-Agent Mary Kole talks about the promise of your novel

-Adventures in Children’s Publishing shares some exercises to recharge your creativity and also looks at active vs. static description

-James Scott Bell lists two things every novel needs

-Project Mayhem gives us a chapter worksheet to use during revisions

-Natalie Parker breaks down the anatomy of a good hook

-DIY MFA talks about the role of voice in writing

Have a great week, everyone!

I don’t often think of historical novels as being written in verse since verse novels are so spare and historical fiction tends to rely on a good amount of description to convey the time period and setting. But in May B, Caroline managed to put us right into May’s world in just a few telling and active details. Here’s an example:

I stop when home is nothing more

than a mound on the windswept plain.

Like a prairie hen I settle down

until I can’t be seen,

breathing comfort from grass and soil.

I listen for silence,

but there’s no room for it.

My mind’s too full.

Ma and Pa want me to leave

and live with strangers.

I love how much we get in this short passage. We have a sense of the landscape, including how it smells, and we also see May’s emotional state and the reason behind it. Talk about packing a punch! This book was a wonderful reminder for me about being concise and using each detail to its fullest potential.

Have you read May B yet? Are there other books that impressed you with their conciseness?

[By the way, if you're interested in winning a copy of May B, there's an ARC up for grabs on First Page Panda.]

Today I’m thrilled to kick off a series of guest posts on the process of writing a series (a series series, if you will). We start with Joy Preble, author of Dreaming Anastasia, Haunted, and the forthcoming Anastasia Forever. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences with us, Joy!

There’s an exercise I do with my students that I think proves this point. I have them write a scene twice. The first time I have them write it normally, and the second time I tell them to exaggerate it as much as they can. Undoubtedly, the second version is always more engaging, and it almost never feels too over-the-top.

I think sometimes we’re afraid to really push things, but to make a story feel real, we need to make it elevated. Fiction is real life dramatized, after all. So make it dramatic!

I’ve been working on revising a tween novel on and off for a while now. My main focus has been on character and pacing, but I had a realization the other night when I was having trouble sleeping. I’d written the story in past tense, but what if it actually needed to be in present tense?

When I rewrote the first chapter in present, I was excited to see the character’s personality pop. That was the good news. The bad news? Having to rewrite all 46k words in present tense. Ugh. But I decided to dive in, and so far I’m liking the results.

An added bonus is that going through and changing the tense is making me really pay attention to each scene. I’m hoping the process will give me a new perspective on the overall story and help me fix some of the other issues.

How are you all doing with your WIPs? Anyone else embarking on a tense change?

I’ve been working on revising a manuscript, focusing primarily on fleshing out the character. I’ve realized that what I’ve essentially been doing is “weirdifying” her. What does that mean? Well, think about all the odd little things you do and think that you might never admit to anyone else. The joy of fiction is that we can see everything about a character; we can get to know them even better than we know ourselves.

So I’ve been trying to really dig into my character and find out all the weird, quirky things about her, the things that will make her interesting and relatable and real. It takes time to get at a character’s layers, and I know I tend to get impatient and not dig far enough. But I have to remember that it’s actually fun to find all these odd things about my character, things that I didn’t even realize were there. It’s all part of the game.

Anyone else working on weirdifying your characters?

Also, today is the last day to enter my August/September Debut Novel Giveaway. (It’s international!)

Last week I talked about how I needed a kick in the butt to get back into the swing of writing. But when I went back to a project I’d been revising, I still felt a little stuck. I knew that something was missing, but I didn’t know exactly what.

Finally, I followed my husband’s advice again (he’s a smarty!) and picked up a book I loved. Even though there are books that I like to come back to (Jane Austen, for example) I haven’t been rereading much recently because there are so many new books to catch up on. But I decided to take a break from all that and go back to the last Harry Potter book which I’d been meaning to reread for a while.

Giving myself a break from revising and letting myself get lost in a great read seemed to shift something in my brain. After a couple days, I started to think of ways to make my manuscript better. When I read a new book, I’m focused on what’s going to happen next and on the technical aspects of the story. But rereading a favorite book is like curling up with a warm blanket.

I’ve still been thinking about craft while I’m reading, but I don’t have to work as hard since I already know the story. I think that process has allowed my brain to keep working in the background and brainstorming new ideas. The power of rereading! So if you’re feeling stuck, try picking up a favorite book and letting it inspire you.

A while back I blogged about Unearthly by Cynthia Hand and how it completely sucked me in. Now, thanks to NetGalley, I’m reading the sequel, Hallowed, and it’s just as engaging as the first book. Whenever I read a good book, I have to analyze why it works, so this is what I came up with.

Mystery

In both Unearthly and Hallowed, the story starts with the main character having a vision. The vision is vague and mysterious; the character then spends the rest of the book trying to figure out the meaning of what she saw. This works really well because it sets up a mystery right from the start, and readers try to figure out what it means along with the main character. And, of course, there are some twists and turns along the way.

Emotional Conflict

Cynthia Hand does a fantastic job of creating characters that feel completely real. The main character’s emotions feel genuine, and I think a big part of that is how conflicted she is throughout the story. She’s torn between following her destiny and doing what’s personally important to her. She also has to hide her true identity from almost everyone around her, though she hates lying to people. And, to top it off, she’s torn between two guys who are good for her in different ways. Normally, I’m not a big love-triangle fan, but in this case I think the emotions feels genuine enough that I believe it.

So what lessons should we take away from this series? Giving the character a mystery to solve, clues to put together, etc. can help to keep pushing the story forward. And the more conflicted your character feels, the more we’ll relate to her. It all comes back to Donald Maass’s mantra: Tension comes from conflicting emotions.

Part of why this has been on my mind recently is that I’ve been brainstorming a new picture book idea. As I learned with the last picture book I worked on, it can take months to find the right way to approach an idea and develop it into something worth reading. So I’ve been taking my time with this new idea, letting it sit, coming back to it and sketching things out, making lists, etc.

This wool-gathering approach is the opposite of how I usually work; normally I jump into an idea and run with it. But the problem with doing that is often the idea stays just that: an idea. It never grows or blooms. And eventually, I abandon it because there isn’t enough there to keep me interested.

So how do you make an idea into a story? Part of it is time, of course, but I think it’s also important to think about why this story is special and why people should care about it. Then you get out of idea territory and get into emotions, which is ultimately what readers want to feel (whether they laugh or cry or gasp in awe). Ideas are fun but emotions are true.

How about you? How do you take an idea and make it into a story?

Last week, I read a great book called Fracture by Megan Miranda (thanks to NetGalley). The story was fascinating and creepy, and I zipped through it because I couldn’t wait to see how things would end. And you know what was amazing? It actually did end. There wasn’t a vague ending that left things open for a sequel, or a “the battle is over but the war has just begun” feeling. In a landscape of series, it’s refreshing to find a standalone book that has a clear beginning, middle, and end.

That isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy series; in fact, I read plenty of them. But the experience of reading a series is different than reading a standalone book. I go into reading a series knowing that the traditional story arc won’t necessarily apply. While I’m fine with that, I wonder what that might mean for the shape of stories. As series become more prevalent, will our expectations for how stories resolve change?

A series does usually follow a traditional story arc if you look at all the books together. But if you were to chart out the shape of the whole series, it would look different than the arc of a standalone novel. I wonder if that means the way we think about stories is evolving, and if we’ll have different expectations for stories now that standalone novels are becoming the minority. I’ve blogged about this before, but I’m coming back to this topic because it’s still on my mind.

What do you think about the fate of standalone novels? Do you think differently about the shape of stories now that series are so popular?