Tag: how to write a novel

How to Fix Your Sagging Plot

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Does your story sag in the middle? Do you feel like you’re plowing through boring scenes just to get to the cool ones? Is your protagonist wandering around aimlessly, looking for the climax?

It’s not enough to have all the major events written down in a neat little list – what you need is structure.

An important distinction

Structure is not formula:

  • Formula is like having the same floorplan over and over.
  • Structure is a floor, walls and roof: you can organize them into whatever floorplan you like – but you can’t build a house without them.

Structure is the ebb and flow of tension and discovery that keeps you readers moving through the story. Structure helps you:

  • Keep the pace up
  • Know what’s important and what isn’t
  • Understand when to start and end the story

The following is a time-honored plot structure endorsed by Syd Field and others.

Structure of a Plot

setup, problem, confrontation, setback/decision, resolution

Photo by total13

Setup

In Act I, or the beginning of your story, you introduce the hero. We learn what he cares about and decide if we like him. This part should be relatively short. Keep the backstory to a minimum: it’s only an introduction.

Examples:

  • Bilbo celebrates his eleventy-first birthday
  • Luke buys some used droids
  • Passepartout starts a new job under Fogg

Problem

Within the first or second chapters, introduce the problem. Syd Field calls this Plot Point 1, which hooks the action and spins it into the next act. James Scott Bell calls it the first “pillar” of your plot “bridge,” or the first Door of No Return. This usually happens in a single scene – maybe at the end of the same scene you used to introduce the character.

Examples:

  • Frodo learns an evil something is coming to the Shire in search of Bilbo’s old Ring.
  • Luke’s aunt and uncle are killed, and he’s got the droids their killers are looking for.
  • Passepartout’s new boss bets some friends he can circumnavigate the globe in 80 days. Starting tonight.

Confrontation

Now we’re in the middle, or Act II of your story. This is the biggest chunk of the book. Your hero will face a series of obstacles, each more difficult than the last. As he overcomes each obstacle, the plot thickens, the tension increases, and the stakes are raised. In other words, new developments reveal that the hero stands to lose (or gain) even more than he originally thought.

Your hero should be getting more and more desperate; the pace should get quicker and quicker.

Examples:

  • Frodo and his friends face wraiths, orcs, trolls, giant spiders, etc.
  • Luke saves a princess, escapes the Death Star, loses his mentor, etc.
  • Passepartout and co. fight through bad weather, savage attacks, etc.

Setback/Discovery

Plot Point 2, the second pillar of the bridge, or the second Door of No Return. This is the worst setback and/or the major discovery that signals the climax. Your hero is now either armed with new information that leads him to a final showdown with the villain, or has been brought to his lowest point – he is betrayed, or he’s been shot, or the girl he’s been trying to save all this time gets killed, etc. The villain believes he has won.

It’s at this point the hero must make a decision. The ultimate decision.

Examples:

  • Setback: an army of orcs between Frodo and MountDoom. They disguise themselves as orcs. Decision: Frodo decides whether to keep or destroy the Ring.
  • Setback: Luke, now a rookie rebel fighter, is the last armed fighter left against the giant space station. Decision: Whether to trust the computer or the Force.
  • Setback: After being detained, Fogg and co. believe the game is lost. Decision: Fogg decides to marry the girl he loves.

Resolution

The End, or Act III. The climax and conclusion are the results of his ultimate decision. Does he win or lose, learn a lesson, live to fight another day?

Examples:

  • We find out who survived, who married whom, and who leaves Middle Earth.
  • We find out if Luke succeeds or fails and what that means for the Rebel Alliance.
  • Passepartout sets out to find a priest to do the marrying, when he discovers they arrived in town a day early – and we find out if they make it in time.

So there you have it. Just follow the bridge to get safely across to happily ever after.

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When Editing Goes Too Far

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measuring tape

Photo by Ciara McDonnell

I preach plenty about trimming the fat from writing. Strunk, White and Zinsser command it, and I’ve learned it firsthand from dealing with limited space in ads, radio commercials and billboards.

Efficient writing is better writing.

But this isn’t some professional writing secret. You’ll read it on all the forums, hear it at all the conferences and even in your local writers’ group. Cut, cut, cut. Maybe it’s the growing popularity of flash fiction, maybe it’s the waning attention spans of the masses, but whatever the cause, the fact remains:

Skinny writing is in.

We’re all shaking our pages till the adverbs fall out, beating the paragraphs till the parentheticals flee, ever striving for that low, low word count.

The red ink flows in our lust for trim prose.

And what are we seeing as a result? Leaner literature?

Or malnourished manuscripts?

Are we perpetuating a healthy word diet – or an editing disorder?

There is a point when the art becomes emaciated, with wording so simple you can’t differentiate the work of one author from another. Cut too deep, and the voice will bleed right out of your sentences.

Cutting words is one of those rules you have to learn first, to break later.

First you learn how to make each word count. How to construct clear thoughts. How not to waste your readers’ time.

But then you have to find your voice: that special way of writing you have (or your narrator has) that no one else has. And that voice may require a few “unnecessary” words.

Once you know the mechanics of writing efficiently, you can start learning the art of writing uniquely.

What happens if you don’t?

I took the red pen to the three wordiest excerpts from the 5 fantastic examples of voice I posted two years ago. Here’s how they came out.

Mr. Dickens: A Christmas Carol

There is no doubt Marley was dead. The clergyman, clerk, undertaker, and chief mourner all signed the register of his burial. Scrooge Signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.

I don’t know what is particularly dead about a doornail; I might regard a coffin nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery. But our ancestors’ wisdom is in the simile; and I won’t disturb it, or the Country’s ruined.

WORDS CUT: 60

Mr. Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

In the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small yellow sun.

Orbiting this at about ninety-eight million miles is an insignificant blue-green planet whose primitive ape-descended life forms still think digital watches are cool.

This planet had a problem: most of its people were unhappy. Most of the suggested solutions for this problem involved the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

WORDS CUT: 48

Mr. Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

You don’t know about me, unless you read “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that doesn’t matter. Mr. Mark Twain made that book, and told the truth, mainly. He stretched some things, but everybody lies sometimes, except Tom’s Aunty Polly, Mary, and the Widow Douglas.

WORDS CUT: 55

Feel that? That something missing? How it seems rushed?

I could have cut even more: Dickens’s entire second paragraph; several of the adjectives from Adams’s piece. But honestly, would there be anything left?

Learn to write efficiently, by all means. But don’t cut so much that you lose yourself.

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Need help finding your voice? Sign up for Voice Week, November 4 – 8! You’ll have a chance to win a copy of Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief!

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measuring tape

Are you over-editing?

The 300th Post: Featuring the Top 10

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Yes folks, you are reading post number 300 on BeKindRewrite! Applause! Music! Fanfare! And in monument to this momentous moment, I present the top ten most viewed posts (so far). Click through and read ’em if you haven’t already.

#10. Tips for Creating Lovable and Relatable Protagonists

#10. Tips for Creating Lovable and Relatable Protagonists

#9. 4 Steps to Convince People They Need to Read Your Novel

#9. 4 Steps to Convince People They Need to Read Your Novel

#8. Online Writing Resources

#8. 20 Great Free Online Writing Resources

#7. the 21 Best Tips for Your Opening Scene

#7. the 21 Best Tips for Your Opening Scene

#6. 7 ways to Motivate Yourself to Write

#6. 7 Ways to Motivate Yourself to Write

#5. 6 ways First Person Narrators Can Describe Themselves

#5. 6 ways First Person Narrators Can Describe Themselves

#4. Which fiction genre sells best?

#4. Which Fiction Genre Sells Best?

#3. Fantastic examples of voice.

#3. 5 Fantastic Examples of Voice.

#2. How to Control People's Thoughts with Words

#2. How to Control People’s Thoughts with Words

#1. The 7 Narrator Types

#1. The 7 Narrator Types

5 Ways to Build a Detailed World Without Boring Your Readers

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Photo by InterdimensionalGuardians. Interesting.

Photo by InterdimensionalGuardians. Interesting.

It’s the year 2053. Earth has made first contact with an extraterrestrial race; socialist aliens who reproduce asexually. You, now a literary giant, are tasked with adapting a sample of Earth literature for the aliens to enjoy. The book is Pride and Prejudice.

You open your well-worn copy to that famous first sentence, It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife…and you break down in tears, realizing this tale of class and marriage will mean absolutely nothing to your audience.

Universal truth, your foot!

Yet this is the challenge science fiction and fantasy writers face every day.

We create whole new worlds to house our stories, then find ourselves struggling to keep up the pace while stopping the action every few paragraphs for a history lesson.

But we don’t have to! With a few tricks of Show, Don’t Tell, we can show our readers a lot about our world without slipping into exposition. The close-up details of our heroes’ personal lives can reveal the big picture of the world they live in.

Like so:

1. Your protagonist’s job

…and the jobs of the people he knows say a lot about your world. If they’re all farmers, your readers see an agrarian community. Make him a moisture farmer in a desert, shopping for robots, and he’s Luke Skywalker. Or make him a starship repairman or a dragon breeder. Whatever the occupation, in one conversation with buddies at the pub about how hard work has been this week and what the government is up to, you can cover:

  • The major industries of your world
  • Who controls them / has the power
  • The biggest problems with society

More useful tools along these lines:

  • Living quarters (cave, tent, cryotube, barracks, fortress?)
  • School/studies (from a blacksmith’s apprenticeship to a mind control science project)
  • News reports (from the town crier announcing the war to a psychic message about falling nanobot stock prices)

2. Your protagonist’s relationships

How was he raised? Does he live with the wife and kids? The wives and kid? Seven generations of his family? Coworkers, classmates, cellmates, refugees? No one at all? This all reveals:

  • The society in your world
  • The structure of the family
  • Barriers between the classes

3. Your protagonist’s traditions

Does he pray before he eats? Does he have to slay a beast to be acknowledged a man? When he attends a funeral, is he watching a body buried, burned, scattered, eaten, or recycled? Do they even have funerals? This reveals:

  • Religion – who they worship, where they came from, where they go when they die
  • History – holidays can be used to reenact important points in history

Traditions can include:

  • Daily rituals: getting up, going to sleep, eating
  • Life events: birth, coming-of-age, marriage, parenthood, funerals
  • Holidays: festivals and fasts

*Pro tip: A liturgy, specifically words sung or recited at any of these events, can be an especially handy way to sneak in detail.

4. Your protagonist’s speech

Language, slang, shop talk, and industry buzzwords are all great tools to both plant clues and add personality to your world. For instance, your can make up your own:

  • Terms of endearment or insult (honey, jerk)
  • Titles (husband, wife, king, priest)
  • Curse words (…)
  • Greetings (hello, hi, good day, hey y’all, yo)

5. Use the appendices, Luke!

Your readers will usually be able to interpret casual references to foreign concepts by the context. But to include more detail, you can always add appendices at the back of the book. Tolkien and Herbert, renowned for their world-building in Lord of the Rings and Dune, both did it. Use footnotes to lead readers to things like:

  • Glossary of terms
  • Translations of foreign words
  • Maps
  • Summary of religion and history

What are some of your ideas for showing your world to readers? Tell me in the comments!

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Thanks to Sky for suggesting this topic! If you have a writing question you want answered, leave it in the Suggestion Box!

little green men

Great show-don’t-tell world-building tips for sci-fi/fantasy writers.

 

Great Free Research Resource for Writers

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I have a post about a new proofreading software 95% done. But I just don’t think I have the last 5%  in me tonight. It has been a long week and a longer day. So instead, I’ll leave you with a super cool research resource I recently discovered.

Photo by Brett Jordan

Photo by Brett Jordan

We writers are always having to do research on the strangest things. Wikipedia articles don’t always cut it, and reading non-fiction books severely cuts into our fiction-reading time. If we’re lucky, we might happen to come across just the right special on the History or Discovery channel, but we wonder how much of that is just sensationalism, and how many important details we are missing.

Introducing…free online lectures! From respected universities! On almost any subject you can think of! Some are audio, some are video, all are free. Among the lectures I’ll be listening to:

  • The Roman World
  • Science, Magic and Religion
  • Literature and Psychoanalysis
  • Science Fiction and Politics

The site is OpenCulture.com/FreeOnlineCourses

Now isn’t your mind just buzzing with curiosity?

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