J.I. Thacker's Blog

If you have a proper job, then my advice about sitting down every morning at 9 am to work on your book probably made you laugh.
Sit down at 9 am and start writing? Who does Jit think I am?
More realistically, you probably have a full-time job to do, and a busy life outside work. Your opportunities to work on your first book are few and of short duration. In fact, it’s more likely that you’ll have half an hour to work on your book, not all day. You’ve just finished one thing, and have a fragment of time before the next begins. Maybe you’re waiting for a train.
It might not seem worth doing something in that half an hour, but believe me, it is. If you are lucky enough to be able to spend an entire day writing, then 9 to 5 gets you eight hours, less lunch and tea breaks, or 16 half-hour chunks. But those 16 (let’s call it 15 because of your lunch break) will probably not all see you working at full power. You might stare out of the window, answer the phone, open your emails or sneak a glance at the internet or social media (do not do these latter things. I can’t stop you from looking out of the window or answering the phone). You might well begin to flag at some point in the afternoon. If working in a notebook, your hand might start to hurt. (Mine does. I’m a wimp. Writing has given me a tailor’s bunion, or whatever it’s called.) Add together enough of those half-hour blocks, and they will become worth it. What else are you going to do with that bit of time?
So, you have half an hour. How can you usefully use that time? With you, you have a project notebook and (in my case) a faithful mechanical pencil. Here are a few things you could do:

i) Read back some draft material and make minor edits. Ideas for new inserted paragraphs might occur to you. Some might get crossed out. You might add another one or two.
ii) You might have had an idea earlier in the day – while walking to work for example – and now is a great time to note it down.
iii) Look about you. Are there people around you who might make a useful basis for a minor character’s description? What mood are the people around you in, and how can you tell?
iv) Listen to people talking. Listen to the way they don’t speak in sentences! A peculiar mannerism, an interesting accent, could inform the speech of one of your characters.
v) Look at buildings, decoration, furniture, plants, insects. Look at the rain. Do any of these things resemble part of a setting for one of your scenes? Everything around you could potentially be transplanted into your universe. Sure, it might need a radical mutation. But it could be done. What would the place you are in look like ten years after a zombie apocalypse? What about after a hundred years of abandonment?
vi) Environment around you too prosaic to inspire anything and empty of interesting people? Get your phone out and search for paintings, drawings or photographs. Try searching for images related to “Namib desert,” “Carlos Schwabe,” or “Pripyat” to get you started.

Octarine is the colour of magic. But what is the trouble with magic?
It’s fun to put magic in a story (as long as it’s a fantasy story. I don’t think you should swerve things three-quarters of the way through if the story is about the ordinary universe). There are though potential pitfalls.
Magic, by its very nature, jars with reality. A reader will happily go along with the presence of magic in a story (although there are some for whom it is an instant deal-breaker). But the universe you create has to be consistent with the presence of magic and magicians.
As a writer, it is your job to convince me that your world is real. In turn then the magic has to fit into it naturally.
Let’s say our main character can do magic. Then we immediately have to place strict limits on his or her use of magic within the story. Why?
To make an analogy: if our character was a sprinter, we can’t have him or her winning every race. They can’t be the best sprinter, or if they are, we have to put leg irons on them somehow. Of course, they might win one or three races in the story – but they can’t win every race. If they did, there would be no drama, no struggle, no antagonist. Similarly, your football team can’t win every match. You might want them to, and hate it when they lose. But if they win every match, games mean nothing and there is no tension. If our sprinter wins every race, there is hubris aplenty, but no nemesis. There’s a reason why the hero’s arc is usually a glimpse of potential followed by a prolonged struggle followed by a triumphant success.
In other words, the less magic your hero can do, the greater their achievement when they come through victorious in the end. If I defeat the Dark Lord, this has to be in an epic struggle taking place over three chapters, not as a finger snap. (One argument for the non-existence of God relies on the sort-of logic that if the Universe was created by an omnipotent being, it was no great achievement. In fact, the weaker the being that creates the Universe, the greater the achievement, and the greatest achievement in terms of Universe creation would be if the job was done by a being with no power at all.)
There has to be a struggle, so there have to be limits to our character’s power. And the stricter those limits, the harder the struggle, and the more rewarding the ultimate success.
The need for limits applies across the board, of course. If the Dark Lord has infinite power, then the story of our hero defying them loses any semblance of credibility.
Things to think about include: How is magic distributed? Can everyone do it, or just a chosen few? Do they lord it over the plebs? If not, why not? Do the plebs know that there are superior beings among them?
If there is powerful magic, you will have to find means of limiting it. My epic journey of a thousand miles is not so epic if I can just click my fingers and teleport there.
Is there a cost to magic? Does the first law of thermodynamics (that energy cannot be created or destroyed) apply, perhaps in a not-obvious way?
Lots to think about there. But the key thing to remember is: your hero can win a match. They just can’t win every match.

Why do orphans make such good main characters for young adult fantasy stories?
Easily answered. Because they have no parents to rely on to help them, an orphan is in more jeopardy than a character who lives with their parents, and has to be more self-reliant too. You can’t really be thrust into an adventure if you keep running back to your parents for safety. The same may apply if you have big sisters or brothers.
I don’t think I need to name a story whose central character is a self-reliant orphan, do I?
Now, I use the term “orphan” to mean more than just a child or youth whose parents are deceased. Your character might be a de facto orphan, even if his or her parents are still alive.
For example, your character might be physically separated from their parent(s). Their mother might have floated them down the river, Moses style. One parent might be in prison. Some emergency might have occurred, and now our “orphan” is temporarily separated from their parents (e.g., on the other side of the city in the midst of an invasion by aliens).
What if there are parents, but they cannot help? To take the alien invasion story as an example. Rather than be separated, our main character could be together with one of their parents. What if the parent was disabled, or badly wounded in the attack? Now our “orphan” has to be responsible, not just for themselves, but for their parent too.
Of course, having deceased parents automagically spirits up a question about what happened to them, including the possibility of murder and ongoing jeopardy (the princess whose parents were murdered and who now has to flee from the killer, who sees herself as the only thing between him and the legitimacy of his stolen throne). Later on there might be a possibility of revenge, and it would form a natural direction for the story. (Yes, there is a danger of slipping into clichés here.)

When writing, I find I am like a rusty tap. The longer I spend turned off, the harder it is to start me flowing again.
I’ve found that, when working on a novel, the best plan at the writing stage is to begin at the same time every day, if that is possible. I recommend that you do not wait for inspiration to strike. If you do, it might only strike for half a page and then leave you. The idea at this stage is to get something down on paper, and not be too concerned about how good it is.
The journey to a complete first draft is a long one and can be daunting. But you should not treat it like a marathon. If I asked you to run a marathon today, the chances are that if you are typical of humanity of large, you would collapse after a couple of miles. Luckily, writing a book is less like a marathon and more like running around the block every day. You can complete a marathon’s distance that way surprisingly quickly.
When daunted by the length of the journey, focus not on the finish line, but on the next landmark. Today’s job is to write a particular scene in your book, not to write the entire book. I think it is important though to move forwards every day. Don’t stall. If you take one day off, one day can become two days within, er, another 24 hours. Obviously you have a life, and often you can’t just sit down at 9 am and work on your book until 5 pm. What you must do though is to make progress every day. Even if this is as small an increment as a single sentence, or a page read back and edited, that is enough. Each day takes you closer to the finish line.
Here is the procedure in an ideal world:
Sit down at the same time every day, read through what you wrote yesterday and edit it, then carry on writing from there. Editing yesterday’s efforts warms you up for today’s efforts. It gets your mind back into the groove of your world. And it certainly rounds off the sharp edges of yesterday’s writing.
On a good day, I could probably write 3000 words, based on already having a paper draft in a notebook. Some days I might produce far fewer, maybe 500 words. Sometimes an issue arises – a dilemma for example – that can cause an abrupt halt to progress. Suddenly you spot a glaring plot hole and have to figure out how to close it. It can be of the form of “I need character X to do thing Y, but they would never do it because of fact Z.” At other times there is a gap in the pencil draft that you didn’t notice was missing before, but needs bridging now. Sometimes two scenes need to be linked, but you can’t see how to do it.
If a chunk of progress doesn’t happen, it doesn’t matter. Make it at least a chip every day, and you’ll get there in the end.

Sometimes stories begin far away from where the action takes place, or a long time before it.
Our hero usually doesn’t have a role to play as such in the prologue, but the prologue obviously must impinge on later events in some way. It either shapes our character or provides an impetus for the story.
Is a prologue necessary?
That depends on a lot of things. I used one in Elsie Smith: Vampyre Hunter to introduce two characters, without naming them. We don’t know who they are at first, even after they appear in the main story. One of the characters’ seemingly irrational actions start to make sense when we begin to realise that they were one of the duo in the prologue. (This is an example of getting your reader to join the dots rather than making things too plain.)
You can create a dramatic irony with a prologue by revealing something to the reader that your main character does not know. If and when you let them find out is part of your craft.
Let’s say our hero meets a new character in the wilderness half-way along his or her epic journey. All our hero knows is what they see: how the new character looks and acts from the time they meet. But what if that character had appeared in the prologue? Suppose they had a relationship with our hero that we as readers know about, but that our hero does not? For that matter, the new character themselves might be unaware of the relationship as well – or instead.
For example: in the prologue, our new character kills our hero’s parents, making him or her an orphan. Twelve years later, the two meet again on the road. Perhaps our hero was too young to remember the murderer/assassin. On the other hand our hero might have been too young back then for the assassin to recognise them now. How do we as readers know who it is? Is there a key identifiying mark, a scar, or an eyepatch, that refers back to the description given in the prologue? Perhaps as they grew up, those who did see the deed tell our hero what the killer looked like. Perhaps the killer steals a medallion bearing the family crest, which is seen by our hero – perhaps not immediately, perhaps even after the duo have struck up a trusting relationship. Or perhaps the killer might deduce over time who they are with as our hero talks about their childhood. The dramatic possibilities of such an encounter are endless, and it’s thanks to that jarring prologue.
As to whether you need one, the answer is no. But imagine the sequence as described with and without the prologue and ask yourself whether it improves the story.
Now, I’m going to suggest that you decide on the usefulness of a prologue after you’ve written the story. That’s because the story in your head will be very different when it climbs out onto the page. Our hero might end up meeting a completely different character half-way through their journey, for example. It might suddenly occur to you that a certain character already knows our hero, and that might point towards a prologue.
There are of course other reasons you might think about reaching for a prologue, and I’ll talk about at least one of them later.

OK, so we’ve decided what happens at the beginning – or where we have chosen to make the beginning – now how do we begin the scene?
There might be a temptation to go for something striking as a first sentence, as described in First Words 1. I have already said that I don’t like that approach personally, and that even if I wanted to begin with what my friend Sheldon calls “arresting prose,” I would certainly write the first sentence last. The reason I don’t like that approach is that I don’t see the point. Do you have to make the first sentence so shiny? It’s not as if a potential reader will only read the first sentence if it isn’t Orwell grade. And you can’t write the entire book in that mode, so why begin that way?
What I mean when I ask how the scene begins is, what is our (the writer’s) way into the scene?
Our character is doing something in a certain place, and with a snap of our fingers, we’re right there with them. What is the first thing we notice? Answer that, and you have a way into the scene. It might be Gretel woolgathering in the yard:
The bee hummed heavily from flower to flower, disappearing into each in a moment of silence.
Or Frankenstein in the morgue, interrupted by the delivery of a corpse:
The door crashed open, and two porters wheeled in another dead body.
It might be something about what our character looks like – I don’t describe my principal characters in great depth, which is something I will explain in a future episode, but some writers do;
It might be what our character is thinking;
Something about the place they are in;
Something they are doing.
The first sentence is a domino being knocked over, setting in motion a chain reaction. The second sentence is, by experience, much easier than the first.
Naturally, the same issue occurs, albeit at a smaller magnitude, at the beginning of each new chapter and after every section break, if you use those. The answer is the same. Either jump into your character and describe what they can see/hear/smell, or what they are thinking, or place your mental camera close by and tell us what they look like or what they’re doing.

How do you decide what should be the first scene in your novel? As mentioned above, the story begins before we join it. Unless it’s the Bible I guess. Where you begin to tell it is instinct, and it’s not a writer’s instinct – it’s a human instinct, because we all tell each other stories, all the time. It’s just that they are not usually as formal as in writing.
Take any well-known tale and ask yourself where it begins. Let’s say you decide to tell me the tale of Hansel and Gretel. (Imagine I’ve never heard it of it.) The place you want to begin will crystallise in your mind straight away. The funny thing is, your beginning might not be in the same place as mine. I just stared out of the window for a moment and thought about it: where would I begin this tale? This popped up:
“Come on, we’re going for a walk.”
No description, just a voice coming out of the blue. So my first scene is the evil stepmother leading Hansel and Gretel into the woods. Is it the evil stepmother, or the weak-willed forester? It doesn’t matter as far as the story is concerned, but it makes for a completely different scene, because of the interaction between the three characters. So that’s mine. You might have set things going on the day that Hansel and Gretel’s mother came down with a mysterious illness. (Did she? What killed her?) Or you could have begun when the forester introduces his new wife to the children. You could have talked about a typical day in Hansel and Gretel’s life after the stepmother’s arrival. Or one of the children daydreaming, watching a bee go from flower to flower, surprised by a scolding from the stepmother, accusing them of laziness.
Let’s take another, not a fairy story this time – well, it kinda-sorta is – Frankenstein. Everyone knows the story, but a tiny fraction of us have actually read the original. The story we know is a sort of distillate of the essence of Mary Shelley’s original. I can’t remember how the original begins.
Update – having looked it up, I am fairly sure that a modern writer wouldn’t have done it that way! In any case, telling the “cultural” version of Frankenstein and not the original, when would you begin? Victor’s first successful experiment? (I can already hear Colin Clive shouting, “It’s alive, alive!”)
OK, so – stare out of the window, if you have a window handy, and ask yourself: how do I tell this story to someone who has never heard of Frankenstein?
…
Right, I’ve got mine. A doctor arriving in a rush, a pregnant woman, complications, death of one or both of mother and child. The doctor, a manic genius, obsessed by his failure to save his patient, is distraught. Only at the end of the scene do we find out the doctor’s name; it’s that which sets us off balance.
Alternatives, as well as the “reanimation” scene, could be the theft of a body from a mortuary.
Having described my first scene, I wouldn’t actually do it that way. Why not? Because it’s a scene that belongs in the eighteenth century, along with Victor Frankenstein. If I was actually to re-tell Frankenstein, the first thing I would do would be to move the action forwards in time to the present day. Why? Because I do not believe I could ever do enough research to know enough about life in the eighteenth century to make the story seem authentic. Because I live now, I could make a better fist of writing a story set now. That means that the home visit by the eccentric doctor is out. Instead, I’m seeing a nightshift mortuary attendant working clandestinely to save people who are already dead. It’s someone trained as a doctor, but thrown off the medical register for some reason – perhaps because they killed someone through negligence.
The new first scene? An innocuous handover of a corpse, something creepy about the mortician – trying to get the porters out of the room as fast as possible – the door closes on them, and the morgue attendant hurries over to the body, uncovers it, feels its forehead with the palm of one hand. A slow smile spreads over the attendant’s face…
…still warm.

There you are, pencil poised above the paper. How on Earth do you begin?
Don’t get hung up about the first words. For one thing, the first words you put now will probably not be the first words you eventually end up with.
Think of the first words you write now as a way in to the story for you, rather than for the at-some-point-hoped-for reader. If you want to spend time on perfecting the first sentence, do it later. For now, just start.
The cliché of the agitated writer ripping sheet after sheet from their typewriter, then crumpling and hurling them towards the bin, which is already surrounded by a small mountain of previous failures, is probably not real.
OK, so how do I start?
Well, the start is not as important as the ending. You have a lot more freedom about where to begin than where to end, I think.
Imagine a train trundling along a track. It stops at many stations, and you can join it anywhere along the route. The story you are about to write began before you got on the train. (Yes it did!) The terminus is rather more abrupt. Of course, the story doesn’t end when we decide to stop writing, unless everyone is dead…
“Happily ever after is just a story that hasn’t ended yet.”
If the ending is a crisis resolved, the beginning does not have to be a crisis revealed. Something out of the ordinary probably happens at the beginning, for if it didn’t, we could have started the story tomorrow, or yesterday.
Obviously the length of our story has great bearing on where and how we begin. You may think 1500 words is a lot, if you are writing a short story – but it really isn’t. By the time you’ve started, you’ve almost hit the word limit. Which might seem odd if you struggled with undergraduate essays of the same length, but it’s true in my experience.
Pick up a handful of books at random from your shelf and read the first sentence. You will probably find a mixture of arresting prose and perfectly normal sentences. Here are a few from books I have lying around:
It was a cold bright day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
*
Tikil was really three cities loosely bound together, two properly recognized on the maps of Korwar’s northern continent, the third a sore – rather than a scar – of war, still unhealed.
*
He was called Smith and was twelve years old.
*
The three or four “To Let” boards had stood within the low paling as long as the inhabitants of the triangular “Square” could remember, and if they had ever been vertical it was a very long time ago.
*
The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn’t sure it was worth all the effort.
*
George Orwell – 1984, Andre Norton – Catseye, Leon Garfield – Smith, Oliver Onions – The Beckoning Fair One, Terry Pratchett – The Light Fantastic.
You can distinctly see a variation in these between sentences that only work as a first line, and sentences that might be found somewhere else in the book. Some give you the feeling that an author has gone back and written the first line after everything else is more-or-less done, just to make it something impressive.
I prefer to write a normal sentence, but your style is your style. Orwell sets you off balance straight away. Pratchett makes you laugh. The other three are “just” beginning their tale.
I found the first sentence of Elsie Smith: Vampyre Hunter quite hard, and I’m sure I changed it several times. I ended up with:
Elsie was locked up in the shepherd’s hut by the high meeting ground to get ready alone.
I eventually stuck a prologue in front of the opening scene (more on prologues in another edition).
Edison Blue was far easier:
My name is Edison, and I have just discovered that I am blue.
The first words themselves don’t really matter, as long as they aren’t too clunky. You might think that something jarring like the opener of 1984 will stand you in better stead in a competition, and you might be right. But the key point is not to get too hung up about them now.
Which scene should be first, and how to step into that scene, I will talk about later.

Naturally, even if you want to write a fantasy epic in the end, it might be a bit daunting to make a fantasy epic the first thing you try. If you do try a fantasy epic as your first attempt at writing, the likelihood is that the project will go off like a rocket in an initial burst of enthusiasm, but will crash back down to earth shortly thereafter as the scale of the challenge causes disillusionment.
So. Why not have a go at a short story first? If you’re not sure how to begin with a short story, may I suggest the following approach: your story should consist of:
One character
One setting
One action.
Now, of course I’m not suggesting that you only have one character in your story (although you can if you want). I mean you should focus on one. One setting means it takes happens in one place. One action means that the story tells about a single thing happening.
Thus Hansel and Gretel is not a short story, but Babes in the Wood might be (two children abandoned in the wood die, and their bodies are covered in leaves by robins). Of course there is a lot of preamble before the final scene, with enough material to turn the story into a morality tale pantomime. But while the last scene of Babes in the Wood works as a (rather macabre) short story, I don’t think the ending of Hansel and Gretel does.
I wrote an autobiographical short story about a boy who walks from home along the estuary shore to visit the town library for the first time. It’s a single event, and there is only one other character: the librarian. The setting is spread out a bit, but I don’t mean to be so prescriptive that no travelling is allowed.
If you have any short story collections handy, read a couple and see if they fit this rule. Chances are that they won’t, and this is because most short stories you read are longer than the maximum length of many short story competitions (1500 words). You will find that in 1500 words it becomes almost essential to boil things down to, er, their essence. For my The Kid Borrows a Book, the initial draft was way over and needed severe pruning to make the word count, and that was with me trying to apply my “Nelson” rule of short story writing.
Of course, other competitions apply word counts of 3000 or more to their short stories, and that gives you a little more leeway.
Wait, what? I’m not sending my stuff to a competition!
Of course, this is not compulsory. But you never know. (More on competitions another time.) So do freestyle it. By which I mean, if your short story happens to be 1800 words, you don’t have to trim it to 1500 unless you need to to fit the word limit of a competition.
As to what to write about, remember what I suggested last time: that if your ambition is to write a fantasy epic, you can still begin with a short story that tells about something that happened to one of your characters, perhaps even a minor one. Those minor characters do have lives outside of the times they appear in the main narrative.

Now, if like me you have a mind full of unwritten fantasy epics, a blank page can seem not just like a block of perfect marble waiting to be ruined, but also as the first step in an impossible journey. Let’s say you really like The Lord of the Rings and you want to write something like that. In your head there are different lands, diverse peoples, deserted cities, haunted tombs, lonely monsters – ideas popping out all over the place.
And a blank page. Writing such an epic is in itself an epic journey. It’s not impossible to just sit down and start such an epic one day and end up with something amazing a year later. Not impossible – just extremely unlikely. The most likely thing to happen is that you will write a scene, or half a scene, and at that point the scale of the enterprise will begin to dawn – something else takes your attention, work or life; you later return to what you have begun and realise that there is no hope. It’s like Frodo stepping out of Bag End and then –
Well, giving up and going down the pub. This is perfectly normal and natural. So my advice is, do not begin by attempting such an epic. Attempt, instead, a journey that you can definitely complete: a 1500-word story. It may not be any good, but we both know you can do it. It’s not a marathon; it’s walking around the block.
As to what to write about, if that fantasy epic is still filling your mind, why not take a story out of that?
Huh? You just told me not to write that story.
Well, the story you will write in the end when you do finally write your fantasy epic can be represented as a thread of gold that weaves and turns, following those parts of the story that you want to tell us. But that thread is narrow, and much is left unseen and unsaid. There will be a depth to your world that will be apparent to us readers, even though we will never visit it. So write something about that.
Not only will it be within your reach, it will also contribute, in a small way at least, to that epic three-volume story you end up writing.
I would suggest you pick a character that your main character meets along the way, and ask yourself: how did our minor character get where they are when our main character meets them?
In Edison Blue, Edison comes across a paladin fighting a bron in a clearing. The bron – something like a giant bear with banana-sized claws – is battering the golden-armoured paladin to bits. Now, I originally put this scene in the story for what it told us about Edison’s character. As to why the minor character was a paladin, well that’s another story. Anyway, I got to thinking: how did this paladin get here in the middle of nowhere – and why doesn’t he seem to care that he’s losing?
Those questions became a little story of their own, which is revealed later on in the novel. And because the paladin was now something more than a reckless knight in need of rescuing, he featured more in subsequent parts than was planned. In short, his story – although it was never written as a standalone piece – made a piece of background come to life.
So, conquer the blank page and make a (small) contribution to the epic you really want to write, by discovering and telling the story of a minor character.