Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

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

I have this idea for a book that I came up with when I was 14 (ten years ago). I never got serious about writing it, but overtime as I matured my idea matured as well into a complex story. Now I’m pretty serious about getting this thing written. However, I have this fear that after I get it published that I won’t be able to let it go. Throughout the ten years my story has grown, like solving a puzzle, and I’m afraid that afterward ideas for it will still keep coming. Or I’m afraid that I’ll change my mind on something. Does this happen to published authors?

Randy sez: I’m sure it does. I occasionally think of things I’d like to change in my published novels. I know a lot of authors wish they could take back their entire first two or three novels so nobody could see what dreadful writers they used to be. (These are typically those “lucky” authors who sold their first attempt at a novel. Those of us who were “unlucky” and wrote five or six pieces of crap before we got published generally feel a lot better about our first published work.)

Here’s the thing: Write the book. There is one thing worse than wishing you could change something in a novel you published: Failing to ever publish a novel at all.

You can deal with letting your novel go when you’ve got it written. That’s a happy problem to have. But you can’t let it go until it’s written. Write your novel.

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.

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

Hello Mr. Ingermanson. I really enjoyed reading your book “Writing Fiction for Dummies.” It has made me become a better writer and has been extremely helpful. I have just come up with my one sentence storyline and was wondering what you thought of it.

“A young architect is forced on the run after he’s accused of helping terrorists bomb a building he designed.”

Does it have a strong emotive punch or do you think it is missing something?

Also, I’m having an issue with bringing ideas into backstory. I keep trying to bring an idea I have for one novel (that explains the main character’s motivation in that novel) into the backstory of my main character in another, trying to make it fit (though I don’t believe it works too well). Is this a common problem? It seems to have brought about a bad case of writers block.

Randy sez: This is a good strong one-sentence summary. It’s neither too vague nor too specific. It tells us immediately who to root for (”a young architect”). It puts him in jeopardy (he’s on the run). And it creates mystery which immediately implies a storygoal (how can our hero clear his name?) So bravo on the one-sentence summary!

As for the problem with bringing in backstory, yes, this is a very common problem. Backstory is good, by the way. Backstory is, in fact, great. You can hardly know too much backstory about your characters. But you can all too easily tell too much backstory, especially at the beginning of your novel when you’re trying to get the frontstory rolling.

Now the main issue for you, George, right now is that all the backstory is getting you blocked because you know there’s a pesky rule out there that says backstory is bad. Here’s how to get unblocked right away, and this is the most common cure for writer’s block:

“Ignore the rules.”

That’s, right, just ignore the rule that says that backstory is bad. Write the backstory. Write it as fast as you can. That should get you unblocked. Then move on and finish the first draft of your novel.

Here’s the thing that’s essential whenever you’re dealing with writer’s block: Nobody is ever going to see your first draft except a very few people who already love you, warts, backstory, and all. Those are your critique buddies. Frankly, they already know your first draft sucks, so it’s OK if they see some backstory. It’ll give them something to feel good about when they point it out to you.

When you edit the novel, then’s when you can apply the rules. That’s when you’ll trim down the backstory to the bare minimum, or move it later in the story, or make it live in flashbacks (you’re allowed to do flashbacks if you do them well enough — don’t let anybody tell you flashbacks aren’t allowed).

My buddy John Olson and I made it through fifteen drafts of our novel OXYGEN without dying because of one mantra that I repeated over and over: “We’ll fix this in the next draft.”

That was a brazen lie. On each draft, we fixed only some of the problems, and I knew it. But I knew that neither John nor I would quit until the book was right. We didn’t. It was right. But only on the fifteenth draft. (Which we emailed in at 3 AM on the day the book was due to the publisher.)

The process wasn’t pretty, but we got it done. You can too. If you’re stuck or blocked or whatever, make a note for yourself to fix it on the next draft and then move on. Those are words to live by.

Randy sez: Oops, in reading your question one last time after I posted this blog, I realized that maybe I misread you to begin with. It sounds like your real problem is that you’re reusing a motivation from one novel in another novel. OK, that’s actually a separate issue. It can be good or it can be bad.

Here are two tricks you can apply to possibly solve this problem:

• Interview your character and really press him on what his motivations are. As I talked about in my book, ask him exactly what his Storygoal is. Then ask what abstract Ambition this Storygoal comes from. Then ask him about his Values — his “core truths” that he believes are self-evident, which need no explanation because they’re so obviously true. Then ask yourself what it is in his background, his culture, or his subconscious mind makes him believe these Values.
• If that doesn’t work, then try my earlier advice and just forge ahead and write the story. You don’t have to know your character’s motivations fully up front. You can always figure those out on the next draft. Which might really mean the fifteenth.

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.

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

I’m in the middle of a first draft, but I’ve changed the plot quite a bit. I haven’t rewritten anything yet, though, so here’s my question: should I just rewrite the parts where I’ve changed the plot, before I write the second draft? Or should I wait until I’ve done some top-layer editing (storyline, act structure, etc.) and make the changes in the second draft?

Randy sez: A lot depends on how you want to do it. There are many roads to writing a great novel, and you should choose the one that feels most comfortable to you. I’ll outline below the way I do it, but it’s not graven in granite that you have to do it this way.

Be aware that it’s perfectly normal and okay to change the plot in mid-course while writing your first draft. I do that all the time and I think it improves the story and saves time, even if it makes the first draft a little confusing and less coherent.

Here’s what I’d do, which you can follow or modify to suit yourself:

• Finish the first draft. A book that never gets finished is a book you’ll never sell. This is obvious to some people and not obvious to others but it’s a simple fact.
• Rethink the Big Picture stuff. Can I improve the one-sentence summary? Do I understand the Three-Act Structure better now? Can I strengthen the disasters at the ends of Acts 1 and 2 and the disaster in the middle of Act 2?
• Edit the scene list. A key part of my Snowflake method is a list of scenes. This is the one part of the Snowflake that I find most essential in writing the first draft and editing the second (and all succeeding drafts for that matter). Which scenes aren’t working? Why aren’t they working? Should I buff them up, or move them to a new place in the story, or delete them altogether? This is a good place to apply some of the analytical tools that I teach in my article “Writing the Perfect Scene” here on this site.
• Make a copy of the first draft into a new file. I don’t ever want to edit the original. I want to edit a copy so I can always get back to the original if I wind up disimproving things.
• Edit the new copy straight through, guided by my new scene list. If the next scene in the list is fine, then polish it up a bit to catch the word-smithing issues, and then move on to the next. If the scene needs to be moved from somewhere, move it to its new location now. If the scene needs major buffing up or a complete rewrite, do that now. Delete any scenes that need to die. (I’ll still have them in the original first draft, because I’m working on a COPY, not the original.)
• Keep going until the second draft is done. Again, if you never finish a draft, you can’t sell the book. Always keep focused on the tactical goal — to get the next draft done.

If you follow the above procedure, then you’ll get through the first draft, then through the second draft, then through the third draft, in a nice and organized way. You’ll always have a clear record of what you wrote first, how you edited it later, and so on.

Please understand that this isn’t the only way to work. It works for me. If it works for you, then follow it. If you need to adapt it, do so. The only unbreakable in writing fiction is that there are no unbreakable rules.

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.

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

What do you do if you can’t get your characters to ’speak’ to you? I’m attempting to write my first novel, and I’m stuck just creating the characters! I’ve tried asking questions, but she isn’t forthcoming and very tight-lipped. I’ve tried a journal, but all I heard was my own voice instead of my characters’. Do you have any suggestions?

Randy sez: The key thing here is in your second sentence: You’re just starting your first novel. And you’re hoping that the same methods that work for experienced novelists will work for you. Those methods will work for you some day, when you’ve put in hundreds or possibly thousands of hours of learning the craft. Not until.

I’ll bet Danica Patrick’s car “speaks” to her. Mine doesn’t, other than to whine in an indecipherable mutter sometimes when the engine’s cold and I’m in a hurry. I haven’t put in the thousands of hours behind the wheel of a high-performance engine for my car to talk to me.

I’ll bet Lance Armstrong’s bike “speaks” to him. I used to have a bike. It never said a darned word to me. My legs did — mostly things I can’t print in a family-oriented blog. But the bike — never.

I spent two or three years writing before my characters began to get real to me. I remember the first time it happened. I was doing my daily writing in my “notebook computer” — in those days it was a real notebook, made out of actual paper, and you wrote on it with a pen that left permanent black marks on the white paper. I was writing a scene about a certain historical character and I was fictionalizing an event that actually happened. And at the end of the scene, I found that I was crying. And I thought, “Wow, I actually got inside the skin of that character. Finally.”

That novel never got published, but years later I was working on another novel that I had already sold to a publisher. And I wanted to fictionalize that same event from the point of view of another character. I looked up that scene from my old novel, typed it up in a new POV, and the same thing happened. I connected viscerally with the characters and the scene brought those pesky tears to my eyes. That scene is, in my opinion, one of the strongest scenes in that novel. [If you’re wondering, the novel is RETRIBUTION and the scene is in chapter 22 and ends on page 176.]

If you’re just beginning to write fiction, this probably won’t happen right away. That’s okay. Put in a thousand or two thousand hours of writing, and you’ll probably start connecting amazingly well with your characters, if you have any talent for fiction whatsoever. (If you have a desire to write fiction, then you almost certainly have some talent.)

Put in your hours at learning the craft by doing the craft. Eventually, either your characters will start speaking to you or you’ll realize that you were created to listen to a car or a bike or a spreadsheet instead. You can’t forge the gift of fiction and you can’t force it, but if you just put in the time, the gift will show up on its own. Or not.

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.

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

Plagiarism was a big deal when I was in college. I now find it to be haunting me every time I write (I’m afraid that I might accidentally write something that is too close to one’s idea). Is this something we have to worry about on writing fiction novels?

Randy sez: First, let me preface all my remarks with the usual disclaimer that I am not a lawyer, and nothing I say here should be construed as legal advice.

My understanding is that plagiarism is not “stealing somebody else’s idea.” Plagiarism is “stealing somebody else’s presentation of an idea.” Normally, that means stealing somebody else’s words without giving credit (for short quotations that fit the “fair use” criteria) and without getting permission (for long quotations that don’t fit the “fair use” criteria). However, most people also consider it plagiarism if you copy somebody else’s work and then simply rearrange a few words to make it look original.

We are not talking here about inadvertently using a sentence that somebody else used in their novel. This undoubtedly happens from time to time. You read a great sentence. It sticks in your brain. Months or years later, you’ve forgotten the original book, but you’re writing on a related topic, and you type out that memorable sentence, thinking that you wrote it yourself. This is easy to do, and it’s not plagiarism. Yesterday at my critique group, I had what I thought was a brilliant and original idea for a title for my friend’s novel. She pointed out that I had suggested the exact same title a month ago! I had totally forgotten about it.

Plagiarism happens when you type out paragraphs or pages of somebody else’s work and call it your own. It is still plagiarism if you tweak the words a bit. It is still plagiarism if you move a few sentences around.

It is not plagiarism, so far as I know, if you take that idea, digest it in your own brain, and write it down in your own words. If you do this, it’s always a good idea to give credit to the originator, if you know who the originator is. But you don’t always know.

An example of that: I was sitting in the front row of a class at a writing conference a few years ago and a speaker who knows me well got up to speak. One of the first things he said was, “The purpose of fiction is to give your reader a Powerful Emotional Experience.” And I started laughing, because I coined that phrase years ago, and I assumed the speaker was about to point out that I’d invented the term. But he didn’t. He just gave me a very odd look. Later on, he asked me why I’d laughed at him, and I explained. It turned out that he had no idea that I’d coined the term. “Powerful Emotional Experience” has entered so much into the vernacular of the writing community that my own friend didn’t know it originated with me. (I sometimes wonder if I got it from someone else and have forgotten the source of it. But so far as I know, it’s original with me.)

The moral here is that using short phrases or even a whole sentence is not plagiarism, it’s just a sign that the phrase or sentence made a powerful impact on you. I don’t think it’s anything to worry about.

Please note that it is possible to steal ideas for stories. However, so far as I can tell, this isn’t considered plagiarism. If you steal an idea and use it extremely closely, then it’s considered stealing an idea. But if a plot twist or a character attribute in one story suggests to you a similar plot twist or character attribute for your story, then that isn’t stealing. If it was, every author who ever published would be a thief. I’m told that Shakespeare borrowed most of his story ideas from other writers, and most writers will tell you that they’ve borrowed ideas from time to time. If you borrow an idea and then remake it in your own image, that seems to be just fine.

Also remember that sometimes “ideas are in the air.” (I don’t know who first said this phrase, but I’ve heard it a billion times.) It’s not uncommon to see two novelists who never heard of each other simultaneously publish books with similar characters or similar ideas.

The same goes for titles. I submitted my first novel to my publisher with the title AVATAR about ten years ago, never dreaming that James Cameron would make that title famous with a movie in 2009. (My publisher didn’t like the title, and we eventually retitled it TRANSGRESSION.) My second novel, OXYGEN, appeared at about the same time as another novel with that same title. My sixth novel, RETRIBUTION, was published in the same year as a best-selling legal thriller with the same title. I only discovered the coincidence when I saw the other book in an airport bookstore.

I would say that if you take reasonable care not to model your story after somebody else’s, then you’re probably OK. If you inadvertently use a phrase or a sentence or a plot twist that you picked up somewhere else, it would at most be a bit embarrassing. Just don’t intentionally use more than that.

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.

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

My question is about novel structure and word counts. Using the Snowflake Method, I developed my story with multiple subplots that intersect meaningfully with the overall plot/theme. The result of my planning session created 12 chapters (3 each for act 1, 2a, 2b, and 3).

At 100k words, this averages around 8300 words per chapter. Since my story has multiple POVs, the chapters are currently broken into multiple scenes — anywhere from 500 to 2500 words each — all adding to the approximate 8300 word target count.

I’ve both seen and heard other writers that use single scenes for each chapter. So, my question is, what does the industry standard generally dictate? Should each 1500 word scene get its own chapter number? Or should I continue with the plan to keep chapter breaks dependant on significant story events rather than a switch in POV?

(Note: The mid-chapter POV changes keep the scenes in chronological order to prevent jarring the poor reader as this is intended for a YA audience.)

Randy sez: 1500 word scenes would be about six pages of manuscript and maybe 4 or 5 pages in the printed book, depending on page size and font size and all that. I shoot for an average of 2500 words per scene, so if I were writing your book, I’d probably have two scenes for most chapters. I’m not writing your book, so you get to decide. I’ve noticed that James Patterson has incredibly short chapters — a few pages each. I think with a YA novel, you might want to go with one scene per chapter. That makes it easy for your reader to decide to read “one more chapter.” And then another and then another.

There really isn’t any industry standard. Some authors like longer chapters. Some like shorter ones. It’s up to you. However, there is an industry average, and it seems to be about 8 to 10 pages, give or take a little.

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 registered last week for the ACFW conference in Indianapolis. The dates for the conference are September 17 to 20, 2010. ACFW stands for American Christian Fiction Writers, an organization of over 2100 writers.

Why am I going to yet another conference? I can think of 7 good reasons that I want to go:

• Writing conferences are fun. I am an extreme introvert and I don’t do well in crowds. Yet somehow, writing conferences bring out my inner extrovert, and I always meet a bundle of new friends.
• Writing conferences are educational. I have never gone to a conference where I didn’t learn something completely unexpected and incredibly useful.
• Writing conferences are where you make contacts. I met my first agent at a writing conference. After he died, I met my second agent at a writing conference, although at the time, he was an editor and I was hoping to sell him a book. (I did, and after he quit editing to become an agent, he called me.) Virtually all of the books I’ve sold have come as a direct result of the people I met at conferences.
• Writing conferences are a place to serve. I strongly believe that every writer should find a way to help other writers. Normally I teach at conferences. At ACFW this year, instead of teaching, I’ll be taking appointments with writers to help them out on any question they might have. One-on-one for fifteen minutes. It’s amazing what you can get done in fifteen minutes when you’re focused. This will probably be the best part of the conference for me this year.
• The ACFW conference is one of the best in the Christian publishing industry. Last year, there were about 500 attendees, with about 20 editors and a dozen agents. If I could only go to two writing conferences this year, I’d go to ACFW and Mount Hermon. If I could only go to ONE, I’d go to ACFW and Mount Hermon and then I’d lie about how many I went to.
• Virtually all my friends will be there. You can never have too many friends in the publishing business.
• I’m on the ACFW Advisory Board which meets with the Operating Board twice per year to make key decisions for the future. One of the decisions we made two years ago was to create the FictionFinder web site.

Many of my happiest memories in the publishing business have happened at ACFW conferences. At the 2004 conference, I gave a talk on “Writing From the Male Point of View” which people still talk about because I revealed a number of closely guarded Guy Secrets. I gave an updated version of that talk again at the 2009 conference. In between those years, I’ve spoken on numerous topics, made hundreds of friends, won a few awards, learned more than I ever expected, and enjoyed it all immensely.

This year I’ll be taking Jim Bell’s Early Bird Session. Jim was the guy who taught me about Three-Act Structure years ago, the weekend I first met him at — you guessed it — a small conference in Malibu, California. He’s become a good friend of mine. Jim is a former trial lawyer who now writes fiction. He served for a time as the fiction columnist for Writer’s Digest and he’s the author of Plot & Structure, one of the books I recommend most often to beginning writers. I expect I’ll learn something totally unexpected from Jim.

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

How long does the editing stage take?

Randy sez: That depends on a lot of things. There tend to be two schools of thought on editing:

• Writing is rewriting. Everything you wrote in the first draft is crap and will need to be completely redone, so ultimately, you will edit the life out of that sucker. No time will be wasted on preparation; writing the first draft will be quick; it will take a long time to edit. Deal with that.
• Writing is writing and editing is polishing. You think it out in advance, then write the book the way you want it on the first draft, then polish it up a bit and away you go. Preparation will take a long time; writing the first draft will go quickly; editing will be over in an eyeblink.

These are, of course, extreme cases, and there are some writers in the middle, but it’s remarkable just how many working authors are near one of the two extremes.

People in the “writing is rewriting” school generally don’t do a lot of planning up front for their novel (although some of them do). Instead, they get the first draft written any way they can, assuming that it’s going to be awful, and then the REAL writing gets rolling with the second draft. Which will still be awful, just not so awful, so the real, REAL writing happens on the third draft. Which will also be pretty bad, but better than #2. This goes on sometimes for 10 or 15 or 20 or 30 drafts. For this school of thought, editing can take a very long time.

People in the “writing is writing” school generally put a lot more planning into their novel. Then they write the first draft and it actually is pretty good. They let it cool off a bit, then read it, then polish it up. And then it’s ready to go. For this school of thought, editing can be incredibly short.

Which of these schools of thought is “better?” I don’t know how to answer that question. After talking with many, many novelists over the years about their creative processes, I’ve concluded that the best way for you to write a novel is whatever works best for you.

Many, many novelists write their first draft by the seat of their pants and then edit the heck out of it.

Many, many other novelists plan their novels carefully, either by writing several detailed outlines or by using my Snowflake method or using some other process.

You can write a good novel either way. You can, in fact, write a GREAT novel either way. Tragically, you can also write a horrifically awful novel either way. There just aren’t any guarantees in life.

Write your novel in whichever ways works best for you and don’t worry whether it takes a long time or a short time.

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.

A number of my Loyal Blog Readers left comments yesterday in response to Jacob’s question and my answer about how to portray Evil in fiction. I took the liberty of asking my friend, freelance editor Meredith Efken at the Fiction Fixit Shop, to comment on this issue on her own blog. She had some interesting things to say, and her closing comments raised a point I hadn’t thought of — that the really scary thing about evil is its capacity to turn a good person bad, as with Frodo in The Lord of the Rings.

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

I have asked many different professionals in writing about how to pitch a series, but never really get a answer. It is always a run around. I heard for the first time novelist publishing companies might want to sign you to a 3 book deal due to the costs, to me this makes more sense to write a series for your first book. Anyway, could you please talk about the best way to pitch a series to an editor or agent and even the benefits or pitfalls of having your first book part of a series. Thanks

Randy sez: You pitch a series almost the exact same way you pitch a one-book deal. If you’re a first-time novelist, you almost always must have a complete polished novel before you can sell it. When you’ve got that in hand, you query agents with your book idea and you can mention that this book is the first in a series, but you really don’t need to say more. If an agent is interested, he’ll ask for either a proposal or the full manuscript or both.

In a proposal, you tell all about the book. And somewhere in your Executive Summary for the book, you add a paragraph explaining that this is the first in a series and then you tell a very little bit about the series. You don’t have to tell much. You’ll sell your book (or fail to sell it) based on the polished manuscript you have.

Many publishers prefer to do a multi-book deal with a new author. The reason is simple. They figure that marketing a new face is expensive, and they’d prefer to spread that cost over several books. If you turn out to be a good selling author, they’d like to have you in their stable for several books.

There are of course some publishers that prefer to do one-book deals. Your agent will know which publishers like the multi-book deals. Some categories are very commonly done as series. Mysteries, for example, often feature the same detective in many, many books. Likewise, fantasies are often multi-book series. Romance novels are most often standalones, for the simple reason that most romances end with a wedding, and that’s generally a non-repeating event for any given pair. However, even if a book is a standalone book, many publishers will still want to do a multi-book deal. In that case, it’s not a series; it’s just a multi-book deal. Yes, even first-time novelists get multi-book deals.

In my view, it makes all kinds of sense for an author to sign a multi-book deal. Then you have some reason to believe that your publisher will work reasonably hard to promote your book, since they’re investing more money. (But even so, never assume that a publisher will promote your book. Bad things happen in publishing and books sometimes just all through the cracks.)

I don’t know of any real pitfalls to a multi-book deal. It’s a good thing to have a pipeline of books you’re working on, with one book just coming out, one book being polished, and another book being concepted. If you can schedule your books at regular intervals (maybe 9 months or a year apart), then you’ve got that pipeline going nicely, and you probably won’t get hammerlocked as you might when working with different publishers, neither of whom cares to compromise with the 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.

Jacob, from the Netherlands, posted a very long question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

How do I create Evil? (not an evil character, but just “evil”)

And should I?

Oaky, let’s see if I can put this in words?

I fear I need a bit of an introduction to this question:

I write about a precociuos girl (based on a real caharacter I met when I gave training in social skills to young delinquents. She is a bit like Lisbeth Salander form the millennium trilogy)

In my story this girl learns that “total freedom” does not exist. She learns that she has to bind herself to the people she loves. She learns that going head-on even if she is right (which often she is) is only getting her in worse trouble.

I want to write this transition (when you love/accept yourself, you can be more forgiving in the faults of others, something like that) not as a psychological novel, but as a supernatural thriller.

So the girl has two kinds of enemies: human, that is everyone who has authority, and supernatural ,that is the personification of the enemy within.

In scary books (I don’t use the word horror because there will be scary, but no bloody scenes in my book) the protagnosists fight against something truly evil.

I can make the human adversaries multi-dimensional.

I hesitate to use an evil force, because (almost by defentition) this is a one-dimensional force.

The origin of this force is the self-destructive part of my protagonist. But in my story I want to use this force as an external force. But by making it external, I also make it one-dimensional. There is my dilemma..

How to handle an evil force? And I don’t just mean enemy. She has those, and they are being worked out in step 3 of the snow flake.

Pure evil is a powerfull symbol, but how to give it body. Stephen King is the only one one I know of that can pull this off. As a reader i can follow him as long as the book is long. George Lucas did it when he created the dark side. Darth Vader is a character but the dark side just is. Now how did he pull off everybody not questioning the existence of a dark side. Because I can see no motive. Now I come to it, i can see no motive for the devil himself! World dominium? Boring! Maybe good enough for James Bond protagonists, but not for me.

(Yes I am a christian, but I believe in the devil only as a symbol)

The closest thing to a motive is Al Apcino in the devils advocate when he says that vanity is his favorite sin.

Please could you give me some insights in good an evil in a novell?

Not as in creating a multidimensional evil character, the snowflake takes care of that one (darth Vader I can manage). But what if you also want some really old fashioned black and white good and evil? How do you set up a mythology that works? Especially when it lies hidden beneath the real world.

Im afraid I am over my head (that is answering my own questions by coming up with new ones). But just in case you can give me some insight I will still click the “send email” button.

Randy sez: Wow, Jacob, that is a tough, tough question. I don’t know if the depth of my answer will match the depth of your question, but I’ll give it a shot.

You’re treating evil here as a noun. Maybe there is such a thing as evil incarnate, but it’s very difficult for most of us to visualize. I can’t see it, hear it, taste it, touch it, or smell it.

So why not simply stick with evil as an adjective? Then it will, as you say, be one-dimensional, but that’s okay because it’s one dimension of a very three-dimensional character.

Maybe I can’t see evil, but I can see a terrorist putting a knife into the belly of a pregnant woman. That’s evil.

Maybe I can’t hear evil, but I can hear the screams of an innocent girl being dragged into a back alley by a rapist. That’s evil.

Maybe I can’t touch evil, but I can feel the jackboots of the SS troops kicking me in the gut while they make an example of me in front of the other prisoners. That’s evil.

Show your reader evil in the actions of your characters. That’s how I’d show evil. I think that’s enough.

What do you think, O Loyal Blog Readers? Can you show pure and unalloyed evil in fiction? Or does evil need a body?

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.