Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

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.

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.

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

In today’s market, how many viewpoint characters are allowed/considered acceptable? In my current WIP, I have 10. The story has an epic sweep: wars, genocide, heaven’s doors closing forever. It’s definitely not a quaint little romance story, but is the quantity of POV characters going to distance the reader too much, even if I employ a lot of deep POV in the respective scenes?

Randy sez: Ten POV characters are a lot, but in an epic kind of a story, it’s entirely appropriate. Think how many focal characters you see in THE LORD OF THE RINGS. I never counted how many POV characters were in THE GODFATHER, but it felt like about fifty. Romance novels tend to have only a few POV characters, and rightly so. Big-canvas novels with many characters on many stages have more, and rightly so.

In my own fiction, I usually have somewhere between 3 and 5 POV characters. I’ve done a novel once with 2, both of whom were told in first-person. (This novel is yet unpublished.) I’ve also done one with about 9 POV characters. (This one also needs a home.)

It’s important, when you have a lot of POV characters, to remember that one of them needs to be the most important one. In THE LORD OF THE RINGS, the main character is Frodo. Of course, there was a long stretch in THE TWO TOWERS where we didn’t see Frodo. However, we had a stand-in there for him — his two young hobbit friends, Merrie and Pippin. Frodo was never far from their thoughts, and therefore never far from ours.

What do my loyal blog readers think? What’s your favorite novel? How many POV characters does it have? And in your current work-in-progress, how many POV characters do you have?

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.

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

What, in your mind, is the surest way to achieve a powerful emotional experience in fiction - is it having a solid structure with compounding disasters? Is it having solid and deep characters? Or do you need to know it all before you can get the average reader to “have a PEE”?

I’m not looking for a shortcut, just a topic to study/practice so that my writing has a sharper edge and can cut down to deeper emotions.

Randy sez: Sometimes I think I’ve created a monster by coining the term “Powerful Emotional Experience.” (To my knowledge, I was the first writing teacher to claim that the purpose of fiction is to create a Powerful Emotional Experience, which my students quickly discovered had a delightfully naughty three-letter acronym.)

In my opinion, the Powerful Emotional Experience really requires only two elements:

1. You have to have characters that your reader actually cares about, because nobody will get emotionally invested in a character they don’t care about.
2. You have to put a character at hazard, and then either rescue him or let him go down in flames. (Either way will create an emotive response in your reader.)

There is a certain structure to characters. They must have Values, Ambitions, and Goals. (Drat, I can’t type out the entire chapter 7 from my book WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES, but trust me, it’s all there.)

There is also a certain structure to hazard. At the highest level of story, there are Storygoals and Disasters. The middle level of story (the scene) is a little more complicated, because there are two basic kinds of scenes that are specially good at creating hazard and then paying it off to the reader with a PEE. At the very lowest level of story, paragraph by paragraph, there is a simple structure of hazard that gives the reader a continuous stream of, um, Powerful Emotional Experience. Again, it would be a an awful lot of work to type out here chapters 8, 9, and 10 of WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES, and my publisher would probably get very irritated at me for violating their copyright.

A fair bit of this is summarized in the “Writing the Perfect Scene” article here on my web site.

Bryce also asked a second question:

Also, when are you going to have more contests so that us plebes that are still learning can earn a one-page critique? Or have you considered offering a paid five-page critique service? Or am I going to have to spring for a writing conference if I’m ever to have some direct input about my fiction?

Randy sez: I’ve not been doing many critiques lately except at writing conferences. It’s a matter of being very busy and wanting to have an impact on the most people I can in the limited time that I have. There are a number of good free-lance editors listed on my blogroll who could do a paid five-page critique, if you asked them. When I’ve got stuff to be critiqued, I usually hire Meredith Efken at the Fiction Fixit Shop to look it over. She gets my writing and knows how to tell me what’s wrong without making me want to break things. When you find a good freelance editor who works well with you, stick with him or her!

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.

Yesterday, I challenged my loyal blog readers to ask their burning questions on fiction writing on my new “Ask a Question For My Blog” page. (Please remember to ask your questions on that page, rather than posting them here as comments where they’re hard to manage as individual units.)

I’ve already got quite a hopper full of questions, so will be burning through them, starting today.

Mari asked:

As I go through the snowflake method, I find my storyline to be complex that I can see breaking it down to multiple storyline, a series perhaps. My storyline covers a girl’s life from when she is a child up until mid-life in which she encountered multiple challenges throughout this lifetime. Is there a “rule of thumb” that I can use to decide to choose whether to write a novel that covers them all or to break this into series?

Randy sez: Mari is referring to my Snowflake method article here.

My advice on this is to try to write it all in one book unless that book would get too long. What does “too long” mean? That depends on how many books you’ve published. If you’re a first-time novelist, shoot for a first novel under 100,000 words. (Published novelists may be able to write substantially more words than that, but publishers tend to be wary of investing too much in a first novel. And costs increase with length.)

Mari, if you can see that your book is going to be 300,000 words, then break it up into three novels and pitch it as a series. But if it’s less than about 140,000 words, try to get it into a single book of 90,000 words or less.

Remember that there are very few actual rules on this point. Occasionally publishers will print a novel by a first-timer that’s huge. But the odds are against it, so the smart writer plays the odds. And the odds say that a first novel between 60,000 and 90,000 words is easiest to sell (roughly).

I’m in Indianapolis this weekend for the joint board meeting of American Christian Fiction Writers (I sit on the advisory board and we’re meeting with the operating board to set the vision for the coming year). We’re in the hotel we’ll be using for our national conference in September. From where I’m sitting in my room, I can see the state capitol building just across the street. I’m really excited to see how the conference is shaping up. More on that in the coming months.

I’ve got a few minutes free right now to critique another one-sentence Storyline — something we’ve been doing here for the last couple of weeks.

Today’s entry is by Rob, who posted this Storyline:

A young father searching for his abducted toddler son becomes the pawn in a terrorist plot to bomb a crowded NASCAR speedway.

Randy sez: I like this. Let’s look at the parts to see what makes this work well:

“A young father” is a strong lead. I constantly hear the comment that “young father” is redundant, since we see shortly that he’s the father of a toddler. My response to that is, “So what?” Redundancy isn’t always a bad thing. My experience is that when you’re describing your lead character, if you haven’t got any other adjectives to make him or her more precise, the word “young” is almost alway a help (if the character actually is young). I’d guess that’s because America is a youth-oriented culture. So I favor keeping it “young father.”

The phrase “searching for his abducted toddler” is very strong, for all kinds of reasons. This pushes the emotional hot buttons for anyone who’s ever been a parent and for most people who haven’t been parents.

The phrase “becomes the pawn in a terrorist plot to bomb a crowded NASCAR speedway” is also strong. It’s a little wordy. It might be possible to shave a word off here or there. But count the emotive words: “pawn” and “terrorist” and “plot” and “bomb” and “crowded”.

The word NASCAR is specific and concrete and it suggests that our author knows something about racing and will put it into the novel. If Rob had said merely “a major sporting event,” that would work less well because it’s less specific. You might imagine that “a major sporting event” would appeal to more readers than “a NASCAR” event. Not really. “A major sporting event” is squishy and out of focus. Rob has this story sharply in focus. This Storyline will appeal to a lot of people just because of the strong thriller element. It will appeal massively to racing fans who like suspense.

Good job, Rob! In 22 words, you’ve shown us both the personal and the public stakes for this novel. If I saw this book on the shelf with this sort of ad copy, I’d open the book to see if I like the writing. That’s the job of a one-sentence Storyline. If you sell this book to a publisher, your editor will know exactly how to position the book and both the Marketing and Sales directors will know how to do their jobs.

We’re currently analyzing the one-sentence Storylines submitted by my loyal blog readers. Today, we consider the curious case of Carrie’s characters. Carrie has two Storylines, each focusing on a different character:

Here’s the first one:

A demon-banisher must save a young oracle from kidnappers, possibly including her own fiancee.

Here’s the second one:

A man who watched his sister’s murder must battle her killers to save a young girl.

Randy sez: Let’s analyze each of these in turn.

The term “demon-banisher” is a bit awkward. It doesn’t carry much emotive punch, and it’s definitely not a common term. The usual term is “exorcist” and this does carry some emotive punch, especially if the words “Linda Blair” mean anything to you. Since it’s only one word, Carrie could then afford to add an adjective or two to give us more information on this exorcist. There are all sorts of ways to do so: “A witch doctor exorcist” is very different from “A mathematician exorcist” who is in turn very different from “A five-year-old girl exorcist.” There is room here to make this character unique.

As for those pesky kidnappers, what do they want? If they are holding the oracle hostage for release of their fellow freedom fighters, that’s one thing. If they want a million ounces of gold bullion, that’s another. If they want safe passage to Mars, well, now you’re talking real loonies. In any event, telling us what the bad guys want is an inexpensive way to get us to invest emotionally in the story.

I think the word “possibly” here is leeching the very life out of this Storyline, so kill it if you possibly can. On second thought, kill it, kill it, kill it. If the fiance is one of the kidnappers, then say so. If it’s really not clear, then leave it out. The Storyline is not the place to fool your readers.

I don’t know the story well enough to fill out this Storyline the way it needs to be. Only Carrie can do that.

In the second Storyline we’ve got a lead character who is “A man.” Those two words are pretty bare. Tell us more about him. Is he an accountant? A professional wrestler? An Elvis impersonator? In any suspense story, it’s very helpful to give us some idea what skills our hero might bring to the table.

This man, however, “watched his sister’s murder.” That’s pretty potent stuff, and this Storyline would be stronger if you backloaded it so that this phrase is at the very end.

The murderers are also threatening a young girl about whom we know nothing. We need to know more. How is this young girl related to the man? What reason might he have for wanting to get involved in a kidnapping (rather than calling in the FBI)? What do the kidnappers want? What are the stakes here–are they personal, city-wide, national, global, or cosmic?

It’s not clear to me if the “young girl” of Storyline 2 is the same as the “oracle” of Storyline 1, but if so, then Storyline 2 might work better as follows:
“A xxx man tries to rescue yyy who has been kidnapped for zzz by the men who murdered his sister.”

Here, you’d need to fill in xxx with something that tells us more about our hero, and you’d want to fill in yyy with something that explains the emotive bond between our hero and the kidnappee. ZZZ tells the reason the men kidnapped the girl, and it may or may not be necessary, depending on what the reason is. If it’s for ransom, that’s not all that exciting and you might want to leave it out. If it’s to bring nuclear ruin to Washington D.C., the stakes are a bit higher and you could definitely stand to leave it in.

When writing a one-sentence Storyline, you want to push whatever emotive buttons you can to arouse fear, desire, rage, empathy, or whatever powerful emotional experience that you can. You also want to arouse curiosity in the prospective reader. You also want to use as few words as possible. That’s not easy. It’s hard, in fact. But it’s worth doing.

In my last blog post, I critiqued a couple of one-sentence Storylines submitted by my loyal blog readers, and then I invited comments on a Storyline by Grace, which runs as follows:

A Belfast biologist is forced to run from her own creation — across the real world and into a virtual one, where a strange power wrestles for control of her life.

A number of you gave very insightful appraisals of Grace’s Storyline. Well done, folks! Now let’s try to improve on the Storyline. Grace gave us the back cover copy for the book, which I’ll quote again here:

If you could end world hunger, you’d do it, right? What if governmental experiments caused your miracle fertilizer to become a weapon of mass destruction? Meet Naomi, the Belfast biologist forced to run from her own creation–across the real world and into a virtual one. But there, a strange power wrestles for control of her life.

Randy sez: My philosophy in writing a Storyline is to make the problem clear, without necessarily hinting much at the solution. The problem is that Naomi’s government is messing with her good science and turning it into evil science. Naomi’s solution to the problem is, in part, to flee into a virtual world. This is intriguing, but I don’t understand enough of it to incorporate into the Storyline. Nor do I have a good handle on the “strange power.” So I’ll work with what I have. Here’s my first cut at a revision of Grace’s Storyline:

A Belfast biologist creates a miracle fertilizer that could end world hunger — but her own government uses it to create a weapon of mass destruction.

That’s a little long — it’s 25 words — but it captures Naomi’s essential predicament. It does leave out the extremely intriguing flight into virtual reality and I wish I could see how to capture that, but my brain has turned into oatmeal today after talking to four different mortgage refinancing folks.

Now my challenge for you all, and for Naomi, is to tweak this. Can you make it shorter? Can you capture that bit about the virtual world? Can you do both? Can you make it better? How good can this Storyline get?

To make progress, we’ll need some info from Grace on what forces Naomi into the virtual world. It may turn out that we really don’t need to know anything about the virtual world because it not be essential to the story. I don’t think I understand the story well enough to decide on that point yet.

This exercise highlights the remarkable power of the one-sentence Storyline — it forces you to isolate the most critical parts of your story.

Next time, we’ll wrap up on Grace’s Storyline and tackle the next couple of Storylines on the list of submissions, which has grown to a very large pile in the last week or so.

In my last post, I challenged my loyal blog readers to critique Armando’s one-sentence Storyline:

A man writes and sings an incantation over and over wherever he stands to unravel the prophecy that beckons the next savior of the world.

A number of you provided a wide range of critiques of this, and most of the comments were quite incisive. I agree with the majority view that the Storyline doesn’t tell enough about the story. There are a lot of unanswered questions, but we don’t know enough about this man and his incantations to root for him (or against him). That raises a critical point — the Storyline must make you care about the Story Question. Normally, we care about someone if we can identify with him or we agree with his goal.

My challenge for Armando is to read all the comments and then try to improve on this Storyline.

Wolfhardt posted this Storyline:

On a space station a shell-shocked security chief tries to save the dreaded aliens survivors of a peace conference disrupted by a human religious terrorist.

Randy sez: I think we can immediately identify with “a shell-shocked security chief,” so that’s a very good beginning (for those readers interested in space stations). Please note how important that caveat I just made is. Wolfhardt had started with the location, which pegs it as science fiction. That will turn away some readers, but that’s OK. Good marketing is less concerned with turning away certain readers than it is with catching the attention of certain other readers. You simply can’t appeal to EVERYBODY. So your best bet is to appeal to SOMEBODY — some niche of readers. So Wolfhardt has started well.

The Storyline begins to get unfocused in the middle of the sentence, however. Our hero is trying to save “dreaded aliens.” The immediate question is why we should care about aliens who are dreaded? Wolfhardt, can you revise this? I’d suggest either a different word than “dreaded” or else give more facts to explain why these aliens are actually worth saving, even if they’re dreaded.

The ending also needs more kick. We have a human religious terrorist. There are two issues here. Most readers have some religious views, so when they hear about a “religious terrorist” they may well be worrying that this story is going to be kicking their own religion. And nobody enjoys having their religion kicked. So it would be best to get explicit here. What sort of a religious terrorist are we dealing with here? That will give potential readers more info on whether the book is going to insult them or not. It’s better to be clear — so that some readers KNOW for sure they’ll be insulted and the rest KNOW for sure they won’t. You don’t want to leave things ambiguous, so that nobody knows whether they’ll be offended by the story or not.

But there’s a bigger issue. What does that pesky religious terrorist want to achieve? So far, we can gather that he may be anti-alien and he may be dangerous. But what’s his goal? Ethnic cleansing? Burning at the stake? Mass baptisms? We need something concrete that we can visualize.

Wolfhardt, can you refine your sentence for us?

Grace wrote an intriguing Storyline:

A Belfast biologist is forced to run from her own creation — across the real world and into a virtual one, where a strange power wrestles for control of her life.

Randy sez: Once again, I have some thoughts on this, but first I’d like to hear what my loyal blog readers think? Grace has done at least two things here that work really well. What are they? But there are two things that are missing. What are they?

Post a comment with your thoughts. The more you wrestle with Storylines — both your own and those of other people — the better you’ll get at the process.

Yesterday, I asked to hear the one-sentence Storylines of my loyal blog readers. Wow! There are a ton of them posted as comments!

I’ll critique these in the order they came in. Today, I’ll critique Heather’s and Katie’s, and then throw out a challenge to my readers to critique Armando’s.

Heather’s one-sentence Storyline goes like this:

The last Dryad searches for a way to heal the forest.

Randy sez: In Heather’s comment, she says she’s not satisfied with it because it doesn’t seem to sum up the storyline. Let’s see if we can figure out why.

A powerful way to analyze a storyline is to ask, “What’s the Story Question?” (A Story Question is the question that your story must answer by the end of the story. Typical Story Questions are: “Will Scarlett get Ashley?” or “Will Luke destroy the Death Star?”)

The Story Question raised by Heather’s storyline is this: “Will the last Dryad heal the forest?”

The issue I see is that this question is a bit abstract. I don’t know what’s wrong with the forest. Is it sick? Sorrowful? Cut down by Al Gore? The actual, specific problem that the forest has will determine what the actual, specific goal the last dryad has.

Now, you don’t want to get too specific, of course–that takes too many words. But I think we need some more concrete details here to understand what’s wrong.

Heather, do you want to add some detail to this and post it as a comment? I just bet it’ll be a better Storyline if you do.

Katie’s Storyline goes like this:

A maid of honor struggles to understand her powers after accidentally transporting herself, the best man, and the flower girl to a deserted island.

Randy sez: This is pretty specific! We have three characters named, and their relationship is all pretty clear. We have a deserted island. We have some sort of magical powers. The Story Question is similar to that on Gilligan’s Island: “Will they get off that pesky island and go home?”

This is a good strong Storyline. It does everything it needs to do. It tells prospective readers instantly if this is the kind of story they want to read.

Here’s Armando’s Storyline:

A man writes and sings an incantation over and over wherever he stands to unravel the prophecy that beckons the next savior of the world.

Randy sez: I have my own thoughts on this Storyline, but I think it’s good for everyone to exercise their analytical powers. So here’s my challenge to my loyal blog readers: Does this Storyline work? Is it perfect, or can it be improved? Post a comment and tell us what you think!