Literary agent and blogger extraordinaire Rachelle Gardner is running a contest now for the best one-sentence summary of a novel. Check it out! This contest has some nice prizes. By the way, if you don’t regularly read Rachelle’s blog, then I highly recommend it.

Wayne posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I like your take on Dwight Swain’s scene and sequel breakdown. What is your take on his mentor at the U of Oklahoma, Foster Harris and his ideas of “reversal” and “moral equations”? Could you use your scientific mind and explain it more clearly with examples. Thanks for a great blog.

Randy sez: I wish I could comment on this, but I can’t. I know almost nothing about Foster Harris, except that I vaguely remember Dwight Swain mentioning him in his book, Techniques of the Selling Writer, one of my favorite books on writing fiction.

TJ asked this question:

Fantasy novels and series marketed towards children and teens seems to be all the rage today–it also seems to be how authors are becoming immensely famous and wealthy. What can’t be done in a youth fantasy novel, and what cliches and archetypes should be avoided?

Randy sez: That’s a good question. I don’t know if there are any limits on YA fiction. I’m pretty sure you can’t have a sex scene in a children’s novel, but it wouldn’t surprise me if somebody somewhere has done it. YA is fairly hot right now, with numerous authors doing very well. J.K. Rowling is the most obvious YA author, but James Patterson is doing YA and he’s one of the biggest of the big in current fiction.

I would avoid all cliches in any fiction, YA or not, except in dialogue. Showing a character using cliches in dialogue tells the reader something interesting about that character. Archetypes are by definition not cliches, and I can’t think of any to avoid. Archetypes are good starting places for characters. Obviously, they are not a complete character, and you want to build out unique characters starting from any archetype.

Rob asked:

Is every scene always reactive or proactive. While reading other writers, I’m looking for these things and sometimes finding them hard to spot. Many scenes don’t seem to fit either paradigm, but still make for compelling reading.

I know you’ve probably beat this subject to death, but I’m a slow learner. 🙂

Not every scene in fiction is either reactive or proactive. (“Reactive scenes” and “Proactive scenes” are explained in my book Writing Fiction For Dummies. I’m not entirely sure who coined these terms. I don’t believe I was the first to use them, but I can’t quite think who did.) I am reading through Sense and Sensibility right now with my family, and there are a few scenes that just sit there on the page, neither proactive nor reactive, and frankly quite boring.

The real question is whether every scene in fiction would be better if it were revised so as to be either reactive or proactive. I don’t know the answer to that question for certain, since mathematically, the space of all possible scenes is just about infinite, and since there is no objective way to measure how good a scene is. But my gut instinct is that the vast majority of scenes would be improved if they were edited to be either proactive or reactive.

A Proactive Scene begins with a Goal, continues through most of the scene with Conflict, and concludes with a Setback.

A Reactive Scene begins with a Reaction, continues through most of the scene with a Dilemma, and concludes with a Decision.

In my view, it never hurts to look at a scene and ask whether it fits one of these patterns. If it does, how well does it fit the pattern? If not, will it be improved by editing it to fit the pattern?

Note that I am very much against a “paint-by-numbers” scheme of writing fiction. However, I do believe in using design patterns to help edit fiction, and the Proactive Scene and Reactive Scene are two powerful design patterns.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Jon posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

My question concerns how to pick a story topic or story line. I never feel like any of my one sentence summaries are worth expanding to a story. I think this frustration is the biggest thing holding me back from trying to write. I don’t have any confidence in my story ideas. I feel like they are either too boring or too similar to novels/movies/TV show that have already been done. Any advice?

Randy sez: Yikes, that’s a tough one. I think it’s a mistake to write a novel about a story you don’t care about. But it’s also a mistake to have your standards set so high that you never work on anything because it’s not original enough.

Without knowing you, Jon, I’d be hard pressed to pinpoint the problem. One thing to bear in mind is that there are very, very few truly original story ideas. Most stories are similar in some way to stories that have already been told. So why tell them? That’s simple: because those stories have never been told by YOU. If you’re a real writer with something to say, then telling ANY story will automatically make it original.

A group of my novelist friends did an experiment a few years ago. They all agreed to write a short story based on the same idea. The story had to have a number of elements all the same. Everybody wrote a story from that same starting point. Every story was different. The result was a book titled WHAT THE WIND PICKED UP. The subtitle is “Proof that a single idea can launch a thousand stories.”

Jon, I’d suggest you just pick the idea you like best and see if maybe it’ll grow into something unique and original and interesting as you work on it. The mark of a good writer is that he or she can turn an ordinary thing into an extraordinary story.

What do you all think, O loyal blog readers? What’s your advice for Jon? Post a comment telling him what you’d do.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

I’m working on my May issue of my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine right now, but thought I should make a quick note here that one of my ever-popular 50% Discount Sales is going on right now. Until midnight on Friday, May 7, 2010, I’ve got every electronic product in my store discounted by 50%. To get the discount, you need to know the coupon code, which is given on the page linked above.

If you got a tax refund this year, you might consider investing a small fraction of that refund in your writing career — an investment that could have an impact for the rest of your life.

All of these are on sale:

• “Fiction 101” lecture series is 50% off
• “Fiction 201” lecture series is 50% off
• “Writing in the Shadows” lecture series by John Olson is 50% off
• “Clean Up Your Act” teleseminar series by Allison Bottke is 50% off
• “Promote Your Writing by Speaking” teleseminar series by Mary Byers is 50% off
• “Writing the SuperArticle” e-book is 50% off
• “Writer’s Conference Survival Guide” e-book by Meredith Efken is 50% off
• “Snowflake Pro” software is 50% off

All of these products work on Macs, Windows, and Linux.

For all the gory details, visit my product info page, where you’ll find the coupon code that you need to know in order to get the 50% savings.

I usually run a sale like this a couple of times per year. The last one was in December of last year.

OK, back to working on my e-zine . . .

The second half of March was consumed with traveling. 🙁 I was out of town for a total of about 12 days. I’ve been back home for more than a week now, but am still digging out from all the work that piled up while I was having fun hanging out with writers.

While I was gone, I did just barely get my monthly humor column done.

The latest column is titled “Sue the Nymph.” In it, my plumber Sam goes into the “vampire remuval” business in hopes of doing background research on his new novel. Can I talk him out of this plan before he damages his good name beyond all repair? Find out!