Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

What happens when you overthink your storyworld so much that your novel is filled with thousands of irrelevant details and your story gets lost?

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

Hi Randy,My name’s Sam. My problem right now is that i have seriously overthaught my story. I dream it, daydream it and effectively live in it from time to time. this means that when it comes down to writing, my story is full of incredibly boring details that no-one really wants to read.

Typically, my chapters end up being 1/5 interesting, 1/5 plot important, and 3/5 of solid, useless details that are important for the imagination, but not to the story.

My question is, How do you counteract the cumalative mind-numbing effects of incredible detail, without compramising the integritory of the story, and ‘putting danger around every corner’ to compensate. how do you make sure that youve said everything important and nessisary, without going overboard?

Ive made the mistake of dreaming up a whole new alien world, with new sights, smells, even the fruit. i want to explain the new world and all its glory, but i dont want to make it boring.

Randy sez: First of all, you’re doing things right by thinking about your Storyworld in Xtreme depth. Most of the novelists I know do that. We may be sick, sick people, living in our own little universes, but that’s what novelists do.

Now, your question, Sam, is how to keep that from being boring.

The solution is one I heard in the very first critique group that I ever attended. One of the critiquers quoted a very famous line from a very famous author (but nobody seems to agree on exactly who that famous author was): “A story is just like real life with all the boring parts taken out.”

And my immediate response when I got whacked over the head with this comment was: “Are you trying to tell me something? Which parts of my story are boring?”

I didn’t get an answer to my question, and I left the meeting that night feeling rather miffed. If somebody is going to tell me there’s something wrong with my story, they at least ought to tell me what it is.

I now know the answer, and by a grand coincidence, it’s found in my most recent blog, where Jonathan asked whether a story really needs conflict.

My answer was yes, a story really needs conflict, because that’s part of the definition of a story.

The reason is simple: Conflict is interesting. Conflict means that some character wants something that he or she can’t have. When you read about a character like that, you either want the character to get it, or you don’t want them to do so. Either way, you want to read on to find out what happens.

So the “boring parts of the story” are those that don’t have anything to do with the conflict. The “interesting parts” are those that contribute most directly to the conflict.

Sam, you’ve cooked up an incredibly detailed Storyworld. That’s Job 1 for the novelist. Job 2 is to only show those parts of the Storyworld that relate to the conflict.

That’s your yardstick with everything you show in your Storyworld. The more a detail is part of the conflict, the more time you can spend showing it.

Does this mean you can’t ever show any other details at all? No, of course not. Those details add texture to the story. But if you’ve got 1000 details you could use for that pesky story texture, and if five of those details are critical to the conflict, then show at least those five — and maybe five others that aren’t critical but which you just want to show.

That might be a good rule of thumb for a novelist: For every detail you add in that’s unrelated to the conflict, show at least one detail that is.

What do my Loyal Blog Readers think? Is that a reasonable way to write a story? Leave a comment and say your say!

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.

Blog of the Day: Meredith Efken had a couple of good blog posts yesterday and today on her Fiction Fixit Shop blog in response to questions posted here on my site. Meredith is my freelance editor and is helping me catch up on the incredible backlog of questions I’ve got. Today, she talks about dual protagonists in a novel. Yesterday, she answered the question of whether the Scene/Sequel structure needs to apply to the antagonist in a novel.

Does your novel require conflict? If so, why? If not, why not?

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

Why do books HAVE to be about conflict to be interesting? The human condition isn’t all about conflict, so why should fiction be?

Randy sez: Books don’t have to have conflict to be interesting. I have on my shelf a perfectly fascinating 700 page book titled: PROBABILITY THEORY: THE LOGIC OF SCIENCE, by E.T. Jaynes. This book is brilliant. One of the best I’ve ever read. And it has zero conflict.

You may object that this book is nonfiction. Well, yes. Nonfiction doesn’t require conflict. Nonfiction teaches you something you want to know.

Fiction always has conflict, for the simple reason that conflict is part of the definition of fiction. The simplest definition of fiction I ever heard was told me by Sherwood Wirt: “Fiction is characters in conflict.”

If you don’t have characters, you don’t have a novel. If you don’t have conflict between the characters, you don’t have a novel.

What do my loyal blog readers think? Is it remotely possible to write a novel without conflict? Can you think of an example? Post a comment and tell us all what you think!

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.

Can you use the Snowflake method of writing a novel to help you write a short story?

I’m fully recovered from the ACFW conference and am now ready to resume blogging at the usual pace.

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

I’ve been a lurker here for quite a while. I have over the last couple of years purchased your Fiction 101, and 102 series (Excellent investment, btw!)

My question is with short stories and the Snowflake Method. How would you suggest scaling back the Snowflake process to fit short story writing.

Randy sez: The Snowflake method is designed to help you manage the complexity of a novel, which typically runs from 60,000 words on up to maybe 250,000 words. A short story will typically run a couple of thousand words. So we’re talking about managing something that is 30 to 100 times smaller than a novel.

I’d say that you still want to do a one-sentency Storyline that defines your short story. (You’ll need this in your submission letter, so you might as well write it sooner rather than later.)

You probably also will want to write a one-paragraph summary, since that lays out your Three-Act Structure. Story is story, whether it’s long or short. Goldilocks and the Three Bears has a very clear structure based on threes which is useful to study for short stories.

I also think you’ll want to work out your characters’ Goals, Motivations, and Values, along with their Storylines.

I don’t see any need to write a synopsis for a short story. Nor do you need to spend a lot of time developing the characters’ backstories. A short story is really too short to have much in the way of backstory. You’re too busy trying to squeeze in the frontstory to care much about backstory.

Nor do you really need a scene list. (If you write one, it’ll be very short, and will probably just restate what’s in the one-paragraph summary.)

If you use the Snowflake method for a short story, you really ought to be able to do it all in an hour or two, and it will guide your thinking.

I don’t write many short stories, and I usually just think about them for a bit and then write them using that pesky seat-of-the-pants method. But I see no reason not to use some of the core ideas of the Snowflake — as long as you’re not using the method as a way to avoid writing the actual story.

At the end of the day, you get paid for writing the story, not for designing it. The design is an aid to you in getting the story written faster and better. If it doesn’t do that for you, then skip the design and go straight to the writing.

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 long should you “compost” your story idea before you start writing your novel?

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

I have been reading your website for a while, and I recently bought your writing fiction for dummies book, and thanks to both, I am more excited about writing than I ever have been before.

My problem is that I am stuck in the idea composting stage I have seen you talk about. The good part is that, whenever my brain has a free moment, it just starts grinding away at ideas, seemingly of its own volition. It does give me hope to know that, given the opportunity, my thoughts default to thinking of story ideas. Ideas that I am itching to start writing, if I could just get them into focus.

The bad part is I know I am not a seat of the pants type, and that I need a mostly complete idea to start. However my ideas seem to melt away and get replaced by the latest and greatest one before I can fully develop them. Sometimes I keep combining ideas until it is so convoluted I canít keep it straight. Then I pull it all apart until I am back at a generic, unoriginal idea.

So, do you have any ideas on how to compost ideas more effectively? I have toyed with the idea of some kind of journal, but that sounds an awful lot like writing by the seat of your pants. Am I just missing the point where I should stop thinking and start outlining? Oh, and I should mention my genre is Sci-Fi / Fantasy and it is usually the world building that is slowing me down.

Randy sez: Trevor, you remind me a lot of my buddy, John Olson. John gets tons of ideas, seemingly without effort. He can spin out a full story idea in minutes. But he has a hard time staying on track and finishing a novel.

That’s a good problem to have, of course. I have the opposite problem. I take forever to come up with an idea. Often, it’s just a piece of the idea and I need to wait for the rest to come — a process I call “composting.” I just write whatever fragments I have on a tablet of paper and stick it in my “Idea File.” Then as more ideas come, I pull out the tablet and add them to the page. It can take years for me to compost a book. Once I start writing, I’m a bulldog and will never let the idea go. I’ll keep working on it until I get it done.

Let me emphasize that both of these character traits are valuable. John’s ability to generate new ideas is worth gold. My ability to see a project through is too.

True story: Years ago, I was nagging John to finish a novel, any novel. I asked him for a list of books he was working on. He sent me a list with ten items on the list.

I gave him a scolding on the hazards of not being focused, and asked him which one sounded most interesting.

He said he liked #4, a science-fiction suspense novel about four astronauts on the way to Mars and an explosion that leaves them with only enough oxygen for one of them to survive the journey.

I told John to write that story and leave all the others for later. John wrote back and said, “OK, I promise I’ll do it if you write it with me.” I called him on the phone to make sure he really wanted to do that, because the idea sounded brilliant to me. We talked for a few minutes and agreed to coauthor the book together.

Within a couple of months, we had pitched it verbally to an editor friend of ours. He liked it and asked for a proposal. By the end of that year, we had a proposal written. Seven weeks after we sent it out, we had a contract. A year and a few months later, the book was published with the title OXYGEN. We won several awards for that book and it really made our names. All because we joined our strengths.

Trevor, it sounds to me like you don’t need much composting time. Spin out an idea, make a commitment, and then start writing. Rather than composting, you need commitment.

You may just find it useful to find a friend you can be accountable to. Or a friend to coauthor something with. Or a friend to play some other role. Friends make the writing business work a lot 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.

Blog of the day: I mentioned above that John and I pitched a novel to an editor at a conference before we even wrote the proposal. That editor, Steve Laube, is now an agent. Steve’s most recent blog entry is “That Conference Appointment” and it’s terrific. Steve has done thousands of conference appointments, and he can tell you what not to do (which is good to know) and what is critical to do (which is even better).

Today, I’m taking a break from answering questions so I can post the Marketing column that I wrote for this month’s Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine. As I’ve said several times this summer, we are in an epochal year. 2010 may be considered by future historians as the biggest change in publishing since the invention of the alphabet in 18th century BC Egypt. Yes, bigger than that Gutenberg guy and his movable type.

Here’s my article, which I hope you’ll find interesting. I think it would be great if one my Loyal Blog Readers became the author of the first Billion-Dollar Book:

The Billion-Dollar Book

I think it’s plausible that in the next five years, some author somewhere will write a book that earns him or her a billion dollars. I call that a “B-book.”

Who will that lucky author be?

Let’s not be silly. Luck will have nothing to do with it. Great writing and great marketing will have everything to do with it.

If I had to hazard a guess on who will be first to publish a B-book, I’d say J.K. Rowling has the best shot. The 7-book Harry Potter series has reputedly earned her a billion dollars, so a B-book is quite possibly in her future.

If not JKR, then James Patterson is my bet for the next likeliest candidate. If not him, possibly one of the other heavy hitters in the publishing world.

Truth to tell, however, I wouldn’t bet even money on any one of these candidates.

In my view, the most likely author of that first B-book will be some unknown author who comes out of nowhere with great writing and an A+ marketing game.

While I can’t guess who will be the first B-book author, I am reasonably confident that the B-book itself will earn most of its revenue in electronic formats.

Prediction #1: The first B-book will be an e-book.

The reason is that you can’t have great sales without great distribution. There are roughly a billion computers on the planet connected to the internet and all of them can read e-books in numerous formats using free software. There are roughly four billion mobile devices, and most of those will soon be able to read e-books.

The sales channel for e-books is growing rapidly and has global reach. That’s why the first B-book will be in e-format.

What about the price of the first B-book? The higher the price, the fewer the number of copies you have to sell to earn a billion dollars, but the fewer the number of people willing to pay the price.

If your royalties are $1 per book, you could earn a billion dollars by selling a billion copies. Or you could get there by earning $10 royalties per book on 100 million copies.

Nobody knows the sweet spot, but my guess is that it’s somewhere between those extremes. If I had to guess, I’d say that a $2 royalty on half a billion copies is the best way to get your B-book. I can’t prove this. It’s a hunch based on incomplete information.

The reason I think this is plausible is because if you price an e-book at $2.99 on Amazon, then you earn a 70% royalty, which translates to $2.09. That means you’d need to sell about 478 million copies.

(Note that Amazon charges you a small amount for delivery costs when it sells your e-book. For a typical novel, this amounts to a few cents per copy, so things aren’t quite as rosy as I’ve painted them, but it’s a close approximation.)

I’d say that a large fraction of the 4 billion people who can afford a mobile device can afford a $2.99 e-book. And the vast majority of the one billion computer owners with internet access can buy that book.

It’s possible that the sweet spot price is $3.99 instead. At a 70% royalty, you’d only have to sell 358 million copies. Great news, eh?

If you try running these numbers with typical royalties paid on hardcover, trade paper, or mass market paperback, you see right away how much harder it is to get your B-book. Most of the money charged for these formats is going to somebody who isn’t you. That means the retail price has to go a lot higher or you have to sell many more copies. And delivery costs are much higher for a physical book than for an e-book.

This leads immediately to my next prediction.

Prediction #2: The first B-book will be self-published.

Self-publishing is the best way to get the royalty rate high enough and the retail price low enough to make the B-book a reality.

The fact is that most publishers aren’t going to price your e-book at $2.99 or $3.99. They’ll want it at $9.99 or $12.99, which is probably too high for the market. And they’ll pay you only 25% royalties on the wholesale price, which is too low. If you want an aggressively priced e-book and a high royalty rate, you’ll almost certainly need to publish it yourself.

Of course it may be that all of the above is just my wishful fantasy, but if you’re with me so far, let’s ask how you’re going to market a few hundred million copies of a self-published e-book.

You can’t do that alone. You need what Seth Godin calls a “tribe.” In the context of book publishing, your tribe is your set of committed fans. They’re the people you lead.

You don’t have the marketing oomph to reach hundreds of millions of people on your own. You do have the marketing oomph to reach thousands or tens of thousands of people. If you can energize them so that they love what you’ve got and if they’re willing to spread the word, then they can reach those hundreds of millions.

Want proof on that? I don’t have absolute proof, but I have three words that ought to be persuasive if you were awake two years ago:

Barack Obama 2008.

President Obama raised an estimated $656 million in individual contributions for his presidential campaign. He raised that by tapping into the social networks. In a word, he built a powerful tribe of committed followers.

Now it’s true that Obama didn’t hit quite a billion dollars, but he came close and he had an end-point for his marketing campaign. Presidential campaigns end with the election. Books stay on the market as long as they’re selling.

Let me sketch out how I foresee the first B-book will happen. I’ll probably be wrong on some details, but the general picture is plausible:

• First write a great book. There is no substitute for excellent writing. I define that to be, “Writing which provides a Powerful Emotional Experience.” Style is less important here than raw emotive force. See any current best-seller list for proof of that.
• Self-publish the book as an e-book and put it up for sale on all the usual sales channels: Amazon, B&N, etc.
• While you’re at it, create your own online store where you can sell your e-book in all the common formats: text, PDF, RTF, Mobi, ePub, etc. Don’t count on this bringing in a billion bucks on its own, but you can’t beat the royalty rate, and there’s just no reason not to do this.
• Post a large fraction of your book on your web site. I’d recommend at least half the book. Enough so that your readers can really get hooked on the story. Include links to your sales channels, along with incentives to buy. (Access to online “Director’s Cut” material would make a nice incentive. Don’t be offended, but a date with you would probably make a bad incentive.)
• Early on, you might jump-start sales with a special low price. Publishers can do “free Kindle” campaigns that seed the market with early fans by setting the price of the e-book to zero for a short time. (Don’t try that with a paper book!) You probably can’t do this if you self-publish your book, but you can set the price to $.99, which is almost free.
• Focus your marketing efforts on your tribe. Who is most likely to love your story? Build your web presence to appeal to them.
• Communicate to your tribe. Treat them as special, because they are. These are the people most like you. These are the folks who read your blog and subscribe to your e-mail list.
• Enable your tribe to communicate to you. They can do that through comments on your blog and by sending you personal e-mails. You can and should automate part of this by using online surveys — this will let you go broad. But don’t forget to go deep too — your tribe deserves personal responses from you. These are your people. Do right by them.
• Empower your tribe to communicate to each other. Your tribe is excited about your great writing. Naturally, they want to talk to like-minded people. Make that easy by giving them an online place to gather and talk — a forum is ideal for this. Join them when you can, but give them the space to be leaders. A large tribe needs many sub-chiefs. Foster those leaders. If you can, give them the ability to add content to your fan site.
• Encourage your tribe to communicate to the world. Give them buttons on your web site to Twitter or Facebook about you to their circles of influence. Collectively, your tribe knows a lot more people than you do. Your tribe can sell your book better than you can.
• Team up with similar authors who have similar tribes. Your fans will love these authors and their fans will love you. If I can switch metaphors here, remember that “the bigger the hive, the bigger the buzz.”
• That’s it. Don’t do things that sap your energy or drain your money or monopolize your time. You are finite. That’s OK.

You may be saying, “But what about book-signings? Speaking engagements? Giving away free copies in drawings on your blogs? Library visits? Yada yada screama?”

What about them? Those may move a few copies or a few dozen or a few hundred. They may be fine things to do once in a while for your tribe. They aren’t going to make a B-book for you.

Think about it. How many book-signings would you have to do to sell a hundred million copies? You will never book-sign your way to a B-book.

There isn’t any magic bean you can eat that will make you a B-book author. You need outstanding writing and a marketing campaign that you can automate as much as possible, so it doesn’t require ten times as much work to get ten times the results. You need strong, loyal fans who brag about your great writing to their friends.

Very few authors will ever write a B-book. It’s a lot easier (but still Xtremely difficult) to write an M-book — earning a million dollars. It’s vastly easier to write a K-book — one that earns a thousand dollars.

Most authors will fall somewhere on that spectrum. Now here’s the good news. No matter where you fall on the range, from B-book to M-book to K-book, the principles above can help you market your work more effectively.

That’s good news for all of us.

What do you write about when everything you want to write has been done before by a thousand other authors?

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

I’m a teenager, and I’ve been writing for years. I love writing fantasy stories, and recently I started seriously thinking about trying to get published. The problem is, good plot ideas are few and far between.

I really want to write SOMETHING, but every idea for a plot that goes through my head has already been written and rewritten in a thousand different ways, in hundreds of different settings, with countless different characters. And I don’t want to copy, because it’s really obvious when an author imitates another one, and it can be really lame.

I can write and have written with no plot idea in mind, and made it turn out okay, but it’s really miserable. I have nothing to use. What can I do? I HAVE to write something, or I’ll go crazy. But I need an inspiration, something that will make me actually care about my work. What can I do?

Randy sez: If fiction writing were easy, anyone could do it.

There are two extremes to avoid in writing a novel.

One extreme is to say, “I’ll just write about any old thing that comes to mind and not worry about whether it’s fresh and original.” The result is writing that’s not fresh and original.

The other extreme is to say, “Well, I’d really like to write about this idea, but it’s not completely original and the characters are pretty much like every other character that ever walked the pages of a novel, so I guess I better nuke that idea before I even start.” The result is brain-lock, which is what you’re experiencing, Kailyn.

Because you’re at one end of the spectrum, I’m going to ignore all the usual hazards that lurk at the other end. So what I say today won’t be completely true, but it should hopefully pull you back into the middle of the road so you can get yourself on track.

Listen, there is absolutely no way to have completely original characters that your reader can identify with. Go ahead, anyone. Try to come up with something totally new. Most characters are human, so if your character is too, then she’s already been done — a thousand times.

Want to make her a hobbit instead? (We’ll assume this is 1920, and hobbits have never been done before.) Not good enough. Those annoying hobbits still have two eyes, a nose, a mouth, two arms, two legs, etc. Hobbits are hardly new — practically every bit of them has been done before.

How might we make your character original? Make her a vampire? Been done. Make her a werewolf? Done. Make her a golem? Ditto. Make her a two-headed, seven-armed, grtwflbz from the planet Zblfwtrg? She’s still a female, and how many times has that been done? Make her some totally new gender? Who could relate to that?

Likewise, there aren’t any original plots worth writing. You’ve got either man against environment, man against man, or man against self. All of those, tragically, have been done to death. To death.

New genres get invented, oh maybe once per fifty years. Fantasy is probably the most recent genre, invented by Tolkien, and that was really based on the far more ancient fairy tale, so maybe it doesn’t count. New subcategories come along every five to ten years. Chick-lit and technothrillers are fairly recent subcategories. But those are both really variations on much older themes.

There is nothing new under the sun, as a wise man said roughly three thousand years ago, so even that observation isn’t new.

But wait. There is one thing that’s new. One thing that didn’t exist AT ALL as recently as twenty years ago. Can you guess what it is?

It’s you, Kailyn. You’re a teen, so you weren’t around twenty years ago. You’re new. Not completely new, of course, but you’re still unique.

When you write fiction, you’re going to mix something old and something new. The “something old” will come from character archetypes and plot ideas that amused your ancestors sitting around the fire five thousand years ago. The “something new” will come from inside you.

How do you get that “something new” on the page?

Only one way, and you know it as well as I do:

Write. Start writing and keep writing. It’ll start out lame and boring and it’ll be about as original as the air molecules you’re breathing. No matter. Keep writing.

If you’ve got any talent or creative spark in that skull of yours (and I don’t know for sure if you do), it’ll eventually come out. After a few hundred or a few thousand hours of that lame and boring writing that every writer on the planet has to do to get there.

Don’t let yourself get brainlocked by the need for absolute originality. Won’t happen. Just go write and keep writing and keep doing it until you wear out or get bored or wake up someday to find out that you’re brilliant.

Any of those is possible. Do what it takes to make that brilliant thing a reality.

End of pep talk. I know it won’t apply to all my Loyal Blog Readers. It will, in fact, be deadly poison for some of my Loyal Blog Readers. Some of you are convinced that you are God’s gift to Hemingway after only five minutes of writing. I would give you the spanking you need right now, but it’s probably easier to just lock you in a room and make you write Kailyn’s question five hundred times until you shrink your head back down to no more than the size of the average weather balloon.

Writers, keep to the middle of the road. Don’t get your brain fixated on the idea that you’re hopeless or brilliant. Leave that kind of judgment to editors and agents and other people who are more objective than you. (Mortal and inferior though they be.)

OK, Loyal Blog Readers, any thoughts on this? Have any of you ever felt as Kailyn does? Or felt like you were so savagely brilliant that the world just might not be able to contain the heat of your genius? Leave a comment and tell us all about it. For the record, when I started writing, I was pretty sure that fame and fortune would be mine within weeks. That was about 22 years ago. Still waiting, but it’s only a matter of hours now, I’d guess.

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.

Blog of the Day: If you’re a fan of Sherlock, you might want to check out the blog of Loyal Blog Reader Andy Van Loenen. I’ve always like Sherlock, and Andy’s got some interesting goodies that you might enjoy.

Also, check out Meredith’s two part response to the burning question of how much money fiction writers can expect to make. This is hard reality, folks. Don’t be discouraged by it, but don’t ignore it either. The better you understand the battefield, the better equipped you’ll be to win.

In my teaching on fiction writing, I often talk about the importance of disasters. But there’s an essential ambiguity that needs to be explained. We’ll talk about that today.

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

Can you explain how the concept of the ‘three disasters plus an ending’ for the overall structure of a novel (which you refer to in the snowflake method) ties in with the ‘goal, conflict, disaster’ structure of each individual scene.

Randy sez: The structure of a story has different levels. At the top level, a story can be summarized in a single sentence that tells the premise of the story. At the next level of detail, the three act structure, you typically have a beginning, middle, and end, tied together with three disasters.

The first disaster glues the beginning and middle together. The second disaster serves to add tension to the story right at the midpoint of the middle. The third disaster glues the middle to the ending.

So I often say that a story is “three disasters plus an ending,” although a story is really a whole lot more than that. (See Chapters 8 and 13 of my book, Writing Fiction for Dummies, to get all the details on the high-level story structure.)

The next level of story structure is the synopsis (a several-page document that sketches out your story in paragraphs that each summarize several scenes).

The next level of story structure is the scene list, which spells out what happens in each scene.

The next level of story structure is the scene itself, and this is the fundamental unit of story. By that, I mean that any scene can stand alone as an independent unit and it will make sense to a reader who comes to it without any knowledge of the rest of the story. (It might not make complete sense, since the reader may be missing lots of information, but the scene has a beginning, middle, and end of its own that function as a “story within a story.”)

Most scenes are what I call “proactive scenes” in which the focal character of the scene begins with some sort of goal in mind. As the scene progresses, conflict arises — our hero can’t get what he wants. This continues for most of the scene. At the end of the scene, there’s a setback. (I prefer to call it “setback” these days instead of “disaster” because I don’t want to confuse the issue. The setback at the end of a scene can be minor or it can be major.

For most scenes, the setback at the end will be some minor thing. But once in a while, when the scene is pivotal to the story, the setback may be a major disaster. In fact, it may be one of the “three disasters” that we talked about earlier.

That’s how the setbacks and disasters are related. A disaster in the large-scale structure of the story is always a setback in one of the scenes. But most of the setbacks in the scenes are not disasters for the large-scale structure of the story.

By the way, if you’re at all interested in story structure, you really ought to check out the detailed roadmap for stories that Larry Brooks spells out on his blog at StoryFix.com. I listened to Larry speak about this at a recent conference, and his presentation was excellent. He’s got a book coming out in February that is devoted to story structure. I’m looking forward to getting it when it comes out.

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.

Blog of the day: Check out agent Rachelle Gardner’s discussion today on revision letters. Rachelle recently had Camille Eide, (one of my Loyal Blog Readers and a member of my monthly critique group) as a guest blogger to talk about how Camille survived Rachelle’s revision letter. A revision letter is always traumatic. (If it isn’t, then it really doesn’t do you much good.) Today, Rachelle talks about why a revision letter is necessary to a writer. Normally, you get a revision letter from your editor as part of the process of editing your book. When you’re lucky enough to have an agent who writes you a revision letter, you have a golden opportunity to improve your craft before your editor does. Which makes it that much more likely that someday you’ll actually sell the book and HAVE an editor.

Shortly after my last blog post last Wednesday, the hard drive on my laptop began showing signs of distress. I ran Disk Utility on it and found that it was in the early stages of failing. The utility told me to get the hard drive replaced. I made sure that my backups were up to date and then took it in to the Apple store.

The Apple folks were great. They made their own backup of the entire machine, replaced the hard drive, and restored all my data. No charge, because the machine is still under warranty. I got my machine back late on Friday, and am thankful that everything is back to normal.

If you don’t have a good system of backups, the best time to do so is before things start going kablooey. You can buy a huge external hard drive for under $100. Apple’s Time Machine software (on either Leopard or Snow Leopard) is fast and brain-dead easy to use. I’m not a Windows guy, but undoubtedly Windows has excellent backup faciilities built-in (I don’t know the name of the Windows tool, or I’d name it here). Use these tools. Don’t leave your data at risk.

I missed a couple of days of blogging because my normal blog time was spent driving. Today is my day to write my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, so I’ll be back to normal blogging mode tomorrow.

In the meantime, I thought I’d point you to a new blog I just discovered: Slushpile Hell. This is the work of an anonymous “grumpy literary agent” who regularly posts quotations from query letters he or she receives from clueless writers, along with a snide comment from the agent. This blog is short — sometimes fewer than 30 words — and it’s hilarious. If you read it every day, you’ll learn hundreds of stupid things NOT to say to an agent. And that can be gold.

The other blog I’ll point you to is freelance editor Meredith Efken’s blog at Fiction Fixit Shop. I have a serious backlog of questions asked by my Loyal Blog Readers. My commitment is to answer all questions in the order they come in, but I’m now about 10 weeks behind. So I asked Meredith to help out.

Today, Meredith tackles the gnarly question of how much a novelist can expect to earn. The answer to this question is so long that she’s breaking it into two parts.

I’m Xtremely pleased with the terrific job Meredith is doing in answering questions. She explains things thoroughly and well. (That’s why I pay her to review my own fiction before I send it to my editor or agent.)

Must you begin your fiction-writing career by writing short stories so that you can “pay your dues?” Or is it OK to just start writing novels?

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

Hi Randy: I want to write novels but I have read that you should start with short stories. I have read short stories but I have never been interested in writing them. Should I start with writing short stories for several years or should I start by writing novels which is my end-goal?

Randy sez: The short story is a somewhat different art form than the novel. If you want to write a novel, then write a novel.

Way back in the bad old days, there were a lot of markets for short stories, and if you wrote a short story, you had some prospect of getting it published. A lot of those markets have dried up for various reasons. You can still sell short stories, but your prospects of getting paid are lower than ever.

The advice that writing teachers gave writers in the bad old days was to start with short stories. Part of the theory here was to “fail quickly” although that particular buzzword didn’t hit the world until the 1980s, and the advice on writing stories goes back long before that.

Personally, even in the late 1980s when I started writing, I thought it was bad advice. I have written very few short stories in my life. I started right in learning the novel as an art form. After nine years of working on novels, I still hadn’t sold anything, but I was getting close.

One day I got an idea for a geeky short story, “Computers in Hell.” The question I asked myself was, “What kind of computers do they have in Hell?” I figured there had to be plenty of good puns that could be made out of “wicked fast” and “blazing speeds” and all that.

So I wrote the story and submitted it to a local computer magazine in San Diego that took one short story per week. What do you know! It got published and I earned $150 for it. So it turned out that my training as a novelist fitted me to earn a few bucks writing a short story.

Shortly after that, I sold my first nonfiction book and then soon after, my first novel, and I was off to the races. I’ve not looked back to short stories. Don’t see why I would want to.

If you wanted to write short stories, I’d say to go ahead and do it. If you wanted to write haiku, I’d tell you to do that too. Write what you want to write.

Neil, since you want to write novels, write novels. And have fun! If this fiction game isn’t fun, then it isn’t a game, and the pay’s just not good enough to do it as a job.

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.

Blog of the Day: My freelance editor, Meredith Efken, answers a really interesting question today on her blog at the Fiction Fixit Shop: “Must every scene end with a disaster?” The short answer is of course, “Yes and no.” The long answer is . . . longer than that. Check out Meredith’s blog to see what she wrote and my comment.