Writing Novels.

[Rimbo]

So I touched on this in the DOOMed Exercise thread, but I'm having a bit of difficulty with a novel.

I think the main problem comes down to this: When I find a voice to tell a story with, I only have that voice for that moment. Once the moment has passed, I no longer have the voice. This is why I'm hesitant to make anything other than the most minor changes to drafts; if I get too quick with the red pen, I alter the voice enough that it may seem to have multiple personalities.

The other problem is that you can't write a novel in a night. So one chapter may have a totally different feel from the next.

But there's also just plain laziness. It took me a good half of the first draft before I finally figured out where the story was going. Now I'd like to go back through and at least make the first half consistent with the second. I'd like to flesh out some of the details I skipped (a lot of the chapters felt like mere outlines when I wrote them). And enough time has passed that some of the ideas I thought I had, I don't like at all.

Of course, I have none of these problems with short stories. If I can bang it out in an evening, it works.

Help! How does one do this thing called a 'novel?'

[Creole Ned]

I had a similiar experience with the first novel I wrote at the tender age of 19. It began as a short story then grew until it became obvious that it would be novel-length. As I went along, I began reworking parts of the plot and made dramatic changes to certain characters, essentially rewriting the story on the fly. In some cases I went back and fixed things up, in others I made mental notes to do the same later but in the end the whole process got away from me and after 475 handwritten (!) pages I abandoned the story altogether.

I guess that's not very encouraging, is it? :D

The novel I'm working on now also began life as a short story many years ago but I always felt it could work as a longer piece. Unlike my first novel, this story is pretty straightforward and there's not a lot of things to keep track of so I'm finding it easier to maintain tone and focus. The hardest part was taking the 11,000 or so words I'd written as a short story and switching them over from a first to a third person perspective.

I think if you find a tone that works for the story you'll actually have no trouble holding onto it as long as you don't let huge amounts of time pass without working on the novel. As for the revisions, I'd probably keep plowing ahead and finish the story before going back and trying to fix things. Flipping back and forth between fixing old stuff and writing new chapters was certainly a factor in me abandoning my first novel. Creating is a rush, revising not so much. Too much revising early on and I think you can kill the spark for creating.

That's my cockamamie input, anyway.

P.S. One of the upcoming exercises will be participation in November's National Novel Writing Month. 50,000 words (minimum) in no more than 30 days -- that might be a deadline that could work for you. :)

[Kael]

Im going through this right now as well. Ive done a lot of short story writing. Hundreds of stories from 500 - 5,000 words. But now that Im sitting down and trying to writing something larger it is very difficult and my experience is working against me.

I tend to like brevity. If anything isn't absolutely needed for a story then I cut it. I spend a lot of time looking for that perfect adjective (not that I ever find it) rather than give a paragraph of detail.

Also I tend to think in a short story mode. I find a situation or event I want to write about. I know the twist, I know the characters, and I get it down pretty quickly.

But breaking out of the short story format means having more than an event. I need a journey, and I have difficulty imagining the entire journey before I start writing. I would be curious to see how authors "storyboard" their books before they begin, or if they just have a vague idea and start writing.

The second method doesn't work for me since my nature is to remain as tight and focused as possible. I'll wrap the story in 3,000 words and be done. And although I find little nuggets along the way (like Rimbo's excellent aside about killing the children in spring in "The Slough of Despair") my wanderings dont fill pages or chapters.

[russellmz]

my own novel is a bunch of disconnected blobs. i think of something cool, i jot it down and try to figure out where i can fit it in. even if it's a one liner or background to the universe i'm making. but i don't have a theme other than "being a clone sucks."

it's useful for when i'm writing short stories since i can cannibalize the chunks i haven't used.

[Creole Ned]

Yeah, I can almost picture your novel being a collection of stories set in the particular universe you've created rather than just having the usual singular overarching plot.

[Acid]

I think I have a hint or two.

Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Joel Durham Jr, a tech writer with a novel in the can and a prospective agent (that all, I don't want to jinx this with details...), and it was a labor of love to write my first fiction book. Labor being the operative word.

What I did to make it consistent:

1. Remember your inspiration, whatever it was. Meditate on it for a few minutes before you start your day/evening/night of work on your book.

2. Make notes. Minor characters, place names, etc. Consistency.

3. Get in the right mood. Think about your book. Think hard about it for a few minutes before you jump in to continue the narrative. Even reread the last few grafs. Listen to the same musical act you were listening to when you last wrote (if any).

Those are the things that I did to make it easier for me. Purely self-engineered; I can't guarantee results, but give it a shot.

AND: Rewrite. Edit. Rewrite again. Edit agin. Smooth it, like fresh paint, arrange it like a Zen rock garden. Blend it. Flesh out characters. Check for plot holes. Look for continuity errors.

Make it perfect BEFORE you start pitching, because you never know when someone may bite...and expect a FULL, COMPLETE, FINAL DRAFT. You can't pitch ideas in fiction. You must have a completed work.

Regarding pitching and not writing: the personal advice I received in reply to a fan letter to Tom Robbins is three simple words. Persist, persist, persist.

[Kael]

Is there a market for a 20,000 word story (fantasy fiction)? Or is that to long for any short story submission and to short for a book?

[Creole Ned]

Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine (http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/glines.htm) accepts submissions up to 25,000 words. The other likely place would be in an anthology of sorts but I've not looked into how a new author might get into one.

Acid, welcome to the forum and congrats on your first novel. Those are all good tips. I have just recently been able to resume work on my novel (and writing in general) and hope to have a first draft ready for a select few to peruse soon.

[Kael]

Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine (http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/glines.htm) accepts submissions up to 25,000 words. The other likely place would be in an anthology of sorts but I've not looked into how a new author might get into one.

Thats great advice, thanks!

[kerzain]

Rimbo, how long are you waiting between drafts? It is much harder to identify 'voice' problems when you're brain is still full of all the stuff you've been laying down in the story. It's easy to become confused about what you left in and what you took out if you rush into a second draft, because it is all much too fresh in your mind.

When you finish your first draft you need to stick it in a box (or a flash drive, whatever) and keep it as far away from yourself as possible. Put the box in a closet and just forget about it for at least 3 months. Don't even sit around trying to dream up good additions for a second draft, forget all about the story and just move on to your next one.

It is essential you keep writing in the mean time, but don't write anything about the story you just drafted.

Once you've waited a few months, crack the box open, pull out your manuscript (or print it from your flash drive if you still have it saved as a .doc or something) and then edit the thing page by page with a pen or pencil. Do not just plop down in front of your computer and start scanning pages in MS Office. Read the pages on paper, you might not think this makes a difference, but it really does. Believe it or not redrafting on a computer is much more distracting than you know, and you need the focus of just shutting the world out and reading/editing on paper.

The reason for the delay in first and second draft has everything to do with stuff like 'voice'. When you're stuck in the middle it can be hard to see what you're putting down, and whether the tone all sounds like same. But when you read the same text months later you are seeing the story with fresh eyes.

It's almost like it was written by another person, well almost. You will find a ton of logic errors, and stuff, that's par for the course, but the most important thing is that you will be approaching the story WITHOUT the bias of this voice being the driving force behind your thoughts. You need that fresh perspective. You need to see the story as a reader would, this is the only way you're going to be able to do that. The tone changes and voice changes will be much more apparent. You can then block off the text that works and the text that doesn't, and it should be easier to tell WHY something works and WHY something doesn't.

Don't confuse your first draft with an actual story. Some people have alluded here that the first draft often just feels like a framework, or a synopsis of a real story. Guess what, that's all first drafts are supposed to feel like. The most important part of laying down a first draft is to get the information from your mind on to the page as fast as possible. Don't sit there dwelling on things, just put it on paper and then step away from it. When you do your re-read and first edit you can figure out what works and what doesn't, and start trimming from there.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to muddle the first draft process with the editing process, they serve two very unique purposes. One is to tell the story, the next is to fine tune it and turn it into something worth sharing. You can't fine tune your story if it is still fresh in your mind.

Haven't you ever opened a story you wrote months (or years) before and noticed how much easier it was to spot the flaws? Didn't you get the urge right that moment to start fixing things? This is the newness you want, this is the freshness and inspiration you really, really want.

Don't think of stories as something you have to start and finish in a month, or one night. I am as guilty as anyone else at dumping out 3000 words in one sitting, running a quick spell-check and calling it a story and sharing it with the world, but this shot of inspiraction will only really provide good results once your brain has had a chance to rest and digest it before stepping back up to fix what (invariably) will be wrong with the story.

Novels are the same way. I've pounded out hundreds of pages and got lost in the mire of instant-gratification-editing. I thought the results were great, then months or years later i re-read the story only to discover it was in need of some serious editing. Don't do this.

Everything I said was said better by the King himself, Stephen King, in his book "On Writing". It is one of the very, very few books on the subject of writing that I 98% agree with. You might want to read it, all of it, autobiography stuff too because the autobiography shows King readers how inspiration can work. If you aren't familiar with his writing the autobiography can still show you how to turn mundane topics into a good read, but if you've read any of his classics it is an invaluable resource for showing how sources of inspiration can be shoehorned into your stories -- even if he doesn't explicitly say this.

The rest of his book focuses on the importance of story, and editing do's and don'ts, and there is a really cool section where he shows his typical first draft before and after editing. Even though his first draft is still better than most people's final drafts, it still shows that even the pro's produce wooden and badly crafted first drafts. The important thing is how and when you approach the second.

[Rimbo]

Great advice, Kerzain. Some of it I already knew once, and had forgotten. Thanks!

[Paladin]

I'm going to plug another book, which I'm currently rereading. Orson Scott Card's How To Write Science Fiction & Fantasy (http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=palasplay-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&asins=158297103X).

It's an interesting read which focuses mainly on how writing for sci-fi and fantasy genres is different from general fiction writing. For about $10, it's source of good ideas on thing to do or not do.

It covers areas such as:

World (or universe) building
Character creation
Maintaining internal logic and constancy
How genre writing differs from general fiction writing
Story flow and pacing
Writing professionally and/or trying to get published


I'm also going to link to his Characters & Viewpoint (http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=palasplay-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&asins=0898799279) book. I haven't read it yet, but it's also about $10 and seems to be an area where you guys think you need some guidance.

[kerzain]

I'm going to plug another book, which I'm currently rereading. Orson Scott Card's How To Write Science Fiction & Fantasy (http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=palasplay-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&asins=158297103X)I actually snipped a paragraph I had dismissing this specific book. I cut it because although the book doesn't work for me there's no reason to think it wouldn't work for someone else.

There were two main things I didn't like about the book. #1 Card's blatant arrogance that bleeds through every chapter. He is a Sci-Fi snob that spends part of the book putting down successful sci-fi franchises like Star Trek, which dares send the Captains down on away teams, and also because the franchise has Warp Speed allowing them to break the speed of light.

The other thing I dislike is his thinly veiled contempt of up and coming and established sci-fi authors. He dismisses almost every one of then by plainly stating that any monkey with half a brain for science can get published if they write sci-fi because the field is saturated with crap (what genre isn't?) and looking for something good.

He gives readers a completely unrealistic set of expectations on how easy it is to get published, and it comes across like "So, in closing, you're a bad writer if you can't even get a Sci-Fi book into print." Perhaps this is a dated statement that was relevant at the time of the book's writing, but I doubt it. Getting published has always been akin to winning the lottery for unpublished authors. To suggest that anybody can do it, unless they suck, is short sighted and goes to show that he doesn't quite have the handle on that part of the industry that he purports to have.

To his credit though, I think published authors sometimes forget how hard it can be to get published. It can be a real tough journey even for the highest skilled writers, because so many agents already know what they're looking for and just toss anything that isn't it.

Card's book comes across like he is trying to shape the fantasy and sci-fi genre's to fit his own needs, rather than encouraging writers to simply write what feels right to them. He seems like he wants to lump all sci-fi that doesn't adhere to strict universal constants and laws as cartoonish blather. I understand wanting to keep a story feeling real, but I'm also willing to make concessions for the sake of the story. We can't have every Sci-Fi book revolve the same old tired plot of "I'm traveling to a distant planet and back. When I get back all my loved ones will be old or dead, let's retread this cliche plot device and serve up another heaping spoonful of sameyness".

It's Science Fiction, did he forget the fiction part? Sometimes certain aspects of realism can be sacrificed to help improve a story, but he spends more time trying to box writers in rather than telling them to go wild, write whatever they want, as long a it feels right and true to them. Let the readers decide what works and what doesn't. But writers shouldn't be trying to shoe-horn Card's ideal's into their own works, they should be encouraged to imaging a reality however they want.

All of this is my own take however, for those people that agree with Card's ideal Sci-Fi universe and think shows or stories like Star Trek or Star Wars should never have existed this is the book for you. Who am I to question a pillar in the sci-fi community?

[Rimbo]

To his credit though, I think published authors sometimes forget how hard it can be to get published. It can be a real tough journey even for the highest skilled writers, because so many agents already know what they're looking for and just toss anything that isn't it.

You are quite right about established authors, but you talk about agents as if it's a bad thing.

Look, I'm all for artistic integrity. I also know that writers write because we are driven to do so. It's something that's a part of us. We'll write because we want to write.

But for a publisher or an agent, they can't just publish whatever, no matter how well-written it is. They have to publish something that will cover the costs of printing. If your writing is fantastic but 90% of the folks browsing the aisles are looking for either a Star Wars novel, a vampire sex fantasy or a "kid witch" novel, then it damned well better appeal to every last one of that remaining 10%. But the safer bet is to just find another Star Wars, vampire sex or kid witch novel. And that's just the business as it is. Eventually the market will get saturated with all of those and people will be looking for something new. And then one lucky novelist will become the next Anne Rice or JK Rowling. But let's remember these opportunities come along once per decade if you're lucky.

Card was lucky that he happened to fit into the genre defined by Asimov's lucky break. I can see why he'd be oblivious to such a thing. I myself fit into the genre defined by the lucky breaks of Burroughs, Howard and Lovecraft (minus the racism). It's a genre that's pretty thoroughly played-out, though, for which one can find the originals' works for free, so what chance have I to make a publisher happy?

Edit: Of course, this is assuming I can actually finish the fucking thing first. Anyway, the point is, if you want to do anything for a living, you have to be aware of -- and prepare yourself to spend time on -- the business aspect of it. Doesn't matter if it's software or novels or rock and roll. That, right there, is the reason talented musicians and writers never get paid for their work.

[Paladin]

I'm going to throw this one out there...

A while back I was browsing Amazon for a good zombie novel. I'd gone on a zombie movie watching kick and decided to look and see what was available to read at lunchtime. One that I found was "Monster Island" by David Wellington. A little reading turned up the fact that he originally wrote the book as an online serial. One new chapter, 3-5 pages long, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He published them himself on Brokentype.com (http://www.brokentype.com/davidwellington/). No idea if that was his site or some kind of blog site (like Wordpress.org) or what. Anyway, the idea apparently worked and he developed enough of an established readership that a small genre publisher signed him to a book deal. He's now published about 10 books or so, including a really cool vampire series that I really dig (I stopped reading the zombie series after the first book).

Anyway, while it's a very non-traditional route, it worked for him. In fact, I've had a number of people say that most publishers won't touch anything which has already been published online when I've mentioned this before, so it may not be a very good idea.

It did serve another purpose though... long before there was even a hint of a book deal, this option gave this writer a meetable goal (3-5 pages), a deadline (every other weekday) and an outlet where people could read his stuff.

[kerzain]

Anyway, while it's a very non-traditional route, it worked for him. In fact, I've had a number of people say that most publishers won't touch anything which has already been published online when I've mentioned this before, so it may not be a very good idea.Publishers will publish anything they think will make money. Yes, they might be hesitant to publish something if they think the author has already milked the market for all it's worth, but look at books like Eragon and The Shack. Both of these are stories that were published long after the authors spent their own money self-publishing and self-publicizing. But with Eragon and The Shack what actually sold the publisher on the deals were that these books were selling very very well for being self-published books, and the publisher saw potential for even better sales with an industry marketing team behind it.

Although there is definitely something to be said about publishers feeling apprehensive to touch anything that has been published before in any way, shape or form (saturated market aside, there are legal ramifications that come in to play if they think there's even a tiny chance someone else bought publishing rights), they will be much more likely to show interest if you can prove that your book is already selling itself, and that you are simply inviting them along for the ride.

It did serve another purpose though... long before there was even a hint of a book deal, this option gave this writer a meetable goal (3-5 pages), a deadline (every other weekday) and an outlet where people could read his stuff.This here is a very true statement. I've toyed with the idea of creating a blog of sorts and throwing my ideas out there because such pressure would create a constant source of inspiration for me to get the job done, but when it comes to writing my work typically needs an assload of editing, and I figured I might actually be hurting myself for the simple sake I just throw stuff out there before it's ready, because I get all spazzed out and insist on putting it out there the very moment I first hit "Save".

Self restraint, if I could learn it I could probably do more with what I already have written.

The closest I came to something like this was about 10 years ago, long before I started REALLY trying to take my writing somewhat seriously. I had a few chapters of a story written and I put the chapters for sale, $1 on ebay, (I was selling them as digital downloads). I made like $8 on chapter one, and got exactly 8 people emailing me back asking for a refund because my editing sucked, the story sucked, it was too grim, too violent -- you name it. Yea, I learned a lesson, a few actually. Now I at least try to take things a little more serious, if only I'd stop spazzing out to get the damn thing out there before it's really ready.

[Paladin]

Resurrecting this thread with an article one of the authors I read posted on his blog...

http://www.businessinsider.com/amanda-hocking-2011-2

He's going to rework one of his old stories and try it on Kindle to see how it goes. Just thought I'd post this since I know a few of you have finished novels or novellas, and it may be worth self-publishing something to see how it goes.

[Creole Ned]

You should re-post this to thenwrite.com's general discussion forum. :nod: