Category Archives: James Scott Bell

Structural Words of Wisdom

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Today’s Words of Wisdom is on a subject near and dear to my own writer’s heart: story structure. For me, story structure was the key that unlocked the puzzle of how to write novels that worked. I work on story structure before beginning writing a book, during drafting, and while editing.

We have excerpts from posts on structure by James Scott Bell, Jordan Dane and Larry Brooks. A link to the full post is provided at the bottom of the respective excerpts.

I love to teach structure, and Joe’s post on Wednesday brought up a tremendously important question. Someone in another writing forum wanted to know how you figure out where to end Act 2, and go into Act 3.

The question of where the act breaks go, and what they entail, may be the most crucial in all of dramatic structure, because if they are weak, the entire edifice of the story will be unsound. Knowing how to fix them will go a long way toward making your novel more readable.

Think of novel structure as a suspension bridge.

As is obvious from the picture above, the suspension bridge is held up primarily by the two supporting pylons, one near the beginning of the bridge and one near the end. Without these pylons in those exact spots, the bridge will not be stable.

Now looking at the picture you can see that it perfectly represents the 3 act structure. A solidly constructed novel will look just like a solidly constructed suspension bridge. If that first pylon is placed too far out from the beginning, the first “act” of the bridge will sag and sway. In a book or movie, it means the first act is starting to drag.

Similarly, if the second pylon is misplaced, you’ll end up either with anti-climax (the pylon too far away from the shore) or a feeling of deus ex machina (the pylon too close).

In my book, Plot & Structure, I refer to these pylons as “doorways of no return.” I wanted to convey the idea of being forced through doorways, and once that’s done, you can’t go back again. Life will never be the same for the Lead. If you don’t have that feeling in your story, the stakes aren’t high enough.

Now, the first doorway is an event that thrusts the Lead into the conflict of Act 2. It is not, and this is crucial, just a decision to go looking around in the “dark world” (to use mythic terms). That’s weak. That’s not being forced.

A good example of a first doorway is when Luke Skywalker’s aunt and uncle are murdered by the forces of the Empire in Star Wars. That compels Luke to leave his home planet and seek to become a Jedi, to fight the evil forces. If the murders didn’t happen, Luke would have stayed on his planet as a farmer. He had to be forced out.

In Gone With the Wind it’s the outbreak of the Civil War. Hard to miss that one. No one can go back again to the way things were. Scarlett O’Hara is going to be forced to deal with life in a way she never wanted or anticipated.

In The Wizard of Oz, it’s the twister (hint: if a movie changed from black and white to color, odds are you’ve passed through the first doorway of no return).

In The Fugitive, the first doorway is the train wreck that enables Richard Kimble to escape, a long sequence that ends at the 30 minute mark (perfect structure) and has U. S. Marshal Sam Gerard declaring, “Your fugitive’s name is Dr. Richard Kimble. Go get him!”

The second doorway, the one that closes Act 2 and leads to Act 3, is a bit more malleable, but just as critical. It is a clue or discovery, or set-back or crisis, one which makes inevitable the final battle of Act 3. It is the doorway that makes an ending possible. Without this, the novel could go on forever (and some seem to for lack of this act break).

In The Fugitive, at the 90 minute mark (the right placement for a film of just over two hours), Kimble breaks into the one-armed man’s house and finds the key evidence linking him with the pharmaceutical company. This clue leads to the inevitable showdown with the “behind the scenes” villain.

In High Noon, the town marshal reaches the major crisis: he finally realizes no one in the town is going to help him fight the bad guys. That forces him into the final battle of Act 3, the showdown with the four killers.

By the way, this structure works for both “plot driven” and “character driven” stories. It’s just that the former is mainly about outside events, and the latter about the inner journey. But that’s beyond the scope of this post.

James Scott Bell—January 16, 2010

I used to think of the 3-Act Structure as beginning, middle, and end, but I’ve read it more accurately reflected as Establish, Build, & Resolve by Michael Hauge in his book “Writing Screenplays that Sell.” Thinking of these acts in this manner denotes movement. So imagine these three segments as buckets, but before I can toss wads of paper (or scenes) into these buckets, I must have a place to start. Set aside your buckets for now and grab a paper and pen—or Sticky Notes, colors optional.

Presuming I have a general notion of my book, I would create a list of 20-25 things I know about the action in my book in terms of what I call “big ticket” plot movements. No backstory. What will go on my list will be scenes that I envision as key elements to my story. They won’t be put into any order. I merely list them as they occur to me. I would brainstorm without censoring my thoughts. I heard an author talk about creating notes on 3-M sticky notes, rather than a random list, but you get the idea. I don’t expect to know every scene in my book at this stage. The storyboard I create will be an evolving beast that I will change as I write, edit, and final my book so I can see my plot at a glance.

Now let’s talk about the 3-Act Structure in terms of a BIG “W.”

ACT I – Establish – The start of Act I (or the top left of my “W”) is the Triggering Event. It’s the inciting incident that will start my story, the point at which my main character’s life changes forever. As I travel down the left side of my “W,” I head for the 1st Turning Point that usually sets up the problem or the first low point or perhaps a moment of hope. This is a reversal point that changes the direction of my plot as I head out of Act 1. I’ve “Established” my world up to this point and the general conflicts and players in the first 25% of my book, in theory.

ACT II – Build – As my plot heads toward the upward middle of my “W,” that is another key reversal. If I have a book with hope in my first turning point, this shift might dash those hopes to some degree. If I have a dark moment in that first turning point, things get worse, but the plot takes another key turn one way or the other as the action “Builds.” Act II ends with the next turning point (the 2nd low point of my “W”). This is the black moment where all seems lost. This part of the “W” represents the middle part of the turning point structure or 50% of my story, the “building” middle.

ACT III – Resolve – Now I would be in Act III, the last upward line of the “W” after the black moment. I’m headed toward resolution. In this section, my hero or heroine might discover something about the villain in the story that is his or her weakness. He or she implements a plan to take advantage of this Achilles Heel, but I might consider throwing in another epiphany or twist before the end. This could be a twist or complication—an “Oh my, God” moment the reader might not see coming before the world is restored or the ending happens. This last part of the structure is the final 25%.

I’ve oversimplified these blended theories for the sake of this post. The lines of the “W” don’t have to be linear, for example. I could have little ups and downs along the way that will take me through my book, but I wanted you to have a general idea of how this could work.

Now get ready with your buckets. Each of these acts is a bucket, for the purposes of this explanation. So the list I created at the beginning—the 20-25 brainstormed scenes—each has a place in an Act Bucket. I would add to these 25 things as I get more familiar with my book, but if I were to Storyboard this out, I would create 20 squares that represent chapters in my books. (You might write differently, so make this work for you with your average number of chapters in a single-title book.) I would write my 25 items down with each one going on a 3-M Sticky Note and place them on my storyboard where I think they will go in Act I (25%), II (50%), or III (25%). Since each of these scene ideas is moveable, I can change the order and chapter they might appear to get the pace and building intensity up. Once I see things on my storyboard in a visual manner, I will no doubt want to add more Sticky Note scenes to fill out the detail and transitions in my story as the plot develops.

Jordan Dane—March 1, 2012

 

Think of your novel as a flow.

Now we’re talkin’. Because you know – you don’t resist – that your story is not, it is never, about one moment in time, that is doesn’t take a snapshot of something and describe it to death, that your story needs to move forward (and even backward if you like) in time, it needs to change, to evolve, that new information needs to come in to play, stuff happens, stuff changes… and eventually, things get resolved.

You don’t resist that.

When you realize you don’t resist that, you are also signing up to implementing some form of story structure.

Think of structure as the flow of your story… and understand that the flow of your story follows a natural, organic contextual essence, one that has arisen from any and all other possible flows because this is how human beings experience life (which also has a beginning, middle and end) and stories themselves.

This is how readers engage with our stories. We are writing, first and foremost, for them. If that’s not true for you, you have another issue besides structure that you will eventually need to confront.

Now think of that flow having four definable sub-sequences, each with its own unique narrative purpose. Just like life has infancy, youth, middle age and old age (a list you can expand as you wish, but these four always remain in place)… the context of those experiences is by definition different – everything about them is different – when we livethrough it.

So it is with your story.

A functioning story has four segments to it that are unique relative to each other, and to how the reader experiences your story. Here they are:

Setup… you need to introduce your hero, present a story world (time, place, culture, natural law), inject stakes and set up the mechanics of an impending launch of – or twist to – your core dramatic arc (the plot), which is what your hero will spend the rest of the story investigating and pursuing and wrestling, all in context to the pursuit of a goal that leads to resolution).

Response… after things have been setup, the story needs to settle into a lane that shows your hero responding to a new path – the core story path, also known as your plot – with stakes in play and some form of obstacle (antagonism) causing the hero to react to something they may not understand (pursue more knowledge) or, if they do, a need to deal with it in a way that keeps their ultimate goal on their horizon.

Attack… because if the hero is too heroic too soon there isn’t much drama for the reader to engage with (there needs to be), so we wait until this quartile to show your hero evolving from a seeker/wanderer/responder to become a more proactive attacker of their problem or goal, both relative to the goal itself and the presence of an equally-evolving obstacle (a villain or a storm or a disease or an approaching deadly meteor, whatever is the source of tension and drama in the story)… moving closer to a showdown and some form of…

Resolution… wherein all the moving parts of your story converge to put your hero face to face with their goal and whatever blocks their path toward getting what they need to get.

This is, by the way, the nature and essence of the most common form of story model, the 3-act structure embraced by screenwriters and a huge percentage of professional novelists… this is the very same flow, because those two middle segments comprise “Act 2” of that model, thus creating a 3-act whole.

The degree to which you depart from this accepted – and expected – story flow is the degree to which you are putting your story at risk. Either by not knowing this, or worse, by defying it.

Because the context of the scenes and chapters with each of these four eras of flow differ, each with its own contextual mission for the scenes and chapters within it, you are then empowered to create a different contextual experience for your hero from part to part.

For example, your hero’s true story-arc-challenge doesn’t fully launch in the first-part (roughly a quartile) setup, and once it does, everything else in the hero’s life is trumped by whatever it is you have placed before your hero as a problem or a need or a goal, with stakes and opposition in play.

There will be those who resist, even to this kinder, gentler flow of a story. There will be those who say, “but wait, my story does kick off on page two, not on page 62,” which is a statement of fact or intention rather than a valid defense. This is why stories get rejected, and why the author may not ever be clear about why it happened.

If that’s you, then I urge to you see a movie tonight, and notice how it flows over these four contextual essences.

Read a bestseller, notice how it sets up the core story before fully launching it, (even when something highly dramatic opens the story, trust me, things will change for the hero, and soon, all within the setup quartile).

Notice how the story shifts (at what is called The First Plot Point) to thrust the hero down a new or altered path, causing her/him to react, to respond, all in the face of stakes (motivation) and the presence an emerging threat (both of which were, in a properly structured story, introduced and/or foreshadowed in the Part 1 setup quartile) of an antagonist (a person or force or situation) that seeks to prevent the hero from reaching their goal (in a romance, for example that would be whatever – person or thing or situation – that keeps the two lovers apart)…

… and then, how the story again shifts in the middle and points your hero toward a more proactive attack on their problem…

… and then, after another twist at roughly the three-quarter mark (new information), where all paths and motives and strategies begin to converge, resulting in a confrontation or a catalytic series of decisions and actions by your hero (who cannot passively sit on the sidelines while someone else steps up to solve the problem), creating some form of resolution.

If you want to see seven or eight parts in that, you can. They may indeed be present, but almost always as subsets and supporting dynamics within these four parts of the flow.

Here’s something that’s true, even if you are the most ardent resister to anything that smacks of story structure: your novel is not a snapshot. Not a dissection of a singular moment in time. A story needs to move forward. Things need to change.

Your hero needs something to do.

Every time.  In every story that works.

Larry Brooks—February 22, 2016

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  1. Do you consciously utilize story structure in your own writing, be it in drafting and/or when revising?
  2. Do you have a favorite story structure—such as three-act, four-act, etc.?
  3. How do you visualize story structure?

Humorous Words of Wisdom

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“Dying is easy, comedy is hard.” That’s certainly true in thrillers and mysteries. Humor can enrich an otherwise serious novel, lightening a reader’s mood at just the right time and providing emotional contrast.

Today’s Words of Wisdom looks at how to add funny into your fiction, with posts by Jordan Dane, James Scott Bell, and Reavis Wortham. The full posts for each excerpt are well worth reading, and date-linked below.

FIVE WAYS TO ADD HUMOR

2.) Write Earnest Dialogue With a Sarcastic Internal Monologue from the POV Character

Cut loose on your inner smart ass with this type of scene. The dialogue lines would read as idle banter or may not appear to have color, until the reader sees what the character is thinking or gets a whiff of their cynicism. Whether you write in first person POV or deep third, you can make this happen and add attitude to your character. Remember, people don’t censor their opinion when they think no one hears them, in their head. So let the sarcasm fly, without filter.

Example: From My WIP – Legacy in Blood. My 24-year old bounty hunter wannabe, Trinity LeDoux, argues with Hayden Quinn about coming along on a dangerous trip:

“We? Oh, no,” he said.

“Yeah, but that’s the deal. I go too.”

“That’s crazy. I’m not a coaster ride at Six Flags. You can’t buy a ticket and climb onboard.”

If Quinn were a ride, I’d definitely buy a ticket, but now wasn’t the time to embarrass us both. I had to find another way to pique his interest before he voted me off his island.

Example: Hayden notices Trinity is carrying a weapon when he “visits” her condemned warehouse home

“You’re carrying a weapon,” he said as he let me pass. “I feel better already.”

Busted. Okay, yeah. I had a gun tucked under my Ren and Stimpy T-shirt, my one big investment in my new career. I couldn’t read Hayden’s reaction, but his deadpan sarcasm had begun to grow on me.

I’d once argued that bullets were more valuable than a gun. My shooting instructor went ape shit crazy over that one, especially when I said, ‘Without bullets, any gun is only a passable paperweight.’ It’d been a chicken and egg argument. You had to be there.

3.) Use Funny Sounding Unusual Words to Add Color & Humor
How about these zingers? Bamboozled, bazinga, bobolink, bumfuzzle, canoodle, carbuncle, caterwaul, cattywampus, doohickey, gobsmacked, gunky are but a few of the words listed in my link below, but imagine how you might use these words in a story and who might say them. These words alone could stir your imaginings on a character.

Example: The word ‘parsimonious’ means stingy. Here is how I used it in my latest WIP – Legacy in Blood:

I hadn’t eaten since early yesterday. If Hayden didn’t kick me off his property, I’d eat enough to last. I’d stuff it in my cheeks like a parsimonious squirrel if I had to.
(The internal voice of Trinity LeDoux. She’s presently homeless and beggars can’t afford to be persnickety.)

4.) Try Tongue-in-Cheek/Deadpan Delivery in the Banter Between Characters
In my opinion, less is more. Write the banter in short punches and don’t explain. If the reader finds it funny, that’s good, but don’t overwork it by trying too hard to be funny. Also be mindful of pace. Too much of a diversion can slow the plot. Get in, get out. Or in the case of Robert Crais’s example below, add several quick schticks of the same idea (ie. John Cassavetes) through the book to reinforce the humor in short spurts.

Example: In Monkey’s Raincoat, Robert Crais carries on a schtick with Elvis Cole, PI. A new client flatters him by saying he looked like a young John Cassavetes. After that, Cole asks others if they think so too. Each short punch is funnier and funnier. Here’s one encounter:

“Tell me the truth,” I said. “Do you think I look like John Cassavetes twenty years ago?”

“I didn’t know you twenty years ago.”

Everyone’s a comedian.

Example of Lillian’s POV from my novella – Lillian & Noah:

“It’s a sexual fantasy site,” I said. “Members share their most intimate erotic fantasies on their profile.”

“In my day, guys just wrote those on a bathroom wall.” Vinnie snorted.

“Shut up, Vinnie. Let her finish.” Candy shushed him with her red nails. “What happens next, doll? I think I saw something like this on Days of Our Lives.”

I clenched my jaw as heat rushed to my face. Not even a pig in a blanket helped.

Jordan Dane—June 12, 2014

So let’s talk about humor used on occasion in an otherwise serious novel. Why have it at all? Comic relief, as the name implies, is a spot within the suspense where the audience can catch its breath. It delivers a slight respite before resuming the tension. It’s sort of like the pause at the top of a roller-coaster. You take in a breath, look at the nice view and then…BOOM! Off you go again. It adds a pleasing, emotional crosscurrent to the fictive dream, which is what readers are paying for, after all.

I see three main ways to weave humor into a novel: situational, descriptive, and conversational.

Situational

You can insert a scene, or a long beat within a scene, that takes its comic effect from the situation the character finds himself in. For an example I turn to the great Alfred Hitchcock, who almost always has comic relief in his masterpieces of suspense.

Like the auction scene in North by Northwest. Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) has been mistakenly tagged as a U.S. secret agent by a group of bad guys. At one point, Thornhill walks into a fancy art auction to confront the chief bad guy (James Mason). But now he’s stuck there with three deadly henchmen waiting in the wings to send him to the eternal dirt nap.

So Thornhill hatches a plan. Act like a nut and cause a commotion so the cops will come in and arrest him, saving him from the assassins. This is how it goes down:

How do you find situational humor? You look at a scene and the circumstances and push beyond what is expected. Most humor is based upon the unexpected. That’s what makes for the punch line in a joke, for example. So make a list of possible unexpected actions your character might take or encounter, and surely one of them will be the seed of comic relief.

Descriptive

When you are writing in First Person POV, the voice of the narrator can drop in a bit of humor when describing a setting or another character. The master of colorful description was, of course, Raymond Chandler, through the voice of his detective, Philip Marlowe:

It must have been Friday because the fish smell from the Mansion House coffee-shop next door was strong enough to build a garage on. (“Bay City Blues)

From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away. (The High Window)

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window. (Farewell, My Lovely)

The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back. (The Long Goodbye)

For descriptive humor, listen to your character. Use a voice journal to let the character riff for awhile. You’ll unearth a nugget or two of descriptive gold.

Conversational

Dialogue presents many possibilities for humor. First, you can create characters who have the potential for funny talk. Second, you can take create conversational situations where such talk is possible. I had two great aunts who lived together in their later years. They had a way of subtly sniping at each other over minor matters, which was always a source of amusement to me. So I put them in my thriller, Long Lost, as two volunteers at a small hospital:

Just inside the front doors, two elderly women sat at a reception desk. They were dressed in blue smocks with yellow tags identifying them as volunteers. One of them had slate-colored hair done up in curls. The other had dyed hers a shade of red that did not exist in nature.

They looked surprised and delighted when Steve came in, as if he were the Pony Express riding into the fort.

They fought for the first word. Curls said, “May I help—” at the same time Red said, “Who are you here to—”

They stopped and looked at each other, half-annoyed, half-amused, then back at Steve.

And spoke over each other again.

“Let me help you out,” Steve said. “I’m looking for a doctor, a certain—”

“Are you hurt?” Curls said.

“Our emergency entrance is around to the side,” Red said.

“No, I—”

“Oh, but we just had a shooting,” Curls said.

“A stinking old man,” Red added.

“Not stinking,” Curls said. “Stinko. He was drunk.”

“When you’re drunk you can stink, too,” Red said.

“That’s hardly the point,” Curls said.

And it goes on like that.

I think you can develop an ear for this kind of humor by soaking in the masters of verbal comedy. Start with Marx Brothers, especially their five best movies: The Coconuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, Duck Soup.

James Scott Bell—December 13, 2020

 

I sat in on a humor writing class once, and came out weeping. The presenter broke down humor with sentences like, “Writing comedically usually requires establishing a setup pattern and then misdirecting the reader by throwing in a punch line. The simplest way is to create a pair of ideas and then add an incongruent statement. I like to list three, because 30 is too many.”

Good lord.

How about misdirection, which can be funny by taking readers someplace they expect to go and suddenly shifting direction.

“I looked down at my five-year-old son who broke the window and lied about it. I was shocked to think he wouldn’t tell the truth, and had to get him to understand what he’d done wrong, so I knelt on one knee, took his small shoulders in my big hands and looked him in the eye. Son, I have something to tell you.”

“What?”

“Quit picking your nose.”

Most of the things we laugh at in real life are true stories that someone exaggerates for effect. I once wrote a column about running from a bear while wearing a backpack…

“That thing was right on my heels, and I ran like rats across the tundra. My backpack came open and I left a string of equipment behind, my tent, half the food I’d packed, tent stakes, the stove, a laptop computer, two cameras, a chair, the kitchen sink and a VCR along with all my John Wayne videos. Now light as a feather, I left the bear far behind, sniffing the laptop full of newspaper columns and probably wondering what stunk so bad.”

Some other things I’ve learned:

Don’t try to write jokes. Look for something that happened in real life and make a few changes. Here in Texas, every truck has a trailer hitch. We all know they’re right there, but when the guys get together, someone inadvertently barks his shin on the damn thing. While we curse and rub that shin, the rest laugh like loons. What is it that makes us guys giggle like little girls? We’ve all done it. Exaggerated familiarity is funny

Don’t tell your reader something is funny: “Hurts, don’t it,” he joked. Like the old saying goes, if you have to explain it, it ain’t funny.

Avoid sarcasm, except to identify a character.

Surprise your reader.

I’ve judged humor writing contests, and cousin, exclamation points don’t make a story funny!

Use humor sparingly, unless you’re shoving it in someone’s face, like this slightly insane column I wrote some years ago about an Outdoor Detective that somehow caught on with readers. I only produce one of these a year. They’re a lot like fruit cakes, you don’t want too many, but an occasional bite is good.

Reavis Wortham—November 27, 2021

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  1. Do you enjoy some funny to go with the serious in your fiction?
  2. Do you have a favorite trick or tip to share about inserting humor into a novel?
  3. Is there an author you feel who does this especially well?

BICHOK Words of Wisdom

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I first encountered the expression, “Butt in chair, hands on keyboard,” on the Writing Excuses podcast years ago and it stuck with me. BICHOK. Such a simple proposition, and a succinct way of looking at a writing session. It’s also easy, for me at least, to drift away from practicing BICHOK. Distractions abound, as do tasks like research that are related to your work-in-progress but aren’t actual writing or revision/editing.

Today’s Words of Wisdom is about BICHOK, how you can benefit from daily/regular writing, and how to use different sorts of writing sprints to help achieve that. We have excerpts from Nancy Cohen, PJ Parrish, and James Scott Bell. As always, the original posts are linked from the bottom of their respective excerpt, and then the floor is open for your comments.

Writers sit in a chair for hours, peering at their work, blocking out the rest of the world in their intense concentration. It’s not an easy job. Some days, I marvel that readers have no idea how many endless days we toil away at our craft. It takes immense self-discipline to keep the butt in the chair when nature tempts us to enjoy the sunshine and balmy weather outside.

We don’t only spend the time writing the manuscript. After submitting our work and having it accepted, we get revisions back from our editor. This requires another round of poring over our work. And another opportunity comes with the page proofs where we scrutinize each word for errors. How many times do we review the same pages, the same words? How many tweaks do we make, continuously correcting and making each sentence better?

These hours and hours of sitting are worth the effort when we hold the published book in our hands, when readers write to us how much they enjoyed the story, or when we win accolades in a contest. As I get older, I wonder if these hours are well spent. My time is getting shorter. Shouldn’t I be outside, enjoying what the community has to offer, admiring the trees and flowers, visiting with friends? Each moment I sit in front of the computer is a moment gone.

But I can no more give up my craft than I can stop breathing. It’s who I am. And the hours I sit here pounding at the keyboard are my legacy.

BICHOK is our motto: Butt in Chair, Hands on Keyboard. This policy can take its toll on writers’ health with repetitive strain injury, adverse effects of prolonged sitting, neck and shoulder problems. We have to discipline ourselves not only to sit and work for hours on end, but to get up and exercise so as to avoid injury. This career requires extreme discipline, and those wannabes who can’t concentrate for long periods of time or who give up easily will never reach the summit. They can enjoy the journey and believe that’s where it ends, but they’re playing at being a writer and not acting as a professional.

We’re slaves to our muse, immersed in our imaginary worlds, losing ourselves to the story. And then we have to revise, correct, edit, read through the manuscript numerous times until we turn it in or our vision goes bleary. We are driven. And so we sit, toiling in our chairs (or on the couch if you use a laptop). Hours of life pass us by, irretrievable hours that we’ll never get back.

So please, readers, understand how many hours we put into this craft to entertain you, to educate you, and to illuminate human nature in our stories.

And this doesn’t even count the time required for social media.

I put myself in the chair until I achieve a daily quota. In a writing phase, this is five pages a day or twenty-five pages per week. For self-edits, I aim for a chapter a day but that’s not always possible. I do this is the morning when I’m most creative. Afternoons are for writing blogs, social media, promotion, etc.

Nancy Cohen—May 8, 2013

“Writing is almost a place of dreams for me.”

That is Mosley talking about the subconscious. He goes on to talk about how the act of creating fiction necessitates that the writer enter a dream world and inhabit it fully. Not just visit whenever the kids are quiet and the dishes are done. Not just swing by for a quickie when the husband is off playing poker. And not just deign to show up if you feel like it.
If you want a reader to live in the world you create, you the writer can’t just rent that space. You have to own it.

Mosley believes that only through daily contact with your novel can you maintain the subconscious threads that will keep it alive. The constancy of entering that fictional world every day will force not just the process along (Yea! I just wrote THE END!) but will engender a richness and authenticity in your fictional universe that you won’t otherwise achieve.

I used to go days without writing then burn myself out writing in furious 12-hour sprints. I thought it was working, but what I didn’t realize was that in those days I was away, my characters’s voices were dimming to whispers, my settings were fading like old pastels, and my plot was drifting off into the blackest bayous.

Here’s how Mosley describes this stasis:

The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do every day. There are two reasons for this rule: Getting the work done and connecting to the unconscious mind. The process of writing a novel is like taking a journey by boat. You have to continuously set yourself on course. If you get distracted or allow yourself to drift, you will never make it to the destination. It’s not like highly defined train tracks or a highway; this is a path that you are creating discovering. The journey is your narrative. Keep to it and a tale will be told. Nothing we create is art at first. It’s simply a collection of notions that may never be understood. Returning every day thickens the atmosphere. Images appear. Connections are made. But even these clearer notions will fade if you stay away more than a day.

“Thickens the atmosphere.” God, I love that.

Now I am no angel. Decades of procrastination die hard. Sometimes old dogs can’t hear the call for new tricks, let alone do them. You guys undoubtedly have your own ideas on how to keep a daily pace and I’d love to hear them. Here are some of the things I do to force myself to return each day to my fictional world.

Just open the book

Sometimes just seeing your work on the screen gives you a jolt of confidence. Read that word count ticker-thing down in the left corner. Wow…I’ve made it to 43,034 words? Next thing you know, it’s an hour later and you’re up to 43,306.

Read yesterday’s work

Okay, your brain is bone-dry and you can’t face that sucky chapter 12. Open the damn file anyway. Do some rewriting. Even if you ignore sucky chapter 12 and go back and repave a pothole in chapter 6. Just the act of setting foot back in the fictional world will get you moving again. Or, as Mosley puts it:

One day you might read over what you’ve done and think about it. You pick up the pencil or turn on the computer, but no new words come. That’s fine. Sometimes you can’t go further. Correct a misspelling, reread a perplexing paragraph, and then let it go. You have re-entered the dream of the work, and that’s enough to keep the story alive for another 24 hours. The next day you might write for hours; there’s no way to tell. The goal is not a number of words or hours spent writing. All you need to do is to keep your heart and mind open to the work.

PJ Parrish—January 19, 2016

 

Then there are setbacks that come from life itself: pandemics, family issues, physical challenges, mental fatigue. All this can affect our work.

How to handle them? My advice has always been along the lines of the flippant doctor’s prescription for insomnia: Just sleep it off. I’ve counseled writers to keep writing, or “write your way through” whatever it is that knocks you flat.

But I know that’s easy to say and hard to do. So let me suggest an exercise I call writing sprints. This is where you set yourself a goal of writing 250 words—a nifty 250—as fast as you can. The three rules of writing sprints are: 1) Write without stopping; 2) Don’t judge what you’re writing as you write; and 3) Wait ten minutes before you look over what you’ve done and decide what to do with it.

I’ve broken writing sprints into five categories:

  1. Scene sprints

That scene you’re about to work on? Pick a spot in the scene, any spot, and write 250 words. It could be the beginning, or it could be the “hot spot” where the meat of the scene is taking place. You can also write an ending, too. There is no wrong decision.

  1. Emotion sprints

This is my favorite. Find a place where your viewpoint character is feeling something deeply. Then write 250 words just on that feeling. Expand it. Use internal thoughts. Use metaphors. Follow tangents wherever they lead. Later, you’ll use the best of this in your writing. Even if it’s only one line, you’ll have found gold.

  1. Dialogue sprints

I love dialogue. It’s fun and easy. In a sprint, don’t use quote marks or attributions. Just the dialogue between characters. Let them improvise. Let them argue. Let them reveal things. Usually you’ll find something that is delightfully surprising (and it will delight your readers, too).

  1. Description sprints

Go wild on describing a person, place, or thing. I often close my eyes for this, and let my imagination give me pictures.

  1. Random Word sprints

Open a dictionary at random (I used to carry a pocket dictionary for this, back in the days when it was acceptable to write in a coffee house). Pick the first word you see that is a noun, verb, or adjective. Write 250 words on whatever that word triggers. You can apply it to your WIP if you like. Example: You find the word bloodhound. You can just start writing and follow rabbit trails (hey, just like that dog!) Or can ask yourself, “How might a bloodhound figure in my story?” and then go. Maybe your Lead can have a memory of a bloodhound. Or maybe he feels like a bloodhound. Okay: what does he think about that feeling? Keep writing!

Here’s another benefit. After you’ve done those 250 words, you’ll almost always feel the flow. You’ll want to write some more. So write! Because setbacks won’t stop a writer who produces the words.

James Scott Bell—November 29, 2020

***

There you have it: why and how to have butt-in-chair, hands-on-keyboard.

  1. Do you practice BICHOK daily?
  2. What do you think about Walter Mosley’s observation that spending time with your work-in-progress helping your subconscious create?
  3. Have you tried any of JSB’s different sorts of writing sprints?
  4. How do you get yourself to the writing chair and practice BICHOK? Do you use a daily quota?

Words of Wisdom On Burnout

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Writerly burnout. I never thought it would happen to me, until it did.

In 2016, I produced the first two novels in my Empowered series as well as a prequel novella to that series, with the novels scheduled for publication the following year. In 2017, I produced two novels, including the third Empowered and a space opera novel, publishing those as well that year. In the first half of 2018, I produced a novel and a novelette.

Not an unreasonable pace. But the whole time I was stressing about not writing fast enough.

By mid-2018 I’d published five novels since January 2017, along with the novella and the novelette, and was working on what was supposed to be Book 1 in my next series, which I published in September 2019. However,  I had started out in back January 2016 determined to produce four novels a year. After all, I knew indie authors writing at that pace, or even faster. Why couldn’t I? The result was lots of self-induced stress which eventually led to my burning out.

I didn’t stop completely, but I struggled to write the second novel in my second series and eventually trunked it. I did write the fifth and final Empowered novel during the first half of 2020, and then, that fall, moved to working on my first mystery novel. That ended up being a learning process which took two and a half years, with A Shush Before Dying releasing in April 2023. The second novel, Book Drop Dead, was published in June 2024. I’m now in the middle of writing the third book in my 1980s library cozy mystery series, and more mindful than ever of my own individual process and speed as a writer, especially given that mysteries are more challenging to write than my fantasy novels.

So, I did recover from my own burnout. A big help was advice here from our own JSB and other TKZ posters, especially on managing expectations, getting rest, and focusing on my own process and path rather than comparing my writing career to others.

As it so happens, this evening I’m on a panel about dealing with burnout, taking place as part of Orycon, our local science fiction convention. Tonight’s upcoming panel inspired me to dip into the archives for today’s Words of Wisdom.

We have an excerpt from James Scott Bell on finding a steady pace to avoid writerly burnout, and another by Joe Hartlaub on getting past writerly and readerly burnout. As always, links to each post are provided at the end of their respective excerpts.

The pressure comes when the writer who wants to make good dough at this thing (even a living) realizes that the only “formula” (and lottery-type luck is not a formula) is to keep producing quality work at a steady pace.

Notice that word, steady. I believe this is the key to avoiding writer burnout. Every writer has a sweet spot where production meets life and stays on its side of the fence. We call this a quota.

Now, those of you who’ve read my craft pieces over the years know I’m a quota guy. It’s the single most important discipline in my own writing life. I started down this road in 1988, and early on I remember reading about how important a quota was. The very first writing craft book I ever purchased was Lawrence Block’s Writing the Novel. In it, he has a section on quotas, and notes that most pro writers keep track of the words they produce, not the time they spend at the desk.

That got to me, and I have stuck to a quota ever since. It’s almost always been 1,000 words a day, six days a week, with a day of rest on Sunday.

Though I have cheated on occasion when a deadline was breathing down my neck, this “writing Sabbath” has been crucial for me. It gives my brain much-needed rest. I find I’m always energized to start up again on Monday. That is perhaps the main reason I’ve never truly felt burned out. Tired, yes. But the big fizzle, no.

It’s also important, I’ve found, to take daily breaks. I’m usually not more than an hour at a time at the keyboard. I’ll then take a five- or ten-minute stretch or stroll. In the afternoon I take a power nap—15 to 20 minutes.

One other thing I have to do is keep myself from “over-writing” when the going is good. Block addresses this in his book:

One thing you might try to avoid, in this connection, is attempting to extend your productivity. This sort of overload principle works fine in weightlifting, where one’s ability to manage more weight increases as one lifts more weight, but it doesn’t work that way in writing. It’s tempting to try to do a little more each day than we did the day before, and I still find myself intermittently struggling to resist this particular temptation, even after lo these many years. If I can do five pages today, why can’t I do six tomorrow? And seven the day after? For that matter, if I really catch fire and do seven today, that proves I can definitely do a minimum of seven tomorrow. Doesn’t it?

No, it doesn’t.

What does happen, in point of fact, is that this sort of overload generally leads to exhaustion … Find your right pace, make sure it’s one that’s not going to be a strain, and then stick with it.

And sometimes writing breaks are thrust upon us.

Like getting sick. I thank the Good Lord I’m pretty healthy most of the time, but last year I got taken out by a bout of pneumonia. It actually set me back a couple of weeks. I managed some writing, but mostly I rested and took my antibiotics and sniped at my wife (this saint continued to take care of me.)

I’ve also found that when I go to a convention, like Bouchercon or ThrillerFest, it’s almost impossible for me to get in any writing time. There’s too much going on, like Gilstrap holding court in the bar with his Beefeater martini. No one wants to miss that. So I give myself permish to take several days off when I attend. (I also find I can write on a plane going to a location, but not coming home. I think that has to do with my being a morning person, as I described a couple of weeks ago.

Yes, there is one exception to all this steadiness, and that’s NaNoWriMo. We need not revisit the debate over this singular month of writing madness (you can search for NaNoWriMo in our archives for that), but it’s there for you to consider.

What I’m saying is simply this: be as intentional about taking a break from writing as you are about producing the words. Be strategic, be smart. I’ve said this many times before, but here it is again: figure out how many words you can easily write in a daily session. Now up that by 10%. So if it’s 250 words, you aim for 275. 1000 = 1100. Try to do that six days a week.

But do not beat yourself up if circumstances conspire against you. Treat every new week afresh.

Do this day after week after year—with regular breaks—and you will not only avoid the B-word, you’ll see an amazing output of material. Which is the difference between someone who wants to write and a writer.

James Scott Bell—February 4, 2018

I’ve been repeatedly having the same vaguely disturbing conversation in person and via email with a number of individuals recently about books and reading. The topic is variously referred to as “reading fatigue,” “book burnout,” and “reading slump,” among other terms. The complaint centers upon the perceived feeling that new books being published are “all” following the same pattern. Elements of that pattern would include 1) “the placement of the word ‘girl’ in the title; 2) the unreliable first-person narrator; and 3) a missing child/husband/sister who seems to suddenly reappear with an inability to explain their absence.

It is true that publishing industry generally is reactive and not proactive. We all remember The Da Vinci Code. That book became a sub-genre unto itself. It seemed for a while as if every other newly published book concerned a hunt for an ancient relic that, depending on what it was and who was hunting it, would destroy, save, or enslave the world. Going back a bit further, Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent and John Grisham’s The Firm revived the popularity of the courtroom thriller, though it’s not as if that sub-genre ever really went away, once Erle Stanley Gardner had taken that beachhead in the 1930s with his Perry Mason novels.

There is some method to publishing’s madness, based on the proposition that if the public likes a certain type of book then it will want more of the same. I don’t recall a research  ever calling me and asking, “If you went to the library tomorrow, what type of book would you look for?” My answer would be “bound,” but that’s beside the point.

What does this mean for budding authors? My best advice is to not follow trends. If someone writes a book about an alcoholic housewife on a train who suspects that she has witnessed a murder being committed, and it becomes a bestseller, write your book about something else. Flip the script. Write about a recovering alcoholic who is as reliable as a Fossil Haywood and who, while doing some backyard gardening,  believes that she sees someone being murdered on the LIRR. I’m only kind of kidding. Do something different, because by the time you write your book and find an agent the publishers will probably be looking for something else. As for readers: if you’re tired of new books, look for an author who is new to you, or go back to the past and seek out something in your favorite genre among the mountains of books that have been published in the past sixty years or so. You can also seek out a couple of go-to authors. When I do my own reading, and nothing seems to please me, I pick up one of Timothy Hallinan’s fine novels, or an Elmore Leonard book, or start working my way through James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux canon, among others, to shake me out of my doldrums. Reading is good for you. You don’t want to stop.

Joe Hartlaub—November 4, 2017

***

Along with JSB’s and others advice, two books which helped me in dealing with burnout are Breakthrough by J. Dharma Kelleher and Dear Writer, Are You In Burnout?, by Becca Syme, as well as Becca’s YouTube series on burnout on her Quitcast channel there. To supplement Joe’s excellent advice on dealing with reading burnout I recommend checking with your local librarian for advice. Librarian’s love giving “reader’s advisory” and helping reader’s find their next great read.

The panel I’m on tonight, “Thinking Through Burnout,” asks several questions in the description that can serve as a jumping off point to our discussion today:

“Thinking is hard when you’re tired all the time. How do you manage burnout when it hits in the middle of a list of critical tasks? What coping mechanisms have worked for you, or not? Do you have tools or strategies to prevent burnout?”

In addition to that, have you ever suffered from reader burnout as described by Joe? If so, how did you get past it and reconnect with your love of reading?

Making Trouble During An Ordinary Day And Other Character Words of Wisdom

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In today’s Words of Wisdom, James Scott Bell gives us advice and an example of how make trouble for our hero in the midst of an ordinary day. Claire Langley-Hawthorne shares her approach in coming up with names for characters. Sue Coletta gives tips on how to misdirect the reader with characters.

 

We start to care about characters when trouble—or the hint of it—comes along, which is why, whenever I sign a copy of Conflict & Suspense, I always write, Make trouble!

Now, there are two ways to disturb HPHL [Happy People Happy Life] in the opening. One is something happening that is not normal, as I mentioned above. It’s an “outside” disturbance, if you will.

But there’s another way, from the “inside.” You can give us a character’s ordinary day as it unfolds—while finding a way to mess it up.

That’s the strategy Michael Crichton uses in his 1994 novel, Disclosure (made into a movie with Michael Douglas and Demi Moore).

The plot centers around Tom Sanders, an mid-level executive at a thriving digital company in Seattle. He’s married to a successful lawyer named Susan. They live in a nice house on Bainbridge Island, with their four-year-old daughter and nine-month-old son.

As the book opens, we learn that Sanders expects this to be a good day. He’s sure he’s going to be promoted to head of his division, which will set him up for a windfall of millions after an expected merger and IPO. So it’s essential he get to the office on time.

Crichton is not going to let that happen. Here’s the first paragraph:

Tom Sanders never intended to be late for work on Monday, June 15. At 7:30 in the morning, he stepped into the shower at his home on Bainbridge Island. He knew he had to shave, dress, and leave the house in ten minutes if he was to make the 7:50 ferry and arrive at work by 8:30, in time to go over the remaining points with Stephanie Kaplan before they went into the meeting with the lawyers from Conley-White.

So Tom is in the shower when—

“Tom? Where are you? Tom?”

His wife, Susan, was calling from the bedroom. He ducked his head out of the spray.

“I’m in the shower!”

She said something in reply, but he didn’t hear it. He stepped out, reaching for a towel. “What?”

“I said, Can you feed the kids?”

His wife was an attorney who worked four days a week at a downtown firm.

So now he’s got to feed the kids? He hasn’t got time! But that’s life with two working parents, so he quickly begins to shave. Outside the bathroom, he hears his kids starting to cry because Mom can’t attend their every need. Crichton stretches out this sequence. Even something as innocuous as shaving can be tense when the kids are wailing.

Tom finally emerges from the bathroom, with only a towel around him, as he scoops up the kids to feed them.

Susan called after him: “Don’t forget Matt needs vitamins in his cereal. One dropperful. And don’t give him any more of the rice cereal, he spits it out. He likes wheat now.”

She went into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.

His daughter looked at him with serious eyes. “Is this going to be one of those days, Daddy?”

“Yeah, it looks like it.”

Exactly!

He mixed the wheat cereal for Matt, and put it in front of his son. Then he set Eliza’s bowl on the table, poured in the Chex, glanced at her.

“Enough?”

“Yes.”

He poured the milk for her.

“No, Dad!” his daughter howled, bursting into tears. “I wanted to pour the milk!”

“Sorry, Lize—”

“Take it out— take the milk out—” She was shrieking, completely hysterical.
“I’m sorry, Lize, but this is—”

“I wanted to pour the milk!” She slid off her seat to the ground, where she lay kicking her heels on the floor. “Take it out, take the milk out!”

Every parent knows how true to life this is. A four-year old has definite ideas on their routine, and what they want to control!

“I’m sorry,” Sanders said. “You’ll just have to eat it, Lize.”

He sat down at the table beside Matt to feed him. Matt stuck his hand in his cereal and smeared it across his eyes. He, too, began to cry.

Can’t you just picture this?

Sanders got a dish towel to wipe Matt’s face. He noticed that the kitchen clock now said five to eight. He thought that he’d better call the office, to warn them he would be late. But he’d have to quiet Eliza first: she was still on the floor, kicking and screaming about the milk.

“All right, Eliza, take it easy. Take it easy.” He got a fresh bowl, poured more cereal, and gave her the carton of milk to pour herself. “Here.”

She crossed her arms and pouted. “I don’t want it.”

“Eliza, you pour that milk this minute.” 

Throughout the scene he’s looking at the clock, trying to gauge how late he will be. At the end of the chapter, Susan has finally come to Tom’s rescue, and says—

“I’ll take over now. You don’t want to be late. Isn’t today the big day? When they announce your promotion?”

“I hope so.”

“Call me as soon as you hear.”

“I will.” Sanders got up, cinched the towel around his waist, and headed upstairs to get dressed. There was always traffic before the 8:20 ferry. He would have to hurry to make it.

End of chapter. We want to read on. After what this guy’s been through just to get ready for work, we hope he’s day’s going to get better.

It’s not, of course. This is Michael Crichton. Things are about to get a whole lot worse for Mr. Tom Sanders.

This strategy will work whether you open in a home or office; in a car or on a boat; in a coffee house or Waffle House.

Just decide to be mean. Mess up your character’s day.

James Scott Bell—October 14, 2018

Character names

Finding the right name for a character is always a critical first step for me. I can’t just put in a placeholder or any old name in a first draft, I really have to be sure of at least the main character’s name before I can find the right voice. Usually female character names are easy – they come to me right away, or at least after just a little historical research (when you write historical like I do, the last thing you want is a modern name that’s completely wrong for the period). When it comes to male characters, however, there’s always some degree of angst. For example, in my current WIP I’ve only just realized that I’m using the same name for my principal male protagonist as in a book a wrote a few years ago – so obviously I have some favorites that I need to eliminate:) I also avoid names of ex-boyfriends or former colleagues (I find it difficult to separate the real person from the imaginary one when using particular names). When it comes to female characters I don’t seem to have the same sensitivity (I also accidentally named a maid after my sister and had no idea until she pointed this out to me…). In my current WIP I can’t work out exactly why the name of the antagonist doesn’t fit (my beta readers are happy with it after all), all I know is that it doesn’t…and I’m struggling to find a name that does.

This character angst has got me desperately looking for new naming strategies including scouring my bookshelves for random author and character names in the hope that these strike some inspiration (nope…) and resorting to baby naming websites (also with little success). So what to do when a character’s name is so elusive?? Honestly, I’m not sure (but maybe you TKZers can help!).

When starting a first draft I often ‘try on’ a couple of character names for my main protagonist (or protagonists) as I work through accessing their voice and POV.

Claire Langley-Hawthorne—April 26, 2021

 

Character Misdirection

Character misdirection is when the protagonist (and reader) believes a secondary character fulfills one role when, in fact, he fulfills the opposite.

Two types of character misdirection.

  • False Ally
  • False Enemy

These two characters are not what they seem on the surface. They provide opportunities for dichotomy, juxtaposition, insights into the protagonist, theme, plot, and plot twists. They’re useful characters and so much fun to write.

A false ally is a character who acts like they’re on the protagonist’s side when they really have ulterior motives. The protagonist trusts the false ally. The reader will, too. Until the moment when the character unmasks, revealing their false façade and true intention.

A false enemy is a character the protagonist does not trust. Past experiences with this character warn the protagonist to be wary. But this time, the false enemy wants to help the protagonist.

When Hannibal Lecter tries to help Clarice, she’s leery about trusting a serial killing cannibal. The reader is too.

What type of character is Hannibal Lecter, a false ally or false enemy?

An argument could be made for both. On one hand, he acts like a false enemy, but he does have his own agenda. Thomas Harris blurred the lines between the two. What emerged is a multifaceted character that we’ve analyzed for years.

When crafting a false ally or false enemy, it’s fine to fit the character into one of these roles. Or, like Harris, add shades of gray.

Sue Coletta—December 13, 2021

***

  1. Do you find trouble in your characters’ “ordinary day?” If so, any tips?
  2. How do you come up with names for your characters? I’ve used the U.S. Social Security tools for popular baby names by year and decade as well as baby name and other name guides.
  3. Do you create false allies or false enemies in your fiction? Any advice on how to do so?

Plotting Words of Wisdom

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Learning how to effectively plot stories and novels was one of the keys to eventual publication for me. Reading Plot and Structure by our very own James Scott Bell got me started on the path to being able to write fiction that succeeded in engaging and immersing readers in a compelling storyline.

Today’s Words of Wisdom shares three excerpts of TKZ posts from 2011-2013, each providing useful advice on the fine art of plotting your fiction. Interestingly, each one was originally published in May—perhaps there’s a special plotting vibe to that month. More likely it’s just coincidence, but we fictioneers live to find meaning, so, after finding these three wonderful post I like to think of May as being unofficial plotting fiction month.

First, Joe Moore presents screenplay 9-Act Structure. Then, Claire Langley-Hawthorne looks at a powerful tip from JSB’s Plot and Structure on his LOCK and strengthening a potentially sagging middle of a novel . Finally,  P.J. Parrish shows how to plot visually.

When I looked into plot structure for fiction—while I was still delusional about having the capability to actually plot—I found references to the Nine-Act Screenplay Structure. This is the basic framework of today’s blockbuster movies. You’ll see 3-Acts and 12-Acts, but I played with this version below as a format and had some success in conceptually plotting one or two of my earlier stories. Ah, the ambiguity…

It’s my belief that once your brain grasps the concept of this structure, you may automatically follow the idea whether you’re aware of it or not. As a visual learner, it helped me to draft this and embed it in my brain, like a time bomb triggered to go off when I sat in front of my computer.

The 9-Act structure is similar to the classic Hero’s Journey that you may have seen, but I thought this would be interesting to talk about. See what you think. Would something like this work for writing a novel?

Word of Caution – Once you see this framework, you may not enjoy movies the same way again. Just sayin’…

Nine-Act Screenplay Structure

Act 0—During Opening Credits First 5 Minutes (film time)
What strikes the conflict—sets it up—event years earlier may plant the seed of conflict

Act 1—Opening Image—The Panoramic Crane Shot Next 5 Minutes

Act 2—Something Bad Happens 5 Minutes
In a crime story, it’s usually the murder—Reveal the bad front man, but hold off on the introduction of the bad head honcho until later

Act 3—Meet Hero/Protagonist 15 minutes
Meet hero—give him 3 plot nudges to push him to commit

Act 4—Commitment 5-10 Minutes
The push—Usually one scene that’s a door to Act 5—1-way door, no turning back

Act 5—Go for wrong goal – approx. 30 minutes est.
A series of 8-12 min. cycles called whammos or complications followed by a rest period of 5 minutes or so to uncover some of the backstory. End this act with the lowest point for the protagonist. The dark moment.

Act 6—Reversal 5-10 Minutes—Usually 70 Minutes into the Film
The last clue discovered—Now Act 2 makes sense—It is the low point, a history lesson usually revealed by the bad guy/honcho—but reveals the Achilles heel of the nemesis too.

Act 7—Go for New Goal 15-20 Minutes
The clock is ticking—Hero has a new plan. The action seesaws back and forth with nemesis and hero gaining & losing ground between each other—usually takes place in 24 hours within the context of the movie. Favors are repaid, magic, good luck happens. The new plan is kept secret. New goal is achieved.

Act 8—Wrap it Up 5 minutes
Back to where it all began—a feeling of accomplishment & rebirth—the world restored. Ahh!

Now having outlined this plotting structure, I’m not sure if following something like this (without deviation) would hamper creativity by providing too much framework. This would be like “the rules” of writing. Maybe rules are there to be understood, but we shouldn’t be afraid to break them either.

I tend to “think” about my book ahead of time and let my brain ponder what I call my “big ticket” plot movements—like what my black moment will be for my main character(s). I also develop my ideas on who the main cast of characters will be and maybe where I might set the story location(s).

Joe Moore—May 19, 2011

For me, the hardest part of plotting is keeping things simple (as I have a tendency to overly complicate everything!) and because of this I outline (and re-outline) throughout the writing and editing process. Even if you don’t outline, however, I think you need to have a mental grip on the key elements of plot as you are writing.

Now, I get to make an unsolicited plug for James Scott Bell’s excellent book Plot & Structure: Techniques and exercises for crafting a plot that grips readers from start to finish. In this, Jim summarizes the basic plot elements with the acronym LOCK:

  • Lead (the main character that draws readers into the story)
  • Objective (what gives the lead a reason for being in the story – what compels and drives them -often either to get something or to get away from something)
  • Confrontation (the battle between the lead and the opposition – what is preventing the lead from achieving what he/she needs)
  • Knockout (an ending that answers all the major questions and which leaves the reader satisfied)

In so doing Jim neatly encapsulates the critical elements needed for a successful book – particularly a thriller or mystery. As Jim points out, confrontation is the engine of plot and at critical junctures in the book the lead must face his/her battles  in order to transition to the next level of confrontation in the story.

When facing a sagging middle, I always remember Jim’s comment that middles are all about confrontations and setting up for the final battle to come. This helps me keep focus and tension in those murky middle waters. I also find that right from the start I have the key plot elements in mind and these continually inform the writing process and keep me on track.

Claire Langley-Hawthorne—May 28, 2012

 

We talk a lot here at The Kill Zone about the difference between plotters vs pantsers. (i.e. do you outline or do you wing it?). But we never talk about the picture makers. I am a picture maker. I can’t keep control of my story, can’t control its pacing and rhythms, can’t really SEE where it’s going, unless I draw it.

I used to think I was alone in this but I found out many authors use some kind of story boarding. Some even use software for it, Scrivner being a favorite. My dear late friend Barbara Parker had beautifully rendered storyboards on her office wall that would have made any Hollywood mogul proud.  My scribbles aren’t nearly so neat but they do the job. It also something born of necessity because if you work with a collaborator, you both have to be literally on the same page.

My co-author sister Kelly and I happened upon our methodology by accident about nine books ago. She was visiting me here in Florida and one day I came home and saw this:

Kelly had written all our plot points down on scraps of paper and taped them to a board. (The wine is an optional but vital writing tool). We found this was a quick way to visualize our plot, move chapters or add things. It also acts as a chronology and time line, which is valuable during rewrites. We eventually graduated to Post-It notes. And the PLOT BOARD, as we call it, became more complicated as we refined our methods:

One Post-It per chapter, each with the salient plot points in that chapter. Usually, our Louis Kincaid books are written only from his POV so it’s all yellow. EXCEPT: we sometimes use pink for what we call “personal” chapters. This is because as we mix “case/plot” chapters with character-development chapters (ie personal) we are constantly aware of the need to keep the main plot moving. Too many pinks in a row? That’s death in a suspense novel so we find a way to distribute that extra pink stuff around. It’s all about pacing. This board above, however, is for HEART OF ICE, which is a more complex plot. It has five POVS, so we use a different color for each. Again, it helps with pacing.

But we do more than just plotting on boards. We often need some pretty elaborate drawings, maps, and charts to keep track of things.

This board above was for THE LITTLE DEATH. The plot concerns multiple bodies found in disparate locations in Florida’s cattle country. Louis finds no connections between the murders until he digs deep into each victim’s life. This board helped up keep the victims’s backgrounds straight as well as where the bodies were found in relation to each other (an important clue).

Here is a board for A THOUSAND BONES. This book drove us nuts because the plot, about a serial killer operating over almost 20 years, was very complex. Its backstory begins in 1964 and the main plot moves to 1990. The killer left tree carvings with each victim but the carvings changed as he got older. We had to kept track of each girl’s backstory, where the body was found (the color coding), what personal items were found with each, and what carving.

PJ Parrish—May 28, 2013

***

  1. What do you think of the nine-act structure? Do you have a plot structure, be it 3-act, 4-act, 7-point, W plot, or something else which you find especially helpful?
  2. Have you used the LOCK approach? Any advice on propping up a sagging middle of a novel?
  3. Have you plotted visually? If so, what’s your approach?
  4. If you’re a pantser, do you use any of these plotting approaches or others to help with your revisions?

More Villainous Words of Wisdom

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Today’s Words of Wisdom returns to an evergreen topic: villains. We love to hate them.  Our fiction needs them. They help drive the plot. Understanding the importance of villains can be the key to writing more engaging and gripping mysteries and thrillers.

Clare Langley-Hawthorne, James Scott Bell and Debbie Burke give advice and tips on creating better villains in your fiction. Afterwards, please give us your take.

It can often be all too easy to fall for the ‘psychotic’ serial killer or other sort of evil cliche without trying to provide for the reader a solid grasp of what lies behind this. Villains rarely consider themselves villains. Sometimes they feel justified (in their own perverted way) or compelled by something to do what they do. Unlike in real life, in fiction, we can often provide the reader with a rationale for someone’s behaviour.

So how do you create a believable villain? How do you ensure that, when it comes to the battle between good and evil, neither side slides into caricature? I’ve been thinking about this a lot in my current WIP and I have some to a few conclusions (or observations, at least) as I go through this process:

1. Characters don’t think they are dumb so don’t make them do ‘dumb’ things just because they are (cue manic Dr. Evil laughter) the bad guy.
2. Don’t fall into the trap of making evil generic. For every character there needs to be a specific reason, cause or motivation for his or her behaviour. The more specific and believable this is, the more believable a character will be.
3. Give you villain a clear objective. I’m not a big fan of the psycho who just seems to do stuff because he is, well, ‘psycho’ – this always seems to the to dilute the power of having an antagonist.
4. Think as much about the back story for your villain as you do for the protagonist of the story – this will ensure the character behaves consistently and with clear purpose. It also helps you avoid falling into a cliche if you have a fully realized back story.

Clare Langley-Hawthorne—July 23, 2012

 

Dean Koontz wrote, “The best villains are those that evoke pity and sometimes even genuine sympathy as well as terror. Think of the pathetic aspect of the Frankenstein monster. Think of the poor werewolf, hating what he becomes in the light of the full moon, but incapable of resisting the lycanthropic tides in his own cells.”

All this to say that the best villains in fiction, theatre, and film are never one-dimensional. They are complex, often charming, and able to manipulate. The biggest mistake you can make with a villain is to make him pure evil or all crazy. 

So what goes into crafting a memorable villain?

  1. Give him an argument

There is only one character in all storytelling who wakes up each day asking himself what fresh evil he can commit. This guy: 

But other than Dr. Evil, every villain feels justified in what he is doing. When you make that clear to the reader in a way that approaches actual empathy, you will create cross-currents of emotion that deepen the fictive dream like virtually nothing else.

One of the techniques I teach in my workshops is borrowed from my courtroom days. I ask people to imagine their villain has been put on trial and is representing himself. Now comes the time for the closing argument. He has one opportunity to make his case for the jury. He has to justify his whole life. He has to appeal to the jurors’ hearts and minds or he’s doomed.

Write that speech. Do it as a free-form document, in the villain’s voice, with all the emotion you can muster. Emphasize what’s called “exculpatory evidence.” That is evidence that, if believed, would tend to exonerate a defendant. As the saying goes, give the devil his due. 

Note: This does not mean you are giving approval to what the villain has done. No way. What you are getting at is his motivation. This is how to know what’s going on inside your villain’s head throughout the entire novel.

Want to read a real-world example? See the cross-examination of Hermann Goering from the Nuremberg Trials. Here’s a clip:

“I think you did not quite understand me correctly here, for I did not put it that way at all. I stated that it had struck me that Hitler had very definite views of the impotency of protest; secondly, that he was of the opinion that Germany must be freed from the dictate of Versailles. It was not only Adolf Hitler; every German, every patriotic German had the same feelings. And I, being an ardent patriot, bitterly felt the shame of the dictate of Versailles, and I allied myself with the man about whom I felt perceived most clearly the consequences of this dictate, and that probably he was the man who would find the ways and means to set it aside. All the other talk in the Party about Versailles was, pardon the expression, mere twaddle … From the beginning it was the aim of Adolf Hitler and his movement to free Germany from the oppressive fetters of Versailles, that is, not from the whole Treaty of Versailles, but from those terms which were strangling Germany’s future.”

How chilling to hear a Nazi thug making a reasoned argument to justify the horrors foisted upon the world by Hitler. So much scarier than a cardboard bad guy.

So what’s your villain’s justification? Let’s hear it. Marshal the evidence. Know deeply and intimately what drives him.

  1. Choices, not just backstory

It’s common and perhaps a little trite these days to give the villain a horrific backstory and leave it at that. 

Or, contrarily, to leave out any backstory at all.

In truth, everyone alive or fictional has a backstory, and you need to know your villain’s. But don’t just make him a victim of abuse. Make him a victim of his own choices.

Back when virtue and character were actually taught to children in school, there was a lesson from the McGuffey Reader that went like this: “The boy who will peep into a drawer will be tempted to take something out of it; and he who will steal a penny in his youth will steal a pound in his manhood.” 

The message, of course, is that we are responsible for our choices and actions, and they have consequences. 

So what was the first choice your villain made that began forging his long chain of depravity? Write that scene. Give us the emotion of it. Even if you don’t use the scene in your book, knowing it will give your villain scope.

James Scott Bell—October 26, 2014

 

I wrote mysteries like I read mysteries, from a state of ignorance, constantly trying to figure out what was going on.

I had a general idea of the bad guy’s motive, but never paid much that attention to the schemes and machinations happening offstage. All action took place onstage because the first or close third POV required the sights, sounds, smells, and emotions be filtered through the protagonist only. My focus stayed stuck on the hero.

The bad guy hid in the shadows behind the curtain until the big reveal at the end. Unfortunately he’d been hiding from the writer too!

Finally, thanks to the wise folks at TKZ, I recognized the big fat blind spot in my books.

Here’s the epiphany:

In crime fiction, the antagonist drives the plot. Unless a crime has been committed, or is about to be committed, there’s nothing for the protagonist to do. The antagonist acts, the protagonist re-acts.

I’d been following the wrong character around all these years! 

My realization probably seems like a big DUH to many crime authors. But I’m sharing it in hopes of helping others like myself who overlooked the obvious.

It’s fun to think like a villain! When I started writing from the bad guy’s POV, a whole new world opened up—a world without conscience, constraints, or inhibitions.

Jordan’s great post from last May says, “The best villains are the heroes of their own stories.” 

Actor Tom Hiddleston says, “Every villain is a hero in his own mind.” Most actors would prefer to sink their fangs into the role of a great villain than play the good guy.

The baddies in my earlier books had been flat and dull because I’d never gotten inside their heads. Finally, the missing element became clear and…my book won a publishing contract!

Why is the villain willing to steal, cheat, and kill? What rationalizations justify the harm done to others? 

A sociopath comes up with perfectly logical justifications and excuses for abhorrent actions.

Irresistible influences like greed, power, and lust can seduce an ordinary person over to the dark side.

Misguided righteousness can lead to horrendous consequences.

A law-abiding citizen may be forced into a corner where he commits acts he would never do under normal circumstances.

If an author roots around in the antagonist’s brain for a while, background, reasons, and rationalizations for antisocial behavior bubble up. Armed with such knowledge, it becomes impossible to write a two-dimensional character. Jim Bell offers a great technique—try to imagine the villain delivering the closing argument to the jury that will determine his fate.

Do you show the villain’s POV in the story or not? That choice is contingent on subgenre.

In a whodunit mystery, the identity of the villain is typically a surprise at the end. Therefore, that POV is generally not shown to the reader, although some authors include passages from the villain’s POV without revealing the identity.

Suspense and thriller novels often are written from multiple POVs, including the villain’s. When the reader knows early on who the bad guy is, the question is no longer whodunit, but rather will s/he get away with it?

The author can choose to show the antagonist’s POV or keep it hidden. But either way, you need to be aware of it because that’s what’s driving the story forward.

Even if you never show the villain’s POV, try writing scenes inside his/her head.You don’t need to include them in the book, but the act of writing them gives you a firmer grasp on that character’s deep desires and how those desires screw up other people’s lives. Once you really understand what the antagonist is striving for, that provides a solid framework from which the story hangs.

If you’re in a corner and your hero doesn’t know what to do next, check in with the villain. While the hero is slogging through steps A, B, and C to solve the crime, the bad guy is offstage setting up roadblocks D, E, and F to keep from being caught.

Debbie Burke—September 28, 2017

***

There you have it, advice on writing villains. Today the authors of our three excerpted posts pose the questions to help jumpstart our discussion:

  1. So how do you approach the process of creating villains? Are there any ‘evil doers’ in novels that strike you as the ‘dumb and dumber’ of their kind? What about the most chilling, compelling and believable villains in fiction?
  2. What’s your approach to villain writing?
  3. What is your villain doing right now? Do you prefer to show the antagonist’s POV or keep it hidden?

 

Subconscious Words of Wisdom

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While writing Book Drop Dead it became obvious I wasn’t letting my subconscious have a much of say in the process. When I realized this and opened back up to my inner collaborator, the narrative became richer and more surprising and the writing flowed more easily. It’s a lesson I’ve taken to heart as I work on the next book in my mystery series.

Today’s Words of Wisdom takes a deep dive into the power of the subconscious in writing and how to set the scene for it to work its magic, with excerpts from posts by Laura Benedict, James Scott Bell and Debbie Burke.

There are so many theories on what dreams are. Just a few:

Subconscious problem solving.

Wishfulfillment

Random neuron firing

Emotional cleanup using dream symbols

Messages from the future or past

I don’t know about you, but my dreams tend to be a mix of the above, with the exception of messages from the future or past. As an adult, I’ve had some very comforting dreams about my grandparents, but I put those in the emotional cleanup category.

Dreams are as entertaining to me as a good book, and sometimes even more so because I’m participating. I go to sleep hoping the dreams are good. The only time I fear them is when I’m home alone overnight and have paralyzing night terrors about strangers in my bedroom. But most of my dreams contain vibrant colors, vivid situations and storylines, and people I don’t often see. I couldn’t enjoy them more if I made them up myself. Which, in a way, I suppose I do. It’s my subconscious at work—that part of the brain from which I suspect my best writing material comes.

But how to access that material in the waking world? As writers, we are essentially creating dreams for our readers. Stories that are like reality, but just that much better. Just that much less predictable, like any good dream.

Some ways to access the dreaming part of your brain:

Lucid dreaming: Lucid dreaming is dreaming when you know you’re dreaming. You won’t necessarily control your dreams, but you’re likely to remember them. Here’s a comprehensive list of ways to make it happen.

Dream journals: This is one of my favorites. As soon as I wake, I jot down the details of all the dreams I can remember. The exercise of writing it out makes me feel like I have a jump on my creative day.

Music: Do you listen to music as you write? It can quickly put you in the writing zone, but music with lyrics can be distracting. When I wrote Charlotte’s Story, I had this adagio on a loop for weeks. Repeated music is a great self-hypnosis tool.

Rituals: Same Bat Place. Same Bat Time. If you’re in the habit of doing deep work in the same place every time, your brain will begin to relax once it’s in sight.

Silence: I used to brag a lot about how I could write just as easily in a noisy cafe as I could in a silent room. While it’s still true, silence settles me much more quickly. You can almost hear the doors in my head opening.

Do you have trouble recalling your dreams? It’s common.The reason it’s sometimes difficult is because the brain may shut down its memory-recording functions while we’re in REM sleep.

Here’s what I find so fascinating about recalling dreams—or even having them. What if they really are simply random discharges of neurons firing up images in our brains while we sleep? That doesn’t make them any less interesting or less vital. It’s what we do with the connections between those images that makes a dream a dream. Even while we are sleeping, we are constructing narratives. How cool is that? Storytelling is so elemental to our being that we may be compelled to do it unintentionally, while we’re asleep.

That means that we are all storytellers. But to be writers, we have to externalize those narratives.

Laura Benedict—February 22, 2017

 

In an article in the Harvard Business Review, “Your Brain Can Only Take So Much Focus”, Dr. Srini Pillay writes about our over-emphasis on focus. We have our to-do lists, timetables, goals. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But it turns out we also should be practicing “unfocus.”

In keeping with recent research, both focus and unfocus are vital. The brain operates optimally when it toggles between focus and unfocus, allowing you to develop resilience, enhance creativity, and make better decisions too.

When you unfocus, you engage a brain circuit called the “default mode network.” Abbreviated as the DMN, we used to think of this circuit as the Do Mostly Nothing circuit because it only came on when you stopped focusing effortfully. Yet, when “at rest”, this circuit uses 20% of the body’s energy (compared to the comparatively small 5% that any effort will require).

The DMN needs this energy because it is doing anything but resting. Under the brain’s conscious radar, it activates old memories, goes back and forth between the past, present, and future, and recombines different ideas. Using this new and previously inaccessible data, you develop enhanced self-awareness and a sense of personal relevance. And you can imagine creative solutions or predict the future, thereby leading to better decision-making too. The DMN also helps you tune into other people’s thinking, thereby improving team understanding and cohesion.

Dr. Pillay recommends building “positive constructive daydreaming” (PCD) into your day. I do this very well at my local coffee house. I stare. Out the window. Sometimes at people. I’m really working, though. That’s PCD time!

Another tip from the good doctor: power naps. “When your brain is in a slump, your clarity and creativity are compromised. After a 10-minute nap, studies show that you become much clearer and more alert.”

But the technique that really jumped out at me was this:

Pretending to be someone else: When you’re stuck in a creative process, unfocus may also come to the rescue when you embody and live out an entirely different personality. In 2016, educational psychologists, Denis Dumas and Kevin Dunbar found that people who try to solve creative problems are more successful if they behave like an eccentric poet than a rigid librarian. Given a test in which they have to come up with as many uses as possible for any object (e.g. a brick) those who behave like eccentric poets have superior creative performance. This finding holds even if the same person takes on a different identity.

When in a creative deadlock, try this exercise of embodying a different identity. It will likely get you out of your own head, and allow you to think from another person’s perspective. I call this psychological halloweenism.

This is close to something I’ve done on occasion. I may have finished a draft and am doing the first read through. Something’s not working. I don’t know what.

I set it aside for awhile and do something unfocused: like pleasure reading, eating a Tommy Burger, or riding my bike. Then when I go back to it I think of a favorite author and pretend he’s looking over my shoulder at the draft. I have him say, “I think you need to ….” and just imagine what he would advise. It’s amazing how often this can break the logjam.

In light of all the science, then, I’ve determined to take a little more unfocus time on weekends.

I’ve also gotten more specific about how I spend my focus time. I’m a morning person. I like getting up while it’s still dark and pouring that first cup of java and getting some words down. I can write for two or three hours straight. But I’ve stopped doing that. I am forcing myself to take a break after 45 minutes of writing, to let the noggin rest a bit. Ten minutes maybe. Then back to work.

James Scott Bell—May 28, 2017

 

What is the subconscious? Novelist/writing instructor Dennis Foley reduces the definition to a simple, beautiful simile:

The subconscious is like a little seven-year-old girl who brings you gifts.

Unfortunately, our conscious mind is usually too busy to figure out the value of these odd thoughts and dismisses them as inconsequential, even nonsensical.

The risk is, if you ignore the little girl’s gifts, pretty soon she stops bringing them and you lose touch with a vital link to your writer’s imagination. But if you encourage her to bring more gifts, she’s happy to oblige.

Sometimes the little girl delivers the elusive perfect phrase you’ve been searching for or that exhilarating plot twist that turns your story on its head.

At those times, she’s often dubbed “the muse.”

The trick is how to consistently turn random thoughts into gifts from a muse. Here are eight tips:

#1 – Be patient and keep trying.

Training the subconscious to produce inspiration on demand is like housetraining a puppy.

At first, it pees at unpredictable times and places. You grab it and rush outside. When it does its business on the grass instead of expensive carpet, you offer lots of praise. Soon it learns there is a better time and place to let loose.

Keep reinforcing that lesson and your subconscious will scratch at the back door when it wants to get out.

#2 – Pay attention to daydreams, wild hare ideas, and jolts of intuition. Chances are your subconscious shot them out for a reason, even if that reason isn’t immediately obvious.

Say you’re struggling over how to write a surprise revelation in a scene. Two days ago, you remembered crazy Aunt Gretchen, whom you hadn’t thought about in years. Then you realize if a character like her walks into the scene, she’s the perfect vehicle to deliver the surprise.

#3 – Expect the subconscious to have lousy timing.

That brilliant flash of inspiration often hits at the most inconvenient moment. In the middle of a job interview. In the shower. Or while your toddler is having a meltdown at Winn-Dixie.

Finish the task at hand but ask your subconscious to send you a reminder later. As soon as possible, write down that brilliant flash before you forget it.

#4 – Keep requests small.

Some authors claim to have dreamed multi-book sagas covering five generations of characters. Lucky them. My subconscious doesn’t work that hard.

Start by asking it to solve little problems.

As you’re going to bed, think about a character you’re having trouble bringing to life. Miriam seems flat and hollow but, for some reason you can’t explain, she hates the mustache on her new lover, Jack. Ask your subconscious: “Why?”

When you wake up, you realize Jack’s mustache looks just like her uncle’s did…when he molested Miriam at age five.

Until that moment, you didn’t even know Miriam had survived abuse…but your subconscious knew. That’s why it dropped the hint about her dislike for the mustache. She becomes a deeper character with secrets and hidden motives you can use to complicate her relationship with Jack.

#5 – Recognize obscure clues.

This tip takes practice because suggestions from the subconscious are often oblique and challenging to interpret.

You want to write a scene where a detective questions a suspect to pin down his whereabouts at the time of a crime. You ponder that as you drift off to sleep. The next morning, “lemon chicken” comes to mind.

What the…?

But you start typing and pretty soon the scene flows out like this:

“Hey, Fred, you like Chinese food?”

“Sure, Detective.”

“Ever try Wang’s all-you-can-eat buffet?”

“That’s my favorite place. Their lemon chicken is to die for.”

“Yeah, it’s the best.”

[Fred relaxes] “But not when it gets soggy. I only like it when the coating is still crispy.”

“Right you are. I don’t like soggy either.”

“Detective, would you believe last night I waited forty-five minutes for the kitchen to bring out a fresh batch?”

“Wow, Fred, you’re a patient man. About what time was that?”

“Quarter to eight.”

“So you must have been there when that dude got killed out in the alley.”

[Fred fidgets and licks his lips] “Um, yeah, but I didn’t see anything. I had nothing to do with him getting stabbed.”

“Oh really? Funny thing is, nobody knows he got stabbed…except the killer.”

Lemon chicken directed you to an effective line of questioning to solve the crime.

Debbie Burke—February 5, 2019

***

  1. Have you tapped your dreams for you writing? If so, in what way?
  2. Do you give yourself a break and let your subconscious work it’s magic while you’re mentally elsewhere? Is there a particular activity, like talking a walk or a shower that helps in this?
  3. Do you listen to your inner “seven-year-old” and accept the gifts it has to offer your writing? Any tips on doing so?

***

There’s a sign above the library book drop: NO TRASH OR VIDEOTAPES. Meg never thought she’d have to add: NO DEAD BODIES.

It’s May 1985 and Meg Booker already has her hands full, what with running the busy Fir Grove branch library, helping her flaky actor brother with his latest onstage project, and caring for an orphaned kitten that shows up outside the branch.

Then a rare bank note goes missing at a library event, igniting a feud between two local collectors, and Meg thinks her life couldn’t get any more complicated… until a dead body turns up in the book drop room.

Racing against time, Meg must use all of her librarian skills to discover the real killer’s identity, before the police arrest her for the crime.

Book Drop Dead is the second title in the 1980s Meg Booker Librarian Mysteries series.  It’s available at the major ebook retailers via this universal book link.

Tracking Your Writing: Words of Wisdom

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The first time I participated in National Novel Writing month, I actually wrote a novel the month before writing my NaNo novel. The pre-NaNo novel was right on the word count edge of novella at 40,000 words. It had been three years since I’d drafted my first novel and I wanted to get back in the game by doing NaNoWriMo 2006, and thought, why not write a shorter book in October as a warmup?

So, I created a simple Excel spreadsheet that tracked my daily word count, as well as the running total of my WIP, and also listed daily word count and overall running count goals. It worked like a charm. I did the same thing for November, aiming for 1667 words a day to reach 50,000 words total by November 30. What I learned was that my word count fluctuated, but averaged out to close to the daily goal. It worked. However, I did not track the time I spent grinding out those words. Instead, I loosely scheduled writing time.

I drifted away from tracking my word count, but now want to return to it. I like JSB’s practice of setting a weekly word count, but even simply tracking how many words I draft each day can be helpful. It’s something I’d like to start doing when I begin drafting Meg Booker Librarian Mystery #3. Also, while rewriting the previous book, I began tracking pages revised as well as setting goals for daily pages revised which helped get me through multiple editing passes, especially the last one.

One thing I’ve never been successful at is tracking my time spent writing. Instead, I schedule writing time.

Today’s Words of Wisdom presents a grab bag of excerpts on time and words. Joe Moore gives tips for how to track your time spent writing. James Scott Bell shares two tactics to unstick your story and begin increasing your word count again. Laura Benedict discusses why word counts are important in her own creative process.

Most writers live and publish by a quota, a magical number of words or pages of work they produce each day. Supposedly, Stephen King writes ten pages a day, every day, no matter what. Hemingway was a little more reasonable, at 500 words per day.

The truth is, I don’t actually have a quota, not if one insists on the notion of measuring effort in terms of something solid and concrete, like numbers of words. My quota is more elastic, more ephemeral if you will: it’s time spent writing. I write for two hours each day in the late morning, no matter what. (Okay, sometimes I’ll write for 45 minutes a day, or 20, but those days are rare.)

The problem with my type of quota is that I’m a word worrier. I can spend the entire two hours nibbling around the edges of a single paragraph. The next day, I might strike that paragraph and start over. With this method, productivity, as you might imagine, is quite the wild card.

I do have occasional spells when the writing flows–I bound through the pages effortlessly, like Emily Dickinson’s frigate on a following sea. But those happy periods of clear sailing are inevitably followed by a dead calm, and I get bogged down on a single page for days. Or a single sentence,

“Just keep going!” When we’re stalled, this is the sage advice we get from most writing teachers, critique groups, and professional writers, But so far I’ve been incapable of doing that.  Sometimes I do leave a placeholder, something like, “Brilliant description of character goes here, but don’t do a generic description dump. Must be something fresh that will make the reader’s eyes widen in recognition.” One can take that kind of thing too far, however. You can wind up with an entire novel of placeholders, and then where would you be? Exactly where you started.

Joe Moore: October 19, 2010

Today, I want to offer a couple of tips for that fearful moment when you’re 10 – 20k in and you have absolutely no idea what to write next.

One tip was in my recent post about asking what the bad guy’s doing. If you’re stuck in the middle, take half an hour to think about what your antagonist is up to off stage. Have him planning his next few moves. Then go back to your protagonist who will feel the permutations of those moves.

The other tip I have for you when you get stuck is to do a variation of Raymond Chandler’s advice about bringing in a guy with a gun.

Yep, introduce a new character.

But what character? How do you choose?

Here are a couple of suggestions:

Open up a dictionary at random. Find a noun. What kind of person pops into your head who you would associate with that noun?

Spin the Writer Igniter. You can also use this cool app to choose a scene, a prop, or a situation.

Now you’ve got a new character ready to enter the fray. Before he or she does, ask yourself how this character will complicate the lead character’s life. Hopefully, you know enough about writing a novel that your Lead is facing a matter that feels like life and death–– physically or professionally or psychologically.

This new character will be the carrier of a subplot. A subplot needs to intersect with the main plot in some significant way––and a way that complicates matters for the Lead.

A new character like this is good for another 5k words at least

Bada-bing! You’ve added to your NaNo word count.

But what if you’re in the final act of your book? The hard part, where you have to figure out how to tie up the loose ends?

Add another character! A loose-ends tier-upper!

But won’t that seem out of the blue? A Deus ex machina?

Not if you go back to Act 1, or the first part of Act 2, and introduce the character there. You’re the writer, remember? You can go back in time in your own book!

This exercise works for NaNo, but also for any novel where you feel that long middle is starting to sag.

Introducing one complicating character gives you lots of plot possibilities. And I love plot possibilities.

James Scott Bell: October 16, 2016

One of my best friends, an enormously successful writer, has kept track of her words on spreadsheets for well over a decade. But I also know a writer who has been writing for a half-century and couldn’t tell you precisely how many stories she’s published, let alone the number of words.

The subject of word counts comes up frequently when you’re an emerging writer. Agents only want to see a certain number of pages, and competitions, magazines, and writing workshops all set limits. When you sell that novel, there will be a word count mentioned in the contract, and when it comes time for delivery, it better be close: if there aren’t enough, it won’t meet the contract; if there are too many, it could negatively impact the production schedule and projected costs. Word counts are relevant.

But should word counts have a place in your creative life? What do word counts mean to you?

This might sound a little crazy, but keeping track of my words satisfies the voice in my head that says, “use your time well.” Word counts are by nature quantifications. Proof that I’ve written. It doesn’t matter if I’ve written badly. It doesn’t matter if I throw them out later. It doesn’t matter if I don’t even like them. I’ve written. I’ve worked. It sounds a little cold, but sometimes you have to feed the voice. (Now, these are only my thoughts. If you don’t have that scary neurosis voice in your head telling you she’s watching how you use your time, good for you.)

The softer, more right-brained view is that the more words you write, the more practiced you become. A friend of mine is fond of saying, “Writing begets writing.” This is so true. When I write, I work things out on the page. The more words I get down on paper, the more room there is in my brain for birthing new ideas. My brain feels larger, happier when it’s planning new words.

At the end of December, I started tracking my word counts in my daily blog. The person who asked me why I tracked words wondered if I was in some kind of competition. The answer is yes. I am in competition with myself. I like to know how much I’ve written, and it keeps me motivated—not just to improve the numbers as I go along, but to have some markers along the way.

Laura Benedict: January 25, 2017

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  1. Do you track the time you spend writing? If so, how do you do it, and does it help you stay on track as a writer?
  2. Are there specific word count points, like at the 10K, 20K or 30K word marks where you tend to run out of steam. Any tips or tactics you use to get the words flowing again?
  3. Do you track the words you write? If so do you keep daily or weekly word counts? Do you set word count goals? Do you track scenes or chapters written instead?
  4. Do you track the revising you do? If so, what metric do you choose-words, pages, scenes, chapters or something else?

Novel Writing Words of Wisdom

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Writing a novel is a big undertaking, especially at first. It took me years before I discovery-drafted my first novel. Three more novels followed, all written by the seat-of-my-pants.

However, it wasn’t until I began studying the craft of novel writing and getting feedback on my novels, as I had done earlier for short fiction, that I began to make actual progress. Learning how to write a novel took time, as did learning how to write a fantasy novel which worked, and later still, how to write a mystery novel that spun a convincing mystery.

Today’s Words of Wisdom looks at three diverse aspects of writing novels. First, James Scott Bell gives us the three rules of writing a novel. Then, Elaine Viets shares succinct advice on how-to-write a mystery, given by a fictional detective. Finally, Robert Gregory Browne looks at the idea of knowing how to write a best-selling novel.

RULE # 1 – DON’T BORE THE READER

Can anyone disagree with that?  Doesn’t it make sense that this should be emblazoned across the writer’s creative consciousness as the most foundational of all rules?

If you bore the reader, you don’t sell the book. Or, at least, if the reader does manage to make it to the end, you don’t sell your next book.

It’s a rule. In fact, it’s a law, just like gravity.

Which leads to:

RULE #2 – PUT CHARACTERS IN CRISIS

Novels that sell are about people in some kind of trouble. Conflict is the engine of story. You can create “interesting” or “quirky” characters all day long, but unless they are tested by trial they wear out quickly (here I will issue a confession: I’ve never been able to get past the first 50 or 60 pages of A Confederacy of Dunces, and I’ve tried. Believe me, I’ve tried).

Now, trouble can be generated in many ways. The narrator of Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine is simply trying to get from the lobby of his office building to the next level via an escalator. That’s the whole story, and the trouble is inside his head.

At the other end of the spectrum are the commandos in The Guns of Navarone. 

The point is, every novel must have some fire, not just a layout of kindling and logs. That’s a rule.

RULE #3 – WRITE WITH HEART

I admit this rule is somewhat difficult to define. It’s a bit like what a Supreme Court justice once said about obscenity: “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.”

The novels that not only sell, but endure, have something of the author’s beating heart in them. We could run off a list of such novels, from To Kill A Mockingbirdby Harper Lee to the Harry Bosch series by Michael Connelly.

In my seminars, when we work on voice and style, I mention two novels that were publishing in 1957. They were as different from each other as Arbuckle and Keaton, and challenges for the publishers. Yet they both became bestsellers and, more to the point, continue to sell thousands and thousands of copies today.

They are Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and On the Road by Jack Kerouac. No matter how you ultimately come out on the merits of either book, what can’t be denied is that every page pulsates with the author’s voice and vision.

So put your heart in every scene of your novel. It’s a good rule.

Now, when a writer says, “There are no rules,” I suspect what he’s really saying is there is no one way to do the things we’ve been talking about here. And that is mostly correct.

I say mostly because, over time, it has been demonstrated that there are fiction techniques that generally work better than others. A good teacher (or editor) is able to help students learn the things that tend to work and avoid the things that tend not to.

And then it’s up to the writer to make choices. If a writer decides not to follow a tried and true method, at least she should know why.

For example, we talk a lot about starting a novel off with a hook (or, as I like to put it, a “disturbance.”) But what if you want to start your historical with ten pages of setting and description? Well, you’re certainly allowed to. And maybe you’ll manage to make those ten pages so interesting that readers will wish they’d go on and on.

But the odds are you’ll bore them, as they keep on asking Who is this story supposed to be about? Why should I care about any of this?

You might then decide it’s better to use the technique of starting with a disturbance and dropping in details within the action. A technique you can learn and practice.

James Scott Bell—September 23, 2012

How do you write a mystery?

    There are whole books on this subject.

    But the best short advice is in Grafton’s new Kinsey Millhone novel, “W Is for Wasted.”

    Private eye Kinsey Millhone talks about how she started investigating two mysterious deaths. One victim was a sleazy PI and the other was a homeless man.

     Kinsey was drawn into the mystery by a call from the coroner’s office. The coroner was “asking if I could ID a John Doe who had my name and phone number on a slip of paper in his pocket,” Grafton wrote. “How could I resist?”

    That had me hooked. But then Kinsey explained how to write a mystery:

    “Every good mystery takes place on three planes – what really happened; what appears to have happened; and how the sleuth, amateur or professional (yours truly in this case) figures out which is which.”

    There it is. The art of mystery writing in one succinct sentence. We writers are supposed to set up the story for the readers, help them find out what really happened, and tell it, giving enough clues to play fair but not give away the ending.

    Grafton gives us another dollop of advice in Kinsey’s next sentence:

    “I suppose I could put everything in perspective if I explained how it all turned out and then doubled back to that phone call,” she wrote, “but it’s better if you experience it just as I did, one strange step at a time.”

    New writers and experienced ones need to remember Kinsey’s advice: Tell the story, one strange step at a time.

    Many newbies try to be too clever. They don’t have the skills to deliver a twisted tale. They get lost in the maze they created.

    Experienced writers get bored with the format after writing book after book. We try to start in the middle, or start at the end, or switch narrators, often to amuse ourselves. Too often, it simply confuses our readers.

    Following the straight path, in Grafton’s footsteps, can be far more difficult.  But she kept me interested for 496 pages.  She also made me care about two people society considers worthless: a crooked PI and a homeless man who doesn’t even have a name.

Elaine Viets—January 16, 2014

But here’s the thing…

EVERYONE WANTS TO WRITE A BESTSELLER,

BUT MOST AUTHORS NEVER WILL

Because it’s completely out of your control.

If you sit down to write a “bestseller,” you are taking a wrong-headed approach to writing. Writing great fiction has nothing to do with writing bestsellers. Bestsellers are, by and large, flukes. Right place, right time. And not all bestsellers are created equal.

I can name a dozen of my friends who do everything right and should be on the bestseller lists, and authors who are and don’t belong there.

When I wrote Trial Junkies, I just wanted to write a great book. I had no idea it would go on to be an indie bestseller. Sure, it was something I hoped for, but I certainly wasn’t rubbing my hands together in anticipation of mega-sales. I just wrote the book I wanted to read and decided to let fate take care of the rest.

So don’t put all your energy into trying to write a bestseller. You should simply write the best book you can possibly write. A book you’re so excited about that you don’t care if you ever make a dime off of it.

I spent many years writing stuff that I knew would never sell. In fact, I didn’t even try to sell it, because I knew it wasn’t good enough. But I kept at it for several years. I wrote story fragments and screenplays and teleplays and partial novels and while I knew what I was producing was not quite there yet, I also knew, with great certainty, that it would be one day.

Sure, I had dreams of being Stephen King or Dean Koontz. We all do. But the reality is that most writers never make it to the lists, yet they still manage to have wonderful careers.

Should you forget about your dreams?

No. Sometimes they’re all you have.

But any thoughts of bestsellerdom should be relegated to the back part of the brain. You have a story to write. And that’s all you should be thinking about.

If you publish it and it manages to reach one of the bestseller lists, that’s just gravy.

So there is no How to write a bestseller.

Robert Gregory Browne—May 4, 2016

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There you have it, three pieces of advice on different aspects writing novels. Now we’d like to hear from you.

  1. Do you have any “rules” to share for writing a novel?
  2. What do you think about Kinsey Mallone’s advice for writing a mystery? What advice would you add?
  3. Do you have dreams of bestsellerdom? What keeps you writing your novel?
  4. What is the most challenging part of writing a novel, for you? What is the most enjoyable?