Writing Fiction For Dummies E-Book

Randy Ingermanson

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 645

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

A complete guide to writing and selling your novel

So you want to write a novel? Great! That’s a worthy goal, no matter what your reason. But don’t settle for just writing a novel. Aim high. Write a novel that you intend to sell to a publisher. Writing Fiction for Dummies is a complete guide designed to coach you every step along the path from beginning writer to royalty-earning author. Here are some things you’ll learn in Writing Fiction for Dummies:

• Strategic Planning: Pinpoint where you are on the roadmap to publication; discover what every reader desperately wants from a story; home in on a marketable category; choose from among the four most common creative styles; and learn the self-management methods of professional writers.
• Writing Powerful Fiction: Construct a story world that rings true; create believable, unpredictable characters; build a strong plot with all six layers of complexity of a modern novel; and infuse it all with a strong theme.
• Self-Editing Your Novel: Psychoanalyze your characters to bring them fully to life; edit your story structure from the top down; fix broken scenes; and polish your action and dialogue.
• Finding An Agent and Getting Published: Write a query letter, a synopsis, and a proposal; pitch your work to agents and editors without fear.

Writing Fiction For Dummies takes you from being a writer to being an author. It can happen—if you have the talent and persistence to do what you need to do.

Leseprobe

Writing Fiction For Dummies®

Table of Contents

Introduction

About This Book

Conventions Used In This Book

What You’re Not to Read

Foolish Assumptions

How This Book Is Organized

Part I: Getting Ready to Write Fiction

Part II: Creating Compelling Fiction

Part III: Editing and Polishing Your Story and Characters

Part IV: Getting Published

Part V: The Part of Tens

Icons Used in This Book

Where to Go from Here

Part I: Getting Ready to Write Fiction

Chapter 1: Fiction Writing Basics

Setting Your Ultimate Goal As a Writer

Pinpointing Where You Are As a Writer

Freshmen: Concentrating on craft

Sophomores: Tackling the proposal

Juniors: Perfecting their pitches

Seniors: Preparing to become authors

Getting Yourself Organized

Mastering Characterization, Plotting, and Other Skills

Editing Your Fiction

Chapter 2: What Makes a Great Story?

Choosing What to Give Your Readers

Creating a powerful emotional experience: What your readers desperately want

Educating your reader

Practicing the gentle art of persuasion

Making Life Hard on Your Characters: Conflict Plus Change Equals Story

The Five Pillars of Fiction

Setting the stage: Your story world

Creating characters

Constructing the plot

Formulating a theme

Expressing your style

Seven Ways to Deliver the Goods

The here and now: Action

Giving your characters a voice: Dialogue

Revealing thoughts: Interior monologue

Feeling with your character: Interior emotion

Seeing what your character sees: Description

Taking a trip to the past: Flashback

Supplying narrative summary

Chapter 3: Finding Your Audience and Category

Identifying Your Ideal Novel

Looking at what you love to read

Thinking about what you love to write

Defining Your Ideal Reader

Considering worldview and interests

Looking at gender

Writing for readers of a certain age

Defining your niche

Understanding Your Category

Genres: Surveying categories based on content

Understanding audience-based categories

Picking your category and subcategory

Finding Your Category’s Requirements

Targeting your word count

Accounting for major characters

Determining levels of action, romance, and all that

Identifying your story’s emotional driver

Chapter 4: Four Ways to Write a Great Novel

Giving Yourself Permission to Write Badly

Creative Paradigms: Investigating Various Writing Methods

Writing without planning or editing

Editing as you go

Planning a little, writing a little

Outlining before you write

Finding a Creative Paradigm that Works for You

Understanding why method matters

Developing your creative paradigm

Using Your Creative Paradigm to Find Your Story Structure

Chapter 5: Managing Your Time . . . and Yourself

Finding Time to Write

Establishing and sticking to a writing goal — for this week and this year

Organizing your time

Setting Up Your Ideal Writing Space

Securing the best writing surface

Finding the right chair

Choosing a computer (if you want to use one)

Putting everything in place

Dealing with Distractions

Looking at Money Matters

Budgeting money for writing

Making your living as a writer: Don’t expect this to be your day job (yet)

Part II: Creating Compelling Fiction

Chapter 6: Building Your Story World: The Setting for Your Story

Identifying the Parts of a Story World

Creating a Sense of Place

Making description do double duty

Fitting description in the story

Weaving emotive force into your descriptions

Deciding What Drives Your Cultural Groups

Revealing cultural drivers with immediate scene

Exposition: Explaining cultural drivers through narrative summary

Combining various elements to show cultural drivers

Choosing the Backdrop for Conflict

Defining your backdrop

Defining your story question

Story World Examples from Four Well-Known Novels

Pride and Prejudice

The Pillars of the Earth

Patriot Games

Ender’s Game

Researching Your Story World

Identifying what you need to know about your story world

Knowing how much research is enough

Being Able to Explain Your Story World to Sell Your Book

Chapter 7: Creating Compelling Characters

Defining Roles: Deciding Who Goes in Your Novel

Backstory: Giving Each Character a Past

Understanding why backstory matters

Creating your character’s backstory

Avoiding stereotypes

Motivation: Looking to Your Character’s Future

Values: Core truths for your character

Ambitions: Getting abstract, or why Miss America wants “world peace”

Story goals: Your story’s ultimate driver

Establishing your character’s motivation

Point of View (POV): Getting Some Perspective on Character

First-person POV

Third-person POV

Objective third-person POV

Head-hopping POV

Omniscient POV

Second-person POV

Choosing between Past and Present Tense

Revealing Your Characters to the Reader

Chapter 8: Storyline and Three-Act Structure: The Top Layers of Your Plot

Giving the Big Picture of Story Structure: Your Storyline

Understanding the value of a storyline

Writing a great storyline

Examples: Looking at storylines for 20 best-selling novels

Three-Act Structure: Setting Up Three Disasters

Looking at the value of a three-act structure

Timing the acts and disasters

Introducing a great beginning

The end of the beginning: Getting commitment with the first disaster

Supporting the middle with a second major disaster

Leading to the end: Tackling the third disaster

Wrapping up: Why endings work — or don’t

Summarizing Your Three-Act Structure for Interested Parties

Examples: Summarizing The Matarese Circle and Pride and Prejudice

Describing your own three-act structure

Chapter 9: Synopsis, Scene List, and Scene: Your Middle Layers of Plot

Deciding Which Order to Work In

Writing the Synopsis

Taking it from the top: Fleshing out your three-act structure

Bottoms up! Building around sequences of scenes

Knowing how much detail you need

Example: A synopsis of Ender’s Game

Developing Your Scene List

Top-down: Fleshing out your synopsis

Bottom-up: Summarizing your manuscript

Example: A scene list of Ender’s Game

Extending your scene list

Setting Up the Structure of Individual Scenes

Setting the proactive scene

Following up with the reactive scene

Coming full circle with your scenes

Scene structure in Gone With the Wind

Scene structure in Patriot Games

Chapter 10: Action, Dialogue, and More: The Lowest Layer of Your Plot

Using Seven Core Tools for Showing and Telling

Action

Dialogue

Interior emotion

Interior monologue

Description

Flashback

Narrative summary and other forms of telling

The Secret of Showing

Sorting it all out

Understanding the two kinds of clips

Writing public clips

Writing private clips

Putting cause and effect together

Chapter 11: Thinking Through Your Theme

Understanding Why Your Theme Matters

Looking at why writers include themes in their novels

Examining the features of a theme

Example themes for 20 novels

Deciding When to Identify Your Theme

Finding Your Theme

Faking it till you make it

Reading your own novel for the first time

Listening to your characters

Using test readers

Must you have a theme?

Refining Your Theme

Part III: Editing and Polishing Your Story and Characters

Chapter 12: Analyzing Your Characters

The High-Level Read-Through: Preparing Yourself to Edit

Developing a Bible for Each Character

Physical traits

Emotional and family life

Intellectual and work life

Backstory and motivation

Psychoanalyzing Your Characters

Are values in conflict?

Do the values make sense from the backstory?

Does ambition follow from values?

Will the story goal satisfy the ambition?

The Narrator: Fine-Tuning Point-of-View and Voice

Does your POV strategy work?

Have you chosen the right POV character?

Is your POV consistent?

Does your character have a unique voice?

Fixing Broken Characters

Boring characters

Shallow characters

Unbelievable characters

Unlikeable characters

Chapter 13: Scrutinizing Your Story Structure

Editing Your Storyline

Removing all unnecessary weight

Keeping your characters anonymous

Staying focused

Cutting down some example storylines

Testing Your Three-Act Structure

What are your three disasters?

Are your acts balanced in length?

The beginning: Does it accelerate the story?

The first disaster: Is the call to action clear?

The second disaster: Does it support the long middle?

The third disaster: Does it force the ending?

The ending: Does it leave your reader wanting to tell others?

Scene List: Analyzing the Flow of Scenes

Rearranging your scenes

Foreshadowing: Planting clues to prepare readers

Putting it all together as a second draft

Chapter 14: Editing Your Scenes for Structure

Triage: Deciding Whether to Fix, Kill, or Leave a Scene Alone

Identifying ailing scenes

Evaluating a scene’s chances of recovery

Fixing Proactive Scenes

Imagining a proactive scene: The Day of the Jackal

Checking for change

Choosing a powerful goal

Stretching out the conflict

Desperately seeking setbacks

Examining the final result

Fixing Reactive Scenes

Imagining a reactive scene: Outlander

Checking for change (again)

Fitting the reaction to the setback

Working through the dilemma

Coming to a decision

Coming to the final result

Killing an Incurable Scene

Chapter 15: Editing Your Scenes for Content

Deciding Whether to Show or Tell

Knowing when clips, flashbacks, or telling techniques are most appropriate

Following an example of decision-making

A Good Show: Editing Clips

Guidelines for editing clips

Fixing mixed clips

Fixing unintentional head-hopping

Fixing out-of-body experiences

Fixing cause-effect problems

Fixing time-scale problems

Getting In and Out of Flashbacks

Editing Telling

Tightening text and adding color

Knowing when to kill a segment of telling

Part IV: Getting Published

Chapter 16: Getting Ready to Sell Your Book: Polishing and Submitting

Polishing Your Manuscript

Teaming with critique buddies

Joining critique groups

Working with freelance editors

Hiring freelance proofreaders

Looking at Three Common Legal Questions

Deciding between Traditional Publishing and Self-Publishing

Understanding how traditional publishers work

Understanding how self-publishing works

Beware the vanity publishers!

Our recommendation

First Contact: Writing a Query Letter

Piecing Together a Proposal

Deciding what to include

Your cover letter: Reminding the agent who you are

Your title page

The executive summary page

Market analysis: Analyzing your competition

Your author bio

Character sketches

The dreaded synopsis

Your marketing plan

Your writing, including sample chapters (or whole manuscripts!)

Chapter 17: Approaching Agents and Editors

Defining the Roles of Agents and Editors

Finding the Best Agent for You

Deciding whether you need an agent

Doing your homework on agents first

Contacting agents to pitch your work

Editors, the Center of Your Writing Universe

Targeting a publishing house

Choosing which editor to contact

Contacting editors directly

Part V: The Part of Tens

Chapter 18: Ten Steps to Analyzing Your Story

Step 1: Write Your Storyline

Step 2: Write Your Three-Act Structure

Step 3: Define Your Characters

Step 4: Write a Short Synopsis

Step 5: Write Character Sketches

Step 6: Write a Long Synopsis

Step 7: Create Your Character Bible

Step 8: Make Your Scene List

Step 9: Analyze Your Scenes

Step 10: Write and Edit Your Story

Chapter 19: Ten Reasons Novels Are Rejected

The Category Is Wrong

Bad Mechanics and Lackluster Writing

The Target Reader Isn’t Defined

The Story World Is Boring

The Storyline Is Weak

The Characters Aren’t Unique and Interesting

The Author Lacks a Strong Voice

The Plot Is Predictable

The Theme Is Overbearing

The Book Fails to Deliver a Powerful Emotional Experience

Writing Fiction For Dummies®

by Randy Ingermanson and Peter Economy

Writing Fiction For Dummies®

Published byWiley Publishing, Inc.111 River St.Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774www.wiley.com

Copyright © 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax [phone]. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone], or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Trademarks: Wiley, the Wiley Publishing logo, For Dummies, the Dummies Man logo, A Reference for the Rest of Us!, The Dummies Way, Dummies Daily, The Fun and Easy Way, Dummies.com, Making Everything Easier!, and related trade dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries, and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Wiley Publishing, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: The contents of this work are intended to further general scientific research, understanding, and discussion only and are not intended and should not be relied upon as recommending or promoting a specific method, diagnosis, or treatment by physicians for any particular patient. The publisher and the author make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of fitness for a particular purpose. In view of ongoing research, equipment modifications, changes in governmental regulations, and the constant flow of information relating to the use of medicines, equipment, and devices, the reader is urged to review and evaluate the information provided in the package insert or instructions for each medicine, equipment, or device for, among other things, any changes in the instructions or indication of usage and for added warnings and precautions. Readers should consult with a specialist where appropriate. The fact that an organization or Website is referred to in this work as a citation and/or a potential source of further information does not mean that the author or the publisher endorses the information the organization or Website may provide or recommendations it may make. Further, readers should be aware that Internet Websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. No warranty may be created or extended by any promotional statements for this work. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any damages arising herefrom.

For general information on our other products and services, please contact our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 877-762-2974, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3993, or fax [phone].

For technical support, please visit www.wiley.com/techsupport.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009939355

ISBN: 978-0-470-53070-2

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

About the Authors

Randy Ingermanson is the award-winning author of six novels. He is known around the world as “the Snowflake Guy,” thanks to his Web site article onthe Snowflake method, which has been viewed more than a million times. Before venturing into fiction, Randy earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of California at Berkeley and published a number of articles on superstring theory. He has spent a number of years working as a computational physicist developing scientific software for high-technology companies in San Diego, California.

Randy has taught fiction at numerous writing conferences across the country and sits on the advisory board of American Christian Fiction Writers. He also publishes The Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, the world’s largest e-zine on how to write fiction. Randy’s first two novels won Christy Awards, and his second novel, Oxygen, coauthored with John B. Olson, earned a spot on the New York Public Library’s Books for the Teen Age list. Visit Randy’s personal Web site at www.ingermanson.com and his Web site for fiction writers at www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com.>

Peter Economy of La Jolla, California, is a best-selling author with 11 For Dummies titles under his belt, including two 2nd editions and one 3rd edition. Peter is coauthor of Writing Children’s Books For Dummies, Home-Based Business For Dummies, Consulting For Dummies, Why Aren’t You Your Own Boss?, and many more books. Peter also serves as Associate Editor of Leader to Leader, the Apex Award–winning journal of the Leader to Leader Institute. Check out Peter’s Web site at www.petereconomy.com.

Dedication

To my loyal blog readers on the Advanced Fiction Writing Blog. You’ve taught me more in your questions than I could possibly teach you in my answers.

— Randy Ingermanson

Authors’ Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the many people who took time to provide their advice and input to us as we created the book you now hold in your hands. Specifically, we would like to thank the folks at Wiley who cared enough to make this book the best it could be, including Tracy Boggier, Natalie Harris, Danielle Voirol, and Christy Pingleton. Thanks also to our talented technical editor David Hassler.

Randy would like to thank his coauthor Peter Economy for guidance in learning the Dummies way and for many strategic and tactical conversations during the writing of this book. He also thanks his wife, Eunice, for being there always and his daughters, Carolyn, Gracie, and Amy, for many hundreds of hours of reading-out-loud time.

Peter would like to thank his coauthor Randy Ingermanson for his hard work and dedication to this project and for showing him that there is much more to the world of writing than nonfiction. He would also like to thank his wife, Jan, and kids, Peter, Skylar, and Jackson, for their ongoing love and support.

Publisher’s Acknowledgments

We’re proud of this book; please send us your comments through our online registration form located at http://dummies.custhelp.com. For other comments, please contact our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 877-762-2974, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3993, or fax [phone].

Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:

Acquisitions, Editorial, and Media Development

Project Editor: Stacy Kennedy

Acquisitions Editor: Tracy Boggier

Senior Copy Editor: Danielle Voirol

Assistant Editor: Erin Calligan Mooney

Editorial Program Coordinator: Joe Niesen

General Reviewer: David Hassler

Editorial Manager: Christine Meloy Beck

Editorial Assistants: Jennette ElNaggar, David Lutton

Art Coordinator: Alicia B. South

Cover Photos: © Gerard Fritz

Cartoons: Rich Tennant (www.the5thwave.com)

Composition Services

Project Coordinator: Sheree Montgomery

Layout and Graphics: Carl Byers, Joyce Haughey, Melissa K. Jester, Christine Williams

Proofreader: Shannon Ramsey

Indexer: Christine Karpeles

Special Help: Christine Pingleton

Publishing and Editorial for Consumer Dummies

Diane Graves Steele, Vice President and Publisher, Consumer Dummies

Kristin Ferguson-Wagstaffe, Product Development Director, Consumer Dummies

Ensley Eikenburg, Associate Publisher, Travel

Kelly Regan, Editorial Director, Travel

Publishing for Technology Dummies

Andy Cummings, Vice President and Publisher, Dummies Technology/General User

Composition Services

Debbie Stailey, Director of Composition Services

Introduction

So, you want to write a novel? Great! Writing a novel is a worthwhile goal. It’ll challenge you, stretch you, and change you. Getting it published will gain you respect from your family and friends, and it may even earn you a bit of fame and money.

But respect, fame, and money aren’t the only reasons for writing a novel. The only reason you need to give for writing a novel is that you want to write a novel. Don’t let anyone bully you by demanding some better reason; there isn’t one.

Whatever your reason, Writing Fiction For Dummies can help you make the leap from writer to author. You can write a powerful novel. You can get it published. And you can be the author you’ve always wanted to be.

About This Book

Writers like to think of themselves as artists, and rightly so; writing fiction is an art form. But artistic talent is not enough. Writing fiction is also a craft — a set of practical skills you can learn. This book is about teaching you the craft of writing fiction so that your art can shine through. So if you’re a budding novelist, then we wrote this book specifically for you. This book teaches you the craft you need, shows you how to edit yourself, and takes you through the process of getting published.

If you’re more advanced than a beginning writer, that’s great! You’ll find some parts of this book obvious. We hope to surprise you with some fresh insights, though, so stay alert. We’ve found that even published novelists are sometimes weak in certain areas. Our aim is to give you a solid foundation in every aspect of writing fiction.

We focus on novel-writing, but if you’re a screenwriter or you want to write short stories, you’ll find virtually all the material here useful to you; however, we don’t try to cover the specialized things you need to know to write screenplays or short stories. Again, our goal is to give you the foundation that every fiction writer must have in order to write strong stories.

As you build your craft, remember that every rule we mention in this book can be broken. Every rule. If we sometimes sound horribly dogmatic on some of the rules, it’s because they’re almost always true. When we sound less certain with a rule, it’s because it’s true more often than not. The one unbreakable rule of fiction writing is that no rule is unbreakable — you should use whatever works.

Conventions Used In This Book

We use the following conventions throughout the text to make everything consistent and easy-to-understand:

All Web addresses appear in monofont.

New terms appear in italics and are closely followed by an easy-to-understand definition.

Bold text indicates keywords in bulleted lists or highlights the action parts of numbered steps.

The English-speaking world is still trying to sort out how to deal with generic pronouns. In the bad old days, he was understood to refer to both men and women, which never made sense, but it was the standard. Now there is no standard. Replacing he with they is awkward, so in most cases, we try to use he and she in roughly equal numbers.

Because more fiction readers are women than men, we often tilt toward using she when referring to the reader. Because a great many editors are women, we often use she for editors and he for agents, but we’re not consistent. We try to mix up the he and she usage when referring to characters. Forgive us if we don’t get our pronouns quite even. We tried, and anyway we know you’re smart enough not to be confused.

What You’re Not to Read

We’ve written this book so you can easily find information and readily understand what you find. We also simplify the presentation so you can identify “skippable” material. Sidebars are the shaded boxes that appear here and there. They share useful facts, but they aren’t essential for you to read.

Foolish Assumptions

Every author writes with an ideal reader in mind. Here are some things we assume about you:

You want to get published. You’re a creative person, but you intend to act like a professional right from the start. You’re willing to do unglamorous tasks, like researching your category and target audience, because you know that fiction writing is a business, not just an art.

You want to write a novel. This book focuses on writing novels, which typically run 60,000 words or more. If you prefer to write short fiction, the information on craft applies, but you’ll create a simpler plot and use fewer characters. If you want to write a screenplay, you’ll find all the information on story world, characters, structure, plot, and theme valuable, but we don’t discuss the formatting you need to know for screenwriting, and we don’t tell you how to sell your screenplay (you can find that kind of info in Screenwriting For Dummies, by Laura Schellhardt [Wiley]).

You recognize that fiction is a big tent with many different opinions on what’s good and what isn’t. In this book, we give you broad guidelines that apply to most kinds of fiction, but there are no rules that apply everywhere and always for all writers. You’ll strongly disagree with us sometimes, but you’re smart enough to take the advice that works for you and ignore the rest. You know that many other writers will find the advice you reject useful.

You want to figure out how to tell a great story rather than how to fix grammar and punctuation. You already have a good handle on grammar, or you know where to find the help you need (perhaps you plan to enlist your grammar-guru friends, consult Geraldine Woods’s English Grammar For Dummies [Wiley],or hire a freelance proofreader). When you do break grammar rules, you claim artistic license and do it on purpose.

How This Book Is Organized

This book is divided into five parts. Dive in wherever you like. This section describes what’s in this book and where we put it.

Part I: Getting Ready to Write Fiction

A little planning can go a long way. We believe strongly in strategic thinking — setting goals, defining story, choosing a category, developing a creative style, researching your novel, and getting the right tools. If you need help in strategic planning for your next novel, check out this part and see whether you can find some ideas you’ve never seen anywhere else.

Part II: Creating Compelling Fiction

Writing fiction is about giving your reader a powerful emotional experience. To do this, you need to master several main aspects of fiction, including creating a great story world, constructing believable characters, building a well-structured plot, and overlaying it all with a theme. These are your core skills, and this part gives you step-by-step guides for developing them. After you’ve mastered this part, you’ll have all the tools you need to write the first draft of your novel.

Part III: Editing and Polishing Your Story and Characters

After you have a first draft, you need to edit it to a high polish. Editing isn’t hard, but you need a strategic and tactical plan to help you analyze your characters and your plot. This part shows you how to ask the right questions of your manuscript and how to use your answers to rework your story. We give you many practical tips for editing your manuscript from top to bottom.

Part IV: Getting Published

With an excellent manuscript in hand, you’re ready to take it out to the world and knock ’em dead with your story. You’ll want to get a second opinion, of course, but after you’ve been through that, you’re ready to find out about editors and agents. Don’t be terrified of these folks — they’re looking for writers (like you) with great stories. If you have what they need, they’ll become your instant lifelong friends.

This part shows you how to research and identify the agents or editors who are most interested in your kind of fiction. You discover how to pitch your work to agents and editors who are looking for exactly what you have.

Part V: The Part of Tens

This part contains some quick resources on two subjects of undying interest: Ten steps to designing your story and ten reasons people in the publishing business reject novels.

Icons Used in This Book

To make this book easier to read and simpler to use, we include some icons in the margins that can help you find and fathom key ideas and information.

Tips provide advice that’s short and easy to remember that you can use right away.

This icon marks a writing exercise that you should do to move forward on your novel.

Remember icons flag advice you’ll come back to again and again over the years.

This icon indicates a warning note about some special hazard that you should avoid.

The True Story icon marks anecdotes that illustrate what we’re talking about.

Where to Go from Here

The great thing about this book is that you decide where to start and what to read. It’s a reference you can jump into and out of at will. Just wander over to the table of contents or the index to find the information you want.

If you’re new to writing fiction, you may want to start at the beginning of this book and read through to the end. If you’re more experienced, then you can find a topic that interests you and turn right to it. If you’re interested in character development, check out Chapter 7. If you’ve already written a story and want to analyze the plot, flip to Chapter 13. And if you want advice on finding an agent, try Chapter 17. Whatever the case, you’ll find a wealth of information and practical advice. Ready? Set. Go!

Part I

Getting Ready to Write Fiction

In this part . . .

We know you’re excited to start writing, but before you begin, you need to do some strategic thinking. In this part, we consider exactly what makes a great story and how to find the fiction category that works best for you and your reading audience. Next, we take a look at four common methods writers use to write a novel. Finally, we delve deeply into the important subject of managing your time — and yourself.

Chapter 1

Fiction Writing Basics

In This Chapter

Setting your sights on publication

Getting your head ready to write

Writing great fiction and editing your story

So you want to write a novel? Great! But is that all you want to do? After all, anybody can type a bunch of words and call it a novel. The trick is writing one that’s good enough to get published. This book is for fiction writers who want to write an excellent novel and get it published. That’s a tough, demanding goal, but it’s entirely doable if you tackle it intelligently.

If you’re going to write a novel, you need to get your head fully into the game. That means making a game plan that’s a proven winner and then executing your game plan. After you have a plan, you need writing (and rewriting) skills — lots of them. Writing fiction means developing a raft of technical skills, both strategic and tactical. None of these steps are hard, but they’re a lot easier to pick up when you have some guidance.

After you’ve written a great novel, whether you choose to get an agent or make the deal yourself, selling a strong story is about making the right connections with the right people at the right time.

Our goal in this book is to take you from being a writer to being an author. We have every confidence that you can do it, and this chapter explains how. It can happen — and it will happen — if you have the talent and persistence to do what you need to do.

Five urban legends that can hurt you

As soon as you admit to your family and friends that you’re working on a novel, they’ll start feeding you all kinds of urban legends about writing. These are things that “everybody knows,” and yet they’re dead wrong. Wrong or not, they can kill your career before it gets rolling. Here are some of the urban legends we’ve heard, along with answers you should have ready:

Legend 1: You’re not smart enough to write a novel. How smart do you have to be to write a novel? How do you know? What does IQ have to do with writing fiction? The fact is that the main thing any novelist needs is the ability to tap into her own emotional wellsprings and create a story that can move her readers. We know plenty of novelists, and they run the gamut on intelligence from average to ultra-high. But every one of them is a person we’d be happy to be stranded with on a desert island for long periods of time. Fiction writers are exceptionally honest people who don’t balk at telling their own inner truths. If you can do that, you can write fiction.

Legend 2: You’re not talented enough to write a novel. What is talent? Does anybody know how to measure talent? What if talent is something you grow, not something you inherit? The fact is that writing fiction requires quite a few skills. We’ve never met anyone who had all those skills when they started writing. Every single published novelist we know spent long hours learning the craft of fiction. They all had one thing in common: persistence. We have no idea what talent may be, but we do know persistence when we see it. If you have persistence, you have as good of a chance of getting published as anyone else.

Legend 3: You have nothing to write about. Is there only one kind of novel that you can write? Do all novelists have to come from New York City? Do they all have to be trendy and cool? Why? If you’ve lived long enough to be able to type, you have something to write about. If you’ve ever known fear, joy, rejection, love, rage, pleasure, pain, feast, or famine, then you have plenty to write about. If you’ve survived a miserable childhood or a wretched middle school or a toxic relationship — if you’ve been to hell and back — then you have enough material to write about for your whole career. If your life has been one long happy stream of nicey nirvana from beginning to end, then you’ll need to work a little harder, but you should still be able to scrape a story out of that.

Legend 4: You have to know people to get a novel published. Who knew Stephen King before he got published? Who knew Tom Clancy? Who knew J. K. Rowling? If you have great writing in your pocket, you’ll get to know people quick enough. All you have to do is show around what you have, and the right people will find you. Yes, really. Great writing trumps great connections every time.

Legend 5: You’ll forget your friends when you’re famous. Which famous writers ever forgot their real friends when they hit the limelight? Why would they do that? If you become famous, you’ll be besieged with people posing as friends who are looking for a piece of your fame. Soon enough, you’ll find out that the friends who knew-you-when are the only friends that you know for sure love you for yourself. You won’t forget your real friends — you’ll value them more than ever.

Setting Your Ultimate Goal As a Writer

If you’re writing a novel, don’t be modest about your goals. First of all, you want to write a really good novel, right? You aren’t in this game to write a piece of schlock. You have some talent, and you have a story, and you want to write it well.

Second, you want to get the darned thing published. Don’t hang your head and say, “I’ll be happy just to get it written.” Write to get published. Humility is a fine thing, but false humility can keep you from doing the one thing you really want to do.

Do this right now:

1. Take a piece of paper and write down these words:

“I’m going to write a novel and get it published. I’m going to do it because writing a novel is worthwhile and because I have the talent to do it. I’m going to do it because I have something important to say to the world. I refuse to let anything get in my way.”

2. Put today’s date at the top and your signature at the bottom.

Hang it where you can see it every day, and tell your family and friends about it.

As of this moment, you’re a writer. Don’t be ashamed to say so. On the happy day when you get your novel published, you’ll be an author.

It’s all too common for a writer to say (hanging head in shame), “I’m an unpublished writer.” Banish that word unpublished from your vocabulary. You are a writer. Call yourself a writer, whether you’ve been published or not.

Randy’s path to publication

Back in 1988, Randy decided that he was going to write a novel and get it published someday. Never mind why — just because. He started writing that novel, and about a year later, he’d written enough that he felt ready to go to a writing conference. He met some other writers there, got some great training, and joined a critique group.

Another year passed, and Randy’s skills were developing. At a certain point, he realized that the novel he’d been working on for more than two years was fatally flawed. He put it in the drawer and never looked at it again, but he didn’t abandon the vision. The goal was not to get that novel published; the goal was to get some novel published. Randy kept writing, worked hard, and after a couple of more years, he finished a novel.

He then began looking for an agent. Meanwhile, he began writing the next book. Within a year or so, he met an agent at a writing conference and within a few months signed an agreement for literary representation with him. The agent submitted the manuscript to a number of likely publishers. Randy kept writing.

One by one, every publisher on the list rejected Randy’s manuscript. The agent submitted it to more publishers and resubmitted it to some publishers who’d rejected it but seemed interested. One of the publishing houses eventually rejected it three times. Randy kept writing.

The last publisher on the list saw some merit in Randy’s work. The publishing committee looked at the manuscript for several months — and then rejected it. However, they took the time to point out three major problems that prevented them from buying the work. Randy’s agent called him with the news that the novel was dead. He also explained to Randy the publisher’s three concerns.

That day, Randy began working on a new novel, one that didn’t have any of those problems. This time, he felt sure, he had a winner. This one would be the novel that got published. His agent liked the idea and told him to pursue it. Randy kept writing.

Three months later, the agent died. Randy was devastated. He’d now been writing for eight years. He’d completed a novel, done his best to sell it, had it rejected everywhere, and then lost his champion. He kept writing.

Shortly thereafter, Randy went to a writing conference and made an appointment to talk with an editor he’d never met before. He stumbled through his pitch, making a perfect hash of it. Finally, the editor asked to see a writing sample. Randy pushed five pages across the table, and the editor skimmed over them. “You write pretty well,” he said. “Here’s my card. Send me a proposal and 100 pages.”

A year and a half later, without an agent, Randy sold that novel to that editor’s publishing house. The novel appeared in the spring of 2000, 12 years after he started writing. At last, he was an author. That novel, Transgression, went on to win a Christy Award, and Randy went on to write several more award-winning novels. He became well-known enough that conferences began asking him to teach.

Fast-forward another nine years. Randy has taught hundreds of writers. He’s mentored a number of them to become authors. He’s seen his students hit the bestseller list. And he’s now seeing them as finalists for major awards. In this book, he’s distilling what he’s learned over the last 21 years on the art and craft of writing fiction.

Pinpointing Where You Are As a Writer

Now that you’ve set your goal — to write a novel good enough to get published — we can talk strategically about how to get there. It won’t be easy, but it will be straightforward, so long as you do things in the right order.

We’ve identified four stages in the life of most writers on the road to publication. They’re analogous to the four years of college, so we like to call these stages freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior.

Please note that these stages may take more or less than a year to work through. We’ve seen a writer go from sophomore to senior in less than a year. Randy is pretty sure he was stuck as a junior for about eight years. If he’d had a coach, he could’ve zipped through that painful junior stage in about a year. That’s why he takes such joy in coaching writers.

This section looks at those four stages and explains how you can advance to the next level.

Freshmen: Concentrating on craft

Freshman writers are new to the game, and that’s okay. Every Ph.D. was a freshman in college at one time, and every author was a freshman writer at one time. It’s one step along the path. Typically, freshman writers have been reading fiction all their lives, and at last they’ve decided to start writing a novel. They write a few chapters and then discover an unpleasant truth: This fiction-writing game is harder than it looks.

Some freshmen give up at that point, but those who persist decide to get some training in the craft of writing fiction. They read books, take courses, join critique groups, and maybe go to a writing conference. Most importantly, they keep writing.

Nobody ever got good at writing by talking about it. Or hearing about it. Or reading about it. You get good at writing by doing it. Then you get your work critiqued, figure out what’s not up to par, and try it again. And again. And again.

At first, freshmen writers feel like nothing is happening — those miserable critique partners never seem to be satisfied, and new flaws seem to pop up before they solve the old ones. But persistence pays off. Eventually, after months of hard work, freshmen writers wake up one day to a surprising truth: They’ve gotten better. They’ve gotten a whole lot better.

A freshman advances by writing and by getting it critiqued and by studying the craft of fiction and by writing some more.

Sophomores: Tackling the proposal

Sophomore writers have been writing for a good while, and they’re no longer rank newbies. The other writers in their critique group are telling them, “That’s pretty good. You’ve made a lot of progress.”

A sophomore has generally taken at least one course on writing or has read several books on writing. A sophomore has almost always gone to at least one writing conference. He or she is starting to feel pretty confident. This writing game no longer seems hopeless. The craft of fiction is no longer a mystery.

But one thing is still an enigma: By now, a sophomore has heard how hard it is to break into publishing. There’s a thing called a book proposal that needs to get written, but who knows what that’s supposed to look like? And it requires a dreaded synopsis, and that sounds too ghastly for words. And how are these things related to a query letter? Typically, a sophomore feels a mix of confidence and terror: A growing confidence in craft, a rising terror of marketing. (If you’re curious about query letters, synopses, and proposals, see Chapter 16.)

Retreating into defeatism here is easy, but that way lie dragons. The winning strategy is to keep writing — advancing in craft — but now to begin figuring out how to market yourself effectively. Writing marketing materials like a query, a synopsis, and a proposal is a skill that no novelist can afford to ignore.

If you’re a sophomore, it’s high time to go to a good writing conference armed with a proposal (and a finished chapter or two) and show it to somebody — maybe a writer. Maybe an agent. Maybe an editor. The proposal will likely need a lot of work. Go with that attitude and ask for a critique of your proposal. Make it clear that you’re not pitching the project yet; you’re just learning how to pitch. You’ll get all the critique you can handle. (If you’re uncertain about the difference between an agent, an editor, and a publisher, see Chapter 17.)

Can’t wait! Practicing your proposal

Does a novel need a nice, long proposal to be sold to a publisher, or is a short synopsis good enough? Most writers Randy knows always prepare and submit full proposals, even to publishers that they’ve worked with frequently. The agents Randy knows all insist on receiving a proposal before agreeing to represent an author, and most of them use proposals in submitting potential novels to publishers. One editor says that she loves proposals because they help her get ready to take a project to her committee.

Randy insists that figuring out how to write a proposal is a highly valuable exercise for any writer. Many writers of commercial fiction need them, and this is becoming even more true as publishers find the economic screws tightening — they need to know that the project has a good chance to sell well.

Please note that the fiction proposal is substantially different from the nonfiction proposal. A query letter is often part of the process (all of which we explain in Chapter 16). However, proposals are very important for a great many novelists, and it’s unwise to remove them from the table. If you meet an agent and he’s interested in your work after reading your query, he’ll ask for more — either a manuscript or a proposal with sample chapters. It’s far too late at that point to suddenly realize you have to learn to write a proposal. Even agents who don’t want a proposal will be asking all the same questions that a proposal answers.

Go home and rework that proposal. And then do it again. And again. Sooner or later, you’ll find that by some magic, you have a terrific proposal to go along with your excellent writing. You’ll be a junior.

A sophomore advances by writing, by studying how to write a proposal, by writing that first practice proposal, and then by testing the proposal at writing conferences.

Juniors: Perfecting their pitches

Juniors are excellent writers. They’ve mastered most of the skills they need to get published. Their critique partners are saying, “Why aren’t you published yet?”

A junior has typically taken a proposal or a sample chapter to a conference, showed it to an editor or an agent, and heard the magic words, “Send that to me.” The junior has also heard back a few months later with the news, “Your work isn’t right for me.”

The junior year can be frustrating, humiliating, and depressing. It can be exhilarating beyond words at the same time. The junior period carries great highs and great lows, but you get through it if you persist.

If you’re a junior, then you need to be writing, writing, writing — perfecting your craft. You also need to be polishing proposals and pitching them, preferably in person at writing conferences.

It’s quite possible that you’ll find an agent late in your junior year. Or you may hear from an editor that your book is under review by the publishing committee. Or a published author may read some of your work and tell you that you’re almost there. If any of these things happen, you can be quite confident that you’ve become a senior.

A junior advances by striving for perfection in craft, by polishing proposals, and by pitching projects to live agents or editors.

Seniors: Preparing to become authors

Seniors are those chosen few who are destined to get published. This is clear to everyone — their critique buddies, their family, their friends, their agent. But it doesn’t always feel that way to the senior.

Your senior period can be supreme agony. You are that close to getting published. You know in your gut that you write better than many published authors. In a just universe, you ought to be published. So why aren’t you?

The answer is that you just haven’t found the right publisher with the right project at the right time. Making that connection takes time: the time you spend as a senior. Any senior could be published at any time.

Your action plan as a senior is simply to follow the process. By this time, you must have a very polished complete manuscript and a strong proposal. Get your work out to editors (or better yet, have your agent get your work out). Keep getting it out, ignoring the rejections. It only takes one yes to get published. Keep looking for that yes.

And keep writing. You may one day wake up with a brilliant idea for a novel. You know instantly that this is The One — this novel will be your ticket. If this happens, follow your instinct. Write that novel in a white fury. You now have all the skills to write an excellent novel, and you’ll find that you can write it far more easily than you can revise that old worn-out thing you started as a freshman writer.

Someday — this usually happens on a miserable day when the car’s had a flat tire, or when the washing machine has leaked soapy water all over the floor, or your 3-year-old son has decided to iron the cat — on a day like that, the phone rings. It’s your agent, calling to tell you that a publisher has made an offer on your novel. On that day, you suddenly forget all those years of striving, rejection, and heartache. On that day, you’re an author.

A senior advances by ignoring rejections and continuing to submit a polished project until a publisher buys it.

Getting Yourself Organized

Most writers hate organization. We do, too. We probably hate it twice as much as you do, because there are two of us. However, we’ve found that we’re a whale of a lot more productive when we do a bit of organization first. It isn’t fun, but it makes the fun stuff easier.

It helps to know exactly what that fun stuff is, so in this book we begin (in Chapter 2) with a high-level look at why fiction is fun and why your reader wants to read your novel. What keeps your reader turning pages at 3 a.m. when the alarm is set for 6? We show you that secret and what you need to do to keep that reader up all night.

In Chapter 3, we discuss your niche and your genre. You can’t appeal to every reader ever born. But the good news is this: Neither can any other author. Some readers walking this planet may find you the best author they’ve ever read. You need to figure out what those readers look like and how you can best meet their needs. When you know that, you’re ready to write the perfect book for them.

You’re unique. That means that you’ll probably use methods different from your friends’ for getting the first draft of your story down on the page. Some authors (Peter, for example) love outlines. Most authors hate them. Our job is not to tell you the one best process to write your novel. Our job is to show you (and we do so in Chapter 4) a variety of roads to completion and to let you choose one that works for you — or better yet, to find a unique road that fits you perfectly.

You have only a few resources that you can use to write your novel: time, energy, and money. Manage those effectively, and writing fiction will be a joy. Fail to manage them well, and writing will be a grind. In Chapter 5, we share some ideas we’ve found helpful.

Mastering Characterization, Plotting, and Other Skills

Novice writers have great ideas. Great writers have great ideas and great craft. Your first task is to understand the craft you need to turn your great ideas into great stories. Here’s what you need:

Story world: Your novel doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s set somewhere. That somewhere is usually called the setting or milieu, but we prefer the term story world because it’s the world in which your story takes place.

In Chapter 6, we show you what goes into constructing a great story world. It’s harder than it looks, but we give you a checklist of key concepts you need to nail down to have a fully defined story world. We also show you the most common backdrops that make a story world cry out for a story to fill it up with meaning.

Characters: Your characters have a past, a present, and a future, and you need to know each of these. In Chapter 7, we show the ideas that go into building a believable backstory for each character. And we show why backstory is essential for knowing the possible futures of your characters. Finally, we show you how the past and the future intersect in the present — right now — to create a compelling story that moves (and moves your reader).

Plot: The typical modern novel has a plot that contains six layers of structure, ranging from the 100,000-foot view all the way down to the up-close-and-personal view. As a novelist, you need to master each of these six layers and put them together into a harmonious story. In Chapters 8 through 10, we coach you through each level.

Theme: Every novel has a core idea — a theme. The twin hazards of theme are to put in either too little or too much. Go to Chapter 11 to see how to find your theme by listening to your characters. We also show you what to do to fix the most common problems.

Editing Your Fiction

Great writing never happens in the first draft. It happens when you edit your work — keeping what works, chucking what doesn’t, and polishing it all till it gleams.

You can’t depend on your editor to fix your novel. Modern editors are vastly overworked and underpaid. When you hand them your masterpiece, it needs to be burnished to a brilliant shine already.

Editing your fiction is hard work, but it’s not a hard idea. It comes down to two primary tasks:

Reworking your characters so that they come fully alive

Revising your storyline at all six layers of plot

In Part III of this book, we tell you what you need to do and show you how to do it. In Chapter 12, you find out about character bibles, backstory, values, ambitions, story goals, and most importantly, the subtleties of point of view (POV). And in Chapter 13, we show you how to create a hook for your story that will be the number one sales tool at every link in the seven-point sales chain that comes between you and your masses of readers. We teach you Aristotle’s three-act structure, but we add to it a three-disaster structure that Aristotle never dreamed about.

Your scenes are critical to making your story work, so in Chapter 14, you find out how to triage a scene — when to kill a scene, when to leave it alone, and how to fix it when it needs fixing. In Chapter 15, we show you how to analyze your story paragraph by paragraph to put your reader right inside the skin of your characters.

Chapter 2

What Makes a Great Story?

In This Chapter

Satisfying your goals and those of your readers

Writing about change

Understanding the five pillars of fiction

Using the seven core tools of the fiction writer

Your readers desperately want one thing from you when they pick up your novel: a powerful emotional experience. Readers want to feel something, and they want to feel it deeply and fully. If you fail to deliver that emotional punch, you lose, no matter how clever your story or charming your characters.

But assuming you deliver what readers want, you also have the freedom to give them more — possibly much more. It’s up to you to decide what else you want to give, if anything.

The art of writing fiction is built around five key tasks, which we like to call the five pillars of fiction. You must construct a believable setting, fill it with interesting characters, create a strong plot, develop a meaningful theme, and do it all with style. Most writers excel at only one or two of these, but you must become reasonably competent at all of them before you’re likely to get your novel published. You also have seven tactical tools to use in your writing: action, dialogue, interior monologue, interior emotion, description, flashback, and narrative summary. When you use these effectively, you give your readers that all-important powerful emotional experience.

Choosing What to Give Your Readers

Why do you write? We’ve asked many writers over the years what drives them to write fiction. We’ve heard zillions of different answers. Here are six of them:

To see my name on a book cover

To be a famous author

To make lots of money

To educate people

To entertain my readers

To persuade people to accept my views on politics or religion

These are all fine reasons to write a novel. Your reasons for writing are your reasons for writing. You don’t have to justify them to anybody. But it’s important to know what they are. Otherwise, how will you know whether you’re succeeding?

Take a few minutes right now and write down why you want to write fiction. What do you hope to get out of it? What do you want to do for your readers? On the same sheet of paper, write down the reasons you read. Circle the one that’s most important to you. If you’re like most readers, the main reason you read is to have fun — to be entertained.

In this section, we discuss how novels can educate, persuade, and, above all, entertain readers.

Creating a powerful emotional experience: What your readers desperately want

What is entertainment? After writing and teaching fiction for many years, we’re convinced that entertainment can be boiled down to one thing: giving the reader a powerful emotional experience. Here we unpack this concept a little:

Why emotions matter: Emotion is common to all fiction. Think about any of the major genres of fiction, and you see that each of them packs some sort of emotive punch:

• Romance novels and erotica deliver some combination of love and lust, as does any novel with a romantic thread.

• Suspense novels, thrillers, action-adventure novels, and horror fiction all deliver various flavors of fear.

• Mysteries arouse a strong sense of curiosity and usually deliver a healthy dose of fear.

• Historical novels, fantasy, and science fiction all give the reader an experience of being “elsewhere.”

• General fiction and literary fiction can deliver any of the preceding emotions, along with a strong sense of feeling understood.

Why emotions must be powerful: Think about that for five seconds. Do you know anyone who ever bought a novel in the hopes that it would deliver an insipid emotional experience? Of course not! Powerful emotions make stories more enjoyable and memorable. Most people want excitement when they read a novel. They want a lot of excitement. Boatloads of it. If your readers want it, that’s all the reason you need for giving it.

Why the experience is critical: Your readers don’t want to read about somebody else having powerful emotions. That’s actually rather dull. Imagine spending hours of your life watching somebody you don’t know crying or shivering in terror or kissing somebody you’ve never heard of. That’s boring.

Your readers want to become somebody else for a few hours, to live an exciting life, to find true love, to face down unimaginable terrors, to solve impossible puzzles, to feel a lightning jolt of adrenaline. Give them that, and you’ll earn fans for life. Give your readers anything else, and you’ll lose them forever.

The rest of this book has one goal only: to teach you — as simply and as quickly as possible — how to give your reader a powerful emotional experience. Nothing matters more.

Educating your reader

Some novels educate readers, allowing them to explore other cultures, speculate on scientific discoveries, build up their stores of trivia, or just understand a bit more about how the system (or the world) works. English professors would add that great fiction explores what it means to be human, but don’t feel pressured to explain the meaning of life — plenty of readers just want a little mental exercise.