Author: Writing your first novel-Some things you should know

E-Books

Writing your first novel-Some things you should knowLeave a comment

images-5With e-books and the ease with which anything can be published, writers have a new way to not write a novel that may be worth reading. They  don’t have to put in the work. Whatever they write is worth putting out as a self released e-book.

This relieves the pressure of trying to grow as a writer and combining it with the chip-on-your-shoulder attitude you get from a rejection letter. Well, lets just say you got a double whammy of not worthy to be published.

If you want to be taken seriously as an e-book author, there are some things you can do.

Use test readers- have them review your work and provide feedback.

  • Does the plot flow seamlessly throughout the story?
  • How was the pacing?
  • How did you feel about the characters?
  • Did the dialogue move the story forward?
  • How was the wording, did it flow? Was it too wordy? Too choppy?
  • What was your overall impression?

Hire a good freelance editor-the big benefit of traditional publishing is professional editing. It’s worth finding a reputable freelance editor to review your work if you want to be taken seriously as a writer.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with e-books. I have thought about using this method myself.  There are traditionally published authors now using e-books. Just don’t use it as an easy way out. Put in the work and develop your writing skills.

If you’re using it just so you can be published, you accomplished the feat, but that doesn’t mean anyone will ever read it.

Please feel free to comment on my thoughts.  I would love to hear from you. Also if you would like a little more information on E-Books, I have another blog on the different ways to get your book published.

You can follow me simply by hitting the follow button on the bottom right hand corner of this page. It will alert you to any new blogs that I post.

-Jan R

 

 

 

E-Books

So You Got A Rejection Letter

Writing your first novel-Some things you should know2 Comments

So you received the dreaded rejection letter.  Well it was bound to happen.  You are in great company and I wasn’t talking about me.  If you are a writer, then rejection will be a part of your everyday life.  Author David Eddings said, “If you don’t have callouses on your soul, writing isn’t for you. Take up knitting instead.” Funny but true.

When you get your rejection letter and odds are you will, treating it as an insult and allowing it to bring out the worst in you will stall your dream of becoming an Author.

Those who are successful as novelists, recover and learn from their rejection using it to motivate them to become better writers. They recognize that rejection hurts but see it as part of the process. They don’t take it personal. Writers like this do the following.

  • Wallow then write – Give yourself thirty minutes or so to  get the rejection out of your system then get back to the keyboard.
  • Learn from the critique – Attempt to understand what you did wrong and correct your mistakes.
  • Try to understand where the publisher is coming from and why your novel didn’t work.
  • Remember publishing is a business and publishers are in the market to make money. It’s not personal.

I received rejection letters from four different agencies. I hated the ones that said ‘Thank you but this isn’t what we are looking for’. What do you do with that?  Fortunately one saw something in my manuscript and while she said it wasn’t ready for publishing, she offered suggestions to make it better. As a matter of fact, that particular agent has offered me advice on three separate occasions. That’s why I started this blog. She informed me I needed to build a solid platform.

I took all of her suggestions to heart. I researched and even took classes to make me a better writer. I started this blog to begin building a platform. If you’re not sure what that is, I have written about it in previous blogs and you can google it for more information.  I recommend reading some of Michael Hyatt’s stuff. The man is very knowledgeable on the subject and easy to follow.

I hope this helped somebody. I would love to hear from you. Any comments or questions would make my day.

Please consider following me.  Just press the ‘follow’ button in the lower right hand corner of the page. You will receive a notice whenever I update or write a new blog.

-Jan R

 

So You Got A Rejection Letter

Becoming An Author Takes Work

Writing your first novel-Some things you should knowLeave a comment

images-8Good writers and published authors, take the craft of writing seriously. They have people give feedback-editors, critique groups(Writers.com), trusted and objective friends. They also read a lot. They read countless stories and analyze what’s going on in them to make them successful.

When you read, you should ask yourself the following questions.

  • How does the author make me want to turn the page?
  • Why am I drawn to the lead character?
  • What makes the scene work?
  • What’s the key conflict?
  • How does the author handle dialogue?
  • How does the author integrate minor characters?
  • How’s the pace, can you feel the tension building?

Authors also read books on writing, take classes and apply what they have learned. Through the wonder of trial and error, they find themselves growing as writers.

You don’t have to take my advice. Keep writing. You will never get where you need to be to publish that first novel. Just like any other job, writing requires work. You don’t just wake up one day  and you’re an author, just like you don’t wake up one day a brain surgeon.  Just because you want it to be doesn’t make it so. Pay your due diligence and learn the craft. It will save you so much time and heartache in the long run.

I can relate so much to this article. Being the novice with a really good story line, I thought all I had to do was get it down on paper. I did a minimal amount of research and got a mediocre story set up for rejection.  The response I got from the literary agent – Really good story line but everything else about the manuscript needs serious work.

Of course I already told you about the grammatical and structural errors, they were inexcusable. I was also nailed for dragging dialogue, head bopping, and on- the-nose writing. These terms I had never heard before, but if I had researched and learned the proper way to write a novel, I would have known exactly what she was talking about.

-Jan R

Becoming An Author Takes Work

Calming Your Inner Critic

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If you are constantly looking over your shoulder, you may not finish your novel. You will be too busy battling the thoughts of it not being good enough. No one wants to be humiliated or rejected. Your inner critic will paralyze you by telling you just how bad it really is (even if it’s not) .  This is another obstacle that I have had to overcome. It hasn’t gone away, I’ve just learned to deal with it.

I recently did a Bible study on the battlefield of the mind. Though it’s primary purpose is dealing with spiritual warfare, it also relates to many of the issues that we deal with in our everyday lives. Our mind is a battlefield. In writing for example, all of us worry about looking dumb and never getting published. Fiction writers make a business out of being scared and not just looking dumb.

It took me six months from the time I started writing my novel, to tell my husband what I was doing. When I finally told him, I was a mess. I knew he would be excited for me and encourage me in my endeavor, and I didn’t want to let him down.

For the longest time I’ve treated my novel as a hobby. That’s not a mindset that will get you published. When I finished and sent it out to the first few agents, I was more than a little anxious. The first few rejections confirmed my beliefs. I just wasn’t good enough.

Note that I said I wasn’t good enough. Well that’s not exactly true. The truth is the novel wasn’t good enough. The fact is, it was filled with grammatical and structural errors, there was some serious head bopping going on, and my on-the-nose dialogue was all but bringing the story to a complete halt. If you are not familiar with these terms you should be. Go back and read the posts I have written addressing them.

I don’t know that the inner critic will ever go away. So how do you combat it? You keep moving forward and growing in your craft. Don’t stop writing. I still question my novel but I know that I know that I know, that it’s a lot better than it was after the first draft. I’ve learned the hard way and hope to help you avoid some of my pit falls.

Some professionals recommend the following exercises to help you move forward  when the inner critic tries to stop you.  I do my own variation but never really thought about it.

  1. The five-minute nonstop-Write for five minutes nonstop without thinking about what you’re writing.
  2. The page long sentence-Choose something to describe and write a page long sentence about it.
  3. The list maker-Whenever you’re stuck for an idea make a list. Brainstorm the ideas and use the best.

I just pound away at the keyboard and concentrate on what I’m writing about until inspiration kicks in and it will. Just don’t quit.

-Jan R

Calming Your Inner Critic

Are You Waiting For Inspiration?

Writing your first novel-Some things you should knowLeave a comment

If you are you might as well give up. It is one sure fire way to doom your novel. It’s also an excuse I have used many times over the past five years, which is probably one of the reasons it has taken me so long to finish.

I decided to write a series on things that will put an abrupt halt to your writing career. I chose waiting for inspiration first as it is arguable. It makes sense, at least to the reasonable mind of a person who doesn’t write for a living or ever aspire to become a published author.

Some writers don’t write unless they feel inspired. They think that they are wasting their time by pushing forward through the mental block that is stifling their creativity. Their argument is that they are bound to make more errors and have to go back and do significant revisions so why bother. These writers are better known as aspiring authors or the unpublished.  Many don’t complete their masterpiece because they are waiting for something that may never come. Think of writing as a job. You can’t call in every other day and say I’m not working today, I just don’t feel inspired. You could but it wouldn’t go over very well and that would be the end of that job. You get the picture?

Sometimes we have to push ourselves even when we don’t feel like it. In most cases the results are positive and once we get going things just flow. Published Writers/Authors have the mindset that you work on your craft everyday. They set quotas based on amount of time or number of words.

Remember the more you write the better you will be at it. Writing everyday also helps you to develop a writers mindset. If you are concerned about ruining your story by writing without inspiration you could always leave your story alone and work on something else until the creative juices start flowing. Just write.

I can relate to those of you who procrastinate and make excuses. Some days it is a true battle of the mind. Thank goodness for my accountability partner.

Hope this was of help to someone reading.  Please let me know what you think and follow me by pressing the follow button in the right lower corner of this blog. I would love to hear from you.

-Jan R

 

 

Are You Waiting For Inspiration?

Using Dialogue For Exposition

Writing your first novel-Some things you should knowLeave a comment

I have to admit this is one of those days that I don’t feel like writing. Yes I have them too. Lately I’ve been putting more emphasis on providing information and less on me and my journey. I need to find a good balance. My main objective however is to provide useful information.  Things I wish I had known before I got started.

One last blog on dialogue for now anyways. Dialogue can also be used for exposition. Exposition is a literary device used to introduce background information about events, settings, characters etc. to the audience or reader. It is crucial to any story.  Without it nothing makes sense.

Using dialogue for backstory can be tricky.  It works well if you are interjecting small amounts into a conversation, but if you are trying to provide to much information during the conversation, it could cause the story to come to a complete stop. You will have action, stop for conversation and set up, and then action again. Nothing seamless about it.

There are three ways to provide exposition without using dialogue.

  • Provide the information directly. This does violate the show don’t tell rule but sometimes it is necessary.
  • Provide information through a first person narrative.
  • Use indirect dialogue-Provide a summary of what a character has said without using the persons exact words.

Remember that dialogue is not a separate entity from the rest of the story but an integral part that works with everything else to make the story seamless.

-Jan R

Using Dialogue For Exposition

Using Dialect In Writing

Writing your first novel-Some things you should know, , Leave a comment

One way to differentiate between characters and to get a better understanding about who they are is through dialect.  We can learn a lot about a person based on their accent, grammar, and choice of words.

You don’t have to ask a person if they are from the North or South-just listen to how they speak and note their word choices.  While that is one of the most obvious examples for me, you can also distinguish education level, social status, race and ethnicity from the way a person speaks.

One thing you want to avoid is coming across offensive or stereotypical(racist).  Look at your word choice or variation of syntax as tools to differentiate your characters and suggest their ethnicity.

Use slang, nonstandard syntax, or grammar to suggest race, social class, education i.e. gonna vs. going to,  kinda vs kind of,  holler vs hollow, don’t matta vs It doesn’t matter. If you have a character from abroad throw in some regional slang ( Scottish say-aye for yes and bairns for children).

The next time you read a book take a close look at your characters and their dialect. You will learn a lot and the fact that you didn’t even think about it while reading the novel is a plus for the author. It was seamlessly woven into the story.

Creating a characters speech pattern is less about reproducing dialect and more about knowing your character. If your character is……

  • terse                –   short burst of speech
  • angry               –   speaks through clinched teeth
  • nervous           –  stammers or rambles
  • domineering  –  silent and threatening or rages

If you’re writing science fiction you can develop you own language and your own rules. There is no limits. Just be consistent.

Hope this gives you something to think about when writing dialogue. Remember to differentiate through dialect and the dialect should match your characters position in society. Also remember to be consistent with speech patterns, unless an evolution in speech pattern is an integral part of the story (Flowers for Algernon, My fair lady).

Please consider joining me on this journey and press the FOLLOW button to receive new posts as they are published. Also if you have any comments or questions, please let me know what you think.

-Jan R

 

 

 

Using Dialect In Writing

Writing Seamless Dialogue

Writing your first novel-Some things you should know, , Leave a comment

As I stated in a previous post, dialogue should be seamlessly integrated into the story.  It should flow. If you can feel yourself reading then stopping for a brief conversation and then reading again something isn’t quite right.

Conversation works best when combined with thoughts, actions and settings.  Don’t separate them but interweave them. People don’t stop to talk, they keep doing what they are doing unless it’s something really important that demands their full attention.

You can integrate by using setting, thought and action in combination with dialogue.

Example

The day had been crazy but it wasn’t over yet. Walking into the conference room, Mark  found Ellen sitting at the head of the table preparing packets for their upcoming meeting.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said walking over to offer assistance.

Handing him a few, she looked him in the eye, anger and disappointment written all over her face, “Isn’t that your norm?”

Mark grasped for something to say that would ease the tension between them and get him through this day. Staring at the packets he was at a loss. What she said was true and he couldn’t explain why. At least not now.

Easing herself up, she walked by him without saying another word.

“Well that didn’t go well at all,” he said quietly to himself as he continued to prepare for the meeting. He would attempt to smooth things over with his secretary later, but for now he had a business to save.

By interweaving thought, action, setting and dialogue, the scene moves forward seamlessly. I hope 🙂

If you just use dialogue you are witnessing a conversation. When you begin to interweave thoughts, actions, settings and dialogue you are pulling your reader in and making them a participant.

A really good exercise to help understand and follow this concept would be to write a simple conversation with no tags or anything.  Read it. Now go back and add tags. Read it again. Now go back and add more tags or actions. What was the person doing during the conversation? What about setting.  Where were they during the conversation?  You can even add thoughts. These aren’t conveyed through the conversation but because we are on the outside looking in, we can get a better idea of where the character is coming from.

Hope this series on writing dialogue helps you in your endeavors.  Would love for you to join me on this journey. Please consider pushing the follow button and you will receive a notice any time I write a new blog. Also if you have any comments or questions I would love to hear from you.

-Jan R

 

 

 

 

Writing Seamless Dialogue

Writing Dialogue?

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Writing dialogue isn’t as straight forward as it would seem. It was one of the areas I was dinged on when I first submitted my manuscript. My dialogue dragged. Basically I wrote out conversations just like real people talk. After taking a few classes and looking at how other authors wrote in published books, I did get a grasp on what the literary agent was saying.  My dialogue was weighing the story down and offering unnecessary detail. It caused everything to come to a stop.

I plan on spending a couple weeks talking about dialogue as there is a lot more to it than you would think. Fictional speech is more focused and coherent than real speech. Fictional speech also has to be purposeful. You can’t just rant and rave about the newest fashion with your friends unless it’s an integral part of the story providing information that you are going to need later. Your dialogue should be evoking something from a character or moving the story forward. It also needs to be seamlessly integrated into the story. Told you there was  more to it than you would think.

There are special rules of punctuation that are used to separate dialogue from other texts and signify who is talking. These rules are pretty standard and if you pick up any novel and turn to a page with dialogue you will see them in use.

  • Direct quotations are set apart by using quotation marks.
  • Alternating speakers are set apart by paragraph breaks.
  • All quotations begin with a capital letter.

Dialogue tags are not part of a quote and should not be included in the quotation marks. They  are necessary to identify who is speaking and to convey information that isn’t clear. A character tag usually includes the character’s name and some version of said, unless conveying information that isn’t clear.
e.g.   “I love you,” Mary said.      vs.    “I love you,” Mary sobbed.

Dialogue tags should be used sparingly. You don’t want to bog down your story with he said, she said. Use them only when necessary to inform the reader who is speaking or to convey feelings.

If two characters are in a short conversation you should probably be able to get by with identifying both at the beginning of the conversation without adding additional tags. If you’ve written a long conversation between two characters, you may need to add tags ever so often to help the reader keep up with who is talking. It isn’t fun when you have to stop and go back to the top of the page and count by two’s to figure out who is saying what. You also may want to use the tags to convey feelings. Mary may have gotten angry in the middle of the conversation and you need to add a tag to suggest this.

I will continue this discussion in my next post and probably look a little closer at how dialect can be used to distinguish between characters.

If you have any questions please comment and I will answer them to the best of my ability.  I would also like to request that you join me on this journey and consider hitting “follow” to keep up with my latest posts.  Thanks.

-Jan R

Writing Dialogue?

How Do I Start My Novel?

Writing your first novel-Some things you should knowLeave a comment

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A lot of people would like to write but aren’t sure where to start.  They allow this to paralyze them. There are no hard fast rules to writing novels but there are some guidelines that need to be followed.

Wherever your opening paragraph begins in the story, it had better draw your readers in and make them want to find out what happens next. A good opening should hint at what the story is about.

The opening paragraph in my novel reads as follows:

A cool breeze swept over Josh’s face tousling his too long hair across his forehead and into his eyes. Brushing the loose strands to the side, he stared out at the glassy water with only one thought on his mind. Laura. He would be going to Iraq in a month and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. Six months wasn’t that long, but it felt like an eternity right now.

I hope this draws you in, it most definitely hints at what the story is about and paired with the title “Always and Forever”, provides a little foreshadowing.

You don’t have to start your story at the beginning. Some stories begin with the ending and are followed by back story explaining how the character ended up where they are. Creative writing isn’t a science, whatever works go for it.

Some people do a story outline in advance and others start with an idea. Just begin writing and you’ll be amazed at how your story unfolds. You don’t have to know how it ends.  Once you start writing it will take on a life of it’s own. Be prepared for the happy accidents that seem to come out of nowhere when the creative juices are flowing or when you pray for a little help. Just keep it on the track and don’t let it wander off course.

Remember it doesn’t have to be good to begin with. You can do as many drafts as you like. I have done so many revisions I’ve lost count, and plan to go through my manuscript one more time before resubmitting it. Get it done then get it good.

Write, Write, Write! The more you write, the better you will get. I still have a lot to learn but there is such a difference between my first draft and my current one.

-Jan R

 

How Do I Start My Novel?