Practices - Revision history

CourseDirector at 03:37, 27 December 2018

2018-12-27T03:37:49Z

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	I still haven’t made it past the form letter myself, but I’m going to keep on climbing. Once you land an agent, it’s smooth sailing. I’ll keep trying, and you should too.		I still haven’t made it past the form letter myself, but I’m going to keep on climbing. Once you land an agent, it’s smooth sailing. I’ll keep trying, and you should too.

			[[Category:Miscellaneous]]

Siddharth1: /* Editing */

2017-04-11T00:14:27Z

Editing

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	Writing timelessly is tough. It takes practice, research, and dedication. But it's also the only way you’re going to end up with a finished novel that can pass the test of time. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolken books continue to be printed and read over half a century later: do you want the same from your work?		Writing timelessly is tough. It takes practice, research, and dedication. But it's also the only way you’re going to end up with a finished novel that can pass the test of time. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolken books continue to be printed and read over half a century later: do you want the same from your work?

			===Constructive Criticism===
			The best resource for writers is other writers. Even if it's just a friend you bounce ideas off, or an older mentor, you need to give and receive critiques to be a better writer. Having counseled many young writers over the years (and even run a creative writing club) I can say with great confidence that knowing how to give constructive criticism is vital.

			The first step, no matter how bad the subject matter is, is to find one positive thing to say about it. I hate poetry as a rule, and I have heard some very bad teen poetry in my day, but I was always able to open my critiques with a compliment.

			Writing is an extremely person thing for most people, and showing it to someone else is very hard. Now, this dynamic changes if you are dealing with an older, more seasoned writer, but for the sake of this journal we’re going to assume you aren’t. So if your first response isn’t something positive, it can be crushing.

			Now you can move on to the criticisms. Phrasing is everything here, choice of words makes all the difference. Nothing is ever ‘bad’ in constructive criticism, it’s just ‘not good’. Try to stay away from statements based on personal feeling “I didn’t like this”, or “I didn’t like that”. These have a way of making the whole thing less about helping them and more about talking about what you don’t like. The exception here is if you did like something, since the person is brining their writing to you for your approval, if you really liked a specific part or the whole thing, let them know.

			Again, coming back to phrasing, probably the most important thing comes in when you do explain which parts are bad. Or more specifically, when you don’t. If you say “this part needs improvement”, or “this part could be better”, it’s much more uplifting to the individual than “this is no good”.

			Finally, try to offer up concrete examples. If something needs improvement, give examples of how they could make it better. Add more detail, make the character’s responses more realistic, consider the laws of physics here. That’s the sort of thing that helps build a stronger writer.

			And keep in mind that at the same time you are offering up useful critiques, you are teaching this individual how to critique, and thus building a better writing partner. When I was running the creative writing club, I had plenty of people come in who had absolutely no idea how to offer up anything more helpful than “I liked it.” But meeting after meeting, as they shared their work and received critiques, they learned the basic tricks I have offered above. Just like any other skill, critiquing must be practiced.

	==Becoming an Author==		==Becoming an Author==

Siddharth1: /* Editing */

2017-04-11T00:01:20Z

Editing

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	So never hesitate to make a change. You can keep modifying a story pretty much until you publish it. Then, once it’s out there, you can’t take it back.		So never hesitate to make a change. You can keep modifying a story pretty much until you publish it. Then, once it’s out there, you can’t take it back.

			===Tips===
			No. 1: Avoid word over-use. This is a problem I myself recognize and struggle with in my own work. That’s the first step, right? Admitting you have a problem? In any event, this obviously doesn’t apply to basic words like ‘the’, ‘a’, and ‘and’, although two 'ands' in a sentence is often a little awkward. I’m talking more like nouns or verbs: ‘forest’, ‘intellect’, ‘gun’, etc. This tends to create repetition, and might cause readers to get confused, especially in the middle of a big paragraph. Fortunately, we have thesauruses (thesauri?) to help with this problem by just basically giving you a nice, handy word-list of things that mean the same thing as the word you’re trying to write.

			But perhaps more importantly, as this is less of a novice mistake, pay attention to the words or combinations of words you use frequently and try not to over-use them. I, for example, tend to use ‘had’ and ‘of course’ entirely too often. When I look at my older work, it seems that I used the word ‘seem’ just entirely too often.

			No. 2: Add tons of description. This one should probably go without saying. Personally, I learned this trick from Terry Goodkind, author of the ''Sword of Truth'' series. The guy knew almost perfectly when and how to use massive volumes of description. Obviously you do not always use a whole ton, but you have to work at it and learn where and when to put it in. In one particularly poignant scene from the first book, the main character jumps off a small rise and kills an assassin with his sword. The author uses about two and a half pages to describe this. Why? Because it is a very major, sort of pinnacle scene to the story. In other parts of the book, he cuts down bad guys by the hundreds (no exaggeration), with hardly a mention. It's all about knowing where, and how much detail to add.

			Since books are largely character-driven, this is the first place to look. Are you attempting to communicate something about your character’s emotional state? Conversely, drippingly-detailed descriptions can be very useful for creating suspense. You can drag something like the sword-chop scene mentioned above out for pages and pages, merely by describing every last detail.

			Finally, it just helps the reader get a clear picture of who, and exactly what they are reading about, and why they should care. You want your readers to bond with your characters, to identify. You want them to laugh together, cry together. When something as simple as a peach is incredibly important to the character, you want the reader to understand why.

			Pick a tense, and go with it. Again, this one doesn’t sound like it deserves mention, but it is one of those things a lot of people (again, including myself) struggle with. Most of the time, your story is probably happening in real-time, the events are occurring as they are being described to your reader. However, you’ve also got flashbacks. Sometimes the entire story is told as a flashback; I was watching a movie recently in which the main character had a running internal monologue that was really him describing the events of the film as though they had already happened. The movie was happening in real-time, but we were getting his commentary from after it was over. This effect can be replicated in writing, but it is very difficult and can be confusing if not done properly.

			Most of the time, you just need to pick a tense and run with it. Past, present, future, tesseract. If you want to include a flashback, do something to clarify that you are indeed flashing backwards to something older.

			Tenses get especially difficult when you are working in a first-person POV. When you are expressing thoughts and emotions, it gets much easier to use past-tense, but if you are supposed to be working in the present, it can be hard. This is really just the sort of thing you have to watch for in editing.

	===Policy on Pop. Ref.s===		===Policy on Pop. Ref.s===

Siddharth1 at 23:52, 10 April 2017

2017-04-10T23:52:16Z

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	==Pre-Production==		==Pre-Production==

			===Inspiration===
			Fiction writers fall into a wide range of levels. I have previously compared it to climbing a mountain. At the bottom you’ve got everyone who wants to write and never does, at the top you have published authors. That’s the spectrum, everyone else is somewhere in between.

			But then you can also arrange writers according to potential. Which ones are just wannabes and posers, and who has it in them to truly write full-time. I am a part of the latter group, I don’t mind saying. I know that sounds a bit egotistical, and I know I try to be humble (boyscout thing), but I can and have spent 8-12 hours a day generating solid gold in literary form.

			I am not a poser. I am confident in my skills. This is not a self-affirmation ritual; I’ve got all the confidence I need.

			So how do you separate the men from the boys, so to speak? Having worked with scores of up-and-coming writers over the years, I can tell you it’s pretty easy to pick out the ones with real potential, and those pretenders who are destined to languish on fanfiction forums and dream of one day finishing that masterpiece.

			The real potential writers can write. And I don’t mean they write well or are simply technically able; I mean they can generate content pretty much on demand. For me, the information and ideas are like a tap, I can turn it on (though not necessarily off) at will. I can, and have built entire worlds on the spot, with no prompting, just made everything up and wrote it down later.

			A wannabe can’t do this. They need lots of poetic terms like “inspiration” and “feel” and others I don’t feel like looking up. Production takes time. These are the people that start out writing fanfiction, and even if they do produce something “original”, it is just a thinly-veiled copy. Fanfiction writers are, by the way, a step below the general public on the writing spectrum.

			Real writers can see the entire project, they write with a vision. They do not start with a vague idea and just hope they find the plot eventually. That’s how you end up with several dozen novel openings cluttering up your hard drive. You don’t have to write an outline, but you need to know the central conflict and basic over-arch of your plot before you begin, otherwise you are going to start from nowhere and end up nowhere.

			This is where the wannabe lives, figuratively. Their head is full of ideas, but these are largely vague, unfocused. Things like “what if I wrote a story about a boy with bird wings and a cat tail?”. A unique concept, sure (not really), but that isn’t a story. There are six basic conflicts:

			Man vs. Man
			Man vs. Self
			Man vs. Machine
			Man vs. Nature
			Man vs. God
			Man vs. The Unknown
			When you begin your novel, you should probably know which one yours is. The wannabe writer reading this is, by the way, at this very moment protesting either “wait, what about women?” or “there must be more than six!”. For those of you to whom those were the first thoughts: substitute 'woman' if you want, or nuts; it doesn’t make any difference. Substitute 'sentient, self-aware being', it’s still the same thing. Second: there are no others. Your story is about one or all of those conflicts, or some combination of any number of them, or it begins with one and turns out to be about another.

			Finally, a true writer doesn’t need inspiration, even though we all have to draw inspiration from somewhere. Every book we’ve ever read, every movie we’ve ever seen, every Saturday morning cartoon, every Sunday afternoon spent playing with action figures in the backyard; every billboard, every ad, every second of every day we’ve been alive informs our imagination. That is where the true writer is drawing inspiration. Experience is the one thing unique to all of us, and the one thing that truly defines who we are.

			Of course, we sometimes steal ideas. I myself am currently writing a series of light novels using a plot lifted from a light '90s children’s television show, which itself lifted its plot directly from ''Star Trek: Voyager''. This is pretty normal; you can do that and still produce a highly unique and original work of art. Basic concepts are universal, stripped down to the core the series in question is a combination of Man vs. Man, Man vs. Machine, Man vs. Self, and Man vs. The Unknown. I should probably also throw nature in there, since it is in space and all.

			But I have taken a simple concept, and made it my own. My story is so unique that any resemblance to the source material is so basic as to be universal. There is a spaceship, they are traveling through space. Sometimes they move faster than the speed of light, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they visit planets. This is the sort of thing all space travel stories have in common. What makes it unique is the details: the characters, the technology, the circumstances, the list goes on.

			Wannabes can’t generate these details themselves. This is why so many of them resort to fanfiction, or thinly-veiled copies of other people’s work. In the above example, the two shows were actually very unique and original: the details made all the difference.

			The wannabes are also the poets. Poetry books do not sell. There are obvious exceptions, I’m sure any one of you whose taken high school English can name two or three famous poets, but here’s the thing: most of them either weren’t famous while they were alive, or didn’t write primarily the sort of poetry your high school English teacher made you write. They wrote, and got famous for writing, very long, multi-page narrative poems that could be assembled into books you could actually read. These people did not spend all day writing and revising a single 10-line poem. The people who do that, do not have what it takes to be a writer.

			But the biggest red flag for who don’t have the talent is the requirements to write. Sure, we all have times when we can’t write; I can’t write when I’m experiencing a particular kind of stress(not deadline-stress, I actually write better like that). That’s normal, any art form requires concentration, and there are things that help and hinder that. But the main thing I see in those who just lack what it takes is their requirement for music. When someone tells me “I absolutely have to be listening to [insert music genre] in order to write” or “I need to listen to [music genre A] to write this sort of scene and [genre B] to write this sort of scene”, or, my all time least favorite “I can’t re-write this masterpiece I lost years ago because I don’t have [album from specific band] anymore and I can’t find it anywhere!”. I look at those folks and think: “You will never be a writer”.

			People, this isn’t inspirational music: this is your crutch. You have trained yourself into dependence on something. You are not a good writer, you are an addict. I have mentioned before the reward-nature of writing, and how we are addicted to it. Those who can’t write without highly specific background music have the addiction part, but not the talent.

			Nine times out of ten, wannabes with this sort of deficiency write really dull, drab, uninteresting pieces. It seemed great in their heads because they had the music going. It’s like a movie: the write music sets the mood and can make all the difference; but without the music, it’s just boring.

			Now, I think it is important to separate out the wannabe-music-crutch writers from the normal ADD folks. When I’m making 3D models, I have something (T.V., radio, cats, etc.) going on in the background to help me focus. A lot of people are like that with writing. I knew a fellow in college who had to have the TV and the radio in order to concentrate. It didn’t matter what it was: he just needed that background noise going to help him focus.

			This is different from the person who cannot write unless they have some highly specific genre, band, or album going. Just needing noise probably means you have Attention Deficit Disorder. Needing something specific makes you a wannabe with crutch music. Maybe I’ll make a song about it. Maybe it’ll help someone write.

	===Step I===		===Step I===

Siddharth1: /* Policy on Pop. Ref.s */

2017-04-10T23:44:32Z

Policy on Pop. Ref.s

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	Writing timelessly is tough. It takes practice, research, and dedication. But it's also the only way you’re going to end up with a finished novel that can pass the test of time. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolken books continue to be printed and read over half a century later: do you want the same from your work?		Writing timelessly is tough. It takes practice, research, and dedication. But it's also the only way you’re going to end up with a finished novel that can pass the test of time. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolken books continue to be printed and read over half a century later: do you want the same from your work?

			==Becoming an Author==
			Now, for the contexts of this entry, when I use the phrase ‘becoming an author’, I don’t mean the pansy definition I give my pupils when I’m trying to encourage them, I means books-on-store-shelves, your-name-known-by-strangers author. That’s the peek we’re all striving to reach, one step at a time.

			It begins with simply wanting to write. Anyone who’s read a few books has probably had an idea for a novel. This is the base of the mountain, you’re at the bottom, looking up, and the first stage of the ascent is the hardest of all: a blank page.

			The vast majority of individuals out there never get past that. They sit there, looking at the blank page, unsure of how to begin, and so they simply don’t, and remain merely a reader. Maybe they go out and buy a shelf full of “how to write” books, but they haven’t got the patience to read them. Maybe they waist a small fortune on an antique typewriter, which is nine kinds of stupid any way you slice it. Or, maybe the dream just sits in the back of their mind forever.

			But some people make it up the next few steps. They kludge out an opening paragraph, maybe a few pages. But without proper planning, that first attempt at a novel is pretty effectively doomed. It will take several tries and possibly many years to go from concept to completion. As I’m fond of mentioning: Author of the Gust took 5 years to write.

			The determined few will reach that next step, and finish a rough draft. If you’ve made it that far, congratulations, you’ve done far more than most. You are no longer one of the dreamers, you are one of the doers. The few, the proud, the people with rough drafts sitting on their hard drives.

			It’s a plateau, nowhere near the top. You’ve made it up there, but you’ve still got a long way to go. Editing is a lengthy process, and in many ways, harder than writing. If you don’t love your own novel, you won’t be able to read it many, many times. Again, personal experience: Author of the Gust took 10 edits. Many people haven’t even read 10 books, I’ve read one book 10 times and I wrote it!

			So if few people reach the rough draft stage, even fewer are going to get to the polished novel stage. But that’s basically the other end of the plateau, a long walk but not overly challenging. The next stage of the ascent is the hardest.

			Going from polished manuscript to published novel is another multi-step process in and of itself. If writing a novel is like climbing a mountain, imagine getting to the top, and finding an entire other mountain that you still have to climb. In short, it kinda sucks.

			The first step is the query letter. For me, this was the hardest. I mean literally harder than writing the freaking novel. I am currently querying for The Next Progression, a few snippets of which I have posted on here before. While I definitely wouldn’t say writing the letter took longer, it was much more difficult. I spent exhaustive hours doing research, reading samples, asking questions, discovering both that a QueryShark exists and that it is retarded, and listening to the narcissistic ramblings of people who have never even read, let alone written, a complete book.

			For all of my time and effort, I produced a one-page query letter that will probably not get read. That was the next stage of the ascent; now that I had something to send to agents, I needed some agents to send it to.

			I use a site called Writer’s Market, which charges a small fee for access to a searchable database of literary agents, publishers, etc. I looked for a list of agents who cover fantasy novels, since mine is definitely that, and got back 41 results. Combing through that list, I used my own criteria to cull it down to 18 who looked promising.

			Now came the next difficult stage of the climb. Each agent wants something different; about half just want a query letter and a self addressed, stamped envelope(SASE). For the layman, that’s an envelope with your name and a stamp, that you fold up and stuff inside the envelope with all of your hopes and dreams, and also your query letter. Other agents want the first three chapters of the novel or some variation. I’ve seen 3 chapters, 2 chapters, 10 pages, 50 pages, 40 pages, and some places want the entire manuscript. You will not be getting any of these materials back, just so ya know. Some also want a synopsis, an author biography, or even an outline. All of this can potentially be as difficult as the query letter, because you have to realize that you are being evaluated and judged with every line.

			When you’ve got all that finished, you have the privilege of shipping off a stack of query letters at your own expense. Expect to spend a lot on stamps. Most agents and publishers will tell you if you should expect a response, and how long you will have to wait. It’ll be anywhere from 2 weeks to six months. Personally, I don’t typically query places that say they only respond if interested, just because I don’t feel like checking the mail every day for half a year with no way of knowing whether or not I’ll ever hear from them.

			In all, I queried more than 30 agents and publishers for that novel. I probably got turned down on the basis that I had self-published the silly thing, but it was still a good metric for rejections. About half your SASEs will come back stuffed with a form letter. If you’re very, very lucky, some of them might have actually been signed by a real human being! The other half are going to come back with your query letter, and a hastily—but politely—worded form of “no”. The form letters are also exceedingly polite, and typically contain something to the extent of “ours is not the right agency”. Or sometimes its “we are not accepting new clients at this time.” They will pretty much never say your work isn’t good enough, and don’t expect any kind of constructive feedback. They might have any number of reasons, so don’t waste time questioning it: just accept it.

			I still haven’t made it past the form letter myself, but I’m going to keep on climbing. Once you land an agent, it’s smooth sailing. I’ll keep trying, and you should too.

Siddharth1: /* Second Worlds */

2017-04-10T23:43:22Z

Second Worlds

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	==Second Worlds==		==Second Worlds==
	Now, this is the sort of thing that takes a lot more thought than most people realize, and a lot more effort than a lot of writers are pulling to put out. This is why so many books, even in the fantasy genre, manage to be set on earth. The theory is that having your book about wizards going to school in a castle take place on earth, this will be a lot easier and more believable than building a second world. All of my books to date have been set in the same second world, I’ve even created a massive wiki to help keep track of all the details.




	The term “second world” originates with renowned author J.R.R. Tolken, though he probably wasn’t the first to use the concept. It basically means you have your story take place in a completely different, unrelated world where they’ve never even heard of Earth.		The term “second world” originates with renowned author J.R.R. Tolken, though he probably wasn’t the first to use the concept. It basically means you have your story take place in a completely different, unrelated world where they’ve never even heard of Earth.

Siddharth1: /* Character Creation */

2017-04-10T23:29:24Z

Character Creation

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	Having tried both approaches(planning and not planning), I believe I can state unequivocally that it is always better to plan. Whether you are writing a flash-fiction-esque short story or a full-length novel, the more time you put into the groundwork, the better the finished product.		Having tried both approaches(planning and not planning), I believe I can state unequivocally that it is always better to plan. Whether you are writing a flash-fiction-esque short story or a full-length novel, the more time you put into the groundwork, the better the finished product.

			==Second Worlds==
			Now, this is the sort of thing that takes a lot more thought than most people realize, and a lot more effort than a lot of writers are pulling to put out. This is why so many books, even in the fantasy genre, manage to be set on earth. The theory is that having your book about wizards going to school in a castle take place on earth, this will be a lot easier and more believable than building a second world. All of my books to date have been set in the same second world, I’ve even created a massive wiki to help keep track of all the details.




			The term “second world” originates with renowned author J.R.R. Tolken, though he probably wasn’t the first to use the concept. It basically means you have your story take place in a completely different, unrelated world where they’ve never even heard of Earth.

			And while this does take a considerable amount of effort, it’s actually much easier in the long run. For general purposes, creating a fictional city like Superman’s Metropolis or Batman’s Gotham removes a lot of issues as the author no longer has to worry about writing in a real city. Street names, addresses, bridges, all of it can just be made up, which is particularly useful if you’ve never been to the city your writing in. Residents of the city will always catch the little mistakes, and you’re bound by the constraints of reality. But just a fictional city does not a second world make, in the superhero examples, these cities are still set on earth and the characters frequently travel to other, actual locations.

			The second world removes all of this, giving you total freedom. It actually takes less suspension of disbelief for the reader to immerse themselves in this world, since you’ve already told them from the get-go that they don’t need to pay attention to reality. But, from there, it gets tricky.

			Authors typically tend to want a few specific features for their second world, without giving much thought to the underlying system that makes them possible. Just like magic requires a system, a second world requires all the functional aspects of this one. It needs a stable economy, a working system of government; its people need religions and schools and houses and food. There is quite a bit more to world-building than you first imagine.

			Fortunately, for a lot of it, you can basically copy-and-paste from the real world. Not to much, though; systems resembling real-life ones are good, but they shouldn’t be identical.

			Start by considering the type of world you want to create. Is it a futuristic sci-fi landscape? A medieval fantasy realm? Somewhere in between? Now research first-world equivalents; if you’re going for medieval, read up on European history, if science fiction is more your game, look for the closest real-world equivalent(Disneyworld).

			Medieval realms were basically agrarian societies, so your medieval fantasy world is probably going to be like that. This means a lot of peasants, farmland, castles, etc. Travel is going to be pretty slow and typically via animal power. This means if a character is going to travel 1000 miles, they are probably going to walk or ride a horse the entire distance. Horses, by the way, move a lot faster than wagons being pulled by horses: remember that.

			Information moves a lot more slowly in world where a fast galloping horse is the state-of-the-art in high-speed transportation. If the character is going to travel 1000 miles, expect them to get there quite far ahead of any information about them—unless of course you invent some sort of means for the people of your fantasy world to move information faster. ''The Lord of the Rings'' had the 'seeing stones'; you have plenty of options available.

			Economics are a complex thing, but one that must be considered. Even if it doesn’t factor into the story in any spectacular way, your world needs a working economy. An Agrarian society with lots of subsistence farming is fairly easy to manage, though it gets more complex from there. You might be surprised to know that such modern jobs as doctors and lawyers existed as far back as ancient Egypt, 3000 B.C. Egypt back then was mostly about subsistence farming, but they needed doctors and lawyers even then.

			Essentially, any modern profession that doesn’t deal specifically with electricity is a viable occupation in a fantasy realm. Even your subsistence farming culture is likely to have aqueducts, bridges, roads; all of which will need to be constructed and maintained. Even in the dark ages, people knew how to build some pretty spectacular things.

	==Pre-Production==		==Pre-Production==

Siddharth1: /* Outlining */

2017-04-10T23:27:05Z

Outlining

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 The journey is important, but trying to make it in this manner will fail. You may actually succeed in writing a novel, but probably not a good one. Maybe if you are working full-time on the project, with nothing to distract you, this approach can work, but since most of us are writing from in our spare time, we need to plan.
-Having nurtured a lot of young writers over the years, I know most of my readers will cringe when I say this next word, so I’m going to get it out of the way as quickly as possible: outline. Go ahead, cringe a bit, you know you want to.
+Having nurtured a lot of young writers over the years, I know most of my readers will cringe when I say this next word, so I’m going to get it out of the way as quickly as possible: outline. Go ahead, cringe a bit.
 Much like building a structure requires blueprints, writing a novel requires planning. A blueprint can be as simple as a few lines scratched onto a page. An outline can be as uncomplicated as a short list of the events of the story in the order they are meant to appear. Even if you haven’t figured everything out yet, just dump what you have onto the page, and fill in the blanks with “Stuff happens here”. Having that simple list can make the whole process so much less painful. And, most importantly: easier to come back to.
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 Outlining is just one part of planning; next, we’ll tackle character creation.
 ==Pre-Production==

Siddharth1 at 23:24, 10 April 2017

2017-04-10T23:24:50Z

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	If I ever get around to it, this page will detail my (Rick Austinson's) various writing practices and the procedures that go into finishing a book.		If I ever get around to it, this page will detail my (Rick Austinson's) various writing practices and the procedures that go into finishing a book.


			==Outlining==
			Most of us, when we sit down to write, at least have an idea of where the story is going. You have a destination in mind, but are unsure about exactly how to get there, so you just start writing and hope to find your way.

			This is guaranteed recipe to get yourself lost.

			The journey is important, but trying to make it in this manner will fail. You may actually succeed in writing a novel, but probably not a good one. Maybe if you are working full-time on the project, with nothing to distract you, this approach can work, but since most of us are writing from in our spare time, we need to plan.

			Having nurtured a lot of young writers over the years, I know most of my readers will cringe when I say this next word, so I’m going to get it out of the way as quickly as possible: outline. Go ahead, cringe a bit, you know you want to.

			Ok, cringe-time is over.

			Much like building a structure requires blueprints, writing a novel requires planning. A blueprint can be as simple as a few lines scratched onto a page. An outline can be as uncomplicated as a short list of the events of the story in the order they are meant to appear. Even if you haven’t figured everything out yet, just dump what you have onto the page, and fill in the blanks with “Stuff happens here”. Having that simple list can make the whole process so much less painful. And, most importantly: easier to come back to.

			We all shelve projects occasionally. I, for one, am typically working on 3 or 4 different books and up to a dozen short stories at any given time. Not all at once, mind you, but I will constantly have a wide range of projects going, and switch between them on a daily, or even hourly basis. By producing simple outlines for each project, I can come back to it, months, or even years down the road. ''Author of the Gust'' spent 2 years on the proverbial shelf, half finished, but I was easily able to come back to it because I had a good outline.

			And just because you create an outline does not make it absolute. It’s just a set of suggestions, a few notes about what should happen in the story. Deviate from it all you like, your wrote it. I often look back at some of my outlines and laugh at how different they are than the final story.

			Outlining is just one part of planning; next, we’ll tackle character creation.

	==Pre-Production==		==Pre-Production==

Siddharth1 at 23:23, 10 April 2017

2017-04-10T23:23:33Z

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	For this project, the initial outline will probably be it. The Consecution Books are set to be a series of “light” novels, hopefully clocking in at around 60,000 words each. For that reason, they are not divided into chapters. If this were going to be a longer novel, my next step would be to actually outline the individual chapters.		For this project, the initial outline will probably be it. The Consecution Books are set to be a series of “light” novels, hopefully clocking in at around 60,000 words each. For that reason, they are not divided into chapters. If this were going to be a longer novel, my next step would be to actually outline the individual chapters.

			==Chapters==
			Now, they are confliction schools of thought on this subject, and much like length, there is no right or wrong answer. There is no rule anywhere that states that a novel must be broken down into chapters. Further, there is no specific rule as to how long those chapters must be.

			Now that we’ve established that there are no rules, let’s go over a few. First, keep in mind that these are not “rules” that must be strictly obeyed, this is more of a craft thing. Your novel doesn’t “have” to do anything, but there are certain features that will make it more enjoyable for the reader.

			There are a wide variety of breaks you can use to split up your work. A single, straight, unbroken line of paragraphs is not particularly conducive to storytelling, and tends to induce a sort of hypnosis in the reader. Line breaks, scene breaks, and finally chapter breaks help to break the novel structure down into more manageable chunks.

			This is one novice mistake I see in young writers again and again: the overwhelming desire to produce chapters. There is no minimum length, but of your 110-page novel has 43 chapters, your reader is going to get really annoyed, really fast. There’s a reason why you don’t typically see that sort of thing in books on store shelves: people don’t like it.

			I’ve seen it again and again, though, in my young writer’s work. They’ll read aloud for five minutes, and cover 3 chapters. They are using chapter breaks when a simple scene-break would suffice. One theory is that they are planning to go back and add more detail later, thus making the chapters longer, but its hard to expand a 3-page chapter that much.

			It’s probably getting repetitive, but there is no minimum or maximum length. Its good form to try and keep your chapters all more or less the same length, though a 10-20% variation will not draw complaints. What does get annoying is when say a single chapter makes up half the book, and there are still 10 other, very short chapters.

			If you think of the chapters like boxcars on a train, it helps to have them all roughly the same size. Another way of looking at it is like mile-markers on a road, if they are being used by the reader to track his or here progress, it helps if they are all roughly the same distance apart.

			In my novels, I like to stick to a format of about 10,000 words a chapter, which in the Antelope Books added up to a neat 8-9 chapters per volume. At 90,000, 83,000, and 80,000, and with 9, 9, and 8 chapters respectively, the 3 volumes of the series have a really even and flowing feel

			You may have also noticed that not all novels are even divided into chapters. Since there’s no rule, its basically up to the writer and the publisher to decide how to break it up. Since my current work is probably going to top out at about 65,000 words, I am currently not planning to break it down into chapters(as that would result in only about 6 chapters according to my formula). When I find a publisher for it, they may well decide they want a chapter book.

			There are other options as well. My continual work-in-progress currently entitled “Epic” presently totals at a near 44,000 words, officially making it a “light” novel according to the in-no-way-official standards for novel lengths. Because it is simply too short to be broken down into decent-sized chapters, it is divided into a series of “movements”.

			In following with the three-act structure Shakespeare taught us, Epic is broken into three movements . These individual movements even have titles, sort of like chapters. But for some reason, and this is silly but true, because they are “movements” instead of chapters, it doesn’t seem silly that there are only 3 of them.

			You can certainly use the movement structure for shorter works, and you are by no means bound to just 3. If you want to call them “acts”, you should probably stick to 3, because that is the accepted number for things called “acts”, and the theater managers will riot at you if you don’t.

			When it comes to dividing up your novels, the possibilities are endless. I have seen very long, very complex novels in which multiple methods are used, “acts” or “movements” that encompass chapters, which include scene breaks as well as line breaks. It makes it a whole lot easier to figure out where you are in the book, and I promise if I ever write a single, 250,000-word-long novel, I will break it up in a similar fashion.

			Now, with all my talk about no short chapters, similar lengths, etc, I know what all two of you who’ve read my books are probably thinking: “But Rick! The Course Books aren’t like that!”; but the Course Books are a collection of short stories, not novels. Each short story is designed to stand on its own, with its own three acts.

	==Editing==		==Editing==