Your One-Sentence Summary by Randy Ingermanson

Your One-Sentence Summary

by  Randy Ingermanson

 

My friend Larry Brooks is an extremely well-known writing teacher. Last November, he released his latest book, Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves. I’ve been reading the book lately, and I’m not quite ready to review it here, but it got me thinking.

Larry is very big on the idea that great stories need a great “premise.” Which sounds obvious, but it’s hard to nail down, because different people mean different things by the word “premise.” Larry spends quite a fair bit of time disentangling the various meanings of the word. He’s also got a lot of practical insight on how you test the premise of your book to make it better.

It’s all good stuff, but “premise” is Larry’s thunder, not mine, so I won’t steal it. If you want to know what he says, you can read his book. I did a lot of highlighting in his book, and I’ll certainly be using his various tests on my current novel to see how well it works.

But all this talk of “premise” got me thinking of a subject that is most definitely part of my thunder—the idea of a one-sentence summary.

What Is a One-Sentence Summary?

A one-sentence summary is a sentence of up to 25 words that enflames the imagination of your Target Audience and repels everyone else.

See what I just did? I wrote a one-sentence summary about one-sentence summaries. That’s kind of meta.

Who would want to write a one-sentence summary? (That is to say, who is the Target Audience for the very notion of writing a one-sentence summary?) Novelists who want to be successful. That would be you.

Novelists who want to be successful know:

• They should market only to their Target Audience.
• Marketing is about exciting emotions.
• Good marketing actually drives away the “wrong sort of reader.”

So my one-sentence summary above is designed for just those people. Here’s what I did in that one-sentence summary:

• I used the phrase “Target Audience.” That phrase gets the attention of any market-savvy novelists.
• I used the phrase “enflames the imagination.” Those are emotive words, aimed at writers who want to attract the right sort of reader.
• I also used the phrase “repels.” Another emotive word, aimed at writers who want to drive away the wrong sort of reader.

How is a One-Sentence Summary Related to “Premise?”

Larry Brooks is big on “premise,” and rightly so, because a great premise is practically an absolute requirement for a great book. I’m big on writing a great one-sentence summary, because it distills a novel’s premise down to one sentence that makes an amazing marketing tool.

You will use your one-sentence summary forever to sell your book to:

• An agent you meet at a conference.
• The editor the agent sends your book proposal to.
• The publishing committee who decides whether to publish your book.
• The publisher’s sales team, if they still have one.
• The bookstore buyers.
• People browsing for books in the store.
• People browsing for books online.
• Anyone those people ever talk to about your book.

You need a one-sentence summary, whether your novel has a great premise or not. In fact, even if your premise isn’t spectacular, you still need a one-sentence summary, for a couple of reasons.

First, it catches people’s attention so you can sell them your book.

Second, it keeps you focused when you’re writing and editing the book.

An Example One-Sentence Summary

Larry’s book spends quite a bit of time analyzing a mega-bestselling novel by Robert Dugoni, My Sister’s Grave.

I had never read this novel, but Larry’s book got me interested, so I bought My Sister’s Grave. I’m in the target audience. It’s a legal thriller and I like legal thrillers.

I read the book and thought it was fantastic.

Here’s my one-sentence summary for My Sister’s Grave:

“A homicide detective learns that her sister’s grave has been found, with conclusive proof that the man convicted of the murder was framed.”

A few comments are in order:

My first cut at this sentence was 27 words. I clipped out a few and got it down to 23.

The Target Audience for this novel is readers who like either police procedurals or legal thrillers. The novel is a bit of both. There is some forensic work and some detective work and a long series of scenes in a courtroom.

Look at the emotive words and phrases in my one-sentence summary:

• homicide detective
• sister
• grave
• convicted
• murder
• framed

With one exception, these words are designed to attract readers specifically in the Target Audience. The exception is the word “sister,” which is an emotive word not normally associated with this kind of book. But the contextual fact that the sister is the murder victim actually heightens the emotive force for the Target Audience and increases the repellant force for people outside the Target Audience.

What Your One-Sentence Summary Won’t Do

Your one-sentence summary is not the whole tuna. You still have to write a good novel, and it needs to fulfill the promise you made in the one-sentence summary.

Your one-sentence summary doesn’t even make a complete “premise.” If you want a complete premise, see Larry’s book, Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves.

Your one-sentence summary won’t sell your book, at least not by itself. All it does is get the attention of the right sort of person (your Target Audience) and scare away everyone else. The thing that sells your book is your first scene, because that proves you can actually write.

Homework:

• Do you know who the Target Audience is for your current work-in-progress?
• Do you know what the “premise” is?
• If the answer to both of the above is yes, can you distill your premise down to one sentence that attracts your Target Audience and repels everyone else?

 

About The Author

Randy Ingermanson is a theoretical physicist and the award-winning author of six novels. He has taught at numerous writing conferences over the years and publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.

Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

 

Writing The Perfect Scene by Randy Ingermanson

 

 

Writing The Perfect Scene 

by Randy Ingermanso

 

Having trouble making the scenes in your novel work their magic? In this article, I’ll show you how to write the “perfect” scene.

Maybe you think it’s impossible to write the perfect scene. After all, who can choose every word perfectly, every thought, every sentence, every paragraph? What does perfection mean, anyway?

Honestly, I don’t know. Perfection is in the eye of the beholder. Style is a matter of taste.

But structure is pretty well understood. Maybe you can’t write the perfectlystyled scene. But you can write the perfectly structured scene. And that’s a whale of a lot better than writing a badly structured scene.

The Two Levels of Scene Structure

A scene has two levels of structure, and only two. They are:

• The large-scale structure of the scene
• The small-scale structure of the scene

This may seem obvious, but by the end of this article, I hope to convince you that it’s terribly profound. If you then want to fling large quantities of cash at me in gratitude, please don’t. I’d really rather have a check. With plenty of zeroes. I am going to steal insights from Dwight Swain’s book, Techniques of the Selling Writer. This is quite simply the finest book ever written on how to write fiction. If you don’t have this book, you are robbing yourself blind. I will be giving you the high points in this article, but there is really no substitute for reading the book and digesting it.

Before we begin, we need to understand how we keep score. How do we know what perfection is? The answer is based on understanding your reader’s motivation for reading.

Your reader is reading your fiction because you provide him or her with a powerful emotional experience. If you’re writing a romance, you must create in your reader the illusion that she is falling in love herself. If you’re writing a thriller, you must create in your reader the illusion that he is in mortal danger and has only the tiniest chance of saving his life (and all of humanity). If you’re writing a fantasy, you must create in your reader the illusion that she is actually in another world where all is different and wonderful and magical. And so on for all the other genres.

If you fail to create these emotions in your reader, then you have failed. If you create these emotions in your reader, then you have succeeded. The better you create the desired emotional experience in your reader, the better your fiction. Perfection in writing comes when you have created the fullest possible emotional experience for your reader.

Large-Scale Structure of a Scene

The large-scale structure of a scene is extremely simple. Actually, there are two possible choices you can make for your scene structure. Dwight Swain calls these two choices “scenes” and “sequels”. This is horrendously confusing, since both of these are what most ordinary people call scenes. In what follows, I’m going to capitalize these terms, calling them Scenes and Sequels. That is your signal that I’m using Swain’s language. When I use the word “scene” in the ordinary non-Swain sense, I’ll leave it uncapitalized. Since you are exceptionally brilliant and perceptive, you will not find this a problem. Let me give you the high points on Scenes and Sequels right up front.

A Scene has the following three-part pattern:

1. Goal
2. Conflict
3. Disaster

A Sequel has the following three-part pattern:

1. Reaction
2. Dilemma
3. Decision

You may think these patterns are too simple. You may think this is reducing writing to Paint-by-Numbers. Well, no. This is reducing fiction to the two patterns that have been proven by thousands of novelists to actually work. There are plenty of other patterns people use. They typically work less well. It may well be that there are other patterns that work better. If you can find one that works better, please tell me. But for now, let’s pretend that Dwight Swain is right. Let’s pretend these are absolutely the best possible patterns for writing fiction. Let’s pretend these are the keys to writing the perfect scene. Let’s move on and look at each of these in turn.

As we said, the Scene has the three parts Goal, Conflict, and Disaster. Each of these is supremely important. I am going to define each of these pieces and then explain why each is critical to the structure of the Scene. I assume that you have selected one character to be your Point Of View character. In what follows, I’ll refer to this character as your POV character. Your goal is to convincingly show your POV character experiencing the scene. You must do this so powerfully that your reader experiences the scene as if she were the POV character.

1. Goal: A Goal is what your POV character wants at the beginning of the Scene. The Goal must be specific and it must be clearly definable. The reason your POV character must have a Goal is that it makes your character proactive. Your character is not passively waiting for the universe to deal him Great Good. Your character is going after what he wants, just as your reader wishes he could do. It’s a simple fact that any character who wants something desperately is an interesting character. Even if he’s not nice, he’s interesting. And your reader will identify with him. That’s what you want as a writer.
2. Conflict: Conflict is the series of obstacles your POV character faces on the way to reaching his Goal. You must have Conflict in your Scene! If your POV character reaches his Goal with no Conflict, then the reader is bored. Your reader wants to struggle! No victory has any value if it comes too easy. So make your POV character struggle and your reader will live out that struggle too.
3. Disaster: A Disaster is a failure to let your POV character reach his Goal. Don’t give him the Goal! Winning is boring! When a Scene ends in victory, your reader feels no reason to turn the page. If things are going well, your reader might as well go to bed. No! Make something awful happen. Hang your POV character off a cliff and your reader will turn the page to see what happens next.

That’s all! There is literally nothing more you need to know about Scenes. Now let’s look at Sequels . . .

The Sequel has the three parts Reaction, Dilemma, and Decision. Again, each of these is critical to a successful Sequel. Remove any of them and the Sequel fails to work. Let me add one important point here. The purpose of a Sequel is to follow after a Scene. A Scene ends on a Disaster, and you can’t immediately follow that up with a new Scene, which begins with a Goal. Why? Because when you’ve just been slugged with a serious setback, you can’t just rush out and try something new. You’ve got to recover. That’s basic psychology.

1. Reaction: A Reaction is the emotional follow-through to a Disaster. When something awful happens, you’re staggering for awhile, off-balance, out of kilter. You can’t help it. So show your POV character reacting viscerally to his Disaster. Show him hurting. Give your reader a chance to hurt with your characters. You may need to show some passage of time. This is not a time for action, it’s a time for re-action. A time to weep. But you can’t stagger around in pain forever. In real life, if people do that they lose their friends. In fiction, if you do it, you lose your readers. Eventually, your POV character needs to get a grip. To take stock. To look for options. And the problem is that there aren’t any . . .
2. Dilemma: A Dilemma is a situation with no good options. If your Disaster was a real Disaster, there aren’t any good choices. Your POV character must have a real dilemma. This gives your reader a chance to worry, which is good. Your reader must be wondering what can possibly happen next. Let your POV character work through the choices. Let him sort things out. Eventually, let him come to the least-bad option . . .
3. Decision: A Decision is the act of making a choice among several options. This is important, because it lets your POV character become proactive again. People who never make decisions are boring people. They wait around for somebody else to decide. And nobody wants to read about somebody like that. So make your character decide, and make it a good decision. Make it one your reader can respect. Make it risky, but make it have a chance of working. Do that, and your reader will have to turn the page, because now your POV character has a new Goal.

And now you’ve come full circle. You’ve gone from Scene to Sequel and back to the Goal for a new Scene. This is why the Scene-Sequel pattern is so powerful. A Scene leads naturally to a Sequel, which leads naturally to a new Scene. And so on forever. At some point, you’ll end the cycle. You’ll give your POV character either Ultimate Victory or Ultimate Defeat and that will be the end of the book. But until you get there, the alternating pattern of Scene and Sequel will carry you through. And your reader will curse you when he discovers that he’s spent the whole doggone night reading your book because he could not put the thing down.

That’s perfection.

However, it’s only half the battle. I’ve told you how to design the Scenes and Sequels in the large scale. But you still need to write them. You need to write paragraph after compelling paragraph, with each one leading your POV character smoothly through from initial Goal to knuckle-whitening Conflict to bone-jarring Disaster, and then through a visceral Reaction to a horrible Dilemma and finally on to a clever Decision.

How do you do that? How do you execute those paragraphs? How do you do it perfectly?

Small-Scale Structure of a Scene

The answer is to use what Dwight Swain calls “Motivation-Reaction Units.” He calls them MRUs for short. This is such an absurdly ridiculous term that I’m going to keep it, just to prove that Mr. Swain was not perfect. Writing MRUs is hard. However, I’ve found that it provides the most bang for the buck in improving your writing. I’ve mentored many writers, and a universal problem for them was the failure to write MRUs correctly. My solution was to make them painfully work through several chapters so that each one was nothing more nor less than a string of perfect MRUs. After a few chapters, the technique gets easier. Then I maliciously require them to rewrite their whole novel this way. This is brutally hard work, but those who have survived it have become much better writers.

Writing MRUs correctly is the magic key to compelling fiction. I don’t care if you believe me or not. Try it and see.

I hope you are salivating to learn this magical tool. You need to first suffer through one full paragraph of theory. I know you will do this because you are intelligent and patient and because I am flattering you quite thickly.

You will write your MRUs by alternating between what your POV character sees (the Motivation) and what he does (the Reaction). This is supremely important. Remember that Swain calls these things “Motivation-Reaction Units”. The Motivation is objective but it is something that your character can see (or hear or smell or taste or feel). You will write this in such a way that your reader also sees it (or hears it or smells it or tastes it or feels it). You will then start a new paragraph in which your POV character does one or more things in Reaction to the Motivation. There is an exact sequence you must follow in writing your Reaction. The sequence is based on what is physiologically possible. Note that the Motivation is external and objective. The Reaction is internal and subjective. If you do this, you create in your reader the powerful illusion that he is experiencing something real. Now let’s break this down into more detail . . .

The Motivation is external and objective, and you present it that way, in objective, external terms. You do this in a single paragraph. It does not need to be complicated.

Here is a simple example:

The tiger dropped out of the tree and sprang toward Jack.

Note the key points here. This is objective. We present the Motivation as it would be shown by a videocamera. Nothing here indicates that we are in Jack’s point of view. That comes next, but in the Motivation we keep it simple and sharp and clean.

The Reaction is internal and subjective, and you present it that way, exactly as your POV character would experience it — from the inside. This is your chance to make your reader be your POV character. To repeat myself, this must happen in its own paragraph (or sequence of paragraphs). If you leave it in the same paragraph as the Motivation, then you risk whip-sawing the reader. Which no reader enjoys.

The Reaction is more complex than the Motivation. The reason is that it is internal, and internal processes happen on different time-scales. When you see a tiger, in the first milliseconds, you only have time for one thing — fear. Within a few tenths of a second, you have time to react on instinct, but that is all it will be — instinct, reflex. But shortly after that first reflexive reaction, you will also have time to react rationally, to act, to think, to speak. You must present the full complex of your character’s reactions in this order, from fastest time-scale to slowest. If you put them out of order, then things just don’t feel right. You destroy the illusion of reality. And your reader won’t keep reading because your writing is “not realistic.” Even if you got all your facts right.

Here is a simple example:

A bolt of raw adrenaline shot through Jack’s veins. He jerked his rifle to his shoulder, sighted on the tiger’s heart, and squeezed the trigger. “Die, you bastard!”

Now let’s analyze this. Note the three parts of the Reaction:

1. Feeling: “A bolt of raw adrenaline shot through Jack’s veins.” You show this first, because it happens almost instantly.
2. Reflex: “He jerked his rifle to his shoulder . . .” You show this second, as a result of the fear. An instinctive result that requires no conscious thought.
3. Rational Action and Speech: “. . . sighted on the tiger’s heart, and squeezed the trigger. ‘Die, you bastard!'” You put this last, when Jack has had time to think and act in a rational way. He pulls the trigger, a rational response to the danger. He speaks, a rational expression of his intense emotional reaction.

It is legitimate to leave out one or two of these three parts. (You can’t leave out all three or you have no Reaction.) But there is one critical rule to follow in leaving parts out: Whatever parts you keep in must be in the correct order. If there is a Feeling, it must come first. If there is a Reflex, it must never come before a Feeling. If there is some Rational Action, it must always come last. This is simple and obvious and if you follow this rule, your Reactions will be perfectly structured time after time.

And after the Reaction comes . . . another Motivation. This is the key. You can’t afford to write one perfect MRU and then be happy. You’ve got to write another and another and another. The Reaction you just wrote will lead to some new Motivation that is again external and objective and which you will write in its own paragraph. Just to continue the example we’ve created so far:

The bullet grazed the tiger’s left shoulder. Blood squirted out of the jagged wound. The tiger roared and staggered, then leaped in the air straight at Jack’s throat.

Note that the Motivation can be complex or it can be simple. The only requirement is that it be external and objective, something that not only Jack can see and hear and feel but which any other observer could also see and hear and feel, if they were there.

The important thing is to keep the alternating pattern. You write a Motivation and then a Reaction and then another Motivation and then another Reaction. When you run out of Motivations or Reactions, your Scene or Sequel is over. Don’t run out too soon. Don’t drag on too long.

Write each Scene and Sequel as a sequence of MRUs. Any part of yourScene or Sequel which is not an MRU must go. Cut it ruthlessly. Show no mercy. You can not afford charity for a single sentence that is not pulling its weight. And the only parts of your scene that pull their weight are the MRUs. All else is fluff.

About Those Pesky Rules

You may be feeling that it’s impossible to write your scenes following these rules. Doing so causes you to freeze. You stare blindly at the computer screen, afraid to move a muscle for fear of breaking a Rule. Oh dear, you’ve got yourself a case of writer’s block. That’s bad. Now let me tell you the final secret for writing the perfect scene.

Forget all these rules. That’s right, ignore the varmints. Just write your chapter in your usual way, putting down any old words you want, in any old way you feel like. There, that feels better, doesn’t it? You are creating, and that’s good. Creation is constructing a story from nothing. It’s hard work, it’s fun, it’s exciting, it’s unstructured. It’s imperfect. Do it without regard for the rules.

When you have finished creating, set it aside for awhile. You will later need to edit it, but now is not the time. Do something else. Write another scene. Go bowling. Spend time with those annoying people who live in your house. Remember them? Your family and friends? Do something that is Not Writing.

Later on, when you are ready, come back and read your Great Piece of Writing. It will have many nice points to it, but it will not be perfectly structured. Now you are ready to edit it and impose perfect structure on it. This is a different process than Creation. This is Analysis, and it is the opposite of Creation. Analysis is destruction. You must now take it apart and put it back together.

Analyze the scene you have written. Is it a Scene or a Sequel? Or neither? If it is neither, then you must find a way to make it one or the other or you must throw it away. If it is a Scene, verify that it has a Goal, a Conflict, and a Disaster. Identify them each in a one-sentence summary. Likewise, if it’s a Sequel, verify that it has a Reaction, a Dilemma, and a Decision. Identify each of these in a one-sentence summary. If you can’t put the scene into one of these two structures, then throw the scene away as the worthless piece of drivel that it is. You may someday find a use for it as a sonnet or a limerick or a technical manual, but it is not fiction and there is no way to make it fiction, so get rid of it.

Now that you know what your scene is, either Scene or Sequel, rewrite it MRU by MRU. Make sure every Motivation is separated from every Reaction by a paragraph break. It is okay to have multiple paragraphs for a single Motivation or a single Reaction. It is a capital crime to mix them in a single paragraph. When they are separated correctly, you may find you have extra parts that are neither Motivation nor Reaction. Throw them away, no matter how beautiful or clever they are. They are not fiction and you are writing fiction.

Examine each Motivation and make sure that it is entirely objective and external. Show no mercy. You can not afford mercy on anything that poisons your fiction. Kill it or it will kill you.

Now identify the elements of each Reaction and make sure they are as subjective and internal as possible. Present them as nearly as you can from inside the skin of your POV character. Make sure they are in the correct order, with Feelings first, then Reflexive Actions, and finally Rational Actions and Speech. Again, eliminate everything else, even brilliant insights that would surely get you a Nobel peace prize. Brilliant insights are very fine, but if they aren’t fiction, they don’t belong in your fiction. If you can contrive to rearrange such a thing to be in a correct fictional pattern, then fine. Keep it. Otherwise, slit its vile throat and throw the carcass to the wolves. You are a novelist, and that’s what novelists do.

When you reach the end of the scene, whether it is a Scene or a Sequel, check to make sure that everything is correctly placed in an MRU and all carcasses are thrown out. Feel free to edit the scene for style, clarity, wit, spelling, grammar, and any other thing you know how to do. When you are done, pat yourself on the back.

You have written a perfect scene. All is well in your world. You are done with this scene.

Now go do it again and again until you finish your book.

Best regards,

Randy Ingermanson, Ph.D.

 

 Also See:

1. How to Write a Dynamite Scene Using the Snowflake Method
2.  Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

 

About The Author

Randy Ingermanson is a theoretical physicist and the award-winning author of six novels. He has taught at numerous writing conferences over the years and publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.

 Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

The Snowflake Method For Designing A Novel by Randy Ingermanson

 

The Snowflake Method For Designing A Novel

by Randy Ingermanson

 

Writing a novel is easy. Writing a good novel is hard. That’s just life. If it were easy, we’d all be writing best-selling, prize-winning fiction.

Frankly, there are a thousand different people out there who can tell you how to write a novel. There are a thousand different methods. The best one for you is the one that works for you.

In this article, I’d like to share with you what works for me. I’ve published six novels and won about a dozen awards for my writing. I teach the craft of writing fiction at writing conferences all the time. One of my most popular lectures is this one: How to write a novel using what I call the “Snowflake Method.”

This page is the most popular one on my web site, and gets over a thousand page views per day. Over the years, this page has been viewed more than six million times. So you can guess that a lot of people find it useful. But you may not, and that’s fine by me. Look it over, decide what might work for you, and ignore the rest! If it makes you dizzy, I won’t be insulted. Different writers are different. If my methods get you rolling, I’ll be happy. I’ll make the best case I can for my way of organizing things, but you are the final judge of what works best for you. Have fun and . . . write your novel!

The Importance of Design

Good fiction doesn’t just happen, it is designed. You can do the design work before or after you write your novel. I’ve done it both ways and I strongly believe that doing it first is quicker and leads to a better result. Design is hard work, so it’s important to find a guiding principle early on. This article will give you a powerful metaphor to guide your design.

Our fundamental question is this: How do you design a novel?

For a number of years, I was a software architect designing large software projects. I write novels the same way I write software, using the “snowflake metaphor”. OK, what’s the snowflake metaphor? Before you go further, take a look at this cool web site.

On the side of the page, you’ll see an animation of a pattern known as a snowflake fractal. Don’t tell anyone, but this is an important mathematical object that’s been widely studied. For our purposes, it’s just a cool sketch of a snowflake. If you scroll down that same web page a little, you’ll see a box with a large triangle in it and arrows underneath. If you press the right-arrow button repeatedly, you’ll see the steps used to create the snowflake. It doesn’t look much like a snowflake at first, but after a few steps, it starts looking more and more like one, until it’s done.

The first few steps look like this:

I claim that that’s how you design a novel — you start small, then build stuff up until it looks like a story. Part of this is creative work, and I can’t teach you how to do that. Not here, anyway. But part of the work is just managing your creativity — getting it organized into a well-structured novel. That’s what I’d like to teach you here.

If you’re like most people, you spend a long time thinking about your novel before you ever start writing. You may do some research. You daydream about how the story’s going to work. You brainstorm. You start hearing the voices of different characters. You think about what the book’s about — the Deep Theme. This is an essential part of every book which I call “composting”. It’s an informal process and every writer does it differently. I’m going to assume that you know how to compost your story ideas and that you have already got a novel well-composted in your mind and that you’re ready to sit down and start writing that novel.

The Ten Steps of Design

But before you start writing, you need to get organized. You need to put all those wonderful ideas down on paper in a form you can use. Why? Because your memory is fallible, and your creativity has probably left a lot of holes in your story — holes you need to fill in before you start writing your novel. You need a design document. And you need to produce it using a process that doesn’t kill your desire to actually write the story. Here is my ten-step process for writing a design document. I use this process for writing my novels, and I hope it will help you.

Step 1) Take an hour and write a one-sentence summary of your novel. Something like this: “A rogue physicist travels back in time to kill the apostle Paul.” (This is the summary for my first novel, Transgression.) The sentence will serve you forever as a ten-second selling tool. This is the big picture, the analog of that big starting triangle in the snowflake picture.

When you later write your book proposal, this sentence should appear very early in the proposal. It’s the hook that will sell your book to your editor, to your committee, to the sales force, to bookstore owners, and ultimately to readers. So make the best one you can!

Some hints on what makes a good sentence:

• Shorter is better. Try for fewer than 15 words.
• No character names, please! Better to say “a handicapped trapeze artist” than “Jane Doe”.
• Tie together the big picture and the personal picture. Which character has the most to lose in this story? Now tell me what he or she wants to win.
• Read the one-line blurbs on the New York Times Bestseller list to learn how to do this. Writing a one-sentence description is an art form.

Step 2) Take another hour and expand that sentence to a full paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters, and ending of the novel. This is the analog of the second stage of the snowflake. I like to structure a story as “three disasters plus an ending”. Each of the disasters takes a quarter of the book to develop and the ending takes the final quarter. I don’t know if this is the ideal structure, it’s just my personal taste.

If you believe in the Three-Act structure, then the first disaster corresponds to the end of Act 1. The second disaster is the mid-point of Act 2. The third disaster is the end of Act 2, and forces Act 3 which wraps things up. It is OK to have the first disaster be caused by external circumstances, but I think that the second and third disasters should be caused by the protagonist’s attempts to “fix things”. Things just get worse and worse.

You can also use this paragraph in your proposal. Ideally, your paragraph will have about five sentences. One sentence to give me the backdrop and story setup. Then one sentence each for your three disasters. Then one more sentence to tell the ending. Don’t confuse this paragraph with the back-cover copy for your book. This paragraph summarizes the whole story. Your back-cover copy should summarize only about the first quarter of the story.

Step 3) The above gives you a high-level view of your novel. Now you need something similar for the storylines of each of your characters. Characters are the most important part of any novel, and the time you invest in designing them up front will pay off ten-fold when you start writing. For each of your major characters, take an hour and write a one-page summary sheet that tells:

• The character’s name
• A one-sentence summary of the character’s storyline
• The character’s motivation (what does he/she want abstractly?)
• The character’s goal (what does he/she want concretely?)
• The character’s conflict (what prevents him/her from reaching this goal?)
• The character’s epiphany (what will he/she learn, how will he/she change?
• A one-paragraph summary of the character’s storyline

An important point: You may find that you need to go back and revise your one-sentence summary and/or your one-paragraph summary. Go ahead! This is good–it means your characters are teaching you things about your story. It’s always okay at any stage of the design process to go back and revise earlier stages. In fact, it’s not just okay–it’s inevitable. And it’s good. Any revisions you make now are revisions you won’t need to make later on to a clunky 400 page manuscript.

Another important point: It doesn’t have to be perfect. The purpose of each step in the design process is to advance you to the next step. Keep your forward momentum! You can always come back later and fix it when you understand the story better. You will do this too, unless you’re a lot smarter than I am.

Step 4) By this stage, you should have a good idea of the large-scale structure of your novel, and you have only spent a day or two. Well, truthfully, you may have spent as much as a week, but it doesn’t matter. If the story is broken, you know it now, rather than after investing 500 hours in a rambling first draft. So now just keep growing the story. Take several hours and expand each sentence of your summary paragraph into a full paragraph. All but the last paragraph should end in a disaster. The final paragraph should tell how the book ends.

This is a lot of fun, and at the end of the exercise, you have a pretty decent one-page skeleton of your novel. It’s okay if you can’t get it all onto one single-spaced page. What matters is that you are growing the ideas that will go into your story. You are expanding the conflict. You should now have a synopsis suitable for a proposal, although there is a better alternative for proposals . . .

Step 5) Take a day or two and write up a one-page description of each major character and a half-page description of the other important characters. These “character synopses” should tell the story from the point of view of each character. As always, feel free to cycle back to the earlier steps and make revisions as you learn cool stuff about your characters. I usually enjoy this step the most and lately, I have been putting the resulting “character synopses” into my proposals instead of a plot-based synopsis. Editors love character synopses, because editors love character-based fiction.

Step 6) By now, you have a solid story and several story-threads, one for each character. Now take a week and expand the one-page plot synopsis of the novel to a four-page synopsis. Basically, you will again be expanding each paragraph from step (4) into a full page. This is a lot of fun, because you are figuring out the high-level logic of the story and making strategic decisions. Here, you will definitely want to cycle back and fix things in the earlier steps as you gain insight into the story and new ideas whack you in the face.

Step 7) Take another week and expand your character descriptions into full-fledged character charts detailing everything there is to know about each character. The standard stuff such as birthdate, description, history, motivation, goal, etc. Most importantly, how will this character change by the end of the novel? This is an expansion of your work in step (3), and it will teach you a lot about your characters. You will probably go back and revise steps (1-6) as your characters become “real” to you and begin making petulant demands on the story. This is good — great fiction is character-driven. Take as much time as you need to do this, because you’re just saving time downstream. When you have finished this process, (and it may take a full month of solid effort to get here), you have most of what you need to write a proposal. If you are a published novelist, then you can write a proposal now and sell your novel before you write it. If you’re not yet published, then you’ll need to write your entire novel first before you can sell it. No, that’s not fair, but life isn’t fair and the world of fiction writing is especially unfair.

Step 8) You may or may not take a hiatus here, waiting for the book to sell. At some point, you’ve got to actually write the novel. Before you do that, there are a couple of things you can do to make that traumatic first draft easier. The first thing to do is to take that four-page synopsis and make a list of all the scenes that you’ll need to turn the story into a novel. And the easiest way to make that list is . . . with a spreadsheet.

For some reason, this is scary to a lot of writers. Oh the horror. Deal with it. You learned to use a word-processor. Spreadsheets are easier. You need to make a list of scenes, and spreadsheets were invented for making lists. If you need some tutoring, buy a book. There are a thousand out there, and one of them will work for you. It should take you less than a day to learn the itty bit you need. It’ll be the most valuable day you ever spent. Do it.

Make a spreadsheet detailing the scenes that emerge from your four-page plot outline. Make just one line for each scene. In one column, list the POV character. In another (wide) column, tell what happens. If you want to get fancy, add more columns that tell you how many pages you expect to write for the scene. A spreadsheet is ideal, because you can see the whole storyline at a glance, and it’s easy to move scenes around to reorder things.

My spreadsheets usually wind up being over 100 lines long, one line for each scene of the novel. As I develop the story, I make new versions of my story spreadsheet. This is incredibly valuable for analyzing a story. It can take a week to make a good spreadsheet. When you are done, you can add a new column for chapter numbers and assign a chapter to each scene.

Step 9) (Optional. I don’t do this step anymore.) Switch back to your word processor and begin writing a narrative description of the story. Take each line of the spreadsheet and expand it to a multi-paragraph description of the scene. Put in any cool lines of dialogue you think of, and sketch out the essential conflict of that scene. If there’s no conflict, you’ll know it here and you should either add conflict or scrub the scene.

I used to write either one or two pages per chapter, and I started each chapter on a new page. Then I just printed it all out and put it in a loose-leaf notebook, so I could easily swap chapters around later or revise chapters without messing up the others. This process usually took me a week and the end result was a massive 50-page printed document that I would revise in red ink as I wrote the first draft. All my good ideas when I woke up in the morning got hand-written in the margins of this document. This, by the way, is a rather painless way of writing that dreaded detailed synopsis that all writers seem to hate. But it’s actually fun to develop, if you have done steps (1) through (8) first. When I did this step, I never showed this synopsis to anyone, least of all to an editor — it was for me alone. I liked to think of it as the prototype first draft. Imagine writing a first draft in a week! Yes, you can do it and it’s well worth the time. But I’ll be honest, I don’t feel like I need this step anymore, so I don’t do it now.

Step 10) At this point, just sit down and start pounding out the real first draft of the novel. You will be astounded at how fast the story flies out of your fingers at this stage. I have seen writers triple their fiction writing speed overnight, while producing better quality first drafts than they usually produce on a third draft.

You might think that all the creativity is chewed out of the story by this time. Well, no, not unless you overdid your analysis when you wrote your Snowflake. This is supposed to be the fun part, because there are many small-scale logic problems to work out here. How does Hero get out of that tree surrounded by alligators and rescue Heroine who’s in the burning rowboat? This is the time to figure it out! But it’s fun because you already know that the large-scale structure of the novel works. So you only have to solve a limited set of problems, and so you can write relatively fast.

This stage is incredibly fun and exciting. I have heard many fiction writers complain about how hard the first draft is. Invariably, that’s because they have no clue what’s coming next. Good grief! Life is too short to write like that! There is no reason to spend 500 hours writing a wandering first draft of your novel when you can write a solid one in 150. Counting the 100 hours it takes to do the design documents, you come out way ahead in time.

About midway through a first draft, I usually take a breather and fix all the broken parts of my design documents. Yes, the design documents are not perfect. That’s okay. The design documents are not fixed in concrete, they are a living set of documents that grows as you develop your novel. If you are doing your job right, at the end of the first draft you will laugh at what an amateurish piece of junk your original design documents were. And you’ll be thrilled at how deep your story has become.

Ways To Use The Snowflake

Are you struggling right now with a horrible first draft of your novel that just seems hopeless? Take an hour and summarize your story in one sentence. Does that clarify things? You’ve just completed step (1) of the Snowflake, and it only took an hour. Why not try the next few steps of the Snowflake and see if your story doesn’t suddenly start coming to life? What have you got to lose, except a horrible first draft that you already hate?

Are you a seat-of-the-pants writer who finally finished your novel, but now you’re staring at an enormous pile of manuscript that desperately needs rewriting? Take heart! Your novel’s done, isn’t it? You’ve done something many writers only dream about. Now imagine a big-shot editor bumps into you in the elevator and asks what your novel’s about. In fifteen words or less, what would you say? Take your time! This is a thought game. What would you say? If you can come up with an answer in the next hour . . . you’ve just completed Step 1 of the Snowflake! Do you think some of the other steps might help you put some order into that manuscript? Give it a shot. What have you got to lose?

Have you just got a nightmarishly long letter from your editor detailing all the things that are wrong with your novel? Are you wondering how you can possibly make all the changes before your impossible deadline? It’s never too late to do the Snowflake. How about if you take a week and drill through all the steps right now? It’ll clarify things wonderfully, and then you’ll have a plan for executing all those revisions. I bet you’ll get it done in record time. And I bet the book will come out better than you imagined.

If the Snowflake Method works for you, I’d like to hear from you. You can reach me through the contact page on my web-site.

Acknowledgments: I thank my many friends on the Chi Libris list and especially Janelle Schneider for a large number of discussions on the Snowflake and much else.

Best regards,

Randy Ingermanson, Ph.D.

 

Also See:

1. How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method
2. Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

 

About The Author

Randy Ingermanson is a theoretical physicist and the award-winning author of six novels. He has taught at numerous writing conferences over the years and publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.

 

 Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

 

 

 

Today's article is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with Scrivener, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 20% off the premium edition at ProWritingAid.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

THE MURDER OF
ROGER ACKROYD

BY
AGATHA CHRISTIE

AUTHOR OF
THE SECRET OF CHIMNEYS,
THE MURDER ON THE LINKS, Etc.

GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS      NEW YORK

Copyright, 1926,
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.

To Punkie,
who likes an orthodox detective
story, murder, inquest, and suspicion
falling on every one in turn!

---

CONTENTS

CHAPTER
         
I
    DR. SHEPPARD AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE   1
II
    WHO’S WHO IN KING’S ABBOT     7
III
    THE MAN WHO GREW VEGETABLE MARROWS     17
IV
    DINNER AT FERNLY     31
V
    MURDER     49
VI
    THE TUNISIAN DAGGER     65
VII
    I LEARN MY NEIGHBOR’S PROFESSION     75
VIII
    INSPECTOR RAGLAN IS CONFIDENT     92
IX
    THE GOLDFISH POND     106
X
    THE PARLORMAID     118
XI
    POIROT PAYS A CALL     136
XII
    ROUND THE TABLE     145
XIII
    THE GOOSE QUILL     156
XIV
    MRS. ACKROYD     165
XV
    GEOFFREY RAYMOND     178
XVI
    AN EVENING AT MAH JONG     190
XVII
    PARKER     202
XVIII
    CHARLES KENT     218
XIX
    FLORA ACKROYD     226
XX
    MISS RUSSELL     238
XXI
    THE PARAGRAPH IN THE PAPER     251
XXII
    URSULA’S STORY     260
XXIII
    POIROT’S LITTLE REUNION     269
XXIV
    RALPH PATON’S STORY     284
XXV
    THE WHOLE TRUTH     289
XXVI
    AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH     298
XXVII
    APOLOGIA     303

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About the Author 

Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBE (née Miller; 15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, The Mousetrap, which has been performed in the West End since 1952, as well as six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In 1971, she was made a Dame (DBE) for her contributions to literature. Guinness World Records lists Christie as the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies. Wikipedia

Buy Agatha Christie Books at Amazon

Contract by Crawford Kilian

Reading a Contract 

by Crawford Kilian

 

When you do finally receive a publisher's contract, you may feel your heart sink. It runs to several pages of single-spaced text, highly flavored with legalese and organized in a daunting sequence of numbered paragraphs and subparagraphs. Who knows what thorns lurk in such a thicket?

Actually, not too many. Most of your contract is standard ``boilerplate'' text that protects you as much as the publisher. It is often possible, even for a novice, to negotiate specific aspects of the contract.

Still, it helps to know what you're getting yourself into, so let us take a look at some of the key passages you're likely to find in your contract.

Delivery Of Satisfactory Copy

If you're selling your novel on the strength of sample chapters and an outline, the publisher wants assurance that you'll submit the full manuscript (often with a second copy), at an agreed-upon length, by an agreed-upon date. If your full ms. doesn't measure up, or arrives too late, the publisher has the right to demand return of any money you've received.

In practice the publisher is usually much more flexible. He may bounce your ms. back to you with a reminder that you don't get the rest of your advance until the ms. is ``satisfactory.'' He (or more likely the editor) will tell you in exquisite detail what you still need to do to achieve ``satisfactory"''status. A late ms. also means you won't collect the balance of your advance until it arrives, and it may also cause delays in final publication--as I learned to my sorrow with Greenmagic.

Permission for Copyrighted Material

If you want to include the lyrics of a pop song in your novel, or quote something as an epigraph, it's up to you to obtain the rights to such material, and to pay for them if necessary. If you leave it to the publisher, he'll charge you; if he can't get permission, and the novel doesn't work without such material, the deal is off and you have to repay any advance you've received. Obviously, this is an extreme case; normally you just drop the lines from the song or poem, and carry on.

Grant Of Rights

You are giving the publisher the right to make copies of what you've written. These copies may be in hardcover, softcover, audio cassette, filmstrip, comic book, or whatever. You are also specifying in which parts of the world the publisher may sell such copies. For example, a sale to a British publisher may specifically exclude North America, leaving you free to sell North American rights separately.

You may also be giving the publisher rights to sell foreign translations, to print excerpts in other books or periodicals as a form of advertising, or to sell copies to book clubs. Normally such sales require your informed, written consent.

Proofreading and Author's Corrections

You agree that you will proofread the galleys or page proofs of your novel and return the corrected pages promptly. If your corrections amount to actual revision of the original manuscript, and will require re-typesetting more than 10 per cent of the book, the publisher will charge you for such costs. This can very easily destroy any income you might have earned from the book.

Advances and Royalties

This spells out how much the publisher will pay you, and when. The most common agreement is payment of one-third of the advance on signing the contract; one-third on delivery of a satisfactory complete ms.; and one-third on publication date. You may be able to negotiate half on signing and half on delivery; otherwise, you are in effect lending the publisher some of your advance until a publication date that may be over a year away.

Royalties are generally a percentage of the list price of the book. For hardcover books, the usual royalties is ten per cent of list price. So a novel retailing for $24.95 will earn its author $2.50 per copy. For mass-market paperbacks, royalty rates can range from four per cent to eight per cent, usually with a proviso that the rate will go up after sale of some huge number of copies--150,000 seems to be a popular target. A paperback selling at $5.95, with an eight per cent royalty, will therefore earn you about 47 cents. A ``trade'' paperback, intended for sale in regular bookstores rather than supermarkets and other mass outlets, will probably earn a comparable rate; the list price, however, will likely be higher and the number of copies sold will be lower.

Whatever the royalty rates, you're likely to get only half as much for sales to book clubs or overseas markets. (This is especially painful for Canadian authors with American publishers: sales in your own country, as ``foreign'' sales, earn only half the U.S. royalty rate.)

You will also agree to split the take from certain kinds of licensing sales. For example, if your novel is a hardback and some other house wants to bring out a paperback edition, you can normally expect a 50 per cent share of what the paperback house pays. Sometimes a paperback house will license a hardback edition (in hopes of getting more critical attention for your book and hence selling more copies in paperback eventually); in such a case you should expect 75 per cent of the deal.

If you can possibly avoid it, do not agree to give your publisher a share of any sale to movies or TV. A film or TV show based on your novel will boost the publisher's sales quite nicely; he doesn't need a slice off the top of a deal that will surely pay you more than the publisher did. But if the book seems highly unlikely to interest Hollywood, you might offer a slice of film rights in exchange for a richer advance, with a proviso that an actual film or TV sale will also produce an additional chunk of money from the publisher.

The publisher will normally not charge for the production of versions of your novel in Braille or other formats for the handicapped. So you will get no money from this source.

The publisher should agree to supply you with two royalty statements a year. Each will cover a six-month reporting period, and each should arrive about 90 days after the close of that period. So a statement for January-June should reach you at the end of September. This will probably be a computer printout, and may be confusing. But it will indicate the number of copies shipped, the number returned unsold by booksellers, and the number presumably sold. The publisher will hold back on some of the royalty ``against further returns.'' Whatever remains is the actual number on which the publisher owes you money.

Chances are that your advance will have consumed any potential royalties for the first reporting period, and perhaps for the second as well. Once you have ``earned out'' your advance, however, you should expect a check with each royalty statement.

Do not sign a contract that does not explicitly promise you at least two royalty statements a year. Some publishers promise a statement only after the novel has earned out its advance. This means you may go for years--or forever--without knowing what your sales have been.

Author's Warranties and Indemnities

Here you are promising that this is indeed your work, that it isn't obscene, a breach of privacy, libelous, or otherwise illegal. If you do get into trouble, you agree to cooperate with the publisher's legal defense, and you agree to pay your share of the costs instead of asking the publisher, booksellers, or others to do so. If the publisher's lawyer thinks the manuscript poses legal problems, you agree to make the changes required to solve those problems--or to allow the publisher to do so.

You may find an insurance rider as part of your contract; this is intended to protect both you and the publisher from suffering total financial disaster if you get caught in a losing lawsuit.

Copies to Author

You will get a certain number of free copies, and will pay a reduced rate for more copies. That means you will still pay for those copies, and you should.

Option Clause

Pay attention to this one! This says you are giving the publisher right of first refusal on your next book (or at least your next book of this particular genre). The option clause means the publisher will give the next book a close, prompt reading. You should expect a response within 90 days, but some contracts specify 90 days after publication of your current book. That means you might have to wait for months, maybe over a year, until the publisher sees the initial reaction to your first book.

In practice, though, you probably will get a quicker response than that. If the publisher does make you an offer, you have the right to refuse it; you can then take your second book to any other publisher you like. However, you can't sell it to anyone else unless you get better terms for it than your original publisher offered.

You may well find yourself trapped as a result. If you need money in a hurry, you may feel you've got to accept a bad offer rather than spend months or years shopping your ms. around the market until you find a more generous publisher. And then, of course, your second contract will include an option clause for the third novel!

Your best hope in this case is that sales of the first book will warrant a heftier advance on the second or third book. And if the publisher still won't cooperate, you can then go to another publisher with at least some respectable sales figures that show you deserve a better deal.

Going Out of Print

Request for it to be reprinted; if he doesn't want to, you can then demand that all rights revert to you. You are then free to sell the book to another publisher. (I have done this a couple of times. You don't make as much money on the resale, but at least the book stays out on the market longer.) You may be able to acquire the plates or film from which copies of your novel were made, making it possible for a new publisher to bring your book out quite cheaply.

You will probably not make any money from ``remaindered'' copies that the publisher may sell to a book jobber at a deep discount. In some contracts, however, the author may indeed receive some percentage of such sales. It's also possible to buy copies of your book at a similar low price.

A Word of Advice

If at all possible, go over the contract with the editor or publisher, asking whatever questions arise. Then take your contract to an agent, lawyer, or professional writer. Chances are that it's perfectly okay. But even if you don't find something sneaky in the fine print, you'll have a clearer understanding of what you and your publisher have committed yourselves to. If something arises later on, like a problem over the option clause or the frequency of royalty statements, it won't come as a total shock.

Finally, bear in mind that if you have read this far, you are seriously interested in mastering an art and craft that rewards very few practitioners--novices or experts. Fiction in print is still relatively popular, but only relatively. For every reader you might attract, TV or films or recordings attract hundreds of consumers. You will work for months or years to create a product that is theoretically eternal, but in practice has a shelf-life of a few weeks. Most of your readers will, two months after reading your work, be unable to recall anything about the story (including your name)--maybe not even whether they liked it or not. And you will reach more readers with a punchy, witty letter to the editor of a metropolitan daily than you're likely to reach with your novel.

Is it worth it? Only you can answer that question. My answer has been yes, and I don't regret it. Writing ten novels has been not only fun but an education; I can hardly wait to find out what the eleventh novel will teach me.

 

Except from "Advice on Novel Writing by Crawford Kilian."

 About the Author 

Crawford Kilian was born in New York City in 1941. He moved to Canada in 1967 and now resides in Vancouver B.C. Crawford has had twelve science fiction and fantasy novels published. He has been nominated for an Aurora Award 3 times for his novels Eyas, Lifter and Rogue Emperor- A Novel of the Chronoplane Wars. His latest contribution to SF is a non-fiction book for would-be SF writers called Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Crawford has two more novels in the works.

To learn more about him at Wikipedia.

 

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Crawford Kilian Books at Amazon

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Researching Publishers and Agents by Crawford Kilian

Researching Publishers and Agents 

by Crawford Kilian

 

Too many people submit manuscripts to publishers.

Simply to read enough of those manuscripts to judge them unworthy would take the full-time services of several salaried editors. Most publishers simply can't afford to plow through the slush pile in hopes of someday finding a Great Novelist.

So they indicate in Writer's Market that they will consider only ``agented submissions''--work that a professional literary agent, who knows the market, thinks has some sales potential.

That simply draws fire onto the agents, who now find that they too have huge slush piles. And, like the publishers, the agents can't make money reading unsalable junk.

Where does that leave you?

In better shape than you think. If you've hammered out a credible but surprising plot about interesting people in a hell of a jam, and you're showing them in action instead of telling us what they're like, and your grammar, spelling and punctuation are first-rate--you're already ahead of 80 per cent of your competition.

Now the problem is finding the right market. Too many novice writers simply fire off their work to a publisher they've vaguely heard of, or one that's supposed to be prestigious, or even one that happens to be conveniently located right in town. (Those were precisely my three motives in submitting my first children's book to Parnassus Press. They bought it, which shows that sometimes even ignoramuses can get lucky. By rights I should have had to send the ms. to a couple of dozen houses before hitting the right one--if I ever did.)

Publishers tend to carve out special markets for themselves. A couple of sharp editors can dominate a genre; because they know how to reach a certain kind of reader, they attract a certain kind of writer. Or a publisher may be passionately devoted to supporting a certain kind of fiction, but is deeply uninterested in any other kind. A feminist publisher wouldn't have the faintest idea how to market a men's action-adventure novel, and wouldn't care to learn. A children's publisher won't care how well-crafted your murder mystery is. And so on.

So step one is almost embarrassingly obvious: Notice which houses publish the kind of story you're working on. Look carefully at the story elements in the titles they publish; Del Rey fantasy novels, for example, require magic as a major component, not just frosting or a gimmick to get the hero somewhere interesting. Out of all the publishers in North America, only a few are potentially yours.

Then consult those potential publishers' entries in Writer's Market and see what they have to say about their own needs and who their editors are in specific genres. You may learn that your work in progress is too long, or too short, or needs some particular quality like a heroine aged over 35. You may also learn how long it takes them to respond to queries and submissions. Don't take those statements as legally binding promises; responses almost always take far longer, especially for unagented submissions.

Writer's Market also lists publishers by the genres they publish. This list can lead you to houses you're not familiar with, but don't just rush your ms. off to some publisher in Podunk. Check out the entries of these houses also, and also track down some of their recent titles in your genre. If they strike you as dreadful garbage, avoid them. Better to stay unpublished than to be trapped with a bad publisher.

Another useful source of research information is the publishing trade press. Quill and Quire in Canada, and Publisher's Weekly in the US, are much more up-to-date than any annual can be. So if the top horror editor in New York has just moved to a new publisher, or a publisher is starting a new line of romance novels aimed at Asian women, you may adjust your marketing strategy accordingly. Magazines like The Writer and Writer's Digest supply similar market news.

If every possible publisher warns you off with "No unagented submissions," you then have to go through a similar process with literary agents. You should be able to find an annually updated list of agents in your local library or the reference section of a good bookstore. Some agents, like Scott Meredith and Richard Curtis, have even written books themselves about the publishing business; these are worth reading.

As a general rule, you probably need an agent in the city where most of your publishers are. That, as a general rule, means New York City. You also need an agent who knows the market for your particular genre, so your work will go as promptly as possible to the most likely markets. (Some agents may submit a work in multiple copies to all potential publishers; this can really speed up the process.)

But also bear in mind that the phone and fax can put almost anyone in close touch with the New York market, so an agent in Chicago or Los Angeles or Miami may be quite as effective as somebody in Manhattan--and may also be familiar with regional publishers.

Consider whether you want a big agent with scores or hundreds of clients, or a small outfit. The big agent may have clout but little stake in promoting you; the small agent may work hard for you, but lack entree to some editors. Talk to published writers, if possible, about their experiences with agents; sometimes a sympathetic author can suggest a good one.

No agent, however good, can sell your work to an editor who doesn't want to buy it. What the agent offers the editor is a reasonably trustworthy opinion about the marketability of a particular manuscript. It's in the agent's interest to deal only in work with serious sales potential, and to get it quickly into the hands of its most likely buyers.

You may therefore have to query a number of agents before you find one who's willing to take you on. And you may find that some highly reputable agents won't look at your stuff unless you pay them to.

This is not a racket. If you agree to the agent's terms, the reading may give you a very frank response. Sometimes you'll get a detailed critique that may devastate your ego but teach you just what you need to learn. In many cases the agent will waive the reading fee if he feels you're a commercial possibility and you're willing to sign on as one of his clients. That should be an encouraging offer indeed.

Sometimes an agent will take you on but strongly suggest certain kinds of revisions, or even that you tackle a completely different kind of story. Listen carefully; you're getting advice from someone who knows the market and wants to share in your prosperity. At least one of my novels greatly profited from the advice of an agent who thought my originally proposed ending was a disaster.

Your agreement with an agent may take the form of a detailed contract, or a simple agreement over the phone, or something in between. Be sure you understand and accept the terms your agent requires: Ten per cent of what he makes you, or 15? Deductions for photocopying, postage and phone bills? Control over all your writing, or just your fiction output?

Once you have an agent, don't be a pest. When he's got something to report, he'll let you know. If you've got something to report, like the completion of the manuscript or an idea for turning it into a series, let the agent know. Otherwise, stay off the phone and stick to your writing.

In some cases, of course, you may find you've sold a novel on your own hook and then decide to go looking for an agent. Under these happy circumstances you should find it fairly easy to get an agent's interest. If the publisher's already offered you a contract (and you haven't signed yet), the agent may be willing to take you on and then bargain a better deal for you. But you'll probably do all right even if you negotiate that first contract on your own. Most publishers are honorable and decent people; sometimes their integrity is positively intimidating. Even if they weren't honorable, your first book is likely to make so little money that it wouldn't be worth it to screw you out of spare change.

 

Except from "Advice on Novel Writing by Crawford Kilian."

 About the Author 

Crawford Kilian was born in New York City in 1941. He moved to Canada in 1967 and now resides in Vancouver B.C. Crawford has had twelve science fiction and fantasy novels published. He has been nominated for an Aurora Award 3 times for his novels Eyas, Lifter and Rogue Emperor- A Novel of the Chronoplane Wars. His latest contribution to SF is a non-fiction book for would-be SF writers called Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Crawford has two more novels in the works.

To learn more about him at Wikipedia.

 

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Crawford Kilian Books at Amazon

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Writing A Query Letter About Your Novel by Crawford Kilian

 

Writing A Query Letter About Your Novel

by Crawford Kilian

 

The query can be a quick way to tell whether your novel might be of interest to a particular publisher--without having to wait until some editor finds your manuscript deep within her slush pile. The query should give the editor an idea of your story (and a sense of the way you're handling it) that's clear enough to help her decide if it's worth considering. If the idea sounds good, you know the complete manuscript (or sample chapters) will enjoy a prompt and careful reading. If the idea doesn't sound right for her, she may tell you why, and perhaps suggest either a new approach or another publisher.

Some queries are very short, and others are long indeed--novel outlines masquerading as letters. Consider the following suggestions as guidelines, not ironclad laws:

1. Supply a short, pungent description of what the book is about: a desperate attempt to escape a narcotics bust, an unexpected journey that leads to romance and danger in 1930s China, an aging gunfighter's attempt to prove himself again in the Mexican Revolution.
2. If not obvious from your plot outline, identify the audience your book is aimed at: hardcore space-opera fans, teenage girls, Regency-romance readers.
3. Be able to tell the editor what makes this novel different from others in the genre: a twist in the plot, a new angle on the hero, an unusual setting.
4. Your credentials may be helpful, if only as a dedicated and knowledgeable reader in the genre, or as an observant resident of the city you've set your novel in. These are not trivial qualifications: If you don't know and love the genre you're writing in, it will show. And if you don't know the history and folklore of your setting, the story will lack depth.
5. Display in your query some of the excitement and energy you want to bring to your story--show how and why this story matters to you, and it'll matter to your editor.

The Letter Itself

Ideally, your query letter ought to run to a page or a little more, organized something like this:

First paragraph: Tell us what kind of novel you've written, or are now writing. How long is it, when and where is it set? Describe the hero and heroine, and perhaps one or two other major characters. What's their predicament? How are they proposing to get out of it? And why should we care--that is, what's at stake?

Second paragraph: Describe what happens in the middle of the novel--how your characters interact, what conflicts arise among them.

Third paragraph: The resolution of the novel--the climax and its outcome, and tying up loose ends.

Fourth paragraph: Why this story interests you, what your qualifications are for writing it, and some questions for the editor: If this story interests you, would you like the whole ms., or an outline and sample chapters? Do you have any specific ms. requirements I should be aware of?

Obviously this pattern will vary depending on the nature of the query: If you've included an outline and sample chapters, the plot summary will be very brief or nonexistent, and the query will focus on your background and your questions for the editor. If the book is completed, the plot summary will be easier to supply than if you have only a rough idea of where the book is going.

The query letter is a blurb for your novel, and like any blurb it needs to pique the reader's interest and make the reader wonder: ``How is that going to turn out?" The quality of writing in the query had better be first-rate, especially if you haven't included an elegantly written chapter or two. If your query is clumsy or riddled with English errors, the editor will be less than eager to see more of your prose.

Because the query requires little time to read and respond to, it can help you quickly identify potential markets and definite non-markets. But it can't pre-sell your novel; at best, it can only create a cautiously welcoming attitude in an editor who knows how tough it is to sell a first novel during a recession.

Will your query reveal such a knockout story idea that the publisher will steal it--turn you down, pass on your idea to one of their hack writers, and publish it for their own profit? This may be the single most common anxiety of novices, but the sad truth is that your idea probably isn't worth stealing. In fact, the editor may wearily see it as the umpteenth standard variation on some ancient plot, one she's seen a dozen times just this week. This is not to say your idea should be positively weird; most story ideas in genre fiction are indeed variations on ancient plots. The trick is to make the variations appear to be fresh, surprising, and full of potential storytelling power. A query is a direct approach to an editor. But you may well be aware that many, many publishing houses no longer even consider queries or submissions that do not come through an agent. In my next posting I'll consider what that implies in the selling of your novel.

 

Except from "Advice on Novel Writing by Crawford Kilian."

 About the Author 

Crawford Kilian was born in New York City in 1941. He moved to Canada in 1967 and now resides in Vancouver B.C. Crawford has had twelve science fiction and fantasy novels published. He has been nominated for an Aurora Award 3 times for his novels Eyas, Lifter and Rogue Emperor- A Novel of the Chronoplane Wars. His latest contribution to SF is a non-fiction book for would-be SF writers called Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Crawford has two more novels in the works.

To learn more about him at Wikipedia.

 

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Crawford Kilian Books at Amazon

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