Category: Fiction (Page 1 of 3)

It’s hard to know what reasons will make a Reader pick up a book. And unless you’re stalking the shelves of your local bookstore, ready to point out to anyone who wanders by that $YOUR_AWESOME_NOVEL is worth checking out, none of those reasons are directly under your control. Getting a reader to pick up a book is the realm of the mysterious Marketer, a place of dragons and spreadsheets where few Authors ever dare to go.

But once a person does pick up your book…and flips to page one…and starts to read? That is something that you, the heroic Author, can control. A reader will keep reading an interesting book, and they’ll put down a boring one. It doesn’t matter what other awesome qualities your novel has—if the reader doesn’t want to finish it, nothing else matters.

Different types of readers want different things out of reading. Someone picking up a romance novel will have different goals and expectations than someone picking up a mystery or thriller. In some genres, you have to hook them with the first sentence; in other cases, you’re free to build up your hook at a more leisurely pace. But there is always a basic hierarchy of three reasons why a reader keeps going with a story. Out of a sense of deranged grandeur, I’m going to call these three reasons the Reader’s Taxonomy of Interest.

They want to know what happens

The first level on the Taxonomy is simply wanting to know how the story plays out. This is the most basic and obvious reason for wanting to finish a novel, but it’s also by far the weakest. This isn’t the same thing as caring about what happens; this is just “I want to find out what the ending is.”

Imagine going up to a reader holding a novel and offering to tell them the ending. They say, sure. You tell them the alien werewolf vampires are foiled in their plot to take over the world because Earth garlic contains a deadly bacteria. They say thanks, and then they set the book down and never open it again.

All they wanted to do was know the ending. They were curious, but they didn’t care. Did the rogue leader of the alien werewolf vampires reconcile his conflict between his world-taking-over comrades and his love for a beautiful Scottish soccer mom? Yes? No? Tell me, I just want to know.

This level of the Taxonomy is purely intellectual. It’s driven by curiosity, not desire. A reader at this level isn’t engaged emotionally. No reason for finishing a story is a ‘bad’ reason, and certainly getting the reader interesting in knowing the ending is better than not getting them interested. But when knowing the ending is the only hook your story has on them, its hold is tenuous at best. They can easily become distracted or decide that it’s not worth their time to finish it. They might flip to the ending, ask a friend, or even just Google the plot.

If you want to hook a reader so that they’re compelled to finish your story, you need to move them up to the higher levels of the Taxonomy.

They want to see what happens

Level Two on the Taxonomy is wanting to see what happens. A reader who wants to experience your story is immersed in your world. They simply like being there. If you were to make that same offer to tell this reader what happens at the end of the story, they’d consider for a moment, then shake their head and say nah, I’d like to see it for myself. Your story has become an experience, instead of just a sequence of events.

Whereas Level One (wanting to know what happens) is mainly a result of the plot, Level Two is about the story’s world. When a reader feels like the world of a story is real, you’ve hooked them at a deeper level, regardless of whether that world is a mining town in West Virginia or a planet populated by intelligent octopi. Good description and world-building transport a reader to a different place, and when that happens they’ll be reluctant to transport themselves back to the real world.

Still, just because a reader feels immersed in a setting doesn’t mean they care a whole lot about what happens there. Some plot arcs are obvious: the hero will get the girl and slay the dragon. The reader knows what will happen, and they want to witness it. I once read a book where the main character had been deceived by the person she thought was her father. I read a good hundred pages just because I wanted to see the part where she found out that he was really the bad guy. And then as soon as I finished that part, I put the book down and didn’t finish it, because I didn’t really care what happened to her.

Wanting to see how your story resolves is better than just wanting to know, but it’s still a tenuous hook. If you want to get your reader completely hooked on your story, you have to get them to the next level.

They care about what happens

Now we’re at the top level of the Taxonomy. When someone cares about what happens, they’re really hooked. They want the bad guy to be defeated. They want the heroine to get the guy. Their heart is pumping, their palms are sweaty. They’re turning pages so fast they’re getting paper cuts.

If Level One is about plot and Level Two is about world, Level Three is about characters. Your characters are the only thing that readers actually care about. Nobody wants a a plot to resolve in a particular way just for the sake of it. They want something—good or bad—to happen to the characters. If the hero failed in his quest, the reader would be saddened. If the heroine never found out the real reason why her friend betrayed her, a wrong would not be righted. The reader who cares about what happens is like a cheerleader screaming from the sidelines. Rah, rah, sis-boom-bah, make sure Molly finds her Ma. And what they’re cheering for isn’t the plot, or the world—they’re cheering for characters.

If you’ve read anything about storytelling, you’ve read that conflict is essential. But why is it that a reader needs conflict? I think the reason is because without conflict, there’s nothing to care about. A story with conflict sets up a situation which is ‘bad’ and promises to make it ‘good.’ We care about a young boy living in a cupboard under a staircase because we want him to become a wizard. We care about a boy who has just found an extra-terrestrial in a shed because we want to see him develop a ‘human’ connection. All of these wants revolve around the conflict of characters.

Of course, just because the reader wants a particular thing doesn’t mean you always have to give it to them exactly as they want it. In fact, it’s almost always better to surprise them in some way. They may want the boy with the laser sword and his mentor to defeat the bad guy in the black mask. But instead of giving them exactly what they want, you might twist it so that the bad guy kills the mentor. Twisting expectations is a great way to keep a story fresh, but there’s a caveat—you’re always still giving the reader the core of what they want. Nobody wants to read a story where the bad guy not only kills the boy’s mentor, but the boy, his scoundrel friend, two robots, and a princess as well.

Any good story hits all three of the levels of this Taxonomy, and usually the author does it subconsciously. Experienced writers know that stories need conflict and characters that the reader will care about. But for those of us who are still learning their craft, it can be helpful to separate out the different reasons why a reader would get hooked on your novel.

So once you’ve finished a draft or two, re-read your story and ask yourself these questions: Have you given the reader any reason to want to know what happens? Have you given them a reason to want to see it? And have you given them reasons to care?

from the analyze-evaluate-create dept.

If you want to be a writer, there are six words that you need to memorize above all else. You need to tape them to your wall, tattoo them on your arm, and teach them to your parrot until it repeats them back to you a hundred times per day. You need to pay skywriters to draw them in the sky above your house and hack your cybernetic ocular display so that they hover in front of you wherever you go.

Are you ready? Here are the six words.

First drafts suck, and that’s okay.

“Oh, sure,” you say. “I know that.”

Yeah, but do you really? The extraordinarily, depressingly huge suckitude of first drafts is hard to grasp. It’s like comprehending the size of the universe: you expand your mental image until it’s a hundred billion times larger than anything you could possibly think of, and then just to be on the safe side you multiply that by a hundred billion, and then you find out that in reality it’s a hundred billion times larger than that.

Just to be clear, the idea isn’t that your first drafts suck. Or that first drafts of beginning writers suck. It’s that all first drafts suck. By anyone. Anytime. Ever. When you write a craptastic first draft, not only are you not alone, you are in the company of literally every writer who ever lived. The first day some primitive human decided hey, that’s a good story, I should invent writing so that I can write it down was the first day that a sucky first draft was written. Homer wrote them. Shakespeare wrote them. Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce. You name ‘em, and I promise that they’ve written catastrophically bad first drafts.

First drafts suck, and that’s okay.

At some point people start to realize that writing involves multiple drafts, and that the final words of books they read do not spring from writer’s fingers like Force-lightning. (This is sometimes hard for kids to grasp—I’ve spent several conversations trying to explain to my seven-year-olds why I’ve written multiple drafts of one book. “You mean, you just write the same book over and over?”) But even once people acknowledge that rewriting is a part of writing, they still generally believe that a first draft is just a slightly-unpolished version of the final product, as if all that’s necessary is to sandpaper a few rough edges and paint over the odd mistake.

Nope.

First drafts suck, and that’s okay. Because the point of a first draft is not to be an actual coherent story. The point of a first draft is to start getting the various bits and pieces of a story down onto paper so that you can look at them and see what they are. (“Oh, hey, looks like I wrote a story about were-rat jewel thieves from Flanders.”) You get it all down, you write something that looks approximately-kinda-sorta something like a book, and then you step back and figure out what story you actually want to tell. Because a lot of the time, you discover that the story you end up wanting to tell isn’t the same one that you started out with.

Let’s take a little side-journey into metaphor-town. Imagine that a story is like a blanket. Maybe it’s the sort that your grandmother might knit for your living room couch, or maybe it’s a little warm blanket for a baby bed. Whatever it is, you can see it in your head, and so you brew a pot of coffee and you sit down to knit. You stretch your fingers and you get out your knitting needles.

And then you realize that you don’t have any yarn. You don’t even have thread to spin into yarn. You don’t even have cotton to spin into thread, or plants that might grow cotton that you could spin into thread.

What you have is a field and some seeds. You plant those seeds, and you water them, and you fertilize them, and many moons later you have some full-grown cotton plants. You pick that cotton, and then you spin the cotton into thread, and then you spin the thread into yarn.

Once all of that is done, you cast your mind back to that day you sat down to knit, and you remember that your goal wasn’t to produce piles of yarn. So you brew some more coffee and sit back down and knit that yarn into your blanket.

After all of that is it any wonder that the blanket you come up with looks like crap? You’d planned for it to be nice and square, but one side is longer than all of the rest. Some of the threads of yarn stop and start or change color or just disappear altogether. There are giant holes where you forgot to knit anything at all, and one corner is knit so tightly you’re pretty sure you could stab someone to death with it.

But that’s okay. Because what can be knit can be unknit and knit again.

See, you don’t need a cotton field to write a second draft. You’ve already got all the stuff you need right there. Just pull your first draft apart until you’ve got a giant pile of yarn and then start knitting it together again. You’ll need to add some thread here and there, and you’ll throw away so much yarn that your trash can will look like you slaughtered a coven of Muppets. (The More You Know™: ‘coven’ is the correct collective noun for a group of Muppets). But now that you can concentrate on how the knitting will look instead of spending all your time wresting thread from the earth, that second draft will be easier. Oh, will it be easier.

The corollary to the first drafts suck mantra is this: revising makes good. Just as people have a hard time realizing how bad first drafts can be, they don’t quite realize how much a story can be improved through the process of revising. Your non-writer friends might read your first draft (if you let them, which you shouldn’t) and drop polite hints about how the restaurant on the corner is hiring servers. Your writer friends who read your first draft (if you let them, which you probably still shouldn’t) will squint at it, hem and haw, and then say “sure, there’s a story in here somewhere.” It’s a first draft; it sucks. But your second draft will be better, and your third better still. If you can improve your story with every draft, then all you need is time.

You sometimes read about how a particular writer published the first book they ever wrote, while another, just-as-successful author wrote eight novels before they got one into print. That first writer isn’t necessarily any better than the second, and they probably didn’t write any fewer drafts overall. Some people write umpteen drafts of the same novel because they really want to tell that story and get it right. Other people write two or three drafts of several different novels, because by the time they’ve rewritten one story a few times, they have a new idea that they want to try out.

Either way, in the end, two things are still true. First, by the time they’ve learned how to tell a good story, they’ve written a lot of drafts.

Second, their first drafts sucked.

And it was okay.

from the you-should-have-read-the-first-draft-of-this-post dept

First drafts are a pain in the ass. They are, by far, the hardest thing about writing. There’s a blank page, there’s you, and there’s some idea you’ve got for how to turn that empty whiteness into a full-fledged story.

There are a few important rules for first drafts. First and foremost is always that first drafts suck. You have to turn off your inner editor and just write something. The second rule is write what you have. Don’t spend lots of time trying to come up with ideas, scenes, characters, plots, settings, or anything else that doesn’t come naturally. Just keep going and finish that draft.

Of course, you do have to have something, or it’s not a story. So what do you need to have by the time you finish that first draft?

First, you need a beginning and an ending. Every story has an inciting incident (which isn’t necessarily in the opening chapter or scene). The beginning has to begin this story, not a different one. Similarly, your novel has to resolve itself somehow, in a way that’s faithful in some way to the story you’ve told. Just like how combining any subject with any verb creates a complete sentence, putting together a beginning and an ending creates a story.

Second, you need enough detail for the core of the story to be told. If you say “boy meets alien and eventually helps him return to his spaceship,” then you have a beginning and an ending, but there’s no detail. If you listed out the core scenes of your story (boy and alien go trick-or-treating, boy helps alien phone home) you still won’t have enough detail to really ‘know’ the core of your story. A first draft can get by without every last tidbit that will go into the final story, but it does need enough detail to flesh out the story. Without that detail, all you have is an outline. Outlines can be helpful, but the thing about them is that they’re a plan, while a story is execution. Even the most detailed plan goes astray when you get to the point of actually putting it into action. An outline is like Xs and Os on a coach’s clipboard; a first draft is like an actual practice with the full squad. As soon as you see your plan in action, you’ll be changing it, because the act of fleshing it out will push it in directions that you didn’t foresee.

Third, you need—well, you really don’t need anything else. If you write a beginning and ending with enough detail to tell the story, then you have a workable first draft. More specifically, here are some of the things you can skip in a first draft:

A middle

Okay, you can’t actually skip having the middle of a story. Every story will technically have a middle that ties together the beginning and ending, even if it’s just the phrase ‘and then.’ But you don’t need a good middle in order to have a first draft. You don’t need all of the various plots and characters that will eventually go into your story. You don’t need all of the scenes that will stretch out the pacing so that the reader has enough time to anticipate and enjoy the ending. All you really need in a first draft is enough connective tissue to lead the story from your beginning to your ending. When you’re in the middle of your middle, that’s the time to make sure you keep your momentum up. Beginnings are easy, since there’s so much possibility. Endings are easy, too, once you have an idea for what they’ll be, since the pressure of the story is pushing toward that last chapter. But middles are like endothermic reactions: you have to add energy to keep them going. So focus on keeping up that momentum and keep the words flowing. There will be plenty of time later to tighten things up and add all the bits you skip.

Continuity

Oh, boy, is this something you don’t need. Worrying about continuity in a first draft is like worrying about your kid’s college fund when you or your partner are in labor. If something changes halfway through your draft, let it change. Jot it down somewhere if you want, but keep going. Nobody is going to read this draft except you, remember?

Setting

Like the middle, a setting is something you can’t really get away from. But you don’t need a fleshed-out setting. In fact, I believe that you should actively try to not flesh out your setting until you’ve finished that first draft. You’ll probably have at least something of the setting in mind when you start, and that’s great. But don’t spend any time at all at world-building (meaning, the process of expanding that notional setting into something that feels real and believable) until later. In your second, or third, or tenth draft, it may be very helpful to know a million different details about your world, but before you write that first draft, how do you know which million details you need? And what happens when you get halfway through and realize that you need your castle to be next to a river, except that your well-fleshed-out world has your castle sitting in the middle of a desert? There will be time for world-building, but the story has to come first. By all means, include whatever details you already have, or which come naturally while you’re writing, but don’t spend a millisecond actively trying to build your world until you have (at least) one draft of your story written.

Prose

Uh. This one may be a bit of a puzzler. How can you write a story without using prose?

Well, playwrights and screenwriters (screenwrights?) do it all the time. Their format is nice and simple: dialogue, centered on the page with the speaker’s name on the line above, and stage direction or screen direction in blocks where necessary.

Is it helpful to write out the first draft of a novel as a screenplay? I think it can be. Not as a full screenplay format, but something closer to a script treatment, which is sort of a film industry rough draft. The nice thing about the script treatment format is that it’s clearly not your final draft, so there’s much less pressure to get any part of it right. You still have your dialogue, which is one of the most important bits of a first draft, and you have the major action. You can include as much incidental action as you want, but you get to do it in a nice shorthand format. Here’s a section of a science-fiction novel I’ve been working on:

     The cargo doors open up, revealing the Atlantis about a hundred meters away, framed against the blackness of space.

          RAHUL

     This is as close as you can get?

          LUCAS

     Just get yourself in position and jump. Don't overdo it.

          RAHUL

     What if I miss?

          ELENA

     Don't miss.

Elena goes first, and to no one's surprise, lands gracefully at the waist airlock. Addy goes second and manages okay. Rahul somehow manages to put himself in a slow tumble, and Elena has to catch him. She waves at Lucas, who then jumps over easily.

The nice thing about this format is that I can write much more quickly than if I write ‘real’ prose. The bits of action are written as notes to myself, which lets me be as detailed or un-detailed as I want. Whatever I have, I put in; whatever I don’t, I leave out. One of the things I really hate is when I know I need to move to the next scene, but I don’t have a clear way to ‘get there.’ With this format, I just stop where I am and start the next scene, and leave the connecting prose to a later draft.

If you want a great example of a script treatment, you can read James Cameron’s treatment for The Terminator here. Cameron does a great job of telling the core of his story in the most simple and straightforward way possible. If you look closely, there are details and bits that an actual shooting script would require, but at the same time, the story is all there, right on the page.

The downside of this format is that you haven’t actually written your prose yet, and that’s something you’re eventually going to have to do. But for me, a first draft is often so rough that I can hardly keep any of the text, anyway, so using a completely placeholder format doesn’t end up wasting much time.

Quality

Out of all of the things that a first draft doesn’t need, this is the biggie. Nobody is going to read this draft but you. Tell yourself that, over and over, while you write. It can suck. It can leave bits out. It can be a barely-functioning, on-life-support story, but as long as it’s a story with a beginning and end, and as long as it has enough detail to prove out the novel that it will become, then it’s a first draft.

The flip side to this mode of thinking is that eventually, you do have to care about quality. Your story will require a middle, and prose, and setting. All of those things will have to be developed. If you’re the sort of writer who can rattle off all of those things in a first draft, then god bless you. For the rest of us mere mortals, figuring out which parts you can leave out is one of the major keys to finishing that first draft.

from the missing-pieces-in-a-jigsaw dept.