Unmotivated Characters Don't Have to Suck

You may at some point want to write about a character who doesn’t know what they want. Who has no focus or great passion for life.

Often this will be the starting point of the story and events will conspire to shake them out of their stupor. Or it could be a character study, possibly an existential tale.

It’s a valid character to write about because there are many people who feel that way, and they deserve to be written about as much as anyone. There are many famous precedents by writers like Salinger, Camus, Beckett. 

The problem is that this kind of character is very hard to make interesting.

Read more »

Throughline: Tying Your Story Together

It’s a simple task to explain what throughline means. It’s making sure each scene feels connected to the main story. Whether it’s pivotal or not, even if it’s a scene without any of the main characters in it, or part of a sub-plot, if it starts to feel unconnected the reader will lose interest, and any momentum or tension you’ve built up will dissipate.

What isn’t so simple is to explain how to make sure YOUR story has a strong throughline.

Read more »

Specifics Make Stories Real

In order for the reader to see your make believe world as clearly as you see it, you need to be specific.

This does not mean long descriptions or emphasising the way characters react to their environment. It means when you make a claim (it was an amazing library) or assign an emotion (she loved him), you have to back it up (what was so amazing about the library? What did she love about him?).

This is quite difficult, especially if you’re trying to avoid the clichés most commonly used. 

Read more »

Romantic Fiction: It's All Over, Casanova

Romance novels make a lot of money. Even the bad ones. The demand is very high. Around 50% of all fiction books sold in North America are romances. In Britain the number is around 20%.

What’s more most of these books are written by women and read by women.

So what is it about this genre that makes it so successful, and what can the boys do to emulate that success?

Read more »

Questions For Mooderino

Since it’s Q-day in the A to Z Challenge I thought I’d open the floor to any questions you might have about the writing process. I can’t promise you a good answer, or the right answer, but hopefully I can offer you a new way of looking at the problem.

Read more »

Problems With Publishers

Publishers are very choosy about which books they consider worth publishing. It’s a very expensive business and so they have every right to choose only those books they believe will find a readership, and make them a profit.

That is certainly a reasonable position to take.

But, after their thorough and exhaustive selection process, of the books they decide are good enough, less than 10% actually make them any money.

It could be that the tastes of the public are so refined and demanding that even if you pick out the best of the best, only a fraction are good enough to make the grade in the eyes of a discerning public.

Or, it  could be that the people choosing the books to be published have no idea what they’re doing.

Read more »

Only One Thing Will Make You A Better Writer

Obviously, you need to hone your craft and develop your skills, and there are certainly a multitude of styles and genres to choose from. But the one thing you definitely have to be is open. Open to the idea your work might need to improve.

But you can’t be honest about what you need to do with your writing if you worry about what other people think of you. What they think of your writing is another matter. But tying up your self-worth with the stories you produce is not helpful.

The work is the work, and you are you.

Read more »

Novels Of the Future

The three major forms of storytelling are books, television shows and movies. Books are the odd man out because they require active participation. You can sit back and let the story wash over you with a TV set or cinema screen. Books, you have to engage your faculties a little more actively.

 

While television and cinema have gone through major changes over the years as they try to take advantage of advancing technology, books have stayed more or less the same over the last 500 years.

Meanwhile TV and film have been having a battle royale as they try to outdo each other, and the kinds of stories they tell have developed accordingly. Has the novel been left behind?

Read more »

Marketing For Books

What makes a book sell? Obviously a good story that’s well written is going to be a big selling point, but once you have a finished product, what makes your well-written book sell better than my well-written book?

And what makes the other guy’s terribly-written book outsell both of us?

Read more »

Linear Writing Leads To Flat Narrative

By linear I don’t mean the way time is structured in your story. You don’t have to write scenes all out of order Christopher Nolan style to make it interesting.

This is what I’m talking about: A man is hungry. He goes to the kitchen and makes a sandwich. He eats the sandwich. He is no longer hungry.

The journey from hungry man to sated man is very straight. It’s easy. It’s obvious. It’s dull.

When someone wants something you have the beginning of a story. When they get it you have the end of the story. But the bit in between is the interesting part, and making it too linear won’t generate much enthusiasm in the reader.

Read more »