Category: Writing Craft, Revising, Screenwriter Tips for Novelists
Sometimes I write a story where lots of exciting stuff happens, my protagonist is proactive and has a goal, and I’m hitting all the right beats (if you don’t know what those are, check out this post on the 15 Story Beats), yet the story still feels flat. What’s wrong? What am I missing?
The truth of the matter is often I’m not missing anything. I spend a lot of time developing my stories and I know all the story parts that I need to make a story sing, but effectively implementing those parts into a manuscript is a whole other challenge. In a manuscript, those parts can get out of whack or lost or muddy. So how do you fix it?
By doing something we screenwriters often call “tracking the story’s spine.” A story’s spine is the character arc woven into the plot; the two should always go together just like your vertebrae and your spinal cord. Tracking a story’s spine means making sure the protagonist’s transformation (arc) is addressed in EVERY SCENE of the journey (plot). Because after all, as I’ve said before (specifically in this post about character journeys), every story is about change.
So let’s get started…
Category: Writing Craft, Outlining, Revising
This week while flushing out my novel’s outline, I decided to track where I raised and answered questions in the story. Why? Because questions are crucial to a good story; they ensure it has enough intrigue and suspense to keep readers reading. Have you ever set down a book and not been compelled to pick it back up? That’s probably because you weren’t dying to know the answer to a question! Questions and their elusive answers keep us reading. For the A to Z Challenge, I blogged about big and little story questions and gave tips for how to make these questions engage readers all the way to The End. Check out the full post here. For today’s post, I will illustrate how tracking questions and answers can improve your story…
Category: Writing Craft, Revising
A month ago I wrote a post called Test That Scene – Is It Essential or Filler? The basics of it are this:
No Filler Test
Question #1 – If deleted, will the reader still be able to follow the story? If yes, you’ve got filler!
Question #2 – What is different by the end of this scene? If nothing, it’s filler!
Question #3 – What/Who does this scene affect? If nothing/nobody, it’s – you guessed it – filler!
If even one of these questions results in “filler”, the scene should be cut or revised. But how do you know which option to choose?
That’s the issue I’ve encountered as I write and revise the outline for my WIP. I never create totally inessential scenes, and if a scene is two-thirds of the way there (i.e. satisfies two of the three test questions), my instinct is to revise not cut. Sounds reasonable, right? Sure, but I found my story dragging anyway. If I’d revised them into fully fleshed-out essential scenes, why did they still feel like filler?
To find out, click here and read the full post on Writeonsisters.com.
Category: Writing Craft, Revising
When I plot a story, I tend to think in terms of action. This is probably due to my screenwriter training. In a screenplay all you have to work with is action and dialogue. And in an outline, where you don’t write dialogue, all you have is action. So naturally, when I outline, I follow the action – this takes place here, then the character does this, then the antagonist counters with this move, etc. This is a perfectly good way to plot a story, as I explained in this post: Outlining – Active Beats (aka “Show Don’t Tell”). However, a proper scene requires more than just action…
Category: Writing Craft, Revising
Last week I confessed the reasons Why I Haven’t Finished My Novel, and #1 is that I over-revise. To recap, that means when a story isn’t quite working, I change it in huge, drastic ways that make it a totally different story. Sometimes the main character even sports a whole new personality! My solution to this over-revising problem is to Take A Break. That’s what I’ve been doing this week whenever I get an epically large revision idea – I step away from the story for an hour or three. When I come back to it, I ask these two simple questions to test if my revisions are reasonable or overkill…
Category: Writing Craft, Revising
When I decided to become a novelist, I thought I could whip out a novel in a year. After all, I knew how to write – I was a professional screenwriter. I could structure stories and develop characters and string together words in a compelling fashion. Why wouldn’t I complete a book in a year?
Six years and zero novels later, that question is no longer confidently rhetorical. What went wrong? I was prioritizing writing time (I even took a year off to write), I never gave up because writing is hard (I’m stubborn like that), and I rarely procrastinated (I beat that bad habit). So I did some painful soul searching and identified my three main problems and (fingers crossed) came up with some solutions…
Category: Writing Craft, Revising
I’ve been working on my current novel since May. Back then it was a vague one-sentence idea. I wrote about four beat sheets a month, feeling out the story and figuring out how to shape it. In October I started outlining, and as I outlined I’d find problems and head back to the beat sheet stage to revise. But I felt this back and forth (write, revise and repeat process) was moving forward – I was getting closer and closer to completing the outline to my satisfaction, and after that I would write! Oh, the joy! It would happen soon, maybe next month, and then…
I stopped making progress. I started rewriting everything and getting nowhere. Finally, I put down my pen and assessed the situation. Was I in a rut? And what should I do about it? This certainly wasn’t the first time I’d found myself stuck. As I pondered the situation, I came up with 4 Writing Ruts and how to get out of them…