The lead (opening) for your novel (or story)

The lead has to be the single most difficult thing in a novel. You have to do something that will make people want to continue to read at the same time as you are introducing a 60, 90, or 125,000 word book. What to do?

You don’t want to go too far overboard with fireworks and explosions when the rest of the book is going to be sedate and comfy. You don’t get readers on your side by lying to them.

You also don’t want them to feel the rest of the book is anticlimactic.

And yet, you don’t want them to put the book down, so there has to be enough to grab them and some kind of promise of more good things to come.

You have about 30 seconds - maybe a minute if you’re lucky - to grab them. Not a lot of time.

What to do?

Well, I’m going to share with you a few of my favorite leads.

I’d love it if you’d share some of your favorites with me. These aren’t even full openings - they’re basically first-lines that grabbed me immediately (and made me buy or borrow the book).

“When at last they found her and took her out of the water, I knew I had to go down and look at her.” John. D. Macdonald, All These Condemned

I don’t know about you, but that made me want to keep reading. Who was she? Why was she in the water? And what was he going to see? (Nothing good, I’m sure.)

“As grey dawn crawled over the city, Dortmunder went home to find May still up, dressed in a baggy sweater and green plaid slacks.” Donald E. Westlake, Drowned Hopes

Why was Dortmunder out at night? Why was May still up when he came home? And what woman would be wearing a baggy sweater and green and plain slacks? The image of a grey dawn crawling over the city also piqued my interest. Gave it a somewhat “unsettled” feel. As though something was amiss.

“Just after midnight he stopped thinking.” Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo, The Abominable Man

Okay, all kinds of questions. Who was he? How can you stop thinking? Did he die? Or was there something else? What’s going to happen to him? What happens to people who stop thinking?

“Later, I found out his name was John Daggett, but that’s not how he introduced himself the day he walked into my office.” Sue Grafton, “D” is for Deadbeat

Who is he and why didn’t he give his real name? Why did he come to see her? Why did lie to her? Does he lie to everyone, or just her?

“‘It all began,’ said Roderick Gaskell, a little more loudly than could have been considered necessary in the quiet room, ‘it all began with Grandfather’s will.’ He paused and eyed the man he was addressing doubtfully, as though wondering whether he had, in face, succeeded in obtaining any part of his attention.” Sara Woods, This Little Measure

Who is this man who speaks loudly in a quiet room? What began with a will? What did the will say that caused a problem? Was there money involved, or something else? What has happened? And who is this other man who can cause Roderick to feel uneasy without saying a word? And why is the other man not interested in Grandfather’s will?

“The story of the little man, sometimes a stockbroker, sometimes a tea merchant, but always something in the City, who walked out of his suburban house one sunny morning and vanished like a puff of grey smoke in a cloudless sky, can be recalled by nearly everyone who lived in Greater London in the first years of the century.” Margery Allingham, Flowers for the Judge

Who was he? What happened to him and to his family? Where did he go? Where did they look for him? Why wasn’t he found? Why did he disappear? Will someone else disappear? Will he return? Did he…? Oh dear. I think I need to go read this book again right now. So many questions in my mind.

Questions. Yes, that’s what a good lead does. It leaves the reader asking questions - questions you want answered, and so you have to continue reading…

Top 10 reasons why you should write 25 short stories before you write a novel

Ed Hoch passed away on January 17th at the age of 77. For those who don’t recognize his name, Ed was one of the pre-eminent short story writers of all time. He wrote close to 1,000 short stories, most of them in the puzzle mystery genre. For over 35 years, he had at least one story in every issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He was certainly one of only a handful of authors in recent years able to make a living strictly by selling short stories. Those who knew him found him to be a very kind, likable man. Having spoken to him briefly and seen him on panels at mystery conventions, I would add that he was quite informative as well.

I speak to a lot of aspiring writers, and I find that a majority of them want to write a novel (or are already writing one). In Ed’s honor, I thought I’d list my top ten reasons why short stories are a better choice - especially for a new writer.

10. Writing a novel can take a year or more. A short story can be written in a short time - a month, a week, maybe even a day. You can write a lot of short stories in the time it would take to write a novel.

9. The most important part of any great novel or short story is the characters. When you write a novel, you’re stuck a long, long time with a few characters. You may find you don’t like them. Or you may find they don’t work well for you. If you write short stories, you can invent new characters for every story. You can try a lot of different kinds of people. Or aliens, animals, even rocks that talk…

8. Every story and every novel need great openings. When you write a novel, you get one opening. You might end up rewriting your opening fifty times, and then throw it out in the end. When you write short stories, you can try a variety of different kinds of openings and see what you like and don’t like.

7. When you write a novel, you get one plot-line. If it doesn’t work, too bad. When you write a number of short stories, you can try a variety of different genres, different kinds of plots, and different resolutions.

6. If a short story isn’t working, you can just toss it into the trash without feeling you’ve wasted too much time and energy. If a novel isn’t working, it’s a lot of investment to throw away.

5. A short story can later grow into a novel if you find you really like the characters and see that the plot could grow. You might even use the original short story as a scene or chapter in your book.

5. Most people write to say something they feel is of importance, whether it’s about their faith, saving the environment, or encouraging everyone to practice safe sex. Because new writers often don’t know how to send a message without having it take over, some novels become very little more than propaganda. Writing a number of short stories, each with a tiny aspect of your message, will not only help you learn how to include a message in an acceptable way, but also help you find markets for your work and readers with similar interests.

4. Some people are natural short story writers. They have tons of ideas, like to work quickly and finish things up, and don’t have the patience to spend a lot of time on one thing. You can read what Ed said about why he wrote short stories here. On the flip side, some novels are really short stories with a whole lot of unnecessary padding. Better to learn how to trim and streamline than how to add unnecessary verbiage.

3. Unless you’re really, really famous, more people will read a short story in a magazine or on an internet site than will ever read your novel.

2. Writing a novel before you’ve written some short stories is like marrying the first person you date. Usually, it’s better to meet a few people before you make a commitment. Writing a number of short stories in a variety of genres will help you hone in on both what you enjoy and what you write best.

1. It’s possible to spend a great deal of time and energy writing a novel without learning a great deal about the craft of writing. Time and effort alone don’t equate with gaining skill.

God told me to write a book!

What you choose to write is, of course, between you and God. But one of the biggest mistakes I see new writers making is thinking that whatever is on their heart absolutely must be published as a book, and the sooner the better.

This is problematic for several reasons.

The main difficulty is that if you have little or no writing experience, you may simply not be ready to write the book yet. While there are a few people who’ve produced something really good on their first attempt, developing excellent writing skills normally involves a learning process. I’ve seen quite a few books and other things that “God told” someone to write that were - well, let’s just say they weren’t ready to be published and leave it at that.

Think about it. If I believe God is telling me to become a school teacher, I can’t just start walk into a classroom and start teaching - I have to first go to university and get a teaching degree of some sort. Or I may believe I should become a doctor, and I can just see myself helping people. But first, I have to go to medical school and then do an internship and a residency…

Writing a book is actually a very complicated undertaking; one that involves not only writing ability, but also organizational skills, knowledge of the market, understanding of the publishing industry, and the ability to promote oneself effectively.

So, while your ultimate goal may be to write a book, it’s a great idea to kickstart the process by joining writers’ organizations, reading books and blogs about writing, and then writing some short articles or stories on the topics that interest you. Ideally, you should have those articles critiqued, first by your peers and then by experts. Then send them out to editors of appropraite publications. As you do all this, you are slowly working yourself up to writing that book. Kind of like getting a degree.

Not only that, but creating articles out of some of the ideas for the book and selling them will actually make book editors more interested in you. And the articles can possibly be used later as chapters for your book.

The main thing is that you take your time and do a good job and not rush something into print that simply isn’t ready yet. Yes, there are all kinds of companies out there ready and willing to take your words and produce a book with your name on it. But after the initial burst of excitement, reality usually sets in, and you realize you’re in over your head. There are always people offering get rich quick schemes, too - but I hope you wouldn’t use them either.

There’s a second reason why you shouldn’t rush to write that book - I’ll talk about it tomorrow.

Judging books by the cover

You’ve heard the statement, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Well, maybe we shouldn’t, but the reality is we do! All the time!

Because of my work with writers, I see a lot of covers. And I have to say that while some of them are good, far too many of them are not. In fact, one of the two biggest problems I see with self-published books is that they look self-published. By that, I mean that if you put a self-published book on a shelf beside a book published by a large royalty-paying publisher, chances are very high that the self-published book will look duller, less interesting, less exciting, and well, less professional.

Very simply, some of the common problems with covers.

• Not having a professional graphic artist design it
• Not paying for the top quality, full-colour, glossy printing
  
• Not paying someone to write top-notch cover copy
• Not studying the genre you are publishing in well enough to know how to make the book look as though it fits.
• Cutting corners so the costs aren’t too high

How can you get around these problems?

• Spend a day in a bookstore or get catalogues from publishers and study the latest books - especially those in the genre you’re writing in - romance books look a lot different from mysteries; memoirs look very different from self-help books.
• Don’t get a friend to design the artwork unless that friend is a professional who does this all the time (even someone who does graphics but not books will likely not have the expertise you need).
• Hire someone who understands marketing and promotion to help with the words that go on the cover (especially the back cover). Titles need a blog of their own!
  
• If you insist on going to a vanity publisher (place you pay to publish your book) take control of every aspect and bring in your own design, etc. if you need to. One vanity publisher I know has only done a few covers I consider excellent, and in every case the author brought in their own cover design.

Without an attractive cover that fits in with the other covers on the shelves, no store except maybe the one in your home town will want to carry your book. Why should they? They know their customers are going to judge the book by the cover.

Before you self-publish your book…

One of the workshops I teach is “So You Want to Write a Book.” In it, I strongly urge and implore people not to self-publish, especially a novel, at least until they’ve considered all ramifications so they can go into it knowing the facts.

My reasons are as follows.

1. Distribution

Even if you can get a distributor (and that’s very iffy, for very good reasons), most self-publishers can’t afford to pay 60-70% of what they make to a distributor. The smaller the press run, the higher the costs of the books. The more books you print, the more you’ll have sitting in your garage. If your dream is to be in bookstores, it’s very unlikely that you’ll make it. So what will you do?

2. Promotion

Most self-publishers, esp. those who do it through vanity presses, tend to start thinking about selling the books when they are arriving from the publisher. At that point, it’s about six months too late. You need a plan for selling the books before you send the book to the printer. You also need a promotion budget. If you’re a speaker or someone with connections to organizations that are a good fit, or if you’re innovative and have lots of time to put in, you can sell books. But speaking and getting bulk sales work best for non-fiction. Fiction is a much tougher sell.

3. Branding

What a good royalty publisher offers that a vanity publisher usually doesn’t (and most self-publishers can’t get) is the ability to get a new author’s book into stores or on websites or wherever books go. Well-known publishers have spent time and money developing conduits of good will. Part of that is having a good distributor, but just having a distributor is absolutely no guarantee that the book will ever get into a store or be sold on the internet. What really gets the bookstore to carry the book is having a respected publisher’s name on the book. Not yours, at least not in the beginning, but the publisher’s. The bookstore buyer sees RandomHouse or Dundurn on the cover, and says, “Ah, yes, I can trust them.” And eventually the customer buying the book will say the same thing.

When you publish through a vanity press, their name usually goes on the cover, and the bookbuyer goes, “Hmm. Let me think. Oh yes, tried one of their books, but it was bad. Nope.” They have a brand all right, but the brand is “self-published!” Sometimes you don’t even have to look past the cover. It has the self-published look! There are a number of publishers whose books I won’t even bother to open because of the publisher’s reputation. By the way, Mystery Writers of America has a list of publishers whose books they won’t consider for credit as an author, and most are vanity presses. (And while I’m on this subject, have you ever wondered why vanity publishers seem to be everywhere you look? Can it be that they’re all anxious to help struggling writers get their books in print and fulfill their dreams, or might they be the ones making money at this?)

When you publish independently (my term for when you become the publisher and hire a substantive editor and a copy editor and a proof reader and a graphic artist, and then you get your own ISBN and bar code and CIP info and deal with a printer and hire a publicist – all the things a normal publisher does - you’ll have your own publishing name on the book. And then you have the problem of being an unknown quantity. Personally, I’d rather be unknown that recognized as a vanity press. That way I can create my own brand.Given that all publishing houses have to start from scratch, maybe in 10 years of so, you’ll have built up your publishing house so that you have a recognizable and accepted brand of your own. Yes, you can have some vanity presses use your publishing name on them. And if you make sure all the other things are done well, the book can look good, but if you have to do all that, why do it through them in the first place?

My five cents! (I heard they’re planning to retire the penny.

You’ve written a book: now what?

Most of the time when new writers tell me they’ve written a book, what they actually mean is that they’ve completed a first draft of a book. And if you know what you’re doing, you don’t rush off to find a publisher for a first draft.

What you do next is let it sit for a week or so while you work on something totally different, and then sit down to read your book in editor mode. Basically, you try to pretend you’ve never seen it before, and you do an objective critique of it.

If your book is fiction, and you haven’t read Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King; The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes by Jack M Bickham: Revision by David Michael Kaplan; Making Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern; or most of the books in the Writers Digest Elements of Fiction series, I’d suggest you go to your local store or join Writers’ Digest book club and buy as many as you can afford and read them first.

If your book is non-fiction, look for On Writing Well by William Zinsser, A Writer’s Time by Kenneth Atchity; The 28 Biggest Writing Blunders (And How to Avoid Them) by William Noble, or one of the many books on specific kinds of nonfiction from Writer’s Digest or other publishers. Since each chapter of many non-fiction books may be viewed as a single entity, books on writing articles could also be helpful. Eg. Writing from the Heart by Marjorie Holmes; the Elements of Article Writing Series from Writer’s Digest.

At this time, you also need to refine your target audience so you know exactly who you’re writing the book for.

Next, you write a second draft. How you do that is up to you. Some people just start writing again from scratch. It depends on how much it needs to be changed. What I do is save everything I have as a new file and then start taking it apart and moving things around and rewriting sections, and do forth. I like to think of that first draft as the clay I need to work with in order to create a masterpiece.

I look first for big problems or issues, and ignore most of the little things like spelling and grammar and so forth. Focus on the plot - does it work - and the characters - do they feel real? Or in non-fiction, are the chapters in the right sequence? Does it flow? Have I missed any key areas? What research still needs to be done to make sure everything is accurate?

And when you have that done, you do it all over again and again, as needed. You likely want to get a critique from another writer or two, or a really knowledgeable reader. At some point, you may want to pay for a really good editor to do a substantive edit (more about that next time.)

When you’re satisfied with the plot and the characters in your novel, then you look at the description, the dialogue, the accuracy of the details, and the time sequences.

In your non-fiction, check out the flow of your ideas, make sure all the relevant points are there, look at the illustrations you’ve used, refine your transitions, check that there is something for the reader to take way, and make sure every aspect is good.

Keep refining until you get down to the last bit - the spelling and punctuation, and so forth.

I revised Shaded Light 17 times. True, it’s a very complex book with multiple plot-lines and 14 points of view. My other books have been revised more like 7 or 8 times. Well, Friends Like These took maybe 10 times. My non-fiction books took probably 5 or 6 times.

The bottom-line is that you aren’t just “writing a book” in the sense that once all your thoughts on paper you’re finished. Even if you have done some editing as you wrote (something I don’t encourage), you still need to work with the end product. What you’re actually doing is crafting and molding and shaping it it so it says exactly what you want it to say and so that every single word you leave in has a function.

Yeah, I know. Sounds like work. But, actually, writing a book IS work. As the old saying goes, the idea - the “inspiration” is only a small part of the entire process. The other 90% involves “perspiration”.