Created by Randy Ingermanson - "the Snowflake Guy"
America's Mad Professor of Fiction Writing

What If Your Novel is Losing Steam?

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in Fiction Writing, Production Tagged:

So you’re planning your first novel, and suddenly it seems like you’ve chewed all the sugar out of the gum. You felt so excited about this novel, but after taking several shots at the opening scenes, the whole thing seems to have run out of steam. What do you do?

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

I think I have a story that I want to write. This would be my first time writing a book, and I’m at a pretty big loss for words. I find myself wrestling with multiple opening chapters and losing steam when trying to plan it out. It’s unbelievably frustrating to me. Would you say its best to dive right into a novel or should I have a solid outline before beginning?

Randy sez: There are a couple of possible reasons that I can think of for why your novel is losing steam, Bailee. I can’t tell which is the reason, so I’ll cover them both and hope that one of them rings a bell for you.

You might be losing steam because:

  • You’ve gotten stuck on rewriting the first few scenes over and over again. 
  • You’ve tried to plan out your whole novel, when your brain isn’t wired that way.

Let’s look at those two possibilities in more depth.

Revision Hell

Writer sometimes talk about “revision hell”—a bad place where you can get stuck forever.

Note that there is also a “revision heaven” where you put the pot on simmer for a good long time and keep doing revisions over and over while the story turns into soup. I’ve done that for a project that needed it, and I didn’t mind it a bit, because I thought it made the story better.

You can tell whether you’re in revision heaven or revision hell by asking whether the story is getting better. (And also, whether you’re enjoying it.)

Bailee, it’s possible you’re in revision hell. New writers often get caught in revision hell by writing a few scenes, then getting them critiqued, then rewriting the scenes, then getting them critiqued again, and doing that over and over forever. 

That way lies eternal torment. That road guarantees to make your novel lose steam.

If you’re in revision hell, then here’s how to escape. Write your scenes and take them in for critique, but then leave the scenes alone while you write the next scenes in your novel, applying what you just learned from the critique to the new scenes. Promise yourself not to revise any scenes until you finish the first draft of the novel.

When you do this, you make forward progress in your story, and you become a better writer, both at the same time. And your novel doesn’t lose steam.

Planning for Pantsers

Some writers just naturally write by the seat of their pants, without any kind of outline or character preparation. We call these writers “seat-of-the-pants” writers (SOTPs for short), or sometimes just “pantsers.” Their brains are wired to write without planning. Many, many great novelists write this way. If that’s the way your brain is wired, then write that way.

Other writers just naturally need to plan out the story before they write it. Knowing where they’re going gives them the feeling of security they need in order to write the next scene, and the next, and the next. Many, many great novelists write this way. If that’s the way your brain is wired, then write that way. My wildly popular Snowflake Method is one variation on this theme, but there are others.

But what happens if a pantser tries to plan their novel?

Bad things happen. I’ve seen it numerous times. 

The pantser will quickly get bored trying to plan their novel. They feel like the story isn’t fun anymore. And they’re right. Planning isn’t fun for pantsers. Planning is loads of fun for planners. 

Bailee, it’s possible you’re a pantser trying to be a planner. That will take the steam out of your novel every time.

If that’s the case, then the solution is simple. Stop planning and just type the novel. 

Here’s one indicator that can help you decide if you’re a planner or a pantser. Imagine that some authority figure tells you: “Throw away all your plans and just type the novel.” 

How do you feel when you hear those words?

  • If that feels liberating to you, then you’re probably a pantser.
  • If that feels terrifying to you, then you’re probably a planner.

Other Possible Causes

There are probably other possible reasons why Bailee might be losing steam. I can’t think of any right now, but I’m sure my Loyal Blog Readers can. If you’ve got some ideas on what’s causing Bailee’s problem, leave a comment here. 

Writing fiction should be fun. If it’s not fun, then something’s wrong. 

Got a Question for My Blog?

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 the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

Revising Your Novel

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in Craft, Editing, Fiction Writing Tagged: , ,

If you finished your novel during NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month—you may be wondering what comes next. How do you tackle revising your novel?

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

So, NaNoWriMo is done. I won! Yay!

I now have a fairly “complete” story of about 96,000 words that is … a big mess! Where do I start with revisions? And how do I keep from feeling overwhelmed?

Randy sez: First off, Amanda, congratulations on winning NaNoWriMo! And you won very handily. To win, you only had to write 50,000 words and you did almost twice that, 96,000. That’s a very productive month!

Your question is a common one—how to tackle revising your novel. There are several ways to do that, just as there are several ways to generate your first draft. 

First, a quick note on how to revise your novel without feeling overwhelmed. My general strategy is this:

  1. Make a written document that tells what changes I’m going to make without actually making any changes. This gives me a chance to think strategically about my revisions. 
  2. Once I have a written plan for my revisions, I plunge in and actually start making changes. But I do this on a copy of the first draft, so I can always get back to the original if the revisions turn out bad.

Now before we talk about how to revise your novel, let’s review some basics on how we write first drafts, because there are a number of ways to do that. The method you choose will affect how you later tackle revisions.

Quick Review of Creative Paradigms

In my book Writing Fiction for Dummies, I talked about “creative paradigms”—various methods that novelists use to write the first draft of their novel. There are many creative paradigms that work. Here are four common creative paradigms that I identified in my book:

  • Seat Of The Pants—you just sit down and type your first draft without planning your story and without editing anything. You keep pressing forward until the first draft is done.
  • Edit As You Go—you sit down and type your first draft without planning, but you edit each page and/or each scene many times before moving on to the next.
  • The Snowflake Method—you use my wildly popular 10-step Snowflake Method of planning your story before you write it.
  • Outlining—you create a long and detailed synopsis (sometimes up to 100 pages). Then you write the draft following your outline.

There’s no one best method of writing a first draft that works for everybody. I think it’s worth learning how other authors do it, because that can give you ideas on how to do it yourself. But ultimately, you get to choose the method that works best for you. If it works for you, then nobody has the right to tell you you’re “doing it wrong.”

When writing the first draft, you are mainly wearing your creative hat. But once the first draft is done, it’s time to put on your editing hat. So how do you do that?

You Have Options

Just as there’s no one best method of creating your first draft that works for everybody, I suspect there’s no one best method of revising your novel that works for everyone. 

I would bet there are a number of editing paradigms that writers use. I can think of at least two, and I’m sure there are many others.

The two editing paradigms I can think of are closely related to my Snowflake Method creative paradigm:

  • Work through the Snowflake Method in light of everything you learned by writing the first draft. Make a list of revisions you’ll make. I’d use this method to revise a first draft that is “not too messy”—that is, the story structure is pretty clear and the characters are reasonably consistent.
  • Work backwards through the first nine steps of the Snowflake Method, again making a list of revisions you plan to make. I’d use this method to revise a first draft that is “very messy”—this is, the story structure is very unclear and the characters are not yet well fleshed-out.

I’ll say a few words about each of these in the next two sections. 

Revising Your Novel Using the Snowflake Method

If the large-scale structure of your story is pretty clear, then I suspect you’d do well by working through the Snowflake Method, making a list as you go of things you want to change. (If you already used the Snowflake Method earlier to write your first draft, then this should be quick. Just make a copy of the original Snowflake document and keep a running list of the changes you want to make to the story.) I’ve done this myself, and it’s worked well for me. Here’s what I do:

I start with my One-Sentence Summary that I came up with before I wrote the first draft. Can I improve it, now that I’ve written the story? And does my revised One-Sentence Summary suggest ways to improve the story on the next draft? 

Then I look at the One-Paragram Summary. This breaks down into a Three-Act Structure, with three major disasters as turning points. Can I refine my One-Paragraph Summary in light of the actual story I wrote? And after refining my One-Paragraph Sumary, can I see things in my first draft that need to change in the next?

I continue on like this through the first nine steps of the Snowflake Method. At each step, I try to tweak my original Snowflake document in light of the actual first draft that I wrote. And after tweaking the document, I ask if the tweaks I just made suggest any changes that I need to make in the next draft. 

Revising Your Novel Using the Reverse Snowflake Method

If the large-scale structure of your story is not clear at all, then you might do better by figuring out your story structure, working backwards through the steps of the Snowflake. 

Start with the actual manuscript you wrote for your first draft. Analyze each scene using the tools in my book How to Write a Dynamite Scene Using the Snowflake Method. Is the scene Proactive or Reactive? What are the main parts of the scene? Does the scene work emotively? Can you summarize this scene in a single sentence? If you do this for every scene of your novel, you will have completed Steps 9 and then 8 of the Snowflake Method. 

Read through the manuscript, taking notes on all your characters. What’s their physical description? What is their age? What do you know about them, their family, their friends, etc? What drives them? You can create a separate dossier for each character in your novel. By the time you finish this read-through, you’ll have a complete “character bible” for all your main characters. This is Step 7 of the Snowflake Method. 

Go back to your list of scenes and construct a long synopsis (4 or 5 pages) in which you cover the high points of all the scenes. When you complete this, you’ll have finished Step 6 of the Snowflake Method. 

Think about each of your characters, focusing on their backstory and how that affects them in your story. Write half a page up to a full page on each of your main characters. Or do an imaginary interview with each main character. When you’ve done all this, you’ll have finished Step 5 of the Snowflake Method. 

Try to trim down your long synopsis into a 1-page synopsis that just covers the high points. It’s OK to not cover every single scene. Try to capture what’s going on in the main groups of scenes. This is Step 4 of the Snowflake Method. 

Write a short summary of each of your characters, focusing on their role in the story and their story goal, their ambition, and their values. This is a caricature of your characters where you capture only the high points. When you finish, you’ll have done Step 3 of the Snowflake Method. 

Summarize your story in one paragraph. Write a sentence that sets up the background of the story. Then one sentence for each of three main acts in your story. Then one sentence explaining how it ends. This is Step 2 of the Snowflake Method. 

Write a One-Sentence Summary of your story that you can use as your “elevator pitch”—in case you ever find yourself on an elevator with an editor or agent. (This does actually happen sometimes.) When you’ve got a good One-Sentence Summary, you’ve completed Step 1 of the Snowflake Method.

Now that you’ve worked through all the steps backwards, zip through them all again from Step 1 to Step 9, making notes on what changes to make. What should you add to your story? What should you remove? What other revisions should you make?

I’ve never used this Reverse Snowflake Method to revise a novel. But I’ve used essentially this method to take a huge set of research notes and turn it into the storyline for a historical novel. (The problem in writing a historical novel is that history is not structured like a story, so you have to find your plot and your character motivations from a mishmash of dull historical texts. This is extremely hard.)

Actually Editing Your Manuscript

When you’ve made a list of the changes you want to make in revising your novel, make a copy of your first draft and rename it as your second draft. That way you aren’t editing the original, and if you don’t like your edits, you can always get back to the original.

Then get to work putting in the changes you listed. Start with the first scene in your new scene list. If it’s a brand new scene, then write it from scratch. If it’s an old scene that you’ve marked to delete, then delete it. Otherwise, make the changes that you decided to make. 

Keep going from the first scene to the last, following your revision plan. When you finish, you should now have a second draft that’s way better than your first. It may not be perfect, but it’s better. Repeat the process as many times as you need.

Every writer is different, and it may be that the methods I’ve described above don’t click with you. That’s okay. But I hope they give you some ideas so you can invent your own action plan for revising your novel. Good luck, and have fun!

Got a Question for My Blog?

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 the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

Why Publish Your Novel with a Traditional Publisher?

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in Career Management, Marketing, Publishing Tagged: , ,

Are you about to publish your novel? If so, should you try going with a traditional publisher, or should you go indie? How do you make that decision?

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

I’m planning to go indie with my WIP. It’s only my second novel, I’m still a newbie, but here’s the question: what are the biggest reasons for seeking an agent and/or traditional publisher?

There are a number of obvious negatives associated with traditional publishing, such as low royalty rates. And I’ll have to do much of my own marketing even if my manuscript is accepted. I’d also like to do my own kindle pricing, something I can only do as an indie.

Thoughts? I want to know both sides before committing to my course.

Randy sez: Lynne, I have a feeling your question is much bigger than a single blog post can handle. I’m pretty sure I could write a whole book on the subject, and maybe someday I will. But you’ve got to make a decision right now, so I’ll try to boil things down a bit.

First Some Definitions

It may be useful to define a few terms, for those who are new to the industry.

Traditional publishing means that you sell the rights to your novel to a publishing company. The publisher pays for all production costs, including editing, cover design, printing paper copies, warehousing, distribution, and sales calls to bookstore chains. Generally, the publisher also does some marketing, but most authors are responsible for most of their own marketing.

Indie publishing means that you act as your own publisher. You pay for all production costs, which are typically editing, cover design, and formatting your book for e-books (and optionally print books). Most indie authors who do print books use a print-on-demand service, such as Amazon’s CreateSpace, which means there are no warehousing costs. Most indies deal only with the online retailers, such as Amazon, B&N, Apple iBooks, Kobo, etc., which means they have no need for distribution or sales to bookstore chains. The author does all the marketing.

Vanity publishing means that you pay a “publisher” to do all the work that you would need to do as an indie author, such as lining up an editor and a cover designer. Most people in the industry agree that vanity publishing is a terrible deal for virtually all authors, so let’s put this off the table right now.

So our choices as an author are to work with a traditional publisher or to be an indie author.

A Side Note On My Background

I have many author friends. Some are exclusively traditionally published. Some are exclusively indie. Many are hybrid authors—they work with traditional publishers while also doing some indie work.

I started out working with traditional publishers and published 8 books with them—6 novels and 2 nonfiction books. The novels all eventually went out of print, and I’ve republished them as indie books. I’ve also published a nonfiction indie book and will soon be releasing another. At this point, I consider myself exclusively indie, but I do still get royalty statements for my two trad-pubbed nonfiction books.

Issues for the Big Winners

Let’s be clear that in publishing, there are a few big winners who take a large section of the financial pie. There are roughly 100 authors in the US who each earn more than $1 million per year. Most of these are traditionally published, but there are several indie authors in this very exclusive club.

My opinion is that the reason authors at the very highest levels tend to be traditionally published is that traditional publishers have a lot of marketing muscle and they can turn a winning book into a very big winning book, using methods that indie authors just don’t have. An indie author can’t buy space at the front of every B&N bookstore; a large traditional publisher can. An indie author can’t place a book in airport bookstores and supermarkets; a large traditional publisher can.

So if you’re one of the top 100 authors in the US, then you can make a strong financial case for working with a traditional publisher. (However, there are other considerations than just money. More on that below.)

Issues for Top 5% Authors

What if you’re not in the Top 100 Club but you’re still in the top 5%, meaning you’re earning more than about $5,000 per year? (That is not a typo. If you’re an author earning more than about $5k, you’re doing better than roughly 95 out of 100 authors.)

I have many friends in this category. A few are exclusively traditional. Many of them are hybrid—they work with traditional publishers on their current books, and they republish any books that have gone out of print as indie books. Some started traditional, but have now gone exclusively indie. Some started indie and have never published traditionally.

So how do you decide? There are several main factors that you have to weigh against each other:

  • Convenience—do you prefer to “just write” and let a traditional publisher deal with the editing and cover design and formatting? (Be aware that “just writing” is not really an option. All authors have to market themselves. But it is true that indies have to do some tasks that trad-pubbed authors don’t—hiring editors and cover designers, and doing the book formatting.)
  • Control—do you prefer to have control over the schedule of your book, how it gets edited, and the cover design? An indie author has complete control over everything. A trad-pubbed author has much less control.
  • Productivity—do you write more books per year than a traditional publisher can handle? (Many publishers don’t want you “competing with yourself” by publishing a lot of books. Indie authors believe that your books market each other, so they would argue that “competing with yourself” is a nonsensical notion.)
  • How often do you want to get paid? A trad-pubbed author gets an advance, and often this is the only money they ever get for the book. So the money is front-loaded in a big spike, with some possible royalties a year or two down the road, paid at six-month intervals. An indie author gets no advance and has to spend some money on production, but then they get paid royalties every month, and their royalty rate is roughly 5 times higher than a trad-pubbed author. (That is not a typo. Indies get all the profit from the sale of a book; traditional publishers get most of the profit and the authors get quite a small fraction.)

I don’t think there’s any one right answer. A lot depends on you, the author. I have a pretty strong entrepreneurial streak and I hate deadlines. I’ve done much better financially as an indie and I like not having deadline stress in my life. So for me, going indie has been a good decision.

But I know authors who’ve done better traditionally than they have as indies.

Issues for Bottom 95% Authors

What if you’re in the bottom 95%, meaning that you’re earning less than about $5k per year? (Again, that’s not a typo. That’s just the hard reality of the publishing world. Most authors are not well-paid. I wish they were, but I’d be a liar to say they are.)

There are several reasons you might be in this category:

  • You might be a newbie who hasn’t published anything yet, nor sold anything for a big advance. In this case, some issues you should weigh are these:
    • Speed to get published: it can take a long time to break in to traditional publishing, whereas you can indie-publish as soon as your book is written.
    • Validation: it feels good to have a traditional publisher make you an offer, whereas if you go indie, nobody is validating you except your reviewers.
    • Quality control: a traditional publisher will set standards for the quality of your book, which means that your book will only get published if they think it’s good. If you’re an indie, you can publish the worst drivel imaginable, and nobody will stop you.
    • Cost: it can be expensive to go to writing conferences to make the connections needed to get traditionally published. If you go indie, there will be some costs for editing and cover design, but you can make these quite low if you want—you decide whom you’ll pay and how much.
  • You might be selling to very small publishers who pay very low advances. In this case, some issues you should weigh are these:
    • Convenience: Small publishers take some of the burden off your hands—editing and cover design and formatting. If you went indie, you’d have to do this.
    • Quality control: Small publishers might be small because they’re not actually very good at editing and cover design and formatting. That’s something you can only determine by looking at their products. But if their quality is not up to your standards, you don’t have much say in the matter. If you’re an indie, you get to control the quality.
    • Royalties: Small publishers often pay a higher royalty rate than the big publishers, because they have lower costs. So that may be an advantage. They may be paying you as much as half the profits, which would be good for you.
  • You might be publishing very infrequently with big publishers. In this case, you face the same issues as the Top 5% authors, so see those above.

Marketing Issues

There is one other main issue to talk about, but this applies to all authors everywhere. You have to market your books. If your books are doing well, then your publisher will help out on the marketing. The better your books do, the more the publisher will help out.

This is a classic Catch-22. Your books won’t do well without marketing, and your publisher won’t market your books much unless they’re doing well.

As I noted above, if you’re in the Top 100, then your publisher is going to do marketing things that you can’t do as an author.

Otherwise, pretty much all authors use the same kinds of marketing methods. But here the indies have an advantage, and this doesn’t get discussed much.

Suppose you’re using a marketing method that gets 100% ROI (return on investment). By definition, that means that for every $100 you spend in marketing, your book earns $200 in gross profit that gets paid back to the publisher.

If you’re an indie author, you get that $200 in gross profit, and you recover the $100 you spent on marketing, giving you $100 net profit. That’s a good deal for you.

If you’re a trad-pubbed author, and if you have an agent, the gross profit is still $200, but now it’s paid to the publisher. You get approximately 20% royalties on that, which works out to $40. Your publisher and agent get the other $160. But you spent $100 to earn your $40, giving you a net loss of $60! Which means your publisher and agent got $160 from your marketing efforts and you lost $60. That’s a terrible deal for you, but it’s very good for the publisher and agent.

In fact, it’s just not cost-effective for a trad-pubbed author to pay for a marketing method that only gets 100% ROI. If you’re trad-pubbed, you’ll lose money if you pay for marketing methods that get less than 400% ROI. (Whereas an indie author makes money if the ROI is more than 0%. So indies can afford to use more marketing methods than trad-pubbed authors can, and that’s an advantage.)

Let’s check the numbers. If you spend $100 on a marketing method that has a 400% ROI, the book earns $500 in gross profits. Your publisher and agent get $400 of that and you get $100 in royalties, which covers your original $100 marketing costs, which means you broke even.

That sounds terrible, but in fact, your marketing situation is even worse as a trad-pubbed author, for two reasons :

  • If your book actually earns royalties, you don’t receive that money for several months, because most traditional publishers only pay royalties every six months, and they typically cut the check a month or two after the royalty period ends. So you might spend marketing money in January and not get reimbursed until September! That creates a cash-flow problem for you.
  • But most trad-pubbed books never earn out their advance, which means they will never earn any royalties at all. Which means that any marketing money you might spend on the book will never earn you one extra penny in royalties. This is a strong disincentive for the author to do marketing, unless the publisher pays for that marketing.

If you’re not a math person, you may be thinking that there must be something wrong with my numbers above. You may be thinking that the marketing picture for trad-pubbed authors can’t possibly be as bad as I’ve painted it.

I’m a math guy. I’ve done the numbers every way I know how. The marketing picture is as bad as I’ve painted it. And this is one reason a lot of formerly trad-pubbed authors have gone indie.

Lynne asked a short question, and I’ve gone about twice as long as I intended to in my word count. My apologies on that. There is very much more to be said, and no more space to say it, but I’ve tried to lay out the main issues.

Got a Question for My Blog?

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 the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

When Should You Drop Your Story?

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in Craft, Fiction Writing Tagged: , ,

Is your current novel in a quagmire? Are you wondering if maybe it’s hopeless? Do you think it might be time to move on? How do know when you should drop your story?

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

How do you know when to drop/kill a project/book/story?

I’ve been working on the first draft of a novel and I’ve been realizing there’s a lot of problems with the plot. For instance, I don’t quite have a clearly defined second or even third disaster (maybe, I have ideas for them in my first snowflake of the story but that was a year ago and I’ve long since tossed it into storage), and my subplots are all hopelessly tangled with the main thread and need some untangling/focus. It doesn’t help that I’m probably being way too ambitious with this by making it the first book in a series despite it being my first original writing project.

I’m very much a seat-of-the-pants writer (seeing as how snowflake didn’t really help identify any of my problems specifically, only highlighted how overall unprepared I was to actually make a snowflake), and more of the story is unfolding as I force myself to progress and come up with new scenes/plotpoints/what-have-you. I’ve been working on this (mostly inconsistently, to be honest) for three years now so this project is pretty close to my heart. However, I’m wondering if I should change gears, drop this project for now, and move on to a less ambitious, more “traditionally designed” (but less thought about) project (ex. a techno-magic fantasy tragedy of Little Red and/or a slower, character-driven, semi-post-apocalyptic fantasy).

(The series I’m working on now is an action/adventure (hopefully, I’m working on adding more action) character-driven fantasy with an overarching theme of pain/suffering leading to hope. The setting and target audience is admittedly less defined, but I’m hoping it all works out as I go.)

Since I rambled on A LOT, I’ll reiterate: How do you know when to stop working on a story? (And some guidelines on why you should?)

Randy sez: OK, that’s a lot of question there. The core issue is how you know when you should drop your story. That’s an issue every writer has faced.

Reframing the Question

First let me point out that dropping a story isn’t necessarily permanent. You can set it aside on your “Someday Maybe” list and come back to it later.

But let me turn things around a bit, Elin. It sounds to me like you’ve lost enthusiasm for this story, at least for right now. It’s a big ambitious project. This may be a case of trying to do calculus when you haven’t learned algebra yet.

So let’s reframe the question this way: How do you know when you should keep working on a story?

I can think of several reasons you might want to forge ahead with a story, even if it’s causing you some pain:

  • This story is burning a hole in your gut. If you don’t finish this story, you’ll be thinking about it all the time and wishing you were working on it. (This is an emotive reason to keep working.)
  • This story is going slow right now, and it feels like you’re in the swamp, up to your ears in alligators, but you know perfectly well that this is the usual slog-through-the-middle that happens with every story that was ever written. You have good reason to think that with a bit more slogging, you’ll come to dry land and produce a story you can be proud of. (This is an intellectual reason to keep working.)
  • This story is one you already sold or know you can sell, and it really is a doable project, even if you’re not in love with it. But it will bring you money, and you need money. (This is a financial reason to keep working.)
  • This story is ___________________. (Fill in the blank with any other reason you can think of that would make it a good sound decision to push ahead to the finish line right now.)

Why Continue on This Project?

Now the issue I see for you, Elin, is that it looks like your heart’s not really in this story right now. Maybe at some point in the future, your heart will be back in it, but at the moment, it looks like you don’t have an emotive reason to keep going.

You also appear to have some doubts about whether you currently have the skills to finish it. You’re thinking that you might build those skills by working on a less ambitious project. And I would bet you will.

And also, it sounds like you haven’t sold this project, so there’s no major financial incentive to carry on.

So the question I’d ask is whether you can think of any other compelling reason for keeping on working on this project.

A Break is Not Forever

If you can’t think of a good strong reason to keep going, then I think it makes sense to write some notes to yourself about the project so you can pick it up a year from now, or five years, or even twenty.

It’s OK to put it on the shelf for a while. (I set aside a big project back in the mid 90s. It’s still not time to pick that project up again, but someday I’d like to. In the meantime, I’ve finished a number of other novels and published them and my skill set is quite a lot bigger now.)

Then go work on something else. Work on less ambitious novels that will help you learn the craft better. (Nobody ever masters the craft of writing, but at a certain point, you can say, “I’m good enough to tackle this particular project.”)

It’s good to be ambitious and work on hard projects. But one thing at a time. Everest should not be the first mountain you try to climb.

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Controlling Chapter Lengths in Your Novel

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in Craft, Fiction Writing Tagged: , ,

What if some scenes in your novel are long and some are short? What do you do about that? Is there some standard scene length or chapter length for your novel? How do you control the chapter lengths in your novel?

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

Hey Randy! My problem is consistency in chapter length. Some of my chapters are long, and some are very short. Sometimes I merge a few chapters together, but I feel like this isn’t the best way to improve. I’ve been working on adding more subtle detains about the surroundings of my characters in hopes of making those short chapters longer, but other than that I’m not sure what else to do.

Randy sez: Your question is about chapters but the underlying question is about scenes.

Let’s remember that there’s nothing fundamental about a chapter. Chapters just provide convenient mental milestones that let the reader know she’s making progress through your story.

Think Scenes, Not Chapters

The scene is the fundamental unit of fiction. (For more info on writing scenes, see my article Writing the Perfect Scene.)

A chapter is just a bag of scenes. So your scenes control your chapters. If your chapters are variable in length, it’s because your scenes are variable in length.

And there’s nothing wrong with scenes varying in length. That’s just normal. You can write a scene in a hundred words, sometimes. Or you can write a scene that goes on for three or four thousand words, sometimes.

My personal average is about a thousand words per scene, but that’s just me. Other authors write shorter or longer, on average.

You get to decide the typical length of your scene. A lot depends on the pace of your story and on its complexity. So your story and your personal storytelling style will control the length of your scene.

Creating Chapters From Scenes

You also get to decide the typical length of a chapter, but that decision is much more arbitrary. Every chapter has to contain at least one scene, but aside from that, your chapters can be whatever length you feel like.

So how do you go about deciding what your chapter length should be? I do it by deciding how many chapters I want in my novel. Typically, I have four Parts in my novel, and I’m looking to write about ten chapters in each Part. That works out to about forty chapters for the entire novel, plus or minus.

Doing the math, that means that if I write a novel with 100,000 words, then each chapter will have about 2500 words, which works out to two and a half scenes.

Of course, you can’t have two and a half scenes in a chapter. A scene is fundamental. Scenes are the atoms of fiction.

So how do I assign scenes to chapters? I just glop together enough scenes to get a total close to 2500 words, and I call that a chapter. If I go under by 1000 words, that’s OK. Some chapters are short. If I go over by 500 words, that’s OK too.

I prefer to go under, rather than over, because the end of the chapter is a milestone for my reader, and I want my readers to feel like they’re burning through the chapters.

More Thoughts on Chapters

I prefer to end a chapter on a cliffhanger, which can be either a setback or a decision. Either way, it keeps the reader hungry, and a hungry reader is a reader who wants to read one more chapter, even if it’s 3 AM.

Maddie, you suggested that you can try to fill out a chapter by adding more description to your scenes. That will certainly make your chapters longer, but it doesn’t add more story, and readers are reading for story, not for description.

So if you’ve got a short chapter, either add in another scene, or just live with the short chapter. It’s not a crime to have a short chapter. James Patterson writes nothing but short chapters, and he seems to be selling okay.

Got a Question for My Blog?

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 the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

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