Writing Your Story

In our last lesson we talked about the beginning and the importance of capturing the reader’s interest right from the start. However, many writers are guilty of starting their stories with a great hook that captures a reader’s interest, and then everything goes south from there. I’ve heard quite a few editors say this. While a catchy first line is great, a writer must ensure the hook works for the story lest s/he fall into the category of rejected manuscripts mentioned above.

Let’s move on from the beginning, because no matter how great the beginning is, it will only take you so far. It is what come after that will hold the reader’s interest.

The objective of this post isn’t to tell anyone how to write, but to provide tools and guidance that should help writers develop their stories.

Research

Just because we write fiction doesn’t mean is shouldn’t be stemmed in reality. If your story is set in 1980s Africa, there can’t be mobile phones or emails. In many cases, even landlines, which were available during that period, are going to be unrealistic. How many times have you watched a movie and noticed something that is so unrealistic you wonder what they were thinking? West African movies are the worst offenders. It is so easy to spot holes in plotlines of movies that didn’t benefit from good research. Editors have even keener eyes for manuscripts that didn’t benefit from research.

Every genre requires some amount of research, even if it is simply finding the perfect names for your characters or finding out what the rich and famous drink. In some genres like contemporary romance, a writer can get away with relatively little research. However, there are some others (like suspense, crime, fantasy, historicals … to name a few) that need extensive research. My favourite novel, A Man Cannot Cry by Gloria Keverne took 20 years to research!

If you want to be a serious writer, you can’t be lazy about research; there are no short cuts. 

Content and Chapter development

Every chapter must have a purpose. Do not waste the reader’s time by including scenes that add nothing to the story, no matter how beautifully written they are. If it doesn’t advance the plot, it shouldn’t be in the story. 

Pacing

In music, pacing refers to the speed at which a composition is to be played. In writing it refers to the speed at this which the plot unfolds. I'd modify this to say: pacing is the speed at which the plot 'appears' to be unfolding relative to the genre. Action and suspense do best when everything seems to be moving fast. A good writer is one who can reveal just enough to keep the reader informed and yet feel like s/he is in a race against time. In romance, you and other softer genres, a writer should make certain not to drag the story. Finding the right balance is something a writer must constantly be concious of.

Imagery

I dare say, we've all read books that made us pause to admire the sheer beauty of the author's words. That's the power of imagery--the ability to form mental images of things or events. Some words are more descriptive, or more visual, than others. Make use of them.

End your chapter on a promise

Hooks aren't just for the beginning of the story or chapter. A good place to leave a hook is at the end of a chapter. That's what an editor I once talked to said. The end of a chapter is usually a good place to stop pause on reading a book. As writers, we all want to know our books are 'un-put-down-able'. An end-of-chapter hook ensures that the reader goes to the next chapter instead of putting the book down.

I'm trying to keep posts short, so I'll end here. In my next post, I'll continue with more of these, as well as some Dos and DONTs. I'll be looking for examples to go with the it.

Cheers

FWoWA

Getting there: Lesson 2 - Starting your story

So you have an idea, but how do you present it so it reads as wonderful as it sounds in your head? It takes planning and plotting to get to that first draft.

Right now, let's forget about the editors and publishers and think about the most important thing--the story. You need a story in order to get published, no so?

Let's get started.

Plotting is a tool all authors use, but all use it in very different ways. Plotting, in this context, means planning the pieces of your story and how they all fit together. There are authors who approach a novel as one would an essay or some sort of technical drawing. They work out the plot, develop their characters, and even write a synopsis or outline before they sit down to write their first word. On the other extreme (I fall under this category) are authors who start with just the theme/idea and develop their plots and characters as the story goes along. This second method works well for me, since, in my opinion, I get to know my characters more as I spend time with them.

Either way, there has to be a beginning, a middle and an end, whether you're writing a short story or a novel.

Let’s start with the Beginning. What do you want to write about? Why does that story need to be told? What makes you the best person to tell that story? The first question, to me, is the most important, since the second two will manifest themselves in the story, based on the author's personal experiences and motivation.

When I set out to write my first novel, Forest Girl (FG), my basic idea was to do an arranged marriage story. The common plot in most Ghanaian stories/movies/plays is of a young girl forced into marriage to a much older man for the financial benefits it would bring her family. Usually the girl would have a love interest—a young man her age who has little or no money to his name. It means that usually, the girl is against the marriage while the rich man calls the shots and the poor boy ends up a casualty of love. Most of these stories advocate love marriages while depicting the evils of arranged marriages.

I asked myself, what if the girl was all for the marriage and the man wasn’t? How do you force a man into an arranged marriage in a culture where the man has a say and the woman doesn’t? That was the seed that grew to become FG.

Once you've decided what you want to write about, how do you start the story? Now more than ever, it has become important to hook the reader as early as your first line, since the industry has become very competitive, and potential readers have a vast number of alternatives for entertainment.

Think of a story that starts with: Jesus was not born on Christmas day. Both religious and non-religious people are likely to be drawn to this line simply because it sounds so audacious. The author has the reader’s attention now. If you have a good story, the reader will continue reading. Suspense is probably the easiest genre to do a first-line hook, since the genre naturally lends itself to drama. Here’s a good example:

The Secret is how to die.
From the beginning of time, the secret has always been how to die. [The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown]

Of course, best-selling books don’t always start with such dramatic lines. In fact, an article I once read said that many stories get rejected by editors, because the first line is so great, but the story goes south from there. You would serve yourself better to avoid starting with a bang if the rest of the story doesn't support it. Grabbing attention is only the first step; you need to be able to hold the readers attention.

To buttress this point, take a look at the following starting lines for the top 5 Paperback Mass-Market Fiction on New York Times Best Seller list as of 13th December, 2009. (For some I chose to include more than the first line):

1. To her complete stupefaction, he slid his blaster out of its holster faster than she could blink and opened fire on Rits. [Born of Ice, by Sherrilyn Kenyon]

2. My name is John Tyree. I was born in 1977, and I grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina, a city that proudly boasts the largest port in the state as well as a long and vibrant history but now strikes me more as a city that came about by accident. [Dear John, by Nicholas Sparks]

3. The rules of the New Haven Youth League required that each kid play at least ten minutes in each game. Exceptions were allowed for players who had upset their coaches by skipping practice or violating other rules. [The Associate, by John Grisham]

4. The sixty-foot steel-hulled trawler was what all commercial fishing boats ought to look like but seldom did. [Arctic Drift, by Clive Cussler and Dirk Cussler]

5. Tiny lights winked on the Douglas fir standing tall and full in front of the picture window. Swags of Christmas greenery and dozens of cards decked the well-appointed living room, and apple logs cackled in the fireplace, scenting the air as they burned. [7th Heaven, by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro]

As you can see, some start with a bang, while others lead you in. A hook comes in many forms as exhibited but these authors; element of danger, humour, imagery etc. Each of these sets very different expectations in the reader’s mind.

What do you think of the examples above? Which is your favourite and why? How does your first line(s) compare?

The next few of posts will talk about the middle—developing the meat of the story.

I hope you stop by to check those out.

Cheers,
Empi

Some helpful online/electronic resources

As a follow up to my last post, here are some online resources I use. They are obviously not the only ones out there, but they serve me extremely well, and I definitely recommend them:

Dictionary
http://dictionary.reference.com/

Thesaurus
http://thesaurus.reference.com/

WordWeb

This is a one-click English thesaurus and dictionary (and word finder) for Windows that can look up words in almost any program. The great thing about WordWeb is that, it works off-line. There is a free and a premium version. I currently use the free version, which has the following features: Definitions and synonyms, antonyms for some words, related words, audio and pronunciations. This is an absolute must-have.

In the premium version, internet connection allows you to look up words in web references such as the Wikipedia encyclopedia. To learn more or to download, click here.

Google
For everything else (grammar etc) use a word search engine. I swear by Google, although I sometimes use Bing or Yahoo! etc. It's good to get comfortable with more than one search engine.Speaking of comfort, I’ve heard many people complain they can’t find things or they get confused by when they search. I read an article a couple of years back, which basically showed that most of us don’t know how to get the best out of our searches.

E.g. Special characters and operators, like +, –, ~, .., *, OR, and quotation marks, can help you fine-tune your search and increase the accuracy of the results. I found a site, called Google Guide, that takes you through tutorials for Google searches. I'm sure the rule will work for other search engines. To go to the website, click here.

cheers,

Empi

A Little Overview about publishing

As promised, I am starting a short series I’m calling “Getting There”. The assumption is that we all want to improve our craft, we want people to be affected by our work, and we want to see our work/name in print.

The bad news is that, to make money as an author, there are no short cuts in this business even if you decide to self-publish.

For avoidance of doubt, let’s do some background.

Self-publishing is whole different ball game and I will deal with that in a separate session. Right now, though, I’ll give an overview. Self-publishing means getting your work published, and undertaking all marketing and promotions at your own cost. There’s no competition between authors here, as long as you are willing to pay for the work, the publisher will get your book printed.There are various ways to go about it, but this will be dealt with later.

Self-publishing is one way to go, but there’s another. We will simply call it Publishing.

If you’re thinking, “Wait a minute. Is she saying I shouldn't pay to get my book published?” The answer is yes. Do you think Dan Brown pays for his books to get published? No, he doesn’t. Neither should you. You may not get the millions he’s receiving now, but I bet neither did he when he started out.

Here’s how it works. Most of the big names in publishing—Hachette, Harlequin, HarperCollins, Kensington, Macmillan, Penguin, Random House, Simon & Schuster etc—do not demand a penny from the author. Rather they pay the author. Sounds good, doesn't it. 

Once you have a finished manuscript, you would query the editor of a publishing house, either directly or through an agent, to sell your story. Usually the query will be in the form of a letter that summarises your plot and includes a brief author bio. In some cases the publisher’s guidelines will also ask for a synopsis and/or a samples of the story in question—usually the first three chapters of your book. This enables them assess whether yours is a story they would be interested in. If they are, they will request for the full manuscript, upon which you might receive what, in the publishing world, we refer to as ‘the call’.

The Call is basically when an editor calls to inform you that the publishing house would like to buy your book. In cases involving the big publishers (like those mentioned above) the author will receive an Advance, which varies by publisher and author. The Advance is based on the projected sales the book is expected to generate. This means the more money the publisher believes the book will make, the higher the Advance. This is why a publisher would pay Dan Brown or Danielle Steele or Stephen King oodles of money for their books. The implications of the Advance is something I’d like to treat in a latter post, because it gets complicated. However, as I've learnt, every author should know a little something about everything to do with publishing.

Okay, to keep things simple, I’ll end here to let you chew on it; comment, ask questions etc., before I move on to what you need to do as an author before you even get to the querying and submission stage of your career.

Cheers,

Empi

A little more on Pacesetters

If you’ve read my posts both here and on FWoWA’s Yahoo! Group, you may think I have a bit of a fixation with the Pacesetters series. I do. It's my easiest reference for the kind of talent we have, which I think we're letting go to waste instead of nurturing.

In my previous post I mentioned that the publishers may have had a problem with the quantity of submissions they received from authors across the continent. I also believe that one of the things impeding our progress is the lack of information. While published authors may have had access to the relevant editors, it would be my guess that aspirants were in the dark about how to get the proverbial foot in the door.

In those days, we didn’t have the Internet, which complicated things. Now we have a vast source of information. Even the publishers are getting closer to authors through their website and blogs.

Speaking of websites and information ... guess what! I found a website dedicated to the Pacesetters series. I was a little surprised to discover that only 130 titles were published in the time the series was active (over 16 years, which means an average of just about 8 books a year = less than a book per month)

Find this and more on Pacesetters here. If you wish, you can just go straight to the site's novel catalog, which is complete with cover pics of the books. It seems you can buy available copies, but I can't advocate for the legitimacy of that aspect (if anyone has purchased books from the site, kindly let us know). 

Wikipedia, has a list of established African writers, grouped by country. Where were they? What are they working on? How much money are they making for their publishers and more importantly for themselves. Most do not even have websites...

Before I sign off, check  out my blog for an interesting post on how much a New York Times best-selling author actually makes.

Empi

Resuming Lessons: A Quick Recap

Before the Christmas break, I'd started a series of lesson I called 'Getting There', where getting there means getting your work published. As the saying goes, a writer who doesn't get published is one who stops trying. Needless to say, unless the work you're putting out there is up to par, no one will publish your work.


And even if you go the self-publishing route, you won't be able to sell your book after the reviews your first set of readers will give.


After the VERY long break, I think it's time to resume the lessons. I will post the next in a fresh post, but for now, here's a refresher:


Lesson 1: Getting started

     Step 1: Assess where you are as a writer

     Step 2: Decide what you want to achieve with your writing 

     Step 3: Set targets (e.g.: a page a day)

     Step 4: Get your basic resources

            i -   An imagination (you have to have one, and keep feeding it)

            ii -  Dictionary

            iii - Thesaurus

            iv - Grammar book

            v -  Internet

     Some helpful resources:

          1. Dictionary

          2. Thesaurus 

          3. WordWeb

          4. Google (or Yahoo! or Bing, if you prefer those). Learn how to use and maximise search engines.

Lesson 2: Starting your story

1. Plotting
2. Question to ask yourself about your story
3. Your opening line (or hook)

Feel free to add any other resources you've found helpful

Later, 

Empi