The Second Month: Staying on Track

Wow. Has it been a full week already? Guess it's time for another post, I'll be it extra long to make up for my lack of posting. Let's start off today's post with an analogy (in honor of my track meet Thursday).

Long distance running is a lot like track.

Say you are completely sadistic and insane and weird like me and love to run long distance. While I love long distance it's not very easy to deal with sometimes. While the typical long distance event is from 4-8 laps on a standard track, sometimes it's hard to run that distance, so you cheat on your training. Run a few sprints then call it a day. And while you're making some progress in track, it's not the kind you want to be making.

Writing is the same way. The typical YA novel is 40,000-80,000 words.** And sometimes it's hard to write; so for whatever the reason, we, as writers, cheat on that too. Maybe we post our opening pages in hope of critiques, or we just quit altogether... Whatever the reason you decide 1,000 words into your novel that you should stop and re-write. Again. And again. And again. While you're learning how to write the first 1,000 words well, you aren't learning how to write a novel well.

I would know that.

I spent three, count 'em, three hours re-organizing my novel. Why? Because I had exactly forty-nine openings for the exact same novel. I have no clue how it got that way, but it did. I wouldn't have even noticed it if I wasn't reorganizing all the files on my laptop!

I realized that my story was so scattered that if unless I started over it wouldn't make any sense. At the same time, I realized that that if I started over, I'd probably quit for some reason or another and that file would be shoved along with the others. With an extremely vague name like "Intro-4". So I needed to change.

I wrote down a non-vague title that would remind me of each fragment of my story on a notecard with the title, file name, date, and number of pages.

After that I sorted them into piles. "USE!", "Useful", "Salvageable", "Useful for other stories", and "Useless".

Then I used the usefully ones to help write an outline for the start of my novel. 















The process took a while but at least this way I'll finish. If you find yourself in the same situation and don't want to waste paper I would recommend using the notecard function on Noodle Tools. (It's pretty cool for school projects too).

But that's not what today's post is on. Today's post is about how to prevent yourself from getting to this point. It's fairly easy, if you follow a few simple but vital rules.

1) Have a plan.
Or some idea of where you want to go with your story. This will also save a whole lot of rewriting later.

2) Just keep writing.

Don't stop for critiques or to edit what you've already written. This is the fastest way to convince yourself that the book sucks and you need to re-write it.

3) Write for yourself.

Don't let anyone else read what you've written. Don't obsess over what you think others will think, either. As my drama teacher would say, "get rid of your cool brain". Don't be afraid of acting like a dork or writing something badly, because SURPRISE most of your first draft will be dorky and bad.


That's it!

-C









** I have no factual proof of this, but the minimum a story must be to be considered a novel is 40,000 words and publishers like their books to be between 75,000-85,000 words

The Second Month: Getting Started

So you have an idea. It's been in the back of your brain forever! You've planned out all the characters, the plot, the conflict until it's practically real (more on this later). You're ready; you're ready to start writing your novel. So open up a blank word doc and prepare the world for your genius. This is a monumental occasion for readers everywhere. 

Then... nothing. Zip. Nada. You have no ideas whatsoever. Nothing comes out. It sucks right?

Or, even worse, it ends up like this:

Awful, right? I won't tell you where I found it, but needless to say, it needs some work. The answer to the question is no, it turns the readers off.

And more importantly, it turns agents and publishers off. If the first page of your novel is bad, they're no going to read the rest, even IF the rest is better than Suzanne Collins and JK Rowling combined. This makes the first page of your novel the MOST IMPORTANT page. So it has to be the best.

We'll discuss using the bad example above (okay, I'll tell you where I got it; I made it up for this. But I ALMOST used a passage like this a couple of years ago.)

Rule number one: It has to be exciting

Most newbie writers love to write long descriptions without any action. Instead of writing about a spy getting assigned to something, then going to lunch, then figuring out there's a bomb, then going to save people from the bomb, drop us right in the middle of the spy defusing the bomb. It's high-stress, intense and page turning.

Make us want to keep reading, there's a time and place for semi-long descriptions, but it's not now.

Okay, so maybe not all of us have action packed, spy movies. But we can still stuff interesting, which brings us to rule number two.

Rule number two: Include a conflict

There has to be a problem, or something that makes a situation difficult. Maybe your character isn't a bomb defusing spy, but s/he still can be in a high stress situation. Maybe s/he is going to move. Maybe s/he doesn't want to move.

It doesn't have to be the main conflict in the end. It doesn't even have to effect the rest of the story. As long as you have a conflict it works.

Rule number three: Use your best grammar and spelling

This is an obvious.

And the last rule, Rule number four: Use the same voice for the first part as you will in the rest of the novel.

This one is just a must. You can't switch voices back and forth unless you're switching characters. Period. And you can't switch narrators unless you start a new chapter. This keeps it from being confusing.