Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

What do you do if you get a better idea for a novel while you’re writing the one you’re on? Should you go write the new one, or should you show a little persistence and finish the old?

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

After months of research and Snowflaking I started writing my first novel, an action oriented spy story based on true events with a lot of twists in the plot. I enjoy writing it, but a new story has emerged in my head and it really wants to get out. It’s about a recently divorced father trying to get a grip on his life, but falling in love with his teenage son’s girlfriend. No exploding helicopters here.

Though I’m neither teenage nor divorced, I really enjoy snowflaking this new story and all the Powerful Emotional Experiences I can put into it.

My dilemma and question for you is: should I finish my spy story first or should I go for the second, possibly more inspired story?

Randy sez: There are a couple of factors you should consider here before you abandon Story #1 for Story #2:

• Author readiness. Just how close to getting published are you? (You might want to read my article on the publishing roadmap before you answer.) If you’re a Freshman or a Sophomore, then your first novel is very unlikely to get published. So there’s no real point in switching to a new novel. Save it for later and finish the one you’re on now.
• Story quality. Just how much better is this new idea than the one you’re working on? It sounds like an interesting idea, with shades of American Beauty and various other movies and novels thrown in, but unless it is staggeringly better than the story you’re writing now, I’d say you should stick with the one you’re on. You don’t want to get into the habit of abandoning every good idea you ever have as soon as a new one comes along. If you do, then you’ll never finish anything. Finishing is always a good idea unless you’re working on a story that you already know is hopeless.

So Ron, unless you’re an advanced writer AND this new idea is amazingly better than the old one, I’d say to put it in the bank and save it for your next story. That’ll give you some motivation to finish the one you’re on.

I have an “idea file” that has several different ideas for books in various stages of composting. This guarantees that I’ll never run out of ideas.

What do my Loyal Blog Readers think? Have any of you ever abandoned one novel for another? Why did you decide to switch? What was the result? Post a comment here and tells us all about it.

I’ve been out of town twice in the last two weeks. The first time I went to Houston to teach a one-day conference for the Northwest Houston RWA. The second time I went to Denver to do a similar one-day conference for the Heart of Denver Romance Writers. Both weekends were great fun and I met a lot of new people. I got to hang out with my friend Margie Lawson and I met several of my Loyal Blog Readers. So it was wonderful, but also exhausting.

I’m glad to be home now for the rest of the year. I don’t foresee much travel during the next several months. Which means I’ll have a bit more time to blog. August through October are always my busy season.

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 old is too old when you’re a fiction writer? Is there an “age bias” in the publishing world?

The last week has been busy with travel and all that, so I’m just now catching my breath.

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

Hi Randy, I’m a fan, needless to say, and I read your blog daily. This morning’s question brought up one that has been bothering me for some time and that is, when is a writer too OLD to be considered by agents and publishers? One hears all the time that agents/publishers want to develop a career novelist, one who will produce book after book and make the agents and publishers rich. But what about those of us who are seniors. Should we keep mum about our age in our queries or just wait and cross that bridge when and if it comes up? And how about meeting and pitching an agent at a conference? No chance hiding one’s age there, so do you have any advice for what to say or do to mitigate any prejudice they might have about oldsters?

Randy sez: I’m told that age bias is a serious problem in screenwriting. I wouldn’t know, since I don’t do screenplays.

In the world of novel writing, there may possibly be an age bias, but it’s really the least of your worries.

Your main worry with fiction writing is “craft bias.” Agents and editors are massively biased against poor craft. They are massively biased in favor of excellent craft.

It’s that simple. There are any number of examples of fiction writers who’ve published novels in their 70s. Fiction is about life, and the longer you’ve lived, the more you probably know about life.

If you were extremely old, your age might even be a selling point, as it was for 88 year old Helen Hoover Santmyer’s novel “… And Ladies of the Club.”

This is a good time to mention the “Fiction After 50” blog, by my friends Ron and Janet Benrey. They published their first novel after the age of 50, and their blog is about the advantages of being an older writer.

Martha, my advice is to not mention your age at all in your queries. It’s essentially irrelevant. What matters is your craft. Great writing is great writing. If you write well, you can get published at any age.

Go to it.

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.

What happens if you’re a plain old ordinary person trying to write a novel with characters who are anything but plain, old, or ordinary? Can you write great fiction if your own life is boring?

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

Hi Randy,

Just a quick question and one that’s been bugging me a lot since I finally decided to stop dreaming and start writing.

What if you think your life is boring?

I understand it’s a necessity to draw on experiences you’ve had in your own life to enrich your novel, but I honestly think my life has been dull, run-of-the-mill everyday toast with butter boring. I have a vivid imagination and I’ve been relying on that to get me where I want to go with my writing but I’m starting to find that characterisation is the bane of my existence. Is it because I’m a ‘never bungee jumping’, ‘won’t smoke or drink’, ‘can’t bear the thought of short-changing someone’, kind of plain Jane?

I’ve tried some psychology books about different habits in different personalities but I still can’t turn my character from a stick figure into a fleshy Mona Lisa!

Help!

How do you take mundane and make it something magnificent?

Randy sez: Join the club, Tammy. I know a lot of writers. The vast majority of them live tofu lives and still manage to write hot curry fiction.

I know a sweet and gracious Southern lady who regular murders people in her novels. I know a guy who preaches in his church every Sunday and writes novels with alcoholics and pimps and . . . lawyers. I know a mild-mannered mom who writes werewolf erotica.

Your characters are not you and they don’t have to be like you. They can do all the bizarro things you’d never do. That’s probably why most writers write — so they can vicariously do all those things that they’d never do.

Tammy, I’ve never bungee-jumped either. I don’t smoke or drink. And I do my best not to short-change people. Are you telling me I’m . . . boring? Not possible. I’m a geek, and geeks are the new cool.

I haven’t seen your writing and I’ve never met you, but my bet is that the problem isn’t with you. If you’re like most writers, the problem is with your writing.

Which is good news, because you can make improvements to your writing a lot easier than you can make changes in yourself.

In fact, the real problem appears to be pretty simple: Your characters are underdeveloped. There’s a cure for that, and it comes in three parts:

1. Read up. There are plenty of good books on characters. I recommend Brandilyn Collins’ book GETTING INTO CHARACTER. Also, Margie Lawson’s course on EMPOWERING CHARACTER EMOTIONS. And while I’m passing out recommendations, chapters 7 and 12 of my book WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES are pretty decent too.
2. Write on. There is no substitute for getting words on paper. Every day. You get good at brain surgery by doing brain surgery. You get good at writing by writing.
3. Get critiqued. Every writer is her own worst critic, so you have no business critiquing your own work. You need a second opinion — preferably from somebody who is one part nice, two parts honest, and three parts well-trained in the art of fiction. A professional novelist can see problems that you’d never find on your own, if you’re willing to listen and not argue.

So Tammy, don’t worry about being a Plain Old Ordinary Person. You’ll probably live longer not smoking or drinking or jumping off bridges or whatever it is you think would make you more exciting. If you want to write about something you’ve never done before, the information on what it’s like is only a Google away, and you can probably interview online twenty people who’ve done exactly the thing your character wants to do.

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.

Is it OK to write characters who are older than you are? More mature? Characters who’ve gone through life experiences you haven’t?

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

Hello, Randy- I happened across your blog about three weeks ago, and it has really encouraged and challenged me- so thank you!

I read your blog yesterday about 15 year-old Colby, and in reading your response I happened across the dilemma that had been growing in my mind.

You see, I’ve been working on and writing a novel for about eight months, and I’ve nearly finished the first draft and have been going back giving everything more detail, more background, etc. As I’ve gone back and read it, I realized that my characters lacked “pop”. Part of this problem was the fact that I wrote most of the novel for the NaNoWriMo challenge in November, and planning/writing at high speed is not conducive to fleshing out characters. I am 17, and I am writing about adult characters in their late-twenties and on, and I’m worried that my lack of experience of being that old is inhibiting my ability to portray characters of that age.

Should I hold off for a few years on this novel, and work on something that has younger characters? Or should I just continue working on and rewriting this novel, and at the worst treat it as a cringe-worthy, but necessary part of my journey as writer?

Randy sez: A lot depends on where your heart is. If your heart is in writing this story, then write the story, whether or not you’ve got the life experience to write the characters credibly.

As I’ve said in previous posts on this blog, you don’t have to be like your characters to write them. You don’t have to be a man to write male characters; you don’t have to be Jewish to write Jewish characters; you don’t have to be a Martian to write Martian characters.

The more unlike yourself your characters are, the more research you need to do. Monica, your characters are about ten years older than you. If you know a lot of twenty-somethings, then you might very well do just fine with writing people that age. Or not.

The easy way to find out is to get a critique from a few people in that age group. If they think you nailed your characters, then you probably did. If they don’t, then you probably didn’t.

One advantage that any outsider has in writing about characters is that the outsider sees things that the insiders take for granted. So you may be able to put some new insights into your characters. Or you might end up, as you suggested, with a piece of cringe-worthy shlock. There’s no way to know until you try.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. There’s no way to be a great writer unless you’re first ready to be a horrible, wretched, shlocky, cliche-ridden, miserably bad writer. You get good by starting out bad. Some people can’t handle that. Some people can.

There’s a word for people who can: “Authors.”

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.

What is style? What is that voice thing that editors keep going on about? How do you develop style and voice in 3 easy steps?

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

Randy, please describe how you see style and voice and how that is cultivated. Sight examples for clarification.

Randy sez: Drat! I was hoping for a question with an easy answer. You’ve asked one of the questions I find most difficult in teaching fiction writing.

I’d define style to be the set of patterns you use in your writing: word choice patterns, grammatical patterns, sentence structure patterns, paragraph structure patterns, narrative structure patterns.

I’d define voice to be the “attitude” you bring to your writing. This can be separated into the voice of each of your characters plus the voice you bring in as author.

Some examples of style patterns:

Word choice patterns. Do you use long words or short words? Do you use foul language or fair language? Latin-based words or Anglo-Saxon words? Active verbs or passive verbs? Spicy nouns or tofu nouns? Lots of adjectives or adverbs or hardly any?

Grammatical patterns. Do you violate those annoying rules of grammar that Mrs. Thiesing taught you in ninth grade English, or do you follow them? Do your verbs and nouns agree? Do you split infinitives?

Sentence structure patterns. Do you use long sentences or short? Clip the subject of the sentence? Do you pile on the clauses?

Paragraph structure patterns. Do you use long paragraphs or short? In dialogue, do you make a new paragraph every time you have a new speaker or do you sometimes lump two or more people together?

Narrative structure patterns. What is the mix of action, dialogue, interior monologue, interior emotion, description, and narrative summary in your writing?

Some examples of “attitude” in your writing:

Are you an optimist or a pessimist? Religious or not? Confrontational or conformist? Conservative or liberal? A rule-keeper or an anarchist? Altruistic or selfish? Judgmental or slow to leap to judgment? Angry? Depressed? Chaotic? Whimsical? Neurotic?

I could go on and on, but I think you get it.

Now the problem is how to develop your style and voice.

To develop your style, you need to learn what your options are. You do that by reading. Ten million words should be enough, if you read a mix of categories. That corresponds to about 100 novels. When you’ve read that many, you ought to have a good sense for what can be done with the language.

To develop your voice, I recommend writing a million words. That works out to about 10 novels, although you don’t have to write that many different books. It might be ten complete versions of one book. Your voice is you on paper. You don’t need to practice being you, but you may need to unlearn some of the things you were taught in school. That’s why you need to write a lot — because it’s only in doing it every day for years and years that you strip away all the handcuffs that Mrs. Thiesing put on you in school.

Do you have to read 100 million words to develop your own style? No. You might learn it quicker. You might never learn it. I’m guessing that 100 million words is an average. Your mileage is guaranteed to vary.

Do you have to write 10 million words to develop your own voice? Same answer.

What do my Loyal Blog Readers think? How many books did you have to read to develop your style? How many did you have to write to develop your own voice? Leave a comment and let me know, because I’m just guessing based on my own sordid experience as a reader and a writer. I’d love to get some data from writers who aren’t me.

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: Agent Steve Laube blogged today with the headline: Every Writer Must Read This. I read it, and found that it’s a summary of a recent Harris Poll on the reading habits of Americans. There are some useful trends to note here. The most popular category is mystery/suspense, as measured by the percentage of readers who read this category. I suspect that the most popular category is still romance, as measured by the number of books actually bought, because romance readers tend to buy tons of romances. Steve is a guy I always pay attention to, so check out what he has to say.

When you’re constructing the Story Goal for your novel, how concrete does it need to be? Does it have to be something your protagonist can do all by himself? Or is it enough if he just helps out? Is it enough that he was just a cog in the wheel?

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

Hey Randy,
I’m a teenager writing a fantasy novel, which is the first in a series which looks to be about three books. The protagonist is an eighteen-year old guy, whose hometown is ransacked, and he’s captured, which is the first disaster. That’s when he makes the choice to fight against the tyranny to try to defeat it, but is that a good enough Story Goal? Is it enough emotional payoff for the Good to beat the Bad, even if the lead character has little or nothing to with it himself? What if he’s wounded while his friends win the all-important Final Battle? I just don’t think it’s enough for Good to win over Evil–it’s too impersonal. The lead character has to defeat the Villain himself. What do you think?

Randy sez: Your Story Goal needs to be something that is possible for your lead character to do, possibly with some assistance. But he needs to be in on it in a major way.

Example: In THE LORD OF THE RINGS, Frodo’s Story Goal is to throw the Ring into the Cracks of Doom. He makes this decision at the Council of Elrond. Notice that his Story Goal is NOT to defeat Sauron. That is his Ambition (and it’s the Ambition of most of our good guys in this novel).

But defeating Sauron is abstract. (I define an Ambition to be abstract.) What does it look like to defeat Sauron? It could look like many things — cutting off Sauron’s head, or vaporizing him with an atom bomb, or feeding him a live grenade and letting it explode. You can photograph any of those. You can’t photograph “defeat.” That’s too vague.

Frodo’s Story Goal is concrete. You can photograph throwing the Ring into the Cracks of Doom.

So Amadeus, your character has a fine Ambition — to battle tyranny. Now you need to turn that into a concrete Story Goal. What will it look like for him to battle tyranny? Will he become a commando and destroy the crucial bridge? Become a witch doctor and learn to bring back every dead warrior to fight again? Learn the power of the Grzazaga Force and use it to destroy Castle Ytrtrtr? Develop the power to belch fire and then kill the tyrant while entertaining him with a fire-eating act?

Only you can decide what your Story Goal for your lead character will be. But make it as concrete as you possibly can. Make it something you could photograph. Something that any intelligent observer could see and report back on.

I don’t think it’s enough to just send your hero into battle, get him wounded, and then let the victory be won while he’s recovering in the hospital. If you go that route, you chose the wrong lead character. You should have chosen the guy who actually blew up the bridge, raised the warriors, destroyed the castle, or killed the tyrant.

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.

If you’re writing a novel, is it OK to use a pseudonym? Is it wise?

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

The only thing that’s holding me back from publishing my book sooner than the next few months is finance but otherwise I am extremely serious and more serious that ever. I want to use a psuedonym for personal reasons and have fun finding one with heaps of belly laughs to go with it. Could you please give me some pros and cons about the subject?

Randy sez: I can think of a few reasons why you might want to use a pseudonym:

• Embarrassment. Your book contains material that you don’t want your parents/spouse/children/grandmother/friends/minister to know that you wrote. For example: you write erotica or your characters have potty-mouths.
• Libel. You say things in your book that could get you sued.
• Fear. You’re afraid that you’ll offend some terrorists or government or big corporation and they’ll come after you.
• Privacy. You just know you’ll become famous after your novel hits it big and you don’t want to be bothered by all those pesky groupies who’ll be beating a path to your door.
• Moochers. You’re certain that your novel will make you wealthy beyond all imagination and you want to avoid the gold-diggers, especially your freeloading brother-in-law who is such a horrible mooch that you’ll never get him off your couch if he thinks you’re stinking rich.
• Dweebishness. Your parents saddled you with the world’s most dweebish name, such as Throckmorton B. Grieselheimer the 23rd, and you really don’t want that loser on your covers.
• False fame. By horrid chance, you have the same name as somebody who’s already famous, such as Richard Nixon or Monica Lewinsky, and you don’t want to be confused with That Guy or That Girl.
• Unpronounceable. You have one of those names that people can never pronounce, such as Grzsazg, and you suspect that isn’t going to help on the word-of-mouth thing for your book.
• Almost dirty. Your name looks for all the world like a dirty word, such as, um, well I can’t put a name like that in a family-oriented blog like this, but you’ve seen names like that and your worst nightmare is having to introduce somebody like that for a speech, because you just know you’re going to say it wrong.
• Cool. You just know in your gut that “Mark Twain” will be a lot cooler name for an author than “Samuel Langhorne Clemens.”
• Sexism. You’re a woman writing military technothrillers or you’re a man writing romance and you fear your readers won’t take you seriously.
• A fresh start. Some writers with weak sales adopt a pseudonym so the bookstores won’t hold their past track record against them. Yes, really.
• Overproductivity. Some authors write so many books that their publisher fears that they’ll saturate the market. So they write some books under their real name and some under a pseudonym.

Any of those is a decent reason to use a pseudonym. I bet there are some other excellent reasons. Maree, if you have a good reason to use a pseudonym, then do.

I can think of a few disadvantages to using a pseudonym:

• Confusion. You need to remind your publisher to make your checks out to you, not to your pseudonym. You may also have some explaining to do to the tax authorities when you claim all that income for books written by somebody who apparently isn’t you.
• Fame. So you’re a best-selling author and you pay for your meal in a restaurant and that darned waitress looks at your Visa card in your real name and DOESN’T say, “Oh my gosh! You’re that famous author! I love your books! I feel like I know you! I want to bear your children!” Sometimes it really is fun to be recognized, (although it can also be weird.)
• Credit. When you go to your high-school reunion and tell all those meanies that you really did make good and publish a novel, do you think they’ll believe you if you wrote under a pseudonym? Uh-uh. Jim-Bob and Mary Sue will still mock you for being a hopeless geek.

Maree, if you can live with those downsides, then writing under a pseudonym should work just fine for you.

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.