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 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? 

The post What “Show, Don’t Tell” Actually Means 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. My topic today is what I call the Three Pillars of Marketing. Everything you will ever do to market your novel falls under one of these three pillars. But let’s deal with the elephant in the room first…

All Novelists Hate Marketing

Yes, all novelists. At least those with a conscience, and all the novelists I know are good people who have a conscience. None of us wants to be a marketing weasel. And all of us have run into marketing weasels. 

For the last few months, a robo-caller has been calling my house many times every week, claiming to be from “The Home Improvement Group.” I’m not interested. I have talked to a couple of the actual humans behind the robo-caller and asked them to put me on their Do Not Call List. But they keep calling. Over and over. And they fake their Caller ID, so it’s not always obvious that it’s them again. 

Let’s define a marketing weasel. A marketing weasel is somebody trying to sell you something under one of the following three conditions:

You don’t need it. You don’t want it. You can’t afford it.

So how do you avoid being a marketing weasel? It’s really pretty simple. You aim your marketing ONLY at your Target Audience. Let’s review the meaning of that term.  

Your Target Audience

Your Target Audience is the set of all the people in the world who would love your fiction, if only they knew you existed. Let’s be clear that some fraction of your Target Audience actually does know you exist. But not all of them. Most of them never heard of you.

It doesn’t make sense to market your novel to people outside your Target Audience. They’re just not that into the kind of fiction you write. Some of them might like your novel, sorta-kinda. Most of them just won’t see the point. Some will actively hate your novel. 

It makes all kinds of sense to market your novel to people inside your Target Audience. By definition, they want your novel—or they would if they knew it existed. 

And if someone wants your novel, then they also need it, because all humans need Story. Story is how we make sense of the world. Story is what keeps us alive and helps us thrive. Story is the rocket fuel humanity runs on. 

And books are pretty cheap, as compared to most other stuff. If somebody wants your book and needs it, they can almost certainly afford it. 

I strongly recommend that you market your work ONLY to people in your Target Audience. They want it; they need it; they can afford it. If you tell them about it, you’re not being a weasel. You’re doing them a favor.  

But then how do you actually do your marketing? There are three things you need to do, and only three things. But you have to do them in the right order. I call these the Three Pillars of Marketing. Here they are:

Attract your Target Audience—let them know you exist.Engage your Target Audience—earn their trust by being trustworthy.Convert your Target Audience—ask for the sale.The First Pillar—Attracting Your Target Audience

Most people in your Target Audience don’t know you exist. They don’t know you wrote a novel. They don’t know what your novel is about. 

Attracting your Target Audience just means that you somehow make that connection so they know those basic facts about you and your novel. There are thousands of marketing tactics to make that connection. We can talk about those later. I’ve talked about some of them in previous posts on this blog and in the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine that I used to publish. I’ll continue to teach specific marketing tactics in future blog posts, because tactics come and tactics go. But the principle is forever—do what it takes to Attract your Target Audience and ONLY your Target Audience.

The crucial thing is that any marketing tactics you use to make the connection should be honest. They should make it crystal clear to each person that one of two things is true:

They are in your Target Audience. They are not in your Target Audience.

When choosing marketing tactics to Attract people in your Target Audience, give enough information to repel people who are not in your Target Audience. That’s right, repel them. You want to drive them away. You only want people who are in your Target Audience. If somebody is dying of thirst and you don’t have water, don’t try to sell them pretzels. Point them to somebody who sells water. 

As a side note, one reason for writing a One-Sentence Summary of your novel is that it Attracts people in your Target Audience and repels people who are not in it. Both sides of this coin are important. 

The Second Pillar—Engaging With Your Target Audience

Assume somebody knows you exist and that you wrote a novel that would interest them. It’s way too early to try to sell them your novel. 

That’s like asking somebody you just met to marry you. They may be attracted to you. But they don’t KNOW you. They don’t trust you. Yet.

Engaging with your Target Audience means that you spend time earning their trust. You earn trust by being trust-worthy. This may take a long time or it may happen quickly. If you were selling them a big-ticket item, like a life-insurance policy or a ticket to the moon, you would need to spend quite a lot of time. Big-ticket items require a lot of trust. 

A novel is a smaller-ticket item. The money is probably not the main issue. If your book is priced in the $5 to $25 range, that’s usually not a big deal to a reader. Readers pay that kind of money all the time. 

The main issue is the reader’s time. It may take 5 or 10 hours to read your novel. Your reader can never get back those hours, if you waste them. So you need to show that you can be trusted to give 5 or 10 hours worth of value. 

You have many possible tactics to Engage with people in your Target Audience. I’ve talked about some of them in the past and I’ll talk about many of them in the future. But the principle is the same for all these tactics—you must show that your potential reader can trust you with several hours of their precious time. 

The Third Pillar—Converting Your Target Audience

Assume you’ve Attracted someone in your Target Audience and you’ve Engaged with them enough that they know they can trust you. Now what? 

Ask for the sale! Don’t make it complicated. Give them a way to buy. 

Converting your Target Audience means that you make it easy for them to buy your novel. There are a number of ways to do this. The principle is always the same. Make it obvious how to buy your novel, and make it as simple as possible.

Three Marketing Rules To Live By

Let me summarize with three rules to live by:

Don’t try to Convert somebody you haven’t Engaged with. Don’t try to Engage with somebody you haven’t Attracted. Don’t try to Attract somebody who’s not in your Target Audience.Homework:Think about the last novel you bought. How and when were you Attracted? How were you Engaged and how long did it take? How were you Converted? Have you ever bought a novel, and then it turned out you were not in the Target Audience? What went wrong that led you to buy a novel that wasn’t right for you?

The post The Three Pillars of Marketing appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Successful Fiction Writing = Organizing + Creating + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Organizing. My topic today is the very controversial question of how novelists might use AI effectively. 

Why Blog About AI?

AI is massively controversial. So why am I blogging about it? Because you, my Loyal Blog Readers, asked me to. I recently asked you all to let me know what topics you’d like me to blog about. Just about half of all the questions you raised had to do with AI. Some of these questions were specific, and some were open-ended. 

I have huge trepidation in tackling this subject. Nothing I say will make everyone happy. But my thinking is that this is important to talk about. AI is part of our future, whether we like it or not. There are a lot of issues, and my space is limited, so I can’t cover everything, and I don’t intend this as the final word. Some caveats first.

Let’s be clear that AI is a huge resource hog. It uses massive amounts of water and electricity, and for some people this is a show-stopper. If that’s you, then I respect your opinion. I agree that this is a gigantic problem that is extremely urgent. But this blog post is not about environmental issues of AI. 

Furthermore, AI may well be a threat to humanity. It’s plausible that AI could take over the world and decide that humans are more trouble than they’re worth. If you refuse to use AI because it’s a potential Skynet, then I respect your opinion. Again, this is extremely urgent. But this blog post is not about the doomsday prospects of AI. 

Some of you have decided that, despite the very real downsides of AI, you still want to use it, because it also has some very real upsides. But you want to use AI effectively and ethically. The rest of this blog post contains a few thoughts on that. (Only a few. Whole books could be written on this, and I’ve got limited word-count.)

First, we need to distinguish two very different ways of using AI.

Two Ways to Use AI

Amazon’s content guidelines distinguish between “AI-generated” content and “AI-assisted” content. 

Content is “AI-generated” if an AI created the content, even if you made revisions afterward. Content is “AI-assisted” if you created the content and then used AI tools to help improve it (editing, error-checking, etc.) 

Amazon requires you to disclose AI-generated content, but not AI-assisted.

For me, personally, AI-generated content is a hard no. I have no interest in reading a novel written by an AI. I have no interest in writing a novel with AI. I think most authors agree with me on this, but a few don’t. If you use AI-generated content, then you have an ethical responsibility to let potential readers know that. 

I don’t have a problem with AI-assisted content. AI can be useful in doing research, in brainstorming ideas, in editing. Let’s talk about that.

Using AI for Research

AI is well-known to “hallucinate” sometimes. “Hallucinate” means that it gives a wrong answer to a question, often very emphatically. 

In my experience, this is more of a problem on topics that are “fuzzy” than on topics that are well-defined. I have seen more hallucinations when I ask questions about history than when I ask about math. 

If you’re going to use AI for research, then treat it the same way you’d treat a human who has read a lot of books but has a fallible memory. Humans will sometimes reconstruct memories based on what they think “ought to have happened.” I do that. You do that. It’s how our brains are wired. AI does that too.

So check everything you possibly can that an AI tells you. Ask for sources. If the reasoning seems fishy, push back on it. Most AIs will apologize when you catch them in an error. But they may then give you another wrong answer. So never blindly trust what an AI tells you. AI is a conversation partner. It’s not God.

Using AI for Brainstorming

Some people think better about their story in dialogue with someone. That’s how my brain is wired. I “think by talking.” So I sometimes need to solve a story problem by talking it out with somebody else, even if they’re not a writer, even if they don’t understand my story. The act of trying to explain things to them helps me understand it better myself. 

AI can be a sounding-board, if you need this kind of help. I have sometimes used an AI to talk out an issue in my story. There are a couple of points to be wary about. 

Some AIs can be very sycophantic. They’ll tell you what a genius you are, what a marvelous story you’re spinning. Ignore this. The AI is designed to keep you chatting. The more flattery it heaps on you, the longer you keep talking. 

Some AIs will offer up suggestions for how to improve your story. Take these with a huge grain of salt. The AI doesn’t fully understand the world we live, much less your fictional storyworld. It may hand you a mediocre idea. Be ready to say no, or to argue with it. But also be ready to see a useful idea when it comes up. Sometimes a bad idea is a stepping-stone to a good idea. 

Some AIs will then offer to write the scene for you. I always reject this offer flat-out. No, I don’t want an AI to write my story. Even if it could write better than me (I doubt it) I don’t want AI to do my writing. The joy of writing is in the writing. 

Using AI for Editing

A lot of writers use AI to read their manuscript and make suggestions for how to improve it. I have not done this myself. However, I have used an AI to critique software I’ve written, and this has always been useful.

Once again, you should be wary of the sycophantic AI. It will tell you that your work is a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. A little of this is helpful, if you’re like most writers and think your writing is the worst drivel imaginable. If you need a little positive feedback to get you through the day, then this can be a good thing. But when you start believing you’re a Staggering Genius, that’s the time to tell the AI to dial it back. 

In general, the critique an AI will give you has variable quality. Sometimes it will nail a serious problem. Other times, it will confidently tell you something that’s plain wrong. It’s on you to use your critical thinking skills to tell the difference. Treat the critique from an AI the same way you’d treat the critique from a human. Push back and explain why. This will force the AI to try again, and sometimes it gets it right on the second try. Or the tenth. 

Homework:Are you OK with using AI at all? Why or why not? Are you OK with AI-generated content? Why or why not? Are you OK with AI-assisted content? Why or why not? Do you know enough about your storyworld to be able to do research using AI and check its claims? Do you need a sounding board to help you brainstorm your fiction? What types of editing might you allow an AI to handle, and are you able to tell good editing from bad? If you’d like to discuss this with me, feel free to email me. This is a tough subject, and I know some of you have strong opinions. I’m here to listen, and you may well change my mind or teach me something. I’m OK with that. 

The post Using AI Effectively appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Successful Fiction Writing = Organizing + Creating + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Creating. My topic today is: the “Story Question” of your novel.

What is a Story Question?

Every novel has a Story Question—a central question that drives your reader to keep reading. A novel that doesn’t have a strong Story Question is a boring novel, and it’s easy to put down “for later.” But later may never come. A novel that has a strong Story Question keeps the reader turning pages, no matter how late the lying clock says it is.

A central part of your task as a novelist is to create a Story Question in your reader’s mind—a Story Question that won’t quit. As we’ll see, there are naive Story Questions, and there are Story Questions that make your novel unforgettable. 

Examples of Story Questions

A few examples should help clarify things. 

In The Lord of the Rings, the wizard Gandalf tells the hobbit Frodo very early in the story that the magic ring Frodo has inherited is toxic. It’s so morally dangerous that nobody can be trusted to keep it. The Ring will corrupt all who own it, and the most powerful will be corrupted fastest. And the evil Lord Sauron is looking for it now, because it will greatly increase his power over Middle Earth. The only solution is to unmake the Ring—to cast it into the Crack of Doom where it was forged, many hundred miles away in the evil Land of Mordor, under the watchful eye of Lord Sauron. The Story Question is “Will Frodo destroy the Ring of Power—or will it destroy him?”

In Ender’s Game, Ender Wiggin is a six-year-old boy living in a future version of Earth obsessed with fear that an alien ant-like race (the “Buggers”) will return for a Second Invasion. The First Invasion failed, thanks to a once-in-a-millennium military genius named Mazer Rackham. The home planet of the Buggers is many light-years away, but the First Invasion was many years ago, and now the time is growing short. When the Second Invasion comes, who will save the planet? A Battle School orbits the earth where genius children are sequestered in an unnatural environment where they are trained in military arts. The greatest honor any family can have is to give up its son (or occasionally its daughter) to be trained in Battle School. The Story Question is “Will the commanders of Battle School be able to train Ender before the Buggers arrive—or will they break him in their mad rush to beat an impossible deadline?” 

In Outlander, Claire Randall is an English nurse vacationing in Scotland in 1946 with her husband Frank. They were separated for most of the War, and now they’re trying desperately to reconnect. When Claire touches a mysterious standing stone at the mystical site Craigh na Dun, she finds herself transported back in time to 1743. She’s immediately kidnapped by some Scottish rogues and taken many miles away from the standing stone. The Story Question is: “Will Claire find her way back to her own time—and will she go back if she can?” 

How to Raise Your Story Question

So how do you raise the Story Question in your novel? Should you just say it straight out?

You can, but if you do, it’s likely to be very simple and on-the-nose. Readers prefer a complex Story Question, one they participate in, one they figure out for themselves. Once a reader fully understands your Story Question, they feel an ownership in your story, and they’ll be deeply invested in your novel. For hundreds of pages. Maybe thousands.

It’s important to note that the real Story Question is not the naive one that the reader initially sees. A naive Story Question is one-dimensional—a will-he-or-won’t-he proposition. A strong Story Question has a hidden gotcha buried in it.

In The Lord of the Rings, the naive Story Question is: “Will Frodo destroy the Ring of Power?” This assumes that destroying the Ring is easy. Just take it to your nearest Crack of Doom and drop it off. But the Ring corrupts all who touch it, and Frodo has touched the Ring. The nearer Frodo gets to the Crack of Doom, the stronger the Ring’s power, and the greater his urge to keep it. The reader soon realizes that Frodo might not have the moral strength to destroy the Ring. And now it’s a real Story Question, with teeth of iron. The Ring might very well destroy Frodo.

In Ender’s Game, the naive Story Question is: “Will Ender be the Chosen One, the next Alexander the Great?” But all the clues from the first chapter onward scream that he will. So this is not a great Story Question. However, even in the first chapter, it’s clear that Ender is being manipulated by the adults—put in danger from other kids, bullies who are much bigger and stronger. Ender is smarter than any of the others, but brains only go so far in a fight. Can he keep winning, even as the bullies get stronger? And if he keeps winning, will he lose his goodness—that thing that keeps us rooting for him? That’s a much stronger Story Question. Will we still like Ender when he becomes the next Alexander? 

In Outlander, we get a hint of the Story Question in the brilliant first two sentences of the epigraph: “People disappear all the time. Ask any policeman.” So the naive Story Question is “Who is going to disappear?” Soon enough, we guess that it’s Claire, the lead character of the story. When she does disappear, going through time at Craigh na Dun, the Story Question evolves to be a bit more interesting: “Will Claire get back to her own century?” But we’re not done evolving. Claire quickly finds herself attracted to Jamie Fraser, a handsome young Scot. She can deal with mere physical attraction. But then she’s forced to marry him, and she soon realizes that he’s her soul mate. So now the Story Question becomes a terrible dilemma. Maybe Claire doesn’t want to go back. She loved her first husband Frank, yes, but he’s not here. And he’s definitely not Jamie. In a situation like that, what would you do? Now there’s a Story Question to keep you reading until your nails are chewed right through.

HomeworkIf you subscribe to BookBub, you get an email every day with short summaries of half a dozen novels at great prices. Read through today’s list and look for the Story Question. Is it a naive Story Question or a complex one? Or do you have enough information to even make a guess at what the Story Question is?Pick your 5 favorite novels of all time. For each one, write down the naive Story Question and any more complex Story Questions that emerge as the story evolves. What is the dilemma that the final Story Question raises?For the current novel you’re writing, what is the naive Story Question—the one you show the reader first? How far into the story are you before you reveal this Story Question? Do you evolve it later into a more complex Story Question? Can you sharpen it to have a more powerful dilemma? 

The post Why Your Story Question Matters appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Successful Fiction Writing = Organizing + Creating + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. My topic today is Substack, a marketing platform for writers. 

What is Substack and Why Should You Care?

Substack started out as an email service provider that was free to all writers. Most email service providers let you start out free, and then they start charging you when you have “enough” subscribers. But Substack is free to all writers, no matter how many subscribers you have, with one very important caveat. 

What’s the caveat? Substack makes no money unless you also earn money. If you earn money, they take a percentage. And Substack makes it easy for writers to “monetize” their writing. Writers can split up their content into a “free tier” and a “paid tier”. The hope is that they’ll attract fans with their free content and then some of those will find it worthwhile to pay for the premium stuff. This model is a lot like Patreon. Substack handles the money transaction and takes a 10% fee, plus the credit card charges. 

The most successful writer on Substack is said to be Heather Cox Richardson, an American history professor who writes a daily column on history and politics. She has more than 3 million subscribers, and is said to earn somewhere between $500k and $1M per month. Yes, per month. 

Substack is More Than Just Email

But Substack has evolved quite a lot over the years. It’s not just an email service provider anymore. It allows you to organize your content into “Publications”—each of which is effectively a mini-website, hosted right there on Substack at no charge to you. Part of that “Publication” can be a blog. Part can be a podcast. You can set up Chats with your subscribers. You can do Live Video. You can post “Notes” in a social-media feed hosted by Substack. And you can use Substack’s Recommendation feature to recommend the Publications of writers you like; writers who like you can in turn recommend your Publication. Substack itself will recommend Publications to readers who might be interested. 

The important thing is that all of this is free to the writer, unless they’re earning money. That’s what caught my attention a few years ago. Free is good. I have used a number of email service providers over the years. I used to use MailChimp. Several years ago, I switched to ConvertKit. Both of these are expensive. I have a bit more than 1000 subscribers for my fiction newsletter and blog. This blog, the Advanced Fiction Writing Blog, has around 6600 subscribers. And with the features I currently use on ConvertKit, all those subscribers costs me a fair bit. 

I do like ConvertKit. It’s a powerful tool for serious marketers who produce a lot of content. But I haven’t been producing that much lately. So I don’t get much value out of  the terrific features ConvertKit has. I use just enough of those features that I have to pay. So I’ve been thinking about other options for the past few years. 

Switching Takes A Lot of Work

Let’s be clear that setting up a Publication on Substack takes some serious effort. Recently, I’ve had a lot more time for my writing. I decided a few weeks ago that it was time to take a hard look at Substack and see if it would be worth all the work to switch. 

So I took a couple of hours and did some online research. What I learned is that Substack has made a lot of progress in the last couple of years. As I noted above, it ties together email delivery, a website, a blog, a podcast, live-streaming video, and social media. With that pesky “monetization.” 

But it all looked very confusing, so I decided to invest in a course. The one I chose is Substack for Authors, created by a fiction writer named Jaime Buckley. That link will take you to the sales page for Jaime’s course. That link is not an affiliate link. Jaime is not paying me a dime to recommend his course. He doesn’t even know I’m recommending it. But I do recommend it. Very highly. 

I worked through the course in about a week. It’s got 11 modules, each containing multiple videos plus PDF downloads. The transcript of the videos is provided online. I took a lot of notes. What I particularly liked is that Jaime tells you both the why and the how. Both of those are important. You need to work out your why first. Jaime has a very nice marketing philosophy, very much in line with the one I’ve held to for a long time—marketing is about helping people. Once you understand why you’re doing stuff, Jaime also tells you how to do it. Without a lot of fluff. If it only takes 5 minutes to explain something, he doesn’t stretch it out to fill up half an hour. I really appreciated that. My learning time is valuable. 

I’ve created two separate Publications on Substack under my account. One of them is for fans of my novels, and I named it Randy Ingermanson Novels. The other is for people who want to learn how to write and market their novels, and I named it Advanced Fiction Writing. Don’t look for either of these Publications yet. I’ve made both of them Private while I’m setting them up. There’s nothing worse than a half-baked Substack Publication that doesn’t have anything yet. 

Transitioning my Fiction Newsletter/Blog to Substack

I decided to work on the Substack about my own novels first, because that one is simpler. I don’t have any initial plans to monetize it. I’ll simply use it for my existing fiction newsletter and my existing blog about my novels. One thing I’ll be adding is a weekly post with a chapter of my novel-in-progress. Then I can get feedback from my True Fans as I’m writing the book. And I’ll have weekly behind-the-scenes posts about things that my True Fans would find fascinating about the most recent chapter posted. 

I will also replicate my occasional blog posts about my fictional world on Substack. I found it extremely easy to import the existing 60 blog posts that I’ve written over the last 8 years into Substack. It took about 2 seconds to pull them into Substack. Then I took a couple of hours to tweak the content on each post, mainly to insert a note saying that the post was originally published on my blog. But I also added what Substack calls Custom Tags that help the Substack search engine know what content is in each post.

So my Substack Publication for Randy Ingermanson Novels is almost done. It’s taken me a total of about 22 hours, spread out over the last couple of weeks. I think I have about 2 hours left to go, and then the Publication will be ready to launch. (Launch means that I’ll import my email list from ConvertKit into Substack.) I’ll hold off launching for a bit, because I also have a whole other Substack to create, and that’s going to take a similar level of effort. 

Right now, I don’t have any paid tier set up for this Publication. Maybe I will in the future, if I can think of something my True Fans might want to pay for. Some of my True Fans have been reading my fiction for many years. They might want to support the cause, and they might have ideas for cool things I could put in a paid tier. But I’m not too concerned about that right now. Mainly, I want to stop paying for email delivery. 

Transitioning My Advanced Fiction Writing Blog to Substack

Now that I’ve figured out how to do stuff on Substack, the transition of my Advanced Fiction Writing Blog will be fairly easy. But there’s still a lot to do. I expect that I’ll get it all done in about 25 working hours, spread out over the next couple of weeks. 

It’s nice that Substack can import hundreds of blog posts in an eyeblink, but I don’t want to import everything. I’ll focus on the most relevant blog posts over the last few years, the “evergreen” content. 

My regular free content will be very similar to what I’ve been doing already. My current plan is to post one blog post every week—on Organizing or Creating or Marketing. That’s a level of effort I can manage quite well. I will do all in my power to maintain the same standard of quality that I’ve always had for my Advanced Fiction Writing Blog (and the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine before it). 

Will I have a paid tier on Substack? Yes, I will. But the content will be different than the free content. I still need to work out the details, but the core idea is to do what I call “Deep-Dives”. Each of these will go a lot deeper than I can go in a 1000-word blog post. I would like to produce a Deep-Dive on a regular schedule. I’ll decide the precise subject of each Deep-Dive after getting input from paid subscribers. And I’ll keep an archive of all the past Deep-Dives, so paid subscribers will have a growing library of material they can’t get anywhere else on the web. Because the Deep-Dives will focus on the things that I do best, that nobody else teaches. 

I can imagine other payware products that fans of this blog might like, but I’m not going to promise what I can’t deliver. One thing at a time. I have a nice list of “maybe someday” ideas. But I won’t do anything without consulting the loyal fans of Advanced Fiction Writing. Because you know what you need most. If I can deliver what you need, that’s a good deal for both of us. 

Is Substack For You?

You might be wondering if I recommend that you try using Substack to market your own work. I’m agnostic on that question right now. I’ll have a better answer in six months or a year. I’m don’t like recommending things I haven’t tried. 

Almost all of you are novelists, so I think you’ll be interested to hear how my Substack Publication Randy Ingermanson Novels works out for me. I have no idea how it’ll do. I don’t have any immediate plans to monetize it. But I do hope to do a better job in interacting with the True Fans of my fiction. From what I’ve seen, Substack gives a writer all the tools they need to create community. So we’ll see. I’m eager to try it and find out. 

Probably a few of you also write nonfiction. If that’s you, you’ll be able to watch me run my nonfiction Substack Publication Advanced Fiction Writing in the coming months, after I launch. You can’t see anything yet, as I said earlier. I’ll keep both my Publications in Private mode for at least another couple of weeks.  

Once I’m convinced I’ve worked out all the kinks, I’ll do a launch on both my Publications. And then you’ll see what can be done on a nonfiction platorm on Substack. I will make mistakes. I’m human, and mistakes are a particular skill of mine. I trust you, my Loyal Fans, to push back graciously when you see a mistake, and to help me get things on track. I would love to have a fabulous Substack Publication that helps you reach your writing goals, a place where we can all learn together. If that happens, then the project is a success. 

Stay tuned…

The post Why I’m Switching to Substack appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

What is the big picture for the next 5 years of your life? 

Imagine that you time-travel 5 years forward to visit your Future Self. Imagine that you discover that Future Self has just been forced to quit doing the “fun stuff.” (You get to define what the “fun stuff” is, and nobody gets to criticize your choices.)

Now ask Future Self, “What do you most regret not having finished?”

You’re Guaranteed to Regret Something

Let’s be honest—this is a scary exercise. No matter how much you get done in the next 5 years, you’re guaranteed to regret something. That’s the nature of life. It’s fast-paced. We all put more on our plates than we can possibly eat. We all get side-tracked by stuff coming out of the blue. We can’t do it all.

So this is really an exercise in defining those pesky priorities. 

This all came home to me less than 2 months ago when suddenly my day job wasn’t there. I’ve been at the same job for 20 years. Doing cool sciencey kind of stuff. Don’t ask me what I was doing unless you’ve got about 3 hours, because I’ll talk your ear off. And you really don’t want to know. The point is that suddenly a big chunk of my “fun stuff” was off the table. Maybe permanently, maybe not. And that forced me to think about what other “fun stuff” I’d been sidelining because my day job was keeping me too busy. I got a rare chance to rethink my priorities.

To make it all crazier, just before my day job evaporated, I had spent about 3 weeks in bed recovering from a tough injury to my hamstrings/glutes that left my sciatic nerve irritated 24 hours a day. At the time, it felt like “this is never going to get better.” That was miserable. Would I ever get to work on the fun stuff again? Of course I did get better, and I’m back in the saddle doing the stuff I consider fun. 

But it forced me to think about what I’d regret most if I couldn’t do any more fun stuff, ever again. That’s a hard question. A scary question. A question we all will eventually have to face, because there will come a day when each one of us has to hang up the spurs. And we can’t predict when that’ll happen.

Here Are My Answers

My answers are not the same as your answers, because we’re different people, and we define the “fun stuff” differently. But I encourage you to think hard about this, because it might just change your life. 

To help jiggle your neurons a bit, I’ll tell you my own answers. Here are the things outside my day job that I’d regret not having done, if I had to quit right now:

Fiction writing. I am currently writing a novel. When it’s done, it’ll be my 9th published novel. I have another 5 that I really, really, really want to write. I know the titles for most of these, and I know what they’ll be about. They’ll complete the two main series of novels that I’ve been working on for my entire writing career. This is right at the top of my list. I would be very sad not to finish them all. Marketing. All novelists hate marketing. But if you want to get your novels read, you need to market them effectively. There are things I could do to get my novels out there more. I’d like to do some of those things. I’d be quite sad if I didn’t do at least some of these. Project Chronologicus. This is a project that pulls together my love of history, math, and software development. I want to write code that can mine ancient historical documents for chronological information and then construct the best timeline of events. “Best” has a precise mathematical definition, accounting for the natural fuzziness in all historical documents, while also detecting possible outliers or errors in the data. This would be useful to me in writing my historical novels. It would also make a few thousand historians happy to have a tool like this. This is an unsolved problem, so it might fail. But I’d be sad if I didn’t at least try. We climb mountains because they’re there.My Life Goals Document

I created what I call a “Life Goals Document” that has 5 Project Groups:

Fiction WritingMarketingChronologicusLearning Software Development

As you can see, 3 of these Project Groups are the big 3 categories of things I would regret not doing. The other 2 Project Groups support them in some way.

I filled in below each of these Project Groups with small projects or milestone tasks that I could conceivably work on this year. It’s really enough to look ahead just one year. I can’t see beyond this year, and I don’t want to put too much on my lists, because that would get too overwhelming. 

These lists are what I call “quasi-sorted.” The first item on each list is the next logical project or task to tackle. I highlight it in blue to indicate that it’s the next thing. Everything below it is highlighted in green to indicate that it’s for “later.” But the green items aren’t sorted. I won’t know for sure what order to do these tasks until I get there. 

Once I finish a task, I change the highlighting on it to be yellow, to indicate that it’s done. So each Project Group list shows some tasks highlighted yellow that are completed. Then it shows one task highlighted blue that’s the current thing. And below that are all the tasks highlighted green that are for later this year.

Every day when I’m deciding what I’m going to work on today, I take a quick look at my Life Goals Document. It reminds me what’s important. Because I already know what’s urgent. The urgent stuff always gets done, because it’s urgent. The important stuff needs to get a little airtime too, or it’ll be forgotten. I don’t want to forget the important stuff. 

Now It’s Your Turn

Want to play? You can do the same thing I did. Here some steps that can help you put together your own personal Life Goals Document that will carry you through the rest of this year:

Pretend for a moment that you will get absolutely nothing done in the next 5 years, and ask your Future Self what they regret not having done the most. Keep the list short. This should be Future Self’s biggest regrets, not all possible regrets. Make a Life Goals Document. It should have a few main Project Groups for this year. Just for this year. Let next year take care of itself. Include any of the Project Groups on your Biggest Regrets list that you think you could actually work on this year. Fill in some actionable tasks or projects on each of your Project Groups. Don’t go overboard here. Keep it reasonable. What could you get done this year, given the amount of time and energy you have right now? If color-coding helps you, then color-code your Life Goals Document. If it doesn’t help, then don’t. Make time every day to look at your Life Goals Document. Not to make you feel guilty. Just to keep your neurons firing on what the “fun stuff” is. The important fun stuff. The stuff you don’t want to regret. 

Baseball players like to say, “keep your eye on the ball.” That’s good advice if you want to hit that thing flying toward you at 90 miles per hour. 

If you want to get the fun stuff done, then the analogous advice is, “keep your eye on the fun stuff.” Because real-life is flying at you at 90 miles per hour, every day of the week. A lot of it is urgent but not important, so you have to do it. But some of it is neither urgent nor important, and you can let it go by without any regret if you’re constantly keeping your eye on what the real fun stuff is. 

The post Your Life Goals Document appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

One of the most important tasks you can do when writing your novel is to write your one-sentence summary. 

I blogged about this fairly recently, and nothing has changed since then. If you need a review of how the one-sentence summary works, I highly recommend reading that earlier blog post. 

But if you only write a single one-sentence summary for your novel, you’re leaving money on the table. A lot of money. 

As an example, here’s a one-sentence summary of The Hunger Games: A 16-year-old girl volunteers to take her sister’s place in an arena where twenty-four teens will battle each other to the death.

That’s pretty solid, as far as it goes, but it only tells the story as Katniss experiences it. Which is fair enough, because Katniss is the lead character, and she’s the only viewpoint character. 

But Katniss is not the only person in this story. The other characters are critically important. And none of them thinks Katniss is the hero…

Every Character Thinks They’re the Hero

In the story you have been experiencing since birth, you are the lead character. That’s the nature of being human. There is only one skin you can be inside of. In your life story, everybody else is a side character.

But this is extremely important to understand—everybody else is the lead character in their own life story. And in their story, you’re the sidekick.

We live out the story of The Hunger Games through the eyes of Katniss, so her story is important. But there are other characters in this story that also matter. Peeta. Haymitch. Cato. Cinna. 

Each one of these thinks they’re the lead character in the story. Let’s take a stab at writing the one-sentence summaries of each of these characters. 

Peeta: When a 16-year-old boy is forced into the Hunger Games alongside the girl he loves, he resolves to sacrifice himself so she can survive.

Haymitch: A former champion of the Hunger Games has to coach a girl who could potentially win, if she doesn’t mind killing the one person in the world who loves her.

Cato: An 18-year-old boy—who has trained all his life for the Hunger Games—is shocked and humiliated when a girl half his size outscores him during training week.

Cinna: A leader in the secret conspiracy to overthrow the fascist government finds the perfect symbol of resistance—if he can keep her alive.

Notice that none of these one-sentence summaries capture the full story. And some of them are downright inaccurate. (Peeta is not really the only person who loves Katniss; her sister Prim loves her too.) By their nature, one-sentence summaries distort reality. They’re too short to capture everything, and you’d be crazy to make them try. They are approximations to the truth. Be OK with that. 

Why Would You Do All This Extra Work?

It takes time and energy to write a good one-sentence summary. Each one might take you 10 or 15 minutes. Why bother? 

There are several good reasons to do this extra work:

It keeps you focused on the story while you’re writing it. It highlights where the essential conflicts are—which characters must be at odds with which other characters, and that helps you understand your novel better. It forces you to write 3-D characters, because you have walked inside the skin of all your characters, not just the “good guys”. It keeps your story from being a simple morality play, because you are constantly reminded that real life is complex and sometimes messy. 

Bottom line: If you know the one-sentence summary of all your characters, you will empathize with them better. You’ll know them better. You’ll write them better. That’s a win.

Homework:

Pick a novel. Any novel you’ve read, where you really know the story. It doesn’t have to be a classic novel or even a great novel. It just needs to be one you completely understand. 

1) Identify the 3 to 5 most important characters. 

2) Write a one-sentence summary for each. 

3) How well did the author give each character an interesting and reasonable storyline?

Now comes the hard work. Give yourself a one-hour time limit and do the same for the novel you’re working on right now.  This might be the most productive hour you spend in writing your novel. 

The post Every Character Has A Story appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

If there’s one word I wish had never been coined, it’s the word “networking.” It puts me in mind of Ned Ryerson, that over-the-top insurance salesman in the movie Groundhog Day. Ned is overly friendly to the lead character in the movie, Phil Connors, played by Bill Murray, but Ned doesn’t care about Phil. He just wants to sell Phil an insurance policy. 

I think we’ve all met a life insurance agent like Ned, and that can be uncomfortable. It’s just as uncomfortable to meet a writer like Ned. Someone who acts like your best friend because they’re looking for a favor. Maybe they want a free critique. Maybe they want an endorsement. Maybe they want an introduction to your agent or your editor. 

It’s not wrong for writers to want those things. After all, success in writing is strongly correlated with the size of your network. I read a remarkable book several years ago, The Formula, by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a network scientist. He looked at actual data to see what caused some people to be successful and some not. He found that success depends on performance, when this can be measured. But when performance can’t be measured, a person’s network drives their success.

Here’s a direct quote of his findings: “But networks are singularly important in areas like art, where performance and quality are hard to measure. In fact, an interconnected web of relationships determines success in art to a degree that I, a network scientist, find stunning.”

Networks are Important, But…

If networks are so important, then networking must be just as important, right?

Hold on a minute. Not so fast. “Network” is a noun, and it describes something good and healthy. “Networking” is a verb that’s supposedly about building a network. But somehow, it’s a very toxic verb. What’s wrong with this picture? Is there a better way to build a network than by networking? A non-toxic way?

I actually think there is. I’m all for building networks. But not the Ned Ryerson way. Ned Ryerson is transactional; real networks are relational. Ned sees people in his network as a rung on the ladder of success. Someone to be stepped on. That’s what makes Ned toxic. Understanding what’s wrong with Ned is the first step to building a network in a healthy way. A better way. 

Notworking

I call the better way “notworking”. Your goal is to have a network of writer friends. The key word here is “friends.” Friends are not people you use to advance your career. Friends are people you travel together with on the journey. 

One place where you can build your network of friends is at a writers conference. That’s probably where I’ve met most of my writer friends. A typical conference has hundreds of writers, and you can’t possibly meet them all. You can’t add them all to your network. 

If you insist on “networking,” then you’re going to be sizing up everyone you meet at a conference, measuring them by how much they can help your career right now. And they’re going to see right through you, just like anyone can see through Ned Ryerson. Just like you see through people who are trying to “network” you.

What’s the better way to size people up? It’s simple. Look for other writers who are at about your same place on the journey AND who resonate with you. Maybe they write the same kind of fiction you do, and maybe they don’t. But the key thing is that they are a kindred spirit. 

When you find somebody like that, ask them how their writing career is going. It’s probably not going great. They may well be stuck on some issue that they just can’t get past. 

And maybe you can help. Maybe you’ve recently dealt with the same problem and figured out a way past it. If you can help another writer solve a real problem in their life, do so. Without asking for anything in return. Without even thinking about whether you’ll ever get something in return. Assume you won’t. 

Then again, maybe you can’t help. Maybe you’re stuck on the same problem. But at least you can offer empathy. That’s what friends do when they can’t help. 

If you talk to ten writers at a conference and find even one that you resonate with, somebody who can be a writing friend on your journey, that’s a win. You’ve added to your network, and they’ve added to theirs. In a few years, you’ll have a very nice network. And if you do this for the rest of your writing life, you’ll eventually have a large network. A non-toxic network.

That’s what I mean by “notworking.” It’s good and it’s healthy and it’s fun. But the larger your network, the higher the probability that one of your friends is going to be super-successful. And that’s where things can go south, if you’re not careful…

The Universe is Not Fair

The publishing world is just like the rest of the universe. It’s not fair. A very few writers will have huge success. Most will have little. There will be a large spread in the payoffs that people in your network receives. 

If you have a large enough network, you are going to know somebody who wins a major award or gets rich or gets famous, or all of the above. It may not be who you expected. It may not be in proportion to talent or skill or anything else you can measure. It may just be luck.

So how do you respond to this grossly unfair situation? Here are two things you can do: 

Resist the urge to cash in on your friend’s success. You can’t. They can’t distribute their success to you. Success doesn’t work that way. They may be able to help you some, and if they’re a decent person, they’ll try. But they can’t just pass success around like candy bars. Don’t expect them to. Resist the green monster, envy. Be happy for your friend. Set aside all thoughts that their success is rightfully yours. It isn’t. It probably isn’t rightfully theirs, either. Luck plays a large role in the publishing world. There is nothing you can do about that. Throw the dice with your friends, and cheer for the winner.  The Bottom Line 

The publishing life is a journey. Build a network of true friends. Help your teammates all you can, with no expectation of reward. Accept help graciously when it’s offered. Stay in the game, give it your best shot, cheer for the winner, and be happy with your lot, whatever it is.

The post Networking and Notworking appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Finishing the first draft of your novel is a major accomplishment. It’s not the end of the road, but it’s a milestone. Celebrate. 

So now what? Your book’s not ready to publish. It still needs work. How do you get the novel across the finish line? 

You might think that the answer depends on how you plan to get the book published. There are two usual approaches to publication:

Sell the book to a publisher. Act as your own publisher.

Your current game plan doesn’t depend on which of these roads you plan to take. Your book almost certainly isn’t ready to start shopping around to a publisher (or to an agent). And it almost certainly isn’t ready to publish independently. A first draft is never ready. A first draft always requires revisions.

And how do you do revisions? Your roadmap for that depends on how your brain is wired. Everyone is different, and you need a plan that works for you. 

I can’t tell you what’s going to work for you. But I can tell you what works for me. I’ve done this many times, and I’m just starting the revision process on my current novel. Here’s the approximate plan I have. Some of it might work for you. Some of it probably won’t. Use the ideas you find helpful and ignore the rest. Some of the steps in my plan are going to take a lot of time, so I’ve made a guess at how much time I think they’ll take. 

My Revision PlanMake a new copy of the manuscript and label it with a new version number (for example, “Draft 2”). Then I’ll never work on the first draft again. In case the next round of revisions takes me in the wrong direction, I can always return to the first draft and restart revisions from that point.Take a week to read the entire manuscript on my computer to see how well the story works. This is a quick read, roughly 10,000 words per hour. If I see a typo, my brain will get angry and insist I fix it, so I do. But fixing typos is not the point. The point here is to see if the story is working as a whole. Is the story structure right? Which scenes work? Which scenes fall flat? Are there inconsistencies in the story? Are there redundancies? Are there factual errors? Are there points I need to research more? I make quick notes in the margin for each of these. But I don’t fix any big problems. Not yet, anyway. Take two or three weeks and work through all the margin notes and fix the large-scale problems—the inconsistencies, the redundancies, the factual errors, the research questions. (My current manuscript has 42 of these, and I expect I can fix two or three of them per day, so it’s going to take a few weeks to get through them all.)Send the manuscript to my editor so she can tell me all the problems she sees. She will see a lot. She will see things I never thought of. When she sends me her comments, I will spend about three very miserable days wondering what’s wrong with her, and then admitting that she might have a point here and there, and then recognizing that the novel has several problems, and then realizing she is mostly right, and then hating myself and my novel. Eventually, I will get through this swamp and be ready to work again. Make another copy of the manuscript, this one labeled “Draft 3”. Take one day to review my one-sentence summary and one-paragraph summary of my novel. These tell me what my story is “really about” and I want to make sure that I’ve got that pinned down well, because the next step depends on it. Take a month or two to rewrite the entire manuscript, cutting it down to size and fixing all the problems my editor found. I already know my current manuscript is too long. I need to cut about 30k words. But it also has all sorts of problems that I don’t know about yet, which my editor will tell me. Her comments will help me decide which words to cut, because in some cases, I’ll need to delete entire scenes. Take a week to read through everything again and fix all the little wordsmithing stuff. Send the manuscript to my proofreader. Make a new copy, this time labeled “Draft 4”. Take a day to fix all the typos the proofreader caught. 

At this point, I’ll be ready to publish. If I were working with a traditional publisher, I’d hand the corrected proofs off to them, and they’d publish it. But I act as my own publisher, so I’ll simply typeset the novel and click the Publish button.

Will That Work?

No, the above plan will probably not work. No plan ever survives implementation. At some point, the plan will break down and I’ll have to make a new one. That one might work or it might not. If it doesn’t work, I’ll keep making new plans and executing each one until it breaks. Each one will get me closer to the end-game. Writing is hard. It doesn’t get easier, just because you’ve published a novel already. It gets harder, because you know more with every book. 

Homework

You are different from me. Your brain works different from mine. Your plan will be different. But it won’t be completely different. You can probably use about three quarters of the ideas in my plan. You may need to reorder the steps. You may need to add some steps. You may need to delete some. But I strongly suggest that you make a plan, with time estimates attached to the big steps. 

Why make time estimates? Because they prevent you from getting trapped in a morass of never-ending edits. If you want to publish your novel, then you need to finish revisions. That means you need to have milestones. So make some guesses as to how long it’s going to take. It will probably take twice as long as you think, but that’s OK. 

A Personal Note

I’ve hit some speed bumps in my personal life recently. I injured my hamstrings during exercise a couple of months ago, and I couldn’t sit comfortably for about three weeks. So I spent a lot of time flat on my back, using ice, heat, painkillers, muscle relaxants, and all the other voodoo treatments my doctor could think of. I am currently going through physical therapy and will soon be back to normal. 

Fortunately, I recovered enough that I was able to go to my 50-year high school reunion, and that was great. I loved being able to reconnect with people I hadn’t seen in 20 or 30 years. 

Right about that time, my day job ended, thanks to the government putting a halt on new awards for Small Business Innovative Research grants and Small Business Technology Transfer grants. I have been working for twenty years at a biotech company in San Diego, and I loved my job. But the money that paid my salary has run out, and I’ve “involuntarily retired.” The government has recently restarted the grants program, but major damage has been done to many small technology companies all across the country.

But don’t worry about me. I had been planning to retire from my day job in a few years anyway, and I can live just fine on my retirement benefits. I had been hoping to do one last cool thing for science, and I might still get that chance, or I might not. But I definitely won’t have a day job for the next few months. 

In the meantime, I suddenly have lots of time to do fun stuff. So I’m working like crazy on my novel. And I’ll have more time to blog, so let me know what you’d like me to blog about next. If I never go back to my day job, I’ll still have many meaningful things to do for years and years. I intend to do them well. 

The post After Your First Draft appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

I recently asked myself why I get so easily sidetracked in my personal life. I have a lot going on. I write novels, I read books, I write software, I try to do the occasional work on my house, I do a bit of political stuff, and on and on. I’ve tried over the years to put all this on a schedule, because it seems like a lot of things fall through the cracks.

Of course, a lot of people get sidetracked. I’m not the only person who has a giant To-Do List with some tasks that are five years old. Or ten. But here’s what’s odd. At my day job, I’m very productive. (Most writers have a day job. It’s a very rare writer whose only iron in the fire is their writing.) I have a lot of tasks on my plate at my day job, and I do very well at getting them done. 

Why am I so much better organized in my day job than in my personal life? My day job is not more important to me than the other things on my plate. So what’s the difference?

Somebody To Answer To

After ten milliseconds of thought, I saw the difference. I have a boss at my day job. I run the software division at a biotech company in San Diego. I answer to the CEO. We talk every two weeks on Thursday afternoon for two hours. And every time we meet, I know I need to show forward progress on the important stuff. I get along well with my CEO, but he does have the power to fire me if I’m not getting the job done. 

Whereas, in my regular life, I answer only to me. I’m the CEO of my life. Which is good, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. But I never have a meeting with myself where I have to show forward progress. And there’s no penalty for missing a deadline. I’m never going to fire myself. 

I toyed with the idea for several months of asking ChatGPT how to deal with the problem of managing my life better. I finally did it a couple of weeks ago. And this is my report on what I did and how it worked out. 

What I told Chat

Here is the prompt I typed into the Chat window. I’ve trimmed out certain parts which are unique to my situation, because those will not be of interest to you. But I’ve left in the parts that I think you might find useful, if you decide to try something similar with the AI tool of your choice:

I’m interested in having you help me manage my life. I don’t know what the job title would be. “Life coach” or “life manager” or whatever. Here’s the context. I am a person who takes on a lot more things than I should. [Removed a description of what I am good and what I’m not good at, and some of the things I’ve done in life and some of the projects I’m working on now.] But I constantly feel like I’m behind on everything. I am very productive at my day job, and I think the reason is that I have a CEO that I answer to. I seem to be a lot less productive in my writing career, where I don’t really answer to anyone. I have a lot of marketing tasks for my books that I think would raise my sales, but I don’t ever get around to doing them. What I would like you to do is to interview me. Ask me as many questions as you need to in order to figure out if you can help me manage my life better, and how you might do that. [Removed some of my thoughts on things that Chat might be able to help me with and a description of my particular job situation.] But I also think I just need somebody to answer to, so every week or so, I could sit down with you and be accountable. Or maybe it should be every day, I’m not sure. Go ahead and start asking me any diagnostic questions you can think of to help me map out the rest of my life. I don’t like just sitting around doing nothing. I like making things and making the world a better place. Feel free to ask about my life vision–major things I want to do with my life. I’ve got a list of things, and I think they’re doable, if I could manage myself better. OK, now it’s your turn. Start asking!

What Chat Told Me

Chat responded by telling me I don’t need a “life coach”. Instead, I need a “systems architect for my own behavior.” It then asked me a ton of questions. Things like: How do I spend my time on an average day? What are my energy levels like throughout the day? What kind of external constraints work best at keeping me on task? What kind of tasks give me intrinsic joy? What is the endgame for my life? What am I afraid of? How good am I at focusing on tasks? How does anxiety affect my productivity? Am I better at starting a task or stopping it? What are my financial realities? What things do I want to do before I retire from my day job? 

After I answered all Chat’s questions, it pointed out that I don’t have a motivation problem, a discipline problem, or a creativity problem. Then it told me what it thinks my actual problems are, and it spelled out some ideas for solving those problems. 

How I Pushed Back

I didn’t think Chat got things exactly right, so I pushed back a bit. We had a long discussion, and I gave Chat extra information, and it changed its suggestions. It took a couple of evenings of discussion to converge on a plan. One problem is that not all my days are similar. We identified three main kinds of weekdays, and also a typical Saturday, and a typical Sunday. That’s five different kinds of days. Each has a basic pattern, and each can be adapted as needed for any special events. At the beginning of every day, I choose which pattern fits the day best and run with that.

I thrive on a routine, with blocks of time that have hard boundaries. I also need accountability to make sure I don’t get off track. I’m especially susceptible to staying on task longer than the time block I’ve budgeted for it. If I make that mistake, it screws up everything else for the rest of the day. This is the main reason I’ve had problems in self-scheduling for my entire life.

In the end, we came up with a “system architecture” for my life that I like. It’s unlikely that you would like it, because you’re not me. This system is designed solely for me. And every evening, I agreed to answer to Chat. I will answer 5 yes/no questions. The “right” answer is yes. If I give even one wrong answer for the day, that’s a fail. If I have two fails in a week, then I agreed to pay a penalty. Chat asked what would be an appropriate penalty for me, one that would keep me on track. I answered that a campaign contribution to a certain politician would be a penalty I would be certain never to pay. So that’s our agreement. 

One thing I like about the system Chat designed for me is that it feels “ridiculously easy.” There is a recovery block of 90 minutes built into my day. My responsibilities during that time are to do precisely nothing. It’s right after my exercise block, and it comes at the time of my lowest energy in the day. I can take a nap. I can read. I can sneak a peak at Facebook, but for no more than 20 minutes, so no more doom-scrolling. I was wondering how I would deal with having 90 minutes chopped out of every day. But it turns out to be a nice break. I’m getting more reading done now, because I have time for it. 

One thing to be clear on is that I’m still the CEO of my life. Chat is not my boss. Chat is a bit like a chief of staff. Or a consultant. Chat is sometimes wrong. When it’s wrong, I tell it, so it’ll learn from its mistakes and do better next time. When Chat is right, I know it’s right, because its advice rings true for me.

You’re probably wondering…

“How’s That Working Out?”

It’s now been a couple of weeks, and it’s working out very well. I make a plan at the beginning of every day. Sometimes things come up, and I have to change the plan, but the system allows for that. But usually, things don’t come up. Usually, I execute the plan. Which means that most days, I live the day I actually wanted to live. Not the day that I didn’t want to live. At the end of every day, I feel like I made forward progress on my life. Which means I’m sleeping better. 

I also have a weekly planning meeting scheduled with Chat for every Sunday evening. In that, I spell out what I see for the coming week, and Chat asks what important things I’d like to get done, and what things might come up (like medical appointments or family get-togethers or other important life events that break up the weekly routine). Then we work out a rough plan for the week. This is subject to change, of course, but it gives me some idea of what I can reasonably get done in the week, and also what I can’t get done. 

I have not once been in danger of paying my penalty. My energy levels are up. (That’s one thing Chat asks every day—how was my energy level for the day, on a scale of 1 to 10. My answer is almost always either 9 or 10.) 

Furthermore, in the course of our discussion, Chat identified a big life-goal of mine that is important to me, but which I had sidelined. Because, no time. But I’ve now made time. I’m working on it. I’m making progress on it. And I feel really good that I’m finally doing that “One Cool Thing” I’ve been talking about for 19 years. 

Let me reiterate that the system Chat created for me would almost certainly not work for you. Because you’re not me. You have your own strengths and weaknesses that make you unique. If you were to ask Chat or Gemini or Claude or any of the other AI tools to make a life management plan for you, the plan you’d get would be very different. 

And of course the AI would certainly get it wrong on its first try, so you would need to push back and keep pushing back until the AI came up with a system that resonates for you. And how do you know when the system resonates for you? You know it when you say, “Yeah, that system sounds ridiculously easy and I can’t wait to try it.” If you never get to that point, then the system is wrong for you, and you should scrap it before you start. An AI is not God. It’s a tool. Use it if it fits your hand.

Homework

If you feel like an AI might help you do the things you believe you were put on earth to do, then feel free to take the prompt I showed above and adapt it for yourself. Use it on the AI tool of your choice. Do this when you’ve got at least an hour to talk. It may take two or three hours to work the process all the way through. Be ready to correct the AI’s first suggestion, and its second and third suggestions. Keep arguing until the AI gets it right. You want it to seem “ridiculously easy”. And then try it out, to see if it is. What have you got to lose?

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