Category Archives: Writing

Resources for Writerly Types

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Hello again! As it turns out, some of the photos I planned to use for my next post about England aren’t on my laptop yet. So I’ll post that entry next week. In the meantime, I thought I would post some of my favorite resources for writers, for those of you who are looking for some advice (or are just curious where all these writers learn their bizarre and impractical magic).

First off, I strongly recommend starting with some “big-picture” books about writing. Most books for writers that I’ve found are either general treatises on inspiration and work ethic, or they discuss specific parts of the writing process. In other words, most of them don’t teach you how to write a story so much as how to write a sentence, or create a character, or outline a plot.

While those things are great, I think most new writers need to learn about story first. You know, the basic stuff, like… What is a story? What is its structure? What do you need to write a satisfying story, from beginning to end? The most helpful book on this subject that I’ve read is Wired for Story by Lisa Cron. Other big-picture books about writing include Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass and the ever-popular Stephen King’s On Writing. (And if you like learning about story structure, The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler is an interesting read, and it will teach you about the famous Hero’s Journey motif.)

After that, I would suggest looking for specific advice on the areas of your writing you want to improve. That will vary from writer to writer, but here are some resources I’ve found especially helpful in improving my work.

Writing Excuses: By far my favorite writing-related podcast. Probably because Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Tayler, and Dan Wells are all fans (and skilled creators!) of science fiction and fantasy. Each week, they take fifteen minutes to discuss specific topics about writing. Some of them only apply to fantasy and science fiction, but most are applicable to writing in general. (Like how to write in the first-person point of view, or how to create suspense.) Plus they’re short, so it’s easy to hunt for the specific advice you want.

(And if you like Writing Excuses? Then I highly recommend Write About Dragons, where you can watch videos of Brandon Sanderson teaching college classes about writing fantasy and science fiction. You can watch two entire semesters for free, and the advice and exercises are all excellent. Seriously.)

The First Five Pages by Noah Lukeman: This is a helpful book for learning about how to refine your writing on a sentence level. It teaches you how to tighten your prose, which helps keep a reader’s interest (crucial when querying!).

Second Sight by Cheryl B. Klein: This is a great book for learning about different ways to revise a manuscript, and one of my favorite books about how to write for children and young adults.

Finally, all writers who want to be published need to learn about the publishing industry. Whether you’re planning to go the traditional route or self-publish, it helps to know the current marketplace. One way to do this is by reading lots of published books in the genre you write. It’s also helpful to sign up for the free e-mailing lists at Publishers Weekly and Publishers Marketplace. Writer’s Digest has a lot of great content on their site as well (plus you can sign up for a variety of tutorials over at their online shop, and/or subscribe to their magazine, which is a good resource in its own right).

Happy writing!

 

The Plot Versus Character Conundrum

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So I’ve been thinking about something. When my friends and I talk about books or movies or TV shows, why do we almost never mention plot? For the most part, we only talk about characters—who was brave, who was sweet, who was strong, who was deliciously wicked or witty or angst-ridden. We don’t talk much about plot. If we do, it’s only in relation to what a specific moment revealed about the characters. “Oh man, that character was so cool when they did [x]!”

A lot of my favorite stories are criticized for not having much in the way of plot, or for a plot that drags too much. Take Game of Thrones, for example. I’ve heard multiple people say that A Song of Ice and Fire barely has a plot, that all George R. R. Martin does is write about interesting people who bump into each other and interact in unusual (and often bizarre or dramatic) ways. But the fans love it! We don’t care about tight plotting; we just want to find out what Arya or Tyrion or Daenerys or Jon Snow will do next. Because they’re fascinating characters, and we like them, and we love to watch interesting personalities collide.

As a story fan, I guess don’t care much about plot, per se. For me, character trumps everything else. And it seems like that holds true for most of my fellow story geeks. A story with a tense plot or exciting premise might catch my attention, but I’ll never fall in love with it unless it has an emphasis on character—specifically, on character interaction and character development. Maybe this is why some “page turners” don’t stick with me, or fail to catch my attention at all.

Honestly, this is a conundrum for writers. We are often told to write as tightly as possible, to cut any character interaction that isn’t essential to the main plot. It’s not bad advice, far from it. The last thing you want as a writer is to bore your readers, and risk losing their interest. But according to that rule, most of my favorite moments from books should have been shortened, or cut entirely.

In the end, this isn’t an “either/or” situation. A story can have an exciting plot and plenty of character interaction. One of the best solutions at a writer’s disposal is to combine the two. When a story focuses on interesting characters who make choices, and those choices reveal something about them, their character development becomes the plot. Often, boring stories are boring because they fail to connect plot and character, not because they need more of either element.

Still, this subject does give me pause when I write. I often wonder if I’ve included enough interaction between my characters, if I’ve revealed enough about them as individuals to catch the interest and affection of a reader like me. Ultimately, I try to write what I love to read—and to do it as efficiently and effectively as possible, without removing every fun moment from the story altogether.

And when in doubt, writers can always go for the Joss Whedon method. Just make your characters witty enough that no matter how action-packed the plot gets, the story has plenty of humorous dialogue that reveals what the characters really think about each other…

Story Structure – The Key to a Novel

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I’ve been thinking a lot about how to write a novel. Specifically, the prewriting stage—how to research, how to outline, how to create characters. These days, I view prewriting as the most important part of my process. If I do enough work before I start to write, my drafts are solid. If I don’t, the manuscript will need more revision later on. (Sometimes a lot more. As in, a complete rewrite from beginning to end. Which is not fun, let me tell you!)

So what is the most important part of prewriting? For me, it’s story structure. That’s what I call the central arc of a novel. Story structure is not world-building or plotting. It guides the plot, and shapes it—but it’s much bigger than that.

Story structure looks something like this…

My protagonist wants [fill in a goal or desire].

To achieve [that goal or desire], they will [a list of actions the protagonist takes during the story to get what they want; the more specific the better].

When they take these actions, the protagonist will encounter the following obstacles or complications: ____________________________________.

At the story’s climax, the protagonist achieves [the goal or desire] by doing this: [one final action].

Bonus question: The protagonist would not have been able to take that final action earlier in the novel, because ________________________________.

Those are the fundamentals of story structure. Some people call it different things (the protagonist’s arc, etc.), and I’ve seen other ways to chart it. But more or less, that’s what it looks like. As you can see, it’s pretty basic! Why is this important?

Story structure is the skeleton of your novel. If you do it right, this structure should guide everything your protagonist does—which in turn determines how other characters react to them. It also helps ensure that your novel has a satisfying conclusion. Readers like to see protagonists achieve what they set out to do at the start of the story (or not achieve it, if your story is a tragic one!).

I’ve also found that this structure is helpful for keeping me on track while I’m drafting. If I start to feel lost, I just go back to my notes about what my protagonist wants. It helps me decide what they should do next—whether or not that action makes sense for them, and whether or not it helps achieve their goal. Which means story structure can help me avoid these mistakes:

  • Having my protagonist do something that doesn’t make sense, because it doesn’t match up with their goals/desires.
  • Writing a scene that doesn’t advance the story in any way.

In other words, story structure helps me decide what’s “in character” for my protagonist, and whether or not a scene is needed. It really helps cut down on revision time! If I plan this structure out in advance, I don’t have to cut as many scenes, and I don’t have rewrite them to better fit the protagonist’s motives.

That’s why I think story structure, more than anything else, is the key to writing a good novel. A story is a series of events. A well-written story is one in which those events are driven primarily by the protagonist’s desires, all leading up to a climax where the protagonist achieves (or doesn’t achieve!) what they want.

Well, that’s it for now. I plan to add a second part later on, with a few tips and examples. But I hope this is a helpful starting point, for any aspiring novelists out there. If you would like to explore the topic in more detail, I highly recommend Wired For Story by Lisa Cron. I’ve read a lot of books about writing in the past five years. This is one of the few that teaches how to write on a story level, and the advice is essential (yet so easy to understand that I wondered why I hadn’t heard much of it sooner).