Do you write under a pen name? If so,why, and how did you choose that name? If not, are there any circumstances under which you’d consider using a pen name?
Could Ian Fleming Get Published Today?
By Elaine Viets
Does your mind wander when you read the hot new thriller? Does that blockbuster mystery sag worse than a flophouse couch?
Yep, I’ve been running into lots of those: Highly touted bestsellers that make excellent doorstops.
This isn’t about how to fix the sagging middle in your novels. It’s a question about what causes them:
Are modern mysteries too long? Are we forced to produce bloated books?
Most commercial mysteries are 75,000 words or so. The average mystery weighs in at about 325 pages. Many are twice that size.
But thrillers and mysteries didn’t used to be so big. Once they were as slender as that deadly dame in black. Many Golden Age mysteries were 150 to 200 pages LESS than today’s mysteries.
Raymond Chandler’s The High Window was a scrawny 206 pages when it was published by Pocket Books in 1945. Curt Cannon’s I Like ’Em Tough (“Me?” he says, “I’m a down-and-out private eye with nothing to lose”) delivered 143 action-packed pages a princely 25 cents in 1958. Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale was 144 pages in 1953.
Makes you wonder if Fleming’s spy classic could be published today.
Or would an editor tell him, “Nice story, Ian, but you need to flesh it out a bit. Maybe add another subplot. Or get more of Vesper’s life before she met Bond to justify her actions. And we know almost nothing about Bond’s childhood. Clearly he’s got some daddy issues with M.”
Personally, I like the Bond novels better than the movies. Ian Fleming’s Bond in the original novels is more sensitive and less cartoonish than the man in the movies – and I’ve seen them all. For the record, I like Daniel Craig best as Bond, even better than Sean Connery.
By the way, if you haven’t read the original Bond novels, you’re missing some elegant writing.
Here’s the opening to Casino Royale: “The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling – a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension – become unbearable, and the senses awake and revolt from it.
“James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired.”
And so the adventure starts and “hums with tension,” according to Time magazine.
The plot is clean and unburdened by armchair psychology. The ending is swift, free of the current trends for corkscrew plotting.
As the end of the contemporary overcomplicated doorstop nears, I find myself saying, “Yes, he did it! I knew it was the American tourist. No, wait, it was the Russian! No, not the Russian, the undercover CIA agent who betrayed his country. Wrong again! It was his gay lover, who wanted revenge.”
When the book finally ends, I’m so exhausted, I don’t much care.
Hardcovers are $25 to $30 now. Maybe we’d have more readers if we wrote smaller books.
Maybe we’re breaking that important writing rule: Less is more.
Win KILLER CUTS, Dead-End Job No. 8, set at a posh salon where a color and cut are $300. Click Contests at www.elaineviets.com
Sculpting That Manuscript
When we first moved to Colorado, we rented a tiny studio apartment while looking for a permanent home. One evening, our landlords invited us up for a glass of wine and some conversation. She is a sculptor who works primarily in stone. She mentioned it was interesting we were both artists.
Frankly, I’d never considered myself an artist, but we discussed our creative processes. There’s an old saying that in order to carve a block of stone into an elephant, you simply chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. In writing, you keep adding until you get the elephant.
If writing were like sculpting, it would mean being able to change what comes next, but not what came before. Scary. Really scary. When the sculptor asked how I created a book, what my preparation process was, did I outline the plot, or develop the characters, I answered that I knew very little when I first started writing.
She said she worked the same way. She might have a very simple sketch—no more than a line drawing, when she started, and a vague idea of the finished product—but the actual sculpture was dictated by the stone. She starts working and lets the stone show her the way.
That sounds very much like my own writing style. I joked about how my characters were always surprising me, and that the discovery was as much fun as the final product. On that, we were in total agreement.
But imagine if you started writing your book and couldn’t go back to fix things. Once you chip away that piece of marble, it’s gone and you can’t reattach it to the sculpture. I don’t think there is such a thing as a ‘first draft’ for her. Some artists might make models first, using a different, “less valuable” kind of medium, but she likes to get right to it.
I remember going to a RWA chapter meeting, and as we shared where we were with our writing since the last meeting, one woman said, “I’m on Chapter 30 and have only 5 chapters left to go.” I was flabbergasted. How did she know what was going to go into each chapter, and that much in advance? How did she know her book was going to be 35 chapters long? A recent book ended up going on for about 4 chapters more after I thought I was writing the final chapter. And my editor asked me to expand even more. Glad I wasn’t a sculptor!
But when you do finally reach the end, if you’re like me, your book is full of “extra stuff”. It’s time to play sculptor and chisel away the words, paragraphs, scenes that aren’t helping your book look like the elephant it’s supposed to be. My first attempt at writing a novel came in at 143,000 words. The agents and editors I spoke with said 100,000 was the absolute top limit they’d even look at for a debut author.
Time to cut. You start with the jack hammer, removing any scenes that aren’t moving the story forward (even though they’re probably your favorites). “Does it advance the plot?” becomes your mantra. This is where you’re probably letting everyone know how much research you did. What constellations are visible in the night sky at 10 PM in Salem, Oregon? What’s the story behind Orion? What are the landmarks visible from the passenger seat while driving north on I-25 between Denver and Cripple Creek? What kind of cattle are grazing in the pastureland? How many coal trains chug by each day, carrying how much coal? Ask yourself two questions. 1: Does the reader need to know this. 2: Does the reader need to know this now? That 143,000 word book, Finding Sarah, was published at about 85K.
Another question to ask is “Does it come back?” In my book, Deadly Secrets, I had a scene where my heroine comes into her diner and tells the cop hero that she thinks someone’s in her upstairs apartment. The cop tells her to get down behind the counter. There’s mention of a pistol kept near the register. However, we never actually see the gun, other than a few thoughts about who it belongs to, and that almost everyone in the small Colorado town probably has one. Since the gun was never needed and never showed up again … SNIP. “Get behind the counter” is all that’s needed. Readers, especially mystery readers, don’t like a parade of red flags that have no place in the story.
After you’ve tossed those big chunks of stone, you can get out the chisel and look at your narrative. Have you told what you’ve already shown? Trust your readers—they’ll get it. Are you repeating yourself even when you’re showing?
Once you’ve got the story essentials, you can get out the little grinders and brushes to get rid of those sneaky crutch words—the ones that creep into your manuscript when you close your file. (A handy writer’s tool for this is Smart Edit, which will find overused words you never saw coming.) Check for ‘filler’ words. Just, really, well, very, some (and all its variations). When we speak, we use ‘filler words’ to give our brain time to think. Most of the time, they’re not needed on the page and merely slow the read.
Once you’ve got your elephant cleaned and polished, it’s time to get it out there on exhibit, whether to an agent, editor, or beta reader.
What’s your writing style? I’m an ‘edit as I go’ writer, but even then, I have to go back and get rid of everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.
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Thanks so much to Nancy for inviting me to be a guest at The Kill Zone. I’m thrilled to be here.
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From childhood, Terry Odell wanted to “fix” stories so the characters would behave properly. Once she began writing, she found this wasn’t always possible, as evidenced when the mystery she intended to write turned into a romance, despite the fact that she’d never read one. Odell prefers to think of her books as “Mysteries With Relationships.” She writes the Blackthorne, Inc. series, the Pine Hills Police series, and the Mapleton Mystery series. You can find her high (that’s altitude, of course—she lives at 9100 feet!) in the Colorado Rockies—or at her website.
Reading Roundup
I’m following up on James Scott Bell’s excellent post, Advice to Traditionally Published Authors, by suggesting some additional reading about the current publishing landscape, for both traditional and independent writers.
Shutterstock photo purchased by TKZ
Traditional publishing sales are flat
Several major publishers are struggling with declining sales, according to a recent article in Publisher’s Weekly:
The PW article attributed the declining sales to a lack of major bestsellers, and noted that publishers are under increasing pressure to find “big hits.”
Indie ebook writers overtake traditional authors on Amazon
The PW article doesn’t address the continued growth of independent publishing as a factor in the flattening market for traditional publishers. That seems like an oversight, especially when one considers the following information from the January 2015 Author Earnings Report:
“In mid-year 2014, indie-published authors as a cohort began taking home the lion’s share (40%) of all ebook author earnings generated on Amazon.com while authors published by all of the Big Five publishers combined slipped into second place at 35%.”
PW noted the Author Earnings information in an earlier article, “Surprising self publishing statistics”
I think that eventually, traditional publishers will face reality and give writers better contract terms, as Jim described in his post on Sunday. But for now at least, they’re sticking to their guns, putting more emphasis than ever on finding bigger, bolder hits. I wonder how long that will work for them?
2015 Predictions
Well okay, we’re more than halfway through 2015, but Mark Coker’s predictions for this year are still worth reading:
Can you suggest any other articles about the publishing world to add to this reading list?
A V.I.P. List for Writers (Very Important Principles)
Writers tend to despise rules. They quickly reject that which smacks of them (a sort of carpet bombing of anything that seems to dictate what they should and shouldn’t do in a story), and on some occasions, proceed to drift to the dark fringe of their genre in an attempt to reinvent the form.
The last writer to successfully reinvent a genre is buried next to Machiavelli in a cathedral in Florence.
Rejecting what we perceive to be a rule is a choice. But it may not be the choice the writer believes it to be.
Because what they’re messing with may not be a rule at all.
What it is, more likely, is a principle.
Semantics? Perhaps. But when it comes to our beliefs and boundaries about writing, semantics count. So let’s agree that, in writing, there are no rules.
But there are principles. And they don’t care what we believe. They just are. The principles of storytelling are like gravity: they are forces of nature that govern the effectiveness of what we do.
Rules, principles, tropes… whatever, pick what allows you to write with confidence with a maverick sense of creative individualism, if that’s what you require. But know this: when you mess with gravity — which doesn’t care what you call it — it can kill you.
As I write this I’m in a hotel room prepping my Powerpoint for a seven hour “master class” workshop at the annual Willamette Writers Conference in Portland, OR, where I’ve taught for seven of the last eight years. While it may be curious to some why they keep asking me back, I believe it is because of my advocacy and analogy-saturated focus on storytelling principles, some of which are less obvious than others (the principles, not the analogies).
Here, then, are a few of my favorites, some of which I suggest you consider pasting onto your monitor. Preferably not on the screen itself.
That, too, is not a rule, but yet one more principle that will serve you every time.
Successful stories are never primarily “about” something in terms of primary focus (a character, a theme, a location, etc). Rather, they are about something happening.
The best way to illuminate character is to give them something interesting to do.
Conflict is the most important word in fiction, trumping a list of other very important words. Conflict fuels fear and risk and threat and danger, which are the tropes of nearly all modern fiction. Mostly, though, it manifests as confrontation and a collision of agendas, leading to dramatic tension. If your story doesn’t have dramatic tension as the primary engine the narrative, chances are your story won’t work.
Character is the collision of backstory (which creates inner landscape) with opportunities that require decision and action in the presence of stakes.
Concept and Premise are not the same thing. Concept is to premise what sugar and spice are to baked goods. What salt is to popcorn. Concept fuels premise with something conceptual.
Break in — and break through — novels almost always have something highly conceptual driving the premise.
Plot is not a dirty word, no matter what your MFA program would have you believe. In commercial fiction, plot is your ticket in.
When you hear or read someone referring to their book (usually the one they hope to write one day) as a “fiction novel,” disregard all that comes out of their mouth from that point forward.
Your experience as a reader is only a minor and inadequate preparation for your experience as a writer.
It takes most of us ten or more hours to read a novel. It takes two hours to watch a movie. Screenwriters learn on Day One of their journey what it can take some novelists years to assimilate. Watch and learn.
There are twelve categories of skills and essences you must master before you can write effective fiction. Your pretty sentences and paragraphs are just one of them.
Passion for a particular theme can crash your story. Story is a window into theme, not a pulpit for it. Passion is an intoxicant, best used in moderation.
Nothing exposes a rookie quicker than dialogue that sounds like it came from an elementary school play. Check that — there is one thing that outs you even quicker: the mishandling of dialogue punctuation and attribution.
Once exposed to the principles of writing effective fiction — this is especially true relative to structure — the best way to cement that knowledge is to watch it in play in the novels you read and the movies you watch.
Exceptions are out there, but those authors are also buried in that Cathedral in Florence, so make your choices accordingly.
*****
Larry Brooks writes about story craft, with two bestselling books out on the subject, and his third book – Story Fix: Transform Your Novel From Broken to Brilliant – (with a Foreword by Michael Hague, and generously blurbed by several of the authors here on Kill Zone) releases in October from Writers Digest Books.
Advice to Traditionally Published Authors
I have a number of writing friends who are in one phase or another of a traditional career––still in it, sometimes hanging by a thread, a few dropped by their publishers. These friends all started in the “old system.” You wrote a book, got an agent, signed with a publishing company. Getting invited inside the walls of the Forbidden City was the only game in town.
Of course, that’s all changed. The indie revolution that began in earnest in 2008 has grown from healthy baby to active toddler to good-looking adolescent. It’s driving the family car now. It has some acne, sure, but the teeth are good and the body sound.
From time to time I’ll hear from one of my friends, asking for advice about which way to go. They may be near the end of a contract, or in new talks offering them lower advances and tighter terms. Here is some of what I tell them.
- Traditional publishing is still a viable option
To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of traditional publishing are greatly exaggerated. Yes, trad pub is in the throes of reinvention due to digital disruption. That process is slow, as it is for any large industry facing a shifting infrastructure. Rapid innovation has never been the strength of large industry. But they’re trying.
Traditional companies are also the only way to distribute print books widely into physical stores, including big boxes and airports. If that’s where you want your books to be then traditional publishing is your best shot.
Just understand that your shot is getting increasingly long. Because big bookstores are closing. There is tighter shelf space within those stores. Big boxes and airports are ordering fewer books, and therefore sticking with the big names like Lee Child and Janet Evanovich. While there has been a nice resurgence in independent bookstores, they can’t replace what’s being lost when a major chain store closes.
- I understand your anxiety
Being with a traditional house provides a level of security. When you’ve been working with the same people for a long time, there’s a comfort level. When you’re used to the system—editorial, design, distribution, marketing—the thought of switching to a place where you have ultimate responsibility for these things can be nervous time.
Many writers just “want to write,” and not worry about all that other jazz.
My advice is: don’t let anxiety be the tail that wags you. Think back to when you wanted to break in the first time. How nervous were you pitching to an agent? Getting rejected? Wondering if you had what it takes? Eventually, you broke through. You can do it if you go indie, too, because you have the added benefit of a track record. You know what you’re doing as a writer. You have readers who will follow you.
Writers always operate with a certain degree of fear. The trick is to translate anxiety into action, with a rational plan for where you truly want to be.
- Don’t think of traditional publishing as your nanny
Trad pub is about the bottom line, because it has to be. You can’t stay in business unless you make a profit. Publishers have to stay in business, and they will treat you with that in mind.
I tell my writing colleagues that a publishing company is not your nanny. If you don’t make them money they are not going to coddle you, make you breakfast, or tuck you in at night. There will continue to be very nice (albeit overworked) people within the company, who like you and want you to succeed. But it is the counter of beans who will determine your future at said company.
Now, if you’re making midlist money and your publisher continues to offer it, you may want to stay right where you are. One successful indie author misses several things about traditional publishing. Have a look here.
Fight for a fair non-compete clause. Your business partner owes you that.
But you should also learn to sing “It’s a Hard-Knock Life” like the orphans in Annie. I have several writing friends who have been “orphaned” over the years when their editor-advocate within a company moved on or was let go.
- Traditional contracts are tight
Traditional publishers are taking fewer risks these days. This is reflected in contracts many writers and agents find particularly onerous. Which is why the Authors Guild is calling for fairer terms. It’s a lovely thought. But it is slamming up against harsh reality. Big publishing simply cannot afford to be overly generous or induced to easily revert assets (i.e., books) back to authors.
It’s business. I hold no animus for a corporation that is trying to stay in business.
But you are in business, too. So be educated about contracts. Work with your agent on the terms you can live with, and those you can’t.
In a lengthy piece on this topic, Kristine Kathryn Rusch wrote:
[W]riters need to know what they’re up against.
They’re not signing up for a partnership with a production and distribution company like they had in the past. Mostly, these days, writers are signing with an international entertainment conglomerate that wants to exploit its assets for as long as possible…
When writers do business with an international entertainment conglomerate, they should be prepared to walk away from what initially looks like a good deal. Because, in most cases, the writers will lose the right to exploit that property themselves for the life of the copyright.
- Know your risk tolerance
Thus, what you really need to assess, right now, is your own risk tolerance. Are you willing to walk away from a sure, albeit smaller and more restrictive contract? Can you do without an advance? Do you have the patience it will take to build up an indie publishing stream?
You are taking a risk either way. Traditional publishing is a wheel of fortune. When you pay to play, you’re hoping your book will be the one on the wheel that comes up the big winner. If it does, it could be worth millions. It could be the next Harry Potter or The Fault in Our Stars or Gone Girl.
That’s what you’re playing for—a #1 bestseller slot, the movie deal, the airport placement, the Today Show appearance.
Of course, this sort of fortune happens to very, very few. Books that deserve to be there don’t ring the bell. Yes, your book could be the one, which is what lottery players say to themselves every time they walk into a liquor store or gas station mini-mart.
If you play and your books don’t make it, the cost may be several years of your writing life and possibly no reversion of rights. So be rational about your gambling. If you are you willing to risk all that for a spin of the wheel, then get the best terms you can and good luck to you.
- Know your freedom and creativity valuation
But here’s another thing to consider: how much do you value the freedom to write what you want to write and to publish when you are ready to publish? To try a different genre and not worry about branding restrictions and non-compete clauses?
Do you want to be creative more than you want to be secure?
Another thing: if you decide to stay traditional, you at least need a footprint in the indie world. Work with your agent and publisher about non-competing, short-form work to grow your readership.
It all comes down to making the decision YOU want to make, without letting a thousand anxious thoughts hack away at your dreams. So listen to counsel and advice. Talk things over with your agent, your spouse, your talking cat. Pray, if you believe there is divine benevolence.
Just don’t wait for certainty, because the only constant is change.
Traditional publishing will stick around and try to find its way forward. Indie publishing will continue to grow and diversify, and new options for writers who own their rights will appear. This requires constant vigilance and business savvy, which some writers don’t like. Don’t be afraid. The principles of success are not difficult to understand and implement. I wrote a whole book about that.
Whatever you decide, keep writing. I love what one of my favorite Hollywood writer-directors, Preston Sturges, once said. He was riding high in the early 1940s with a string of hits that still shine today. But he knew Hollywood careers are transient. “When the last dime is gone,” he said, “I’ll sit on the curb with a pencil and a ten-cent notebook, and start the whole thing all over again.”
As long as you write, you’re never out of the game.
Reader Friday: Writer, Unplugged?
Another Way to Get Your Ebooks into Libraries
Available for Amazon ebook preorder now
Interested in getting your ebooks into libraries and get paid? And would you like to do it without forcing libraries to repurchase your digital offering after a restricted loan count as if it has a limited shelf life? You can upload your ebook into Overdrive or get to Overdrive through Smashwords. Both can be cumbersome systems to work with and have their challenges, there are many e-book programs being developed every year, such as Sqribble, and more and more platforms to read ebooks, not just iBooks.
But I wanted to share a developing alternative.
EbooksAreForever
EbooksAreForever is a platform to help libraries sustainably purchase ebooks from independent authors and publishers. It was launched in March 2014. Since it’s new to me, and I’d been looking for a means to reach out to libraries for my indie pubbed and backlist novels, I thought I’d share what I found.
Ebooksareforever’s philosophy is based around sustainability. They believe libraries should be able to buy ebooks at affordable prices. Since ebooks are digital and not physically degradable items, libraries should be able to own and offer them to loan for eternity.
Authors JA Konrath and August Wainwright co-founded ebooksareforever to sell DRM-free ebooks with no re-licensing restrictions.
“We deliver a curated collection of titles from independent authors and independent publishers and make it as simple as possible for both the author/publisher and the library to interact with the collection and to fairly compensate the author/publisher for every transaction.”
—August Wainwright, co-founder
How does EbooksAreForever work?
I’m excited at the prospect of having a new avenue into libraries, but understandably, libraries need a gatekeeper to ensure quality. How does that work?
Every author and book is approved by a curation team. “We need this because we’re working hand in hand with libraries”, says Wainwright, “and we need to deliver what they’re asking for. We assess by reviews, number of titles the author has available, whether those titles are in a series, quality of cover art, interest in libraries, and genre saturation in our system. We couldn’t be taken seriously if, say, 80% of our titles were romance. It equally wouldn’t work if every book had to have at least 200 reviews on Amazon.”
Good news. If your book is rejected, you can reapply 60 days later.
Each book is purchased by a library on ‘perpetual license’. They pay once and they can use it forever. Only one copy can be checked out at a time.
Will authors get paid?
Yes. Titles are sold to libraries for $7.99 (full-length) and $3.99 to $4.99 for shorter works. Authors receive 70% royalty of every sale.
Ebooksareforever says it hopes to evolve the submission/rejection process once the business grows and the system flourishes, but the current focus is on developing and sustaining a robust system which is a trusted resource and popular with libraries.
They are also working on ‘patron apps’ which will break the business out of the US and allow global libraries to purchase titles with patrons loaning copies using universal apps. This system should also see broader opportunities for author payment. A very exciting prospect.
PROS
• Free to submit
• Author payment
• Set up by authors for authors
CONS
• There are rigorous curation efforts that favor series and higher-profile authors
• For now, it’s limited to US-only
Discussion:
What have you heard about EbooksAreForever?
Any other ways to distribute your ebooks into libraries besides the ones I’ve mentioned?
The Last Victim available for ebook preorder at a discounted price. After release, will be available in print and ebook formats.
Too Fast, Too Slow, Just Right
The story in most novels takes place over a period of time. Some are condensed to a few hours while many epic tales span generations and perhaps hundreds of years. But no matter what the timeframe is in your story, you control the pacing. You can construct a scene that contains a great amount of detail with time broken down into each minute or even second. The next scene might be used to move the story forward days, weeks or months in a single pass. If you choose to change-up your pacing for a particular scene, make sure you’re doing it for a solid reason such as to slow the story down or speed it up. Remember that as the author, you’re in charge of the pacing. And the way to do it is in a transparent fashion that maintains the reader’s interest. Here are a couple of methods and reasons for changing the pace of your story.
Slow things down when you want to place emphasis on a particular event. In doing so, the reader naturally senses that the slower pace means there’s a great deal of importance in the information being imparted. And in many respects, the character(s) should sense it, too.
Another reason to slow the pacing is to give your readers a chance to catch their breath after an action or dramatic chapter or scene. Even on a real rollercoaster ride, there are moments when the car must climb to a higher level in order to take the thrill seeker back down the next exciting portion of the attraction. You may want to slow the pacing after a dramatic event so the reader has a break and the plot can start the process of building to the next peak of excitement or emotion. After all, an amusement ride that only goes up or down, or worse, stays level, would be boring. The same goes for your story.
Another reason to slow the pace is to deal with emotions. Perhaps it’s a romantic love scene or one of deep internal reflection. Neither one would be appropriate if written with the same rapid-fire pacing of a car chase or shootout.
You might also want to slow the pacing during scenes of extreme drama. In real life, we often hear of a witness or victim of an accident describing it as if time slowed to a crawl and everything seemed to move in slow motion. The same technique can be used to describe a dramatic event in your book. Slow down and concentrate on each detail to enhance the drama.
What you want to avoid is to slow the scene beyond reason. One mistake new writers make is to slow the pacing of a dramatic scene, then somewhere in the middle throw in a flashback or a recalling of a previous event in the character’s life. In the middle of a head-on collision, no one stops to ponder a memory from childhood. Slow things down for a reason. The best reason is to enhance the drama.
A big element in controlling pacing is narration. Narrative can slow the pace. It can be used quite effectively to do so or it can become boring and cumbersome. The former is always the choice.
When you intentionally slow the pace of your story, it doesn’t mean that you want to stretch out every action in every scene. It means that you want to take the time to embrace each detail and make it move the story forward. This involves skill, instinct and craft. Leave in the important stuff and delete the rest.
There will always be stretches of long, desolate road in every story. By that I figuratively mean mundane stretches of time or distance where nothing really happens. Control your pacing by transitioning past these quickly. If there’s nothing there to build character or forward the plot, get past it with some sort of transition. Never bore the reader or cause them to skip over portions of the story. Remember that every word must mean something to the tale. The reader assumes that every word in your book must be important.
We’ve talked about slowing the pacing. How about when to speed it up?
Unlike narration, dialog can be used to speed things up. It gives the feeling that the pace is moving quickly. And the leaner the dialog is written, the quicker the pacing appears.
Action scenes usually call for a quicker pace. Short sentences and paragraphs with crisp clean prose will make the reader’s eyes fly across the page. That equates to fast pacing in the reader’s mind. Action verbs that have a hard edge help move the pace along. Also using sentence fragments will accelerate pacing.
Short chapters give the feeling of fast pacing whereas chapters filled with lengthy blocks of prose will slow the eye and the pace.
Just like the pace car at the Indianapolis 500 sets the pace for the start of the race and dramatic changes during the event such as yellow and red flags, you control the pace of your story. Tools such as dialog versus narration, short staccato sentences versus thick, wordy paragraphs, and the treatment of action versus emotion puts you in control of how fast or slow the reader moves through your story. And just like the colors on a painter’s pallet, you should make use of all your pacing pallet tools to transparently control how fast or slow the reader moves through your story.
What additional techniques do you use to control pacing?
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Max is back! THE BLADE, book #3 in the Maxine Decker thriller Series is now available in print and e-book.
How Long Should a Chapter Be?
Half of art is knowing when to stop — Arthur William Radford
By PJ Parrish
This must be the week for throwing out lifesavers. Sunday, James wrote about hearing from a former student who needed help getting over his writing paralysis. Good post for all of us, so click here to read it.
Yesterday, I got an email from a participant who took the two-day fiction-writing workshop Kelly and I gave last summer at Saturn Booksellers in Gaylord, MI. This woman was our best student and her sample chapters showed real promise. She absorbed stuff like a little sea sponge, took criticism like a pro, and was eager to get back to work on her story. But then came her email. Here is her nut graph:
This is probably a dumb question but I can’t find the answer anywhere and I am really worried that I am letting it get to me and prevent me from moving forward. My question is: How long should chapters be?
I started to write her back then realized this is one of those “dumb” questions that isn’t really that dumb. So I am writing to her via our group here at TKZ. Because I know you guys will help me give her a good answer. So…
Q: How long should chapters be?
A: As long as they need to be.
{{{Well, hell, that’s a big help, Sen-Sen breath.}}}
Patience, grasshopper.
Okay, here’s the facile technical answer, according to what I found through a quick Google of writer’s sites: The average word count for a novel is about 4,000 words. For genre fiction, it tends to be about 2,500 and shorter for YA. (The thought being, apparently, that young folks have short attention spans or fall asleep easily. But that didn’t seem to deter JK Rowling.)
This word count thing, as we all know, is about as helpful as advising an aspiring novelist to start at the beginning and keep going until the end. But the email from my workshop friend did get me thinking about the structure of chapters, and how often, when I read a manuscript, I see the writer struggling to figure out how and when to bring a chapter to a graceful, logical and satisfying end.
So I’m going to turn the question around a bit and focus on a different question I often ask of writers, be they raw beginners or even my seasoned critique group buddies:
What is the purpose of this chapter or scene?
I think sometimes we all can lose sight of this important question. As we write, we often charge through scene after scene propelled by raw passion, or a desperate desire to get it all down before it disappears, or grim determination to make a self-imposed daily word quota. In that mad rush, we can lose the focus of what the chapter should be trying to accomplish. You’ve heard this advice, I’m sure:
Make your writing muscular.
Now, that refers to all the usual stuff about using sturdy verbs, active voice, lean evocative description etc. But I think it also means that we should strive to make each scene, and by extension each chapter, work hard to propel the story forward. Maybe I can explain by showing you how Kelly and I approach this. We’re sort of pantsers in outliner’s clothing. We Skype every couple days and talk out where the book is going next. We can see about five or six chapters ahead at a time. We then write out a rough template of those chapters/scenes and what we hope to accomplish in each one. Here’s the actual template for our WIP Louis Kincaid book. Skim as needed:
CHAPTER ONE – Date?
Boys in box. Two unnamed terrified boys are fleeing someone in the dark and hide in a closet. No suggestion of place or date.
CHAPTER TWO – day 1 Saturday April 6:
Louis arrives at church and talks briefly with Steele. Intro Steele as main character. Brief Louis backstory reference on why he is here.
CHAPTER THREE – day 2:
Louis finds new apartment and unpacks his mementos. Insert thoughts about daughter and Joe. Phone call from Joe maybe? Very brief backstory reference to what happened in DOW with Steele. Stress that Louis feels really good about wearing a badge again after wandering so long in PI wilderness. (Set up for Steele show-down later).
CHAPTER FOUR – day 3 Monday morning April 8
Back at remodeled church. Team members show up. Brief info about structure of this State police task force. Steele gives intros and they take their cases. Louis chooses Boys in the Box case.
CHAPTER FIVE – day 3 late night
Emily comes and they go to dinner at bar and talk. Character enhancement scene and intro Emily with bit of FBI backstory. Set up hint that something is troubling Emily (later will reveal suicide of parents, which is why she balks at her assigned case later in book).
CHAPTER SIX – day 4
The meeting in the choir loft. As Louis is packing up file and getting read to leave, he can’t resist asking Steele why? Backstory on what exactly happened in Loon Lake 5 year ago (in L’s thoughts) and what changed Steele’s mind about Louis. Est. tension with Steele.
CHAPTER SEVEN – day 4 later
Louis makes long drive to Upper Peninsula. Heavy description to est mood and sense of remoteness. Meets Sheriff Nurmi. He is invalid but sharp as a tack. They discuss the cold case about boys in box.
Scene break or new chapter?
Louis goes to evidence room and examines the box. Sees marks on inside lid and realizes boys tried to claw way out.
Scene break or new chapter?
Louis goes to local cemetery to see boys graves but can’t find them. More talk with Sheriff Nurmi about what happened to the boys remains. Nurmi suggests he talk to old Rev. Gandy who presided over boys memorial service.
CHAPTER EIGHT or NINE?? Late that day.
Louis checks into the local inn. Reviews case file of boys in his room. Heavy case info scene. Est time line clearly over last 20 yrs of cold case. L Goes to dinner, talks to locals but no one remembers the boys from 20-odd years ago. He drinks too much, falls asleep and has a bad nightmare (IT ECHOES THE OPENING CHAPTER BUT ONLY OBLIQUELY.) Wakes up in a sweat and goes for a scary night run on the Lake Mich. Shore. Feeling of extreme disquiet.
NEXT CHAPTER – early next morning.
Louis goes to visit the abandoned copper mine where the boys in the boy were found. Build Creepy atmosphere. He finds the Catholic medal but it’s too old so he doesn’t know what it is. Other mementoes found? Goes to see Rev. Gandy?
When we do these quick sketch templates, we are hyper-aware of the need to make each chapter “muscular,” to make it work in hard-harness to pull the plot along. But it’s not just about plot here. We also look for secondary purposes, like opportunities to inject spurts of backstory (and thus avoid one giant info-dump) or to illuminate characters or their motives.
Also, by articulating the main focus and the secondary purposes of each chapter BEFORE we start writing, we are positioning ourselves to be able to better recognize a logical place to END each chapter instead of just allowing the chapter to peter out through pure exhaustion or inertia. Which brings me to my next point:
Every chapter should have its own dramatic arc.
We talk a lot here at TKZ about how your entire story have a dramatic arc. But I think it’s helpful to think of each scene/chapter having its own mini-arc. Think, before you write, about what you need to accomplish in each chapter and focus your output to that end. Of course you will veer off on digressions and detours and deadends – that’s why they call it creative writing! But if you have defined the central focus of each chapter beforehand, you will be less tempted to fill the screen with mere typing.
I suspect you will find that each mini-arc has its own natural little conclusion. Think of the end of each chapter as a sort of pause, almost like you are taking a breath before moving on. That’s what you are asking the reader to do if you are breaking your chapters at the right moments. You are sending a subtle signal to the reader: Okay, I’m going to give you a second to catch your breath here. Ready? Now turn that page and let’s move on…
One great thing about crime fiction, propelled as it is by the needs of strong plot, is that it tends to give us plenty of obvious places to end chapters. Here are a couple:
- A significant shift in time or place.
- A change in point of view.
- A new plan of action. You show cops outside planning and preparing to go rescue a hostage. Stop there, then open next chapter with the action itself.
- Introduction of a new twist or information. Say your hero has just learned about a huge new clue. Stop there, then build a bridge to the next chapter. In our last book, Heart of Ice, Louis finds forensic evidence that tells him he has the wrong suspect. It’s a devastating twist that sends the plot careering off in a new direction, so we end with Louis’s partner saying, “Now what?” And Louis says, “We start over. And this time we don’t make any assumptions.” The next chapter opens with Louis back at the murder site, reassessing the evidence.
- The classic cliffhanger. In Heart of Ice, Louis chases a black hat out onto frozen Lake Huron. Here are the last lines of the chapter:
A loud crack, like a rifle shot.
Louis froze. Afraid to look down, afraid to even take a breath.
Another crack.
The world dropped.
Good storytelling is musical. It has pacing and rhythm, and no two writers have the same rhythmic style. If you are doing a good job of identifying the mini-arcs in your chapters, your readers will start to get a feel for your rhythm and will begin to even anticipate it. Which is partly what successful pacing is about: Your reader moving in sync to your writerly rhythms.
So should all your chapters be about the same length? Hard to say. I like a certain consistency when I read and when I write. My chapters tend to run about 2500 words. But when I am nearing the end of the story or in the middle of an action sequence, the chapters tend to get shorter. And sometimes, it just feels right to throw a really short chapter in there to shake things up. Stephen King has a chapter in Misery that’s one word: “Rinse.” And William Faulkner had this classic in As I Lay Dying: “My mother is a fish.” I mean, what can you say after that? So go short if you need to. Vary your rhythm like a scatting Ella. But make it all work as a whole, with purpose, passion and music. Which always comes down to…
Get me rewrite, baby.
Don’t sweat chapter numbering in your first draft. Strive instead for that mini-arc structure and you’ll find, when you go back in the hard light of rewrite time that the story has its own pacing. You might find you need to merge two chapters that feel anemic, or that you need to break up two that feel bloated or aren’t organically connected. In rewrite, you can go back and really listen hard for that natural intake of reader-breath, that pause. Which leads me to the perfect ending…