Randy Ingermanson's Blog: Advanced Fiction Writing

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. Our topic today is author branding. There is no need to spend a lot of angst on this. Branding yourself as an author is simple, once you know the answers to two questions… 

Who Is Your Target Audience?

The first question to ask yourself is: Who is your Target Audience? 

Let’s define our terms first. Your Target Audience is the set of all people in the world who would love your book, if only they knew it existed. This is usually much less than 1% of the world population. It’s often much less than the population of the country you live in. And that’s OK. I live in the US, which has a population of almost 350 million. 1% of that is 3.5 million. 

And that’s plenty. My Target Audience for this blog is the set of people who want to write a novel. These are very special people. I’ve always estimated that only about one person in a thousand is really serious about learning to write a novel. That is more than a third of a million people in the US. And many more outside the US.

If you work with a traditional publisher, they’ll often send you a questionnaire about your Target Audience, asking “demographic” questions like “What is the age of your ideal reader? What is their sex? What is their annual income?” I take a jaundiced eye toward these questions. They’re relevant for a few kinds of fiction and useless for most. 

I prefer “psychographic” questions such as “What does your ideal reader secretly dream of doing, if they had the time, energy, and money? Who would your ideal reader want to have dinner with, if they could choose 5 guests from any period of time?” These questions tell you how your ideal reader’s brain works. 

Once you know who your Target Audience is, there’s only one other question to ask…

What Would Delight Your Target Audience?

You have only one job as a writer—to delight people in your Target Audience. If you do that, you’ve won the game of fiction writing. If you don’t do that, you need to rethink and retry. There’s no shame in missing the mark. Nobody’s perfect. We all make mistakes. We all have to keep improving. But once you start hitting close to the mark, your life changes. Amazingly. 

So what experience can you give your ideal reader that would delight them? Only you can answer that question. And you’ll probably be getting better and better answers to that question for your whole writing life. Finding good answers to that question is the secret to branding. It’s the whole secret. There isn’t anything else.

Constructing Your Branding Promise

When you’ve figured out what your Target Audience wants and you’ve settled on an experience you can give them, it’s time to make a Branding Promise. Let me give you a couple of examples. 

I’ll use my own work as an example, so I don’t have to guess. I respect and admire many authors, but I don’t know exactly what thought processes they went through to figure out their Target Audience or their Branding Promise. Whereas I do know mine. 

For my Advanced Fiction Writing website and (forthcoming) Substack, my Target Audience is “Everyone who dreams of writing a novel someday and successfully publishing it.” There are hundreds of thousands of people in the US who are in this Target Audience. But there are hundreds of millions of people in the US are aren’t. 

My Branding Promise for Advanced Fiction Writing is this: “I will teach you to write an excellent novel.” This appeals to people in my Target Audience, and it drives away people who aren’t. If people who aren’t in my Target Audience accidentally come to my website, I want to let them know right away that this is not the place for them. But if they are in my Target Audience, I want them to stay. 

For my fiction, my Target Audience is “Everyone who would take a vacation in ancient Jerusalem.” This is not a huge Target Audience, but I’m in it. I’d go on that vacation. I’d love every minute of it. The closest I’ve come to this impossible vacation is the four times I’ve worked on archaeological digs in Jerusalem.

My Branding Promise for readers of my fiction is this: “I will take you on an adventure to ancient Jerusalem.” I’m well aware that not everyone wants to go on my adventure. That’s fine. Other authors can take them on other adventures. But for those who want to go to ancient Jerusalem, my aspiration is to be the best person on the planet who could take them there. (A high bar, yes, and I hope someday to reach it. You jump higher when you try for something difficult.) 

Constructing Your Branding Promise

Once you know your Branding Promise, it tells you how to market yourself, forever. Everything you do marketing-wise—your website, your email newsletter, your blog, your Substack, your TikTok, your Instagram, your FaceBook, your whatever—should make your Branding Promise crystal clear. 

You can make your Branding Promise explicit or implicit. Neither way is always right or always wrong. The only important thing is that you must know what it is. That will guide your art, your layout, your presentation, your message, your everything. 

Your Branding Promise gives you a clear yardstick to measure your work. Look at the results of your fiction every year or so. Are you keeping your Branding Promise? If not, what went wrong? Did you lose focus? That happens to everyone occasionally. The solution is to get your eye back on the ball. 

Talking to Agents and Editors

Once you understand your Branding Promise, it becomes super easy to talk to agents and editors. When they ask, “What do you write?”, you just tell them your Branding Promise. “I teach people how to write excellent fiction.” “I write novels that take people on an adventure to ancient Jerusalem.” 

99 times out of 100, when an agent or editor hears your Branding Promise, they’ll say, “Sorry, that’s not for me.” That’s fine. You’re trying to separate the sheep from the goats, and you just found another goat. If they don’t like your Branding Promise, they’ll never like your book, so don’t bore them by talking about it. Talk about the weather or sports or food or something else equally unbook.

But 1 time in 100, the agent or editor will stare at you with thunderstruck eyes. After ten seconds of golden silence, they’ll say, “Where have you been all my life?” And now you have a potential business partner for whatever you’re writing. And not just a business partner. A true believer. Wouldn’t that be incredible, if your agent or your editor was a true believer in your work?

Homework:Who is your Target Audience? What delightful experience could you give your Target Audience?What is your Branding Promise? What actions could you take to make your Branding Promise clear on all your marketing platforms? 

The post Your Branding Promise appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Organizing. This will be a very short blog post, but it shows you how to master one small aspect of one of the most powerful skills any writer can have—the art of getting stuff done. Most writers have far too many things on their plate. A lot of stuff doesn’t get done, and it keeps us from writing as much as we want. But there’s a way to change that…. 

Nothing Happens Unless You Take Action

Years ago, I came across a marketing guru who often used the phrase, “Nothing happens unless you take action.” This guy got an incredible amount of stuff done. 

Getting stuff done is hard when you’re neurodivergent. I’ve struggled with this all my life. My neurodivergence is my superpower, but it’s also my anchor—both at the same time. 

So I watched how this guru worked for a while, and I got better at taking action. I started getting more stuff done. 

Getting stuff done requires you to break every project down into Tasks. I capitalize the word Task because I’m using it as a technical term. What is a Task?

A Task is some action you can take in a single sitting. Like editing a scene. Writing a blog post. Fixing a broken page on your website. Calling your agent. Reading a contract. And on and on. Tasks are small chunks of a large project. 

Most of the things on your To-Do List are Tasks. If they’re not a Task, then they should probably be broken up into Tasks, because each Task is a step on the road towards getting stuff done. “Stuff” is amorphous. A Task is a discrete chunk of work. 

But there’s a problem, and it’s the reason some Tasks sit on your To-Do List for ten years without getting done…

The Two Kinds of Tasks

There are really two kinds of Tasks we take on. One kind gets done in an afternoon. The other kind may never get done.

An Actionable Task is a Task that you have the skills and the know-how to do. This is the kind you do quickly. You would like for all your Tasks to be Actionable Tasks. 

A Hard Task is a Task that you don’t have the skills or the know-how to do. This kind will sit festering on your To-Do List for years. Because you literally can’t do it. 

If all your Tasks were Actionable Tasks, you would get all kinds of stuff done. But if your project has even one Hard Task on it, your project is going to stall. Possibly forever. 

The only solution is to somehow convert a Hard Task into an Actionable Task. And how do you do that?

Let’s say you’ve got a Hard Task on your plate and you desperately need to get it done. Now. What are your options? You only have a few:

Converting Hard Tasks to Actionable TasksDo some research to learn how to do the Task. Google is your friend here. Also YouTube. Sometimes Wikipedia has the answer. Ask a few friends if they know how to do the Task and can teach you. Find somebody who does this kind of Task for a living and hire them to do it. There is no shame in hiring out Hard Tasks that you just don’t have the time to learn how to do. We all have things we’ll never be able to do, even if we had infinite time to learn. 

Please note that all of these are Actionable Tasks. You know how to do research online, so “researching a Hard Task” is an Actionable Task. You know how to talk to friends, so “asking friends for help on a Hard Task” is an Actionable Task. You know how to hire somebody to do a task, so “hiring somebody to do a Hard Task” is an Actionable Task. (It may be beyond your budget to hire them, and if that’s the case, this option is off the table.)

The key point is that you can convert any Hard Task into an Actionable Task—one that you have the skill and the know-how to do. It may be an Actionable Task that you can’t afford. If you can’t afford it, then you can’t afford it, and that may mean it’s the end of the line. There is freedom in knowing that something just can’t be done. When you know that, you can delete it from your To-Do List. 

This Doesn’t Fully Solve the Procrastination Problem

Converting Hard Tasks into Actionable Tasks is a powerful skill that will change your life, once you master it. But it won’t completely eliminate procrastination from your life, because there are many reasons we procrastinate. 

Having a Hard Task is only one of those reasons. It’s the one I’m focusing on today, because it’s been a big thing in my own life and it’s a big thing in a lot of writers’ lives. 

So now let’s make this practical…

Homework:If you keep a To-Do List, take a look at it right now. Are there any Hard Tasks on it?Rewrite each Hard Task to be an Actionable Task—either a research Task or an “ask a friend” Task or a “hire somebody” Task. Never again put a Hard Task on your To-Do List. If you have a Hard Task that needs doing, always reframe it as an Actionable Task. 

The post Yes, But Is That Task Actionable? appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Creating. Specifically, we’ll be talking about the theme of your novel. How do you find your theme? Do you even need a theme? This is not a huge topic, so this blog post will be shorter than usual. 

Three Strategies for Dealing With Theme

First, let’s define what we mean by “theme.” When I talk about theme, I mean the deep meaning of your story. It’s the message behind all the shooting and kissing and car-chasing and wand-waving and shouting and whatever else is happening in your story. So when I use the word “theme,” I don’t mean merely some controversial subject. I mean the actual stance that you take on that controversial subject. 

I can think of three strategies that authors use with their themes. There might be more, but these are the ones that jump out at me:

You come up with the theme first, and then you create a story that sends that message. You come up with a story first, and then a deep theme emerges from the story. Your story doesn’t have a theme. There’s no message. 

Authors have used all three of these strategies effectively. There’s nothing intrinsically right or wrong with using any of these strategies. You get to decide what kind of novel you’re writing. But it’s a good idea to know what your decision is, and why you came to that decision. 

So let’s talk about each strategy and give some examples. 

Strategy 1: The Theme Drives the Story

Some authors have a theme in mind, and they create a story to illustrate that theme. The hazard here is that your theme can come across as heavy-handed. The upside is that reader who already agree with the theme of your story will love your novel and may help promote it, and that may turn out to be very good for sales. 

A classic example of a theme-driven book is Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. This was the best-selling novel in the US in the entire 19th century. The theme was that slavery is evil. This is not controversial today, but it was in the 1850s. Some people loved this theme. Others hated it. The story was created solely as a vehicle for the theme. The book had a lot of flaws that make it much less popular today. It had a sentimental style that is long out of date. And it glorified the servility of the main character, Uncle Tom. It’s now an insult to call someone an Uncle Tom. And yet, for all its problems, the book had a huge impact. 

A modern example of a theme-driven story is The Shack, by William Paul Young. The theme was that God is good, even though he allows evil in our world. This is highly controversial. The question of the goodness of God is hotly debated, and the problem of evil is one of the two strongest arguments used by those who don’t believe in the existence of God. Some people loved the book. Others called it stupid or heretical. The book sat at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year and has more than 10 million copies in print.

If this is your strategy, then own it. You have a theme. Send your message. Make it clear. Be ready to take some heat for it. Be hopeful that bad publicity will lead to good sales. Sometimes it does. 

Strategy 2: The Story Drives the Theme

Some authors just set out to write an interesting story, and a theme emerges. The upside here is that the theme naturally fits the story, because it grows out of it. But you may find that once you’ve found the theme of your story, you may need to rewrite it extensively so that the theme is fully woven into your novel. 

So far as I can tell, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn fits this model. The book follows on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a light-hearted book about a boy growing up in the South. It took Mark Twain about seven years to write the Huck Finn book, and things evolved as he worked on it. A strong anti-racist theme eventually emerged organically from the story. But the theme is not perfectly developed. The book is a 19th century novel, and it contains 19th century stereotypes and racial slurs that don’t sit well in the 21st century. 

In my own novels, I’ve never started with a theme in mind. I usually just try to write a story and see what comes out of it. In my City of God series, a theme has emerged organically from the hard questions one of my characters, Ari, asks about the problem of evil. Ari rather reluctantly believes in God, but he’s not at all happy with the common explanations for why God should allow evil in the world. I am three books into the series, and the theme as it now stands is that the problem of evil is not solved. 

If this is your strategy, then own it. Watch what your characters find disturbing—that’s your clue for the theme that may emerge. Once you identify the theme, take care to keep it consistent through the story. This may take a lot of rework. Do the work. If you don’t feel the need to hammer the theme hard, then don’t hammer it. A message can be subtle, if that’s more your style. Or it can be bold, if that’s what you want. 

Strategy 3: There is no Theme

Some authors set out to write an interesting story, and no theme ever emerges. There is nothing wrong with this. A novel isn’t required to have a message. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a story is just a story. 

I’ve read most of the Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child, and I don’t think any of them had a theme. Reacher travels around with nothing but a wallet and a toothbrush and the clothes on his back. He gets in fights. He catches the bad guys. He moves on. There’s no “moral of the story.” Fans of Reacher don’t seem to mind, and it’s certainly never bothered me.

If this is your strategy, then own it. You don’t owe your reader a message. You owe your reader a story. Your novel doesn’t have to carry some deep meaning. 

Homework:Pick five of your favorite novels. What is the theme of each? For each one, do you think the theme was designed in from the start, or did it emerge organically? Did you start out with a theme in mind for the novel you’re working on right now? If so, what’s the theme, and do you hope that it’s controversial enough to drive big sales?Has a theme emerged organically from the novel you’re working on? If so, are you willing to put in the extra work needed to make sure the theme is consistent within your novel?Does your current novel have no theme at all? Are you good with that, or do you feel that it needs one?

The post 3 Strategies for the Theme of Your Novel appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. The question for today is how do you launch your novel without having a panic attack? Even if you are years away from launching a book, there are things you can do now to prepare for that happy day. 

Why Most Authors Feel Massive Anxiety in a Book Launch

We authors put a lot of pressure on ourselves. It’s easy to think launching a novel is a huge, gigantic task that’s going to be expensive and risky and force us to act salesy. And it’s easy to believe that if we don’t run a good launch, then our book is going to die. That’s just not reality. 

You can massively lower your anxiety level in a book launch by remembering one thing. In a book launch, you are not trying to sell your book to the whole world. You are not even trying to sell your book to your entire Target Audience. The ONLY people you are trying to sell it to are the people who meet all three of these criteria:

They already know you exist. They already know they like your fiction. They already have given you permission to let them know when your book is available.

That may be a very small set of people. It might include only your family and your close friends. 

But your circle of influence is probably broader than that. If you have followers on social media who know you’re writing a novel, then some of those people may be in that set. If you have an email newsletter about your fiction, that’s ideal. 

If you remember my recent blog post  on The Three Pillars of Marketing, you are launching your book ONLY to people you have already Attracted and Engaged. Attraction and Engagement are the first two pillars of marketing. In your book launch, you’ll execute the third pillar—Conversion. This simply means that you’re going to give them a good reason to buy your book RIGHT NOW.

And this step is stress-free. If people already know you and know they like your fiction, then they’ll be happy to buy your book. So the task of launching your book is just a matter of contacting them with an incentive to buy it right away. And how do you do that? That depends on what road you chose for publishing your novel. So let’s review those roads…

The Two Roads to Publishing a Novel

There are two methods authors commonly use to publish their novel:

Traditional publishing—you sell the rights to your book to a publishing company that manages the editing and production of the book and pays you an advance and then later pays you royalties.Self-publishing (also called indie authoring)—you manage the editing and production of the book yourself. You don’t get an advance, and you have to pay the up-front expenses, but then you get all the the money the book earns.

Both of these are valid routes to publishing a novel. Both of them can be extremely successful, and both can be extremely frustrating. Neither of these is “the right way” for all authors. Some authors like working with a publisher that handles all the production and editing hassle, so they can focus on writing. Some authors like doing it all themselves because they feel like they can do a better job. 

I’ve published both fiction and nonfiction books by both of these routes. I started out my writing career working with traditional publishers. I later transitioned to indie authoring, and that’s worked out better for me. (Translation—I have earned more money as an indie author than I did as a traditionally published author. And being indie has caused me a lot less stress.) 

Choose the method that works best for you. I can’t go into all the ins and outs of how you make that decision in this blog post. That’s a topic for another day. The reason I mention these two options is that your approach to launching your book will depend somewhat on which route you take. So let’s look at how you run a book launch for each case.  

Launching a Traditionally Published Novel

When you work with a traditional publisher, they will set the publication date far in advance. They’ll work with you on the editing. They’ll hire a cover designer and proofreaders. They’ll ask you to keep to a schedule that they set, and if you fail, they have legal recourse, because you signed a binding contract. 

Your publisher will expect you to help out a lot with the launch. They may give you a long list of tasks they think you should do. Most of these will be impossible to do in the window of time you have available. So don’t feel obligated to do everything they ask. But you should definitely do something. Let them know what you’re doing, because they may be able to help you a bit, and they’ll be grateful that you did anything at all. 

There are two main things you can do:

Send free copies of your book to “influencers”—people who read widely in your category and who have some sort of platform for promoting books.Email all the people you have Attracted and Engaged and give them a reason to buy the book now. 

Let’s talk about those two tasks.

Free Copies For Influencers

Publishers will often give you free copies of the paper edition of your book to send to influencers. Maybe these influencers have a blog. Maybe they moderate a Facebook group or a Goodreads group. Maybe they have a large following on TikTok or Instagram or whatever. Publishers know that this can be very cost-effective, because paper copies probably cost them around a dollar apiece. 

When I launched my book Writing Fiction For Dummies, I was part of a large online group of novelists. I offered a free autographed copy of the book to anyone in the group who wanted it. 60 authors sent me their mailing addresses. Almost all of them were friends of mine, and I knew that most of them taught at writing conferences and would be good influencers for years to come. My publisher sent me three cases of books, and I did all the work—signing the books, packaging them, adding mailing labels, and taking them to the post office. The publisher offered to pay the postage, so my only cost was a few hours of boring labor. This worked out massively well. 

Emailing Your Followers

In the launch week for your book, it’s way too late to try to put together an email list. Building an email list is one of your lifelong projects as a writer. You will never stop building your list and cultivating it. And the sooner you start, the better. List-building is a giant project, and I can’t cover it here. I’ve blogged about it in the past. If you want to know how it fits into your overall marketing strategy, I can recommend my post A Virtuous Cycle for Marketing Your Books. For the nuts and bolts of how to build a list, I can recommend the book Newsletter Ninja, by Tammi Labrecque. 

Assuming you have an email list, when you launch your book, you will probably send out a series of emails beginning a few weeks in advance to let your people know that your next book is coming. You can do a cover reveal when your cover is designed. You can send an email weekly in which you talk about your story. If you want to include any part of your novel in your emails, you’ll need to get permission from your publisher, because you sold them the publishing rights. Usually, they’re happy to give you permission, so ask. Then on Launch Day, send your fans an email announcing the book. Add links to the usual online retailers. Add any incentives you can think of to buy the book right now. 

What do I mean by “incentives?” There are a couple of types of incentives. You might be able to convince your publisher to lower the price during the first week of sales, especially for the e-book version. But don’t count on it. Few publishers will do this. I have seen it happen, and once it had absolutely spectacular results. But one cost of working with a publisher is that they set the price of your book, and you don’t. 

There’s a second kind of incentive, and you have complete control over this. You can offer your true fans in your email list some sort of free electronic download if they buy your book during Launch Week. I did this with my book Writing Fiction For Dummies. I asked my publisher to put me in contact with similar authors who might provide electronic freebies. We put together a list of 8 free goodies that I put on my website for anyone who bought my book during Launch Week. And I added a 50% coupon code for all the products that I had on my website. I didn’t ask for any proof that they bought my book. That would have been a nightmare to check. I trusted people to be honest. When you treat people as trustworthy, they live up to your trust. The launch went extremely well, and I had a nice sales bump on my website from the coupon code. 

But what if you’re self-published? In that case, you have more control…

Launching a Self-Published Novel

When you self-publish your novel, you control everything. You set the deadline, and if you miss it, nobody will take you to court. You will know your publication date at least a month in advance. Which means you can start actively promoting your book to your email list weeks before the book is available. And you have the same general methods of promoting your book. But there are some differences from the traditional-publishing case.

Free Copies to Influencers

You can still send copies to influencers, but now you have to pay for them yourself—you don’t have a publisher to give them to you for free. If you use Amazon’s Print-on-Demand for your paper copies, you can make individual orders for the book at a reduced cost and send them directly to each influencer. You won’t get any royalties on these copies, but it’s nice to let Amazon deal with the shipping. 

Emailing Your Followers

You can also promote your book in advance to your email list, and now you have a bit more latitude as a self-publisher. Here are some of the advantages you have that your traditionally published author lacks.

You can email your followers for weeks in advance with any amount of excerpts from the forthcoming book, and you don’t have to ask your publisher for permission. Because you’re the publisher. You can set up preorders on Amazon up to a year before publication and notify your followers so they can buy it in advance. You have complete control of the price and you can change it at any time, and use this to create an incentive to “buy now”. As an example, suppose you want the regular price of your e-book to be $4.99. You can tell your followers that during Launch Week, the price will be set to $2.99. And you might even offer a low-ball price for preorders of $1.99 or even $0.99. At that price, any of your followers who cares about your book will order. It’s a no-brainer. Note that you can’t go that low with the print version of your book, because paper costs money. The Common Thread—Your Email List

A major part of your book launch is your email newsletter. If you don’t have an email list when you launch your book, you can still use social media, but don’t expect great results. Successful authors know that social media converts a lot worse than email. Please note that it can take years to build a good list, so it’s way too late to think about building your email list when your book is weeks away from launch. If your launch is coming up and you have no email list, then focus on the things you can do and keep your expectations low. 

Your book launch should not be stressful. Stress comes from trying to sell to people who never heard of you and don’t know anything about your fiction. There are ways to reach these people, but Launch Week is not the time to try. Launch Week is for your true fans. And there’s no anxiety when promoting your work to your true fans. They want you to let them know when your book is coming out. They’d be angry with you if you didn’t tell them.

Homework:When is the approximate date of your next book launch? This might be more than a year out, and if that’s the case, you don’t really have a date, you have a range of dates. This might be years away, and that’s OK, because it gives you time to build an email list. Do you have influencers in mind for your book? It’s OK if you don’t, but it’s nice if you do.Do you have an email list for your true fans? If not, then now is a good time to start thinking about building one. It’s never too soon.  

The post How to Launch Your Novel Without Stressing Out appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Organizing. We’ll talk about the amount of clock time it takes to write a novel versus the calendar time. 

Clock Time and Calendar Time 

If you were a machine who never got tired or bored or had to eat or deal with a family, then you could just work straight through on your novel. If it takes you 500 hours to write a novel, then you could divide that number by the 24 hours in a day to get the calendar time—a bit less than 21 days. 

But you’re not a machine. You can’t work 24 hours every day. So the actual number of hours you log “on the clock” to write your novel are going to be different than the required number of calendar days. 

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to estimate both the clock time and the calendar time for your novel. We’ll assume that you have already learned the craft of fiction writing, which means you know how to do all the stages of writing a novel, so it’s just a matter of executing each stage. Let’s talk about those stages first… 

The 7 Stages of Writing a Novel 

Nobody just writes a first draft of a novel and then publishes it. Well, nobody who writes well. There are other stages in the process. Not everybody needs all of those stages, but most writers put some time into each. 

Here are some typical stages that professional novelists go through:

Research and worldbuilding. This is optional. Some kinds of fiction don’t require you to do any research. Others don’t require you to do any worldbuilding. Fantasy typically requires a lot of worldbuilding. Science fiction and historical fiction often take huge amounts of both research and worldbuilding. Your mileage may vary. Story planning. This is also optional. If you’re a Seat-of-the-Pants novelist, you don’t plan your story—you just start writing. If you use my Snowflake Method , you spend a fair amount of time planning your story. If you’re an Outliner, you spend even more time planning. Your brain is wired to be somewhere on this spectrum, and I don’t think you can change it. So work with your brain, however you’re wired. Writing the first draft. This is not optional. Everyone writes a first draft. There are different ways to do this. You might write every scene in sequence. You might write scenes as they come to your mind and then piece them together later. You might write part of the draft, then replan the story, then write more of the draft, and so on until you finish. You might write a page and then polish it many times before moving on (this is called Edit-As-You-Go). All of these are valid ways to write. It’s on you to find the process that works best for you. Editing your manuscript. Most writers put their novel through several revisions. Edit-As-You-Go writers may possibly produce a publishable manuscript in their first draft, because their process combines editing with first-drafting. Again, it’s your job to decide how many revisions you need to make your manuscript its best. Working with editors and proofreaders. If you work with a traditional royalty-paying publisher, they’ll assign an editor to read your manuscript and send you a “revision letter.” This will tell you what you did well and what you need to improve. Revision letters typically run several pages, but they can go to many pages if there are a lot of problems. Professional novelists who self-publish their work often hire somebody to review their work, or they may ask a friend to do it, or they may hand it off to alpha readers or beta readers. Once you’ve got feedback, it’s up to you to make new revisions in light of what your editors or readers say. The final stage of editing is called proofreading, and it’s often done by a professional and returned to you for review. Strictly speaking, this entire stage is optional, but successful novelists rarely skip it. Producing your book. When the book is finally declared done, it still needs to be produced. If you’re publishing a paper edition, the book needs to be typeset, printed, bound, and shipped. If you’re publishing an e-book edition, it usually will be typeset and exported in ePub format. (The one exception is that some self-publishers who only publish e-books will simply upload their Word document directly to Amazon. But even in this case, the Word document has to be formatted the way you want the e-book to look.) In either case, a cover needs to be designed, and it’s different for the paper edition and the e-book edition. So this stage is not really optional. If you’re working with a publisher, they do this work. If you’re self-publishing, then you do it yourself or hire someone to do it. Launching your book. Once you’ve got your book produced, you usually want to spend some time letting the world know it’s available for sale. A few authors do nothing to launch their book, but most successful authors spend some time on it. 

So how long do each of these stages take? That depends on a lot of things. Which stages are you executing? How long is your book? How fast do you write? How many hours do you have each week to work on your novel? Are you working with a publisher or doing it all yourself? 

A typical novel runs 60k to 120k words. You can write shorter, and you can write longer. In what follows, I’ll assume a round 100k words and make estimates based on that. Then you can scale my estimates up or down, depending on whether your novel is shorter or longer than 100k.

Estimates for Research and Worldbuilding

If you don’t need to do any research or worldbuilding, then lucky you—this stage will take zero time. Or if you’re writing a series, then every book after the first one can use all the research and worldbuilding you invested into that first one. 

A reasonable amount of clock time to put into your research is 50 to 100 hours. Some novelists put in much more. (I plead guilty to this. That’s just the way my brain is wired. Research is part of the fun, and ditto worldbuilding.)

How much calendar time does this convert to? That depends on how many hours you spend per week. If you have 10 hours every week, then that 50 to 100 hours is going to cost you 5 to 10 weeks. 

Estimates for Story Planning

If you don’t do any story planning, then this stage will also cost you zero time. It’s tempting to skip this stage and just “get to the good stuff,” but if your brain is wired to need story planning, then you need to do it. You’ll end up writing your first draft quicker, and you’ll save a ton of time on editing and probably on working with editors. 

For those who plan their story, it’s again reasonable to budget a clock time of 50 to 100 hours. Snowflakers will take less time than Outliners. Neither is right or wrong for everyone. Both are right for some people and wrong for others. Part of your career management problem is figuring out how your brain is wired so that you can collaborate with it to be as productive as possible. 

To estimate the corresponding calendar time in weeks, again just divide your estimated clock time by the number of hours you have in a week. 

Estimates for Writing the First Draft

Everybody has to write a first draft. Some writers are faster than others. I have known writers who produce 100 to 200 words per hour. I have known others who write 2000 words per hour. Writers who dictate their first draft claim speeds up to 5000 words per hour. I have my doubts on that. 

I typically write about 1000 words per hour if I’m in the zone, and about 500 when not in the zone. I can’t control being in the zone. Some days just click. 

If you are an Edit-As-You-Go writer, you may write just a few hundred words and then go back and edit it many times. This reduces your speed at writing first-draft copy, but the payoff is that you may spend very little time in the next stage, editing your manuscript. Don’t make this decision based on speed. Make it based on how your brain works best. If you need to Edit-As-You-Go, then do so and be happy. If you don’t need to, then don’t and be happy. You are who you are and you can’t change that. 

The clock time to write your first draft is just your total word count divided by your hourly speed. So if you are writing 100k words and you write 1000 words per hour, then your clock time estimate is 100 hours. 

The calendar time again depends on how many hours you write per week. You know the drill, so I won’t repeat it. 

Estimates for Editing Your Manuscript

If you skip editing, then this stage will cost you nothing. Edit-As-You-Go writers may be able to skip this stage. I know a fair number of professional novelists who’ve written many novels and feel comfortable skipping this stage. I am not one of them. I usually put my manuscripts through 5 to 10 rounds of editing. The early rounds are slow. The later rounds are fast. 

Most writers can edit their work quite a bit faster than they can write first-draft copy. But if you rushed the first draft, you may find yourself spending more time on the second draft, and probably also the third. 

The clock time to do each round of editing is again easy to calculate by dividing your word count by your speed. If you have 100k words and you can edit 2000 words per hour, then a round of editing will cost you 50 hours. 

And again, the calendar time just depends on your clock time and the number of hours you have per week.   

Estimates for Working With Editors

This stage is different because now you’re working with somebody else. Your editor can’t send you a revision letter instantly. I’ve had an editor who once got a revision letter back to me in 3 days. That’s practically a miracle. But most of them will take weeks or even months to respond. When I worked with traditional publishers, it usually took them 1 to 3 months to return a revision letter. I’ve heard stories of much longer wait times. Yes, really. 

While you’re waiting on your editor, you are spending zero clock time of your own. But the calendar continues to turn. This can be frustrating. It’s probably a good idea to have another project to work on while you wait. 

Once you get your revision letter, you then need to edit your manuscript again, based on your editor’s comments. (The editor doesn’t make the changes; you do. Their job is to guide you in what needs reworking.) When you work with a publisher, they may well hand you a revision letter and ask for revisions within a few days or weeks. Yes, they really can give you only days to make revisions. If you complain, they’ll point out that you signed a binding legal contract and they invested a lot of money in your book, and now it’s time to buckle down. This can get very uncomfortable. 

After you do revisions, a traditional publisher will always send the manuscript to a proofreader, who will catch all the last little Punctuation, Usage, Grammar, and Spelling (PUGS) issues. Most publishers will send the final proofs back to you for a final read-through. They will often give you a short fuse (“Can you get it back to us tomorrow? Thanks! You’re a prince!”) Again, this can be not-fun, especially if the proofreader decided to change your wording. I’ve heard horror stories of proofreaders making drastic changes that wrecked the dialogue or the author’s voice. I’ve not experienced this myself. Self-published authors have a lot less pressure here. They can always just throw out what the proofreader did. But trad-pubbed authors may have to grin and bear it. 

It’s very hard to make estimates here, but when I was traditionally published, I figured about 40 hours to do edits based on the revision letter, and another 10 hours to review the final proofs to catch the errors the proofreader missed. I tend to put more time on the edits now that I am self-publishing, but that’s probably because I have no deadline and I’m a perfectionist. So for me, 100 hours is about right. 

Estimates for Producing Your Book

If you are traditionally published, your publisher will handle all the production. So this stage costs you almost zero clock time. (The only time you take will be an hour or two to complain about the awful cover your publisher created for you. This will get you nowhere, usually. Also, you will be asked to approve the terrible back-cover copy that a marketing intern wrote, which will cost you another hour to rewrite.) 

A traditional publisher may take a few months to over a year to work through production. The wheels of traditional publishing grind slow. You should have other projects to work on while you wait.

If you are self-publishing your work, then production is your job. You have two tasks:

Typeset the novel. You can do this yourself in an hour or two using Vellum (a Mac-only piece of software that is fantastic) or Atticus (runs on Mac OS and Linux and Windows and Chromebook, and I’ve never used it, but I hear it’s very good). The calendar time here is typically one day.Get a cover designed. If you have excellent graphic design skills and excellent marketing skills, you can do this yourself in a few hours. Otherwise, you should hire a freelance cover designer. This will take an hour or two of your time to create a cover design brief that tells the designer what you think you want. Then you’ll spend a few hours telling your designer what they got wrong. This can take weeks to months of calendar time to get right, so it’s a project you should launch long before you’re ready to publish. Estimates for Launching Your Book

Whether you are traditionally published or self-published, you will probably spend some time on your launch. The main thing here is letting people in your Target Audience know that your book is available and giving them incentive to buy it right now. The list of possible tasks you could do in your book launch is gigantic. Pick a few that mesh with your personality and do those well. Don’t let your publisher steamroll you. I had a publisher once give me a list of 25 things to do. I had a talk with my editor and the head of marketing and the head of publicity and told them the 3 things I was actually going to do. One of my tasks was not on their list—they didn’t know you could do that. We had a terrific launch. 

It’s reasonable to spend anywhere from 1 to 50 hours on your launch. The calendar time is usually compressed. Most authors commit no more than a week or two to a book launch. 

Hard Numbers

For reference, here are a few hard numbers from my own life, which show how much variance there is in the real world:

The fastest I ever wrote a traditionally published book was about 300 hours, which took only 9 months from signing the contract to seeing books in the store.The slowest I ever wrote a traditionally published book was about 500 hours over 12 to 15 months (I don’t have good records on either of these numbers, so they’re estimates). The fastest I’ve written a self-published book was about 150 hours in 3 months. The slowest I’ve written a self-published book was more than 1000 hours over more than 5 years. 

A lot depends on where you are in life. If you have a demanding day job and young children, you may not have much time and energy to put into writing. As you get older, your energy level may drop, but you may also find yourself with more time for writing after you retire. 

Homework:What is the expected word count for the novel you’re currently working on? Which of the 7 stages do you need to do? What is a reasonable estimate for the clock time for each of these stages? What is a reasonable estimate for the calendar time for each? Multiply all estimates by 2 and add them all up. That is a pretty decent estimate of the amount of time you will actually spend on your novel.  

The post How Long Does it Take to Write a Novel? appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Creating. We’ll talk about the Storyworld of your novel. 

What is Your Storyworld and Why Does It Matter? 

The Storyworld of your novel is the stage on which your story plays out. It might be a room, a building, a city, a region, a nation, a planet, or a galaxy, depending on your story. Every Storyworld has rules that govern how it works. The physical Storyworld has physics, chemistry, biology, geography, cosmology. Your characters have physiology, psychology, sociology. Usually, they have government, economic systems, philosophy, religion. 

Your Storyworld matters because it sets constraints on your characters. There are actions your characters can’t take, places they can’t go, things they can’t buy, ideas they can’t think. Humans living on earth can’t jump 10 feet in the air. They can’t go to Mars (not yet, anyway). They can’t buy a galaxy. They can’t know what it is to be a bat. 

Constraints are important, because they create conflict in a story. Without conflict, you don’t have a story. 

It’s your job to know your Storyworld well enough to create an interesting story. It’s also your job to inject enough of your Storyworld into your reader’s brain that your story is understandable and believable. 

Some Comments on Worldbuilding

The process of figuring out how your Storyworld works is called “Worldbuilding.” Writers who write science fiction or fantasy or historical fiction often spend a lot of time on Worldbuilding, because they work with Storyworlds that may be wildly different from the world their readers live in. 

Worldbuilding is a very large subject. I’ll leave the actual process of Worldbuilding for another day. Every novelist has to do at least some Worldbuilding. Even if you’re writing about life on planet earth in the present day, you still have to pick some part of the world to show to your reader. And you have to know what rules apply. 

The rules of your Storyworld may be just the rules you’ve lived by all your life. If that’s the case, then you don’t need to do any extra work. But that’s only because you’ve spent your entire life doing the work, just by living. 

If you’re writing about a Storyworld even slightly different from the one you live in, you’ve got to spend some time figuring out the rules of your Storyworld. 

How far should you go in building your Storyworld? That’s a tough question. J.R.R. Tolkien went pretty far in constructing Middle Earth. A lot of what he created never made it into The Lord of the Rings. He created it because he enjoyed it. And he undoubtedly used parts of his Storyworld that he never imagined would be needed. Until the moment when his story needed something extra, and he realized that he already had built in a little chunk of Storyworld that would provide that extra something.

A reasonable rule of thumb is to build enough of your Storyworld that you can figure out what the constraints are that your characters face in any given situation. If you know the constraints, then you can throw new obstacles in their path in every scene.  

How Much Storyworld Should Appear In Your Story?

Some authors choose to show just a little of their Storyworld. Others choose to show a lot. That’s a decision you get to make. The readers you attract will be those who like your choice. 

But you can’t possibly show your entire Storyworld. You have around 100,000 words for your novel, plus or minus. A full explanation of your Storyworld, even as you know it, might run into the billions of words. You don’t have the word budget to show it all. You have to pick and choose. 

Here’s another rule of thumb: If your Storyworld creates a problem for your characters, then you should explain to the reader the part of your Storyworld that creates the conflict. A few examples should clarify this:

In Pride & Prejudice, by Jane Austen, the five Bennet sisters are in a tough spot because the estate their father owns is “entailed”—meaning that it can only be passed on fully intact to the closest male heir of their father. The entailment could be broken only if there were a Bennet brother who signed a legal document, along with the father, to end the entailment. But there is no brother; the nearest male heir is their stupid and selfish cousin, Mr. Collins. So the five sisters can only hope to inherit their mother’s smallish dowry. They have poor prospects for marriage and worse prospects if they stay single. The entire novel is about this quandary, which is created by this one small legal aspect of the Storyworld of Regency England. 

In Artemis, by Andy Weir, the Storyworld is a small colony on the moon, sometime late in the 21st century. The moon has a gravity about 1/6 of earth gravity. Because of that, it can’t hold an atmosphere, and the colony lives inside a set of connected pressurized domes. You can venture outside only in an EVA suit, and only for a limited time. The lead character, Jazz, came to the moon as a child, and her adult body was formed in moon gravity. If she were to return to earth, she’d face severe physical challenges because her muscles and bones could not handle earth gravity. Jazz is a smuggler, and her greatest fear is that she’ll be deported to earth. This is one way in which the low moon gravity affects the story. But there’s another consequence of low lunar gravity that drives the main storyline of the novel. I won’t reveal this consequence because it’s a plot spoiler. Go read the book if you really want to know. (I enjoyed Artemis even more than The Martian or Project Hail Mary, and that is saying something. I think the main reason is that Artemis has a more complex social structure in its Storyworld.)

In The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, the evil Capitol has created a mutated species of wasps, the “tracker jackers.” These have a horrifically painful sting that causes hallucinations. If you’re stung by several tracker jackers, you’ll probably die, and you’ll definitely wish for death. Tracker jackers play an important role in only one scene of the novel, Chapter 14, where the lead character Katniss uses them to get herself out of a jam—at the cost of being stung herself. While tracker jackers are only a small part of the Storyworld of this novel, the fact that they exist illustrates why the Capitol is so widely hated by the Districts. And tracker jackers are just one example of the Capitol’s “muttations.” Other muttations cause problems in other parts of the novel, and the Capitol’s technological supremacy is the main reason it’s able to dominate the Districts and force them into slave labor. 

So how do you put your Storyworld into your novel? You have two options, Showing or Telling…

Showing Your Storyworld

I discussed the difference beween Showing and Telling a few weeks ago, in my blog post What “Show, Don’t Tell” Actually Means.

You can Show your Storyworld using any of the five tools of Showing—Action, Dialogue, Interior Monologue, Interior Emotion, or Sensory Description. 

These tools work best when you’re trying to Show your reader some small aspect of your Storyworld. You’re relying here on your reader figuring out your Storyworld by the things you Show. 

Action works nicely for Showing the reader the physical facts of the Storyworld. In Artemis, the characters can jump a lot higher than anyone can on earth. But they have to spend a lot of time putting on an EVA suit if they want to go outside. The problem with Action is that you can’t explain laws or religion or philosophy using character Actions. 

Dialogue can work well for explaining the ideas that rule your Storyworld. But you have to be careful. If both characters know the rules of the Storyworld, it looks dumb for one of them to explain it to the other. So this works best when you have a child or a foreigner who doesn’t understand the rules and demands an explanation. Even in this case, beware of infodumps. It’s better if one of the characters argues that the rules are unfair or stupid. Then you have some conflict to keep the story going while you explain the Storyworld. 

Interior Monologue can also be useful for Showing your Storyworld. But you can’t put in long explanations like you can with Dialogue, because nobody ever explained something to themselves. 

Sensory Description can be great for showing the physical parts of your Storyworld. Again, you don’t want to do an infodump. When you Show your Storyworld using Sensory Description, highlight the things that create problems for your characters.  

Telling Your Storyworld

There are times when Showing just won’t work to explain part of your Storyworld. In that case, if the story depends on your reader knowing something about your Storyworld, then Tell it using Exposition. 

SF writers and historical novelists are especially susceptible to the disease known as SeeHowMuchResearchIDid. Do your best to avoid getting this disease. Readers get bored with infodumps. Tell what’s essential, and leave the rest out. And “essential” usually works out to be a whole lot less than the author thinks it is. 

How do you know how much to leave in or take out? Get someone to read the scene. If they’re confused, you need to put in more. If they’re bored, you need to take stuff out. 

Homework:How well do you know the Storyworld for the current novel you’re writing? What parts of your Storyworld create the conflict that drives the main storyline for your novel? Have you given your reader enough information about your Storyworld so they understand your main storyline? Have you Shown or Told your reader things about your Storyworld that don’t drive the conflict? If so, this is not necessarily bad, but it creates an opportunity. Can you use those aspects of your Storyworld to increase the conflict in your story? 

The post The Storyworld of Your Novel appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Creating. We’ll talk about three critical decisions you must make when you’re choosing a viewpoint character for a scene. 

Before You Write Your Next Scene…

A scene is the fundamental unit of fiction. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end—it’s a small story in its own right. Each scene is like a brick that you use to build the larger story of your novel. If you can write one good scene, you can write a hundred, and that’s a novel. So it’s crucial to get each scene right. 

Before you begin writing a scene, you need to make three key decisions:

Whose story are you going to tell in this scene?Where is the video camera you’re using to show this scene, and which way is it pointed? What tense will you use for the verbs in your scene?

Let’s talk about each of these, in turn.

What is a Viewpoint Character?

First things first. Every scene is a miniature story about somebody. That somebody is called the “viewpoint character.” They are also sometimes called by other terms—the “point-of-view character” or the “POV character” or the “lead character.” These all mean the same thing. 

In your scene, you’re going to show your reader a movie in which they find themselves inside the skin of the viewpoint character. The scene is a small story about one particular incident in the life of the viewpoint character. The incident usually lasts for some minutes, but it can last mere seconds, and it could in principle go on for hours. 

Why do you need a viewpoint character? Because the viewpoint character provides the emotional yardstick that tells your reader how to feel. The events of the scene only have meaning when the reader knows who is “the good guy” that they’re rooting for. 

Suppose you’re writing a scene about the 100 meter finals in the next Olympics. Here are some options for viewpoint characters:

The 17-year-old phenom who wins, shattering the world record in the process. A year ago, he was nobody, and now he’s on top of the world.The 35-year-old veteran runner just behind him, who also breaks the previous world record, but comes in second. He’s spent his whole life dreaming of a gold medal, and now he’ll retire with only a silver, because he was one millisecond too slow. The sportscaster calling the contest on TV, who is secretly battling Alzheimer’s and mixes up the names of the runners as they cross the finish line. He’s been lying to his network about his condition, and now he’ll lose his job. The new CEO of a failing shoe manufacturer, who hopes to sign an endorsement deal with the winner of the race. He doesn’t care who wins. What he cares about is saving his company from bankruptcy. 

The story you tell in your scene depends critically on which of these characters you choose as your viewpoint character. If you choose the winning kid, it’s a story of sudden, life-changing victory. If you choose the second-place guy, it’s a bittersweet story of running the best race of your life and still losing. If you choose the sportscaster, it’s not about the race at all, it’s about losing your livelihood while all the world is watching.  If you choose the CEO, it’s a story about dollars and cents and brutally real dog-eat-puppy capitalism. 

Choose your viewpoint character so as to tell whatever story you want to tell in your scene. You can use different viewpoint characters in different scenes if you like. Or you can write all the scenes in your novel using the same viewpoint character. It’s up to you, and there’s no one choice that’s always right. 

What is a Viewpoint, and Why Does It Matter?

Once you’ve chosen your viewpoint character, you still need to decide how to show that character on the page. Your goal as a novelist is to create a movie in your reader’s brain. And a movie requires a video camera. A camera has to be placed somewhere. It has to point somewhere. The choice of where to put your camera and which direction to point it is called your viewpoint.

There are six commonly used options for the viewpoint of your scene:

First person viewpoint. You put the camera inside the viewpoint character’s head, using the pronoun “I” to refer to the character. The camera points outward, showing only what the viewpoint character knows. This is a fairly common viewpoint. Second person viewpoint. You put the camera inside the viewpoint character’s head, using the pronoun “you.” Again, the camera points outward, showing only what the viewpoint character knows. This is a very uncommon viewpoint. Third person viewpoint. You put the camera inside the viewpoint character’s head, using suitable third-person pronouns, such as “he” or “she” or “they”. Again, the camera points outward, showing only what the viewpoint character knows. This is the most common viewpoint.Third person objective viewpoint. You put the camera outside the viewpoint character,  not inside. Again, you use suitable third-person pronouns, but you can no longer show what the viewpoint character is thinking or feeling. You can point the camera at the character or at anything else, as you like. You can show things the character can’t see, such as the smudge on his forehead, or the spider walking across her hair. But you can’t show what’s inside the character’s head, because you’re outside. You have to suggest the character’s thoughts and feeling based on their facial expressions and body language. This is a very uncommon viewpoint. Head-hopping viewpoint. You switch the location of the camera to be inside the heads of multiple characters at different times in the scene. Typically, you use either third person or first person, but now you’re doing these for multiple viewpoint characters in the same scene. Some writers think this is a horrible thing to do, and others think it’s perfectly fine. You get to make your own decision on this. Omniscient viewpoint. You can move the camera anywhere in the universe or outside it, popping inside the heads of any of the characters, inside the head of God, or anywhere else you feel like. This viewpoint was more popular in the 19th century than it is now. It can be amazing when it works, but it’s difficult to do well, and it’s easy to do badly.Past, Present, or Future?

The last decision you have to make is what tense you’ll use for your verbs. This is very simple. You have three choices: past, present, or future. 

Past tense is most common, and it’s easy to do. 

Present tense has become more common in the last couple of decades. It takes a bit more work, but it’s also relatively easy to do. 

Future tense is rare, but you can imagine cases where it makes sense. If you’re writing a scenario for how to deal with a nuclear reactor catastrophe, you might write a scene in second person future tense, like this: “You’ll see a safety switch below the main shutoff valve. You’ll switch that to Override. Then you’ll turn the valve all the way Off. Then run to the escape hatch. You have a maximum of 8.4317 seconds to get there. Approximately.” 

Further Reading

If you’re interested in reading more on viewpoint characters, viewpoint, and tense, see Chapter 4 in my book How to Write a Dynamite Scene Using the Snowflake Method. 

Homework:

Look at the most recent scene you wrote in your current novel. 

Who is the viewpoint character (or characters)? Why did you choose that person, and might your scene be better if you had used a different viewpoint character?What is the viewpoint you used? (Where did you put your camera, and which way did you point it?)Why did you choose that viewpoint, and might your scene be better if you had used a different viewpoint? What tense did you use, and why? If you’re inside the head of your viewpoint character, did you show the reader anything that the viewpoint character can’t know? This is called “breaking point-of-view,” and it’s considered bad because it can disrupt the movie you’re creating in your reader’s brain.

The post Why Viewpoint Characters Are Fundamental to Fiction appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. Specifically, do you always need to write a book proposal for your novel? Let’s start with the obvious question…

What is a Book Proposal?

A book proposal is a document you use to sell your novel to a traditional royalty-paying publisher. It spells out in detail the following:

What kind of novel you’re writing. Why this novel would be a good business deal for the publisher. Why you are the right author to write this book.

If that sounds intimidating, good. If you feel intimidated, you won’t underestimate the task, so you’ll do a better job at it. And this is one thing you want to nail. Learning to write a great proposal is an essential skill for anyone trying to sell a novel to a publisher. Essential. It’s not enough to write a good proposal. You need a great one. The market is extremely competitive, and the proposal shows a publisher that you’ve got the professional skills you must have in order to write a successful book. 

It also gives the publisher the information it needs to know where your book would fit in the marketplace, and how much of an advance your novel would be worth. 

But What If You’re an Indie Author?

You may be an “indie author”—meaning that you intend to act as your own publisher. Do you still need to write a book proposal?

You don’t have to, of course. You can just upload your manuscript to Amazon and the other online retailers. They won’t ask for a proposal. 

But if you’re not an experienced novelist, I still recommend that indie authors write a proposal. Pretend you’re trying to sell your book to a publisher, a corporation that needs to earn money on the books it publishes. This will force you to think like a publisher. It will make you think about the marketability of your novel. Small changes in a book can make a big difference in its marketability. Which may very well earn you a lot more money when you self-publish your book. 

How Do You Write a Book Proposal?

This is a large subject. Whole books have been written on how to write a proposal. So I can’t say everything here. But I can tell you the parts of a proposal and give you some tips on how to write each section. Most agents will tell you on their website what they want in a proposal. I strongly recommend that you read any agent’s guidelines very carefully and follow them. Ignoring an agent’s guidelines is a good way to get an instant rejection. 

Here are the main parts of proposals that I’ve written in the past:

Cover page—one page with the following elements:Title of the novelName of the authorMailing Address of the authorPhone Number of the authorEmail Address of the authorExecutive Summary—one or two pages with the following elements:Working Title (Call it “Working Title” because editors all think they are smarter than you, and they’ll want to change your title. Sometimes they’re right.)Target Audience (Define your audience by their “psychographics”—how they think and what they want. Defining a target audience by their “demographics”—age, sex, etc.—is rarely as relevant.)Category (For example, Romance, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Historical, Horror, etc. You will probably want to specify a subcategory also, because each of these main categories is very broad.)Word Count (Round this to the nearest 10,000 words. If you haven’t finished the manuscript, estimate the word count. Word count matters to a publisher, because it translates into page count, and every page costs money. The publisher will hold you to the word count you give in your proposal, so get this right.)Completion Time (The time in months that you estimate it will take to finish the manuscript after you sign the contract. If you are previously unpublished, this is probably irrelevant, because you usually have to have the manuscript already completed before your proposal will even be considered.)Story Summary (Write a one-paragraph summary of your story. This should reflect the 3-Act Structure of your novel. You can take this straight from Step 2 of the Snowflake Method, if you’re a Snowflaker.)Similar Books (Name some books that are “similar” to your novel in some way. One paragraph on each is enough. Don’t assume that the person reading your proposal has read any of these books. Tell how your book is like each book, and how it’s different. Resist the urge to put down the other books. It’s enough to show how your book is “different”; you don’t have to show that it’s “better.” Resist the urge to compare your novel to books that have sold millions of copies. Yours probably won’t, so it’s best not to make yourself look delusional.)Platform (Describe your channels for reaching your Target Audience, with hard numbers. Maybe you are a public speaker and speak to 5000 people per year. Maybe you have a blog or email list with 5000 subscribers. Maybe you have a Substack with 300 paid subscribers and 12,000 free subscribers. Maybe you have 100,000 followers on Facebook, or 300,000 on TikTok, or 5,000,000 on X, and hopefully some of these are not bots. Publishers know that social media follower count is not very meaningful and rarely translates into sales, so highlight the communications channels that work best—speaking, email, blogs, Substack—if you have them.)Research (An optional paragraph or two spelling out any research you might have done for this novel, or any unusual qualifications you might have. If you are writing a hard science fiction novel and you have a PhD in physics, this is a nice place to say so. If you are writing a historical novel and you have a degree in history, that’s relevant. Resist the urge to brag. If your novel doesn’t require any research, skip this section.)Endorsements: (An optional list of people you’ve lined up to endorse your novel. If you’re a beginning novelist, you may not know anybody who could endorse it; in that case, leave this section out. Never say that you will get an endorsement from a certain person unless you have already asked them and they have written the endorsement or have promised to write one. Endorsers should be relevant to your novel.)About the Author—one page with a long paragraph or two of relevant information about the author. If you have published any similar book, that’s relevant. If you have any degrees in creative writing, that’s relevant. If you have credentials that relate to your book, that’s relevant. If you have been reading since the age of four and “love reading,” that’s not relevant; most authors began reading early and they all love reading. If your mother loves your novel, that’s not relevant, unless your mother is a well-known author or a celebrity. Synopsis—typically one or two pages summarizing the plot of your story. This is the most boring thing you will ever write in your entire life, but all agents and editors insist that you include it, so grit your teeth and do it. If you’re having trouble grinding out your synopsis, here is a blog post I wrote a few years ago on Writing the Perfect Synopsis for Beginners. Character Sketches—this is optional, and very few authors write these, but they are the secret sauce that I’ve put in all of my proposals. Editors and agents love these. Love, love, love. A strong set of character sketches can turn a good proposal into a great one. I did a blog post on Your Secret Weapon—Character Synopses not too long ago that has a nice example of how to do this. 

For those of you who use my software, Snowflake Pro, I’ll note that it generates a book proposal with most of the sections filled in. You have to work through the Snowflake Method process first, and then the software creates an RTF document that you can import into your word processor and finish. I don’t sell Snowflake Pro anymore, nor do I support it, but it still works just fine. If you need a running start on your proposal, it will get your rolling. 

If you mail in your proposal on actual paper, you will also need a cover letter—a one-page letter of about four paragraphs that does the following:

Introduces you to the editor or agent (or else reminds them of how and where you previously met them, usually at a writing conference). Describes your story in two or three sentences. This includes the category of your novel, sets the backdrop for the story, and then tells enough of the Three-Act Structure (up to about the First Disaster) to hook the editor or agent’s interest. If you’re unclear on what the First Disaster is, you can review it in my blog post Writing That Pesky Three-Act Structure. Optionally mentions any special qualifications you have for writing the story. Also tells whether you are previously published and gives a few details on your most recent book or your most successful book, if any. If you are unpublished, say you are a debut author and mention any degrees in creative writing you might have. Avoid puffery here. Just keep to the facts, like any professional would. Closes with a paragraph saying that you’re enclosing a proposal and three sample chapters. (If the editor’s or agent’s website specifies more or fewer sample chapters, then do what they request.)

It’s much more common these days to email your proposal. If you do that, the body of your email should contain the above information, so you don’t need to attach a cover letter. You should attach the proposal and sample chapters as Microsoft Word documents. Word is the standard in publishing. Whether you love it or hate it is irrelevant. Don’t make an editor or agent do extra work to read your proposal. 

How Do You Know if Your Proposal is Any Good?

The first proposal you write will probably be awful. That’s OK. Every author who ever lived has written an awful first proposal. My first three were awful. I don’t think anyone ever died of writing an awful proposal. However, many novels have died of this disease, so you really do need to get beyond this stage. An awful proposal is the necessary first stepping-stone to a great one.

You can’t cure a problem you can’t see, so you need an honest diagnosis of what’s wrong with your proposal. The only people who can tell you are publishing professionals with experience in writing or reading proposals. 

And who are these mysterious “publishing professionals?” It’s a small group: 

EditorsAgentsAuthors who have written numerous proposals and have used them to sell a novel to a traditional, royalty-paying publisher. 

If you already have an agent, send the proposal to your agent. They will almost always have suggestions to improve it. A good agent will make good suggestions. That’s one way to know you have a good agent. 

If you’re good friends with an author who’s been published by a traditional royalty-paying publisher, that’s ideal. Most authors are happy to help a beginner whom they know well. 

If you don’t know any publishing professionals who could critique your book proposal, then you need to find one. You might take a class at a local community college, as long as it’s taught by a published author. Once you get to know your teacher, you can ask them to have a look at your proposal and tell you what’s wrong with it. 

An alternative is to go to a writing conference that offers appointments with publishing professionals. Conferences are expensive, so if you take this route, make sure the conference offers one-on-one appointments with faculty members. When you get to the conference, make appointments with one or more people who seem to be the best fit for your novel. Appointments are usually 15 minutes, so you won’t have a lot of time. Say right away that you are a novice writer learning to write a proposal and you would like a critique on your current best effort. If you’ve made an appointment with an author, they will empathize and will be amazingly helpful. If you’ve made an appointment with an editor or agent, make it clear that you are not pitching the book to them. Tell them you are trying to learn how to write a proposal and this is the best you’ve come up with so far, and ask them to critique it. This takes the pressure off them. Editors and agents have to reject a lot of pitches at a conference, and this wears them down. Asking them for a critique instantly changes an adversarial relationship into a cooperative one. Now they’re on your team. They are no longer looking for a reason to say “no.” Now they’re looking for how to get you to “yes” with somebody else, someday. If they spot a gaping flaw in your proposal, they may also suggest how to fix it. 

What Do You Do With a Book Proposal?

The purpose of a book proposal is to provide written information on a proposed business partnership between you and a publisher. A proposal is the tool you use to sell your novel to a publisher. It’s the only tool most writers will ever have. 

Most publishers require you to submit your proposal through an agent. (Not all publishers do, but most of them do.)

If you don’t have an agent and need one, your proposal is your ticket to getting one. Look for suitable agents online, read their guidelines, and follow them to the letter in making contact. It is better to do a carefully targeted submission to one agent than a scattershot submission to a thousand. Yes, really. A targeted submission has a low probability of success. Scattershot submissions have zero probability. Don’t use AI to write your submission. Use your own personality. Humans can tell the difference. 

If you have an agent, send your final, polished proposal and sample chapters to your agent. You will probably have been through several rounds of revisions with them, as I mentioned earlier. They’ll create their own cover letter and submit your proposal and chapters to suitable publishers. 

If you’re submitting your proposal to publishers who don’t require an agent, review their guidelines carefully and follow them to the letter. Just as with an agent, it’s better to carefully  target a few publishers than to shotgun out hundreds of submissions. 

If you’re an indie author and have a proposal, you don’t need to do anything with it. The act of writing the proposal forced you to “think marketability.” Which changed the way you wrote your novel. And changed the way you designed your cover. And changed the way you wrote the sales copy for the online retailers. And made your book better in a thousand ways. Upload your novel and reap the rewards. 

Homework:Do you need to write a proposal? If so, what do you hope to gain by writing it? If not, why do you not need one? In case you need to write one, give yourself 5 hours to write a first cut. This may take several days of calendar time, but 5 hours of clock time is just enough. Don’t overthink this. Sit down and drill it out. The first cut is just a first cut; it doesn’t have to be pretty. Once you have a first cut at your proposal, make a plan for how you’ll polish it. You have a lot of options. You can read through it yourself, pretending you’re the marketing director of a major publisher. You can show it to your critique group. You can show it to a published author. You can show it to your agent, if you have one. You can take it to a writing conference and get it critiqued. Make your plan. Then execute it. 

The post Do You Really Need a Book Proposal? appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Organizing. Today I’m writing about how to map out your writing career—what can you expect and how can you optimize things?

What’s Normal in the Publishing World?

I know a writer who signed her first publishing contract after working on her novel for 26 years. She went on to write a number of award-winning novels. 

I know another writer who was a novice writer when I met her at a conference, and she signed her first publishing contract less than a year later. She went on to write a number of other novels and has done well with them.

I know another writer who uploaded her first novel to Amazon as a self-published work, and it sold pretty well. Then it sold very well. She went on to write a number of other novels that have also done very well. 

I worked about 11 years learning the craft of writing before I sold my first novel to a publisher. I went on to write several more award-winning novels and 3 best-selling books on how to write fiction. 

If you’re looking for a pattern here, there isn’t one. There is no “normal.” Other than persistence. Some writers have to persist longer than others, but persistence is what gets you there—if you do actually end up getting there. 

But I also know many writers who have persisted for a long time and never got published. Or they self-published and got no sales. 

So how do you plan your writing career, when you don’t know whether it’s going to go anywhere? Let’s talk about the stages of a writer’s career, and how to know which one you’re in, and how to move on to the next level…

The Four Stages of a Writer’s Career

Your life before you get published is a lot like high school. It can be a miserable experience or a fantastic experience, or both, or neither. But your success after graduation has no correlation with how much you enjoyed high school. Your success in life has all kinds of correlation with the amount of work you put into getting a good solid high school education. 

I see four stages in a writer’s pre-published life, much like the four years of high school—freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior. And yes, I know some people go to middle school from 7th to 9th grade, and then high school only takes up three years. So the metaphor’s not perfect. But let’s run with the four-year analogy, because it has a lot to tell you about where you stand and what you can do to graduate.

The Freshman Writer

A freshman writer typically has been writing for less than a year. The freshman has an idea for a novel. Maybe she’s been mulling it for a long time, but one day she decides to actually write the thing. So she sits down and starts typing. 

Some freshman are amazingly energetic. They can drill out several hundred pages in a few weeks or months. Others are agonizingly slow. They may take years to get the first ten chapters written. 

What is common to most freshmen is that they don’t start out getting any feedback on their work. They just type words. They may think the words are amazing. They may think the words are hopeless drivel. They are generally wrong on both counts. Freshmen typically don’t have the skills to assess their own work. And (in most cases) they will continue to be freshman forever unless they get some help. 

What kind of help? There are all kinds of help. The right critique group can move you along very quickly. (The wrong critique group can crush your will to live.) A good coach can tell you what you’re doing wrong and show you how to do it right. Sometimes, a community college class on writing is all it takes to get a freshman moving in the right direction. Or a few good books on writing. Or a writing conference. Some writers choose to get an MFA in creative writing. 

A personal note: I was a freshman for a couple of years. What kicked up my game was going to a good writing conference, getting hooked into a quite decent critique group, meeting some writing buddies, and reading a couple of spectacularly great books on how to write fiction. 

Every writer is different. What worked for me won’t necessarily work for you. But every writer needs some kind of help. Once you get the right kind of help and use it to improve your writing, you will rapidly advance over the next year or so to the next stage… 

The Sophomore Writer

A sophomore writer is starting to write pretty good fiction. If she’s in a critique group, she is the best or second-best writer in the group. If she’s working with a coach, the coach has taught her most of what they have to teach. If she’s taking a class at a community college, she’s getting an A or an A+ in the class. If she’s reading books on craft, all the books are starting to sound the same. 

It’s easy for the sophomore writer to think she has arrived. She is now publishable, because she’s getting As, right? No, wrong. Getting an A in your local community college writing class is not enough. It’s a start, but it’s not going to get you a writing contract. Yes, you write better than 99% of all humans. But there are still hundreds of thousands of writers who write better than you. This is a hard truth to hear, but it’s still truth. 

There is a big difference between “good fiction” and “marketable fiction.” What is common to all sophomores is that they don’t understand what makes a novel marketable. Sophomores (in most cases) are going to remain sophomores forever until they get help.

What kind of help? For the most part, reading more books is not going to have much value. You’re going to have to interact with real humans, people in the publishing world. You can go to writing conferences and make appointments with editors or agents. (If this sounds terrifying, then I have been unclear. This is utterly traumatic.) You can join a group of online writers that includes actual published authors. You can hire a high-priced editor with experience in the publishing world. 

One way or another, you’re going to need to learn how to write a book proposal. I recommend doing this, even if you intend to self-publish. Writing a book proposal will expose all the gaps in your understanding of marketability. If you show your proposal to anyone with experience in publishing, they’ll point out all the things you don’t understand about the realities of modern publishing. And that will be good for you, if you let it. 

A personal note: The first book proposal I wrote was spectacularly awful. It ran on for about 200 pages, which is ten times too long, but I didn’t know any better. I lugged a couple of copies to a writing conference and made appointments with two real, live editors. Both were far, far, far kinder than I deserved, and I learned something from them. My second proposal was better; it was merely awful. My tenth proposal was quite good. 

Every writer is different. One way or another, you must find some way to learn how to make your novel marketable. Because an unmarketable book is not going anywhere. Once you’ve figured out the marketability thing, you’ll wake up one happy day to discover that you’ve advanced to the next stage…

The Junior Writer

A writer in her junior year is writing very good fiction. She’s writing very good proposals. But she is not yet writing at the professional level. “Very good” is fine if you want to impress people in your writing class or your critique group or your fellow writers at a writing conference. It’s not enough if you want to impress an editor or an agent. 

You need to get better, if you want to advance. You get better by writing more pages of your manuscript. And by writing more proposals. And by showing your work to publishing professionals. And by learning how to tell good advice from bad advice. You will get both kinds. From very intelligent, well-meaning people. It’s on you to know which advice is right for you and which is wrong. The same advice can be perfect for one writer and awful for another. 

A personal note: I spent several years at the junior level. That was longer than it should have taken, but I was very busy with other things in my life—young children, new house, demanding job. I worked on my novel most days. I went to a local conference once a year. What I needed was to go to larger conferences with more editors. Once I started doing that, I quickly broke through to the next level. (“Quickly” means it only took two years.)

Every writer is different. You will need to find your own path to advancing your skills. You will need to work hard. You will need to find your writing voice, so that no AI on the planet can copy you. You will need to understand the psychology of your Target Audience, so that you can write exactly what they’re dying to read. If you do that long enough, you’ll realize one day that you’ve moved on…

The Senior Writer

A writer in her senior year is in the zone and in perfect misery, both at the same time. She is writing the best fiction she’s ever written. She is writing amazing, powerful proposals. She is showing her work to editors or agents on a regular schedule. She is getting back all kinds of warm, glowy feedback, all of which ends with, “…but it’s not quite right for us.”

What’s wrong here? The senior writer who is committed to selling her work to a traditional publisher spends a lot of time angsting about this. Why is she getting all kinds of bites, but never pulling in a fish?

The answer is time. It just takes time. You need to connect with the right editor or agent, at the right time in their life, at the right time in the publishing world. That can happen fast or it can happen slow. It may never happen. That’s the risk you take. 

A personal note: After writing for nine years and creating many proposals and going to many conferences and meeting with many editors, I sat down across the table from an editor at a conference. We made small talk for a few minutes, and that went badly. We talked about my novel idea for a few more minutes, and that went catastrophically. The editor, in complete exasperation, asked if I had a writing sample. I pushed five pages across the table. Two minutes later, he pushed them back and said, “Send me a proposal.” A year later, he called to ask for the full manuscript. Nine months after that, he called to make me an offer. My first novel appeared on the shelves about 12 years after I started writing. A year later, it won a major award in its category. 

Every author who has ever gotten published traditionally has been through this hellish senior year. It’s a horrible time, because you know in your heart you deserve to be published. And it’s not happening, not happening, not happening. Until one day it does. One day, you get a call and you have an offer. Without any warning at all, you have graduated. You’re about to move on to a whole new realm of existence, which may not be all you expected, but it will be different. 

One way around the brutal senior year is to simply self-publish your work. Why bother with a traditional publisher who takes forever, when you can just upload to Amazon and click Publish? That’s a question for another day. I will say only that self-publishing works wonderfully well for some authors (it has done very well for me), while traditional publishing with a big corporate publisher works fantastically for other authors (I did OK with traditional publishers). 

If you want to self-publish, go to it and have fun! You’ll be very glad you learned how to write a book proposal, because that knowledge will guide you in your marketing efforts. If instead you work with a traditional publisher, you’ll be even more glad you learned to write a proposal, because that’s how you make it happen, if it’s going to happen. 

Is All This Struggle Worth It?

Yes. Any published author will tell you the same thing. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! The-diner-scene-in-When-Harry-Met-Sally yes. 

The writing life is hard. It’s hard, whether you’re published or unpublished. It’s hard whether you work with a traditional publisher or you act as your own publisher. You’re going to sweat blood to learn how to write. You’ll sweat more to learn how to make your work marketable. You’ll sweat more to achieve mastery. You’ll sweat more to find exactly the right publishing opportunity. You’ll sweat blood until the day you hang up your spurs, or the day you die in the saddle, whichever comes first.

You will hate very minute of it. You will love every minute of it. I wish you the very best of luck. 

Homework:If you are not yet published, what stage are you currently in—Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, or Senior? What actions can you take today and this week and this month and this year to advance to the next stage? If you are currently published, are there writers you know that you could help move forward in their writing career? What actions could you take to help them advance?

The post How Long Does it Take to Get Published? appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Creating. Today I’m blogging about the completely useless advice that every novelist has been given: “Show, Don’t Tell.” What does that mean? What are you supposed to do with it?

The World’s Worst Advice

Lazy editors since the beginning of time have scribbled “Show, Don’t Tell” on novel manuscripts and handed them back to novice writers without any explanation. If you’ve ever been infuriated by this advice, you’re not alone. It’s bad advice. 

The reason it’s bad advice is that it tells you to “Show, Don’t Tell,” when you need to be shown how to “Show, Don’t Tell.” It’s very meta, in the worst possible way. 

I’m thinking that the next book I write in my Advanced Fiction Writing series should probably cover this topic. But I haven’t written that book yet. I did spend a couple of chapters on the subject in my best-selling book Writing Fiction for Dummies (see chapters 10 and 15, if you have the book). In this blog post, I’ll lay out the basics. 

The 7 Tools of a Novelist

Novelists typically use 7 tools to write their stories. Here they are (and I’ll define them, with examples, a bit further down in this article):

ActionDialogue Interior MonologueInterior EmotionSensory DescriptionNarrative SummaryExposition

The first 5 of these (Action, Dialogue, Interior Monologue, Interior Emotion, and Sensory Description) are what editors mean by “Showing”. The last 2 (Narrative Summary and Exposition) are what editors mean by “Telling.” 

None of these are “always right” or “always wrong” to use. Each of them has a place, and part of the art of fiction writing is knowing which tools to use for any given paragraph. When an editor scrawls “Show, Don’t Tell” in your manuscript, they mean that the particular section they marked should use the “Showing” tools, rather than the “Telling” tools. 

But you can see the problem. Just saying “Show, Don’t Tell” doesn’t give you any guidance on which of the 5 “Showing” tools to use. Nor does it give you any insight into why Narrative Summary or Exposition was the wrong choice for the offending paragraph. 

This is a large subject, so the best I can do in this article is to give you definitions of each of the tools, along with examples.

What Action Means

Action means that you show your characters doing something. Here is an example:

Hermione swung her heavy sword at the werewolf’s neck. 

The werewolf ducked and lunged straight at her.

Hermione twisted hard to the right and kept spinning clockwise. She brought her sword up to chest level and threw all her weight into the swing. 

The sword bit into the werewolf’s throat. 

The above snippet is pure action. Nouns and verbs. If you do your Action right, you create a video in your reader’s brain.

What Dialogue Means

Dialogue means that you show your characters saying something. Here is an example:

“Are you going to answer my question?” Mr. Darcy said. 

Lizzie scowled at him. “You are the last man on earth I should ever be prevailed upon to marry.”

The above snippet is mostly dialogue. Words within quote marks. The first sentence ends with a dialogue tag that tells us who the speaker is—Mr. Darcy. The second sentence begins with an action tag for Lizzie. When writing dialogue, you can use either kind of tag, or you can leave the tag off completely, if you’re certain the reader will know who’s speaking. If you can’t be sure, it’s best to include a tag. If you do your Dialogue right, you create an audiobook in your reader’s brain.

What Interior Monologue Means

Interior Monologue means that you show one of your characters thinking something. You often put this into a paragraph that also includes Action or Dialogue. There are two flavors of Interior Monologue, direct and indirect. Direct Interior Monologue shows the thought in exactly the words the character thinks them. Indirect Interior Monologue summarizes the thought. Here are examples of each, paired with Action:

Katniss fired an arrow at the Gamesmakers’ table. Have a nice day, bozos.

Katniss fired an arrow at the Gamesmakers’ table. She didn’t care if it hit any of them, as long as they got the message. She was not somebody to ignore.  

The first snippet is direct Interior Monologue; the second is indirect. Direct Interior Monologue is often italicized, but not always. It is never necessary to add a tag, such as “Katniss thought.” Most novelists choose to get inside the head of only a single character (the “viewpoint character”) in any given scene, so the reader will always know who is doing the thinking.

If you do your Interior Monologue right, you create an audio voiceover in your reader’s brain.

What Interior Emotion Means

Interior Emotion means that you show your viewpoint character feeling some emotion. This is not as simple as telling the reader what the emotion is. That is considered “telling.” Instead, you typically do this by showing a physiological reaction that implies an emotion. A little Interior Emotion goes a very long way, so you almost always team it up with Action, Dialogue, and/or Interior Monologue. Here is an example:

“Just give me your wallet and everything’s going to be fine.” The knife point pressed lightly into Reacher’s back. All his body suddenly felt cold. He knew that voice. He’d heard it on six different tapes. This was the RSB killer—Rob, Stab, Burn. Everything was not going to be fine.

This paragraph begins with Dialogue, followed by Sensory Description—the knife point in the back. The  only Interior Emotion is the short sentence in which Reacher’s body goes cold, a feeling that is commonly associated with fear (although fans of Jack Reacher know that he’s rarely scared). Then there’s some indirect Interior Monologue. 

It is not necessary to get fancy with your Interior Emotion. Tell the physical sensation that your viewpoint character feels. If you do it right, your reader feels the same emotion as your character, even though your reader probably doesn’t feel the physical sensation associated with the emotion.

What Sensory Description Means

Sensory Description means that you show what your viewpoint sees, hears, smells, tastes, or touches. This can stand alone, or you can mix it with any of your other tools. Here is an example:

The moon’s surface was blindingly white, pocked by a thousand craters. The black sky touched the horizon absurdly close. Dust rooster-tailed behind the rover that was racing away at six kilometers per hour—faster than a human in an EVA suit could run. Jazz looked at her arm readout. She had 18 minutes of oxygen left, and civilization was three kilometers away. Her comm link continued to crackle useless static. She took a sip from her water supply. It was lukewarm and tasted like dirty gym socks. 

This paragraph is mostly Sensory Description, with a little Action (Jazz looking at her watch) and a little indirect Interior Monologue. You might wonder if the rover racing away is Sensory Description or Action. My view is that it’s a little of both. I tend to reserve the term Action for people who have agency, and I use the term Sensory Description for inanimate objects. The rover might be driven by a person with agency, and it might be an AI with some level of agency. Or it might be just out of control. We don’t really know, so my call is that it could go either way and it’s not worth arguing about. 

Remember that you are not painting a picture, you are telling a story. Sensory Description works best when it serves the story. In the example above, all the details described highlight the predicament Jazz finds herself in. 

If you do your Sensory Description right, your reader sees and hears and smells and tastes and feels exactly what your viewpoint character does. You have put your reader inside your character’s skin, and that’s a win.  

What Narrative Summary Means

Narrative Summary means that you are summarizing a story without using much Action, Dialogue, Interior Monologue, Interior Emotion, or Sensory Description. That can be very efficient at moving through time to get to the interesting stuff. But it should never be used on the actual interesting stuff. 

Here’s an example of Narrative Summary that does the job it’s intended to do:

When I got on the plane at LAX, I was trying desperately to figure out what I’d tell Corleone about where his investment had gone. My flight attendant read my situation from the get-go and kept bringing me courage in a bottle at about three times the recommended weekly allowance. Somewhere over Indiana, I briefly considered becoming a priest. Or a pirate. Or a peony. About the time we settled onto the runway at JFK, I made the decision to tell Corleone the truth. He wouldn’t like it, and maybe he’d have one of his guys work me over, or maybe I’d wind up in the wood-chipper. But I didn’t care anymore. Like my first girlfriend told me, “No brain, no pain.” 

The paragraph moves our character from LA to New York. More importantly, the lad is making what can only be described as a Poor Life Decision. We don’t see any of the logic, which is probably for the best, because no amount of logic will get him to this decision. But copious amounts of the demon drink will do the trick. Note that this is a summary of many unseen events. We don’t see a single bottle. We don’t hear a word of Dialogue, nor Interior Monologue. It’s all just summary. But this paragraphs gets our boy where the author wants him to go in 122 words, which is a lot less than a scene would take. So this is a serviceable bit of Narrative Summary. Even though it’s Telling, not Showing.

Now let’s see where Narrative Summary goes wrong. And this is where an editor is going to hit you with a big red “Show, Don’t Tell” sticker. Let’s show the scene where Corleone sics his thugs onto our hapless protagonist.

When I was done talking, Corleone yelled a bunch of insults at me and told his thugs to beat me up. They took me outside and hit me thirty or forty times. It hurt bad in several places. I begged for mercy. Then one of them shot me.

This 48-word paragraph is way too little. It summarizes a terrifying and violent scene and the reader feels pretty much nothing. The right way to write this requires all the Showing tools you’ve got—Action, Dialogue, Interior Monologue, Interior Emotion, and Sensory Description. To do this well, you’d need anywhere from 500 to 1500 words. I don’t have the word count allowance for that here, but here’s how it might start.

“…so I lost it all on blackjack in Vegas,” I said.

Corleone just stared at me. A vein throbbed in his neck. I thought he was going to have an aneurysm for sure. He leaned back in his chair, and said…

OK, I’m going to stop right there, because what Corleone said can’t be printed in a family newspaper. But feel free to write the rest of the scene yourself. It’s not going to be pretty. It is going to take a bunch of words. Because Showing is inefficient. It burns word-count like crazy.

Narrative Summary is efficient, but it’s usually boring, so it’s your job to make it as unboring as possible while keeping the word-count low. Narrative Summary works best when there’s a bit of story to be told, but it unfolds over a long stretch of time. It works worst when it blurs over the exciting parts of the story that your reader really wants to see, hear, smell, taste, touch.

What Exposition Means

Exposition means that you explain some set of facts that your reader needs to know. Maybe it explains the physics of zero-gravity. Or the history of mockinjays. Or a complicated bit of politics in your storyworld.

There are many places where you need to inject some facts into your reader’s brain. You can do it economically with Exposition, and that’s not bad. 

Book 1 in the Harry Potter series begins with a full page of Exposition, describing the Dursley family. Charles Dickens begins his novel, A Tale of Two Cities, with a famous bit of Exposition—“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…” These are both examples where Exposition works very well. 

If Exposition goes on too long, or if it doesn’t really serve the story, the reader will get bored, and that’s a major problem. 

You can juice up Exposition by having one character explain it to another in Dialogue. When an editor writes “Show, Don’t Tell” on a bit of Exposition in your novel, they may be urging you to do just that. The problem is that Dialogue used as a smokescreen for Exposition can be just as boring as the original Exposition, while chewing up twice the word-count. So this is not always a great strategy. 

My advice on Exposition is to think three times about how much you really must have. Use the minimum amount of Exposition to get the job done. And then go back to Showing your story. 

There is much more I could say on all of the above. I’ll say more in future blog posts. For now, I leave you with…

Homework:Look at the most recent scene you wrote. Analyze every single sentence in the scene. Is it Action? Dialogue? Interior Monologue? Interior Emotion? Sensory Description? Narrative Summary? Exposition? Some mixture?Are you doing too much Telling? (This is common.)Are you doing too much Showing? (This is less common, but equally lethal.) Do you like the balance you strike between the 5 different kinds of Showing? 

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