The Opening Chapter Reveals a Secret Vow

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A novel’s opening chapter makes a promise, a secret vow that says, “This is what you can expect from me.”

The chapters that follow better fulfill that promise, or the author will suffer the consequences with low-ratings, bad reviews, or their name on the Don’t Not Read list.

Yes, the promise is that important. It’s how we build and maintain an audience. It’s how we climb the proverbial ladder of success. It’s how we keep readers hungering for more. This solemn vow can NEVER be broken.

So far this month I’ve read three novels (all 5 stars). I average about one novel per week, along with nonfiction (craft books or true crime). None of my recent reads landed within my preferred genres of psychological thrillers, dark & gritty mysteries, and serial killer thrillers, but I feel it’s important for writers to venture outside their genres from time to time.

For my next read, I wavered between WIN by Harlen Coben or Book 2 of a serial killer thriller series from one of my auto-buy authors. I devoured Book 1 in a couple days, and I’d been dyin’ to read Book 2 for a while now, so I bought the $9.99 ebook. Immediately, the author transported me to a serial killer’s lair with the protagonist bound and helpless. I was enthralled. As I said, I’d been looking forward to this novel for a while and the opener didn’t disappoint.

Without sharing the title, I’ll show you how the writer sucked me into the scene.

Darkness.

It swirled around him deep and thick, eating the light and leaving nothing behind but an inky void. A fog choked his thoughts—the words tried to come together, tried to form a cohesive sentence, to find meaning, but the moment they seemed close, they were swallowed up and gone, replaced by a growing sense of dread, a feeling of heaviness—his body sinking into the murky depths of a long-forgotten body of water.

Moist scent.

Mildew.

Damp.

[Protagonist] wanted to open his eyes.

Had to open his eyes.

They fought him though, held tight.

His head ached, throbbed.

A pulsing pain behind his right ear—at his temple too.

“Try not to move, [Protagonist’s name]. Wouldn’t want you to get sick.”

The voice was distant, muffled, familiar.

[Protagonist] was lying down.

Cold steel beneath the tips of his fingers.

He remembered the shot then. A needle at the base of his neck, a quick stab, cold liquid rushing under his skin into the muscle, then—

Gripping, tense, love the story rhythm, the way he pauses at just the right moment. I could not flip the pages fast enough. Lovin’ every second of it!

And then…

In the next chapter, I find out it was all a dream. Infuriated, I almost whipped my Kindle across the room. One of my auto-buy authors wrote this thriller, and I expected him to fulfill the promise he made to me. Instead, he cheated. I was so disappointed, I refused to keep reading. He’d broken my trust. He let me down.

Sounds harsh, doesn’t it? But that’s exactly how I felt.

The emptiness he inflicted left me hungering for a visceral, gritty, serial killer thriller, one that would fulfill its promise.

I downloaded thriller number two.

Without revealing the title or author, here’s a small sampling of that opener.

            I woke up from a gentle shake. My sister’s face hovered a few inches above mine, her eyes glistening wet. A grinding sound came from her jaw as it moved back and forth.

I shivered.

[Sister] put her fingers against my lips. “SSSH. Nod if you understand,” she whispered.

I nodded.

My room was freezing from the cold wind blowing in through my open window.

“The monsters are coming for us. Be very quiet. We’re escaping,” she whispered.

I nodded again, biting my lip hard to not cry.

Was there a monster in my closet? Behind my closed bedroom door?

My heart thrashed against my ribs like a bird trying to escape its cage. Why were the monsters after us?

We learn the protagonist is a child and her older sister is rescuing her from an imminent threat. Other than a few writing tics, like SSSH instead of Shh…, the author did a terrific job of showing the action. Finally, I could sink into a gripping read. Or so I thought.

The next chapter (Ch. 1) consisted of pages and pages of backstory. No plot, only backstory. The premise still intrigued me, so I kept reading. Then I hit a flashback that dragged on for several pages. The worst part? It added nothing to the main storyline.

Still, because the prologue was so good, I read on. The prologue had raised many, many story questions, and I wanted answers. But in Chapter 2, I read more pages and pages of backstory and another flashback. The next chapter was equally disappointing, with more pages of backstory and a third (fourth?) flashback. I lost count.

Whiplashed from being thrown forward, then backward, I couldn’t take it anymore and closed the book. A good premise will only take you so far. At some point, you need to deliver on the promise you made to the reader.

The third novel I bought—all in same day, I might add—began with a slow burn opener. A girl is emptying a bucket of oil into the dumpster behind Burger King. It doesn’t sound like much on the surface, but the co-authors held my interest. Which, after being burned twice in a matter of hours, wasn’t an easy task.

Here’s the opening of DEAD END GIRL by L.T. Vargus & Tim McBain:

            Corduroy pants swished between Teresa’s thighs as she crossed the parking lot. She had a headache. That drive-thru headset gave her a headache every damn time. The band squeezed her skull like an old man trying to find a ripe cantaloupe in the produce department. Pressing and pressing until her temples throbbed. When the headaches were really bad, she got the aura. And it was gonna be a bad one tonight. She could already tell.

By the time she got home, she’d be nauseous from the skull throb along with the stink of fryer grease clinging to her clothes and hair and skin. Sometimes she swore she could feel it permeating her pores.

She placed a hand under the lid of the dumpster and lifted. The overhead lights in the parking lot glinted on the surface below. It looked like water, but it wasn’t. It was oil. Every night they emptied the fryers, dumping the used oil into this dumpster. It was a disgusting task. Worse than taking out the trash on a 90-degree summer day, when the flies got real thick, and the meat went rancid almost as soon as they put it in the bin.

It was dead out. No traffic. No noise at all but her fiddling with the dumpster and the bucket.

Her skin crawled a little whenever she was out here this late. In the dark. In the quiet. A feeling settled into the flesh on her back and shoulders, a cold feeling, a feeling like after watching one of those scary movies when she was a teenager. It might have been a thrill while she was watching, but later on that night she’d always get spooked. She’d tremble in bed, too terrified to walk down the hall to pee. The house never seemed so ominously still as it did on those nights. Anyhow, she couldn’t stand to watch horror movies anymore. Her weak stomach couldn’t handle the gore.

Bending over the metal cart she’d wheeled along with her, Teresa scooped one of the buckets of used fryer oil and balanced it on the edge of the dumpster. She tipped the bucket and watched as the gallons of brown grease oozed into the dumpster, disrupting the smoothness.

Settled at the bottom of the bucket, there were clumps and chunks. Burned bits of fries and chicken tender crumbs. They splatted and splashed into the pool of liquid that looked black in the night.

That’s when Teresa saw it. Something rising out of the oil, disturbing the otherwise unblemished surface.

Intriguing, right? Most importantly, the authors kept their promise. Elated, I could not flip pages fast enough, savoring favorite passages, the story rhythm and pace pitch-perfect. And now, I have a new favorite series. 🙂

Come morning, I felt bad about dissin’ my auto-buy author. Maybe he had a reason to break the don’t-open-with-a-dream rule. Could the last line of the first paragraph indicate a dream?

…his body sinking into the murky depths of a long-forgotten body of water.

In hindsight, maybe. Probably. But it’s too subtle. Nonetheless, I grabbed my Kindle and kept reading. Sure enough, he used the dream sequence to show the affect it had on the protagonist, who’s been suffering nightmares after a serial killer slipped through his grasp. The dream relates to the plot because that serial killer is back.

Do I agree with the dream opening? No, but I’ll keep reading because I know this author delivers each and every time and his writing speaks to me. But what if I wasn’t a fan? What if I’d chosen the book at random? He would’ve lost me. See what I’m sayin’? It’s a risky move.

We spend a lot of time perfecting our opening pages, polishing them till they shine, but our job doesn’t end there. We must follow through in subsequent chapters by setting up scenes, paying them off, setting up more, paying off more.

Other than that crucial promise, your solemn vow to the reader, a few other takeaways are…

  • Don’t start with a dream sequence unless the reader knows it’s a dream AND you’ve got a damn good reason to do it.
  • Go easy with backstory. Sprinkled it in over time.
  • Avoid flashbacks unless they’re absolutely necessary. Most times they’re not.
  • Don’t tell the reader what happened in the past. Trust us to figure it out on our own.
  • A great premise only works if you deliver on that promise.
  • If a slow burn opener works for your story, use it. Every novel doesn’t need a lightning-fast opener to draw and hold interest.

If you missed Jim’s post yesterday, read it (and the comment section!) for speed bumps that stop the reader.

How many chapters do you read before giving up on a novel?

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Three Things That Bugged Me in a Book

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Terry’s recent post observed, “As writers, we don’t read the same way ‘normal’ people do. We have internal editors who insist on reading along with us and shouting their opinions.” That’s because we are attuned to the craft; we know the rules guidelines that should not be broken ignored lest we “pull” the reader out of the story. 

Often these are little things. I call them speed bumps. The more there are along the story road, the less the reader will enjoy the ride. Much of my teaching is devoted to speed bump removal. The downside is that it’s harder for me to read just for pleasure. I can’t help lingering over the bumps I encounter and imagining ways they could have been eliminated. 

This happened recently when I went back to re-read a novel in a popular series. I was only a few pages in when I got majorly bugged by something:

1. An eating scene that defies the laws of physics (and has no conflict)

In the first chapter the series hero sits down to dine with a client. A waitress comes to the table, takes their order and leaves. The two principals chat a bit. The speedy waitress returns with drinks. More chatting (about 30 seconds worth in read-aloud time) and the world’s fastest waitress, apparently working with the world’s fastest chef, came with our filets.

Another chat session (1 minute, 23 seconds) during which one character takes one bite of filet. Then: The waitress came to clear our dishes. We ordered creme brulee for dessert.

There follows two lines of dialogue. Two! Five seconds in real-world time. Then: The waitress came with the creme brulee. 

Gadzooks! This waitress must be the only human to break the land speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats…without a car!

Forty-three seconds more of chatting, then: My creme brulee was gone.

Holy Coneheads! These character must eat like this:

I’m sure many a reader would notice the same thing. Maybe not enough to toss the book aside, but it is so unnecessary and so easily fixed! Just a few lines of narrative summary sprinkled throughout would have sufficed. Something like: We lingered over our filets, talking about her past, her ex-husband, and the train she missed in Paris. By the time we were ready to order dessert, I thought I knew her as well as my own sister.

Plus, all the dialogue was friendly and informational. No conflict or tension. Thus, boring. Again, it would have been so easy to add a little argument, a disagreement, a bad vibe. (See my further notes on eating scenes.)

I read on, and got a feeling that bugged me further:

2. Phoning it in

“To phone it in means to make the least effort possible, to do something without enthusiasm. The expression phone it in is American, and seems to have originally been connected to the theater and acting. During the early 1930s, a popular joke among theater actors alluded to having a role that was so small it was possible to call on the phone, rather than appear on the stage in person.”

When a series gets hugely popular, and both author and publisher know that any new book will automatically hit the top of the bestseller list, it becomes a temptation to phone it in. Put in the minimum effort and still rake in the dough. I once sat next to an author of this profile at a book signing event featuring several writers—known (him) and unknown (me). Since he was so prolific, I asked him about his work habits. He told me he writes a one-page outline and sends it to his publisher so they will send the rest of the advance. He then ignores the outline and takes a couple of weeks to dictate a book aboard his yacht. That’s about as close to phoning it in as you can get. And it is noticeable. The later books show it.

Look, there’s nothing illegal about not putting in the effort to write the best book you can, and still make bank. Heck, that may even be somebody’s version of the American dream. But it bugs me.

And so does this:

3. The superfluous said

I admit the following is only a tiny speed bump, but it’s still a bump that doesn’t need to be there. So why have it at all? This is from the same novel, the third chapter, which is yet another eating scene:

The waitress came to our table with a coffee pot. “Coffee?” she said.

Well, who else would have said it? When you have an action beat before or after the dialogue, you don’t need the attribution.

“Take it away!” she said, waving her arms.

Better: “Take it away!” She waved her arms.

Or: She waved her arms. “Take it away!”

Brock plopped in a chair. “Whattaya want with me?” he asked. 

Better: Brock plopped in a chair. “Whattaya want with me?”

Now, I like said. It’s a workhorse that does its job and gets out of the way. It’s just as much a mistake to never use said (only action beats all the time wear a reader out) as it is to use it needlessly.

So don’t do that, or I’ll get bugged.

There. I feel better now.

What little things bug you when you see them in a book?

Pace Yourselves

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I was watching a movie the other night that should have been great, but the pacing was so slow I hit the pause button. “This movie is making me want to drink.”

The Bride raised an eyebrow. “You have a gin and tonic in your hand right now.”

“I need another one to stay awake.”

“No, you need a break to get up, and while you’re there, pour me a glass of wine, please. Let’s finish this tomorrow.”

She was absolutely right, and we did. Despite two of my favorite actors, what should have been a good movie was damaged because so many useless scenes should have been left on the cutting room floor.

I know this blog is about writing, but someone wrote that script that became a movie. Now I know how hard it is to write a screenplay. I wrote one myself that’s under consideration (read “it’ll never be filmed” here), and it was one of the hardest projects I’ve ever undertaken. That’s because I distilled my first 350-page novel, The Rock Hole, down into 130 narrow pages. The industry standard has been 120 pages, but I simply couldn’t tighten it up any more without losing the essence of the novel. One thing I did though was to maintain the pace, which brings us to what is essential in a novel.

Let me repeat that, pacing, which is the process of discovery.

Pacing is the speed at which a story unfolds, the rhythm and flow. Consider a roller coaster. There are times the train moves slow, the rise to the crest of the ride, and then the fall of plot points and events which should be fast enough to keep us turning the pages until we  rise again in anticipation of the next drop and ultimately, the final rush into the climax.

In other words, it’s how fast your story unfolds to the reader.

Let’s jump back to movies for a moment and look at two films about the same subject that released within months of each other, Tombstone, directed by its star Kurt Russell, and Wyatt Earp, directed by its star Kevin Costner.

Both are about the Earp brothers and the ultimate shootout at the O.K. Corral, but their pacing is dramatically different. Tombstone moves fast. Even what might be considered a slow scene passes quickly because of either action or humor, or a combination of both.

In Costner’s three and a half our hour film, Wyatt Earp, we find a movie dedicated to history and character development. He emphasizes Wyatt’s younger years and tells us how he eventually became the man he was, and the drive that sent him to Tombstone…

…and in the movie of the same name that lasts two hours and fifteen minutes, Kurt Russell utilizes a rule all authors should learn, show, don’t tell. He doesn’t give us half an hour of slow moving angst and backstory, he picks up the action almost at the outset and takes us for a satisfying roller coaster ride.

An interesting point is that the original Tombstone screenplay was so long it could have been a limited miniseries, but Russell understands what viewers want in a theatrical release and left huge chunks of already-filmed dialogue and character development on the floor.

It’s the same thing John Wayne learned from his legendary mentor, John Ford.

Keep it moving.

Tombstone works because he shows us instead of telling us, and unfolds the story with efficiency and a measured tempo. He keeps it moving.

How about another example, this time between mysteries and thrillers? A mystery usually advances with slower steps. We don’t know who the bad guy or killer is, so we follow the clues as the protagonist unravels a tangled web of suspects or motives until the end where it is all revealed. It’s a detailed process that some revel in, while other readers aren’t that detail oriented.

Thrillers are like that aforementioned roller coaster ride. We usually know who the bad guy is near the outset of the story, but we hang on for the ride until the end and justice (hopefully) prevails.

In my opinion, there are a couple of musts that have to be included in a well-written novel and of course one is tempo. Each chapter must push the story forward (pacing again), but it must have enough elements to keep the reader engaged. If you lose a reader because the story moves to slow, you’ll likely lost them before the end.

And things have to move , maybe not at hyper speed, but enough keep a reader interested. One of my favorite methods of driving the story forward and keeping someone turning the page is the use of short chapters. I grew up reading chapters that took days to push through, and often lost my place when I had to put the book down, or because there was wayyyy too much included in that one chapter (read Costner’s Wyatt Earp here again).

I love short, quick chapters and use them to effect. Then, as the action speeds up in the third act, I’ll shorten them even more, sometimes to only a page. This leaves the reader’s heart pounding, breathless (we hope) and ready to move on to the next chapter to see what happens next.

Consider this, many people like to read a night in bed. Slow, ponderous chapters and pacing will keep their interest until the Sandman comes in and throws his grains around, but short chapters will make the reader flip ahead and think, “Hey, this next one’s short. I can read another.”

Then another.

Flip.

Short chapter.

How fast did you hit those three extremely short chapters above?

Now we have velocity and the reader stops checking the length of those chapters, caught up in the story’s drive and pushes ahead. “I can finish this before I go to sleep.”

Do you want your fans to mark their place, put that book on the nightstand and turn out the light, or create a fast-paced novel that drives them to stay up until one in the morning because they can’t put it down?

Here’s my answer. I’ll watch Tombstone every time it’s on, and to the end, because it’s engaging. I simply can’t watch much more of Wyatt Earp other than the shootout at the corral. Why? Because. It. Moves. Slow.

So pace yourselves.

 

Reader Friday: What Subjects Are You Passionate About?

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Last Tuesday marked the start of a new endeavor for me: teaching a 5-week course on serial killers. I never tire of the subject. To some, it may seem like a strange passion/obsession, but all aspects of murder and forensics fascinate me.

Apart from the craft of writing, what subject(s) are you passionate about?

Ya Gotta Wanna

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“Ya gotta wanna,” isn’t exactly what you’d expect from a highly achieved man’s mouth. However, that’s exactly what multi-billionaire Jim Pattison said when asked for his key to success.

Jimmy, as Mr. Pattison is affectionally known around his home city of Vancouver, British Columbia, is the self-made, sole owner of the Jim Pattison Group. It’s a diverse empire employing 48,000 people in businesses like supermarkets, soft drink manufacturing, auto dealing, forestry, fishing, magazines, outdoor advertising, and theme parks. Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and The Guinness Book Of Records are two Pattison holdings. Forbes lists the 93-year-old’s personal net worth at $10.2 billion.

Jim Pattison

Jimmy Pattison is a philanthropist. He’s donated millions of dollars to hundreds of causes, yet the most valuable give-away he has is business guidance to others. I believe writers, like us, can learn from folks like Jimmy Pattison. Here’s an expansion of his “you gotta wanna” quote:

“At the end of the day, you have to want it. You have to have a deep desire to keep moving forward in the face of opposition. You have to have fire in your belly that keeps you focused on the task at hand and on the goal ahead so you don’t give up. If we don’t have passion to persevere, we will not succeed. Those who don’t ‘wanna’ end up giving up. And remember, failure isn’t falling down. It’s refusing to get back up again.”

I’ve never met Jimmy Pattison, but I’d have to say he’s a mentor. So is Napoleon Hill (long deceased) who authored Think And Grow Rich—one of the most influential self help books of all time. One of Napoleon Hill’s seventeen success principles is having a definite purpose backed by a burning desire to achieve it. It’s a guiding force driving my current WIP.

My definite purpose—my wanna—is creating the series titled City Of Danger. It’s a concept long brewing in my mind but activated by a chance opportunity with the film industry. I committed to City Of Danger on April 7, 2021 and steadily worked on developing it for the last ten months. I expect the pilot episode releasing this summer.

Regardless if this project gets green lit on screen, I’m retaining ebook, print, audio, and foreign translation rights. To give you an idea of the concept, the logline is A modern city in crisis enlists two private detectives from its 1920s past to dispense street justice and restore social order. You can read a bit more about City Of Danger on my website.

When I started the project, I realized I knew little to nothing about the film industry—at least not about content production. I immersed in screenwriting lessons, and the best value I got was from an online course called Immersed In Story with tutor Anne Helmstadter. If you check out Anne’s home page, you’ll see a testimonial I did for her.

This screenwriting course was the best money and time investment I could have made when I started City Of Danger. At the course’s opening, Anne had me write out why I wanted to create this series. Writing out my definite purpose—my burning desire—gave me the clarity and motivation to keep moving forward. Call it my gotta wanna spirit.

I read this affirmation every day. It’s very personal, but I’d like to share it with others here at the Kill Zone so my ongoing experience can possibly benefit others. Here goes:

Motivation for Writing City Of Danger Series

What’s old is new again. I believe there’s a resurgence coming in hardboiled detective crime fiction. I see this as the right timing for a leading-edge product that capitalizes on successful series like The Wire, Dragnet, etc. as well on diverse HB storytellers like Leonard, Spillane, Hammett, Chandler, Paretsky, and Connelly. Yet, this takes an entirely new approach in blending the 1920s and the 2020s. I see this as a niche-base market for episodal ebooks, print, video streaming, and audio with a large audience resonance.

I’m writing City Of Danger for these reasons:

  1. Financial — I want to make decent money from this project.
  2. Sense of Purpose — I want to be creative and constantly moving.
  3. Sense of Accomplishment — I want to have something to show from this. (A social statement.)
  4. Recognition — I want my family, friends, fellow writers, and audience to know.
  5. Learning — I want to learn from this and take my craft to the next level.
  6. Opportunity — I want this project to lead me to new and influential people.
  7. Legacy — I want to leave something behind that others can enjoy and benefit from.

In summation, City Of Danger is about creating a unique and valuable consumer product that I can enjoy building and be compensated for in these seven ways.

I want to create this.

Garry Rodgers

April 7, 2021

How about you Kill Zoners? How badly do you want what you’re pursuing? Have you written an affirmation? Have you defined “success” for yourself?

I trust your want includes family, friends, faith, your contribution to the community, and your purpose in life—and isn’t just about money. But however you define success, you gotta wanna.

——

Garry Rodgers is a retired homicide detective with a second career as a coroner. In all, Garry has over three decades in the human death investigation business. Now, he’s reinvented himself as a crime writer and indie publisher who’s experimenting in other storytelling mediums.

Vancouver Island is home to Garry Rodgers where he spends a lot of time cruising the Pacific saltwater. While he’s never seen Jimmy Pattison in person, he’s been broadside the Pattison yacht, Nova Spirit, many times.

Jim Pattison’s Nova Spirit

Rules? Who Needs Rules?

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Rules? Who Needs Rules?
Terry Odell

Rules in WritingAs writers, we don’t read the same way “normal” people do. We have internal editors who insist on reading along with us and shouting their opinions.

  • She’s used that word five times on this page.
  • Look at all the filler words.
  • That sentence would flow better if the clauses were reversed.
  • What a fantastic metaphor. Why don’t you use it in your next book?
  • A narrator would hate that alliteration, but it works for the written word.

And so on, and so on.

I’ve belonged to several book clubs. I find it enlightening to see what resonates with the members, as well as what turns them off. Every once in a while, we even agree. I’m usually the odd woman out, since I don’t read much “literary” fiction. Or, a sub-genre I was unaware of, “book club fiction.”

I recall pointing out that an author was pulling me out of the story because they had more than one character acting in a paragraph, so it was hard to tell who was speaking. The rule I learned was that the speaker owns the paragraph. One of the club members looked at me, eyes widened in surprise.

“I never knew that,” she said. She wasn’t the only one. The knowledge, or more accurately, lack thereof, doesn’t keep them from enjoying the story.

Recently, I downloaded a book. It was a freebie, so I didn’t look at a sample first. The author, for whatever reason, had opted to do away with quotation marks. Instead, dialogue began with a dash and ended with a paragraph return. No beats or tags to accompany the dialogue.

Now, maybe language is changing, and maybe the ‘rules’ we are taught are changing as well, but one “rule” I try to follow is:

Don’t Do Anything To Pull The Reader Out Of The Story.

And for me, seeing dashes, figuring out they represented dialogue, and trying to figure out who was talking yanked me out like the guy with the hook in a melodrama.

Why did the author choose to make their own rules? I don’t know. Liked gimmicks? Wanted to be clever? To rebel against convention?

Or is this a case of Learn the rules, then break them?

Short of finding the author’s contact information and asking, I have no idea.

What are your thoughts, TKZers? Are you a “rules were made to be broken” sort of writer, or do you prefer to stick with convention? Would you have trouble reading a book that threw basics like the rules of punctuating dialogue off the cliff? Have you read anything where a blatant deviation of “normal” pulled you out of the story? Enticed you to read more? Made you consider trying it?

And now, a total digression, but I’m curious.
Wordle? Yes or No?
Reacher on Prime? Yes or No?
Olympics? Yes or No?

On a personal note, I will be heading off on a bucket list trip next week and cyberspace access will be extremely limited in Antarctica. I have guests filling in for my posting days, but if I’m not participating in discussions for several weeks, that’s why.

In the Crosshairs by Terry OdellAvailable Now. In the Crosshairs, Book 4 in my Triple-D Romantic Suspense series.

Changing Your Life Won’t Make Things Easier
There’s more to ranch life than minding cattle. After his stint as an army Ranger, Frank Wembly loves the peaceful life as a cowboy.

Financial advisor Kiera O’Leary sets off to pursue her dream of being a photographer until a car-meets-cow incident forces a shift in plans. Instead, she finds herself in the middle of a mystery, one with potentially deadly consequences.

Terry Odell is an award-winning author of Mystery and Romantic Suspense, although she prefers to think of them all as “Mysteries with Relationships.”

Interview with Randy Ingermanson – The Snowflake Guy

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By

Debbie Burke

@burke_writer

 

Randy Ingermanson AKA the Snowflake Guy

Brilliant people understand complex concepts. But, despite their superior intelligence, they often cannot explain those concepts to less-than-brilliant folks.

But Randy Ingermanson can. He’s brilliant but he has a simple way of breaking down the incomprehensible so we mere mortals understand what he’s talking about.

For those who don’t know Randy, he has a PhD in physics specializing in elementary particle theory. According to the bio on his website: “Most of my work was in nonperturbative methods in quantum field theory.”

Did that lose you? Yeah, me too.

When I Googled nonperturbative, I recognized three words in the definition: cannot be described. That’s for sure!

Yet…Randy, in his spare time, became a successful author of fiction and nonfiction as well as a sought-after writing instructor. His two-book Snowflake series and Writing Fiction for Dummies still remain in the top 100 writing reference books on Amazon many years after they were published.

Randy has the extraordinary ability to break down complex writing concepts into easily digestible bites. In addition, his step-by-step plan of action template helps writers track and accomplish their goals.

Randy graciously agreed to chat with us here on TKZ. Welcome, Randy!

Debbie Burke: Your day job as a physicist requires a lot of brain energy. You also keep up the Advanced Fiction Writing blog and write bestselling craft books. Plus you write multiple fiction series, some involving extensive historical research, including archaeological digs. And you have a family. Do you ever sleep?

Joking aside, your ability to juggle multiple projects is impressive. Can you share some hints on how you manage your time and prioritize tasks?

Randy Ingermanson: For a big chunk of my life, I didn’t manage my time very well. I took on too many things and then felt really stressed. But things began to change about 15 years ago when I read David Allen’s classic book Getting Things Done. I realized that I was doing things badly, and that’s the first step to doing things better.

One key thing I’ve learned is that sometimes you just have to prune things out of your life. That’s very hard, but over the last several years, I’ve cut back several parts of my life that I thought were essential. And nobody died. I have a theory that everyone has a set limit to the number of main projects they can juggle. My limit is three. Some people can do four, and I admire them to death, but I can’t do it.

Another key thing I’ve learned is that it’s OK to have a hundred things on your To-Do List, as long as they’re not all visible right now. So I have a cascading sequence of To-Do Lists, one for “Someday”, one for “This Year,” “This Quarter,” This Month,” “This Week,” and “Today.” Every Sunday, I review the lists and promote some tasks from “This Month” to “This Week”. Every day, I choose things from “This Week” to put on the “Today” list. The beauty of this is that a day is a success if I knock off all the things on the Today list. I only have to look at those 15 items and decide which to do next. I don’t have to look at the dozens or hundreds on This Week or This Month or This Year. Those will all get done in due time, but the name of the game is to not be overwhelmed. When you get overwhelmed, your brain goes into panic mode, you spend all day spinning your wheels, and you end up eating all the Haagen-Dazs.

I use a nifty method called “Kanban” to manage my tasks. (This is very popular among software developers.) There are a bunch of websites that let you set up Kanban projects. The one I use is at Kanbanflow.com, and it works for me. But I recommend that people always use a tool that resonates with them.

DB: Writing a novel is a hard project. You have a wonderfully workable system for how to tackle hard projects. Can you explain the steps in that system?

RI: I wrote a blog post awhile back on the general problem of managing any hard project. I’ll refer your readers to that post here: https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/blog/2021/01/21/how-to-make-an-action-plan/

I’ve gotten extremely famous for my system for managing one particular hard project—writing the first draft of your novel. The “Snowflake Method” will probably be listed on my headstone. It’s a ten-step method I use for writing my first draft. I wrote out the ten steps back around 2002 in answer to a question somebody asked in an online writing group I was on. And some people liked the idea enough that I posted it on my website. And then it just took off. It’s now been viewed more than 6 million times and has earned me a ridiculous amount of money.

The core idea is that you design a novel before you write it. Some people hate this idea and would rather just write by the seat of their pants. That’s fine by me. Different people are wired different in the brain, and it doesn’t matter how you get your first draft down on paper. We all can respect each other and recognize that we don’t all think alike. The Snowflake Method happens to work well for about a third of the writing population.

You start by taking an hour to write down a summary sentence for your story. This will be your selling tool forever, so it makes sense to take a little time to do it. But don’t spend weeks obsessing on this. Write down your best one-sentence summary for now and then move on to the next step. You can always come back and improve it later. In fact, you certainly will.

The Snowflake Method has another nine steps, and I don’t have space to even summarize them here. But anyone can Google “Snowflake Method” and find my 3000-word web article or my 50,000 word book on the subject. If you like to know approximately where you’re going before you start writing, then the Snowflake Method is designed for you. If you don’t, then it’s not for you.

 

 

DB: Most authors dread marketing. What do you recommend as the most important marketing tools for a writer?

RI: I used to hate marketing. In fact, I remember the day I told an agent friend of mine, “I hate marketing! I’m a terrible marketer, and I don’t ever want to have to market my books again!” She got a panicky look on her face and told me not to say such things out loud, because the walls have ears. And she was right.

I now believe there are three main keys to good marketing for a novelist. I call them the Three Rings of Power. They are:

  • Your website
  • Your email newsletter
  • Paid advertising

Your website is important because you own it. Social media is notoriously fickle, and any social media platform can suddenly become unusable, for a variety of reasons. Various platforms can ban you, or go out of fashion, or start charging you. But you own your website and it’s very hard to take it away from you.

Ditto for your email newsletter. If you have a newsletter with 5000 loyal readers who know you and actually read what you send, you have a guaranteed bestseller, every time you launch a book. That’s gold.

Paid advertising is now just a fact of life. None of us like paying for ads, but they work. If you use Amazon ads and Facebook ads and BookBub ads and the various book promo sites effectively, you can move copies with a positive return-on-investment. I think TikTok will soon join this short list of paid-ad opportunities that authors routinely use.

So the Three Rings of Power are great, and I personally have done extremely well using them. However …

However, a lot of authors don’t see a good return on their investment for their website, their email newsletter, and their paid ads. Why not? Do the marketing gods hate them?

No, the reason is very simple. The Three Rings of Power are useless unless you also master the One Ring that Rule Them All. That One Ring is copywriting. The ability to write good headlines, strong sales copy, and a compelling call-to-action, all without smelling like a weasel. This is a fine line to walk, but once you learn it, you can apply it everywhere. To your website. Your newsletter. Your paid ads. And away you go.

As it happens, I began to learn copywriting shortly after I had my “I hate marketing” conversation with my agent friend. And that has made all the difference for me. In some sense you make your own luck in marketing, and my luck changed permanently when I took the time to learn how to write copy.

Copywriting is not particularly sexy or fun. But if you go to Amazon and do a search for books on copywriting, you’ll find any number of sources that will teach you the fundamentals. And then you just need to go do it, determined to learn it, no matter what.

Learn copywriting, and the Three Rings of Power are your servants, not your masters. Many Bothans died to bring me this secret.

DB: What are you working on currently?

RI: I read Steven Kotler’s book The Art of Impossible back in October, and it revolutionized my thinking. I decided that for the next few years, I’m going to focus on fewer things and do them better. I have a day job doing image analysis for a biotech company in San Diego, and that consumes half my life, because it’s a half-time job. I am currently writing a series of historical novels on the most influential person ever to walk the planet, Jesus of Nazareth, and that’s going to take me another three or four years to finish. And I’m working on a project I call “Project Chronologicus” that will combine my mathematical/computer skills with my interest in ancient history—it’s a project to harvest historical data from ancient documents and compute the best-fit chronology for ancient history. (This is a notoriously hard problem, too difficult for any human to solve without a computer; but my whole career has been spent solving problems humans can’t solve alone, so I may possibly be able to write the software to solve this one. And if not, I’ll have fun.)

 DB: Is there anything else you’d like to add? Any questions you wish I’d asked?

RI:  As Gandalf once said, you don’t know your danger when you ask a hobbit such a question, because the hobbit will go on endlessly. This hobbit will have mercy on you and just say no.

~~~

Randy, feel free to go on endlessly with all the knowledge you have to impart to writers! Thanks for visiting The Zone!

Randy’s Snowflake series

Advanced Fiction Writing blog

Randy’s website

~~~

TKZers: Have you tried the Snowflake method of plotting?

Please share your best tips for time management for writers.

Our Love Affair With Books

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“Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.”

                       — Arnold Lobel

Lately, I’ve been reading For the Love of Books by Graham Tarrant, and it occurred to me that this was an excellent subject for a Valentine’s Day post. Much of what follows I gleaned from that book.

***

A brief history of tomes. Books have been around for thousands of years, of course, but they weren’t for everybody. Some of the first ones were the real hardbacks – clay tablets that were inscribed and then dried in the sun. Durable, but not terribly convenient.

Next came the scrolls written on papyrus. The Egyptians and Greeks liked this medium. But leave it to the Romans to come up with something useful: the codex written on individual pages of parchment or vellum and attached along one edge so that pages could be turned.

In the Middle Ages, books were still confined to the elite classes of priests, scribes, and nobility. Monasteries housed buildings or rooms called scriptoria where monks laboriously hand-copied texts. Often the books in the scriptorium were chained to the shelves so they couldn’t be stolen. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco is set in such a location.

The printing press. Then came Johannes Gutenberg and everything changed. His invention of the printing press along with his process for mass-producing movable metal type, provided an economical means for the mass production of printed books for the first time. Many scholars consider Gutenberg’s printing press to be the single most significant invention of the second millennium CE. The Age of Information had begun.

Because of Gutenberg’s invention, books were not only produced in great quantities, they began to be printed in the vernacular languages rather than just Latin. Literacy spread. Knowledge and ideas became available to the common man and woman through books. Some of the works produced in this early era were the King James Bible (1611), First Folio (1623), a collection of Shakespeare’s plays, and Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) in which the scientist explained his laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation.

By the eighteenth century, demand for books was so widespread that subscription libraries sprang up in Europe, and soon after public libraries came into being. Books were now available for all.

The novel. The novel adventure began with Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes which was published in 1605. It’s considered to be the first great modern novel.

As we fly through the next centuries, we find Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1837), and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

Closer to the TKZ home front, the first modern detective story was Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue short story (1841). However, Wilkie Collins lays claim to the first mystery novel, The Woman in White (1859), and the first detective novel, The Moonstone (1868).

It seemed that people couldn’t get enough of books. In 1935, Penguin Books became the first mass-market paperback endeavor. One of its first ten published works was The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie.

Soon paperbacks became so popular and inexpensive they could be found in drug stores and newspaper stands in addition to libraries and book stores. Detective stories and crime novels were especially popular and made authors like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Erle Stanley Gardner household names.

Today our books come in hardback, paperback, digital print, or audio, and the publishing industry continues to grow.

***

So that tells a little of what happened over the last few millennia, but the question remains: Why do we love books so much? Is it the desire to acquire knowledge or increase understanding of times and places we can’t experience ourselves? Perhaps it’s just to be entertained. Personally, I believe the best books are those that make us think and feel, that make us go beyond ourselves to empathize.

Consider this small group of novels that all deal with young women growing up in vastly different circumstances:

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen shares her humorous tale of Elizabeth Bennet growing up in manners-conscious England during the early 19th century.

To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee tells the riveting story of young Scout Finch learning hard lessons about life as she comes of age in a small town in Alabama during the Great Depression.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith captures the joys and heartbreaks of Francie Nolan growing up in difficult circumstances in early 20th-century Brooklyn.

West with the Night – Beryl Markham captivates the reader with this memoir of her adventurous life in the wilds of Kenya during the first half of the 20th century.

Although these four books differ in times and places, they each resonate with themes of family, community, adversity, and determination. The circumstances and personalities of the main characters may be different in each book, but the stories enable us to see ourselves in them. Such books influence who we are and how we interact with the world around us. No wonder we love them so.

***

How many books are there? As of Thursday, August 5, 2010 at 8:26 AM, the Google Books Project counted 129,864,880 unique books. According to a November 2021 article on Market Research Telecast, that figure had grown to about 170,000,000 by 2019.

I don’t know how many books there are today, but I’m honored to have friends who have added to that total, and I’m happy that I’ve contributed a few myself.

***

TKZers: What books do you love? Why do you think people love to read? What books should I have added to this post that I missed?

Write Diamonds

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

We are, of course, flooded with books these days. The Forbidden City still puts out product. The indie output is a veritable tsunami that swells ever larger each day. While most of it is bad (per Sturgeon’s Law), there is also a sizable chunk that is competent, even good.

Which is not enough to make it in this game. You’ve got to strive for unforgettable. You’ve got to write diamonds that sparkle through the rock piles and gravel pits of content.

Emotional intensity is one ingredient that will help get you there.

There’s an axiom attributed to Robert Frost: No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. That is another way of saying you must feel deeply as you write your story, and transfer that feeling to the readers.

Let me offer some tips.

1. Feel it

In my theater days I learned a technique handed down from legendary acting teacher Konstantin Stanislavsky. It’s called “emotion memory.” You think back to a time when you felt the emotion you want to convey in a scene. Get in a quiet place and recreate the memory with all its sensory data. That means what you saw, smelled, touched, heard and tasted.

As you recall these sensations you will discover that the emotion wells up afresh within you. The sense memories are causing you to experience the emotion as if it were happening in the present.

With a little practice you’ll be able to call up emotions as you need them when you’re about to write a scene.

2. Improvise

Invite your characters to play around. Take a seat in the movie theater of your mind and watch what happens.

Close your eyes and conjure up a character. Set the scene, whatever pops into your head.

Follow the character. How does she move? What is she wearing? How does she react to the setting?

Now give her a reason for being in the scene. Where is she going? Why? Have her turn to the “audience” and say exactly what she’s after. Make that hugely important to her.

[Note: this is not an actual scene for your novel (unless you choose to use it). This is a scene to get to know your character more deeply. Let it surprise you.]

With your character on the way toward a goal, introduce another character into your scene, someone who will be the opposition.

Watch the scene unfold. Don’t try to control it. Let emotions run rampant. Have the characters struggle and fight. Where’s the passion?

The late Stephen J. Cannell, author of the Shane Scully series, said, “I’m a visceral writer. I do improvs through the books. I become the characters. I’ll say something as Shane, then I’ll say something as [his wife] Alexa. And it’ll tick me off. And I’ll react to that. I have to know what my characters want and I have to feel things. That’s part of the fun of it for me.”

Stay attuned also to images that will begin to arise in your imagination at odd times. E. L. Doctorow said he was feeing a “heightened sense of emotion” when visiting the Adirondacks after many years. He saw a sign that read Loon Lake. He liked the sound of the words together, and then a flood of images washed over him—a private train at night going through the Adirondacks; gangsters onboard; a beautiful girl holding a white dress in front of a mirror. He had no idea what the images meant, but started writing about them anyway.

Improvisational images will lead to story material pulsating with emotion.

3. Plan

Let your left brain pitch in and help. Ask some key questions before you write a scene:

– Who is the viewpoint character in this scene?

– What does he want?

– Why can’t he have it? Who or what is opposing him?

– What obstacles are placed in his way?

– What strategy will he use to get what he wants?

– What surprises can happen that will lead to emotional turmoil and the necessity for new plans?

4. Write

Write your scenes as fast as you comfortably can. This is not the time for editorial decisions. Get the words down and overwrite the emotional moments. Let yourself go! Get inside that character. Now, come back to this scene the next day and edit things down to where they feel right. You might only retain a line or two, but because you found them in the overwriting they’ll be choice.

5. Finish, Cut, and Polish

Write on. Keep the momentum. Finish the dang novel!

If you’ve written with emotion your draft will be a raw gem of great value. Now finish the job like an expert diamond cutter. This is the editing process, which I cover in some detail here. Another book I recommend is Donald Maass’s The Emotional Craft of Fiction.

My final step is always a polish—I look one more time at scene openings and endings, and long dialogue exchanges (where a trim here and there makes a big difference).

Diamonds are formed by heat. So is great fiction. Feel your characters and plots intensely to produce a precious stone. Then cut and polish. That’s how your fiction will stand out from the pile of the merely competent.

What are some of the ways you bring emotion to your pages?

Abraham Lincoln and the 3 Rs

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Abraham Lincoln and the Three Rs

Reading, Writing, and…Remedy

By Steve Hooley

Today is Lincoln’s birthday. He was born on 2/12/1809, 213 years ago. Ten score and thirteen years ago.

“Writing—the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye—is the great invention of the world.” (Abraham Lincoln)

Lincoln is known for his voracious reading, his tenacious will to learn and overcome his single year of formal education, and his eloquent prose, both written and spoken. I thought that in honor of our 16th president and his 213th birthday, it would be a good day to be inspired by his reading and writing remedy plan.

Below are some of the key paragraphs in an article in Harvard University Press, 2/12/2019 on Lincoln and his reading and writing habits, and in review of The Annotated Lincoln by Harold Holzer and Thomas A. Horrocks.

  1. Know your weakness and commit to rigorous self-education.

“That Lincoln would come to be celebrated after his death as one of this nation’s greatest writers would have surprised and perhaps shocked some of the well-educated contemporaries who saw the living Lincoln as a man lacking the accoutrements of refinement, as nothing more than a country bumpkin who spoke like a hayseed and wrote like a yokel completely ignorant of the fundamentals of grammar. Lincoln, of course, was always aware of those who underestimated his intelligence and talents. As a young man, painfully conscious of his intellectual deficiencies, Lincoln committed himself to a rigorous course of self-education, so that by the time he reached middle age he possessed a steely inner confidence in his ability to hold his own intellectually with his more refined and better-educated peers.”

       2. Prepare for prolonged, persistent study and practice.

“Lincoln’s ability to write the eloquent prose for which he became famous developed over time, gradually enhanced through strenuous practice and constantly reinforced through his active reading habits. After Lincoln’s death, his stepmother recalled Lincoln’s fascination with words and their meaning when he was young: ‘Abe read all the books he could lay his hands on — and when he came across a passage that struck him he would write it down on boards if he had no paper & keep it there till he did get paper — then he would re-write it — look at it repeat it — He had a copy book — a kind of scrap book in which he would put down all things and this preserved them.’”

  1. Reap the rewards of self-study.

“Lincoln’s writing skills in his mature years were primarily influenced by his youthful reading habits. His early reading tended to be intensive rather than extensive. Since books were scarce on the frontier, he would have read a few books more than once, memorizing much of what he read.”

  1. Practice, practice, and practice.

“Lincoln spoke not only from conviction but also from personal experience. In regard to writing — even writing about writing — Lincoln stands as one of its most inspired practitioners. From his earliest scribblings as a teenager to his final memoranda on the day he went to Ford’s Theatre, Abraham Lincoln may have spent more time writing — most of it wisely and memorably — than performing any other task.”

  1. Success and eloquence.

“No American president before or since has faced the problems that confronted Abraham Lincoln when he took office in 1861. Nor has any president expressed himself with such eloquence on issues of great moment. Lincoln’s writings reveal the depth of his thought and feeling and the sincerity of his convictions as he weighed the cost of freedom and preserving the Union.”

 In summary, Abraham Lincoln is an inspiration to us as both readers and writers. His desire to learn, his willingness to overcome adversity, his determination to practice and improve himself, should inspire us to never stop reading and learning, and to never stop writing and practicing.

Addendum: When I began writing this post, I set out to review Lincoln’s reading habits. What I came away with was a new-found respect for someone with a humble beginning who, through self-study and diligence, achieved success that blessed an entire country. The information created the shape of the post.

If this self-study program sounds vaguely familiar, check last Sunday’s post, and go back and reread the second section (Self-study) of Chapter 5 (Keys to a Winning System) of How to Make a Living as a Writer, James Scott Bell.

 

Okay, TKZ community, it’s your turn.

  1. What writer(s) has (have) most inspired you to read/learn/write?
  2. How do you divide your time between reading nonfiction and fiction?
  3. What one area of writing do you intend to focus on and study in 2022?