odds are than any publisher will work harder for you if they think you’re already working hard for yourself.

So the answer to David’s question is this: “It depends on where you are. You can’t master everything all at once. So focus on where you are right now and do the things you need to do to get to the next stage in your career.”

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Nana posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

What is your no.1 rule for writing fiction in first-person POV? Thanks in advance.

Randy sez: One of the nice things about writing in first person is that it’s really hard to hop heads and it’s really obvious when you do. First person is a nice intimate point of view and it makes it easy to get the reader to identify with the POV character.

As for rules on writing in first person, I have plenty of thoughts on that, but I don’t know how to choose which is most important. Here are a few of them:

• Once you’ve established that the scene is written in first person POV, you can often skip using the word “I” in places where it’s obvious. For example, if a tiger comes running into the room, you don’t need to say, “I saw a tiger dash into the room.” Instead, you can just say, “A tiger dashed into the room.” The reader knows that the narrator is the person who sees the tiger. (This same principle applies in third person.)
• By the same token, if the narrator of the story can’t see, hear, smell, taste, touch, feel, or know something, then don’t tell it. It makes sense to say, “Sally didn’t see the mugger coming up behind her. I tried to shout a warning, but my voice caught in my throat.” However, it doesn’t make sense to say the converse: “I didn’t see the mugger coming up behind me. Sally tried to shout a warning, but her voice caught in her throat.” If you didn’t see it, then you can’t be telling about it. And you can’t know what Sally tries to do unless she actually does it. (Again, a similar rule applies when you’re writing in third person.)
• Let’s emphasize that point for knowledge. It usually doesn’t make sense to write a sentence like this: “I didn’t realize that on the other side of the country, my poodle was quietly investing all my savings in dog biscuit stocks.” If you don’t know it, then your reader can’t know it either. There is one exception, when you’re writing in retrospective past tense. In that case, you’re narrating the story from the vantage point of the future. So it’s possible that you learned information later than the point of narration and it might make sense to say, “I didn’t learn until six months later that my poodle was quietly investing all my savings in dog biscuit stocks.”

Some writers find the first person POV constraining because they want to show action in different locations at the same time. If you’ve only got one POV character (which is normal when writing in first person) then your character can’t be in two places at once, and you’re stuck. One solution is to use multiple first person POV characters, or else switch from first-person to third-person. These are legal, although they may disorient the reader unless you do a good job tipping her off. That’s one reason I always start a scene with a header that tells who the POV character is. I learned this from Irwin Shaw, and it’s always made a lot of sense to me.

I’m curious if my Loyal Blog Readers have any particular other issues with first person POV that I should talk about. If you do, go ahead and post a comment here with your question and I’ll answer the question right inside the comments section.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Evey posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Which elements of style mark something as more literary or less? Word choice? Rhythm? More use of metaphor? Choice of theme?

Also, when in Fic 201 you say “10 hours minimum of writing to begin modeling habits of a Junior” do you mean strictly generation of new words, or revising your material, studying craft, reading fine examples etc. aswell? 10 hours is not enough to do all that! And if I can only grab 10 right now, how do I breakdown all the tasks of a professional writer for maximum effect? 75% new stuff? 10% revision, 5%craft study, 5% reading? 5% marketing?

Randy sez: It’s not very easy to define literary fiction. I’m tempted to avoid trying to define it by paraphrasing what a Supreme Court justice once said of another matter, “I don’t know how to define it but I know it when I see it.”

But let me take a stab at it. Literary fiction is art and therefore it’s defined by whatever the current generation of artists define it to be. Literary fiction these days tends to be “sentence driven,” or so I’m told. If I understand this term correctly, it means that every sentence needs to be well-written. Every word must be perfectly chosen. Some literary novelists are very good at rhythm or metaphor or their choice of theme or the beauty of the language.

I‘m not a particularly good person to ask about literary fiction because I don’t write it, although I do read some literary fiction when it’s also good strong commercial fiction. If you want to write literary fiction, I’d say your best bet is to first get a good foundation by reading a lot of it. Then, when you know what you like and who you aspire to be like, it’s probably a good idea to get a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from a school that has teachers who can teach you the kind of fiction you want to write. There are a number of schools these days with low-residency MFA programs.

As for those pesky 10 hours that I mention in my Fiction 201 course, I’m not saying that one block of 10 hours will do it! Of course not. I’m talking about 10 hours per week of work on your writing. If you want to be a professional writer, you need to be in the habit of spending 10 hours per week on your writing. Less than that is not going to cut it.

There is no easy way to break down how you spend your time. My own rule of thumb is pretty simple. Figure out what you’re strongest in and what you’re weakest in and then focus on trying to improve those two areas. Editors say “yes” because of your strengths. They say “no” because of your weaknesses.

One more point about your weaknesses: Your goal is NOT to improve your weaknesses so that you’re “best in class.” Your goal is to improve your weaknesses to be “acceptable.” In some cases (such as punctuation or spelling) your best strategy may be to outsource to somebody who’s good at it. I’ve met very good writers who just couldn’t spell or just couldn’t master the comma. Nobody’s perfect. Don’t try to be. Far better to spend your valuable time learning to be the best you can be on your strong points. If you look at all the wildly successful novelists, each of them excels at one thing and really delivers on it — that’s why their readers buy their books. So ask yourself what it is about your writing that your readers will LOVE and then focus on how to deliver that better.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.