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When Stories Start to Go Wrong!

Here are some descriptions of manuscripts. Read them and figure out what’s wrong:

• 6000 word, ABC book
• 13,000 word middle grade
• 250,000 YA/teen novel
• 2000 word YA poetry book
• 4000 word picture book

Match Audience with Length and Format of Your Story

In each of these cases, the format, especially the length of the manuscript, does not match up with the intended audience.

Here’s a typical run down of manuscript lengths for different formats:

Picture book, including ABC titles. The hottest items are under 500 words. Some picture books can go up to 2000 words, but those are iffy. The audience for picture books can be anything from birth to about 10 years old. Usually the break down is something like 1-3 years old, 2-4, 4-8 or 6-10, though it varies from publisher to publisher.

The best advice for a picture book manuscript is “cut it in half.” Yes, it’s hard in 500 words to have a beginning, middle, end, a satisfying narrative arc, and a character that kids want to spend time with. Welcome to the difficult world of picture books.

ABC books, especially Sleeping Bear Press ABC titles, sometimes will go longer. But essentially the ABC format is just a way to organize information. These are not true ABC books for preschoolers.

Beginning reader and early chapter books. These are aimed at the beginning reader, so ages 4-8. For the truly beginning reader, the text may just be a couple words on each page. This is the only place where a publisher will try to control vocabulary, choosing words with regular spelling or from the sight vocabulary lists. By second grade, though, kids are reading short chapter books, and there’s more leeway in vocabulary and complexity of texts. These run maybe 6000-12,000 words, again depending on a publisher’s inclination and publishing program. Usually these are contemporary stories, grounded in a child’s real world.

Short chapter books. Some people add this category for 3-4th graders. These are short novels (novelettes?) of about 12,000-20,000 words. The topic of these books changes slightly to allow for historical fiction, science fiction or fantasy, or mysteries.

Middle grade novels. For grades 5-8, or about 10-14 years old, the middle grade audience has a wide variety of interests that are reflected in their fiction. Novels for this group run 30-80,000 words, but tend to fall more in the 40-60,000 range. Only the rare Harry Potter will go to 100,000 or more.

YA/Teen novels. For ages 12 and up, the YA or Teen novel has an almost free rein in length, complexity and subject matter. Still even here, the average novel might run 60,000 or so. You can go longer or shorter, if there’s a good reason for it. Some have said that YA novels are just like adult novels, just 100 pages shorter and without the sex scene. Today, you can add both the 100 pages and the sex scene. What distinguishes this literature is the tone of the story, particular the tone of rebellion of some sort. It’s a time of life when kids must break with their parents and figure out life for themselves; that’s what is reflected in the liter

Scene Quiz: From a Harvard Bar to Your Scenes

Yesterday, we talked about what you’d find if you dissected a good scene. Today, we’ll apply this information by studying a scene from the classic movie, Good Will Hunting. (Warning: Adult language) Then, you can apply it to your own scenes.

Watch this four minute scene and identify the following:

1. What happens in the beginning phase?
2. What happens in the middle phase?
3. What is the turning point or focal point of the story?
4. How does the scene end? In a disaster (tragedy), in success, or somewhere in between? At the end, what has changed for each character?
5. What is the setting for this scene? Why is this an appropriate scene for the action that happens?
6. What is the underlying emotions of this scene, the pulse, as Sandra Scofield calls it?
7. List at least 3 reasons why this is a necessary scene for this story.
8. What else do you notice about scenes by studying this film clip?

Repeat this analysis for each of the scenes in your novel.
If you want confirmation of your answers, or want to discuss the analysis, please leave a comment.

Anatomy of a Scene

If you dissect a scene, what do you find? Sandra Scofield, in The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer lays out a simple, yet insightful discussion of this concept and it’s usefulness to a novelist.

Here are the basics of a scene:

1. Event and Emotion: Something happens and it makes the reader feel something. We’ll say it again: novels are made up of external events, not interior thoughts and feelings. Yes, novels are distinguished by their ability to take a reader inside a character’s head and show us their thoughts and feelings. Yet, paradoxically, the scene is the solid framework of events to which the character reacts.




2. Function: Hey, why did you write this scene and include it in your novel exactly here? For example:
   • Character: character entrance, develop character’s qualities, build relationship, complicate relationship, argument, making up, romance, etc.
   • Plot: conflict, twist, surprise
   • Technical stuff: foreshadowing

   The question is always, do you need this scene, or could you skip it or just summarize it?

3. Structure: There should be a beginning, middle (including a turning point, or as Scofield describes it, a focal point), and end.
4. Pulse: This is the emotional content of the scene, the underlying emotions, whether expressed explicitly or implied.

I could spend pages explaining each of these, but a demo will work better. Tomorrow, we’ll look at a film clip and see if you can identify each of these in the clip.

Meanwhile, read Scofield. Her explanations are so good, you should get it directly from the master.

Dr. David Kilcullen is one of the world’s leading experts on guerrilla warfare.  He has served in every theater of the “War on Terrorism” since 9/11 as Special Advisor for Counterinsurgency to the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to General David Petraeus in Iraq, and chief counterterrorism strategist for the U.S. State Department.  In his new book, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars In The Midst of a Big One, Kilcullen takes us on the ground to uncover the face of modern warfare, illuminating both the global challenges and small wars across the world.  In the excerpt below we learn why the Afghanistan is so very difficult and so very important in this struggle.

People often speak of “the Iraq War” and the “the war in Afghanistan” as if they were separate conflicts.  But was we have seen, Afghanistan is one theater in a larger confrontation with the transnational takfiri terrorism, not a discrete war in itself.  Because of commitments elsewhere-principally Iraq-the United States and its allies have chosen to run this campaign as an “economy of force” operation, with a fraction of the effort applied elsewhere.  Most of what has happened in Afghanistan results from this, as much as from local factors.  Compared to other theaters where I have worked, the war in Afghanistan is being run on a shoestring.  The country is about one and a half times the size of Iraq and has a somewhat larger population (32 million, of whom about 6 million are Pashtun males of military age), but to date the United States has resourced it at about 27 percent of the funding given to Iraq, and allocated about 20 percent of the troops deployed in Iraq (29 percent counting allies).  In funding terms, counting fiscal year 2008 supplemental budget requests, by 2008 operations in Iraq had cost the United States  approximately $608.3 billion over five years, whereas the war in Afghanistan had cost about $162.6 billion over seven years: in terms of overall spending, about 26.7 percent of the cost of Iraq, or a monthly spending rate of about 19.03 percent that of Iraq.  In addition to lack of troops and money, certain key resources, including battlefield helicopters, construction and engineering resources, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets, have been critically short.

Resource allocation in itself is not a sign of success-arguably in Iraq we have spent more than we can afford for limited results-but expenditure is a good indicator of government attention.  Thus the international community’s failure to allocate adequate resources for Afghanistan bespeaks an episodic strategic inattention, a tendency to focus on Iraq and think about Afghanistan only when it impinges on public opinion in Western countries, NATO alliance politics, global terrorism, or the situation in Pakistan or Iran, while taking ultimate victory in Afghanistan for granted.  Two examples spring to mind: the first was when Admiral Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, remarked in congressional testimony in December 2007 that “in Afghanistan, we do what we can.  In Iraq, we do what we must,” implying that Afghan issues by definition play second fiddle to Iraq, receiving resources and attention only as spare capacity allows.  The reason for Admiral Mullen’s remark emerges from the second, larger illustration of this syndrome: by invading Iraq in 2003, the United States and its allies opened a second front before finishing the first, and without sufficient resources to prosecute both campaigns effectively.  Western leaders committed this strategic error primarily because of overconfidence and a tendency to underestimate the enemy: they appear to have take for granted that the demise of the Taliban, scattered and displaced but not defeated in 2001, was only a matter of time.

These leaders would have done well to remember the words of Sir Olaf Caroe, a famous old hand of the North-West Frontier of British India, ethnographer of the Pashtuns, and last administrator of the frontier province before independence, who wrote in 1958 that “unlike other wars, Afghan wars become serious only when they are over; in British times at least they were apt to produce an after-crop of tribal unrest [and]…constant intrigue among the border tribes.”  Entering Afghanistan and capturing its cities is relatively easy; holding the country and securing the population is much, much harder: as the Soviets (with “assistance,” and a degree of post-Vietnam schadenfreude, from Washington) discovered to their cost, like the British, Sikhs, Mughals, Persians, Mongols, and Macedonians before them.  In Afghanistan in 2001, as in Iraq in 2003, the invading Western powers confused entry with victory, a point the Russian General Staff lost no time in pointing out.  The Taliban movement’s phenomenal resurgence from its nadir of early 2002 underlines this point: the insurgents’ successes seem due as much to inattention and inadequate resourcing on our part as to talent on theirs.

Afghanistan is also a very different campaign from Iraq, though the two conflicts are linked through shared Western political objectives and cooperation between enemy forces.  The Iraq campaign is urban, sectarian, primarily internal, and heavily centered on Baghdad.  The Afghan campaign is overwhelmingly rural, centered on the Pashtun South and East, with a major external sanctuary in Pakistan and, as of 2008, increasing support for the effort in Afghanistan than for Iraq (though rhetoric often does not translate into action).  Afghanistan is seen as a war of necessity, “the good war,” the “real war on terrorism.”  This gives the international community greater freedom of action than in Iraq.

Perhaps counterintuitively, events in Afghanistan also have greater proportional impact than those in Iraq, effort there has greater effect than equal effort in Iraq-a brigade (3,000 people) in Afghanistan is worth a division or more (10,000-12,000) in Iraq, in terms of its proportionate effect on the ground.  Regardless of the outcome in Iraq, Afghanistan still presents an opportunity for a positive long-term legacy for Western intervention, if it results in an Afghan state capable of effectively responding to its people’s wishes and meeting their needs.

Conversely, although the American population and the international community are inured to negative media reporting about Iraq, they are less used to downbeat reporting about Afghanistan.  Most people polled in successive opinion surveys have tended to assume that the Afghan campaign is going reasonably well, hence Taliban successes or sensational attacks in Afghanistan may actually carry greater political weight than equivalent events in Iraq, a campaign that is so unpopular and about which opinion is so polarized that people tent to assume it is going less well than is actually the case.