Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

Do you need an agent? Is it still possible to get published without one?

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

I enjoy reading your novels very much. As an aspiring writer, I have completed my first novel. How important, if at all should a writer have a literary agent? Your advice would be much appreciated.

Randy sez: That depends on what your goals are.

If you want to publish your novel with a traditional, royalty-paying publisher, then you desperately need an agent. It’s possible to sell your book to a publisher without one (by pitching your novel at writing conferences), but even if you sell your novel, you still need to negotiate the contract. My agent friends tell me that a lot of publishers have changed their contracts massively in the last year — in a way that is far more favorable to the publisher. This has forced agents to spend a lot of time negotiating terms to get a decent deal for their authors. If you don’t have an agent, you probably won’t have any idea what’s important and what’s not. Even if you have great negotiating skills, those will do you no good if you don’t know what to demand.

If you decide to self-publish (either in print or in e-books), then you don’t need an agent — yet. However, if your book does well as a self-pubbed book, then eventually you’ll want to publish it with a traditional, royalty-paying publisher. In that case, (see above), you’ll need an agent. When you need one, get one.

A quick note on the obvious question — what’s the advantage of working with a traditional, royalty-paying publisher? The answer is that those are the people who will get you into Barnes & Noble, Borders, Costco, and all the other bookstores. Good luck doing that on your own.

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 to write a novel? Are you too old if you’re 75?

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

Do you think it is a waste of time and energy for a person seventy-five years old to work toward a career (maybe short) in the writing/publishing business? What is the general response of a publisher when receiving a manuscript from a person this age?

Randy sez: Helen Hooven Santmyer was 88 years old when her best-selling novel, AND LADIES OF THE CLUB…, was published. She died at the age of 90.

A mere youth of 75 who wants to write a novel should write a novel.

As for what publishers will think, their opinions will vary all over the board. You’ll find a few publishers who think that anyone over 50 is a lost cause. You’ll find a few publishers who think that a 75-year-old author sounds like a pretty darned good publicity angle. You only have to find one publisher to get published.

In fact, publishers are no longer absolutely necessary. Don’t get me wrong — it’s great to be published by a traditional, royalty-paying publisher who pays you an advance, handles the editing and artwork and typesetting and distribution, and does a bit of marketing for you. I’ve worked with royalty-paying publishers for my entire writing career. For 498 of the past 500 years, publishers were a practical necessity if you wanted to make money as a novelist.

But in the last two years, plenty of authors have found that they can do better publishing their own work as e-books. When I say “do better,” I mean, “earn boatloads more money.” For details on that, go read the last ten blog entries of Joe Konrath. If you can read all ten of Joe’s latest blog posts and still NOT believe that we’re entering the Golden Age for Authors, then you have no pulse.

So Margaret, write that novel. Make it the best piece of work you can write. Then take your best shot at getting it published.

What have you got to lose?

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

How do you stay focused on writing your novel? What do you do when you’ve got so many ideas popping in your brain that you have a hard time finishing anything?

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

Randy, I am a new writer having only been writing for about a year now. I have written a few short stories, poems and screenplays in that time. I now decided to take the big step and write my first novel. I have started on two projects but abandoned them after a few chapters. I am now on number three. I feel strongly about this one. My problem is staying focused on the novel. I have so many ideas for screenplays and short stories I don’t have the time to work on them. They are a distraction. What is the best way to stay focused on a single project or do you think it is wise to jump around between projects? I really want to complete this novel. I have the characters and the story all laid out because it is a story I have already written as a screenplay. I would really love to hear your suggestions. i need help.

Randy sez: This seems to be one of the most common problems for writers, judging from the email I get.

First, let’s make it clear that it’s a good thing to keep focused. If your competition is working on one novel and you’re working on ten, the odds are extremely high that he or she is going to get a novel written a LONG time before you do. The odds are pretty good that you’ll never get one finished. And if you don’t finish it, you can’t sell it.

So how do you do it? There’s no foolproof way to do anything, but let me make a suggestion that keeps me on track.

Accountability. Find yourself a friend who can hold you accountable. That means four things:

1. Goals. You’ll make a goal and let your friend know what it is. Example: “I want to finish a novel in the next 10 months.”
2. Milestones. You’ll define milestones along the way that you must meet. Your friend should help you do the math to make sure that if you meet the milestones, you’ll hit your goal. Example: “I’ll spend 5 hours per week working on this novel.”
3. Updates. You’ll routinely update your friend on what kind of progress you’re making. Example: “I’ll check in with you every Saturday to let you know if I hit my milestone for the week or not.”
4. Penalties. You give your friend the power to exact a penalty for not meeting your milestones. Example: “Any week that I fail to hit my milestone, I’ll pay you $50.”

Will this work for you, Marvin? I don’t know. I know it works for me in making sure that I haul myself out of bed at the appointed time every day. Once I get rolling, that’s half the battle.

If accountability works for you, then you’re miles ahead of the game. And if it doesn’t, then you can try something else.

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

I recently discovered that copies of my novel RETRIBUTION are currently on sale at CBD.com for only 99 cents. Many of my fans believe, as I do, that RETRIBUTION is the best novel I’ve published.

RETRIBUTION is book #3 in my City of God series, a time-travel series of novels set in first-century Jerusalem shortly before the Jewish Revolt. Two of the characters, Rivka and Ari, are visitors from the 21st century, stranded in the first century after a physics experiment gone horribly wrong.

Rivka is a nice girl from San Diego who grew up in a Messianic Jewish family and then went to work on an archaeological dig in Israel.

Ari is a nice guy who grew up in Israel and got his Ph.D. in theoretical physics and got mixed up with a not-so-nice experimental physicist and wound up on the wrong side of a wormhole with the girl of his dreams.

Both Rivka and Ari know that Jerusalem is going to burn and all her people will be killed or carted off into slavery in just a few years. So they ought to be united in doing everything they can to get out of town.

But they have a serious personal conflict. They’re married, and they’re really, truly in love with each other. But Rivka is a devout Christian girl and she’s never going to change. And Ari is a devout atheist turned devout agnostic turned loyal Jew, and he’s never going to change. So they’ve got some religious differences and there’s no way in the world to resolve those.

Plus, Ari’s got some physics skills that come in incredibly useful to his friends who are plotting to destroy the Roman overlord. Ari’s a pacifist, but he’s also a loyal Jew and he would do anything to help his people. Rivka is a historian and she knows beyond any doubt that Rome can’t be beat, and the best thing to do is run for the hills. Both of them are right and both of them are wrong, because there just isn’t any good answer.

Rome is intent on exacting retribution from the Jewish freedom fighters. And in this part of the world, at this time in history, Rome gets whatever she wants.

I’m a physicist myself, but it’s not widely known that I also have a long interest in history and I know an awful lot about Jerusalem in the first century. I spent about 20 years researching the books for my City of God series. I taught myself to read Hebrew. I follow the world of Israeli archaeology — and got myself mixed up in one the biggest archaeological fights of the decade, the debate over the alleged Jesus family tomb. Why? Because I like to. Some people are just sick, sick, sick research puppies. I’m one of them.

You can find out about all of my books on the Books page of my personal web site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Literary agent and blogger extraordinaire Rachelle Gardner is running a contest now for the best one-sentence summary of a novel. Check it out! This contest has some nice prizes. By the way, if you don’t regularly read Rachelle’s blog, then I highly recommend it.

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

I like your take on Dwight Swain’s scene and sequel breakdown. What is your take on his mentor at the U of Oklahoma, Foster Harris and his ideas of “reversal” and “moral equations”? Could you use your scientific mind and explain it more clearly with examples. Thanks for a great blog.

Randy sez: I wish I could comment on this, but I can’t. I know almost nothing about Foster Harris, except that I vaguely remember Dwight Swain mentioning him in his book, Techniques of the Selling Writer, one of my favorite books on writing fiction.

TJ asked this question:

Fantasy novels and series marketed towards children and teens seems to be all the rage today–it also seems to be how authors are becoming immensely famous and wealthy. What can’t be done in a youth fantasy novel, and what cliches and archetypes should be avoided?

Randy sez: That’s a good question. I don’t know if there are any limits on YA fiction. I’m pretty sure you can’t have a sex scene in a children’s novel, but it wouldn’t surprise me if somebody somewhere has done it. YA is fairly hot right now, with numerous authors doing very well. J.K. Rowling is the most obvious YA author, but James Patterson is doing YA and he’s one of the biggest of the big in current fiction.

I would avoid all cliches in any fiction, YA or not, except in dialogue. Showing a character using cliches in dialogue tells the reader something interesting about that character. Archetypes are by definition not cliches, and I can’t think of any to avoid. Archetypes are good starting places for characters. Obviously, they are not a complete character, and you want to build out unique characters starting from any archetype.

Rob asked:

Is every scene always reactive or proactive. While reading other writers, I’m looking for these things and sometimes finding them hard to spot. Many scenes don’t seem to fit either paradigm, but still make for compelling reading.

I know you’ve probably beat this subject to death, but I’m a slow learner.

Not every scene in fiction is either reactive or proactive. (”Reactive scenes” and “Proactive scenes” are explained in my book Writing Fiction For Dummies. I’m not entirely sure who coined these terms. I don’t believe I was the first to use them, but I can’t quite think who did.) I am reading through Sense and Sensibility right now with my family, and there are a few scenes that just sit there on the page, neither proactive nor reactive, and frankly quite boring.

The real question is whether every scene in fiction would be better if it were revised so as to be either reactive or proactive. I don’t know the answer to that question for certain, since mathematically, the space of all possible scenes is just about infinite, and since there is no objective way to measure how good a scene is. But my gut instinct is that the vast majority of scenes would be improved if they were edited to be either proactive or reactive.

A Proactive Scene begins with a Goal, continues through most of the scene with Conflict, and concludes with a Setback.

A Reactive Scene begins with a Reaction, continues through most of the scene with a Dilemma, and concludes with a Decision.

In my view, it never hurts to look at a scene and ask whether it fits one of these patterns. If it does, how well does it fit the pattern? If not, will it be improved by editing it to fit the pattern?

Note that I am very much against a “paint-by-numbers” scheme of writing fiction. However, I do believe in using design patterns to help edit fiction, and the Proactive Scene and Reactive Scene are two powerful design patterns.

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.

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

My question concerns how to pick a story topic or story line. I never feel like any of my one sentence summaries are worth expanding to a story. I think this frustration is the biggest thing holding me back from trying to write. I don’t have any confidence in my story ideas. I feel like they are either too boring or too similar to novels/movies/TV show that have already been done. Any advice?

Randy sez: Yikes, that’s a tough one. I think it’s a mistake to write a novel about a story you don’t care about. But it’s also a mistake to have your standards set so high that you never work on anything because it’s not original enough.

Without knowing you, Jon, I’d be hard pressed to pinpoint the problem. One thing to bear in mind is that there are very, very few truly original story ideas. Most stories are similar in some way to stories that have already been told. So why tell them? That’s simple: because those stories have never been told by YOU. If you’re a real writer with something to say, then telling ANY story will automatically make it original.

A group of my novelist friends did an experiment a few years ago. They all agreed to write a short story based on the same idea. The story had to have a number of elements all the same. Everybody wrote a story from that same starting point. Every story was different. The result was a book titled WHAT THE WIND PICKED UP. The subtitle is “Proof that a single idea can launch a thousand stories.”

Jon, I’d suggest you just pick the idea you like best and see if maybe it’ll grow into something unique and original and interesting as you work on it. The mark of a good writer is that he or she can turn an ordinary thing into an extraordinary story.

What do you all think, O loyal blog readers? What’s your advice for Jon? Post a comment telling him what you’d 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.

I’m working on my May issue of my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine right now, but thought I should make a quick note here that one of my ever-popular 50% Discount Sales is going on right now. Until midnight on Friday, May 7, 2010, I’ve got every electronic product in my store discounted by 50%. To get the discount, you need to know the coupon code, which is given on the page linked above.

If you got a tax refund this year, you might consider investing a small fraction of that refund in your writing career — an investment that could have an impact for the rest of your life.

All of these are on sale:

• “Fiction 101″ lecture series is 50% off
• “Fiction 201″ lecture series is 50% off
• “Writing in the Shadows” lecture series by John Olson is 50% off
• “Clean Up Your Act” teleseminar series by Allison Bottke is 50% off
• “Promote Your Writing by Speaking” teleseminar series by Mary Byers is 50% off
• “Writing the SuperArticle” e-book is 50% off
• “Writer’s Conference Survival Guide” e-book by Meredith Efken is 50% off
• “Snowflake Pro” software is 50% off

All of these products work on Macs, Windows, and Linux.

For all the gory details, visit my product info page, where you’ll find the coupon code that you need to know in order to get the 50% savings.

I usually run a sale like this a couple of times per year. The last one was in December of last year.

OK, back to working on my e-zine . . .