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Write a Successful Novel In Five Simple Steps

Want to write a novel and rake in some money? It’s very simple. Just follow these steps:

  1. Spend twenty years learning how to write, honing your craft.

  2. Spend twenty years learning about people and the world, so you have something to write about. (May be done concurrently with step 1, but often isn’t.)

  3. Write a novel.

  4. Put the novel out where people can see it. (Send it to publishers, self-publish, etc.)

  5. Get lucky.

Sufficient quantities of good luck can substitute for some or all of the learning and skill acquired in steps 1 and 2. No amount of learning and skill can overcome an insufficiency of luck.

There you go! Five simple steps to writing success.

Don’t Buy The Bullshit

I’ll be brief. PIPA/SOPA isn’t about ‘protecting intellectual property rights.’ It’s about censorship, and giving big media companies (through the efforts of their paid mouthpieces in Congress), the ability to control what people see on the wild Internet.

So, you know, fuck them.

Close the Window, Pick Up The Phone

I was writing at the library the other day and for some reason my laptop wouldn’t latch onto the library’s WIFI. When I had to look up something or other, do a quick bit of research, I used my iPhone.

It worked. No Internet on the laptop kept me focused, but I wasn’t completely cut off from whatever facts I thought I needed. The extra step of picking up the phone to get to the Internet (and the low speed and small screen), kept me from lunging for it every time I paused in my writing, the way I might on the computer.

Give it a try. Unplug your computer from the Internet, or turn off your WIFI, do your fact checking on your phone, and write. If you don’t have an Internet-capable phone, go back to the old trick; slap [lookitup] in the text where you need to check something and move on. Go back later and fill in the gaps.

Sometimes Enough Is Enough

A common mistake that new writers make is over-explaining, particularly with background and backstory. I don’t know if it’s because the writers put so much into the background and feel like it has to be shared (sometimes in excruciating detail), or if they lack confidence in the reader’s ability to follow the story without that information, or some combination of the two (most likely), but there it is. New writers often put in too much stuff that isn’t story.

That was one failing I never had, though I had plenty of others. I’m a pretty minimalist writer. (No, not this kind of minimalism; my desk looks like the site of an illicit intimate encounter between a used bookstore and an electronics shop.) Not only are infodumps anathema, as they should be for all writers of fiction, but I shy away from lavish description as well. Not that there’s anything wrong with lavish description, necessarily; it’s just not my style. I sprinkle in just enough background to (hopefully) keep the reader from getting lost.

This was brought home to me a while back in an amusing way. One of my first reader’s raised some questions about my novel’s background. When I sat down to address this issue, and better explain how magic had influenced the development of technology, the question I asked myself was, “Where can I put in a line about that?”

In a 100,000 word novel, my first reflex was to use no more than a single sentence to fill in this bit of background, and that is exactly what I ended up using.

The preparation and concentration required to work magic made it better suited to the factory and laboratory than the battlefield, but it could be decisive on the battlefield too.
Not out of any sense of minimalism for its own sake, but because it was background, not essential to the plot, and–most importantly–not something that the viewpoint character would dwell on. Exposition works best when it flows naturally from the characters’ perceptions and reactions, rather than interrupting the narrative with a chunk of data.

More significant pieces of background and backstory get whole scenes, but it’s important that those scenes fill other roles as well. Even in a novel, every sentence must serve a purpose, and there should always be a drive to push the plot forward, increase tension, and draw the reader along towards the climax.

When putting in your backstory and exposition, don’t just ask yourself, “Where can I put this?” Also ask yourself, “How little of this can I get away with? Do I even need it at all?”

You might be surprised at how quickly your plot moves along once you jettison the excess baggage.

Should You Do It?

If you are a new writer, ask yourself these questions before you self-publish your novel:

  1. Has anyone but you read it?

  2. Anyone who doesn’t live with you?

  3. Anyone who has not at any time ever given birth to you?

  4. Did they like it?

If the answer to any of those questions is ‘no,’ you are not ready. Your book is not ready. If you haven’t shown it to anyone, do so. If no one outside your immediate family likes it, it needs work.

(If you can answer ‘yes’ to all of these questions you may be ready, or you may not; this is just the quick cut.)

The point to self-publishing is to take a greater degree of control over the distribution of your work than a traditional publisher gives you. It is not to throw any old shit at the wall and hope it sticks. Write something good, get some honest feedback to confirm that it’s good, then you can proceed. Otherwise, you’re not just making yourself bad, but you make all self-published writers look bad too, and none of us want that.

Good One

“…you need to keep trying until one of two things happens: you learn to perceive and fix the problems, or it gets really dark and they start throwing dirt over you.” — John Barnes

Diverse? Really?

It seems that when agents say, “We represent a diverse list of talented, dedicated authors” what many of them really mean is, “We represent a number of different women, who write many types of romance novel.”

Fact Into Fiction

“The method of which I speak is that which chooses from life what is curious, telling and dramatic; it does not seek to copy life, but keeps to it closely enough not to shock the reader into disbelief; it leaves out this and changes that; it makes a formal decoration out of such facts as it has found convenient to deal with and presents a picture, the result of artifice, which, because it represents the author’s temperament, is to a certain extent a portion of himself, but which is designed to excite, interest and absorb the reader. If it is a success he accepts it as true.” – W. Somerset Maugham

If there’s a better single sentence on turning real events into fiction, I’ve never seen it.

The Self-Published Fire Hose of Sewage

A little late to this party, but Chuck makes excellent points. If there is anything that is going to sink the new ebook self-publishing revolution, it is the astonishing volume and poor quality of most self-published books. There is already a reader backlash, and it’s only going to get worse.

The problem isn’t that there are no good self-published book. The problem is that there are so very, very many bad ones that it’s hard for readers to find the good ones, and after they’ve been burned a few times they’re less likely to trust any book that doesn’t come from one of the major houses.

I’m not sure what’s to be done about that. I think there has to be (and eventually will be), some mechanism for guiding readers past the shit, but I’m not sure what it would be. My own vague thought would be some sort of standards committee or clearinghouse. This organization (possibly volunteer) would basically just say, “This book meets certain minimum standards of literacy and production values.” That’s it; nothing about the story being enjoyable, no editing services, just, “It doesn’t make me want to gouge out my eyes with a pen, you can use our logo.”

Not perfect, but it would give readers at least some sort of lifeline to cling to when they venture into those murky self-published waters.